ConservativeHome's ToryDiary

Six must-adopt ideas to tackle social injustice

Gordon Brown's 10p U-turn is unravelling.  Over at CentreRight, Simon Chapman has the latest.

It's clear that the Government handled the 10p row very badly.  Through his tax on lower income Britons, Gordon Brown - as David Gauke MP has written - trashed his reputation as a champion of the poor and as a master strategist.

The Conservatives can only be pleased with current events but they have fallen short in one crucial respect.  The 10p row was an opportunity to present the party as a champion of hard working, lower income workers.  Lord Forsyth - followed by today's Sun and Telegraph - urged the party to focus on raising the threshold for paying income tax.  A reluctance to do so has meant the party has missed an opportunity to do the right thing and add a key group of voters to the conservative coalition.  By 63% to 28% the insiders that make up PoliticsHome.com's daily index do not believe that the Conservatives have emerged from the 10p tax row with a stronger connection with lower income voters.  That's a pity.

As the Conservative Party looks ahead it can do no better than to pick up more of the ideas from Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice.  The CSJ has been monitoring the party leaders' pick up of its ideas.  Gordon Brown has adopted 16 ideas so far.  David Cameron has adopted 27.

As part of our Agenda 2008, here are seven yet-to-be-picked-up ideas that we think are most worthy of being adopted:

A national programme of relationship education.  The SJPG’s proposals did not promote marriage at the expense of single parents but included many measures intended to support people in all types of families, for example by better integrating them into the communities of which they are a part.  Relationship education has proven to reduce divorce and break-ups among couples. To help couples fulfil their aspiration to have healthy relationships that go the distance, the SJPG proposed the roll out relationship education across the nation recommending a national relationship and parenting education ‘invitation’ scheme for couples and parents at key life stages.

Pilot localisation of welfare to work provision to local consortia. Chris Grayling’s green paper in January showed that the party has accepted most of the SJPG’s welfare-to-work proposals.  However they have not adopted the proposal to facilitate innovation in the welfare system by piloting the devolution of decision-making, funding and contracting of welfare-to-work services to local employment consortia.

Putting human rights at the heart of foreign policy

The next theme in our Agenda 2008 is for the Conservative Party to take the lead on international human rights policy. David Cameron, in his first speech devoted to the subject, could build on the progress William Hague has made in emphasising the importance of human rights to foreign policy by setting out a commitment to properly integrating human rights advocacy into the machinery of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office - which is due to release its annual human rights report this afternoon - and the United Nations.

The Party's Human Rights Commission has done much of the thinking for them. You can download its most recent annual report here or view our summary of its recommendations here. This agenda is simply translating the principles in David Cameron's speeches on social responsibility, into foreign policy.

The phrase "human rights" needs to be reclaimed from those on the Right who see them as always contradicting responsibilities and common sense, and those on the Left who blur natural rights with socio-economic expectations and lack a sense of proportion when it comes to the West's own transgressions. There's a need for a hard-headed back-to-basics championing of the basic freedoms, speaking out against torture, imprisonment for political or religious beliefs, state-sanctioned rape*, forced labour, conscription of child soldiers, restrictions on religious freedom, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Brown's government has downgraded the issue - Ian McCartney had a genuine concern for human rights but his remit was simply too big and included the competing interest of trade. His successor, Mark Malloch-Brown doesn't even have the human rights remit mentioned in his title, as it is just one of his many large and competing responsibilites.

The proceeds of a civil service recruitment freeze should be shared between taxpayers and the defence budget

Later this morning George Osborne and Boris Johnson will be addressing the cost of living in London.  They have chosen a good day to do so.  A report in this morning's Times notes that "British workers will be taking home an extra £44 a month on average after this year’s pay rises, but families are facing an increase of £148 a month in essential living costs".  Tory Treasury spokesman Philip Hammond tells the Daily Mail that "Gordon Brown's legacy to Britain's hard-working families is falling take-home pay, soaring food and fuel costs."  All true Mr Hammond but what are you going to do about it?

