ABOUT US

Blue: We are developing a new blueprint to advance the interests of the blue collar workers. Finally, blue is the colour of the last hat in our proposed decision-making process.

Revolution: Our aim as a political platform is to bring an end to the Party Political system.

Our Strapline and Core Aim

The Platform for Ending Party Politics

Why we want this peaceful and democratic Revolution.

Having a party political system means we have elected politicians who are conflicted between what is right for their party and that which is right for their constituents.
It is the constituents who vote for their representative by name, not by party. To us at a Blue Revolution, it is the voters who deserve full representative without the party confusing the situation.

There are examples of fully independent councils and they have great outcomes because the members vote on conscious and what they believe is best for their area with no confusion from the Political Party System.

Successive Prime Ministers and Opposition Leaders have discussed bringing an end to the confrontational style of politics, ‘Punch and Judy’ as David Cameron called it, at Prime Ministers Question Time.

How we plan to do this.
Edward Debono in his book ‘6 Thinking Hats’ implies that the current political system wastes a lot of energy arguing and debating. In effect, politicians are using their minds to win the argument rather than finding the best solution for the country. The six thinking hats method helps fix this through a predetermined process. A process where everybody involved in the decision-making focuses on finding the best solution through cooperation. It encourages all minds to focus on solutions rather than party political point scoring.

SIX HATS, 6 THINKING STYLES

Each of the Six Thinking Hats represents a different style of thinking. Here’s a quick outline.

1. White Hat
This is for putting up facts and figures neutrally and objectively. Look at the available information and also identify information gaps, so we can choose to fill them or just take account of them. This is where you provide background information, and analyse and extrapolate historical trends.

2. Red Hat

The red hat represents the emotional view. It recognizes and gives visibility to feelings, intuition and gut reaction as an important part of thinking. The red hat allows a thinker to switch in and out of his feeling mode, and also to invite others to share their feelings, in a non-judgemental way. By making emotions visible, we can observe their influence in the thinking process.

3. Black Hat

The black hat represents caution and what could go wrong. It points out what doesn’t fit, what may not work, what is wrong, and hence protects us from fatal flaws and wasted resources. The black hat recognizes the value of caution and risk assessment; it makes our plans more robust.

4. Yellow Hat

The yellow hat focuses on value, benefits and optimism. It is positive and constructive. It helps us to develop “value sensitivity” and invest time to seek out value.

5. Green Hat

The green hat is about creativity, new ideas and change. This is when we present alternative and new ideas, possibilities, and modify or improve suggested ideas. It is about recognizing the value of creative effort and allocating time for it.

6. Blue Hat

The blue hat is for process control, and for managing and organizing thinking. It has a strategic role in laying out the overall plan, and also for moment-to-moment instructions. It helps to organize the other hats, assess priorities, list constraints etc. Unlike the other hats, the blue hat is a permanent role. It is worn by the facilitator or chairperson of the meeting, though the leader may also assign the blue-hat role to others, or invite participants to wear the blue hat.

Source: – https://readingraphics.com/book-summary-six-thinking-hats/

With the ‘Six Thinking Hats’ style of working, we would no longer need party politics because everybody will be doing what is best for the country and their constituents and not conflicted by the party.

Should a constituent not agree the elected representative’s direction after the ‘Six Thinking Hats’ process, the thinking behind the decision can be shared with the individual to understand the decision and put forward an alternative idea if needed.

This will enable a new level of transparency that is not clouded by underlying party political allegiances and donor influences.

If like us you would like to see a new cleaner, more honest decision-making process within our democratic system please join our political platform and help this new future become a reality.

Introduction.

The world goes through revolutionary upheavals every two centuries or so and semi-revolutions every half century. The last one in the UK was in 1997 when Tony Blair acquired a mandate to secure the state’s total moral and social dominion over its people. In the U.S. Bill Clinton achieved the same thing. Their “third way” was based on the idea that the political elite knew better than the public what was good for them.

To avoid change being merely aspirational Tony Blair’s bourgeois socialist (1) elite knew that there would have to be some underpinning economic model that could pour funds into the British Treasury to finance the nation, generate moral renewal and deliver Blair’s New Jerusalem. Blair’s bourgeois socialists believed it would work because they did not really understand the long-term impact of the changes they were engineering. They were not economists.

The economic model that they developed was based on Government spending being used to boost economic growth and this it was believed would empower people to achieve their social and economic potential. In Abraham Maslow’s (2) terms people would ‘self-actualise’ or fulfil their personal ambition. The era of naïve economics and identity politics was born, to a fanfare of “things can only get better” by the band D:Ream.

