Have the Tories rediscovered the Right instincts?
If power without responsibility has been the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages, then the lot of a government minister can seem like responsibility without power. In private moments,
ministers complain that they are overwhelmed by paperwork and have to drive change through a recalcitrant Civil Service. Members of the coalition Cabinet are rapidly finding out that the answer to
the question ‘who governs Britain?’ is not as simple as they’d hoped.
Nothing new there. Relative impotence is the perennial complaint of new ministers. They quickly come to appreciate that Yes, Minister was as much fact as fiction. Today, however, there are three
other obstacles thwarting the will of Tory ministers: the Equalities Act, the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Union.
Conservative ministers moan that all their decisions must get past this modern Cerberus. As a result, they are moving sharply to the right. Tories who last year said that it was not worth a picking
a fight over any of these issues are now spoiling for one. Government is making the Tories more intellectually assertive and Eurosceptic.
Before the election, the Tory view was that trying to take on the equalities agenda, Europe or the human rights culture was too time consuming and politically difficult. When the Lisbon Treaty was
ratified, many Tories were heard to say that it wasn’t such a bad thing. They would have their hands full dealing with the deficit; they did not have the energy for trench warfare in Europe.
But what they are now discovering is that the EU is interested in them even if they are not interested in it. One can’t park an issue that is still being driven forwards.
Ministers have been shocked to discover just how many issues now have a European dimension to them. One recent Downing Street audit discovered that half of the government’s agenda was
European in origin. Brussels’ bureaucratic demands are simply not compatible with the Cameroon desire for a post-bureaucratic age.
Many Tories have rediscovered their inner Eurosceptic. Oliver Letwin, Cameron’s minister for policy and the intellect behind the Cameron project, now believes that, if the government
can’t secure all the opt-outs it wants, Britain should get out of the European Union altogether. An increasing number of Tory ministers agree. As one puts it: ‘The facts of life are
Eurosceptic.’
Equalities is another subject on which Tory opinion has hardened. Back in 2009, the Tories abstained in the crucial vote on the Equalities Bill. They were too worried about ‘Tories vote
against equality’ headlines to pursue their concerns.
But this intellectual cowardice has come back to haunt them. They now find themselves having to do equalities’ impact assessments on nearly everything they do. It is as if Harriet Harman is
standing over government ministers, supervising their every decision. She might not be in office, but she remains in power.
Equalities’ impact assessments are particularly hard to get right as no one is quite sure what the required standard is. One minister told me despairingly this week how he now expects to be
judicially reviewed over a decision that he and his departments’ lawyers believed to be fine.
Then there is the European Convention on Human Rights. In opposition, the Tories knew the ECHR was a problem. There was a long, internal debate over what to do about it. Ultimately, the party
settled on a compromise. Britain would remain within the convention and the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg court but would pass a Bill of Rights to give Britain a greater margin of independence.
A promise to set up a commission on a British Bill of Rights made it into the coalition agreement. But with Nick Clegg as Deputy Prime Minister holding responsibility for constitutional reform and
with Ken Clarke and Dominic Grieve, two pro-ECHR Tories, as Justice Secretary and Attorney General there seems little chance of this commission proposing anything radical.
Again, however, the reality of government has led to a hardening of Tory views. Number 10 sources now say that the Prime Minister will instruct the coming Conservative policy commission on the ECHR
‘to examine every option’. In other words, leaving is now on the table.
One might ask why the Conservatives aren’t acting now rather than just venting their frustrations in private. The answer is coalition. The Lib Dems simply wouldn’t support a Tory move
in any of these areas. If David Cameron went to a Tory conference and announced that he was repealing the Equalities Act, withdrawing from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights and
renegotiating Britain’s membership of the European Union, the hall would rise to him as one. But if Clegg were to do the same at a Lib Dem conference, there’d be a mass walk-out.
For the coalition, these three issues are, in many ways, more challenging than the deficit. They cut to the question of who we are as a country. And Tory and Liberal Democrat answers remain very
different. This, perhaps, explains why the Tories are becoming more assertive: beefing up the political team in Number 10, ostentatiously going further than Clegg did a fortnight ago on public
service reform, and taking more of a role against the Lib Dem leader in the ‘No to AV’ campaign. The desire among the Cameroons for ever closer union with the Liberal Democrats is
ebbing.
To what will all this pent up Tory radicalism amount? If it is real, then the next Tory manifesto will address these issues directly. There are, of course, dangers in ‘banging on’ about
Europe. But a Euroscepticism that expressed itself not in the abstract language of sovereignty but in emphasising the everyday limitations imposed by Brussels would appeal to the public. A recent
YouGov survey for the pro-European Fabian Society found that only 22 per cent of Britons view EU membership as ‘a good thing’, while 45 per cent called it ‘a bad thing’.
One of the challenges for the Conservatives at the next election will be rediscovering their distinctiveness after a period of coalition government. Nothing would do that better than a commitment
to tackle these three impediments to reform.
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