Liberty isn't the opposite of security, it's the basis for a safe, strong and successful society

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Although the conext of Benjamin Franklin's remark is somewhat specific (it was about rich people using political power to dodge taxes), the sentiment comes down to us as an essential argument against authoritarian government. It also reminds us, or should do, that liberty is not the opposite of security. Nations with high levels of freedom are, overwhelmingly, safer than places without those liberties. Moreover, people in free countries are less fearful and more optimistic.

So it should concern us that Onward, the supposedly 'conservative' (or at least 'centre-right') think tank run by Theresa May's former policy wonk now frames the future direction of policy - the "Politics of Belonging" is their slightly cutesie term - as a choice between freedom and security:

The poll suggests that policies which increase freedom, autonomy and choice are unlikely to be major vote-winners in the way they were for much of the last fifty years. Instead, policies that restore a sense of belonging, provide security and protect citizens from the modern world are likely to be most effective.

My first thought here is that this is not really a surprise since Onward has given the people it polled a binary choice between "a society that focuses on giving people more security" and one that “focuses on giving people more freedom”. Do you want A or B ask the pollsters without it seems considering that there isn't any real contradition between freedom and security.

There are plenty of competing measures of safety but all of them show that the world's safest countries - least conflict, lower crime, safer streets - are all places we would see as liberal.

The Global Peace Index has a Top 5 of Iceland, New Zealand, Austria, Portugal and Denmark while SafeAround's similar ranking has a Top 5 of Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand and Singapore. If we look at immediate public concerns about crime for example we have a Top 10 including Sweden, Austria, Norway, Denmark and Japan. And when we look at the extent to which people trust other people (a central factor in the idea of belonging that Onward speak about) we find the same countries - Sweden, Denmark, Norway - crop up near the top again.

Although authoritarian places like Singapore (sadly a favourite of so many on the Tory right, something they share with China's leadership) appear in these lists, the majority of the world's safest places are associated with those individual liberal values Onward place as the opposite to security. They are also places with very free market economies, big welfare states and that invest a great deal in community (much of Denmark's huge welfare state is managed by local not national government, for example).

I like it when conservatives talk about community but this research seems to co-opt the ideas of family and community into a justification for “having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country”. And we see a sort of isolationist, protectionist streak in the claims that that "globalisation, technological change and immigration have harmed ordinary people’s lives, jobs and wages".

What we have here isn't a reflection of what a good, safe, strong society looks like (clue - it looks quite a lot like Denmark) but rather a reflected set of fears about crime, terrorism and economic insecurity. Day after day wise-looking grey heads on the TV tell the public that the economy is weak, that everyone is getting poorer and that austerity is biting. Other 'experts' appear and tell them that every business is trying to rip you off, that all sorts of scams and cons are widespread and the Internet needs controlling because it's fostering all sorts of evils (even though you and I don't see any of them). All this is accompanied by a weird ennui among the great and good; nothing is quite right, there's hate and offence (albeit mostly a sort of lazy on-line hatred and offence) everywhere, and you can't trust anyone any more.

Is it any surprise that, when asked to chose between the freedom that gave us all this bad stuff (hint - it didn't, quite the opposite) and some sort of unspecified 'security' people plump for the latter? And if that just means a few more coppers, a bit more spent on the military and some road safety cameras, then we're all cool with it. But what if it means ending the aspiration for free trade (and what else does “globalisation has not benefited most people” mean) and closing the borders to foreigners - especially brown foreigners? Will that really make us more secure?

If we want a real agenda for conservatives, one embracing freedom and democracy, then we need to start with the idea that the best government is government closest to the people. This means a radical devolution back to communities - not the technocratic and undemocratic nonsense of grand regional mayors given a campaign pulpit and a little bit of central government cash. It means putting communities not technocrats in charge of the police, the hospitals and the schools. It means central government handing over administering welfare and the collection of taxes to those communities.

At the same time we need a return to the presumption that people are mostly decent and honest. And that we should trust them. This means an end to officious demands for ID, the simplification of welfare applications and tax forms, and no longer seeing people as just a reference number on a national database.

We also need to rediscover some old ideas - a chivalry that recognises men are strong but raises them to use that strength for good, a charity that isn't a well-funded industry but rather individual, selfless acts of care for our neighbour, and that the family forms the bedrock of a safe, secure society. What we don't need is more of the security state, more cameras, more restrictions, more controls, bans and limitations - all imposed because it will make us safer, a sort of nanny state on steroids. Most of all we should reject - utterly reject - the seemingly popular idea of “a strong leader who does not have to bother with Parliament”.

The best security doesn't come from any sort of benign authoritarianism, from a sort of cuddly fascism, but from living in a world where we see out neighbour and see someone we can trust, where we know the government because he or she lives round the corner and where the decisions that affect us are mostly made in a place nearby filled with our neighbours not by anonymous authorities in a castle in a city.

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Some questions to get conservatives thinking

 I've repeatedly warned conservatives that, if defining who is or isn't a conservative and what is or isn't conservatism is left to socialists, liberals and reactionaries, we will become irrelevant to politics and policy-making. Historian Robert Saunders, in criticising Roger Scruton's call for defunding of university departments lacking in intellectual diversity, set this out in a Twitter thread:

In its early years, Thatcherism teemed with ideas. The party became a magnet for historians, philosophers and economists - some converts from the radical Left - who hammered out their ideas in think tanks, discussion groups and Scruton's own journal, The Salisbury Review

Saunders asks whether the current reaction from conservatives to left-wing dominance of academia - ban it, stop it, take its money away - simply covers over the paucity of conservative thinking, especially in or near to the Conservative Party itself. Saunders isn't a conservative so my warning is relevant but his (admitted a tad jaundiced) analysis of David Cameron is very telling:

From this perspective, Cameron seems guilty not of ‘scepticism’ but of what his biographers call a ‘heroic incuriosity’. He takes no interest in the arts; has only the haziest grasp of history; and cheerfully admits that he ‘doesn’t really read novels’. Far from liberating himself from ‘ideology’, he has simply ceased to ask meaningful questions of it.

This is, without question, the defining characteristic of many modern politicians - Cameron is not unique in being spectacularly bright but incredibly shallow, just look at Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Leo Varadkar and, of course, the godfather of 'image is everything' political positioning, Tony Blair.

A while ago - when slightly angry voices on the right of politics were saying that Cameron was a 'conservative in name only' or similar, I wrote that this was far from the truth, he is absolutely a conservative:

But for Cameron – and we see this in his enthusiasm for “social action” – such an obligation to act nobly is essential to conservatism. We are defined by what we do rather than what we support. Passing laws to help the poor in Africa or to care for communities in England is not sufficient; we must act ourselves to help society. A central tenet of Cameron’s conservatism is the idea of “giving back” – we are fortunate so it behoves us to put some of that fortune back into society.

The second concept is the idea of administration. Some people see the purpose of securing political power as the way to effect change, to direct the forces of government so as to improve mankind. In Cameron’s conservatism this is not the case; the purpose of power is administration – the running of good government.

The problem is that this outlook - action and managerialism - doesn't leave a great deal of space for thought and rather focuses our preference on doers rather than thinkers - Rory Stewart rather than Jesse Norman. As Blair once put it "what matters is what works" and, in most cases, "what works" is defined as what wins us elections rather than a genuinely technocratic evidence-based polity. Our modern government looks technocratic but is far more concerned with what might be called "feels" than with substantive thinking about policy.

An illustration of this came from Will Tanner (who runs the brand new Tory think tank, Onward) in response to Liz Truss MP's suggestion that we need to reform planning and build a million new homes on what is now 'green belt' around London:

You've got to admire @trussliz' chutzpah, but our 10,000 sample megapoll last month suggested allowing development on the Green Belt would be the most unpopular housing pledge the Conservatives could take into an election, even with young people

Truss responds with a very telling comment:

We've got to move away from focus-group paralysis and deliver what will improve people's opportunities and life chances. We have to start making arguments again and not just follow.

Tanner's comment is in line with the Conservative Party of Cameron - no thinking ("how do we craft a planning system that protects, enhances even, the beauty, heritage and environment of England while allowing the housing development we need") just 'we can't do that, it isn't popular'. You don't have to agree with Truss's argument about housing development to see that setting policy by opinion poll denies the requirement to think seriously about the sort of places we want in our society. It is also a little ironic to see a politician slapping down a think-tank chief for not doing any actual thinking.

