Labour will only win the next election if we can show people that we’re on their side. And what better policy to do this than universal free school meals, which both help hard-pressed families and improve children’s health and learning.

The Labour party in Islington, Newham and County Durham have just introduced free school meals for all – the latter two partly funded by the Government. The results so far show that almost all children are now eating healthy school meals, instead of unhealthy (and expensive) packed lunches or, worse, just some snacks eaten on the way to school.

This not only helps in the battle against childhood obesity, teachers also report that well-fed children learn better and behave better too.

But don’t all children who can’t currently afford a school meal get one for free already? Scandalously, no. The income qualification for free meals is so low that many families under the official poverty line still do not qualify.

Asking families like this to pay for school meals, which cost around £300-a-year per child, is one of the most invidious elements of the poverty trap. Simply the cost of school meals is one of the main reasons it doesn’t pay for some parents to return to work. Breaking the poverty trap is vital to getting more people into work, quickening the pace of economic recovery.

Finally, many children who are eligible for free school meals currently do not claim them, because of the perceived stigma. Some schools even ask children claiming a free school meals to use a different queue. The pilots of universal free school meals show that almost all of the families who would be eligible for free school meals now do claim them as the system no longer singles them out.

Richard Watts is a Labour councillor in Islington

(a) What’s proposed

The whole financial flow of state funding for all political parties that have representatives in the House of Commons (as a proxy for overall current national legitimacy, and to exclude the BNP and other nasties) should be reversed, in order to promote local political activity and devolve power within parties to the ’grassroots’.

The total amount of state funding should be equivalent ONLY to the amount of funding provided indirectly to political parties in the forms of MP allowances, ministerial allowances etc. and, for example, funds spent by the BBC on allowing free party political broadcasts. There would therefore be no overall additional cost to the taxpayer. Indeed, a saving might be made.

The overall ‘pot’ of money should then be divided up at a local level e.g. CLP level/Tory association level on a pro-rata basis according to membership at the start of the financial year. It would be up to the parties themselves to debate and decide on what amount of this locally allocated resource should be allocated to national party levels.

If the Labour party want to involve trade unions in those discussions, that’s up to the Labour party etc. The important change would be that, as with the money – if formally lodged with local parties in the first instance – the power balance between centre and local is changed, in my view for the better.

All other types of donations would be permissable, but could only be made to local parties, and would not exceed a certain ratio of private donation to state funding (level to be agreed). Individual donors would only be able to donate to a limited number (let us say 3 for arguments sake) of local parties in this way, of which one would need to be the donor’s area of residence.

Unions would abide by the same rules, with each union branch counting as an individual donor. There would be an expectation that the ratios of state to donor funding permissable would fall over the first few years, as the money is replaced my membership fees in rejuvenated local parties (see below).

(b) Rationale and consequences

The reversal of financial flows, as set out briefly would do two main things.

First, and important enough in the current context of poor public opinion of both MPs and national level political parties, it would make them much more accountable to the local parties that selected them to stand for office (whether parliamentary or intra-party) in the first place.

For example, the money that used to go straight to their MP expenses bank accounts to fund e.g. local offices, local staff as well as their day-to-day personal expenses will be lodged, alongside any other matching funds, with the local party. The MP will need to justify her/his claim to a section of the overall local party ‘pot’, perhaps by setting out a ‘business plan’ for an appropriate period and justifying costs.

In most cases, local parties are going to want an MP who does plenty of casework and local representation, as well as ‘performing’ for them in parliament as they want them to, and will provide a reasonable budget for this, including an OK place to live in London during the week and that kind of thing.

If the MP can justify 1st class travel on the train, for example, because it allows them to get more work done, then that’s fine. If not, that’s fine too. If the local party thinks it might be a better idea if the MP’s office and the local party office functions should be merged to rationalise stuff, then they’ll have the final say.

Equally, national level parties will have to seek money from local parties to carry out their functions. Thus, for example, if the national party wanted to spend money on TV adverts, they’d have to seek the money for it from local parties, probably via (revitalised) party conferences. Local parties might decide instead to approve alternative plans to set up Obama-style IT-based networks, and that would be up to them.

That’s all very well, and all done with the same money as was spent before, just with the decision-making power totally reversed by ‘statute’.

Cynical readers will already however have spotted that, while it’s all very well to devolve power to local parties, this is hardly the same as devolving to local people; local parties are, after all, weak structures, peopled if they are peopled at all by self-selecting, self-referential nobodies with few brain cells to rub together, will run the argument. This argument will come, not least, from party HQs themselves desperate to retain the status quo of the power and money structure, and who are distrustful of the capacity of the ‘foot soldier’ activists.

