Standing back to survey Gordon Brown’s Britain, it’s clear to me, and to many other observers, what the main problems are.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband and that banana

The main areas of concern cluster around two characteristics of Brown’s personality:

1. Stultifying complexity
2. The inefficient allocation of scarce resources from wealth creation to an expensive raft of State programmes — most of these arising from neurotic knee-jerk responses to little-understood undercurrents in society.

Can all that be put right? Yes, but not by Gordon Brown or the Labour party, and it will take three Parliaments to do it.

We really do need a reforming Conservative Government now. It has become so urgent that it could be described as a National Emergency.

Not everyone will agree, of course, especially the hordes of folk who have done well out of the Brownian settlement: mainly those working in central and local government bureaucracies.

Simplicity
Let’s take simplicity first. What does it mean? Essentially, it’s about clearing the desks of almost everyone in Whitehall and transferring competencies down to local level. The Conservatives made a tentative start on that yesterday with their “localist” proposals. They did not go nearly far enough — but it’s a positive opening shot.

In my recent article Public failure and Superdemocracy, I suggested determining first, the Level of Maximum Competence for each critical decision made in the public realm, and then the Point at which it should be taken at that level, i.e. the person with the most experience to take it.

Since decisions, like cream in a milk bottle, have a tendency to rise to the top, it would be necessary to bring in a degree of routine maintenance for this process. A small team of decision-deciders (for want of a better term) could carry out this task at both central and local levels. It should not become a bureauracy in its own right, more a practical exercise based on the simplicity principle.

All centralized directives to local councils forcing them to provide services of a busybody or intrusive nature should be scrapped.

I recently spotted a van emblazoned with “Exeter City Council” and “Community Patrol”. It had a rotating video camera on top intended to pick out anyone who misbehaved. And we now have a dizzying array of crimes and misdemeanours to oversee, most of which are not even guessed at by the public.

Aren’t the police meant to do that? This is yet another layer of quasi-policing by ill-trained civil servants given power over us by the vast, flaccid Home Office and an increasingly brutalist Home Secretary, often on the back of idiotic directives from Brussels.

Allocation of resources
The State should never allocate more than 25-30 percent of national income. Easier said than done? Not really. A scheme of mandatory private sector social insurance for health, welfare, and possibly education, would strip away much of central government’s tax take and transfer ownership in these areas back to individuals on their home patch.

Policing should have much more local control through the election of senior officers, and elected Mayors for everyone made a top priority.

The Conservatives need a three-Parliament plan to redistribute not the nation’s wealth, but the nation’s decisionmaking back to the people.

The great advantage to David Cameron and his team is that they will not be blamed for everything that goes wrong as is the case with Labour.

The aching elephant in the broom cupboard, Britain’s membership of the failing European Union, also needs a firm hand to negotiate an Association agreement for the country, as former French President Giscard d’Estaing recently suggested.

The BBC’s Today programme will just have to make do without a constant stream of boring, and mainly false, government announcements on a daily basis. It will be a better experience without them, especially as the BBC should be made to survive without its oppressive licence fee.

Are you following the excessive fuss they are making over Charles Darwin? Time to shape up, lads.

John Evans

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