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How you responded to the Budget last week probably depended on how strongly you feel about the long-run. It was a budget couched in the language of Keynesianism and it was Keynes who once famously declared ‘in the long run we are all dead.’ But Keynes, as his own comments imply, had no children

Those of us who believe they have a duty to future generations care about the long-run. Rather than Keynes I agree with Edmund Burke who said that ‘history is a pact between the dead, the living and the yet unborn.’ The budget breaks this pact. It is the product of a government that only cares about the present, how to get through the next 12 months; to do so the Chancellor plans to borrow an incredible £175 billion – 12 ½ per cent of national income.

The Chancellor knows we can’t keep spending forever. But like Saint Augustine he declares ‘Lord make be chaste, but not yet.’ He hopes that tough decisions can be delayed until after a general election and probably taken by someone else. This is the greatest dereliction of duty by a Labour Government since 1931. Then a Scottish Labour Prime Minister put country before party. Today we have a Prime Minister who puts himself before both.

Gordon Brown would rather burden a future generation with a mountain of debt then be straight with the British people about the state we’re in. As a result, the Institute of Fiscal Studies has estimated that it will not be until 2032 – 23 years from now – that national debt will return to sustainable levels

If we want the future to be better then we have to start making changes today. We desperately need a Government that cares about the long-run.

“First the unthinkable becomes thinkable, then it becomes an orthodoxy whose truth seems so obvious that no one remembers that anyone ever thought differently.” (Theodore Dalrymple, 1997)

A new orthodoxy has crept upon us and was alive and well at the Cambridge Union last week. It is now acceptable and normal for students to believe that we can’t stop adolescents using drugs, we have no responsibility to even help them do so and that our only responsibility is to protect them from killing themselves (from overdosing) by giving them the heroin ourselves.  

On the day I was due to oppose the motion that 'This house would prescribe heroin on the NHS' alongside Neil McKeganey at the Cambridge Union I received a desperate letter. It was from the Chairman of Middlegate Lodge, one of very few, if not the only, residential rehabilitation units for ‘socially excluded’ 11-18 year old addicts.  Imminent closure faces them and this despite the fact that, since 1995, they have cared for and treated the most desperate and marginal of young people with “extreme substance misuse and behavioural related problems” – those at the end of the line, in a poor state of health and abused and bullied.

Getting ‘heroin prescribing’ onto the political and public agenda is easy. In fact it is already there and doesn’t need the Cambridge Union to take up its cause. The National Addiction Centre’s Randomised Opiate Injecting Trials are already well supported - some £½ million for just one of at least three sites - and benefiting overall 150 ‘chronic’ addicts.  Heroin prescribing is actually still practised by some authorised doctors.  Its advocates range across the great and good from doctors and journalists to pro legalising drugs lobbyists.  

Far less easy is it to get the cause of adolescent neglect and the need for ‘Middlegates’, with their robust behavioural interventions and their model of family care advocated. Journalists and politicians are not known for their quickness of understanding about recovery as a moral and spiritual process. Much easier for them to digest ‘cost benefits’ public relations justifications of medical treatment interventions.

That I found this choice of debate a terrible comment on ‘the hollowing out of spiritual values’ (Spengler), on our distorted priorities and the muddled thinking, did not got get any response from the students.   

So it was not so surprising perhaps, in retrospect, that the Cambridge Union’s would-be politicians fell for the proposers’ request to run Channel 4’s ‘Mum, Heroin and Me’ programme at the start of the debate.  Naïve no doubt that I am, I was stunned to find current debating practice now appears to include propaganda aids and that special treatment is given to those who might be considered ‘victims’.  Oh yes – I should mention proposing the motion was ‘Mum’, the second of the two stars in ‘Mum, Heroin and Me’ for anyone who has watched it – the other being her daughter. 

Blind to this manipulation,  shock and awe read on every student face as highlights of this full frontal drama of self-destruction and self-degradation of young people just their own age unfolded in front of their eyes. ‘Anything but this horror’ was the natural and immediate response; it made the clinical prescribing of heroin seem the clean and simple answer. So Neil’s dispassionate, but ultimately more compassionate, analysis of the illogic and pseudo pragmatism of this approach to solving the individual and society’s drug problems and my rendition that there exists successful ‘treatment’ which,  unlike heroin prescribing,  actually  gets addicts  better rather than damning them and their families to an eternity of addiction,  equally fell on stony ground.