That, after all, is what is writ large in both main parties’ ’motivational’ literature, and in the many central government documents, influenced by the policy wonks at HQ or at Downing Street – the view that local parties are a thing of the past, that local politics can safely be done away with in favour of technocratic management of CLPs/Tory associations, where the only expectations are lip service to policy reviews and, more important, to campaigning with HQ-sanctioned leaflets, HQ-sanctioned IT set-ups which alienate people ‘on the doorstep’ because they’ve been created by people who’ve never been ‘on the doorstep and don’t realise asking questions of people while ticking off their answers on a pre-arranged coded list is not the same as talking to people like they are people.

The point is that, with a reversal of the financial flow, with what a local party gets dependent on their membership, local parties will suddenly become different beasts.

With money comes the capacity to ‘do stuff’, and combined with a new motivation within existing membership to draw in members, there would almost certainly be a rapid rise in membership, as people actually start to see a point – a decision making point – to being in their party of choice.

They suddenly get not just the opportunity to decide, as a member, on how the MP should use their money (or whether to give them any at all), but also to decide, for example, on whether the party, and by newly re-established link, the area as a whole, will be best served by the state funding going into a dozen leaflets, or into a playscheme the Council won’t pay for.

And suddenly, the way opens up for parties to become mass parties again. At local level, people will engage because engagement matters, and it won’t be long before there is a much smaller distinction between ‘the party’ and the people those parties have, rhetorically, at least, been set up to serve.

As set out above, as membership increases in this way, so will the opportunity to legislate on the permitted ratio of private donations to local funding, as the membership fee total will be counted into this whole. As membership grows therefore, so does democratic entitlement, whereby you don’t have to be called Ashcroft to have your say on what your party does with the cash.

In terms of the Labour party, the obvious additional opportunities will lie in the possibility of renewing the link with trade unions, via membership fees, and in some cases starting even to develop the local party organically as the ‘workers’ council’ in the way aspired to years ago but never really attained because of the very constraints on power, from above, that I have set out above.

Of course, I don’t see the ‘powers-that-be’ leaping up and down with joy at the thought of having their money removed and given to someone else to decide how they might spend it if they behave themselves, but I’d like to see a challenge laid down to them.

The challenge is best in question form, and reflects in part this useful critique of ‘freedom’ (and allied concepts) set out by Dave at Though Cowards Flinch.

It goes:

‘So what do you have against a proposal to actually do what, in paper after paper after speech after speech after speech you have said you want to do – to empower people?

‘What do you have against a proposal to hand over power in a way which does not cost more money, and which comes without any of the financial and legal hang-ups that come when you try to ‘empower communities’ through supposedly allowing them influence on local public policy and local public spending, but in tautologous reality only allows them to do this if they tick YOUR boxes about what communities are, how they should behave, and how they should spend the money (another post to follow from me on the discursive complexities of how ‘empowerment’ is ‘disempowering’)?

‘What do you have against a real ‘freedom’ – freedom to build parties anew, to build democracy? Are you scared of the power you’ll lose, or are you with us?’

Paul Cotterill is the leader of the Labour Group on West Lancashire Borough Council

During the eighties a great number of public assets were sold off, ostensibly with two aims in mind. The choice agenda and the share-owning democracy were given as reasons, although selling the state silver to fund tax cuts was the view among the cynical.

The creation of a share-owning democracy never really happened. It is true enough that there was a clamour when shares were first floated, but these were soon scooped up by the big fish. A quick buck for the small investor, a longer-term gain for the corporate investors, and a loss for tax-payers insofar that what was once owned by us all was (and still is) bought up, often by foreign investors.

Was the choice agenda served? For some industries the answer is undoubtedly yes. Telecommunications was liberated, although superseded by mobile communications. Power (electricity and gas) supply also gives choice, as well as huge profits (creating a call for windfall taxes, unnecessary if still publicly owned).

There were sell-offs that did nothing for the choice agenda. Railways and water are two obvious examples.

Try as I might, when I visit my local railway station I have a choice of one. That railway privatisation has failed to deliver choice is clear, that there are other manifest failures and that the railway companies are in receipt of large subsidies is also a given.

To bring the railways back into public ownership is easily and cheaply achieved. Non-renewal of franchises as and when they come about is a pain-free way to bring this back into public ownership. With climate change very much on the agenda, public transport should be playing a key role in this. I am far from certain that private profit has a role here, and I am sure that a state-funded monopoly is not progressive.

Water supply and sewage disposal are also a utility where choice is non-existent. This vital utility should not be at the mercy of the market. This is another case of a monopoly handed over with little if any discernible improvement to the customer.

