Three weeks in to an utterly tawdry squabble of election campaigns by all the current political parties and it has become crystal clear the UK political system is completely unhinged and not fit for purpose. I think the clincher was the Conservative candidate that decided to share some of the hate-mail she’d received. Apparently she deemed it no gruesome enough so took the liberty of adding a death threat. No-one expects politicians to be honest, but, really? So somehow, we find ourselves with a serial lying sociopath for a Prime Minister, and a time-warp crypto-communist hijacker as leader of the Opposition. Which in effect means, in our dysfunctional first-past-the-post election system, no party is worthy of anyone’s vote.
The crypto-communist party is currently standing on a platform of ‘real change’. In theory this sounds like the sort of thing we need as a country. Unfortunately, what ‘real change’ seems to mean in their case is a return to the early 1970s. The decade of powercuts, three-day week and uncollected refuse by the sides of the road. Good idea. Personally, I was kind of hoping for the sort of change that might help the UK get out of its ongoing tailspin decline.
I live in a constituency with a chasmic Serial-Liar Party majority. Meaning that I’m effectively dis-enfranchised. I have (postal) voted, but I might just have well flushed my voting paper into the septic tank at the end of my garden.
The party I would have liked to have voted for doesn’t exist. So I decided to sit down and think about what that party might look like, what their manifesto might contain.
Here’s what I got.
1) The way the current political system is set up, we inherently get the wrong politicians. A desire to ‘make a difference’ is a necessary but not sufficient condition to hold public office. Guiding the country requires a number of critical skills and wisdom, and as such, no prospective politician will be allowed to stand for office until such times as they have acquired the requisite skills. As time progresses, these same skill requirements will pass down the hierarchy from national to local level in such a way that progressively more decision making power in society can be devolved away from the centre and towards those closest to the immediate stakeholders. The requisite set of skills is described in the blog article preceding this one, ‘Minimum Viable Politician’.
2) The public has lost all trust in the political classes and as such, any person wishing to enter public life will be subject to synchronous veracity monitoring (SVM) technologies. Such technologies will indicate, for the benefit of any viewing/listening member of the UK public, whether a politician is lying and/or bullshitting on a topic they don’t understand. SVM will be activated whenever the politician is in public. The right to privacy for any citizen is sacrosanct, and as such, when a public figure is away from the public eye, they re-acquire this privacy right. The foundations of the SVM technology solution idea are described in ‘Making Sense Of Fake News #2 – Solution Generation’ in the February 2019 issue of the SI ezine. As can be seen from what’s happening in China, the technology already exists.
3) Several key sectors of UK society have suffered enormously from the disruptive oscillations caused by left-right shifts in political power. The biggest sufferer has been the Education sector. The main reason being that the time required to educate a child is considerably greater than the current five-year election cycle. As such, Education will be taken out of the political ping-pong arena, and Education policy will instead be determined by a permanent all-party coalition. The education of future citizens is simply too important to be subject to games of political table-tennis.
4) Measurement. One of the main reasons for societal dysfunction is the use of inappropriate measures and metrics. The Government has been consistently guilty of measuring what is easy rather than what is important. Education league tables, healthcare targets, GDP, etc have caused enormous unintentional harm to their respective sectors and the country as a whole. Measurement is an important precursor to improvement and to ensuring the country is moving in the direction that citizens desire, but only if said measurements are fit for purpose. It is often said that the most important numbers are ‘unknown and unknowable’, but we also now know that there is a science that underpins an ability to measure what is important. All current metrics used by the Government will be reviewed and, where necessary, be replaced with measures that are meaningful. Starting with Education and Healthcare. Our PanSensic tools might have a role to play here.
