I feel compelled to endorse a new publication, The Plan, Twelve Months to Renew Britain, by Douglas Carswell MP and Daniel Hannan MEP, released today and I would suggest that David Cameron give serious consideration to its key proposals. It is targeted at a generation who have not yet given up with politics, but instead have given up with MPs, lying politicians, a cynical political elite, false Westminster promises and empty political initiatives. Thus, in the worst cases, those voters have ceased to believe in the ballot box. The election turnout figures have said it all – so the point does not need to be reiterated here.
Carswell and Hannan bat out some honest and very real plans for a 12 month term in Parliament, which can help bring about a true restoration of faith in Westminster and our national political system. Their ambitious aim, inherent in the Tory localist agenda, amounts to “nothing less than the restoration of liberty to the individual, dignity to the legislature and purpose to the ballot box.” (The Plan, page 44). The Conservatives must be responsible for rejecting the Big Government-knows-best approach and ensure that decisions should be taken as closely as possible to the people who are affected by them, decision-makers should be directly accountable and that the citizens should be as free as possible from state coercion (The Plan, page 42). It is a template for how many people would probably like their country to be run, given the completely disastrous management of Britain under New Labour and the collapse of trust in Parliament and its representatives.
It is essential that David Cameron endorses its key proposals, as specified in The Plan because it may prove essential to support important proposals from within his own Party in order to win the next General Election. In this book, there is a vast array of proposals to lend support to. Within the next two years, it may well be upon the shoulders of the Conservative leader to commit his leadership to:
- Assert direct democracy, including the right to popular legislative initiative, the right to initiate a referendum to block new laws, local referendums and referendums for proposed constitutional changes;
- Clean up Westminster for good by abolishing MPs’ perks, ensuring MPs are bound by the same laws as the rest of the people, shrinking the House of Commons bureaucracy, ensuring parliamentary officials are elected and therefore, accountable;
- Return law, order and accountability by allowing for directly elected sheriffs to act with a degree of control over local policing, sentencing and prioritising of offences;
- Demand the Supremacy of Parliament, so that we can scrap the destructive Human Rights Act, withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, pass a new Act to ensure the supremacy of Parliament over authoritarian EU Treaty requirements and appoint senior judges through a transparent parliamentary process (who currently appear to be running the country on behalf of some ancient Islamic fundamentalist sect);
- Ensure the independence of state schools, so that central Government does not dictate administrative and teaching policies to every local school in the land;
- Initiate a true localism to make local councils self-financing and abolish regional development agencies and the regional governmental bodies we have already voted against;
- Put patients in control of health choices so that they can opt out of the NHS if they choose – and opt in to their own health accounts with their own contributions;
- Allow neighbourhoods to take care of their own welfare by allowing counties/cities to determine eligibility for benefits and allocation of funds for social security;
- Repeal the Acts that provide the basis for costly UK regulations, including the worst of all, the necessary amendment/repeal of sections 2 and 3 of the European Communities Act 1972;
- Create an independent Britain which will be achieved by scrapping Crown Prerogative Powers and replace the existing terms of EU membership with a Swiss-style bilateral free trade agreement.
If Cameron did speak up on behalf of these well established ideas, it would make his position resolute and boldly Conservative because there would be less of a concern from the people about what our troubled Conservative Party will actually stand for, if they do ever decide to vote for it over the next two years. Carswell and Hannan have laid down the framework – all it needs now is a little debate and in my view, a whole lot of support.
