The Harmony Party UK Policy Book See the future differently. v2025.0.1 On Palestine, Ambazonia, Sudan, and self-determination for all The Palestinian people are facing genocide at the hands of the Israeli State, and Harmony opposes both that genocide and the Apartheid of Israel wholeheartedly, perpetually, and without reservation. Likewise, the people of Sudan and the people of Ambazonia deserve self-determination and freedom from colonial violence. This exploitation of the global South by the global North is the global Apartheid which we must deconstruct and oppose. It is driven by the predatory whims of both white supremacy and capitalism. As an antiracist, anticapitalist, antiwar party committed to the defence of individual consent, we will always stand with the oppressed, and always stand against those who seek to benefit from war. None of us will be free until all of us are free does not just mean in the UK \- but everywhere. That means we support safe routes for refugees, too. Justice \- Climate & Social We place action on the climate disaster and action on inequality at the top of our agenda. We support the right to protest, and we support direct action undertaken in good faith for ethical causes. We oppose racism, transphobia, sexism, ableism, and all forms of bigotry besides. But we do not just oppose them on paper. We will oppose them in action, too. We will give our voice to marginalised communities via their own advocacy assemblies in our federation of assemblies \- such as the disabled community, the GRT community, & marginalised sections of the labour movement such as sex workers. These advocacy societies will be formed of people from those communities, and led by them; and they will lead this Party on policy relating to their communities. A Healthier Tomorrow We passionately believe in the NHS, and in socialised healthcare. As such we will bring dentistry, eye care, & all GP services fully under NHS control \- bringing everything into the fold as it should have been all along And we will end the threat to the NHS that private healthcare providers pose by banning them, while allowing specialised private healthcare services to continue to ensure that marginalised communities, such as the disabled or trans communities, are not negatively impacted. We will seek to implement largescale reforms to the NHS to improve community involvement in key decisions that impact those communities, establishing regional "health assemblies" to directly involve local people in local decisions. We care about NHS staff, too, which is why we will end NHS staff car parking charges \- and more besides. We won't just put 15% on the table: we'll put the power to determine wages into the hands of NHS workers directly. We'll democratise pay across the public sector via a "top to bottom" linked pay scale system, with all public workers regularly voting on the maximum difference between highest & lowest paid. We want to win the fight for doctors, nurses, porters, and all the rest \- once and for all. We will end NHS outsourcing wherever feasible, as rapidly as possible, because we want to take healthcare in-house, where accountability to the public is clear & transparency simpler to achieve. We take the principal of internationalism seriously too: we will campaign for the beginnings of what could become a global health service. This would initially be a kind of "international medical union". It will enable the big national healthcare systems to join less well funded ones in ensuring lower prices for equipment & drugs. Our vision for healthcare is bold \- at home and abroad. Facing the Climate Disaster We will create a new environmental regulatory system, with a dedicated environmental court to enforce environmental law, with a dedicated national people's environmental assembly regularly reporting to Parliament on potential improvements to environmental law based on the experiences of the regulator, the court, and the knowledge of participants of that assembly. And we will ban fracking. We all know that renewables are vital to the future of electricity production in this country, and so we will legislate to enable more utilisation of onshore wind. Further, we will act to phase out fossil fuel subsidies as rapidly as possible. What's more, we'll legislate for an alternate day driving scheme for all non-hybrid fossil fuel powered vehicles by 2025, starting in cities, and then expanding nationwide by 2026\. This will be the first phase towards the next big step: banning all non-hybrid fossil fuel powered vehicles by 2028 (starting in cities, expanding nationwide by 2029). We are actively developing further policy to support both individuals and businesses through both of these changes. As part of a joined-up green transport push, we will expand bicycle routes nationwide, and evaluate ways to better link bus and rail services together with cycling routes, as well as finding ways to ensure cyclists can use those services more easily with less disruption to other service users. We will investigate the possibility of a "non-renewable bottle tax" to generally reduce the use of plastic bottles (and make it illegal to pass cost onto public). We think it's important those actually responsible for the climate disaster bear the burden of mitigating the impacts we'll all have to face together. We will also introduce a plastic bottle deposit scheme to cut bottle waste & encourage the use of longer-lasting alternatives, including glass bottles. We've also been discussing a novel, community-led approach to dealing with gum. We want to provision the nation with free public water dispensers, coupled with community refill schemes to encourage use of long-lasting bottles. We think the looming fresh water crisis needs addressing \- sooner, not later. We will seek to expand the usage of reclaimed water wherever possible, and fund research towards widening the usability of water reclamation. We think that green spaces are crucial to both physical and mental health, and we think there's a ton of evidence to support that. And that's why we want to legislate for every person in the UK to have the right to access to green spaces, requiring local and national government to ensure that access. We will seek to limit new construction as much as possible in favour of repurposing/rehabilitating existing constructions, and empower the new environmental court to prevent unnecessary new builds where rehabilitation is provably viable. We will ban cryptocurrency mining: we will pass