Conservative Party

Defection of Mark Reckless to UKIP Serves Notice To The Establishment

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

mark reckless nigel farage ukip defection 3

 

A little less conversation, a little more action.

With the pumped-up remix of the classic song ringing in their ears, UKIP delegates to the party’s 2014 conference in Doncaster stood and cheered and welcomed their latest high profile parliamentary defector: now ex-Conservative MP Mark Reckless.

Say what you want about UKIP’s policies, internal contradictions and some of their wackier personalities, but this does not look like a party of economically left-behind losers or over-the-hill retirees caught up in nostalgia for times past.

As Mark Reckless himself noted, to thunderous applause: “The only nostalgia I see is that of the European bureaucrats as they cling to their fading 1950s vision.”

And in a political landscape where talk is cheap and real progress is rare, all of the action and momentum right now is with UKIP.

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The Underwhelming Return Of Boris Johnson

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Boris Johnson Parliament 2015 General Election 3

 

Who cares that Boris Johnson, the current Mayor of London, has finally admitted the blazingly obvious and declared his intention to stand for Parliament in the 2015 general election?

Almost everyone in the commentariat class seems to care, and to have a strong opinion about what is perhaps the most unsurprising revelation in British politics. But precisely why the rest of us should care about this revelation is not so self-evident. There’s obviously something in it for Boris Johnson: the opportunity to compete for the Conservative Party leadership in the event of a 2015 general election or 2017 EU referendum defeat. But what does a potential future Boris Johnson premiership offer the country that merits such a fevered round of speculation and media coverage?

Read any of the articles breathlessly speculating about David Cameron’s annoyance at being outmanoeuvred by Boris whilst on holiday, where the Mayor of London will make his stand as he searches for a constituency, or the pieces imagining the circumstances in which Boris might beat George Osborne and Theresa May to the leadership in the event of Cameron’s early demise, and you will learn everything you possibly need to know about The Decision. Everything, that is, except for why a Boris Johnson administration would be interesting, or different, or especially harmful or beneficial to Britain. But you can’t entirely blame the press corps for the oversight – if they are unable to answer these questions it is because the great man himself is just as uncertain of the answer, and has taken every opportunity to avoid revealing his vision.

Those people hailing Boris Johnson’s announcement should explain to the rest of us exactly what it is about their man that makes it worth getting excited about. Is it his bold, original policies on this or that? Because precious little has been written about the stark policy differences that distinguish the London mayor from the likes of David Cameron or George Osborne. Is it his approach to the electorate and politics in general? Because the Boris trademark down-to-earth, sometimes frank demeanour is nothing that UKIP’s Nigel Farage does not already offer. Or is it because of his years of executive experience managing the capital city of the world? Because the competencies needed to be a competent mayoral figurehead are not necessarily the same skills of tenacity, diplomacy and coalition-building needed to succeed as prime minister.

In one of the few tangible political divides where Boris Johnson has forcibly expressed an opinion, he has been wrong, and unabashedly part of the problem rather than the solution. At a time when airport capacity in southeast England is under pressure and London’s competitiveness impacted, the British government has done what it does best – handwringing, buck-passing and stalling for time with lengthy enquiries – and London’s mayor has campaigned against the obvious solution of expanding Heathrow airport in favour of a hare-brained scheme to close the UK’s largest airport and replace it with an entirely new facility in the Thames estuary. This blog has repeatedly explained the foolishness behind the mayor’s alternative vision.

Boris Johnson is also on manoeuvres to distinguish himself from Conservative Party orthodoxy on the thorny subject of Britain’s EU membership, but even here his newfound embrace of euroscepticism is riddled with disclaimers and lacks sincerity. It is particularly telling that when polled, over half of UKIP voters said that if Boris Johnson were to stand for the Conservatives on their local constituency, it would make no difference to their voting intentions. While eurosceptics and believers in nation state democracy should be pleased when any prominent Conservative politician commits to campaigning for a British EU secession in the event that renegotiations fail, in Johnson’s case it does not automatically make up for his previous equivocation and instinctive desire for Britain to remain inside the European Union.

