For a nation to thrive it must be connected to its roots. We as the living generation are responsible for looking after the heritage which has been passed to us from our forefathers, and we have a duty to pass it on to the generations which will come after us. This is the basis of social conservatism. 

Successive governments have eroded our freedom, given away our sovereignty and mismanaged our economy. 

The Heritage Party exists to return to the principles of social conservatism, to reverse the cultural destruction wreaked by politically correct ideologies and to return to our true traditions and heritage. In embracing these principles, we believe the United Kingdom can once again become a great and prosperous nation.

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We have a great and proud history, but our culture and heritage are under severe attack by subversive ideologies in the guise of political correctness. This is a real and present danger to the fabric of our society. The slow corrosion of the ‘Long March Through the Institutions’ is now evident. Marxist groups and activists openly agitate to smash capitalism, disrupt the nuclear family, defund the police and close prisons while accusing British society of systemic injustice.

The Heritage Party rejects these false narratives and believes we should celebrate our culture and heritage. Our society based on liberty and enterprise balanced by individual responsibility allows the opportunity for citizens to prosper. Our Common Law based on Christian principles is the fairest system of justice in the world, and the United Kingdom is one of the best places in the world for members of minority communities to live.

Children should be taught British history in schools, both good and bad, but with a sense that on balance, we are a nation with a history and heritage to be proud of.

There should be no law or penalty for expressing controversial opinions, making jokes, or engaging in banter. This means supporting the freedom of speech of people who have differing views to ourselves, even if we find such opinions offensive. Everyone has the right to freedom of belief, freedom of speech and freedom of expression, provided they are not inciting violence or crime, or directly threatening another person.

Everyone must have the right to discuss and criticise all ideologies and texts without fear of being harassed by the state for their opinions. This right has been eroded over recent decades by the burgeoning concept of so-called ‘hate speech’, which is a term used to impose ‘repressive tolerance’, whereby only the prevailing ‘politically correct’ viewpoint is tolerated, and other views are stifled or sanctioned, even if they are held by the majority.

Nobody should be dragged through the courts or fired from their jobs because someone has accused them of ‘hate speech’. The Heritage Party will repeal the legal framework which has led to repressive tolerance so that everyone can once again feel free to express themselves freely, whether in social settings or on-line. We will require that Codes of Conduct for employment allow freedom of expression outside the workplace and demand that Codes of Conduct at Universities encourage, rather than restrict, diversity of opinion. Digital social media platforms should be open to all and not be allowed to censor legal opinions simply because someone considers them to be ‘politically incorrect’; they should be classified as publishers if they engage in such arbitrary censorship.

Free speech must also be ensured in the media, both mainstream and social media. Broadcasters, reporters, journalists and commentators must be free to say anything they wish provided it is lawful and does not incite crime or violence. The state should not be allowed to shut down people and organisations on the spurious grounds of ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’ or ‘bias’.

Liberty also means that individuals have autonomy over their own lives, as well as individual responsibility for their actions and choices. The state should not seek to impose its own ideologies on individuals, nor force or coerce individuals into making choices concerning themselves or any aspects of their life over which they should have rightful autonomy. Individuals have responsibility for their own finances. They also have responsibility for their own health, and no-one should be forced or coerced to take any medicine or vaccination without their consent.

The draconian lockdown laws and regulations implemented during the Covid era were an egregious and unlawful attack on our civil liberties. The Heritage Party opposes arbitrary restrictions on citizens and businesses and will ensure there are no more lockdowns.

The technology now exists to create a dystopian 24-7 surveillance state where everyone and everything can be monitored continuously. It is therefore more important than ever to guarantee liberty and ensure that individuals continue to have the right to privacy and anonymity. The law should ensure that people can live a private life by default unless they choose otherwise. Personal information should not be held without consent. This principle should also apply to personal financial transactions. Cash must remain an option for purchasing goods and services at retail outlets for people who choose not to use electronic payment methods. We oppose any moves toward a ‘cashless society’ which would discriminate against many vulnerable, elderly and poorer people who do not have access to banking and electronic payments.

In addition, the state should not attempt to unduly interfere with family life or micro-manage families and relationships. Parents are the primary educators and carers of their children, and have the right to bring up their children as they wish, either through home education or in school. There has never been a requirement for parents to register children who are home educated or a compulsion to place them in school. These freedoms should not be removed by the state.

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While we uphold the right of individuals to make choices about how they conduct their personal lives, we believe that the institutions of marriage and the natural family are fundamental to the fabric of a good society and the transmission of values, customs, traditions and identity from parents to children through the generations.

The traditional nuclear family where a mother and father bring up their own children is the best and most successful model for bringing up healthy and well-balanced children, and building stable communities.

While there are many excellent single parents, carers and guardians who do their very best for the children in their care, the bell curve of success for children who are brought up by their own married mother and father is better than for any other model of family. Such children have better educational attainment, economic success and health, and lower rates of crime, suicide, depression, drug abuse or self-harm.

Children should not deliberately be denied a mother and a father. We will encourage and support the traditional family structure through the tax system and education, and we oppose the engineering of society in such a way that causes increasing numbers of children to be deliberately brought up without their own mother and father.

In particular, boys need fathers. Boys who have been abandoned by their fathers, or deprived of contact with them by an often discriminatory legal system, are far more likely to turn to gangs and crime than boys who are raised with a male role model. Refuting divisive notions of ‘toxic masculinity’, we will promote father figures and the nurturing of each boy to become a good man.

