Tag: 2002

The speech made by Iain Duncan Smith, the then Leader of the Opposition, in Birmingham on 17 January 2002.

Some people say that the world changed on September 11th. They say that we have entered a new era – that a period of peace and order has been shattered by a wholly new and unexpected threat.

And they say that out of this, a different world must be born. A world in which everyday behaviour must change. A world which demands a seismic shift in the powers between Government and people. A world that requires the dissolution of old alliances and their replacement with new ones.

They also say that it is a world that promises a new order. One in which the threat of terror can finally be subdued in favour of a permanent peace. In which alliances that have been forged to root out a specific enemy can be turned to a broader and permanent purpose.

I do not see September 11th in those terms. I don’t believe that the world before September 11th was as benign as others, then or now, would have us believe. The end of the Cold War did not represent the triumph of reason and goodwill but a victory for a decades-long policy of credible and effective opposition to those who would destroy us. A victory for practicality, not pipe dreams.

And as the communist threat ended, it was replaced by a myriad of other threats. That’s why, when fashionable opinion regarded a policy of strengthening our defences as being somehow unnecessary I was more determined of the need to defend against different threats. I have spoken often about the threat of rogue states and their connection with terrorism. I have also pointed out that their terror feeds off organised crime and, as a result, links right through to the drug dealers on our street corners and schools.

And because I don’t believe that the period between the end of the Cold War and September 11th ushered in a new era of consensus, ‘the end of history’ as some have put it, I am concerned that there are some who say a new global settlement should be the principal goal of the Government.

Conservatives take the world as it is, not as we would prefer it to be. Those on the Left are always prone to policies that rely on a view of the world as they would wish it to be. So-called ethical foreign policies, or public dreams of pivotal roles take us nowhere if they are built, not on a shrewd understanding of the world as it is, but on a refusal to contemplate a world that eludes attempts to control and order it.

“Instead of aiming for an all-encompassing consensus built on a vision of a new world order, my instincts are always to build from the bottom up: to derive policy from the instincts and values of the people we represent, guided by our own values.

To me the grandeur of the response to September 11th lies in the sum of instinctive reactions by a whole host of unrelated people and groups whose behaviour is impelled more by their values than by the deliberate enactment of an ambitious plan. The dying who sustained the lives of their loved ones with a final telephone call. The firefighters who instinctively plunged into the burning buildings to rescue others.

The Mayor and the President who, in very different ways, found in themselves the ability to lead their people. The ties of history that caused Britain instantly and unswervingly to commit our help to our American friends in the fight against terrorism.

Perhaps most of all the way sovereign nations came together for a singular, and very specific, purpose that has been conspicuous in its success.

The steps that these thousands of individuals took were not grounded in some abstract theory, but in values and instincts expressed through actions.

In Britain today the Government seems to be constantly finding ways to prevent people’s own instincts and values from guiding their behaviour. Whether it is in the public services, in companies or in local and national government, people’s actions are increasingly justified by, or even dictated by, policies with which they must comply. If there’s a single word that has gained currency over the last 30 years, and encapsulates much of what is going wrong, it is ‘compliance’.

It is dangerous for at least two reasons. First, the more pervasive is the compliance mentality, the more we degrade the capacity of our employees and our neighbours to exercise personal influence and responsibility. We dumb down the individual.

Second, it implies that the official view that replaces individual discretion will be wiser and more effective. We need more, not less discretion, as individuals, as teachers, as doctors, as social workers, as neighbours.

My colleague Oliver Letwin, the Shadow Home Secretary, spoke last week about how we need to support and help families, schools, and communities in building the values that sustain a neighbourly society. An ethos of public service is one such value. Labour claim that the value of public service is incompatible with the private sector. But it is their own remorseless centralisation that is the gravest threat to the notion of public service. Our teachers, our nurses and our police officers will progressively lose their sense of vocation if all they are permitted to do is to follow detailed instructions from Whitehall. Labour are destroying, not building, the neighbourly society by not allowing people the freedom to express their values through their actions.

