Best Of

WRT Reform, I commented a few days ago that almost everyone I befriended through the Conservative Party had joined them,

A big issue, over and above policy details, is that people like to be in at the start of something, rather than in at the end of it. If you join Reform, you're joining a party that's winning new seats, every week. If you've been an experienced activist, in another party, you'll be fast-tracked to fight council seats, Senedd seats, and on to the candidates' list.

As one put it to me, there's a buzz and excitement, that he hasn't known since he was a YC, in the late eighties. Not least, the fact that lots of young people are involved, which has not been true of the Conservatives for a long time.

If you join the Conservatives, you're joining an organisation that has a great future behind it.

It's like being a centre-left person, interested in a political career, in c.1925. Labour are the more attractive option than the Liberals.

A couple of comments from the article and the comments:

1) It is not at all clear to me that the economy is broken. As a GDP we remain 6th in the world. There are imbalances and problems but we remain as a country OK. GDP per capita is comparable with France and Germany. We are talking ourselves down. There are political and redistributist solutions to many of the messes.

The starting point for serious discussion should not be: 'We are a broken third world disaster zone'. We aren't.

2) I don't support Reform, on competence grounds and on then grounds of the company they keep. And some other reasons. But it is delusional to think that they plan to enter 2029 with a Trussplus manifesto. We have to wait and see but a certainty is that they will produce a centrist, socially conservative, gimmick filled, as costed as any other party, social democrat, high tax, high spend programme, reflecting very precisely the socially conservative welfarist opinions of the people of Clacton.

Those arguing that we're Argentina and need a Millei are just idiots wishing catastrophe on the country.

What need to be is Poland.

We need to think as if we are a growing, successful eastern European economy: That means when we spend we don’t try and pretend we’re the most powerful country in the world that can afford the best of everything. No, we buy the optimal £/outcome option & accept that it’s not cutting edge, nor will it be perfect in terms of environmental or other concerns: getting a good enough outcome quickly is more important than a more perfect outcome that arrives late& expensive.

That means spending much, much less on endless legal niceties (see HS2, the proposed Thames Crossing, Nuclear plants). It means spending much less on local customisation (see every MoD project ever, HS2, Nuclear plants, etc etc). It means buying cheap & working over buying expensive & might work sometime in the future.

We need a bunch of warships for the Navy? We buy them off-the-peg from South Korea or Japan. We need a new large nuclear plant? We buy a few of the ones South Korea is turning out at the rate of one every two or three years, with no customisations or changes. etc etc etc. We need a Thames Crossing? We do it, or we don’t, without faffing about for fifteen years racking up enormous legal bills. We need to electrify the rail network? We set an annual budget & just get on with it at a steady pace, instead of endless stop-start Treasury angst which just ends up delaying the project & tripling the cost. And so on & on & on.

The problem is that doing all of this cuts into the income & raison d’être of a whole swathe of special interests, both inside & outside government. All of whom have got very used to justifying their absolute necessity to every project this country ever undertakes.

There’s a weird double-think in this country that budgets are limited, but simultaneously we must only have the best. New projects end up enormously expensive, squeezing budgets for the maintenance of existing infrastructure & often ending up with the new project itself being cheese pared back in order to fit within what is financially viable.

There's a natural space here for the Conservatives to grab the mantle of fiscal responsibility from Reform and Labour, as Matthew Parris wrote over the weekend. However, Kemi seems more interested in picking (and losing) peripheral fights on free speech and culture.

If they don't, then the Liberal Democrats in theory could move into this space - but that'd require them to drop much of the social democrat bit, and given the party is built on beards and sandals that might be a stretch.

There's little point in being fiscally responsible if they aren't going to reform the supply side of the economy. Remorselessly imposing higher and higher taxes to fund ever higher spending is fiscally responsible and politically easy, but it strangles enterprise and destroys economic growth in the medium-long term.

Low taxes, low spending and light regulation on the other hand generates it. THAT'S the gap in the political market at the moment, not yet another high tax, high spending, enterprise-crushing component of the uniparty.

Denmark has high taxes, but enterprise flourishes and growth is good.

A couple of comments from the article and the comments:

1) It is not at all clear to me that the economy is broken. As a GDP we remain 6th in the world. There are imbalances and problems but we remain as a country OK. GDP per capita is comparable with France and Germany. We are talking ourselves down. There are political and redistributist solutions to many of the messes.

