The Conservative Reader

Issue VIII: migrant crisis; a case for ID cards; changing planning laws; decoupling from China; conservative economics; stopping the oil protests; enduring cultures... and goodbye Will and hello Gavin

It’s goodbye to Will, who is now ensconced in Number Ten, and hello to Gavin, your new Conservative Reader co-editor. Gavin is Policy Director at the Centre for Social Justice, and used to work in government as a Brexit Department special adviser.

Our purpose remains the same: we think conservatives need to talk more and get better at sharing ideas. We use this newsletter to share with you the best newspaper columns, policy reports and books that will stimulate thinking and promote new ways of doing things.

The Conservative Reader is published every Friday lunchtime, so please do look out for it. And expect plenty of content about the things we think make conservatism such a compelling body of thought: identity and belonging, community and commitment, market economics, national resilience and good government.

Best wishes, Nick and Gavin

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Towering columns

Matthew Syed says the West’s good intentions are being exploited over the refugee crisis:

As the number of displaced people rises, the resulting strain is concentrated on the West because we are a beacon to the poor and dispossessed, while totalitarian China sits and smiles. We should not underestimate the incentive this offers the autocratic axis to foment global disorder as a geopolitical weapon.

Human rights are one of the great achievements of the West, but they can’t exist in a vacuum. Rights require social stability, checks on arbitrary power and other miracles conspicuous by their absence in much of the world. It is not illiberal but realistic to ensure that free societies are robust to the instability set to define the coming age. My view, reluctant but firm, is that this debate cannot even start unless the West is willing to amend the refugee convention, since the open-ended obligation to everyone who suffers persecution is an invitation for exploitation by gangs and autocrats, as well as xenophobes in our own nation wishing to stoke the cancer of populism. It is pointless talking about other issues — ID cards, processing methods, the criteria by which we determine numbers — unless we bite this bullet first.

David Willetts suggests how we might reduce immigration and reinforce our sense of national community:

My first proposal is a feasible priority now. The Home Office already provides a list of shortage occupations for which migration may be justified. But links between that list and vocational training policy are far too weak. That list should be a guide for the Education Department to the training courses which should be priorities for public funding. There could be direct funding of them at FE Colleges and perhaps higher maintenance loans for students studying them at university.

That is the least difficult option. The second one is much harder. One reason that migrants and refugees are so keen to get to the UK is that is easier than to get a job and housing because we do not require identity cards. I do not like the idea of ID cards any more than I like higher taxes, but they are a very effective way of policing access to jobs and public services. A Britain with ID cards would be much less attractive to migrants.

There is a third option too. We could move to a contributory principle for working age benefits. That would significantly reduce the appeal of coming here as more financial help would be dependent on prior residence in the country. There would have to be credits for British citizens who were not able to pay. We could even extend that contributory principle and expect pensioners to pay in as well if they could afford it.

John Muellbauer suggests three growth-friendly reforms for the planning system:

We need three things. First, a planning system that would, on change of use, direct that the uplift in land value be split between the national or local planning authorities — to help meet infrastructure or housing needs — and the current landowner, whose portion would be fair reward for selling the land. The Oxford Civic Society supports land value capture with a 50:50 split.

Second, an amendment of the Land Compensation Act 1961 so that local and central authorities could, where necessary, compulsorily purchase at a price close to the existing value. This would exclude “hope” value — that might at some future time arise if planning permission were given for change of use…

Finally, the government’s fiscal rules should become more growth-friendly, shifting the focus from constraining government debt relative to gross domestic product. Instead, the goal should be to enhance the public sector’s net asset value (assets minus debt) where the market value of land is counted on the asset side of the balance sheet. In the short term, acquisition of land for the public sector funded by debt would then leave the net asset value unchanged. However, planning consent would soon enhance land values owned by the public.

Ben Marlow says Western decoupling from China is inevitable - but it will bring inflation and suffering:

China’s exports to the rest of the world shrank unexpectedly in October, another reminder that its economic miracle is rapidly waning. The International Monetary Fund has warned that China's zero-Covid strategy has put it on course for growth of 3.2pc this year, its second worst output since 1977. Meanwhile, having long prioritised trade ties with the West above all else, ideology and territorial aspirations are increasingly gaining prominence. It comes as Xi’s leadership enters an unprecedented third five-year term and takes inspiration from Putin…

Disengagement from China will be painful and take years. The West’s ability to unhook itself from the Kremlin’s energy imports is proving difficult enough. Ending an addiction to cheap Chinese goods will be many times harder. One effect of this gigantic schism will be more price rises. The energy crisis will eventually be resolved one way or another. However, the end of China as the West’s workshop means that – far from transitory as the Bank of England once claimed – inflationary pressures are here to stay.

