Spotlight Manifesto Consultation.

With May elections looming and Your Party struggling to get off the starting block, I’ve been considering what what Spotlight could do to help get things back on track for the left. The first thing I know we can do is to help put together a socialist manifesto – a list of policies that the left can unite around. Having our own socialist manifesto makes it easier on Your Party proto-branches, who might be considering who they’re going to endorse for the upcoming local elections, as it allows them to select candidates who more closely align with their values.

I’ve already made a start and pooled together policy ideas from various left sources, including the All-London Delegate Assembly 12 point Manifesto, The Labour Party 2019 Manifesto, and various contributions from comrades in the Spotlight Your Party Network WhatsApp group. I’m now inviting comrades to provide feedback. Join the debate in the Spotlight Your Party Network WhatsApp group – https://chat.whatsapp.com/L4EG4xsrfJaIIGOBx2uWrt – to propose changes, expand on what we already have and/or suggest any new policy ideas we may have missed.

SPOTLIGHT MANIFESTO (FIRST DRAFT)

**This is a live consult. All updates will be high lighted in red**

Defence, Policing & Security

• Stop all wars and introduce a complete arms embargo on all countries engaged in human rights abuses, and end all military cooperation
• Military action should be a last resort and reserved for defensive purposes, military spending should be reduced and we should associate and cooperate with campaigns and other organisations that share these aims (e.g. CND).
• Defence spending has increased by £2 billion for the 2025/26 financial year (up from £60.2 billion in 2024/25 to £62.2 billion) and is expected to increase to £73.5 billion by 2028/29. This is mostly for “investment spending” (equipment, vehicles and weapons, as opposed to day-to-day running and maintenance). This suggests a trajectory toward greater militarisation and greater reliance on the arms industry and arms trade for economic growth. We should withdraw from NATO and redirect funds to supporting public services (like Health, housing, education, and environment) and growth in a greener economy so we can reduce our reliance of oil & gas, which, ironically, is what most wars are fought over.
• Your Party will revoke all agreements that require the UK to host foreign military bases on UK soil and UK territories, and the UK will no longer operate British Military bases overseas, including on UK territories. 
• Ditch digital surveillance – No to ID cards and facial recognition. No to state monitoring of ordinary people, online and offline, simply for holding legitimate political views that they don’t agree with.
• Legislate to protect free speech and our human right to peaceful protest, and to stop police abuse of powers.
• Stop disproportionate spending of public money on UK Trade and Investment Defence and Security Exports to promote and sell wares from the global arms trade to purchasers including public money spent on hosting global arms fairs. Redirect investment into renewable energy and social security spending that makes us truly secure from the effects of climate change and the effects of global capitalism
• Stop-and-search should not be a tool that police officers can use arbitrarily. It must be used proportionately and only be legitimately used when based on ‘credible’ intelligence.
• Review the circumstances requiring judicial warrants. A judicial warrant in the UK is a legal document issued by a magistrate, judge, or Judicial Commissioner, authorizing law enforcement to take specific actions that would otherwise violate privacy, such as conducting arrests, searching premises, or seizing evidence. 
• Review the Prevent programme.
• Overhaul cybersecurity by creating a co-ordinating minister and regular reviews of cyber-readiness, and review role and remit of the National Cyber Security Centre to determine whether it should be given powers as an auditing body.
• Review structures and roles of the National Crime Agency. The primary role of the National Crime Agency (NCA) has been to lead the UK’s fight against serious and organised crime, protecting the public by targeting criminals who pose the highest risk. It operates as an intelligence-led agency, focusing on disrupting transnational, national, and regional criminal networks.
• Bring PFI prisons back in-house and no new private prisons.
• Reunify probation and guarantee a publicly run, locally accountable probation service.
• Recruit hundreds of new community lawyers, promote public legal education and build an expanded network of law centres
• Ensure legal aid for inquests into deaths in state custody and the preparation of judicial review cases
• Establish public inquiries into historical injustices including blacklisting and Orgreave.
• Require judicial warrants for undercover operations and retain the Mitting Inquiry into undercover policing.
• Enforce a legal duty of care to protect our children online, impose fines on companies that fail on online abuse and empower the public with a Charter of Digital Rights.
• British nuclear test veterans and their families, who allege severe health issues from 1950s radiation exposure have still not been provided specific dedicated compensation. Pay a lump sum of £50,000 to each surviving British nuclear-test veteran.
•  Introduce a War Powers Act to ensure that no Prime Minister can bypass parliament to commit to conventional military action.
• Implement every single recommendation of the Chilcot Inquiry.

