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My Manifesto
I have laid out my full manifesto within the 427 pages of my book:
WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW
12 ESSENTIAL REFORMS FOR SURVIVING THE 21ST CENTURY.
Here I will try to summarise its core principles and ideas:
The resulting policies of the vision that Political Humanism provides
We are developing an App that allows you to give
your consensus and ideas directly to your local MP
As this App develops candidates could stand as an
MP only to represent their constituents through the App and thereby forcing a change to the system
The main voters seem to be either telling you what you want to hear in order to gain the power and the gravy train position or they are airing a wishlist without backing anything up with a full economic plan or long term vision for a better future. I'll show you how my policies compare
Why Vote Reggie?
1. To have a local candidate representing you -
2. To change the system -
3. To draw attention to a whole new approach to improving our society
I'm a pub landlord in Bethnal Green, chairman of the local PubWatch and a business community member. From first hand experience, I am fully aware of and concerned with frontline issues affecting us all from crime, health, social care (or the lack of it), housing issues, traffic problems, unemployment, and all parts of council servises. I will represent you, no back-handers, no lobbyist interests.
I am already developing a new App for constituents to let their MP know how they want them to vote on certain issues and when specific Bills are in front of them in Parliament. This is only the beginning of what the App is designed to do. After it has been used and road tested MP candidates could be standing purely to fulfil 'what the people want' at every vote on every issues within Parliament thereby changing the system itself.
There are more Apps on the way too, for interacting with local council services and a CrimeWatch App, both great ideas.
All my policy ideas are as a result of years of research, writing and lecturing on the subject political philosophy and macro-economic theory. I have drawn up a whole raft of new conclusions about how we may better design our communities, our societies and our political landscape so that we achieve a better result for all. All my policies and practical solutions are built around one single new philosophical outlook based on the moral framework of Humanism, the love for humanity, and what maximises well-being for people in society. Its a big subject and one not easy to boil down to simplified little soundbites. It has taken me a 427 book to explain it all and even then as briefly as I could have.
Please scroll through this site and I'll do my best to lay it out here.
A Whole New Approach - Political Humanism
It begins with a new way of looking at the political landscape and a basic question:
'what do we want of our society'
Of course each of us want different things depending on our own circumstances and at different times in our lives but on what merits could we all agree upon would make for a 'better' society?
Well, it turns out that there has been a series of studies that have tried to specifically answer that question. Many large organisation, The UN, global charities and government advisers all have more or less similar answers and they have become what we call 'human development indices'. It has become a way of measuring a developing country's progress in terms of turning their tax revenues into societal achievements and there are main categories like healthcare, education, levels of democracy, justice, economic factors like wages and cost of living, infrastructure and others. Now, 'development' may sound like we are ready to pave over paradise so as I have ventured into the study of this subject and have concluded by describing 12 main areas of 'human well-being' for people in society. There are some really detailed formulas but it can be abbreviated -HWix12.
My initial concern was to try to describe the nature of our individual relationship to society and what we have collectively manifested as the institutions that we see around us today but what I quickly realised is that when you look at all we have in place and measure it against this gage for what we expect to have in place we can quickly see where we are falling short. When you look at society through the prism of HWix12 you can quickly see 1) in what ways we need to better organise ourselves 2) what is to be achieved through collaboration and agreement as opposed confrontation in the political landscape and 3) how quickly and efficiently we can start making real effective change.
The very principle that society is there to help us collectively best achieve better lives for ourselves and that we play our part in that social contract then becomes a moral endeavour and it is therefore my conclusion that this idea represents a whole new branch of political philosophy. For this reason I have come to give it a name - POLITICAL HUMANISM. I describe it as a post-Utilitarian position because it precisely describes what 'better' looks like on the Utilitarian principles of 'what maximises well-being to people in society'.
Now, I hope that makes some sense to you. I hope that you see that it completely changes how we look at the political landscape because there is no longer any need to describe what is of the 'right wing' - Neo-liberalism which serves only those with the most wealth and on the 'left wing' the failed ideologies of Marxism. We no longer have need to place all political thought along a spectrum between two failed or failing ideas when we can simply ask 'will this policy achieve a better result for what the people want', as defined by HWix12.
I believe that Political Humanism will only grow as an agreeable idea and will become the next big rallying point for enforcing rapid social change on the institutions of governance.
This is because, regardless of your standing in society, you are looking at principles of common agreement in order to realise the best possible result for all and therefore the process itself is one of collaboration and not of conflict. 'The Common Good' then becomes the single rallying principle in order to start the process of change that will create the kind of society we all want.
