Cllr. Gavin Ayling

Oliver Letwin today explained Cameron Conservativism in a way I believe was not intended for the lay audience. This explanation assumed that the argument about free-market vs. socialism had been won. Mr Letwin started out by saying that Thatcher’s economic policy had been accepted as the right way to go. He didn’t say, though I suspect he’d agree, that the result of the French Presidential election should be the final evidence of that victory.

But then he went on to explain the clear-blue water between the Conservatives and Labour. Something that I believe my party should have done long ago:

… the targets and directives, the reorganisations, schemes and initiatives. Direct government intervention has been brought – with the best of intentions, though often with notable lack of success – to bear on schools and hospitals, police officers and neighbourhoods, local authorities and universities. The State has been seen as the source of enlightened social action, just as it was once seen as the source of enlightened economic action.

The explanation leaves plenty of wiggle-room but I summarise it thus:

• Brown would like to use the profits of taxation (gained from a free-market, not nationalised industries) to attempt to provide those remaining public services that consensus appears to have decided should be provided by the State.
• Cameron (and so Osborn only by implication bizarrely) would like to use the profits of taxation to provide a framework within which charities and industry can provide public services.

I understand why the first couple of commenters (Andy Wigmore and Peter Gooderham at the time of writing) find this difficult to follow, but the fact that they’re not willing to try shows the reason style-over-substance rules supreme in modern England.

But back to the point, what is the fundamental difference between the Cameron and Brown positions as I have illustrated them? It seems to me that the difference is that the State, while involved, does not do the providing directly — the provision is outsourced.

If that is the case, then what has changed? Conservatives have always been about privatisation. If we’re to help provide services in a new way, isn’t this just gloss? Have we really decided that the party should no longer even debate the need for state-provided refuse collection? Could the remaining public services not be better provided by a private company entirely free from state intervention?

It occurred to me today, coincidentally, how much state-licensing and intervention in public transport is the cause of its lack of take-up. Environmentalists have been decrying us evil car drivers since they decided that the being green allowed their socialism to survive. But I wonder if they have considered the counter-argument?

If a bus company could be started by you or I tomorrow, by buying a bus, painting a number on the front and perhaps dropping some leaflets through local doors, how many more entrpreneurs would try? How many more bus-routes would there be servicing those routes that people actually want?

A local bus company started a trial service recently but only provided the service (from a suburb to a railway station) in the morning. The trial found that people did not use the service (because they couldn’t get home) so the route was abandoned. But if you or I had our own bus company, would we not put more effort in? Providing a service at each end of the likely user’s day?

Transport is one of those key areas which is ignored as a purely old-fashioned econocentric debate. Let’s have that debate!

Quentin Langley, in his comment, puts it best so I will leave the final thought to him:

I believe Milton Friedman said — and I paraphrase — that he won all the economic arguments and lost all the political arguments. That is an important addition to the paradigm shifts that Oliver Letwin is discussing. It is true that free-market ideas have triumphed in the economic debate: but they remain, largely, unimplemented. The size of the state over the past 30 years or so has varied from around 38% to around 43% and is currently at the top end of that range. I would hope the Conservatives can develop an agenda to bring that down, at least to the bottom end of that range, and preferably well below. Otherwise, the intellectual triumph has been for nought.

Quentin Langley, Woking, UK

I started this reply on Robert Jackman’s blog and realised it was turning into a long rant. So here it is instead:

You see Enoch Powell’s speech wasn’t wrong in sentiment, it was just that is was racist. His warning about multiculturalism has been shown to be right and will be shown that way more in the future. In Channel 4’s poll 41% (Update: thanks Stop Whining it’s actually 33%) of Muslims want Sharia law here in the UK — that’s not hysteria, that’s a fact. If that proportion doesn’t grow with the world’s increasingly extreme religious groups (Christians and Muslims mostly) then we will still have a very large number of Muslims in this country who believe in Sharia law by 2050.

That’s not scare-mongering.

But the environmental thing is.

You said “Climate change could tear the very fabric of our everyday lives to shreds”

I have yet to read anything that shows me how this can be done. In El Nino the net effect to the US agricultural sector was an increase in yield. The US produces 25% of the world’s food. If global warming turns out to happen as per the approximations then we will have slightly more food. A dire warning indeed.

If sea levels start to rise (they haven’t yet — check) then we may have trouble on the coasts, but that will be minor trouble. It won’t be the loss of the south of England or the islands off Scotland. It may be, at worst, that we need more defences along the East Anglian coast.

Environmentalism is a great way for the left-wing parties (Lib Dems, Labour and the Tories (oops)) to tax us more. We needn’t pay these taxes, they say, because they are only be used as a disincentive to non-green activities. But what of people who must fly, or want to, God forbid, go on holiday? Should these people sacrifice a good life because some scientists have made some wild predictions that haven’t come true and so have made some more? No. Actually what we should be doing is saying to ourselves: Oil dependence is causing wars, damaging the ability of third world countries to progress and is silly as it is a finite resource — let’s do some research into alternatives.