We will not allow schools to propagate anti-family propaganda which undermines the picture of the traditional nuclear family as the best model of family. We will also block teaching materials and lessons which encourage early sexual activity in children before they reach the age of consent, or inappropriate materials detailing non-reproductive sexual acts.

School children should not be exposed to unscientific nonsense like queer theory or gender fluidity. It is a scientific fact that there are two sexes: male and female, which are determined by anatomy and chromosomes. Previously on the fringe of radical thought, gender ideology has been mainstreamed to the detriment of children’s well-being. Transgender propaganda which confuses children about their biological sex and damages their natural development as boys or girls should not be allowed in schools.

To protect children, we will introduce Hungarian-style legislation to prohibit the promotion of LGBTQQIAAPPP*+ ideologies and practices to minors under 18-years-old.

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The United Kingdom left the European Union in January 2020, but the new treaties that have been made with the EU are far from perfect and leave unfinished business. We must leave the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) so we can take back full control of our rich 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone for fishing, end the Northern Ireland Protocol which has divided our nation with a trade and customs barrier down the middle of the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and disentangle ourselves from the ‘level playing field’ requirements that commit us to ‘net-zero’ carbon emissions. On leaving the TCA, we will offer a new free-trade agreement that removes its onerous restrictions on fishing, Northern Ireland and carbon emissions.

It is good that we are now free to make our own trade deals around the world, but we must ensure that any new trade deals are mutually beneficial and do not snare us into accepting new regulations, harm our essential industries or remove jobs to countries with inferior working practices.

The EU is not the only organisation which has impinged on our sovereignty however. We must ensure that we do not make any treaty or join any international organisation which involves in any way the surrender of any part of the United Kingdom’s sovereignty. The British people must never be subject to the imposition of a foreign legal or monetary system, or the jurisdiction of foreign courts. 

To truly regain our sovereignty, we must re-think our membership of international organisations and agreements which previous governments have signed. We should remain members of international bodies, treaties and conventions which are beneficial to our national interests, but we should not join or continue to be part of globalist arrangements which dilute our sovereignty and interfere with our democracy by imposing conditions and policies on the nation which the people never voted for. These include the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Paris Climate Agreement, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The original ECHR is a good convention which was drafted in 1950 by British lawyers to help restore human rights to a continent devastated by Hitler’s National Socialism. Seventy years on however, activist judges in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg have made all manner of rulings which prevent the UK government from imposing law and order here at home and carrying out the wishes of the British electorate. They have ruled that we cannot impose whole-life sentences on murderers, we must give prisoners the vote, and have blocked the deportation of terrorists on several occasions, leaving them free to roam the streets of Britain. If we wish to have full national sovereignty, we must leave the ECHR and trust that our own system of Common Law will better protect the human rights of our citizens without the interference of foreign activist judges.

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There is no climate emergency. Carbon dioxide is a natural atmospheric gas; it is not a pollutant, nor is it harmful. Human activity contributes very little towards global warming, a phenomenon caused by naturally occurring gases in the atmosphere such as H₂O, CO₂ and CH₄. The adherence to green ideology is scientifically spurious and economically insane. We need to abandon the unnecessary commitment to ‘net-zero’ carbon dioxide emissions and ensure that we produce enough energy to keep the lights on and power our industry.

This can be achieved with our 5-point plan to energy security and self-sufficiency:

• We will immediately re-open mothballed coal power stations and stop the insane practice of burning wood pellets from North and South American forests in place of coal at our largest former coal power stations such as Drax.

• We will open new oil fields and gas fields in the North Sea which are already known about. In the medium term, we will develop the on-land shale gas industry for exclusive use in the UK. This will meet our natural gas needs for decades from domestic supply. 

• In the long term, we will commission 20 or more small nuclear power stations, each one providing a consistent supply of 600 – 800 MW. These are cheaper to construct than singular large nuclear power stations, and will provide a significant proportion of supply to the National Grid reliably and cost-effectively.

• We will divest from wind turbines and solar arrays on prime agricultural land. They are a blot on our landscape and they do not work when the wind stops blowing, blows too fast or the Sun doesn’t shine. Their intermittent nature means back-ups must be available at all times in case they stop producing electricity, which requires massive subsidies that increase the energy bills of every household. In addition, wind turbines kill vast numbers of birds and offshore wind farms ruin the sea bed, making them more harmful to the environment than if they were not used at all. We will begin the process of decommissioning wind farms and solar arrays, so that our scarce farming land is returned to producing crops and the sea bed is returned to marine life.

• We will support new energy production technologies that do not need government subsidies and can operate viably on the free market. To this end, we shall explore the possibility of harnessing the power in tidal rivers using discrete turbines.

In addition, we will end the use of ‘biofuels’ made from crops or grown on plantations which should be used for growing food. It is wrong and immoral to use crops to make biofuels when the UK is not self-sufficient in food.

To ensure sovereignty over our energy and environment policy, the UK must leave the Paris Climate Agreement which implements a significant portion of UN Agenda 21/2030 and demands that the UK government adheres to the false ideology of climate alarmism. It imposes restrictions on the nation’s energy policy and forces us to be bound by carbon trading systems from which other nations are exempt. It is already undermining our competitiveness and freedom. It will fundamentally alter our way of life as petrol cars, gas boilers and gas power stations are successively banned, and restrictions are placed on roads which prevent vehicles from travelling easily from one place to another. It is wrong to stay in such a far-reaching agreement whose effects were never explained to the British people.

