How might the Right right itself?

It’s interesting to me that you have chosen Chatham as the person after whom to name this lecture. The first Earl Chatham – William Pitt the Elder – was indeed an undergraduate at Trinity College Oxford, but he went down without a degree, after two years. I admire him for being a self-made man. I am not sure that I would agree with Michael Beloff that he was one of the country’s greatest Prime Ministers. He played a distinguished role as Secretary of State during the Seven Years War and made considerable gains against French control of Canada. One city held by the Canadians called Port Duquesne passed during that time to the British, and was renamed Pittsburgh in honour of William Pitt. But Pitt the Elder spent most of his time in Opposition whereas his son, William Pitt the Younger, had a most distinguished and lengthy period in government. In this lecture, which is on “How might the Right right itself?” I might suggest that Conservatives want to emulate not Chatham, the first Earl who gave his name to this lecture, but rather the second Earl, William Pitt the Younger, who was more successful at holding power.

When discussing the condition of the right in politics, it’s important not to be parochial. Looking internationally, there’s no sign at all that the right is in retreat. It won new terms spectacularly in Australia and in Spain, it’s in office in Italy, it came within a hair’s breath of regaining power in Germany, despite a sleaze scandal that makes Britain’s Tories look whiter than white. In America, a relatively inarticulate candidate, George W. Bush, won the presidency for the right after two terms by a popular president, and at a time when the economy was doing well; and before anyone mentions hanging chads on the Florida ballot cards, that called the result into question, remember that the Democrat candidate Al Gore couldn’t hold his home state of Tennessee. Last week the Republicans won in the mid-term elections to the Senate and the House, even though the economy is at a standstill, and their campaign included some old-fashioned rightwing messages about patriotism and lower taxes.

Then again, the right is not really out of favour in Britain either. The Project, the BBC’s drama about the Labour Party broadcast on Sunday and Monday last, reminded us that this government delivered us Tory spending limits during its first two years in office, and introduced tuition fees, cuts in one-parent benefit and invalidity benefit, the privatisation of prisons and air traffic control, the emasculation of its own Freedom of Information Bill, and the restriction of trial by jury. Watch out during this Parliament for more private finance, freewheeling foundation hospitals, top-up fees at top-flight universities and illiberal reforms of the criminal justice system.

The problem for the Conservatives is not so much that right wing policies have been discredited or out of fashion. The problem is more that the Party appears to be divided, and people think that a party that cannot run itself cannot run the country. The Party carries many negative connotations to do with its recent and not-so-recent past. The party is unclear what it stands for.

It’s not a failure of the Party’s ideas, nor should the Party go on a wild goose chase for the Big Idea. This is not a period in politics where there are likely to be big ideas. Labour itself was elected without a big idea. This is a period when people don’t feel very passionate about much. There is widespread apathy. Partly that’s because many of the demons that people wrestled with in the past – the privileges of the trades unions, the threat from the Soviet Union, Britain’s steady relative economic decline – have been put to bed in one way or another. For as long as people do not have a sense of political engagement with big problems, it is difficult for politicians to come up with big solutions.

Returning to Labour for a moment, it has the appearance for me of a French government of co-habitation. The rightwing “President” Blair pursues policies that Old Labour hates and Tories find hard to oppose: pro-American in foreign policy, anti-protectionist, with an increasing defence budget, tough on asylum and sentencing, and increasingly in favour of introducing private sector money and disciplines to the public services. He co-habits (in French terms) with leftwing “Prime Minister” Gordon Brown who does what Old Labour approves of: he pushes up taxes, attacks pensions and self-provision, and massively extends means-tested benefits.

All that makes life difficult for Conservatives. The stuff that “President” Blair is doing makes it hard to convince people that Labour is doing leftwing things, even when it is. Where it’s doing rightwing things, the unappetising choice for Tories is between being ineffectually in agreement with the government, or unattractively further to the right, or unconvincingly to the left.

That is not the right place for me to begin a discussion of how the Tories might recover, but it illustrates the danger that we face. The public will in due course look out for an alternative to Labour. They may look to the right of Labour, as they always have done historically. But since Labour has never been so far to the right as now, and since the left will always seek to be represented in any political system, many voters may look for something as an alternative to Labour which is to the left of where they perceive Labour now to be. The opportunity for the Liberal Democrats is to capitalise on the public’s enthusiasm for redistribution and social justice, and their opportunity would be at its largest if the economy were doing well at election time, and people weren’t therefore looking for tax cuts. The Liberal Democrat opportunity is the Conservatives’ peril.

