Requesting OBR Forecasts
On 23 September 2022, the Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, made a series of announcements in a fiscal statement which shocked the country and the international market for our debt. Importantly, he deliberately chose not to publish the forecasts carried out by the Office of Budget Responsibility, and there is speculation that these forecasts would show a projected shortfall of anything up to £60 billion, presumably a year. As this is clearly a huge cost to the nation during a time of crisis, I believe it is only right and proper that these forecasts should be made public immediately. As such, I have requested them from the OBR formally, and as a Freedom of Information Act request via What Do They Know. If I get any information on this, I will post an analysis in a further post.
Conservative Promises
I have decided that it would be sensible for me to look at the promises made by the Conservative Party as a whole given they hold such a significant majority and have been in power for 12 years at the time of writing (though their ideology was at least slightly moderated by their need to form a coalition for the first five years). As such, these are the common promises from Conservative candidates for the 2019 General Election: NHS Many Conservative politicians have promised to make sure that the NHS continues to be funded, but under the Conservatives the NHS is on its knees, with both junior doctors and nurses threatening strike action over working conditions. Clearly a different approach is needed, and reducing the spending on the NHS for ideological reasons is doomed to failure. In addition, Conservatives promised to build 50 new hospitals, a promise which has simply not been kept. Transport Again, many Conservative politicians have run on a platform of improving transportation, but we are now facing an unprecedented cost of fuel for private travel, and in the realm of public transport we are again seeing widespread industrial action due to chronic levels of underfunding. Education Conservatives have repeatedly called for improvements to education, but at the same time they have cut budgets in real terms, resulting in a lower standard of education for children. At the same time, Conservative ideologies have caused the cost of university education to spike upwards both in terms of tuition fees and the cost of actually living near a university for the years of study. Again, abject failure. Supporting Public Services Across the board, every public service has had its budget decimated in the wake of austerity, and the latest attempt to provide tax breaks to the ultra wealthy certainly did nothing to help the countless people working to keep this country together in the public sector. Brexit Clinging hard to the concept of a hard Brexit has damaged the country economically and reputationally. We need to find a way to mitigate that economic loss and improve relations with our nearest trading partners once again. Reduce Carbon Footprint At the national level, Conservative policy is for the country to embrace fracking, which will increase our reliance on carbon-intensive energy generation for decades to come. As an alternative, we should be exploring mass adoption of renewable sources of energy, including solar, wind and tidal, all of which we have in abundance as a nation. Supporting Local Areas All politicians claim to support their constituencies, but in reality, the Conservatives have consistently voted against increased budgets for local authorities, against decent funding for the NHS and against the interests of other civil servants, all of whom work to provide our constituencies with services that we could not live without. Democracy Conservative MPs have consistently voted against the introduction of Proportional Representation, a system that is designed to ensure that the electorate is accurately represented in Parliament. Instead they have opted to wholeheartedly support First Past The Post, a system set up to allow the largest parties to hoard a disproportionate amount of power compared to votes they actually received. For example, in the 2019 General Election, the Conservatives received 43.6% of the vote, which translated into 365 of the 650 seats (56.2%), which essentially gives them 100% of the power. This is authoritarianism masquerading as democracy. In summary, the Conservative party has made a lot of promises over the years, but has broken them almost entirely. You deserve better than this. In another blog post, I will look at the other parties, but the Conservatives are the worst offenders purely because they have been in power for 12 years, 7 of which as sole decision-maker for every major policy affecting the UK, and it is very clear right now that the UK is broken and needs new politicians to fix the mess that the Conservatives have dropped us into.
My Goals
I want to be a Member of Parliament, allowing me to vote on issues of national policy, including things like healthcare, education, policing, judicial and care funding. I believe that we are a wealthy enough nation that these can be fully funded with a review of the tax system to incorporate wealth at a very similar level to income at present. This can be best achieved by reviewing both capital gains tax and inheritance tax, both of which are currently enabling the ultra-wealthy to pay a much lower tax rate than an equivalent worker. I am disabled, though still able to get around. As such, I have a real passion for helping those who have need to access the current benefits system, and I can speak with some experience on the subject of applying for Employment and Support Allowance, Personal Independence Payments and Blue Badges. I firmly believe that the way such people are treated is appalling at present, and anecdotally I have heard several people stating that they dread their periodic review with the Department of Work and Pensions, an organisation that should be there to help. Finally, I am concerned at the unequal distribution of land in the UK. At present, land owned by homeowners in England represents some 5% of the size of the country, with up to 50% still owned by the aristocracy. In my view, this is anachronistic and unfair, and I would want as a long-term goal to move more towards land by default being owned by the country as a whole for the use of the country as a whole, whether in the form of agriculture, residences or energy generation.
My Personal Manifesto
My views are still changing, but I believe some of my positions are worth setting out below, with an invitation to anyone to get in touch with me to discuss my views. Please note, some of my personal views do not align directly with Liberal Democrat positions on some issues. As a party, we are constantly debating ideas to add to the party manifesto, and as a result the positions below are ones that either I would already vote for in line with existing Liberal Democrat policy or I would put my policy proposals to the Party as a whole in an attempt to persuade them of my views. My voting record in future will be drawn from my personal manifesto, the manifesto of the Liberal Democrat party, and above all my constituents. Electoral Reform Brexit Land and Property Tax Reform Pensions Trusts Education & Healthcare Utilities Transport
Getting Started
It has been a rollercoaster of a week for me. I genuinely feel like I haven’t had a day to just sit and think about the enormity of the task I have set myself, namely to become a Member of Parliament, but here we are. It might make sense to talk about why I have set that as a goal. Years ago, I would have considered myself a political apathist, really not caring who was in charge because everything seemed to tick along regardless. In hindsight, this was an incredibly privileged position where I didn’t have to worry about benefits being cut for austerity reasons and didn’t yet have any real dependence on services like the NHS. In short, I was pretty unthinking. Not selfish – but not really considering the needs of others purely through ignorance. Looking back, I think this is not only commonplace, but also a design feature of our current electoral system. Under First Past The Post (FPTP), the vast majority of votes are wasted. Vote for a losing candidate and you might as well not have turned up to the polling station – that one is obvious. However, what about votes for the winning candidate? Well, any excess votes over what they need to win are also wasted. So in essence, the only votes that matter are the ones that push one candidate ahead of second place, and arguably that means that only one vote actually carries any weight under the current system. Worse yet, this system has a knock-on effect of generating an effective two-party state. Indeed, the basis of our government is that power is wielded solely by one party (or a coalition) until the system listed here results in a swing to the other large party, at which point all the power immediate transfers over to a new set of politicians. Because of this, we generally see successive governments spending inordinate amounts of time simply unwinding what their predecessors did, and the adversarial nature of this system makes long-term compromise on key issues very difficult indeed. It is for this reason that I firmly believe that the UK needs a form of Proportional Representation desperately. Under PR, we would have genuine representation of the electorate at Westminster, while the current system generates less representation than simply picking 650 people at random from the electoral roll. Under PR, politicians would need to get used to the idea that compromise and collaboration would need to be the norm, as majority governments would become increasingly uncommon. In short, under PR we would have an actual, functioning democracy. This has been a fairly lengthy diversion from talking about why I decided to get involved in politics, but it hopefully shows where the idea came from. In other blog posts I will talk at length about specific subjects, but invariably it will always boil down to these core messages: Integrity Equality Fairness Everything else is, to me, linked to one or more of those core concepts. I am also a huge fan of a philosophical morality concept known as the “veil of ignorance” when it comes to considering policies, in that I try to assume that I could be anyone when thinking about an issue. I believe that the current government has fundamentally breached all three of these core principles, and as such I see it as my duty to stand against them and fight for a better UK.