None of the students who spoke seemed to find it, as I did, sad and perverse that the mother of a heroin addict daughter, was not just advocating her own daughter’s permanent dependency on heroin but such a life sentence for every other heroin addict too.  Few thanks would be coming her way from those struggling to escape and already up against the state’s methadone prescribing regime, I mused.

I had not had the foresight to demand ‘extra time’ to read out my letter from Middlegate Lodge.  So I could only quickly tell the assembled students the depressing statistic that for the 24000 under-18s in the country currently signed up to the government’s drug treatment services ‘in the community’ - 1600 of whom are already on substitute opiate prescribing (normally reserved for adults) - that there are only 5 rehab beds for them and no money to pay even for these five.  There was no time to explain the Alice in Wonderland world of our drug treatment services that has got us to this pass. 

So my contribution to the Cambridge Union debate hardly gave the alternative to heroin prescribing either the platform or the fair treatment it needed. Yet this is what I have to believe most students in that chamber would, if faced with the reality of addiction in their families, choose for their dear ones, not each and every day centred around the trip to a sanitised injection suite in the local hospital.

Last week, when Middlegate sought a meeting with Tom Aldridge, Head of Young Peoples Services at the National Treatment Agency, they were immediately disabused of any hope of support.  They were told the NTA was unable to assist in any way regarding unblocking the flow of referrals - which Middlegate needs immediately to keep it open.  Yet the NTA has it well within its powers to advise, if not to instruct, DATs, PCTs and YOTs to prioritise children in severe need. As a palliative Mr Aldridge said that it was, perhaps, “worth seeing if Middlegate could be of any value to rehabilitate young people with drug, alcohol and substance misuse issues who have entered the criminal justice system…..”  

It needs Orwell to put his finger on this particular piece of linguistic trickery -  as though Middlegate had yet to prove its worth – damning it with faint praise and signing its death warrant all in one

So while the government is happy to spend taxpayers millions on adolescent treatment and youth services which do not attempt to stop them abusing themselves (I have been told by more than one young people’s services’ teams that “you can’t get them off drugs”), Middlegate is about to join the 18 adult residential rehabilitation units who, because of lack of referrals, have been forced to close.  

The cultural change that Cameron called for last week cannot come soon enough.

David Cameron’s interview on the Today programme wasn’t given huge prominence , but his call for a massive culture change in government is extremely welcome.

Of course the dreadful state of the public finances does provide opportunities for rationalising and getting rid of some of the more egregious misuses of public money. The tens of billions of pounds earmarked for bolstering our surveillance and security society can surely be repurposed; Titan prisons have already gone, with any luck closely followed by ID cards, the government’s rights-busting databases and so on. And the plans for the Olympic Games could easily be made less grandiose, whatever the IOC says.

But the main point was Cameron’s idea of rewarding ministers who save money, rather than those who dream up eye-catching initiatives. This is a genuinely conservative idea, tying in with his localism agenda; let us hope he can bring it about. Immense amounts of public money are wasted on clever schemes – closely followed by more money spent clearing up after badly-costed, barely-thought-through, shoddily scrutinised legislation and “reform”.

The problem: 24/7 media coverage demands novelty, announcements, instant rebuttals, instant responses – in short, everything that stands in the way of reflection, evaluation and scrutiny. Lord Salisbury once rightly said that the hardest thing for a government to do is nothing, and in today’s media-saturated world, that is doubly true.

The reason New Labour has bombarded the airwaves over the last twelve years with pointless initiative after pointless initiative is precisely to keep control of the news. Once the immediate demand for an announcement has been satisfied, the initiative can then carry on soaking up public money out of the spotlight until it screws up so badly a new problem is identified, a new initiative is dreamed up, and on it goes.

Cameron’s idea – which also links to his long-standing strategy of talking about social problems without proposing specific solutions – is a risky one. It speaks volumes about the causes of dysfunctional politics that such a sensible idea is problematic.

Politics nowadays is focused around the media – this much we all know. Cameron’s culture change is tantamount to altering that focus, to refuse to play the media game of identifying problems and demanding instant solutions. If he can implement it, we will see the Prime Minister and Cabinet Ministers admitting in interviews that such-and-such is a serious issue, and yet that relatively little can be done immediately.

