Championing Policies

Policy Approval by the Electorate

The Jury Team has identified ten legislative Proposals which the political class does not wish to deal with but which are clearly important to the public, as shown in a series of YouGov polls it has commissioned.  It will pass legislation on each of these issues.  However as it believes in the electorate's ultimate right to decide, these Proposals will all be passed subject to an authorising referendum.   The Jury Team has chosen policies which it appears will be passed by such referendums as there is no point in wasting Parliamentary time on policies which the public does not want.

The ten policies cover a wide range of issues which appeal across the electorate.  The detailed YouGov poll results can be seen by clicking on this download but key findings from the results are as follows (ABC1 is the pollster's definition of the people in administrative/managerial/supervisory households and C2DE in manual and unemployed households):

1. Holding a referendum on the status of the UK within the EU: 59% agree (37% strongly agree and 22% tend to agree) and 31% disagree (13% strongly disagree and 17% tend to disagree). More popular among C2DE at 65% than among ABC1 at 55%.

2. Limiting government borrowing to 10% of expenditure: 47% agree and 19% disagree.  Stronger support among C2DE at 50% than among ABC1 at 45%.

3. Protecting bank customer deposits from casino banking: 73% support and only 9% against, with 80% support among the 55+ age group.

4. Limiting benefits to 80% of the after tax minimum wage:  63% in favour and only 15% against with 59% support even among the C2DE who are likely to be most affected.

5. Sentencing violent criminals to 'army style' punishment:  78% support with only 11% against and with only 8% of the C2DE against.

6. Limiting UK troops in Afghanistan to the NATO average: Supported by 67% to 14% with particular support among females (71%) and those aged 55+ (75%).

7. Requiring private medical insurance for non-EU citizens: 78% in favour and only 10% against.

8. Establishing 10 year residence requirement for UK Citizenship: 63% agree with the 10 year rule and 81% that any crime in those 10 years should disqualify someone for Citizenship (highest in both cases among the C2DE).

9. Allowing state schools to opt out from local authority control: Approval by 36% to 33% in England and by 31% to 27% in Wales.  Main approval is from the C2DE who currently have to put up with the worst schools.

10. Requiring stores to allow customers to leave excess packaging

We shall also make the political system more responsive and give back the balance of power to the electorate:

11. Setting up an English Parliament

12. Holding a referendum on the status of Scotland within the UK

13. Giving the Welsh Assembly similar powers to the Scottish Parliament

14. Reducing the number of MPs by a third (from 650 to 433)

15. Changing Commons elections to proportional representation

16. Requiring referendums on petition by 5% of the electorate

17. Introducing "no-fault" compensation for public bodies

The Failures of Traditional Political Parties

The need for reform of our political system is now seen as urgent by the public.  The current political class has failed the country.  It is time for a real change, not just an exchange of one group of career politicians for another.  

Peter Oborne, the experienced political journalist, says in his book The Triumph of the Political Class:

'The techniques of manipulation, deception, smear and institutional capture have taken power away from ordinary voters and placed it in the hands of the Political Class.  But this means that democratic politics in Britain no longer does the job most people want it to do.  Rather than resolve conflict, it suppresses it.  Rather than inform voters, it deceives them.  Rather than place a check on the power of the executive, it celebrates it.  This is a fantastically dangerous structure.

Voters put their MPs into Parliament to represent their interests, and to articulate their anger, not to form part of a comfortable club, or to collude with opposition parties'

In an Editorial in November 2008, The Times said:

'Britain has more children leaving school at 16 than any comparable nation. A tiny fraction of crimes are seen all the way through to prosecution. The incapacity benefit bill is still huge. So are the unfunded pension liabilities. There has been a decade-long experiment in the social democratic idea that money and a modicum of efficiency saving will lead to drastic improvement. It has failed to do so and there is now no option other than fundamental reform of the State.'

Professor Anthony King, the political scientist, wrote in the Daily Telegraph in December 2008:  

'However, the truth is that the deepest divide in British politics today is not between Labour and the Tories; or between Speaker Michael Martin and irate backbench MPs; or between members of Gordon Brown's Cabinet and each other. It is between Britain's whole political class and the great majority of the British people. On the far side of a chasm stand politicians of all parties and their hangers-on. On the near side is almost everyone else.

Part of the answer lies in a crucial fact that almost everyone in Britain is dimly aware of but that has yet to find full expression. It is that our system of government is failing to perform adequately. Governments of both major parties blunder and fail far more often than they used to.

