Ten policies for a better Britain

For whoever — Reform, Tory, ‘Start-up’ — is listening

The Tory Manifesto was remarkably lacking in policies that anyone could call right-wing, let alone effective. On migration, they refused to give us firm commitments in terms of numbers; instead, they will be outsourcing the decision to unelected bureaucrats, who, taking into account the supposed ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’, will advise what the numbers should be. This is a classic case of Blairite depoliticisation; a depoliticisation that has crushed the British Right on issue after issue, showing that after fourteen years, the Tories have learned nothing. The rest of the document was, among other things, enthusiastic about renewable energy, mental health, and ‘diversity’. No-one sensible now has any reason to vote for them.

As the Conservative Party is now third in the polls behind Reform, and the latter is yet to release their manifesto, we thought we would take this opportunity to offer some ideas for Britain’s new main opposition party, or indeed anyone else — ‘Start-up’, even Tory (unlikely) — who might be listening. This is not intended to be a full manifesto, but a selection of policies that we at Pimlico Journal think would be both effective and popular — if only the British public knew about them.

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1. Equality of Opportunity, not Equality of Outcome

Everyone should be given a fair chance in life. But we know that the misleadingly-titled Equality Act 2010 has introduced the principle that discrimination in favour of some groups is permitted, but discrimination in favour of others is not. It is already common for job opportunities to be targeted at certain ethnic minorities, despite the reverse clearly being against the law. Universities will ask all sorts of irrelevant questions about an applicant’s personal background, prying into matters that should be none of their business in order to better implement their flagrantly discriminatory admissions policies. In some cases, such as with the RAF, this has tipped over into outright anti-white discrimination.

Equality of outcome is simply incompatible with a free society: we must put an end to this unjust and immoral social engineering. We will repeal the existing Act and introduce a new Equality Act which will include strict new rules — with no get-outs and no excuses — that all organisations, whether in the private or public sector, must put all British citizens on an equal footing, ensuring that everyone is judged on their merits alone, rather than by their race, gender, sexuality, or indeed any other personal characteristic.

2. Public Bodies Accountable to Britain

We will replace the divisive Public Sector Equality Duty, which encourages government agencies to divide people up into groups — inevitably favouring some over others — with a statutory Public Sector Citizen Duty.

Former Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell stated that he thought that he should aim to ‘maximise global welfare not national welfare’. The new Public Sector Citizen Duty will put an end to this, ensuring that all public sector organisations put the interests of British citizens first. It will be made mandatory for all policy proposals to include an assessment of how they will impact British citizens. At the same time, we will reform the Civil Service Code to clarify that civil servants’ commitment is to British law first and foremost, and not to international law.

3. Dissolve the Blob

In Britain, thousands of activist organisations in possession of hundreds of millions of pounds of funds are currently masquerading as ‘charities’. Charities should be soup kitchens and homeless shelters — not organisations dedicated to political campaigning. Many of these supposed ‘charities’ in fact receive a substantial part of their revenue from the government itself. Others have simply misappropriated funds left to them by long-dead tycoons, using them for purposes that their benefactors never would have anticipated.

Those activist organisations that are in receipt of taxpayer money should not get a single penny more. Furthermore, charitable status will no longer be possible for organisations which receive more than half of their income from government grants.

We also propose that the Charities Commission should take a more stringent approach in defining and monitoring political campaigning. Charities with an income of over £100,000 which only have a low proportion of their donations as small donations (i.e., donations of under £5000) and which engage in political activities will automatically be redefined as lobbying groups, losing their tax breaks and restricting how they can present themselves to the media and interact with politicians. We will further restrict the ability of activist organisations to claim charitable status by removing ‘human rights’ and ‘racial equality and diversity’ from the list of charitable objects, and review the operation of ‘community development’ so that it does not become a replacement.

We know that our government has become bigger, more diffuse, less accountable. We need to restore responsible government, and that means bringing the long list of quangos under closer political supervision. We will change the employment contract for the chief executives of quangos to have them work for the Prime Minister, ensuring their alignment with the government’s wider agenda — so that where a quango is pursuing its own agenda, or is failing in its duties to the public, the Prime Minister can act.

