I'm minded of the old adage - keep it simple stupid. It's got me through 44 years in business & I'm still going.
The US constitution ( ok, it's not a manifesto) is roughly 4 pages long (c. 4,500 words).
I do wonder if a UK constitution of a similar length could be written - then a manifesto to align with the constitution would be an easier ( ok, not a lot) task?
I think it is very true that to solve our many problems we will have to take tough decisions which none of the current lot in Westminster are prepared to seriously consider let alone take. Currently manifestos just contain glib sound bites and stay away from laying out the difficult decisions we need to face.
I think this idea of writing a bespoke manifesto is a masterstroke and as well as being a monthly subscriber to Northern Variant I have just paid £100 to the cause and will try and do more in the future.
"..The British approach is precautionary because the alternative is an Americanised culture of ambulance chasing lawyers.."
You've then got the EU which uses the precautionary principle to stifle much in the environmental, health & technology world's viz:
"..The precautionary principle is a guiding principle that allows decision makers to adopt precautionary measures even when scientific uncertainties about environmental and health impacts of new technologies or products remain..."
Here's the rub - maybe as a sovereign nation state the culture and law's of the UK don't comfortably fit into the use or application of the precautionary principle - which by definition is a technocratic dream on steroids.
This begs the question - do we need to be belong to a nation state ( option c) & all its trappings or ought we to be subsumed into a) technocratic supranational or b) federal superstate ( per US) with the commensurate homogenisation & consequent lack of demo's & consent that we've had to date.
I know what I prefer & it ain't the US or the EU - maybe by giving people the choice of a , b or c along with their constraints might lead to solutions to the kind of questions about governance you yourself are asking?
ps: beginning to think that the UK is far less precautionary than the EU or US models - maybe it's our exceptionalism & culture that mitigates against the technocratic bureaucracy/clerisey.
"Writing a party manifesto is no small undertaking. The process has already revealed to me that I know less than I thought I did on a range of subjects."
Gives one a little sympathy for those that dive in with both feet (of whatever persuasion)
Don't let it stop you though. Ya don't need to know everything about everything. That's why it should be a team effort. Nobody, alone, can know everything. If you want to know about genetic manipulation then ask a Biologist. Plastering a wall, ask a plasterer ...
My point being that the "manifesto" should be setting broad "goals". Minutiae is for those charged with achieving those "goals".
Anyway, It's 5am and I'm off (fly) fishing my "horribly polluted" local river for Trout. Hopefully, I'll be eating the result later ...
I find the problem with a good substack is it excites more words in response than the original article. I was in a much bigger Air Force than we have now. The parade grounds were turned into car parks, 20 mph speed limits introduced and the RAF Police issued traffic cones and radar guns.
The sharp end, the jets, aircrew and groundcrew, weapon storage were a few hundred people. The administration of them, pay, cooks, messes, clothing, accommodation, MT, air traffic, servicing bays, married quarters and single accommodation ballooned until the tail wagged the dog. Not forgetting MoD, they said a uniform needed 5 civilians to support them. Some RAF stations had over 4000 staff in the 70s.
I remember Athens traffic problems and pollution. One attempt was to allow only even numbers on alternate days. The Greeks simply bought or borrowed cars with the appropriate plates for the day, exaggerating the problem. Government, like the law, is by consent. Sadiq Khan's London. He lied about pollution. More came from buses and the Tube and people with enough money just pay the ULEZ or change car to suit. Some don a balaclava and pop out with an angle grinder.
Too many people and we have a government willing to ship in more - who need administration.
If the unemployed are the blunt end the same as the RAF above applies. Likewise the new arrivals. Heaven must be a nightmare full of irritable overburdened angels.
Found this post (appended below) under a Dominic Cummings article; it makes some interesting assertions relevant to industrial strategy / geopolitics. Don't know if / how defensible, but thought you might be interested-:
Power machinations across USA, UK and France are cooking this summer. France are using gerrymandering and desperate tactics to block nationalists from their inexorable ascent to power. They now enter a chaotic period trying to figure out who can lead.
In USA, Joe Biden.
At home Kier Starmer had impressed me during the earlier half of this year just by being low key, he sort of transmuted his woodenness to some kind of proto-stoicism. But just one week in power and there is no mistaking that the Labour Party is spitting hydra of nutjobs.
