Encouraging a culture of work
Government endeavours to relieve the poor in our society have all too often undermined the creation of a free and independent-minded citizenry. Individual hope, opportunity and responsibility have been replaced with the Welfare mindset - a dependency on the State, a poverty of ambition, and a general resentfulness against the so-called 'haves'.
Milton Friedman, the late American economist, set out some radical solutions to our collective welfare problems in his book, Capitalism and Freedom. The ideas advocated could be applied across the welfare system, and included the replacement of Public Housing with individual cash subsidies, a system of school vouchers in Public Schooling, and the abolition of the minimum wage. Whilst far removed from what is currently political possible, they provide, at the very least, some potentially great ideas to draw inspiration from in the future.
But how can we begin to shift our welfare system onto the right footing? How can we help to replace spiritual poverty with a sense of hope, dependence with contribution, and resentment with aspiration? One method would be to focus in on Britain's Work and Benefits culture.
It is no secret that the current regime, on the whole, inadvertently discourages work. Get a job, and you will rapidly lose your Housing Benefit entitlement. Get a job, and your jobseekers allowance entitlement will similarly vanish. There may seem nothing wrong with these mechanisms in theory, but in practice they act as a disincentive for people to choose part or full-time work over welfare.
A much better system would be a genuine partnership between citizen and State. Such an arrangement would allow for people to gradually move away from Benefits and into full-time, stable work. In short, it would help to encourage work, over dependency. There would be a number of tools the State could utilise to advance this cause - tax incentives, for instance, to allow the newly-employed to retain more of their initial earnings, phasing out such breaks over time as the individual increased their general net income. Working tax credits, in the form of payments to the low-incomed and their families, are already in existence, could perhaps be made more of - State maladministration aside.
The other side of creating such a culture of work would be to encourage the private sector, rather than the State, to recruit the unemployed, invest in them, and receive State money after a job recruiting-training-establishment operation had been carried out successfully. Such a shift of emphasis was tried and tested in America, when President Clinton's welfare reforms returned responsibility for welfare back to individual States who then experimented with different ways of adminstering entitlements and getting people into work.
The effects of these and other reforms will not been seen overnight. This is the case for much of the reform agenda, and conservatives should be concerned with the long-term effects of policy, rather than their sound-bite quality or ability to appease the tabloid press. We should expect, however, to see the benefits of such reforms within a relatively short space of time - and with the forward march of a free and independent citizenry, a longer-term retirement plan for the Welfare State Leviathan.
Saturday 16 January 2010
Monday 4 January 2010
The European Union
Continuing the series on conservative reform.
Britain's relationship with the European Union remains an uneasy political subject, but is nevertheless a subject conservatives should be taking seriously - and discussing with vigour. Whilst it is important to move away from a narrow understanding of what issues are important, our relationship with the EU is at the heart of the conservative project's central objectives - more open and accountable government, appropriate subsidiarity between local and national politics, and the elimination of poorly targeted regulation wherever found.
The role of national governments
On examining the history of the EU, the most obvious development has been the 'salami-slicing' of powers away from national governments and in the direction of the EU and its executive branch, the Commission. In a manner equivalent to a Gordon Brown tax increase, this has happened gradually, and through stealth, without the proper consultation of the public or even a political discussion in Westminster of the consequences. Lest I bore my kind readers with too much detail, I will point to a specific example to illustrate the problem of decisions being made too far away from the centres of their impact.
Take the European Working Time Directive, implemented into British law in 1998. Ostensibly noble, the legislation aims to protect Eumropeans by maximising the number of hours they can work in a week, refining the use of night time work, ensuring rest break entitlements and paid leave annual entitlements. In practice, however, the results have been disastrous, not only for British businesses, but for organisations such as the NHS where a natural first priority is the staffing of patient wards at all different times of the day. In short, it is has been a mischief maker.
Whilst most people would agree that rights and responsibilities are involved in the employer/employee relationship, we must put an end to the EU's 'one size fits all' approach to legislation. Is it right that a group of 27 EU Commissioners and its rubber-stamping Parliament should be making such monolithic decisions on employment law, without regard to the unique working histories and cultures of each of the different member states? It is self-evident that certain matters should be left to national governments to legislate on, and only where individual contractual arragements or more localised employment laws are not possible to meet specific needs.
Policy
The other big concern we should address is the EU Budget and how it is allocated.
