Three Answers

(1) For too long has Britain been trying to hold on to the vestiges of its imperial legacy, masking our various military misadventures under the cloak of being the world’s policemen. The real genius of Britain is its ceaseless creative energy, its contradictory celebration of what has gone before and simultaneous desire to rip up the preceding order of things. This creativity can only be given space to breathe and intervene – it cannot be legislated (government ‘inspired’ creativity results inevitably in the banal and the anodyne).

Therefore, the government’s role is to remove the distorting fabric of performance-related pay and quantitative targets, the business case and analysis of return-on-investment that plagues every institutional endeavour. It must empower the bold and not seek to put universal metrics in place of inspired judgement. It must look after the corporeal needs of its subjects, ensuring they are healthy, housed and secure, instead of pursuing the aims of a rapacious capitalist boardroom-ocracy whose only aim is to capture the labour of everyone else in its matrix of financial performance and faux-displays of corporate social responsibility.
Thus, my government pledges to roll back the bureaucratic constitution of personhood that has so foolishly contrived to reconstitute each and every one of us as a nexus of data and paperwork, of tax returns and indexed KPIs. We shall welcome the ensuing chaos as a true celebration of the contradiction that is at the heart of this thing called Britishness.
(2)Democracy does not mean the periodic rubber-stamping of this or that faction (Labour / Conservative) of the business-friendly management-driven party that is in truth our only real choice for government. Democracy is about the ongoing holding to account of power – it is what happens between elections that matters, it is about engagements between the people and the government that makes the government uncomfortable – it is not about travelling roadshows focussed on “giving people a voice”. It is about rejecting the nihilism espoused by people like Russell Brand and taking seriously the business of how people’s life are controlled, interfered-with and subsumed under other interests. In short, democracy is vitally important, but real democracy is not what we, by and large, suppose it to be.
(3) those occupying the places of power, and those who inhabit its pernicious interstices, need to feel precarious and vulnerable, ready at any point to be radically held to account, to act in the knowledge that when they act venally in their own interest, the response will be dramatic, decisive and irreparable – not just the usual slap on the wrist and telling off by party whips or other organs of power.