As to that conservative thinking, it is out there but not quite where you'd expect to find it. Firstly, the sort of issues that really bother people are now far less about economics than they are about sociology:

As conservatives, however, we can take advantage of not being tied to a canon to dip into a wider range of sources, to use fiction - Austen, Trollope, Tolkien and even Disraeli - as well as philosophy. Above all though, conservatives should pay more attention to sociology than economics. Most of our problems are because we haven't done this, we've allowed ourselves to be captured by the dry logic of what Deidre McCloskey calls "Max U" - maximising utility, utilitarianism, metrics, technocracy, Plato's Philosopher Kings.

So if you want to get some substance about family, community, identity and the loss of institutions, you're better off reading US sociologist Robert Putnam's "Our Kids" or Dutch geographer Harm de Blij's "The Power of Place" than dabbing your eyes at reactionary paeans to a lost bucolic England or thudding your way through "The Road to Serfdom". And taking a look at non-conservative voices at the fringes of what's usually called 'populism' like Ben Cobley, David Goodhart and Matthew Goodwin.

The questions - challenges we could call them - that emerge include:

1. How do we restore trust to society - in things like marriage, education, justice, business and finance as well as government?

2. How, in an age of individualism, LGBT rights, gay marriage and identity wars, do we rebuild families as the central building block of society?

3. How do we balance the undoubted power of free markets and new technology in promoting betterment with the human desire to sustain community?

4. How do we promote local autonomy in a world filled with outcries about 'postcode lotteries'?

5. How does personal responsibility square with the popular idea that our agency is compromised by modern marketing methods?

6. Is there still a concept of duty - to family, friends, neighbourhood and nation?

7. Can we meet the aspiration for security without compromising civil liberties, and where is the boundary beyond which acceptable social control become autocracy?

8. What are the institutions we need to meet the aspirations for secure families and strong communities?

Too much of our thinking is, as Lizz Truss noted, dominated by opinion polling and focus groups resulting in policy-making that, to use an ad man's term, "just films the brief" - we get lists of initiatives each crafted so as to ping a positive in polling or research but these lists are, taken as a whole, unsatisfying. From tweaks, up or down, to taxes through grants or incentives to tinkering bits of regulatory change, what we have doesn't present any sort of picture of what we want tomorrow's families, communities and neighbourhoods to look like - they are bereft of a vision and wholly without the sort of mission Disraeli set us, 'improve the condition of the working man'.

You don't need university departments, think tanks or learned societies to consider what a 21st century conservatism might look like and there's no point in (given the left wing bias of academia) trying to push water uphill - so feel free to take those eight questions above, add to them if you like, and start thinking about what kind of place you want to live in and how we get there.


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So all you want for Christmas is a new political party?

UK politics is in a shocking mess with the two big parties riven by factions, splits and arguments. We have parts of the Conservatives referring to colleagues as "quislings" and "traitors" at the same time as the Labour Party's left is calling for anyone with the mildest critique of the leader to leave the party and join the Tories. The cause of all this - or most of the cause - is the division over the UK's imminent departure from the European Union. It's not simply a matter of leave versus remain any more but a bewildering mish-mash of options, arrangements, contested votes and personal vendettas all fuelled by the high octane fuel of twitter. It's time for a new party to crawl from out of this chaos armed with wisdom, common sense and an unshakable moderate purpose - or so lots of people seem to think (or want or believe).

Now it is possible that a new party could be formed - indeed we are blessed with dozens of such things. It is also possible that this new party will sweep all before it as people leap at following a political movement that isn't either obsessed with One True Brexit or led by Jeremy Corbyn and a clique of Tankies (although we should remember that there is a national party, the Liberal Democrats, that meets these criteria and it isn't bounding ahead in popular support). But these things are unlikely for a whole lot of reasons - here are a few thoughts.

The last successful new national political party in Great Britain was formed in 1900. We call it the Labour Party (it's true to say, however, that the Scottish National Party and, to a lesser extent, Plaid Cymru are also successes and were founded more recently). It took the Labour Party nearly 25 years to get a sniff at government and 45 years to secure an overall majority. And Labour was also helped by the massive expansion of the franchise in 1918 (not just women but millions of working class men too). So, if you're seeing your new party as something that will rush Chuka Umuna, Chris Leslie or Justine Greening into Downing Street perhaps think again.

The Labour Party (and for that matter the SNP) weren't set up by existing politicians unhappy with the current political arrangements. Labour was, in essence, formed by the trade union movement and began life with an established and organised activist base as a result. Even so it wasn't until the 1922 election that Labour got more than 100 MPs elected. A bunch of existing politicians setting up a new party has precedents (Oswald Mosley's New Party in 1931 and the slightly more successful Social Democrats in the 1980s) but without the activist base it is pretty difficult to turn fine words into campaigning on the ground. In the case of the SDP, they were subsumed into the Liberal Party following pacts and alliances simply because the Liberals already had an organisation, local councillors and local parties.

Again this doesn't prevent a new party succeeding but it makes it more hard work than it looks when some bright-eyed politicians appear smiling and blinking on the news shows. And it won't be those politicians doing the slog but some people who, at the smiling and blinking point, aren't involved with the new party. Moreover, the chitter-chatter about new centre parties covers up another essential flaw - these parties are light on ideology and unsure on their positioning. This makes it difficult for them to deal with the inevitable problems that come from one or other established party occupying politics' centre ground.

To succeed any new political party has to decide which of the established parties it plans on replacing (in the manner of Labour replacing the old Liberal party). As those media-friendly, centrists parade their credentials it is important to target one or other existing party - saying something like "we'll take moderate votes from both parties" is to fight on two fronts making it more difficult to win. Far better to say something like "Labour has been taken over by the far left, we want to return to the values of Attlee, Gaitskill and Wilson in providing a voice for Britain's workers and their families". Or, if it's the Tories in your sights, "the Conservative party needs to be the voice of decent, patriotic communities but its obsession with Europe and austerity is failing these people". And remember that this message isn't just for 2022 (or whenever there's an election) but for as long as it takes to complete the replacement of the targeted political party.

All this means that you'll lose - six years of Labour campaigning after its formation resulted in just two MPs - and, more significantly, you will split the vote for left or right resulting in them being out of power or in unstable coalitions for decades. Lots on the left blame the SDP and Liberal Democrats for Margaret Thatcher's governments (and I guess that plenty of Liberals back in the first half of the 20th century thought the same of Labour).

Setting up new political parties works where you've a system of proportional representation (just look at Ireland or Holland for a guide) but even in such systems being an established political brand with an organisation and loyal supporters counts for a great deal. In the UK with its first-past-the-post system new parties start at a disadvantage and you can rest assured that existing politicians are not going to vote for self-destruction just for the sake of your shiny new centrist party.

A new party might work but the UK's political game, even with the current chaos, is stacked against new political parties (and, it seems, pretty much against either radical change or the fixing of mistakes within the existing big parties). You may want a new party for Christmas but it's likely to end up like one of those toys that everyone wanted, played with once or twice and then left untouched in favour of the Lego set with the pieces missing.

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Let's be a property-owning democracy not a land of wage-slaves and renters

It's hard to find a better definition of what it means to be a Conservative than this:

We want a country which makes the fullest use of all its human and material resources to build a new prosperity. A country which uses that prosperity wisely and well, helping the elderly and those in need, providing new educational opportunity for our children, investing for the future as well as giving us a fuller life today. A country confident in itself, playing a full part in the world's affairs, accepting and meeting its responsibilities to others.

We want a society in which material advance goes hand in hand with the deeper values which go to make up the quality of life. A society which cares for its cities, towns and villages, its rivers, its coast, its countryside.

We want people to achieve the security and independence of personal ownership greater freedom of opportunity, greater freedom of choice, greater freedom from government regulation and interference. A responsible democracy based on honest government and respect for the law.

These values and the mission they encompass represent the timeless principles of Britain's Conservative Party. This particular version comes from the Party's manifesto for the 1970 General Election signed off by my old boss, Ted Heath but their origins go back to the origins of the modern party, to Robert Peel, Benjamin Disraeli, to the embracing of free trade and the extending of the franchise, to the idea - represented today by Robert Halfon and Tory Workers - that our over-riding purpose is to improve the condition of ordinary people. This is a soft, gentle, caring and polite party not one that speaks of 'traitors' or 'saboteurs', not one that runs campaigns to unseat good, hard-working MPs because you disagree with them on one particular issue.

I chose the 1970 Manifesto because it's the one that took us into the Common Market reminding us that our core values and purpose are not, and never have been, defined by the issue of Europe. Right now the issue seems so huge and important that it swamps everything but sooner than you think we will move on from it and have to, once again, look at how we make a better nation for British people. I hope we will do what we've done before and say loudly and clearly that we stand first and foremost for decency, good government, personal responsibility, trust, family and community. And at the heart of this, once again, we have to put the promise that Ted Heath made in 1970 and Margaret Thatcher made in 1979 - a promise that we will give ordinary people the chance for a real cash stake in Britain, that we'll be a property-owning democracy not a land of wage slaves and renters dependent on the state.