The past three decades have given us the BSE debacle; the poll tax; the Child Support Agency; Britain's ignominious expulsion from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism; the Millennium Dome; the massive cost-overruns and the partial or total failure of IT projects across the public sector; the failure to control immigration; the bungled introduction of home information packs (Hips); the abandonment of supercasinos; the fiasco of the cost-ineffective Assets Recovery Agency; the collapse of Metronet; GPs' and dentists' ill-drafted contracts; Northern Rock; the failure of government regulation across the financial sector; the botched marking of last summer's SATS exams; the mishandling of Post Office card accounts; the shambolic arrest of Damian Green, and a great deal else besides.'

Frank Field, the Labour MP, wrote in the Guardian in December 2008 that we now need to start preparing for a national Government:

'If the Government fails to survive the economic catastrophe beginning to engulf practically all of us, its inability to finance record-breaking debt is what will probably bring it down. Any such end is likely to come unexpectedly, so we need to start planning what to do.

If the debt can't be sold, it will be impossible for the Government to continue. The only options then will be to print money, with all the dangers for a country of going along with such a policy; or for the political parties to come together - in a national Government - to try to convince the gilt market that the country is serious about bringing under control the gap between projected Government expenditure and its falling tax revenue base.

It is crucial that we begin to plan for this scenario for, once in this totally uncharted territory, we may not then have that long to convince the markets that Britain's political class really means business in trying to get the nation's accounts into some sort of order. If we fail to convince at this point, then the outlook for the country is truly unimaginable.'

In a December 2008 article in the Mail on Sunday, Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat MP and Treasury Spokesman, wrote:

'I believe the public will see the need to 'stick together' and, in particular, will expect the political parties to rise above the usual petty, tribal bickering. There will be calls for a 'government of national unity', to get political adversaries round a table working together rather than pointing fingers at each other. There must, of course, be vigorous debate and public accountability, as well as unity, but I think the public senses that this is not what they are getting at the moment.

I see the personal and party animosities played out every week at Westminster and wonder if the political classes are capable of grasping the enormity of the crisis we are in and the challenge to us to behave differently. If we do not, the public will become seriously angry. We know from history that such anger can lead to extremes.

It will no longer be acceptable for Ministers and mandarins (or MPs and peers) to have a feather-bedded existence, with large, protected pension pots, like First World War generals enjoying the comforts of a chateau at the rear while their men are fighting in the trenches.'

A January 2009 letter to The Times from J. Anderson of London said:

'We have, through our own apathy, allowed our government institutions to become increasingly corrupted by a cosy club of self-centered professionals who are more disconnected than ever from the real lives that most of us want to live.

If Britain wants real leadership in government, by honest and independent-minded individuals, who put the interests of their local constituents and their country above their own and those of their party, then voters need to take collective action at the next election to remove this cross-party crop of political cronies.  We need to find a new way forward.'

In an Editorial in August 2009, The Financial Times stated:

'Britain looks as ready for change and new ideas as it was after 1979 and in 1997. Margaret Thatcher's Tories and Tony Blair's 'modernisers' certainly agglomerated in the centre, but evolved a distinctive ethos: respectively, of shrinking the state and privatising the economy; and using market-friendly means to pursue traditional Labour ends such as social justice.  Now, both major parties evince an extremism of the centre.  The Tories are repositioning themselves roughly where Blairism was ('progressive ends by conservative means').  Labour, recovering from its fulsome conversion to being 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich', is scrabbling.

Neither party is grappling with the challenges facing the UK. The next government will have to balance poverty, for example, against fiscal penury.  How will it redimension the state?  We need a vision of the future.  We are not getting it.'

The Neglect of Important Issues

The traditional political parties shy away from the issues which most concern the electorate.  As political parties pander to the floating voters to get elected, they find it increasingly difficult to discuss bad news that could upset any part of the population. They therefore have to try to be favourable to all.  The search for a stance and image which will lead to a political party being elected, requiring it to move towards the centre, means that all major parties have to have policies which specifically appeal to and do not upset the floating voters.  

Alastair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in January 2010:

'It is blindingly obvious you cannot win elections if you cannot capture the middle ground'.

As A. Millar wrote in the Brussels Journal ('The Voice of Conservatism in Europe') in January 2010:

'If Labour won't tackle rising crime, uncontrolled immigration, the EU (which makes 75 percent of Britain's laws), then the opposition must.  Cameron doesn't get that. Consequently his party goes up and down in the polls depending on what the country thinks of the Labour government, not what it thinks of the Conservatives. And in December, with the elections looming, his party was at its lowest point in the polls since May.  People will vote Conservative only in the hope that it means getting Labour out, not the Conservatives in, because most suspect that a Cameron government will be little better than the Blair or Brown government. The tone of Cameron's latest speech – with its repetition of 'we can't go on like this,' and lack of content – seems to suggest that he recognises this, but, like the public, lacks faith in himself.'