At the heart of my politics is a belief that people’s values should be free to drive their behaviour. That applies to political parties as it does to individuals.

I was recently asked in an interview whether there is a Conservative equivalent of Clause IV in the Labour Party’s constitution: an article of faith that we have to repeal to be seen as a modern party.

The answer is that it is unimaginable that the Conservative Party should be faced with such a dilemma, because the idea of a Clause IV is inconceivable for us. Labour draw their policies from a blueprint for society. They have a top-down approach to policy which leaves them always susceptible to the glamour of grand schemes and global solutions.

Blair may have removed Cause IV from Labour’s constitution, but he could not remove it from their hearts. He executed a coup de theâtre – milking the applause that were given to a symbolic clash of personalities, the repudiation the old and its replacement with the new.

Characteristically, though, all of his efforts were focussed on changing the superficial expression, rather than the underlying instincts. Labour remain hostile by instinct to solutions that do not involve heavy state direction. It is no surprise that when Labour’s policies are tested by crisis they fall apart amid chaos and recriminations.

Stephen Byers, once New Labour’s leading cheerleader for modernisation, now says that there is too much private sector in the Third Way.

The Health Secretary, Alan Milburn said that he would ‘come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who has anything to do with the private sector’. He said, just six months ago, ‘thankfully we have one monopoly provider and that is the National Health Service and as long as there is a Labour government in power that will remain the case’. On Tuesday, in blind panic at the impossibility of delivering health improvements, he said that he wanted to see the end of the NHS as a ‘centrally run, monopoly provider of services’. When their rhetoric rails against their own instincts it is inevitable, that they should suffer the political equivalent of a nervous breakdown. They have no basis of principle for their policies, so they have nowhere to go, nowhere to turn. So they barricade themselves against reality with 5, 10 and even 20-year plans – each one more ludicrous than the last.

John Prescott unveiled a 10-year plan for the railways in 1999. In 2000 we had a 10-year NHS National Plan. Last November the Chancellor announced a 20-year plan for the NHS. On Monday Stephen Byers rushed in another 10-year plan. Two year, two portfolios, four 10-year plans.

Always a new plan – they never get shorter, and the Government never talks of being four years into a plan.

They also have a cynical purpose. They take refuge in the abstract to distract people from what is all too real. They go to enormous lengths to prevent themselves from being judged.

David Blunkett tries to turns the clock back to zero by blaming their failure on crime on his predecessor, Jack Straw. John Prescott said ‘judge us on transport after 5 years’. Five years come and Stephen Byers says it will take another 10. If anyone personifies Labour’s failure to hide behind plans rather than take responsibility it is Stephen Byers.

This whole approach is alien to Conservatives. We have never believed in new world orders or domestic blueprints. We have always been the practical party, because we have never tried to cut ourselves loose from our principles, but instead have expressed them through our policies.

Conservatives have been successful when we have articulated a clear view of the problems that Britain faces, and have found ways to solve them that rely on empowering people rather than pushing them around. ‘Trust the people’ has always been a powerful Conservative rallying cry. It has never let us down in the past, and it will not now. We have embarked on the most far-reaching renewal of our policies for a generation. It is our opportunity to refresh our sense of purpose, and to make connections way beyond our usual supporters.

The first thing this requires is to be clear about our priorities. We can’t concentrate on everything at once, and nor should we. To govern is to choose, and as we prepare for government we will not flinch from making choices.

We choose to concentrate on the issues that make most difference to people’s lives. So our efforts will be focussed on solving the crisis in our public services – the health service that makes people afraid to fall sick; schools that deprive millions of children of the opportunities that a first class education offers; a transport system that makes travelling in or between our cities an ordeal.

And we will focus on the problems – and they include our public services – that are hardening the arteries of our economy turning it from one of the most flexible and dynamic in the Western world into one of the most overburdened, conformist and bureaucratic.