Ed Miliband is a danger to shipping, an industrial strategy based entirely on stopping things rather than doing things. Ed's plan is to stop the world from turning and to then borrow money at 5.5% to do vanity projects that have been rejected as unviable by global engineering giants who can borrow at 2%. He is going to crater a lot of public money and cost every household thousands of pounds a year at both ends, higher public debt to service and higher energy bills to pay.
Rachel Reeves is just in a rush to do stuff, do anything, it doesn't matter what, just grab some headlines, I'm famous now. She seems determined to sign off all kinds of batshit headline grabbing stuff. Including borrowing money at 5.5% to put in an investment fund that yields ?.??tbc% she needs an 8.5% yield to beat interest + inflation. She won't get that because if she could she would be running a huge hedge fund and eating George Soros et al.
Prisons. Apparently the hydra doesn't like them, didn't mention it during the campaign. But is now keen to vomit all the criminals back onto the streets, because the hydra gets icky tummy from being mean to people. Presumably this strategy was adopted by Starmer to justify a massive expansion in law and order spending?
I have a bad feeling that the MPC are going to slam the brakes on their expected August rate cuts, and wait to see the autumn budget statement. They won't want to be Kwapartenged again.
So I'm keen to follow the trajectory of Gilts, and am watching the yield curve over summer (such a tedious little man), as I expect this will determine much of the next 5 years for the UK. I think Ed Miliband is an enormous inflation faucet and this parliament is really going to come down to how much blame shifting can Labour do. Probably very little, as this is starting to look like it could be the first time since 1970's that this is a UK only monetary problem as head out on our next epic misadventure.
For me, the future for the UK needs to be based on low cost domestic electricity. The only 100 year viable options for secure low cost energy are SMR (which OMFG we have! but I'm terrified we fumble on sight of the first po-face NGO), and North Sea wind (for which we lack the industrial base). Any serious strategic planner would pursue both.
We should also shower money over our best 20 somethings so that they build a big robotics company, because humanoid robotics is largely solved from a tech perspective and is really an engineering and product opportunity now. We should do this because there is no way any industrial country should import 10's of millions of robots if they get firmware updates from overseas (which they do). Even if the firmware is from a strategic ally, nobody should do this. I don't want to sleep in a village that has 500 Chinese robots carefully leaving lego bricks on staircases, etc, etc.
Some time around the year 2060-2100, economics and demographics will fully decouple as virtually all labour gets automated, and there are only 2 factors that will determine geopolitics thereafter.
1). How defendable is your geography?
2). How much cheap electricity can you generate?
China and India's huge population advantage is going to be utterly irrelevant, big countries will no longer be the biggest in the way that matters. The future of geopolitical power is really just how many robots can you power and secure from sabotage?
Places like Australia, Russia, USA (again) with huge solar landmass potential, and uranium deposits are going to have superpower status. By 2150 Australia may well be the dominant power on Earth just by virtue of their low human debt, vast and expansive resources and highly defendable interior geography.
What is the UK's place in all of this?
Well we need to accelerate SMR commercialisation, build a couple of shipyards for turbine building crane vessels, build a couple of turbine factories, and then funnel 10 years of Oxbridge engineering grads into developing a robotics building robotic fab.
If we do nothing coherent, all our technology will get pick off by vultures dressed up as allies (Deepmind, ARM, etc) and the UK's place in the world will just continue to erode away.
Entrepreneurs do what their home government tells them, in order to avoid blackmail and prison, our capital markets should recognise this reality and end the wilful blindness or foreign buyouts. This is a precluding requirement to state sponsored industries or which SMR and robotics should be our industrial strategy.
The whole life sciences strategy is also good in the near / medium term, but the market for that is going to get killed by the fact machines are going to take over the economy and leave all the life science customers less economically valuable and thus impoverished.
Truly an industrial revolution is upon us and everything that has gone before is irrelevant / wrong. That doesn't mean we need to pull the rip chord today, but we should try yo be pointing in the right direction, and we are not. We are still fighting yesterdays propaganda, the climate crisis, culture wars, etc.
I've been interested in the "transport problem" for many years.
I would sum it up thus:
1. The car offers a far better service than public transport. It goes from door to door, it moves when you want it to rather than operaring to a timetable.