legislation forcing hardware companies to prevent mining on non-specialised commercial products. Mining-specific products will be permitted, but graphics cards, for example, would no longer be useable for crypto mining. We again say that those most responsible for the climate crisis should be the ones to foot the bill. And as such, we will ensure that small consumers of electricity pay less per unit than large ones. We will legislate to prevent electricity being cut off when people cannot afford to pay. We all need power. Which is why we will end mandatory pre-payment meters. We will implement a requirement to use brown sites before green sites in construction, ensuring preservation of vital green spaces. Our new environmental court can help defend them, too. Your Right to a Warm, Safe Home As part of our social policy package, we plan to apply rent controls nationwide. This is important to prevent UBI from becoming principally beneficial to landlords. Instead, we want a "new deal" for everyone \- a system where everyone gains. With that in mind, we will legislate to encourage fair, democratic, cooperative or community ownership of homes; it will also be necessary to relax the law around the registration of mutuals and cooperatives generally to enable this. We will also fight tooth & nail to increase the number of both permanent and temporary pitches for the GRT community, and seek to legislate to protect their right to their way of life in line with the recommendations of regional and national direct democratic participatory assemblies led by and composed of those same communities. We will legislate to improve legal protections for renters based on the input of renters unions such as Acorn, Living Rent, and others. We will campaign for an emergency eviction ban and rent freeze. We will create legislation to allow the State to take ownership of uninhabitable, uninhabited property, and fund the restoration of that property where appropriate for social housing stock. Meanwhile, we will introduce tax benefits for landlords who carry out necessary works to ensure occupancy of their properties. We will introduce "Lifetime Homes" \- the requirement that "new build" houses must be built under the assumption that disabled people or the elderly will sooner or later live in them. We will fully decriminalise homelessness. We will reorganise the national approach to homelessness. We will establish a new national homelessness monitoring team, with regional subteams, intended to first create a full picture of homelessness in Britain, and, then via both consultation with those teams and by way of accessing preexisting third sector knowledge, we intend to apply maximum leverage to end homelessness in Britain once and for all \- with progressive social policies and by providing housing. All of the above is part of a pattern of working hard on making the idea that "everyone should have a warm, safe place to shelter and call home" a reality \- something we'll be working towards at a local level before we ever get a foothold in Parliament. But there's a lot more to come. Power to Young People Our universal living wage means every age gets the same minimum wage. Our universal basic income will be a gamechanger for the young, too. We also think children don't get enough say, and we want to revise the law to ensure young people have a fair voice in the issues that impact them. We want to redress the injustices of the past, too \- we're committed not just to reform of social services, but also to the commissioning of a special independent historic investigation of child social services. That investigation will spill out into "breakout investigations" on specific historic injustices, geared to restorative justice where necessary for those individuals harmed by the unfair removal of children from families, eg for reasons of multigenerational poverty, ethnicity, and so on. Our reforms will seek to end the injustices in this area faced by the GRT community and by people of lower income or from other marginalised communities. No more should children be removed from where they belong on the basis of prejudice alone: their family home. We also say "no more" to child labour in the UK, still a scourge affecting hundreds of thousands of unpaid young carers. Society should make whatever interventions are necessary to ensure that no adult or child with a disability is reliant to any extent for any number of hours per week on the care of a child of any age. And we will fight for those interventions however we must. We will integrate sign language into the national curriculum as part of our overall determination to include and make accessible. Big changes for schools \- led by those who know them best We will implement universal free school meals, because no child should go hungry. Full stop. Just as access to food is a basic dignity all British children must enjoy, so too is access to education \- all the way through. That is why not only will we end tuition fees \- we'll find a way to forgive existing student debt too. We want to change the education system, too. We don't think it's fit for purpose as it stands, and we think change is very long overdue now. As such, we're committed to a complete restructuring of schools, including abolishing private schools, and enabling students & educators to take the lead on reforms via either a national assembly or a series of regional assemblies. We will listen, and implement what we are told is best for children. We will also seek, as a matter of some urgency and as part of antiracism efforts, to improve education on marginalised communities \- such as Black history, GRT history, LGBTQIA+ history. We will also seek to enshrine the importance of inclusion as a key value of the new education system. We will too be seeking to increase further/higher education uptake of STEM courses as Britain looks ahead to the mid 21st century with an eye to building on the gains made in high tech industry in the late 20th and early 21st. We also believe children must be heard. As such, we will legislate to improve the rights of children to be heard directly \- to always have a say on matters that impact their welfare, wellbeing, and futures. We’ll also either abolish school uniforms or make them universally available to all school children, free at the point of “sale”. And in more instantly practical terms, we will legislate for the State to fund a counsellor in every school in England to ensure that children really are being heard. Work & Social Justice We will implement a universal basic income. We believe that doing so is vital in the face of onrushing automation and teleoperation, both of which developments in the labour market threaten the sudden need for reskilling of vast numbers of people. We will decriminalise sex work, at their request of the sex worker community, for their safety \- and because sex work is work. Rather than preparing for an outcome we can't deliver \- the climate crisis means jobs will be hard to produce out of a hat in the next few decades without jeopardising just about everything else \- we'd rather ensure that people have the space they need. And it's long past time we end precarity. That, too, is why we we will implement a national living wage, which, in combination with the UBI, will ensure a good baseline standard of living for everyone. That won't mean that the fight for better workplace rights will just go away, though \- which is why we'll be strengthening the unions with legislation, and by repeal of the Trade Union Act. We want to revolutionise public services, too, and guarantee a baseline of service for every citizen, which we're calling "universal basic services" \- a network of state-funded socialised services intended to ensure that socially agreed-upon basic needs are always met. Like having a roof over your head, healthcare, access to education, broadband \- all the things you need to live & work. UBS means that national and local government will be committed to ensuring these services are always provided free at the point of use. Did we mention free broadband? Free broadband\! We're committed to social justice, too. As such, we're dedicated to enshrining trans rights in British human rights law, as per the findings of a national direct democratic participatory assembly of trans people. It impacts them most; they should determine how it works out. Nothing about you without you is an important mantra to democracy. We will also decriminalise homelessness and ban hostile architecture \- and while we're on ending hostile things, we'll also end the hostile environment, with reparations for the wrongs of Empire & justice for Windrush. We will also force the declassification and release of all necessary documentary evidence to ensure the Windrush generation & all those impacted since can have that promised justice at last. And we'll revoke those payments given to slave-owning families when Britain banned the transatlantic slave trade; the money from those payments can be, instead, paid to the descendants of those injured by the slave trade, perhaps as a monthly stipend. We want to implement reforms to pay structures by implementing workplace democracy. We think the public sector is an excellent place to prove the concept. Pay rises for the highest earners should result in pay rises for the lowest earners. Everyone in the public sector should get to regularly vote on the exact gap between highest and lowest. And we think that to encourage media independence and plurality, current workers should collectively own 51% of each media outlet and should have the same democratised pay gap system as we propose for the public sector. This would also form a vanguard to increasing democracy in the workplace in the years to come. Justice Firstly, we must properly fund the justice system to ensure equal recourse to the law; there must be enough court time for all cases to be properly heard. And we must also direct our energies to guaranteeing that recourse to the law is fully equal; as such, we must legislate to make legal aid a universal right once again. We must also seek to right historic injustices, as discussed elsewhere. One route to that is the evaluation of the classist and frequently ableist (and racist) "ASBO" system, still largely in effect despite some window dressing changes by recent Governments. We will also order a case-by-case judicial review of "imprisonment for public protection" (IPP) inmates. Perhaps most crucially, we want to radically reform justice & abolish the police in the UK, and are developing finer and finer grained policy towards achieving this over time. We won't be rushed on this facet of our platform, though, as we understand how vital getting this right is to every community in Britain. But in short: we want a public health approach to crime. This is why we believe sex work must be decriminalised: in the interest of the health of sex workers', and out of respect for their own understanding of their own work, because sex work is work. We are also carefully considering decriminalisation of the possession and consumption of all currently illicit drugs (while planning to ensure provision of social services to support those negatively impacted by the consumption of those drugs) & will be making a final decision by inviting stakeholders, experts, and the general public into consultation via our direct participatory democracy. We will set the age of criminal responsibility in England to be 16 years of age. It is currently far too low, and we find it lamentable and regrettable that so many young lives are thrown away on the altar of Crime And Punishment. We will also be reducing the length of copyright to 50 years. Disability: Rights & Seeking Equity First and foremost we will be seeking to hear the policy devised by our disabled Members. And spearpointing that will be their work on creating a "disability act", intended to meet the needs of the disabled community & provide disabled people with clearer rights than those laid out in the Equality Act. But we also want to implement a new national social care service to provide caring services free at the point of provision for both disabled people and the elderly. This will enable us to raise the quality \- and quantity \- of care available. We will nationalise Motability/mobility aid schemes & fold them into the new national social care service \- because transport should be freely available to disabled people. We will scrap disability assessments. We can trust the efforts of GPs and consultants and there is no real need to put disabled people through the hardship of repeated assessment in the first place. We will work to increase accessibility of bus and rail services, particularly provision of route info on transportation and at stops/stations, via a unified national app, and other measures to be developed in consultation with disabled people. And there's a lot more policy in this area to be developed. Saving British Democracy Britain doesn't have a constitution. And