When policies work ... and when they fail

Conservatives should draw lessons from the success of synthetic phonics, but they still need to reform Whitehall and learn from overseas

We think conservatives need to talk more and get better at sharing ideas. So here we share 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.

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Best wishes, Nick and Gavin

Towering columns

In the Daily Telegraph, Nick Gibb explains how synthetic phonics has improved literacy and English schools have risen in international league tables:

It has not been an easy journey. When we changed the national curriculum to require the use of systematic phonics, and when we introduced the Phonics Screening Check in 2012, testing every six-year-old to ensure they were on track with their reading, we faced vocal and bitter opposition from education academics and others. They said our “obsession” with phonics would fail and would kill children’s joy of reading.

In their view it was better to teach children using “progressive” teaching methods such as “look and say”, where they are encouraged to repeat high-frequency words – “Look John look. Look Janet look” – or a method that expected children to identify or guess words through picture or story cues and just a bit of phonics. But all the evidence suggested that these methods failed too many children, particularly the less able or those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

England’s successful approach to reading shows that, despite all the cynicism there is about politics, if a policy is based on firm evidence and ministers are determined to follow through and implement reform despite opposition from vested interests, politics can make a difference. And millions of children’s improved reading proficiency is the reward.

For J’Accuse, “THDHMO” examines the Government’s new mathematics policy, and says it is a case study in the failure of Whitehall:

With a functioning civil service making maths compulsory at 18 would be straightforward. You would commission a standard maths test for all 18 year olds in full-time education and then make funded university places dependent upon a minimal pass mark in said test. Then leave the rest to schools and colleges to work out how to help their students pass, maybe linking any general funding increases to the new requirement to ensure they know it’s their responsibility to prepare their students.

Apparently, we need an expert group to define maths and how it is to be taught, we can already declare the need for “hubs” and “new professional qualifications for maths leaders in primary school”. Hubs are the Blob’s preferred mode for fattening the layer between the public sector and political direction or accountability. The rationale for the primary school qualification to help with maths teaching 16-18 year olds is… entirely unclear, but a perusal of teachers’ Twitter accounts will show you this is not the first little-known qualification and won’t be the last…

To consider this public sector incompetence is to miss the point. Whitehall now exists to diffuse political energy from government to pursue the interests of the stakeholders… Anti-corruption is a profound political message, and the corruption we have in Britain is open. It could not be an easier target. But as long as ‘Conservatives’ conceive of the ‘Rolls-Royce’ Civil Service as charmingly corrupt, but ancient and wise (as in Yes Minister), and part of the irreducible core of ‘Britain’ that must be ‘conserved’, we will labour under the Blob and all of its tentacles in to the third-world living conditions that are our current trajectory.

On his Substack, James Sean Dickson invites British conservatives to learn from Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Canadian Conservatives:

[Poilievre is making] not just any argument, but a conservative argument for housebuilding. A conservative argument that also challenges established wealth and power structures and champions aspiration. One that focuses on the role of local government-facilitated suppression of supply on housing affordability. This is a position a liberal, free market conservative should be completely comfortable taking and communicating. It contains echoes of Thatcherism. Yet British Tories wouldn’t dream of such articulation, fearful of the negative reaction of their core constituency of elderly, homeowing boomers…

How interesting to see what many would claim to be classically populist political arguments, targeting established institutions, being made to the young, rather than the middle-aged and elderly. It’s also a populist argument based in facts, not pure emotion — 1) young people can’t afford housing, and 2) government regulation plays a central role in suppression of housing supply.

In the Daily Telegraph Miriam Cates says politicians must do something about collapsing fertility rates:

The current UK fertility rate – the average number of children per woman – stands at 1.6. This is significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1, and continues to fall. This means that, absent migration, in only two generations’ time we would have 40 per cent fewer births than we do today. And over the next 20 years, the ratio of working age people to each pensioner will drop from four to three. The Left complain that public services are currently underfunded and the Right think taxes are too high. But both sides are unprepared for what is coming down the line unless we recognise the serious – and imminent – economic consequences of population decline.

The only serious and sustainable remedy to this catastrophe is to increase the birth rate. But as soon as politicians start to highlight the problem of low fertility rates – and suggest potential solutions – we face accusations of being “backward” or regressive. The implication of these criticisms is that the “burden” of producing more children is carried disproportionately by women and impacts female participation in the workplace.

It shouldn’t be the role of politicians to tell any individual what to do in their personal lives, and certainly not in the sensitive area of having babies. But it is the role of government to create the conditions that make it possible – even attractive – for individuals to make positive choices that benefit society as a whole.

In the Sunday Times, Dominic Lawson makes the case against euthanasia:

In 2016 [Canada’s] parliament passed legislation permitting voluntary euthanasia, limited to those with a terminal illness whose death was “reasonably foreseeable”. The politicians were following a Supreme Court judgment a year earlier, which ruled unconstitutional the existing ban on assisted suicide. The judges dismissed as based on “anecdotal examples” the argument that this would “initiate a descent down a slippery slope into homicide” of the vulnerable…

What followed was predictable. Canadians with disabilities who couldn’t get the care they needed in a health system under enormous strain (sound familiar?) were encouraged to take the fast way out. Last year Canadian television reported that a 51-year-old Ontario woman known as Sophia was euthanised, although it turned out that her suffering was not just from a chronic condition but despair that “her meagre disability stipend left her little to survive on”. The CTV News station showed a recording of her saying: “The government sees me as expendable trash, a complainer, useless and a pain in the ass”…

Opinion polls consistently show the British public strongly in favour of “assisted dying”. But that euphemism (it replaced “voluntary euthanasia”) seems to have confused millions. When the pollsters Survation asked members of the public in 2021, “What do you understand by the term ‘assisted dying’?”, and offered four definitions, only 43 per cent gave the correct answer: “Providing people who have less than six months to live with lethal drugs to end their life.” Almost the same number (42 per cent) thought it meant: “Giving people who are dying the right to stop life-prolonging treatment.” The latter has always been available: no adult is forced to have treatment against their will…

For Unherd, Tom McTague traces tension between conservatism and Toryism, and asks whether contemporary Conservatives really trust the people:

Both Disraeli and Thatcher identified the same problem inherent in conservatism: without an idea of what it is actually trying to conserve, of the kind of society it believes in, conservatism is little more than an ineffectual brake, unable to stop the drift towards the type of world it ultimately opposes. And yet, a conservatism that retreats into some kind of romantic defence of lost causes does not win power and conserve anything either…

Lord Randolph Churchill argued that the difference between the two great political parties of England was that the Tory party clinged “with veneration and affection to the institutions of our country” while their radical opponents regarded them “with aversion and distrust”. The Tory Party, he summarised, must always “trust the people” — a motto which would later be adopted by his son, Winston. Even this week, when I asked one Conservative MP who attended NatCon if he could define the essence of conservatism, he replied: “Trust the people.”

The most glaring problem with the national conservatism on display this week is that it’s not entirely clear it still does. National conservatism is not inherently ludicrous or sinister, as its critics argue. It is perfectly reasonable to differentiate between conservatism and liberalism, which are distinct philosophies, and to argue that more conservatism is needed. The problem is that, beyond this analysis, what does British national conservatism amount to? Listening to this week’s speeches, it all feels so inchoate and, ironically, alien from the people.

Wonky thinking

As part of the Resolution Foundation’s Economy 2030 Inquiry a group of academics including Paul Collier and Colin Mayer study seven international cities - Dortmund and Duisburg in Germany; Bilbao in the Basque Country of Spain; Lille, in northern France; Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia; Windsor in Ontario, Canada; and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania - and draw conclusions about how Britain might go about levelling-up:

First, while the 2022 Levelling Up White Paper robustly spelled out the nature of the UK’s regional imbalances and under-performance, there are still many unanswered questions about the ensuing governance-reform agenda. The White Paper correctly clarified that the under-performance of many of the UK’s large cities was a core component of the UK’s overall productivity weakness, and also that the over-centralisation of the UK contributed to the under-performance of many UK cities. However, there are no major new powers or funding streams for city-region combined authorities. In the last 40 years in the UK, expenditure on regional economic development never surpassed 0.2 per cent of GDP and in recent decades has been of the order of 0.1 per cent of GDP. In contrast, countries such as Germany routinely spend four to five times as much overall, and if we focus specifically on policies for enhancing weaker regions, Germany spends something of the order of 25-30 times more than the UK…

Second, there are also real concerns that the actual evolving governance arrangements set in train by the Levelling Up White Paper mostly focus on areas too small to realistically drive fundamental changes… Pre-existing local authorities are bestplaced to garner bottom-up engagement, since they are closest to citizens. However, in terms of the market-facing role of sub-central government, both councils and individual counties are individually usually too small to have any real economic development effect. This proposed direction of UK reform contrasts with our successful ‘turnaround’ cities… Instead, new powers and mechanisms need to be established to enable individual combined authorities to work together in a formal manner, rather than informally, to address strategic challenges which are larger than their individual remits and resources currently allow for.

Third, there are currently no new proposals to create institutions, powers or governance mechanisms aimed at addressing any broader region-wide land use or planning issues which traverse individual devolution ‘deal’ areas. There is an institutional vacuum at the middle tier. There are nationwide investment priority recommendations from, for example, the National Infrastructure Commission or the Natural Capital Commission, and the only actors able to bring about change are central government. The recently announced programme of Investment Zones looks set to have nowhere near the clout required to address these issues, and there are precious few formal links between individual city-regions or combined authority areas… Crucially, as well as genuine coordination between different tiers of governance, horizontal learning between sub-central governance institutions is vital in turning around cities and regions…

