The Centre

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The Budget of March 2020, and the Government’s response to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, have ended the era that began with the Budget of December 1976. The Centre is the think tank for this new era. It upholds:

• family and community values, by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty;
• social solidarity as an expression of personal responsibility, personal responsibility as protected by social solidarity, international solidarity as an expression of national sovereignty, and national sovereignty as protected by international solidarity;
• equality and diversity as economic equality and class diversity, as regional equality and regional diversity, as the equal sovereignty of diverse states, and as equal respect for diverse opinions within a framework of free speech and other civil liberties, including due process of law, with the presumption of innocence;
• the leading role of the working class in the pursuit of economic equality, the leading role of the working class and of the youth in the pursuit of international peace, and the need to maintain unity within and between them, including against separatist tendencies in England, Scotland and Wales;
• One Nation, with an equal emphasis on the One and on the Nation, using Brexit as a double opportunity, both to reorganise the British economy under State direction, and to begin to develop a fully independent British foreign policy, including in relation to the United States, with military force used only ever in self-defence;
• the leading role, in the building of One Nation, of the people and places whose votes have decided the outcomes of the 2016 referendum, of the 2017 General Election, and of the 2019 General Election, namely the rural working class, and the industrial and former industrial communities that are either outside the metropolitan areas or peripheral to them;
• the sufficiency of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of anti-Semitism as “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews”, and the need to give a voice to a BAME Britain that is now young, increasingly mixed-race, often in its second or subsequent generation to have been born in Britain, connected to every inhabited territory on the planet, found in every town, and well on the way to being found in every village;
• the scientific fact of binary and immutable biological sex, the priority of defending women’s spaces, and the need to rescue such issues as men’s health, fathers’ rights, and boys’ educational underachievement, from those whose economic and other policies have caused the problems in the first place;
• an approach to climate change which protects and extends secure employment with civilised wages and working conditions, which encourages economic development around the world, which maintains the right of the working classes and of people of colour to have children, which holds down and as far as practicable reduces the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, and which refuses to restrict travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich; and
• the full compatibility between the highest view of human demographic, economic, intellectual and cultural expansion and development, and the most active concern for the conservation of the natural world and of the treasures bequeathed by such expansion and development in the past. 

The eventual aim is to hold three conferences per year, and to publish the papers from them. One conference will be held outside London, one in London, and one outside Britain. Initially, these will form a three-year cycle, with the first conference to be held in the North West Durham parliamentary constituency. Please contact the Director of The Centre, David Lindsay, on davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.