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A combination of fussbucketry, economic illiteracy and the denial of liberty - welcome to Conservative policy-making

Conservative policy-making is in a bit of a pickle. It's not that there isn't any thinking about policy just that the thinking seems rooted in focus groups, the received wisdom of government policy wonks and a seemingly obsessive desire to be liked. The best place to start in explaining this is a set of "principles" set out by centrist Tory think-tank, "Bright Blue". These principles purport to be an encapsulation of something called 'liberal conservatism'. Now, leaving aside the slightly oxymoronic nature of the tag (Americans would probably pop if they were faced with such an apparent contradiction), it seems that the nice folk of Bright Blue have confused having an activist state with 'liberalism' - here's a couple of examples:

We should be open-minded to new thinking, applying solutions to public policy problems on the basis of good ideas rather than tired ideology.

Markets are the best way of allocating resources, but they can be inefficient and inequitable, so government and social institutions can help correct market problems.

Both of these statements doubtless tick the box for bureaucrats and assorted inheritors of Blair's actualist ideal of "what matters is what works" but they are essentially illiberal and, to make matters worse, contradictory. Describing your positioning as 'liberal conservative' is a statement of ideology even if, like Blair did, you adopt a sort of rhetoric that denies ideology while promoting an approach that sees government intervention as central to policy. Bright Blue are ideological in the same way and it is likely that their policy proscriptions will involve the state intervening in the interactions of private individuals - the very antithesis of liberalism.

This illiberal position is underscored by the essentially anti-market stance of Bright Blue's "pro-market, not free-market". If you are a liberal then the free part of free market is the bit that matters - liberals should be making markets more free not believing that government can "correct" market problems. These contradictions and confusions can only result in similarly contradictory and confusing policy proposals. Indeed scrolling though the titles in Bright Blue's library, there is a sense that the environment and climate change, human rights and how capitalism is in some sort of crisis seem to dominate. I may be doing an injustice but I've a feeling that, while these things matter, they are not the basis for a cogent conservative position appealing to the wider electorate.

From this same camp - a sort of slightly squishy centrist world where policy gimmicks dominate - comes Onward, another conservative think tank. It's the brainchild of Neil O'Brien MP (who used to policy wonk for George Osborne when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer) and they are a step ahead of Bright Blue by looking at something that does seem to matter - housing. The problem is that, having identified the problem (there aren't enough houses), Onward sets out proposals that seem designed to make development less likely. After all the cost of land is a big chunk of the reason why we don't building enough houses where people want to live but nowhere in its proposals does Onward set out any way to reduce the cost of land. Instead O'Brien tells us that the high land values are a boon because we can tax them and use the money to build "vital" infrastructure (although it's not so vital that private-funded initiative delivers it).

In truth Onward and O'Brien are trying to square the circle of needing development while pretending this can be done without building on green belt sites. O'Brien also gets confused between landowner and developer (a common problem with the public but one a bright young MP who worked at the treasury shouldn't be making): "(a) thing that drives my constituents mad is the way that developers make a killing when they get planning permission..." says O'Brien when it isn't the developer who cleans up on the land value but the landowner who the housebuilder bought the land from. The only impact of infrastructure contributions, a sort of CIL on steroids, would be to make development more costly, more slow and, in a lot of locations, uneconomic.

Onward has the jump on Bright Blue making proposals that, while they are entirely counter-productive, at least reflect the fears and concerns of likely Conservative voters. The problem, however, is that Bright Blue and Onward assume that the resolution to policy challenges must lie in action by government - tax this, regulate that, control the other - and most commonly by central government. For all Bright Blue's talk of institutions, the only ones they seem to feel matter are the institutions of state - local, private and civil society institutions can be commissioned by the state to deliver policy, there is no sense that those institutions can do the business without requiring the direction of national government.

Policy development in this centrist Tory world seems to consist of manufacturing crisis and then setting out proposals to resolve the crisis, proposals that almost always require significant government intervention, new laws, new taxes and bans. Mark Wallace at Conservative Home, in what amounted to a cry of pain, described the current Conservative obsession with banning things and concluded:

"...meddling in people’s lives might temporarily satisfy some politicians’ itchy need to “do something”, or to paint themselves as go-getters, but the cumulative price is to paint the Government as increasingly dour, gloomy and authoritarian in both tone and policy. Some positivity, some joy, some creation of new opportunity and liberty would not go amiss."

I fear that this pain will be ignored - even attacked - by those developing policy for Conservatives. We are stuck in the world of "something must be done" with the finest example being the new "Obesity Strategy" filled with pettifogging fussbucketry like trying to get Sid's Caff on the A49 to count the calories in his full English breakfast. Even worse there's its pretence that somehow these proposals are based on evidence when they're just another list of nannying gimmicks from astroturf campaign groups like Action on Sugar - ban ads, force manufacturers to reformulate, stop offers like two-for-one, and ban sweets at the checkout. Plus taxes, more taxes and yet more taxes.

Yet, as I noted in criticising the New Puritan Left, the response from ministers when challenged on this is to say that we're doing it to protect the NHS - asked about the obesity strategy's fussbucketry by Phillip Davies, the current public health minister replied:

“This is a publicly funded health service that we all believe in and all love. If we want it to celebrate its 140th birthday, we need to protect it, and that means getting serious about prevention and stopping people coming into the service and getting sick."

The same lie as the left's new puritan nannies - the NHS is under strain and it's your fault because you're too fat, you drink to much and have too many bad habits. All followed up by proposals for bans, controls, taxes and regulations to make you change your bad behaviour. It's a lie - obesity isn't rising and NHS costs are going up because we've got better and better at staying alive. Everyone - even the NHS - knows this, ignores it and proposes a new bunch of nannying, fussbucketing interventions that amount to a nudging us with a baseball bat.

To close the loop here, the same goes for housing. Everyone knows that the problem is that we've spent 30 years or more not building the homes we need resulting in hugely over-valued housing, sky-high rents, homelessness and a resentful young generation. And we also know that the reason we've not built those houses is our planning system, a system that's now wholly-owned by NIMBYs and BANANAs. Yet nobody does anything beyond tinkering for fear of upsetting those (few) constituents who moan to Neil O'Brien about heavy vehicles delivering to development sites or (a loud handful of) campaigners fighting hard to protect a bunch of ugly buildings in a derelict airfield because 70 years ago some brave Americans flew bombers from that field.

There is almost nothing about current Conservative policy-making - whether in think tanks or inside the government - that gives me, as a conservative, any confidence. Our core values of localism, self-reliance, community, enterprise and liberty have been swamped by technocratic solutions based on questionable evidence devised by bright young things with barely the first idea about the communities those policies will affect. It's not just fussbucketry, although that drives me mad, but also the ignorance of basic business economics and the belief that freedom is somehow a 'nice-to-have' rather than something absolutely central to what we believe as conservatives. The next generation of policy will be set by these people and it will be a putrid combination of fussbucketry, economic illiteracy and the denial of liberty. It won't be conservatism.

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Conservatives urging restrictive planning controls are planning their own demise

Liz Truss was right when she said that the Conservatives limpet-like attachment to uban containment policies would usher in a far left (and antisemitic) government:

In the early 2000s, there was only a weak connection between land-use restrictions and partisanship. Democratic places were only slightly more regulated than Republican ones. Interestingly enough, many towns that started out more Republican actually became more restrictive over time. This, for Sorens, is a key piece of evidence: “These data support the central claim of this paper: Democrats do not cause stricter zoning, but stricter zoning causes more Democrats (relative to Republicans),” he writes. In other words, when Republican towns increase land-use restrictions, they tend to drive away more Republicans.

I know this is the USA but the impact of urban containment policies is always to drive up land values (and rents and house prices) resulting in places where only the very rich and the poor can live. The less well off - especially the most marginalised such as immigrant groups, single parents and the disabled - live in social housing that is de facto reserved for such groups while the richest can afford the sky high prices and stratospheric rents. The most left-wing places in the USA are becoming, as a result of anti-development policies, the most segregated and most unequal.

As conservatives we should be pragmatic - if the result of such policies is the persistence of housing dependency for the less well off and, as reported recently, an explosion in wealth inequality as land values rocket then we should be looking for an answer that meets aspirations to own for as many as possible, that protects the poorest without enriching landlords and which doesn't featherbed the already rich. Right now, all we're getting is Onward proposing the extensive use of compulsory purchase to prevent landowners profiting from artificially expensive property as a result of those urban containment policies. Such an approach is little different from South African government seizing farms in the name of equality. Plus the, mostly left-wing run, councils in inner London will simply use the cash to shore up their client base through sustaining housing dependency.