Cameron has already said similar things – arguing for instance that certain social problems will take generations to solve – but in opposition he has been given a relatively easy ride. He will be under greater scrutiny as he gets closer to an election victory, and then we will see how well he can ride out the inevitable storm.

In the name of rational politics, we can only wish him well.

A predictable aspect of the fall-out from the Damian McBride affair has been the reopening of the debate about the role of ‘unaccountable’ special advisers in Whitehall. But it would be a mistake for any future government to believe that a golden age of ministerial/civil service relations existed before government was polluted by political appointments. It should also be remembered that McBride was a Treasury civil servant before he became a special adviser and that he clearly breached the code governing the conduct of advisers.

There is a long tradition of bringing outside expertise into Government, including John Maynard Keynes. Among the first formal special advisers appointed by Harold Wilson’s Government in 1964 were the economists Nicolas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh. But since 1997 advisers who have any kind of policy expertise have become vastly outnumbered by those whose role is largely political. There is often very little ‘special’ about these appointees, other than their loyalty to the ministers they serve.

If a future Conservative Government is to bring about meaningful change then, as the debate in this blog about the Conservative trilemma reveals, it will need to change the perimeters of debate. If we ask the same questions as the Government then we are likely to come up with the same solutions. Bringing about real change will therefore require a transformation of the culture of Whitehall after over a decade of Labour Government. The role of those appointed from outside the Government machine will surely be vital to this process.

Mapping out policy for the long-term is always hard – not just because, as Keynes said, “in the long run we are all dead.” In an area like broadcasting policy, it’s impossible to second guess technology and predict with certainty exactly how consumption patterns and content provision will look in 10 or 20 years.

Yet the current debate about the future of broadcasting seems to be all about the short term – and all about individual institutions, notably Channel 4 and a potential partnership arrangement with the BBC to ensure it stays afloat.

No doubt a solution will be hammered out in the coming months. However, the central argument of a new pamphlet for the CPS by Martin Le Jeune is that this fixation on institutions neglects the bigger picture of what is actually available to consumers and how the evolution of new content and new online and multichannel platforms is transforming traditional understandings of public service content.

The existing development of new technology can at least tell us that quality content will come from a huge range of different sources. As the report argues, “The correct policy response to these developments would seem to be reasonably easy to grasp and to implement. If the market is providing more, the state (through direct and indirect intervention) could and should do less.”

Clearly there is market failure in broadcasting – where commercial considerations will continue to mean that certain types of programming (such as original children’s programming, UK drama and documentaries) will require public intervention. This idea of ‘market failure’ was described by the BBC Director General himself as “the only economic justification for the BBC – indeed for any public intervention in broadcasting.”

The issue, however, is that the size, cost and remit of the BBC goes far beyond ‘market failure’ and sees it competing with commercial operators in a host of copy-cat genres. And as the Brand-Ross scandal shows (with the Corporation today being fined £150,000 by Ofcom) this quest to be all things to all people has led to a race to the bottom in many areas in terms of taste and quality.

Far better would be an acknowledgment that the BBC’s unique funding arrangements and cultural status should mean it is focussed on providing for where there is market failure and delivering the kinds of high quality and distinctive programmes for which it is renowned. 

Niall Ferguson’s CPS lecture has certainly provided considerable food for thought – as the blogs on this site in recent days have shown. His mastery of financial detail – both historical and contemporary – combined with his political analysis of the ‘trilemma’ facing conservatives (which Scott discussed yesterday) made for a fascinating speech. 

One of the central themes of his argument was that the right was in danger of ceding ground in the battle of ideas during the economic crisis – specifically in the debates around public spending and the size of the state. Ferguson argued that “there has been a failure on the part of conservative intellectuals to arm them [Conservative politicians] with effective arguments against the New Labour mantra that Conservatism is equivalent to “cuts” in public services. Rather than get sucked into an argument about public finance the terms of which are defined by hyper-Keynesians, we need to counter with a new and more credible vision of the state’s role in times of volatility.” 

