For most of the postwar era, the Conservative Party prided itself on its ability to tell an economic story. Tories traditionally explained their right to govern in terms of an overarching economic vision for the country, a vision which was instantiated in policy and which often set the political agenda.
From Macmillan to Thatcher to Cameron, they presented themselves as the party of national prosperity, and of hard-nosed economic realities, and many people voted for them on this basis. But this no longer seems to be the case.
The last few years have witnessed what elsewhere we called the Strange Death of Tory Economic Thinking. In the years following the EU Referendum, Conservatives in Britain largely dropped the economy from the heart of their political story. This is not just a criticism of Mayism, with its Home Office view of the world; many who professed to be market liberals seemed to do so performatively, without serious consideration of what they wanted to deregulate or how.
The recent change of Prime Minister and the current upheavals in government provides an opportunity to put this right. We hope that the new government will turn away from the trajectory of the last three years, and start taking economics seriously again. If it chooses not to, we would urge others on the centre-right to take up the challenge.
This paper is an attempt to sketch out some principles for a centre-right economic outlook, and some specific policies to focus on.
We begin by presenting a few important stylised facts about the contemporary British economy that should frame an economic narrative; we then set out some political principles for how to turn these into economic policy.
Based on these, we set out a set of policies in four areas where we think progress can be made: tax, housing, infrastructure and devolution, and innovation and technology.
Finally, we conclude with some long-term actions that need to be taken to begin rebuilding an economic narrative for the Right.
This website was written by Sam Bowman and Stian Westlake. If you would like to discuss it, they can be contacted via Twitter (@s8mb and @stianwestlake respectively).
To read the whole essay as a single page, click here.
If you want to read the sections sequentially, start here, with a sketch of the UK economy.