Maybe Nanny does know best

Not least among the shivers down my spine as I listen to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng pump up the rhetoric on their economic revolution is the evocation of myself – myself when young.

Like Ms Truss, I too joined the Liberal party as an Oxbridge fresher. I too believed in the power of personal choice. I too had a dream of unhindered competition liberating the animal spirits of enterprise and individual genius. I too told myself that we liberals must grit our teeth and keep the faith when sink-or-swim left some to sink. I too thrilled to the metaphor of ‘tall trees’ being allowed unencumbered access to the light.

And when (as with Truss) it dawned on me that the Liberal party was not serious about power and I joined the Conservatives, I, like her, carried my liberalism into our new political home. We rallied to our leader, Margaret Thatcher, because we saw in her the faith that as long as some were able to outpace others, and prosper and achieve more than others, the whole of society would benefit. We loved the phrase ‘the dead hand of the state’. I seemed to see that hand everywhere: the Great Impediment; the block to realising our own potential as a nation. ‘The dead hand of the state’ provided us with an all-purpose explanation of economic failure. My politics, then, became the politics of release.

So, aged 28, it was partly with speeches to this effect that I plied Tory gatherings and local Conservative associations until finally I became a parliamentary candidate at 29.

Seven years followed as a backbench MP, and then another 36 as an outsider looking in on my old party. E.M. Forster had written ‘only connect’. My guiding wisdom became ‘only release’. I carry it still within my heart: a flame in the firmament of my beliefs.

But a flame, now I’m old, among others; and a sometimes-flickering flame. Unlike (it seems) with Truss or Kwarteng, experience has dulled the sharpness of such certainties.

Let me, then, examine a phrase beloved of the young Tory hopeful I once was, and now a favourite among Trussites: ‘the nanny state’. It’s a potent metaphor. The starched uniform and joyless constraint on childish exuberance that we associate with nannies in fiction vividly illustrates government’s dreary instinct to find out what people are doing and tell them to stop it. Nobody likes being bossed around.

But Nanny is often right. Nanny may be an author of what Theresa May so memorably called ‘the good that government can do’. Examples? I shall resist the temptation to stray into such territory as social or cultural enlightenment, the abatement of human suffering or even desiderata like happiness, dignity and human rights. Instead let me restrict myself to what Kwarteng and Truss were talking about in Britannia Unchained, and again in last week’s mini-Budget: Nanny’s role in the shackling of economic growth. This growth, as our Prime Minister and our Chancellor never tire of asserting, depends on productivity. Nanny, in fact, often agrees.

There was a time not so long ago when a certain group – half our potential workforce – were all but disqualified from contributing to Britain’s GDP. This group were called ‘women’. Women were generally unable to own property, or to play much more than a menial role in business (let alone politics, where they could not vote). So who helped unleash women’s potential, gave them rights in the workplace, stopped employers throttling their potential by restricting them to mindless occupations? Was it free trade? Was it big business? Was it competition? Was it Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’? No. Step forward Nanny. Nanny it was – legislation, the House of Commons, the first world war, the state – who commanded these things, driven in part by the forces of democracy.

There was a time when instead of investing in technology, machinery and enlightened design, employers took the easy way out to clean Britain’s millions of chimneys. They sent children up them, for niggardly wages because they were children. Many died, most were disabled, damaged or invalided by the experience. Even by the narrowest of economic reckoning, once the human costs were taken into account it was not efficient to use children for this work. As with the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802 and a succession of Factories Acts throughout the 19th century, Nanny had to take the lead. In the end the big employers were begging Nanny to enforce her rulings on the smaller employers.

Nanny, however, had to contend with forerunners of Trussonomics, like Harriet Martineau, who argued that ‘If men and women are to be absolved from the care of their own lives and limbs, and the responsibility put upon anybody else by the law of the land, the law of the land is lapsing into barbarism’. Martineau objected to legislation protecting workers from getting mangled in machines.

Nanny had been busy since the 18th century, when in the Papists Act of 1778 she decreed that Catholics should not be excluded from key parts of the economy. She was still busy in the 20th century, starting with the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, and later the 1944 Education Act outlawing the barring of married women from teaching. In the 21st century, Nanny has been making it easier for part-time employees to contribute to economic growth, and for women to combine employment with family life. In my direct experience, Nanny has helped open up senior professional and management roles to homosexual employees.

Far from ‘shackling’ Britannia, Nanny can play a vital role in maximising economic gain. She knows that when it comes to boosting productivity, bad employers are often foot-draggers. She’ll be raising an eyebrow at Truss’s plan to import cheap labour to prop up otherwise uncompetitive businesses. So spare a thought for Nanny and her work. Without her, I wonder whether we’d even have had a female prime minister in the first place.