It’s election time again
The Socialist Party will be standing in the elections to the European Parliament on 4 June. These elections will be held under a system of proportional representation and the whole of Greater London will be a single constituency. We will be presenting a full list of 8 candidates. There are over 5 million electors in London. Which will be the largest number of workers up to now who will be faced with possibility of voting for world socialism. Below is the socialist manifesto on which our candidates will be standing.
Every few years groups of professional politicians compete for your vote to win themselves a comfortable position, this time in the European Parliament. All of the other parties and candidates offer only minor changes to the present system. That is why whichever candidate or party wins there is no significant change to the way things are. Promises are made and broken, targets are set and not reached, statistics are selected and spun.
All politicians assume that capitalism is the only game in town, although they may criticise features of its unacceptable face, such as greedy bankers, or the worst of its excesses, such as unwinnable wars. They defend a society in which we, the majority of the population, must sell our capacity to work to the tiny handful who own most of the wealth. They defend a society in which jobs are offered only if there is a profit to be made.
Real socialism
The Socialist Party urges a truly democratic society in which people take all the decisions that affect them. This means a society without rich and poor, without owners and workers, without governments and governed, a society without leaders and led.
In such a society people would cooperate to use all the world’s natural and industrial resources in their own interests. They would free production from the artificial restraint of profit and establish a system of society in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation. Socialist society would consequently mean the end of buying, selling and exchange, an end to borders and frontiers, an end to organised violence and coercion, waste, want and war.
What you can do
You can vote for candidates who will work within the capitalist system and help keep it going. Or you can use your vote to show you want to overturn it and end the problems it causes once and for all.
When enough of us join together, determined to end inequality and deprivation, we can transform elections into a means of doing away with a society of minority rule in favour of a society of real democracy and social equality.
If you agree with the idea of a society of common and democratic ownership where no one is left behind and things are produced because they are needed, and not to make a profit for some capitalist corporation, and are prepared to join with us to achieve this then vote for the SOCIALIST PARTY list.
The election will of course be taken place outside London too, in fact in most of Europe. To take account of this, our manifesto will be translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian and Swedish and distributed by socialists there as well as being published on the website of the World Socialist Movement at www.worldsocialism.org. In the rest of Britain, and in Ireland, the following leaflet will be distributed.
Flying pigs and the Euro elections
You might have heard of the Euro elections, the biggest in history, 500 million people, 27 countries, June 4th? You’re supposed to choose which of your local crème-de-la-crème get to go on free holidays to Brussels and Strasbourg, and the powers that be are a bit worried that you won’t take it seriously enough to bother voting. Shame on you!
Just to show how desperately important all this is, here’s a few ways in which the European Parliament has recently changed your life enormously:
· working time directives limiting your weekly hours to 48 (but don’t worry, the UK government opted out of that one pretty smartly).
· all-inclusive air-fare prices (for those of you frequently travelling to Brussels and Strasbourg…).
· REACH directive on industrial chemical use.
· roaming mobile phone directives (for those of you frequently travelling to Brussels and Strasbourg…).
Alright, not very Earth-shaking, admittedly. If you’re struggling to make ends meet on benefits, or facing redundancy or any of the hundred problems workers are always having, these are probably not the issues that will drag you out to the polling booth.
The fact is, the whole Euro show is not really designed to do anything for YOU, it’s just designed to stop the big Ruling Piggies from going to war with each other, like they did in the two World Wars. Though it’s a good idea to avoid wars, since it’s always workers who end up suffering, it’s really the expense that bothers them, not your welfare. If they make the Euro-trough big enough, goes the thinking, they can all shove in their snouts without getting in each other’s way. It’s all about the money, surprise surprise. While money and capitalism exist, it always will be.
You might think, especially with this economic depression, that capitalism does nothing but make a slave out of you, and that it’s only the rich that benefit. If your local candidates are not saying this, why bother voting for them? Well, better to make a statement than stay silent. All you have to do is write something rude across your ballot paper, or if you prefer, ‘Abolish money and capitalism’ or ‘World Socialism, common ownership and democratic control’, if it’ll fit. A vote’s always worth using, even when there’s nobody worth voting for.
And when you’ve done that, go and find some like-minded people at www.worldsocialism.org