the last few decades have seen many times the question has been levelled: what is it to be British? The union itself has also, equally, been often questioned. Therefore we want a new constitution for Britain. A written, actual constitution. And when elected to Government, we will hold a people's congress; the congress will offer the option of independence to any region which democratically prefers it during the processes of that congress. The congress will be composed of many smaller congresses, each one focused either on a region or an area of policy. Each congress can fracture smaller if need be, and would hold both physical and virtual meetings over the course of a set period of time. And the decisions of the constitutional congress would, collectively, be final: the Government would be bound to act. This would provide Britain a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to correct many wrongs, and find new paths wherever her people desire. Even before that, our advocacy assemblies provide an open platform for various marginalised communities to express their priorities and concerns, and lead party policy in areas that impact them directly. This opens the way for more direct democracy in Britain, such as in the aforementioned planned constitutional congress. We already can provide an open democracy platform for local communities to have a clear say in policy affecting their region via our own constituency assemblies & we will work to amplify their voices in the national conversation by continuing to develop those assemblies across the UK. And we strongly believe everyone's vote should count \- which is why we support the implementation of proportional representation by the single transferable vote for general elections. It's also why we will reduce the voting age to 16\. Sixteen year olds are perfectly capable of expressing political opinions, and we want to hear them. We will seek to expand election laws around fairness on political reporting to more media, particularly to social media, and implement "purdah" style fairness rules all the time, not just during electoral campaigns \- and we will either create a new political ad body, to work in cooperation with the Electoral Commission, or more strongly empower the ASA with regards political ads instead, whichever is most prudent (as a matter of ongoing development of policy). We will seek federalisation of Britain into more fairly proportioned regions to ensure better, more granular democracy, furthering the devolution project started many years ago. We will hand more power to those regions to speak for themselves, as we have inside our own Party structure. Getting You from A to B We will "socialise" public transport \- a form of nationalisation, but putting control into the hands of communities instead of central Government \- by implementing regional and national expert executive management, with broad "policy direction" forged by ordinary people via direct, participatory democracy in regional "Public Transport Assemblies" (both regional and national). Control of the executives will be retained by communities via "recall" votes (available when the public judge the Public Transport Executives to have failed to follow policy direction) and control of pay by the participatory assembly governing transport policy, enabling the public to reward good performance as appropriate. In short, the public will set the direction & the transport executive authorities will steer where told. And public transport fares will vanish at the point of service. We will further make intense efforts to "green" public transport as rapidly as possible as part of efforts to combat the climate disaster, replacing systems as rapidly as possible wherever that meets the goal. Business & Tax Reform We will establish a "small business assembly", attended by individuals, not the businesses themselves, to consult on the best way forwards on issues such as business rates, and to provide continuing democratic feedback from the small business community to the Government. We will consider simplification of some tax systems, in consultation with stakeholders & the public. We will seek to reduce the tax burden on middle and low income families in favour of increased tax burden on the wealthy. We will evaluate ending British-controlled tax havens, with public consultation. Righting Historic International Wrongs (and Working On Modern Ones Too) We will create an "Empire: Truth and Reconciliation" assembly, inviting persons from and with ancestral links to the wider Commonwealth to contribute to a tapestry of truth developed by the wider victims of the British Empire, to serve as the foundation of a full apology to all the victims of the British Empire through history \- and to address the question of reparations; this would not be a single apology, but a sequence of apologies for all of the wrongs of Empire as identified by those most impacted by them. For initial international development budgeting, we will create a special commission to conduct a metastudy to investigate the best possible spend for the maximum return on mitigation of suffering, and then implement the recommendations of that commission. For subsequent foreign aid budgeting, we will consider banning lobbying for aid funds and implementation of a direct participatory national assembly for discussion of the best possible spend for the maximum return on mitigation of suffering. A New Defensive Focus We think that it is time to reorient the defensive forces to better meet non-traditional threats, such as the climate crisis and/or global water shortages. And we think that it is time that the armed forces were moved into the 21st century when it comes to safeguarding & mental healthcare. As such we would commission a root & branch examination of training techniques and their impact on human psychology, with a view to reorganising training in the armed forces to ensure a humanitarian-first defensive organisation fit both for operational use & with ethical individual outcomes. We believe in unilateral disarmament: after careful consultation to ensure minimal loss of available work for those impacted by the decision, we believe that Trident should ultimately be scrapped, given that NATO already provides ample nuclear defence and there is no actual "justifiable use scenario" for strategic nuclear weapons. We want to improve veteran care & enshrine in law a guarantee of provision of mental and physical health services on return to "civvie street".