John Redwood: Conservative voters are looking for a bold new agenda, and nothing less is going to woo them

Sir John Redwood is a former MP for Wokingham and a former Secretary of State for Wales.

What should conservatives offer? The audience is wanting a change from the high taxes, wasteful spending, excessive borrowing offered by the current government.

Labour won with a large majority of seats but only got one third of those voting to support it.

Nine months on that is down to just a quarter. Pensioners, the disabled, business and savers have every reason to be angry. Growth has been crushed, inflation is rising, longer term interest rates driven up, vacancies are down, investment and new jobs have been cancelled and optimism has been abolished.

Last weekend I spoke to meetings in Wirral and Manchester. The audience wanted a conservative agenda to look forward to and to fight for in future local and national elections. They wanted hope for a more prosperous future, an end to policy madness and a slimmer fitter state delivering high quality core services. I set out three big central tasks for the next government.

The first is to transform economic prospects by going for growth with an approach which will deliver. Taxes on the rich and on business need to be lowered. That will bring in more revenue. We need to end the flight of billionaires and millionaires to the exit , as they have been paying much of the tax.

We need them to stay and pay or to return and invest.

We need to lower the tax on creating jobs and employing people. We need to scrap IR 35 which stops more self-employment, raise the VAT threshold for small business and lower business rates. This needs to be paid for by eliminating some of the massive losses of the Bank of England who are sending taxpayers a bill for £38 bn for just the last year, and the railways.

We need to carry through a good reform of welfare through helping more people into work. It does not mean taking benefit away from people who need it. It starts by doing more to avoid thousands more qualifying for a sick note for life by helping them get better or assisting them into work with suitable support.

The second is to end the many disastrous policies pursued in the name of net zero. Many of these policies fail in their own terms as they increase world CO 2 whilst hurting UK consumers and the economy. End the ban of getting our own gas out of the ground. Importing liquefied natural gas instead greatly adds to world CO 2 given all the extra energy used in liquefying, transporting it and then turning the product back into gas. We also lose all the well-paid jobs and billions in tax revenue.

End the 2030 ban and the extra taxes on new diesel and petrol cars .

Forcing people to buy battery cars means burning more gas in power stations to recharge them as we are short of reliable wind power. Stop promoting heat pumps. That just means gas on a cold still winter day burned in a power station instead of in someone’s home. Stop the dear energy policy which is closing our petrochemical, ceramics, steel, vehicle and refining industries. Electricity is four times the price of gas per unit of energy. Gas is not usually the reason our power prices are high.

The third is the need to reduce migration into the UK massively.

Most has been legal migration, so Ministers can just change the eligibility for visas. We now need all the jobs we can create for people already legally settled here so stop visas for jobs below £50,000 a year and for people needing benefits or free public services to live here. Net migration has been running at 750,000 a year. We should have built 3 cities the size of Southampton each year to provide for them.

The public sector costs for subsidised homes, new schools and hospitals and extra utility provision are huge. We can longer afford that, and have failed to expand provision enough for all the people coming in. No wonder rents are through the roof, NHS waiting lists are long and we are short of water and sewage pipes.

Here are three big issues where the half of the public with conservative views are desperate for change.

The government itself says it wants to reduce migration, wants welfare reform and a slimmer state. Its problem is welfare reform does not work if you overtax jobs and destroy confidence and vacancies. You do not get growth if you are wedded to net zero policies that close our factories to rely on imports. We get poorer per head with dear energy and an economy crippled with high taxes.

You don’t stop migrants with words or false promises to smash the gangs.

You need Ministers to change the rules and to enforce them.