Author Archives: George Potter

Yesterday, George Potter blogged about the need for the Liberal Democrats to have a radical manifesto for the 2015 General Election. Today he sets out his suggested themes:

I suggest that we limit our 2015 manifesto to two main themes. The first should be the proper implementation of community politics – and we need to emphasise what this means. Community politics is not just a strategy for winning elections; it is a philosophy for empowering communities and giving people control over their lives. It is about giving people freedom from dependence on the council, and the government and the rest. And it doesn’t just apply to geographical communities, it applies to other communities as well, such as workplaces. We need to develop the ideas of community politics and emphasise how they can be implemented. This policy, as it happens, isn’t too hard to develop. There is a wealth of thought and writing about community politics in the party’s collective memory so we need merely look around us for ways in which community politics can be translated into a manifesto.

The second theme, however, should be something far more radical.

In 2015, as we approach the general election, it will be exactly 70 years since the 1945 general election. When we draw up our 2015 manifesto, we need to remember the lessons of 1945.

That election saw the Labour party, after several years in a coalition government for reasons of the national interest, cast aside the memories of the wartime government to win a landslide majority based on a radical, optimistic manifesto that laid out a glowing vision of the future. Say what you like about the Labour party of old, at least they could not be accused of lack of …