Only radical action can block Britain's path to penury

Telegraph

5 days ago

Someone said to me the other day that Britain's national characteristic is no longer queueing or complaining about the weather. As they put it, it's about trying to 'carry on and pretend that none of this is really happening to us'.
Look around you, and it's maybe a rational view, if you are a citizen. It ought to be less so for the policy-making classes. But nevertheless, faced with economic and social crisis, the dominant view of Britain's governing class is 'yes, things are bad, but there's very little to be done and the best thing is to get used to it'. They refuse to contemplate any serious change and prefer to retreat to their comfort zone and blame 'populism'.
I'm often asked, not least in the reactions to these articles: 'OK, so what would you do instead?' In truth I think it's clear. We are beyond tinkering. When things are as bad as they are, only radical reform can make any difference.
So set to one side party politics. For now, this isn't about which party is best placed to do it. Set to one side the endless 'who's up, who's down' SW1 analysis. Let's look at the big picture.
Two sets of actions are needed to get back on track. The first is to rebuild our country: its institutions, its government machine, its borders, its history, its culture. This is crucial. People always want to give their loyalty to something. Without a respected, effective nation state, they will be loyal instead to an ethnic group, a religion, or a cause. We have gone much too far down that particular road already.
The other is to get economic growth going again: to rebuild a market economy with a social contract, an economic machine that benefits working people and doesn't leave anyone behind.
If we don't do the first we lose all the things that actually make a country a country. If we don't do the second we carry on getting poorer. We need to do both.
Rebuilding the country involves first of all reforms to state machinery. Without this, everything else is impossible. We must remove the major remaining international legal constraints on our actions – mainly from the EU, the ECHR, and certain UN conventions. We must reform the civil service so ministers are genuinely in charge and have more political support and control. And we must limit judicial review and at least constrain and probably abolish the Supreme Court, reverting to pre-Blair arrangements.
There can be no argument about these things. The necessary legislation should be in the manifesto and ready to go on Day 1 of a new government, in a State Reform and National Independence Bill. It is a pre-requisite to taking back proper control and making sure the state does its core jobs properly.
Those core jobs include controlling the borders and reducing migration to zero. Cracking down on real crime. Putting in place an assertive integration programme to foster loyalty to Britain – a daunting task, but one which must be taken on. Scrapping most of the Equality Act and bringing in a proper Freedom of Speech Act. Re-establishing credible armed forces. Putting in place a proper national resilience programme covering trade policy, energy, core economic capacity, and connectivity.
All this is essential to running a country properly in the first place. But we also want a successful country – which means re-establishing confidence in a market economy and its ability to make everyone better off.
There's no alternative to tough decisions here. We need a ten-year programme of consistent but radical change. And it must be explained correctly. There is a widespread belief that the last twenty years have seen crazed free market reform and austerity. The exact opposite is true. The economy is corporatist, entrepreneurialism and the self-employed have been crushed, and the tax burden is higher than ever. It is undoing this that leads to prosperity, not more of it.
So, the tax and spend burden needs to be cut, slowly but surely, and the tax system reformed to be more family-friendly and more supportive of work. That has a transitional cost and it can't all happen at one go, but a course must be set, and in a decade the tax burden has to be back at Blair-era levels – hardly a time of free market madness.
There will have to be welfare reform. Those who genuinely can't work – the elderly, sick, disabled – should be protected as far as possible, but everyone else has to be expected to earn their living. We can't have a system where you can often have the same disposable income not working as on the median national wage.
And markets need to be freed up. Net zero must go, giving us both a fiscal and a growth benefit. A Royal Commission should examine moving to European-style health and social care arrangements. Planning liberalisation can unleash the market to build houses and infrastructure. Child care can be deregulated to make it cheaper. Labour's employment laws should be reversed. There is no shortage of things to do. A serious reform programme will soon lift the growth rate. Look at Argentina and how quickly fast growth has returned after the initial pain.
The programme can't all be done at one go. So politicians who just add up all the pledges and claim this means a fiscal 'black hole' are just posturing. The programme needs careful sequencing and it will take time. But the direction must be set and it can be set in Opposition. Effective leaders must explain it, persuade the voters, and get the legislation ready.
Of course we can say all this is too difficult. But in that case we are condemning ourselves to permanent decline. Plenty of other countries have gone down that route. We don't have to.
The great if occasionally wayward political adviser Sir Alfred Sherman once said: 'You can wake someone who's asleep, but you can't wake someone who is pretending to be asleep'. The British people are beginning to wake up to the extent of their problems. But too many of our leaders are still pretending to be asleep, imagining the problems will go away, or at least not hit them personally, if they can just keep their head under the pillow. This country and its people deserve better than that.