By Alan Bickley

Since it is accepted as a charity for tax purposes by the Customs and Excise, the Libertarian Alliance is an apolitical organisation. We do not recommend for or against any candidate in any election. Take this particular recommendation, therefore, as a personal view. It does not represent the formal opinion of the Libertarian Alliance.

I will not vote for the Conservative or Labour or Liberal Democrat Parties. These are all different strands of a ruling class cartel that has been working at least since 1990 to impoverish and to enslave ordinary people. Since I have been arguing this for the whole of the present century, and somewhat longer than that – and since it is now pretty evident to anyone of common intelligence – I see no point in explaining myself.

I will not vote for the Reform Party. This is an improvement in many respects on the Conservative Party. At the same time, asked on the 4^th June 2024 about his intentions for the Conservative Party, Nigel Farage answered that he wanted “to take it over.” Already, its personnel are interchangeable with the personnel of the Conservative Party. There is an open house for Conservative politicians who want to leave the sinking ship of the Conservative Party. Both parties are managed by members of the bizarre ex-Marxist cult that is promoted by the Establishment as a fake libertarian movement. Leaving that aside, and the harm thereby done of the Libertarian Alliance, there is no “Tory Right” to be poached by the Reform Party. Conservative politicians who call themselves traditionalists or libertarians are simply frauds. They have had fourteen years to organise and put a brake on their leadership. They have done nothing. For the most part, their principles are so much moral currency to be traded for the right to unlimited bribes and sex handed out by the wealthy enemies of England. I will not vote for the Reform Party. It may once have been a step in the right direction. That time is past.

I will instead vote for the Workers Party of Britain. I know that this is an explicitly socialist party, and is led by a man who once admired Josef Stalin, and may still do. I would once have rejected the notion of voting for such people without troubling anyone with an explanation. However, what makes Stalinism objectionable is that it was an extreme and murderous type of statism. We already live in a country as statist as it can be made. In 2023, the British State spent £1,189 billion of money taken in taxes, borrowed, or printed. This is about 44 per cent of gross domestic product. The foreign policy of the British State appears to be directed towards a big war with Russia and China. Its environmental policies, and its promotion of those deadly vaccines, can be taken as another murderous intent. The most relevant issue, then, is whether we want a statism that continues to enrich and empower the present beneficiaries, or one that is directed to improving the lives of ordinary people.

I turn to a consideration of the Workers Party manifesto. The Workers Party:

is committed to the redistribution of wealth and power in favour of working people.

I like the sound of this. Wealth and power are nowadays redistributed away from working people. An opposite redistribution is not wrong in principle – it depends only on the means employed. How much of the wealth will be destroyed by the transfer, and how much power will stick to the hands of middle class redistributors? Let the right answers be given here, and I do like the sound of the idea.

is committed to a reversal of policies aimed at deindustrialisation & to exploring innovative demands for workers control and participation in the future of industry through our trade unions.

I like the sound of this. For about a year in the 1990s, I thought that globalisation was just a trendy name for free trade. I then realised the truth. Britain was deindustrialised by design. Manufacturing did not drift abroad because of spontaneous changes in the pattern of comparative advantage, but was sent abroad as part of an attack on the working class. This had been a nuisance between 1945 and 1979, with its demands for higher wages and greater regard – unwise demands, I accept, since they were usually not balanced by a willingness to accept changes to improve productivity or quality of what was produced. From the 1980s, a new British economy was created with many opportunities for people like me, but no opportunities for those with nothing to sell but their unskilled or semi-skilled labour. The result is a national income pyramid with a narrow apex and nothing for those at the base but jobs as various kinds of skivvy – jobs where wages and conditions are further depressed by subsidised mass-immigration.

My preferred reindustrialisation would involve a free market with low taxes, plus a return to the old laws that kept the financial sector from metastising into a casino. Since this is not on offer, let the State build steel factories, and let these produce little but pollution, and let the output be sold to domestic buyers behind a tariff wall. The main object should be the recreation of an autonomous working class. Everything else can be fixed later.

