The Lanchester Manifesto; Signatories Welcome

If you would like to sign this, then please contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com by 5pm on Saturday, 10th October:

1. We reaffirm the Lanchester Declaration. The currency-issuing power of the State is such that the entire benefits system should be replaced with a Universal Basic Income no lower than anyone already received in benefits, undergirding the Jobs Guarantee, and paid through the Treasury, thereby making possible the abolition of the Department for Work and Pensions. It is time to implement Theresa May’s original Prime Ministerial agenda of workers’ and consumers’ representation in corporate governance, shareholders’ control over executive pay, restrictions on pay differentials within companies, an investment-based Industrial Strategy and infrastructure programme including greatly increased housebuilding, action against tax avoidance including a ban on public contracts for tax-avoiding companies, a cap on energy prices, a ban or significant restrictions on foreign takeovers, a ban on unpaid internships, and an inquiry into Orgreave.
2. We need a minimum of 100,000 new homes every year for at least 10 years, including council homes with an end to the Right to Buy, with the capital receipts from council house sales released in order to build more council housing, and with councils empowered to borrow to that end. We need a minimum of 50 per cent of any new development to be dedicated to affordable housing, with affordability defined as 50 per cent of average rents. We need rent controls, action against the buying up of property by foreign investors in order to leave it empty, repeal of the Vagrancy Act, and the outlawing of practices such as “poor doors”.
3. Including high speed rail, but not restricted to it, the renationalised rail service should be the backbone of a rebuilt network of public transport, free at the point of use, and extending to every village. Returned to public ownership, there should be a National Grid for water, with water and energy free at the point of use, within an all-of-the-above energy policy based around civil nuclear power and around this country’s vast reserves of coal and lithium. The State should ensure both the manufacture in this country of the vehicles that could be run on that domestically produced electricity, and the universal availability of charging points. Legislation should annul all convictions and other adverse court decisions arising out of the three Miners’ Strikes since 1970, as well as Clay Cross, Shrewsbury, and Wapping, while also securing justice for the victims of the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme scandal.
4. Enactment of the NHS Reinstatement Bill should be accompanied by the abolition throughout the United Kingdom of prescription charges, of eye and dental charges, and of hospital car parking charges, as well as by the creation of the National Care Service. The Fifth of July, the anniversary of the creation of the National Health Service, should be the United Kingdom’s National Day, with Saint George’s Day, Saint Andrew’s Day, Saint David’s Day and Saint Patrick’s Day also public holidays throughout the United Kingdom. Apprentices and trainees should enjoy the same benefits as their peers in further and higher education, and vice versa. Higher education should be fully funded all the way to doctoral level, with lifelong access. The training and other standards for the private sector to match should be set by national and municipal public ownership. Parents are the first educators of their children. The Relationship and Sex Education curriculum should conform to the Science curriculum. Independent schools provide views such as ours with a platform denied by state schools. 
5. We should require the approval of the House of Commons for changes to interest rates, introduce a Glass-Steagall division between investment banking and retail banking, extend the Freedom of Information Act to the City of London, and conform its municipal franchise to that of local government in general. All tax havens under British jurisdiction should be closed, non-domiciled tax status should be abolished, the Big Four accounting firms should be broken up, auditors should be banned by Statute from selling extras, and they should have unlimited liability. Crown immunity should be abolished. Limited Partnerships and Limited Liability Partnerships should be required to have at least one member who was a natural person resident in the United Kingdom. The State should buy a stake in every FTSE 500 company, large enough to secure Board-level representation, for the exercise of which both the First Lord of the Treasury and the Chancellor of the Exchequer would be accountable to the House of Commons. After any investment in public services, the dividends would be distributed equally to everyone by the Treasury. Public bodies and public contractors should be required to buy British wherever possible, and to buy local wherever possible. Employment rights should begin with employment, and apply regardless of the number of hours worked. There should be a four-day working week by 2100. Our people should be active in the trade unions appropriate to their jobs where applicable, or otherwise in Unite Community. The unions are crucial to the necessary mutualisation of the gig economy. Every part of this country should be on the Belt and Road, and we should encourage the building of one or more Bering Strait crossings, as part of a wider and deeper realignment with the BRICS and other emerging economies on the understanding that “development is the new word for peace”. The principles of the Antarctic Treaty should be extended to Outer Space. 
6. We should end this country’s poisonous relationship with the Gulf monarchies. Instead of NATO, we need bilateral nonaggression treaties with all other European countries including Russia, with the United States, and with Canada. We need nonaggression treaties with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and with the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, and preferably with each of their members bilaterally. There should be no foreign military bases on British soil, but justice for Harry Dunn, and self-determination for the Chagossian people. We stand with Julian Assange. Instead of Trident, an extra £70 billion should be given to each of the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Air Force. Military force should be used only ever in self-defence and with the approval of the House of Commons. BAE Systems should be renationalised as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, with a ban on all sale of arms abroad, and with a comprehensive programme of diversification.
7. There should be a Coroner’s Inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly, a Coroner’s Inquest into the Manchester Arena attack, a Coroner’s Inquest into the death of Dawn Sturgess, an action to challenge the legality of the bombing of Syria after the confirmation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that no nerve agent had been used at Douma, an action before the International Criminal Court against those who had brought slavery back to Libya, and an action before the High Court of Justiciary of Scotland inviting it to exercise its declaratory power against those who had waged war on Iraq in 2003. The present British funding of the White Helmets and of the “Free Syrian Police” should be diverted to our own emergency services. The Integrity Initiative, the Institute for Statecraft, and the 77th Brigade, should all be disbanded. The Statute Law should specify that aid to any given country be reduced by the exact cost of any space programme, or of any nuclear weapons programme, or of any nuclear submarine programme, or of any foreign aid budget of that country’s own, with the money thus saved remaining within the International Development budget, and with the 0.7 per cent target intact, but with a ban on the funding of offences against the sanctity of life.
