Party Conference is a forest and you can only see the trees in front of you. You rely on the media for reports of events elsewhere. I found it perfectly congenial for the 24 hours I was there this week, with a number of interesting policy meetings and roundtables, including one I attended with Michael Gove, who said nothing disloyal or inflammatory. But I found from the media that things were somewhat fraught in other parts of the forest. And certainly the unfortunate U-turn on the plan to cut the top rate of tax back to its 2010 level will be what the Conference is remembered for.
For my part I am highly supportive of the general thrust of the Government’s plan, which is to stimulate growth through supply-side reforms, including tax cuts, to get investment into the sectors and places that need it. I think the PM and Chancellor have the right overall approach and I believe they need the time to introduce the reforms they are planning.
I regret that the strategy included scrapping the 45p rate so early on, just when people on ordinary incomes are facing a serious financial squeeze. And more generally, I am keen to hear a more nuanced account of what will actually deliver the prosperity we all want.
Tax cuts on their own won’t do it, and if the other reforms - like new deregulated Investment Zones - only focus on cutting red tape for business, that won’t do it either. I’m all for lower taxes and fewer regulations, but the roots of prosperity are found in strong families and communities, spreading the values and skills, the social resilience and the local liveability that make good workers and attract investors. A group of colleagues and I set out some suggestions along these lines at Conference in some papers we published here.
The local NHS is in some difficulty, with very high demand in our hospitals and many people unable to get GP appointments. I’ve had emails this week from the friends and neighbours of a lady diagnosed with Parkinson’s who won’t see a specialist, and therefore get treatment, for twelve months - during which her condition will no doubt deteriorate. From the point of view of patients this is simply unacceptable. The causes are pent-up demand from Covid, the ongoing problems with doctor recruitment and retention, and the eternal crisis in social care. The new Government is hell-bent on fixing all these issues, but it will take time - which is no consolation for people needing treatment now.
One ray of hope is the way doctors, councils and communities are cooperating on the ground to identify ways to help people outside the formal structures of the NHS, where this can help - for instance with the prevention of illness, or helping people recover, or simply cope with ageing. There is so much we can do that isn’t about specialist medical treatment - including for illnesses like Parkinson’s. This was the point made by the brilliant Jill Turner of the Marlborough Health and Wellbeing group, which held a big meeting in St Peter’s Church this week that I was delighted to join.
There has been a lot of talk about a new agriculture policy which Liz Truss is dreaming up. I have two priorities here. As a country we need more food security, which means more domestic food production and less imports, which means a more local food economy and more productive techniques for boosting yields. And we need a restored natural landscape, with richer soil, cleaner water and greater biodiversity. I hope that any changes to the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) which will replace the old EU farm payments just for owning land, will satisfy these two, perfectly complementary ambitions.
Both will help the climate too. I was up and out at 5.45am on Friday with the redoubtable Belinda Richardson, Marlborough’s tourism guru, to join a flock of early birds at the Community Kitchen to cheer on the runners completing a relay from Glasgow, where the COP26 climate conference happened last year, to Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt, where COP27 is due to take place. One gaggle of runners, who’d set off from Avebury at 4.30am, passed a bundle of rushes - unlit - to the next gaggle, who jogged off to Ramsbury for the next handover. Their message is that we need to save the local environment to save the global one, which I agree with.
360 Design is a lighting manufacturing company run out of a collection of converted farm buildings in the village of Mildenhall near Marlborough. Jon Baker grew up wondering why everything said ‘made in China’ on it, and here he is making top-end commercial and domestic lights, employing Brits and paying tax in Wiltshire. As I keep arguing the future doesn’t have to look like an exaggerated version of the recent past - ever-more off-shoring to the Far East while our own people wonder where the modern economy has left them. The future can be more local, more sustainable, more high-tech and more prosperous. Wiltshire is brilliantly well-placed - geographically, and with our mix of industries and skills old and new - to participate in this gentle revolution.
