New Conservative manifesto

We are facing the end of the Neo-liberal paradigm and we have always managed to cope with such swings. The electorate is no longer willing to support a low wage, economical unequal economy. I do not feel they are particularly hungry for a return to socialist governance so what can we do to win them back? This manifesto is a skeleton of ideas that can provide a 3^rd way.

So tax:

We must find a way to stop globalised business dodging tax by doing so we can keep corporation tax low, attacking and aiding business but also ensure that the majority who pay their tax don’t feel cheated.

Solutions:

• Tax income – if a business is not paying 19% corporation tax and the income they receive from their UK market base then we tax their income at 25%
• Tax accesses – high- light businesses not paying their share and levy taxes to cover the cost of their usage of UK facilities
• Create list of tax complaint / good businesses and only these companies will be allowed to tender for government contracts (business kite scheme)
• Replace council tax with regional income tax – set by the regional council

Localism:

People don’t want endless levels of government and councils are too often, too powerless or a holding places for questionable political wantabess but people feel distant from “Westminster”.

Solutions:

• Abolish all councils and replace with single leader regional councils – these leader will sit in the new federal house (replacing the lords) and appoint councils to run their area
• These new sub-federal area will have control of business rates
• Reformed VAT rates and items included
• Set regional income tax rates
• Set minimal wages – never below the national limit
• Lobby for national infrastructure money
• Get money for hosting unpopular but needed infrastructure (i.e. prisons, power plants)
• Run the regional NHS, Social care, fire service, police, education, social service
•  

Housing:

We don’t build enough, we allow bad apple to poison certain areas and we have allow homelessness to grow:

Solution:

• Make it the duty of regional council to provide housing to all – regardless of their behaviour
• For residents at issue – we would use a combination of social service and welfare to try to tackle the issue as soon as possible and at root
• If they continue to prove an issue, they would be removed to special housing but the ambition must always be rehabilitation
• We would also seek to set up special housing for drug addicts, in these area drug possession would be legal and administered via the social service – again the aim is always rehabilitation first but management second
• Reform right to buy – the subsidy would remain but they could then only be sold for the original purchase price plus inflation and only to other social housing residents
• Empower regional councils to take back any house under habitual standards  
• Charge developers luxury house tax (set by the regional council), to be used to build more social housing and pay for infrastructure required
• Simply the processes for mass housing developments

Employment:  

Problem people in work but also needed tax credits, low paid work, threats from automation, too many long termed unemployed

Solution:

• Reform the job centre so there purpose is to fund employment for their clients
• Ensure they form partnerships with the various organisations that do this, even paying them but only if the clients end up in long term employment
• Reform PIP, no longer based on the best day but average week, also re-appraise the skills required to do a real job and make these the criteria.
• Reform sanctions – no one should ever be left with no income EVER! Keep minimum benefits level for all but make part of it a top up for attendance
• Create partnership with A-level colleges for in work training
• Pursue policy of offering tax breaks for employing the long-term unemployed
• Create partnership for work experience (with volunteer participants receiving top-up payments) and only with firms who agree to codes of conduct (all participants would have to be kite marked)
• Accepting that employment is better than unemployment if an employer is paying so badly that the worker needs government aid they should be actively helped to find better employment and cost sort against the employer.

Education:

• Role A-levels up with Degrees – closer collaboration between universities and 6^th forms
• End tuition feed and student loans – replaced by a post university HE tax based on post education income
• Converted back to a commercial loan if they go aboard
• Ameliorated for all public sector workers
• Tax relief for all kits approved firms offering in work training & apprenticeships
• Shorter more generic degrees
• Allow industries to help form the shape of these degrees
• Tax refile on firms paying for top up aspects of these new base degrees  

I shall stop hear but I hope this give you some idea of new conservatism, pragmatic not ideological and hard those who see our great nation as a resource ban but also caring for all those who reside hear  

Losing trust in God?