We understand instinctively that the quality of our lives is influenced more by our families, our communities and our environment than by the economic forces that those on the Left think determine our well being. So we will sweep aside Labour’s ludicrous assertion that Britain’s streets are becoming safer than ever. We all know from experience that is not true, and we will look for the means to revive the neighbourliness that stops the conveyor belt of crime from ever taking hold. And we will address the concerns of a new generation for the condition of our environment. It is fertile territory for Conservative thinking. The best traditions of Conservatism are about our duties as stewards of an unending inheritance, rather than revolutionaries seeking to impose a new order.

During the years ahead, people can count on the Conservatives always to have, at the forefront of our minds, the same concerns that they do.

As we renew our policies we will not be content to listen only to the usual voices. I mean to expand the range of people and organisations that influence us.

But the way we develop policy will be characterised by leadership and direction, and based firmly on Conservative values. Our values have stood the test of time. The problems may have changed, but the values that underpin our solutions are as relevant as ever.

By their nature, Conservative values are not easy to capture in distilled form. Their true expression is through our policies and how we conduct ourselves. But as we renew our policies, and expose the failures of this government, these are the themes that will be consistently expressed.

The first is that our policies will clearly help people to be more independent of the state. Labour is making Britain a nation of supplicants. Every time the Chancellor presents a budget, he draws more people into dependence on his largesse.

Forty per cent of our fellow citizens will rely on means-tested benefits by 2003 – up from 25 per cent in 1997. When more and more people have to rely on the Government for their living we compromise their dignity and damage our economy and our democracy.

We in Britain do not save enough – and societies saving as little as ours are heading for long-term welfare dependency.

And we must go further. It’s not just a matter of increasing people’s independence, our policies must reduce the power of the state over people – and that is our second principle. Because I trust the people, I want people to have more freedom to shape their own lives.

We have a Government of control freaks. For Labour, control is not a means to an end, but an end in itself.

It was explicit in the old Clause IV, and is implicit in everything they do in Government. Their first instinct was to take the railways back into state control – without any idea of how this would help or even of what to do next. The chaos and misery that passengers are suffering is as nothing to them, compared with the self-satisfaction they feel from being in control.

They bombard our teachers with orders and directives, and destroying their ability to act according to their instincts as professionals and as individuals. They attach so many strings to taxpayers’ money spent on health that hospitals have even less money to spend according to doctors’ priorities than before.

And they take every opportunity to emasculate the institutions, like Parliament, that exist to hold them to account.

Our policies will reduce compulsion by the state, and ensure that whenever the government exercises power it is effectively scrutinised, and that the rights of individuals are protected.

As we reduce compulsion, so we increase the choices available to our citizens – and that is our third principle.

Because Labour cannot bring themselves to trust people’s instincts, they are against choice. Among their first acts was to remove choice in our education system, by banning Grant Maintained schools – themselves established by parental choice – and scrapping the assisted places scheme.

As a country, we have always been stubbornly varied. Our great cities still find their characters in the urban villages that make them up. Our counties are proud of how they differ from their neighbours. They embody a diversity that runs with the grain of Britain’s history and our character. But that diversity cannot be imposed. That is why the Government’s bogus regional agenda seeks to replace what is organic and historical, with something that is alien and unworkable. The only diversity that this Government will permit is one of its own design – a diversity that is not the outcome of choice, but its reverse – the attempted imposition of order.

Choice does not equal insecurity. Indeed the opposite is true, which is why the fourth characteristic of our policies must be that they provide greater security for our fellow citizens.

As we have grown more prosperous as a nation, we have lost some of the things that made us feel secure.

It is a paradox that many of the very institutions that were meant to increase our sense of security have become some of the prime sources of insecurity in our lives. The NHS was conceived as a safeguard on which we could all rely. But for many – especially our most vulnerable citizens – the possibility of falling seriously ill and having to rely on the NHS is a nightmare. It adds to their worries, rather than reduces them.

The Prime Minister said in the House of Commons last week that crime is falling. That is not the experience of millions of our fellow citizens, who feel less and less secure in our streets. Muggings are up by 40 per cent. Violent assaults are up by 20 per cent. And, as with our public services, it is the most vulnerable in our society who bear the brunt of the effect of crime.

