Interview with Oliver Letwin

Jeremy Vine interviewed the British government's representative on the convention on the future of Europe, Peter Hain and the shadow home secretary Oliver Letwin MP.

Interview with Peter Hain

JEREMY VINE: So the lesson from you from Lincoln, is that we need to be much less reliant on the state, but how much less.

OLIVER LETWIN: I don't think it's just a question of being less reliant on the state or even indeed principally that. The lesson is that if we're to have, I think what in the modern jargon is called a sustainable society, then we have to have a society in which as well as being free, as well as being equal before the law, people feel an individual responsibility to make something of their lives, and to help one another make things of their lives. And that means not being clamped down and suffocated by a state that fails to give that opportunity. I think it's best seen if you go to the hardest pressed areas of Britain and you ask the question, is the government trying to make them better? And I think the honest answer to that is, it is. It's not that ministers in the present government or any other government are sitting there with their officials trying to make things worse, that's a ludicrous obsession, but they're trying to make it better and they try to make it better with initiatives, and injections of money and then you go and you talk to people, about what life is like for them, and what they say is well, people came and built things or people have come and provided us with a new road or a, one estate I visited recently, with beautiful raised flower beds. But nothing is really changed because in the case of the raised flower beds, that's a poignant example in my mind of a recent visit, because the local youths then take the bricks from the raised flower beds and start using them as projectiles.

JEREMY VINE: Yes, but that's not an argument surely against the State trying to raise the flower beds.

OLIVER LETWIN: No, no not at all. It's an argument that says, that's not enough. It's not even the beginning of what's really enough. In order to create what I've called a .... society, to create a society in which individuals sustainably flourish, the people who live in a place, have to take some ownership and have to feel that they are part of the business of making it better and sustaining it, and that's I think what Lincoln is saying is, yes we need an equal society, we need one that has equal rights before the law, we need a free society, but we also need a society in which people accept their individual responsibility and their communal responsibility to do something for themselves and their communities.

JEREMY VINE: Now Lincoln had a much smaller state. His state spent 10% of GDP, we spend 40% of GDP. Do you think we could even think in terms of pulling back or halving the size of the state.

OLIVER LETWIN: No, not, not realistically now. But there is something else we can do. When Ian Duncan Smith recently made, what I think is a ground breaking speech that encapsulates sort of eighteen months of work, and he talked about a fair deal for everyone, no one being held back and no one being left behind, what he was talking about was not going back nostalgically to a world which is long gone. But rather, using modern methods to achieve the sorts of aims I've been talking about; let's take the case of schooling. The state scholarship for the inner city pupil, who's currently locked in a bad school. Now if that pupil was in the Netherlands or in Sweden or in Denmark, they'd be able to take the money the state spends on them, yes there is the state spending, yes we're raising the money via the taxpayer. They'd be able to take that money and they'd be able to use it on a school that might have been created by a local charity or created by a local trust, or created by the parents. In our country you can't do that at the moment, and what we're saying is, let's find the mechanisms, using the money that the state provides in many cases, to enable people to create sustainable communities.

JEREMY VINE: I'm just trying to, to work out how the Lincoln model could work for the Conservative party. I know you've got a drug and crime rehabilitation policy, which you'll be announcing shortly, maybe you could say how it would work there because if you're going to ask voluntary groups to look after drug offenders for example, you do lose the safety net that the state puts in place don't you.

OLIVER LETWIN: No and that's, that's another very good example. I announced a while ago, and I'm delighted to have another opportunity, and I shall keep trying to get opportunities to reannounce it, announced a while ago that there's a terrible contrast between this country and the Netherlands and Sweden on hard drugs. We have a tenth as much support for rehabilitation treatment. We need the voluntary sector to work at that. We need to fund that centrally, not bureaucratically, through the voluntary sector. So let's have the central funding, but let's use it effectively to get treatment and rehabilitation for the hard drug addicts, out of the people who can really deliver it on a human scale in the voluntary sector.

JEREMY VINE: Oliver Letwin, thank you very much for coming and thank you for the film as well. Thank you.

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