Trust in God

In the western world, believers have lost a great deal of doctrinal certainty, even if they talk about it loudly. There has been a loss of confidence in our ability to trace the works of God and broadly relay to the world what God has said. (P22, being dispel, Rowan Williams)

I often ask myself if the church has lost faith in God and for good reason: “Numbers attending church services have fallen by 12% in the past decade, to less than half the levels of the 1960s.” This was the first result I got when googling falling church attendance. The Methodist church is losing members at an alarming rate and our churches seem emptier by the day. Sometimes it feels easier to accept personal losses then this collective loss. 

I suspect this loss is made all the harder because we never talk of it So I ask you, people called Methodist do you trust God with the care of his church anymore? 

If we can’t see God at work in the church then it is no surprise we have lost our ability to see God at work in the world (trace the works of God) and to speak of God to those around us. 

So Let us assume that we see God as some benevolent absentee landlord. How are we going to abide in Him and He in us anymore? 

Gods answer: Trust me for just one more day, today! Just one more day, think of all the love I’ve shown you in the past and give me just one day. Seek me at work in the world, come to where you see me and reside with me there. Just one day is all I ask 

I truly believe Gods answer for our spiritually wounded church is rebirth. It just so happens that our church is limping through PMC (along with all the others). It is seeking God, learning to trust, learning that he was never absent just beyond our vision. It’s rather like rediscovering joys we felt long past. It is like entering into a relationship. There is a lot of confusion, inaction, debate but a wish to continue and a call from God to be in relationship with Christ and through Christ with him.

So can we trust God just for one more day? 

An Open letter to the conservative party.

I have oft been asked to defend pretty foul ideas. The idea that it’s actually acceptable to deny a person their daily bread because they have offended a bureaucrat at the job center really takes the biscuit. Mr. Cobyn's economics may be fantasy but in a race between fantasy and 5 more years of austerity, after 7 years of the same, I can understand why people would opt for fantasy.

So we lost, Yes lost! And we will be exiled to the wilderness if we don’t accept that fact. We may have got a higher % of the vote and more seats but that is down to the thankfully short election. Every day May sits in power with the homophobic DUP is a day more worth of toxicity added to the eternal austerity party and a day more we will be exiled from the British people affections. 

Another election is coming, I very much doubt this liaison with the DUP will last long and I would be shocked if it can last through the Brexit negotiations. It would be better for us to allow Mr. Corbyn to form a minority government and fail. Let his saintly promises be crushed by the realities of leadership. Allow him to drink from the poison chalice that is Brexit.  Let people see what the progressive alliance would achieve and what chaotic government is like to live through. Corbyn will have to renew Trident!

Better this then another election with May as leader, or a hasty leadership election just before an election with Saint Corbyn’s myths and reputations untarnished. He would win this election, and he would have a majority. Empowered with a majority he would forever, destroy the city with his Robbin Hood tax. With a majority, Corbyn would chase all the foreign investment from the UK or forever alienating the Saudis with his pro-Iran foreign policy. A minority Corbyn slowly destroying himself is containable a majority Corbyn destroying the UK is not.

And what should we do in opposition? Well, one contain Corbyn. Secondly, elected a new leader, one with proven ability in debating and handling the media and one with some popular touch. Thirdly and most importantly rid ourselves of our idealization of neo-liberal economics. A true conservative holds no ideal as perfect and the market is merely an idea. It is an idea that is now irrevocably tainted and it is time to move away from it. I am not advocating turning Marxist like McDonald. All I am saying is that we once again acknowledged that if we cannot promise a slice of the good life to those who work then they will not vote for us. We have for far too long excused taking very hard actions because the market (that great deity) has demanded it. Well, that was okay while the market was delivering these improvements. After 7 years of stagnation, it’s now time for a change. 

