I have a proposal for the current government. It might at first glance seem to throw caution to the wind, and the current breakdown of relations between the Starmer government and the civil service alleged by the press might throw a spanner in the works, but hear me out.

This government has plenty of policies, some good and some bad. I’m not going to go through them line by line, but as a good policy I would suggest the recent decision to disconnect electricity prices from gas (although I’ve seen the proposed implementation questioned here – worth reading for a deeper dive into the issue). This is one of those bold actions that really ought to have been done as soon as they got into power, not just for our sake but for theirs. It could have made the early decision to take the winter fuel allowance away from all but the very poorest pensioners more palatable, and more like a part of an understandable, integrated agenda framed around getting energy costs down for everyone. Think of the political trouble this would have saved the government.

As a bad policy I would propose ID cards as probably the worst, for reasons too complex to go into here. But this policy should have been fatally damaged by the recent appearance for sale on the well-known Chinese website Alibaba of medical information culled from half a million participants of one of the UK’s landmark scientific programmes, UK Biobank. You don’t get to be this loose with critical citizen’s data and then ask for all the rest of it to look after. There is a version of digitally-empowered citizen sovereignty, on an entirely more advanced technology stack, I might be persuaded to support, but the current policy as I understand it goes nowhere near even approaching that possibility. The government would increase its chances of staying in power with the electorate by dropping the policy, and kicking the issue into the long, long grass for a rethink.

But beyond dropping the dodgy stuff, while implementing and selling their better policies quicker, I think the best thing the government could do at this point is look at all the main parties, including different Labour factions, and steal all their best policies.

That’s right. Comb the current policy agendas of Reform, the Lib Dems, the Greens and the Tories and just steal all the best policy. Petty larceny on a grand scale. Some of that could even work in synergy. The Tory proposal to abolish stamp duty could be funded not as they propose by welfare cuts or whatever but by a radical reform of land and property taxes in general, as suggested by the Greens and some on the Labour left

What got me thinking about this was the best policy announcement I’ve heard from the Liberal Democrats in some time. In keeping with thoughts across parties and party factions, the proposal is to essentially abolish HM Treasury (an ancient institution which seems to be a Norman innovation), breaking it up and separating public spending from tax and growth decisions. Some version of this idea is shared by Michael Gove and some left-of-centre thinkers, based on analysis that the ancient and over-powered Treasury holds Britain back. If we really want investment in internal improvements, it has to go. The Liberal Democrat announcement adds to this, proposing a new department of tax and growth be founded in the great city of Birmingham, in line with cross-party desires to get parts of government out of London. Personally I’d go further and move the House of Commons (but not the Upper House) to Birmingham too, but that’s another story.

Starmer talked, vaguely, of rewiring the British state. If other parties then come up with a solid proposal to actually do it, why not adopt the essentials of the plan, while retaining flexibility over the details?

In a two-party system, the political danger is obvious. You risk looking like you are simply stealing your opponent’s attire, without ideas of your own. The latter part of this though is a reputation Starmer’s already saddled with. In the current emerging multi-party system, stealing the best policies from all four Westminster-focused rival parties wouldn’t give advantage to any one of those rivals, so the electoral calculus for Labour should be neutral. But supercharging Labour’s existing agenda with the most synergistic and best of the rest on offer would make the government look capable of governing in a fractious political kaleidoscope, even of resolving our current chaos into a some kind of dynamic yet inclusive new order. If they can do that and govern with professionalism and compassion they could find themselves the leadership of a coalition government, or even retain a majority, in the next Parliament

I see no other alternative but more chaos. But only time will tell.