Mary Riddell wrote in the Daily Telegraph in January 2010:  

'Ken Clarke, musing on why the Tories had failed to seal the deal with voters, said in his Sunday Telegraph interview that 'the public don't want political heroes any more'. With Obama worship curdled by reality, the vogue is for workaday leaders such as Kevin Rudd and Angela Merkel.  

If the trend is changing, Mr Cameron has not noticed.   Labour ministers have been startled by Mr Cameron's New Year campaign, spearheaded by vague promises on the NHS — identified by Lord Ashcroft as the policy area that will win or lose the election. 'We can't believe it's all so thin,' says a No 10 aide.'

Henry Porter wrote on The Guardian website in January 2010:

'The battle lines were drawn in the general election campaign this week, with the usual exchanges on the health service, tax and spending cuts, no doubt because these issues are the ones people care about.  But 2010 also brings the chance to vote on the equally vital issues of liberty and rights, the future of Britain's free society and the gross extension of state power under Labour.

This is a critical moment, perhaps the most important year for liberty and rights in a century or so and on 6 May (the most likely date for the election) we will be voting on our future, as well as the past 13 years, in which the unwritten constitution, liberties and parliament have been constantly undermined in favour of executive power and an overmighty centralised state.

Who will best defend individual liberty and rights and provide the best dissection of the Labour programmes that eroded the concept of innocence and criminalised the public with the creation of hundreds of new offences?'

A January 2010 Editorial in The Independent stated:

'The long general election campaign has begun – and the heart sinks at the narrowness of the battleground being staked out by Labour and the Conservatives. What these early skirmishes indicate is that the prospects of an honest, mature debate on Britain's future in the run-up to polling day are remote.

Politics has, of course, always been about branding and exaggeration to some extent.  It will be naive to expect politicians to make their case in the manner of balanced academics.  And this is especially true in an election campaign.

Other important questions about Britain's future also seem unlikely to be addressed by Labour or the Tories in this campaign.  Our dependence on the financial services sector to drive economic growth has been brutally exposed by the present recession.  Yet neither party, for all their outrage over bankers' bonuses, is willing to talk in detail about long-term alternatives to the City of London for national economic expansion.

And then there is Britain's role in the wider world.  Some 9,000 British troops are, at present, involved in a strategically significant and dangerous military commitment in Afghanistan.  Labour and the Tories are wholly aligned on the necessity of this mission.  The unfortunate likely result is that Afghanistan and the global struggle against Islamist terrorism will barely be touched upon in this campaign.

Whoever wins the general election will have to confront these wider issues.  But neither the Tories nor Labour seems willing to debate then over the coming months.  That needs to change. General election campaigns are vital moments in our national democratic life. When they come around, we need to talk about the things that matter.'

The Short-Term Focus of the Current Political System

Governments based on traditional political parties inevitably choose the soft options to woo the floating voters, whether in relation to infrastructure, pensions, education, health or other areas.  These can take the form for instance of government having excessive borrowing in order to appeal to the electorate but with the inevitable cost being borne by future generations.  Similarly environmental issues need to be tackled appropriately now as otherwise they leave a legacy for the children and grandchildren of those who cause the problems.  Likewise investment in education will always be under pressure but ignorance is usually even more costly to a society in the longer term.

Decisions made by politicians with their eye constantly on their electoral prospects now lead to the party leaders offering continual verbal bribes to the electorate in the same way as Roman emperors used to try to stay in power by offering 'bread and circuses' to their citizens.  In practice party leaders appeal for the popular vote by offering competitive bribes to the electorate, often using the electorate's own money, especially in relation to state benefits.  For instance it is now clear that the economic growth of the last 15 years has been built on too much debt.  However because they needed to compete in the minds of voters to say that they could improve living standards, no major party proposed any measures to restrict banks and building societies from providing loans and other credit instruments, such as 125% mortgages, which clearly could not be sustainable.

This Policy Document sets out fairly and clearly the key policies of the Jury Team.  There are of course many other aspects of life which it could address.  However the Jury Team believes that the well researched Proposals in this document will bring about a significant improvement to the country both for its people and for its political system.  Anatole Kaletsky wrote in The Times in August 2008 to warn about more extensive 'manifestos' which pretend they have a blueprint for the next five years:

'Manifestos are rarely worth the paper they are written on. This is not just because politicians are dishonest but because unexpected events intervene. Dealing with the unexpected is a much more important function of government than implementing manifestos.'

