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Who’s got all the good ideas in politics these days? Lara Spirit and Matt d’Ancona are joined by Jesse Norman MP, author of biographies of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith.
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In many ways, UK higher education has been a great success over the past two decades. But our public debate remains trapped in a sterile tussle about whether more university students is a good or bad idea. We need to move on and ask more fundamental questions about the deeper function, effectiveness and purpose of much of UK HE.
Continue reading "Sterile debates over university expansion miss the point" »
Posted at 03:57 PM | Permalink
Phoebe Arslanagic-Wakefield and Joseph Silke speak with the Financial Secretary to the Treasury about COVID-19 and what it means to be a conservative in modern Britain.
Who are the people who have most influenced your political philosophy?
I’d have to choose Michael Oakeshott, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, since I have written so much about them, but that is by no means an exhaustive list. The joy of political philosophy is that it continues to be a very lively area of debate and thought. I’ve just written a piece for Prospect Magazine on John Rawls and his book A Theory of Justice, which presents a remarkably useful and prescient set of philosophical tools for thinking about where we are now with COVID-19.
Posted at 01:35 PM | Permalink
MPs have a standard approach to political biographies, which falls into three phases: first, preliminary gossip about what will or won’t (always a lot more interesting) be in it; second, mildly salacious enjoyment of the usually tepid leaks and excerpts in the press beforehand; and, once the book comes out, the inevitable furtive rummaging through the index to see if they get any mentions.
Stage three is hardly restricted to MPs, of course: William F. Buckley famously sent Norman Mailer a book with “Hi Norman” inscribed in the index, knowing Mailer would look there first.
But I hadn’t got anywhere stage three with David Cameron’s autobiography when my indefatigable assistant sent me a couple of spontaneous screen shots that made clear that David had badly misremembered one small but significant episode: the 2012 rebellion over the Government’s attempt to abolish the House of Lords.
Gentle reader, I led that revolting band of Conservative brothers and sisters -- naturally, we called ourselves the Sensibles -- and hitherto I have rebuffed numerous invitations to spill the beans as to what actually happened.
My view has been that this was a most unfortunate, indeed unConservative, incident best left to posterity. But now that the sanctity of the lobby has been violated, the true story can be told; including a close encounter of the third kind between myself and the then Prime Minister.
Spectator readers are an educated bunch and, I have no doubt, stern and unbending upholders of the British constitution. They have browsed the works of Bagehot, cosseted Coke and delved into Dicey. But the same was not true of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government of 2010.
The Prime Minister had made his big, open offer, and had decided that the Liberal Democrat demand for a national referendum on the Alternative Vote was a small price to pay for a stable government with a large majority at a moment of national economic crisis.
The deal was clear and well known. Conservative MPs would support the AV legislation in return for Liberal Democrat support on boundary reform, the historic neglect of which amounted to anti-democratic gerrymandering.
In May 2011, however, the AV proposal was rightly trounced by voters at the ballot box, by 68%-32%. Immediately afterwards the Government published a draft House of Lords reform Bill, and set up a Joint Committee under the Labour peer Lord Richard to examine the proposals.
Over the following twelve months, several things became clear. The first was that the Bill’s title was a misnomer. Few if any doubted that the Lords needed, indeed still needs, reform; but the Bill effectively proposed its abolition, by turning it over time into an almost entirely elected chamber.
The second was that the Joint Committee was a shambles. Far from being an impartial chair, Lord Richard was known to favour an elected Lords. The membership was packed to support the Bill.
Not only did the Committee fail to reach a unanimous conclusion on most of the key issues—destroying any authority it might have possessed—but a group of its members, including six Privy Councillors, took the almost unprecedented step of issuing a minority report. None of this mattered, though, because the Committee made two majority recommendations, and the Government ignored them both.
The third was that there was serious concern about the Bill from Conservative backbenchers. This had started early: with colleagues, I had presented a private letter signed by over 40 Conservative backbenchers to the then Chief Whip on 18 July 2011, a full year before the Bill got to the Commons. This argued for constructive reform, but unequivocally rejected an elected upper house. It was a very clear statement of intent, but unfortunately it too was ignored.
