Act Now
Act Now: A Vision for a Better Future and New Social Contract is a report published by Manchester University Press (£9.99) in July ahead of the 2024 General Election. It is directly aimed at encouraging parties to support a programme for government that tackles material inequality to end our era of crisis. We have become accustomed to conditions that once would have felt life-threatening. Millions of people in work are unable to afford to heat their homes or pay their mortgages while waits for urgent hospital treatment are now often measured in years. Former Chancellor George Osborne was fond of saying that austerity was needed to fix the roof while the sun was shining. Instead, we are left with a national house that is close to being condemned. But it doesn’t have to be like this. In the 1940s, with the country facing the devastation of World War II, Lord Beveridge proposed changes to public services that would transform the country for the better. Now facing our own 21st Century crisis, we propose commonsense solutions to key problems in British life. From health and social care to transport and education, we show how we can make public services much better and the economy much more productive without breaking the bank.
The authors come from different walks of life and have different political perspectives, but the policies presented here are based on evidence and can, and should, be adopted by parties across the spectrum. The findings of the report are just as compelling as those of the Beveridge Report 80 years ago: we can solve our structural crises through evidence-based policies that are highly popular and that can create a better, wealthier future quickly.
In our survey of Red Wall residents, we found an average level of support for the whole programme of 70.8%, with 61.7% among Conservative and 82.8% among Labour 2019 voters. Nationally, approval was 73.9%, with 51.3% among those intending to vote Conservative, 78.5% among those intending to vote Labour and 68.3% among those who don’t know who they will vote for or who don’t intend to vote at present. There is no appetite to do nothing!
Policy proposals in each area
We have a feasible, affordable and demonstrably popular plan to rebuild Britain as successfully as the Beveridge-inspired reforms of 1945:
- Basic income is the key distributive means of securing society that makes the rest of a new social contract possible, including by reducing pressure on health care and disruption caused by transition to net zero
- A properly funded Green New Deal and nationalization of energy and water are essential to producing national wealth and independence and mitigating the risk of human extinction
- Health and Social Care can only be cost-effective when nationally owned and operated
- Early years and educational investments are critical to reducing pressure on our criminal justice system and increasing productivity as we transition to a new economy
- We can build our way out of the housing crisis and gradually remove the state-led transfer of wealth to private landlords and speculators in the process
- Our infrastructure can be transformed through targeted, regional control of transport
- Democratic reform to control lobbying and corruption is in the interests of progressive parties
- We can fund an expansive programme through wealth, carbon and corporation taxes, massively increasing our tax base and yield (£544.6bn) and productivity sufficiently to create a Britain that leads the world in quality of life, equality and security within 10 years
To read more, click the following to go to specific pages: