A Modest Manifesto
The Armchair General's fast and furious stop-gap manifesto...
As may be obvious from my monicker, your humble Armchair General has no intention of becoming involved in politics again — no, not even on the fringes — or certainly not before he has become “fuck you” rich.
However, it does strike me that, as those contemplating the rapidly accelerating decline of our country see the ground rushing towards them at an increasing pace, there are going to be a goodly number of absolute tosspots willing to grab at any old straws in order to put off the impeding oblivion.
They may even land in this remote but curmudgeonly backwater of the internet, and wonder whether the lazy, mildly scatological, port-soaked old fool in the leather wing-chair might have an idea or two that might be worth a squirt.
A simple scope of works
Now, assuming that this person (or, in my more ambitious fantasies, these people) is already involved in politics, his (or she) is probably thin-skinned, hard of thinking, and possessed of a backbone carefully crafted from only slightly stiffened blancmange, I am going to make these suggestions, in the main, quite simple and easy to achieve. Let’s not scare the horses, eh?
So, what follows are a few very simple suggestions for making this country better than it currently is. Not perfect, you understand — but better.
The Equality Act
There are a number of admirable principles in the Equality Act, including its insistence that everyone — regardless of skin colour, sex, disability, etc. — not be discriminated against, especially in the provision of public services.
As someone who believes that all should be equal under the Common Law, I whole-heartedly approve of this aim. Even if it should not need to be stated again, let’s assume that there were certain iniquities which demanded that it should be (my specialist area of Web Accessibility, for instance, is still below where it should be, despite how much it empowers those with disabilities for almost no cost).
However, this is where it should stop. So, the policy provisions are as follows:
remove “religion” as a protected characteristic — the whole point about unjust discrimination is that it is based on things that are immutable — skin colour, sex (yes, sex), and so on. Religion is a set of beliefs, and is thus not immutable — after all, were that not the case, Islam would not need to articulate a provision for killing apostates, would it?
remove the requirement to promote minorities — the Act requires not only that organisations not discriminate against individuals: it demands that organisations (particularly in the public sector) should actively promote rights, opportunities and careers of so-called minorities above the majority (white, male, etc.). This is a pandering to the morally repugnant Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, and is quite obviously completely counter to the original spirit of the Equality Act.
This second provision is one of the two key enablers of the current trans rows, as well as other unjustified discrimination against the white majority population of the British Isles. And, properly articulated by a politician, should gain them a good number of votes — because, as I said, these people are the majority.
Enacting the above does not discriminate against anyone — that’s the point — and it kicks the risk of impending bloody revolution by the white majority down the road by a good couple of decades.
Motive-influenced sentencing
remove consideration of motive in sentencing guidelines — sentencing guidelines enable, or even demand, that judges add extra tariffs if the crime is deemed to be motivated by racism. However, in line with the spirit of equality and, to some extent, sanity, the fact that a criminal can get a longer sentence if the motive for their crime is adjudged to be “racism” (or any other “-ism”) is obviously wrong.
Quite apart from anything else, Critical Race Theory states that those with the power — crudely designated in this context, and in this country, as white people — cannot be racist. So, this aspect of sentencing is, in any normal sense of the word, racist, and so counter to the concept of equality under the Law.
The same applies to any discrimination on the grounds of sex.
Whether a murder victim is black or white, man or woman, they are just as dead no matter the motivation for the crime.1
Repeal Hate Speech Laws
One of the most pernicious ideas that has crept into our civilisation — creeping in, as many of these things do, from the USA — is the spurious concept that “speech” is as harmful as a physical attack. It is not.
repeal Hate Speech laws — as with the sentencing guidelines mentioned above, these laws are heavily skewed against the majority UK population. As far as anyone can see, they are largely used to protect hateful Islamic preachers (some of whose prognostications, frankly, edge into incitement to violence) and other race-hustlers — as well as being used to introduce new blasphemy laws by the back door. And they are, of course, the other key enabler of militant trans activists.
Regardless of any of that, criminal law should be based on objective harm and not any person’s subjective opinion. Hate speech laws are entirely subjective in their interpretation and designation of harm, and should be abolished (along with any other laws based on the same precedent).