Conservative manifesto

• Saving £9 billion through the Red Tape Challenge and the One-In-Two-Out Rule.
• listed companies will be required either to nominate a director from the workforce, create a formal employee advisory council or assign specific responsibility for employee representation to a designated non-executive director.
• Give the Pensions Regulator new powers to issue punitive fines for those found to have wilfully left a pension scheme under-resourced and, if necessary, powers similar to those already held by the Insolvency Service to disqualify the company directors in question
• The next Conservative government will legislate to make executive pay packages subject to strict annual votes by shareholders
• we will introduce, for employees, a right to request information relating to the future direction of the company.
• So we have launched a new £23 billion National Productivity Investment Fund (funding not listed)
• Create UK sovereign wealth funds – (We anticipate early funds being created out of revenues from shale gas extraction, dormant assets, and the receipts of sale of some public assets)
• We will legislate to change planning law for shale applications. Non-fracking drilling will be treated as permitted development
• A greater percentage of the tax revenues from shale gas directly benefit the communities that host the extraction sites.
• We will give local enterprise partnerships greater weight by backing them in law
• We will hold a Great Exhibition of the North in 2018
• So we will continue to commit the same cash [as the EU] total in funds for farm support until the end of the parliament
• We will use the structural fund money that comes back to the UK following Brexit to create a United Kingdom Shared Prosperity Fund
• We will place the BBC World Service and the British Council on a secure footing so they are able to promote the best of British values around the globe
• So we will maintain the commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of our gross national income on assistance to developing nations and international emergencies.
• Spend at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence and we will increase the defence budget by at least 0.5 per cent above inflation in every year of the new parliament
• One year holiday on Employer National Insurance Contributions for firms hiring service personnel after they leave service
• We will legislate to ensure that a form of identification must be presented before voting
• We will enshrine victims’ entitlements in law, making clear what level of service they should expect from the police, courts and criminal justice system
• We will invest over £1 billion to modernise the prison estate
• Create a national community sentencing framework that punishes offenders and focuses on the measures that have a better chance of turning people around and preventing crime, such as curfews and orders that tackle drug and alcohol abuse
• Building at least a hundred new free schools a year
• We will prohibit councils from creating any new places in schools that have been rated either ‘inadequate’ or ‘requires improvement’ by Ofsted.
• We will make it a condition for universities hoping to charge maximum tuition fees to become involved in academy sponsorship or the founding of free schools
• We will make sure that no school has its budget cut as a result of the new formula
• We will start by replacing 13,000 existing technical qualifications with new qualifications, known as T-levels, across fifteen routes
• make sure that each student does a three-month work placement as part of their [T-level] course
• We will establish new institutes of technology, backed by leading employers and linked to leading universities, in every major city in England
• We will deliver our commitment to create 3 million apprenticeships for young people by 2020
• a new right to request leave for training for all employees
• Introduce a national retraining scheme. Under the scheme, the costs of training will be met by the government, with companies able to gain access to the Apprenticeship Levy to support wage costs during the training period.
• We have no plans for further radical welfare reform in this parliament and will continue the roll-out of Universal Credit, to ensure that it always pays to be in work.
• So for businesses employing former wards of the care system, someone with a disability, those with chronic mental health problems, those who have committed a crime but who have repaid their debt to society, and those who have been unemployed for over a year, we will offer a holiday on their employers’ National Insurance Contributions for a full year
• We will increase the earnings thresholds for people wishing to sponsor migrants for family visas.
• We will require companies with more than 250 employees to publish more data on the pay gap between men and women.
• We will also ask large employers to publish information on the pay gap for people from different ethnic backgrounds.
• We will legislate to give unemployed disabled claimants or those with a health condition personalised and tailored employment support.
• We will therefore also legislate to enshrine a definition of domestic violence and abuse in law, providing the legal underpinning for everything in our new act.
• Our aim will be to halve rough sleeping over the course of the parliament and eliminate it altogether by 2027
•  
• We will go further. We will introduce a safeguard tariff cap that will extend the price protection currently in place for some vulnerable customers to more customers on the poorest value tariffs.
• So we will keep our promise to maintain the Triple Lock until 2020, and when it expires we will introduce a new Double Lock, meaning that pensions will rise in line with the earnings that pay for them, or in line with inflation – whichever is highest.
