I don’t believe that the Conservative Party has a future. I think most of its members will either go away or pass away over the next ten years. I also reckon that Labour will win the next election (perhaps with a new leader), which will be extremely upsetting for many of the current generation of Conservative politicians.
However, Oliver Letwin MP, at last night’s Adam Smith Lecture, offered the sort of evidence, which if sustained over the next three years, could yet force me to change my mind. It is also an exception to my rule never to listen to political speeches, when trying to predict the future.
But then Mr Letwin is no ordinary politician. His speech was Sustainability and society. He started by setting the infamous Mrs Thatcher remark “there is no such thing as society” into its context and then announced that the rest of what he was going to say was consistent with her full statement.
He then listed four main themes and stuck to them. These were:
- Society is irreducibly complex
- Simplistic targets can be exceptionally destructive
- Crude intervention damages natural regeneration
- Natural systems are able to absorb limited disruption, then degrade suddenly and irreversibly
Especially cute was the use of the ecosystem of the tropical rainforest to illustrate the harm that social engineers can inflict on society. Mr Letwin also described the damage caused by spin-initiatives in the National Health Service and housing estates in the manner of a don discussing the pernicious effects of Byzantine tax policies. Mr Letwin was precisely such a don dissecting Marxist philosophy before entering think-tanks and politics. The deliberate refusal to make the attack emotional or personal was all the more powerful. Mr Letwin didn’t spell out every detail. I figured out for myself that the last point could be a description of the accelerating shambles of the railway, state health system and of course the criminal justice system.
I could have written everything Mr Letwin said on the contrast between local decision making being less bad than remote decision making.
He then answered questions openly, without being afraid to disagree.
Mr Letwin responded to the fear that local tyrants would replace remote bureaucracies. Local tyrants are easier to persuade of the error of their ways or to remove if necessary. Also the harm would be inflicted on fewer people at a time, and mistakes could be rectified quicker.
Mr Letwin also outlined his ideas for a ‘Freedom Audit’ for new legislation. This would at least mean that politicians and civil servants would have to invent ingenious excuses why the most oppressive price of legislation was really liberating. This would force the issue of freedom to be raised before a law was rushed through Parliament.
He also gave his case for drug criminalisation in answer to a Cambridge University student who asked what ingenious excuse Mr Letwin could find for explaining that drug prohibition was in fact liberation. Mr Letwin took that point on the chin and admitted that drug criminalisation was a violation of liberty and “inconsistent with the libertarian position”. He defended this on the grounds that for an individual to destroy his intellect was something that should not be allowed. He also claimed that it would be inconsistent to legalise some drugs and not others (True!). But in his view the total legalisation would cause the collapse of civilisation as we know it. However, he did add that cannabis might not be properly categorised as a drug, which he considered a technical issue.
There are three problems for Mr Letwin’s approach (which I suspect he understands full-well). One is that Labour could steal any or all of his actual proposals. To his credit Mr Letwin appears content with this: he would prefer to be in opposition with the government doing the right thing than in government doing the wrong thing. The other is that a lot of the centralisation he talks about was pushed through by his own party: at some stage he will have to say “We were wrong”, it is unclear whether Mr Letwin will be allowed to say it. Finally, will Mr Letwin’s colleagues have the intellectual integrity to keep to this approach, or will they quickly lose their nerve.
Already Sean Gabb is admitting that he may have to change his tactics towards the Conservative Party. If Mr Letwin can silence our separate criticisms, they’re doing something right.
I was asked by someone at the reception afterwards if I thought Mr Letwin would swing young voters to back the Tories. On that performance I said “No, but they would have been intrigued…”
