This site has spoken a few times, usually in jest, about forming its own political party and contesting elections. But as the UK heads for the biggest democratic trainwreck in its history – a vote which, depending on where you live, is really either a proxy Brexit referendum, a proxy independence referendum, a judgement on the personal character of Jeremy Corbyn or any of half-a-dozen other things – we found ourselves thinking again about what, on the fundamental ideological level, we’d stand for.

It’s a question that existing parties find it remarkably hard to answer. Labour used to define it clearly in its key “Clause IV” – a clear statement of commitment to socialist principles like public ownership and wealth redistribution – before Tony Blair junked it in the 1990s for some woolly neoliberal rubbish from an aspirational Facebook meme.

For the SNP, clearly its primary defining goal is always the democratic pursuit of independence for Scotland. What you might call its day-to-day policies have, like most parties, varied and evolved over time, but it’s always had that one clear unifying and overriding aim. It may have won electoral success through decent governance, but its purpose was never merely competent administration for its own sake.

In the case of the Conservative Party, the turn-of-the-20th-century US economist John Kenneth Galbraith summed up their position pithily and accurately:

(And lest an offended Tory should seek to instantly dismiss him as some flavour of pinko tree-hugging bleeding-heart lefty, he also said: “Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.”.)

The Liberal Democrats, of course, stand for being in the middle of Labour and the Conservatives, whatever that means on any given day. (They did briefly experiment in the 2000s with being to the left of Labour, partly because it was hard NOT to be, but the coalition scuppered that and now they’re basically Tory wets.)

But what about us?

As it happens, we’ve always had a simple and clear definition of our political position, and in particular our stance on economics. It goes like this:

“Anyone who works a full 40-hour week, at ANY job, should be able to afford a roof over their head and an acceptable quality of life – including a social and leisure life – without state assistance.”

It has the benefits of being short, easy to understand and very difficult to disagree with. Who could possibly contest the basic, modest notion that full-time work should pay enough to live on? If the entire 20th century achieved anything, it was surely that most minimal of social contracts – work hard and you’ll have a decent life.

Millions of people have no interest in climbing a career ladder (even assuming one should be available in an increasingly service-based economy). Like their parents and grandparents before them, they’re happy to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, be able to afford the occasional night out or family daytrip and an annual holiday and a nice TV and a second-hand car and a couple of quid tucked away for emergencies and their old age.

It’s not much to ask from a First World society, and more to the point it’s completely achieveable. Despite the challenges of globalisation and outsourcing and such, plenty of countries manage it, most obviously (to the point of cliché) the Nordic ones.

The framework is there waiting to be copied. Their high-wage, high-tax, high-welfare approaches result in healthy economies and the happiest populations in the world.

(Coincidentally, most are also small nations very roughly the size of Scotland. The average population of the top 10 is just 11.7 million, and if you take out Canada and Australia it plummets to 7 million.)

But it’s a goal that the UK – with its low-wage, low-tax, low-welfare ideology shaped primarily for the interests of the shareholders of multinational corporations – comes nowhere near reaching. The minimum wage is comically inadequate in large swathes of the country, including most of the major cities, and hundreds of thousands of working people now rely on food charity just to avoid literally starving to death.

The average rent in London – including one-bedroom and obscene “studio flats” that are basically cupboards with mattresses in them – is now £1,246 a month. Cities like Edinburgh and Aberdeen are catching up fast. The new “national living wage” of £7.50 an hour pays £1,157 a month after deductions for a 40-hour week – in other words, almost £100 short of even covering rent in the nation’s capital, let alone food, clothing, bills, travel costs or anything else.

Rather than tackle the fundamental issues, Labour filled the gap for 13 years with “tax credits” and ever-spiralling housing benefit, effectively massive state subsidies to corporations to pay sub-liveable wages. The Tories have characteristically attacked these “handouts” at the first opportunity, casting struggling workers and families deeper into poverty and misery.

Those out of work, for whatever reasons, have suffered even more brutally. Benefits have been capped and frozen below inflation, those under 35 have been denied the right to non-shared housing and under-21s denied housing full stop, the bedroom tax sought to force the poor out of cities entirely, and huge cuts to disability benefits have imprisoned the vulnerable in their homes and driven many to suicide.

(And if you do kill yourself in desperation, an absolutely massive cut to bereavement benefits will leave your dependents destitute after just 18 months, if that.)

Tory ideology is essentially – and we’re going to be euphemistic here – Darwinist in nature. The strong scoop up all the rewards and the weak are abandoned to charity or death. It’s not just anti-socialist but anti-civilisation, seeking to reverse almost all the social progress of the previous century. Compassion is antithetical to the market. The vulnerable are a burden, and supporting them is “unfair” on the rest.

We’re straining every sinew not to draw the obvious – and reasonable – analogy.

But the terrifying thing is that the people of the UK have been persuaded – chiefly by the right-wing media over a period of several decades, but also by the ideological cowardice of the other political parties – to go along with it. Attacks on benefits are popular even with the working class, and redistributive policies like higher income tax on the wealthy and inheritance tax are strongly resisted by all demographics.

In the latter case (inheritance tax), popular opinion is almost certainly coloured by the fact that most voters are now either of the generation who gained enormously from the Thatcher government’s mass housing giveaway in the 1980s (basically the Baby Boomers), or the one (Generation X) which will inherit that windfall from their parents.

Those two blessed generations, who between them now hoard an vast percentage of the nation’s wealth, have – understandably and naturally – no intention of allowing it to be shared out with everyone else. They intend to hold onto what they have while the ladder is pulled up behind them because economic policy has driven housing out of the reach of people just entering adulthood.

In other words, whichever side of the Great Division of wealth in the 1980s you came out on, the haves or the have-nots, you’re staying there forever. Or at least until you outbreed – and can therefore outvote – the generation before you, and the generation before them dies out.

(Seen in that context, the two-child benefit cap takes on a whole new significance.)

But we’re rambling. The Decency Charter is an ideological principle which could and should be adopted by any party who not only want to fix a lethally broken country, but harness the disillusioned Millennial generation in the interests of securing power.

The Nordic nations and others show it can be done within the modern global economy. It fits neatly on a pledge card (with room for specific policy detail on the back). It’s rhetorically powerful – the validity of any policy could be easily measured and argued according to whether or not it progressed the aims of the Charter, in a manner that would be almost impossible to counter. And the left wing of British politics is currently in such a rock-bottom state that it has nothing to lose.

But most of all, the alternative is simply too terrifying to contemplate.