Instead of allowing NIMBY residents on nice Surrey towns (and their MPs) to set the agenda, we should be doing was Liz Truss said and making it easier to develop in the city and easier to develop outside the city - if we don't we can expect to see the same happening to Conservative support in London as happened in Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Hull.

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A less authoritarian Tory Party would have fewer authoritarian policies. Why doesn't it?

There appears to be something of a splurge of thinking in the Conservative Party. I'm keen on this especially given we're also in government making it much harder to leading figures to burst into thoughtful song - the dour, dull business of government 'twas ever a drag on ideas. The thinking seems to revolve around three themes: being altogether jollier, escaping the legacy of Thatcherism, and making a 21st century case for capitalism.

Now this all sound like a slightly updated version of Reaganism (for the record, the USA's best post-war president and a man whose ideas still resonate in their defence of freedom, community and a sunnier life) but underneath is covers over the gaping chasm in the UK's Conservative Party. This isn't a matter of policy nuance but something much more fundamental, a sort of cavaliers and roundheads divide between those wanting a stern parental grip on society and those who think a load more freedom is a great idea.

It's true to say that Conservatives have a sort of on/off love affair with liberalism - David Cameron famously described himself as a 'liberal conservative', a tag that raised the ire of the more autocratically-inclined in the party despite Cameron repeatedly demonstrating his illiberalism. Elsewhere - in what is probably the mainstream of the party - support for illiberal ideas like ID cards, stricter licensing laws, minimum pricing for alcohol, chasing immigrants about with slightly racist posters, and wanting controls on the Internet in the vain hope they will stop teenaged boys looking at pornography.

So when Ruth Davidson, probably the most shining champion of Cameron's liberal conservatism says:

“We look a bit joyless, to be fair. A bit authoritarian, sometimes”.

I have two conflicting reactions. The first is positive, fist-pumping agreement - we really need to stop nannying and fussing over the public as if they're unable to make any decisions at all without the gentle guiding (big stick wielding) hand to the paternal state. So well said, Ruth, well said.

The second reaction is that Ruth is a raging hypocrite - after all:

“Support for alcohol minimum pricing represents a major policy shift for the Scottish Conservatives. It follows my commitment as leader to undertake a widespread review of policy.

“I am delighted that we have managed to secure two major concessions which will reassure the retail industry following productive negotiations with the Health Secretary.”

Here's a policy that is harmful and stupid in equal measure, is the epitome of joyless authoritarianism and Ruth Davidson walked her Scottish Tories into voting for it.

If the future for the Party lies in being more fun, less fussy and more libertarian (a view that seems to have its champion more in Liz Truss than Ruth Davidson) then we need to put an end to things like minimum pricing, sugar taxes, aggressive benefit sanctions, ever expanding demands for ID, and stupid immigration policies that prevent businesses getting the skilled labour they need to compete in the global race David Cameron was always banging on about. Above all we should start treating the British public as adult friends and neighbours who we want to help get along, support when they're in trouble and care for when upset or ill. What we're getting instead is rampant fussbucketry that seems to view people as slightly retarded eleven-year-olds who can only survive under the benign, authoritarian gaze of a nanny state.

Ruth Davidson is right, the Conservative Party needs to be less authoritarian. To to this we should start by not proposing authoritarian policies. It might just help!

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Why house prices should be the number one concern of a Conservative government

Housing is the largest expenditure item in the household budget. Higher house prices have a disproportionate potential to reduce the standard of living by consuming funds that would otherwise be available to purchase other goods and services. Even more concerning, high house prices, and related high rents, increase relative poverty, as many lower income households may have to forego basic goods and services because of higher housing costs, and may even be forced to seek public housing subsidies.

Worsening housing affordability and its adverse impact on the declining standard of living threaten one of the greatest human advances in history – the democratization of prosperity.

In 1959, 1970 and 1979, Conservative leadership set out the aim of creating a property owning democracy with the private ownership of housing at the heart of that promise. In broad terms, though building, liberalising finance and through right-to-buy, those Conservative leaders - Macmillan, Heath, Thatcher - delivered on that promise.

Today that promise needs renewing. The answer to the housing pain of younger people doesn't lie in rent controls, council housing or build-to-rent, the answer lies in setting out how ordinary working families can buy a house. We've made some progress though protecting right-to-buy (although failing to extend it to the wider social sector is a disappointment), reducing stamp duty and Help to Buy. But these instruments don't change the fundamentals for too many people in London, houses are too expensive to buy. This expensiveness is a function of land prices not the cost of building a house and the way to reduce land prices is to make more land available for housing in places where people can live and work (or commute to their work).

In the short term (getting that land supply up isn't an overnight task) a Conservative government should also abolish stamp duty for first time buyers, reform green belt regulation to allow small scale building on brownfield sites, support approaches aimed at reducing build costs, develop more flexible shared equity schemes, finish the job of reforming leasehold and give tenants first refusal (with a RTB discount) when landlords sell property. Other thoughts might include tenant ownership of social housing, reforming conveyancing, longer tenancies in the private sector, and a ringfenced 50% levy on land sales with value increases consequential on housing allocations (at least so long as that value is in the gift of the planning system).

It may be a step too far to simply abolish the green belt but we need to review its size and purpose. Simply opposing 'sprawl' because sprawl is bad can't be justified in an age of electric autonomous vehicles, improved mass transit and home working. Suburbia is socially beneficial and, if transport changes happen as we expect, will be less of an environmental concern. The economic case for densification - based on agglomeration as a driver of growth - needs challenging both because it is socially damaging but also because that economic case is based on removing the brightest from elsewhere and piling them up in the big city to produce.

If we do these things, the main reason for young (and not-so-young) people's angst - not having a real, tangible stake in society - is removed and we once again deliver on the idea of a property-owning democracy that has been at the heart of British conservatism for 60 years.

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We need a better discussion of poverty and welfare

A while back I wrote about how conservatives needed to start talking about poverty.

Two days ago an old cinema in Shipley caught fire – it’s now being demolished as an unsafe building. One tweet I saw suggested that it might have started from a tramp lighting a fire to keep warm on a cold, snowy night. It may turn out that there was some other cause but, sadly, this suggestion could very well be true. For whatever reason there are people sleeping rough on even the coldest night – and this is poverty.

Too many of us look at this and throw up our hands in despair. After all we’ve had a welfare system for over 100 years and a welfare state for nearly 70 – and still there are people who end up unable to heat their home, wondering whether they can feed their children and lacking in any hope or aspiration. So when I see people “defending” the welfare state, I want to scream and point to the terrible injustice of poverty.

In rounds terms the UK government spends about £100bn on alleviating poverty (this is just the welfare budget bit of it so the true figure is maybe a bit higher) - there really ought not to be much poverty left if this money was distributed well. The problem is partly that government really isn't very good at running things and that we design general systems lacking the responsiveness and flexibility needed to respond to the reality of poverty. But fixing that won't fix poverty.

In one respect us Conservatives have it right - the best way to eliminate poverty is for people to have a job and the opportunity for personal betterment. But, even when we move away from relative measures of poverty, there remains, at any given time, a lot of people who by any measure are in abject poverty. When Bradford Council's corporate scrutiny committee looked at this, my back-of-the-envelope estimations gave a figure of 15,000-20,000 people in the City who are genuinely wanting, really are poor. Stretch this across the nation and we get to a figure of about 2 million or so people who are in poverty.

Blessedly, for many of this 2 million, the situation is temporary, they get the benefits sorted out, maybe pay off some debt or get a job and are able to move to a more stable place, at least for the time being. But this still leaves a lot of people - I don't know how many, suspect no-one knows for sure - who are living in terrible poverty and can't get themselves out of it. And, yes, we do a fine job most of the time helping them, either through the benefits system or through the wonderful thing that is people's charity. The thing is, however, that this isn't getting to the heart of the problem, it's treating the symptoms rather than the cause.

As conservatives, people who believe in the free market society that made most people much richer than past generations, we need to resist the temptation to line up with the progressive left and say that cause is down to the system, that liberal capitalism is somehow the reason for that ex-soldier sleeping rough outside Tower Hill tube station or that single mum crying herself to sleep because she's nothing to feed the kids tomorrow. If there are a million people stuck in terrible poverty, there are an accompanying million reasons for that being so.

