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For these last few years, first as a candidate and then as regional President for the Partido Popular, I have advocated for the need of our centre-right party – the People’s Party – to become the ‘casa común’, the ‘common house’ of conservatives, liberals and all those who believe in freedom, prosperity and respect for human life, who love Spain, the West and the rule of law. Something similar to the ‘common ground’ proposed by Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph. Today, I intend to talk to you about the core of ideas around which we are building this project in Madrid: el liberalismo a la espa?ola. (Liberalism, the Spanish way.) ‘How did we get here?’ This was the question I asked publicly a few years ago, seeing the rise of the far Left, the ‘Argentinisation’ of Spanish politics and the decline of liberal democracy. ‘Listen to us: we come from the future’, our friends from Hispanic America used to tell us, as they were fleeing their countries, where socialism and demagogy had stolen their freedom, prosperity and, ultimately, their own country. Since then, I have denounced what I called the ‘woodworm strategy’: Spain’s socialist Government and its communist and separatist partners have been colonising institutions, universities, primary and secondary education, the media, public companies and the boards of directors of private companies. They have appointed political commissars, they have spread everywhere their manipulation of language and reality. We had to start to speak up, to give people back their hope, their faith in Spain, in their own personal projects and in the future. To denounce every abuse, every lie, every trap, and offer a common project everyone could join. ??Isabel Díaz Ayuso https://lnkd.in/eCBTZatt

Special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is an area of public policy that is eye-wateringly expensive for local government. It is also, like adult and children’s services, failing to deliver on a spectacular scale. We are racking up an ￡11 billion bill, without getting the quality of service required, and without driving improvements in outcomes for those who really need it. We simply cannot afford to keep getting the solution to SEND so wrong. The current system hinges on legally-binding Education and Health Care Plans (EHCP). But as SchoolsWeek recently reported, local education authorities (LEA) and schools are frequently not meeting the requirements of EHCPs. They are also often being forced to implement vague and poorly evidenced provisions within EHCPs. As a result, the young people this system is designed to serve are being let down. Children with manageable additional needs start to exhibit worsening behaviour, demanding more interventions and further harming their life chances. ??@CRobertson_LD https://lnkd.in/eA7Y9qEg

Labour’s recent decisions to dilute plans to restrict social media access for under-16s and to put smartphone bans in schools on a statutory footing are misguided. It also comes on top of Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson’s plan for schools to ‘narrow the digital divide’ and enter a ‘new technological era’ by boosting the uptake of education technology (EdTech). At first glance, Labour’s plans may sound forward-looking, however, the uncritical adoption of EdTech could inadvertently harm the learning experiences of a generation of schoolchildren. EdTech typically refers to school-issued digital devices such as Chromebooks, tablets, or laptops and associated software used by students. Increasing tech adoption in schools has been heralded as a way to accelerate learning and bridge attainment gaps. Yet many of these benefits are yet to materialise. Indeed, in a damning indictment, a recent UNESCO report concluded that: ‘There is little robust evidence on digital technology’s added value in education.’ At the same time, across OECD countries, test scores in maths, science and reading have been declining. While Britain has improved its position relative to other nations, it has not been immune from the trend of declining overall performance. Some have argued this is purely a consequence of the pandemic but the decline predates COVID-19 – it dates back to the early 2010s. This coincides with the proliferation of digital devices, such as tablets in classrooms. So, it is at least worth considering whether digitisation contributed to the decline. ??Sarah Kuszynski https://lnkd.in/ek4BGP49

