Danny Kruger is one of the most thoughtful conservative thinkers alive today and that small "c" in conservative is deliberate. Although he worked for the Centre for Policy Studies, edited the comment pages of The Daily Telegraph and worked for both Iain Duncan Smith and David Cameron he has appear estranged from the big "C" Conservative Party in recent times. For him the family and community are at least as important as individual liberation and being "business-friendly" - and he doesn't see enough of the former on today's "Right". In that respect he was an ally of Steve Hilton during the early days of Cameronism - in constant tension with the more individualistic and libertarian George Osborne. Since resigning as Mr Cameron's chief speechwriter he has been running "Only Connect" - a brilliant charity working with younger offenders.
In a new essay for the Demos magazine he does not attempt to hide his estrangement:
"The Conservative Party's 2015 election campaign was misguided, it seemed to me at the time. Leave aside the blatant bribes to the better off. The message narrowly focused on individual effort, personal responsibility and private reward. The Conservatives seemed to see labour mobility as an undiluted good, family formation as irrelevant, and economic growth as the sole indicator of national progress. Whereas – I thought – people wanted their leaders to care about communities, about families, and about wellbeing."
He goes on to admit that he was wrong (at least electorally) - the Lynton Crosby agenda that turned him off did nonetheless deliver the first Tory majority since 1992. But, he continues, let's have an agenda that justifies being in power. Rather than deficit reduction he calls for an emphasis on "social growth". It's a big idea. Rather than the state providing less Danny wants society to provide more (by which he means families, charities, neighbourhoods, social enterprises etc):
"We need to nurture a generation of capable, resilient men and women, self-reliant and mutually-reliant – able to help themselves and each other – and ultimately reduce the need for expensive interventions, whether preventative or remedial."
In his Demos article he sets out what that agenda would look like. It has three key ingredients:
(1) A shift from cure to prevention: Quoting the Early Intervention Foundation he notes that spending £5 billion now in preventive services should save £17 billion later on in no-longer-needed remedial services. People are right to be sceptical about such very specific savings but every parent knows that it's easier to prevent a kid going off the rails than to get them back on track. The Troubled Families Initiative - spearheaded by the estimable Louise Casey - is one of the real successes of the government and it could be the template.
(2) Every person is an under-developed asset - rather than a problem: Adam Smith did not write The Poverty of Nations - he wrote The Wealth of Nations. Danny has a similar positive focus and regrets that programmes focus on "criminals or drug addicts or homeless people or the mentally ill". What Britain needs, he argues, is "programmes for entrepreneurs and gardeners and coders and artists." He accuses the welfare state of "institutional snobbery" - treating people as if they need sympathy and help rather than empowerment.
(3) Radical devolution: Danny Kruger paints a dispiriting picture of disjointed charitable services - "a million subscale, fragmented charities, many doing great work but on a shoe string, with no cohesive mission or way of working with each other or with the public sector". He thinks the solution is the devolution to cities of the kind developed by Greg Clark MP and championed by George Osborne where funding providers are closer to the social infrastructure.
Read Daniel Kruger's Demos article but within the collection of essays that he has put together I particularly recommend Alex Smith's "The Connecting State".