2. Everyone will therefore want to travel everywhere by car.
3. It's not physically possible to provide enough road space in large towns and cities to cater for the demand.
4. It's not physically posssible to provide enough parking space in large towns and cities.
There are some medium-sized cities in the US with a very low population density that do manage to provide enough road space and parking space. However, the result is that water, electricity, etc have to be distributed over 10 times the area of an European city of similar population. Maintaining the roads and other infrastructure becomes excessively expensive. If the city expands, the road network still becomes congested sooner or later.
The end result of all this is that governments everywhere subsidise public transport and try to discourage car use. Government officials are indoctrinated into a policy of "guerrilla war against the car".
One thing I find curious is that no serious attempt has been made to explain the "transport problem" to the public. I think almost everyone should be able to understand the issue and agree that the car promises more than it can deliver.
There needs to be an understanding of the difference between public and private policy. Election campaign material vs actual practical plans once in power. Pete described before the idea of having a "simplified" version of the manifesto fit for public consumption - I would go a step further and say it's acceptable (necessary, even) to downright lie and misrepresent intentions in a party's public manifesto, then implement anything else entirely once in power. After all, that's exactly what has been done to us for decades.
Pete's work fits squarely into the practical plans / private policy category. How a party chooses to distill and distort those ideas into a vote-winning public policy is a separate question.
This work is useful even if it never sees the light of day as official policy of some group because it helps to increase our understanding of the system as a whole, and how we might start to change it. Ideally we would have a huge majority with hundreds of intelligent MPs who understand the work, but that will never happen. But what we can start to think about are questions like:
What work could a single sympathetic MP do at a local level to start to incrementally push change?
What about a single public official like a judge?
What about 5-10 of these people?
What about a single minister, if some opposition party gets enough seats to be able to demand an appointment?
In light of the above, what moves will our enemies (i.e. muslim bloc) be making?
I'm minded of the old adage - keep it simple stupid. It's got me through 44 years in business & I'm still going.
The US constitution ( ok, it's not a manifesto) is roughly 4 pages long (c. 4,500 words).
I do wonder if a UK constitution of a similar length could be written - then a manifesto to align with the constitution would be an easier ( ok, not a lot) task?
I think it is very true that to solve our many problems we will have to take tough decisions which none of the current lot in Westminster are prepared to seriously consider let alone take. Currently manifestos just contain glib sound bites and stay away from laying out the difficult decisions we need to face.
I think this idea of writing a bespoke manifesto is a masterstroke and as well as being a monthly subscriber to Northern Variant I have just paid £100 to the cause and will try and do more in the future.
"..The British approach is precautionary because the alternative is an Americanised culture of ambulance chasing lawyers.."
You've then got the EU which uses the precautionary principle to stifle much in the environmental, health & technology world's viz:
"..The precautionary principle is a guiding principle that allows decision makers to adopt precautionary measures even when scientific uncertainties about environmental and health impacts of new technologies or products remain..."
Here's the rub - maybe as a sovereign nation state the culture and law's of the UK don't comfortably fit into the use or application of the precautionary principle - which by definition is a technocratic dream on steroids.
This begs the question - do we need to be belong to a nation state ( option c) & all its trappings or ought we to be subsumed into a) technocratic supranational or b) federal superstate ( per US) with the commensurate homogenisation & consequent lack of demo's & consent that we've had to date.
I know what I prefer & it ain't the US or the EU - maybe by giving people the choice of a , b or c along with their constraints might lead to solutions to the kind of questions about governance you yourself are asking?
ps: beginning to think that the UK is far less precautionary than the EU or US models - maybe it's our exceptionalism & culture that mitigates against the technocratic bureaucracy/clerisey.
"Writing a party manifesto is no small undertaking. The process has already revealed to me that I know less than I thought I did on a range of subjects."
Gives one a little sympathy for those that dive in with both feet (of whatever persuasion)
Don't let it stop you though. Ya don't need to know everything about everything. That's why it should be a team effort. Nobody, alone, can know everything. If you want to know about genetic manipulation then ask a Biologist. Plastering a wall, ask a plasterer ...
My point being that the "manifesto" should be setting broad "goals". Minutiae is for those charged with achieving those "goals".
