The Tories should stop blaming their woes on Whitehall

IN MAY 2010 George Osborne, the new chancellor of the exchequer, announced a modest wheeze for boosting private-sector employment: a tax break for the first ten employees of new businesses set up in Britain’s poorer regions. The scheme was a “nudge”, intended to tip the balance towards entrepreneurial plunge-taking in parts of the country whose dynamism had shrivelled after 13 years in a tepid bath of public largesse. Over the three-year life of the tax holiday, perhaps 400,000 employers would sign up, the Treasury guessed.

As the plan trundles through Parliament, Mr Osborne’s simple idea has become a slab of red tape accompanied by 108 clauses of box-ticking explanatory notes. These include an assessment of how the scheme complies with European Union rules on state subsidies; its impact on the government’s carbon footprint (none); on small businesses (positive); on race, disability and gender equality (neutral); and its compatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights (no worries there).

Alas, the entrepreneurs of Britain have mostly yet to respond. Though the tax break has been open for applications since last autumn, just 1,500 employers had applied at last count, a take-up rate described as “incredibly low” by a government source. Whitehall departments struggle to sell innovative ideas, the source says. Time and again, “what starts out as an elegant policy turns to mush.”

As the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition nears a year in office, the word “frustration” barely captures the angry complaints being heard inside government, among Tory MPs and from the right-wing press. Many voters might look at David Cameron and his cabinet—filled as it is with smooth-cheeked sons of privilege—and see the Establishment on parade. Yet some of Mr Cameron’s allies seem to feel more like insurgents against the Establishment, battling to reshape a state controlled by vested interests and an out-of-touch elite.

Cameroon insurgents know their enemies: they include the BBC, bits of the EU, left-leaning bishops, police chiefs accused of ignoring lower-level crimes that bring misery to the public, “fat cat” council bosses and health-and-education bigwigs fingered for blocking reform. Senior judges have come under unusually direct fire, with the prime minister declaring himself “appalled” by a Supreme Court ruling that sex offenders should be allowed to apply to be removed from police registers, rather than remain on them for life. Foreign Office mandarins have been chided by Mr Cameron to do more to promote trade; by Tory MPs for counselling surrender to Brussels; and by the press for bungling the evacuation of Britons from Libya.

Prime ministers have grumbled about elites before. In her memoirs, Margaret Thatcher records how to some she was not only a woman but “that woman”, offending by class as well as gender, and through what she calls her “alarming conviction that the values and virtues of middle England” could solve problems created by “Establishment consensus”. In his memoirs, Tony Blair guesses that he unsettled the Establishment by being an “arriviste”: neither born into the elite nor knowing his proper place. Whole chapters record his struggles with civil service “inertia”, and Napoleonic schemes to drive change from Downing Street.

Yet some frustrations of the Cameroon insurgency are distinctive and new. First, there is shock at the panoply of box-ticking checks and balances inherited from New Labour—with European elements made worse by the increasing activism of judges in Luxembourg and Strasbourg. A minister who served as a special adviser in John Major’s administration wistfully recalls when the government could “formulate a policy and announce it”. This government, he says, has been startled by today’s “tortuous” legal procedures, which have seen major planks of policy (including the June 2010 emergency budget) hauled before the high courts, accused of harming gender and other equalities.

Second, this government is trying something new: what that minister calls a “busting open of the public sector’s monopoly” over the delivery of state-funded services. That is tough work; after a string of policy U-turns, Downing Street is currently beefing up its policy, strategy and press teams. The irony of driving decentralisation from the centre is not lost on senior figures.

Third, the Tories currently share power with the Lib Dems, curbing their ability to change some things that make them cross, such as human-rights laws. Some Tory exasperation with the civil service is really frustration at being in coalition, suggests a senior Blairite. Recalling his own battles to push through reform, he says that “the big arguments were not with the machine, they were with my own party.”

Grow up and get on with it

Finally, thanks to Britain’s horrible public finances, this is at once the best and worst of times to sell a reshaping of the state. At least the Thatcher government felt able to cut taxes as it set about privatising utilities and hacking back corporatist controls. New Labour rode an economic boom to offer the illusion that Britons could have Swedish public services and American taxes. In the worst-case scenario, voters might conclude that Mr Cameron’s coalition is offering American public services for Swedish taxes.

All in all, frustration is a pretty natural reaction. And the coalition’s decentralising radicalism is to its credit. Ministers have always hated pulling levers and discovering that less happens than they hoped. But the world is not always fair; voters will inevitably blame the government if the economy crashes or big reforms go wrong. Tory MPs are mostly cross that they did not win the last election outright. To win the next one, they should stop blaming others and make their plans work.