If you ask a typical member of the Conservative party what they want Britain to look like, you’ll get the usual list: low taxes, high growth, strong borders, low crime, sensible regulation, green countryside. If you ask a Conservative MP how Britain might achieve these things, you’ll get a long list of excuses: it simply can’t be done, it’s a bit more complicated than that, the budget isn’t there.
And yet we know for a fact that these things are possible because we can see them elsewhere. Our neighbours are wealthier than us, our politicians promise to copy Australia’s immigration system, and Singapore and Japan show that crime is not an immutable fact of life. Somewhere in the neural wiring of the Conservative party, a link is missing. We know that other places do better and we know that we want these things. What we don’t do is learn from them.
Some Conservatives have developed a long list of psychological self-defence mechanisms to prevent them from realising quite how far they’ve allowed the country to fall. Our economic decline was inevitable; crime levels are impossible to change; it would be a bad look to cut taxes further. What works for Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, France, Germany, or Poland in whichever field they lead in simply would not work here. This excuse falls miserably flat when you consider the following simple point: there is a country which already performs better than Britain, which is filled with British people, and which sits just off the British coast. That country is the Isle of Man.
The Isle of Man is best known for motorbike racing and low taxes. What people are less aware of is that it looks a lot like the country Britain would be if it had been governed by basic conservative principles. Take the issue of crime. Weighted by severity, the Isle of Man has 40 per cent less crime than the least criminal part of England and Wales. It certainly helps that the island is small, with a population of 85,000, and wealthy. But it also compares favourably with well-off parts of the UK. Police officers know their areas well, understand the population, and can be regularly found out on the beat. Now look at London, and the Metropolitan Police’s dedication to pursuing online thoughtcrime rather than solving burglaries. Is it any wonder that one is a better place to live than the other?
But the island has an unfair advantage here; it is a prime example of the sort of high trust country Britain used to be. The founding father of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew spoke rather movingly of the impression made by an honesty box for paying for newspapers. The Isle of Man is a place where postmen delivering parcels just open your door and leave them in the hallway: why would the door be locked?
This trust buys the government and society a huge amount of leeway. When you know people are going to behave decently, you don’t need the huge mass of rules aimed at coercing would-be defectors into doing the right thing. A very basic example is pubs. Friends visiting London are shocked by how poor the nightlife is. The Isle of Man might not have great nightclubs, but it also doesn’t have licensed hours. Alcohol can be served 24 hours a day; the only real limit is the level of business.
Similarly, when people are happy with the strength of local society, they tend to be less concerned about immigration. Less than half the population of the Isle of Man are native born. Most immigrants are from varying British backgrounds, but a fairly substantial chunk originate elsewhere in the world; local Catholic churches in particular have welcomed an influx of new parishioners from the Philippines.
And yet the issue of immigration rarely comes up in conversation because no one really cares; you can’t get a work permit for the island unless you can show that you have skills the country needs, and you won’t get permanent residency until you’ve spent years making yourself useful. Remarkably, it turns out that this simple rule – immigrants must contribute – turns out to be pretty much sufficient for disarming the issue.
Economically, this has all worked rather well. The Isle of Man is famous for low taxes, which bring in vast quantities of money. Not all of this stays on the island, and there is a danger of being caught out by the sort of ‘leprechaun economics’ which bedevils Irish data. But a quick look at household income still shows the island doing rather well, with an average well over £50,000. Even if this is skewed by a few very high income individuals, each segment of the Manx income distribution excluding the richest quarter of households is still some 20 to 50 per cent above its English equivalent.
As for the countryside, the island is the only place in the world where the entire nation is a UNESCO biosphere. Now let’s turn back to the UK: could we replicate some of these successes? The core idea is something like a British Meiji restoration; an overhauling of the state designed to drag its capabilities into the 21st century, coupled with the humility to learn from the rest of the world where it’s doing better. Our own Iwakura mission, bringing back the very best practices to embed into our own government. And once we’ve learned from our closest neighbours, we can start to look further afield.
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