The public were seduced by this model. Blair seemed like a nice guy and who could argue that in the UK public money had for decades been spent on health and welfare, and now it could achieve a multi-coloured kaleidoscopic Great Britain; a Britain shorn of reactionary forces like national pride, belief in the family, and personal responsibility. Who needs that stuff when the state is there to go beyond intervening from the cradle to the grave and can now usefully occupy itself spending public money so it can interfere with the public’s psychology too? These old ideas thought the bourgeois socialists would be consigned to the dustbin of history, just as bonded serfdom and illiteracy had been.

The only problem was that the economics did not stack up. So along with the Financial Crisis of 2007/8 the other consequences of this model has been growing wealth inequality plus the inability of the state to make good its 1997 social and welfare promises and a burden on the taxpayers of the present and future who pay to keep this system in existence.

This model is what we at Blue Revolution call the Secular Western hegemony or more simply “secular-westernism”. Secular-westernism will need a revolution to shift it. Not a violent revolution because violent revolutions are, like the revolutions in China and Russia, effectively a triumph of the state over the individual, albeit with an initially benign intention but in both cases a lot of killing.

A revolution will be needed because just like the aristocrats in the past, the modern big winners of the secular-western system, the politicians, bureaucrats, charity chiefs, and third sector organisations, the publicsectocracy as we call them, will not want to give up the power, status and wealth that goes with their elevated positions.

If you believe that today the hopeless attempt by western governments to extend democracy, promote welfare, international security and basic rights does not pass the sniff test, you may be right. So Please read on.

A Brief History of Time.

How have we got to where we are today?

If we go back in time and consider the fabled “hard working family” in the 17th century we would see it divided internally by sex and sociologically by class or status. A situation largely unchanged for thousands of years. This was the period when the feudal system was going through its death throes and capitalism was emerging as the new ideology on the block.

The old certainties so beloved of the rich and powerful were being challenged by an aggressive merchant class, the ‘bourgeoisie’ as Karl Marx (3) called them, who were not prepared to bow down to ‘God ordained authority” but who were increasingly of the opinion that they were as good as anyone else and indeed could prove this through their economic achievements. The capitalist system was being born. Its father the old feudal system, its mother Protestantism and the ranks of brave souls who had died to preserve it in the face of Catholicism’s stranglehold over economic growth and social progress in Europe.

Like the feudal system, Catholicism (a feudal system with a Pope) did not like people to act freely politically or economically. Authority must be top down and sanctioned by God not humanity. People who could see an opportunity for self-advancement were initially considered a threat to this ancient system but through sheer perseverance over the next century they held their nerve and by the middle of the eighteenth-century Britain was a prosperous, technologically advanced capitalist nation. All this due to economic freedom based on revolutionary principles of contract, choice and consent which overthrew feudalisms reliance on control, coercion and compulsion.

On the continent, old ways continued; their feudal and Papal patronage gave rise to poverty and numerous revolutions. As with Brexit, Britons saw the writing on the wall even then.

With a protestant, Britain powering out value from its factories and farms, wealth grew, and with expansion into new global markets the culture of Britain’s capitalist system became embedded in Britain’s empire. Tribalism went into a slow retreat as Britain’s Empire became a force for liberation turning tribe’s people into workers. Just as feudal serfs became workers under capitalism, so the tribes of Africa where they were urbanised became workers too. The birth of a global working class and bourgeoisie or middle class had started. It is still work in progress.

Now those on the traditional “left” will claim this was all immoral economic and cultural imperialism. However, we do not claim it was all good, but we need to be objective because our feudal or tribal family was riddled with inequalities and cultural abuse. Many horrors we still observe today were cultural norms until capitalism challenged the legitimacy of them. Those who claim some golden age of tribal or feudal culture are as naive as someone saying, “please sir I’d like to be treated like a fourteenth century serf”!

No person alive in the free world whose consciousness (4) has been shaped by contract, choice and consent would want to return to the tyranny of political life before capitalism. A world predating capitalism is still observed in parts of Africa the Middle and Far East where rights are contingent upon the erratic will of totalitarian ideology or a belief in the divine; the will of God. Twenty first century ‘right and wrong’ based as it is on contract, choice and consent bears little moral resemblance to a world based on Halal (good) or Haram (bad), Prescribed (good) or proscribed (bad). Liberated woman or Gay men, as well as animal welfare agencies will attest to that.

The idea of God was however important to early capitalism as it required the low cost associated with moral behaviour based on conscience, and not the costly control by fear based on religious compulsion backed by earthly retribution.