As long as our party is shackled to Labour's spending plans we have very little room to offer some relief to Britain's hard-pressed families.  It is true that the public sector is facing a tight spending settlement but that settlement comes after years of largesse and it is nowhere near as tight as the settlement facing poorer British families on fixed or falling incomes.  Who is on their side?  Conservative MP Michael Fallon is.  Yesterday, over at The Spectator, he recognised that "proper spending control is the key to fairer, lower taxes".  On his blog John Redwood outlines steps necessary for that control.  Mr Redwood calls for a curtailment of government IT projects, a civil service recruitment freeze and a war on absenteeism in the public sector.  Edward Leigh understands, too.  He describes huge productivity failures in the NHS and calls for the spending splurge to end and for a new emphasis on efficiency.

The back of the envelope calculation below (click the graphic to enlarge it for easier reading) outlines how the kind of civil service recruitment freeze suggested by John Redwood could save about £6bn a year by its third year of operation...

A Conservative government will deliver "fair seats"

It appears that one of ConservativeHome's campaigns for 2008 can be retired.  Our campaign for fair seats was launched in January and was given a positive reception by Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Herbert at the time.  This morning the party has confirmed that it will move to a system with votes have "equal value".  The Tory proposals are as follows:

"> Conservatives will reform the electoral system to ensure Parliamentary constituencies are of equal size and better reflect the size of the current electorate in that seat.

> We will end the wide disparities in the size of UK Parliamentary constituencies, by introducing a fixed UK electoral quota (i.e. the electorate divided by the number of seats), allowing only for a small margin of difference to avoid splitting local government wards. Correspondingly, Boundary Commission regulations should be amended to ensure maintaining an equal quota was the rule with priority over other considerations. This will require primary legislation.

Is victory in sight on public spending?

The Telegraph reports that the Tory leadership has been discussing an "elegant retreat" from its policy of matching Labour on spending: "The Tory leader, under mounting internal pressure to stretch his party's lead over Labour, has conceded that it could be impossible to deliver tax cuts if he sticks to Gordon Brown's commitments."  The newspaper reports the overwhelming opposition of party activists to the pledge, as recorded by this website.

If true the news would be a rapid victory for ConservativeHome's campaign for a more flexible approach to public spending.  We've not campaigned for an abandonment of the pledge to match Labour's spending until 2010/11 - only for the pledge not to be renewed.

There are three central weaknesses to the pledge:

• Labour has presided over the largest peacetime increase in the size of the British state.  Conservatives should be putting an end to the spending binge.
• It tied Tory hands for far too long. We need the flexibility in government to adjust spending plans if economic circumstances demand it.
• It left no room for reductions in borrowing or taxation.  On last week's Platform the Tory Treasury team's Philip Hammond defended the pledge.  Mr Hammond said that a period of economic certainty would be the wrong time to cut the growth of public spending.  We have some sympathy for the view that a fiscal tightening would be dangerous in a recession but economy-boosting tax relief would be preferable to still higher public spending.

4pm: Red Box reminds us of what Cameron and Osborne have said about the spending pledge.

David Cameron cannot be bold enough in increasing accountability of politicians

24 hours after the Derek Conway report was published David Cameron took decisive action against the disgraced MP and he has kept up the momentum over the last week with welcome requirements for greater openness from his frontbenchers with regard to their taxpayer-funded expenses.

It's also fair to say that Mr Cameron, with considerable support from Ken Clarke and Andrew Tyrie, has been working on many other proposals that aim to restore the public standing of politicians.  At the start of last month he signalled the abolition of the new (and abused) communications allowance, the closure of the parliamentary pension scheme to new MPs and tougher investigation of breaches of the ministerial code.

Much greater boldness is still needed, however.

We've argued before that the Conservative Party should fashion itself as an anti-establishment party:  standing up for the little guy - not big government, not big business, not big charities and certainly not big political elites.  Finding ways of delivering more power to people is the fourth theme of our 'Agenda 2008'...

We recommend that the Conservative Party stands for the following pro-democracy principles at the next General Election:

No more taxpayer funding of political parties. This would require David Cameron to change position somewhat but voters don't mind politicians who change their minds after listening to the public.  Mr Cameron could quite reasonably say that there is currently such an anti-politician mood that further state funding of politics would be wrong (at least until politicians put their wider house in order).  He could make a pledge not to increase state funding of incumbent politicians for the whole of the next parliament.  We would prefer a principled rather than a pragmatic opposition to state funding of politics - based on the idea that politicians should have to raise funds by appealing to free citizens, not compelled taxpayers - but a temporary pragmatism would be a very acceptable stop-gap.

