Is mankind's highest ideal to live without
incident or adventure? And if so,
when did this begin?

Via Tory: Coalition partners Lib Dems could ‘disappear’ (From Bucks Free Press):

SUGGESTIONS the Lib Dems could ‘disappear’ because of the ’shift in politics’ have been dismissed by the party’s Wycombe leader – following a neighbouring councillor’s defection.

There is an excellent explanation of the structure of political ideas in the author’s preface to Living with Leviathan (David B Smith, IEA, 2006). Smith posits as a replacement for the conventional and flawed left/right spectrum what he calls Hayek’s Triangle:

From Living with Leviathan, Smith 2006

On this scheme:

• The Labour party is an alliance of various denominations of socialist (democratic socialist, social democrat etc, etc) plus an occasional classical liberal in the wrong party.
• The Conservative party is a mixture of conservative interventionists and classical liberals.
• The Liberal Democrats comprise classical liberals and socialists.

These days, Conservatism is not the avoidance of change – perhaps it never was – but its embrace: big society not big government, social responsibility not state control.  This is the new politics. Either you embrace a more dynamic future based on productive relationships between individuals or you are stuck in a past which relied on big government, on imposed state solutions which never seemed quite to work.

Could the LibDems disappear? Possibly, perhaps probably. More important are the practical questions which impact on people’s lives: Where can I give birth? Is a good school place available? Is my income secure? Where will my next job come from?

The fact is, as I said during the campaign, all parties are coalitions. The important political question is this: can we best answer those practical questions through freedom and responsibility or through state control?

Via The Conservative Party | Policy | Our Contract With You:

We go into the general election on 6 May with trust in politics and politicians at an all-time low. And I can understand why: the years of broken promises, the expenses scandal, the feeling that politicians have become too remote from the people – they’ve all taken their toll.

That’s why I’m making this contract with you.

For too long, you’ve been lied to by politicians saying they can sort out all your problems. But it doesn’t work like that. Real change is not just about what the government does. Real change only comes when we understand that we are all in this together; that we all have a responsibility to help make our country better. This contract sets out my side of the bargain: the things I want to do to change Britain. But it also makes clear that I cannot do it on my own. We will only get our economy moving, mend our broken society and reform our rotten political system if we all get involved, take responsibility, and work together.

So this is our contract with you. I want you to read it and – if we win the election – use it to hold us to account. If we don’t deliver our side of the bargain, vote us out in five years’ time.

Read more about how the Conservatives will change politics, the economy and society here.

NB: The author is Tim Hewish, who I am glad to welcome as a local contributor. — Steve

One of my local Wycombe friends asked me: Why, as a young person, should I vote Conservative? I initially came out with the usual blurb about the positives of Conservatism, but she stopped me mid-way and she repeated ‘no, as a young person’. This made me think about the question further and I was fortunate enough to find two articles that stated my case beautifully. The first comes from a young campaigner who recently wrote on the ConHome website:

We’ve come to love and depend on our captors. A whole generation is clearly suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, direly dependent on the State – and Labour would have us stay this way to ensure we vote for them for years to come.

For many my age who think Stockholm Syndrome is just a Muse song let me flesh out the basics. It is instead defined as:

A paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein a positive bond between hostage and captor occurs. In essence, eventually, the hostage views the perpetrator as giving life by simply not taking it.

For far too long, young people have been at the mercy of the Blair/Brown Curriculum.

Almost all of us rebel against our parents in our teens, but then why should we run into the arms of the big nanny state? There is a twisted Nineteen-Eighteen-Four aspect in our generation where we are taught: War is Peace (The Iraq War),  Freedom is Slavery (hundreds of children’s rights but no personal responsibility) and Ignorance is Strength (teaching us social issues, but not the educational facts that means we are unable to question and think for ourselves)

In a world where we are ‘told’ the standard of life has improved by reams of Gordon Brown’s statistics tell us they want a double-think worthy fair future for all. (Click hear for a new blog detailing all of Labour’s failures)

I ask you: Is it a fair future that thousands of young people leave school without the basic grasp of reading, writing and arithmetic? Is it a fair future when you finish university without there being enough jobs to go around? Is it a fair future that Labour doesn’t actively support the stability that marriage brings? Is it a fair future not being able to get a foot on the housing ladder? Is it a fair future that out of the almost 3 million unemployed 1 million of those are 18-24?