Some socialists will say capitalism was unfair to the working class, women and minorities. Those with deeper knowledge of left-wing politics might ask about “alienation” (5) and “exploitation” (6). To which we would say; yes, all of those were major flaws in capitalism, identified by numerous thinkers in the nineteenth century, many of whom promoted a return to the old religious and feudal ways or dreamt up socialist utopias to get away from capitalisms divisive energy, drive and economic anarchy. That energy, drive and anarchy was necessary because as we will see it has ultimately liberated us all.

The reason it has taken time to embed liberty is because capitalism’s mother might have been Protestant consciousness and contract, choice and consent but its father was the feudal system. So, like feudalism it had a patriarchal (7) structure and status-based hierarchy. It might have created modern principles of contract, choice and consent and thus conferred “rights” but if you were poor, or a woman you could not exercise all those rights at least not until much later in the twentieth century.

The history of the last two hundred years has therefore been about rights that existed in theory for most and for some wealthy heterosexual, middle and upper class men, in practice, being extended to other groups too. So before condemning capitalism outright consider that without capitalism’s core principles these “rights” (Contract, Choice and Consent, freedom and democracy) would not have existed at all, for anyone! So, whatever your identity, the rights and freedoms you enjoy you owe to capitalism.

More latterly rights have extended beyond economic rights and now include rights to free expression. The right to be who we feel we are, unconstrained by social norms associated with tribal society, feudalism or with protestant conscience-based principles of good and bad behaviour. These rights have been described as “identity politics” and rather than being seen as springing naturally from humanities growing belief in freedom for all based on capitalist principles of choice and consent, the link to capitalism has been obscured by prejudice about capitalism by people who don’t understand it. Identity politics could not have existed before capitalism, capitalism liberated people from feudalism and religious oppression. Something forgotten by the traditional socialist ‘left’.

In socialisms defence however to extend rights to as many as possible and certainly to extend rights beyond those which were necessary for capitalism to function (rights to contract for work for example) it was necessary after the Second World War for the government to step in. Capitalism had some of its father’s feudal DNA so when capitalisms privilege was working for the benefit of the rich and workers were disorganised, no one in power saw any need to change anything. But as the capitalists themselves began to excessively exploit working people change was eventually demanded by the workers and granted by politicians.

In 1945 a landslide Labour Government came to power and introduced a programme which had been influenced by left wing thinkers and academics like Karl Marx. These enlightened thinkers could see that whilst capitalism had liberated humanity from much of feudalism it had stopped short of liberating everyone economically and the reason was that the value or wealth created by workers within the capitalist system, the capitalists kept for themselves using some of it to pay for their privileged system. The government had the power to intervene and re-distribute the capitalist’s wealth more fairly and did so nationalising industries and creating the welfare state.

For an adult population many of whom were born during Queen Victoria’s reign or raised by people born during Victoria’s reign it must have felt revolutionary, offering freedoms and opportunities only capitalist money could have afforded previously, such as the working classes entering the “establishment” and complex health care, free at the point of use. It was also still possible to rely on Christian values that ensured ‘moral’ behaviour continued at every level of society.

Unfortunately, things started to go wrong in the 1950s. Where we are now (2019) is a legacy of things going wrong back then. Some of the things that went wrong are down to “the establishment” feeling threatened by the power of the workers entering the establishment and some of what went wrong is down to the workers themselves. The working classes who by, the 1950’s had fully absorbed the principles of capitalism were unable to recognise that they should challenge capitalisms inherent unfairness and elitism rather than using these characteristics to enhance their own occupational position at the expense of others. This has been the problem with socialism, it has become divisive just like capitalism misusing contract, choice and consent to promote personal and political self-interest. Hence Karl Marx coined the term ‘bourgeois socialism’(8)

Blue Revolution is an attempt by informed “non-experts” to start a new revolution, to take the legacy of capitalism and socialism and forge a new future of freedom and personal fulfilment. Be part of this revolution by simply looking at things with a different consciousness. Using contract, choice and consent not with a view to self-advancement (bourgeois thinking) but with a view to making society better, fairer and healthier.

SUMMARY

Elites have ruled working people for thousands of years. It was a situation we could not change because we as ordinary people did not have the power to change it. The means by which wealth was extracted from working people became more and more sophisticated until eventually the exploitation went on under a veil of legitimacy based on principles of contract, choice and consent. In themselves these principles enhance the lives of people but until recently only the elite could take advantage of them. We now have a crisis in the western economy and society, and we need to let the workers have more political power based on contract, choice and consent between the working people and their state.

The Economy

How Economies work

Karl Marx described mankind as having a “species essence. The capacity of language to communicate, share knowledge and co-operate to change our environment.

