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