After an exhausting election, the incoming administration is expected to introduce reforms immediately. But which ones are most urgent? The Spectator asked some of its favourite writers and thinkers to advise the new Prime Minister
Stabilise the economy
The new government now has to move with utmost swiftness to stabilise British public finances, which Gordon Brown has left in a truly abysmal condition. We are in the middle of the worst debt explosion in the Western world, according to the Bank for International Settlements, and nothing discussed during the election campaign would remotely suffice to bring the situation under control. On the contrary, there is a very real danger that it could now spiral, Greek-style, out of all control if foreign confidence in sterling slumps and long-term interest rates rise.
To avoid the grim fate of Geórgios Papandréou, Mr Cameron, if he becomes prime minister, needs to do two things right away. He must instruct George Osborne to wield the axe ruthlessly with the aim of returning to a balanced budget over a credible eight- to ten-year time frame. That means not only reversing Labour’s disastrous expansion of public sector spending, but encouraging business growth with incentives to innovate, invest and work. At the same time, he needs to initiate talks with the IMF in case external support proves to be necessary. In both cases, it is much better to act sooner than later. The mess we are in is the result of 13 squandered years in which an unprincipled government frittered away the achievements of the Thatcher era. We are back not just in 1979, but in 1976, the last time the IMF had to bail Britain out as a consequence of Labour’s economic mismanagement.
Niall Ferguson
Overhaul the constitution
The problem that has been exposed by this election campaign is that our political system doesn’t seem to represent the popular will very effectively. What we need is a constitutional snarl-up of epic proportions. The best thing that a new government could do would be to reform the electoral system — and there are many options available. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that any reform will depend on the outcome of the general election. So if Labour gets the smallest popular vote and a lot of seats, and the Liberal Democrats get a huge proportion of the popular vote but very few seats, that will seem inequitable but it may also provoke reform. The system we’ve got is bust, but it carries on because of the momentum it has built up over so many years.
Philip Pullman
End the war in Afghanistan
No expert believes that the conflict in Afghanistan can be ‘won’ in any appreciable sense of the term. It is now a deep-seated civil war of the sort outsiders not only do not win but usually exacerbate. Britain must find a way of honourably disengaging as soon as possible. This is urgent given the losses on the ground, the political complexity of relations between the Kabul regime and the Taleban, and America’s known desire also to disengage. Above all, a new government in Britain must stop talking about winning or hoping the Afghan army and police can ‘take over’ the conflict. This will not happen.
Simon Jenkins
Repeal libel laws
All three parties have promised reform of our authoritarian and crushingly expensive libel laws, but, as cynical readers will remember, parties have been known to break their promises before. Conservative MPs will find reasons to stick with libel reform if they take a hard look at the oligarchs from the former Soviet Union, Saudi petro-billionaires and radical Islamists from home and abroad who are currently exploiting the English legal system. To put it at its mildest, these are not men who wish Britain well or support its best values. Recently Libya was able to use our courts to silence and all but bankrupt a dissident living in exile. No true Tory should be happy that potentially hostile foreign powers can harm the democratic cause by turning to a law that is biased against writers and publishers. I hope they will notice that the patriotic case for libel reform is as strong as the liberal case.
Nick Cohen
Prioritise education
I am hoping the new government will make education a priority and will, at the very least, replace Sats tests with Weds tests so that children do not have to go in at the weekends. Also, I hope that the white middle classes will be given instant, automatic access to all the best, most advantaged schools, thereby avoiding that mad scramble which may involve having to borrow an address while telling a lot of lies. Such a faff.
Deborah Ross
Cut contributions to Brussels
Whatever savings are made elsewhere, one budget is set to increase by 60 per cent: our net contributions to the EU. Britain is now handing over £14 billion a year — enough to pay for a two-thirds reduction in council tax.
Bargaining is about to begin for the 2014-2020 budget. The days when Britain and Germany were the only two net contributors are over, but the slide in sterling and the end of the rebate have pushed up our share, some of which goes to subsidise countries which are wealthier than we are: Luxembourg, for example, is the single biggest per capita net beneficiary. Every politician wants to cut spending while protecting the vulnerable. Here is the perfect place to start.