The only credible solution is decisive action to tackle at source the causes of these insecurities. Palliative measures offer only false comfort. In the late 1970s we recognised that the growing power of the trades unions was a source of increasing national insecurity – compromising our ability to earn a living. A decade of policies to mollify the threat of ever worsening industrial relations failed absolutely to resolve the insecurity that it bred. People predicted that the consequences of decisive action would be destabilising. They did the same when we reformed the British economy during the 1980s.

But in both cases, the result of decisive action to address the causes, not mitigate the symptoms, was to restore a more fundamental security to our national life.

Essential to the confidence that comes from competitiveness is our fifth principle – that our policies should remove obstacles to enterprise, both at home and abroad.

Our businesses resent the fact that in more and more areas they must, in effect, obtain a licence to trade from the Government. It sometimes seems that what is not illegal is becoming compulsory.

A government which says it sees the virtue of eliminating rules, taxes and regulations on international trade is oblivious of the fact that precisely these measures are taking over our own domestic economy. They have identical effects: impediments to trade whether in Britain or internationally impoverish us all and our policies will be characterised by removing them.

The CBI itself puts the increased burden of business taxes at £5 billion a year. The Institute of Directors has put the added cost to business of regulations at a further £5 billion. And in the year 2000 alone 3,864 new regulations were introduced – the highest figure on record. No wonder our businesses have to struggle harder and harder to compete.

The Government says it wants a new relationship with the private sector to pay for public service projects. But it will never work because they lack the basic instincts to avoid interference and control. Just look at the railways.

Four things are needed when private capital is brought into public projects: clear information, on which customers and suppliers can make a choice; freedom for customers to choose; freedom for providers to manage their businesses; and sanctity of contracts.

Labour lacks the most elementary appreciation of each of these. Take the health service, for example. Information about cost and performance is not available.

Customers – GPs or patients are not free to choose their health provider. Private providers are not free to manage their businesses, but have to abide by NHS practices. Characteristically, the Government insists on total control.

And if private capital providers can’t rely on the Government to keep to the terms of the deal – if the Government doesn’t hold to the sanctity of contracts – then there will be a huge risk premium on providing capital for public projects. After the Railtrack debacle what is the risk premium on dealing with this Government now?

All of our policies will be informed by a vision of what our country is like at its best. They will be marked by more self-confidence in Britain than any of our opponents dare display.

This Government has always been embarrassed by our traditions and our ways of doing things. They have tried to promote bogus makeovers for Britain as a nation – do you remember ‘Cool Britannia’? And when that failed, they have tried, as in their approach to Europe, to submerge the things that make us distinctive as a nation.

Conservatives are confident about Britain’s future because we are comfortable with our past. Labour is neither.

People don’t want grand schemes and elegant theories. What people want, in fact expect, from our democracy is something much more simple and yet far more difficult to achieve. They want us to give them the freedom to make life better, to help them when required and to get out of the way when we are not.

So our policies will result in less politics in people’s lives, whereas the Government wants more. Policy renewal is inseparable from effective opposition. Our first duty is to expose the problems people in Britain face, especially where, as in so many areas, the Government attempts to disguise the scale of its failure by a culture of deceit.

But the way that we oppose must also convey our own principles, and exemplify, rather than detract from, our own approach.

Oliver Letwin’s analysis of crime is based on precisely the Conservative principles I have described of recognising the importance of allowing people’s values to govern their behaviour. He is showing that our approach is principled, intelligent and humane. The proposals that we announced this week to replace the House of Lords with a directly-elected Senate, standing above political patronage, shows that our principles can have striking expression. They underline the fact that we can recognise when the time has come for change, and we will embrace it in a way that reflects principle, not self-interest.

In the months to come more flesh will be put on these bones of these principles for a distinctively Conservative approach to government. But within that skeleton, this backbone will be particularly important. For even before our far-reaching policy review has come up with its results, Labour will certainly try to discredit it, and us.

Of course, that’s what politics is often about. And there’s nothing wrong with heated debates, or even the occasional polemic, as long as the issues are fully exposed as a result. But my distaste for New Labour’s political style is quite different.

