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Sunday, May 10, 2009

EUROPEAN UNION ELECTION

Having to decide who to support in the EU election I have had a look at UKIP's policies page. Here are MY COMMENTS

-UKIP will leave the political EU and trade globally and freely. We will re-embrace today’s fast-growing Commonwealth and we will encourage UK manufacturing so that we make things again. YES ON ALL POINTS

-We will freeze immigration for five years, speed up deportation of up to a million illegal immigrants by tripling the numbers engaged in deportations, and have ‘no home no visa’ work permits to ease the housing crisis. YES

-We will have a grammar school in every town. We will restore standards of education and improve skills training. Student grants will replace student loans. YES

-We will radically reform the working of the NHS with an Insurance Fund, whilst upholding the ‘free at the point of care’ principles. We will bring back matrons and have locally run, clean hospitals. YES

-We will give people the vote on policing priorities, go back to proper beat policing and scrap the Human Rights Act. We will have sentences that mean what they say. YES

-We will take 4.5 million people out of tax with a simple Flat Tax (with National Insurance) starting at £10,000. We will scrap Inheritance Tax, not just reform it and cut corporation taxes. YES, CUTTING CT WAS A PRIMARY 9% GROWTH PARTY POLICY, INDEED IT WAS OFFICIALLY THE REASON I WAS EXPELLED FROM THE LIBDEMS

-We will say No to green taxes and wind farms. To avert a major energy crisis, we will go for new nuclear power plants on the same existing site facilities and for clean coal. We will reduce pollution and encourage recycling. YES - PRIME 9% GROWTH PARTY POLICY AT THE SCOTTISH ELECTION TO WHICH ALL THE MAIN PARTIES WERE OPPOSED and THE SNP and LIBDEMS STILL ARE - WITHOUT THIS THE LIGHTS GO OUT

-We will make welfare simpler and fairer, introduce ‘workfare’ to get people back to work, and a new citizens pension and private pensions scheme insurance. NOT SURE IF A NEW PENSION SCHEME IS AFFORDABLE IN THE CURRENT ECONOMIC MESS BUT OTHERWISE YES

-We will support our armed forces with more spending on equipment, military homes and medical care. We will save our threatened warships and add 25,000 more troops. NO, WE CAN'T AFFORD MORE SPENDING ON ANYTHING JUST NOW & WHEN WE CAN WE SHOULD GO FOR NEW TECHNOLOGY RATHER THAN NUMBERS

-We will be fair to England, with an English Parliament of English MPs at Westminster. We will replace assembly members like MSPs with MPs. And we will promote referenda at local and national levels. NO RETAIN MSPs AND HOLYROOD BUT IF MPs WERE VOTED IN ON A DEMOCRATICALLY PROPORTIONAL SYSTEM THEY WOULD BE INTERCHANGEABLE. ENGLAND SHOULD HAVE A PARLIAMENT IF THEY WANT ONE

-We will make customer satisfaction number one for rail firms – not cost cutting and will look seriously at reopening some rail lines that Beeching closed. We will make foreign lorries pay for British roads with a 'Britdisc’ – and we will stop persecuting motorists. BEST WAY OF SUPPORTING RAILWAYS WOULD BE OUR POLICY OF FULLY AUTOMATING THEM. THE POLITICALLY CORRECT HATRED OF MOTORISTS IS SERIOUSLY DAMAGING OUR ECONOMY

-Last, but never least, we will bring in fair prices and fair competition for our suffering farmers, and restore traditional British fishing and territorial waters. FREE TRADE WITHOUT EU RESTRICTIONS WOULD SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCE FOOD PRICES TO THE CONSUMER & FREE FARMERS FROM THE GOVERNMENT FARMING REGULATORS (A CLASS WHICH CONTAINS MORE PEOPLE THAN THERE ARE FARMERS.

ALL IN ALL A SENSIBLE PROGRAMME WHICH WOULD KEEP THE LIGHTS ON AND SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVE ECONOMIC GROWTH. WOULD BE NICE IF THEY HAD A MENTION OF X-PRIZES BUT YOU CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING. THIS IS CLEARLY A CREDIBLE AND SENSIBLE PROGRAMME WHICH IS HEAD AND SHOULDERS BETTER THAN THE OTHER PARTIES.


The EU’s Enterprise Commissioner Gunther Verheugen said in an interview with the FT this week (OCT 2006) that EU legislation now costs European business €600 (£405 billion) a year, on the basis of a new evaluation of the administrative costs of red tape.

That is equivalent to £70 billion in Britain alone now or £2,500 from every wage packet in the country. The official figures of actual cash handed over are on top of that. Expect this fact to remain unmentioned by the BBC and most parties, particularly LABOUR and LIBDEMS who made a Manifesto Promise that we would get a vote on the constitutional treaty and as soon as the election was over cynically broke it

It is impossible for anyone with the slightest self respect to vote for people we know to be corrupt lying war criminals who clearly have no respect for those who voted for them.

And UKIP don't lie about the Catastrophic Global Warming we are all allegedly suffering from like the rest of the tax increasing leeches.

Illegitimi non carborundum

Comments:
Neil commented...

BEST WAY OF SUPPORTING RAILWAYS WOULD BE OUR POLICY OF FULLY AUTOMATING THEM.

I disagree. Right now Britain has a policy of "open access", which would be better called forced access. Essentially the railbed owner charges a flat rate dictated by regulators to companies that run private trains on the track. The railbed owner has no control over what he can charge to recover his costs, and small towns on spurs receive no service at all. An American rail investment fund wrote a series of simple presentations showing how forced access has failed the UK, and how the European rail system is different from the American one.

Here is one comparing the US and European rail systems, and here is one summarizing forced access. The last time I went to their site I noticed that most of their position papers really are restatements of three different papers, so those two should cover 2/3 of what their papers say.
 
2 different subjects. The point about automating rail is that driverless carriages are cheaper to run & more flexible & can ultimately have much higher capacity. This is, like most of my preferred ones, a technological solution that should have been done long ago, whereas yours is a structural one.

I'll check the links - here is mine
http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2008/10/big-engineering-11-automated-rail.html
 
Thanks for the favourable write-up, I agree with you (i.e. the only thing that's truly gimmicky is the 'more armed forces' bit, where the answer correct policy is actually 'start fewer wars').

David Lamb & I slaved over the pensions policy and that's just a one-sentence summary, the detail is all good stuff.
 
The massed ranks of the 9% Growth Party has also endorsed UKIP for that election. owever their policy of apparently getting rid of Holyrood marginalises them here, & is in my opinion wrong. Maybe they mean fold the MPs into about half the MPs & keep olyrood but if so it is sold badly. Or maybe they think they win more in England from this than they lose in Scotland.

And of course I wish they would undertake to leace ESA & put all the money in a space X-Prize Foundation - this would cost mothing, indeed much less than nothing if it didn't work.
 
Agreed, the Holyrood policy is a bit pointless - it's up to Scottish people whether they keep it or not, provided they pay for it.
 
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