14 April 2015
The Green Party has launched For the Common Good, its keenly anticipated 2015 General Election Manifesto. It contains detailed proposals to bring about a more equal and fairer society. Here are some of the essential policy commitments from the manifesto in a nutshell:
We face three connected crises:
1. Healing the planet from the effects of an unstable, unsustainable economy.
2. Creating a more equal society, reversing the trend towards a society divided between poverty and great wealth.
3. Creating truly democratic central and local government that governs for the common good.
To help heal the planet we will:
~ Make achieving international agreement and action to limit climate change to below 2 degrees C of warming the major foreign policy priority.
~ Invest in an £85 billion public programme of renewable electricity generation, flood defences and building insulation.
~ Support local sustainable agriculture, with respect for animals and wild places.
~ cut emissions by providing cheaper public transport and encouraging cycling and walking.
To become more equal and support our public services we will:
~ End privatisation in the National Health Service, provide proper funding and free social care for the elderly, and combat the loneliness of the elderly.
~Let teachers teach in properly funded democratically controlled schools, end SATS (Standard Assessment Tests), league tables and academies, and introduce free early education and childcare.
~ End tuition fees and cancel student debt.
~ Provide 500,000 social homes for rent over the five-year parliament, control excessive rents and achieve house price stability.
~ Increase public spending to almost half of national income.
~ Make tax fair and crack down vigorously on tax avoidance and evasion.
~ Make the minimum wage a living wage for all, with a target of £10 per hour by 2020.
~ Make the highest wage in any organisation no more than ten times the lowest wage.
~ Create jobs and help small businesses by reducing employers’ National insurance.
~ Bring rail back into public ownership.
~Ensure respect for everyone whatever their ethnicity, gender, age, religious belief or non-belief, sexual orientation, class, size, disability or other status.
~ Create over 1 million jobs through our programme of green investment and restoring the public sector.
To create a truly democratic central and local government and a common citizenship and to promote peace based on democratic principles we will:
~ Reform the benefits system. End workfare and sanctions. Double Child Benefit and pay a pension that people can live on. In the longer term, unite tax and benefits in a basic Income system covering everyone.
~ Fund local government adequately and set democratically elected local authorities free to decide how to run education, public transport and other local services and to raise local taxes.
~ Bring in a fair voting system involving proportional representation.
~ Respect immigrants for the contribution they make and control immigration fairly.
~ Decommission the Trident nuclear deterrent system and promote peacemaking.
For the full Green Party 2015 General Election Manifesto see: www.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/manifesto/Green_Party_2015_General_Election_Manifesto.pdf
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