The process itself can be easily summarised as - TWELVE GREAT REFORMS
1 DEMOCRATIC REFORM - We are developing an App called MagnaSocia that will help the British public engage in political debate, direct referendum voting, and to provide consensus on 'the will of the people' so that legislation can be driven by public need and concern. It is designed to aid and assist Parliamentary proceedure initially but then will develop to be a system that asks constituencies to elect a representative who is contracturally obliged to vote in Parliament purely on behalf of the consensus from the constituents
2 CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM
- A separate campaign but still central to the Political Humanism idea is the movement to build a modern day written Constitution of the people. Firstly, the public would have to bring this in by referendum, whether that is a state run referendum or one of our own making via an app such as the MagnaSocia project. Britain is one of the few countries without a single codified constitution. It means that we rely on a small group of old (mostly) men to tell us where we stand on some really big issues because only they can decifer the many dusty old manuscripts going back to the Magna Carte. This is a ridiculous way to run a modern nation state. A constitution should be a document that the whole populace can read and understand. It is the very basis for the 'social contract' between citizen and state that clarifies what the role of each party is about, the roles and responsibilities of governance, its very reason for being, and similarly, the roles and responsibilities of citizenship should be the foundation of law.
- The Executive institutions of government, the schools, the health service, the police, the councils etc would be better organised and managed by the professionals within them in order to better reach the societal ambitions of the people, set out within a written constitution. At the moment they are controlled and interfered with by which ever majority party claims power and then by whoever is shuffled into a cabinet place overseeing them. This is why there is little to no long term planning and why their policy is constantly toyed with for political purposes other than achieve what the populcae expects of them. Leave them to build their own leadership and organisational structures and the whole system would start to work more efficiently on behalf of the tax payer.
- In order to create a perfect separation of powers though, the Executive institutions must be regulated (in real time) and this should only come, not from within the institutions themselves but from a Constitutional Judiciary who appoint a Regulatory body for each branch of the Executive.
This means that all the protections the constitution outlines for its citizens would be enforced on the ground and in the moment. It would make, for example, regulating the police much more efficient.
- The variety of taxes we pay are necessary to fund all of the variety of services provided by the Executive branches of government. The decisions of how and where those taxes are spent fall to the chancellor of the day when one would think that the citizen who agrees to pay their taxes would have a say in how the money is spent based on the societal ambitions of the people. When the taxes were introduced over the centuries each of them were justified to the tax payer against certain schemes and societal aims so that the citizens did not feel that the governement were tyranical. Each of the variety of taxes we pay should be directly assigned to one particular Executive institution so that they knew, more or less, that a certain income was 'ringfenced' for them by the tax payer. The tax payer would feel better that they were contributing directly to a societal cause and the Executive instituion would be fully accountable to deliver as good a service as they could for the tax they recieve. The assigning of each taxation would be relevent also. For examples, our VAT would go directly towards the Health Services and then the decision to add VAT to foods for example could be coupled to the long term health effects of that food, so zero tax on locally produced fresh food produce but the full VAT on unhealthy take-aways. We already pay a sugar tax. We pay the extra if we want to take on what might amount to a health concern which would be a cost to the health service. Corporate Tax could fund education as it is the education of future generations that will ultimately provide the workforce, innovators and CEOs of tomorrow. The numbers currently equate and it would assign a sort of moral responsibility to paying the tax for what is ultimately a worthy societal cause. The tax system should also be designed as a support through ones life including providing a higher education allowance and pension scheme.
- We currently use a delicate money system, at the constant risk of collapse, called a 'fractional reserve' system. It means that a handfull of private banks are allowed to make money on interest from lending money as loans and mortgages that they did not have to begin with. In this country the profits of the private banking sector amount to over £50 billion a year. But it is not necessary. The tax payer could, and should, own their currency to the extent that it is the tax payer that provides a solid economy that supports the value of the currency in the first place. It is the tax payer who currently underwrites the whole financial system as we found out in 2008 when our government released money as 'quantitative easing' to support the financial system so that they could carry on making money out of everything the populace does. The system is the way it is because people don't know enough about it. If they did know then they would not stand for it. It is the most corrupt and elitist of all the things in our society. An alternative system called 'Sovereign Money' would be better for all, more stable, providing a profit for the state either to improve service or drive down taxation. Also, the system would not have the need to keep expanding as it does (otherwise it collapses) which is main factor behind inflation, mass migration and the rush to use up the planets resources. Also see www.positivemoney.org
- We have an 'Oligarchic' style of capitalism, a hand full of global players in each sector of commerce. This situation does not drive down pricing as we were lead to believe and because these corporate giants have such a hold over the decision making of our politicians it means that the system is not as open as we would like to think to new players, in other words, its not the free market we are lead to believe is the best thing for us. Firstly, some provisions of service, health, rail and travel, utilities etc. are collective needs and would be served more efficiently by a single state system, not the terribly managed state institutes of the 1970s but modern, streamlined and openly accountable organisations. Beyond that, where the free market serves better value for the variety and inovating qualities of the goods or services then a truly 'free' free market should be nurtured so that value is passed on to the populace.