It seems to me that our nationalised and centrally-directed welfare system, for all that it works for most of its users, simply cannot give the time and attention to people that would allow plans to get that ex-soldier or that single mum out of their poverty. If we are to redesign a system, it needs to come with space to allow better support for such things as mental health, drug and alcohol dependence, disability and budgeting. And, yes, this means challenging spending reductions in local government and looking at how we can make ideas like the (badly named) troubled families programme work. It also means recognising that providing emergency cash, food and clothing has to be part of a system - things like food banks should be seen as part of society's response not as a reflection of failure.

It also strikes me that we need to see how the creativity of private initiative can be directed to helping these million or so folk stuck in poverty. Big government isn't innovative (probably rightly) but there are a lot of people working in and around government who could be given the opportunity and incentive. I'm struck by the degree to which charities and voluntary groups are ready to take risks, do things a bit differently, in order to help those they were formed to help. How we get more of this should be something exercising the mind of government. David Cameron's 'Big Society' was a good start that was, sadly and wrongly, castigated by people in the voluntary sector suffering from a bad case of 'not invented here syndrome'.

The elimination of poverty is not something that can be achieved by government on its own, least of all by tearing down the system of liberal capitalism most likely to deliver a long term answer. That Cameron observation that "there is such a thing as society, it's just not the same as government" should be our starting point. The task of government is to enable people who want to help to do just that, to remove the controls preventing support. At the same time government needs to start being more trusting of the people who walk in through its doors seeking help.

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It's my party and it'll change politics forever...

Setting up new political parties is a tricky business. I appreciate that us politicians all believe - each and every oneof us - that our intellect, wit, charm and charisma means any party we set up would storm to victory on a tidal wave of popular passion for our brilliant policies. But, truth be told, the track record of new political parties in the UK is pretty rubbish - indeed the record of new parties isn't great anywhere.

This, however, doesn't stop people suggesting that a new party would change everything. Here's Spad Superstar, James Chapman (from holiday in Greece):

James Chapman stepped up his online campaign for a proposed “Democrats” party he has been mounting while on holiday in Greece, saying Brexit signalled the demise of the Conservatives.

A number of serving, former and shadow cabinet ministers contacted Chapman after he posted a series of provocative tweets this week, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

He said: “Two people in the cabinet, a number of people who have been in Conservative cabinets before now – better cabinets, I might say, than the current one – and a number of shadow cabinets ministers have also been in touch.

“They are not saying they are going to quit their parties, but they are saying they understand that there is an enormous gap in the centre now of British politics.”

That this exciting new project from a bloke on holiday in Greece who appears not to have a job at the moment tells you everything you need to know. We've all, with the help of sunshine, Mediterranean food and good red wine worked up incredible schemes to build mighty businesses, transform the game of football, rebalance the British economy and, as James has done, change the face of British politics forever. And when we return to the rain, sandwiches and supermarket lager of Britain these grand plans disappear into the mundanity of everyday life and business. As they should - 'pub talk' as a former colleague David Emmott once called it - because they make little sense.

We know how new centrist parties motivated by divisions over Europe, along with other policies like nuclear disarmament and nationalisation, turn out - even when they are led by a phalanx of cabinet superstars (or in reality three superstars and the one whose name no-one can quite remember):

The SDP began in January 1981 with the Limehouse Declaration, a statement of intent by four former Labour Cabinet ministers—Roy Jenkins, David Owen, William Rodgers, and Shirley Williams—to quit the leftward path that had lately been taken by Labour.

The SDP sputtered on until 1988 as a serious party when most of it voted to merge with the Liberal Party (that it so closely resembled it had shared election campaigns in 1983 and 1987).

While James Chapman's 'Democrats' might be the product of him having too little to do in Greece and too much wine, lots of people seem to think that there's some sort of mileage in setting up a sort of centrist party (presumably one that isn't run by a pleasant god-botherer or aged ballroom dancer) to stop Brexit. Leaving aside that this is perhaps the most short-term justification for creating a political party, it's not going to happen for a couple of very important reasons.

The first reason is that Labour MPs (activists, councillors and what have you) are going to stay right where they are in the expectation that one of two things will happen - Corbyn's leadership will collapse leading to the centre-left getting control again or Corbyn will be prime minister and they'll get some of the goodies that go with power. Folk like Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper and Keir Starmer won't walk away from safe seats and guaranteed media access to engage in a risky, dodgy new party (even one with a tad more thought and planning than James Chapman gave the idea in between eating, tanning and drinking).

And secondly, with a few exceptions the Conservative Party has already been done over by Remainers and the Conservatives currently have (courtesy of the DUP) all the jobs and most of the power. Why on earth would any unnamed cabinet ministers walk out because of the slight possibility that Jacob Rees-Mogg might get to be leader of the Conservative Party at some unspecified point in the future? Assuming that Rees-Mogg actually wants the job.

Moreover running a political party is about a little bit more than have some influential figureheads - political organisations aren't just a couple of chancers sending out press releases from an office on the edge of SW1 (although I suspect folk like James Chapman think this is all you have to do) but involve a lot of organisation, effort and structure. Remember that, after its initial surge, the SDP essentially piggy-backed on the existing Liberal party structure and organisation - a new centrist party can't assume that the current liberal democrats, for all their opportunism will let this happen again.

The last successful new political party in the UK was the Labour Party. And it's worth bearing in mind that it arrived to the left of existing politics and that it took best part of 25 years to get to the stage of forming a (coalition) government - over 40 years to govern alone. There may indeed be a 'gap' in the centre of British politics because of Brexit and Corbyn but, if people want a party, you have to ask why - just like in 1981 - they don't simply switch to the existing, established and "winning here" Liberal Democrats?

British politics has to get a lot more broken before there's even the faintest chance of a new party - let alone one with any chance of success. The Conservative Party isn't (despite the best efforts of the media to pretend otherwise) split on policy but rather by the competing ambitions of leading figures. This is why otherwise sane Tories give credence to the idea of Rees-Mogg. And there may be enormous policy differences between the Corbynistas and Blairites in the Labour Party but the latter are staying put because they believe people - inside and outside the party - will eventually get bored with permanent revolution.

But Still - pour me another glass of that lovely red wine and let me explain my plan for a new centre-right political party...

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"It starts with what you can see from your doorstep" - thoughts on conservatism

Conservatives don't spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a conservative. After all politics is boring, political philosophy doubly boring. So we don't spend hours discussing the nuance of our ideology, preferring instead to talk about the garden, the football or the state of the gulleys on Bingley Road.

The problem with us conservatives not thinking much about conservatism is that others decide to do it for us. And they really don't get it at all. A thoughtful consideration of conservatism get replaced by a set of negative stereotypes depending on who is doing the defining.

To our right we get faux-conservatives who pretend that they're the only real conservatives. Everyone but them are 'cucks', 'conservatives in name only' or, worst of all 'liberals'. The true conservatism for these people is a sort of warmed over nationalism peppered (or even pepe-ed) with sub-literate on-line memes and old-fashioned racist tropes.

To our left are a bunch of folk who range from considering us sad thickos to really, genuinely hating us. No chance of a positive press here, we're greedy, uncaring, elitist and even murderous. Conservatism is a bloated, red-faced man in a pin-stripe suit.

As conservatives we've allowed these oppositional stereotypes to dominate people's understanding of the ideology (insofar as it is an ideology - but more of that later) because we spend almost no time considering what we do believe and, more importantly, what conservatism means to the millions of people who simply toddle along to the church hall and vote for us.

Conservatism is ill-defined - it's felt rather than analysed, emotional rather than intellectual. Unlike the left there is no ur-text, no 'Capital' that provides a bedrock of religious certainty to ideological discussion. We have a set of populist aphorisms - 'hand up not a hand out', 'people who do the right things', 'choice and opportunity' - but these don't help except as a set of clues to what we believe.

The advantage, of course, with all this is we can, like the Red Queen, believe almost anything if we try hard enough. This is the problem that some absolutist free marketers (and those Pepe-loving nationalists) have with conservatism - it doesn't preclude a role for the state or assume that there is some perfect model of government that, if introduced, will lead us to the Fields of Elysium.

The disadvantage with the lack of that ur-text or even a recognised corpus of accessible conservative thinking is that there's no obvious ideological filter through which to assess policy. Conservatives literally wing-it much of the time at least in ideological terms. When people speak of some sort of conservative ideological mission they largely miss the point - it's mostly this is what we do not a case of this is what we believe.

As a starting point in understanding conservatism let me say that emotional meaning is more significant than philosophy, at least in its role as an ideological source. Place, people and values matter more to conservatives than the words in some book written in the 19th century. Where there are central texts to liberalism and socialism, there is no source book for conservatism - we can't get ideological reassurance from Marx or Smith or Mill.