In addition, we will create a new Public Employment Blacklist, so that repeated failure or negligence will not be met with constant sideways promotions, but instead by a guarantee that no further public employment will be possible.

4. Homes for Britons

The housing crisis is a case of insufficient supply coupled with skyrocketing demand. Our policies on immigration will take care of the latter, but this does not mean that we can just ignore the former. A mountain of unnecessary red tape has meant that even in the absence of immigration, it is almost impossible for the supply of housing to meet demand. As such, for the younger generations, homeownership is now an increasingly distant dream.

Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 is perhaps the most harmful regulation of all, satisfying neither local people nor developers. Section 106 can force developers to hand over absurd proportions (in some cases close to half) of the houses they are building to local authorities or registered social landlords, making many projects financially unviable, thus restraining supply. Even when construction does take place, given such onerous requirements, many new builds are now of exceedingly low quality because developers are forced to cut costs in order to maintain reasonable profit margins.

Despite recent moves to restrict their use, Section 106 agreements remain widespread within the system and continue to be an option for local authorities. Section 106 should be amended so that we can further restrain the activities of out-of-control local authorities, helping make the dream of homeownership a reality once more in the process.

5. Achieve Energy Independence

Even under the Government’s own unrealistic Net Zero plans, Britain will still be getting around a quarter of its energy from oil and gas in 2050.

It is essential that renewables providers bear the risk of not being reliable: the new energy system will be run on an Equivalent Firm Power basis, where renewable providers will buy backup support from gas and nuclear energy providers for when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.

It’s simply common sense that if we plan to continue using fossil fuels, we should be using our own wherever possible. Reliance on imports has left British homes and industry at the mercy of events thousands of miles away. In order to move towards increased energy independence, creating thousands of well-paid jobs and smashing inflation in the process, alongside investment in nuclear, we should examine exploiting oil and gas in the North Sea and near the Falkland Islands. We should also let the private sector determine whether fracking in Britain is economically viable, rather than having bureaucrats decide for them by imposing unreasonable regulations on the sector. The long-term aim should be for Britain to become a major energy exporter once more.

6. Reform Higher Education

Our university sector has become grotesquely bloated, funding itself through selling low-quality degrees and visas en masse. Some are sold to domestic students, underwritten by the taxpayer despite very low grades; some are sold to foreign nationals, not because of the quality of the education, but because of the offer of a visa after study.

Many jobs — such as nursing, which did not require a degree as recently as 2009 — now require full degrees, often with little to no justification given for the change. We will get rid of unnecessary credentialism, allowing those who want to work to work earlier.

As well as abolishing the graduate visa route and ending visas for dependants of non-PhD students (see Section 10), we will also more closely monitor the quality of education being offered by our universities. We will systematically randomly sample and test graduates from each institution before and after graduation, checking for whether large numbers are graduating despite poor skills, especially numeracy and literacy, and for whether attending university has actually improved these skills (as is often claimed). We will also focus taxpayer support on those most likely to benefit from a university education, restricting funding only to those students who receive above a certain UCAS tariff threshold (with highly limited exemptions, such as for conservatoires).

7. Bring Back Free Speech

If we believe in a free society, Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 must be repealed. A law written when the Internet was still in its infancy has now been used in ways that Parliament could never have imagined. Section 127 means that people can be imprisoned for sending any message that is ‘grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character’, regardless of the context.

In practice, the law is selectively enforced, and is now being used by activist prosecutors and judges to criminalise private conversations that they dislike for political reasons. Repealing Section 127 would not decriminalise genuine threats and harassment, as these are already criminalised by other legislation.

It's time to restore our right to free speech, and abolish this outdated, impractical, and excessive law. The repeal of Section 127 will also be accompanied with a new Free Speech Act, requiring all legislation to be interpreted in a manner that is maximally compatible with a general principle of ‘no censorship’.

8. Lock Them Up

To hide their failure to build enough prisons, successive governments have resorted to automatically letting loose criminals halfway through their sentence, and generally avoiding custodial sentences whenever possible. The result has been deadly: dozens of people are raped or murdered every year by criminals who had been set free too early.