Anyway, It's 5am and I'm off (fly) fishing my "horribly polluted" local river for Trout. Hopefully, I'll be eating the result later ...
I find the problem with a good substack is it excites more words in response than the original article. I was in a much bigger Air Force than we have now. The parade grounds were turned into car parks, 20 mph speed limits introduced and the RAF Police issued traffic cones and radar guns.
The sharp end, the jets, aircrew and groundcrew, weapon storage were a few hundred people. The administration of them, pay, cooks, messes, clothing, accommodation, MT, air traffic, servicing bays, married quarters and single accommodation ballooned until the tail wagged the dog. Not forgetting MoD, they said a uniform needed 5 civilians to support them. Some RAF stations had over 4000 staff in the 70s.
I remember Athens traffic problems and pollution. One attempt was to allow only even numbers on alternate days. The Greeks simply bought or borrowed cars with the appropriate plates for the day, exaggerating the problem. Government, like the law, is by consent. Sadiq Khan's London. He lied about pollution. More came from buses and the Tube and people with enough money just pay the ULEZ or change car to suit. Some don a balaclava and pop out with an angle grinder.
Too many people and we have a government willing to ship in more - who need administration.
If the unemployed are the blunt end the same as the RAF above applies. Likewise the new arrivals. Heaven must be a nightmare full of irritable overburdened angels.
Found this post (appended below) under a Dominic Cummings article; it makes some interesting assertions relevant to industrial strategy / geopolitics. Don't know if / how defensible, but thought you might be interested-:
Power machinations across USA, UK and France are cooking this summer. France are using gerrymandering and desperate tactics to block nationalists from their inexorable ascent to power. They now enter a chaotic period trying to figure out who can lead.
In USA, Joe Biden.
At home Kier Starmer had impressed me during the earlier half of this year just by being low key, he sort of transmuted his woodenness to some kind of proto-stoicism. But just one week in power and there is no mistaking that the Labour Party is spitting hydra of nutjobs.
Ed Miliband is a danger to shipping, an industrial strategy based entirely on stopping things rather than doing things. Ed's plan is to stop the world from turning and to then borrow money at 5.5% to do vanity projects that have been rejected as unviable by global engineering giants who can borrow at 2%. He is going to crater a lot of public money and cost every household thousands of pounds a year at both ends, higher public debt to service and higher energy bills to pay.
Rachel Reeves is just in a rush to do stuff, do anything, it doesn't matter what, just grab some headlines, I'm famous now. She seems determined to sign off all kinds of batshit headline grabbing stuff. Including borrowing money at 5.5% to put in an investment fund that yields ?.??tbc% she needs an 8.5% yield to beat interest + inflation. She won't get that because if she could she would be running a huge hedge fund and eating George Soros et al.
Prisons. Apparently the hydra doesn't like them, didn't mention it during the campaign. But is now keen to vomit all the criminals back onto the streets, because the hydra gets icky tummy from being mean to people. Presumably this strategy was adopted by Starmer to justify a massive expansion in law and order spending?
I have a bad feeling that the MPC are going to slam the brakes on their expected August rate cuts, and wait to see the autumn budget statement. They won't want to be Kwapartenged again.
So I'm keen to follow the trajectory of Gilts, and am watching the yield curve over summer (such a tedious little man), as I expect this will determine much of the next 5 years for the UK. I think Ed Miliband is an enormous inflation faucet and this parliament is really going to come down to how much blame shifting can Labour do. Probably very little, as this is starting to look like it could be the first time since 1970's that this is a UK only monetary problem as head out on our next epic misadventure.
For me, the future for the UK needs to be based on low cost domestic electricity. The only 100 year viable options for secure low cost energy are SMR (which OMFG we have! but I'm terrified we fumble on sight of the first po-face NGO), and North Sea wind (for which we lack the industrial base). Any serious strategic planner would pursue both.
We should also shower money over our best 20 somethings so that they build a big robotics company, because humanoid robotics is largely solved from a tech perspective and is really an engineering and product opportunity now. We should do this because there is no way any industrial country should import 10's of millions of robots if they get firmware updates from overseas (which they do). Even if the firmware is from a strategic ally, nobody should do this. I don't want to sleep in a village that has 500 Chinese robots carefully leaving lego bricks on staircases, etc, etc.
