Monday, May 12, 2014

Online socialist statement for Brixton

The Brixtonblog has published statements from the various parties contesting wards in Brixton. You can see them here.

Scroll down to see Danny Lambert's (our candidate in Ferndale} on our behalf (also the UKIP candidate there dancing with Nigel Farage). Anyway, here's what it says:
These borough elections are an opportunity for people to register their rejection of austerity, capitalism and the whole profit system.

The Socialist Party makes no apology for raising the issue of socialism in local elections. Things are not produced today to meet people’s needs, they are produced to make a profit and that’s the cause of the problems people in Lambeth as everywhere else face.

It’s not what local councils or even national governments do that shapes how we live. It’s the economic system which requires that profits be put before people. That’s what has to be changed to make things better.

Lambeth Council are under economic pressure, transmitted via the government, to balance their books both by cutting spending and increasing their income through selling off assets such as sheltered accommodation.

This year the Council plans to cut £4 million from helping disabled, vulnerable and older residents, also £3.9 million from children and young people services. They are evicting tenants from the short-life housing co-operatives where they have lived for 30 years. Some residents have even had to seek charity handouts from Food Banks.

It’s profits before people. That’s how capitalism works.

The only alternative is socialism, to replace the profit system with one based on common ownership and democratic control so that there can be production to satisfy people’s needs instead of for profit. Socialism, as a society of common ownership, will apply the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”

People in Clapham Town and Larkhall wards as well as Ferndale ward can register their rejection of the profit system and the need for a socialist alternative by putting an X next to the name of the Socialist Party candidate there.

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