Wonky thinking

Ahead of the Autumn Statement next week, Tim Pitt published The Road to Credibility, a plea for conservatives to recognise the need for fiscal responsibility, while rising to three great challenges: low growth, high inequality and an ageing population:

As Arthur Balfour, Conservative Prime Minister at the beginning of the last century, argued: “every phase of civilisation requires its own political economy”. The strength of Conservative economic thinking over time has been its ability to adapt to changing circumstances. The task for Conservatism now is to do so again to address the growth, inequality and fiscal challenges ahead, while staying true to its core principles. In doing so, it must be honest that there is no silver bullet and reject the idea that the Lawsonian orthodoxy must be completely overhauled. But this cannot simply mean a return to that orthodoxy.

The explicit recognition of economic inequality as a significant problem, as well as the acceptance that the tax burden must be permanently higher, will both be uncomfortable for many Thatcherite Conservatives. Addressing the challenges ahead will also require some significant policy departures: proposals for fiscal devolution, an overhaul of the taxation of property, inheritance and earnings, as well as the need for fiscal policy to be designed flexibly so as to support significantly more investment in human capital are just three examples of material departures from the status quo advocated by this paper. But any truly Conservative economic strategy must have evolution, not revolution, at its heart.

Policy Exchange released a report on what is stopping the authorities from getting to grips with the radical protestors disrupting everyday life and vandalising buildings, statues and works of art:

It is time for authorities to step up. Policy Exchange proposes new legislation which Parliament should enact that would make clear that there can be no lawful excuse for blocking the highway if an aim of the obstruction is to interfere with the legal rights of others. Legislation should make similar provision in relation to the offence of criminal damage. The College of Policing guidance to officers must be reviewed, and individual police forces should act immediately when they reasonably suspect that an offence has been committed, even if it is of course true that it will often be difficult to predict whether the court will in the end convict the protestors. This needs to be followed by fresh training for all officers involved in public order policing, to ensure the highest degree of consistency and professionalism.

The Sentencing Council should be invited to issue guidance on punishments where the law has been broken during political protests. Repeat offenders must be punished more harshly than first-time offenders, especially when or if additional offences take place while a person is on bail, or when it is clear that an offender is unrepentant and intends to continue to commit similar offences. The protestors discussed in this paper are not engaging in civil disobedience insofar as they are not pleading guilty and accepting the legitimacy of the penalties imposed by law. Public authorities should also make full use of their existing rights under the law, seeking injunctions to restrain trespass and damage and vigorously seeking compensation for the loss that Just Stop Oil deliberately inflicts.

Book of the week

This week we recommend American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, in which Colin Woodard argues that political and social cleavages today can be traced back to and understood by shared identities forged centuries ago:

If the existence of the [eleven] American nations seems persuasive enough for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, one might still ask how they could possible have survived to the present day. After all, isn’t the United States a nation of immigrants, and Canada, too, for that matter? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did we not welcome to our shores tens of millions of people from all over the world, those tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free who flowed through Ellis and Angel islands on their way to create the wondrously diverse America of today? Surely the cultures of the regional nations were subsumed by the great multicultural tide of 1830 to 1924, surviving only in the imaginations of a few old-money white Anglo-Saxon Protestants still hiding out in their last scraps of habitat: Nantucket, Harvard Yard and Skull and Bones reunions… The short answer is no.

These great immigration waves enriched and empowered these two North American federations, but they did not displace their preexisting regional nations. These remained the “dominant cultures” which nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century immigrants’ children and grandchildren either assimilated into or reacted against. Immigrant communities might achieve political dominance over a city or state (as the Irish did in Boston or the Italians in New York), but the system they controlled was the product of the regional culture.

Quick links

The ONS says GDP fell further than expected between August and September.

56 per cent of us believe immigration has been too high since Brexit.

Pension funds are rethinking their investment strategies after the recent market chaos.

Munira Mirza has launched Civic Future - to get high calibre people into public life.

Yoram Hazony has been in Britain to make the case for national conservatism.

American Compass published an overview of conservative economic principles.

Today, we honour the fallen.