Overton Window: Policies for a Better Britain

Dr Madsen Pirie calls on politicians to embrace bold, innovative solutions to reverse Britain’s decline including abolishing the Town and Country Planning Act, moving to an Australian-style healthcare system,and scrapping inheritance tax.

This conference season, as politicians of all stripes are reflecting on the suite of challenges facing the UK, a new discussion paper shows how we can address them and build a better Britain.

Co-Founder and President of The Adam Smith Institute, Dr Madsen Pirie, sets out a series of game changing ideas that would tackle the UK’s long standing problems. He draws from real-world examples, including New Zealand’s agricultural policies, Singapore’s tax system, Sweden’s model for education and pensions, and Australia’s healthcare approach.

This unapologetically radical paper cuts through the Westminster consensus, encouraging our political class to think beyond traditional limits. His key recommendations include:

• Allow businesses to fund university degrees, ensuring students graduate with jobs and no debt;

• Improve the UK’s healthcare system by adopting the Australian model under which people can choose between public and private treatments; 

• Pay for social care out of funds into which young people put money, which are invested and grown, and are there to pay for their own social care later in life if needed, and to be passed on to heirs and successors if not;

• Repeal the Town and Country Planning Acts to free up so-called Green Belt land, providing the homes needed for the next generation;

• Abolish subsidies and tariffs, emulating the model of New Zealand’s world-leading agriculture sector;

• Simplify the tax system, and scrap inheritance tax;

• Treat drug addiction as a medical, rather than a criminal, problem;

• Cut funding for quangos at home and abroad;

• Count foreign private aid in the form of remittances sent overseas as part of its total foreign aid;

• Incentivise private aid to poorer countries by making it tax-deductible.

Dr Madsen Pirie, President and Co-founder of the Adam Smith Institute and report author said: 

“As we have long been saying, the Adam Smith Institute proposes things which people regard as being on the edge of lunacy. The next thing you know, they're on the edge of policy.

It pays at times to stand back from the constant cut-and-thrust and point-scoring of everyday politics to examine what Britain might look like if some of its problems were addressed by imaginative and long-term solutions.

I called this paper the Overton Window because the ideas included in it are radical and game changing. Given the condition of and prospects for the state-run current practices, it is time that the Overton Window was stretched to bring them inside it.”

-ENDS-

Notes to editors:

For further comment, or to arrange an interview with Madsen, please contact press@adamsmith.org | +44 7584778207.

Dr Madsen Pirie is President of the Adam Smith Institute, and was one of three Scots graduates working in the US who founded the Institute in 1977. Before that, Madsen worked for the House of Representatives in Washington DC, and was Distinguished Visiting Professor Philosophy at Hillsdale College in Michigan.

At the Institute, Madsen was part of the influential team which pioneered privatisation and the extension of market choices and incentives. His work in helping to develop the Citizen’s Charter led to his appointment to the Prime Minister’s Advisory Panel from 1991-95.

The Adam Smith Institute is one of the world’s leading think tanks. It is ranked first in the world among independent think tanks and as the best domestic and international economic policy think tank in the UK by the University of Pennsylvania. Independent, non-profit and non-partisan, the Institute is at the forefront of making the case for free markets and a free society, through education, research, publishing, and media outreach.