New ideas for a renewed movement: the final 25

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

Earlier in the summer, LabourList hosted a series of proposals the next Labour manifesto under the banner New Ideas for a Renewed Movement.

Since then, we’ve received hundreds of suggestions, in comments on LabourList, by email, on Twitter and on Facebook. The breadth and importance of all those ideas are demonstrated in the graphic below.

We’re now ready to unveil the final 25. Next week, I’ll be asking LabourList readers to vote on their favourite of the 25, and I’ll try and take the top 5 to the party during conference, which is now only days away.

Before then, I wanted to give those readers who made the initial poilicy suggestions the chance to expand and argue their case for why their idea should go into the manifesto, though it wasn’t possible in every case to get in touch with the person who contributed the proposal initially. So over the next week, we’ll be rolling out each idea. They will not appear in any order of anyone’s preference, but in the order in which I was able to get hold of them from each contributor.

The final 25 policies, on which we’ll vote, were the most repeated suggestions in the initial proposal phase. They represent broad opinion and good solutions to some of the most important issues: health, education, welfare, housing, democracy, taxation and more. Who said Labour was bereft of ideas or vision?

The final 25 are:

A full wide ranging housing plan to include demolition and filling of derelict homes.

A national living wage.

A public share in the private profits of local green energy generation.

A fully elected House of Lords.

Lower the voting age to 16.

Create universal childcare.

A youth club in every ward.

Clamp down on tax evasion through tax havens.

Commit to building a national high-speed rail network.

Make advertising of Junk Food to children illegal.

Investment in off-site and outdoor education programmes for children.

The National Curriculum should include credit management and personal finance education.

Introduce post graduate student loans.

Free minimum standard of long term care for all older people.

Make hospital car parking free in England.

Nationalise the railways.

Increase the basic rate of income tax threshold to £10,000.

Remove charitable status for public schools.

Introduce free prescriptions on the NHS.

Create a national standards agency to regulate private housing standards.

Liberalise the Sunday trading law to allow weekday opening hours on Sundays.

Improve access to parenting classes and offer them free to those on low incomes.

Both parents should have the option of taking shared amounts of maternity and paternity leave.

Use public buildings, such as schools, for community and social events.

Link a commitment to curbing domestic flights by 2025 to further electrification of the railways.

These short descriptions are not perfect, and will be expanded upon and improved in the individual posts. Here, they are combinations of the language used in repeated initial suggestions.

Related posts:

1. Ideas, not smears: LabourList launches a summer of new ideas for a renewed movement
2. New ideas for a renewed movement
3. We have to be insurgents at conference, filled with energy and hungry for renewed change – here’s how
4. A renewed bid to oust Gordon Brown?
5. Three ideas that will change the country