Rather than do any of the things which might actually ease the housing crisis, David Cameron’s Coke Zero Conservative government wants the state to enter the housebuilding business
When faced with the inescapable truth of the housing crisis – the fact that demand for housing is increasing faster than supply – David Cameron’s Conservative government has typically preferred to faff around with headline-chasing proposals to boost demand for the same inadequate housing stock rather than upset any of their vested interests by unleashing a real, consumer-focused supply side revolution.
But doing nothing at all in the face of a pressing national problem doesn’t look very good, and so the government has simultaneously been grasping around for eye-catching policies which give the illusion of taking serious action, while doing almost nothing to tackle the root causes.
And since this government is clearly content to pick freely from any policies ranging anywhere from the authoritarian left to the bland centre, they have come up with a doozy of a socialist idea: being unwilling to deregulate the market or meaningfully ease burdensome planning restrictions, the state will simply start commissioning new housing itself. What could possibly go wrong?
The Prime Minister will today announce that the government is to step in and directly commission thousands of new affordable homes.
In a radical new policy shift, not used on this scale since Thatcher and Heseltine started the Docklands, the government will directly commission the building of homes on publicly owned land. This will lead to quality homes built at a faster rate with smaller building firms – currently unable to take on big projects – able to get building on government sites where planning permission is already in place. The first wave of up to 13,000 will start on 4 sites outside of London in 2016 – up to 40% of which will be affordable ‘starter’ homes. This approach will also be used in at the Old Oak Common site in north west London.
This amounts to nothing so much as a nationalised British Housing corporation – on a small scale for now, but who knows where or how far this statist adventure could lead us? Where once we had British Coal, British Steel, British Rail and even British Restaurants, now we are about to have British Housing foisted upon us – and by a supposedly conservative government, no less.
But just as nationalised, centrally planned companies like British Leyland churned out low quality, uncompetitive products that nobody wanted back in the last century, so British Housing will inevitably see the construction of more cookie-cutter, non-high-rise, low density “developments” that barely keep pace with rising demand and do nothing to tackle house prices or put the dream of home ownership within reach of more people.
But who cares? George Osborne will have another excuse to don his high-vis jacket, strap on his hard hat, and prance around a building site with his sleeves rolled up like a man of action and plausible Future Prime Minister. And that’s all that matters. Not solving real problems. Not applying the best of contemporary conservative thinking to transform Britain for the better. Just another good photo opportunity and more of the same endless, vacuous triangulation and electioneering.
Rigorous conservative thought and policymaking is capable of producing compelling answers to nearly all of the problems facing modern Britain – unemployment, housing, welfare, competitiveness and the democratic deficit. But we do not have a prime minister or a government who have any respect for conservative thought, or the principles of small government, free individuals and the free market as a force for good.
We have David Cameron, George Osborne and the bricks-and-mortar equivalent of British Rail sandwiches.
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The Left may love to rail against the Evil Tory government inflicting untold harm on the defenceless people of Britain in service to their extreme, worse-than-Thatcher ideology. Of course, it’s all just hysterical, hyperbolic nonsense. This “What Conservative Government?” series will highlight multitudinous examples showing that David Cameron’s rootless, centrist Conservative Party is an authoritarian, Big Government carbon copy of Tony Blair’s New Labour.
Last week, I had the opportunity to debate the Conservative Culture Minister, Ed Vaizey, on the infantilisation of today’s students and their ludicrous demands for trigger warnings, safe spaces and the suppression of free speech.
When I first became a Minister, we abolished the libraries quango and moved responsibility to the Arts Council. We wanted to join up our cultural strategy with libraries. This decision has been thoroughly vindicated. The Arts Council has made £6 million of new Lottery funding available to libraries to host cultural events and realise their role as important community spaces. Yesterday, they announced a further investment of more than £1.5 pounds, which will help library authorities work better together, and will support a range of national initiatives covering reading, digital literacy and health.