Our species essence is therefore different from lower mammals. From tribal times, we have had to deal with sex and cultural differences, differential treatment for those who were visibly different. In tribal times men and women had very different roles but there was a value associated with each role and women were highly regarded as homemakers. This is a period prior to wealth introducing power into relationships between men and women, a situation which is captured most clearly in the patriarchy of the three main Judaeo religions namely Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Environment therefore shaped the way “species essence” was reflected in tribal reality. As Karl Marx said ‘man’s consciousness doesn’t shape his material environment his material environment shapes his consciousness’(9) As there was no storage of food, in tribal society life was uncertain, and this would be reflected in the ‘consciousness of the people’, who would expect punishments to be harsh with unforgiving Gods ‘in control’ of human destiny. Brutality reflects hard material circumstances. Act with brutality without the material circumstances that ‘justify it’ and it becomes merely a perversion, an irrelevant cultural fetish or an abuse of power.

Once storage of food happened and surpluses could be traded in pre-Biblical times, authoritarian system emerged. At this point man was set against man and man against woman. Stored value became wealth that could be taken by force. This point in history redefined people’s lives in ways that went beyond just their sex. They owned, created and consumed value in ways which could define who they were. This reality went on right the way through history up to and including the birth of capitalism with capitalists, under the cloak of employment contracts, misappropriating the profit created by workers. It was going on when the final collapse of capitalism occurred in the west sometime around the mid-1980s. Karl Marx said the history of humanity is the history of class struggle. The struggle between those who create the wealth (workers) and those who control it; the elite!

Having maintained steadily growth throughout the post second world war period by the 1980’s western capitalism was in crisis. It was unwieldy and unprofitable in its bourgeois socialist form, over managed by a well-paid self-interested political class rather than controlled by either capitalists or its workers.

In the UK, unprofitable state industries were damaging the economy. Trades Unions believed they were acting in the best interests of their workers by demanding more pay but by misunderstanding the nature of profitability and the responsibility of the state to act in the interests of the tax paying public, they ended up, along with the Conservative government, of destroying industries.

Putting those industries in the hands of the workers would have been an alternative strategy but one not available in a bourgeois state run by a political elite and with workers who had accepted contract, choice and consent but who also accepted uncritically the bourgeois values of unfairness and elitism. Put simply they promoted a them and us attitude towards their employers, taxpayers and the state.

In the 1980’s on each side of the Atlantic charismatic leaders emerged; Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Regan in the US. Both held the view that the state must be brought to heel. In Britain it meant closing nationalised industries that were not profitable and privatising those that were profitable. Moreover, the solution to the western world’s economic crisis was solved by the capitalist system getting China to manufacture the goods and out strip demand with a planet destroying but inflation preventing over supply. Even now no one really grasps the implications of this as we have come to accept it as our economic ‘reality’.

The 1980’s therefore is the point when western businesses unable to excessively exploit western workers to make massive profits due to decades of state intervention and worker protection, went east and shamefully embroiled the western worker in the exploitation of workers elsewhere in the world. Were, it not for the fact western workers do not understand their role in exploiting workers in places like China or Vietnam they could be accused of consciously accepting worker exploitation under the cloak of contract, choice and consent, a process well understood by the Victorian bourgeoisie.  However western workers role in exploiting workers of poorer nations is done unconsciously. The global bourgeoisie and western politicians know what is going on and maybe feel powerless to change it. What they have done is trap western workers into consuming goods made cheaply elsewhere in the world. As consumers we have little choice but to accept being global capitalisms fellow travellers. At least for the time being.

As a result of what happened during the 1980’s and 1990’s Britain and the US watched the right kind of things happen (economic growth/low inflation) but seem not to have understood the harm it was doing to the planet. The economies of the west began to flourish. In the UK, the heirs to Thatcher (Major and Blair) spawned the heirs to Blair (Cameron and Osborne). Each man believing in turn that this story of wealth, and jobs in retail or services, was an economic success. All this of course led eventually to the famous banking crisis and the taxpayer bailouts arranged by our political elite.

The legacy of western capitalism ‘going global’ partly explains why the first and second generation of ex industrial workers voted Brexit in the UK and for Trump in the US. It is because the economic changes overseen by our political elites has created an army of under employed or unemployed people who want to have good jobs and create social and economic value by doing something useful but find they cannot. Their jobs have gone to China. These people who are shown such utter disrespect by the political class are basically out of work because they are victims of the European, US and global labour and employment markets. Their redundant knowledge, uneconomic skills and employment costs cannot find a market within the western economy and they are too poor and immobile to move to where their skills might find a market.

