Useless Quango never heard of “SPGB”
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We have received the following communication from the useless quanqo that is the Electoral Commission displaying an incredible ignorance about politics in Britain from a body that's supposed to advise on elections.
Quote:Decision to remove your party description from the register of political parties
I am writing to inform you that we have conducted a review of party identity marks (party names, descriptions, and emblems) on the registers of political parties. The law requires the Commission to form an opinion on whether an identity mark would be likely to be confusing, misleading or hinder an elector's understanding of the ballot paper. Our review therefore considered these questions.
The review identified that your registered party description "SPGB" contain is an acronym.
In the Commission's opinion, the use of an acronym is likely to mislead voters as to the effect of their vote, unless that acronym is well-known and used in everyday language. An example of such a well-known acronym is 'UK'. It is our opinion that 'SPGB' is not such a well-known acronym that is used in everyday language.
The Commission will remove the above description from the register of political parties for Great Britain on 16 November 2015.Everybody in politics knows us as the "SPGB" (even if we don't promote this ourselves).
Hopefully, when it meets on Saturday, the EC will agree to send a robust reply to the political ignoramus and incompetent who made this decision and who evidently doesn't realise what a fool he is making of himself in political circles.
[This decision only concerns one of the variants of our registered name not our emblem.]
Positively absurd. Let's hope the EC sends the useless quango links such as these:https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/SPGBhttp://www.briefwiki.com/SPGB.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_of_Great_Britain
Well what about NO2EU and many other variants of those types? Can we check who else have now been disallowed? A quick google very quickly demonstrates that SPGB is in common political usage.Most dictionaries carry SPGB as the acknowledged acronym of ourselves …Did he check those or as you say based his decision on his personal [lack of] knowledge.
So the registered names and emblems are okay? Then remove SPGB from the description and add it to our list of registered names.
description = registered nameI suspect since NO2EU is not an acronym of the party name, but the name itself, and EU is in common use, they will be unaffected. I suspect if we formally changed the name of the party to Just SPGB they would have to allow that, since it would be our name, what they are kiboshing is acronyms of party's full names.
Hmmm, I suppose we could change our name to SPGB (Socialist Party of Great Britain) (actually, that's 6 words, we could register that…
They are offering us a free replacement variant of our name (instead of having to pay the usual £25). What about EsPeeGeeBee?At the moment the variants we have registered are:The Socialist Party (GB)SPGBThe World Socialist Party (Britain)The World Socialist Party(EU)The World Socialist Movement.I can't check because their website is no good either.I think slogans such as "Abolish the Wages System" and "The World for the Workers" might be allowed. At least they used to be.
I'm reading the quote as party identity marks consists of three things; party names, descriptions, and emblems. If acronyms aren't allowed in descriptions, then if we want to register them then we should do so in the party names.On a related old chesnut, according to Conference 2008, the full name 'The Socialist Party of Great Britain' is to be used in legal documents where confusion is likely, and this resolution supersedes the 1986 and 1988 Conference resolutions respecting the use of the Party's names. How come 'The Socialist Party of Great Britain' is not among the names registered with the confused Electoral Commission?
Of course it is. That's our registered name. The others I listed are, as I said, "variants" of it , which parties can also register and, if they want, use on the ballot paper instead.
In our case, yes since the only acronym we have in our emblem is GB and even they know what that means.
ALB wrote:In our case, yes since the only acronym we have in our emblem is GB and even they know what that means.That's the emblem to be used on ballot papers of course.
http://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/English/Registrations/PP110Our full registered details…
Shit! Just checked out the website and apparently Paddy Shannon is the leader, I thought it was still Bobby Gleghorn!On a serious note could we not make a small but relevant statement by just pulling a random member's name out of a hat on the last Friday of every month and then changing the leader's name on their website, or would this have a cost implication?
That's actually how Paddy was chosen as our "Leader" at one Conference. The idea was repeat the exercise every year but you have to pay £25 every time you make a change and there's a certain amount of bureaucracy is involved. But if you want to be our Leader it can be arranged. When registering him we did make it clear in a covering letter that it was for the purpose of the Political Parties Act only.Meanwhile, the 16 November having past and despite our letter, the Electoral Quango has gone ahead and removed "SPGB" as one of the registered variants of our name.
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