In the United States, when the Republicans had been out of power for a long time, they developed something called compassionate conservatism, and portrayed themselves as being in touch with the Black and Hispanic populations and their grievances. It is noteworthy that they felt the need to do that, given that American political culture is different from ours in important ways. There is less of a consensus in the US than here on maintaining a high safety net for people who are poor. There is there no consensus on socialised medicine. There is a much higher proportion of people invested in the stock market. Business is seen as the engine of the economy. I would hazard a guess that many people in the US could grasp and agree with the principle of a Laffer curve, the theory that cutting tax rates can paradoxically increase tax revenue. You cannot get people in Britain to believe that. There is no history of even mild socialism in US mainstream politics. Yet for all that, the Republicans felt bound to talk up compassionate conservatism. For instance, they carefully span their party conventions leading up to the Presidential Election to present teachers and parents talking from a Republican platform to a television audience about education.

The question is should we British Conservatives learn something from that? Of course we should. In Britain, where we have had buckets of socialism, where the Thatcherite vaccine took only superficially and temporarily, where people feel bound by a sense of decency to tell opinion pollsters that they want higher taxes even if they don’t mean it, where the National Health Service, with all the clear failings of a centrally-planned system, is the nearest thing we have to a national religion, should we learn anything from the fact that the hard-nosed Republicans, dealing with a less soft-hearted electorate than ours, chose to campaign on compassionate conservatism? I think it obvious that we should.

It’s also obvious, but nonetheless disputed, that any party that has lost elections, has to change. You cannot tell the electorate that they were wrong. If the electorate throws you out, you have to change. Sometimes those changes can be effected very quickly. Following President Clinton’s defeat of George Bush the Elder, Newt Gingrich in the mid-term elections came up with a programme that was coherent, had cut-through and was an election winner.

Some of those points have been widely accepted in the Conservative Party, but it’s important to understand the scope of what it is necessary for us to do. People who think that no change is needed argue that the Conservatives will never be thought more compassionate than Labour, whatever they do. I’m sure that’s true: those on the left will always have the advantage of being thought more compassionate, but it’s not the end of the argument. If the Party were thought not to have a social conscience, it would repel huge numbers of voters. Iain Duncan Smith has emphasised the Party’s commitment to helping the vulnerable, which is very welcome.

On social issues, most people brought up in the 1960s or later tend to have pretty liberal views about lifestyle choices. They are going to be an increasing proportion of the population. I believe many people brought up before that time are also rather liberal, if only because within their families they have see that life is lived very differently today, and through their love for their families, they have come to accept a new diversity in the choices that people make.

The broadcast media is predominantly socially liberal. Indeed a large number of broadcasters believe that politicians who in any way seem to court racism (and they would include any lurid statements about asylum seekers in that) or homophobia (however carefully disguised) put themselves beyond the pale. Unless broadcasters are convinced that politicians are what they, the broadcasters, would define as “decent”, they will make it extremely difficult for them to use the broadcast media to their benefit, and commentary about such politicians will always carry a hostile or ridiculing tone.

There’s a constant temptation for a Conservative leader to see whether he could improve the opinion poll ratings by a point or two by taking up a rightwing populist agenda, which would undoubtedly attract favourable headlines in one or two newspapers. But such adulation comes at a terrible price. Iain Duncan Smith has avoided the temptation, but I am sure that others try to tempt him nonetheless.

To me it seems natural that the Conservative Party should be a party committed to liberty and choice. Under Margaret Thatcher we became more explicitly economic liberals, believing that people should be allowed to spend more of what they earn, and should have fewer economic decisions dictated to them by government. I believe it entirely logical and natural that we should also be the party of social liberalism. We should have no more desire to tell people how to live their lives than to tell them how to spend their money.

I admit that there is a contrary tradition of authoritarianism in the Conservative Party. That’s why this debate is a difficult one for Tories. As time passes, however, it seems to me less and less plausible to put our emphasis on that authoritarian tradition. Iain Duncan Smith’s party conference speech last month recognised that, I think, when he urged the party to understand how life in Britain is lived today, not twenty years ago; and his statement last week talked of his wish to take the whole party with him in his thinking.

Perhaps few of the people in the know – the Kremlinologists of British politics – would now dispute that the Party is changing. One challenge the Party faces is to make that clear to the masses, who do not study things so closely. When Labour was undergoing its changes in Opposition, it found that it had, figuratively, to erect neon signs saying that it had become different. The debate over Clause 4 was in the strict sense unnecessary. It was a fossil of a clause that made no difference to real life, to the Labour Party or what its policies might be. But the struggle to remove it provided a cliff-hanger, and then a victory for the leadership. Once that debate had been won, no one ever again seriously questioned whether Labour was new or old. But for good measure they added something highly counter-intuitive. During the election campaign they announced that if, in order to stick to Conservative spending plans, they had to privatise air traffic control, they would do so. Wow. What a clear way to show that they had changed.