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The population of the UK rose officially by 9 million between 2000 and 2020, from 59 million to 68 million, mostly through ultra-high net immigration, but this figure does not include millions more undocumented illegal immigrants. It has been exacerbated by previous governments which signed the UK into the UN Global Migration Compact, the Barcelona Declaration, and the Marrakesh Declaration, which are globalist schemes designed to encourage and normalise mass immigration without a democratic mandate. The Heritage Party will withdraw from these three schemes, and bring the era of mass, rapid immigration to an end.

Legal immigration must be brought down to sustainable, balanced levels, with strict caps on specific classes of immigration such as students and low-skilled and unskilled workers. Skilled workers should be allowed to come to the country for specific jobs on time-limited work visas where there is a shortage of British workers, but this must not be at the expense of training up British young people with the skills they need in every profession. Sham marriages and chain migration must be stopped, and illegal immigration must be halted entirely and reversed.

Substantial developments to protecting our borders and coastal waters are needed. More robust checks should be conducted at harbours and airports to prevent illegal immigration, and all means of forced entry to the country by migrants should be made unviable. There must be an end to rewards and incentives which encourage spurious claims of asylum by illegal immigrants who have travelled through a number of safe countries to claim benefits in the UK.

Asylum should only be granted to genuine refugees who have arrived in the UK without passing through any other safe countries such as France or Belgium, and they should be helped to return to their home countries when they become safe. All immigrants to the UK should be expected to adapt to our culture and way of life while they are here.

It is the poorest communities which have borne the consequences of mass, rapid immigration. The political and economic beneficiaries of mass immigration do not have to share their resources, space or facilities with the millions of migrants they have let into the country, and they are shielded from the consequences of their decisions. These include unaffordable homes, wage compression, packed trains, a lack of school places and huge pressure on doctors’ surgeries and Accident & Emergency units in the towns and cities where immigration levels have been the highest, as well as a housing crisis as it has simply not been possible to build homes for 9 million extra people in 20 years.

Illegal migrant workers are often willing to work for less than the minimum wage, but some are duped and forced into enduring appalling slave-like conditions to enrich unscrupulous bosses who break the law. This has led to wage compression with honest hard-working British men and women unable to compete with illegal cheap migrant labour. We will beef up our Border Force to provide them with the resources they need to return illegal immigrants to their home countries. Anyone found to be using illegal cheap foreign labour or forcing others to work in slavery should be imprisoned and have their assets confiscated to pay compensation.

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The Heritage Party will preserve what is left of the natural beauty of our countryside and our towns and villages, but this requires a drastic reduction in net immigration to protect both rural and urban areas from rampant ‘development’.

The United Kingdom is already over-populated and dependent on food imports to survive. We should aim to lower our dependency on food imports and ultimately become self-sufficient in food. The United Kingdom has some of the best agricultural land in the world which is a precious resource and should be preserved for agriculture. Despite this, there is huge pressure to concrete over large areas of our green belt and the countryside to build housing for artificially inflated population growth, or for solar panels and wind turbines to satisfy the false claims of green ideology. This pressure must be resisted.

Our 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone for fishing is a precious resource and our control of it should never have been given up. This maritime zone should be managed responsibly to protect fish stocks while also reducing Britain’s food deficit and revitalising our coastal towns and fishing industry. Foreign trawlers should not be allowed to fish in our fishing waters, except by specific permission, and a fleet of cutters should be commissioned for the Royal Navy to prevent destructive fishing by foreign vessels and super-trawlers in our waters.

We must ensure that our environment is protected from harmful chemical, biological and radiological hazards. While carbon dioxide is natural, many chemicals used in industry and agriculture have a detrimental impact on our ecosystems. Harmful chemicals which should be kept out of our environment include:

• Neonicotinoids, which are harmful to bees and other pollinators and should never be used. 
• Fluoride, which should not be added to the water system. People should not be coerced into drinking fluoride. Adding it to water effectively removes choice from people who wish to avoid it. If people wish to expose themselves to fluoride they are able to buy and use fluoride toothpaste. 
• Heavy metals and toxic metal compounds, which should not be emitted into the environment at all, including in the process of ‘cloud seeding’. The atmosphere, and thus clouds and rainwater, should not be knowingly laced with lithium, cobalt, silver, barium or aluminium salts or other toxic compounds.

5G uses frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum between 3 GHz and 100 GHz that have never been used before for communication. Their effects on human health are unknown. There should be a moratorium on using 5G, or any other new electromagnetic frequencies, before it has been fully and thoroughly tested by independent researchers as to its effects on humans, animals, plants and microbes. It should not be switched on unless it is conclusively proven that it does not cause any adverse health effects.

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It is as important to maintain beauty and harmony in our urban environments as it is to protect the countryside from rampant development. Once beautiful towns and cities across the country have been brutalised by depressingly ugly modernist architecture. This must end.

The Heritage Party will require all new homes and commercial buildings to be constructed in keeping with the traditional and historic character of the area. We will also create renaissance zones in towns and cities whose character has been spoiled by the construction of depressing, densely-built, dehumanising eyesores. In these zones we will restore and recreate the historic beauty of urban spaces which have been ruined.

Every young British family should be able to buy their own home. This means that the housing market must work for home buyers rather than big property developers.

Demand for new housing has outstripped supply for over two decades now due to mass, rapid immigration, including through a rapid increase of student numbers in University cities. In 2021, over 1.1 million visas were granted for foreign nationals to come to the UK either to work, to live or to study, but there were only 150,000 completions of new homes. This is completely unsustainable.

