Douglas Carswell

Swedish levels of public spending. Texan levels of public service provision. Britain needs change

If you're a Lefty, you probably think Britain ought to be more like Sweden, with high levels of tax and spend. Those on the political Right might want to model ourselves more on low-tax Texas.

But bizarrely, Britain today manages to combine Swedish levels of tax and spend, with Texan standards of public service provision. No wonder voters on both Left and Right feel let down.

"Don't exaggerate, Carswell," I hear you say. "It can't be that bad." But how many hospitals in downtown Houston do you suppose are subject to police investigations over the alleged manipulation of cancer patients' data? My local hospital is.

I know a school in Essex where nine out of 10 children do not get an A*-C grade GCSE in maths and English. How many charter schools in the US would be able to get away with that?

Government spending as a percentage of GDP might be coming down. But it is falling from a Scandinavian 48 per cent peak.

By any objective measure, Britain has been badly run for a generation. The amount of tax taken by the state has rocketed, without the corresponding improvements in public services the public had a right to expect.

Instead of defending the way things are, we Conservatives need to be a little bit less conservative. We need to be the party of radical change.

In 2015 voters will face a clear choice; either you can vote for Ed Miliband – and the idea that we should hose yet more money at public services, hoping that this time it will be different – or you can vote for more public service reform, and the idea that those who run public services ought to answer to the public.

But it is not just public service reform that Conservatives need to champion. Britain desperately needs political reform, too.

One of the reasons Britain has been so badly run under successive governments is that it has been run from the sofa in Downing Street.

A more "presidential" Downing Street has not always got the big, macro decisions right, whoever is in charge. From Margaret Thatcher's implementation of the poll tax, to Tony Blair on Iraq and David Cameron over Syria, those on the sofas in Number 10 could have done with someone else saying "hang on, chaps. Are we sure about this?"

Instead of voting to change which clique gets to sit on the sofa in Number 10, we need to vote to change the system of sofa government itself.

Ministers and mandarins need to answer outward to Parliament, not just to the special advisers in Number 10. Ministers today ask themselves "will judicial review allow me to do this?" We need proper legislative review of ministers' actions.

Instead of a president in Number 10, we need to return to the notion that the Prime Minister is primus inter pares. If MPs are to be bound by collective responsibility, government needs to be bound by Cabinet decision-making once again.

Our politics, like our public services, needs reform to ensure far more openness and accountability. Do that, and we might be better governed whoever is in government.

This first appeared on the Telegraph site, where Douglas writes regularly.

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