The Prime Minister used to say that the problem with Old Labour was that it confused means with ends. The problem with New Labour is that it its only purpose is to stay in power.

This Government has impoverished politics. They have weakened all the institutions that could check or effectively scrutinise their actions – the Lords neutered, the Commons ignored, the media alternately cosseted and intimidated.

The Prime Minister has appointed more peers more quickly than any holder of his office in history.

Wasn’t it typical of New Labour that their plan for the House of Lords was to take the 80 per cent appointed House they created in 1999 and offer to turn it into an 80 per cent appointed House, with a further 20 per cent chosen by party bosses through closed lists?

No wonder the sense of alienation with politics grows by the day.

I am determined that the next Conservative Government will not just implement different policies that reflect our principles. Our whole approach to government will be fundamentally different. We will check the obsessive media manipulation, the suppression of debate, the erosion of constitutional checks and balances. We will stop burying bad news, adjusting targets and double counting public spending figures.

We seek power for a purpose, we will pursue policy based on principle, and this will give our government clear direction.

And we will conduct ourselves in opposition as we mean to conduct ourselves in government. Honest, principled politics is important. Because we trust people, we know the importance of persuading them to trust us.

The speech made by Iain Duncan Smith, the then Leader of the Opposition, in London on 5 February 2002.

It is a great pleasure for me to speak at the Westminster Day 2002 today and I am very grateful to you for inviting me. I know that my predecessor, William Hague, very much enjoyed coming to the Westminster Day and I look forward to doing what I can to support it in the future.

One of the reasons for that is the importance that I attach to encouraging people from all walks of life, whatever their background, to take an interest in politics and what their political leaders are actually doing. That applies just as much to people of my own generation as it does to people of your generation. It is important because the decisions that are made here in Westminster can have a huge impact on all our lives.

Questions about the future of our health service, about our education system, about the actions we will take to protect the state of the environment and to help those in our world less fortunate than ourselves, all of these will be decided through our political process.

Our world is moving at a bewildering pace. It is important that democratic institutions guarantee our security at such a time, while leaving us free to take advantage of the opportunities that change presents us.

But you cannot understand the power of politics without recognising first its place in modern life. At the very time when people are looking to politics for more and more answers, there has never been a more glaring disconnection between politicians and the people whom they are elected to represent.

Active participation in politics is now very much a minority pastime. General apathy with politics is now leading to dangerously low levels of participation in the democratic process itself.

Huge numbers of people cannot be bothered to vote. For them politics is just one big turn off.

That was demonstrated clearly at the General Election last year. At just 59 per cent we had the lowest turnout of voters at any Election since 1918 – and even then there were exceptional circumstances at work. Alarmingly for the state of our politics, more people stayed at home and didn’t vote on polling day than actually went out and voted for the party that won.

Among younger people the situation was more shocking. Just before the election an opinion poll for the BBC showed just 38 per cent of 18-24 year olds intending to vote, while among 25-34 year olds the figure was still only 45 per cent.

This isn’t a partisan point at all but there is a strong argument for saying that the real winner at the Election was apathy.

As a candidate, I met countless numbers of people who said to me that there was simply no point in voting. “They’re all the same – after your vote and then do nothing when they get in”. “Voting never changes anything. “It makes no difference to me”. They’re just in it for themselves”.

So it almost goes without saying that the image of politics and politicians, especially among younger people, is not a good one. It is borne out in opinion polls that regularly place politicians among the least trustworthy members of society.

There are numerous reasons for this. I don’t doubt that the various scandals that have hit all parties in recent years have tarnished the general image of politicians.

There is a widespread feeling that Parliament no longer matters – that it is marginal to events and not a place where people can get things done.

The language of politics is so often not the language of people and the priorities of politicians sometimes don’t appear to be the people’s priorities. As a result, political leaders seem to be remote arguing about obscure matters that have little or no relevance to people’s day-to-day experiences.

There is the growth of single-issue pressure groups that channel people’s energies and act as an outlet for their political grievances rather than political parties.