If anyone feels that they are being unfairly maligned by another person to the extent of being harmed, then they can resort to the old Civil Law stand-by of libel or slander.
This measure, combined with the reform of the Equality Act, would cut off militant activists at the knees, and neatly defuse the so-called “culture wars”; whilst it would not end them overnight, it would remove the “lawfare” that provides the ammunition.
Stretch Goals: legal simplification
It is a core component of the Common Law system that laws be simple and easy to understand.
As such, a campaign of legal simplification should be undertaken — based on the central non-aggression axiom — you shall not initiate force or fraud against someone’s life (murder), liberty (slavery) or property (theft).
The determination of whether this simple tenet has been breached is what trials, and case law, exist to provide.
Get building
As I recently pointed out at some length, the planning system is a colossal drag on the economy. It is the cause the Housing Crisis because it prevents the building of enough houses to lower prices (and enforces the building of very small and/or “high density” housing, i.e. pokey little rabbit-hutch flats); it also prevents us from building roads, sewers, broadband connections, water and gas pipes to service those houses — which are what lead to a great deal of (professed) NIMBYism.
It prevents us from building reservoirs (leading to water companies urging us to use less of their product, and to hosepipe bans when it’s pissing it down), power stations, railways, mines and refineries, bio-tech laboratories, and anything else you can think of.
It also leads to obscenities like this current dismal record:
The planning application for a £10bn road project to relieve traffic on the M25 at Dartford has become Britain’s biggest ever, sparking concern over the state of the UK’s planning system.
Documents for the Lower Thames Crossing project amount to more than 359,000 pages and would run nearly five times as long as the road if laid out end-to-end, the Times reported. Its application contains 2,383 documents, a total which surpasses Heathrow’s terminal five, the length of which prompted calls for reforming the system in 2001.
Just that planning application has cost £300 million! Three hundred million pounds for a planning application — they haven’t even started building the bloody tunnel yet!
the key aim of planning reform is to blow up the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, and all its successors. Kablooie!
given that entirely destroying the planning system and putting in a sensible system of compensation payments — which is what existed before 1947 — will take some time, the adoption of the Adam Smith Institute’s planning reforms should be a good first step in getting the country moving again.
Energy
Once the planning system is in a reasonable state, there will be a focus on building new gas and nuclear power stations — including the revisiting of the Small Modular Reactor procurement process, currently being screwed up by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
The Americans and Canadians are linking their SMR technical approval systems so that either regulatory authority’s approval is automatically deemed to be approval by the other.[4] The UK was invited to join but declined.
As a first salvo, and to fast-track new SMR projects, the UK will reverse this decision — and seek to extend the same regulatory co-operation beyond SMRs, into regular nukes.
Encouraging investment
The people of this country need to understand that if they want lots of goodies, then we need growing companies to deliver the revenue.
Companies need investment and so reversing the Chancellor’s recent raid on Capital Gains Tax and dividend allowances is the absolute bare minimum that should be done.
There is a lot more that could be done, but that is outwith the scope of this brief manifesto.
The Minimum Wage
The National Minimum Wage (NMW) is damaging to the employment prospects of low-skilled and low-wage workers. However, these effects can be minimised through setting the NMW at an optimum level, as articulated by Tim Worstall in 2021:
What level of minimum wage still protects but doesn’t cause – not too much of at least – the ill effects?
The traditional answer here has been in the range of 50-55% of the median wage. There just aren’t that many people who make less than half median wage in any free market society. So this is the number where that backstop against exploitation can be set without causing too much undesired unemployment. More recently the calculation has been refined into what is called the ‘Kaitz Index’ meaning the ratio of minimum to median wage. We also have a significant report for HMG on exactly this point, by one of the major scholars in the field (and very much in favour of minimum wages) Arindrajit Dube, the result is 59%. So the optimal – or perhaps top sensible – level of the minimum wage is 59% of the median wage.
The UK median wage for both and full and part time workers is £13.68. This gives us a maximum sensible minimum wage of £8.07 an hour.
In his recent budget, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt raised the National Minimum Wage to £11.44 per hour. This is a win-win for the government since not only does it cost them nothing — all of the burden is borne by businesses — but it actually netts the Treasury money: combined with the freeze in income and NICs allowances, it enables the government to force higher pay and thus to collect more taxes (from the very poorest in society, for fuck’s sake)!
