‘If only …’ Guardian writers on the one policy they’d have in their manifesto
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Version 0 of 1. Lola Okolosie: Part-time working for all Think of the weightless laziness that envelops you when you realise it’s a bank holiday and you have nowhere you especially need to be. Now imagine that feeling of bliss repeated every working week. It could be reality if we all worked no more than 30 hours a week. And crucially that we did so without a detrimental impact on pay. To paraphrase Hot Chocolate, everyone would be a winner. Women, who are three times more likely than men to work part time, find it is often when they have had children that the gender pay gap begins to widen, gaining in distance to a disgraceful 42% for mothers in their 50s. If we all worked part time it could no longer be viewed as semaphore for “since having babies and working a four-day week, I’m not very bothered about my career any more”. It’s not just mothers who would benefit. More of us would be freed up to care for elderly relatives or volunteer at local charities. We’d have more time with family and friends and, for the misanthropes out there, more you time. When you remember that 45% of all sick days are lost to stress, we can see the benefit for business as well as the NHS. Even the environment would be better off. One day less commuting would go a long way to cleaning up our toxic air. George Monbiot: Safer cycling in our cities We have a pollution crisis, a climate crisis, a congestion crisis, a fitness crisis and an obesity crisis. And we have an ingenious technology than can solve them all. Not the flying car or the jetpack, but the bicycle. The current government ensures that cycling is the preserve of the brave and determined. It creates as much space as possible for driving, making the roads hazardous for everyone else. When I ask people how they travel, I keep hearing the same refrain: “I would love to cycle, but it’s too dangerous.” If it wanted to solve our traffic crisis, government would take space from cars and give it to cyclists. This means safe cycle lanes everywhere, priority at junctions and good bike parking. Over half the car journeys we make at the moment are less than five miles. We could be travelling faster with almost no environmental impacts, taking up a fraction of the space and getting fit, but instead we sit fuming in a tonne of metal, breathing a cloud of toxic smoke. Traffic is making our cities ever less liveable. Which of the major parties is brave enough to make the bicycle the main form of urban transport? Sonia Sodha: A year-long service scheme for the young It’s a long time since bare-footed policy gurus padded the hallways of No 10 talking up the “big society”. How to create a flourishing civil society has slipped down the agenda, as our political debate has become dominated by Brexit and what the state ought and ought not to do. But many of the big social challenges we face – how to care for our ageing population, tackling loneliness and isolation – can’t be solved by the state alone. In countries like the US, Germany and France, there are year-long voluntary service schemes young people can do before or after university or before getting a job: a gap year in their own communities, for example, mentoring in schools or running activities in care homes. The idea is young people pick up valuable skills for the workplace while at the same time transforming other people’s lives. I’m a trustee of City Year UK, a charity that provides opportunities for 18- to 25-year-olds from diverse backgrounds to do a year of service in British schools. But these young people don’t have a clear legal status: they are officially counted as not in employment, education or training and don’t even get the national insurance contributions you would get on jobseeker’s allowance. I’d like to see the parties pledge to give these young people the recognition and status they deserve by creating a national year-of-service scheme, like Americorps in the US and Service Civique in France Rafael Behr: The opposite of big, bright promises Some part of British politics has been in a state of almost continual campaigning frenzy since the Scottish independence referendum in autumn 2014. That battle bled into the general election of spring 2015, which begat last year’s EU referendum, which toppled David Cameron and so generated this coming vote in June. And that isn’t counting local polls and a couple of high-intensity Labour leadership contests. There have been lulls but they have felt like episodes of sobriety (or hangover) in an epic ballot-box bender. It would be churlish to object to the holding of elections – democracy doesn’t exist without them. But sustaining debate at such a shrill pitch for a prolonged period has not been good for the voice in which British politics speaks. It has not encouraged civility, nuance, balance, reflection, rationality. We have shouted ourselves hoarse. That is why I cannot say there is any one policy announcement that I crave as a political tonic. The missing element is not bigger, bolder or brighter promises. It is the opposite: recognition that simple promises are invariably misleading; that the retail pitch of the campaign trail is only a small part of what politics should be about; that the serious business of government involves disappointing people as well as satisfying their demands. Campaign fever excludes any pondering of the complexity of challenges facing the country. It is hostile to the ethos of realistic, pragmatic explanation of the available options as opposed to hyperbolic inflation of fantasy choices. That is an unavoidable feature of elections and there isn’t much point complaining about it. But it would be refreshing to hear politicians periodically admit it too. Zoe Williams: A basic citizen’s income Policies have no objective value: they come through the filter of whoever is delivering them. Jeremy Corbyn objects to large class sizes in schools but would nail himself to no upper limit. Tony Blair, on his 1997 pledge card, capped primary school classes at 30. Yet since Corbyn’s the radical, his policy is supposedly the unrealistic one. Ditto, the energy cap, dangerous Marxism when Ed Miliband said it, a hand up for the hardworking when Theresa May did. But if there is no such thing as a policy to which people respond in a conceptual way, unshackled from its political context, on its own merits, that doesn’t mean they’re not important: they are waypoints on a narrative journey. Even if they’re never enacted, never intended to be enacted, they tell you something about what any given party wants the future to look like. Consequently, I’m not interested in “consumer” policies – £10 a week more for this person, lower utility bills for that person – since they convey a future basically unchanged, where life’s inevitable hardships are allayed by a kindly state. I’d be swayed by policies of greater scope and unromantic but hopeful modernity: a green New Deal of massive investment in nationally distributed renewable energy, to solve multiple questions – climate change, de-industrialisation, over-reliance on foreign fossil fuels, fuel poverty – at once. I’d also support a basic citizen’s income: it deals simultaneously with a broken social contract, looming automation and poverty wages. It reframes the dynamic between the state and the individual, away from command and control, towards mutual support in the service of limitless potential. It draws us into a conversation that is happening in progressive circles worldwide, from Canada to Finland to Kenya. For a single policy to ignite my interest, it would have to give a clear account of the real problems now, a plausible account of the problems it foresaw, and a bold and imaginative way to connect their solutions. |