JOHN LISTER

Socialist Alliance Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Oxford East. (www.oxfordsocialists.org.uk)

Immediate Release: Weds March 7

The Socialist Alliance has published an alternative budget for working people, which calls on the Chancellor Gordon Brown (and Treasury Secretary Andrew Smith) to spend the full £18 billion surplus on boosting public services.

The Alliance calls for a complete shake-up of the taxation system – including a 15% levy on oil company revenues – so that direct taxes on businesses and the rich become the predominant source of revenue, while regressive taxes on ordinary working class families are scrapped altogether.

It calls for the end to the "cap" on National Insurance contributions, which would raise an extra £5 billion a year, and for Corporation Tax to go back up from the present 30% level to the 52% level it was at under Thatcher.

The Alliance budget proposes to spend this extra revenue on public services, pensions and benefits. It calls for a 25% increase in spending on education and training, the scrapping of university tuition fees and restoration of the student grant; and a further big increase in NHS spending, with the abolition of the Private Finance Initiative as a means to finance new hospitals like the Radcliffe Hospitals development in Oxford.

Alliance Oxford East candidate JOHN LISTER said:

"The basic difference in approach is between a Labour government seeking to do only what its new friends in big business will allow, and a socialist government seeking above all to meet the needs of ordinary working people.

"Four years after Labour romped to power with a massive majority, Britain is if anything further away from socialist policies: the Alliance challenge in the coming election will for the first time give voters in 100 seats a chance to opt for something better.

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