 As Ferguson elucidated during an extensive Q&A, this “new and more credible vision” needs to learn from the tumult of the 1970s and 1980s, but avoid being hidebound by former battles. In this vein, it was fascinating to hear his observation that the US is engaging in a real time experiment in running ‘hyper Keynesianism’ alongside monetarism. A kind of posthumous bout of Keynes versus Friedman. As Ferguson put it, though, “Future historians will have a job on their hands to work out which was more effective in countering the financial crisis of 2007-9: the huge fiscal deficits…or the massive expansion of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet through a succession of targeted “loan facilities’”. 

But to return to the issue of intellectual leadership, a leading article in today’s Times argues that with the G20 being dominated by the left, “the Centre Right has lost ideological ground” partly because of a lack of commanding international statesman. It argues that Merkel and Sarkozy, although both conservatives, are primarily focused on their domestic constituencies: “There is a vacancy for a messenger with a coherent message for a global audience, waiting to govern from the Right”. As both the Times, and ConservativeHome point out, this offers David Cameron a unique opportunity to fill the vacuum of international conservative leadership and “become much more than the British Prime Minister.”

Last Tuesday I attended Naill Ferguson’s fascinating CPS Ruttenberg memorial lecture on the challenges facing conservatism. He argued that while conservatives may crave global free trade, social stability and a small state they can at best have two but not all three of these things.

At first sight this diagnosis seems rather too gloomy - reflecting, perhaps, Professor Ferguson's long residence in America where the Republican Party (as opposed to conservatism)  is now genuinely in crisis. However, while the Conservative Party in this country may perhaps not face a full blown trilemma, the next election will almost certainly be fought on the battleground of the size and the role of the state. If the Conservative Party is to maintain its lead in the opinion polls and convert it into an overall majority in the next Parliament it has to continue to develop the arguments for a smaller and leaner state and it has to do so against a backdrop of continuing economic uncertainty.

With this in mind, Professor Ferguson was surely right to focus on the importance of education in a world of open labour markets.  He cited the Danish model, where flexible labour markets have been combined with systematic Government support to help the jobless back into work through re-training. This system has the rather ungainly title of ‘Fexicurity’.  

We should be careful before we draw too many conclusions from the success of the Danish model. Policy makers in Britain have often been guilty of believing that it is possible to copy the parts of policies from overseas with which they approve and to leave out the rest, even when these are fundamental to the approach. The history of the corporatist experiment of the 1960s and 1970s was of the establishment of planning bodies which lacked the teeth that enabled similar bodies to work effectively, at least for a period, elsewhere in Europe.

Denmark has a large public sector, it spends a great deal on labour market support and workers receive 90% of their last salary when they are on the dole. Nevertheless, the Danish example does suggest that substantial investment in training can be an effective way of helping people back into work and of maintaining high levels of employment where there is a flexible system that responds to the needs of individuals and the market.

In the UK the Government has developed an incredibly complex model of publicly supported training provision, with numerous funding streams and eligibility criteria. Funding has also been increasingly restricted to support for people without a level 2 qualification (equivalent to 5 GCSEs) even though this often does not meet the needs of business or those made redundant. As a result, these rules have prevented F.E. colleges and other providers from responding swiftly to changing need of the economy in the recession.

Almost unbelievably the Government has also decided that this is the right time reorganise the way training is funded, splitting the Learning and Skills Council into three new bodies and thus creating the confusion that has led to a capital funding crisis in Further Education at a time when colleges should be focused on training the unemployed.

What the Government’s failure suggests is that labour markets flexiblity needs the support of a much more responsive system for retraining. It is not only in the provision of compulsory education that we need to empower teachers and learners and open up the supply-side to new providers.

At Tuesday’s seminar on financial regulation in the post-bureaucratic age, co-hosted by the CPS and the Conservatives, it was great to see the debate on regulation move beyond the dilemma of a heavy- or light-touch approach. It has been too easy for too long for partisan politics to paint our major political parties as being, on the one hand, the provider of burdensome regulation, and on the other, the party that is too light-touch. Regulation isn’t just the number of rules, and it isn’t just the amount of people working at the regulator – it’s also about the credibility of the regulator, their ability to back up threats with actions, and their relationship with those they are regulating. And the current crisis was caused just as much by banks themselves not knowing what was on their balance sheets, as it was regulators not knowing.