• We will also ensure that the state pension age reflects increases in life expectancy, while protecting each generation fairly.
• [On social care ]This will ensure that, no matter how large the cost of care turns out to be, people will always retain at least £100,000 of their savings and assets, including value in the family home.
• We will give workers a new statutory entitlement to carer’s leave
• We will increase NHS spending by a minimum of £8 billion in real terms over the next five years
• Building and upgrading primary care facilities, mental health clinics and hospitals in every part of England. Over the course of the next parliament, this will amount to the most ambitious programme of investment in buildings and technology the NHS has ever seen.
• And we will increase the Immigration Health Surcharge, to £600 for migrant workers and £450 for international students, to cover their use of the NHS.
• So we will review the operation of the internal market and, in time for the start of the 2018 financial year, we will make non-legislative changes to remove barriers to the integration of care
• recruiting up to 10,000 more mental health professionals
• We will deliver the reforms proposed in our Housing White Paper to free up more land for new homes
• We will enter into new Council Housing Deals with ambitious, pro-development, local authorities to help them build more social housing [….]providing them with significant low-cost capital funding
• In doing so, we will build new fixed-term social houses, which will be sold privately after ten to fifteen years with an automatic Right to Buy for tenants
• We will reform Compulsory Purchase Orders to make them easier and less expensive for councils to use and to make it easier to determine the true market value of sites.
• we will immediately institute a capital fund to help primary schools develop nurseries where they currently do not have the facilities to provide one
• We will introduce a presumption that all new primary schools should include a nursery
• We will demand all local authorities be commissioners of the highest-quality family support and child protection services, removing these responsibilities from the weakest councils and placing them in trust
• at least one new institute of technology in the UK, dedicated to world-leading digital skills and developed and run in partnership with the tech industry.
• We will give businesses the right to insist on a digital signature and the right to digital cancellation of contracts.
• Our starting point is that online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline
• We will make clear the responsibility of platforms to enable the reporting of inappropriate, bullying, harmful or illegal content, with take-down on a comply-or-explain basis.
• We will give people new rights to ensure they are in control of their own data, including the ability to require major social media platforms to delete information held about them at the age of 18
• We will repeal Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2014, which, if enacted, would force media organisations to become members of a flawed regulatory system or risk having to pay the legal costs of both sides in libel and privacy cases, even if they win.
• We will therefore create a new presumption of digital government services by default and an expectation that all government services are fully accessible online, with assisted digital support available for all public sector websites
•  
• VERY, VERY LONG TERM POLCIES:
•  
• our Universal Service Obligation will ensure that by 2020 every home and every business in Britain has access to high speed broadband
• When we leave the European Union, we will fund the British Business Bank with the repatriated funds from the European Investment Fund.
• with a further investment of £1 billion by 20/21 in mental health services
• We plan to invest £178 billion in new military equipment over the next decade
• By 2020, we will, as promised, increase the personal allowance to £12,500 and the higher rate to £50,000
• We will continue to ensure that local residents can veto high increases in Council Tax via a referendum
• Corporation Tax is due to fall to seventeen per cent by 2020
• We will create a network of Her Majesty’s Trade Commissioners to head nine new regional overseas posts
• Increase the National Living Wage to 60 per cent of median earnings by 2020
• We will legislate for tougher regulation of tax advisory firms
• we meet the current OECD average for investment in R&D – that is, 2.4 per cent of GDP – within ten years, with a longer-term goal of three per
• We will double the Immigration Skills Charge levied on companies employing migrant workers, to £2,000 a year by the end of the parliament, using the revenue generated to invest in higher level skills training for workers in the UK.
• Putting some £40 billion into transport improvements across the United Kingdom over the rest of this decade
• invest £600 [in electric cars] million by 2020
• We will get 1 million more people with disabilities into employment over the next ten years.
• committing to upgrading all fuel poor homes to EPC Band C by 2030
• We will adopt a “Breathing Space” scheme, with the right safeguards to prevent abuse, so that someone in serious problem debt may apply for legal protection from further interest, charges and enforcement action for a period of up to six weeks.
• Where appropriate, they will be offered a statutory repayment plan to help them pay back their debts in a manageable way
• we will deliver the new promise to give patients a definitive diagnosis within 28 days by 2020
• We will meet our 2015 commitment to deliver a million homes by the end of 2020

