Herbert Why Vote Conservative 2015

The Essential Guide
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84954-811-3
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 4, 144 Seiten

Reihe: Why Vote

The Conservative Party wants to win the 2015 general election with an outright majority. But what should be the party's purpose in government? In this unique guide, Conservative MP Nick Herbert explores the values that have ensured the party's success for the better part of the last hundred years, and sets out how they should be applied to build another Conservative century. Why Vote Conservative 2015 proposes a radical Conservative agenda to reform political institutions, bring government closer to the people, personalise public services and lower taxes.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Herbert, Nick

Leseproben

Chapter 4

Nation

Labour pulled at the wires of the British constitution without knowing what they might disconnect. They endangered the fabric of the Union by devolving extensive power to Scotland but giving it little real fiscal autonomy and so no ability to exercise the responsibilities that come with it. They imposed the Lisbon Treaty on Britain, reneging on their promise to put it to a referendum. Tony Blair even accidentally abolished the office of Lord Chancellor in a Cabinet reshuffle and hurriedly had to reinstate it to avoid constitutional chaos. The contrast with the Conservative approach to constitutional change could not be greater.

Disraeli said that ‘the Tory Party, unless it is a national party, is nothing’.66 But we are not nationalists. Orwell drew the vital distinction between patriotism, ‘devotion to a particular place and to a way of life’, and nationalism, which is ‘inseparable from the desire for power’.67 A century after the outbreak of World War One, we should remember the destructive power of nationalism, and shudder that it is still causing conflict at Europe’s borders. Conservatives should eschew the narrow appeal of nationalists and reject identity politics. As Orwell noted, ‘no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit’.68 Conservatives are proud of our country and know what makes Britain great, but are also practical about our national interest. At best, exceptionalism permits complacency about decline; at worst, it leads to isolation.

Preserving the Union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has, therefore, been core to the Conservative Party’s belief. Indeed, we are, historically and formally, the Conservative and Unionist Party. That is why we argued that our shared history and geography allowed the United Kingdom to be more than the sum of its parts, that together, we formed one of the most powerful countries in the world, punching above our weight in international affairs, and that we prospered together and would each count for less were the country broken apart. Even Alex Salmond was forced to acknowledge an element of this truth: his ‘independent’ Scotland would retain the UK’s monarchy and (he claims) its currency.

At the time of writing, the referendum on Scotland’s independence has not been held. If Scotland votes ‘Yes’, it will be a shameful rebuke for Westminster politics, a serious embarrassment for the government and a shock to the economy, and it will damage the prestige of the UK. As unionists, the Conservative Party would be deeply saddened by such a decision.

But the UK will recover and prosper, while an independent Scotland, in the grip of a socialist utopian fantasy, living beyond its means, will face rising taxes, spending cuts and long-term decline. As David Smith has pointed out, for the past quarter of a century, ‘even with a geographic share of oil revenues, and even in a period when North Sea production was at its peak, Scotland has run a bigger deficit than the whole of the UK’.69 It has enjoyed higher public spending financed by UK taxpayers. After independence, that subsidy ends.

If divorce must happen, it is in everyone’s interests that it is amicable, but it cannot be on Scotland’s terms. They cannot be permitted to share the pound. They may choose to use the pound, rather as Zimbabwe uses the dollar, but they can have no control over it, because that would damage both economies. No currency union has succeeded without political union. Twenty years ago, in the so-called ‘Velvet Divorce’, Czechoslovakia divided to create the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The countries agreed to share the Czech Koruna. The different pace of economic development in the two new republics made it impossible. The currency union lasted for thirty-three days, and Slovakia now has the euro. Sharing the pound would damage the UK and Scotland alike.

Nor should MPs for Scottish constituencies be permitted to allow the formation of a UK government in the 2015 general election, since they will no longer be members of the UK Parliament after ‘Independence Day’.

