THE ECONOMY - We believe 9% growth is entirely achievable using the methods which have given Ireland 7% growth (cutting corporation tax & business rates & regulations particularly housebuilding regulations) plus a programme of building as many new nuclear power stations as there is demand for producing power at 1.3p per unit, which would obviously be attractive to business (& to all of us who use electricity at home).
Currently 55% of Scotland's economy consists of government spending, from almost all of which examples of waste abound. This is not sustainable in the long term & certainly couldn't be dine by an independent country.
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LAW & ORDER - There are no easy answers here & any party that says otherwise is feeding you a line. We would be prepared to bite the bullet & build more prisons. We would also consider cutting the age of criminal responsibility. As a general principle the law should ensure that punishment should hurt the perpetrator at least as hard as they hurt the victim, though it must be admitted that there are strong limits on what can be done here under Westminster & EU rules.
In the longer term there is statistical evidence that children without a father present, particularly boys, are considerably more likely to become criminals or generally anti-social. This is not something which can be altered either easily or quickly but we would wish government to incline more towards encouraging family stability & male role models who are not members of gangs.
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EDUCATION - The 9% Growth Party approves of education vouchers. We would allow schools as much freedom as possible & allow parents to choose. This choice would also extend to schools outside the state system & to new ones created to satisfy this market. In theory Catholic schools are difficult to ideologically justify but in practice they have, in recent years, produced relatively good results. We prefer a system that works to one that is ideologically correct & expect that such schools would become only one of a variety of schools available to people.
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The NHS - The 9% Growth Party believe that the NHS' problem has not been money, but political meddling & the establishment of PC rules & targets. We spend 25% more per head than in the south. We would seek to see the separate health areas being free to set their own rules as far as possible with a transparent funding formula for each area & a free market between areas.
Currently decisions on the opening or closing of facilities seem to resolve themselves into an arm wrestling comprtition between local MSPs & MPs, whose duty is correctly, to try to get as much as possible for their own constiturcies but it would be better if such decisions were made by area management, knowing exactly how much money they have.
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HOUSING - "Affordable housing" has become a political code word meaning houses built by government, often to be turned into tied houses for government employees. This is not our policy.
A century ago houses & cars cost about the same & there is no technological reason why we should not get close to that again. Government planning is not the solution - government planning is the problem, They insist that houses not be built except in very limited approved areas - thus we have land rated for agricultural use on one side of a fence costing £2,000 an acre & on the other side rated for housing at £40,000 a plot (£320,000 an acre). They insist on using pretty much the same materials used in Victorian times, while cars are no longer made of wood. They insist on individual planning approval (& design changes) which prevents the sort of mass production technologicla breakthrough that Henry Ford made for cars.
We will allow builders to build, allow them to use modern materials, grant type & encourage them to invest in mass production off site manufacturing by giving type rather than individual approval & providing bridging loans on completed houses till sale. If the laws of supply & demand work, and they do, we can guarantee fully affordable across the country.
TAXATION - We are committed to cutting business taxes first, since in anything but the very short term an increase in GNP puts more money in people's pockets than tax cuts. Nonetheless we are committed to a freeze on government spending & the severe pruning of the most outstanding examples of government departments which are not providing value for money. For example we think most of the £500 million Scottish Enterprise spend would more successfully attract nrw business in the form of business tax cuts, the Executive has spent £12 million on a debt counseling service which which counedled only 202 people with debts totaling £3 million (both major opposition parties want merely to "reform" this bureaucracy, we would get rid of it) or Scottish National Heritage's hedgehog programme which cost £750,000 to get rid of 690 hedgehogs). We are convinced that after 2 to 3 years of this, depending on how fast the economy takes off, we will be in a position to cut income tax by up to 3p.
We recognise that some of the pruning will be painful & many special interests, who are not bad people, will cause a stramash. Nonetheless it is the duty of government to spend your money carefully & we believe there is very great room for more care in the way Scotland's government has spent our money. The lessons of the Parliament building are not preventing current waste. We think the Scottish electorate are mature enough to know that we cannot spend as much as we would like on everything in government & still have as much as we want for ourselves & we will not ask you to believe promises that we, or anybody else, can.
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IMMIGRATION - This is a UK matter & in practice cannot be otherwise. Currently Scotland has a relatively slight immigration "problem" due to the success of our current government in keeping up the relative decline in Scotland's economy. We are confident that, when the economy takes off we will not need programmes to attract immigrants. We absolutely disagree with calls from all parties to have special gentler rules for deporting asylum seekers here than in the rest of Britain. In the long term skilled immigrants such as doctors & scientists are people we should be both glad & proud to attract but, with the best will in the world, unskilled immigrants with families & little knowledge of English can add little to our culture or economy.
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IRAQ - Foreign policy is not part of the remit of this election & while we think it both right & in our long term interest that our foreign policy be based on the rule of international law, which the the invasions of Iraq & Yugoslavia clearly broke, we do not call on you to vote for us for this reason. On the other hand the Iraq war was sold to us by Labour on the basis of a lie (WMDs) & the Tories say they would have supported it even without the purported legal justification. The Yugoslav war was also sold on a lie (genocide by the Serbs) by Labour, Tories & Lib Dems. You may reasonably feel that parties which lie to you are unworthy of your vote & on that basis choose to place your vote elsewhere.
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TERRORISM - Terrorism must be opposed. On the other hand most of the damage terrorism has done to us has been through our reaction to it. For example the air security rules we apply to ALL passenger flights ensure that it costs £20 per passenger to keep bin Laden from landing in Tiree. This, in tuen, prevents the establishment of a successful air service there & elsewhere in the Highlands & does immense damage to the potential our tourist industry has. We should not allow ourselves to be frightened pointlessly.
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EUROPE - Again this is not part of the remit of this election. Nonetheless the EU Enterprise Commissioner recently confirmed speculation that our membership costs us £50 billion annually, mainly in regulatory costs, so we would prefer to leave. Wesminster government have always refued to do an official assessment of the cost to us, while denouncing the opinions of sceptics & would like Holyrood to produce an official estimate for Scorland.
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INDEPENDENCE - We do not consider "independence in Europe" to be either true independence or the solution to all our problems it is sold as. On the other hand there are circumstances, such as a refusal to allow us to cut business taxes, when we could support it. The main problem with a referendum is that if we came up with what separatists consider the "wrong" answer they would insist on another chance for us to get it "right" & another & another.
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GLOBAL WARMING- We agree with the, widely unreported, words of the President of the Czech republic who recently said that "no serious person" believes in catastrophic warming & went on to call Al Gore "insane".
It is a scam to get you to accept more taxes & more regulation of your lives. It is a scam perpetrated by the political establishment leading all the other parties.
This can be proven because it is impossible for anybody who believes in catastrophic warming caused by CO2 to oppose the only practical method of generating sufficient virtually CO2 free power - nuclear. Nonetheless those loudest in calling for you to make sacrificies in the name of alleged warming are the very people most opposed to cheap nuclear electricity. The mere fact that, despite all the predictions, the years since 1999 have all been cooler is also a bit of a giveaway that catastrophic warming isn't happening.
Thus we are absolutely opposed to Luddite measures carried out on the name of stopping global warming.
We aren't going to take it any more. If you aren't too there is only one way to vote.
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