Immigration numbers need to be slashed with strict caps on the number of student and work visas granted to foreign nationals. This will relieve the pressure on house prices by reducing demand. Foreign nationals should not be permitted to buy property in the UK unless they have been resident for 5 years, in which case they may be permitted to purchase one property as their main residence.

Schemes which interfere with the housing market and the ability of councils to provide council homes to local people who need them should be abolished. These include ‘Right to Buy’, ‘Help to Buy’ and government Home Equity Loans.

All housing targets for local councils should be abolished, along with the practices of building large housing developments on prime agricultural land and ‘densification’ and ‘intensification’ where zones in town centres are turned into blocks of flats dozens of stories high to meet imposed targets for housing units. Regeneration schemes must work for the benefit of established communities and not destroy historic neighbourhoods and buildings. Such projects should be subject to a ballot of the residents who will be affected, and no residents should be forced to move against their will.

Building regulations should ensure buildings are safe with adequate fire escapes, but requirements to meet erroneous energy and ‘climate’ targets that disadvantage older buildings and their owners or construction in traditional styles should be scrapped.

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The UK must become self-sufficient in skills rather than relying on importing skilled and unskilled labour from abroad. Education needs to be re-focussed onto fostering excellence and teaching pupils and students the skills they need to be self-reliant. We must train enough of our own young people to succeed and thrive in professional and technical careers, particularly as nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers, construction workers and IT professionals.

The re-implementation of a tripartite system at secondary school level is a top priority with grammar schools for the academically talented, technical schools to train young people with an aptitude for practical and vocational skills, and general schools to ensure that all children of all levels have the personal skills, entrepreneurial skills and employability to succeed in the world of work if they leave formal education at 16.
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Universities need to become lean and mean again and focus on delivering high quality academic courses. Universities are not for everyone, particularly those who are talented in practical fields who would benefit more from following a non-academic route and would be better off getting a job at 16 or 18 and learning a trade. There should be parity of esteem between academic, technical and vocational training.

Universities should be for the 20% or so of people who will benefit from rigorous, high-level academic courses. We would pay off the student loans of British students who have graduated in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths, Medicine) subjects so long as they work in their field of study in the UK.

Poor quality courses and Universities which do more harm than good and are of little use to employers should be defunded, and failing universities should not be saved from going out of business. Too many academic institutions seem to believe that their role is to force-feed left-wing ideology and divisive identity politics, while stifling debate. Such institutions should not receive government subsidies or grants to continue their corrosive activities.

For those who are more gifted in practical and vocational fields, we will invest in apprenticeships and bring back the Polytechnics which should never have been closed or converted, so that young people can learn high-level technical skills to succeed in practical trades. Our aim is to return to an era characterised by high-levels of employment, wide ranging skills sets and British manufacturing, where we as a nation are self-sufficient in skills, British youngsters are trained to do skilled jobs so that they can all earn a good living, and there is no longer a need to depend on an unsustainable flow of cheap labour from abroad.

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All people are individually responsible for their actions. We hold that all crime should be treated equally seriously, and the same sentence should be given for the same crime regardless of the characteristics of the criminal. This understanding of equality before the law is today being subverted by a growing number of activist magistrates, judges and police officers. The invention of ‘hate crime’ has led to criminals with certain characteristics being treated more harshly than others for the same crime if they are considered to be ‘privileged’ by activists, and more leniently if they are considered to have a ‘protected characteristic’.

The notion that a more severe punishment should be given for a ‘hate crime’ should be rejected. Sentencing for violent crimes must be equally tough regardless of whether or not a criminal has a ‘protected characteristic’, so that the British people can be safe in our own country.

Policing and criminal justice must be re-focussed again on arresting dangerous criminals and jailing them, rather than ‘understanding systemic injustices against minorities’. We would increase stop and search which is an effective tool for preventing crime and getting knives and guns off our streets, targeted in areas where there is the most violent crime.

There should be an end to automatic release from prison half way through a sentence for violent crime. Violent criminals must serve the bulk of their sentence in prison, with no more than a 10% reduction for good behaviour.

Judgements in criminal cases must be based on objective evidence and not subjective feelings. A defendant has the right of habeas corpus, the right to a fair trial, and is considered innocent until proven guilty. We reject new ‘hate speech’ laws which undermine these fundamental principles and are designed to criminalise speech based on whether a complainant feels offended or uncomfortable.

Political correctness has led to violent crime spiralling out of control, and a systemic failure to deal with certain classes of crimes committed by individuals with ‘protected characteristics’, particularly where there are patterns of criminal behaviour in specific ethnic minorities. It has allowed the problem of grooming and raping of tens of thousands of girls under the age of 16 to fester in hundreds of towns and cities across the country. This is a grave injustice and will be at the top of our priorities to set this country right again. Such heinous crimes do not need new laws; there just needs to be the political will to enforce the laws we already have.

The police force, prison service, probation service and courts must be properly financed so that the country has an effective policing and criminal justice system. The cutting of 20,000 police officers, the botched privatisation of the probation service and the disposal of hundreds of police stations and Magistrates Courts to housing developers in recent years are unforgivable. No more local police stations or Courts should be sold off, and new ones need to be opened to replace those which have been closed.

The Heritage Party wants an end to politically correct policing and justice. The job of the police is to protect us from murderers, grooming gangs, burglars, rapists, paedophiles, vandals, thieves and thugs; it is not to kneel before Marxists, make dancing videos for the internet, or hassle people for politically incorrect opinions.