British, US and European governments however liked the success of the 1980’s model even after the banking crisis hit, as economic success generated tax revenue which could be spent on welfare, pensions and state employment and thus unemployment was low.

The political establishment now fighting to preserve the European Union established their current political ‘groupthink’ during this period, relying on plentiful cheap imports keeping prices low so debt could be pumped into the economy without a shortage of goods driving up inflation. It also helps if wages are pushed to the minimum wage by high levels of inward migration. This essentially Blairite group think has become the political centre ground so hated and distrusted by ordinary working people. It is a bourgeois socialist centre ground occupied by the majority of MP’s from all three main parties.

Having looked at how in the twenty first century we create economic value by exploiting the planet and poorer workers with government debt, we need to explore social value (10). The term used in the United Kingdom, for much of what is understood as social value, is welfare but this includes health and education. Welfare is essentially the government delivering social value. In our simple tribal society, the social value was traditionally woman’s work which may explain why in a patriarchal society it has typically and undeservedly had low value relative to wealth creation. However, this socially important work must be done.

Our state has increasingly taken on the role of providing social value because of changes in the norms of society, norms once expected by capitalism and imposed by Christian belief such as the sanctity of marriage. But with debt used to pay for planet busting consumption as well as debt used to provide welfare, we need to get people involved in a debate about exactly what good is coming out of this frankly unsustainable model. People must continue to enjoy the rights associated with capitalism but as a western world we need to address the inherent inequality, unfairness and elitism which as a legacy of the feudal system was willingly embraced by capitalism and continues to undermine the poor whilst now taking its toll on the health of the planet too.

We must recognise the effects of debt and get debt under control. As far as practical we must reduce the expense of government in social and economic activities, freeing people to support their own communities. We must adopt for government a simple regulatory function based on contract, choice and consent intervening in markets at local and national level assuring the quality of provision which if unregulated could undermine the consumer or the worker.

Summary

Debt has been increasing since the western economy became unprofitable and production was sent abroad. This arrangement has been successful for workers and governments because it has made retailers and brand owners rich and has provided tax revenue and jobs in retail and welfare. However, we need to curtail our dependence on debt and start to once again create value both economic and social.

Can the people run the state?

As we have traced the course of history from tribalism to socialism after World War Two, we have only made fleeting reference to elites. Every culture has had elites. Elites are the people Marx referred to when he commented that the history of the world was the history of class struggle. Elites are the people who take more of what the workers produce than the workers themselves. In our modern world this includes our politicians and many public servants.

A state with much more public involvement if we ever get that far, will have people doing important work but they will be there by public approval, there will be no “status” or economic advantage to be had by being in parliament and indeed leaving the important state jobs or institutions will be no more a wrench or humiliation than changing work place. It certainly will not be like it is now with the spectacle of the powerful clinging on to rank, position and wealth after events like Brexit threaten their status. The state will therefore not have a separate identity from the people and power will be evenly balanced between the working people, who hold it and those who exercise it on their behalf.

Modern elites are not there because of historical accident as in feudal times or because they are talented scientists or businesspeople (whatever they might like us to believe) or because they are especially moral. They are there because they have party based political networks and influence. This is the legacy of the capitalist system retaining feudal power structures that were easily taken over by an ambitious bureaucratic state. With a modern economy reliant on government investment, the political state, rather than an economic elite, becomes the elite. Workers continue to be shut out of the political system by a new class of bourgeois socialist.

The people who take advantage of opportunities to enter the governing class do so out of concern about unfairness and inequality. However, a guilty conscience (11) is what their concern usually amounts to. They are unlikely to see their own privileged political and salary status, or their elitism more generally as a problem. They maintain a consciousness (12) based on their own privilege which prevents them seeing that their privilege occurs at the expense of the ordinary worker. Look at the pay of British Broadcasting Corporation ‘talent’ and the pay of the average licence fee payer, or the salary of an MP relative to the minimum wage.

So, the political and economic elite fret about the disadvantages faced by workers whilst ignoring how they have used the supposedly liberating principles of  the once capitalist free society to feather their own economic and political nest. Karl Marx was the first to describe these people as bourgeois socialists. People who will fret about social unfairness but are happy to overlook economic unfairness if it benefits them to do so. It is a double standard, exactly what characterised the Victorian bourgeoisie with their use of contract, choice and consent to mask what was clearly the exploitation of the working people.