Where real choice is created, and where market forces can be proved to deliver improvement, then there is an argument for the sell-offs. Neither applies to railways and water, and the state has a role to play here.

Julian Ware-Lane, Labour PPC for Castle Point

Every major decision made at any level of government should be subject to potential veto by an individual or small group charged exclusively with having regard to the interests of the future inhabitants of this, our one and only planetary home.

The name I think it natural to invest these proposed guarantors of the future with is guardians… n.b. This proposal is less ‘visionary’ (i.e. unrealistic) than it might sound; Hungary has already adopted a somewhat similar proposal, though with less powers.

Road user charges for lorries in Britain, which some EU countries have already successfully introduced but the UK has abandoned as being ‘too difficult’. Such a charge could raise a very large amount of money, which could be spent, among other things, on the following two extremely worthwhile causes:

1. Introduce an environmental community programme, providing useful and satisfying work in undertaking local environmental improvements to communities across the country. In most of our communities there are small jobs which need doing which would improve our local environment and make life more pleasant, safe and worthwhile.

It’s a matter of for example turning a derelict site into an orchard, creating new allotments, renovating an unused building to create a community centre, making small improvements to help cyclists or building a better access path to an area of countryside. And in a recession we have people who unhappily do not have jobs.

So we should allow local authorities to bring the jobless and the opportunities together, and involve communities in small projects, which are usually job-rich, and which make simple and practical improvements. This would in effect be a modern ‘Green New Deal’ version of Roosevelt’s ‘Civilian Conservation Corps’.

2. All derivative products and other exotic financial instruments should be subject to official inspection by the Financial Services Authority. Only those approved would be permitted to be traded. Anyone trying to circumvent the rules by going offshore or on to the internet would face ‘negative enforcement’ – their contracts would be unenforced and unenforceable in law.

1) Citizen MPs
• Introduce proposals for a new class of MPs to be known as Citizen MPs.
• Citizen MPs to be selected at random, as with jury service (except it would be harder to get out of becoming a Citizen MP). I.e. there would be a fair geographical spread and social/age representation.
• Each Citizen MP would serve for 12 months. They would constitute a third of both Houses in Parliament. There would perhaps be 400-500 per year from all over the country, thus meaning that each major town would be likely to be represented by their own Citizen MP.
• Their presence in Parliament would weaken the power of the Whips. In order to win votes, the Government would need to convince these ‘lay folk’ of the rectitude of their policy, thereby enhancing the importance of debates in the chamber.
• The concept of Citizen MPs could be allied to a broader Government move to reinvigorate a sense that citizens have rights and responsibilities. Citizen MPs could be part of a wider move towards elected Crown Prosecutors, directly-elected mayors and other public officials. The concept of jury-style selection of representatives could be extended to local councils.

2) ‘Youthstart’ centres
• A national network of staffed centres for young people of secondary school age.
• To be billed as the next phase of the highly successful and popular post-1997 Surestart scheme.
• Each Youthstart centre to be well-funded and well-designed (perhaps involving leading architects such as Lord Rogers or Lord Foster)
• To be rolled out in deprived areas first, then nationally in time, with the aim of having one in each ward.
• Tied in with a new emphasis on youth work becoming a discipline in itself, with a new qualification that graduates / 6th form-leavers can obtain on-the-job (thereby giving employment to young people).
• To be a secular, adult-supervised, inclusive space for young people with social facilities such as non-alcoholic cafés/music-making/sports facilities, etc.
• Facilities and information on training, careers, etc to be available.
• Young people to be closely involved in the management.
• Local businesses/armed forces/police/high profile individuals to have the opportunity to sponsor, become involved in management, thereby reducing costs and familiarising young people with business/working life.
• Possibly explicitly funded by downgrading or scrapping Trident or a windfall tax on banks/energy companies which make excessive profits.

3) Volunteering
• All graduates to be offered a 25% reduction in their student loan repayments if they commit to and complete a minimum of 2 years of mentoring children in schools in deprived areas.
• Tax incentives for people to volunteer in their communities. People could receive a 1 per cent income tax rebate if they volunteered for two hours or more per week.

4) A Royal Commission on Housing

• To investigate how Government policy can ensure that everybody lives in a decent home, be that rented, private or social housing.
• To investigate key issues associated with housing such as how to increase the supply of housing (both private and social); how and whether to do more to enable young people to buy property or rent in rural communities they grew up in; how and whether to build communities on Green Belt land; to investigate best practice from abroad; whether we could move away from the UK’s focus on home ownership as preferable to quality rented accommodation.