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The Heritage Party believes in fiscal responsibility. A sovereign nation should not spend beyond its means year after year and decade after decade, as has been the case in the United Kingdom over the last 40 years.

The first steps towards fiscal responsibility will be to stop wasting tens of billions of pounds every year on foreign aid, migrant hotels, diversity officers, overseas military conflicts that are not our national interest, subsidies for unreliable and expensive forms of energy like wind turbines and solar panels, and vanity projects like HS2. Taxpayers’ money should only be spent on essential public services and items which benefit the people such as schools, healthcare, the police, the border force and honouring the military covenant rather than running down our armed forces.

The burgeoning ‘third sector’ is another multi-billion-pound black hole, whereby the state has increased its control over the charity or non-profit sector. Instead of allowing people to make their own choices about which charities they choose to support, successive governments have steadily increased funding to the non-profit sector, and they decide which charities, NGOs and QUANGOs to re-distribute our money to. Many of these NGOs and QUANGOs are politically active, and seek to influence government policy using taxpayers’ money. This is absolutely wrong and undemocratic. The entire NGO sector should be defunded by government, and QUANGOs should be disbanded. Essential government services should be brought in-house and run directly by government Ministries and Departments instead of QUANGOs, saving billions of pounds and leaving politically active NGOs to find their own funding.

We must reduce the annual budget deficit to zero and get the nation’s finances back into balance otherwise there will be a heavy price to pay in the future. Countries which consistently rack up debt always end up with a debased currency and/or hyperinflation which disproportionately harms the middle and working classes.

Monetary policy must be responsible. It must not unnaturally inflate asset prices, which create ‘boom and bust’ bubbles that punish ordinary people by devaluing the currency as well as making house prices totally unaffordable for young people and families. The government should seek to ensure that monetary and taxation policy works in favour of ordinary British people who want to buy a home of their own, rather than leading to homes being sold off to speculators who often leave them empty further exacerbating an unnecessary housing crisis and hollowing out communities.

In the long term, we must aim to reduce our national debt and begin to build up a sovereign wealth fund which can provide a source of revenue for pension funding, rather than operating the state pension like a Ponzi scheme. The government of today must not squander the wealth which has been bequeathed to us by our forefathers. It is our duty to be good stewards of our economy and to leave it as an inheritance for future generations.

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Our aim is to structure Income Tax into 2 bands of 20% and 40% with higher thresholds. There should be no increases on National Insurance rates that are currently 8% and 2% and the annual thresholds should rise in line with those for Income Tax. In the long-term Income Tax and National Insurance rates should be further reduced to take advantage of the Laffer curve.

When feasible, we will reduce and abolish VAT, Inheritance Tax and Stamp Duty on UK citizens’ primary residences. Stamp Duty should remain for foreign nationals and UK citizens purchasing second homes or additional properties.

We will support families by increasing the percentage of Income Tax Personal Allowance that can be shared by married couples with children from 10% to 100%. This means that a single earner in a traditional family of a husband, wife and children will not pay any Income Tax on the first £25,140 of income.

We will abolish the TV licence.

Corporation Tax should be set as low as possible to encourage enterprise and increase overall tax revenues through stimulating economic growth. In the first instance, we will reduce it from 25% to 20% and make further reductions when feasible.

Business Rates disadvantage businesses that need physical premises, such as hotels and restaurants, which have to pay Business Rates in addition to Corporation Tax. As shopping habits have changed significantly since the beginning of the 21^st Century and online shopping is now ubiquitous, Business Rates are no longer fair or appropriate. We would replace them with an Online Sales Tax to be levied on companies that have a digital turnover above £500,000 p.a. 

Large international corporations with multi-million or multi-billion pound turnovers and profits should pay their fair share of taxation but many exploit tax avoidance schemes that result in them paying less tax than a sole trader. This is unfair and any such loopholes must be closed.

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In contrast, planned economies based upon Marxist ideology have always been disastrous, bringing poverty and hunger instead of prosperity, and are almost always accompanied by tyranny and oppression as well.

The Heritage Party will support a vibrant low-tax economy where individuals and businesses can thrive and take advantages of the great opportunities our nation could offer us if it were well-governed.

Unnecessary regulations should be reduced as much as possible to allow maximum freedom to trade, but well-drafted regulations are necessary to protect workers from exploitation, to ensure that the environment is not damaged, and to ensure a fair and level playing field between businesses of different sizes. Regulations which provide unfair advantages to large businesses and global corporations over small and medium sized businesses should be scrapped.

Recent governments have paid lip service to capitalism while implementing socialism by stealth using the concept of the ‘mixed economy’ or the ‘third way’. Governments have excessively interfered in the free market propping up zombie companies who conform to the latest politically correct ideologies, for example on climate alarmism. Many such companies do not produce anything of value and would collapse without government subsidies. This is unfair to businesses which do not receive government subsidies, and is a drag on the economy in the long-term. It is wrong for the state to interfere in the economy in this manner.

There are some sectors which should be wholly owned and operated by the state. These include the armed forces, the police force, the probation and prison services and public roads. There are other sectors which constitute natural monopolies which are at present part-privatised including rail, water and energy. Part-privatisation constitutes the worst of all worlds. Price capping in selected sectors means that businesses in those sectors are not able to operate freely in the market. In order to compensate for this the state then subsidises them for billions of pounds which is paid for by higher taxes.

