How radical is The Alternative Manifesto?

Tuesday April 6, 2010

Simon Hills reviews The Alternative Manifesto: A 12-Step Programme to Remake Britain by Eamonn Butler (Gibson Square, £8.99)

The most shocking element to this manifesto, by director of the Adam Smith Institute Eamonn Butler, is its conclusion: ‘This is, of course, a radical manifesto; but times call for radical measures’.

Well, you could call it radical if radical means less state intervention, allowing the free market to cater for all our non-essential needs and getting nanny off our back. But for many of us, and, one suspects, most of Eamonn Butler’s readers, his 12-step programme to remake Britain is as radical as drinking a cup of tea.

He doesn’t anyway want to overturn our institutions – the opposite in many cases – he doesn’t want to undermine our system of government and he isn’t looking to our cultural institutions to force-feed us a new polemic.

It is radical in other words, in the sense that Margaret Thatcher was radical. It was, after all the newly formed Adam Smith Institute that was the intellectual scaffold from which her policies were built.

Agenda

It shows how far we’ve moved away from those times. Call-me-Dave Cameron is probably now somewhere to the left of Tony Blair’s 1997 government. The global political agenda since then has been insidiously moving if not overtly to the left, then certainly to the idea that government is best and that individual choices – what we drink, what we eat, whether we choose to smoke – simply shouldn’t be allowed.

The Bully State – an idea lifted from ex-Scottish MEP Brian Monteith’s book of the same name – is the title of one of Butler’s chapters, and anyone who believes liberty to be a fundamental part of being human will feel a chill as they read it.

Essentially, though, his 12 steps broadly replicate government ministries with a few add-ons under broader themes with the likes of Bureaucracy and Regulation along with the Bully State tackling head-on just how far our politicians are inveigling themselves upon us.

Opinion

Butler’s manifesto of course is one that only a think tank, free from the compromises and exigencies of real political life, can make. There is a strong body of opinion for the legalisation of all drugs, for example, call for that this spring and you might as well demand all politicians talk in Donald Duck voices for all the votes it will attract.

But whatever the political theory, there is the problem, certainly in the UK, that government policy has led to a profligacy that has taken the state, and all within it, to the edge of bankruptcy. Where this book really scores is its excoriating attack on the scandalous way our politicians have behaved over the past decade.

As Butler points out, if you have licence to take money from people and send them to prison if they don’t give it to you, then wouldn’t you be tempted to ask for more and more of it? There needs to be restraint in other words, and restraint in government at the moment is as visible as Pluto on a midsummer’s night from a floodlit Wembley Stadium.

Refrain

There is a refrain that the author uses through The Alternative Manifesto, and that is, ‘It gets worse’. On the economy, the author quotes figures from the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s predicting that by 2015 national debt could reach 100per cent of GDP, meaning the government owing more than the whole country earns in a year, or twice the government’s own annual income ‘Maybe you think things cannot get worse than this,’ writes Butler. ‘Sadly, they actually are worse than this.’ (He is writing on how private finance initiatives are left out of these equations.)

Although the writing is at times rather dry, this is where the book is strongest, his assiduous research a fusillade against the recklessness of government spending.

You could sum up the book, and the manifesto, thus: ‘Stop taking our money and wasting it’. And it should be waved under the nose of every self-important, spendthrift politician, whose pay should be docked until he has proved he has read and understood it.

It is an indictment of our times that such simple arguments should be called radical, even by the man who’s making them.

Simon Hills is associate editor of The Times Magazine