All of this is morally repugnant: if we believe that £11.44 is the absolute minimum that someone’s labour is worth, then it is utterly immoral to then tax them on it.
Rises in the NMW are great for those who have a job — or who manage to retain it after the latest rise — but substantially reduces the number of jobs available: why else do you think that self-checkout machines exist in supermarkets?
Finally, the UK economy is vastly more disparate than the NMW allows for: there is a London weighting, but it really doesn’t do well with the discrepancies in living costs between, say, Surrey and Derbyshire.
So, our provisions here are slightly radical but justifiable:
the National Minimum Wage will be set at no more than 50% of the median wage — recalculated each year as part of the Budget process. See 3. below for why we do not set it at the “optimum maximum” of 59%;
the Personal Allowance for Income Tax and NICs will be set, in law, at the rate of a full time employee on the National Minimum Wage (currently 37.5 hours x £11.44 = £429 per week = £22,308) — this will prevent unscrupulous Chancellors gaming the system by forcing up the NMW to realise short-term tax gains on the poorest in society. They will, however, be able to drop the NMW should they so wish (approximately 0.0005 seconds after this law passes, for instance);
County, City or Unitary level Local Authorities will be able to set their own “top-up” Minimum Wage over and above the National Minimum Wage — this top-up amount will not be included in the Personal Tax Allowance, and will be taxed at the standard amount (currently 20%). This will enable Councils to balance the need for business investment with demand for workers within their areas, and set up real competition for both amongst Councils — in preparation for further devolution of revenue-raising powers further down the line. Workers will also benefit from being able to move across county lines to find their preferred balance of pay and living conditions.
Tightening Benefits
Some of the measures above will, in the short term, reduce the amount of money that the state is able to extort from the populace. As such, whilst some increased borrowing may be possible in the short term, the government will need to reassure markets that it has a plan to shrink expenditure.
due notice to be given that living on benefits will no longer be a viable choice: as standard, benefits will be tapered over time and, eventually, benefits will be removed entirely after a certain timescale of claiming (and yes, I’m looking at you, Gary2)— if you take out private unemployment insurance, your first three months will be, say, 80% of salary; the next three at 60%; and the next three at 40%, etc. Benefits will operate in the same way as standard, with the default maximum claim for benefits being 18 months within any five year period;
exceptions for the genuinely sick — those who are genuinely unable to work will be exempted from this provision, although the bar will be incredibly high and the default presumption will be that only physical disabilities will qualify.3 There will be severe repercussions for medical professionals that provide sick notes for people who are able to work — including criminal prosecution and being struck off the appropriate medical register;
from Day One of the new government, all new state employees will be entered into a standard auto-enrolment pension of the kind mandated in the private sector — there will be no further entrants into Defined Benefit state pensions at any level or in any part of the state. According to estimates by the Taxpayers’ Alliance the government’s unfunded public sector pension liabilities are in excess of £2.90 trillion. This needs to stop;
the state pension amount will be tapered for those who were in the workforce from 2012 onwards, and who should thus have an auto-enrolment pension (as a minimum) — the state’s current liability for state pensions is currently £6.15 trillion (same source as above) so future reductions need to be made. When the state pension was first introduced, the average life expectancy was around 67; it is now 80, and state pensions have become, quite obviously, unsustainable. One of the most sensible things that the Coalition introduced was the auto-enrolment pension: a certain percentage is paid by the employee (~5%) and more by the employer (~4%). The most important provision is that the pension fund belongs to the individual — not the government or the company — and cannot (easily) be raised by either;
the pension age will continue to be raised, and at a faster rate — currently 66, the state pension age is set to rise to 67 between May 2026 and March 2028; and from 2044, it is expected to rise to 68. This will be accelerated, with the age set to rise — and be maintained — at 70 by 2040.
Social Housing
Most people do not know this, but once you have obtained a Social Housing Tenancy, then you have it for life (assuming that you pay your rent, and don’t get evicted for dealing drugs, harassing your neighbours, etc.). Not only that, but you can pass your Tenancy onto your children.
This means that, in the normal circumstances, any Social Housing property is off the market, as it were, for at least two generations.
So, you can fall into trouble in our youth, get a Social Tenancy; then pick yourself up, get a job, get richer — you could even be an MP, for instance — and be paying well below market rent for the rest of your life.
One of the Coalition plans that was subsequently abandoned was Pay to Stay — which was partially modelled off social housing policy in the Netherlands — under which those above a certain household income would have to pay full market rates. This income limit was pretty generous — market rents did not kick in until the tenant was earning £60,000 per annum (again, pretty much in line with the Netherlands).
The Pay to Stay concept will be resurrected — and enacted as quickly as possible.
Eventually, reform of the Planning System should bring house prices low enough that social housing will no longer be required at all.
Public Sector Pay
Politicians and the Civil Service are not incentivised to act in the best financial interests of the people that they represent and work for — this is why so many sensible propositions are quashed because it might make politicians look bad in front of their Davos mates. This needs to end, and quickly:
MPs and Civil Servants will have their pay indexed to the median disposable income across their country (i.e. Holyrood politicians will have their pay indexed to those living in Scotland; the Senedd to those living in Wales, etc.) — if the median disposable income increases by 5% (in real terms, i.e. inflation adjusted), then their pay will increase by up to 5%; if the median pay decreases, then their pay will decrease by the same amount.
Immigration
The first issue with immigration is that of economic contribution, and this is easy to solve for legal immigrants — as we already for those from, say, the USA.
legal immigrants on work visas may not claim any benefits — otherwise they will be deemed unable to support themselves and will be deported to their country of origin. The government may also pay for the deportation of their family, if they so wish;
immigrants on student visas must submit verified and passing examination grades to the Home Office once a year — if they do not, then they will be adjudged to no longer be a student of good standing, and will be deported to their country of origin;
illegal migrants will be deported and barred from ever re-entering the UK — whether by legal or illegal means. The only exceptions to this will be (1) if they cannot have come via a previous “safe” country as defined in the Dublin Regulation, i.e. as things currently stand, if they flew non-stop from their country of origin, (2) where Britain has granted exceptional status, e.g. Ukraine, Hong Kong;
any immigrant granted refugee status will be free to work — and, in the meantime, they will be subject to tapering benefits as with any other claimant (see above);
any immigrants committing any crime, including incitement to discrimination or violence, will be immediately deported to their country of origin — if the French can do it, I fail to see why we cannot;
if the UK’s membership of the ECHR threatens the feasibility of any of the above, then we will make immediate and concrete preparations to leave — if necessary, a UK Bill of Rights will be prepared (with the 1689 Bill of Rights heavily referred to).
Summary
This light programme of work provides quick fixes that will:
re-establish equality under the law;
end the law being used to enforce subjective grievances and introduce new blasphemy laws;
reduce the cost of infrastructure — including in the critical areas of housing and energy generation;
make work pay;
begin the devolution of power more locally;
align public servant incentives with the economy;
address some immigration issues.
Overall, this short manifesto will neutralise the culture wars, get the economy moving, and lay some critical foundations for moving forward. Although some items may cause more ructions than others, all of the above should be politically achievable too.
I commend it to the House. Just for starters…
Astoundingly, murder is the leading cause of death of young black men in the United States of America (USA): 35% (1–19 years) and 26% (20–44 years). It is highly likely that the majority of this is black-on-black violence.
From The Daily Telegraph, 16 March 2024:
Gary quit his first and only job working in a café when he was a teenager. “I just couldn’t handle it. It was too busy,” he says.
Born and bred in Hastings on the East Sussex coast, he says stress and anxiety led him to the doctor, who signed him off on sickness benefits. Gary – who does not want to use his real name – has not worked since.
He is now 49, and has no regrets.
“I wouldn’t be able to work. It would be too stressful and I don’t like being told what to do,” he says. “And I would have to pay too much tax, I don’t believe in paying to work.”
You should not be able to live on money that is stolen from people that do work. Not acceptable, Gary.
I know a chap who lost both arms and both legs in a mountain climbing accident: not only does he still work (largely doing data entry) but he still climbs mountains.