Bog Roll ::

At long last our blundering Prime Minister has called the day and we now have to sit through the political parties lies and counter-lies in the run up the UK's General Election this May.

While I favour one party more than the others, I do think of myself as a free thinker and so here is my manifesto... Items in no particular order.

• We don't need submarines full of nuclear warheads anymore, it's not as if we have ever or could have ever used our Polaris or Trident in anger without permission from the US. We may as well decommission them when they come to the end of their life and use the money somewhere else.
• Our banks need regulating. Without regulation reckless lending will happen again and we will dig ourselves into a very big hole again. Banks should be restricted by law into how much they can lend, who they can lend too, and where the borrow the money from to lend to us. At the same time private individuals should be legally restricted in how much they can borrow and it should be one mortgage per person only. No more "Buy-To-Let" nonsense.
• The government should scrap or at least scale back many silly and grandiose IT schemes. The ID Card project should be cancelled at once. All government departments should more towards all open and public standard document formats, so no more Word and Excel proprietary waste. Where possible all system should move away from proprietary solution such as Microsoft Windows and legacy Unix systems towards open standard based system such as Linux.
• On transport policy the car is doomed, we can't keep pretending we can make it work. It should be short and long term government policy to move away from the private motor car towards less travelling and where travel is required by greener and public systems.
• All British homes MUST be fully insulated. By law all landlords, private and public must provide decent standards of loft and wall insulation (where appropriate), before a property can be let. By law when a house is sold the vendor can only sell the property if the loft and walls are adequately insulated - the buyer can elect to chose the insulation material if none is in place.
• Stamp duty on house purchased to be scrapped. All houses where stamp duty has not been paid would instead be subject to capital gains tax. People who have paid stamp duty in the last 2 years able to claim it back if they accept to pay capital gains instead.
• The UK to adopt the Euro currency to replace Pound Sterling as soon as it is possible. The UK to also more widely adopt EU standards and processes. Arcane measurements to be phased out totally, including pints, miles and miles per hour. Full metrication will take place this time - I'm getting to old to fart about with medieval units anymore...

More to follow when I think of things...

posted 15:05 :: /stuff/politics :: permalink :: ^