The Battle for Politics and those pledges for progress

Monday March 29, 2010

Instead of supporting any one political party, the Institute of Ideas want voters to back candidates who endorse 15 of 21 Pledges for Progress. Dolan Cummings reports.

Following our pre-election public summit, the Battle for Progress in London on Saturday 20 March, the Institute of Ideas is intervening in the election campaign with 21 Pledges for Progress.

Since we don’t consider any of the parties worthy of support on their own terms, the idea of the pledges to to set an alternative agenda: we suggest voters consider backing candidates of any party or none who endorse 15 of the 21 pledges.

We haven’t made it easy for them. Not many mainstream candidates will be happy to support number 10 (open the borders) or 12 (abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords). We believe the kind of political change we need can only come from thinking big. And if those pledges sound a tad lefty, we’re also keen to challenge liberal orthodoxies with the likes of number 1 (repeal hate speech legislation) and 15 (build new nuclear power stations).

Ten of the 21 pledges concern freedom, which we believe is a defining political question of our time, and not just in terms of traditional civil liberties issues (though numbers 7 and 8 are scrapping the database state and limiting the police’s power to detain us without charge to 24 hours). New Labour’s ‘politics of behaviour’, which have been embraced all too enthusiastically by David Cameron’s Tories, undermine freedom on an everyday, cultural level as well as more formally. So pledge number 6 is to allow pubs and clubs the freedom to permit smoking, while 5 is to revoke nonsensical health and safety guidelines.

Number 3 is to stop the official vetting of all adults who come into contact with children, one of the most insidious legacies of New Labour, since it reposes relationships of trust between citizens as a bureaucratic process managed by the state. There is much more to be said about the kind of changes we need, which cannot be reduced to simple pledges, but the really crucial point underlying our election intervention is that it is not the political class that will resolve the current crisis.

It is only the public, freely associating and expressing our needs and desires, who can reconstitute politics in such a way as to make an election something to get excited about.

Dolan Cummings is a co-founder of the radical humanist campaign group the Manifesto Club and editorial director at the Institute of Ideas

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Institute of Ideas
Manifesto Club