If I Ruled Britain

My 2024 Manifesto Election Pledges for the Real-Life we live in Britain

As we all prime up for a general elections this week, It seems odd to me, that in a world and time that is so keen to rid itself of the notion of the White, Western, “pale, stale & male” ideas that exist in every quarter of our society; that seemingly every generation in Britain, especially Millennials, contradictorily, want to hold on to them like grim death when it comes to Economics.

Just two white, middle class men, can be reasonably blamed for the made up notions of these ideas in Britain. Adam Smith the founder of economic theory here in England, who in 1776 published Wealth Of Nations and arguably gave birth to modern Capitalism and the American economist, Milton Friedman, who took his inspiration from another male’s work, Freidrich Hayek and in the 1970s spawned Capitalism's devil’s offspring, Neoliberalism.

They are the only two types of economies we’ve embraced in the past two and half centuries of deciding how we should live our lives. Not really cutting edge is it? Or even evolutionary?

So when reading various politicians' manifestos and listening & watching their so-called debates on a variety of news outlets and through social media, it came as no surprise to me that two things became very clear indeed:

1.  Politicians think economics is a real thing.

And

2.  Politicians think money is a real thing.

Of course the actuality is one is a theory, the other is a concept, but what is most emphatically true, is neither of these things are “Real”.

The real things are the things that we need to live; clean fresh water to survive; home grown unprocessed food to develop & grow healthily; shelter, like housing, to protect us from the elements which can be further extended to clothing, and a social structure of family, friends and community to care for oursleves and produce our culture, including art, literature, music, theatre etc.

That’s it!

Everything else that we do comes from the theory we call economics and is funded by the concept - or “made-up”, if you prefer - we call money.

The two combined to generate the notion of work for work's sake during the Industrial Revolution and changed how we lived our lives by setting in motion the work or die ideology Which is, If you don’t work, you can’t earn money, if you can’t earn money, you can’t buy food, if you can’t buy food you die! Thus enabling the rich to get the majority of people, who were poor, to do jobs that were likely to kill them, so they could hugely profit financially from their efforts with little to no fight in return..

Ebeneezer Scrooge epitomises this thinking in Charles Dickens’s great work, A Christmas Carol with the immortal words to those who would rather die than endure the workhouse conditions and instead look for charitable assistance  “Let them die and decrease the surplus population”

I grew up in the village where the last coal mining pit in South Wales closed, and am currently homeless as I’ve been for the past 15 years, so understand this situation way better than most.

In truth, the only work that needs to be done in the 21st Century, creates the things that are fundamental to life - a method to collect & distribute pure clean water & remove human sewage safely, a means to grow & cook natural food, space and materials to build housing & clothing, and the people to produce culture.

So why, oh why, is nobody’s manifesto focussed on these real things but instead, without exception, ALL choosing to perpetuate the imaginary - those “pale, stale, male, ideas” - that in Britain at least, are over half a century past their sell by dates?

No, I don’t have a clue why either, so let me put that right for everyone by giving you my Manifesto for Britain and what I would do if I were elected Prime Minister

Paul Atherton’s ‘Real Life’ Manifesto Pledges

1.  FOOD

1. Clean water is a prerequisite for life - so I’d renationalise all Water companies and focus on the best people in the world  to run them - just so they can claim to be the best & cleanest in the world (The River Thames, here in London, was for a while the clearest city river after privatisation - what went so wrong? One word, Greed!). People who want to be the best are never driven by money, just accomplishment - so that’s what I’d do.

2. Home grown food is essential - The soil association claims Britain can be food secure within four years. That means we could grow all the food we would ever need right here in the United Kingdom. that will not only be plentiful and variety filled, but would mean we would go back to cooking and feeding ourselves properly and seasonally. Thus reconnecting with nature and ensuring longer and healthier lives and vastly diminishing the need for care and hospital treatment with the added bonus of improving the environment at the same time - that’s a no brainer for me.

