BY JOHN DREWRY

The anger, sense of injustice and total mistrust of anything a politician says is now manifesting itself dangerously across the nation. Perhaps the way to earth the bubbling rebellion is to come out with some policies which make sense to a cynical population. It is easy to select ten issues of burning concern to a large majority of people, across effectively all social strata, and to provide some suggested solutions. Yet extraordinarily, all ten issues run contrary to the current policies of the main parties. Never has Westminster been so diametrically opposed to the sentiments of the people it purports to serve. Indeed, it is likely the suggestions below would be regarded as regressive, almost Luddite. Certainly, they’re designed to smash the machinery of authoritarianism we see burgeoning around us. Yet to many, they’re nothing more than common sense. Has common sense really taken flight? Is it time for The Luddite Party?  

• 1 – Eradicate all surveillance technology. Let’s not beat about the bush. Ned Ludd would make it illegal to spy on anyone, for any purpose, via any technology. This means removing all cameras stationed and operating in the public domain. It means making it illegal to use any image, still or moving, as conclusive evidence in any court case. It also means restricting any database to a voluntary function between user and supplier, and making it illegal to connect it to other databases, networks or third parties.
• 2 – Restore free speech. Many pay lip service to the importance of free speech, but are quick to add caveats, so as not to offend too many people! Offending someone should never be an offence. Surely the only speech crime is incitement to violence against persons or property, and there have been laws to deal with that for many years. Extending them to cover hurty feelings is a travesty and tyranny. Making people afraid to speak up, even having to watch their pronouns, is a crime against humanity. It destroys civilisation, rather than encouraging constructive debate, widening minds, and building an adult culture. It should be illegal to suppress or censor free speech, and citizens should be protected from being attacked or discriminated against for their expressed beliefs.
• 3 – Pull up the drawbridge. Defence of the realm is the first duty of government. People arriving uninvited to our shores without permission, papers or passports are equivalent to alien invaders until we can identify them. After all, we call them illegal immigrants. This means they should be arrested, imprisoned, processed quickly and repatriated, unless it is established that they are fleeing from persecution and danger. No international legislation should overrule British law in this respect. Giving away our sovereignty to a foreign power is an act of high treason.
• 4 – Abolish sex from the curriculum. Sex should never have crept into the curriculum in the first place. Not only are the traditional subjects crying out for full-time attention, teachers are not qualified to propagandise vulnerable minds on sex or gender. Teachers who refuse to abandon this pernicious policy should be sacked. The vacuum thus created should be filled with retired, intelligent and educated people who, if they weren’t already qualified teachers, would cope perfectly well with a crash course to obtain an education certificate. Perhaps then we could get back to teaching children how to think, not what to think.
• 5 – Restore the health of the nation. There is nothing wrong with the concept of a national health service. Our NHS, however, has been hijacked by bloodsuckers who long ago lost the plot. Ned Ludd would dismiss all administrative staff from the top down and pay nurses a lot more with the savings. Trusts and other networks would be dismantled, with each hospital operating as a standalone under the stern eye of a matron. Using a combination of an emergency field hospital culture and advanced technology taking care of administration with simple inputs from frontline staff, nurses would learn comprehensively on the job rather than taking a degree, each regularly shifted between ward work, pharmacy, pathology, A&E, surgical duty and paramedical services on the road. Centralised purchasing would ensure economies of scale. Centralised R&D in new medicines and drugs, funded by the NHS, would secure people-owned patents and progressively replace Big Pharma.
• 6 – Restore the beat of the nation. The key to law and order is a stout pair of boots. When ‘the beat’ disappears, so does the grass-roots relationship between the Police and the people. The solution is to dismantle the centralised, darkened rooms of CCTV screens, and bring back the beat constable as servant of the local community, each party known to each other by name. There should be a mutual climate of partnership and respect, not alienation. On foot, the Police should never have a militarised or armed persona. Mobile communications technology is available to summon rapid-response back-up when necessary.
• 7 – Rebuild council homes. One of the great travesties of social justice was selling off council homes under the seductive guise of ‘right-to-buy’. Its long-term result has been removal of a safety net for the poor and dispossessed, creating homelessness and hopelessness on a grand scale. Hand back to local authorities the power to borrow and build, to once again become the local landlord for those less fortunate, providing them with a stable, secure home.
• 8 – Make energy and water cheap and plentiful. The cost of a kilowatt hour and of a cubic metre should be tied to what the poorest among us can afford. Anything higher is illogical, because it automatically condemns a stratum of society to death. Instead, all users, including the commercial and industrial sectors, get a tremendous financial and psychological boost from ceasing to fear the size of energy and water bills. There are no free handouts here, however, because the shortfall would be funded by the Treasury and recovered through general taxation, most surely a fairer way of distributing the energy-cost burden. Ned Ludd doesn’t buy the man-made climate-change hoax, and would exploit fossil fuels to the maximum in the production of energy. Pollution is a different matter in relation to transport. Here we need to go backwards to go forwards, expanding rail transport (trains and trams instead of roads) and water transport (boats instead of planes).
• 9 – Get the nation feeding itself. Growing our own food, farming our own livestock and fishing our own waters is the best-known way of staying alive independently and prospering. You wonder who or what could ever think otherwise.
• 10 – Restore the work ethic. Having the opportunity to do useful work and provide for oneself and one’s family would once have been presumed to be innate, but many have been encouraged to become state-dependent. The simplest description of Economics is ‘the study of Man earning his living’. Without ‘men earning their living’, is there a real economy? The key to a stable UK economy, and the backbone of a stable society, is a thriving middle class. This is founded on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), created by people who work hard to build a business, employ others in meaningful jobs, and pay taxes. Our focus should be on rebuilding, incentivising and protecting a dynamic middle class, our ‘nation of shopkeepers’, with start-up capital loans, generous tax breaks in the early years, employment incentives, and legal protection against monopolistic pressures, forced takeovers, and unnecessary government bureaucracy. Good economies grow from the grass roots upwards. So, as a booster especially to the smaller-scale, unregistered, ‘unofficial’ retail industry, Ned Ludd would remove all requirements to declare cash transactions. Most cash eventually finds its way back to a bank, at which point is becomes declarable, and taxable as necessary. Whilst the convenience of digital transactions is neither disputed nor challenged, a fluid, self-sustaining cash economy in tandem is essential to prevent digital tyranny.

John Drewry has a background in marketing, owning and chairing an advertising agency for many years. He also holds an Equity card as a stage director and actor, and is Patron & Presenter for the Nursing Memorial Appeal. His anthology, ‘REASON IN MADNESS – 5 short stories about the unpredictable & irrepressible human spirit’ is available at Amazon.