Lib dem manifesto pledges

• ·         Saving the NHS by putting a penny in the pound on Income Tax to give the NHS and social care services the cash injection they need.
• ·         Transforming mental health care with waiting time standards to match those in physical health care.
• ·         In the longer term and as a replacement for the 1p Income Tax rise, commission the development of a dedicated health and care tax
• ·         End the public sector pay freeze for NHS workers.
• ·         Reinstate student nurse bursaries.
• ·         Roll out the Liaison and Diversion programme nationally
• ·         Raise the amount people can earn before losing Carer’s Allowance from £110 to £150 a week, and reduce the number of hours’ care per week required to qualify.
• ·         Make Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention available on the NHS.
• ·         Develop a strategy to tackle childhood obesity, including restricting the marketing of junk food to children, restricting TV advertising before the 9pm watershed and closing loopholes in the sugary drinks tax.
• ·         Encourage the traffic-light labelling system for food products and publication of information on calorie, fat, sugar and salt content in restaurants and takeaways.
• ·         Introduce mandatory targets on sugar reduction for food and drink producers
• ·         Introduce minimum unit pricing for alcohol
• ·         Increase our Early Years Pupil Premium to £1,000 per pupil per year.
• ·         £7 billion more for school and college budgets (Not sure where the funds for this are coming from)
• ·         Guarantee that all teachers in state-funded schools will be fully qualified or working towards qualified teacher status (QTS) from January 2019
• ·         Scrap the planned expansion of grammar schools and devolve all capital monies for new school spaces to local authorities
• ·         Allow Ofsted to inspect both local authorities and academy chains.
• ·         Include in SRE teaching about sexual consent, LGBT+ relationships, and issues surrounding explicit images and content.
• ·         Challenge gender stereotyping and early sexualisation, working with schools to promote positive body image and break down outdated perceptions of gender appropriateness of particular academic subjects
• ·         Extend free school meals to all children in primary education (un-costed)
• ·         Reinstate maintenance grants for the poorest students
• ·         Create individual accounts for funding mature adult and part-time learning and training, and provide for all adults individual access to all necessary career information, advice and guidance.
• ·         Facilitate across the UK an effective and comprehensive system for credit transfer and recognition of prior learning and qualifications.
• ·         New direct spending on housebuilding to help build 300,000 homes a year by 2022 (borrowed money)
• ·         £5 billion of initial capital for a new British Housing and Infrastructure Development Bank
• ·         End the following: The cutting of Corporation Tax from 20% to 17%,  Capital Gains Tax cuts,  Capital Gains Tax extended relief, The Marriage Allowance and The raising of the Inheritance Tax threshold
• ·         Create a new ‘start-up allowance’ to help those starting a new business with their living costs in the crucial first weeks of their business.
• ·         Extend transparency requirements on larger employers to include publishing the number of people paid less than the living wage and the ratio between top and median pay.
• ·         Stamp out abuse of zero-hours contracts. We will create a formal right to request a fixed contract and consult on introducing a right to make regular patterns of work contractual after a period of time
• ·         scrapping employment tribunal fees.
• ·         Strengthen worker participation in decision-making, including staff representation on remuneration committees, and the right for employees of a listed company to be represented on the board
• ·         Require binding and public votes of board members on executive pay policies.
• ·         Devolve further revenue-raising powers away from Westminster, to regions from Cornwall to the north-east
• ·         Ensuring that four million properties receive insulation retrofits by 2022
• ·         A diesel scrappage scheme, and a ban on the sale of diesel cars and small vans in the UK by 2025  (no cost provided)
• ·         Extending ultra-low-emission zones to 10 more towns and cities.
• ·         Set up a British Housing and Infrastructure Development Bank to mobilise investment into the low-carbon and sustainable infrastructure – No amount mentioned
• ·         Continue to back new entrants to the energy market, aiming for at least 30% of the household market to be supplied by competitors to the ‘Big 6’ by 2022.
• ·         Establish a £2 billion flood-prevention fund focused on providing support for small community and council-led schemes (not sure where fund coming from)
• ·         Significantly increase the amount of accessible green space, including completion of the coastal path, and create a new designation of national nature parks to protect up to one million acres of accessible green space valued by local communities.
• ·         Introduce stronger penalties for animal cruelty offences, increasing the maximum sentencing from six months to five years, and bring in a ban on caged hens.
• ·         Clamp down on illegal pet imports through legal identification requirements for online sales
• ·         Funding research into alternatives to animal testing
• ·         Develop safe, effective, humane and evidence-based ways of controlling bovine TB, including by investing to produce workable vaccines
• ·         Pass a Zero-Waste Act, including legally binding targets for reducing net consumption of key natural resources
