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FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The author is a visiting professor at the LSE and former economic adviser to Chancellors Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak.
The Conservative Party, when successful, does not seek to be loved, but to be respected. It speaks hard truths and is elected on that basis. But in the last ten years, that has changed. Easy populism has been preferred to hard truths, particularly on economic matters. Time and again, the party has proposed policies that have impoverished Britain. No wonder people have voted against them. Those who wish to lead the Conservatives in an almost powerless opposition must now face some hard truths of their own.
If the Conservatives are to win again, their leader must be clearly pro-growth. It is also time to be honest about Brexit. Erecting trade barriers against our biggest trading partner was always going to make us poorer. Ideally, the party would admit that Brexit was a mistake, apologise and try to move on. At the very least, it should advocate unilateral regulatory alignment with Europe. If accepting economic reality causes some MPs to defect, a new leader should accept that price.
Next, the Tories must support developers. Thatcher created good jobs when she allowed Nissan to build on Sunderland’s green belt. We need the same now. A film studio near Marlow? Yes. A battery factory near every car plant? Yes. More homes near stations in London’s green belt? Yes.
The Conservatives need to be honest with small businesses. They are not the backbone of Britain, they are the weak point. They have less R&D, lower productivity, etc. The plethora of tax breaks for small businesses must go and the VAT threshold should be lowered to levels typical elsewhere. These changes will alter the composition of UK businesses in favour of larger, more productive companies, thereby increasing average wages and making the country richer.
He Conservatives We must support green energy. “Carbon border adjustment mechanisms” – tariffs on goods from countries without green energy – are coming. Only by supporting onshore wind, large-scale solar and many more pylons can our country avoid being affected. These are tough messages in rural East Anglia, but prosperity requires them.
Conservatives should support universities. Attracting foreign students (from China, Nigeria, India, etc.) to universities like Sunderland and Huddersfield is crucial to the prosperity of those places. Conservatives should support an immigration system that makes students (our customers) feel welcome.
Conservatives must avoid protectionism under the banner of security. The proportion of food grown here is irrelevant. Our failure to feed ourselves since the Napoleonic era has done us no harm. The market, not governments, should decide such things. Nor does the green energy we use need to be manufactured here. Interconnections in all directions should be welcomed.
The Conservatives must take public health seriously. They should support the phasing out of cigarettes, as Sunak has proposed and as Starmer will promote. Smoking remains the leading cause of cancer. A new leader must go further. Obesity is a growing problem. Extending the tax on the soft drinks industry, for example, to children’s breakfast cereals, would be helpful.
Finally, a new Conservative leader must tell pensioners the hard truth. Thatcher ended wage linkage when she became prime minister, deeming it unaffordable. Given recent falls in pensioner poverty and increases in child poverty, and given the state of our finances, the triple lock should end in this term. Pensions should rise in line with national income thereafter. This will stabilise the position of pensioners, not give them an ever-increasing rise at the expense of everyone else.
Painful as change is, it is far less painful than perpetual opposition. The Labour Party has learned this lesson to heart: aspiring Conservative leaders must show they have understood it too.