[..] Councils have a legal obligation to provide comprehensive and efficient library services, and must consult with the local population on plans. We are the first Government to review every closure. Central government can and will intervene if a council is planning dramatic cuts.
There is a serious point here, which is that the Labour Party are utterly disingenuous to attack the Conservatives for library closures, when only 11 of 79 library closures in the past five years have been ordered by Conservative councils. And there is probably merit to the implied suggestion that left-wing Labour councils are publicly rending their garments and spitefully shutting down high profile services as a kind of self-immolating protest against the Evil Tories in Westminster.
But what kind of conservative government obsesses about the “national initiatives” feeding into their “cultural strategy”, and watches over the shoulder of every local authority in the country, demanding the right to sign off on every single building closure? Certainly not any government that truly believes in smaller, leaner government or a renewed emphasis on localism and individual liberty.
Now, this centralise-first instinct in British politics is not new. And ironically, it is partly the legacy of the Thatcher government, which faced implacable resistance from rabidly left-wing local councils and believed that the only way to implement its agenda was to circumvent and/or neuter local authorities. But the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did nothing to reverse this process, and David Cameron’s Coke Zero Conservatives are in no hurry to undo the process.
But the over-centralisation of government is one of the biggest problems in British politics and civil life. It kills any attempt at radical experimentation or bold new policy initiatives in the crib, since everything must conform to the same national standards, either by legal requirement or the fear of endless angry “postcode lottery!” headlines in the press.
Why should the four home nations of the UK not have the ability to vary tax rates and bands as they see fit, according to local priorities, so long as all four pay the correct proportional share of their revenue to Westminster for UK-wide shared obligations such as foreign policy and defence?
Why should local authorities not be able to raise (or lower) sales taxes autonomously, in place of a fixed (and brutally high) VAT rate of 20%, returning funds to taxpayers or spending the revenues as local communities see fit?
Why should city councils not be permitted to implement hotel room taxes, as in nearly every major city around the world outside the UK, and use the revenue to promote local tourism in the provinces and regions?
(The one policy standing in David Cameron’s favour is the creation of local Police and Crime Commissioners – though it has been hard to generate any real enthusiasm for this form local control when it is not replicated in other areas of our lives).
A truly radical, campaigning conservative government would be asking these questions, developing policies to answer them, and then boldly implementing them across the nation. And now, after five years of Conservative government, Britain might be starting to feel the benefit of re-embracing liberty, individualism, localism and regional variation.
But of course, all of this would require the Conservative Party to actually govern like a conservative party.
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Peter Oborne is a journalist of uncommon principle; what he says should be taken seriously and treated with a measure of respect. But Peter Oborne has publicly stated his admiration for Jeremy Corbyn…
This blog has often felt like something of a voice in the conservative wilderness for not viewing Jeremy Corbyn as an unmitigated disaster for British politics.
One does not have to agree with Jeremy Corbyn’s sometimes loopy policies to admire the way his unexpected leadership of the Labour Party has shaken up a dull, lumpen, self-satisfied consensus among the Westminster elite, and put the fear of the voters back into a good many Members of Parliament who were more focused on the smooth progression of their own careers than the trifling concerns of the electorate.
Surely having two party leaders who think and say different things is the point of democracy. The fact that Britain has increasingly been afflicted with party leaders who say and think nearly identical things (once the rhetorical embellishment is stripped away) since Margaret Thatcher left office is the root of our current centrist malaise, and one of the primary reasons why a third of the electorate don’t show up to vote at general elections.
What’s the point in voting if the choice is between Prime Minister Bot A and Prime Minister Bot B, both of whom will automatically praise the NHS without looking more seriously at fixing healthcare, both of whom will tinker around the edges of welfare reform to get the Daily Mail off their backs but without doing anything substantive to fix our broken non-contributory system, both of whom are achingly politically correct at all times (“It’s Daesh, not ISIS! I can’t believe you called it Islamic State!“) and both of whom have so little faith in Britain’s ability to prosper as an independent, globally connected democracy that they strive (overtly or covertly) to keep us yoked to the European Union?
