VG,
Of course you do. This from the first page of Labour’s 2024 election manifesto:
"Labour’s plan to kickstart growth will:
• Restore economic stability with tough new spending rules, allow businesses to plan, with a cap on corporation tax at 25%, and a new industrial strategy to give business long-term certainty for investment decisions.
• Unleash investment with a new National Wealth Fund to invest in the industries for the future, and Great British Energy to accelerate the transition to Clean Power. Our plan will create 650,000 jobs in the industries of the future.
• Reform our planning rules to build the railways, roads, labs and 1.5 million homes we need and develop a new 10-year infrastructure strategy.
• Reform decision-making to shift power away from Westminster to turbo-charge the efforts of mayors across the country, with new powers over transport, skills, housing and planning, and employment support, along with new growth plans for towns across the country.
• Reform our jobs market by getting people back into work with careers and job centre reform, a New Deal for Working people to make work pay, a new childcare offer to get people into work, and a plan to tackle our health and mental health challenges to get people back to work.
• Reform the immigration and skills system to ensure Britain is developing home-grown skills with workforce plans to meet the needs of industries and the economy.
• Introduce a modern industrial strategy, working in partnership with businesses and workers to grasp the opportunities of new technologies, with an AI sector plan, a new national data library to support cutting-edge research, 10-year budgets for key world innovation institutions, and planning reform to build the datacentres and infrastructure we need."
And here’s the Conservative equivalent:
“ - Cut tax for workers by taking another 2p off employee National Insurance so that we will have halved it from 12% at the beginning of this year to 6% by April 2027, a total tax cut of £1,350 for the average worker on £35,000 – and the next step in our
longterm ambition to end the double tax on work when financial conditions allow.
- Cut taxes to support the self-employed by abolishing the main rate of self-employed National Insurance entirely by the end of the Parliament.
- Cut tax for pensioners with the new Triple Lock Plus, guaranteeing that both the State Pension and the tax free allowance for pensioners always rise with the highest of inflation, earnings or 2.5% – so the new State Pension doesn’t get dragged into income tax.
- Give working parents 30 hours of free childcare a week from when their child is nine months old to when they start school, saving eligible families an average of £6,900 per year.
- End the unfairness in Child Benefit by moving to a household system, so families don’t start losing Child Benefit until their combined income reaches £120,000 – saving the average family which benefits £1,500.
- Cut the cost of net zero for consumers by taking a more pragmatic approach, guaranteeing no new green levies or charges while accelerating the rollout of renewables.
- Seize the benefits of Brexit by signing further trade deals, speeding up infrastructure and unblocking 100,000 homes, cutting red tape for business, and creating new fishing opportunities. To provide young people with a secure future
- Give young people the skills and opportunities they deserve by introducing mandatory National Service for all school leavers at 18, with the choice between a competitive placement in the military or civic service roles.
- Fund 100,000 high-quality apprenticeships for young people, paid for by curbing the number of poor-quality university degrees that leave young people worse off.
- Protect children by requiring schools to ban the use of mobile phones during the school day and ensuring parents can see what their children are being taught, especially on sensitive matters like sex education.
- Transform 16-19 education by introducing the Advanced British Standard, enabling young people to receive a broader education and removing the artificial divide between academic and technical learning. To safeguard our borders and national security
- Boost defence spending to our new NATO standard of 2.5% of GDP by 2030, so we can protect British interests at home and abroad in an increasingly hostile world.
- Introduce a legal cap on migration to guarantee that numbers will fall every year, so public services are protected while bringing in the skills our businesses and NHS needs.
- Stop the boats by removing illegal migrants to Rwanda.
- Work with other countries to rewrite asylum treaties to make them fit for the challenges we face. To strengthen our communities
- Increase NHS spending above inflation every year, recruiting 92,000 more nurses and 28,000 more doctors, driving up productivity in the NHS and moving care closer to people’s homes through Pharmacy First, new and modernised GP surgeries and more Community Diagnostic Centres.
- Protect female-only spaces and competitiveness in sport by making clear that sex means biological sex in the Equality Act.
- Deliver 1.6 million well-designed homes in the right places while protecting our countryside, permanently abolish Stamp Duty for homes up to £425,000 for first time buyers and introduce a new Help to Buy scheme.
- Recruit 8,000 more full-time, fully warranted police officers to ensure a new police officer for every neighbourhood.
- Cut anti-social behaviour in town centres by rolling out Hotspot Policing, expanding community payback and legislating to evict social tenants who repeatedly disrupt their neighbours.
- Invest £36 billion in local roads, rail and buses to drive regional growth, including £8.3 billion to fill potholes and resurface roads, funded by cancelling the second phase of HS2.
- Back drivers by stopping road pricing, reversing the London Mayor’s ULEZ expansion and applying local referendums to new 20mph zones and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.
- Champion our rural communities by backing farmers with a legal target and additional investment for food security, and protecting our best agricultural land from solar farms.
- Continue to directly invest in communities across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, protect the UK’s internal market and the integrity of our United Kingdom.”
Do you notice anything about them? Yes – they’re all measurable, and that measurability leads to accountability – if they don’t deliver on these targets they can be removed and dismissed. Now find me a religion or a cleric who commits to that kind of specificity and accountability rather than pronounce that god doesn't want you to eat shellfish or go to bed with your boyfriend and we can have a conversation.
Most of your long list is fluff abut strategy that isn't measurable.
The only measurable bits for Labour possibly are:
"Cap on corporation tax at 25%"
Possibly "create 650,000 jobs in the industries of the future" but not sure what they mean by "industries of the future".
"Build 1.5 million homes" - but it doesn't say if they are affordable and fit for purpose
The Conservatives might have some more precise language but it's still meaningless without ethics.
E.g. if you reduce income tax to put more money in people's pockets and it leads to higher prices or lack of funds to spend on public services then it becomes an ethical issue of how much government involvement should there be in redistribution of wealth and access to public services.
How do you decide which families are eligible for 30 hours free childcare per week
Sitting behind politics’ engagement with the real world is often an ideology of some sort for sure, but the point here is that for the religious the ideology is all there is. There’s nothing to measure that would lead to accountability – that in part at least is why they often last so long.
Not surprisingly religion will last as long as politics because objective measurability is not the most important criteria for human interaction. A lot of the decisions in both religion and politics are fundamentally about ethics and fairness and based on subjective criteria and abstract ideas about collective vs individual, freedom vs restrictions, rights vs responsibilities, duty vs personal fulfilment.
The accountability in religion and politics is derived from votes for a political party leading to power and influence over people or the continued practice of a particular interpretation or school of thought of a religion leading to power and influence over people.
If you can’t see a difference between the two or don’t think the difference is important then we’ll continue to disagree, but difference there is nonetheless and it’s an important one too in my view.
What is the important difference between politics and religion? Just because you insert some ancient stories to illustrate ideas about morality or insert a god, how does that alter human nature or the desire to influence based on abstract ideas individuals have about good and bad. Belief that what you are doing is good or right or that the ends justify the mean is still just your own personal belief based on your own interpretation of good or bad based on your human nature - even when you insert an extra layer of "this is what I believe god thinks is good or bad".
Sure there are some differences e.g. there is a mechanism in politics to vote people in and out of power. With religion, influencers, lobbyists etc there is no such formal mechanism.