On the matter of tariffs, there is no economic defence. Politically, though, we need to bear in mind that, in the great contests of the nineteenth century, tariffs were the main expression of ruling class statism – it was by manipulating the price of corn that wealth was sucked upwards from the people. With modern budgets of more than a trillion pounds – spent God-knows-how, but not for the benefit of ordinary people – tariffs are a very small deformation.

I will discuss the cooperatives idea shortly.

supports the call for a Net Zero Referendum as soon as possible to create a national debate on who profits from these targets and on what terms. We will oppose ULEZ initiatives because of the costs they impose on working households and small businesses.

This sounds hopeful. The “national debate” most likely in mind is one where dissenters from the current orthodoxy will have the freedom to explain that there is no man-made climate change, and that all the green laws and policies are nothing but an excuse for robbing ordinary people and forcing them to eat bugs. The dismissal of the ULEZ scam is also hopeful.

promises to undertake a major review of pensions policy with the ultimate aim of restoring a life-long commitment through earnings to adequate pension provision with all workers having the option of retiring at 60.

Given present life expectancies, sixty is probably too low. However, the principle of an adequate pension for those who have worked all their lives, and who have been defrauded of their actual and potential savings by high taxes and inflation, is unobjectionable. Abandoning the green policies alone would probably fund a doubling of pensions with a few tax cuts left over.

will legislate to support workers and managers in the acquisition of productive enterprises and their assets that otherwise would be closed or distributed to shareholders where the company is either intended to be sold to a foreign owner or to be closed in order to export production overseas.

This sounds like a step towards mutualism. If so, I am wholly supportive. Limited liability corporations are perhaps the ultimate in ruling class statism. Limited liability frees shareholders and directors from legal consequences that would be inescapable in a natural order. It allows businesses to grow far beyond the size they would have in a natural order, and to finance the economic wing of the ruling class. It also raises up armies of middle class drones who take on various management functions. This item in the manifesto says nothing about reforming the company laws. But, so long as they are not fronts behind which the usual middle class drones run everything and take all the surplus, worker cooperatives are an excellent idea. So far as they are successful, they will be an attack on the present corporate structure.

supports campaigning to preserve the right to use cash. We are not Luddites when it comes to digital currency and fintech – our demand, however, is that this and other technologies, including blockchain and artificial intelligence, are under sufficient community control to ensure positive social and economic outcomes for the working class and the vulnerable.

I am not sure about the talk of “community control.” However, the promise to keep cash is another excellent idea. Abolishing cash is one of the final steps towards making us into fiscal slaves, at the mercy of any middle class prod nose who wants to block us from buying cigarettes and drink and disapproved food – or from buying anything outside our assigned geographic areas. If the Workers Party were promising nothing else, I would consider voting for it on these grounds alone.

will immediately increase the personal tax threshold for the poorest paid, removing tax entirely from the first £21,200 of wages for two million low-paid workers, and at the same time we commit to a one-off wealth tax on all estates valued fairly at over £10 million to make a start on redressing the colossal gap between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population.

I see nothing wrong in practice with a wealth tax. Everyone now rich has benefitted in various ways from state privilege, and often outright state subsidy. Let ordinary people pay less tax, and shift as much of the burden as possible to those best able to pay it. If this means a flight of rich foreigners, so much the better. The very rich are always a source of political corruption. The mobile rich are the worst of all.

My own preferred way with the rich would be to lay them under some equivalent of the Athenian liturgies – to give them a choice between paying steep taxes and paying for new opera houses and concert halls and schools for the poor, and repairs to stretches of road, and other important infrastructure improvements. But taxing them out of the country would be a fair alternative.

will ensure working class representation throughout the governance of the Bank of England.

will fully renationalise the NHS and commit to significant spending on social and economic infrastructure and implement major efficiency savings.

