Manifesto: seeking your consent
If I were to say in a word what my programme is all about, I would have to say ‘CONSENT’. How we arrive at and act upon CONSENT.
What follows is how this might look and be acted upon in some of the various domains which might otherwise be called areas of ‘policy’.
In arriving at consent, however, we also need to achieve a higher quality of MEETING and this too is implied in much of what is contained here.
It is an indispensable component of finding new life, new ideas and new ways forward.
The NHS:
would we vote for this now if it were being offered to us in its present form? This form is very different from how it was in 1945.
Ideas about what constitutes illness have changed since then. Our consent is best measured by what we would pay for ourselves.
How many of the services currently provided by the NHS would we pay for if we were having to pay for them ourselves?
We have to be really honest with ourselves and each other if we are to arrive at a true understanding of what we mean when we say ‘Our NHS’.
When groups such as the Clinical Commissioning Groups are set up to cater for local provision,
we need to be really clear about how far the needs being identified by them are catered for within existing budgets and what influences the size of the budget available.
Again, without this transparency, we cannot really exercise our consent.
And Brexit, in terms of local health provision, might mean that each local health area is self sufficient in terms of resources and service delivery.
How would this look without the cross subsidies which may make for better or poorer provision in our own local place? Read more
HS2 and other infrastructure projects:
we have got used to motorways and other large infrastructure projects impacting our environment, and our enjoyment of our environment.
Noise pollution is one example. This is the ‘price’ of progress.
But this balance between progress and environmental impact has always needed to be just that: a balance, with an attendant costs/benefit analysis.
We are now faced with the prospect of HS2. How do we draw the line here between cost and benefit?
The impacts are huge; not least on those who will lose homes or businesses to it. Have we, the electorate, ever really been engaged or invited into a debate about this?
Who are the likely beneficiaries and how many and to what extent the losers?
What are we being told and what are the facts and how do we decide?
That, I think, is a question which has yet to be answered and should be before the project is finally approved. Read more
Town Centre Regeneration:
Consent is also a factor, perhaps by determining one, here. What level of town centre regeneration are we voting for with our cars when we visit retail parks or with our mouse when we do internet shopping? Actions have consequences and we need to be honest with ourselves.
If we want our traditional high streets to remain, what are we all going to do about it and how do we work with our politicians and local development agencies around this?
Development of any sort however requires enterprise and innovation and so there is a question of how the conditions for this are optimised.
Some people know what they want to do the right from the start and have the confidence and sense of purpose to achieve it.
Or they may be seized by some inspiration.
Others of us may need a lot more help to get there!
This is partly about help with making our idea into a reality when we already have this but a question even before that may be how we arrive at this idea in the first place.
Here I would suggest that we may have to be a lot more like the artist naturally is - to be able to observe and to be inspired by this towards a response.
So in terms of enterprise this would be how can we equip ourselves better to notice a need and engage with it so that we can then feel the inspiration as response to it:
To know what we want to do and how to go about it.
To have the opportunity and encouragement to develop these skills could I think make for huge benefit all round.
So we need to ask how we provide for this.
You can’t just ‘magic’ enterprise into being - least of all by huge infrastructure projects which will assume once the form is created the right thing will appear to fill it.
No, the form has to grow from out of the imagination or inspiration experienced as a way of communicating it.
Administration of justice in an age of cuts:
I will highlight one particular area for development, which is around the existing idea and practice of restorative justice.
As this is presently administered, parties to a crime (victim and offender) can only be brought together, even with their consent,
within a restorative and reparative process once the guilt of the offender has been established (and both or all parties consent of course).
This makes it an addition to our normal justice process.
Without impinging on this, or diminishing the rights of the victim, could ways be explored to make this an alternative,
as well as an additional, process - beyond the extent to which it already is?
This could make for resolution in many cases where the weight of evidence is just not sufficient otherwise to secure a conviction and when both parties,
especially the victim, cannot therefore obtain closure through having gone through the criminal process.