• ·         Establish a statutory waste recycling target of 70% in England and extend separate food waste collections to at least 90% of homes by 2022
• ·         Building on the success of our plastic bag charge, introduce a 5p charge on disposable coffee cups to reduce waste
• ·         Extending free childcare to all two-year-olds
• ·         Introducing a new Young Person’s Bus Discount Card for young people aged 16–21, giving a two-thirds discount on bus travel.
• ·         Expand Shared Parental Leave with an additional ‘use it or lose it’ month
• ·         Separate employment support from benefits administration
• ·         Take 13,000 children out of poverty by letting both parents earn before their Universal Credit is cut and also reverse cuts to the Family Element
• ·         Reversing the cuts to Work Allowances in Universal Credit, enabling people to work for longer before their benefits are cut
• ·         Uprate working-age benefits at least in line with inflation.
• ·         Abandon the two-child policy on family benefits
• ·         reversing cuts to housing benefit for 18-21-year-olds
• ·         increase the rates of Jobseeker’s Allowance and Universal Credit for those aged 18-24 at the same rate as minimum wages.
• ·         Increase Local Housing Allowance (LHA) in line with average rents in an area
• ·         Scrap the ‘bedroom tax’
• ·         Withdraw eligibility for the Winter Fuel Payment from pensioners who pay tax at the higher rate
• ·         retain the free bus pass for all pensioners
• ·         Maintain the ‘triple lock’
• ·         End the Voluntary Right to Buy pilots
• ·         Lift the borrowing cap on local authorities and increase the borrowing capacity of housing associations so that they can build council and social housing.
• ·         Create a community right of appeal in cases where planning decisions go against the approved local plan
• ·         Eable local authorities to: - Levy up to 200% council tax on second homes and ‘buy to leave empty’ investments from overseas. –
• ·         Enforce housebuilding on unwanted public sector land. –
• ·         Penalise excessive land-banking when builders with planning permission have failed to build after three years. –
• ·         Allow councils to End the Right to Buy if they choose.
• ·         introducing a new Rent to Own model where rent payments give tenants an increasing stake in the property, owning it outright after 30 years – Not sure who is building these
• ·         banning lettings fees for tenants, capping upfront deposits
• ·         stopping developers advertising homes abroad before they have been advertised in the UK.
• ·         Give tenants first refusal to buy the home they are renting
• ·         Remove the requirement to hold local referenda for council tax changes
• ·         Capping the maximum amount able to be bet on fixed odds betting terminals (FOBTs) at one time to £2
• ·         Ensure that every property in the UK is provided, by 2022, with a superfast broadband connection with a download speed of 30Mbps, an upload speed of 6Mbps, and an unlimited usage cap
• ·         Invest £2 billion in innovative solutions to ensure the provision of highspeed broadband across the rural UK
• ·         Set up a £2 billion Rural Services Fund of capital investment to enable communities to establish a local base from which to co-locate services such as council offices, post offices, children’s centres, libraries and visiting healthcare professionals.
• ·         Guarantee the freedom of people to wear religious or cultural dress, and tackle the growing incidence of Islamophobic hate crime.
• ·         Decriminalise the sale and purchase of sex
• ·         Address period poverty by providing free sanitary products to girls at school
• ·         Introduce a digital bill of rights that protects people’s powers over their own information, supports individuals over large corporations, and preserves the neutrality of the internet.
• ·         Increase community policing in England and Wales by giving an additional £300 million a year to local police forces
• ·         Require all front-line officers to wear body cameras on duty
• ·         End imprisonment for possession of illegal drugs for personal use, diverting those arrested for possession of drugs for personal use into treatment and education (adopting a health-based approach), or imposing civil penalties
• ·         Introduce legal, regulated market for cannabis. We would introduce limits on potency and permit cannabis to be sold through licensed outlets to adults over the age of 18.
• ·         Offer safe and legal routes to the UK for refugees to prevent them from making dangerous journeys
• ·         Expand the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme to offer sanctuary to 50,000 people over the lifetime of the next parliament.
• ·         Re-open the Dubs unaccompanied child refugee scheme, ensuring Britain meets its responsibilities by taking in 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children.
• ·         End indefinite immigration detention by introducing a 28-day limit
• ·         Spending 0.7% of gross national income on aid
• ·         Controlling arms exports to countries listed as human rights priority
• ·         suspending arms sales to Saudi Arabia
• ·         Commit to spending 2% of GDP on defence.
• ·         Introduce votes at 16 for all elections and referendums across the UK
• ·         Introduce the Single Transferable Vote for local government elections in England and for electing MPs across the UK.
• ·         Capping donations to political parties at £10,000 per person each year
• ·         Mandate the provision of televised leaders’ debates in general elections based on rules produced by Ofcom
• ·         Introduce legislation to allow for all-BAME and all-LGBT+ parliamentary shortlists.
• ·         Cancel the boundary review due to report in 2018.