Although the acronym SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) emerged in the United States in 1996 from Professors George Pring and Penelope Canan’s ‘SLAPPs: Getting Sued for Speaking Out’, it originated with Sir James Goldsmith, Robert Maxwell and Mohamed Fayed in their attempts to silence their critics. Drugs companies such as Upjohn and the Sacklers’ Purdue Pharma and corporations such as McDonald’s and Nomura followed suit. Notorious fraudsters have used SLAPPs, as have politicians, convicts and sexual abusers. They bring not just libel, but also data protection and privacy claims. Court actions are the tip of the iceberg. In 2014, Cambridge University Press felt unable to publish Professor Karen Dawisha’s book ‘Putin’s Kleptocracy’ because of libel threats. In 2020, Catherine Belton’s book ‘Putin’s People’ resulted in a raft of unmeritorious claims by oligarchs and an oil company keen to please Putin after Alexei Navalny praised it. Despite the evidence of sexual abuse, intimidation, bugging, racism and corruption of the police that Vanity Fair uncovered to defeat Fayed’s libel action in 1997, Fayed managed to restrict media reporting during his lifetime. The media either did not publish or they self-censored. The UK is the destination of choice for SLAPPsters and reputation launderers. The burden of proof is on the publisher and it can cost millions. Not only have Russians, often with prison records, as well as Ukrainians, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Swedes, Greeks, Germans, Maltese and Chinese brought or threatened SLAPP claims in this country, but England has exported its libel expertise. As the Foreign Policy Centre reported, the UK ‘is by far the most frequent international country of origin for such legal threats’. When Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered in Malta in 2017, she faced 42 libel and 5 criminal libel claims, often from English solicitors. ??David Hooper https://lnkd.in/eikzXUZz

As HL Mencken pointed out, to every complex problem there is a solution that is clear, simple and wrong. But not so for the UK’s current budgetary woes. I have a clear and simple solution that would make Rachel Reeves’ accounts problems disappear into the ether, and I can even lower tax rates as I do so. The answer is 60/40. We currently measure poverty as being under 60% of median household income – with or without housing costs to taste. This is not a measure of poverty: it is one of inequality. It is about having only two pairs of Primark shoes instead of three pairs of Air Jordans. Actual deprivation, real grinding poverty, simply does not exist in this nation today. Which is, as I’ve pointed out before, why the definition was changed to one of inequality. If the actual aim is to be able to dispossess the rich, then having already solved poverty deprives revolutionaries of their rallying call. Redefining poverty to mean ‘a little less than others’ allows you to keep juicing up the mob. We also have a more modern claim that ‘low wages’ are to be defined as less than 66% of median. This is why the Low Pay Commission is tasked with raising the minimum wage to that 66% – so that someone can gurn at the despatch box while claiming to have solved low wages. Never mind the consequences for youth unemployment, or all the other effects of a minimum wage that is set too high. Both of these figures – the 60% and the 66% – are simply too high. If we leave the market to set incomes, many people will end up being on less than 66% of median wages, and even more on less than 60% of median household income. The cost of avoiding this is vast. Indeed, my opinion is that that’s rather why the targets are set so high – so as to be able to insist upon wholesale dispossession of the rich to be able to meet said targets. But the truth is this cost is too high to be borne over any medium or long term. We are taxing – and regulating, which is an issue for another day – too much for growth to happen. We’re taxing too much, because our poverty and low wage definitions are too high. That means we’ve got to find vast gobs of money to hit the targets. The result is a stagnant economy, which we can see does not, in fact, make people happy, even if inequality isn’t rising. ??Tim Worstall https://lnkd.in/ejDQWWpT