We don't want "massive spending cuts", Mr Osborne, just a little moderation

George Osborne was on Andrew Marr's programme earlier and quite rightly noted that Britain is one of the least-well prepared nations for the looming worldwide slowdown.  "Other Finance Ministers", to quote Mr Osborne, were discussing how to use their surpluses to help their economies negotiate the forthcoming turbulence.  That wasn't an option for Britain that ends its 'years of plenty' with horrendous levels of public and private debt.

Mr Osborne went on to defend the fact that the Tories are matching Labour on spending - at least until 2010/11:

"The options for dealing with the budget deficit in the short-term would either be massive public spending cuts or big tax increases and I don't think either of those are sensible given the economic downturn that the world is facing."

That's not a fair characterisation of the options.  Those of us wanting the Tories to constrain spending - like ConservativeHome, the IoD, the TaxPayers' Alliance and The Telegraph - don't seek "massive public spending cuts".  We do, however, believe that spending growth should be more modest.  Labour is planning 2% growth.  A 1.5% growth rate would at least create some possibilities for reducing borrowing and for economy-stimulating tax relief.

The growth of the state under Brown really has been "massive".  A table reproduced by Fraser Nelson over at Coffee House outlines its scale.  Britain's state has grown faster than every other OECD nation from 2000 until 2008, with the solitary exception of Korea.  Government spending as a percentage of GDP equalled 37.1% in 2000 and will be an eye-watering 44.8% this year.  If this spending had been used to lubricate necessary reforms to welfare or to our public services it would be half-acceptable but it hasn't.  We don't want "massive cuts", George - just a return to some moderation.  Is that so much to ask? 

The tortoises versus the hares... How bold should the Tories be?

In a piece for today's Telegraph Iain Martin urges David Cameron to be bolder.  In The Spectator's Politics column Fraser Nelson touches on similar themes - believing that Labour is exhausted and now is the time for the Tories to seize hold of the economic agenda.

'How bold should the Tories be?' is the big question now being asked at the very top of the Cameron project.

The argument is gentle.  It doesn't have the intensity of wets versus drys or modernisers versus traditionalists.  It's not a personal dispute but it's a serious debate.  It's tortoises versus hares.

Leading the cautionaries - or tortoises - is David Cameron himself.  The cautionaries believe that Brown is finished.  They believe that Northern Rock, in particular, is fast eroding the Prime Minister's reputation for economic competence.   They do not want to risk the Tories' strong position in the opinion polls - with the latest ConservativeHome poll of polls giving the party an 8.4% average lead.

The hares - wishing the party to be bold - are hoping to be led by George Osborne.  The importance of George Osborne to the Cameron project is difficult to understate.  Last summer he took much of the initiative in rebalancing the Conservative project away from the uber-modernisers.  He recruited Andy Coulson and won the argument for the inheritance tax cut.  At the end of last year he noted the drift in the Boris campaign and took the decisions that have now produced a team around the Mayoral hopeful that might deliver victory in the most important contest this side of the next General Election.  Osborne is now said to be "on manoeuvres" again - listening carefully to those who think the Tories need to move up a gear.

The bold camp note that the Tories need a seismic shift in order for the party to form a parliamentary majority but that opinion polls point to a defeat for Labour rather than a much larger shift.   They say that the Tories need to give electors some big reasons to vote for them rather than the LibDems.  They worry that support for the Conservatives is widening much faster than it is deepening.   They worry that the party still lacks a defining theme or two that will energise the people who don't float between the parties but who float between voting and not voting at all.

The cautionaries worry that the 'time-to-be-bold' camp are being impatient.  They want to delay any big decision on strategy until after May's election results.  The depth of Brown's problems and the extent to which Clegg will have revived the LibDem vote will then be clear.  They also fear that the Tories may define themselves premmaturely.  They remember the rush to talk of a 'recession made in Downing Street' during the Hague years.  They worry that a too downbeat assessment of the British economy may be at odds with the 'sunshine image' that David Cameron has largely championed.

ConservativeHome believes that it's time to be bold.  Last November we argued that Britain is in decline again - that Britain doesn't need a change of management but a real change of direction.  We've argued that that should start with a promise to slow the growth in public spending.  Only yesterday David Cameron emphasised his cautionary credentials by saying that he may well extend the commitment to match Labour's plans (which continue the biggest peacetime increase in the size of the British state).  This is such a contrast with France that has just announced a five year freeze on public spending.  All of the hard work of the 1980s and 1990s by the Thatcher and Major governments is being undone.  Britain as the enterprise capital of Europe is no more.  Boldness on economic policy could not be more urgent.  If George Osborne really wants to lead the bold camp he should start with his own brief.