The owners and executives of these businesses have all the benefits of government subsidy, but none of the risks which come from making poor business decisions, and this is reflected in the extortionate transport, energy and water prices we are all accustomed to. The sectors which constitute natural monopolies and are vital for the nation should either be fully privatised with an end to price capping and government subsidies or fully nationalised if they cannot survive without financial support from taxpayers: it is not right that taxpayers underwrite all the risks for no reward.

Our nation was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution and has a long history of manufacturing. In recent decades, successive governments have run down our manufacturing base, and it needs to be re-invigorated and rebuilt. To this end there must be a move to lower rates of taxation for businesses and an end to net-zero, carbon capping and other regulations which stifle industry and make the UK uncompetitive. In exceptional circumstances, the government should step in to protect industrial facilities of national importance such as steel works, oil refineries and aluminium smelters if they are under threat. 

We must also re-implement Glass-Steagall style banking regulations which separate run-of-the-mill high street banking from high-stakes high-risk investment banking. Everyday people and small and low-risk businesses should not be exposed to high-risk ventures so that they are protected from systemic adverse events in the banking sector for which they are not responsible.

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There have been nearly 10 million abortions carried out in the UK since the Abortion Act in 1967, and now there are over 220,000 abortions per year in the UK. Unborn children are children. In every abortion a human life is ended.

We will end legal abortion in all parts of the United Kingdom, except in medical emergencies to save the life of the mother. The culture of abortion should be replaced with a culture of life, firstly by encouraging personal responsibility to avoid the need for abortions in the first place, and then by providing help and support, or alternatives such as adoption to mothers when needed. We will also repeal the laws that allow experimentation on unborn children from conception.

We will completely defund UK government support for abortion programs outside the UK.

The state must not support practices that cause genital mutilation and sterility. The ’gender affirmation’ model for gender dysphoria must be abandoned in the healthcare and education sectors and replaced with a return to addressing the underlying issues behind body dysmorphia conditions when they occur. Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender surgery should never be administered to children under 18. 

We support counselling and therapy for people seeking help with gender dysphoria or unwanted same-sex attraction: we oppose any ban on talking therapies, counselling, prayer and pastoral care for these issues that far-left activists pejoratively call ‘conversion therapy’.

The Heritage Party is also concerned for the sanctity of life of older and disabled people. The elderly have as much right to healthcare as the young, and they should not be made to feel a burden. We shall emphasise the Hippocratic Oath and stop nihilistic elements in the medical profession from wreaking destruction. ‘Do not resuscitate’ orders are liberally applied in hospitals, often without consent. We will oppose any legalisation of assisted suicide, or any change to the medical code of conduct allowing arbitrary deprivation of treatment. 

There must never be a repeat of the traumatic cases of Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard, where these children were denied treatment offered to them because of the decisions of activist magistrates and medical practitioners who refused to allow these children to receive treatments offered by other hospitals. No medical practitioner or magistrate should have a right to decide to block a patient from receiving an offer of a potentially life-saving treatment, over and above the express wishes of the next-of-kin, especially the parents or spouse of a patient.

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The ‘first-past-the-post’ system is undemocratic. It is not fit for purpose in this era of multiple parties. Most candidates are elected with fewer than 50% of the votes, and thus the majority has no true representation.

The Heritage Party supports Proportional Representation in all elections, from Parliament to local districts and boroughs. Only then will all votes matter. Instead of the majority of the electorate voting tactically to keep out the worst candidate or party, people will be free to vote positively to elect a party or candidate they genuinely support and know that their vote really does count. That is a far healthier system.

The historic House of Lords and the recently-created Supreme Court have been corrupted by being stuffed full of party apparatchiks. Few Peers and Law Lords are now independent, free-thinking cross-benchers with a lifetime of service to the nation. These bodies need radical reform to make them fit for the 21^st century providing genuine, safe independent scrutiny.

The last decade has seen a plethora of new and expensive political posts created which duplicate or complicate existing roles. These include Police and Crime Commissioners, Metro Mayors and elected local Mayors. All of these positions waste vast sums of taxpayers’ money for no benefit. They should be scrapped and their functions returned to county or borough councils.

We will scrap the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd and return their powers to Westminster or local councils as appropriate.

The Heritage Party will take practical steps to ensure the security of elections and end election fraud. Postal voting should be restricted to the armed forces and severely disabled voters. Voter ID must be presented at polling stations, and voting should be restricted to British citizens only. Students must only be registered to vote in one location to prevent double-voting. Counting must continue to be done manually rather than using electronic counting machines.

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The stifling bureaucracy of the NHS has led to the longest waiting lists for hospital treatment in the Western world. When people need to see a doctor, they should be able to see a GP face to face with no waiting time. There should be no waiting lists for surgery or hospital treatment. In order to reduce waiting lists, the NHS should fund treatment for their patients in the private sector where necessary so that waiting times for operations are reduced and waiting lists are ultimately brought down to zero.

Our country should train enough doctors, dentists, pharmacists, nurses and midwives to work in the healthcare sector without having to rely on a constant stream of migrant healthcare workers because we do not train enough people here to do the jobs that need to be done.  There should be no caps on the number of places for British citizens to train to be doctors and dentists at University, or to train on-the-job to be nurses and midwives. 

Nursing should not be a degree-only subject that is a route to management whereby qualified nurses do little actual practical care. Nurses should spend the majority of their time on wards giving practical care and we will once again make nursing a profession with on-the-job training. 

