A question of trust

Just back from the Conservative conference in Birmingham.

What can I say? It rained. And kept raining. (I thought Liverpool last week was wet, but Birmingham was wetter.)

You might have thought this would put a dampener on things, but surprisingly not. In fact the mood was far more buoyant and upbeat than I anticipated - more so in fact than the Labour conference in Liverpool where things felt quite muted until Keir Starmer’s speech got delegates cheering and off their seats.

Why that should be I don’t know, but perhaps it’s the fact that, without the weight of being in government, the Tories - even party members - can enjoy themselves.

This time last year in Manchester Rishi Sunak was announcing a generational smoking ban, and I remember thinking he really had lost the plot if this was the best he could come up with to reverse the Tories’ fortunes.

It did however spark a mad 24 hours in which, having returned home to Cambridge, I then had to drive all the way back to Manchester - arriving at 2.00am - to conduct a series of media interviews for the BBC and others.

Anyway, twelve months later the TaxPayers Alliance invited me to take part in a fringe event, ‘Lost liberty: why don’t the Conservatives trust people?’.

It’s a good question, and these were my opening remarks in the Think Tent yesterday morning:

Margaret Thatcher understood that people wanted more control over their own lives - hence the success and popularity of the right to buy their own council homes.

Boris Johnson understood that many people wanted Britain to take back control of our laws from the European Union.

I’m not sure, though, that Mrs Thatcher or Boris Johnson were or are typical Conservatives.

Traditionally, Conservatives have always been fairly paternalistic, or worse. This, after all, is the party that in Scotland in the 19th century represented the lairds and the landed gentry - the best of whom looked after their crofters by employing a sort of benign autocracy (although some weren’t quite so benign.)

A strong degree of paternalism has therefore always been ingrained in the Conservative Party, and it’s certainly been my experience that personal liberty is not a high priority for many Conservatives, especially when in government.

Apologies to Tim Scott, the current director of The Freedom Association, but 22 years ago I edited Freedom Today, The Freedom Association magazine. After two years, and a dozen issues, I was sacked for being too liberal.

My mistake was thinking we could reinvent the magazine as a more classically liberal publication when I knew, in my heart of hearts, that despite its name The Freedom Association was neither libertarian nor especially liberal on many issues.

Like the Tory party, the overwhelming majority of its members were socially conservative and paternalistic.

Despite that, in 2008, here in Birmingham, Forest and The Freedom Association launched the first Freedom Zone which ran for two days in parallel to the main Conservative conference.

One of the meetings was entitled ‘You Can't Do That! The Anti-Social Regulation of Public Space’. It featured a Conservative member of the London Assembly who supported the workplace smoking ban and described smoking as a "disgusting habit".

In response I suggested that he probably had one or two disgusting habits himself. I also made the point that if his views were representative of the Conservative party, they could kiss my vote goodbye.

What really shocked me, however, were contributions from two smokers in the audience who said they opposed the workplace smoking ban but supported bans on drinking alcohol in public parks.

Smokers, drinkers, smokers who drink, drinkers who smoke - we all have to stick together and defend one another's interests. You can't pick and choose according to your likes and dislikes.

Smoking has been described as the canary for civil liberties, or a bellwether for liberty, and that is absolutely right. The point is, if we don’t stand up for adults who enjoy smoking, what’s next?

Are public health campaigners going to move from informing the public about nutrition and healthy eating and drinking, to banning more and more products that are deemed ‘unhealthy’, while dictating the amount of sugar, alcohol or calories we are permitted to consume?

In the Freedom Zone in 2008 we also discussed libertarian paternalism, which many Conservatives have subsequently embraced. Libertarian paternalism essentially means nudging people to change their lifestyle.

I remember Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute saying he was sympathetic to the concept, but politicians would always go too far - which is exactly what has happened.

The proposed ban on smoking in outdoor public places, including beer gardens, is a form of nudging because it’s designed to create an environment in which it is increasingly hard to smoke in any public place and this, it is believed, will ‘encourage’ smokers to quit for their own good.

Leaving aside the unintended consequences for the hospitality industry, this is coercion, pure and simple. It’s designed not to nudge but to force people to quit, and it’s a continuation of the bully state that the Conservatives did nothing to reverse while in office.

The consequence has been a gradual erosion of tolerance with a small but vociferous group of anti-smoking activists dictating policy, including Conservative policy.

A few years ago I was asked what was the biggest change I had noticed in the 20 years I had been director of Forest. “When I started,” I replied, “there were voluntary agreements and codes of practice. Today there is far more legislation. Coercion has replaced common sense.”

The generational smoking ban (which is actually a ban on the sale of tobacco to people born after 2008), is a classic case of not trusting young adults to make their own decisions.

In my view, if you’re old enough to drive a car, join the army, possess a credit card, purchase alcohol, and vote, you’re old enough to buy tobacco.

But Rishi Sunak - a Conservative prime minister - didn’t see it that way and the policy, when reintroduced by Labour, is going to infantilise future generations of adults.

It seems to me however that over the next few years there is a wonderful opportunity for Conservatives to create clear blue water between the Conservative party and all the other parties who want to restrict our freedoms.

The one exception is Nigel Farage’s Reform party and you can be sure that if the Conservatives don’t occupy this space then Farage will, and Reform will pick up even more votes at the Conservatives’ expense.

The problem is, Conservative politicians often defend individual freedoms when in opposition, but as soon as they’re in power they change their tune, or accept the status quo they’ve inherited.

I don’t think paternalism is here to stay, but neither do I think that things will get better any time soon. The nanny state - or what I call the bully state - is undoubtedly going to get worse under Labour. But would things be much better under a Conservative government? The last 14 years suggest not.

I’ll end with a quote by Claire Fox (now Baroness Fox), director of the Academy of Ideas. Two years ago, at a fringe meeting hosted by Forest and the TaxPayers Alliance in this same Think Tent in Birmingham, she said:

“I’m on the left and I’m far more pro-freedom than anyone I’ve met in the Conservative party ... What has happened to you lot? You’ve lost your bottle, in my opinion.”

She was right. The Conservatives have lost their bottle, from grassroots to government, on a whole range of issues - and that includes trusting the people. And if you don’t trust the people, how can you expect them to trust you?

My fellow panellists were Joseph Dinnage (Centre for Policy Studies), Emily Fielder (Adam Smith Institute), and Andrew Rosindell MP, and the well-attended meeting was chaired by Benjamin Elks of the TaxPayers Alliance who were sharing the ThinkTent with Popular Conservatism (aka Mark Littlewood’s PopCon).

I didn’t get to all the meetings I wanted to but I understand that the threat of an outdoor smoking ban was raised in several meetings, with Kate Nichols, CEO of UKHospitality, giving a particularly robust response to the idea.

We need her support because, as I explained in my answer to a question from the audience yesterday, if there is to be push back against the Government’s plan, it really has to come from the hospitality industry and from within the Labour Party.

For the moment, and despite the surprisingly upbeat mood in Birmingham, no-one will be listening to the Conservatives, least of all the present Government.