You obviously either missed this earlier or chose not to read it properly...
Writing about oneself is boring, but ideas are not. The question for Conservatives is “What do we want to propose to the electorate and how can we deliver it?” The last election campaign was too managerial and lacked inspiration. An effective manifesto does not need a great list of specific promises, it must instead set out a principled foundation on which each policy may be built.
Unlike the socialist, the Conservative believes that society is built from the bottom up, not the top down. Individuals come together to form families, communities and nations. The instruments of government are there to serve not to command. The random mass of individual decisions will better suit the comfort of the nation than the careful direction of resources from Whitehall. I am not the first to point out that, every day in London, 10 million lunches are served without the need for ministerial involvement.
It follows from this view that the state is there to enable people to lead the lives they wish as far as possible without conflicting with their neighbours. Policy decisions flow from this and it is the moral basis for what the government does. It is interested in what people can do, rather than what they are unable to do, and this has underpinned Iain Duncan Smith’s disability reforms, which seek to find out what a disabled person is capable of doing, rather than assuming that the only response to disability is money.
In terms of taxation, the view that individuals matter is a reminder that the money belongs to a specific person, and the state may only take what it needs. Generally, people will spend their own money more effectively than the government and there is no money at all, except for that earned in the private sector. Public sector workers may pay tax, but that merely circulates money between departments; tax paid by NHS workers comes and goes from the consolidated fund with some administrative expense in between.
In addition to low taxation being right in terms of ownership, it is also better economically. The recent cut in corporation tax, one of George Osborne’s most successful policies, has more than doubled the tax received. This has helped businesses afford to invest and employ people leading to a stronger economy and allowing the Government more easily to finance its expenditure. This example ought to be applied to income tax and, as a matter of urgency, to stamp duty.
Going with the grain of what people want is not only important in terms of taxation. The Grenfell Tower was not created because people chose to live in tower blocks, but because, from the Second World War onward, officialdom wanted tower blocks – despite opinion surveys consistently showing that the overwhelmingly majority of people want to live in houses with gardens.
But the state thought it knew best. Regrettably some Conservatives went along with this, though tower blocks are the physical embodiment of socialism. Would it not be better to pull them down, build houses, even if this requires more space, which it often does not, and then sell them at a discount to the current occupants of tower blocks? It would help people have what they want, and reinvigorate home ownership, which creates a stable society but also meets a natural, almost fundamental, human ambition.
As with tower blocks, so with energy policy It is striking how wrong the big state can be. It was the “Nanny knows best” approach that led to the scandal over diesel emissions. To risk public health today, for a carbon dioxide policy made irrelevant by emerging markets was the worst sort of political grandstanding. Similarly, the tariffs on Chinese solar panels put up the cost of energy subsidies at the expense of the poorest in the land. Meanwhile, the market is providing cleaner energy; in the United States, renewable energy is growing rapidly as it becomes more economic, and shale gas has helped reduce emissions significantly. Conservatives should recognise that individual ingenuity and business acumen do better than central planning.
Conservatives ought to back the free market, but that is not the same as big business. We must tackle monopolies. Big business loves regulation – and incidentally the European Union – because it keeps out competition, maintains high prices and reduces the power of the individual consumer. The role of the state here is to back the customer, not the producer. In some areas this is easy: supermarkets are highly competitive and need little interference. The monopolists tend to have high levels of capital invested, and many customers.
As a constituency MP, the worst organisation I deal with is BT, but it is not alone as a scarcely competent monopolist. The energy companies have a degree of arrogance towards the customers, while both banks and insurance firms penalise loyalty and the BBC writes eye-wateringly rude letters to people who do not own a television, assuming that they must be crooks. This is not about price caps, but about tilting the scales back towards the individual: if a company can penalise me for not paying on time, I ought to be able to fine it for sending out the wrong bill.
Each of us wants to improve our own standard of living and to see our children better off than we are. This is best done by freeing individuals to maximise their own successes through government that has confidence in their capacities, which trusts the people.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is MP for North East Somerset
Whether or not he could deliver it is another matter but, tell me what you see wrong in what he says?