Daniel Hannan
Tackle Islamism
The next government should categorically rule out the possibility of ever incorporating Sharia law and directly challenge the myths on which Islamism thrives. Encourage more balanced coverage, especially by the BBC, of the multiple problems afflicting the greater Middle East, many of which have nothing to do with Israel. Involve a wider range of (critical) voices in any overall strategy for tackling Islamist extremism rather than lazily disbursing huge monies to the usual community leader suspects. Praise positive examples of minority integration, such as Greeks, Turks, Indians and Chinese.
Michael Burleigh
Make life easier for working parents
The priority should be more flexible childcare. Work is no longer a nine-to-five business for millions working in retail, the NHS, emergency services, manufacturing and countless other industries dependent on shifts. But many nurseries and some child-minders are stuck in a rigid pattern of opening Monday to Friday, 8am-6pm, expecting part-timers to stick to the same days every week. It’s a headache both for parents and employers needing to deploy staff flexibly in uncertain economic times. Incoming ministers could look to innovative third-sector providers like the children’s charity 4Children, piloting a ‘pay as you go’ model in nurseries offering more flexible hours. A second priority is establishing why men are less likely than women to use the right for parents to request flexible hours, and more likely to be refused when they do. Fathers are neglected in family policy: the current party leaders are uniquely placed to change that.
Gaby Hinsliff
Serve the national interest abroad
I would like to see something we have not had in the last 13 years, namely a foreign policy firmly based on a coherent view of the national interest, in which there is a single hand on the tiller of our international relations. We should not have one foreign policy conducted by the Department for International Development and another conducted by Foreign Office and another by the Ministry of Defence.
We should not go into wars without clear diplomatic objectives, something which we don’t have in regard to Afghanistan, and there should be a clear unitary purpose in Downing Street and the Foreign Office to which the MOD and DFID are subservient.
How c
an this be done? In principle it’s very easy. All three parties have said they will conduct a strategic defence review. It is extremely important that whichever government we have after the election, this review should be foreign-policy-led and not defence-led. Otherwise you will have the tail wagging the dog.
We need to work out what advances our interest and damages our national interest. Once you know that, everything else falls into place: equipment spend, military restructuring, etc. All those matters become clear when you have a framework.
Christopher Meyer
Cut public arts funding
Abolish all grants to writers and publishers. Retain grants to professional orchestras, opera and ballet, and national theatres, which cannot otherwise survive unless ticket prices become unsustainable, but make them conditional on extensive education touring programmes. Retain subsidies to major galleries and museums nationwide. (Entrance charges are counter-productive.) Grants ought to be decided by small committees which include volunteers, professionally advised. Private arts patronage should be encouraged via more generous tax breaks. Make grants conditional on excellence. Community ventures that are fun but not art should be self/community-supported.
After the 2012 Olympics, licence to run the National Lottery must be conditional on a 50 per cent share of profits going to the arts. That is the light at the end of the austerity tunnel.
Susan Hill
Undo Labour legislation
For whatever party wins the general election, the top priority must be to lighten the burden of legislation that New Labour has imposed on Britain during its 13 years in power. It was Nick Clegg, then the Lib Dems’ home affairs spokesman, who in 2006 uncovered the fact that the government had been creating one new criminal offence almost every day that it had been in office. There have now been about 3,600 of them, including such offences as selling grey squirrels and importing Polish potatoes. A good first step might be to pass a law requiring that for every new offence created, two must be removed from the statute book.
Alexander Chancellor
Repeal the Climate Change Act
The easiest way for any incoming government simultaneously to save lots of money and do the right thing is this: repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act. Though it was passed almost unanimously (there were just three votes against on its third reading, one, to his eternal credit, from Peter Lilley), it was one of the most disastrous, pointless pieces of legislation in British parliamentary history. In the name of unattainable cuts in emissions on the gas — CO2 — which makes barely the slightest difference to ‘global warming’, the British taxpayer is committed to squandering £18 billion a year every year till 2050. Given that all three main parties are wedded to the same lunatic green ideology this is unlikely to happen: proving yet again what many of us have long suspected — that whoever gets in is entirely unfit to run the country.
James Delingpole
More playing fields
I’m only really qualified to talk about cricket but what I have to say has benefits for many of Britain’s most popular sports: the new government must increase the number of playing fields. Under successive prime ministers, hundreds of them have been lost — more than 200 since 1997 — and mainly in urban areas. Too often there simply isn’t the space to play. Imagine the talent and potential that is being wasted.
There are schemes allowing schools to use private pitches and I’m all in favour of those. I also admire Mervyn King’s ‘A chance to shine’ foundation, which is raising money for inner-city cricket clubs. But more must be done.