As conservatives, however, we can take advantage of not being tied to a canon to dip into a wider range of sources, to use fiction - Austen, Trollope, Tolkein and even Disraeli - as well as philosophy. Above all though, conservatives should pay more attention to sociology than economics. Most of our problems are because we haven't done this, we've allowed ourselves to be captured by the dry logic of what Deidre McCloskey calls "Max U" - maximising utility, utilitarianism, metrics, technocracy, Plato's Philosopher Kings.

If you spend time with conservative people - and as a Conservative Party member and activist of forty years, I can say that I have done just that - you soon realise that the stuff of national debate and headlines is not the stuff of conservatism (not, as I've noted, that conservative folk spend that much time talking political philosophy). Boil it down and the core of our belief is about community, family, neighbourhood, friends - social capital, sociology. Yet we bang on as if economics is everything, dry and dusty emotionless numbers.

Because of this and because we don't think enough about what we're about, conservatives become pragmatic, technocratic and seem uncaring. If we don't ground our policy in community, family, neighbourhood and home, we end up sounding like the young man with the spreadsheet trying to tell the old publican why his business is dying. Or worse that it would be an improvement to close that business and turn the property into a convenience store or some flats. Apply this thinking to how we see the poor. Not benefits scroungers. Not immigrants. Not undeserving. But somebody's family. Someone's neighbour. Someone's friend.

The reverse used to be true about conservatives. The folk bothering about their neighbourhood, the town, the country were mostly conservatives. The sense of social duty and that 'we can't let things like that happen here' was what drove my grandmother and two friends to start delivering meals on wheels in the years after WWII - ferried round by the local curate who had a motor-cycle and sidecar.

In Britain, conservatism doesn't need a relaunch, we just need to literally go back to our roots as conservatives. To understand why we are what we are and to start talking about those conservative things - few of which, once we've got past thrift, have much to do with economics, at least in that Hayekian or Marxist "we've a prescription for the perfect society here in this book" sense of economics.

Firstly, everything is local. This is what matters most to people. Their family. Their friends. Their neighbours. Their community. Their place. As Kipling said:

GOD gave all men all earth to love
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Belovèd over all

Admitting our hearts are small is just the start - we must then be able to answer the questions people have about their school, their hospital, their road, their house, their family. It's not that people in Sevenoaks don't care about school and hospitals in Wilsden, of course they do. It's rather that those small hearts make them care much, much more about the things of their neighbourhood than they ever will about things in distant (even five milesaway) places.

Today this means giving people control of the answers to these questions, at the very least a say, a chance to hold the people running the services to account. So when we say we don't like the EU, it's not because it's evil or stupid but because it's simply too far away to understand what our neighbourhood, our community and our family needs except as numbers on a spreadsheet or a footnote in a think-tank report.

Even the local council is too far away to really understand what matters in our communities, to our families and for our neighbourhood. Yet the flattening of everything - creating Harm de Blij's 'flat earth' in the pursuit of Max U - makes that council just an outpost of the distant regime. And people know this and feel excluded. For some there's enough money to escape (or even to be an 'Anywhere' person, a 'Flat Earther') but for most people that's not an option.

If conservatives are to make a difference - and what's the point if that's not the aim - we need to stop trying to make everyone's lives better by centralised fiat. And start with making our and our neighbours lives better. Conservatives should apply that old shopkeeper's adage - 'look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves'. Look after communities - the bit you can see from your front door - and the whole of society, even the bits we can't see, benefits.

The Knight Foundation, an American charity that supports journalism and active citizenship, ran a programme called 'Soul of the Community' that showed how there is an "important and significant correlation between how attached people feel to where they live and local GDP growth" and what "most drives people to love where they live (their attachment) is their perception of aesthetics, social offerings, and openness of a place". If people love where they live, that place will succeed - it's Sam Gamgee going round The Shire planting a grain from Galadriel's garden in every corner.

For me this is the starting point for a conservative mission. We're not about grand schemes for the perfect society but rather for places that people love. I quoted Kipling's 'Sussex' above but I could equally have used Casey Bailey's 'Dear Birmingham' because it's exactly the same sentiment - I love this place for all it's flaws, mistakes and problems. It's my place.

This is where we start - with home, friends, family and the places we love. You want a conservative manifesto then it starts with how we give folk the power and the tools to turn the places they love into great places. For sure there are lots of other things about keeping people safe, about nation and stuff like that - even macroeconomics if you insist, but if we don't start with what we can see out of our front door we've missed the point.

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Don't be a shy conservative - you are the good people

I wrote this a while back - thought it worth sharing again:

• For Conservatives  “caring” doesn’t mean raising taxes from the relatively poor, paying them to middle class professionals who then ‘care’ for the poor. Caring is something we do personally – it is an individual act, done without looking to a nice salary and an index-linked public pension. Right wingers do not view charity as a sin
• Conservatives seek out independence and self-reliance – our aspiration is to provide for ourselves, to care (that word again) for our families, to look out for our friends and to pay our way in the world without recourse to the support of the state
• As conservatives we do not see the words ‘business’ and ‘enterprise’ as problematic or slippery  terms only salvageable through the appending of the word ‘social’ – these words are central of belief that, left to their own devices, people will take advantage of the market’s natural laws to better themselves and, in doing so, better society
• Conservatives recognise the importance of place – not as something to be managed, let alone created, by the agents of government but as the mud on our boots, the soil in which we have settled and grown strong. And the right to own that place – to be able to use our property as we see fit – is essential to that understanding. Place without private property is serfdom
• And lastly conservatives doubt and question the role and purpose of government. It is not simply to echo Ronald Reagan’s joke – the most frightening words in the English Language, “I from the government and I’m here to help”- but to believe that independence, enterprise and the busy-ness of hard work are driving betterment and that the state is, most of the time, a barrier to a better place, a better society and happier people

It's not just the economy, stupid - a lesson from Alinsky for conservatives

Politics is about the economy. This truth has, for most of recent history, dominated the manner in which elections have been fought and to a large degree the outcomes of those elections have been determined by the economy. When James Carville hung that sign - "it's the economy, stupid" - on the wall of Bill Clinton's campaign office, he summed up this political certainty.

Because of this certainty, politicians and, perhaps more significantly, political campaign managers began to focus their attention on economics rather than marketing strategy. These folk assumed that if you got your message right on the economy and economic management and won the argument by undermining the other side's economic credibility then you win. Every time.

And is certainly seemed that way. Bill Clinton won in 1992 by remorselessly talking up recession (a recession caused by his predecessor, of course). John Major delivered a Conservative majority in that same year by positioning his government as trustworthy on economic policy and Kinnock's Labour as risky. The same goes in Germany, Japan and Canada - everywhere you looked the secret was to be boringly reliable and trustworthy on the economy. Do that and the mantle of office falls onto your shoulders.

It seems that our presumption - that the macroeconomy is what matters - may have been misplaced. Here's Graeme Archer looking over someone's shoulder on the train:

You don’t intend to read over the shoulder of the person next to you on the tube, do you, but it’s unavoidable. The well-dressed young woman on the Northern Line on Wednesday was scratching away in a very expensive notebook. The novel in my hands turned to dust, and I swivelled my eyes at her writing.

Top of the page: “Objective: financial security.” Then a new line: “Need: £20,000 to be debt free.”

I didn’t read any more. The thought of twenty grand’s worth of (I’d guess) credit card and student loan debt makes me feel sick, even experienced second-hand.

The economy isn't a thing separate from the real lives of ordinary people, yet this is precisely the manner in which we speak of it. The newspapers and self-important parts of broadcast media are filled with earnest people talking about 'charts' and 'models' and 'forecasts' as if these grand aggregations of ordinary decisions mean anything to the real lives of ordinary people.

In 2008 all this changed although we didn't notice at the time. We assumed that the election of Barak Obama was, like elections always are, determined by the US economy crashing into the wall under a Republican president. Here's a bit of a clue:

"I am proud to see that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008. It is a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday."

Confirming that Obama was trained in Chicago by the Alinsky apparatus, David Alinsky wrote: "It is an amazingly powerful format, and the method of my late father always works to get the message out and get the supporters on board. When executed meticulously and thoughtfully, it is a powerful strategy for initiating change and making it really happen. Obama learned his lesson well."

Describing how the Democratic National Convention was a "perfectly organized event, Saul Alinsky style," David Alinsky wrote: "All the elements were present: the individual stories told by real people of their situations and hardships, the packed-to-the rafters crowd, the crowd's chanting of key phrases and names, the action on the spot of texting and phoning to show instant support and commitment to jump into the political battle, the rallying selections of music, the setting of the agenda by the power people."