In David Cameron and his coalition government, Britain already has a thoroughly conservative-lite leader, happy to talk the talk about fiscal responsibility and small government while carelessly treading the same uncompetitive, centrist and statist path as his predecessors. If the British electorate is to be asked to vote Conservative again, do they not deserve an upgrade from the Tories’ 2010 offering? Differences of image and style aside, it is very difficult to discern how Boris Johnson represents anything new, let alone an improvement on David Cameron.

And in a surprise twist, one of the few senior politicians (aside from Boris Johnson’s direct competitors for the Tory leadership) to see through the bumbling, affable persona is the usually hapless deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg:

“The thing about Boris Johnson is despite all the clumsiness and bumbliness he’s actually a really, really ambitious politician,” Mr Clegg said.

“He treats his political ambition like he treats his hair. He wants everybody to think he doesn’t really care, but he actually really, really does care.

“His tousled hair, his bumbliness, all that’s great. But behind all of that is someone who is absolutely fixated with his own political ambitions.”

The only thing missing from Nick Clegg’s timely critique is this blog’s concern that there might actually not be anything beneath the populist image and the driving ambition. It would be bitterly ironic if Britain’s next Conservative prime minister turned out to be the polar opposite of his most recent Labour predecessor in every area except for one – that they both shared a burning desire to reach Number 10 Downing Street, but had absolutely no idea what to do with the prize once they had it.

So why should we care that David Cameron’s former classmate has made official his plans to return to Parliament? The onus is still on Boris Johnson to convince us that it matters in the slightest.

British Conservatives Must Show The Courage Of Their Convictions

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Bring Back British Rail

 

David Cameron’s cabinet reshuffle dominated the news over the past week – at least, until it was totally overshadowed by world events in Gaza and Ukraine. But the punditry and speculation about who is up and who is down, who succeeded in clawing their way into Cameron’s inner circle and who was excommunicated to the fringes, generally lacked a certain something. Call it relevance.

Beware of anyone offering a neatly packaged, coherent analysis of David Cameron’s cabinet reshuffle so early in its aftermath. There’s a lot of ready made narratives out there – Ken Clarke’s departure heralding the death of the big beasts, the timely promotion of women to the cabinet, the opportunistic promotion of women to the cabinet, the misogynist promotion of women to the cabinet, the triumph of social conservatives, the social conservative purge and the elevation of arch-eurosceptics, to name just a few. The only thing uniting these narratives is that they are quite contradictory, and that they are already out of date.

If you insist on looking for a consistent theme in the Cabinet reshuffle in place of the dull reality (a series of largely independent political calculations by a cautious government), it is not the glaring fact that this was a political reshuffle – paging Captain Obvious – but that it was such a defensive political reshuffle in the run-up to the general election.

With less than a year left of the current coalition government, there was really no point in having a reshuffle at all, from a policy perspective. Little real governing will be done with the coalition partners both manoeuvring to define themselves against each other and take credit for past accomplishments, meaning the only real work left to be done is the cementing and locking down of reforms that have already been made. For all intents and purposes, we are now entering a lame duck session of Parliament.

Given this fact, the most sensible thing for David Cameron to have done – both to achieve the goals of cementing existing government policies and publicly standing behind them – would have been to not have a Cabinet reshuffle at all. But resoluteness and steadfastness was not on David Cameron’s list of priorities. In far too many cases, the personnel changes suggested an apology for successful conservative policy and right-wing thinking in general.

The plain truth is that the conservative agenda – enacted properly and with consideration – works. Privatisation works, welfare reform works (as Fraser Nelson forcefully argued last week), conservative education reform works. Though we should rightly acknowledge and mitigate the negative side effects of weaning people off government aid – and be blunt that these are often counted in terms of human suffering – conservatives should stand unapologetically behind their record, and the ideology which underpins it.