This is exacerbated even more by the second article I found, which shows Labour have dropped their pledge to get one million more people to own their home as it “compounds inequality”.

Their own Housing Minister, John Healey, attacked owner occupation, saying that:

“Home ownership had been dropping since 2005 and I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing” and he slammed parents passing a legacy on to their children since “inequality is compounded over the generations.”

Only in a world where 2+2=5 would this make sense and people would swallow it. The hard graft and determination to own your own home is one of greatest aspiration the young can aim for. It gives you a goal to work towards, it maintains your work-ethic, it gives you a sense of pride and something on which you can improve. While it is also something that you can leave to your children.

Relying on your own acumen and skill is something we should champion, not condemn.

Saying it compounds inequality just shows that Labour doesn’t want any free individual to own anything and wants everyone equally poor as Churchill correctly stated:

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

So at a time when the Government’s own advisory body indicates that only 26 per cent of families aged under 40 could afford to buy a home in England in 2008, the Conservatives are calling for:

• A permanent cut in stamp duty for first-time buyers up to £250,000
• For an equity stake for social tenants who are good neighbours
• Respecting the tenures and rents of social tenants
• And are pledging to build more family homes with parking spaces and gardens for young families by scrapping flawed Whitehall density rules.

This is why young people should vote Conservative on May 6th and break the cycle of being Labour’s captives and end these 13 years of their Big Brother government and start embracing the Conservative vision of the Big Society based on hope, not fear.

UK Public Debt To GDP (via BIS)

A joke doing the rounds by email at the moment¹:

While walking down the street one day a Member of Parliament is tragically hit by a truck and dies. His soul arrives in heaven and is met by St Peter at the entrance. ‘Welcome to heaven,’ says St Peter, ‘Before you settle in, it seems there is a problem. We seldom see a high official around these parts, you see, so we’re not sure what to do with you.’ ‘No problem, just let me in,’ says the man. ‘Well, I’d like to, but I have orders from higher up. What we’ll do is have you spend one day in hell and one in heaven. Then you can choose where to spend eternity.’ ‘Really, I’ve made up my mind. I want to be in heaven,’ says the MP. ‘I’m sorry, but we have our rules.’ And with that, St Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to hell.

The doors open and he finds himself in the middle of a green golf course. In the distance is a clubhouse and standing in front of it are all his friends and other politicians who had worked with him. Everyone is very happy and in evening dress. They run to greet him, shake his hand, and reminisce about the good times they had while getting rich at the expense of the people. They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster, caviar and champagne. Also present is the devil, who really is a very friendly and nice guy who has a good time dancing and telling jokes. They are having such a good time that before he realizes it, it is time to go. Everyone gives him a hearty farewell and waves while the elevator rises…

The elevator goes up, up, up and the door reopens on heaven where St. Peter is waiting for him. ‘Now it’s time to visit heaven.’ So, 24 hours pass with the MP joining a group of contented souls moving from cloud to cloud, playing the harp and singing. They have a good time and, before he realizes it, the 24 hours have gone by and St. Peter returns. ‘Well, then, you’ve spent a day in hell and another in heaven. Now choose your eternity.’ The MP reflects for a minute, then he answers: ‘Well, I would never have said it before, I mean heaven has been delightful, but I think I would be better off in hell.’