Kemi Badenoch seems to think she has lobbed a grenade into the sanctimonious eco-consensus, but it may be a dud. The UK’s 2050 Net Zero target, she says, is kaput. ‘Impossible,’ she called it, without bankrupting the nation or slashing living standards to levels that’d make a medieval serf wince. Cue the predictable wailing from the green lobby and Labour’s sanctimonious Ed Miliband, but let’s get one thing straight – this isn’t Badenoch rejecting Net Zero itself, just a slowing of the breakneck, self-flagellating sprint towards it. And here’s the kicker: she is not some climate-denying heretic. She’s been on the bandwagon before, zealously waving the green flag as Business Secretary in 2022, touting the ‘clean energy revolution’ as a golden ticket to ‘growth and revitalised communities’. So, what’s changed? Reality, that’s what. Badenoch’s not torching the idea of cleaner energy; she’s just pointing out the bleeding obvious: that the current timetable is a fantasy cooked up by Theresa May’s government in 2019, a parting gift of pious legislation with no roadmap. She’s not against Net Zero policies, per se – she’s still muttering about consulting ‘experts’ to find a sensible target – but she’s had enough of the kamikaze pace. Let’s talk brass tacks. UK energy bills are already eyewatering – up again in January 2025, with another hike looming in April. Why? Gas prices, sure, but also the relentless push to decarbonise faster than a greyhound on speed. Labour’s manifesto promised ￡8.3 billion for Great British Energy to sprinkle some renewable fairy dust, cutting bills by ￡300 by 2030. Cute story, but the reality’s grim: renewables might (and that’s a big might) be cheaper to run once they’re up, but the upfront costs and grid upgrades are monstrous. And gas? Still king, still expensive and still imported. Compare that to our competitors. The UK’s industrial electricity prices are among the highest in Europe – higher than France, Germany and even the US. Investors aren’t daft; they’re pulling out – and fast. Jobs? Exporting them to places like Poland or India, where energy’s cheaper and the eco-guilt trip’s lighter. Miliband’s accelerated decarbonisation isn’t just a noble crusade, it’s economic seppuku, and Badenoch’s half clocked it. ??Gawain Towler https://lnkd.in/ermnNZHK

I am subject to a chronic embarrassment. It is assumed that because I write about politics, I must be able to forecast the future. But I always decline. If people insist, I will have a crack at predicting the recent past, but that is difficult enough. Consider the position last December. The Labour Government had endured a lousy start, and this was entirely its own fault. It had done nothing to prepare for government, concentrating on prettifying ministers with the help of Lord Alli plus some imaginative CV drafting, and finally some mean-spirited indulgence in class warfare. Almost in the aftermath of the huge Labour victory, people were asking how long this could last, to which there was an inevitable and regretful answer. Given the brute force of such a parliamentary majority, four years is doable. Three months later, politics, if not transformed, is certainly very different. The Government has been galvanised – particularly by Donald Trump. The Donald had various expectations for his presidency: Sir Stumbler, for his Premiership too. Neither man would have seen the other as a political partner. That said, ‘partnership’ is still a premature assessment. But this American administration is discovering, as its predecessors almost always did, that out of all the European nations, the Britons are more likely to see the world through the same eyes as the Yanks do. The Starmer Government may yet make a crucial contribution to stabilising Nato. After all, Ernest Bevin was there at the beginning. Certainly, the special relationship seems likely to survive. It of course is a much more complex matter than some simple-minded Tories assume. As Churchill himself discovered vis-a-vis Roosevelt, Americans are not necessarily natural allies. They are too strong and too big. Suez was a spectacular example of everything going wrong, but even the Thatcher-Reagan years saw the president’s early vacillations over the Falklands and the landing on Grenada – without telling Her Majesty’s Government that one of the Queen’s territories was about to be invaded: the Monarch was not pleased – and finally Reykjavik, when the president seemed ready to compromise on the UK’s independent deterrent. ??Bruce Anderson https://lnkd.in/eBX9Tm-c

For me, Margaret Thatcher wasn’t just a historical figure. She shaped my entire view of politics, of leadership and of Britain itself. Many of you will know that I was born in London, but I spent much of my childhood in Nigeria – where I saw firsthand what happens when a country embraces socialism and autocracy. There was no Thatcher-style leadership. No belief in free markets, in personal responsibility or in hard work being rewarded. Instead, there was corruption, state control and economic decline. I remember constant power cuts, shortages and the fear that came with living in a place where the state was strong but the people were weak. I also remember boys in my class at school mocking girls and telling us our place was in the kitchen. Two words always shut them up: Margaret Thatcher. When I moved back to the UK as a teenager, I came not to the country in decline my father remembered, but to a country transformed by Thatcher’s revolution. A country that had confidence, energy and opportunity. I saw what leadership could do. What Conservative principles could achieve. And I realised that Britain was special. I became a Conservative because I saw what happens when government overreaches, when socialism takes hold and when the individual is crushed under the weight of bureaucracy and the soft bigotry of low expectations. Margaret Thatcher taught me something powerful: If you want to change a country, you need courage. You need conviction. And you must never, ever back down from doing what is right. ??Kemi Badenoch MP https://lnkd.in/eMWHVVGJ