I’m a conservative libertarian. I have enough of a task on my hands trying to push the Conservative Party in a less authoritarian, more pro-liberty direction without worrying about what the Labour Party is doing every minute of the day. And I have enough confidence in my political worldview that I believe conservative principles will win the battle of ideas when promoted and implemented properly (hence my ongoing despair with the current Tories).
But many of my fellow conservatives, particularly those in the media, are in despair at the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the return of real partisan politics. Why? Their professed concern that Britain have a “credible” opposition (meaning one almost identical to the governing party in all respects) stretches belief to breaking point and beyond. I can only think that their fear of Jeremy Corbyn reflects some personal doubt that their own political ideas and philosophies might not be superior after all – that Jeremy Corbyn might actually win people over in large numbers and have a shot at taking power.
I have no such fear. I believe that the principles of individual liberty and limited government beat discredited, statist dogma hands down, every day of the week. And I believe that the rise of Jeremy Corbyn might force conservatives to remember why they hold their views in the first place, and even refine and improve their own ideas through rigorous debate – if only they could get over their collective outrage that a socialist is in charge of the Labour Party.
I don’t agree with everything that Oborne says in the video. But on the near-conspiracy of the political class and the media to undermine Corbyn (not to merely disagree with him but to portray his ideas as “unthinkable”) and on foreign policy (castigating our closeness with Saudi Arabia, an odious regime with whom we fawningly do business and lend our diplomatic legitimacy in exchange for oil and intelligence) he is spot on.
And I think that’s what makes Jeremy Corbyn’s detractors so angry. No man can be consistently wrong about everything all the time, and on rare occasions Jeremy Corbyn gets it conspicuously right – such as with his criticism of our closeness with the Saudi regime. People accustomed to either being in power or just one election away from power look at somebody who (whatever other baggage he may have) is unsullied by the continual act of compromise and ideological drift, and it makes them mad. It forces them to ask themselves how many of the compromises, reversals and deals from their own careers were strictly necessary, and how many resulted either from failures of courage or pursuing power for its own sake.
Sometimes, the haters were probably right to do what they did. Governing a diverse nation of 65 million people is not possible without the art of compromise, as Jeremy Corbyn would soon discover if the impossible happened and he became prime minister. But sometimes they were not. And the cumulative effect of all of these small compromises by Labour and the Conservatives over the years were two very slick but ideologically bankrupt political parties that looked and sounded nearly exactly the same on a whole host of issues. Issues (like the EU) which the political class had arrogantly deemed to be settled once and for all, though the voters had other ideas.
I understand this. I sense that Peter Oborne understands this. And if that means there are still only two non-Corbynites in Britain who don’t think that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party is an unmitigated disaster – well, at least I’m in good company.
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David Cameron’s rootless Conservative government is casting around, finding ever more ways to shoehorn the state into our lives
Buried in all the talk of Brexit and Bowie this week has been the Prime Minister’s announcement that he intends to force every British parent to take state-run classes in parenting – if not on pain of criminal penalty then at least at the sharp end of some pointed fiscal incentives.
All parents should enrol in state-backed parenting classes to learn how to raise their children properly, David Cameron will say as he announces a new plan to stop families breaking up.
[..] He will use a major speech on Monday to set out proposals for a new voucher system to incentivise parents to attend the classes in an attempt to make parenting advice socially “normal” and even “aspirational”.
The Prime Minister’s plan comes as he announces a £70 million investment in relationship counselling to prevent hundreds of thousands of families splitting up over the next five years.
Mr Cameron’s speech marks the latest step in delivering on the Conservatives’ key election promise to help families at every stage of life.