3. Process foods kill you - Take most, if not all highly processed foods out of our food chain. As Chris Van Tulleken writes in his book Ultra Processed People, this type of food isn’t food, it’s designed for us to get addicted to, to make profit for companies and has no nutritional value whatsoever and in facts makes us very ill e.g. diabetes, cancer, heart conditions etc. - it's way more damaging than heroin to society, so why haven’t we made it illegal yet? I would.  

2.  HEALTH

1. Life without good care is inhuman - so why would we not deliver it, we are human after all - so I would ensure everyone would get whatever care they need, whenever they need it. Which would include the sick, the disabled, the elderly and even the lonely. If we think about quality of life and not financial cost - these decions become simlpe.

2. Doctors & Nurses are for life not just for Covid - and are literally the life blood of a good existence. I’d set up means of returning them to the highly respected members of society they always used to be through education and differing ways of recruitment taking the lead from how things are done in the top ranking courntries like Singapore, Japan & Sweden.

3. Prevention is better than cure - Without the constraints of money, we could findrevolutionary breakthroughs on every medical front, just look at the open source Genome project for a great example of that and instead of focusing on what’s going to make a profit, as all Big Pharma does, we can just focus on  what’s going to make life better.  

   For example, my brother Andrew Toy was a brilliant dentist before he retired. In fact he taught his patients so well to look after their teeth, they rarely or ever needed treatment and as the NHS only pay for treatment and don’t reward prevention, he, as a socialist, had to go private - That’s Insane. So I’d make the NHS a prevention centre with the facilities for treatment, A place that aids and helps you avoid illness in the first place and only treats when all other things have failed. 

3.  SHELTER

1. Make housing a human right - I’m cited in the Amnesty Report on this subject, but I’d go further than they suggest and remove the notion of property as an investment entirely and only see it as a home. That way people couldn’t own anything, they could only swap existing properties (with AI, complex swaps would be easy to achieve) and only produce new property to a set criteria that was beneficial for all. Landlords will claim this is unfair, but what was unfair was removing the rent caps in 1988 which created an insane property market, that was even funded further by the tax payer in the 2008 in the bank bailout after the financial crash. So they’ve benefited from all of over the last 36 years, which wasn’t fair - so this is simply rebalancing and putting the focus in the right place, that’s a benefit for all of the people, not just profit for a few of them.
   
   That point about what is built is hardly a new idea either, if you ask Nicholas Boys Smith, author of the book No Free Parking, he’ll tell you this is precisely what Georgian London did and look at the beauty and wonder of their developments, which blended the rich with the poor in beautiful establishments, to the benefit of both.

2. A home should never be empty - So I’d Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) all of the 1 million empty homes in Britain e.g.Unsold developments, Property assets just held vacant as such, AirBnB, Holiday Homes etc. immediately, either at their values when they were built or when they were originally sold.  Again, the Landlord/owner class will be up in arms, but again, this is precisely what happened with Local Authorities selling off Council Estates to profit driven developers in the first place, so it’s merely a rebalance. It would all but end homelessness in Britain.
   
   Anna Minton’s book Big Capital gives a classic example of that with Aysen Dennis who lives in the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, and bought her home under the Right To Buy scheme. Her decades fight not to be ripped off by her own council who were trying to force her out under a Compulsory Purchase Order for far less than market value in order to get her out of social housing, just so they could sell it on the cheap, in order to profit massively the large property developers who wanted to build luxury flats that nobody wants there. This is happening all over the country today - So as mentioned this pledge would just be a shift from profit focus to people focus. Nothing more.

