UK Parties: The Labour Party

[T_i_B]

A thread about the Labour party, the current governing party in Great Britain, lead by the prime minister Gordon Brown.

As with the other main parties, finding any sort of statement of principles on their website is a bit of a task but I have found a list of testimonies from party members as to why they are Labour

http://www2.labour.org.uk/why_im_labour

[Jeneral2885]

1. Manifesto 2010

http://www2.labour.org.uk/uploads/TheLabourPartyManifesto-2010.pdf

[T_i_B]

2. From the "Enemies of Reason" blog

http://enemiesofreason.co.uk/2010/04/12/this-was-going-to-be-a-post-about-the-express/

This is a post about something else I've seen today, in the Labour Party manifesto for the general election and the handy packaging-together of 'crime and immigration', as if they were subjects that you just couldn't separate and which needed to be put in a section together.

Oh come now, the Labour cheerleaders will come out and say, that's not fair: you can see in the manifesto the way that there's clear delineation, and it's not as if anyone's trying to conflate the issues. But I'm sorry, I just don't buy that. Why is 'crime' lumped in with 'securing our borders'? Why couldn't chapter 5 have been about crime, and chapter 6 about immigration?

Or perhaps there's another title that would have been a better catch-all than 'crime and immigration': they could simply have called the chapter 'FEAR!!" in big capital letters with a couple of massive exclamation marks. Maybe they could have put a skull and crossbones as the graphic instead of a sunburst, and they could have done it in blood red instead of orange: you know, really gone for it, rather than just dancing around the daisies, as they have done here. And why stop there? Why not invite Rod Liddle to write chapter 5 and get him to recycle his fact-free drivel about most street crime being people from an Afro-Caribbean background? Come on Labour, if you want to sound the dog-whistle, let's do it nice and loudly! Don't be shy now, there's an election at stake!

The thing I find most agonising about this whole business, though, is how the tabloid agenda, the fear agenda, has been met by politicians. There's a fear of crime, regardless of whether crime is going up or down, or whether people who fear the most are most at risk of crime or not; there's a fear of the impact of immigration, whether it's justified or not. Instead of meeting these things head-on, and challenging the perceptions, Labour cravenly just whimpers in the face of the tabloid agenda and lumps in crime with immigration and makes it clear that they're all about 'securing our borders'.

[Mark Baker]

3. Clause 4 of their consitution

is a statement of their aims and values. It starts:

1 The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few; where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe and where we live together freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect.

No, I can't find this on their website either, but google found it pretty quickly.

[BolivarianHero]

4. ROFL...

They're a neo-con party; they're as "socialist" as Venezuela's Democratic Action.