While a bold policy agenda is necessary, there are three constraints that we set ourselves: the need for political realism, for policy incrementalism, and for fiscal restraint.
Political realism means proposing policies that could, at a minimum, be introduced by a Conservative Party at the beginning of a new government term without seriously threatening the Party’s chances of winning reelection if their promised effects did not materialise. This is not to say that policies that might endanger the party’s re-election hopes are undesirable — but at a minimum, we believe our agenda should be one that does not ask a government to risk losing power.
This constraint can be met by ensuring that policies are designed that minimise the harms to ‘losers’ from those policies, ideally by aligning their incentives so that they benefit from the policy as well, or that they exist in policy domains that do not usually attract electoral attention.
Policy incrementalism means, generally, proposing policies that do not require other policy changes for them to work. Each of our proposals should be feasible and desirable by themselves.
Fiscal restraint means not assuming any significant growth effects from changes to tax or fiscal policy. The Conservative Party spent most of the last decade implementing painful spending cuts that it said were necessary for the good of the country. We agree with this, and tax cuts or spending rises just to win votes would likely be electorally counterproductive and economically wasteful. The tax and spending changes we propose are for long-term productivity growth.