Modern bourgeois socialism therefore is an obstacle to economic and political progress as it ignores widespread political and economic unfairness but divides the working class using the trickery of identity politics to break the bonds that tie the world’s working people together. Working people of the world should unite against planet destroying economic unfairness but we cannot because we are differentiated by religion, sexuality, nationality and race. The bourgeois socialist elite might have the right values as they believe in Contract, Choice and Consent but they believe for ordinary workers the accent should be on exercising our rights not through acquiring greater economic equality or political power, but through nailing our identity. Other nations (and some people within our own nation) continue to be exposed to compulsion, coercion and control and this is not questioned by our elite seemingly happy to accommodate this outrage in the interests of diversity.

The elite need to be dealt with, not this time by a bloody revolution but by simply allowing “the people” the Blue-Collar workers of the world to determine how access to state power is gained, managed and maintained and this can be done through existing political arrangements. The arrangements just need tweaking! Basically, the current state works on behalf of a bourgeois elite and not for the people who pay for the state via their direct and indirect taxation. Because of this shortfall in influence modern government lacks legitimacy.

The problem of the state’s lack of legitimacy can be easily resolved but it must start with the workers of the western world uniting in the common cause of bringing an end to an economic and political system based on elitism, unfairness and identity. We must ignore the entreaties of the Bourgeois elites to engage us in petty sectarian squabbles over ‘identity’ and through democratic means bring down once and for all the elitist thinking that keeps us paying to support political systems over which we have no control.

SUMMARY

The capitalist system created rights to contract, make choices and consent. These were originally legal and economic principles, but they have now become social in character, we use them in daily life. In the past the political elite extended these principles to more people to protect their economic system capitalism from revolution but now they only allow us to use them in the sphere of identity politics not the politics that governs us from Westminster or the White House. They are as unfair to us as the original capitalists, the so-called bourgeoisie, who hundreds of years ago exploited workers in factories. The new political elite do not want us to enjoy greater economic and political equality as their status would diminish.

Who exactly are the revolutionary class?

Firstly, we need to decide who constitutes the class known as working people. We have become so used to arguing about identity and rights that are promoted within the elite’s political agenda that we have lost sight of who, we are as a group.

The working people are defined by Blue Revolution in this way. A) Do you rely on your labour power alone to make a living? B) Are you in receipt of welfare? C) When you die will you leave enough to enable your children to live a life which does not require them to engage in waged labour? Finally, D) are you well connected enough to ensure that if your children do depend on waged labour you can ensure access to high waged work opportunities? If you answer yes to A and B you are a waged or potentially a waged worker and could be part of a revolutionary class. If you answered yes to C and D, you are part of the elite and probably part of the problem.

Getting the workers views embedded in the nation state requires us to limit the state’s power. We believe western workers are mature and flexible enough to play an important role informing social, economic and political policy.

In the UK there are 26 County Councils and 192 district councils and 190 unitary councils at every administrative level above parish council. These councils will have anywhere between 30 and 80 plus councillors who are ordinary workers and probably meet our blue-collar criteria above. They will come from every walk of life and unlike Westminster MP’s generally they will not go through a rigorous two-day selection process that weeds out eccentrics and potential troublemakers.

These people connect with local communities, reflect the views of local communities, and respect local communities. Even those local communities where ideas based on religious observance remain established. They too need to have a voice as members of their respective community.

The party system works in the interests of political parties and this takes away the sense that politicians work on behalf of the people. Political parties are a microcosm of the state itself. The modern state reflects systems of power and control that existed before working class men had the vote in the nineteenth century.

When members of the political elite worry about the democratic deficit (large numbers of people not voting in elections for example, or councillors being elected with less than five percent of the eligible vote) which suggests working people don’t trust the system or politicians in general, their solution is to extend voting to sixteen year olds or bribe people to vote. Having more people voting in the same out of date eighteenth-century system is not the answer. It is all very well throwing aside eighteenth-century beliefs like homophobia but preserving eighteenth century institutions undermines efforts at real reform. It needs working people to inform and contribute to political decision making.

The way to resolve this democratic deficit is relatively simple bring lower tier authority councillors into the legislature. In the community there will be councillors who could make valid contributions to debates but cannot as they do not sit in parliament. The solution is to create what we call a legislative college. This idea backed up by technology allows any “elected member” from any administrations including in time parishes, to “come in” on a parliamentary debate. In time they could acquire the right to vote in parliament too. The MP for the area will have some real competition from “lower tier” authority members and will need to ensure that their profile is maintained if they are to preserve their seat. All excellent for democracy, access to democratic decision making and progress.

