Reddit mentions of The Plan: Twelve months to renew Britain

Carswell wrote a book called The Plan.

>The common market and the single market are synonymous.

No. No. No. No. No.

Very different things, and represent very different things.

>Well, they aren't, but in the eyes of the EU they are -

Then your eyes are wrong. A common market is very different to a single market.

A common market still exists and the EU has one with many both non-EU countries in Europe and on the borders of Europe.

The common market and single market both exist and are existing at the same time. Supporting a common market literally means leaving the single market and its freedom of movement for labour.

It is nonsensical to argue that access to a common market can only exist with freedom of movement of people, because that is the thing among other that differentiates between what is a common market and what is a single market.

>Are you sure you know what he's advocating here?

Yes. He spells it out quite clearly in his book.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Plan-Twelve-months-Britain/dp/0955979900

>He speaks favourably of both Norway and Switzerland

And Macedonia, as examples of how the EU has trade relations right across Europe and not just constrained by being in the EU, to lend credibility that they're not interested in not having a UK trade deal. He argues for the necessity for the UK to be able to negotiate its own free trade deals. Switzerland was in EFTA for 40 years before it decided to negotiate its own free movement of people deal and put it to a vote, for eight years they were in a European Free Trade Area that had access to a single market, formed by Maastricht, without any free movement of people.

If he says "Common Market" he does not mean "Single Market", however synonymous you like to think of them whilst admitting they're different things.

>Misinformation after all works both ways.

Yes, it does. And when I see it working the other way I'll correct them too.

But you are wrong.

Especially when you even accept it, when your own response's first line is,

"The common market and the single market
are synonymous. Well, they aren't, but in the
eyes of the EU they are"

He and Daniel Hannan have certainly worked closely together in the past - they co-authored "The Plan".

Bit wishy-washy at times although he did contribute to The Plan with Carswell, not sure how much though.

To the best of my knowledge no manifesto says it.

Farage did however.

UKIP's first MP, Douglas Carswell, wrote an entire fucking book on privatising the NHS.

Paul Nuttall, a UKIP MEP and UKIP vice-chair, wrote on his website that, “I would argue that the very existence of the NHS stifles competition, and as competition drives quality and choice, innovation and improvements are restricted. Therefore, I believe, as long as the NHS is the ‘sacred cow’ of British politics, the longer the British people will suffer with a second-rate health service.”

And of course, your infamous 2010 Manifesto. But I'm sure that totally doesn't represent the views of the party even though Farage was the leader immediately before the election, immediately after the election and the most famous party figure throughout the election.

>don't realise that when guys like Carswell and Hannan

You should read their manifesto The Plan: Twelve months to renew Britain. Central to their idea of freedom is radical decentralised democracy. There is a lot to like in it even for the left.

>I'm intrigued by this, do you have anything more concrete in terms of how you would hope it would work? My personal view is that we should ban the concept of parties from the electoral process, but leave the structures and processes essentially unchanged.

The 'market mechanism', as I see it at present, is that MPs owe their future careers to the party machine, so they become lobby-fodder. If however they have a 'personal' mandate, having won selection in a competitive primary, I think the party machine has less ability to threaten them, while the prospect of future candidate selection primaries mean that they know they will have to face their electorates with the record of their actions, and should 'keep them honest'. They will act as independents, rather than cyphers.

There was an interesting article in The Guardian recently:

> Since MPs were first paid in 1911, just two governments have fallen as a result of parliamentary votes: Ramsay MacDonald's first Labour government in 1924 - in any case a minority administration living on suffrance - and James Callaghan's Labour government in 1979, which had seen its Commons majority in effect evaporate.

>Now go back a hundred years in the opposite direction from 1911, and recall that every British government between 1837 and 1874 fell following a Commons vote. That happened again in 1886 and 1895. Political conditions were different, and politicians drawn from a narrow elite. All the same, there really was a golden age of parliamentary government, when the Commons was the master of the ministry - rather than the other way round, as now. And that was connected with the fact that for most MPs politics was not a "job" that they lived in dread of losing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/25/iraq-war-jacqui-smith-mps

There's a old interview with Douglas Carswell on YouTube where he talks about the potential of some of this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SD3M5aMYzU

>increasing the interest and peoples potential involvement in the political process (outside of elections which I don't see as real involvement anyway..) is the key to increasing the size and diversity of the demographic from which potential politicians are drawn

In 'Big Bang Localism', Simon Jenkins argued that the decrease in local political involvement could be traced to the centralisation of power in the 1980s, and that to reverse it, power must be decentralised. People will not get involved in local politics, if they cannot effect change with their efforts.

http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/publications/publication.cgi?id=41

At the next election, I'll in a sense be voting for a fictional manifesto. I'd like to be able to vote for The Plan

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Plan-Twelve-Months-Renew-Britain/dp/0955979900/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238366581&sr=1-1

But I'll vote Conservative in the hope that the Direct Democracy wing will push the Conservatives towards the greater democratic accountability that I want to see, they already seem to be moving in that direction.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/17/cameron-decentralisation-local-government