Oliver Letwin presented the paradox of simultaneous over- and under-regulation at the seminar: where the demands placed on an organisation are overly burdensome and achieve little, whilst the real aspects of business that should have been observed are not. A process-based regulatory approach and a mechanistic view of companies add to this problem. Restoring the balance towards a greater use of judgement and an organic view of organisations would help to address the failures of process regulation, and enacting these changes would sit outside the debate of how much regulation to have. Richard Thaler, the economist, put forward his case that more and easier to understand information reduces the need for government regulation, as it empowers market actors (such as risk analysts) to build up a better understanding of the risks a company is taking, and in fact has feedback effects that would help the company know its own activities better.

There is much to debate on which rules (and indeed how many) need to be included in any future regulation of banks. But that’s not the only change that’s needed. We also need to change how we regulate. The question of “how” is an important one, and we need to recognise it is distinct from the question of “how much”.

Sadly, I couldn’t make it to Niall Ferguson’s CPS lecture on the Conservative trilemma – a fascinating set of ideas no doubt beautifully presented. But what neither the talk, nor the pamphlet available from the CPS website, nor the article in the Daily Telegraph, makes clear is the distinction between an ideological trilemma and a party issue.

A trilemma (or dilemma, or quadrilemma for that matter) is a problem for an ideology because it means that it cannot achieve all its aims without compromise. It means that the ideology is ill-suited, in the relevant respects at least, for the world which it supposedly describes and for which it is normative for political action.

But Ferguson, it seemed to me, was actually referring to a party issue. The Conservative Party in the UK and the Republican Party in the US (the “Anglophone right”) are large and particular coalitions of ideological interests. In the UK, the Tories comprise small-c conservatives, economic liberals, the pro-business community, stern deontic moralists, nationalists and no doubt many others who work together in a broad front against the threat of social engineering or socialism. The trilemma Ferguson refers to arises because the three goods he mentions, globalisation, stability and power, appeal differently to adherents of the different ideologies within the Conservative Party. Similar considerations apply to the Republican Party. The reason this is an Anglophone problem is that right wing parties in Continental Europe are clustered around different coalitions, and are much less inclined to be economically liberal.

So the issue becomes one of compromise within a party, not an ideological re-working. The conservative values social stability, and is not fussed about globalisation and financial liberalisation per se (cf. Scruton). The liberal is keen on globalisation, but not worried about stability (cf. Hayek’s Why I Am Not a Conservative). Moralists worry more about power than liberals, and so on. To keep the party coalition together, party managers have to get an acceptable balance of policies to keep all ideological factions happy. Ferguson supplies a recipe for this.

But ideologically, the conservative should be wincing at a statement that “social stability should not in fact be sacrosanct to conservatives, who should be prepared to embrace social change” (Ferguson, p.10). Up to a point, Lord Copper. The Lampedusa quote about change which Ferguson uses is of course true – stability cannot mean stasis. Organic change was never opposed by conservatives, as can be seen from even cursory readings of Oakeshott, Scruton or Quinton, say. But the conservative is not in fact obliged to accept any old social change, and can draw pretty solid distinctions between good change and bad change.

Conservatives (small-c) oppose irresponsible innovation – Oakeshott in particular is very good on this. And the current financial crisis, whatever else it is, is a crisis caused exactly by the uncritical acceptance of innovative financial instruments, supported by inadequate and over-optimistic risk management models. Oakeshott’s criticisms of rationalism in politics should be required reading not only for the banks but also for the supporters of untrammelled financial liberalism.

Free markets are certainly not opposed by conservatives, but they do have to serve social purposes, as Adam Smith himself argued most strongly. It is impossible to read Smith without marking the strong link between markets and morality – but markets do not define morality. Morality comes first, and it was Smith’s brilliant and unintuitive hypothesis that markets would more often than not serve the purposes of morality, especially when the alternative was 18^th century mercantilism.

Nevertheless, markets, for Smith, are not an end in themselves, but rather are important sources of moral responsibility and stability within a society – and if they simply become transformative without concern for the state of the societies in which they are embedded, the underpinning of all the arguments in The Wealth of Nations disappears. There is a giant gap between Hayek and Smith, and it is within that gap that Ferguson’s trilemma emerges.