Friday 13 December 2019 4:15 am
Bruce Dear
https://www.cityam.com/dont-ignore-your-opponents-ideas-you-could-learn-from-them/
You can’t solve multi-dimensional problems with one-eyed ideology (via Getty Images)
UK politics is a machine for killing good ideas.
It’s brutal, adversarial, and first past the post. Our party-bound MPs almost never ask the only question that matters: based on the facts, what is best for the country?
Imagine that your company has a complex problem. Three of you work up ideas to solve it. But instead of reading your reports, your boss tells you all to hire cage fighters. He then stages a rumble in reception to decide whose idea wins.
Your colleagues watch, shouting “Liars”, “Get it done”, and “Stop Jenny’s report”. Then they vote for their favourite fighter, and the business adopts the idea he fought for — even if it’s the worst one. The “losing” solutions are all thrown away.
It sounds absurd, but this is basically how UK General Elections work.
We must do better. To succeed as a country, we need to learn from our political opponents’ ideas — not just try to crush and ignore them.
Take two of our biggest problems: the housing shortage and the climate crisis. If you try to solve them using just one party’s policies (be they Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat), you will fail. You can’t solve multi-dimensional problems with one-eyed ideology.
But if you study and combine the ideas of the main parties into sensible super-policies, then — suddenly — you have workable solutions to these intractable issues.
For example, on housing the Conservative manifesto proposed more of the same. Right to Buy stays, Help to Buy is extended to 2023, and longer-term mortgages are suggested to help the less well-off borrow to buy. But more of the same has already failed. We consistently miss our annual housebuilding target by over 100,000 homes, and over a million people are on our social housing waiting lists.
Labour’s housing policies also had massive drawbacks. Rent controls would severely damage the socially useful institutional build-to-rent market, while plans to purchase housebuilder land banks compulsorily at no-planning-gain value would undermine share values and damage new build-to-sell pipelines.
But if you put the Labour and Conservative housing policies together, dropping their worst ideas and adding in the best Lib Dem ones, you would have a policy package capable of solving the housing crisis and transforming the country.
This combined solution would see a mass council house building programme (Labour) to help those crying out for social housing. It would keep Help to Buy until 2023 to incentivise private housebuilders (Conservatives), and then refocus it on less well-off first-time buyers (Labour). Right to Buy would end (Labour), and with it the sorrowful 40-year story of fire-selling the state’s social housing stock.
Labour’s rent control and discounted compulsory purchase order ideas would be dropped. Instead, in would come the Liberal Democrats’ idea for all new homes to be zero-carbon by a fixed date and for £15bn to be invested in insulating 26m homes.
Here is a housing policy, made by learning from and uniting different ideas, which would work for the good of the whole country.
The same open-minded approach could create a policy ambitious enough to take on the climate crisis.
Let’s be honest: the free market, left to its own devices, is not going to make us carbon neutral by 2050‚ however good our “British battery makers and turbine designers” may be (to quote the Tory manifesto). The free market is primed to generate excessive consumption. Of course, it has an important role to play in tackling climate change, but it cannot do it alone.
At the other extreme, Labour’s state-led plan to reduce emissions across industries and ban the sale of new combustion vehicles by 2030 would be extremely damaging to the economy.
So again, we must learn from each other. The best climate crisis solution demands a mixed-economy and cross-party approach: the free market working with regulation and state action.
We should unleash an unrestricted dash for solar and wind power and achieve 80 per cent renewable electricity by 2030 (Lib Dems). The Paris Climate Accord targets should be enforced by law across the private and public sector (Lib Dems). We should set up a Green Transformation Fund to invest billions in advanced green technologies, including tidal power, energy and smart grids (Labour and the Lib Dems).
Vitally, we should also give the free market space to create climate crisis solutions and make sustainable profits from them (Conservatives).
The UK’s problems now involve vast global trends and pan-dimensional issues, spanning hundreds of expert areas. Old adversarial politics and single-ideology parties do not have the bandwidth to solve them. We must escape this hideous Victorian strait-jacket of one-party thinking.
Most of the votes from this election have now been counted, and at least 40 per cent of us will have woken up to our own particular idea of a nightmare.
But, whether that’s a majority Conservative government, a Labour administration, or another hung parliament, we still urgently need to rethink the way we do politics. We can only save ourselves by uniting the best policies from each party, and by listening to experts.
It’s time we stopped insulting our political opponents, and started learning from them.
Main image credit: Getty
City A.M.'s opinion pages are a place for thought-provoking views and debate. These views are not necessarily shared by City A.M.
https://www.cityam.com/dont-ignore-your-opponents-ideas-you-could-learn-from-them/
