‘Presumption: an inference as to the existence of a fact not certainly known that the law requires to be drawn from the known or proven existence of some other fact.’
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Thunderstorms greeted England as the United Kingdom rolled into its 2024 voting season last Thursday — their political equivalent had already reached Scotland a few days earlier, in the resignation of first minister Humza Yousaf.
As if to respond to the meteorological challenge, the electorate delivered a withering verdict on Sunak’s lacklustre Conservative Government, whilst its display of tactical voting provided a chequered benefit to the array of opposition parties.
The time has come for a re-set of how we do politics, and where better to start than in the United Kingdom, where democracy first took hold in the Magna Carta of 1215?
Here are three presumptions in favour of re-thinking politics, none of which are reflected in the current array of political options — and perhaps that's why, of the 474 councillors lost by the Conservatives, the beneficiaries were such a mixed bag. The Labour Party accounted for less than 40% of these (the same as the total for independents, the Green Party and the Reform Party), while the Liberal Democrats picked up 22%.
These three presumptions are:
- People want individual freedom — they don't want excess intermediation whether political, in the provision of monopoly services, or from bureaucracy generally.
- There should be a constitutional bias towards providing economic opportunity for all to fulfil their potential, and to feel a sense of participation in how the world is run.
- We need to build a global respect for others — the time is swiftly passing for national boundaries taking precedence on issues of global significance, such as the environment, the polarisation of wealth and the resolution of international tension and conflict.
The yearning for individual freedom was first recognised by Thomas Jefferson in the late 18th Century; the United States has worked hard to deliver it, including the liberty and pursuit of happiness for all for which he called — but they have failed to understand his ‘self-evident truth’ that all are created equal.
So along came Karl Marx in the 19th Century, and he sought to impose that equality; but, in doing so, he lost sight of the individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness by imposing the deadweight of socialist intermediation. While the communism it spawned has been discredited, it still lives on in social democracy and the provision of universal welfare systems; only now are we beginning to realise in the United Kingdom that these systems are thoroughly unsustainable, as NHS waiting lists reach record levels at the same time as the cost of health and social care takes such a massive and growing proportion of public finances.
So, in the United Kingdom, political parties should take a major step away from excess intermediation — and the Labour Party, in particular, should renounce socialism as one of its core ideologies and embrace individual freedom.
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The need for a constitutional basis for individual ‘levelling up’ lies at the heart of our mission to introduce a more egalitarian form of capitalism. For all their rhetoric about ‘levelling-up’, the Conservative party doesn't understand that it's not about the geographical distribution of infrastructure, regional development and new housing: it's about enabling individual people, and particularly young people, to have the resources, opportunities and life skills to achieve their potential in adult life.
We have written so much about this in these commentaries over the past seven years that there really should be no need to repeat it once more. I therefore encourage you to visit the Share Alliance and Share Foundation websites where you’ll find the arguments set out in abundance — and, increasingly, the evidence to show that it works.
All political parties should study these carefully and embrace a recognition that individual opportunity and choices should be accessible to all. It's not a matter of taking away from those who have them: it's a matter of giving them to those who have not, so that we can break the cycle of deprivation once and for all. The Conservative Party, in particular, should stop paying lip service to levelling-up, and should embrace inter-generational rebalancing.
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The third presumption for re-thinking politics is a steady transition towards a global respect for others from all backgrounds, however different they may be. Again, it's more apparent in the United States, perhaps reflecting The New Colossus on the Statue of Liberty, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’; but it's not universally acknowledged even in the U.S., as is evident with Donald Trump and his supporters.
There is a growing realisation that our increasingly integrated world is not aligned with the ideology of separate nations which has framed history over the past millennium. This was recognised after the Second World War in the formation of the United Nations, but there has been very little further transition towards global governance over the past seventy years.
President Biden was right last week when he drew attention to the xenophobic attributes of Japan, India, China and Russia in putting up barriers to migration. We can't wind the clock backwards in terms of international trade, communication and movement: it is a reality, and only international tension can result from maintaining primacy for national rather than global governance.
At the local level, this means that it’s more important to offer democratic elections for our representative at the United Nations than, for example, local police commissioners. I would suggest that the turnout for the former would far exceed the dismal turnout that we experienced last week for the latter.
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These three presumptions for re-thinking politics should be reflected in some, if not all, UK political parties, but you would be hard-placed to recognise them in any. However there are still a few months remaining before a General Election is announced, and therefore adequate time for the parties to re-align their manifestos. Let's hope they pay some attention to our call to recognise some of these self-evident truths, as Thomas Jefferson put it over two hundred years ago.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio