Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics
Описание книги
By The Times columnist and acclaimed author of When They Go Low, We Go High. Start Again is a life-raft for all those who find themselves politically adrift and a rallying cry for a better kind of politics – As heard on the Today programmeBritain is today divided old against young, class against class, region against region, nativist against cosmopolitan, rich against poor and London against the rest. Our country is divided by generation, by education, by place and by attitude. Politics needs to be turned off and started again.In this time of tumult, when Britain is wrestling with the question of what sort of nation it wishes to be, its politics is stuck.Power is hoarded by a distant and unresponsive centre and our two largest political parties have both been captured by those on their outer edges.Too many of us have been left politically homeless.In Start Again, Philip Collins, Times journalist and until recently a lifelong Labour voter, offers a road map to a different political destination.Drawing on lessons from history Collins proposes new answers to today’s most urgent questions: questions of education, work, health, housing, security, nationhood, and of how we can achieve a better future.Hopeful, indignant and inspirational, this is a book for anyone who feels that politics no longer speaks to them.
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Philip Collins. Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics
Contents
Prologue. The Political Virtues. A Political Home
Three Life Stories
The Story of Modernisation
1. The Broken Promise. The Fall of the Meritocracy
Ten Condition of Britain Questions
1 How Does Britain Make a Living?
2 How Do We Reduce Inequalities of Income and Wealth?
3 How Do We Provide a Home for All?
4 How Do We Make Technology Work for Us?
5 How Can We Improve Life Chances?
6 How Do We Ensure Justice between the Generations?
7 How Do We Restore Faith in Politics?
8 Where Should Power Lie?
9 How Do We Create an Open Society?
10 What Is Britain’s Place in the World?
The Poverty of Philosophy
2. The Common Wealth. The Fiscal Philosophers
Taxing Questions and Home Truths
Utopia, Limited
The Open Economy
I, Robot
Common Wealth Capitalism
3. The Liberal Democracy. The Silent Ballot
In Defence of Politics
Sovereign Power
The Lowest Level
Who Votes?
How Should They Vote?
The Caucus Race
Security and Freedom
4. Power Failure. An English Sentence
Give Me the Child of Three
Capable Citizens
Take Back Control
The Long-Term Condition of the NHS
Contribution
Public Service Ethos
5. The Open Society. A Book of Common Prayer
Forging the Nation
The Citizenship Test
The Great British Public
Defender of Faiths
Magic and Daylight
Britain in the World
A Common Wealth of the Mind
Epilogue. Start Again. Back to Limehouse
In Defence of the Common Wealth
Acknowledgements
Also by Philip Collins
About the Author
About the Publisher
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Title Page
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These five chapters seek to define and then answer the questions that will determine the next phase of Britain’s course as a nation. It sketches a new common wealth for Britain. Throughout the book there runs an assumption that the nation needs a jolt, an electric surge to galvanise its politics. It is drifting into a position that shuts it away from the world. Unsure of its place and its status, an old country is in danger of fading from view. Neither of the two main political parties has any inkling of how to stop this slow dissolve. The Conservative party has fallen into Peel’s chasm between open trade and a closed nation. The Labour party has retreated into its nostrum that all the deficiencies of public services can be met by spending the money it has no idea how it can raise.
Above and beyond the two dominant parties, a large tract of political ground lies unoccupied. A band of political orphans has been created. These are the people to whom and for whom this book purports to speak. Half the electorate say that no party speaks for them and that they would consider switching their vote if there were a credible third option available. More than that say no party speaks for them. These political orphans come from all strata of society and all age groups. They lean both to the right and to the left, though none too far. Their sense of lacking a home is itself an indictment of the recent conduct of British politics. The archaic and undignified British constitution is cracking. Power is hoarded by a distant and unresponsive centre and local outposts, despite the few recent innovations of mayoralties, remain vestigial and weak. This is a political dispensation in which neither of the two advertised virtues arrives as stated. Neither agency nor benefits are in evidence. It is surely time for us to start again.
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