3. Eradicate The Third Sector entirely - all of what used to be large charities are now just subcontracted agencies to the state. They create the illusion of doing things but actually endorse the very problem they are meant to solve. In homelessness for instance the likes of Shelter, Crisis, St. Mungo’s, Thames Reach (and yes, I agree with you, why isn’t there just one?) all say they want to end homelessness, yet after nearly 60 years they are nowhere near achieving it - so with them gone, it will be up to the communities and not the state, to fix the problem, which it very clearly hasn’t for over half a century - not sure with that track record why anoyone would expect them to do so in the future? So if, as a large bureaucratic organisation are sayining we help those experiencing homelessness, what they are actually doing is acknowledging that homelessness should exist - I’m legislating it shouldn’t.
   
   Grassroots charities are just communities coming together to solve a specific problem and thus will always exist and should not be seen as part of the Third Sector in this instance.

4.  COMMUNITY

1. Technology doesn’t unite - Nothing works in isolation. We all need each other. We all have differing skill sets that compliment one another, but we’ve disconnected from each other as humans because of the internet. So  I would therefore have a technological reset in Britain i.e. rebirth of the internet as an Open Source space, akin to Tim Berners-Lee original vision. It would not be allowed to have any commercial aspects to it. Again, this was of course the case when it first started because until the advent of online payments - credit cards refused to underwrite transactions made on the internet for the first few years - there was no way of doing so.
   
   It would be there, as it was originally, to be portal for the exchange of verifiable knowledge

   
   There is no need for competition in an Open Source world, it’s existed since technology began, so has proven its case - Linux is an open source platform for instance that was corrupted by Apple & Google for their own ends,
   
   The social media channels that would exist in that space would be purely to connect - with no advertising or data mining - just to enable you to see what friends and colleagues are doing, as they all started in the first place too,

2. A place to commune - The key for centuries to a great and united society, has been a local establishment for the whole community to gather in. For nearly the first 1,000 years that was a church, the next 500 years it was the pub and to the pub I would return, even without the drinking culture that was normally associated with it.

   
   Somewhere to connect, to share ideas and to discover cross generational experiences. So I would reopen, and where there isn’t any build, Public Houses to serve local communities and rekindle and extend the Communities Pub Act.

3. We are all human - I would legislate to eradicate division not to encourage it. Nearly all divisional fights we currently have in society is around work and money, So as I am about to argue that neither concept has a place in a modern society - the focus should all be on universal human rights and not be swayed by infinitesimally small but powerful lobby groups - the question would simply be does something benefit British society and have you been prevented from doing something other than on the basis of law? If you have, then you should be protected. As the World Economic Forum put forward in 2018 it’s the pursuit of Human Dignity that should be at the forefront of our thinking.

5.  WORK

1. Work isn’t real - In the 21st Century there is no such thing as real work, as David Graeber writes, nearly 50% of our jobs are bullshit jobs - Britain is after all an 80% service economy, unlike any other country in Europe - jobs made up to create the illusion we still need them. Whilst that was true in the industrial revolution, it’s completely false today. When Amazon workers went on strike claiming “We’re Not Robots” the reality of course was they had indeed replaced their mechanical counterparts and were in fact doing their work - so I’d rid ourselves of the Bullshit jobs and focus on the real ones, and make sure we do them brilliantly. If you love what you do, you do it well and it is better for everyone.

2. If technology can do it, let it - the reality, as I’ve mentioned, is that the only work we should be focussed on is what makes people’s lives better, not that makes money. The cryptocurrency, ethereum classic, launched with an art project that demonstrated how you could take greed out of the equation of trade, by creating a woodland forest, through the use of Artificial Intelligence and smart contracts, that would eventually own itself and only do what was in its own best interest, entitled Terra0 - In a world where work no longer creates wealth, as Smith & Friedman both envisaged, it’s time for a new way of thinking. - so I wouldn’t force organisations to create jobs as is currently the case in Britain to perpetuate the illusion of work. I’d just ensure the organisations were doing something for the betterment of all regardless of what they were doing to replace their human workforce..

3. Everything we do that makes Britain better should be perceived as work -  in truth, I would prefer to drop the word “work” entirely from our vocabulary - but that’s a big shift and will take generations. So why don’t we think of any activity that improves the lives of others as work. Parenting for example, caring voluntarily, anything creative that others appreciate, things that are done for no money - so that’s what I would put in law - if you’re doing something to make Britain a better place, whatever that is, it’s work. 

