David Cameron, should he become Prime Minister, has an urgent and momentous task – to transform Britain from top to toe. The Spectator gives him some pointers
The key to great success is to follow great failure. David Cameron has this if little else in his favour if, as expected, he is Prime Minister in two months’ time. He may not have the majority he hoped for, but he will be able to command the government machine. Civil servants, for all their love of procrastination, will follow direct instructions. A Tory government can deliver them on the first day. This guide explains how, precisely, Britain can be transformed.
The key is to demand, and expect, change at an urgent pace. There should be no more five- or ten-year plans – a device used all too often to kick ambitions into the long grass. Mr Cameron will be elected for up to five years – and he will be fighting a domestic war. A war for Britain’s solvency, for the reform of our schools, for the recovery of our economy, for fixing our broken society and reversing the feeling of decline which is setting in across the country as it did in the 1970s.
Two major areas of policy are absent from these pages. One is the Tories’ best policy: school reform. It is an agenda which, if implemented properly, cannot and should not be steered by ministers. The government simply needs to pay a sum, about £5,500 per child, and then guarantee planning permission to any school group that finds a property and attracts enough parental support. After that, the government’s role is over. It need only write the cheque. Ministers’ role is to deliver the cash, and get out of the way.
Next, Europe. It will not be long before David Cameron finds the extent to which the hands of a British Prime Minister have been tied by the authorities in Brussels and Strasbourg. His plans for a VAT holiday for small businesses, for example, are illegal under European law. Likewise, plans to abolish school expulsion tribunals are likely to be challenged under the European Convention for Human Rights (specifically the right to a ‘fair trial’). His ministers will quickly end up in the courts unless he legislates to make his Bill of Rights take precedence over the European Convention of Human Rights. Establishing British sovereignty over British laws will determine the extent to which Mr Cameron can properly govern.
It may well be that Mr Cameron will struggle to pass controversial new laws, because he lacks a sufficient parliamentary majority. This might be just as well. The Clinton presidency in America was such a success largely because Newt Gingrich’s Congress refused to co-operate. By and large, the less lawmakers get up to, the better off the rest of us are. Some 31,500 new laws have been passed in the Labour years, and it is hard to argue that society is stronger as a result.
The bias should not be towards passing laws, but repealing them. As Matthew Parris argues on page 15, it is time for a clean slate. To sweep aside the mess of regulations and targets that Labour has left behind. To govern with one guiding instinct: that faith should be placed not in the power of legislation or five-year plans, but in the courage and the character of the British people. The old Reagan maxim – ‘don’t just do something: stand there’ – helped pull America out of a morass in the 1980s. It can help Cameron too.
But in order to let society flourish, there are quangos to abolish; civil servants to suborn, as the brilliant Antony Jay explains; and Treasury errors to put right – Allister Heath has already written the memo for George Osborne. Mr Cameron may well save Britain, as Thatcher did. Or he may fail, as Heath did. But if he is serious about radical change, then this booklet is one he should keep by his bedside.
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