Highlight of labour manifesto:

·         Through our National Investment Bank and regional development banks, we will create the conditions required to flourish and grow by every region and nation of Britain.

·         Set out a plan to eliminate the current spending deficit on a forward-looking, five-year rolling timescale

·         When conventional monetary policy is hampered by the lower bound to interest rates, suspend operation of the rule in order that fiscal policy can work with monetary policy to support economic recovery

·         Make the Office of Budget Responsibility responsible to Parliament with a clear mandate to "blow the whistle" on government breaching these rules

·         Invest £250 billion over ten years [In infrastructure]

·         We will also encourage private investment by removing new plant and machinery from business rate calculations.

·         We will deliver universal superfast broadband availability by 2022

·         will invest to ensure all urban areas as well as major roads and railways have uninterrupted 5G coverage.

·         Ensure that 60% of the UK's energy comes from low or renewable sources by 2030

·         Labour will change the law so that banks can't close a branch where there is a clear local need

·         Labour proposes to amend the Companies Act 2006 so that directors owe a duty directly to [to employees, suppliers, the environment etc ]

·         ensure that businesses identified as being 'systemically important' are protected from hostile takeovers, and ensure that when a company is bought there is a clear plan in place to protect workers and pensioners

·         Labour will also legislate to reduce pay inequality by introducing an excessive pay levy on companies with high numbers of staff on very high pay.

·         Reinstate the small business corporation tax rate.

·         Developing a version of the Australian system of binding arbitration and fines for persistent

·         late payers for the private sector.

·         By ring fencing the extra proceeds from tax revenues and lower eligibility for in-work benefits, we will establish a new employment allowance for business that struggle to pay a higher living wage.

·         a locally run, democratically accountable energy supplier, working to tackle Fuel poverty, return profits to customers via reduced tariffs, support community energy projects and have drive larger energy companies to lower

·         We will reject 'no deal' as a viable and negotiate transitionalarrangements to avoid a cliff-edge for the UK economy.

·         We will introduce a ‘presumption of devolution' where powers transferred from the EU will go straight to the relevant region or nation.

·         Labour will guarantee to cover any shortfall in EU Structural Funding that occurs as a result of Brexit.

·         Labour will not make false promises on immigration numbers. Our economy needs migrant workers to keep going.

·         stop employers from recruiting only from overseas, and make zero hours contracts illegal.

·         We will establish a Migrant Impact Fund for public services

·         Labour opposes parallel investor-state dispute systems for multinational corporations and we will open a dialogue with trading partners on alternative options that provide investor protection whilst guaranteeing equality before the law.

·         Labour will build human rights and social justice into trade policy, We will ensure that trade agreements cannot undermine human rights and labour standards

·         Labour will create a unified National Education Service (NES) to move towards cradle-to-grave learning that is free at the point of use

·         a system of high-quality childcareplaces in mixed environments with direct government subsidy.

·         Transition to a qualified, graduate-led workforce, by increasing staff wages and enhancing training opportunities.

·         ending the public sector pay cap

·         giving teachers more direct involvement in the curriculum

·         Labour would introduce free, lifelong education in FE colleges

·         Restore the Education Maintenance Allowance

·         Reverse cuts to Union Learn

·         Labour will reintroduce maintenance grants for university students, and we will abolish university tuition fees.

