MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: Tories must chart the nation’s future – not focus merely on tax

The next leader of the Conservative Party will have many problems to solve. This is a large, complicated, powerful country passing through many huge changes.

We are recovering from the multiple crises caused by Covid – affecting education, health, criminal justice, employment and transport.

The BBC and its licence fee clearly cannot survive in their existing shape for much longer, and this great and important institution will require imaginative and thoughtful reform.

We are only just beginning to grasp the huge opportunities and changes which Brexit has brought and will continue to bring for decades to come.

We need to develop considered policies which will keep us prosperous and safe into the century which lies ahead. Yet the contest for the Tory leadership has so far concentrated almost completely on the narrow issue of taxation

We are deeply engaged in the greatest European war for a generation, and though we are not actually taking part in it, we are heavily committed to Ukraine. Partly as a result, we face the most pressing energy crisis that Europe has ever experienced.

Nationalism in Scotland and Wales puts unceasing pressure on the Union. Our system of government, especially the House of Lords, is plainly creaking. The long and tumultuous reign of Queen Elizabeth II, in which one beloved person has held us together by personal charisma and selfless restraint, will in the fullness of time come to an end.

And, as National Farmers’ Union president Minette Batters argues on the page on the right, the huge issue of food security, linked to our treasured countryside and a vast part of our economy, remains largely unsettled.

Rhetoric and slogans will not help us resolve these matters.

We need to develop considered policies which will keep us prosperous and safe into the century which lies ahead. Yet the contest for the Tory leadership has so far concentrated almost completely on the narrow issue of taxation.

Sir Keir Starmer seems to lack the force to take on the militants, he fails to convince as a reborn Brexiteer and he certainly lacks the glamour, decisiveness and brio he would need to emulate the success of Tony Blair

No doubt this is important, and it is good that we should know the candidates’ views on it. But it gives little clue as to where Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak stand on the many other matters which will occupy the time and energy of whoever becomes Premier in September.

In fact, sad experience shows that, whatever commitments governments may make on tax, circumstances may force them to go back on what were genuinely firm promises. Mr Sunak knows this all too well. Ms Truss may one day find it out the hard way.

Ultimately, tax is secondary to political aims.

Here, in one of the world’s most mature democracies, a great political party is considering its future and its purpose. It would be a shame to miss the opportunity to debate far more widely on what it stands for.

It would hugely benefit both party and nation if Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak together chose to do so from now on.

After all, a clear and coherent position on the country’s pressing needs would give the Tories a huge advantage over the Labour Party, once again up to its axles in controversy over its purpose.

Is Labour to be merely the political arm of increasingly militant and irresponsible trade unions, still its paymasters? Or is it to be the voice of the metropolitan, woke Left?

Has it anything useful to say about the economy, industry or agriculture? Not that we have heard. Does it offer a genuinely new approach to any of our national problems?

In truth, Labour remains an awkward pantomime-horse coalition of middle-class Remainers and union militants.

Sir Keir Starmer seems to lack the force to take on the militants, he fails to convince as a reborn Brexiteer and he certainly lacks the glamour, decisiveness and brio he would need to emulate the success of Tony Blair.

The Tories have done themselves a lot of harm, but if they can now come up with a coherent programme to keep this country at the forefront of the world’s civilised nations, they have little to fear from a fractured, bickering Left.

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