Richard Hiscocks has been a member of the Conservative Party since 1981, and is currently an active member in Thirsk and Malton.
I am a huge fan of Kemi Badenoch. We finally have a leader who is prepared to do some of the hard thinking that is required; indeed, has already done some of that thinking.
We do need to do a thorough review, that will take some time, of why government in the UK has failed repeatedly in the past twenty five years. It hasn’t failed universally, of course, and we should ensure that we speak loudly and proudly of our achievements in office, not least our education reforms, rescuing the economy from (another) Labour shambles in 2010, and our (mainly) decent record on law and order.
However, overall, we have presided over a growing feeling that nothing is working, and worse, that nothing can be done about it. I am old enough to remember the late 1970’s when everyone accepted that Britain’s decline was inevitable, and the best option was to manage it.
And then Maggie came along and said that it didn’t need to be like that.
I see Kemi in much the same light. She hasn’t tried to offer silver bullets, or bold policies that fix one problem but create a whole load of unintended consequences elsewhere. She recognises that our problems are structural and systemic, and solutions need to unpick this mess.
Otherwise we will say one thing and deliver another, or fail to deliver at all, if we are ever back in power; which is in fact unlikely unless we offer something to the electorate new, bold, revolutionary.
We need to understand how we have ended up with a civil service that actually blocks the policies of elected governments, instead of implementing them. How have we enabled endless judicial reviews from the liberal establishment to overturn the mandated wishes of the British people? Why do things take so long to go from decision to delivery? How come we have 250,000 managers in the NHS, and the best part of a million civil servants, in an age of digital working and mass, instant communication?
We need a coherent, joined up, top to bottom revolution, based on Conservative values and principles. That will resonate with the electorate, who are fed up of decline inaction, and especially of metropolitan wokism, and will save our country and get us moving forward again, much as Maggie’s similar revolution did in the early 1980’s.
So Kemi is right to take her time, think this through, and come up with a plan that is joined up and coherent.
But unlike Maggie in 1975 Kemi doesn’t have time.
We have to face an insurgency that has already started. Across the western world parties are surging whose catchline is that the establishment has failed, but things don’t have to be like this. Whether it is the AfD in Germany, RN in France or Reform here in the UK.
If we take three years, even two, to come up with anything worth hearing, then we won’t exist to actually say anything. We have to catch this wave, or be destroyed by it. But the big advantage we have over Reform, is that we are not a one person and one policy party. We have the corporate intellect and memory to know that the problems of the world and the UK are complicated, interwoven, and cultural as well as simply political. Hence the need for a plan that is well thought through.
So how can we solve the paradox of needing to take our time to come up with coherent solutions and policies, but not actually having any time?
I suggest something quite simple, and that I have seen work repeatedly.
When I worked in a large corporate financial services company, our detailed planning activity would always start with outcomes. What outcomes do we want to deliver? What do we want it to look like at the end of the period of the plan?
So, we might have a required outcome to improve customer loyalty by 5 points, and another to reduce operational expense by 6%. So, we would be more efficient, but increase the number of happy customers at the same time. And so on. And these outcomes were clear from the start, and crucially, were rooted in the type of company we wanted to be. In other words, based on our principles and values. We weren’t a pile it high sell it cheap business, and this was reflected in our desired outcomes around customer loyalty, for example.
So it is perfectly possible for us as a party – right now – to clearly articulate to the country what outcomes the next conservative government will deliver. And these are not the policies that will deliver these outcomes, they come later. But, those policies will be designed to deliver these stated outcomes, and worked up coherently so that there are no unintended consequences.
I would limit things to a few key outcomes that get to the heart of things, such as;
Deliver a balanced budget by the end of the first parliament (we cannot go on bequeathing more and more debt to our children)
Have a health and care capability that means people live longer and live better (ie we don’t need to articulate inputs such as health spending, but the outputs that health spending delivers)
Net migration will be between zero and 50,000 (so that we can welcome those with skills we need, but no longer have more migration than our culture and infrastructure can cope with) and illegal migrants will be deported on the day after they arrive
We build 350,000 homes a year (so that everyone who wants to buy a house can buy one. Owning property is a cornerstone of a conservative society)
Energy costs are reduced by 25% in real terms (it is a scandal that we have the highest energy costs for homes and businesses in the developed world)
We will continue to move towards net zero, but without putting ourselves at economic disadvantage with those countries who produce more emissions and who are going more slowly (gives us the freedom to go quicker or slower, depending wherever the economic advantage lies)
Reduce reoffending by 25% (to free up prison places, and to allow us to lock up more violent criminals, and for longer)
But that is just my list.
We certainly should be looking at something with six or seven outcomes max. And we have no need to say, now, what specific policies are needed to get to these outcomes. But this allows us to clearly show what a Conservative government will do, and we can explain that the detailed policies have to be worked out so that the policy for one outcome (eg balancing the budget) doesn’t rely on something (eg mass migration) that makes it impossible to deliver another outcome (eg very low migration levels), which is exactly what happened in the past.
Launching these outcomes, which are firmly rooted in our values and principles, fills the vacuum, articulates what we stand for, and what people will get if they vote Tory at the next general election, but also at a local elections in the meantime. It also allows us to ready people for the fact that our policies, when they come, will be bold and will make the liberal establishment wail from their wokish towers.
Bring it on.
And, of course, whilst it won’t make Farage go away straight away, it means that he hasn’t got the monopoly in claiming to own the big issue of the day. We can say we get it, show remorse for why we didn’t sort some of this out last time (because it is difficult and that we didn’t do the joined up work well enough), and show that only the Conservatives have the capability of producing a plan that addresses all of our problems as a totality, in one coherent revolution.
We do not need to choose between laying out who we are and what we will do NOW, and giving ourselves the time to think through policies properly. We already know what outcomes we want to deliver.
Get them out there.
People will love them.
