The Liberal Democrats are not serious!
The Lib Dems have some good policies, particularly a local income tax to replace the council tax and proportional representation, but they don’t seriously campaign on them. Demonstrations against the council tax have been led by the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and pensioners in England – imagine how big they would be if the Lib Dems mobilised their membership and supporters! Socialists, with the aid of considerable publicity from the Daily Mirror, did far more to build the two million-strong anti-war demo in London in 2003 than the Lib Dems did.
In one recent edition of the Lib Dems’ Focus newsletter, their main headline was about their campaign to stop the former cinema building in the middle of Withington being turned into a pub!
The Lib
Dems claim to be “democrats” but the proposals they put forward for the new
electoral system that will be used to elect members of the Scottish Parliament
(MSPs) showed otherwise. Whereas their proposal to allow transfers from voters’
first choices to other candidates obviously increases democracy, only electing
four to seven MSPs per constituency requires about 14 to 25% of the vote would
be far from proportional – and designed to help them but hinder the SSP.
The Campaign for Democracy in the UK ( www.democracycampaign.org.uk)
Independent Socialist candidate Steve Wallis has set up this campaign around the following set of demands:
· Proportional Representation via Single Transferable Vote in all elections.·
The reduction of the right to vote and stand for
election to the age of 16.
· The extension of the right to vote and stand for election to all people resident in the UK, irrespective of their nationality.
· No longer denying the right to stand for election if you are in prison for over 12 months.
· The right for the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly or Northern Ireland Assembly to decide a policy relevant to its area of the UK, if it votes to remove the policy from Westminster.
· The abolition of the House of Lords and the monarchy.· Annual elections at all levels of government.
· Opposition to Britain adopting the Euro.
· Opposition to the proposed European constitution.
· Opposition to New Labour’s proposed introduction of ID cards.
· Written constitutions for the Westminster and Scottish parliaments, with the right of those parliaments to introduce referendums to change them requiring over 50%.
The House of Lords and monarchy are both relics of feudalism. New Labour did remove peers from the Lords who were only there due to an accident of birth, but filling it with Tony’s cronies isn’t much better! It is designed to hold back the will of the people. A fox-hunting bill would have been passed without wasting many hours of MPs’ time, and without the amendments that still allow foxes to be killed inhumanely, if the House of Lords was abolished.
The Queen and William are quite popular, but most hold Charles in contempt, mainly due to his treatment of Diana (see the back page for details of her assassination). Harry is following in his grandfather’s footsteps (who shook hands with Hitler) in embracing fascism. When asked about his girlfriend, the daughter of a Zimbabwean businessman linked to dictator Mugabe, Harry said that she’s not black or anything!
The monarchy is not just a waste of money – the Queen (or her successor) has the right to dissolve parliament! The SSP’s Rosie Kane protested (see below) when forced to swear an oath of allegiance to enter the Scottish Parliament.
 |
We should vote against the European constitution and joining the Euro, if there are referenda. The Lib Dems support both proposals, which would give a lot of power to an unelected President and a European central bank.
No more “pensions holidays”, Robert Maxwells or stock market gambling!
Workers choose between a company pension, needing bosses to do well in order to pay for all the years we’ve worked (and hoping nobody like Maxwell steals the money), a private pension (gambled on the stock market relying on capitalism doing well) or put up with low state pensions. The new pensions protection scheme can only cope with one top 100 company going bust every 4 years. A stock market crash must trigger a socialist revolution!
Scientific advances under socialism will solve the problems of ageing!
3