My engineered Labour manifesto
Unfortunately I have not been able to finish this article in time for today’s election. However, I will continue the argument in retrospect. My intention was to finish the article with a list of policy measures that should form a Labour manifesto to win an election, a manifesto for jobs and social influence. Having a job goes with minimum social influence – all people should have a job. Going to school is a job. We don’t allow children to be unschooled. So why allow adults to be unemployed when they need work to survive. The balance of social influence is heavily skewed in favour of employers: Labour should act to foster employees ability to exercise influence at work and have their voice heard on how things should be run. The measures in my list are engineered (very doable), i.e., comparatively low in a-t heuristics (ideals). I shall argue that they address the needs of a sufficient number of people to supply a good working majority, a majority that team Miliband will not get, and even if they did, will not sustain.
Labour has betrayed those for whom it was set up. It is the party put together to defend those with little influence. Theirs are not problems to be tackled by idealism, they need to be engineered. Labour exists for very practical reasons and should pursue policies that will assist those with little influence.
- Labour is the party of jobs, people need jobs, jobs means business; Labour should be the party that means business, especially cooperatives – John Lewis style.
- Labour should be guaranteeing everyone a living wage.
- Labour should guarantee a job for everyone (only those who can’t work should be unemployed).
- Labour needs to help people become self-employed.
- Labour should be guaranteeing proportional representation.
- Labour should require people to vote by law.
- Labour should foster local government.
- Labour should abolish the House of Lords and create a second level of government fully elected.
- Labour should abolish the honours system.
- Labour needs to answer this question: If we need a law on sexual or racial discrimination why not class?
- Any national curriculum needs to teach the significance of social influence from age 5, via jobs, business and politics in addition to literacy and numeracy: “if I don’t read my soul be lost”.