Opponents will say it will make governing impossible. That will not happen because the executive’s policies will be either voted for or voted down. The executive would need to be elected by the whole legislature to ensure the end of tribal left- and right-wing adversarial politics and the nonsense of votes of no confidence and ‘whipping in’. Losing a vote on a bad idea will become the will of the people, not the death of an administration. It thus will make the democratically elected executive more cautious and accountable.

To develop this idea which is technologically possible and get it past the elite, will need a Blue ’workers’ Revolution. Ultimately it will mean for example that no government can take us to war by relying on a supine and docile parliament as Tony Blair did and no government would escape the reality of its policies on the working people most affected. The changes to our lives that artificial intelligence or climate change might impose on working people must not happen until working people have given policies political legitimacy.

The whole project can be financed by abolishing the House of Lords.

SUMMARY

Currently six hundred and fifty MP’s represent 65 million people. They look and sound like an elite class because they are. Ordinary people pay for the political system and deserve to have a big role in deciding national policy. Giving the right to speak and vote in parliament takes away the power of the bourgeois socialist elite of all parties including the Conservative Party.

Contract, Choice and Consent

What will our social and political revolution look like in practice?

Contract, Choice and Consent are the three major legal advances that came with the birth of capitalism they have now become social in character accepted as the basis for our free society. With them in place revolutions will never look like previous revolutions in Russia or China where the state totally dominated the people. These revolutions were carried out in Karl Marx’s name but are not Marxist revolutions.

Whilst to contract, choose or consent using these principles should never be impeded by the state or prevented by public prejudice in respect of dealings between competent adults it should not be the duty of the state to promote or finance any group wanting to exercise their rights under these principles.

If the state goes over and above protecting a right and moves towards paying for a right to be exercised, then beyond a certain point the state loses public consent.  This is the situation the bourgeois socialist elite have placed the public in, in matters relating to religion, sexuality and sexual identity.

Of course, we should respect someone’s right to identify as they wish, as Muslim, Christian, man or woman, Gay or straight but it is a matter for them as to how they exercise these rights in their dealings with others, balanced as it would need to be on the basis of reciprocated rights to contract, choose and consent.

The principles above should apply to having children too. Having children has become as a result of dramatic sociological and economic changes a subsidised lifestyle choice over which the taxpaying public at large have little choice but to pay. Parents knowing full well, they cannot afford children, go ahead and have them anyway.

The elite – clueless for a solution to a growing moral and financial crisis caused by the economic changes referred to in a previous section of this pamphlet, continue to throw taxpayers’ money at the problem. The resulting mental health crisis, domestic and child abuse and crime are for the state problems to be mitigated using large state bodies employing millions of workers. These bodies are managed and led by a very well-paid bourgeois socialist elite.

We at A Blue Revolution consider that in the absence of political legitimacy and subsidised by a clueless bourgeois state, western morality has become infused with a thoughtless “do as you like” attitude which has reduced too many adults to behaving irresponsibly. Too many adults are docile, apolitical and happily fed a diet of welfare top ups, healthcare and identity politics. One spin off from this process is that too many people no longer make grown up informed choices about things like having children or getting a job.

The modern state, managed by our bourgeois socialist elite, has given up any pretence of genuinely promoting rights and responsibilities beyond that of identity and consumer rights and responsibilities. The reason is that modern elites do not understand where economic and social value comes from and believe that what you are paid is what you are worth as this reflects what you can spend. They misunderstand that value is more than wages. Yes, value is the profit created by waged workers, but it is also the valuable work done by people trying to make society function efficiently and safely.

To try and re-establish social cohesion by encouraging personal responsibility and taking the very sensitive issue of having children as an example our suggestion is as follows.

In the twenty first century working people are intelligent enough to negotiate a proper contract for the care of their children. This contract should always precede the birth of a child. The contracting people on whatever basis, must agree to share the responsibility of the child they are having. A child with no planning or contracting would see the state take over care and no financial advantage applies to either parent. It will of course be possible for a state informed by popular opinion and based on contract, choice and consent to contract with parents in relation to education for example. We have for too long confused rights to have a child with the elite’s view that irresponsible behaviour cannot be criticised and must be a legitimate lifestyle choice.

So, we must work towards making contract, choice and consent the foundation of the British way of life and a political constitution. Nothing is given or received unless it is contracted for, freely chosen and consented to. Even welfare!

SUMMARY

Contract is based on choice and consent so this should be the basis for all relationships ensuring that everyone is free to live their lives as they wish within a legal and political framework underpinned by the common consent of the people. Irresponsible behaviour would not be encouraged. This is what Karl Marx meant by the dictatorship of the proletariat. Not a bourgeois socialist paradise for the political elite but an economically and socially more equal world where the moral framework is underpinned by liberal principles of contract, choice and consent which in turn gives expression to pro social collective behaviour.