George Osborne must not renew his pledge to continue Brown's spending binge

Over the last few years Brown has presided over a massive growth in the size of the state.  The low tax economy built by Margaret Thatcher and John Major is being undone.  Britain plc is becoming less competitive.  Parts of our nation are being 'Soviet-ised' as Labour 'buys votes' in its heartlands.  Waste in the public sector is well-documented.  And are taxpayers getting value for money from the extra 100-and-more taxes that have been levied?  The question answers itself.  Gordon Brown has been on a spending binge and it's time for some sobriety.

Graeme Leach, Chief Economist of the Institute of Directors, agrees that there is a major problem:

"In the absence of war or recession the public spending build-up since 2000 has been unprecedented. No political party is facing up to the need to restrain public spending as much as is needed. The IoD has called for public spending growth to be kept to 1.5 per cent per annum not just for the next CSR but the following one as well. If we're to reverse the wasteful build-up over the past decade tough decisions will have to be made. Without them high tax and spend will progressively undermine our competitiveness."

Last September George Osborne signed up to Labour's spending plans until 2010/11.  That decision is unpopular amongst Tory members.  Our monthly polling of the Conservative grassroots shows that they oppose the pledge by 64% to 24%.  It's vital that Mr Osborne's pledge is not renewed as we get closer to a 2009 or 2010 General Election.  George Osborne needs to allow himself more room to cut borrowing and/ or introduce economy-reviving tax relief.  As it stands the Shadow Chancellor has left himself with fewer and fewer options.  See the graphic below:

Corin Taylor of the The TaxPayers' Alliance agrees that it's time for restraint:

"It was always wrong for the Conservatives to commit to matching the Government's spending plans. With an economic slowdown on the way, increasing spending at 2% could mean higher taxes, the worst possible thing to do in a recession. It shouldn't be beyond the wit of the Shadow Treasury team to find savings, reduce unnecessary government functions and so create room for much needed relief for overtaxed families and businesses."

ConservativeHome believes that spending growth of 1.5% is almost certainly enough.  That is the IoD's preferred level of growth.  That would give a Conservative Chancellor almost £3bn extra each year to deploy.  That could be used to reduce borrowing.  It could be used for economy-boosting tax relief - tax relief that will partly, if not wholly, pay for itself.  £3bn for example would almost pay for 2p off Corporation tax.  Alternatively it would nearly pay for a penny off income tax.  Less economically useful but more politically potent, it could be used to buy some relief for council taxpayers.  Council tax is now Britain's most hated tax.

David Cameron promised to share the proceeds of growth.  There is a real danger that the already bloated state will gobble up all of any proceeds if the Tories insist on continuing Labour's spending splurge and do not take strong action to increase economic competitiveness.

We give the final word to Michael Fallon MP, a Tory member of the Treasury Select Committee:

"George Osborne showed how we can win the battle on tax. Lower public spending growth is the other key to cutting Labour's borrowing, and putting the public finances back in order.   We cannot keep spending more than we can afford to borrow."

***
As with all of the ten campaign themes that make up ConservativeHome's Agenda2008, we'll be providing monthly updates on this need for a Conservative government to deliver more responsible growth in public spending.  Two other Agenda2008 items have already been launched: (1) A campaign for fairer-sized seats and (2) A media policy that encourages more diversity.

Conservatives must encourage more media diversity

There are two draft 'media policy' ideas that ConservativeHome would like to see fully embraced by the Tory leadership in 2008.

One was released just before Christmas by Jeremy Hunt MP, our Culture spokesman.  It's an idea that will take a modest portion of the licence fee (perhaps 2%) - currently monopolised by the BBC - and distribute it to another broadcaster, or other broadcasters, so that they can also offer 'public service broadcasting'.  Our hope is that the 2% would go to form an alternative to Radio 4:

"What we need, as former BBC journalist Robin Aitken has proposed, is a new licence fee funded broadcaster that is based on the British system of getting to the truth' via having opposing arguments test one another.  Our judicial system (defence and prosecution) and parliamentary system (opposition and government) is based on this adversarial principle.  At the moment, the BBC is largely based on the French inquisitorial system whereby an expert searches for truth.  The trouble is that the BBC expert is up to eleven times as likely to be liberal as conservative."