But just when the Conservative Party should be standing up for its beliefs and accomplishments, the coalition government seems more eager to run away from them, to excuse them in the context of “tough decisions to pull the country out of recession”, or to reveal their fear by preventing the proper scrutiny of opposing ideas.

Take the Commons vote to allow the Office for Budgetary Responsibility to audit and pass judgement on Labour Party budget proposals. A confident Tory party that stood behind its accusations of thoughtless left-wing spendthriftery would welcome the harsh spotlight of a non-partisan body like the OBR being shone on official Opposition proposals, but instead the Conservatives made it known (with dubious reasoning) that they were against the proposal.

(It should be noted that in the United States, the equivalent Congressional Budget Office scrutinises draft legislation submitted by both Republicans and Democrats, which further helps to cement its reputation as a non-partisan body).

Look also at the question of railway renationalisation. Pushing an even greater proportion of the British economy into the dead hands of the state is generally a terrible idea, but reflexive Tory opposition to what Ed Miliband and Labour are proposing is counterproductive. Firstly, it glosses over some of the legitimate flaws in the way that the rail privatisation was carried out, and the way in which the privatised railway system is structured. Ignoring legitimate criticism is never the path to good future governance. But secondly, it suggests a lack of confidence in the Tories’ own ideology. If the private sector is so darn efficient and dynamic, what worry should private firms have if the bloated, inefficient state tries to bid for their train franchises, when surely they would lose every single time?

And in the most high profile case of conservative reshuffle apologetics, Michael Gove – one of the few Conservative ministers to successfully enact genuinely bold conservative reforms – was moved away from the Department of Education and demoted to the position of Chief Whip (those arguing that it was not a demotion should compare the salaries of the two roles).

Alarmingly, much of the reaction to Gove’s departure suggested that he was moved on not because his reforms had failed, but because he hadn’t flattered people with enough platitudes while successfully enacting them. The truth about Mr Gove can be discerned by parsing the reaction of Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers. The Telegraph reports Hobby’s view:

“Michael Gove had a radical and sincere vision for transforming education but he often failed to bring the profession with him.

“His diagnosis was frequently astute but his prescriptions were hard to swallow. It is now time to rebuild trust and confidence between government and teachers so that improvements can endure.”

Translated, this means that Gove’s ideas and reforms were quite sound, but he rubbed too many powerful special interests up the wrong way in the course of implementing them. With his removal by Cameron, good policymaking was subordinated to public sector union ego-stroking.

The unions clearly felt that Michael Gove did not respect them – time and time again, in interview after interview with cheerful teachers, this was the constant refrain. After the dust settles, perhaps people will start asking when the pride of the teachers unions and the egos of individual teachers became more important than implementing the best possible education policy for Britain’s children.

At the recent Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty, organised by the Centre for Policy Studies think tank, former Australian prime minister John Howard made an important observation. Reflecting on his three successive election victories, Howard said: “The worst way to try to win office is to pretend you’re not too different from your opponents.”

If David Cameron and the Conservative Party are to succeed in their audacious goal of winning an outright majority in the 2015 general election, the path to victory does not lie in pretending to be Ed Miliband’s mollycoddling Labour Party with a small added dose of fiscal realism. If people want a fiscally irresponsible government pledging obsequious servitude to the public sector unions and buying into their pretence of representing the public interest, they will vote for the real thing, not a pale imitation. The Conservative Party must stand behind their limited successful reforms, and promise to double down if they are re-elected to government in 2015.

With the general election less than ten months away, this is no time for small government conservatives to falter.

Bankers, Toffs and Tory Scum

Samuel Hooper16 Comments

SPS strike protest 2b

 

“Chav-bashing draws on a long, ignoble tradition of class hatred” – Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization Of The Working Class

 

Less than three weeks ago, fifty thousand people marched through central London almost entirely unnoticed. They came to protest the coalition government’s so-called “austerity” policies and to “demand the alternative”, but their message was lost in a fog of confusion about the undefined alternative they wanted to bring about. Was it the rose-tinted stroll back to the 1970s advocated by Owen Jones, or the peaceful, effortless and joyful revolution promised by Russell Brand? We still don’t know, because they still can’t decide.

