The Conservatives have the power to win over the public: They just don’t use it .

The Conservatives are having a bus moment. Just when you have given up hope of any bus coming to the rescue, a couple of them come hurtling towards you. ‎

The first to arrive was one driven by Nick Boles, the MP for Grantham and Stamford, who is launching his manifesto to reform the party via a new book – Square Deal. Boles wants Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, to end austerity when he presents his Budget next week and usher in an era of investment to create greater wealth and higher wages.

What if the Tories don’t follow his advice? Well, Boles is under no illusion that they will be in trouble:  “We can not expect to be re-elected if we have no new story to tell and no new direction.”

Boles hopes to tell his new story by publishing monthly instalments of Square Deal – a play on Theodore Roosevelt’s radical Square Deal programme launched in 1910. Just as the Republicans faced annihilation in the US, so he warns the Tories are on their way out unless they dare to square up to the robber barons and fight for the working man and woman.
And just as Roosevelt took on the “robber barons” in the oil and rail industries by busting open  monopolies, so Boles argues the Tories should be taking on the big monopolies at home and making the Amazons of this world, which run rings around domestic governments by exploiting international tax treaties, to pay their fair share of UK taxes.

His latest chapter on the economy has masses of ideas – some good, some bad – ranging from introducing a new sales tax on global giants such as Apple and Amazon, to get them to pay tax, to proposing a bribe to shareholders into capping executive high pay in return for lower corporation tax. (His sales tax on giants like Amazon is good but his cap on pay is a terrible idea.)

Then yesterday came the full throttle of the Centre for Policy Studies machine.  And about time too.  As the home of so much of Margaret Thatcher’s reformist zeal, through her work with Keith Joseph, the CPS has catching up to do. Behind the wheel is Lord Saatchi, a former party chairman, and his co-chauffeur is Graham Brady,  who chairs the all important 1922 committee of backbenchers and fend off wannabe leaders. (So it’s intriguing that Theresa May is putting her name to this new campaign.)

Saatchi and Brady want their new CPS campaign, New Generation, to revive fresh thinking to kill off Corbyn by showing the same sort of original thinking that Thatcher demonstrated in the 1970s.  “At the moment, the wrong ideas are winning. The British people think that business can’t be trusted. That the free market isn’t working. That the rich get richer, and the rest get screwed. That is why, rather than being terrified at the prospect of a hard-Left government, many of them actively welcome it – to the point where at the last election, Jeremy Corbyn was only 2,227 votes from power.”

So, they say:  “If we are to save Britain from a Corbyn government, the case for the market needs to be made once again. Not just with slogans, but by the kind of concrete, practical, aspirational policies that these politicians, and the many others who are engaging with this project, are producing.”

There’s a third bus – the one being steered by George Freeman MP, chair of the PM’s Policy Board, who is also working on a raft of interesting ideas with the latest intake of MPs through his recent Big Tent festival.

These are not the only reforming Tories – there are other individual MPs – such as cabinet minister Sajid Javid – who are speaking out loudly on the big issues worrying the voters from housing to mental health.

All this is good stuff and to be welcomed: but it’s all too cosy, too comfortable, like a cup of milky Ovaltine before bed. And yes, it’s sending the rest of us to sleep. Sure, all these bright and reforming Conservative are showing they understand the disaster of the last election, that they understand the sanctimonious nature of the messages they put forward then but are now bold enough to stand up and cry for new ideas.  As you would expect, the CPS wants to show ‘the public that we know how to fix the problems they face. To explain why Conservative solutions can help.”

My concern is that they are all missing a trick; they are thinking too hard about new thinking. Instead, they need to get back to the present.  Most of the issues that they – and the public – are concerned about can be solved now – because they don’t actually need any new laws or Boles’s idea for a new Commission on productivity, or whatever, to achieve reform. That’s just another quango.  What’s more, I reckon the public know that too; another reason why they sniff at all politicians.

We all know that the markets are not working. You know why ? Because the government interferes, particularly in tax, housing, energy and does too little with the powers it already has to make it easier to distribute wealth through mechanisms,  for example, that will promote truly transformative ideas such as employee share ownership. Free markets never work on their own: they have to be open but also regulated – fiercely. And the ways to do that are  staring the Tories in the face.

Put bluntly, this government doesn’t use the powers that it already has, either to promote enterprise, break up the robber barons or to punish excess.

Maybe that’s too easy. Finding scapegoats or writing new policy papers is more fun.

Take tax.  Amazon paid £15 million tax in the UK last year on sales of £7.3 billion. Marks & Spencer, by contrast, paid corporation tax of nearly £100m ( plus business rates) on around £9.5 bn.  Boles suggests a new sales tax would make Amazon pay more. But why wait? Just outlaw all transfer pricing and other gimmicks.

Then take housing. We know the reasons for sky-high house prices: lack of supply, exorbitant stamp duty, tight green belt rules, developers having to wait several years because of tough planning laws for consent,  Nimby councils and Nimby neighbours. To give Nick Boles his credit, he’s spot on when he says the reason most people object to new homes is because they are “pig-ugly”.
Yet all this is so easy to fix. Scrap all stamp duty, encourage parish councils in every village in the land to allow a few more new homes in their territory, bribe town councils to switch consent from commercial to residential and set tip-top standards for new housing to include the latest in technological standards and self-sufficiency in energy savings like solar or triple glazing.

Then show the public that there is not one rule for the rich and one for the rest of us. The law is there in civil negligence to punish anyone who is alleged to have acted imprudently from Fred Goodwin to Sir Philip Green. Section 172 of the Companies Act states that a director has a duty to promote the success of a company and, critically, act with regard to the “interests of the company’s employees”—and that means relations with suppliers, customers and others. There are hundreds more examples of how the government can crack down on egregious behaviour. You just need the will.