·         Repeal the Trade Union Act and roll out sectoral collective bargaining

·         Introduce four new public holidays

·         Roll out maximum pay ratios of 20:1 in the public sector and companies bidding for public contracts

·         Ban unpaid internships

·         Abolish employment tribunal fees

·         Double paid paternity leave to four weeks and increase paternity pay

·         Hold a public inquiry into blacklisting

·         Introduce a civil enforcement system to ensure compliance with gender pay auditing

·         We will strengthen the law so that those who work regular hours for more than 12 weeks will have a right to a regular contract

·         Banning payroll companies, sometimes known as umbrella companies

·         Labour will guarantee the state pension "triple lock" throughout the next Parliament

·         The winter fuel allowance and free bus passes will also be guaranteed as universal benefits.

·         We will extend pension credit to 1950s-born WASPI women

·         So Labour will legislate so that accrued rights to the basic state pension cannot be changed

·         Scrap the punitive sanctions regime

·         Scrap the bedroom tax

·         Reinstate housing benefit for under-21 s

·         Scrap bereavement support payment cuts

·         Labour will repeal the following cuts in social security support to disabled people

·         Increase ESA by £30 per week for those in the work-related activity group

·         Scrap the Work Capability and Personal Independence Payment assessments and replace them with a personalised, holistic assessment process

·         By the end of the next Parliament we will be building at least 1 00,000 council and housing association homes a year

·         Labour will implement minimum space standards for new developments.

·         guarantee Help to Buy funding until 2027

·         We will also give local people buying their first home 'first dibs' on new homes built in their area

·         Labour will make new three-year tenancies the norm, with an inflation cap on rent rises.

·         Starting by making available 4,000 additional homes reserved for people with a history of rough sleeping.

·         We will set up a new £250m Children's Health Fund

·         We will hold a public inquiry into medicines, medical devices and medical products licensing and regulation, including Valproate.

·         [on the NHS] Labour will commit to over £6 billion extra in annual funding

·         Labour will repeal the Health & Social Care Act

·         new legal duty on the Secretary of State and on NHS England to ensure that excess private profits are not made out of the NHS at the expense of patient care.

·         we will provide an additional £8 billion over the lifetime of the next Parliament for social care including £1 billion in the first year.

·         Labour will increase the Carer's Allowance for unpaid full-time carers to align the benefit with Jobseeker’s Allowance

·         Labour will recruit 10,000 more police officers to work on community beats

·         Labour recruit 1 ,000 more border guards to add to our safeguards and controls.

·         release all papers relating to the Shrewsbury 24

·         We will immediately re-establish entitlements to legal aid in the private law arena of the family courts.

·         Labour government will introduce a no-fault divorce

·         Labour will also hire 3,000 more prison officers

·         Labour will fund child burial fees for bereaved parents

·         Labour will give communities more power to shape their town centres, by strengthening powers to protect Post Offices, community pharmacies, high street banks, local pubs and independent shops

·         Labour will reverse this privatisation [post office] at the earliest opportunity

·         We will reduce the maximum stake on Fixed Odds Betting Terminals from £100 to £2.

·         Labour will also legislate to increase the delay in between spins on these games [Fixed Odds Betting Terminals]

·         We will introduce regulations to designate and protect routes of critical community value, including those that serve local schools hospitals and isolated settlements in rural areas.

·         Labour will introduce a new Clean Air Act

·         We will establish Blue Belts in the seas and oceans surrounding our island

·         We will introduce a £1 billion Cultural Capital Fund to upgrade our existing cultural and creative infrastructure

·         Labour will maintain free entry to museums

·         Labour will introduce an arts pupil premium to every primary school in England - a £160m per year boost

·         We will extend the Freedom of Information Act to private companies that run public services

·         Labour's commitment to spending at least 2% of GDP on defence

·         Labour will publish a Defence Industrial Strategy white paper, including a National Shipbuilding Strategy.

·         We will introduce strict standards of transparency for crown dependencies and overseas territories, including a public register of owners, directors, major shareholders and beneficial owners for all companies and trusts.