In a much-trailed speech in Birmingham last week, Iain Duncan-Smith the Conservative Party’s newish leader laid out his view of Conservatism.  The centrepiece was his identification of five Conservative principles.   Is he on the right track?  Let’s take a look.  

1. Conservative policies should help people to be more independent of the state

2. They should actively reduce the power of the state over individuals

3. They should increase the choices available to Britons

4. They should provide greater security for citizens

5. Finally Conservative policies should remove obstacles to enterprise both at home and abroad.

The first and second principles are unexceptional, although the sort of policies that follow naturally from them, such as decriminalising adult drug-taking and reforming the laws of prostitution¹ so that women can work in safety, will require political courage.   Nevertheless the benefits would be enormous and the Conservative Party is well placed both to make sensible changes and to gain electorally.  The authoritarian right has nowhere else to go and an increasing proportion of middle England is ready to support the Conservatives if they implement clear liberal policies (with a small L). 

Few iGreens would object much to principle's four and five, or even to Duncan Smith’s expanding the scope of number four, by making clear that greater security for citizens  refers not just to crime and defence, but also to health care and industrial relations.  Nevertheless distinctions must be drawn.   Health care security for the seriously ill, which everyone supports, is one thing.  Providing the sort of discretionary health spending, health advice and screening, which doctors love so much, is quite another.  Many people regard the latter as nanny state interference in their private lives.   Conservatives must make clear that the state will always pay for the former, although it need not always provide the actual service.  They must not get dragged in to paying for or providing any more of the latter.   

Principle three is the dangerous one.  It sounds great to the woolly minded, but is completely wrongheaded.  The state cannot increase choices.  It can only reduce them.  People who think otherwise imagine that by providing something, which not everyone would bother to pay for themselves, the state can somehow increase the ability of people to choose that service.   It does nothing of the sort.  It simply removes the choice to spend your money on something else, and has all sorts of damaging effects on incentives to boot.   We give people free health care and free education because we don’t like to see them suffer and because we want an educated citizenry, not because we want to increase choice.  If Mr. Duncan Smith wants to increase choice for the poor he should give them money, and let them choose where to live and what sort of food to eat.  Only if he wants to patronise them, should he give them free school milk and council houses. 

Let us hope that Mr. Duncan Smith is preparing to announce some of those daring policies that Conservatives have previously shied away from, such as breaking the two provider-driven state monopolies in education and health.     Parents can only have real choice in either a fully private system or a system of school vouchers where the government pays but other people provide.   Patients will only get decent health care when politicians have the courage to give up on the failed NHS experiment and replace it with the sort of insurance-based system that works in every other civilised country in Europe.  Again the government pays the premiums for the poor but a range of different organisations provide the health care.  

Mr. Duncan Smith appears to be refreshingly free of the bossy authoritarianism of the past.   If he can identify and follow through on policies that follow from his principles, he can reinvent his party as the champion of the people against the power of the state.   

Jim Thornton 20 Jan 2002