Palestine

• Your Party recognises the difference between Zionism and Judaism. We recognise that not every Jew is a Zionist and not every Zionist is Jewish. We understand that Zionism is an ideology that asserts the rights of one specific religious group, over another, through exclusive political domination, subjugation and occupation, of land and people, and we recognise that this is racial discrimination. Your Party therefore acknowledges, unequivocally, that Zionism is racism and pledges to confront it without exception.
• Immediately reverse the proscription of Palestine Action, apologise for the horrendous treatment of activists who had been jailed without charge, abused while in jail and had their human rights violated, and pay them reparations.
• End all trade and diplomatic ties to Israel until they accept a single state solution that meets the approval of the people of Palestine.
• Any British citizen who has chosen to travel abroad to go fight for the IDF will be immediately detained on their return, stripped of their British citizenship and brought up on charges of either directly engaging in, or being complicit in, human rights abuses and/or genocide.

Taxes & Economics

• Introduce emergency legislation to stop the flight of capital by nationalising banks
• Introduce the Wealth Tax
• Give councils power to adjust tax bands and a small amount of borrowing power.
• Lower council taxes and service charges: no rash raiding of reserves. Raising revenue by council tax hits the working class and poor disproportionately.
• Replace the existing Council tax system with a fairer Land Value Tax (LVT)
• Review tax and pension changes implemented by the Tory government
• Close tax loopholes enjoyed by elite private schools and ask the Social Justice Commission to advise on integrating private schools.
• Introduce a windfall tax on oil companies
• Tax multinationals, including tech giants, and use the funds to pay for British Broadband operating costs.
• Boycott corporate tax evaders and unscrupulous for-profit public service providers e.g. Virgin Care, Serco, G4S
• Undertake a review of the financial system to allow a reframing of how we view national and local authority public debt – Quantitative Easing for people and not just the banks – allow money creation for UK infrastructure projects.

Nationalisation & Job Creation

• Nationalise energy (this would cost roughly £2.8 billion so we can fund this by scrapping trident which costs roughly £3 billion
• Move to net zero by building several nuclear power stations, each of which produces a gigawatt of power each year (roughly) and can provide huge employment opportunities.
• Generate jobs through public ownership of utilities, transport, and key infrastructure, reinvesting profits into further expansion to create more jobs and improve services. Investment in skills, green manufacturing and green energy, like solar, wind farms and tidal energy, which will also create more well-paid jobs.
• Make all bus rides free. Expropriate the bus firms, place them under workers’ control. Improve bus links to hospitals. In London, we propose to equalise drivers’ pay with tube workers’ pay.
• Take ownership of water companies or tax big corporations heavily for polluting our water ways.
• Bring construction apprentice schemes under trade union control, and nationalise the big construction monopolies under workers’ control.
• Make bursaries available to women, BAME people, care leavers, ex-armed forces personnel and people with disabilities to encourage them to take up climate apprenticeships.
• As part of the program to improve the National Health Service, we will establish a generic drug company and aim to increase pharmaceutical jobs in the UK.
• Nationalise all the National Trust and English Heritage stately homes (former homes of the aristocracy and symbols of our past exploitation and subjugation) and turn them into NHS convalescent homes, physio rehabs, learning disability day centres, homeless outreach, emergency accommodation and welfare centres.

Workers’ Rights

• Repeal all of the anti-trade union legislation
• Move from ‘reasonable adjustments’ to ‘necessary requirements’ for disabled employees
• Reverse cuts to Access to Work and supported employment schemes and increase uptake
• Have policy making for support at work for disabled people led and shaped by disabled people not by government and big business leaders as in the recent Mayfield review.
• Deliver year-on-year above-inflation pay rises for public sector jobs.

Housing

• Reuse the labour 2019 manifesto pledge of nationalising housing and ending rough sleeping. Homes that are not lived in for more than a year (to reset you must spend a month permanent residency at this house) are able to be repossessed by the government with a half reimbursement of the cost of the house.
• A large scale programme of requisition of industry and land.
• Scrap the right to buy, freeze council rents, improve tenancy rights, stopping social housing providers from selling properties on the open market and build more council housing.
• Outlaw unfair evictions
• Expand the direct labour organisation (Council-run construction and maintenance department) and build more council housing.
• Increase housebuilding to an annual rate of at least 150,000 council and social homes per year by the end of the parliament.
• Review commissioning of adequate supported housing provision for disabled people, domestic abuse victims and mental health under a new supported housing regulator and register
• New minimum accessibility standards for new builds and public buildings – legal requirements of accessibility to public buildings and incentives for private sector
• Undertake a full review of building safety regulations, commission an overhaul of all publicly owned properties to ensure they meet safety standards and legislate to ensure all private landlords also make the required changes to bring their properties up to the latest safety standards.

