Them and us fishes, photo Suzanne Beishon

Them and us fishes, photo Suzanne Beishon   (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)

Democracy hypocrisy

The Conservative Party could face criminal charges over possible electoral fraud at last year’s polls.

A Channel 4 investigation has suggested the Tories did not properly account for £38,000 of spending on their ‘battle bus’. Rather than allocating the cost to the local candidates the bus supported, Conservative HQ filed it as national expenditure.

In 24 of the 29 constituencies, local allocation would have breached spending limits. The Tories won 22 of them.

The police and Electoral Commission are investigating. Courts could sentence fraudulent election agents to a year in the bin. But the Socialist does doubt that judges, chief constables and top bureaucrats will want to watch their mates doing bird.

While the Tories see democracy as an optional extra, socialists face censorship. Liverpool Council struck the names of other parties from material for Roger Bannister, Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) mayoral candidate.

How was TUSC meant to take up Liverpool Labour’s record of enthusiasm for austerity without naming it? It’s one law for them, and another for us.

Thanks to John Smithee for the bus business

Bogus bonus

Parliamentary apparatchiks took home almost a million in ‘redundancy’ payments before the general election – to be reemployed weeks later!

125 MPs’ assistants received a total of £925,000 – tax free. Their establishment party masters then duly shooed them back into the same offices for new MPs. Ten weeks later. That’s not redundancy, that’s a bonus and a holiday.

Meanwhile, potential Tata Steel buyers are threatening jobs and refusing to take on the firm’s pensions commitments. And Thames Water, the privatised utility monopoly, had a pensions black hole of £249 million last year.

Privatisers want to extract the maximum possible cash from their operations. They have no interest in providing a useful service, or maintaining loyal ex-workers in old age.

The Socialist says: nationalise Tata, utilities, finance and the top 150 corporations under democratic working class management and control.