Any change to the present running of the Bank of England is to be welcomed. It might print less money. As for the National Health Service, this needs to be reformed and made more efficient. But all the reforms of the past thirty years have been towards diverting as much as possible from its budget to a cloud of consultants and their special interest paymasters. The first step towards a more sensible health system that gives people adequate treatment free at the point of use is to renationalise everything and then to think what to do next.

will take a decisive role in the pharmaceuticals industry on which our NHS depends. An entirely private pharmaceuticals industry is inimical alongside a public health system. Without close monitoring and significant control, it offers a recipe for profiteering at best and dangerous malpractice at worst.

Who could speak against this? The mention of “dangerous malpractice” speaks so clearly for itself that I have no further comment.

will support Britain’s children by committing to free public travel arrangements, mirroring those that currently exist for children in London by offering them to the rest of the country. Furthermore, we will support the provision of free good quality and nutritious breakfast and lunch meals during term time to all children in school without means testing.

Lower taxes, an end to special interest profiteering, and an end to the green wickedness, are probably all that is needed here. But, if our tax money must be spent, this is a fairly blameless use of it.

by committing to a review of policing priorities, will support a refocus on street safety and estate crime as an antidote to policing by Twitter and criminalising speech and thought.

Good. I am under no illusion that the Workers Party of Britain will have the same uncompromising belief in freedom of speech as the Libertarian Alliance. But any movement away from the current propaganda-censorship complex is to be welcomed. As for policing the streets and housing estates – yes, send in the police to bludgeon the criminal trash into the factories or onto the land. I live in a nice part of England, where no police are needed, and none are provided. But I know well what other parts of the country have become. I want to live in a country where no honest family needs to barricade its doors and windows at night, or wonder if the children will come safe home from school or the shops.

makes no apology for our support for Palestine and the people of Gaza during the current brutal onslaught which has been enabled by Labour and Tories alike. We call for a single state in which all those born in Palestine-Israel can live in peace with equal rights.

My preferred foreign policy is one of complete neutrality and non-intervention. Whether the Israelis want to finish murdering all the Palestinians, or the Arabs want to drive the Israelis into the sea, has nothing to do with British interests. But, if we must have a policy on the Middle East, supporting a multicultural single state with equal rights is probably more humane than giving unlimited moral and diplomatic support to the Netanyahu Régime.

is committed to offering a long term and well organised socialist alternative to the corrupt Labour Party, which is now nothing more than a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Since I have never expected anything good of a Labour Government, I have no comment here – except to give sympathy to anyone who may have expected a Labour Government to do anything to benefit working people. My own hopes of a Conservative Party that might do something conservative tell me how irritating it is to be betrayed every single time.

will undertake a thoroughgoing review of our defence and foreign policy.

is calling for a referendum on membership of NATO with a view to a national debate on all our collective security arrangements. Our own position is clear – under current circumstances, we will continue to campaign for Britain to leave NATO as a clear and present danger to the security of the British population and seek new collective security arrangements centred on the protection of peoples and not of states or industries.

My own full support here. The American alliance has been a disaster for our place in the world. My own ancestors worked as cooks and cleaners and cannon fodder for conquering and holding a great empire. This was then asset stripped out of existence after the Singapore debacle by a ruling class that wanted a “seat at the top table” without the inconvenience of letting the seat be occupied by men from outside that class who might deserve it.

Now, I accept that Mr Galloway and his people do not take my view of the Empire. But we can agree that our current place in the world as an American satrapy has involved us in wars and threats of war that do not remotely approximate to any legitimate British interest. At the moment, we are preparing for wars with Russia and China – countries with which we have every reason to cultivate close friendships. Withdrawing from NATO, closing those American military bases, purging the armed forces and the military bureaucracies of American agents, stopping the flow of bribes from the armaments companies – these are objects I can happily support.

Therefore, I have found a party that deserves my vote – or deserves it rather more than any other does. So, Solidarity, brothers (and sisters), and all honour to the workers and peasants of a socialist Britain. And if all goes tits up, Victory Gin will be tastier than the flat mineral water the present ruling class would have us drink.

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