The Tories’ revolutionary schools and welfare policies are the way forward

13 October 2007

AFTER a disastrous three months, the worst is finally over for David Cameron and his Conservative Party.

What these figures confirm is that Mr Brown used taxpayers’ money wastefully, and that most of the benefit of increased cash spending has been lost to the rising cost of provision and the creation of a cosseted new public sector bourgeoise. This is not to say that the quality and quantity of services provided has not improved a little – just that the extent of the improvement has been feeble compared to its cost. To their credit, the Tories’ more market-friendly policies could finally start to change this; but there is still a long way to go, and they have yet convincingly to show how they would reform the NHS.

There was also a welcome shift this week in the Conservative policy towards the European Union: in a speech on Tuesday, William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, pledged to amend the 1972 European Communities Act to ensure that any future agreement that transferred powers from Westminster to Brussels would automatically require a referendum. Had such a clause been in place in the early 1990s, the Maastricht Treaty would have been rejected out of hand, instead of being forced through Parliament, and Europe would be a very different and much better place today.

The Tories are also rightly calling for a national vote on the new constitutional treaty, which means Europe has now become a central area of difference between the two parties and one where Mr Cameron’s policies are far preferable to Mr Brown’s. The new treaty would be a disaster for anybody who believes in a decentralised, classically liberal Europe based around the Four Freedoms – the free movement of goods, services, capital and people – where cooperation takes place through markets and voluntary action rather than top-down statism.

Instead, like all of its predecessors, the treaty would continue the economic and legal harmonisation of the EU, further erode the democratic accountability of the European ruling classes, hand more powers to unelected judges and enshrine a social democratic charter of fundamental rights at the heart of the EU’s legal system, thus making sure that Europe continues to grow at the slowest rate of any of the world’s regions.