Election 2010 - 'Lest The Candidates Forget'

British politics is currently in a rare state of flux and election candidates say they are keen to engage with voters. So why not make your own one-page 'Citizens Manifesto' leaflet and give it to candidates and canvassers when they come calling as 6 May closes in? Just include a short list of the things you think have not received enough attention in the campaign, and then leave some copies attached to your door with a note inviting canvassers to take one if you are out. Or, if you like it, use the example below.

Encourage your friends to have a go too. They might end up sowing some seeds for the future.

'A Citizens Manifesto' - Ten Steps To A Better Britain

1. Reform party funding.
2. Convert the Palace of Westminster into a museum of pre-21st century life in Britain and symbol of a bygone age.
3. Move Parliament to a building with a layout more conducive to constructive political exchange - after all, what are we going to do with all the Olympic sites after 2012?
4. Abolish the disgracefully tribal format of the weekly 'Prime Ministers Questions' - it's easier for the public to respect politicians when they are seen to respect each other.
5. Strengthen the independence and power of Parliamentary committees to hold government and its agencies to account.
6. Stop the unnecessary and expensive spread of the 'Big Brother' Surveillance State - even without ID cards, the databases are growing and are being linked to new (forgeable) biometric passports serving as surrogate cards. The problem is the database, not the card.
7. Ban GM food and instead invest in modern agricultural biotechnologies which are more publicly acceptable and practically effective, such as 'genomics' based plant breeding.
8. Provide 'Consciousness Based Education' (CBE) for pupil, student, and adult learning, to transform the economic and social well-being of the country, including health and crime.
9. Deploy 'CBE' in Foreign Policy to dissolve political and religious tensions in the Middle East and other troubled regions to secure a less fearful hate-filled world for all.
10. Withdraw Britain from the counterproductive NATO (aka 'Need Another Transit-route for Oil-and-gas') alliance, and stop the futile sacrifice of our troops, whose proper role is to defend the country, not make us more enemies - and invest the money saved in creating jobs in renewable technology to make Britain genuinely more energy secure.

"[P]assports from 2011 will have the same things as ID cards.... [they] can certainly scrap the little plastic card which calls itself a British ID card. However, what they can't scrap is the database because that's going to be used to store details of people who have got passports... ten years after 2011 you will have 80% of the population with their details on a database - whatever you call it - and stored in the same way that you would have with ID cards."
BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, 6 May 2009 - 06:32 am

"New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports... travellers [will be] vulnerable to identity theft when they surrender their passports at hotels or car rental companies."
Times, 6 August 2008

"Our privacy is being invaded by the world's security services in every second of every day, as a routine matter. Vast quantities of information are collected by commercial enterprises such as Google or Tesco. Against these invasions of our privacy we have little or no protection."
Times, 25 July 2008

More Information
Why The World Needs A Ban On GM Food
www.bangmfood.org
Acceptable Genomics Based Biotechnology For Agriculture
www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/smart-breeding
Consciousness Based Education
www.davidlynchfoundation.org