6.   MONEY

1. Money, What Money? - If work in its old fashioned concept is obsolete, then what about money? I hear you cry. I also know that as you’ve read every point above you’ve said to yourself, how are you going to fund it? Well I’d refer you to my opener and remind you “Money” isn’t real! 

   But the very nature of Humans’ as the Wachowskis, then brothers, film The Matrix puts it “Human Beings are a virus that will consume themselves out of existence”, so we do need a controlled means of exchange to prevent just that, rushing out and consuming everything that was free - thus I’d give you the currency of Time.

   
   Yes, like we did on the 15th February 1971 with decimalisation from old money to new, I’d change our current decimal currency into Time. Notes that once represented money would now represent a Year (£50), Month (£20), Week (£10), Day (£5), Hour (£1), Minute (50p) & Second (10p).
   
   Think about it, would you give up half an hour of your life to drink a beer?  That in reality is what you are currently doing. If you work for minimum wage - that is literally the transaction, half an hour of your time doing something for someone else, just to consume a drink that is more often than not gone in a quarter of the time it took you to earn to purchase it.
   
   It would change how you do things about everything, what do you really value, what is it worth to you in the sacrifice the limited hours you have in whatever period of life you are lucky enough to be granted?

   But because we use an abstract concept of money in the UK - we are the only country in the world that’s almost cashless - that is in the main bits & bytes, we don’t think like that, but we should, it’s the reality of the life we currently live.
   
   My new supply of currency would be finite and only used as a means of exchange - thus a return to Britain’s original system of cash.

2. Cash Is King - It is essential for my new economy to work, that we remove the ability to make money from money. I would take away that notion by ensuring currency would only be available in its printed form - as it always was, We know from research at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) where I am a Fellow, that digital transactions disconnect you from the buying process, detach you from value and means you spend four times as much in digital transactions against the times when you use cash. Thus I’d return us to a cash only society - which ensures nobody would try to hoard money as it kills the circulatory economy.  Warren Buffet currently has in his bank account, enough to write off Britain’s debt entirely today - enabling a position where one man could cure a nation’s problems is ludicrous - so I would eradicate it entirely, This thinking is best elucidated in detail in Brett Scott’s work Cloud Money.

3. Universal Basic Income is the panacea - for all the above to work, everyone needs to have on a yearly basis, enough money to meet all their basic needs and this is where the idea of paying everyone over the age of 16, the age by which you can legally live alone, the same amount unconditionally i.e. UBI. In our current currency that would be roughly £18,000 a year, once rental/mortgage payments have been taken out of the equation. It’s been tested globally, including here in Britain, and works every time. If you're asking how do you fund it, I’d suggest you start reading about how our current money system works - you just pluck it out of thin air like the Private Banks already do. Read Positive Money’s coverage of The Bank of England’s decade old report that finally acknowledges how utterly insane the whole monetary system really is in Britain (and the Western World), in the 21st century and finally reveals the lie behind fractional, reserve banking.

The whole point of my manifesto is for us, as members of the society of Britain, to reconnect with absolutely everything. Reconnect with our bodies by consuming fresh water and unprocessed food. Reconnect with our communities in person and - without the obstacles of commercial algorithms - online and to realise we all need each other.  Reconnect with nature in growing food and understanding that meat comes from live animals. Reconnect with our country by reminding the populace that it’s a stupid idea to believe anyone can own land - It’s like two fleas on the back of a dog arguing who owns the dog as Paul Hogan says in his lead role in the 1980s film Crocodile Dundee..

But above all to reconnect with ourselves, to understand what’s of true value to us and to live good productive lives, that benefits everyone and creates a life for future generations, not of the illusion of money & economics, but in the reality of health, wealth in experience and above all, joy.

Will you join me?