One does not have to deny that family breakdown and – how to put it – “unaspirational” parenting have real, negative consequences in our society to balk at the notion of government run classes enforcing the childrearing fads of the day on first time parents.
And Cameron is not even targeting potentially troubled familes – that would be far too judgemental. No, these classes will be “made available” to all, because children “don’t come with a manual” and apparently what has worked for parents for thousands of years is suddenly insufficient to the task of raising a child in twenty-first century Britain.
As parents well know, it is one thing to seek out genuine expertise and help when a child has specific problems (for example, parents of a sick or disabled child will do everything they can to get help from doctors and find all the advice possible to make their child’s life better). But it is quite another to imagine that parents want to be taught the supposedly general skill of parenting. Rather, being a parent means taking on the responsibility for trying, experimenting, failing and learning from experience over and over again. And parents find that the best people to support them in their childraising are those in their family and local community.
… [This] episode shows how a belief in parental determinism, justified through neuro-nonsense, generates a policy programme based on the idea that raising children is just too important and difficult to be left to mere parents, their families and their communities. Those who hold an a priori belief in the need for parenting education simply cannot accept that parents may neither need nor want expert advice. The only conclusion they draw is that more must be done to find ways to train parents, and to increase parents’ ‘demand’ for their own training. Furthermore, they openly support the idea that taking babies away from their mothers is a way to ‘alter destinies’ and ‘improve life chances’.
Policymakers and a parasitical layer of third-sector organisations, whose claim to expertise and professional status lies in knowing how to improve others’ ‘relationships’, are telling us nothing about parents and the family. And it’s not just parents who lose through the relentless politicisation of parenting, and, by association, the private sphere; it’s all of us.
How long, one wonders, until David Cameron seizes upon that totalitarian idea from north of the border, and seeks to introduce a Scottish-style Named Person scheme in England and Wales, whereby a specified adult named by the government is placed in a position of co-responsibility, together with the parents, for the welfare of every newborn child?
Don’t think he wouldn’t do it. If we have learned nothing else about David Cameron since he came to power in 2010, we know that there is no conservative, small government principle which he is not happy to cast into the woodchipper if it helps him to dominate the political centre ground and atone for the supposed reputational sins of Thatcherism.
Never mind that the Named Person scheme was cooked up by Nicola Sturgeon’s swivel-eyed SNP government in Scotland, and is the complete antithesis to how a restrained state should behave. That won’t stop David Cameron if he spies an opportunity to undermine the nationalists, steal a march on the Labour Party and gain short-term tactical political advantage.
But that doesn’t make it good policy, good politics or the right thing for any party calling itself “conservative” to be doing. Who within the Conservative Party – James Cleverley, Chris Philp, Lucy Allan, David Nuttall? – will stand against this creeping tide of paternalism, one which is otherwise likely to be implemented unopposed given that both sides of the warring Labour Party would probably also approve?
Mandatory parenting classes as part of your masterplan for every stage of our lives?
Dear God, man, stop talking. You sound more socialist than Jeremy Corbyn.
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The hysterical left will always call conservatives “Tory scum” and hate us with a blind, unthinking rage. It’s time to stop cowering at their attacks and apologising for our values
As 2015 draws to an end, we still have four and a half more years of David Cameron’s wishy-washy, ideologically rootless, Conservative In Name Only government to look forward to, followed by a general election which will almost certainly deliver another five years of blandness.
For small government conservatives and libertarians, this continual betrayal of principle is bad enough. But as an added insult, it also means four more years of being spat on and called “Tory scum” by demented far-left types who view David Cameron and George Osborne’s half-hearted attempts to pare back the state as the modern-day equivalent of Nazi war crimes, and who have no reservations in publicly saying so. Not very appealing.
That’s why the time has come for conservatives of all stripes to finally seize back the word “Tory” from the haters and reclaim it with pride, rather than meekly and apologetically crawling around and apologising for our values – values which saved this country from decline and irrelevance three decades ago, and can do so again if only we fully unleash them.
