Azara Blog: Labour Party manifesto is launched

Date published: 2005/04/13

Tony Blair has urged voters to make Labour's changes last "for all time" as he launched their election manifesto.
His programme for a third term includes a pledge not to increase the basic or top rate of income tax, but says nothing about National Insurance.
After eight years in power, Mr Blair says he is fighting his last election.

What a boring (and long) manifesto it is. "More of the same" sums it up. And full of the usual New Labour jargon and misleading statistics.

If the last term is anything to go by, then expect increases in National Insurance (NI) to help plug the black hole in public finances that has now developed courtesy of Gordon Brown refusing to balance the books. NI is an income tax, only it is not called an income tax. It is a particularly insidious income tax because it only applies to income earned by working. So if you spend 40 or 50 hours a week slaving on an NHS ward then you have to pay it. But if you make your money renting out houses or playing the stock market then you do not have to pay it. Go figure. The Labour Party is an anti-Labour Party. (Well Blair is a Tory in all but name.)

Amazingly the manifesto mentions the word "Iraq" ten times. (Not to apologise for misleading the nation into an unnecessary war, or for putting the interests of the US government above the interests of the citizens of Britain.) But no mention of "Bush".

Some selected quotes.

"We will seek political consensus in tackling congestion, including examining the potential of moving away from the current system of motoring taxation towards a national system of road-pricing." (If it was a zero-sum game then most drivers would put up with it but it will not be a zero-sum game. The infrastructure costs are huge, which has to be paid for, and the anti-car nutters will be around promising to steal even more money from drivers.)
"We are committed to using the UK's 2005 presidency of the European Union to promote the inclusion of aviation in the EU's emissions trading scheme." (A good idea in theory. Perhaps the only good idea in the entire manifesto, if not very original.)
"We will take further action to narrow the pay and promotion gap between men and women." (Hopefully they will consider this rationally, e.g. taking account of the fact that men travel further to work, but that is unlikely, since that is not politically correct.)
"By 2008, those needing a visa to enter the UK will be fingerprinted.We will issue ID cards to all visitors planning to stay for more than three months." (Well that will encourage foreigners to want to come to study in the UK. Why not just hand out leaflets saying "you are all scum, keep out".)
"We will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports." (Putting the interests of the US government and the State above the interests of the citizens of the UK. And the word "voluntary" is obviously intended as a joke.)
"We also need to disrupt and prevent terrorist activity. New control orders will enable police and security agencies to keep track on those they suspect of planning terrorist outrages including bans on who they can contact or meet, electronic tagging and curfew orders, and for those who present the highest risk, a requirement to stay permanently at home." (Yes, New Labour, New Police State.)
"We need to forge a national consensus about how we move from a pension system designed for today's pension problems to one that is right for tomorrow's." (They could start by undoing all the damaging changes they and previous governments have made over the last quarter century. And by not allowing companies to steal the pension assets of their workers.)
"Fear of seeming to 'nanny' has in the past meant British law and culture have not supported parents and children. Government cannot shirk its responsibilities. Our starting point is that for children to come first parents need to be given choices." (In translation, "choices" for parents means that non-parents will have to fork over even more money than they already do to parents. But all the political parties agree on this. Yet no matter how much money parents get given, they always want more, like all other special interest groups.)
"We are committed to reforming council tax." (As usual everybody wants services but nobody wants to pay for the services. Council tax is badly implemented but anything that replaces it will almost certainly be no better because central government will still decide the lion share of what local authorities receive. So the Tories screwed Labour areas and Labour has screwed Tory areas.)
"As part of the process of modernisation,we will remove the remaining hereditary peers and allow a free vote on the composition of the House [of Lords]." (The House of Lords should be elected, only the cowards who run the House of Commons cannot stand the thought, so we shall see. The House of Lords is currently the only body standing in the way of New Labour becoming a quasi-dictatorship. They may be fossils, but they are our fossils.)

Labour will be the next government so we will all have to put up with this crap. Our only hope is that their majority is vastly reduced so they will be not be able to inflict too much damage on the country, especially with regard to civil liberties. At least in four years we will be rid of Blair (well, he is a serial liar so you never know).

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