Gary Wilkinson has worked as a currency trader, in the City, for 15 years.
What do we really want? What’s the ultimate reason that we are passionate about politics and do what we can to promote the Conservative Party? This is the question we all need to ask ourselves.
Once we have answered this we can work backwards to figure out how to achieve this goal. I hope that our answer is: huge improvements to Britain. For us to rise the ranks in many different metrics, from GDP per head to our NHS, rather than accept a slow decline.
We should want the next big tech companies to be set up in Britain, for the poorest in our society to enjoy longer happier lives, and for crime levels to drop. We should want this all to happen while the ticking time bomb which is our sovereign debt, drops, allowing us to be more secure both economically and militarily against rising unfriendly powers.
If those are our priorities, and we come up with a credible plan to achieve all this, we would be incredibly popular, finally giving the public something to be excited about. If we come to the wrong answers, perhaps we focus on only what Conservative and Reform party members like and want to hear, then we are in danger of languishing in the political wilderness for 15 years or more.
This may sound easier said than done. But I believe it’s very achievable. At the very least, this provides a clear route for big improvements.
Two issues need to be overcome to achieve our goals.
Firstly, our political system isn’t set up to create the best policy for Britain. It seems all government insiders are acutely aware of this. It discourages almost everything needed to ensure the best policies are passed.
From MPs having the lack of time or incentives to scrutinise, high churn for ministers and civil servants in different posts reducing expertise and time to get things done, Number 10 not being an appropriate building for a modern centre of government, and many more. These aren’t changed as they favour the government of the day.
Secondly, governments are discouraged from passing the best policies as they are often at odds with what is popular with the public, a different wing of a party, or members.
If our end goal is to build a better Britain then we should be focused on fixing these two issues. My strategy has a solution for this. Equally as important, it will make us very popular allowing us to win the next election. We would be seen as the party of change.
If we want this world-beating decision-making infrastructure, why not start by reviewing every part of our political system? Why not get a team of experts, including ex-ministers and Prime Ministers, experts of foreign government systems from across the globe, and ex-civil servants, to publicly assess the entire system?
It could assess if policies are being decided on because they are headline-grabbing and sound popular or if they are good long-term decisions and the structural reasons behind this. It could look at every step of policy creation, look at our issues, and take lessons from highly successful big tech companies, organisational psychologists and take evidence from different governments globally to see what works and what doesn’t.
This would be done in full view of the public and would meet the narrative of a party that’s understood it didn’t perform well enough and wants to change not only themselves but the whole system. If our end goal is for Britain to do much better by creating better decisions in government, why wouldn’t we look at the process of our current system? And if the public are looking for a party that will improve their lives, and is currently underwhelmed by any party, would this not convince the public this is real change?
There have of course been many reviews in the past, mostly ignored, and we could of course start by looking at these, but a lot of this is optics. It’s about the public seeing us get serious about what needs to be done and bringing about the credible hope of change.
Imagine how popular it would be to show we’ve completed a full assessment, identified many issues that lead to poor results, learnt from a wide selection of experts, collected evidence from across the world, and have the plan to build a far improved, world-beating system. Imagine how successful Britain would be if we could create the world’s best political structure that stops making decisions based on ideology and populism, but on evidence.
To solve the second issue, politicians are sometimes prevented from passing the best policy if it happens to not be popular. I believe at the heart of the Tory party is rationalism. We have the desire to pass the best policy, not necessarily the nicest-sounding policy. We leave that to Labour and we get called the nasty party for it.
How about we create a strategy to pass that rational policy, the policy that would help Britain in the long term, by making the decision process admired and respected, similar to the respect scientists receive?
To do this we rebrand the party from a right-wing party (bear with me here) to a scientific party. A party that makes decisions using data scientists and experts. It experiments to gather more evidence. It debates properly and asks many to scrutinise policy. Then it presents data and decisions to the public in a press conference to build confidence with the public.
We would be pitching ourselves as the party that makes evidence-based decisions, against Labour’s ideological approach. It would highlight when Labour’s policy is myopic and profligate, against data-led policy that learns lessons from across the globe. This would be the Government’s nightmare, as it would highlight their politics of envy-based decisions
This, in conjunction with the first solution, paints us in a different light to the “old” Tory party. The public would be excited to see the results of the system assessment and how it could improve government. The public would view the Conservatives as a new, modern, scientific-thinking party that has turned its back on ideology and makes intelligent decisions.
The Conservatives would become the real change candidates in 5 years, and not just a changed rosette colour, but a huge change to the very way politics is conducted. This would mean you win the next election, have greater ability than ever before to create excellent policies that would work, and get approval from the public to pass them.
So what will it be? The end goal of getting back into power and growing a greater Britain, or something else?