So St Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down to hell. Now the doors of the elevator open and he’s in the middle of a barren land covered with waste and garbage. He sees all his friends, dressed in rags, picking up the trash and putting it in black bags as more trash falls from above. The devil comes over to him and puts his arm around his shoulder. ‘I don’t understand,’ stammers the MP. ‘Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and clubhouse, and we ate lobster and caviar, drank champagne, and danced and had a great time.. Now there’s just a wasteland full of garbage and my friends look miserable. What happened?’

The devil looks at him, smiles and says, ‘Yesterday we were campaigning … Today you voted.

But who now rides on whom?

Which is most amusing but it also gives me an excuse to mention public choice theory:

Public choice in economic theory is the use of modern economic tools to study problems that are traditionally in the province of political science. From the perspective of political science, it may be seen as the subset of positive political theory which deals with subjects in which material interests are assumed to predominate.

In particular, it studies the behavior of politicians and government officials as mostly self-interested agents and their interactions in the social system either as such or under alternative constitutional rules. These can be represented a number of ways, including standard constrained utility maximization, game theory, or decision theory. Public choice analysis has roots in positive analysis (“what is”) but is often used for normative purposes (“what ought to be”), to identify a problem or suggest how a system could be improved by changes in constitutional rules.^[1]

That is, in a nutshell, for a very long time, that joke has been a reasonable characterisation of politics and the consequence is the catastrophic public debt projection above. The Wikipedia article is somewhat biased against the theory and lacks citations but it is still worth reading.

Now, consider this:

What is that change? Some promise solutions from on high – but real change comes from collective endeavour. So we offer a new approach: a change not just from one set of politicians to another; from one set of policies to another. It is a change from one political philosophy to another. From the idea that the role of the state is to direct society and micro-manage public services, to the idea that the role of the state is to strengthen society and make public services serve the people who use them. in a simple phrase, the change we offer is from big government to big Society.

And this:

The era of big government has run its course.

The former is from the Conservative manifesto and the latter from David Cameron’s Hugo Young lecture on the Big Society. One party is telling people clearly that we need a radical change in the relationship between people and government. It is the Conservative Party.

1. And see also this speech by Mark Littlewood at the IEA, which makes good use of another version. [↩]

Via I’ll put you in driving seat, says David Cameron – Times Online:

David Cameron will invite voters today to take greater control over their own lives as he challenges Labour’s vision for Britain’s future.

The Conservative leader says that he wants to put the public in the driving seat, wresting control of their lives from the State, a sharp contrast with Labour’s pledge to form an “active reforming government, not an absent government”.

Writing in The Times, Mr Cameron holds up the promise of a “more contented country” if voters take up his offer to run schools, vote for police chiefs and set up co-operatives delivering public services.

Conservatives today set out policies to help mend Britain’s Broken Society, including the creation of a new “neighbourhood army” of 5,000 professional community organisers that would give communities the help they need to work together and tackle their problems.

Read more: The Conservative Party | News | Cameron unveils “Big Society” plan.

The policy:

As I have indicated before, the UK needs a new energy policy. Here we go:

And via Conservatives propose radical overhaul of Britain’s energy policy:

David Cameron and Greg Clark, the Shadow Energy and Climate Change Secretary, have launched plans for the largest overhaul of British energy policy since the early 1980s.

With thirteen years of government, a succession of eleven energy ministers, and eight Secretaries of State with responsibility for energy, Labour has failed to take timely action to secure our energy supplies, meet our carbon emission targets, and ensure energy is affordable.

“We are setting out a Conservative programme for the long-overdue reform of British energy policy, Cameron said, “together with the actions we will take to mobilise the investment required to enact those reforms and our strategy for minimising the cost to consumers”.

He criticised British energy policy for being out of date. “It was designed almost thirty years ago for a world in which Britain had an excess of generating capacity; in which we enjoyed the benefits of growing North Sea oil and gas production; and in which neither local pollution nor climate change were the concerns they are today.”

It is time to take decisive action to put British energy policy back on track. The policy paper, Rebuilding Security, sets out 12 key actions that a Conservative government would take immediately. Including:

• Create a capacity guarantee in electricity and a security guarantee in gas supply, to ensure that the lights stay on and our homes stay warm
• Take decisive action to promote nuclear and renewable power, through streamlined planning, a floor price for carbon and improved infrastructure
• Make Britain more energy efficient, through our Green Deal and a new “energy internet”, that puts consumers in control of their energy usage

Greg Clark added that five more years of Gordon Brown would “only make an already precarious situation worse” in terms of the challenges we face with climate change and securing our energy supplies. “We need radical change and in this Green Paper we set out plans for the biggest overhaul of British energy policy in a generation”, he said.

“Our policies will deliver secure, sustainable and affordable energy for the years ahead, while boosting investment and creating jobs. Ours is a plan to turn a threat into an opportunity, demonstrating the energy leadership and values needed to get Britain back on track.”

You can read the Conservative Energy policy in full using the document reader [above], or alternatively click here to download a copy in PDF format.

Recently, I had a good discussion about online campaigning with Graham at Mendip Media. It was an excellent cross-check for what we have been planning in Wycombe.

Anyone who underestimates the significance of the web in the campaign for 2010 is missing a trick. Since 2005, the Internet has evolved into something more than a series of brochures for companies and products. It is now a valuable mine of information for voters and would-be-voters. For example, through this site, you can find out about my political views and the literature which has informed them.

The Internet doesn’t replace meeting people face-to-face — thank goodness! — but it does allow candidates like me engage more fully than traditional doorstep canvassing and literature will allow. For one thing, it is ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’. If a certain issue is troubling you, you can look it up instantly, anywhere, without having to wait for my leaflet to drop through the letterbox. If you have a burning question, you can discuss it with me online.

Millions of younger voters now expect this – they’re regularly active on websites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These are the platforms where peer groups are forming, discussing what matters to them and influencing each other’s decisions. And it’s not limited to the young – indeed, according to Graham, the fastest growing sector on Facebook is 55- to 65-year-old females.

I am looking forward to the full-blooded campaign, online and on the streets of Wycombe, and I am delighted to reveal that fellow Wycombe Conservative Tim Hewish, a Policy Exchange veteran, will be helping online.

You can find my campaign in these locations:  Facebook,  Twitter and myconservatives.com.

Well, after visiting the magnificent Wycombe Abbey School yesterday to discover that they are very happy to share their facilities with the state sector, and after a great doorstep session this morning in Totteridge, where I found Labour voters coming over to the Conservatives, I am feeling rather upbeat, despite disquieting polling and despite agreeing with William Hague:

And I say it is that most crucial election because I believe the choice for Britain is as stark as this: it is change or ruin.

…

We are telling the British people the truth: we cannot go on like this.

We say to them now: it is time, it is time to make the break. We cannot go on just borrowing money from China so that we can buy their goods and then borrow some more. Gordon Brown is like a credit card company who will always send you another letter saying it would be so easy when in debt to borrow even more. Every family, every small business, everyone except this Government knows it is the road to ruin.

…

So it is time for change. And if we do not take this opportunity, grasp this hour, to set a new direction for Britain, then I tell you in all frankness that it will be too late. It will be too late in 5 years’ time to say we should have got rid of them, too late to reverse the decline: the debt will be too big, the bureaucracy too bloated, the small businesses too stifled, the slope Britain is sliding down will be too steep.

Yes, this year, the choice is change or ruin, but I believe people understand that this is true. People know that the days of bureaucracy are over. People must have more to do with one another and the government less.

A new publication,  The choice at this election, explains how Conservatives will:

• Act now on debt to get the economy moving
• Get Britain working by boosting enterprise
• Make Britain the most family-friendly country in Europe
• Back the NHS
• Raise standards in schools
• Change politics

It’s this simple: vote for change, vote Conservative.

David Cameron has launched the education section of the ‘Mending our Broken Society’ chapter of the Conservative Party’s draft manifesto, and is asking for your questions about it online.

Read more: Cameron launches our draft manifesto for schools.