A Regional Manifesto for a regionalist Labour Party

It's been over two weeks since we lost the election. UKIP are eating into our votes all over England, Plaid are doing a good job in some South Wales valleys seats and the SNP all but destroyed the Labour Party in Scotland. Let's face it, the Labour Party is in chaos; Andy Burnham was right to say that this is not ground zero for the Labour Party electorally, things can be much, much worse. We need to look at what fundamentally went wrong.

Labour's opposition to an English Parliament is in my view justified, we need regional assemblies so areas that are look over from Westminster can be changed. In the years under Blair and Brown, New Labour did wonderful things in the North West, Manchester has been transformed from what it used to be, Liverpool has had lots of money thrown at it, and it's worked, these places now have the infrastructure recquired for a so called "Northern Powerhouse" or as I like to call it, Mega-City 1 (kudos to the nerds that get that reference). The areas that we forgot about have rejected Labour for arguably the last ten years. We did nothing in Scotland, running the country with a sense of arrogance, that said that even a donkey could win an election for the Labour Party in Scotland. We have let the north east rot, where were the investments outside of Newcastle and Sunderland? We let the north Kent marginals just grow with no infrastructure for things like roads, schools and hospitals and then wonder why these areas have some of the worst healthcare in the country.

If Labour is to win these ares back from the hands of UKIP and the Tories, we NEED to bring about some actual change. A northeastern assembly could do wonders for places like Durham and Northumbria, it would bring investment into towns like Darlington and Bishop Auckland. A West Midlands assembly could stop the absorption of the surrounding areas into "Greater Birmingham" and actually create jobs for people that need them. Enhanced power for Wales and Scotland can show the people of these proud nations that a United Kingdom is the best for everyone. If we don't stop the tide of nationalism with a wall of regionalism, the Labour Party will be gone as we know it.

Generation Youtube needs a way to be incentivised to vote

In May 2020 Those who are now 13 and older will be able to vote in a general election for the first time, this generation of voters will have grown up in age where they can't even remember dial up. The younger section of this generation will have grown up in a time where they will scarcely remember what life was like before the advent of things like iPlayer were around. This will be the first generation where political parties really need to take a look at what they are going to do to make this tech savvy generation more politically aware. 

One thing which needs to be done, is the enaction of legislation concerning the use of political attack ads on the internet. The Tory party has been very big on ploughing a lot of money into political attack ads on things like Youtube. With specialised advertising it is no more easy than ever to develop an ad designed for people whom the Tories think are most likely to join them. Labour's online presence in comparison to the Tories was absolutely pathetic. Whilst the party did not have the money to invest in these sort of things, they could have at least TRIED to make a difference. Ads from various celebrities were shared across Facebook, and if the situation was anything like it was for my timeline, they were generally met we laughter and trolling (by people you are very close to as well, Politics is a funny thing isn't it!) 

Having just stumbled across the Progress Youtube channel, purely by accident might I add. I have seen that it has 25 subscriber, this is absolutely pathetic. Whilst I know Richard Angell, the director of Progress is a very social media savvy person, it appears that Progress has put little to no attention into its Youtube presence. If 1,000,000+ can watch Zoe Sugg make videos about make up and a hand bag, then why can't at least ten thousand of us watch Progress videos! We have 250,000 members in the Labour Party for heavens sake. This is also one the areas where newer parties like UKIP and the Greens have gained a footing, UKIP have been very clever and surprisingly tech savvy for a political party which is characterised as being full of old people.

Young people want to be engaged, but they needed to be engaged in way that suits them, just remember that as the electorate grows older, more and more people that use social media come into the electorate. I think Dan Jarvis said it perfectly at the Progress annual conference at the weekend that we tend to focus on twitter when the majority of the he population does not use it, we need to be focusing on Facebook and Youtube, the majority of britain has a Facebook account and the majority of Britons watch some form of youtube content at least once a week. One of the good things Ican say about the campaign was that at least Ed bothered to go and see Russell Brand who has youtube account with over a million subscribers, but why didn't Ed Balls go and see FunforLouis, why wasn't Yvette Cooper on Zoella, why wasn't Douglas Alexander on LittleRadge's channel appealing to the Scottish electorate. These are all BIG youtube channels with at least 250,000 subs  and audience younger than anything a direct mail could reach to.