The NHS should only be available for UK citizens apart from accident and emergency units. Foreign nationals should be required to take out private medical insurance before they come to the UK and during the duration of their stay to relieve the pressure from health tourists.

Medical autonomy and informed consent must be upheld and never again breached as it was in the Covid period. There must never be any coercion, threat, penalty or punishment for choosing not to take a particular medicine or vaccination.

Preventative medicine should be at the heart of our healthcare system, whereby citizens are empowered to live healthy and wholesome lifestyles and avoid chronic conditions that make them dependent on drugs for a lifetime. The use of natural products should be elevated to standard use if they are found to be safe and effective in curing diseases and enhancing health and vitality.

The healthcare budget should not be spent on the latest ultra-expensive treatments from pharmaceutical companies whose efficacy is questionable. There must never be a repeat of the general roll-out of unsafe products like thalidomide or experimental mRNA injections, which has led to a surge in excess mortality and the physical impairment of multitudes of people who were deceived or coerced into taking them.

Mental health should be cared for by empowering citizens to experience varied, healthy lifestyles and avoid the negative messaging of media conglomerates. Mental health conditions should be treated primarily by ‘talking cure’ methods rather than diagnosing anti-psychotics or anti-depressants without thought to the underlying issues that cause people to present with mental health conditions. There are occasions where anti-depressants or anti-psychotics may be needed, for example to reduce the symptoms of schizophrenia, but this should be combined with interventions to identify and heal underlying issues.

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The first duty of the armed forces is the defence of the realm. The managed decline of the British armed forces must stop and it must be restored to at least 2000 levels with an Army of 110,000, a Royal Air Force of 55,000 and a Royal Navy of 45,000. 

We should once again become a strong military power that can act positively where necessary and when it is in our national interests, including deployment around our sea borders to prevent illegal immigration and to ensure that our airspace, 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone and underwater infrastructure is secure.

Our armed forces should take on Disaster and Emergency Relief on behalf of the nation rather than NGOs. The part of the foreign aid budget for disasters and emergencies should be re-allocated to the armed forces so they can carry out this function quickly and efficiently.

Our military personnel should be supplied with all the equipment they need to do the jobs they are asked to do. This includes a greater number of aircraft carriers, destroyers, frigates and submarines to replace those which have been decommissioned, and enough suitable barracks and living quarters for servicemen and their families.

There must be no control of our armed forces by anyone apart from the UK government. We must pull out of all programmes and schemes which even hint at joint control or management of our military with the EU including the European Defence Agency (EDA), the European Defence Fund (EDF), the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), and the Coordinated Annual Review of Defence (CARD).

The UK should not become entangled in far-away foreign conflicts which have nothing to do with our national interests and only benefit the chaos mongers of the military-industrial complex who profit from war. Since the end of the cold war, successive governments have sent our armed forces to engage in unnecessary military action in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine that was neither for the defence of the realm or the protection of the British people. On the contrary, the damage to the long-term stability of multiple nations has created migration crises that are detrimental to social cohesion and public safety at home. 

In the future, we should hold to the principle of non-engagement in third party conflicts and de-escalation of tensions at the earliest possible juncture to avoid unnecessary death, suffering, homelessness and migration.

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Road

There should be open free-market competition between petrol, diesel and electric vehicles, The Heritage Party will overturn bans on petrol and diesel cars and end subsidies and vehicle tax exemptions for electric vehicles. Taxation of petrol and diesel should be simplified to comprise only fuel duty and not VAT or other ‘climate’ surpluses.

Our existing roads should be maintained adequately, with pothole repairs a priority for local councils. ‘Smart motorways’ that remove hard shoulders are dangerous and impose intrusive surveillance on road users. Hard shoulders should be re-opened as a matter of urgency, and they should not be used for continuous surveillance of vehicles akin to a police state. We oppose the introduction of pay-as-you-go road pricing nationally and locally.

The Heritage Party fully opposes Agenda 2030 and the war on cars. We will scrap ‘15-minute neighbourhoods’ as proposed in Oxford, Canterbury and other cities, ‘Low Traffic Neighbourhoods’, and any other type of road blockage whose purpose is to coerce citizens to give up their cars and slow down vehicles unnecessarily. Cycle lanes which cause traffic jams and congestion by narrowing road space for other vehicles should not be installed on trunk routes or any other roads, and those that currently cause congestion should be removed and returned to mixed usage.

We will also scrap charging schemes which impose exorbitant charges on vehicles for travelling in arbitrary zones set up by local councils and metro Mayors. These go under various names such as ‘Low Emission Zones’ (LEZ), ‘Ultra Low Emission Zones’ (ULEZ) and ‘Clean Air Zones’ (CAZ) but their effect is to coerce citizens to give up their cars and bankrupt small businesses who have no option but to drive in these zones but do not have the cashflow to upgrade their vehicles.

New technology allows vehicles to be remotely controlled and disabled. To ensure freedom, this must never be compulsory by law, and government should never have the power to remotely disable vehicles with ‘kill switches’.

The normal speed limit in urban areas should remain at 30 mph, and we will remove 20 mph speed limits where they have been implemented.

Rail

Rail franchises that need cash injections from government subsidies should be brought back into the public sector when they finish. It is not right that corporations that run rail franchises have guaranteed profits underwritten by British taxpayers. This is especially egregious when rail franchises are given to foreign state-owned corporations that use British taxpayers’ money to cross-subsidise rail fares abroad.