Cricket is beginning to appear to be an elitist sport. That’s cause for tremendous sadness, but it is to be expected if inner-city children don’t have nearby pitches.
Henry Blofeld
Promote green energy research
Scrap the untenable promise of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 34 per cent over the next ten years. It is technologically and economically unfeasible. Rather than continuing to try to make carbon-based fuels much more expensive, focus instead on making green energy sources much cheaper. There are still no affordable alternatives to coal and oil, so the UK government must seriously ramp up its commitment to green-energy research and development. This would help reduce global warming and provide an example for the rest of the world to follow.
Bjørn Lomberg
Be brave
Remember that the first few days are like Omaha beach. You have suddenly landed in what was enemy territory. You will take incoming flak. There will be casualties. You have just got to forge on and don’t be paranoid about the civil servants. Many of them are brilliant, public-spirited people who will be fed up with Brown and eager for a new lead.
Boris Johnson
Less legislation
Start ripping up useless legislation and keep ripping. Ensure that you are ditching rules faster than you are making them. Bring in strict legislation curbs and a ‘net legislation’ monitor that ensures there are always at least the same amount of laws leaving the statute book as are coming in. If you must make a law, make a law ensuring that I am never asked to produce a copy of my birth certificate at Blockbuster again. Make a speech telling people what you cannot do. Say you couldn’t care less if people were married or not, so long as they pay their taxes and keep their kids off the streets after nightfall, then get on with running the economy. Dispatch the hunting ban quickly. No long, drawn-out, agonising death of a dodgy private members’ bill please. Only a swift, bite-to-the-throat one-line repeal bill will do.
Melissa Kite
Revive the Enterprise Allowance Scheme
There is cross-party consensus that business start-ups and micro-entrepreneurship will be central to Britain’s economic recovery. I have been lobbying for some time for a revival of the Thatcher-era Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which paid people on benefit slightly more than the dole to set up their own small businesses. Alan McGee of Creation Records, which gave us Oasis, started his business on the EAS, as did Julian Dunkerton, whose £180 million fashion empire was floated this year. Unemployment is a curse — for the individuals involved and the wider society. This is why my charity, New Deal of the Mind, has urged a revival of the kind of street-level encouragement for business that helped the likes of McGee and Dunkerton off the dole during the last recession.
Martin Bright
Harness Christian activists
The new government should harness the energy of the sort of Christians who actually get things done — who run genuinely non-political charities and are straining at the leash to set up small faith schools. But that means turning a deaf ear to the whining social engineers who dominate the bureaucracy of the Catholic and Anglican Churches.
Damian Thompson
Restore hereditary peers
Prosperity will return if the hereditary peers are first restored to their places in the Lords. More than ravens at the Tower they embody a reliance on the implicit strengths of history. At the moment the constitution is like a ruined wall with bricks hanging out. Its reconstruction is essential as a foundation for everyone to pull together and start making some money.
Christopher Howse
Cut government PR
A great way to cut waste would be to compel the Beeb to carry all government advertising. This will cause a vast and instant diminution in the plagues of bori
ng state info we’re bombarded with. Schools, councils and other public bodies can cut the zillions they splurge on glossy brochures by posting their prospectuses on the web.
Hospitals should transfer every work of modern art to the artist’s home. Then we’ll see how well it makes them feel. Adrian Chiles’s empty place on The One Show should be filled by Nick Clegg. And if we declare Gordon Brown a national treasure we’ll discover how cheaply we can sell him on the international currency markets.
Lloyd Evans
Get rid of CRB checks
If there’s an upside to the recession, and the need for alarming cuts to public services, it’s the thought that we might, in response to the crisis, finally unglue ourselves from the TV and shoulder some of the responsibilities currently undertaken by the state — like keeping control of our own children or visiting grandmothers. Maybe even babysitting for friends or popping round with lasagne for an elderly neighbour.
For the new PM, a 1950s-style community spirit would be a godsend — cheap and cheering — but if he even breathes a word in support of the ‘big society’ without first axing the need for endless Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) checks, then he’s a liar and a fraud. At the moment in Britain it’s almost impossible to do someone a good turn without being CRB-checked.
School runs, school trips, babysitting: they’re all out of bounds without a check. But as well as being expensive and time-consuming, a CRB check can be risky: thousands of good Samaritans have been wrongly branded by the Bureau as criminals and faced legal battles to clear their names.
Mary Wakefield
Comments