Today, Britain observed what was hailed as the largest coordinated industrial action since the general strike of 1926 – but apart from some inconvenienced parents who had to endure the closure of their children’s schools, nobody seemed to notice that anything much was different. And what little serious press attention the strikes garnered was focused mainly on Ed Miliband’s untenable balancing act of supporting the strikers but deploring the strike, and the eyebrow-raising fact that the National Union of Teachers was legally permitted to use a 2012 vote by a fraction of its membership to hold a strike in 2014.

There is a lot of frustration on the British activist Left that they are not being listened to or taken seriously – by the public, the media, the Labour Party, anyone at all. But at some point soon, those people hawking conspiracy theories about a right-wing media cover-up or the dead hand of Ed Balls will have to turn the accusing gaze back in on themselves.

The Left has been shrieking about austerity for four years now, but have utterly failed to convince the electorate that they have a workable alternative. Indeed no alternative has been suggested – save for pumping pre-2010 (or even higher) levels of taxpayer money into the same unreformed government programmes, which is as patronising a suggestion as it is lazy. Worse still, the Left’s level of empathy or willingness to understand the viewpoints of others who do not agree with the “Down With Austerity” mantra is almost non-existent.

Big government apologists on the Left forever accuse the Conservative Party, UKIP and others on the right of stoking fears and indulging in emotional manipulation. Cases of grotesque welfare fraud are cherry-picked and non-representative, they insist, while questioning Britain’s immigration policy and relationship with the European Union is narrow minded at best, but more often a sign of shocking, premeditated race-baiting. But the left use these same techniques freely and often, and they do so in a way that hampers their ability to think of bold new policies to connect with middle Britain.

The bankers. David Cameron’s cabinet of millionaires. Billionaire non-doms. Tory scum. According to many on the Left, this motley crew of villains are not only deliberately rigging the system in their favour (arguably true), they actively delight in hurting the poor at every turn. Michael Gove is an arrogant bully and persecutor of teachers, Iain Duncan Smith is a virtual psychopath in his hounding of the destitute and David Cameron is the evil mastermind at the top, answerable only to Rupert Murdoch. It’s the age-old divide: those on the right think that Left-wingers are well-meaning but misguided, while those on the Left seem to sincerely believe that their right-wing opposites are actually evil.

The anti-Tory slogans and bitter invective have always had their place in Britain’s left-wing grass roots, but when this stubborn inability to empathise with or think like the other side starts to infect people who are supposedly the Labour movement’s greatest minds and political leaders, they have a real problem. The British Left, from Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet on downwards, can’t seem to get past the mistaken notion – perhaps sincerely believed after so many years of constant, mindless repetition – that those on the right really do hate the poor and long to trample them underfoot.

But the anti-austerity protesters, the public sector strikers and their sympathisers on the Left are fighting a bitter battle against a straw man, a distorted vision of the real spectrum of right-wing thinking. While the British right generates ideas and (albeit limited by coalition) implements them in government, the Left rail against a cartoon foe of their own imagining, and almost completely fail to engage with the substance. Voters are able to discern this disconnect – the British left’s gradual conscious uncoupling from reality – which is one of the reasons why the Labour Party is making so little traction in what should be very fair political weather.

Attacking the usual left wing bogeymen – the bankers, toffs and Tory scum – is not an exciting, compelling pitch for an alternative to our present course. It’s the equivalent of a child’s temper tantrum. And whatever truth there is in the insults does not make up for the yawning chasm that exists where viable alternative left-wing policies should be.

In fact, such is the degree of hysteria and inability to comprehend the attitudes of others on the British Left, it is becoming comparable to the worst excesses of the Tea Party in America, where die-hard “patriots” can see no other motive for Barack Obama’s actions than the deliberate, treasonous undermining of the United States by a foreign-born, illegitimate president.