Health & Welfare

• Return to full public ownership of the NHS and bring GP, Dental and Opthalmic services and the care sector under the same umbrella.
• Carer’s allowance should not end when a parent or carer reaches retirement age
• Make accessibility and inclusivity for disabled people a legal requirement for larger companies and support smaller businesses to make changes through a government funded initiative
• Commit to infrastructure improvements and legislation to make our public spaces more accessible for the disabled: toilets, no pavement parking, reducing sensory overload within public environments etc
• No more car-parking charges in hospitals (for both patients and staff) and, where needed, invest in expanding parking facilities.
• As well as providing free bus services with improved links to hospitals, we will provide additional support for people who are not able bodied and are therefore unable to use the bus service. We propose offering a subsidised Taxi service that can collect patients from home, drop them at the hospital entrance and then collect them from the entrance and return them back home. This would be an alternative to the traditional  inhouse service that would require investment in a fleet of vehicles that need to be maintained and insured, and replaced every few years (plus the added cost of hiring drivers). Also, with an inhouse service there’s the question of availability and having to pre-book whereas, with a taxi, you can call them up the same day (no pre-booking required).
• Get rid of Universal Credit and let’s have a proper review of the benefits system so we can prioritise a person’s need over cost cutting measures.
• Introduce ‘Right to food’, a publicly funded food system, grounded in living wages and social security, and democratic food governance, that ensures universal free school meals, free nutritious foods delivered to elderly, fair pay for community food workers, open access to emergency food, and community control over food environments and public land so that food justice, based on care, replaces reliance on charity and multinational food corporates who make our communities sick.
• Make women’s sanitary products free.
• Free abortion and contraception on demand.
• Commit to free gender-affirming healthcare.
• Increased funding for mental health services. Improve access to, and significantly reduce waiting times for, mental health diagnostic capabilities and service provisions, across the UK.
• Overhaul of the pharmaceutical sector to lower costs, establish a state-owned generic drugs company to manufacturer to produce generic, affordable versions of essential, high-cost medicines and the use of Crown Use licensing to override patents on high-priced medicines and allow the production of cheaper generic alternatives if companies refuse to set fair prices.
• Abolishing all prescription charges in England
• Roll out pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medication to prevent HIV
• Resisting patent extensions and changing the incentives to ensure public research funding benefits public health rather than just private profit.
• Create a National Care Service and completion of a full review and recommendations for long-term sustainable funding of the care sector. This should be led by workers, service users and their relatives / carers to improve the outcomes of meeting individual support needs, independent living, community integration and equality of rights and opportunity for disabled and elderly people and based on the social model of disability not purely medical and health based
• Set up a task forces led by disabled people and minorities themselves to address health inequalities between the general population and these groups
• Reverse the discriminatory earned settlement proceedings and access to essential benefits being linked to immigration status
• More safe legal routes to claim asylum – abolish the harmful and ineffective ‘one in one out’ policy – reverse the expansion of harsh detention conditions and increased sanctions to asylum seekers – allow them support to work and live on a living wage

Education & Child Welfare

• Education for life, abolish tuition fees and reinstate grants.
• Instead of closing schools and sacking staff, cut class sizes and raise school budgets, especially for SEND and SEMH provision. Then place them under the control of educators, parents and students.
• Bring Academies back under local authority – and working class – control.
• Rebuild Youth Clubs and bring them up to date with creative and recreational technology, under the supervision of young people.
• To break the hold of criminal gangs over young people and stop police harassment of youth, legalise drugs under a state monopoly, and deliver healthcare and enhanced mental health support and guidance to vulnerable young people.
• Introduce legislation to require social media companies to implement changes and added protections for vulnerable children, like removing algorithms that feed them unsavoury content, clamping down on abusive and misogynistic content creators and introducing algorithms that could actually help identify potential groomers.
• Undertake a review of education system to include and support neurodiversity at all levels – in addition to ‘special budgets and special needs’ – to improve inclusion and accessibility.
• Review of curriculum and activities in schools to positively promote rights and inclusion for all groups.
• Implement recommendations of the Survivors Trust’s National Inquiry into Childhood Sexual Abuse without delay.

Government restructure

• Clean up politics and make all forms of lobbying and second jobs for MP’s illegal (unless it’s a professional job that they had before they became an MP, such as a medical or teaching professional, for example).
• Get rid of the House of Lords and replace it with…
  a) Another elected chamber,
  b) A sortitioned second chamber
  c) An appointed apolitical scrutiny panel of professionals who are experts in their respective fields (medical, care work, scientific, construction, agricultural, industry, education, transport etc), who can check over any bills or amendments for flaws or contradictions.
• Abolish the Monarchy, the Privy Council, Star Chamber, honours system (Order of the Garter) etc and all feudal relics which retain influence over the lives of working class people. This includes a system of land tenure which essentially dates back to 1066.
• Your Party will work towards the dissolution of the current undemocratic parliamentary system of government which represents a veil, behind which a tiny elite own the nation’s wealth and use it to entrench their power. It will be replaced by a grassroots system of democracy in which working class people own the wealth of the country and decide how that wealth is distributed to meet need.

