The Dicey Conference

In March two Year 12 students attended the Dicey Conference held at Trinity College (Oxford University). One of the students Stephanie Straszynski describes the two days in Oxford:

“It has to be admitted that Louis (McLean Wait) and I knew very little about the Dicey conference before we arrived; simply that it was a forum-styled event being held in Trinity College at Oxford University, and all the expenses bar travel were paid for. We were also informed that the topic would be ‘Would Britain benefit from less government?’ with several guest speakers arguing the cases. As it turned out all the representatives from the con- side of the argument (principally speaking on the benefits of more government) couldn’t make it to the conference, and so we were treated to lectures from Professor D. Myddelton, Oleg Gordrevsky, Professor Tim Congdon and Sir Ivan Lawrence.

After being given the information as to the actual structure of the conference we found ourselves being allotted to ‘syndicates’ – small groups of about ten students led by an accompanying teacher, and my syndicate happened to contain the grandson of the Dicey group’s trustee the McWhirter brothers. What would happen is a speech would be made by one of the speakers, the floor was opened to questions, and then the syndicates separated to different rooms of the college to discuss the issues raised in a more informal and conversational manner. The two-day trip divided the four speakers up evenly, and on the afternoon of Tuesday (11th, March) the opening address was made and followed by the first lecture of Professor Myddelton.

Author of a number of textbooks, and several more outspoken books on broader economic and political views, his most recent book was ‘They meant well: government project disasters’, and he kept true to this theme in highlighting the growing size of government and in particular the amount of money they increasingly require to continue functioning. The facts and figures were at times both impressive and worrying, and after a break in the syndicate groups and a quick tea in the main hall the students, some of whom had travelled since the early hours of the morning, returned for the second lecture: Oleg Gordrevsky.

As suggested by his name, Oleg Gordrevsky was a Russia, and in addition a KGB colonel – eventually the highest ranking person to have worked for Great Britain as a secret agent. Serving for eleven years, he was eventually revealed as a British spy by a CIA turncoat and was promptly imprisoned and subject to interrogation, though managing to escape to Finland hidden in the trunk of a British car. His lecture, aside from being heavily accented, was a powerful piece about the dangers of large, strong governments, and in the question time he plainly admitted that he thought Russia was now both incapable of revolution (as the revolutionaries had all been killed) and unable to function without the corruption present today. From this subsequent syndicate session we were given two hours leave before a reception and dinner, with the guest speaker being Sir Alexander Graham, a former mayor of London.

The night passed in the empty university students dormitories, Wednesday the 12th began early with the first lecture by Professor Tim Congdon a little before ten, and proved to be so radical in some of his views that the term ‘anarchist’ would not have been entirely out of place – he believed so much in the reduction of government he even claimed that we didn’t need one at all, defining himself as one of the more difficult speakers to find ground with.

The last speaker, Sir Ivan Lawrence, was perhaps the most charismatic of the lecturers, a criminal lawyer turned MP; he cracked jokes (I had to resign from my seat due to illness… my constituents were sick of me) and also managed to seriously highlight the pointlessness of the present day’s masses of legislation. From the unenforceable laws such as bicycles running red lights to laws that simply sounded like pure gibberish, he proposed a very poignant point that sometimes less is more.

The closing plenary session, which selected a speaker from each syndicate and prepared several questions based on issues raised over the two days, the conference closed on points such as ‘if we do accept that there should be less government, where should it be cut?’ and, as proposed by Louis, ‘Given the current erosion of civil liberties, should we be worried about a Big Brother state?’