5) Meta-Data. The Magnificent Seven ‘Big Data’ companies have demonstrated the value of data, both in monetary and influence terms. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in particular may be said, by optimising their algorithms to grab and trap maximum user attention, to have played an already significant role in destroying democracy. Billions of users have given these companies enormous amounts of information for ‘free’, and the companies have in turn monetised that information for their own benefits. Given the harm already committed as a result, the Magnificent Seven will be taxed and made to pay for the damage they have caused. Data provided by UK citizens will be ‘nationalised’ and each citizen will own the rights to any and all of their past, present and future data. The Government will have access to anonymised elements of this data for the sole purpose of measuring what is important to help steer the country in the directions desired by citizens.
6) Climate Emergency. The UK contributes only 2% to overall global emissions and as such there is only a limited amount of direct impact we as a country can expect to have on reducing climate change. That said, the UK’s core strengths continue to be creativity and innovation, and as such we have an enormous opportunity as a country to pioneer the creation of environmental technologies that will not only accelerate the de-carbonisation of the UK, but also open up the potential to create world-changing export markets. We will, therefore, seek to make a positive impact on the global emissions story that goes way beyond the 2% we can directly control. It is not known how real and deep the climate ‘emergency’ is. The large majority of the scientific community says there is a problem, but it is not clear how much their thinking is subject to poor assumptions and confirmation bias. As a matter of priority, therefore, we need to build far more comprehensive simulation models that remove the linear-extrapolation fallacy found in all current models and build in more coherent effect-interaction models in order to build more meaningful predictions of how our climate will change in the coming decades. That being said, we also need to be cognisant that risk is a combination of likelihood and consequence. Better models will allow us to be more precise on the likelihood side of the risk story, but whatever the likelihood story turns out to be, the potential consequences of getting the calculations wrong are utterly catastrophic. And because that is so, until such times as the simulation models tell us otherwise, we act assuming the climate emergency is a real and imminent threat. We do this in recognition of the fact that current generations have an obligation to the generations yet to come. All of our duties involve leaving the planet in a better state than it was when we arrived.
7) AI and other digital technologies look set to have enormous impact on large swathes of society, with, in particular, the threat of enormous disruption to the labour market. We should use these technologies to assist in the elimination of meaningless work in society. The work that people do brings – or should bring – important meaning to life, and as such, as a country we should be actively working to not just eliminate the meaningless, but to promote and open up opportunities for new meaningful work in the coming AI revolution.
8) The Small State. Government bureaucracy needs to be kept to a minimum, and in many ways the shift to a more digital, AI-driven world enables this to happen. ‘Nanny-State’ thinking is inconsistent with the desire to create an AntiFragile society. That said, the world is at a point now where the ability of advertisers and MNCs to manipulate individuals to act against their best interests means that the fight between freedom-of-choice of the individual versus sellers is no longer a fair fight. In the same way that politicians and those individuals that choose to live a public life will be required to use SVM technologies, any and all advertisements will be subject to the same technologies. The public has the right to eat as much fast-food as they wish, but at the same time they have the right to know that they are being manipulated. The ‘Snowflake & The (Magnificent) Seven Dwarves’ blog post describes this fight between MNCs and the individual in more detail.
9) Unearned versus earned income. The gap between haves and have-nots in the UK has reached unprecedented and now de-stabilising levels. The capitalist system, unfortunately, creates self-reinforcing cycles in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The tax structure in the country reinforces these cycles by penalising earned income (principally work and entrepreneurship) and rewarding unearned income (principally land and property ownership). This happens in large part because historically it has been easier to tax the former. This is fundamentally unfair, and as such the country will progressively shift the tax system in the other direction. Rent-seekers and rent-seeking behaviours are not good for the country. Workers and entrepreneurs, on the other hand, people with ‘skin in the game’, are our future lifeblood as a nation, and as such income taxes will be progressively lowered and land and property taxes correspondingly increased to reward those invested in creating our future success. Our desire as a society should be to reward those that are actively working to improve our standing in the world and not those that inherited a property portfolio.
