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“For many international diplomats, the path towards a ceasefire is clear. ‘It’s devastatingly obvious how this war will end,’ says one former western senior statesman who travels frequently to Kyiv. ‘Ceasefire along the line of control, plus security guarantees for Kyiv short of full Nato membership. No formal ceding of territory. Ukraine becomes like Cyprus – an EU member which does not recognise that it’s been partitioned.’”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/zelenskys-peace-summit-flop/
South Wales branch’s display advert is appearing today in the two main regional dailies circulating in Wales — the Cardiff-based Western Mail and the Liverpool-based Daily Post. The branch had been intending to contest a seat in Swansea but in the end decided to do this.
The text reads:
No money, no wages, no politics. What does that sound like?
In the coming General Election, you’re being asked to vote for parties who all have the same basic way of looking at things. They all support the continuation of the present system of money and wages, buying and selling and production for the market and for profit rather than for human need. There are marginal differences between them as to how this system should be run, for example with more or less control or ownership by government rather than by private companies or individuals.
But whichever of them comes to power, the same thing always results – crises of one kind or the other, damage to the environment, wars causing death and
suffering in various parts of the world, and even in the UK many people going without the basics of food and housing. This is in a country – and a world – that could produce abundance for everyone and easily satisfy everyone’s desire for a secure and comfortable life for themselves and their families.
But this is not possible – and never will be possible – in a world where a tiny minority of people possess the vast majority of the wealth and the vast majority of people have to be satisfied – if they are lucky – with just getting by.
Voting for any of the established parties in the forthcoming election will just mean more of the same. But you do have the opportunity to register your opposition to the existing system of society by voting for none of the candidates or parties who are standing but by writing ‘Socialism – a world of free access’ across your ballot paper and doing this in your thousands. When enough of us are prepared to do this and take democratic action to bring that kind of world about, there already exists, with modern communications and technology, the means to give everyone on the planet a comfortable life in a society of voluntary cooperation and planned abundance. This will be a society of free access to all goods and services, without buying and selling, without markets, without leaders and without frontiers – a society where people co-operate freely and produce what is necessary to satisfy everyone’s needs.
To findout more, visit the website of the Socialist Party of Great Britain on http://www.spgb.net or use the QR code https://tinyurl.com/4tdz4sdb This will also allow you to request a free 3-month subscription to our monthly journal, the Socialist Standard.
Promoted by the Socialist Party of Great Britain at
52 Clapham High St, London, SW4 7UN.I didn’t know about this but someone mentioned somewhere that Galloway has put up as many candidates as he could in order to get more “Short money”. So I looked this up and:
“Short Money is made available to all opposition parties in the House of Commons that secured either two seats, or one seat and more than 150,000 votes, at the previous General Election.”
So if he can get elected and he and the ragbag of other WPB candidates can garner at least 150,000 votes in total between them his party will qualify for:
“General funding for Opposition Parties – the amount payable to qualifying parties is £21,438.33 for every seat won at the last General Election plus £42.82 for every 200 votes gained by the party.”
I can’t see them garnering that many but they might have done if there were 500 of them.
Incidentally, this explains why the parties put up candidates in seats they know they have no chance at all of winning —- they get a couple of bob for every 200 votes these no-chance candidates get.
If this applied to all parties contesting (as happens in some countries but not hereb) if we can get at least 200 votes we could get £43.82.
Strangely we are still getting people using the QR from our GLA emection campaign leaflet. 30 in fact since the election day of 2 May. Which compares with the 42 up to that date.
Taken together that’s about 1 for every 200 leaflets distributed (14,500).
For the record, they are still discussing in the letters column of the Weekly Worker the question of whether or not a socialist party should have a programme of immediate demands which we raised after the GLA elections, with our approach still being mentioned.
Just when it might be thought that the electoral statement of some individual WPB candidates could not be more vacuous, there’s this one from their candidate in Kingston and Surbiton:
You have still missed the point. It’s not about how a majority of the world’s population might come to want socialism but about, if they did, whether or not mechanisms to express and implement this exist. Someone had suggested that they couldn’t.
That wasn’t the point. The point was that they all did vote for the same — capitalism — so why on principle couldn’t they vote for a different same — socialism. But you are such a Party pooper that you can only see the negative side of things.
This year a large percentage of the world’s population will have voted in elections — the EU, the USA, India and Russia, not just here. Why is it inconceivable that they could have all returned a majority in favour of socialism? They didn’t of course but the mechanism to do this in a comparatively short period of time already exists.
Actually, the other left of Labour candidate standing in Southgate and Wood Green, Geoff Moseley of the Workers Party, doesn’t sound so bad as the Trotskyist.