Education

Education has a vital role to play in contributing to the nation’s collective well-being. It is an essential pre-requisite in establishing, and maintaining, Britain’s future on the world scene. We do not believe that education is about employment but is about life choices beginning with the choice by parents to have children in the first place.

‘Education for education’s sake’ must become a central tenet of educational policy. Thus, the essence of Blue Revolution’s educational policy, as an acknowledgement that every ‘learner’ in our society should have numerous affordable education pathways to provide opportunities for a fulfilling lifetime of learning which is both social and economic in character. Education is a human right; not something which should be a burden on the state or individual. As such, there are some essential principles which we would like to see reflected in education which are based on a contract between the people and a people’s state. They are as follows:

• A move towards a broad, diversified and inclusive National Curriculum which takes learning beyond the basic subjects
• The abolition of imposed selection or pressured direction within the education system. This will enable the student at any age to demonstrate choice on what they study and when they study it.
• Free access to education at any age.
• Create a universally accepted view that vocational and academic routes to learning are of equal esteem. Eradicate the stigma of not going to University and remove the disproportionate economic advantage associated with the private schools and top universities.
• With all the above in mind reduce the school leaving age to 15 which is year 10, for those with a minimum standard of literacy and a guaranteed contract of two years employment.

Summary

Education is vital to the nation’s well-being. It should suit the needs of the people throughout their lives and be flexible enough to enable people to enter education at any level at any point in their lives. Education provided by the state will not be used to reinforce economic advantage or disadvantage.

And finally bringing the Blue Revolution together for the sake of our revolving blue planet

Debt and the demands of consumer-based growth are destroying our planet. With A Blue Revolution’s commitment to promoting social value by delivering democracy at the level of peoples lived experience, provision for children and the elderly will come with state support but with less bureaucracy and elitism. We should see the drive to consume and general indebtedness decline. With fewer people overpaid by the state there should also be a reduction in aggregate demand, and this takes the pressure off the planet. The elite will not want it like this they will want us to take the hit to save the planet whilst they carry on regardless.

By scaling back the bureaucracy of the state the British will signal that the age of the super-rich living off the debt of others whilst the planet overheats has come to an end and that rather than talking hot air at every global conference Britain is doing something about its moral, economic, sociological and environmental problems and guess what? All these factors work to improve each other and thereby help to save the planet.

Glossary

(1) Bourgeois basically means benefitting from the exploitation of working people and promoting elitism, greed and self-interest using contract, choice and consent to conceal blatant unfairness at the bottom of a free society. Bourgeois socialist: is someone who knows that the western economic system creates social, political and economic inequalities but they do not want to change the system they will just be anxious about it.

(2) Abraham Maslow stated that there was a hierarchy of human needs at the base people needed food water and shelter at the top relationships and ultimately to fulfil their own personal aspirations.

(3) Karl Marx was a political philosopher who identified how working people had been either exploited openly by elites in pre capitalist times or were exploited under the cloak of ‘freedom’ based on contract, choice and consent under capitalism. He called his theory scientific socialism.

(4) Consciousness is seeing the world framed in a way which benefits you and your class. Bourgeois consciousness is about protecting elitism, unfairness and maintaining class distinction and identity. Working class consciousness is recognising that bourgeois principles like contract, choice and consent should not be used as an excuse to exploit workers and that elitism, unfairness and bourgeois class identity undermine everyone’s right to live democratically, freely and fairly.

(5) Alienation: The experience of being detached from any ownership of your work and alienated from other people by the monotony of the workplace.

(6) Exploitation: The process by which capitalist make profit from the workers and then turn this profit into their own private property. It is an abuse of the principles of contract, choice and consent as the worker is never told that they will not receive their share of the profits they create. The economics of capitalist exploitation have become more complicated in the modern era and are of limited value today.

(7) Patriarchal: A system that controls women in interests of property ownership, control and inheritance. It is based on the privilege of men over women. It began after tribal times and extended in an economic from in the west into the twentieth century. It is still prevalent elsewhere in the world.

(8) This Marxist quote means that what we do collectively to provide for our family and society whether it is within a tribal, feudal or capitalist system shapes how we see the world and our way of thinking (our group consciousness)…rather than our group way of thinking shaping the way we provide for our families. It is putting action before thought. For example, it would not have occurred to anyone to think about ‘freedom’ before capitalism required people to be ‘free’.

(9) See 1 above.

(10) Social value is everything that contributes to society being well organised and efficient.

(11) Conscience is a belief or feeling that something is wrong and harmful to others.