Political Honesty

“Thank you all for taking the time to come along this evening to hear why I wouldn’t make a very good MP. Definitely don’t put a cross in the box for the Socialist Party of Great Britain if you somehow come to the conclusion that I would play the Westminster game for the benefit of everyone. Because I couldn’t, even if I tried. No-one can. The state, and the very way that our society is put together, can’t be made to work in the interests of the vast majority of people. MPs who start out with good intentions about reforms and representing their constituents soon get stifled by the cumbersome bureaucracy and made to follow vested interests or the dictates of the elite. MPs who don’t start out with good intentions probably have an easier job.
If you vote for the Socialist Party, you wouldn’t be voting to put me in that position, thankfully. Instead, you’d be making the point that the whole system which we live under has to be replaced.”

So said the Oxford West and Abingdon Socialist Party candidate, Mike Foster, at the first of his many to come  election appearances.

He then put the case against the class-based, profit-driven system that is capitalism and for a socialist society where the means of production would be owned by everyone and no one but subject to democratic control and where work would be unpaid and people have free access to what they needed without money. This elicited the usual questions (about human nature, the incentive to work, has it been tried anywhere).