In my previous article – “The Great Reset: a pathway to hope for our political future” – I described seven key objectives that a future centre-right government should consider with the aim of delivering a political ‘reset’ to a time and place before the far-reaching constitutional and political changes that were started by Tony Blair and built upon by successive Governments.  A place where common sense, freedom and true equality prevails once more.

If the previous article was the ‘what’ then this is all about the ‘how’.  How should things be done and in what order to be successful.  How and why is it beneficial to do some things alone and how it is beneficial to implement other changes simultaneously.  How long will it take to achieve these goals and over what timescales.

The Game is Rigged…

Liberal democracies like ours are an exception both throughout history and in the world today.  Democracy is fragile.  It is difficult to create and challenging to sustain.  Britain has managed to do both successfully for a very long time and we have even exported our model to much of the world.  It is with good reason that, Westminster is often referred to as ‘the Mother of all Parliaments’.

However, our democracy has been under attack for some time now, both from forces within and without.  For those paying attention, this has been obvious for a while.  Things are getting so bad now that everyone is beginning to notice and that has no doubt been one of the underlying causes of the recent unrest.

One thing that I think the right-wing of politics has got seriously wrong in the last 30 years is to underestimate the guile, intelligence, resourcefulness, patience and determination of the Left to achieve their goals in shaping and dominating the political landscape in the UK.  We are now living with the consequences of that complacency.

A major reason that a succession of Conservative administrations seemed to consistently fail on major policy issues is that the game was rigged: they were in power, but they were playing on a Blairite chessboard.  The scope and range of their manoeuvres was restricted by the various changes introduced under the New Labour years.  Add to that the success of the Left’s long-term initiative to capture our public institutions, it is no surprise that politics and the country seems to have drifted inexorably to the left-over recent decades.

We must not and cannot afford to make that mistake again.  We must recognise and respect the political Left as a worthy adversary and make our plans accordingly.  We must have a plan and clear objectives that have broad agreement within the shadow cabinet and the Party, before we assume power.  We owe it to the nation, to our children and grandchildren to get this right – there may not be another chance.

Learning the Lessons

With regards to the importance of having clear objectives and a plan, the last Conservative parliament demonstrated two salutary lessons.

• The first was that it became painfully obvious as time went on that the Johnson administration didn’t have a plan for implementing Brexit beyond delivering the election slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’. Johnson was granted an 80-seat majority by the electorate to achieve this and much more – he was supposed to lead us out of the EU and make the necessary adjustments for us to operate and prosper as an independent trading nation in charge of our own destiny once more.  He and the Tories failed miserably.  The truth is that Johnson had no plan, he just had a slogan.  History will not judge him kindly.

• The second was the short-lived and dramatic Truss administration. She had clear objectives and she had a plan.  But her timing was questionable because the country was laden with debt from the Covid Pandemic.  And she tried to do too much too quickly – she took everyone by surprise, even many of her supporters.  She had not prepared everyone for such drastic change, especially the ‘Markets’ to whom the country owes so much money.  She didn’t first address the political landscape (the chessboard), instead she tried to work around the obstacles of the Office for Budgetary Responsibility, the Treasury and the Civil Service.  She needed to get rid of or reform these first and create the environment where her plan for growth might have had a chance of succeeding.  That would have taken time, patience and steely determination.  In addition, she would not have had chance to complete that before the next General Election, but she could have set out a plan and demonstrated progress against travel in a new direction.  Who knows…this kind of plan and approach might even have dramatically altered the fortunes of the Conservative Party?

So…the key lesson is that we must have clearly defined objectives.  They may be ambitious, but they must be realistic and achievable.  There must also be a credible and detailed plan to deliver those objectives that is not the sole property or brain-child of a single leader or faction, but which commands a broad spectrum of support from within the Government and the party.

Delivering Change

In terms of socialising our big changes, we need to allow sufficient time so that the electorate, public institutions and the business community is used to and prepared for these changes.  The duration of any planned notice period could conceivably include the ‘long campaign’ in the runup to the election.

Some things will need to be done together and quite quickly as they are interdependent.  For example, in their negotiations over Brexit, the Conservative Government allowed the EU to link membership of ECHR and Net Zero with the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) and the Withdrawal Agreement (WA).

This means that withdrawing from the ECHR could conceivably and legitimately trigger a response from the EU in the form of sanctions, as they will effectively say that we have broken the terms of the TCA/WA.  It is noteworthy that this fact and its consequences are never openly discussed by the two big parties when the topic of leaving the ECHR is discussed.  This may go much further to explain why Sunak was unwilling to leave the ECHR, when it was the obvious thing he needed to do.  It is another example of how, on many of the big issues, despite Brexit, we are still being ruled from Brussels.