8. Parliament should legislate that the withdrawal of nutrition and hydration was intentional killing. Funds should be diverted to palliative care, to the hospice movement, and to research on adult and cord blood stem cells. We need to ban Fixed Odds Betting Terminals, empower local authorities to limit the number of gambling venues, insist on the use of that power, end gambling on television, end the advertising of gambling other than at venues such as casinos and betting shops, and ban gambling with credit cards. There should be no further deregulation of Sunday trading. We need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought should be taught in schools. 
9. Families need fathers. All aspects of public policy should take account of the urgent social and cultural need for highly paid, highly skilled, high status employment as the economic basis of paternal authority, and thus of the paternal responsibility. We need a legal presumption of equal parenting, the restoration of the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit were being paid to mothers, the restoration of the requirement that providers of fertility treatment take account of the child’s need for a father, the repeal of the ludicrous provision for two persons of the same sex to be listed as a child’s parents on a birth certificate, paternity leave available up to a set maximum at any time until the child was 18 or left school, and a foreign policy that did not entail tearing fathers away from their children in wars. We need to give any marrying couple the right to register their marriage as bound by the divorce law that obtained prior to 1969, give any religious organisation the right to specify that any marriage that it conducted would be so bound, give existing married couples the right to re-register their marriages as being so bound, and remove the restriction of civil partnerships to unrelated couples. The whole concept of gender self-identification should be banished. 
10. We need to make it a criminal offence for anyone aged 21 or over to buy or sell sex, with equal sentencing on both sides. The Universal Basic Income, the Jobs Guarantee, and the dividends from the public stakes in the FTSE 500 companies, would remove any conceivable excuse for prostituting oneself. We need a criminal offence of sexual activity with any person under the age of 18 who was more than two years younger than oneself, with a maximum sentence equal to twice the difference in age, abolition of different rules for “positions of trust”, and a ban on abortion or contraception for those under 18 at least without parental knowledge and consent. We need the replacement of the existing categories of sexual assault with aggravating circumstances to the general categories of offences against the person, such that the sentences could be doubled. There should be no anonymity either for adult defendants or for adult complainants. We need to rule out the legal possibility of being a specifically sexual assailant below the age of consent, and specify that intoxication was a bar to sexual consent only insofar as it would have been a bar to driving. We need to end the blocking of progress into paid or voluntary work even though one had been acquitted. C5 notices should be outlawed. 
11. We need to reverse the erosion of trial by jury and of the right to silence, reverse the existing reversals of the burden of proof, abolish conviction by majority verdict, extend throughout the United Kingdom the Scots Law requirement for corroborating evidence, require that the prosecution present its case within 12 weeks of charge, and require judges to instruct juries to convict only and specifically beyond reasonable doubt. The Universal Basic Income, the Jobs Guarantee, and the dividends from the public stakes in the FTSE 500 companies, would give everyone the “stake in society” to be a juror. We need to abolish the Crown Prosecution Service, restore the pre-1968 committal powers of the magistracy, abolish the admission of anonymous evidence other than from undercover Police Officers, exclude the possibility of conviction on anonymous evidence alone, restore the protection against double jeopardy, and end the secrecy of the family courts, the right to cross-examine in which ought not to be removed by mere accusation. There should be nothing like identity cards or control orders, including to vote, where photo identification requirements would heavily favour our opponents over our people. We need the abolition of Police confiscation of assets without a conviction, and of stipendiary magistrates sitting alone. We need to repeal the Civil Contingencies Act, the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act, the Official Secrets Acts, one-sided extradition arrangements, and the provision for “no win, no fee” litigation. We need to restore and extend Legal Aid, and return to preventative policing based on foot patrols, with Police Forces at least no larger than at present, and with police stations at the heart of their communities. MI5 should be disbanded in favour of highly specialised Police Officers. There should be “investment in youth services, mental health and social care, education, jobs and housing: key services to support the most vulnerable before they come into contact with the criminal justice system.” 
12. We should transfer each Royal Prerogative to seven, eight or nine of nine Co-Presidents, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the top nine elected; in practice, at least one of those would protect traditional values, unlike any institution in living memory. Candidates for the House of Commons should have to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland, but there should be no nationality requirement for voting, thereby giving Americans and Israelis equality with Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, while strengthening Christian witness. If the number of Commons constituencies were to be reduced to 600, then the whole country should elect an additional 50 MPs, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the top 50 elected. Two sets of 50 Senators should be elected from among self-nominees, with each of us voting for one candidate, and with the top 50 elected at the end. In one case, electors and candidates would have to be British citizens resident in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens resident in Great Britain or Northern Ireland. There would be a minimum age of 21 to vote, and of 30 to stand. In the other case, electors would have to be resident in the United Kingdom, but there would be no nationality requirement. It is already possible to stand for Parliament from anywhere in the world, so there would be neither a nationality requirement nor a residency requirement to be a candidate. There would be a minimum age of 16 to vote, but, recalling posthumous sons who inherited peerages at birth, there would be no minimum age to stand. In either case, there would be no deposit, and any casual vacancy would be filled by the next highest scoring candidate who was willing and able. In each Commons constituency, there should be precisely one candidate, of any party or none, who subscribed to the Lanchester Declaration and to this Lanchester Manifesto.

