Stronger United-Stronger UK@United Europe: Remain & Transform!

A Strong United Kingdom

A strong United Kingdom is a country that can offer all its citizens peace, prosperity participation, and personal opportunities. It is also country that gives them the common tools required to shape and influence positively the social and environmental ecosystems in which they live. A fundamental difference with traditional definitions of a strong United Kingdom is that in our case we focus not on what the country's government can do but on what its citizens themselves can achieve together. In other words, a strong United Kingdom empowers its people to achieve themselves their own objectives as opposed to giving their central government power over them for five years at a time, between general elections. Empowered citizens will have the motivation, means and ways to work together to accomplish common objectives, by generating and maintaining high levels of social capital.

We're not talking here about the rigid, monolithic unity of the mass industrialisation era or of the technocratic élites era where all leaders had to do was to raise their hands and voices for their massed legions of followers to fall in step with diligence and enthusiasm in a sordid march of the ‘pensée unique’. We are referring instead to a reflective unity emerging out of a multifaceted, open, deliberative debate regarding future objectives and the tactics to bring them about. Deliberative unity is at the same time “agonistic” in the sense that it knows how to differentiate between ‘enemy’ and ‘adversary’ – and does not reduce every single decision-making process to a plastic, manufactured, enforced ‘consensus’ but acknowledges the necessary and desirable continuing existence of an ‘ineradicable opposition’ that is nevertheless willing to temporarily defer to the majority and suspend its opposition in the knowledge that at a different time and on a different issue constellations will change and it will then be part of the constituent majority opinion.

 

The six tactical objectives capable of operationalising and implementing such a Strong United Kingdom are as follows:

  • Unity;

  • Diversity;

  • Civil society;

  • Multi-level citizenship;

  • Deep Security;

  • Sustainable Resilience.