Taxing petrol has not reduced car use — it’s just damaged the economic effectiveness of those people who would rather not stand on a wet and rainy street corner waiting for a bus full of damp people sneezing or worse. Taxing aeroplanes and other, apparently non-green activities will not change behaviour. Tax is not a behavioural management tool — it is a revenue device.

How many people, for example, have given up smoking because of the cost? People pay such high tax not because they are keen to top up the coffers but because the government has decided it wants people not to do something. How liberal is that?

William Hague did say that there was a danger from the Euro and do you know, I don’t think the Italians or Germans would disagree now. One exchange rate across Europe — has that been tried? (Yes) Did it fail? (Yes) Should we try it again? (Er, no).

And Michael Howard did not turn “tabloid paranoia over immigration into a political weapon” — he made policy that is much in keeping with what the majority of people want. Immigration is not a bad thing in and of itself, but the amount of immigration we have had recently has been too much to allow sensible assimilation or cultural attitudes.

The Conservatives may have a historical reputation for “whipping up hysteria” but that is only because socialists make such a hash of running the country. It is not hysterical, for example, to suggest that the mismanagement of the NHS since 1992 (sorry Mr Major) has caused it to come nearly to its knees in England.

And the thing I wish most was that the Conservative Party was the one saying the things I have said above. Increasingly they are not and it is UKIP which is taking the libertarian and economic issues as their own.

But Mr Jackman, I like your writing so onto the blogroll you do go…

Comments are here for this post

Time for some lazy blogging:

I generally find Samizdata a little heavy going so I only dip in there from time-to-time. So if you’re the same as me, there are a few recently which really cannot be missed.

When Johnathan Pearce asked Which law would you like to break? Michael Farris’ excellent answer was: “I would love to break the law of unintended consequences but there would probably be a down side I hadn’t counted on…”

The folly of always voting for the lesser evil is an excellent post by Perry De Havilland which raises some important questions. Do read it.

And finally, in reference to my last post about Michael Crichton some more people have noticed that having the audacity to question the ‘truth’ is risky.

A friend lent me Michael Crichton’s State of Fear.

I don’t want to say too much about it because, I have discovered since I finished reading it yesterday, people don’t want to hear what you have to say when you’re talking about it. I might be sounding a little evasive here, but that’s necessary. Crichton provides links etc. for some of the claims his characters make and, to be quite honest, it’s a little perplexing.

What troubles me most is that a quick look around the internet finds sensationalist propaganda like: “We must act now to stop climate change”. How exactly are we going to do that when even the most scurrilous self-publicist knows that global warming is not a pure human-caused (anthropological) event. Global warming describes the warming of the globe. Climate change is something that has happened since we first had an atmosphere — why would we want to stop it?

I am not naive enough to think that Crichton doesn’t have an agenda, but I urge you to read the book and at least see something of the alternative argument that is never made on the MSM.

Alan Drew (co-founder of Prison Works with the hilarious John East) writes today about the environmental benefit that would be brought about by replacing aging aircraft with modern, more efficient aircraft.

You cannot but admire the conscientious way he goes through the data that eventually shows the government’s headline grabbing, but deeply flawed policy for what it is: rubbish.

The way to solve climate change, say those who think humanity is making the most difference to the world’s climate; and that it is more important than elderly people freezing to death in their own home or African children being born into a life of war, famine and prostitution, is to use micro-generating power stations.

So, in the spirit of this, Currys have recently announced solar panels and B&Q are now stocking wind turbines and solar water heating. And their literature points out that you can obtain up to 30% of the purchase price back in the form of government grants. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether it’s a good use of taxpayers money, but this money is not so easily received as you might have imagined.

Is it right (this is a question though you can take it rhetorically) that to save a small amount of money on the price of a wind turbine, you must pay a lot of money (more than the cost of the turbine)? In order to qualify for a grant for a wind turbine, for example, you must have 27cm (about 11 inches) of insulation in your loft; you must have cavity wall insulation (if you have cavity walls); you must use exclusively energy-saving lightbulbs (which are too dim in some circumstances) and you must have thermostats on each radiator.

I understand that the government want people to save energy in all ways (not just try and make it cheaply) but surely it is better that a household makes green energy and wastes a little than wastes a little and does not make green energy.

It is a false economy not to use energy saving lightbulbs, but it is true economy not to try and obtain a government grant for green energy sources.

Stupid.

Iain Dale commented on David Milliband’s poor showing on yesterday’s Today programme.

I think there are some poignant questions that politicians should answer before we go too far down the route towards becoming environmentalists:

1) Several studies have shown that the cost-benefit ratio of tackling climate change is lower than many other worthy causes for humanity. Would it not be more sensible to tackle those with our hard-earned money?

2) During the late 1940s and the 1950s global temperatures flattened out — this despite the rapid growth of the Japanese, Russian and American economies as well as the development of jets. Should we wonder whether anthropological influences on the climate’s undeniable change are less significant than we think?

3) If politicians on the left seek to control individualism by using environMENTALISM there’s a risk that people will start treating it like a new socialism. We, on the right, must make it clear that avoiding damage to the environment is not a left-wing issue and that the left-wing solutions to climate change are dangerous and, often, counter productive (see the pressure on cars vs. the pressure on aeroplanes).