In his article, entitled “Why I’ve Become Tory Scum”, Tony Parsons calls out the Labour Party and other forces on the Left for the sanctimonious nature of their campaigning during the general election, and their utter inability to empathise with their opponents – or even entertain the thought that those who oppose them might be doing so from a position of legitimate, morally valid disagreement.
Parsons points out:
The general election was decided not by shy Tories but by us reluctant Conservatives. The millions like me who saw nothing but catastrophe in Labour’s addiction to high taxes and big spending, their loathing of success, the way they could use a word like “mansion” with a straight face and, above all, that endless pious prattle about the NHS – as though the British have no other identity but as a sickly, enfeebled, diseased people in need of having our bottoms wiped by the state from dawn till dusk.
But the truth is that David Cameron’s government is very much an unremarkable continuation of New Labour. Far from being a son of Thatcher, Cameron and his leadership team are very much the heirs to Blair, and would bear comparison with many centre-left governments around the world. The Conservative Party, even under Thatcher, has in many respects always been to the left of even the Democratic Party in the United States, and certainly is so now.
Of course, you would not think that the Conservatives were in any way moderate, judging by the hysteria among many vocal parts of the Left, who present David Cameron’s steady-as-she-goes paternalism and tentative deficit reduction as some kind of outrageous economic shock treatment combined with “human rights” abuses worthy of the Nazis.
Tony Parsons ponders why this is so:
Why are those of us who believe in a different economic model – one where aspiration is encouraged, where the state gets out of your way and doesn’t spend money it doesn’t have – morally reprehensible? Exactly why are we scum? History suggests that, when presented with the chance to vote for socialism the British people always run as fast as we can in the opposite direction. It doesn’t make us bad people. But the left have lost the argument and are reduced to shrieking abuse.
But then the hysterical far left have always talked about conservatives thus, and they always will. Parsons recognises this as he writes:
The loud left are as pertinent to modern Britain as blacksmiths. No wonder their protests are increasingly ugly. They react with furious disbelief at the result of a democratic election. They rave about balancing the nation’s books as if it was like drowning kittens in a sack. They scream in our faces about their own compassion while bandying around epithets like “scum” and “filth” with the vicious abandon of Nazis talking about Jews.
Since the abuse will never end, clearly there is nothing to be gained from running from it any longer. Nor is there anything to be gained by continually apologising for core conservative principles – free individuals and strong families, fiscal conservatism and a prohibitive national defence – as the current Conservative leadership sadly continues to do.
What British conservatism and libertarianism really need is their own version of Jeremy Corbyn – someone who unapologetically sticks to their principles, refusing to water them down for political expediency, and who seeks to lead and persuade rather than conform to the results of the latest opinion poll or focus group.
Or to use a West Wing analogy, British conservatism needs a Matthew Santos-like figure, someone willing to proudly wear the “Tory” label just like Santos refused to apologise for being a liberal in the famous presidential debate episode:
Speaking up for American liberalism in a way that one can only wish David Cameron or George Osborne would do for small government conservatism, Santos says to his Republican opponent:
What did liberals do that was so offensive to the liberal party? I’ll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created social security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act. What did conservatives do? They opposed every single one of those things. Every one.
So when you try to hurl that label at my feet – liberal – as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, Senator. Because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honour.
Of course it is almost unimaginable for a conservative to ever talk this way, with such passion, partly because we tend not to make such grand claims for ourselves in reshaping the world or forcibly changing human nature in pursuance of our goals. It is not in our nature to brag about our accomplishments, because the biggest accomplishment a conservative can aim for in government is to get out of the way and help remove obstacles from others so that they might reach their full potential.
But more than this, British conservatives since Margaret Thatcher have had precious little to brag about. Locked out of office under thirteen years of New Labour, the Conservative Party which emerged under David Cameron has made so many compromises with triangulating, Blairite centrism that there are almost no genuinely conservative policy victories or changes in the country which we can claim.