Next week Peter Whittle of the New Culture Forum will be writing a Platform piece for ConservativeHome that will describe what this alternative broadcaster might look like.  It would not be a conservative station but a station that ensured those groups (those licence feepayers) currently under-represented by the BBC would get more of a chance to be involved in programme-making.

The second idea was one that won overwhelming approval from ConservativeHome readers when it was part of our 100policies process (a process that we will revive later this year).  'Aristeides' explained his policy idea at the time:

"All government and local authority jobs will only be advertised on a single government-run website. Operationally, it will be on a low cost almost blog-style platform, searchable by indexing (google-type) software. No one who is looking to work in the civil service should not be able to use the internet. All job centres would obviously also have readily available access to the site over the internet. Departments, councils and quangos would then use the site rather than advertising in the press. With the benefit of technology, jobs can easily be sorted by area, skill or salary."   

We understand from George Osborne's office that the idea remains under active consideration.  We can see no good reason why it does not become party policy.  It would save the taxpayer a considerable sum of money and it would end a huge subsidy to a newspaper with a strong left-liberal bias.  Why should conservative taxpayers be paying for Guardian journalism?

The first Agenda2008 item was published earlier this week: It's time for fairer seats.

Throughout 2008 we'll provide monthly updates on the progress of our 2008 campaigns.

It's time for 'fairer seats'

Just before Christmas ConservativeHome raised the issue of "unfair seats".  On Monday's Platform Conor Burns explained the problem in much more detail:

"If Labour and the Conservatives had the same vote share [at the 2005 General Election] Labour would still have won 111 more seats. If the Conservatives had the same lead over Labour as Labour did over the Conservatives, Labour would still have had 57 more seats. Only a Conservative lead of 6.4% would have resulted in equality of seats and the Conservatives would have required a lead of 11.8% before gaining an overall majority."

Read Conor's full arguments here.

There are many ways of addressing the problem of unfair seats.  Options include more regular boundary commission reviews.  A greater willingness to allow boundaries of Westminster seats to cross natural or local authority boundaries.  Equalisation of the size of Welsh, Scottish and English seats.  During the course of 2008 we'll be examining all of the options and pressing the Conservative Party to then make a manifesto commitment to address this issue.  I hope ConservativeHome readers like Tim Roll-Pickering, who has consistently made intelligent comments on this issue, will help us achieve a good final proposal. 

Our bottom line is that the electoral system needs to be fairer and it needs to be reformed so that the election of a majority Conservative Government isn't such an uphill struggle.

Oliver Heald MP, who used to have responsibility for constitutional affairs in the shadow cabinet, believes in full equalisation of seats:

"It’s time we had fair votes in the UK - and no – I don’t mean Proportional Representation!! Votes in different parts of the UK have different values due to the wide variations in the size of constituencies. This strikes at the heart of the democratic principle of equal voting rights for citizens. We should end the disparities by introducing a fixed electoral quota – the electorate divided by the number of seats – with only a small margin to avoid splitting council wards.  Currently the Boundary Commission chooses not to cross county boundaries and uses old electoral data in making its final recommendations. This creates an urban bias in the system and fails to take adequate account of net migration from the cities. We should change the Regulations to put maintaining an equal quota as the rule with priority over other considerations."

The current shadow cabinet minister with responsibility for this issue, Nick Herbert, Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, doesn't go as far but in a statement issued to ConservativeHome opens the door to a manifesto promise:

"Ideally electoral boundaries would stay as closely linked to established county or district borders as possible, but population growth often makes this impossible.  On balance, it's more important that MPs represent roughly the same size of population than we remain wedded to old boundaries that allow population disparities to grow widely.  I think boundary reviews should be conducted more frequently to take account of population changes, and they should use more up-to-date data."

Mr Herbert describes Labour's inaction on "fair seats" as "yet another example of Labour's willingness to allow distortion of the electoral system for their partisan ends."

Both Oliver and Nick issued much fuller statements and you can read a pdf of them here.

This is the first of ten items on ConservativeHome's 'Agenda 2008'.  All agenda items reflect the opinions of the ConservativeHome Members' Panel.  in the end-December poll 84% agreed that "parliamentary constituencies for the House of Commons should roughly be of the same population size."  Other findings of that survey will be released soon.