Manifesto Project updates
This week I’ve added all new policies to the Manifesto Project on agriculture, fishing, planning, energy, culture, welfare reform, higher education, DOGE< foreign aid, pensions, policing, defence and transport. My brain is slightly fried now.
It does help, though, that I have years of blogging under my belt and a good grounding in most topics, but I’ve found Grok AI very useful this time around. I've established a pretty good working methodology now.
It's not as simple as just telling it to write a section. If that worked then the entire site would be little more than AI slop. You first have to write a framework based on your existing knowledge. You then have to outline your values and red lines, what you want it to ignore (particularly climate lobby dogma), and know which expert sources to point it at.
You then have to interrogate and verify responses. It's then a question of homing in on what is substantive and what's filler. I want it to be comprehensive but not uselessly verbose.
When I last did any major writing on the site, I hit a bit of an inspiration wall and ran out of ideas. I hoped feedback from readers would spur some developments but I’m getting into the weeds on some issues now, where you need a thinking partner with specialist knowledge. You basically have to offer insight on everything from submarine delivery and drone warfare though to TB testing, welfare reform and taxation. No single human can do this.
This is where Grok is a bit of game changer. It really just automates the process I was already using by scanning the internet for existing expertise and looking at it through the prism of my stated values. The plan is now to beef up all the remaining sections and produce a summary manifesto with legislative recommendations - which might then translate into some story of plan.
As I noted the last time around, this kind of exercise gives you some indication of the scale of the task ahead to restore any kind of functionality and sanity to the British government. The process itself has changed my mind on a number of topics. When I originally wrote the manifesto as a raw PDF for Ukip, it was pretty boilerplate dissident-right stuff - leaving the ECHR and purging entire departments, but when you look at what’s involved and what different arms of government actually do, it gives you a whole new perspective. It’s why I can’t take Danny Kruger and his “bonfire of quangos” seriously.
As such, it suggests to me that if parties gearing up for a 2029 election are only just getting down to the business of policy development then they’ve probably left it too late - especially when the right is largely self-satisfied and entirely convinced of its own solutions, regardless of the implementation implications. Certainly we see this from Restore Britain, whose meagre collection of policies are based on blue sky thinking without any reference to what is going on in the real world right now.
The sad part is that there is very little point in this exercise anymore. There was never any real chance of Reform acknowledging the need for policy, the Tories have already blown it, and Restore is apparently in its death throes as its online nationalist base walks away.
I suppose it still serves as an example of what can be done if properly motivated, and at least people can’t say I never have anything positive to contribute. Even in its current state, it is still the best right wing policy prospectus, and would probably remain so without me lifting a finger. Regardless, it’s there to read should you find yourself at a loose end or needing to kill time on a long train ride. We’re not voting our way out of this anyway.