I had never voted against the Government before. As for the other signatories, the vast majority were also not serial rebels but loyal backbenchers—including seven future Cabinet ministers—who wanted to nip a potential constitutional crisis in the bud.
They knew that although our Parliament looks like a bicameral institution, in reality it is not: it is basically unicameral, with a single deciding chamber, the House of Commons, and a secondary advisory chamber in the Lords, whose function is to examine and give sober second thought to legislation which is often rushed and under-scrutinised in the Commons.
The Lords is thus not in the full sense a legislative chamber. Nothing can become law unless the Commons wishes it so, the Lords never even sees Money Bills, and if absolutely necessary the Commons can pass legislation by itself, irrespective of the Lords. The Commons has the core legitimacy of election, the Lords the lesser legitimacy of established practice, expertise and effective process. Both are fundamental to our constitution.
But despite its limited powers, the Lords has often proven highly effective. With its enormous majorities, the Blair government was defeated just four times in the House of Commons over a ten-year period. Over the same period, it was defeated 460 times in the House of Lords. Which chamber did the better job of checking executive power?
Turn the Lords into an elected Senate, however, and mark what follows. The new Senate would start to act as a second House of Commons. It would inevitably become more party-political and less expert. The quality of legislation would fall. The new Senate’s emphasis would be on competing with the Commons, not on scrutinizing and amending legislation.
But this is just the start of the problem. The point of elections is to confer power. Over time the new Senate would argue that it had greater legitimacy than the Commons, since its members had electorates vastly larger than the 70,000-odd voters normal for MPs.
Senators would feel they had a positive obligation to stand up to the Commons, just as MEPs started to throw their weight around after the European Parliament switched from being appointed to being elected in 1979.
Today, when people elect their MPs they elect the government. That would no longer be true. Over time Parliament would become more like the US Congress, marked by gridlock between the chambers, greater partisanship and poorer legislation driven by interest-group politics. The flexibility and balance of the British constitution, fragile but intact today and widely admired around the world for over three hundred years, would be destroyed.
The Lords Bill finally came to the Commons in July 2012. Opening the debate, Nick Clegg made clear that if the Bill was opposed in the House of Lords, the Government would use the Parliament Act to drive it through.
The Labour party supported the Bill in principle, but opposed the shortened timetable which the Government had laid out in a so-called Programme Motion. Securing the Programme Motion was therefore crucial; otherwise the Bill could be filibustered, creating endless delay and preventing the passage of other legislation.
All thus hinged on the votes of Sensible Conservative backbenchers. These had been subjected to huge pressure, including the argument that if the Liberal Democrats did not get their way on the Lords Bill they would kill the boundary reforms, a manifest breach of the agreement between the parties. (The Conservatives won the 2015 General Election even so.)
Over the weekend the press speculated that a rebellion of 30-40 Tories would be enough to defeat the Bill. So when on the first day of the debate I published a letter against the Bill signed by 57 Conservative MPs, with more than a dozen further names withheld, the result was mayhem.
The temperature went up another notch later that day with the release of a devastating comment by Lord Pannick QC — famous now from his
exploits in the Supreme Court — which stated in terms that “The Bill does not adequately address the central issue of constitutional concern.”
Faced with this twin political and legal challenge, on the following morning the Government withdrew the Programme Motion, signalling the effective defeat of the Bill. On the substantive vote itself, 91 Conservative MPs voted against the Government. It was the largest rebellion by Government MPs on the Second Reading of any Bill since the Second World War.
But for me the previous evening had included personal drama as well. As the vote was called, our rebel whipping operation had swung into action and I had moved in front of the No voting lobby so as to encourage MPs towards it.
David Cameron was clearly very angry about the scale of the defeat, his temper not helped by an email I had sent in good faith to wavering colleagues a few minutes before the vote, which argued that the largest possible rebellion would actually help the PM by killing the legislation outright.
Directly after voting, he strode up and tore a strip off me, jabbing me in the chest with his finger, while I stood there gaping at this unexpected development. Little in my previous experience had prepared me for a sudden bout of energetic pectoral massage by the Prime Minister of the day.