America had elected a 'community organiser', a campaigner. For sure, Obama was less of an outsider than some claimed but his election represented a change from the 'it's the economy, stupid' approach to campaigning. And remember, given the circumstances in the USA back then, the core victory for Obama wasn't the actual presidential election but was his win, from behind against a dominant and well-branded opponent, in the Democratic primaries.

Scroll forward a few years to 2016 and we witness two shocks - the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump. In both cases that community organiser approach delivered - in the UK the Remain campaign was entirely old school: 'it's the economy, stupid' while those campaigning for Leave shifted the focus to that Alinsky-style human interest. There were rallies, debates, the use of social media and that on-the-ground spread of a message that made people believe they really could vote their lives better. And they did - Brexit won.

Now put aside your distaste and ignore what the BBC has told you. Donald Trump's campaign took all the lessons from Obama's 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination and applied them for a social media age. Read that letter from Alinsky's son again:

"...the individual stories told by real people of their situations and hardships, the packed-to-the rafters crowd, the crowd's chanting of key phrases and names, the action on the spot of texting and phoning to show instant support and commitment to jump into the political battle, the rallying selections of music, the setting of the agenda by the power people."

This describes Trump's campaign to the letter - add in social media which was in its infancy in 2008 and you have the recipe for his election. Despite him being a really weak candidate without an obvious base for support and without the financial resources available to the Clinton campaign.

All this brings us to 2017. A UK general election with the Conservatives out of sight in the polls and Labour led by Jeremy Corbyn, a leader who three-quarters of his MPs had no confidence in. The result was another shock as Labour climbed and the Conservative's lost their majority. Had it not been for the successful and different campaign by Scottish Conservtives the results would have been worse still.

Why? Right now we're talking about how bad the Conservative campaign was (just as we've done when we talk about the 2016 US elections) - over-centralised, too leader-focused, a dreadful manifesto and a campaign seemingly without bite or passion. And all this may be true but it doesn't really explain - after all the Conservative vote and share of the vote went up. Most of us would have been chuffed to bits getting over 42% of the vote in a general election.

The big story isn't the Conservatives but Labour. The Corbyn phenomenon, just like Obama and just like Trump, leaps straight from the pages of Alinsky - it is the victory of a community organiser against the established 'it's the economy, stupid' strategy. The story is no longer who sounds most credible talking about those macroeconomic charts and models but rather who can offer hope and change to that woman on Graeme Archer's train. Plus a million other stories - about people's health, jobs, education, pension and benefits - that fit into an organiser's narrative and motivate women on trains to become women at rallies.

Obama, Trump, Brexit, Corbyn - Melenchon in France, Bernie Sanders in the US, even the sainted Juston Trudeau in Canada - all changed how we campaign whether from left, right or centre. The old certainties - 'it's the economy, stupid' - are broken down by it being millions of different and personal economies that matter. Yours, mine and that woman on the train.

The Conservative Party remains trapped in the model of campaigning that didn't work for Clinton, didn't work for Remain, and didn't work a few weeks ago for May. It's not about how many Facebook ads you buy - that's just astroturf - but about an actual campaign run by committed campaigners. One irony is that the bussing of campaigners around in the 2015 election that caused so much hoo-hah, is much closer to the sort of campaigning we need.

In the end though, I'm struck by two things. Firstly that typically conservative folk aren't all that interested in politics - which is why Leave and Trump looked to a very different demographic for their shock troops. And secondly that, despite the apparant triumph of these populist campaigns, just as many voters are not taken in by the 'hope' and 'change' message when it doesn't come with a coherent policy message.

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Young people are neoliberals - they just don't realise it yet so let's help them.

It seems to me that the real issue young people have is feeling excluded from the benefits of our capitalist, neoliberal society not that capitalist, neoliberal society itself. And this seems a reasonable gripe to me. Here's a tweet from lefty journalist John Elledge:




This - perhaps not all that considered - comment tells us a great deal. Mostly that the real irritation of the emerging graduate generation is that they feel unable to afford investment assets like houses. For me this is one of the essential failures of UK government over the last thirty years - the idea of a property owning democracy was ignored as we got ever more excited about the seemingly endless rise in house prices.

Some people want to blame all this on my generation - the boomers - who took advantage of cheap asset prices in the 1970s and 1980s and rode the bubble to the point where the house my Dad bought for £3,250 in 1963 in now 'worth' over £400,000 (Dad sold the house in 1975 for about £14,000). I am absolutely with all those people who feel that they're outside this bubblicious world - not just the young or poor but a whole load of people from 'Up North' who've not seen anything like the gains those 'Down South' have seen.

Add to this that we told young people that the way to get into this bubble world was to get a good degree (in fact any old degree as Blair's enthusiasm for book-learning led to the numbers going to university getting up towards half of 18 and 19 year olds). And because these degrees were the gateway to a world of wealth and power, we told young people they could have a load of (cheap) borrowing that they'd spend half their life paying off so as to get the degree.

Young people don't want to be socialists, they want the entrance fee to our neoliberal world of valuable assets, to that property-owning democracy we were all promised. And this is why they've dumped the capitalists, the people who they think are stopping them from joining the glorious free market rat race. "Have free university tuition". "Here's a subsidised mortgage". "How about a big pay rise". "Or a higher minimum wage". "Free child care". "Discounted rail travel"...

It doesn't matter how much others ask where all this cash is coming from, people aren't listening. Or rather they see those telephone number house prices and say, "y'all can afford to pay for this stuff, get on with it". And Labour offered them everything they were asking for and some things they weren't - no questions asked. Is it any surprise that folk who are outside that wealth bubble flocked to this banner?

Young people - and plenty of the not-so-young - want to know when it's their turn to play the free market, asset-owning, property-speculating game. They don't want socialism, they want what their parents and grandparents had - the chance to have a real cash stake in their society, the thing that Margaret Thatcher promised to my generation (and largely delivered). This isn't about nationalisation for all that people tell you the government should run stuff (they always have done by the way even at the height of Maggie's pomp). No, it's about us renewing the promise we made to the post-war generation and to late boomers like me - play your part, work hard, be a good citizen and we'll make sure you can have that real cash stake in Britain.

Right now we're still telling people to play their part, to work hard, to borrow to fund education and to be a good citizen but government has reneged on its side of the bargain, that cash stake in Britain. And the single-minded focus of any new government should be to renew that offer and make it work. Those young people really aren't baby ideologues desperate for some sort of socialist New Jerusalem. They're just like you and I were 30, 40, 50 or 60 years ago - bothered about our own futures, the things we care about, in that thing Adam Smith saw as the driver of a better, richer society: self-interest.

So let's start offering people that chance. Let's free up the planning system so more houses get built were people want to live. Let's revisit the idea of tax relief or other support that backs individual, personal investment in our society. Let's liberate the innovative instincts of property and finance people to meet the aspirations of today's ambitious young people - 21st century capitalists, budding neoliberals every one. And let's do this knowing that the alternative, Labour's market-fixing, price-controlling, 'magic money tree' programme carries in it the seeds of disaster, the crash that socialism always brings.

I'm with you if you want to bash at those folk farming grants and corporate welfare. I'm on your side if you want to try and stop well-funded lobbyists getting government to fix a market or a system to suit their clients. I'm right there if what you want is to stop rent-seekers freeloading on free health, welfare and education. And I agree with you when you say people should pay the taxes they owe - on the nail not just after a long-winded and expensive investigation.

But this isn't about socialism just about getting a free market that works for all of us. It's about setting economic liberty - the idea that, more than anything else, is responsible for the health and wealth nearly all of us enjoy today (even if we can't afford a house) - at the heart of government policy. The more we try to control the market the less liberty we have and the more power we hand to the commissioners, the lobbyists and the corporations protected by the government fix.

What we all want is a real stake in the nation we're a part of - not just a vague notion of citizenship but a real sense of being a part of the place, of having roots. And that means renewing that promise made by Harold MacMillan in the 1950s, by Ted Heath in 1970 and by Margaret Thatcher in 1983 - Britain isn't just land and institutions but its people, all of them. And all of them should have the chance to take a real, solid, tangible stake in their nation.

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A note on Conservative euroscepticism

There's a fairly common retort from those who still wish to remain in the EU when it's pointed out that we've had a referendum that voted to leave and parliament started that processs of leaving. It goes something like "Brexiteers had forty years of moaning about EU membership so they've no room to talk".