The starting point for serious discussion should not be: 'We are a broken third world disaster zone'. We aren't.

2) I don't support Reform, on competence grounds and on then grounds of the company they keep. And some other reasons. But it is delusional to think that they plan to enter 2029 with a Trussplus manifesto. We have to wait and see but a certainty is that they will produce a centrist, socially conservative, gimmick filled, as costed as any other party, social democrat, high tax, high spend programme, reflecting very precisely the socially conservative welfarist opinions of the people of Clacton.

Those arguing that we're Argentina and need a Millei are just idiots wishing catastrophe on the country.

What need to be is Poland.

We need to think as if we are a growing, successful eastern European economy: That means when we spend we don’t try and pretend we’re the most powerful country in the world that can afford the best of everything. No, we buy the optimal £/outcome option & accept that it’s not cutting edge, nor will it be perfect in terms of environmental or other concerns: getting a good enough outcome quickly is more important than a more perfect outcome that arrives late& expensive.

That means spending much, much less on endless legal niceties (see HS2, the proposed Thames Crossing, Nuclear plants). It means spending much less on local customisation (see every MoD project ever, HS2, Nuclear plants, etc etc). It means buying cheap & working over buying expensive & might work sometime in the future.

We need a bunch of warships for the Navy? We buy them off-the-peg from South Korea or Japan. We need a new large nuclear plant? We buy a few of the ones South Korea is turning out at the rate of one every two or three years, with no customisations or changes. etc etc etc. We need a Thames Crossing? We do it, or we don’t, without faffing about for fifteen years racking up enormous legal bills. We need to electrify the rail network? We set an annual budget & just get on with it at a steady pace, instead of endless stop-start Treasury angst which just ends up delaying the project & tripling the cost. And so on & on & on.

The problem is that doing all of this cuts into the income & raison d’être of a whole swathe of special interests, both inside & outside government. All of whom have got very used to justifying their absolute necessity to every project this country ever undertakes.

There’s a weird double-think in this country that budgets are limited, but simultaneously we must only have the best. New projects end up enormously expensive, squeezing budgets for the maintenance of existing infrastructure & often ending up with the new project itself being cheese pared back in order to fit within what is financially viable.

DOGE without the drama. Will never happen, too many vested interests.

We are a nation of lawyers, sub-contractors, gold platers and people who schedule meetings for the sake of meetings.

No, it’s not DOGE. DOGE just went in & cut programs left right & centre without thought or logic. Programs were cut just because they could be cut, not because they should be cut.

Most of the things the British state want to do are perfectly reasonable - the problem is not the programs, it is that every single time we do anything it seems to cost two to three times as much as it should because of the way we approach doing, well, everything. We can’t go on simultaneously acting as if we can afford to simultaneously delay & gold-plate every project whilst cutting other services to the bone so that we can afford to pay the inflated costs we impose on ourselves.

Consider the British Museum lack of a catalogue.

When that came up, I printed out that I had taken part, as a volunteer, in the cataloging of the basement contents of smaller museum.

When I suggested that instead of spend (probably) hundreds of millions on a project to catalogue the British Museum, that letting lose some people doing Masters and PhDs in the various areas, there was considerable derision, here.

“But it’s not a Proper Project”

Instead of a single, giant, perfect solution at a single point in time. A slower accretion of records. A relative is doing something like this with another domain - turning unread historical documents into a database, using an iPhone, OCR and some time.

Meanwhile the British museum hasn’t started working on a full catalogue.

There's a natural space here for the Conservatives to grab the mantle of fiscal responsibility from Reform and Labour, as Matthew Parris wrote over the weekend. However, Kemi seems more interested in picking (and losing) peripheral fights on free speech and culture.

If they don't, then the Liberal Democrats in theory could move into this space - but that'd require them to drop much of the social democrat bit, and given the party is built on beards and sandals that might be a stretch.

After the last 14 years it’s really hard for a conservative to make a cogent case that we should trust them with the economy.
Now I know that includes two huge events - covid and the Ukraine inflation but Tories hung 2007 on Gordon Brown/Labour for a decade, somewhat unfairly.

I think some blend of contrition, setting out what it means to be conservative and a plan to make things better are what is required.

And a lot of patience. The public isn’t listening yet.