There’s been a lot of speculation, before and following the fall of Boris Johnson, that there could be a snap General Election this year – initially that Johnson himself might call one as a final desperate throw of the dice; later that whoever is new Tory leader would see the economic prospects as increasingly dire and go for a personal mandate to give themselves five years to try to ride out the coming Winter of Discontent.
Both Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have now ruled out an early election. But they’ve promised a lot of other things they cannot deliver too.
So it would be wise to be thinking about what we want to see in a Liberal Democrat manifesto.
A snap election would be dominated by the cost of living crisis, so I’ve given some thought to how we might address some of the “freedom from poverty, ignorance and conformity” with particular emphasis on the “freedom from poverty”, and looked a little to Maslow’s famous pyramid of needs.
Everyone will come up with their own answers. These are the answers that I thought of.
1st Food and Water:
No one should starve in this country.
We will introduce a national basic income so everyone will have some means to feed themselves. We will include extra allowances based on need for medical equipment.
We will protect and value our farming and fishing industries, and rebuild our relationship with the EU, our closest and largest market for buying and selling food, to lower barriers and bring down food prices.
We will invest in development of new vertical farming and hydroponics, for a food production and security and to reduce the pressure on intensive farming methods.
Britain is a famously rainy island but embarrassingly short of water.
We will address water-resilience through addressing the issue of losses through leakage, new reserve reservoirs, and de-salination plants.
We will end the discharge of sewage into our rivers and beaches.
2nd Warmth and Light:
We will build onshore and offshore wind turbines and tidal lagoons to provide sustainable low-cost electricity for all. We will make energy the new UK cash crop.
With our mix of wind and tide power, Britain should have more than enough renewable energy supply to provide for the needs of the UK and more.
We will invest in and build new forms of power storage, including pumped water (like Dinorwic) compressed-air under-sea storage, molten salt/sand technologies, and battery storage to create a new National Grid for the 21st century, so that British companies can become the dominant players in what is obviously going to be one of the biggest markets in the world.
3rd Shelter:
Yesterday, members of the Party’s delegation to next month’s ALDE Party Congress in Warsaw, Poland, met to discuss the draft resolutions as submitted from liberal parties across the European Union and beyond.
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