That Scottish nationalism arose with such force is a symptom of the lopsided nature of devolution in the UK. Though the Scottish government has broad powers to enact policy (by some measures wider than those granted to German or Spanish ‘autonomous communities’), it will not be responsible for raising money to pay for them until 2016, when a Scottish income tax will be introduced. This asymmetry precludes a proper debate on fiscal policy and the role of government, while providing nationalists with the ability to blame funding shortfalls on an ‘English’ government in Westminster.

The effects of this asymmetry provide an important lesson for the further devolution which, if Scotland has voted ‘No’, is now inevitable in that country and which, in turn, raises the question of what should happen in England. The well-known West Lothian question, which identifies that Scottish and Welsh MPs can vote on English matters, but English MPs cannot vote on Scottish or Welsh matters, will have to be solved. But so, too, should the remoteness of English government from the English people.

Under current constitutional arrangements, it is quite likely that a government could be elected to office with the support of Scottish and Welsh MPs, despite lacking majority support in England. When the reverse occurred it stimulated the growth of nationalist sentiment in Scotland that was only partially dampened by devolution. It is not hard to imagine a government with a majority derived from its strength outside England imposing taxes that would be borne disproportionately by English taxpayers to finance policies of which English voters disapproved. Such situations would provide fertile soil for an English nationalism every bit as destructive of the Union as the Scottish and Welsh kind. Preserving the Union – our country – therefore requires significant constitutional change.

A minimalist solution of ‘English Votes for English Laws’ has much to recommend it. It fits in with the British tradition of constitutional evolution where constitutional changes are made incrementally, and with minimal disturbance, and therefore with political practice, instead of imposing abstract theoretical models of political order at the expense of good government. It dispenses with the need to create a wholly new institution and provide salaries for a further set of politicians. It is immune from what might be called the ‘Prussian Question’, when one unit in a formally federal country exerts disproportionate influence over the others due to its sheer size, as Prussia did in Bismarck’s Reich.

A more radical alternative would be a fully federal UK, in which an English Parliament, comparable to the Scottish, was set up (with the assemblies of Northern Ireland and Wales becoming similar parliaments). Such a scheme would see the federal government of the United Kingdom retaining responsibility for areas such as foreign affairs, defence, immigration, overall macroeconomic policy and international trade, while an English Parliament, like the Scottish from 2016, would be able to raise its own taxes. The boundaries of jurisdiction would be settled by the UK Supreme Court, as they currently are between London and Scotland.

Either solution would raise the possibility of an English majority, quite possibly Conservative, being at odds with a UK majority. A fully federal system would expose these differences more clearly: there could be a Labour Prime Minister of the UK and a Conservative First Minister of England. The question, then, is which is more likely to provide a focus for a now latent but potentially damaging English nationalism: an arrangement that continues to ignore English claims, or one that answers them. What is clear is that this is no longer only a Scottish, or for that matter, a Welsh or Northern Irish question. Disraeli’s observation that ‘I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad’70 is the beginning of wisdom in this debate. We should no longer allow hot-headed nationalism to dominate it. A constitutional convention is needed to examine the issues.

One nation

When Disraeli spoke of ‘one nation’, he was describing of the division between rich and poor. Today, such divisions of wealth remain, if not as starkly as in the industrialising nineteenth century, and others exist too: divisions between people of different religions, ethnicities and different regions of the country. A modern Conservative government should rule in the interests of the whole country. Since the riots in Burnley and Oldham there have been increasing efforts to dismantle institutions and policies that lead to people living ‘parallel lives’ and to promote integration.

But a main source of divisiveness now is the financing of our welfare state, which is almost uniquely reliant on universal payments and lacks any element of individual social insurance. David Goodhart has written that fostering the solidarity needed to sustain support for the British welfare state requires restrictions on immigration much tougher than those currently in force.71 As the recession deepened, calls for economic protectionism grew; Gordon Brown notoriously called for ‘British jobs for British workers’ and Ed Miliband divided companies into ‘producers’ and ‘predators’, explicitly identifying the former as British.72...