With these facts in mind, if no concession or compromise is possible with the EU to disconnect withdrawal from the ECHR without triggering the rest, then I suggest that a ‘big bang’ approach will be the most effective way of accomplishing this.  Fair warning of our intentions should be given to make sure no-one can claim to be ‘surprised’.

For the Civil Service, a basket of measures should be developed as part of a long-term transformation programme to create a culture of political neutrality at all levels.  A 10-year time frame would be realistic to fully embed this new culture and way of working, albeit significant change and milestones could be realistically achieved in the first five years.  For example, these measures might include moving more departments permanently out of London and away from the main metropolitan areas. 

This will help to ‘level-up’ some of the less affluent areas, ensure that there are increased job opportunities and, over time, will result in greater representation within the Civil Service from these wider (non-metropolitan) communities.  The graduate and early career recruitment process will be opened up to be more ‘diverse’ i.e. to allow recruitment from the private sector and other fields without the requirement for a university education; this approach will place a greater emphasis and value on vocational and real-world experience to improve the diversity of experience and thought.

For specific departments such as the MoD, which are plagued by endemic issues that have resulted in the procurement of so many major equipment programmes ending in eyewatering overspends, failure or both, a systematic review will be undertaken to identify and address the root cause(s).  No-one or thing will be excluded from the scope of the review.  Nothing will be ‘off the table’ in terms of options and solutions.

Education, Education, Education

We need to urgently start an education programme aimed at different target audiences within the population.  This initiative will be a long-term, slow-burn dissemination of right of centre political information and ideas.  The intention will be to present a balanced assessment of ideas and concepts to counter the left-wing biased propaganda that has been promoted by parties, governments, institutions and activist groups for so long.  The ultimate objective will be to help to enable our target audience(s) to make informed political choices.  This initiative could be undertaken in cooperation and collaboration with other right of centre political parties, think tanks and associated / affiliated organisations.

The content and format of the programme should vary depending on the demographic of the target audience.  For example, a key target audience will be Generation Z, to a lesser degree Millennials and some of the older upcoming Generation Alpha.  For this group, the approach should take the form of carefully crafted content on social media that is designed to distribute itself.

The programme should cover topics such as human rights, the nation state, the true meaning of ‘diversity’, personal responsibility, objectivity & critical thinking, the importance of freedom of speech, expression and religion, a critique of socialist ideas…etc.

This programme should start now and also continue after we assume office, as this is a long-term initiative that needs time for these ideas to be disseminated, debated and re-adopted into mainstream thinking.

We should also be mindful that once we are in office, the left-wing politicians and parties will be in full-time opposition and will turn their guns on us and our policies.  If we do not recognise this then we risk suffering their onslaught and ‘death by a thousand cuts’ as we try to deliver the political agenda that the electorate has just voted for.  Therefore, we must maintain our education programme of information and ideas – the best form of defence is attack.

Staying the Course

Achieving these objectives will require commitment and determination and above all sticking to the plan or something close to it, regardless of the trials and tribulations that ‘events’ inevitably inflict on the government of the day.

These changes will not go unchallenged.  Just recall the reaction to Liz Truss’s attempt to go against the current establishment orthodoxy of managed decline i.e. high taxes, big state, high immigration and low growth and introduce something truly conservative – a cut to taxes and a plan for growth.

Implementation of these objectives will receive a similar hostile reception.  We can probably expect condemnation from across the political divide internally and externally from ‘respected’ international organisations such as the UN, IMF, EU and World Economic Forum.  The EU may even apply sanctions – they will say, that we have broken the terms of our agreement with them; we may even face engineered economic shocks.  The left-wing activists and interest groups will go into overdrive, with an onslaught of campaigning, protests and online trolling.  The mainstream media (MSM) will, with some exceptions, be against these changes at every turn, focusing on every possible negative point or outcome, no matter how minor.

We may even receive diplomatic rebukes from our so-called allies and partners for departing from the liberal consensus on things like human rights legislation.

So, we must be prepared for this.  We must be unified; we must speak with one voice.  We will need strong leadership and to hold our nerve.  We must expect the storms and be prepared to weather them.

Just as ‘Project Fear’ got going against Brexit with predictions of apocalyptic doom and disaster, that same prophetic narrative quickly lost its credibility as the end of the world never came; indeed, we have managed to cope quite successfully outside the EU.

Finally, if it is not these ideas or this plan then we need to have a debate so that we can collectively arrive at a set of objectives with a plan to deliver them, that our centre-right movement can get behind.