This modest assault then immediately generated its own mythology, energetically spread by journalists ignorant of what had happened. These myths included the suggestion that my clash with the PM was cooked up between us, to prove to the LibDems that Cameron was serious about the Bill, and that I had been "escorted off the estate" by the Whips. None of this was true. In fact, I had a drink on the Terrace with one or two others, and went home.
Perhaps understandably, in his book David passes over the whole episode in silence. What is more telling, perhaps, is his insouciance then and now about the constitutional issues involved.
That insouciance is widely shared. One of the more striking ironies of the Brexit debate has been the number of well-known politicians — Nick Clegg, Andrew Adonis and many others — who denounced the House of Lords as an undemocratic monstrosity in 2012, only to sing its praises after 2016 as a sober and expert chamber immune to the winds of populism, when they thought it could be used to delay or prevent the UK’s exit from the EU. Wisely, the Lords has declined to do so.
The British Constitution is not perfect. But as this episode and the recent shenanigans over Brexit and the Fixed Term Parliament Act of 2011 remind us, it possesses a deep inherited wisdom which — and this is not a fashionable thought — outstrips individual human comprehension. It has evolved over hundreds of years as a means not merely to constrain democratic power but to defend it; from monarch and people alike. You meddle with it at your peril.
The British Constitution has an enviable record of correcting individual foolishness. Perhaps we all need to spend a little more time with Bagehot, Coke and Dicey. We might avoid a few blunders, and — who knows? — maybe even engineer some lasting and effective Lords reform as well.
A shortened version of this piece originally appeared on 11 January 2020.
Posted at 06:38 AM | Permalink
James Kirkup, published 30th December 2019
“Without realising it the free-market West, most notably the US and the UK, has sleepwalked into a species of financial crony capitalism that has disguised economic reality, shielded underperformance, cosseted poor management and leached away value.”
In 2011, a junior Conservative MP published a pamphlet, The Case for Real Capitalism, which anatomised the failures that led to the global financial crisis and — by implication — the policy responses that followed. Jesse Norman had been elected for the first time the previous year, and no one took much notice of his work; but looking back, he may well be considered a prophet whose foresight ought to have been perceived by his own party.
https://unherd.com/2019/12/the-tories-should-have-listened-to-jesse-norman/
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A striking thing about this Conservative leadership election is just how unconservative it is. In days gone by one might have expected the candidates to extol the importance of fiscal rectitude, keeping taxes low, deregulation and public spending restraint. But there has been very little of this.
The fact becomes more surprising still when one thinks that the UK is now in its ninth year of economic growth. Inflation and interest rates are low, employment is at an all-time high. The UK’s public finances are at last under control. This is, many would say, the moment to be storing away the grain against the proverbial and inevitable “rainy day”.
Continue reading "Sunday Times op-ed: Beyond Brexit, the chance to be One Nation again" »
Posted at 10:34 AM | Permalink
How should the next Conservative leader and PM deal with Brexit? Only by facing the facts and then acting with energy and decisiveness.
Continue reading "Telegraph: No Deal would be bad, but its possibility will get the EU to engage" »
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In recent days I’ve been asked a lot if I would stand for Leader of the Conservative Party. It’s already a crowded field, and my reply has been that the views of my constituents, party members and colleagues should shape that decision, and I will carefully consult among them.
As a campaigner, over the past fifteen years and more, through books and articles, in interviews and speeches, as candidate, MP, Select Committee Chairman and Minister, I have tried to make the case from first principles for a proper, classic conservatism of public service. That conservatism ties thought and action together, and I have argued for it in politics since 2006: in Compassionate Conservatism, Compassionate Economics, The Big Society and my books on the ideas and impact of Edmund Burke and Adam Smith.
Why Burke and Smith? Because they wrote the Operating System for representative government and open markets, for politics and political economy. Their ideas underlie my conservatism. And they have taught me a vast amount about Ireland, Scotland and the Union.
The same core belief in public service has always inspired me: in 1989, when I gave up a job on Wall Street to run a charitable project giving away medical textbooks to doctors behind the Iron Curtain, helping build free institutions in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia; it inspired me in 1997, when I left Barclays to do an MPhil and PhD in philosophy and teach at University College London; and over 20 years in working with astonishing organisations such as The Roundhouse in London which my father created, the Hay Festival, and many others in Herefordshire.
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