A New Weekly Magazine, by David Lindsay

I am setting up a weekly magazine of news and comment. It has a name, but I am not publishing that on here, as, since he is nothing if not time rich, Oliver Kamm would have a field day. 

With only the same online presence as Private Eye, which seems to do all right commercially, it will feature, on its odd-numbered pages, a weekly column by each of around 20 regular contributors, plus around five guest articles, giving a voice to the old Red Wall areas. Those areas tend to have relatively low levels of Internet use, meaning that this magazine ought to sell well here. Among others, we have already secured what would be the only Haredi columnist in the national media.

Kamm has had me kicked of Twitter, as is apparently within his power, so I am having to come on here to ask for 14 of those weekly columnists to be Nigel Farage, George Galloway, and a supporter of each of theirs from each of the Red Wall areas of of North Wales, the West Midlands, the East Midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber, the North East, and the North West. 

In principle, we already have someone from the pro-Galloway camp in all but one of those areas, although we do not yet have the man himself, and several of the others will not quite say yes until he does. We know who we want from the pro-Farage camp in the West Midlands, but beyond that we are entirely open to offers. Please contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. 

The even-numbered pages will feature popular news stories relating to sport, television, music, and so on, plus advertising. Public relations stuff, if you like, but that would get the readers, especially if we made offers of exclusivity to the biggest clubs, programmes, acts, and so forth. Details are available to Mr Farage and to Mr Galloway. For the right to publish whatever they liked within the law, the word limit, and the English language, and provided that it were exclusive content, then we expect to charge a fixed sum per page per annum; again, details of that sum are available to Mr Farage and to Mr Galloway. 

We expect each regular columnist to be paid a fixed sum per annum, and each guest columnist to be paid a fixed fee per time. Newsprint is far cheaper than it used to be, so 15,000 copies could be produced for well under £2000, and probably for less than £1500. Obviously, we would wish to aim a lot higher than that. But that does give a guide to the figures. We expect a retail price of one pound. As the magazine became commercially successful, then the pay would increase accordingly. 

A think tank that I am to direct is to own half of this project, although of course it will be editorially independent. An additional investor is therefore sought. Again, please contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.

George Galloway Should Stand For Durham County Council

This has been sent to various local and national newspapers:

Dear Sir, 

Roger Liddle is an active member both of the House of Lords and of Cumbria County Council, so George Galloway could certainly be an active member both of Durham County Council and of the Scottish Parliament. In 2017, it took 749 votes to win a Chester-le-Street West Central seat on that Council, and 854 for the Leader of the Council to top the poll. Turnout was 1,870. Galloway would get that just by being on the ballot paper.