We have to question the value to the UK taxpayer, other Europeans, and the rest of the world, of the Common Agricultural Policy. Whilst the CAP claims to support vulnerable European farmers, what it actually does is subsidise comfortable French farmers and large agri-business. Furthermore, the policy is not only wasteful, it is manifestly immoral, keeping African farmers poor through the erection of extortionate import tariffs and subdising European exports leading to the dumping of European products on world markets.
In likewise fashion, we have to question the value of the Common Fisheries Policy. Whilst there is a clear need for the proper regulation of Europe's limited fishing stock, the present regime has had the opposite effect to that intended - summed up in no better way than the sight of dead fish being thrown back into the sea by European fisherman to satisfy EU fishing quotas. Add to that the contrasting seriousness with which some of the member states regard enforcement, (Britain and Spain being chief examples of the different approaches taken), and you have a recipe for anarchy and destruction in our waters.
The Conservative vision of the European Union
I am in favour of Britain's continued membership of the EU. In order to make it work, however, we must not be afraid to criticise where the European Project not only undermines our basic principles of government but does much harm in fields of policy. David Cameron's courageous decision to join a new political grouping within the European Parliament is an encouraging first step. It a sign that the Conservative Party are committed to an EU that represents a voluntary coalition of independent nation states, rather than a project for full political integration, and an EU that will shake off the shackles of special interests and focus instead on genuinely shared objectives concerning the common good.
Britain's relationship with the European Union remains an uneasy political subject, but is nevertheless a subject conservatives should be taking seriously - and discussing with vigour. Whilst it is important to move away from a narrow understanding of what issues are important, our relationship with the EU is at the heart of the conservative project's central objectives - more open and accountable government, appropriate subsidiarity between local and national politics, and the elimination of poorly targeted regulation wherever found.
The role of national governments
On examining the history of the EU, the most obvious development has been the 'salami-slicing' of powers away from national governments and in the direction of the EU and its executive branch, the Commission. In a manner equivalent to a Gordon Brown tax increase, this has happened gradually, and through stealth, without the proper consultation of the public or even a political discussion in Westminster of the consequences. Lest I bore my kind readers with too much detail, I will point to a specific example to illustrate the problem of decisions being made too far away from the centres of their impact.
Take the European Working Time Directive, implemented into British law in 1998. Ostensibly noble, the legislation aims to protect Eumropeans by maximising the number of hours they can work in a week, refining the use of night time work, ensuring rest break entitlements and paid leave annual entitlements. In practice, however, the results have been disastrous, not only for British businesses, but for organisations such as the NHS where a natural first priority is the staffing of patient wards at all different times of the day. In short, it is has been a mischief maker.
Whilst most people would agree that rights and responsibilities are involved in the employer/employee relationship, we must put an end to the EU's 'one size fits all' approach to legislation. Is it right that a group of 27 EU Commissioners and its rubber-stamping Parliament should be making such monolithic decisions on employment law, without regard to the unique working histories and cultures of each of the different member states? It is self-evident that certain matters should be left to national governments to legislate on, and only where individual contractual arragements or more localised employment laws are not possible to meet specific needs.
Policy
The other big concern we should address is the EU Budget and how it is allocated.
We have to question the value to the UK taxpayer, other Europeans, and the rest of the world, of the Common Agricultural Policy. Whilst the CAP claims to support vulnerable European farmers, what it actually does is subsidise comfortable French farmers and large agri-business. Furthermore, the policy is not only wasteful, it is manifestly immoral, keeping African farmers poor through the erection of extortionate import tariffs and subdising European exports leading to the dumping of European products on world markets.
In likewise fashion, we have to question the value of the Common Fisheries Policy. Whilst there is a clear need for the proper regulation of Europe's limited fishing stock, the present regime has had the opposite effect to that intended - summed up in no better way than the sight of dead fish being thrown back into the sea by European fisherman to satisfy EU fishing quotas. Add to that the contrasting seriousness with which some of the member states regard enforcement, (Britain and Spain being chief examples of the different approaches taken), and you have a recipe for anarchy and destruction in our waters.
The Conservative vision of the European Union
I am in favour of Britain's continued membership of the EU. In order to make it work, however, we must not be afraid to criticise where the European Project not only undermines our basic principles of government but does much harm in fields of policy. David Cameron's courageous decision to join a new political grouping within the European Parliament is an encouraging first step. It a sign that the Conservative Party are committed to an EU that represents a voluntary coalition of independent nation states, rather than a project for full political integration, and an EU that will shake off the shackles of special interests and focus instead on genuinely shared objectives concerning the common good.
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