The lesson I learn from Labour is not that the Conservatives need to have the same policies as they, but that the methodology – doing things that are counter-intuitive and making everything that you say and do consistent with the new message – is something to emulate.

I hear a lot of people say that they never hear the Conservative Party’s view of this, that or the other. In fact the Conservative Party’s views on every conceivable thing are distributed in the usual way in tens of press releases every day. The reason that people think they don’t hear anything from the Conservatives, is that they do not yet hear a consistent message. The way that the media’s mind works – maybe the way that most of our minds work – is that we only understand things by putting them into pigeonholes. We build a pigeonhole, which is our impression of another person or of a political party, and the things that conform to our impression we put neatly in their place, and other things we tend to disregard. So until the Conservative Party can show that everything it says is consistent, it will continue to suffer complaints from people who think that it is not saying very much. One of the most important elements in a Conservative revival, given that there are no big ideas to hand, is just to achieve consistency in everything.

Tone and appearance are also important. Oliver Letwin is trying out something in which I believe very strongly: a very reasonable tone. It gets away from yah-boo politics, and the assumption that everything that the other side says and does must be wrong and should be contradicted. It addresses arguments on their merits, in a tone that you and I might use in a normal discussion. It tries to bring the language of politics closer to the language of everyday life.

In order to help achieve that change of tone and appearance, I have long thought that we need to have a greater diversity amongst the candidates that we offer for elected positions. That is controversial. First, if you tell Members of Parliament that you want greater diversity, they may take that to mean that you don’t like them very much, and indeed that may have been a difficulty in my leadership election bid last year! Second, there are long-established procedures for selecting candidates, and people don’t want to give up the power that presently resides with Conservative constituency associations.

It’s important not only that a party’s candidates should represent the balance of men and women in the population and the balance of ethnic groups, but that it should be representative in a broader way. We have very few doctors amongst our MPs, not many teachers, and not many manual labourers.

During the leadership election, one person offered me his vote if I would swear that I would never contemplate women-only shortlists for parliamentary selections. I had to disappoint him, and what I told him turned out to be quite an important statement since I lost by one vote. I am pleased to stick by the answer I gave him. It’s not that I think such lists are the answer to everything, but rather that I think we need to take front foot action to convince a majority of women that we are serious about improving their representation within the party.

I don’t know how much Labour actually used women-only shortlists. I suspect that they used them sparingly. The impact, however, was to send a message to all women that it was now worthwhile for them to apply to be a candidate. The symbolic impact of using such measures would be important in getting new people to put themselves forward.

Finally, we should change the composition the party because we need more people on board signed up to change, as occurred with “the Project” in the Labour Party.

One of the slogans for the Conservative Party should be that we are the party that favours liberty. Yesterday’s Queen’s Speech contained may items where I am sure that we will be fighting the authoritarian tendencies of the Government. That stance should colour our attitude to many issues, and should be an important part of the new pigeonhole that we build for ourselves.

Earlier I raised the conundrum of how the Conservatives can battle against a government that is perceived to be on the right. Part of the answer is that Labour has in one way made life easier for us. In this second term, as Tony Blair has been driven by limited resources, and more particularly by inexorable logic, to increase the role of the private sector in health, education and transport, he helps to legitimise Conservative positions. His slogan in the last Parliament was that the choice in health was to modernise with Labour or privatise under the Conservatives. I don’t say that he won’t spout such nonsense again, but it has become less convincing as he himself pledges himself to foundation hospitals and greater diversity in the ways that services are provided.

The Conservatives at their recent conference announced that patients would be guaranteed their operations in private hospitals if they had waited too long for NHS treatment, that they would introduce greater diversity of suppliers in health, especially of hospitals. That reminds me that when the National Health Service was created around 1947, it was a last minute decision by Nye Bevan to include within the new NHS not only all the local authority hospitals, but also all the voluntary and charitable hospitals. During much of the period during which the NHS was planned, it had been assumed that there would be a diversity of supply.

One of the arguments that the Conservative have to get across is that there is great inefficiency in centralisation. The outcomes are not very closely related to the amounts spent. Outcomes depend more on management and organisation. Scotland spends on health at a higher level than the European average, but has outcomes that are worse than England’s, even though England spends below the European average.

I was in East Berlin recently and was recalling with friends there that not that long ago people there had had to queue for food. We used to say to them under Communism that they were not queuing for food because there was a food shortage, but rather because the supply of food had been centralised and was inefficient. But now people in Berlin tell us, referring to the fact that we have to “queue” for health care, that it is not because of a shortage of doctors and nurses, but rather because we have centralised the supply of health care and it is inefficient. We have created the delays and the rationing.

