Spectator - The Magazine

How to start saving Britain in ten minutes

, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The work begins
Subject: No time to lose
Date: Friday, 7 May 2010 14:28
From: David Cameron
To: Sir Gus O'Donnell, Cabinet Secretary

Dear Gus,

The Queen has just invited me to form a government. I’m sending this on by BlackBerry in the car, because there is a degree of urgency. Our country has been badly broken by 13 years of bad government. There is, literally, not a moment to lose in fixing it. The Queen has asked me to govern for up to five years, and mentioned to me that her father saw our country

Day one: getting us back in business

, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Dear Treasury Permanent Secretary,

Good news: the nightmare is over. We both know that Gordon Brown is one of the greatest economic vandals ever to have resided in Downing Street. And to make Britain competitive again will require hard work. We can start immediately, and without the need for legislation. I’d like the following to be in place by the end of our first 100 days.

1) Please draw up plans for a two-year public sector pay freeze, and for a few billion pounds worth of immediate cuts. Rather than trimming spending across all departments, I’d like to axe entire

The Spectator Manifesto

, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The key to great success is to follow great failure. David Cameron has this if little else in his favour if, as expected, he is Prime Minister in two months’ time. He may not have the majority he hoped for, but he will be able to command the government machine. Civil servants, for all their love of procrastination, will follow direct instructions. A Tory government can deliver them on the first day. This guide explains how, precisely, Britain can be transformed.

The key is to demand, and expect, change at an urgent pace. There should be no more five- or

And in the event of a hung parliament...

, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

In late 2007 two fresh-faced, privately educated party leaders gave speeches setting out their philosophies. ‘We’ve always been motivated by a strong and instinctive scepticism about the capacity of bureaucratic systems to deliver progress,’ said one. I want ‘a politics of people, not systems, of communities, not bureaucracies; of individual innovation, not administrative intervention,’ said the other. ‘The days of big government solutions – of “the man in Whitehall knows best” – are now coming to an end,’ they could have chorused together.

The two men were of course David Cameron and Nick Clegg and they would struggle to remember

The unelected bodies that just won’t die

, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

They are our longest-running political horror story. And, under Labour, they have been ever more unruly, increasingly dangerous and always ready to suck the blood of taxpayer’s wealth. For several decades politicians have been discussing cutting the number of Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations (quangos). Back in 1991, even Gordon Brown was talking about it. But it seems Britain’s vampire quangos cannot be killed. The most recent TaxPayers’ Alliance survey found that there are now 1,148 national quangos and other arm’s-length bodies in the UK, spending over £90 billion of taxpayers’ money and delivering huge areas of policy. The next government stands

How to defuse the pensions timebomb

, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Ten years of austerity must deliver the country a radicalism that ten years of abundance has failed to achieve.

The Prime Minister’s economic war council must decree that the necessary budgetary strategy also forges a radical agenda. Every secretary of state should be instructed to bring forward one major reform which, while cutting the size of a departmental budget, also begins to transform the political landscape. Combining these individual initiatives would lay the basis for a five-year reform programme, comparable to the models of 1906 and 1945.

The most obvious and necessary welfare reform is the one that

The Blanket Repeal Bill

, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

And finally, we shall in our first Queen’s Speech be introducing a measure whose like has never been seen among the manifesto commitments of an incoming government. It will be known as the Blanket Repeal of Legislation (Failure of New Labour, 1997-2010) Bill.

The effect of the Act will be to repeal en masse and at a stroke all new legislation brought in since the fall of the Conservative government in 1997. The only exceptions will be those measures which, by affirmative resolution of both Houses, parliament votes to rescue.

There will therefore arise – with regard to any

Time to lift the House of Commons off its knees

, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

What if we win office, but nothing changes? What if, instead of running a new government, triumphant Tory ministers discover that the machinery of government runs them? Making sure that does not happen requires a strategy. Opposition may be a time for tactics, but how we fare in office will hinge on having a robust, coherent plan. We must have a strategy to make government properly accountable to parliament, and parliament to the people.

The MPs’ expenses scandal has turned many people against democracy. ‘If this is how those scoundrels behave,’ runs the argument, ‘MPs can’t be trusted with

Today’s welfare state is making poverty permanent

, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

‘Drug addiction, alcoholism, criminal records, language difficulties, a lack of skills, depression...’ Anyone working alongside Britain’s long-term unemployed can recite a grim litany of social ills. But when I speak to a welfare adviser in Tower Hamlets – one of London’s poorest boroughs – he emphasises a single factor, above all others, to explain the area’s endemic worklessness: ‘the benefits trap’ – the idea that you can be better off on benefits than in work.

Most of the claimants he encounters have fallen headlong into this trap, thanks to years spent receiving dozens of different benefits, and months spent aimlessly