The defeat of that Leader would be heard from the souks to the favelas, from the Dalit colonies to the Rohingya camps, and from Kashmir, to Crimea, to the scattered outposts of Diego Garcia. Armed with an impeccably local running mate in order to stop the target from slipping through, Galloway is just the man to do this. We would need only to get him registered to vote in County Durham, and preferably in Chester-le-Street, in time to be a candidate on 6th May 2021.

Eric Joyce once described Galloway as having stepped beyond what was “reasonable and acceptable for Labour MPs”. Any Labour electoral opponent of Galloway’s, including the present Leader of Durham County Council, has therefore been endorsed by Joyce.

Yours faithfully,

David Lindsay, Lanchester, County Durham

Lee Walls, Chester-le-Street, County Durham

Nathan Allonby, Consett, County Durham

Norman Bolton, Consett, County Durham

Michael Parker, Crook, County Durham

Please contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.

The Lanchester Declaration

1. The Budget of March 2020 has ended the era that had begun with the Budget of December 1976. The Prime Minister’s two closest advisers are Dominic Cummings and Munira Mirza, while Claire Fox has been raised to the peerage. If they can make it, then so can we. “A strict rule is not only necessary for ruling; it is also necessary for rebelling,” since, “a fixed and familiar ideal is necessary to any sort of revolution.” God has revealed all that the Holy Roman Church professes Him to have revealed. Each and every individual human life is absolutely sacred from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death. That principle is the foundation of all morality. We struggle against evils that include direct abortion, indirect abortion at least except where any other course of action would result in the loss of both lives, euthanasia, assisted suicide, destructive experimentation on embryonic human beings, human cloning, human-animal hybridity, “saviour siblings”, capital punishment, and unjust war, if any war be just, but certainly including total war, preemptive war, the international trade in arms, and the manufacture, possession or use of nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological weapons. Their victims are disproportionately working-class people and people of colour. Therefore, we struggle against evils that include poverty, racism, sexual promiscuity, pornography, eugenics, marginalisation of people with disabilities, lack of due respect for old age, refusal to celebrate the infinite beauty of every human being as the image and likeness of God, refusal to respect the dignity of parents as the first educators of their children, classification of human beings solely or primarily as economic units, and policies likely to give rise to armed conflict. Their victims are disproportionately working-class people and people of colour.
2. Since there cannot be a politically chosen “free” market in general, but not in drugs or prostitution, so there must not be a “free” market in general. In order to uphold the sanctity of life, it is necessary to secure economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty. In the struggle for economic equality, the leading role belongs to the working class, which has always been at least two fifths Tory. In the struggle for international peace, the leading role belongs to the working class and the youth. Unity must therefore be maintained within and between the working class and the youth, including against any separatist tendency in England, Scotland or Wales. We are not “For the Many, Not the Few”. We are “For Everyone”. We reject class conflict in favour of “a platform broad enough for all to stand upon”. Ours is a broad social movement towards institutional hegemony, a celebration of the national-popular, and an organic and self-organising working-class culture that includes worker-intellectuals, free of “the enormous condescension of posterity”. The working class and the youth could not fulfil their leading role if they were in a state of stupefaction.
3. Social solidarity is an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility is protected by social solidarity, international solidarity is an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty is protected by international solidarity. Equality and diversity must include economic equality and class diversity, regional equality and regional diversity, the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law with the presumption of innocence, requiring that conviction be beyond reasonable doubt. We have never not been “cancelled”, and we need no lectures on “cancel culture” from those who have always silenced us but who now bellow that they themselves are being silenced.
4. Brexit is a double opportunity, both to reorganise the British economy under State direction, and to begin to develop a fully independent British foreign policy, including in relation to the United States, with no use of military force except in self-defence, if at all. With an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation, the leading role in building One Nation belongs to the people and places whose votes have decided the outcomes of the 2016 referendum, of the 2017 General Election, and of the 2019 General Election, namely the rural working class, and the industrial and former industrial communities that are either outside the metropolitan areas or peripheral to them. Since there cannot be the unrestricted movement of goods, services and capital but not of people, so there must not be the unrestricted movement of goods, services or capital.
5. The issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. A sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself. All wars are fought on this understanding, but the principle applies universally. The State also has the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases. That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to encourage certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and to discourage others. They are not where the State’s money comes from. Nothing is “unaffordable”, every recession is discretionary on the part of the Government, and there is no such thing as “taxpayers’ money”. Armed with this understanding, and shielded by a strict statutory division between investment banking and retail banking, large amounts of central government credit, at low interest rates and over a long term, must be used for public works. Those would then pay for themselves many times over, ably assisted by pro-business tariffs and subsidies, by a pro-business National Bank to promote the growth of productive enterprises rather than speculation, by collective bargaining and trade union representation, by cooperative and mutual ownership, and by reconceived models of public ownership. British elite interests, among others, subverted such an economic order in the American Republic. We do not speak for the declining British elite. We speak from and to the rising British people.