Some time around the year 2060-2100, economics and demographics will fully decouple as virtually all labour gets automated, and there are only 2 factors that will determine geopolitics thereafter.
1). How defendable is your geography?
2). How much cheap electricity can you generate?
China and India's huge population advantage is going to be utterly irrelevant, big countries will no longer be the biggest in the way that matters. The future of geopolitical power is really just how many robots can you power and secure from sabotage?
Places like Australia, Russia, USA (again) with huge solar landmass potential, and uranium deposits are going to have superpower status. By 2150 Australia may well be the dominant power on Earth just by virtue of their low human debt, vast and expansive resources and highly defendable interior geography.
What is the UK's place in all of this?
Well we need to accelerate SMR commercialisation, build a couple of shipyards for turbine building crane vessels, build a couple of turbine factories, and then funnel 10 years of Oxbridge engineering grads into developing a robotics building robotic fab.
If we do nothing coherent, all our technology will get pick off by vultures dressed up as allies (Deepmind, ARM, etc) and the UK's place in the world will just continue to erode away.
Entrepreneurs do what their home government tells them, in order to avoid blackmail and prison, our capital markets should recognise this reality and end the wilful blindness or foreign buyouts. This is a precluding requirement to state sponsored industries or which SMR and robotics should be our industrial strategy.
The whole life sciences strategy is also good in the near / medium term, but the market for that is going to get killed by the fact machines are going to take over the economy and leave all the life science customers less economically valuable and thus impoverished.
Truly an industrial revolution is upon us and everything that has gone before is irrelevant / wrong. That doesn't mean we need to pull the rip chord today, but we should try yo be pointing in the right direction, and we are not. We are still fighting yesterdays propaganda, the climate crisis, culture wars, etc.
May be of interest ????
https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/PX-Getting-a-Grip-on-the-System42.pdf
New Report - Getting a Grip on the System: Restoring Ministerial Authority over the Machine
I've been interested in the "transport problem" for many years.
I would sum it up thus:
1. The car offers a far better service than public transport. It goes from door to door, it moves when you want it to rather than operaring to a timetable.
2. Everyone will therefore want to travel everywhere by car.
3. It's not physically possible to provide enough road space in large towns and cities to cater for the demand.
4. It's not physically posssible to provide enough parking space in large towns and cities.
There are some medium-sized cities in the US with a very low population density that do manage to provide enough road space and parking space. However, the result is that water, electricity, etc have to be distributed over 10 times the area of an European city of similar population. Maintaining the roads and other infrastructure becomes excessively expensive. If the city expands, the road network still becomes congested sooner or later.
The end result of all this is that governments everywhere subsidise public transport and try to discourage car use. Government officials are indoctrinated into a policy of "guerrilla war against the car".
One thing I find curious is that no serious attempt has been made to explain the "transport problem" to the public. I think almost everyone should be able to understand the issue and agree that the car promises more than it can deliver.
Perhaps some of this as a preamble would be a breath of fresh air, levelling with the people(!).
The techniques used by the established parties seem to be:
- get voted in on a positive and slip the negative things in through the back door while everybody is distracted by the positive
- wait until you win a second term before doing anything controversial
There needs to be an understanding of the difference between public and private policy. Election campaign material vs actual practical plans once in power. Pete described before the idea of having a "simplified" version of the manifesto fit for public consumption - I would go a step further and say it's acceptable (necessary, even) to downright lie and misrepresent intentions in a party's public manifesto, then implement anything else entirely once in power. After all, that's exactly what has been done to us for decades.
Pete's work fits squarely into the practical plans / private policy category. How a party chooses to distill and distort those ideas into a vote-winning public policy is a separate question.
This work is useful even if it never sees the light of day as official policy of some group because it helps to increase our understanding of the system as a whole, and how we might start to change it. Ideally we would have a huge majority with hundreds of intelligent MPs who understand the work, but that will never happen. But what we can start to think about are questions like:
What work could a single sympathetic MP do at a local level to start to incrementally push change?
What about a single public official like a judge?
What about 5-10 of these people?
What about a single minister, if some opposition party gets enough seats to be able to demand an appointment?
In light of the above, what moves will our enemies (i.e. muslim bloc) be making?