Sir John Hayes says likely Prime Minister Liz Truss needs to look to the future and unite the British people

In his latest Hayes in the House column, MP Sir John Hayes suggests its time to put the past behind us.

F. Scott Fitzgerald concludes his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, with the insight that we are all boats fighting against the current, ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past.’

Fitzgerald’s understanding of the need to resist the superficial appeal of waves of fashionable, but facile, present preoccupations is wise and welcome.

Nevertheless, politics, whilst being guided by all that’s time honoured, must not become dominated by old arguments.

Too often, debate about our future is overshadowed by the politics of the past, as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair still provide the framework for how many commentators and politicians see the world. Yet Britain’s challenges now are very different from those of the 1970s or even the ‘90s.

Not for the first time, the public realised how much things had changed long before most of the political elite did. People knew that their own lives had altered, often not for the better.

The majority voted for Brexit because they recognised and embraced the need for fundamental change. Yet, this support for a fresh approach has been repeatedly frustrated by a liberal establishment wedded to the assumptions of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton – seen as the ‘smart way’ to do politics.

Underpinning Blair’s ‘third way’ was the assumption that globalisation, and a growing financial services industry, would pay the bills forever.

In practice, Blair’s dogmatic embrace of globalisation hollowed-out our economy and our communities.

Importing cheap goods from countries, such as China, which lack even basic standards of workers’ rights, did much more damage to our manufacturing base than the necessary reforms of the 1980s.

Manufacturing declined at a far greater rate in the Blair years than during Mrs Thatcher’s premiership and dependence on globally provided goods, partly, explains the current, crippling cost of living.

Discourse has become dominated by past problems and personalities precisely because the ’third way’ starved politics of new ideas.

What is most relevant to the Conservative leadership debate about the legacy of Margaret Thatcher is how her ideas were genuinely radically innovative in their time.

Much of the agenda that became known as ‘Thatcherism’ was formulated by Sir Keith Joseph, who perceived that the obsession with ‘the middle ground’ – defined ‘by splitting the difference between Labour and the Conservatives’ - had a corrosive effect.

What really matters to people is their shared values, hopes, and fears. Joseph called this the ‘common ground’.

In the 1980s ‘Thatcherism’ reinvigorated our politics and our economy because it was founded on the commonly held values and aspirations of the people.

Yet, Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph would have recognised that the great challenges we now face today are as much social as economic.

Rampant careless individualism and identity politics are undermining social solidarity.

Yet too many politicians are reluctant to engage with social issues and so to point out that which we know to be true - that children benefit greatly from married parents; that concreting over green fields damages our shared sense of place; or that community cohesion is undermined by high levels of immigration.

Boris Johnson appreciated that people crave government which understands the importance of place and community.

The Government must not abandon that agenda in the name of ‘laissez faire’. As long experience makes clear, the market alone cannot deliver a rebalanced, resilient economy.

As Liz Truss recognises, Brexit provides an exciting opportunity - but it is only a chance to change, not an answer.

As Liz becomes our new Prime Minister, she must begin her stewardship of the nation knowing that the politics of the past are no answer to the challenges of the future; that statesmanship, vision, and decisiveness are required to re-connect politics to shared core values and so unite the British people.