The hardcore US tea partiers have their hallucination of a Kenyan-born, Marxist stooge sent to make America collapse from within, while the British activist Left have their two-dimensional cartoon of the Bullingdon-bred, Eton-educated aristocrat who wants nothing less than the total dismantling of the social safety net and the subjugation of the poor in permanent poverty to be a source of cheap, expendable labour for his friends and benefactors in big business.

In America, the Republican Party tried to ride the Tea Party tiger, but ended up being eaten. The GOP is now completely beholden to its extremist base, and as a result is entirely unable to propose meaningful, workable legislation on anything from deficit reduction to healthcare to immigration reform. In Britain, the Labour Party is perilously close to suffering the same fate – willingly believing its own hyperbole about the callous Tories, and trying to convince itself (and us, the voters) that everything will be okay if only we start pumping more money into existing government programmes and taxing “the bankers” to pay for it all.

This is a depressing state of affairs on both sides of the Atlantic. To self-identify as a Republican in America today is increasingly akin to admitting that you are a reactionary, bigoted nincompoop, either beholden to corporate special interests or too stupid to realise that you are being manipulated by them. And unless something changes very soon, to self identify as a Labour supporter in Britain will proclaim to the world that you are a success-fearing simpleton who would rather see everyone dragged down to the same level of mediocrity than permit spectacular achievement at the expense of government-enforced equality of outcome.

The infinite monkey theorem states that a chimp sat in front of a typewriter will, given infinite time, at some point be bound to unthinkingly hit upon the long and complex sequence of keys that reproduces the complete works of William Shakespeare. By the same logic, if the British Left continue to hold strikes and mass rallies against austerity, probability dictates that eventually they will quite accidentally come up with a politically viable alternative to the coalition government’s spending plans. But unlike the monkeys, they and the Labour Party do not have infinite time.

The 2015 general election is less than ten months away.

Going Back To Battle For Thatcherism, 40 Years On

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

nights watch 1

 

In this week’s thrilling Game of Thrones season finale, there was a moment when the great wall separating the barbarian wastelands from the civilised world seemed sure to be breached. Disheartened and battle weary, the leader of the wall’s depleted guard crossed enemy lines to negotiate the terms of their surrender to the wildling force besieging them. There was no other way out – when suddenly a saviour rode into view, a king from the south with thousands of armed men galloping behind him.

Trade the fictional land of Westeros for the realpolitik of Westminster, and David Cameron’s Conservative Party are not in quite as bad a shape as the ragtag Night’s Watch army on the wall, holding back the tide of socialism but leaderless and in desperate need of rescue by stronger and more organised forces – at least not yet. But this is largely thanks to the Liberal Democrat implosion and Ed Miliband’s pioneering work in the field of political self-immolation.

Were it not for this hugely favourable climate, the Tories would certainly be on the ropes with less than a year to go until election day. That the conservatives are under siege is evidenced by the fact that they have all the unpopularity of a losing team despite having successfully achieved almost none of their policy goals such as eliminating the budget deficit, rolling back the state or pushing back against antidemocratic EU interference from Brussels.

For British conservatives, libertarians and classical liberals, the heroes riding to the rescue were decked out in workaday business attire rather than the resplendent suits of armour seen in Game of Thrones, but they were no less welcome a sight for that when they arrived at London’s Guildhall to participate in the first annual Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty, organised by the think tank Thatcher founded with Sir Keith Joseph 40 years ago.

British advocates of individual liberty and a small state have endured long years in the wilderness – the fading days of the Major government, thirteen years of gradual state encroachment under the benevolent grin of Tony Blair (then the angry fist of Gordon Brown), and four years of conservative-in-name-only meandering under David Cameron’s coalition with Nick Clegg. Aside from the misty-eyed retrospectives following Margaret Thatcher’s death, talk of personal freedom, liberty and unapologetic pride and optimism in Britain have been missing in action from mainstream political discourse, presumed dead.