The Need to Consult the Electorate

The Jury Team will put all of the Policies in Sections B and C of this Policy Statement to a referendum.  Its reason for wanting to have a referendum to authorise possibly controversial policies is that we need to ensure that citizens feel a connection with the process of running the country in an increasingly complex world.  They will only have this if they believe that their opinion is listened to.  The low membership of political parties and declining turnout at elections shows voters' distaste for the existing way of doing politics.  While the vast majority of the electorate remains interested in national and local issues, most people in the UK feel that they do not have a say in how the country is run.  Three fifths of the public can no longer find any real difference between the main political parties.  Political debate is seen as hollowed out.  

It is therefore important that there is a proper and coherent way for the people to adjust the laws which are made by expressing their view on particular issues between elections.  This also limits the power of the Government.  In 1910 in the House of Commons, supporting a referendum about Irish Home Rule, Alfred Balfour, a former Conservative Prime Minister, said:

'The referendum, at all events, has this enormous advantage that it does isolate one problem from the complex questions connected with keeping a Government in office, and with other measures which it wants to carry out and with other questions of foreign and domestic policy. It asks the country not 'do you say that this or that body of men should hold the reins of office?' but, 'do you approve of this or that way of dealing with a great question in which you are interested?' '

Theodore Roosevelt said:

'The majority of plain people will, day in and day out, make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than another smaller body of men will make in trying to govern them.'

The Economist magazine clearly endorsed this in 1993 when it stated:  

'As the old differences of wealth, education and social condition blur, it will be increasingly hard to go on persuading people that most of them are fit only to put a tick on the ballot paper every few years, and that the handful of men and women they thereby send to Parliament must be left to take all the other decisions'

In his speech to the Campaign for Freedom of Information's Annual Awards ceremony in March 1996, Tony Blair said:

'The crucial question is does the Government regard people's involvement in politics as being restricted to periodic elections? Or, does it regard itself as in some sense in a genuine partnership with people? And the Government's attitude to what it is prepared to tell people and the knowledge it will share with them says a great deal about where it stands on that matter.  My argument is that if a Government is genuine about wanting a partnership with the people who it is governing, then the act of Government itself must be seen in some sense as a shared responsibility and the Government has to empower the people and give them a say in how that politics is conducted.'

In a December 2008 debate in the House of Lords, the Conservative peer Lord Norton of Louth, Chair of the Lords Constitution Select Committee from 2001-04, stated:

'There has been a phenomenal growth in the number of interest groups over the past 40 years.  We need to be in a position to engage both with those who come together to form particular groups and those individuals who believe that politics, and what Parliament does, is not for them.'

Zac Goldsmith, a Conservative candidate, wrote in The Sunday Times in September 2008:

'In the sense that we, the people, still have the right to remove our government once every few years, Britain is a democracy.  But I believe the time has come to acknowledge that our current form of democracy is too crude and inadequate to serve properly a sophisticated 21st-century society.  People are switching off, not out of apathy but from a conviction that their voice is not being listened to.  'They're all the same' is a commonly heard lament - and people are increasingly resorting to voting for fringe parties such as the BNP, whose policies and agendas will be disastrous for Britain.  Yet there is a solution: a simple mechanism that, if made an integral part of the democratic process, could both improve the quality of decision-making at national and local levels and restore the public's faith in politics.  That mechanism is the referendum.'

The wording of a referendum is clearly important.  This will be the responsibility of the Electoral Commission under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 (PPERA).  This so far only requires the Government to consult the Electoral Commission on the wording of the question but could easily be strengthened to give the Electoral Commission the right to agree the question.  The PPERA also provides a suitable structure for other issues relating to referendums such as expenses.  Referendums will be held annually at the time of the local authority elections, normally May.  There are various formulae to ensure that sufficient members of the electorate are in favour of a referendum before it is passed.  For Government referendums it is proposed that a referendum question will only be deemed to be passed if there is a turnout of at least 50% with at least 50% of those voting being in favour of it.

In choosing its 10 policies the Jury Team also looked at other potential areas such as 'Legalise cannabis and other 'soft' drugs and allow them to be sold and taxed in the same way as alcohol and tobacco' and 'Put an additional levy on electricity bills to pay an incentive to electricity providers for investing in wind farms and other low carbon ways of producing electricity' but these were rejected by the electorate in a YouGov poll by 28% to 58% and by 21% to 57% respectively and would therefore be unlikely to be passed in a referendum.

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