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		Foreword By Roger Helmer MEP British Conservatives, in May 2005, fought a general election, and for the third time in a row, we lost -- although the Labour majority was reduced from 161 to 67. Many commentators agreed that this was one of the most effective and professional campaigns we have run for years. Yet too often our policies seemed to be ad hoc, reactive, pragmatic responses to circumstance, lacking a coherent vision. Two frequent comments from voters on the doorstep illustrate the problem: "I don't know what the Conservative Party stands for". And "There's no difference between the main parties these days". It is not enough to approach each issue with a clean sheet of paper, with one eye on public opinion, and hope to come up with a coherent Conservative view. We must start from clear conservative principles. Of course our principles must be applied in a modern, pragmatic way that suits the circumstances of the 21st century. We must be as relevant and voter-friendly as we can. But unless the principles inform the policies, we shall end up with a rag-bag, not a vision. It seems to some that the Conservative Party is in danger of losing sight of conservative principles, so let's just recall what they are. Liberty. Small government. Low taxes. Enterprise and free markets. Personal responsibility. Family and nation. American Republicans will immediately recognise these as "Jeffersonian principles", but they are the basis of conservative thinking the world over. These are the touch-stone against which every policy prescription must be tested. Let's take a practical example: ID cards. Labour was in favour, to help fight terrorism, control immigration and prevent social security fraud. The UK's third party, the Liberal Democrats, were against, on civil liberties grounds. The Conservative position (as far as I could see) was that it was a difficult question which we should like to think about after the election. We seemed to be weak and indecisive, allowing the Lib-Dems, on this issue, to be, as they claimed, "the real opposition". If we had gone back to our principles of individual liberty and limited government, we should have seen straight away that we should oppose ID cards. They are about big government controlling the individual, a deeply un-conservative position. Of course we should back up our principled position with pragmatic arguments - ID cards did not prevent the Madrid bombings, new arrivals would not have ID cards for months, the government record on implementation of vast computer data-bases is appalling, and the proposed budget would be much better spent on more effective control of ports and airports. But a principled approach would have avoided indecision, and given us the right answer immediately. A second area where we lost sight of principle was in our approach to health and education. Our policies were fine, but because we failed to explain the principles behind them, they were poorly understood. How else is it possible that journalists could write that "For both major parties the buzz-word is choice - so there is little to choose between them"? Labour uses the language of choice, but fails to understand it. The difference between Labour and Conservative on the NHS is (or should be) that we both agree that the government should pay for healthcare, for those who want it to. But Labour believes that the government should also manage and deliver healthcare, whereas Conservatives know that the market can do it better. Our failure to communicate this concept was dramatically illustrated to me by an interview with a voter, who lived in a remote location where only one hospital was within a reasonable distance. "Choice is no good to me", he said, "It's the local hospital or nothing". But the purpose of choice is not merely to pander to the personal preferences of the individual patient. The plain fact is that choice drives quality. Even if only a proportion of patients can exercise that choice, for geographical or other reasons, the fact that some can do so will still drive quality. The patient unable to exercise choice still benefits from the general rise in standards. The Lib-Dems argue that rather than offering choice, we should ensure that every hospital offers uniformly high standards. They fail to see that choice is the mechanism that will deliver those standards. The vexed issue of taxation again illustrates the failure of principle. Our Shadow Chancellor Oliver Letwin was determined, quite rightly, that we should promise only what we could deliver, with elaborately detailed costings to show where the money would come from. But so determined were we not to be depicted as "slash and burn" tax cutters, that we were reluctant to admit the obvious truth - that we should be alert to additional savings that could be made, we should look for additional supply-side growth generated by our modest early tax-cuts, and that as opportunity offered we should deliver further tax cuts, because we believe in low taxes and small government. Europe: our biggest failure of principle. The European issue scarcely surfaced during the election, yet EU treaty obligations compromise our ability to deliver on all of our key domestic policy commitments. Tested against conservative principles, the EU fails dismally. Its bloated, intrusive, prescriptive regulatory regime and its unaffordable social model run directly counter to the principles of liberty, responsibility, low taxes and limited government. More fundamentally yet, it is undermining the independence and indeed the very existence of our nation. If the Conservative Party is not the party of an independent, democratic, sovereign Britain, it is nothing, and deserves to be nothing. Yet our EU policy is a two-headed monster. On the one hand, we are rightly committed to repatriating powers on fisheries, foreign aid, and social policy, and to amending or abrogating parts of the European Convention on Human Rights insofar as they obstruct our other policies. We have hinted that our shopping-list for repatriation will get longer. Yet on the other hand, we insist that Britain will remain "a full and committed member of the EU". These two propositions are clearly incompatible, indeed mutually exclusive. And because they are incompatible, they are simply not credible. It is time to recognise that the EU is a political union, and is fast becoming a quasi-state, in which former member-states will be quasi-provinces. Most of our laws are made in unaccountable foreign institutions, where we have no control and little influence. What little influence we have is progressively diluted by successive waves of EU enlargement. This collection of essays, largely by serving members of the European parliament, takes a fresh look at many of these issues, and proposes genuinely Conservative solutions to the policy options we face.