Politicians make promises all the time, and break them regularly. Fair enough, circumstances, opinions and alliances change. And they have a way of avoiding the actual word promise.
Meanwhile in the real world people make pinkie promises and swear on their mother’s graves.
Proposal: political parties make permanent promises. As in black and white, no dispute over the wording, nobody in the party advocates against it or votes against it ever. If they do, immediate expulsion, no forgiveness.
They can start with easy ones that they’ll get a majority vote on. I suggest an 80% or 90% approval within the party – there will always be someone against it so 100% won’t be achievable.
How about:
No nuclear weapons
Now you might argue, what if Papua New Guinea gets a crazy dictator who gets his hands on a nuke? Well, vote a different party in. Not our party, we made a permanent promise.
Equal rights regardless of gender
I said lets start with the easy ones… arguably reasons for discriminating against religion (Islamic extremism becomes rampant, or a new religion based on something nasty is formed), or sexuality (beastiality, paedophilia) do exist. I can’t think of any futuristic gender that could be an issue.
Tree harvesting cannot exist without growing more trees
Easy for the Greens. This one would need quite a bit of defining. But it would need to be no more than a couple of paragraphs, as regular folk need to able to understand it.
I can imagine voters, 50% of whom don’t particularly care who gets in, would latch onto permanent promises, and parties employing them, even on a limited basis like those above, would benefit in a big way.
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