# Literature/2010/Moore

Authors :
* A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z &

## Editorial note

Nick Clegg's Great Repeal Bill is indeed great – but who thought of it first, asks Charles Moore.

## Authors
### Charles Hilary Moore

    Born 31 October 1956, Hastings. Trinity College, Cambridge (BA in history).
* Chairman of Policy Exchange, the conservative think tank.
* Margaret Thatcher's authorised biographer for publication after her death.
* Former editor of The Spectator (1984-90), the Sunday Telegraph (1992-5) and The Daily Telegraph (1995-2003).

## Excerpts
### The origin of Great Repeal Bill

   This week, Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, invited members of the public to suggest laws that could be abolished in his forthcoming Great Repeal Bill. Addressing the readers of this newspaper, he explained that, under New Labour, thousands of unnecessary new laws and regulations were passed, "and it is our liberty that has paid the price".
   But if you google "Great Repeal Bill", the top entry, from Wikiversity, makes no mention of the Liberal Democrat leader. It rightly attributes the idea to Douglas Carswell, the Conservative MP for Harwich, and the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, who proposed it, in 2008, in their book called The Plan.
   I mention this to draw attention to where this Government's good ideas are coming from. The Carswell/Hannan repeal proposal itself descends from thinking which I first heard advanced in the early 1980s at the free-market Institute for Economic Affairs by the director, Ralph Harris, who was made a peer by Margaret Thatcher. Lord Harris of High Cross – who decided not to take a coat of arms with his title because he could see no way of depicting Adam Smith's "invisible hand" on it – set up a "Repeal Group" in the House of Lords. Naturally, the Liberal Democrat leader has not revealed the geneaology of his excellent scheme. [links not original]

### Right-wing

   So it would be fair to say that the zeal for repealing laws and rules, and the ingenuity in doing so, comes from the Right. This, of course, makes such reform suspect in polite society. As chairman of the think tank Policy Exchange, I notice that the BBC refers to us as "Right-wing" when it wishes to convey disapproval of our policy work, "centre-Right" when it is including us for "balance", and without any political label when it likes what we are saying.
   So great is the taint of being "Right-wing" in the eyes of the BBC, the bureaucracy and academia that it is almost like being non-white in apartheid-era South Africa. Any idea so labelled is condemned to a life of "separate development". This is a problem of which Mr Cameron has been very conscious from the beginning of his leadership. He believed he had to get back on terms with the chattering classes in order to get a hearing at all. [links not original]

## Wikimedia

| Libertarianism Utilitarianism Egalitarianism Thatcherism Populism Laissez-faire Free market | Friedrich Hayek Antony Fisher Ralph Harris Margaret Thatcher Milton Friedman John Hoskyns Institute of Economic Affairs Atlas Economic Research Foundation International Policy Network Austrian school of economics Chicago school of economics |

## Chronology

* Literature/1977/Hoskyns $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1975/Sober $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1973/Schumacher $^{[^]}$
* Literature/1944/Hayek $^{[^]}$

## Comments

The Great Repeal Bill is making it simple, doing without something. It may have been more or less affected by the 1973 energy crisis, Schumacher (1973) and Sober (1975). The simplified yang, the magnified yin. The less explication of written law, the more implication of unwritten law and "invisible hand," the metaphor that seized Ralph Harris and perhaps even Margaret Thatcher. The metaphor itself is an "implicature" (Paul Grice 1975), "implicit meaning" (Mary Douglas 1975), or "creative imagination" (Michael Polanyi 1975), covered with the face value or explicit meaning. (Incidentally, these three 1975 authors are as Oxonian as Thatcher.)