Fourth, combined authorities need to have the power and capacity to undertake the long-term redevelopment evident in other successful ‘turnaround’ cities. Well-constructed land use and spatial planning processes provide clarity and certainty for investors. Unfortunately, in the UK, many of these attempts at coordination even within Combined Authority areas founder on problems of local housing allocations and how these relate to land use, which remains in the grip of nationally directed policies. The land use planning system in the UK, and especially in England, operates largely as an ad hoc development control system, heavily subject to political pressures… not only do most parts of the UK outside of London and the devolved nations have no regional spatial plans, but most local areas do not have up-to-date Local Plans (and many don’t have one at all). This is unimaginable in other successful high population density countries such as Germany, Switzerland or the Netherlands…

Fifth, in the economically weaker UK city-regions, finding ways to increase access to capital, especially for SMEs, is a priority. By far the most important form of entrepreneurial collateral for business start-ups is housing equity, and part of the reason why London and its hinterland receive so much start-up capital of different forms is the presence of strong underlying land and real estate markets. This underlines the importance of well-thought-out land use and spatial planning... PostBrexit, the UK could potentially move closer to the Australian system where some 4 per cent of its pension funds are invested in private equity, compared with 0.3 per cent in the UK. Potentially, it would be possible to assign some spatially preferential tax incentive in this regard, whereby targeted public funds and preferential tax treatment encourages private capital into priority areas most in need of investment.

Book of the Week

Our recommended book this week is After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State, in which Paul Edward Gottfried argues that the managerial state has supplanted traditional liberalism, and created a governing elite of social engineers:

I do not perceive any possibility of moving backward historically, a point repeatedly stated in this study. Lacking are the social presuppositions and political will for such a restoration or even for a mere approximation of one. The Whiggish liberalism of the nineteenth century, which stressed individual moral responsibility in a politically unreconstructed social space, operated with the aid of ascribed statuses. The values that liberalism exalted did not float in a vacuum but were closely related to gender and social ranks in a still party aristocratic world. Manners and constraints were dictated by the demands of gentlemanly and ladylike behavior, and religion, particularly Protestantism, played a continuing role in shaping bourgeois character.

These by now commonplace observations must be kept in mind to understand the difficulty of returning to the moral world of high liberalism from a post-bourgeois managerial society. One simply cannot recreate the cultural benefits of the past, as one might its architecture or cuisine, through public projects or ad hoc committees. Values-education in schools may have positive or negative effects, depending on the critic’s perspective, but is not likely to yield nineteenth-century ladies or gentlemen. Indeed, it is questionable whether value-traditionalists who speak of a decline in public morals desire to go back in any meaningful sense to the past. Rather, they seem interested in controlling predominantly underclass pathologies, such as teenage pregnancies, and getting adolescent boys to behave less riotously.

… Contemporary liberals are not applying old liberal doctrines by punishing homophobes and sexists or by trying to rearrange the income curve. They are pushing policies that cannot be traced to the bourgeois order that mass democracy and the managerial state helped to dislodge. Liberal-pluralist democrats may like their own politics better than the one embraced by an earlier generation of liberals. But their views and goals are different, and sometimes not even congruent, with what that generation understood as the social Good.

In a revealing but neglected essay for the New Republic in 1955 Deweyite Arthur Bestor admitted a great deal about the planning that he and his colleagues had done twenty years earlier. The philosophical approaches they had adopted, according to Bestor, were “social acids” intended to break down inherited belief systems: “The alliance between pragmation and liberalism was a fortuitous one, called forth by a particular historic situation. Pragmatism constituted in essence [a] sacred act of intellectual spoliation.” But it soon became apparent to Bestor and to other liberals that a pragmatism combining experimental methods with value-relativism is only a “dissolvant.” It does not teach enough that is positive and betrays a “fundamental inadequacy” when applied to fighting fascism. It is therefore necessary to propagate a militant democratic religion through public education, an ambitious policy that Bestor and others pursued vigorously thereafter…

In Western Europe and North America, this state rests its power upon a multitiered following: an underclass and now middle-class welfariate, a self-assertive public sector, and a vanguard of media and journalistic public defenders. Upon the basis of this following, the regime and its apologists have been able to marginalize their opposition. This is apparent on, among other places, the now respectable or moderate Right. There a tolerated opposition offers tepid criticism of the administrative state while warning against populist extremism.

Quick links

England has risen up the international rankings for literacy.

Andy Burnham has announced a Manchester Baccalaureate, which will offer technical education as an alternative to university.

After inflation, average pay including bonuses fell by 3 per cent in the last year.

By its final year the freeze in income tax thresholds will represent the single most significant tax increase since the 1979 VAT increase.

The Estonian PM has asked companies to resist ‘ghost trade’ with Russia.

Volkswagen is talking to Huawei about licensing software for cars in China.

German carmakers joined British industry to lobby for tariff-free access to UK.

The Government is offering a subsidy to Jaguar Land Rover to build a giga-factory.

The Government will not ban Confucius Institutes despite promising to scrap them.

Britain’s dependence on foreign nurses has reached “unsustainable” levels.

Collapsing social trust is driving American gun violence.

Michael Gove told an audience to sign up to the Conservative Reader.