- If we had a justice system based upon a written constitution where both citizen and state each had their roles and responsibilities laid out in complete clarity then there would be a whole new approach to crime, dissorder and justice. The subject could be approached reletive to degrees of anti-social behaviours and how any offending individual takes responsibility for their actions and seeks to make amends towards a more pro-social position. It would mean that low levels criminality would have to addressed and the criminal set a course of rehabilitation and ammendment to address the effect of their crimes on individuals and society as a whole, to repay the damage done to any victims, the the police services, the courts and the penal system. Our worst criminals nearly all started as low level criminals. It is rare for someone to suddenly commit a high level crime out of the blue. The majority of police and courst time is spent going over the actions of the same repeat offenders. On the whole the system seems to be constantly letting off low levels criminals so that they develop a lifestykle of criminal behaviour that leads to more offenses and more serious crimes until they are taken out of society for a period of time. It is not working and everybody knows it. Taking somebody's liberty for a period of time does not 'repay' their debt to society. Offenders needs to literally work off their debt before they can say they have made ammends and should only be awarded the same freedoms as everybody else once they can show that they have the same responsibility as everyone else for the society as a whole. Factors that drive crime such as dependancies should also be addressed as part of a rehabilitation process, if they remain depenedent then chances are that they will continue in criminality.
- If our nations health system were not being sold off to profiteers of basic human needs then we could start to organise a wholeistic approach to health. The health services could be active in areas of ill-health preventions such as dependency managament, lifestyle coaching on nutrition, early screening schemes, benefitting from big data, and having more schemes for assistance in mental health could all be bringing down the reliance on the health service further down the line. Our health services are being used and abused by pharmaseutical companies where our own state R&D has been diminished. Our food system is being contaminated without enough government intervention and it is here that we really need a reliable health service provision to highlight the dangers we face in the future. Only fully empowered Executive Health Service with ringfenced funding would be capable of taking all of this on.
- Our educational system is not dynamic enough for the needs of the 21st century. It should be benefitting from new technology that informs the teaching process and individual learning plans. Tech could be used more fluidly in certain modes of learning such as maths and sciences that only need to inform the student, whereas social learning would suit more of the humanitt subjects. The school system should specialise earlier on so that those most capable can play to their strengths and advance further as they are capable of rather than being held back by broader whole class levels. There should be a 'learning for life' scheme introduced, extending the current NVQ schemes so that the workforce can continue to educate themselves throughout their working careers in all sectors.
- The whole relationship between people and planet needs to be re-addressed. We live in an era now called Anthropocene which means that the planet can be should to be irreversibly changed by our presence. We need to take full responsibliity for that and re-establish our impact on the environemt. One way of doing that is to draw up a matrix of 'ecological boundaries', 12 main areas that we need to evaluated our impact on the environment and assure a reversal of our current damaging trends bringing down the effect to near zero. Then against that we need to look at how we take responsibility on four levels: the personal domestic, the local community, the nation state and the international community. Only once we get a hold over our system of democracy can we better put these ideas into effect because the greed and immorality of global corporations are under little to no constraints.
- We should be working towards a much better foundation of global relations that reaches out to the people of the world more closely than it does to the despot regimes, brutal dictatorships and family owned nations. We should be looking at setting up a United Peoples to oppose and counter the United Nations. We should also set the tone for relations based on how each nation is achieving on the merits of well-being within those nations across the 12 main factors identified in Political Humanism. In those terms, not all countries are equal. The HWix12 perspective within Political Humanism should be the value by which nation states are held to account. Those who achieve better could look towards helping those who are achieving less. Those nations that have traditionally dominatd the arena on global relations should not be allowed to enforce their corrupted version of development on the rest of the world and would not be if a new standard is drawn up in terms of HWix12.
5 TAX SYSTEM REFORM
6 MONEY SYSTEM REFORM
7 ECONOMIC REFORM
8 JUSTICE REFORM
9 HEALTH REFORM
10 EDUCATION REFORM
11 ANTHROPOCENE REFORM
12 GLOBAL RELATIONS REFORM
3 EXECUTIVE POWERS REFORM
4 REGULATORY REFORM
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