In education too we should be looking to increase diversity, and to require the government to distribute some of the money that it raises in taxes to providers of services who are not owned by the state. We should welcome comparison and competition. Critical mass is important: for example, we need a large enough number of schools not run by government to give us a basis of comparison, and to create a system for training teachers which is outside the state system.

I want to touch on a couple more things, but without going into them in great detail. I said how much the Labour Party achieved by doing things that were counter-intuitive. There are some things the Conservatives should think about which are counter-intuitive, but not in any way contrary to Tory tradition.

The Party should be extremely interested in the devolution of power. We have come to be thought of as enemies of devolution because we opposed it for Scotland and Wales. Reverting to basic Conservative principles, we believe that issues of governance should be handled at the most local possible level. Decisions affecting people’s lives should be taken at the closest possible level to them. There was a glimpse of this during the last Conservative Government when power was devolved to schools and hospitals. I hope there would be more of that under a future Tory Government. We should look at regulations too and ask whether so many have to be national? Does all social security have to be established along rules that apply to the whole nation? Could not local communities have more leeway to decide such things?

I have long believed that the Conservative Party, unambiguously committed as it is to the monarchy, should be the party willing to discuss how the monarchy could be reformed so that it will continue to commend itself to the British people. It’s easier for the party that is so clearly committed to the monarchy to discuss how it might be changed to ensure its longevity, and it is our duty to do so.

The Conservative Party should also be the one to require from business the highest of ethical standards. Corporate social responsibility has become a much discussed issue. For Conservatives some of what has happened has been dismaying, and in this country I observe a broad “commentariat” – a group that creates public opinion, who are mainly middle class, made up of lawyers, teachers, journalists, broadcasters and academics – amongst whom only a small minority has any direct experience of wealth creation. Maybe because of that there is widespread cynicism about the motivations of business, and a willingness readily to believe the worst of it. The riots in Seattle and Genoa, under the “anti-globalisation” banner, clearly attracted a lot of sympathy amongst the British middle classes who were prepared to believe that business really was about raping the planet and exploiting workforces in developing countries. Of course, since then we have had the scandals of World Com and Enron and others.

At the national level, business in Britain has done itself no favours by its lack of transparency over boardroom pay. Not so long ago, when the chairman of Marconi was paid off generously, it was impossible to get any British company to discuss what were its basic criteria governing rewards and penalties for performance by their executive team. With such a lack of transparency it is very difficult to get teachers and nurses earning £15,000 or £20,000 a year to believe that the enterprise system is honest and straightforward and something they should respect.

Therefore, because the Conservative Party strongly supports business and enterprise and believes that a thriving enterprise economy is essential to produce the wealth that underpins good public services, we should be the ones to require of business more transparency and higher standards. We should initiate a debate with business about how those standards could be put in place. There are issues in developing countries that are genuinely difficult, concerning wage rates and child labour for example. We should require business to develop codes and standards that could be put out to public consultation and be agreed upon. It would be a good thing in general, and it would show that the Party was concerned with issues of social responsibility.

I return to the conundrum I put to you earlier: how do we deal with a government that appears right of centre impelling people to look for opposition to it to come from the left? One way for Conservatives to deal with that is to develop the theme of corporate social responsibility. We can talk with commitment and sincerity about how a properly functioning enterprise system, with defined codes and practices, operating in the developing world can be the best hope for bringing it improved living standards and prosperity. Then, based on free market and libertarian principles we come up with something that appears to come from the left, because it is expressed in the language of social responsibility, and social justice.

I hope that in these few remarks today I have shown that the right, across the world is not in crisis. Parties of the right are enjoying electoral success. At home, policies that the Conservative Party pioneered in the last few years have now become commonplace and accepted practice. It is the Labour Party that has had to move philosophically – to the right, and in the process has occupied much centre ground. The agony for the Conservative Party is to see right-of-centre policies being applied in Britain, but not by people who call themselves Conservative.

That should be an opportunity for the Conservatives. We don’t need to change so many fundamental principles as Labour did during the 1980s and 1990s. But we do need to undertake some of the organisational changes that they did, to make us more representative of the population, to make the message clear, and to bring about discipline and consistency, from day to day and from person to person.

The Party needs to advertise that it has absorbed the lessons of its defeat and made big changes. It should set aside its authoritarian tradition, and use liberty as its watchword. It should make the most of new political opportunities to set out the case for diversity of provision in public services like health and education. It should campaign for the devolution of power to the lowest possible level. It would benefit from championing reform of the monarchy, and new standards in business.