And, of course, there is the perfectly understandable fact that most people don’t sit around agonising about the day’s events at Westminster but simply want to get on with their lives.

These, then, are the problems. What are the solutions?

The first is that both politicians and voters must rise above the ritual cynicism that has become too ingrained in the conduct of politics.

Britain does not need to be a nation of full time political junkies. But we should recognise that among all the freedoms we have in the country the democratic right to vote in, and to throw out, the Government of the day is perhaps the most priceless.

Look at what is happening in places like Zimbabwe today, where free and fair elections are in peril. 20 years ago I served with the Army in Zimbabwe as we helped to help transform that country from white minority rule into a multiracial, multiparty state. Now, step-by-step it is becoming a dictatorship, unless we do something to stop it. That’s why democracy matters.

Think of the first fully democratic elections in South Africa after the end of apartheid, when people from the black townships got up at dawn, walked for miles and then queued for hours simply in order to exercise their new-found freedom to vote after years of political struggle and oppression. That’s why democracy matters.

When you see in Afghanistan today, women free to walk the streets by themselves, free to go to school and free to teach in those same schools because we lifted that country from the tyranny of the Taliban. That’s why democracy matters.

If we pretend otherwise, if we allow our own cynicism to obscure what a precious and hard-earned thing democracy is, then we cheapen not only ourselves we cheapen those who have lived without it for far too long.

We only have to look at our own country to see the power of democracy. Britain has become a very different place in the last 20 years in part because of the electoral successes of Margaret Thatcher, whether your parents agreed with her or voted for her.

The second thing we can do to revive our democratic culture, is to engineer an outbreak of honesty. You might think this a particularly difficult thing for a politician to achieve!

After all we live in an age of spin, soundbites and media manipulation, partly because we are led to believe that what looks and sounds good is more important than what is good.

This not only insults you as future voters, it does politicians a disservice too. I became involved in politics because I believed in certain things:

– that the more choice and more freedom people have the better their lives are;
– that the traditional rights and laws which shape the way we live our lives in Britain should be preserved for future generations;
– that governments don’t have all the answers and are at their worst when they pretend that they do.

These beliefs haven’t changed. If you ask me what it is that politicians do, I would say we are in the business of ‘practical idealism’. Politics is at its best and its most honest when it is driven by values, when the political debate is between the policies which flow from different principles.

These principles will differ from party to party. For the Conservatives it is about putting more trust in people and taking the world as we find it, rather than the way we would like it to be. That is where we start from when we seek to improve things.

Some of these improvements will be modest. It doesn’t make them any less worthwhile. Today my colleague Caroline Spelman is announcing an appeal launched with Islamic Relief to raise money for a mobile ambulance that will help treat landmine victims in Afghanistan. It is a practical step that will help thousands of victims. It is the sort of initiative that is replicated by countless thousands of people in this country up and down our country every day.

Trusting people means trusting their instincts, their desire to improve their neighbourhoods, to help out in their communities, to lend a hand to people on the other side of the world.

In our public services, it means giving more power to doctors and nurses and to teachers so that they can offer the quality of health care or education that they joined their respective professions to give. It is a simple vision rather than a grand design, but putting it into practice is far from easy. It means looking again at the way we run our hospitals and schools.

It is one of the reasons why my Conservative colleagues have spent so much time looking at the way other countries run their public services in France, Germany and Sweden to see what we can learn, to see what might be made to work here.

It means breaking away from old thinking, from the dogma and ideology that has characterised too much of our political debate on these issues for too long.

What really matters is that people are treated more quickly and to a higher standard in our hospitals; that more pupils have the chance to achieve the same qualifications and learn the same respect for themselves and for others that many of you here today take for granted.

This is the sharp end of politics. The democratic debate over the future of our hospitals and schools will shape the health care your parents and grandparents receive, it will also shape the education your children and grandchildren get when you are their age.

It is nothing less than a debate about the future direction of this country, about the future direction of your lives. If you want to be involved in that debate, now is the time.