Now I'm sure we can probably find some few folk who, having opposed continued membership in 1976, continued to bang on about it from then onwards. Where you won't find them is in the Conservative Party. Aside from Teddy Taylor and a few unreconstructed Powellites, the Conservative Party was completely united in its support for our membership of what was then the European Economic Community (EEC). What opposition there was to membership came from the left - indeed Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair, John Prescott and other enthusists for EU membership fought and lost the 1983 General Election on a platform of leaving the EEC.

In that election I was agent for John Carlisle, MP for North Luton. I think it fair to say that John was as far to the right in the party as you could get but we still included support for EEC membership in the election address. Our membership simply wasn't an issue for Conservatives.

Between this time and the 2001 general election something happened. During the selection meeting for the parliamentary candidate in Keighley, I was asked a question about the Euro. My response was that membership of the Euro should only come following a referendum but that I didn't think we'd have one. I suggested that the next referendum would be about our membership of the EU not the Euro, and that I didn't know how I would vote come that day.

The something - well somethings really - that happened between 1983 and 2001 was all about money and the approach of government. Firstly we had the debacle of the UK joining and then leaving the Exchange Rate Mechanism, then the long drawn out Maastricht Treaty ratification process, and finally we had the creation of the Euro. Tory euroscpeticism was born. But even then it wasn't about leaving but rather that Britain should be less supine in its dealings with the EU and more assertive in opposing moves leading to federalism.

It wasn't until the mid-2000s when the Better Off Out campaign was launched with support from a few Conservative MPs like Philip Davies and Douglas Carswell that we saw a group within the Conservative Party committed to leaving the EU. The long war over ERM, Maastricht and the Euro had scarred the Party and the membership placed the blame squarely on the pro-EU leadership - men such as John Major, Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke.

It is important, therefore, not to rewrite history as some sort of rationalisation for seeking to overturn the decision to leave the EU. There has not been a 40 year campaign to leave - UKIP wasn't formed until 1993 and James Goldsmith's Referendum Party campaigned for a referendum on further federalism (and did very badly) in 1997. Even then the media position on membership was overwhelmingly supportive and the Conservative Party remained committed to membership albeit with a somewhat grumpy attitude to the EU.

None of this is to suggest that Remainers should shut up but rather to observe that their claim of a long media campaign supported by the right of the Conservative Party is largely untrue. The important question to ask is how the Conservative Party transformed from an enthusiast for European economic cooperation firstly into a scpetical and questioning party and then, in large part, to an advocate of leaving. If we're looking for the reason we left, it happened on 7 February 1992 when the EEC stopped being a free trade alliance and became a nascent 'superstate', the EU.

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An existential cry of pain - how "The Left" is losing

As a conservative, it's only recently that I've begun to use the term 'The Left' to describe...well...'The Left'. This was a term that 'The Left', somewhat self-indulgently, used to characterise its so-called values. The premise of any discussion involving such folk was that good things were left-wing and bad things were right-wing. This made life simple - the torture and imprisonment of opponents in an approved left-wing country was necessary to protect the revolution or else simply lies put out by reactionary forces of 'The Right' seeking to undermine said revolution.

In contrast, the torture and imprisonment of opponents in a place designated as 'Right-wing' is a terrible crime against humanity. If you're a Blairite this justifies bombing the terrible place back into the stone age whereas, if you're genuinely of "The Left", the response is to organise a rally, wear clothing symbolising your support for the cause (especially if it looks cool and helps you pick up girls), and do that 'organise, mobilise, agitate' thing that 'The Left' always does.

So I thought that I'd explore this idea of 'The Left'. Not as a coherent political philosophy because, Marxism aside (and Marx would have thoroughly approved of Fascism), there is no coherent philosophy behind 'The Left'. Instead we have a set of positions - some simply not 'The Right' (remember that 'The Right' simply means "bad things I disagree with") whereas others are wrapped up in an incredibly indulgent thing usually called, in that trashing of the language beloved of 'The Left', values.

A long time ago, my Dad said that socialism or socialist in its common usage (by 'The Left') simply meant good. That was it - references to socialism or 'The Left' are intended to conjure up images of people who care more than nasty people who are called 'The Right'. We get folk pulling down a good wage paid for out of tax money or from the contributions of gullible donors while arguing for more 'caring' to be done by taking more cash off other people to give to a different set of ('deserving') people (plus well paid jobs for people from 'The Left'). These people have "values" to which we should all aspire. They are 'The Left' - complete with fluffy kittens, unicorns, glitter and shiny happy people marching for change.

The problem for 'The Left' is that countries that take the ideas of the left and turn them into a platform for government often end up totalitarian, lock opponents up and routinely use torture. These countries - from East Germany to Cuba are places that people tried to leave. Indeed they didn't just try to leave 'The Left', they did so facing the risk of getting shot, arrested and tortured. Or drowning as the tractor inner tube holding up the rickety raft sinks beneath the waves.

Today, 'The Left' face a new problem. Or rather an old problem revisited. In the democracies of the western nations there's an anger among the voters. Millions of column inches are being dedicated by 'The Left' to challenging this anger - they call it 'populism', 'nativism', even 'fascism' and are really agitated by the message it's putting out to voters. Of course, because this threat to 'The Left' is (because it is a threat) a bad thing, it is therefore right-wing, from the dark places of 'The Right'. And as a result people on 'The Right' are being told they should do something about the prospect of more folk like Donald Trump getting elected.

But when you peel back the cover of Donald Trump's agenda (ditto for Marine Le Pen and other nasty populist folk) and look at the policy programme underneath, it's pretty much an agenda that, had it come from 'The Left', would have been applauded. Clamping down on the corrupt and cosy relationship between big business and government. Protecting jobs by stopping firms moving them offshore. Protecting communities by ending dumping. Making politicians more accountable. This is a left-wing programme and it is 'The Left' that is threatened by its success.

What 'The Left' doesn't realise is that us right-wing folk simply don't start from the same place in all this debate. We don't think that the agenda proposed by the likes of Trump, Farage and Le Pen is a right-wing policy platform. The problem is that, after decades of taking its working class voter base for granted, 'The Left' has been found out. Hence the spluttering, shouting and screaming about the way in which those working class voters didn't do as they were told.

There's a huge difference between sympathy and empathy. 'The Left' is very good at the former but appalling at the latter with the result that, for all its language of caring, sharing and 'aren't we good', left-wing people these days come across as patronising, judgemental and arrogant. This is the world of 'we know what's good for you' and 'it's someone else's fault, let's go shout at the government'. The denial of agency to anyone who didn't get a degree is shocking - kids get sugary snacks because their parents can't resist advertising, poverty isn't solved by getting (and keeping) a job, and we need to make it harder for people to have a drink because they don't know how to control themselves.

But these caring noises - "there, there, it's not your fault, nasty, nasty government" - don't wash when 'The Left' shows a tin ear to the communities they claim to care about. At times it seems almost as if 'The Left' are talking about a different animal - one unable to look after itself properly, a permanent victim of 'the system'. There is no empathy for the condition of these people just the idea that we can use them to make our political point (mostly about how caring we are and how our values are so good) and to paint a cartoon picture of 'The Right'.

Back in the day, socialist parties were populist movements. Britain's Labour Party, the Socialist and Social Democratic Parties of Europe, Italy's Communist Party - all these groups built their support using the same sort of populist rhetoric that they now condemn in new political movements. It's true also that these socialist parties emerged from the same place as the Fascists - this doesn't make them the same, just that (unlike conservatives) they're competing for the same voters. This is still true and, in part, explains the screams of pain and anguish from the mainstream left. The problem is that those values 'The Left' is so big on simply aren't the values of a large chunk of the traditional support base for left-of-centre parties.

So when left-of-centre pundits tell 'The Right' that this populist (or nativist, fascist, even Nazi) upsurge is some how its problem they speak from fear. Not fear of a conservative hegemony - nothing conservative about Trump, Farage and Le Pen - but rather fear that the success of populists will keep them, 'The Left', from the things that sustain their livelihood and allow them to patronise the rest of us about values. And those things are government-funded jobs, membership of influential boards or committees, positions of authority in local and national and European government - this is what motivates 'The Left' today. The insurgent populists threaten 'The Left' by borrowing its language but sounding like they actually mean it - there's a real empathy, a genuine feeling of pain rather than a patronising, smug Tony Blair-style "I feel your pain" sympathy.

At the moment, aside form America, the traditional conservative right looks set fair - no room for complacency but it wouldn't be surprising to see by the end of 2017, conservatives leading France, Germany, Spain, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Those who think that the Front National, UKIP and Five Star are a threat to the conservative right are sadly misguided. It is 'The Left' that stands to lose as it continues to pretend that a sort of international order of the smug can sort everything out but only if we can stop those pesky electors voting the wrong way.
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