10) AntiFragile. The endemic shift towards ‘continuous improvement’ in both public, private and NGO sectors has realised great increases in efficiency, but, we now know, at the expense of massively impaired effectiveness. We have unwittingly evolved nearly all of our institutions to be very fragile, and therefore – as we saw in the GFC of 2008 – very vulnerable to disruption when stressed. There is now an urgent need to build greater resilience into our institutions. This does not mean compromising on efficiency, but it does mean recognising that not all ‘waste’ is waste. If an enterprise is unable to innovate and respond to external changes because it has trimmed staff and resource levels, they have trimmed too far. A key objective of Government policy and action should be to assist our institutions to attain resilience and, ultimately, antifragility. The more the UK is stressed, the stronger it should become.
11) AntiFragile II: Health. The UK can be rightly proud of the NHS. It has, however, largely evolved to become the National Illness Service. This in turn has created a downward spiral of increased capability to fix more medical problems, increased demand on the system, and increased cost to provide the services. All the time with there being little or no incentive to improve efficiency since every time there is a budget problem, eventually citizens will lobby and the Government will provide a bail out. The inefficiency problem is in part due to the use of inappropriate success measures (see Item 4), which has in turn lead to the creation of an enormous cadre of ‘managers’ who, in addition to adding no clinical benefit, have expanded exponentially to service the ever more resource-hungry dysfunctional measures. The NHS needs to transform into a genuine Health Service again, which means a much bigger focus on prevention rather than cure, moves to keep patients out of hospitals they don’t want to be in, and moves to introduce ‘self-organising’ healthcare practices requiring less ‘management’ and re-establishing the ability of medical staff to feel pride in the amazing services they provide to patients. During any kind of transformation, the system has to service current demands in addition to taking on additional one-off costs to enable the transition to the new system to take place. Additional transition funds will be provided to enable the required transitions to take place. Throughout and beyond, the NHS will continue to provide healthcare services free at the point of use for all UK citizens.
12) Education. The long-term success of the Nation is critically dependent on the presence of a population possessing the requisite skills and knowledge to thrive in a turbulent, often chaotic world. As such our Education system is the bedrock upon which all else stems. The current education system is 150 years out of date, and the problems of the sector have been exacerbated by poorly designed success metrics (Item 4 again). In addition to the rapid re-design of said metrics, we will embark on a major transformation of the way we educate our country’s children. Rote learning and the teaching of ‘answers’ makes no sense in a world where most answers can be Googled. Emphasis needs to shift much towards the teaching of critical-thinking skills and how to ask the ‘right’ questions. Answers are easy; finding the right problems to work on is what we now require.
13) Veracity. Item 2) is designed to begin solving the UK ‘internal’ trust problem. In a globalised economy, we cannot ignore the bigger problem of ‘external’ veracity. It is a well established fact that certain foreign states are actively seeking to de-stabilise other states through deliberate mis-information campaigns, driven largely through social media. It is a universal human trait that ensures ‘bad’ news travels seven times faster than ‘good’. An emotion-provoking lie travels seven times faster than the boring-truth. Such traits are difficult to change, but this should not stop us from working to actively counter deliberate mis-information campaigns coming from antagonistic states, and as such this will be a high priority for the Government. In a complex, rapidly changing world, citizens need to be able to be confident they have access to knowledge that is true and correct. As such we will work towards the creation of society-wide veracity-establishing and cyber-security capabilities that will be available for use by any citizen in relation to information entering the UK from outside our borders.
14) Dead wood. Too many Institutions -public and NGO sector in particular – have outstayed their usefulness and have become self-preservation societies that add no value to our nation. Such entities will be incentivised to shut themselves down once their original missions have been achieved. Every institution has a shelf-life, and society needs means by which redundant entities in the public domain cannot be allowed to outstay their usefulness. This is in many ways related to the idea of removing meaningless work: no-one wants to work for an entity that serves no useful purpose.