What are we supposed to brag about? Remember when the Tories stood up to the growing climate of intolerance toward freedom of expression, and formally codified a British citizen’s right to free speech? We can’t say that because it didn’t happen. Indeed, under Theresa May Britain is becoming an even more authoritarian police state than it was before, with human beings languishing in our prisons simply for saying, singing, or tweeting the “wrong” thing.
Remember when George Osborne struck a blow for fiscal conservatism, rallied the country with his argument that it was morally obscene for government to spend more on debt repayments than education or the military, and achieved a real budget surplus in order to finally begin paying down the national debt? We can’t say that either, because although Osborne is happy for the public and lazy journalists to believe that the Tories are “paying down Britain’s debts”, in reality the government is doing no such thing.
Conservative supporters truly have the worst of both worlds at present. We are attacked by the furious Left for an ideologically-motivated attack on the state and its poorest dependants, while in reality almost zero real conservative reform is being enacted. We are stuck with the leftist abuse, but have absolutely nothing positive to show for it.
If David Cameron’s Conservative Party was voted out of office today, what will future historians and political commentators say about this government fifty years from now? What will be the Cameron / Osborne legacy? What edifices of stone, statute and policy will remain standing as testament to their time in office? Try to picture it clearly.
Are you happy with what you see?
No real conservative should be happy with what they see right now. Assuming that the political pendulum will at some point swing back in favour of the Labour Party, we conservatives have almost nothing to show after five years of David Cameron other than a half-finished job clearing the budget deficit. We have a reanimated Ted Heath sitting in Downing Street, not a worthy heir to Margaret Thatcher.
But just as the American Tea Party lay conspicuously dormant for the many years of fiscal profligacy and budget-busting spending under the George W. Bush administration only to miraculously awaken when a man named Barack Hussein Obama won the presidency, so the hysterical British Left are now shrieking bloody murder over a set of very pedestrian, middle-of-the-road centrist policies being enacted by the Conservative Party after having airily ignored the very same governing philosophy when the now-hated Blairites were in charge.
As conservatives, we realise there is no point in launching a futile battle against human nature or the instinct of many on the Left to demonise that which they do not or cannot understand. They will continue to call us “Tory Scum” and we have no control over that.
But we do have the power to take back ownership of the label “Tory” and refuse to see it as an insult.
We do have the power to point out that there is nothing virtuous or compassionate about throwing more money at unreformed healthcare and welfare systems, or spreading the wealth around so much that wealth creation is destroyed or driven overseas.
We do have the power to proclaim the importance of fiscal conservatism, not out of some wonkish obsession with balancing the books but because running up further government debt today is a blatant act of intergenerational theft, living at the expense of our children and grandchildren. And because as we have seen with other countries, excessive national debt can become a foreign policy and national security issue too.
We do have the power to point out to anyone who will listen that the modern Left love to parade their virtue and ideological purity but have apparently given up on coming up with alternative policies of their own, and to demand that Labour produce some costed tax and spending plans rather than simply railing against the inhumanity of the Evil Tories.
We do have the power to point out the many ways in which David Cameron’s pitiful excuse for a Conservative government ignores or betrays real conservative values, and to declare “not in my name”.
The Left are not going to change, so we had better get used to the spitting, the vandalism, and the overwrought, emotional and short-termist way in which they discuss public policy.
But we can change. We can stop lying down and taking it every time a virtue-signalling lefty pontificates on welfare without offering a plan of their own, or seeks to win an argument on healthcare by stoking the public’s idolatry of the NHS.
We can stop fighting on the Left’s terms.
And who knows, if small government conservatives and libertarians actually succeed in getting off the back foot for the first time since Margaret Thatcher left 10 Downing Street, we might even manage to salvage something from David Cameron’s woeful premiership.
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Semi-Partisan Politics 