This may be especially relevant in sexual offences where victim and offender know one another, have been together in a social situation and a question has arisen around consent.
Where law enforcement is itself subject to budget cuts this seems an ever more important option to explore and probably,
at a human level, much more satisfactory for the people concerned if they are duly supported.
Public/private finance and taxation:
A corollary to budget cuts generally is how you square the circle, or solve the ‘impossible’ equation of lower taxes on the one hand and better public services on the other.
One way of course is to improve ‘efficiency’ but in not a few instances, including in the NHS, this is seen to equate with ever more ‘aggressive’ management styles, putting off recruits and disillusioning existing staff (so with problems for recruitment and retention).
This also has consequences for job satisfaction and a sense of ‘vocation’.
(Short term and zero hours contracts are also of course a feature of this although I am now speaking more of the public sector.)
Another approach to this might be to encourage much more interface between not for profit organisations and industrial and commercial concerns in the ‘for profit’ sector.
This would mean that the latter did more to support the former in their own local area of operation as a form of gift towards public provision outside the ‘enforced’ gift of taxation.
This again would build on real relationships formed, and a level of ‘consent’ achieved, in a direct way the anonymity of indirect giving via taxation can never achieve.
It may be especially important as a corollary to reduced corporation tax levels.
But all this would equally need to be carefully organized.
My manifesto is about consent, but it is also about representation.
And the ‘first past the post’ system presents only one model of this.
Increasingly it is felt to be an unfair model, leading to many of us feeling disenfranchised.
But it does offer the benefit of certainty or it has until now.
Increasingly however with hung parliaments and sometimes less clear differentiation between the parties a new model is called for.
Proportional representation will be one way forward but another way is to ask how we can improve the quality of listening between the parties so that better decisions
and a better quality of representation can, through that, also be achieved.
That is what is being asked of us now and is also what my candidacy is about.
International aspects including immigration:
The best way to tackle immigration is to help those who want or need to flee their own countries to lead more peaceful and prosperous lives where they already are.
This is what they also most want.
The factors working against this are economic and political.
We can do more to use our influence in the world to address this and more to help these countries to develop peacefully for their own sake, and not just for ours (our markets).
When we think about peace keeping, and sending military personnel in to achieve this, we should think at least as much if not more about peace building.
This means using conflict resolution skills to turn conflict into progress.
‘Conflict is the seed of the new in the husk of the old’ it has been said and we can help to make this a reality both in our own back yard and beyond our shores,
possibly by mobilising an army of mediators when relevant towards the latter end!
How might it have been if we had had more of this attitude and approach back in 2003?
How much consent was there for the war in Iraq?
What happened as a result of this being ignored or falsely manipulated?
We need to be more honest with ourselves about all these things.
When we have become champions of the world in this sense - champions of the world’s causes - we may more readily become champions of the world in other respects!
Some people will argue that more use should be made of referenda, perhaps following the Swiss model.
This may have its merits but we have such a poor record on referenda!
In the last one those providing the information were just seeking to persuade, not to help people genuinely make up their own minds.
People had to inform themselves to know how to vote. They had to do this in spite of the politicians rather than because of them.
This emphasises how much the problem with Brexit was that it was binary right from the start.
Within the existing system, we keep being told that only Labour or the Conservatives can win this seat and the election itself.
This requires that, whatever the situation is telling us, we will go on voting in predictable ways.
But whether it’s Climate change or voter intentions it’s the same:
The important thing is to respond to the situation at hand.
There is little doubt that climate change is a reality and that it is man made.
But even if it isn’t, the remedy lies in our hands.
We are asked to stay engaged and responsive to the needs disclosed.
And now the situation in which we find ourselves politically is telling us
the old approaches are not working.
They are not leading to good enough discussion or
decision making or the delivery of those decisions into practice.
In all of these ways we are being told it really is time to change!
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