MPs Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Chris Skidmore explain their vision for the British workforce: work harder and work longer
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guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 October 2012 16.49 BST
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Dominic Raab: 'The average number of hours worked by Britons has fallen by a third.' Photograph: Sutton-Hibbert/Rex Features
The young authors of Britannia Unchained - a manifesto for the new Tory right - set out their stall on the Conservative conference fringe this afternoon.
In their book MPs Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss (who was absent) call for a Britain of extreme economic liberalism in which, in the words of Labour's Jon Cruddas, "their ideal worker is one prepared to work long hours, commute long distances and expect no employment protection and low pay". The Financial Times called it "shock therapy for the country", a quote the publishers apparently took as a compliment.
I usually try to adopt a neutral tone in these blogposts, but I have to say I found the whole thing pretty terrifying. Britannia Unhinged might have been a better title.
Raab lamented the fact that their book had been caricatured as "Tories blast lazy Brits", but said that since Thomas Edison's time (he died in 1931) "the average number of hours worked by Britons has fallen by a third … We have a shrinking proportion peddling harder and harder not just to drive our economy but also to maintain our precious public services."
He was keen for this not to be seen as public sector v private sector - he said that since 1997 lawyers' hours had stayed constant while police officers' had increased, for example - but he rather let the cat out of the bag by adding: "On average public sector workers work two hours a week less than private sector employees yet they're paid more and they're less productive."
Raab said that "Labour's push to get 50% of young people into university was particularly pernicious. Too many of our universities are instilling a culture of laziness" just when we needed the opposite. University students worked on average 26 hours a week, he said - "seven hours less than the European average". (The idea that university work can be totted up and compared this way seems a bit reductive to me.)
He concluded: "We're going to have to rediscover, recognise and reward the lost value of hard graft that made this country great" - which really is not a million miles away from "Tories blast lazy Brits".
Kwarteng also touched on education, saying that for 30 years exam results had improved, a sequence that could only be seen in the "natural world" in terms of life expectancy. Everyone else seems to be using the Olympics as an example of everything at the moment, so I will just politely ask him to consider that physical and sporting achievements are almost uniformly on the same sort of upward curves.
Asked about the cancelled Building Schools for the Future programme, Skidmore said private companies made "rapacious" profits from it. "Why do we not then have for-profit schools? … India, China, they're not spending the big bucks on the buildings. It's the teachers that matter."
If anything, the audience seemed even more rightwing than the panel. The MPs were asked by businesswoman Rachel McLean: "When I go to India I don't hear anybody talking about work-life balance … Why do we spend all our time talking about it in the UK?"
Raab replied that his wife was expecting their first child, but she "earns considerably more than me" so "how do you balance the dual roles of breadwinning and childcaring?" That was a "major issue" for his family, he said, although he did not see it as one of work-life balance.
Patel said of Indian businessman Ratan Tata "there was a great deal of hysteria when he said he comes over here and at 5pm people are simply not there [at work]". There were different cultures in the country regarding work, she said. Her own immigrant parents "worked 24/7 running small shops", and Patel said she shared that work ethic.
It was left to one delegate to point out that in countries such as India and China that the authors were lionising great proportions of the population "work very hard but for very little money". Patel said they weren't holding up these countries as role models but merely pointing out that they were now Britain's competitors.
A male delegate asked why there was such public hostility to the "modest improvements" (aka cuts) the government were making. Raab's impenetrable answer was: "We don't stretch debate enough … What we must do is have more rigour and more scrutiny and open it up." Kwarteng said those protesting were merely speaking up for their own "sectional interests".
Kwarteng, as you might expect, attacked Labour for having run up deficits in times of growth. But more surprisingly he praised the 1997-2001 Labour government - which didn't do that - as "probably the best government on a fiscal basis since the war".