How the Isle of Man can save the Tory party

If you ask a typical member of the Conservative party what they want Britain to look like, you’ll get the usual list: low taxes, high growth, strong borders, low crime, sensible regulation, green countryside. If you ask a Conservative MP how Britain might achieve these things, you’ll get a long list of excuses: it simply can’t be done, it’s a bit more complicated than that, the budget isn’t there.

And yet we know for a fact that these things are possible because we can see them elsewhere. Our neighbours are wealthier than us, our politicians promise to copy Australia’s immigration system, and Singapore and Japan show that crime is not an immutable fact of life. Somewhere in the neural wiring of the Conservative party, a link is missing. We know that other places do better and we know that we want these things. What we don’t do is learn from them. 

Some Conservatives have developed a long list of psychological self-defence mechanisms to prevent them from realising quite how far they’ve allowed the country to fall.