Sir John Redwood is a former MP for Wokingham and a former Secretary of State for Wales.
Some of my correspondents took to writing to me about the uni-party under the last government. They were frustrated by Labour look-alike policies and by the amount of agreement there was about the big issues of climate change, the economic framework, and large-scale migration.
Maybe after five weeks of Labour government, they can see as some told them that Labour would reinforce and intensify all those so-called uni-party tendencies. It might leave them seeing a Conservative government that let them down with broken promises on the levels of migration and taxes was after all better than Labour.
There is however some truth in the uni-party jibe that accounts for why so many Conservative voters stayed at home or voted Reform on July 4th. A new Leader needs to rethink why the Conservative government became so wedded to official orthodoxies when some were often wrong and clearly against Conservative values.
There was the stupid bossiness over the road to net zero, where several of the policies increased world CO2 output as they shut down U.K.-based energy-intensive activities. We imported instead. That meant more CO2 as the imports came in by diesel ship and truck.
Conservative ministers telling people to buy heat pumps they could not afford and electric cars they did not want was bad enough. When you realised plugging them into the grid would just mean burning more gas in a gas power station it made it stupid. There was no extra renewable energy they could suddenly turn on for the extra demand a new EV or heat pump created.
Telling the North Sea oil and gas industry to shut down early so we could import CO2-drenched LNG from abroad was another self-inflicted harm worthy of a Labour government. Indeed the Conservatives sensibly overrode official advice to stop new fields, only for Labour to ban them as soon as they came to power.
There was then the lamentable performance of the Bank of England, determined to be the worst bond fund manager at the taxpayer’s expense. Ministers watched as the Bank sent them bills for £75 billion of losses. The bond portfolio was always a joint control policy between the Bank and the Treasury where the latter underwrote everything and the former acted as its agent.
Accepting this mismanagement meant less money for tax cuts or better public services. The Government refused to ask the Bank to follow the less damaging policies on bond losses successfully followed by the EU and US central banks.
There was the studied refusal of important ministers to see through repeals and amendments of meddlesome and costly EU regulations. The ministers cancelled their own Bill to cut the costs after it had passed the Commons with a good majority in another fit of self-harm. They seemed keener to keep up with the welter of new laws coming from the EU introducing their otiose measures on media and digital.
Above all, they accepted for most of the Parliament the wrong idea that a huge increase in legal migration would boost our economy. Inviting in over 600,000 additional people a year left us short of houses, with rising NHS waiting lists and pressures on every public service from schools to roads. Far from making us better off asking people in to do low-paid jobs drove down per capita incomes and increased taxpayer charges for subsidised homes, benefit top-ups, and free public services.
Promising to stop the small boats, code for illegal migration, was a popular pledge. The failure to do so became a symbol of the ministerial inability to lead and control a civil service and legal establishment that seemed to oppose the Government’s policy and the public will.
Civil servants advise, and ministers decide. Too many ministers failed to do this. A minister should listen to all civil service advice. He or she should only follow the good bits. It has always been of variable quality.
Successful governments have needed their own strategies to direct the civil service and their own schemes and plans where they wish to improve and change the way the official government is doing things. The last government threw away the opportunities its big majority offered and failed to deliver the greater freedoms, lower taxes, and faster growth we wanted.
Levelling up was a great idea and some places benefitted, but it needed a different economic and migration policy to make a difference.