Local Councils

• Introduce ‘No – Cuts’ People’s Budgets, based on real needs arising from popular assemblies and meetings with unions, tenants and community organisations.
• Boycott and Divest from any companies tied to countries engaged in human rights abuses, or theft of land and/or resources, or occupation, or genocide, or apartheid.
• No job cuts or downgrading – real pay rises and a 4-day week. We need more council jobs and decent pay to deliver better services and cut unemployment.
• To help reduce pollution, and potentially make our cities carbon negative, we need to expand parks, allotments & wild areas, introduce more pedestrianisation, boost recycling services and introduce/retain congestion charges. We should also introduce municipal car, bike and scooter hire schemes and improve infrastructure for cyclists to encourage more people to cycle, such as building more bicycle lock-ups in neighbourhoods (most people don’t have garages so storing a bicycle is a barrier), and take over water companies so that they can be brought under workers’ and consumers’ control.
• Introduce free council childcare, canteen and laundry facilities for all.
• Create cross-disciplinary anti-austerity research and resources group on the concept of preventative support – to create evidence on how spending more money on early intervention and prevention reduces future costs across all public services
• Create and establish a mechanism that allows people to hold their local authority to account for failures in implementation of legislation, without the need for a judicial review.

Fighting fascism, racism, misogyny, abuse and systemic injustice

• Demand full equality for all!
• Introduce anti-racist education in workplaces, estates, schools and colleges.
• Sack or evict those who persist in racist abuse or attacks.
• Support Black, Jewish, Muslim and ethnic minority self-defence – and stewarding of anti-racist events.
• Block immigration raids and deportations.
• Defend migrants, black and Asian people, LGBT people and women against illegal harassment and attacks from far-right gangs and the state.
• Assert our lawful rights to march and meet by convening and training an organisation of stewards dedicated to our legal, digital and physical defence, as well as rapid response networks.
• Legislate for stronger action against people who attack, and institutions who punish, the LGBT+ community.
• Overturn the Supreme Court ruling – Trans women are women. Respect the right to self-identity and for people to use the public facilities that align with their gender identity.
• Introduce legislation to update the current laws around gender identity, that will respect the right to self-identify
• All councils should be required to run local facilities with Trans inclusive policies.
• Introduce equal pay for work of equal value.
• Better police training on domestic abuse, offences arising from coercive control and historical abuses
• Sack misogynist and racist police officers and staff.
• Disbar misogynist and racist legal professionals.
• Set up and support a national movement of working-class women to challenge misogyny online, at work, and in the home.
• Boost funds to refuge and protection services for all victims of abuse.
• Respect the recent UN resolution and offer a formal apology for the trans-atlantic slave trade as well as other crimes during the colonial period and work towards reparatory justice, which should include the return of stolen goods.
• Ensure that black and Asian soldiers who fought in Britain’s colonial armies receive a full apology and look at ways to compensate them for the discriminatory demob payments they received compared to their white counterparts.
• Implement Isabelles Law to establish a National Police Misconduct Body and a public misconduct register.
• Provide support services and create facilities for victims failed by police, as a result of breaches of the Victims Code, to enable them to seek reparations for damages in law.
• Improve accessibility to the court system for refugees, the disabled, migrants and for minoritised victims. We should be commissioning and funding more ‘by and for’ services and increasing provisions for children and families, and those with no recourse to public funds
• There should be a legal requirement that provides access to Individual Sexual Violence Advocates, and Independent Domestic Violence Advocates, and therapeutic support, within an appropriate time frame, and for police to have minimum training standards on trauma and on the complex needs of these groups.
• Bring in full decriminalisation of sex work – accompanied by stronger protections and support for trafficking and abuse victims in support services. Provide victims with access to benefits and healthcare and police liaison.
• Set up a task force, led by those with direct experience of working with victims, to research and address reasons why people enter the sex industry in order to better advocate for changes to policies on poverty and inequality. They can then request the support required to create resources and support groups (led by the above) to support those wishing to retrain or exit (as done by National Ugly Mugs).
• Set up a firewall to prevent the sharing of details (of sex workers and migrant workers) with immigration enforcement, and other authorities, when victims seek healthcare and social support.
• Appoint a Commissioner for Violence against Women and Girls, establish an independent review into shamefully low rape prosecution rates, establish a National Refuge Fund, ensure financial stability for rape crisis centres, reintroduce a Domestic Abuse Bill, improve the safety of the family court system for domestic violence victims and prohibit their cross-examination by their abuser.

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