From one megalomaniacal trade union boss to another. The first thing you see when visiting the site of the Socialist Labour Party (apart from the appalling design) is a big picture of their fearless leader Arthur Scargill.

Now I have to admit that I have a soft spot for the hard left due to being brought up in a fairly left-wing family. Indeed my maternal Grandmother was a card-carrying Communist even going so far as to visit Moscow before the days of Glasnost and Perestroika. So I was raised knowing that the Russians aren’t evil and that you shouldn’t believe everything Uncle Sam tells you.

Web Presence

It appears to be hand-written, and not by somebody who knows what they are doing. Aside from the horrifying design there is no information about any of their candidates (apart from Comrade Scargill) and not a mention of the European elections. You would think that an anti capitalist institution like the SLP would be running on open-source but upon inspecting the site I find:

Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

Tut, tut, tut.

Policies

They have a lot of policies and many of their policy descriptions go on at great length, liberally sprinkled with possibly spurious statistics. I say possibly spurious because they seem to be labouring under a pathological fear of citing their sources. The only document cited in the entire site is a report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which you can’t read unless you drop twenty quid on it.

Phantom sources aside, lets start of on some things I can agree with.

Homosexual partnerships should be recognised, including legally on a par with heterosexual ones. Sexuality should not be a bar to the custody of children, applications for fostering and adoption. Sexuality cannot be a bar to Aids and IVF treatment. When it comes to any aspect of criminal law, homosexual behaviour should be treated exactly the same way as heterosexuality.

Sing it brother. Keep this up and I’ll join you in a rousing rendition of “The Red Flag”.

A written Constitution should embody all individual and collective rights so that Judges would implement and not interpret the Constitution; this, together with a Bill of Rights, would allow a fair democratic system in which people could determine what type of Constitution we should have and then ensure that it is at all times upheld in the interests of us all.

Something else I could get behind.

We can have no higher goal than doing our best to ensure that every baby born into this world is wanted and will be cared for physically and emotionally throughout childhood and into adult life.

So, you’d have to be Ebeneezer Scrooge not to agree with basic premise of “the children are our future”. Further down the page the SLP declare that they are also pro-kitten and very much in favour of fluffy bunny rabbits.

I think at this point we should take it as read that as an economically liberal, free trade kind of chap I’m going to disagree with all of the SLP’s economic policies. However that still leaves a lot of policy ground to cover. The disagreement starts with animal rights.

Vivisection and animal testing should be abolished…..
Animal researchers feed the public lies designed to fool us into thinking that animal experiments are a medical necessity and that they lead to the development of drugs that heal all manner of illness

This only makes sense if you believe that there is a conspiracy amongst all biological scientists. The thing we know about scientists is that they value evidence and truth. If animal testing didn’t work they would stop doing it. What possible motivation could they have otherwise? Are we to believe that all biomedical scientists everywhere are sadists?

The commercial irradiation of many types of food – without our knowledge, let alone our consent – means that a number of foods now last weeks rather than days, but at what cost? What effect does irradiation have on the human body, and how long before we all have to pay the price of the fast-food, get-rich-quick system which now operates in Britain?

To be fair gamma rays are up the capitalist end of the electromagnetic spectrum with their bourgeois short wavelengths and elitist high frequencies.

The development of genetically modified crops is highly dangerous, and is something against which our Party campaigns. Those who try to ‘play God’ with our food, environment and the earth itself threaten disaster for future generations;

At least most Communists had the good grace to also be Atheists and not throw around phrases like “Playing God”. The safety of a GMO depends on what gene you put into it. Rice engineered to express Vitamin E; good. Rice engineered to express cobra venom; bad. It’s really not that complicated.

We can reduce dramatically the ‘greenhouse effect’ if power stations were to use fluidised bed combustion, together with a combined heat and power system. This would not only combat pollution but more than double the energy efficiency of coal-fired power stations.

You shoud note that according to the DOE doubling the efficiency of coal would make it about as green as burning natural gas. i.e not very. If you are serious about climate change you really want want sources of power that produce no Carbon Dioxide.

European Policies

The Socialist Labour Party is totally committed to complete withdrawal from the European Union, or Common Market as it was originally called. That is the only way Britain can begin to regain control of its economy, sovereignty and its political powers.

As I mentioned earlier nowhere on the SLP site do they even mention that the European elections are happening.

Not Mental

On the basis of their environment and animal welfare pages alone I’m going to have to go with mental.

Summary

It’s hard to get past the feeling that this is a vanity exercise for Scargill. The donations of the rank and file pay for Arthur to tour the country giving speeches without the worry of ever having to actually run anything. Shockingly I will not be voting for the SLP.