15) Written Constitution. UK citizens will, for the first time, be provided with a written Constitution. This Constitution will be designed to make clear the rights and responsibilities of each of us. First key amongst these responsibilities will be acknowledgment that the success of any resilient society comes from the diversity that it contains. We can see this clearly by looking at the last 5000 years of the country’s history, and that today we are one of the most diverse, multi-cultural societies on the planet. Second key amongst these responsibilities will be a requirement that every citizen is legally obliged to vote in elections. Every citizen, at the same time, is, of course, perfectly entitled to spoil their ballot paper. There will be fines for non-voters.
16) Elections. The first-past-the-post system is wholly unsuited to the complexities of the global economy the UK must operate within and will thus be re-designed to operate in a manner that enables every citizen’s vote to count and count fairly. Advocates of the first-past-the-post system have previously claimed that other voting systems don’t give a clear majority for government. When there have been such majorities, however, the actions of the in-power Government have generally been in direction that have not served the long-term needs of the country well. In this sense, if the results of an election require coalitions to form, this should not be seen as a bad thing. Some form of proportional representation system will be designed, and, at a local level, the opportunity for secure on-line voting will be created in a similar manner to that found in Switzerland.
Transitions
Key to the implementability of any kind of manifesto is a clear recognition that it is not possible to ‘start again’. Utopian ideas for re-inventing that seem to appear periodically all suffer from the problem of ‘can’t get there from here’. Step-change transitions require careful management, and must fundamentally start from where we currently are. The ongoing challenges of the moment cannot be ignored while bigger-picture transitions are being undertaken.
The start point for this manifesto is the creation of a new generation of appropriately skilled politicians and the necessary education of a first cohort of candidates will take two years. With this in mind, the term of a first Government will be two years, at the end of which will be an Election with parties able to field the newly eligible political candidates.
During this two-year term the Government will:
a) Conduct a nationwide survey of all UK citizens to invite contributions to inform the design and content of the new Constitution. A big part of this survey will be to understand how we collectively see our rights and responsibilities, what we believe our UK ‘values’ are and should be, how we collectively see our place in the world, and what we think our future goals and objectives should be relative to the rest of the world.
b) Put our new Constitution into law by the end of the first year of the Government
c) Urgently re-design the dysfunctional critical measures that we currently use to mis-guide our public institutions. Top of the list will be education and healthcare targets, since they are the things creating the largest levels of societal dysfunction. Measures are easy to change. The shift in the behaviours that emerge from them will, of course, take time
d) Mature and prove the SVM technologies such that they are fully functional, commissioned and in place after the next election.
e) Create strong incentives to encourage the creation and development of novel environmental and renewable energy technologies.
f) Introduce new legislation that will force the Magnificent Seven MNCs to return UK citizen’s data, and pay taxes to compensate for the damage they have thus far caused.
g) Introduce legislation to shift the current tax regimes away from earned income towards unearned income.
h) Introduce legislation to take the education and healthcare sectors out of party-political hands and into the hands of a permanent cross-party coalition.
i) Introduce legislation to replace the dysfunctional first-past-the-post election system to the new every-vote-counts system such that the election to be held at the end of the two-year period of this Government will by run using the new system.
j) Introduce a series of (quarterly) sense-of-progress delivering low-hanging fruit changes to resolve a number of current unfairnesses. These will include: removal of VAT on sanitary products, scrapping of vanity projects like HS2, and re-investment of the released funding into the creation of improved local public transport services, free TV licenses for all pensioners, initiating the sell-off of the tens of thousands of empty Government-owned properties on redundant military bases, fining house-builders failing to comply with agreed proportions of social housing within the sites they are developing and using the fines to build more affordable homes, provide tax incentives to re-use brown-field sites to convert ex-industrial buildings into affordable homes.
k) Within the first three months of Government, hold a ‘people’s vote’ referendum to determine whether we wish to withdraw or remain within the EU.
In retrospect, instead of my (pointless tactical) postal vote, I should have crossed the whole candidate menu out, added a new row, ‘None Of The Above’ at the bottom, and put my cross in that box.
Maybe next time… probably around 12 months from now?