6. Any approach to climate change must protect and extend secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, encourage economic development around the world, uphold the right of the working class and of people of colour to have children, hold down and as far as practicable reduce the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and refuse to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich. We regret the defeat of the miners in 1985. The problem with the world is not that it has people in it. We celebrate the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. That expansion and development must now include space exploration, fuelled by, and fuelling, fusion power. Life is the geological force that shapes the Earth, and the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere, not least by the uniquely human phenomenon of economic growth, so that human mastery of nuclear processes is beginning to create resources through the transmutation of elements, enabling us, among other things, to explore space and to exploit the resources of the Solar System. God has given Man dominion over the beasts, thus over the land, and thus over everything on and under the land. God has given Man dominion over the fish, thus over the waters, and thus over everything in and under the waters. God has given Man dominion over the birds, thus over the sky, and thus over everything in the sky, as far up as the sky goes, and the sky goes up a very long way. That dominion is entrusted so that we might “be fruitful and multiply”. Entrusted as it is to the whole human race, its purpose is, “To increase the power of Man over Nature, and to abolish the power of Man over Man.”
7. If a scientific fact as basic and as obvious as biological sex can be denied, then so can any other scientific fact, to the ruin of human progress. It is contrary both to whole history of human experience, and to the plain facts of biological science, to suggest either that sexual orientation is fixed, or that “gender” is “fluid”. “Sex is a biological fact, and is immutable. There are two sexes, male and female. Men and boys are male. Women and girls are female. It is impossible to change sex. These were until very recently understood as basic facts of life by almost everyone.” No one is “born in the wrong body”. Women-only spaces must be defended, including in sport. The “gender reassignment” of children and adolescents must be resisted. We fight for a legal presumption of equal parenting, and for due process of law, including the presumption of innocence. We seek to rescue such issues as men’s health, fathers’ rights, and boys’ educational underachievement, from those whose policies have caused the problems in the first place. We resist the increasing criminalisation of male youth as such. And we harness the righteous rage against deindustrialisation, and against the harvesting of young men in endless and pointless wars, on the part of the young men who have discovered for themselves the traditional Great Books and the various schools of heterodox economics. Those Books and those schools have always been fundamental to the radical change of which those young men are now the vanguard, just as similarly formed young men were the vanguard of the American Revolution.
8. It is wrong to tell Israelis to “go home” when the State of Israel was founded in the year that the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury. The Oxford English Dictionary sufficiently defines anti-Semitism as “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews”. The IHRA Definition is a denial of BAME, migrant and refugee, and therefore working-class, experience redolent of the Windrush scandal and of the fire at Grenfell Tower. In curtailing criticism of a foreign state, the IHRA Definition is incompatible with national sovereignty. The denial of the ancient indigenous Christian presence in the Holy Land, where it created modern Palestinian identity, contributes significantly to the worldwide persecution of Christians. The Palestinian Christians’ ancestors predated the Israelite Conquest, they founded Jerusalem, and they became Christian when or before the Roman Empire did. One’s attitude to the Palestinian struggle is the litmus test of one’s attitude to the specific phenomenon of white violence against people of colour throughout the world, including in Britain.
9. Britain has links to every inhabited territory. It would be incompatible both with national sovereignty and with equal citizenship to privilege some foreign states over others. “What kind of internationalism says that we must give priority to an Indian over a Frenchman, an Australian over a German, a Malaysian over an Italian?” Global Britain must have “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none,” since, “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.” British elite interests, among others, subverted such an approach on the part of the American Republic. We do not speak for the declining British elite. We speak from and to the rising British people. Christian witness in Britain today depends on communities with roots in Africa and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and Latin America, Asia and the Pacific. The mixed-race population, and the BAME presence in every locality, give every family a stake in the liberation struggles of the Global South. The Red Wall belongs to the global network of internal colonies, and of potentially revolutionary villages that surround the cities both literally and geopolitically.
10. We seek direct representation on public bodies, in the media and in academia, alongside our own media and our own educational programmes. Of all parties and none, we encourage our people to seek election. If Dominic Cummings and the Revolutionary Communist Party can make it, then so can we.

David Lindsay, Lanchester, County Durham

Mark McNally, Consett, County Durham

Please contact davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.