So many manifestos — who has the answers?
Create the party
you would vote for.
Borrow the best policies, fix the ones you don't like, and craft a manifesto that finally makes sense.
Work, pay and welfare
Benefits, pensions, minimum wage, the four-day week. Rewrite the social contract.
An 'Educational Needs Plan' for Every Child
Every child is special. Labelling some as SEN clearly isn't working. Support teacher availability and class sizes are often allocated by the number of SEN children in each, rather than by their actual needs. Children who don't have a
The Royal Mail is a universal service. Regulate it like one, not like a parcels startup.
Last week a Royal Mail delivery driver knocked on my door to hand me a parcel addressed to a neighbour two streets over. She had given up. The van was running. The backlog of redirected parcels in the back was, by my rough count, about fort
Britain should reclaim sovereign control of its own weather. Enough is enough.
Last summer it was 34 degrees in Surrey. Thirty-four. In Surrey. I was born in 1962 and I can tell you categorically that this is not British weather. British weather is 19 degrees and overcast with the threat of a shower. British weather i
Enforce 20mph zones properly or paint over them. Half-arsed is worse than useless.
Bristol rolled out 20mph zones across almost the entire city. Fair enough, evidence says lower speeds reduce serious injuries. Except there is no enforcement. Zero speed cameras on the 20mph roads. Police say they have no resources to prose
A five-year ban on former ministers lobbying their own department, with real enforcement
The Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA) is a fig leaf. It has no statutory powers. It can be ignored, and regularly is. When a former minister takes a lobbying role that touches their old brief, the committee issues a polite
Cross-departmental review of the review process, with a view to reviewing how reviews are commissioned
The Difficult Decisions Party has noted, with some concern, that the government currently commissions a large number of reviews. The Difficult Decisions Party has further noted, also with concern, that reviews are sometimes commissioned to
Stop outsourcing critical public services to Capita, Serco and friends. They keep failing. We keep paying.
A non-exhaustive list of things Capita has been paid large sums of public money to mess up: Army recruitment. The contract was so badly managed that recruitment fell by 30% in the first year. They kept the contract. Teachers pensions. The
Strong support for affordable housing, with some very minor and entirely reasonable conditions
The Nimby Liberation Front is unambiguous in its support for affordable housing. The country is in a housing crisis. Young people cannot afford to buy. Young families are being pushed out of villages like ours. This is a tragedy and we stan
Create a fast-track AIM listing path for UK scale-ups that are growing but not yet profitable
The London Stock Exchange is in slow decline. AIM listings have halved in the last five years. The companies that should be listing here - British AI labs, biotech, clean energy, fintech - are instead moving to New York, or going private, o
Institute a National Week of Quiet Surrender so we can finally stop pretending
Proposal: every year, for one full week in late october, the United Kingdom will officially suspend the pretence that things are getting better. Government will stop announcing initiatives. Ministers will stop appearing in hi-vis. Nobody wi
Hold at least one council meeting a month in a pub. Yes really.
Went to a council meeting last week. They held it in a community centre on the edge of town at 2 in the afternoon on a wednesday. Eleven people attended. Four of them were the council. Two were press. Three were retired. One was me. One was
Mandatory 4-hour committee meetings before any revolutionary action. No exceptions.
Brothers. And sisters. And anyone else, we passed that motion at the last committee meeting. Revolutionary action without committee approval is adventurism. Adventurism leads to splinter groups. Splinter groups lead to the People's Popular
Pay teaching assistants a proper living wage, or stop pretending schools function without them
A teaching assistant in my school earns £18,400 a year on the standard contract. That is term-time only, obviously, but even pro-rata that works out below the real living wage. We have TAs running small-group interventions, one-to-one suppo
Over-75s shouldnt have to sit in A&E for 9 hours because they cant get a GP appointment
My neighbour Frank is 81. Last month he had chest pains at 8am. He rang his GP at 8:00 on the dot, 8:01, 8:02, 8:03. By 8:20 he got through and was told there were no appointments left. The receptionist, who was very sorry, suggested he go
Abolish SATs. They measure nothing that matters and damage the children taking them.
I have watched ten year olds cry in the toilets before a SATs paper. I have watched bright, curious kids start to hate school in year six because for months everything they do is either "practice" or "performance". I have watched schools r
End peat extraction for gardening compost by 2027 and fund the transition for UK growers
UK peatlands store around 3 billion tonnes of carbon. That is more than all the forests in Britain, France, and Germany combined. Healthy peatlands slowly accumulate carbon. Drained peatlands release it, continuously, for decades. The gove
Restore public sector pay to 2010 real-terms levels over five years. It is overdue.
The IFS calculates that a typical public sector worker earns around 9% less in real terms than they did in 2010. That is sixteen years of effective pay cuts. For nurses, teachers, police officers, civil servants. For the people who stepped
Bus lanes should only operate when buses actually run
The bus lane on the A370 is in operation 24 hours a day. Seven days a week. I drove down it at 10:30pm on a sunday in february and there was one car in front of me, no buses anywhere, and about a mile of empty bus lane I wasnt allowed to us
Publish every tax relief and exemption alongside the Budget, with five-year cost projections
HMRC administers approximately 340 tax reliefs and exemptions. They cost the Exchequer over £400 billion in forgone revenue each year. That is more than the entire NHS budget. Most of them are never reviewed, most are poorly targeted, and m
Full Royal Commission into the appropriate use of the Oxford comma in parliamentary legislation
The Difficult Decisions Party notes with concern the current ambiguity in legislative punctuation. On the one hand, the Oxford comma provides clarity. On the other hand, it does not. The implications for future legislation are therefore sig
How it works
Build your party
Name it. Give it a colour. Write a tagline. Every great movement starts somewhere, even a fictional one.
Write your policies
Make your case. Explain how it works. Let the community vote, debate, and challenge your ideas.
Vote, debate, fork
Vote on other people's ideas. Disagree kindly. Fork a policy you like and adapt it to your own manifesto.