What Trotskyist would argue;
“If we want Parliament to act in the best interests of all, we’re going to have to do it ourselves, and
the mechanism for peaceful revolution has been staring us in the face for generations: Democracy.
It wasn’t handed to us on a plate; it’s a right our ancestors fought hundreds of years to get. And it’s not God-given either: it has only existed for about three hundred of the last ten thousand years.
The modern version has been with us for less than a century.
So, we don’t have to take up arms. No one will be killed. There will be no executions. All we have to do is line up in an orderly manner, and vote. If you carry on voting the way you have – or not voting at all – the status quo will remain more or less as is: the rich will continue to exploit the poor, rich countries will carry on treating war as an offshore business, politicians will carry on representing their own best interests, and more and more life on this precious planet will suffer.”This is from his own site not the WPB’s. In fact it comes from the time he had his own registered party, Hoi Polloi, which stood in nearby Hornsey in the 2015 general election. He can may be typical of some of those who have come forward to stand for the Workers Party.
http://geoffmoseley.com/Hoi_Polloi/Never_was_so_much_owed_by_so_many.
Discussion on us on this bulletin board arising out of our leaflet in Clapham and Brixton Hill:
https://vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/18311/clapham-brixton-hill
Talking about Karl Vidol, the TUSC candidate in Southgate and Wood Green (above), a comrade who is an elector there has sent him the following email;
Dear Karl Vidol.
I am writing in response to your Election communication.
It says “VOTE SOCIALIST”, but nowhere is that term, or socialism, defined (see below). It seems to be treated as a word to describe a political flavouring, rather than a revolutionary concept. The term socialism has, unfortunately, has had many associations, most of them unpleasant, although the left usually haven’t shied away from them. You would think that if you were seeking a “socialist” vote you would offer the voters a concise definition to focus on, rather than the usual cat’s-lick-and-a-promise presented by capitalist parties.
You appear rather coy in referring to the working class, but use “working-class people” instead. The gap between rich (capitalist) class and the rest increasing is predicated on the accumulation of wealth by the capitalist class, so there’s nothing new there. The rich get richer because we—the working class—allow them to do so, not because they keep us in physical chains or deny us the vote.
Most political parties vie with each other to administer capitalism. Some, like the left, claim they are doing it in working-class interests, some are blatantly capitalist. The result is the same, unless a complete change is contemplated, capitalism will continue to roll on as usual. Of course, there may be good times, but capitalism offers no certainty. Meanwhile we are cursed with war, poverty, and worse, destitution, environmental degradation, dictatorships, and we know some of the latter the left supported in the past.
If you want to rid the world of the evils that capitalism visits upon it, then offering the working class reforms that may or may not improve their situation, and could be taken away is not the answer.
Why have you picked on Gaza for your outrage, when there are many other conflicts happening round the world?
I have never been let down by the governing parties, recognizing that their role is to run capitalism for the benefit of those who own most of the world—the capitalist class. Governments may try to persuade you that they run the country in the interests of all, but that is not their function. That doesn’t mean that some politicians may believe that they are serving the interests of all. All it means is that they have absorbed the capitalist ideology (false consciousness) that only lets you see the world as it seems, not as it is.
You say, “…a new way of running the economy to benefit the majority, not just the billionaires.” So, billionaires will still exist in your “socialist” society? This seems to be the fact, because you talk about “For real workers’ rights”, implying that the capitalist class will still be around. You also talk in national terms, but socialism can only be achieved on a worldwide basis, a world of common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, without state control. A society introduced by a majority vote of the working class, not imposed upon them by an all-knowing elite.
The only way for “every possible improvement for working-class people” is to introduce a society where the term working class would have no meaning.
“If the system can’t afford that, we need to change the system.” What change?
J. V. (Wood Green)
Apparently the hustings in Folkestone on Monday 17 attended by all 8 candidates was a sell-out;
Came across another wishy washy Workers Party candidate’s manifesto. This one from Lewisham West and Dulwich East (where I have a proxy vote for a comrade in Australia):
Note the pledges to give preference to veterans and small businesses.
He won’t be getting our comrade’s vote.
To check whether or not all WPB candidates were in effect standing as well-known local independents, I looked up that of Heiko Khoo, a long-time Hyde Park orator advocating Militant Tendency Trotskyism from his platform, who is standing for them in Putney.
His manifesto is more what you would call leftwing, but note the hints of conspiracy theories about vaccination and abolishing cash:
Another left-of-Labour candidate whose election manifesto can hardly be described as radical. This from the Workers Party candidate in Battersea in London;
Of course it is a good thing that these opportunistic reformists don’t mention socialism.