Before you cry ‘hyperbole!’, think on it for a moment: The main political mantras of the period 2010 to 2014 have been “The Big Society”, “We’re all in this together” and “Paying their fair share” (fairness, of course, remaining conveniently and forever undefined). All are collectivist tropes designed to soothe and placate natural Labour voters, not the principled words of liberty befitting the heirs to Thatcher.

The Big Society was meant to serve as rear-guard cover as the Conservative-led coalition sought to stem the rise in government spending and enlist volunteer groups to pick up the slack, but its architects forgot that a sudden burst of civic-mindedness and philanthropy was unlikely to come to pass if the government did not reduce its ominous presence in everything else that we do.

“We’re all in this together” was always a phrase better left to the teenage cast of Disney’s “High School Musical”, because it sounds both patronising and wooden coming from the mouths of politicians like David Cameron and his Chancellor of the Exchequer. George Osborne & co. are quite clearly not suffering the effects of austerity in the same ruinous way as families who have been deliberately led down the road to government dependence through Labour tax credits and allowances, and stranded there to suffer in the great recession. Suggesting that we are all suffering equally has opened the door to ridicule and Labour’s inevitable counterattack of ‘class warfare!’ as they seek to distract attention from their awful record in office.

And the less said about “paying your fair share” the better; suffice it to note that we now live in a country where any reduction in benefits granted to an individual by the state is not only indignantly referred to by opponents as a ‘tax increase’, phrases such as ‘the bedroom tax’ are unquestioningly adopted by the media without the slightest hint of irony.

As this blog noted yesterday, these are not auspicious times for those Britons who believe in a smaller government and more power for the individual.

But this only made the words spoken and the ideas expressed at the Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty all the more heartening for those beleaguered souls who think Thatcher was right, and that we need to embrace rather than repudiate her vision of a modern, capitalist Britain.

From start to finish there were powerful speeches on important topics such as re-emphasising national sovereignty, promoting free markets, tax reform, foreign policy, immigration and defence. Sometimes the ideas discussed were almost startling because they clashed so violently with the centrist orthodoxy that now predominates.

Take the panels on economics and fiscal policy. With Art Laffer in attendance there was no pulling of punches as he restated his timeless keys to success for any national economy: “A low-rate, broad-based flat tax, spending restraint, sound money, free trade and sane, limited regulation”. It cannot go unnoticed that the Conservatives have ceded some of this ground to UKIP in the past few years, but while policies such as a flat tax may be something of a pipe dream, Laffer’s contribution to the debate could be what is needed to help the Tories rediscover their footing on tax policy.

Also looming large in the discussion was growing cosiness between big business and big government, be it through lobbying at the national and EU level (more than 15,000 lobbyists and counting, noted Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan) or direct collusion on matters such as government surveillance. Perhaps surprisingly, given the circumstances, the delegates still considered big government a bigger threat than big business by a margin of 79% to 21%. Art Laffer summed up this sentiment, saying “big or small business is irrelevant – what matters is efficiency and competency”.

The discussions on national sovereignty and the need to stand firm in support of the nation state as the best guarantor of individual liberty were particularly refreshing, as they stood in such stark contrast to the pessimism and declinism which inevitably colour the attitudes of the pro-Europeans and those who have lost the ability to distinguish between patriotism and nationalist xenophobia.

Daniel Hannan argued that the EU should become “a free trade area in the model of NAFTA”, a nice idea, but given the fact that the European project has taken on a life of its own with the EU’s own interests now superseding those of its member states, there was too little discussion of how best to effect a British exit. Indeed, when the time came to vote on whether the EU can realistically be reformed, attendees voted 43% yes (wishful thinking) but a solid 57% no.

One of the most concrete areas of policy development was on tax, with the launch at the conference of the very SEO-friendly #ThePolicy. This proposed tax reform calls for the total abolition of capital gains and corporation tax for small businesses, giving them a shot in the arm to expand and create more jobs. The negative impact on the Treasury would be offset by the falling welfare bill, together with increases in PAYE and National Insurance contributions from the newly employed. While the policy needs further analysis and costing, it seems a lot more solid than Labour’s various hare-brained schemes to achieve full employment by levying yet another one-time tax on ‘the bankers’.