5) The social mobility revolution
• Given that social mobility has probably got worse since 1997, the party should now, explicitly say that we stand for advancing social mobility, meritocracy and equality of opportunity. Possible policies:
• An NHS-style target to reduce average class sizes over time to near those of private schools.
• Punitive taxes on private education.
• Increase teachers’ salaries in line with other senior professions while simultaneously tightening the qualifications criteria for becoming a teacher – thereby enhancing the status of teachers in society.
• Set indicative targets for each major profession, the armed forces, business and other organisations of power and influence for increasing the representation of state school-educated people in their ranks.
• Establish a Social Mobility Commission to monitor the above, and report directly to the PM on progress.

John Slinger

Government should commit to ensuring that all Government jobs, and those with Government contractors, are offered on a part time or flexible basis.

Kate Bell

1. Improved Finances: Half national debt by 2014 and get the public finances in order.

2. Improved Future: Industrial activism coupled with investment in skills, education and in work training to help people and companies through the recession.

3. Improved Public Services: Efficient public services ensuring there are no fewer teachers, doctors, nurses and police officers under a Fourth Term Labour Government.

4. Improved Communities: Place the police at the Heart of their Communities, ensure more convictions in a reformed court system and invest in opportunities for young people.

5. Improved Governance: Votes at 16, House of Lords Reform, Electoral Reform, Mayors for Local Authorities and ward devolution to local councillors.

Richard Angell

My idea for the Progressive manifesto is a fairer funding system for university tuition. This would be achieved by introducing a graduate tax so that essentially students contributions were relevent to what they financially gained from their degrees.

Jack Storry

1. Implement a new ‘social responsibility levy’ on bonuses for those salaried over £200k annually, using the proceeds to create a PAYE Reward Fund to give a little back to the vast majority of the working population who pay their fair share of taxes upfront through PAYE.

2. Remove the anomalous £10 automatic Master’s degree awarded to Oxbridge graduates when the rest of the academic population have to work and study for at least a year for their MA.

3. Free higher education tuition for UK armed forces veterans, paid for by ending charitable status for private fee-paying schools.

4. Democratise NHS Primary Care Trust non-executive appointments by transferring responsibility for appointment from Secretary of State to the elected local authority.

5. Introduce a public right to table propositions before the Commons which must be debated and voted on if 5% public petition threshold is achieved.

Chris Leslie

With parliament coming back, a general election looming and the Copenhagen climate summit just weeks away, this is the time for rhetoric to stop and action to start. That’s why we’ve written this manifesto. The policies show that we can protect the environment while also protecting our economy. We want all politicans to steal our policies.

By using the big economic levers we can have sustainable recovery, create green jobs and cut emissions. But for this to happen politicans need to set aside short term party politics and work together to tackle the really important issues. And frankly, if any political party doesn’t adopt these policies, we should be asking them why not?

Zero carbon. Guarantee that emissions from the UK power sector will be near zero by 2030, as recommended by the UK government’s Committee on Climate Change.

Cut coal. Immediately rule out all emissions from new coal-fired power stations, preventing any new unabated or partially abated coal plants.

Cut emissions 42% by 2020. Commit Britain to meeting the bolder emissions target recommended by the Committee on Climate Change.

Insulate Britain. Drastically cut energy wastage by retrofitting all existing buildings and ensuring all new buildings meet zero-emission standards.

Fair financing. Commit to help pay for low carbon development in developing countries, to stop deforestation and to protect the world’s poorest people from the impacts of climate change.

Repower Britain. Commit to ensuring that at least 15% of the UK’s total energy (including heat, electricity and transport) comes from renewables by 2020.

Rewire Britain. Ensure that the electricity grid is upgraded to harness wind power and build smart local grids to improve communities’ ability to generate their own clean energy.

Curb aviation. Stop all airport expansion, including Heathrow’s proposed third runway.

Invest in Britain. Properly fund reseach and development, develop new training programmes and support the manufacturing supply chain to help Britain compete in the global low carbon economy.

Bank on green. Set up a green infrastructure bank that would lend to major low carbon projects and harness the expertise of the financial sector.

Issue green bonds. Give investors and savers a secure new way to help fund green projects through government backed bonds.

Reform taxation. Refocus taxation onto pollution so that it can support new green industries and drive down emissions while strengthening the UK’s finances

The International Energy Agency and leading economists agree that failure to act now will lead to economic as well as environmental disaster. However, if Britain’s political parties can work together to put these policies into practice, they can make Britain competitive in a low carbon world and, most importantly, enable us to play our part in stopping climate change.