HS2 should be scrapped and the money saved put into improving the metro systems of our conurbations and the re-opening of old branch lines closed in the Beeching cuts where economically feasible.

Air

There should be no third runway at Heathrow. Regional airports should be allowed to expand and take more flights where appropriate.

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We currently import about 46% of our food while embarking on schemes that are destroying and degrading farmland. This needs to end. We will set a target to become 100% food self-sufficient within 10 years.

We will end all subsidies that discourage or prevent farmers from growing food on their land and could lead to farm closures. We shall also end all subsidies for converting agricultural land to wind turbines, solar farms and battery-operated storage systems.

We will pay farmers to produce food, not meet climate targets.

In order to protect domestic food production, we will increase the total annual budget for UK Agriculture by £1bn and restore the value of direct payments to farmers that have been cut by DEFRA. The farm subsidy system should be targeted to support food production and safety, good stewardship of the land and animal welfare, as well as encouraging an increase in organic and free-range farming.

We must return to natural, regenerative farming methods. We will encourage diverse, mixed farming for local needs, with proper crop rotation that regenerates the soil, less reliance on pesticides and herbicides, more hedges and nature land strips, zero genetically modified food, and ethically sourced and produced meat.

The alternative is a continuation of monoculture crop production that degrades the soil and high intensity factory farming in which animals are treated cruelly. This is already being replaced by an even worse and dystopian vision of a future of high-tech, unnatural, AI-automated biomass production with genetically modified food, genome processing, 5G geofencing of farm animals, bug powder and vertical soil-less agriculture under hydroponic lighting that Tony Blair describes as a ‘no farm future’.

Our food must continue to be natural and not grown in a laboratory. We will prohibit the production and import of ‘Frankenfoods’ like ‘lab-grown meat’ or insect biomass to prevent them from contaminating our food supply in the UK.

We will repeal the Precision (Gene) Editing Bill 2022 and we will prohibit the inscription of experimental mRNA technology into our food supply.

We will re-develop a system of small abattoirs so that local farmers can take animals to slaughter locally. We will reverse regulations that have caused many existing small abattoirs to close down.

We will re-open the state-of-the-art meat checking facility at Dover to prevent the Illegal imports of 1-2 tonnes of unidentified meat (mainly pork) that has been entering UK daily since it was closed, endangering food safety in our nation.

We will seek to incentivise more British young people to choose farming as a vocation and encourage British students to pick the harvest during their summer holidays to end reliance on foreign labour.

We will deregulate the tracing required on domestic farm animals. This is hugely costly to farmers and provides no discernible benefit.

We will comprehensively overhaul the currently draconian response to animal diseases, e.g. bird flu and foot and mouth. The destruction of entire flocks and herds for diseases that pose no threat to people is pointless.

It is vital that we are able to produce our own fertiliser in the UK. To this end, we will nationalise the UK’s last remaining ammonia production plant in Billingham, which is currently mothballed, and re-start domestic production of ammonia, which is an essential ingredient in fertiliser manufacturing.

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We will improve animal welfare on farms with these actions:

• We will end the practice of keeping egg laying hens in so-called ‘enriched’ cages which are little better than battery cages. All UK produced eggs should be free range or organic.
• All farm animals should have space to move about while they are alive. There should be an end to factory farming where animals are kept in confined conditions for their whole lives. Ultimately, all farm animals should be free range or organic.
• We will ban the intensive farming of fish and other sea creatures where salmon, octopus and other species are kept in dirty, unhygienic and overcrowded conditions for the whole of their lives.
• We will end the export of live animals for slaughter, except from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland.
• There is no pleasant method of slaughtering animals, but in every case, the most humane method must be used for each species. We will ban the practice of non-stun slaughter of cows, sheep and pigs in the UK.

• All slaughterhouses must be fitted with CCTV, and all slaughtering of animals must be carried out by recognised slaughtermen in a registered slaughterhouse.

• All meat and meat products must be clearly labelled with the method of slaughter. This applies to both domestic and imported meat.

We will re-impose a ban on animal testing for cosmetics. and introduce a ban on animal testing for botox and household cleaning products. This is unnecessary as cruelty-free products have been available for some time.

We will ban imports of products that have been produced or developed using cruelty to animals.

Stronger deterrents against animal cruelty are needed than exist at present. Crimes against animals should carry a sentence that is a proportion of the same crime if a human were the victim, up to an equivalent sentence for the most sentient animals.

We will repeal the laws requiring dogs, cats and farm animals to be microchipped.

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The UK-EU TCA sold out our fisherman and effectively left us in the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy with little say over quotas in our own waters. We will leave TCA and take full control of our full 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), as is our entitlement under international law; allowing us to rebuild our fishing industry, its ancillary industries, and our coastal towns. 

Thereafter, we will stop foreign boats from fishing in our waters, including supertrawlers, end the practice of foreign owners buying and using British flags of convenience, and prohibit the sale of quotas, so only British fishermen in British boats can fish in British waters. Fish caught in British waters must be landed in the UK. This will quickly help to revitalise the fishing industry in our coastal towns and contribute towards self-sufficiency in food.

We will end the practice of ‘bottom trawling’ where nets are dragged along the sea bed causing complete devastation to natural habitat of the sea floor, indiscriminately  killing all species of plants and animals alike.

We will end the practice of electric pulse fishing in UK waters.

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(c) David Kurten
Heritage Party Leader

Published: September 2020
Revised: January 2021, May 2021, April 2022, January 2023, April 2024

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