Underpinning all of these conversations on the economy was the imperative to rescue the reputation of capitalism, which has been tarnished partly through its own fault but mostly by left wing saboteurs, crony capitalism and poor government regulation. Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher’s biographer, posed the question: “How can capitalism work for people who don’t have capital?”. It is certainly the prevailing view, and has too often been the case, that capitalism has not worked well for too many people as implemented by their governments. Changing this negative impression of capitalism, and the element of truth behind it, will be key if the Conservatives are to rebuild the winning coalition of working and middle classes that Thatcher forged in 1979.

This discussion naturally led to the importance of preventing distortions in the market, and the observation that “gifts through the tax code and obscure regulatory benefits” are no less than corporate welfare, and should be discouraged in order to salvage capitalism’s reputation. And in another nod to the importance of semantics, it was reinforced that “libertarians, Thatcherites and other pro-capitalism sympathisers need to speak of being ‘pro-market’, not ‘pro-business’ in order to avoid being associated with harmful crony capitalism.”

There were several interesting debates on the media, with Guido Fawkes blogger Paul Staines and the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg hosting an interesting Google Hangout on the future of news media, the opportunities presented by online journalism and the disruptive impact on existing revenue models – a topic which could have been a day conference in itself. And it was perhaps unsurprising that 70% of delegates were against continued full state subsidisation of the BBC.

On national identity and culture (or what has become known here as the #BritishValues debate), former Australian prime minister John Howard attempted to reframe the argument, describing himself as a “multiracialist, not a multiculturalist”. In doing so, Howard explained that conservatives should be welcoming to immigrants regardless of their race and ethnicity, but hold everyone to the same standards of behaviour and observance of the law – a call to assimilate which many on the left are too timid to echo.

John Howard also had timely words of warning on winning elections, a topic where David Cameron could use advice from a someone with a track record. Howard warned: “The worst way to try to win office is to pretend you’re not too different from your opponents”.

Cameron is limited in what he can do in government by his Liberal Democrat coalition partners, but when the starting gun is fired on the 2015 general election campaign, this will no longer be the case. The Conservative Party – if they are willing and courageous enough to do so – will be able to clearly articulate their policies and present a radically different blueprint for Britain than that offered by Ed Miliband’s dystopian “One Nation” vision.

The centrist status quo was challenged on almost every issue, even if some topics (such as immigration, where delegates from North America and Europe found themselves talking at cross purposes for much of the time because of their differing experiences) were not convincingly resolved.

The only question remaining now the conference is over: Is today’s Conservative Party still receptive to what the small government free-marketeers have to say? Will the Tories reach out and take the help and advice being offered?

In Game of Thrones, those who guard the wall are a motley crew of misfits, idealists and outcasts. Anyone who has ever made the mistake of expressing support for conservatism or (heresy of heresies) admiration for Lady Thatcher at a Hampstead dinner party or northern England working men’s club could immediately identify with their plight.

But despite the prevailing atmosphere of scepticism, the happy warriors at the 2014 Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty did something important in defence of the realm the likes of which we have not seen on such a scale since their not-so-ancient order was founded by Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher in 1974 – they came together and boldly, unapologetically proclaimed the principles of small government and individual empowerment that saved Britain once and can do so again.

By contrast, Ed Miliband addresses crowds of the Labour faithful (nobody else listens to him now) and – with a straight face – proclaims that his disproven, tired old formula of tax hikes and renationalisation represents “the new politics” that Britain so desperately needs, if only we realised.

Consequently, the 2015 general election could end up being a battle between two recycled political ideologies. And we will have a choice to make: Shall we choose the one that inevitably leads to the four-day working week, rolling blackouts, industrial unrest, punitive taxation, the brain drain, the politics of envy and ‘managed decline’, or the one that puts its trust in the people, liberating them to make Britain great again through their own efforts?

With the Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty, Thatcher’s peers, friends and successors made a surprisingly forceful show of strength on the side of freedom.