The fact that there are currently over nine million adults in the UK economically inactive, including over 3m people on long-term disability benefits and nearly 1m people aged 16-24 not in employment, education or training, is a national scandal. Thinkers like Fraser Nelson have done an impeccable job at highlighting the explosion in inactivity since the Covid pandemic, and it’s a testament to the Government that they’ve picked up the tricky mantle of welfare reform as a necessary plank of its ambitions to ‘Get Britain Working’ again. As Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have been at pains to emphasise, it’s not just for fiscal reasons that this growing problem must be tackled. A job gives people a sense of purpose in life, a way of learning new skills and an opportunity to meet new people and better themselves. Getting more people into work won’t just help balance the Government’s books, it will help give millions of people a better and happier life. The policies announced by Liz Kendall in her statement today are a welcome start. Nearly 2m people currently say that they want a job but are not currently working, with the current welfare system being riddled with incentives that too often prevent people that want to work from entering employment. ‘Right to try’, in particular, will be a gamechanger to give more people the confidence to try working, and the vast majority of people who start a job will go on to thrive in employment. The Conservatives, too, need to buy into the agenda of reform, and the goal of getting 2m more people into work deserves resounding cross-party backing. Labour have been brave to touch areas of policymaking that the Conservatives trod carefully around during their time in office, and Conservative politicians must avoid the temptation to simply criticise from the sidelines, with the recognition that employment and welfare trends were headed in the wrong direction for too long. But the simple fact is that welfare alone is only one piece of the puzzle. There are currently only 800,000 job vacancies in the UK, and the Government aims to get 2m more people into employment, meaning that there is the need for businesses to generate 1.2m new jobs. Job growth is flatlining at best and falling at worst, with figures continually highlighting that more and more companies intend to either reduce headcount or pause hiring. ??Matthew Elliott https://lnkd.in/eFurHt9f

During my years as a start-up founder, I had the dubious pleasure of navigating the spoken and unspoken procurement rules of Network Rail. To my dismay, I found that discretionary budgets didn’t sit with the operations managers who were the direct clients, nor with the Central Innovation team but under the auspices of the multi-million pound Framework Agreements, with any and all grants conditional on compliance with a Kafkaesque series of rules and regulations. Small players like us could bid, of course, but hardly had a chance against the large engineering consultancies, which had both the funds and expertise to navigate these absurd requirements. Our product was effectively shut out. When done properly, government outsourcing of essential services to the private sector is one of the best ways to deliver better value for taxpayers. It uses the creative power of the market to drive up standards and cut costs. But as with anything else the state turns its hand to, procurement has become bogged down in pointless bureaucracy. Currently, the system only serves only a handful of mammoth firms who cash in on lucrative government contracts. This includes the infamous Fujitsu, which recently had its ￡67 million contract extended with HMRC and is reportedly currently bidding for a renewal worth ￡200m next year, despite its involvement in the Post Office scandal. It’s no surprise then that business leaders with an active relationship with the public sector responding to the recent Business Confidence Survey, published by us at the Adam Smith Institute, flagged the state of procurement as a major issue. One engineering firm in particular highlighted how: 'Red tape generated by supply chain supplier approval, especially for SMEs, has become a real burden – for example creating DEI and Net Zero policies that bear no relevance to our business consumes vast amounts of time to get on a supplier database.' ??Carolina Lawson https://lnkd.in/eGRRj27m