It is now widely acknowledged that we have failed to build enough prisons, and the Labour Party and the Conservative Party have both pledged to do better. But neither has yet committed to ending the farce of automatic early release. We also propose examining how we can introduce more accountability for the parole boards which are responsible for granting early release to criminals who are later convicted of serious crimes, so that particularly poor-performing officials can be barred from serving on parole boards indefinitely.

9. Establish a Grooming Gang Compensation Scheme

Thousands of British children were raped by grooming gangs over a period spanning decades. Many of the perpetrators have gone unprosecuted, or received pitiful sentences; victims have gone unrecognised. Too often, public officials ignored the scandal, or were complicit in covering up or downplaying the severity of offences — whether due to incompetence, laziness, political correctness, or, in some cases, corruption.

The Home Office is currently offering compensation to those affected by the Windrush Scandal. We propose a similar scheme for the victims of the grooming gangs, using the Windrush Compensation Scheme as a model. We also propose examining whether we can prosecute public officials who displayed gross misconduct on grooming gangs.

We will also launch a public inquiry into the grooming gangs, along the lines of the Chilcot Inquiry and the ongoing Covid-19 Inquiry, so that we can better understand what exactly went wrong and how to fix it.

10. Enforce Strict Immigration Controls

Election after election, we have been promised big reductions in immigration. Not only have none of these promises been kept, but immigration has in fact skyrocketed to record levels.

The only way to get a grip on numbers is ultimately to reduce the number of visas being issued. Immigration is a political matter, and should not be outsourced to (for instance) the Migration Advisory Committee; it must remain a matter for Parliament. We propose that each quarter, Parliament should vote on a cap on the number of visas issued over that period.

Ideally, the visas would be auctioned, ensuring the taxpayer gets a direct benefit and imposing market discipline. A small percentage of visas could be offered as a lottery, for family visas and asylum seekers who cannot afford entry otherwise. The frequency of a quarterly vote offers flexibility and means constituents can lobby their MPs about the number of visas being made available.

We also propose the following, especially prior to the full implementation of the system outlined above:

• Britain is an international outlier in how easy it is to obtain citizenship. In order to move more into line with international norms, the standard amount of time working in Britain required to obtain Indefinite Leave to Remain will be increased from five to seven years, and the standard amount of time to obtain British citizenship after being granted Indefinite Leave to Remain will be increased from twelve months to five years. In exchange, the financial cost of obtaining citizenship will be greatly reduced.

• It is not right that British citizenship is granted to dangerous criminals. Anyone who has been given a custodial sentence will permanently lose the possibility of gaining Indefinite Leave to Remain and/or British citizenship (rather than just resetting the clock, as is the case now).

• Nearly half of London’s stock of social housing is occupied by a household with a foreign-born head. This needs to change. No new social housing tenancies will be granted to non-citizens (unless married to or cohabiting with a British citizen), and new claims for housing benefit from non-citizens will automatically be rejected.

• The graduate visa route (the so-called ‘Deliveroo visa’) has enabled bloated former polytechnics to sell low-quality courses to foreign nationals with few skills, leading to an explosion in foreign student numbers. We will abolish the graduate visa route; anyone with genuine skills can already transfer to a skilled worker visa. We will also stop granting visas for the dependants of those on student visas (with an exception for PhD students).

• The care worker visa route has been widely abused and has produced massive numbers of visas for dependants. It should immediately be abolished. Adult social care is a remarkably poorly-paid industry which is still majority British. A small pay rise to attract more British workers to the sector will be much cheaper in the long-run than continuing the care worker visa route.

• Cousin marriage will be banned, and cousin marriages conducted abroad for immigration and/or welfare purposes will not be recognised by the British state. Forced marriage legislation will be strengthened, particularly targeting transnational marriages where there is little contact prior to marriage.

• Humanitarian routes should be capped so that we avoid the enormous numbers that we’ve seen using them. It’s more affordable — and therefore, pound for pound, helps more people — to offer aid in the affected region rather than shipping lots of people over here.

• Every year, we import thousands of nurses and doctors to fill vacancies in the National Health Service; yet every year, we also reject thousands of perfectly good applicants for nursing and medical degrees due to artificial caps on numbers. We propose that caps on places for nursing and medical degrees should be greatly increased, with the goal of making the National Health Service self-sufficient in the long-term, and no longer reliant upon immigrant labour.