Next up is family. Currently, this doesn't really affect me, as most of it is actually about raising a family (i.e. children). There's a good deal of repetition of proposals already given in their education document. The home ownership section is interesting, particularly the sentence (and i quote) "We will also free up much more land for housing...". I wonder where this land will magically appear from? perhaps they'll pull it out of their arses. Or maybe, they'll let a load of green belt land be built on. Hmm. They say they will scrap the council tax and replace it with a local income tax, which will be fairer. Although this will mean the rich pay more in absolute terms, if the same amount of money is to be raised as through council tax. Once again, the document is rather general, at least on points that interest me. For example, on the environment, they say they would "tackle climate change and cut pollution and congestion," but the only things they say they'd do would be to promote the use of public transport, encourage hosueholds to produce less waste and promote recycling. If that's all the ideas they have on this, it doesn't exactly give me confidence that they'll really do anything to help there. Don't they have any real ideas in this area? well, let's wait and see if there's a specific document on the environment...

OK, there's a little more detail in the "Urban and Suburban Communities" document. Although, it's a little confusing. In the previous one, there was a brief mention of getting a doorstep recyclable waste collection to 100% of homes by 2010. Yet here, it only says they will "move towards" kerbside recycling for everyone. Heh. Can you say "consistency"? There's a somewhat strange claim here, too. Under crime, they say the Acceptable Behaviour Contract - a development of the Liberal Democrats, no less - has been adopted by most councils as "the main tool for tackling anti-social behaviour among young people". Funny, we only hear about ASBOs in the news. I wish I could check up on this, but I suspect it to be nigh-on impossible to either prove or disprove, typical of such claims by political parties. Finally, they have some ideas that sound pretty similar to those of the Conservatives regarding community sentencing and its place in punishing criminals.

Next we have the document on young people. Rather stupidly, the first page (after the cover) has been processed in landscape instead of portrait format, but then put into the finished document in portrait format. So it's rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise. Nice and easy to read, like. It doesn't matter much though, the actual proposals aren't until the second page. And there really isn't a lot here--in fact they've done an admirable job - comparable to my days of writing coursework pieces at GCSE and A-level, in fact - of padding it out to fill even the one page of actual substance that it does. There's mention of their want to change our voting system to one of proportional representation. Although now they seem to be calling it the Single Transferable Vote. And they don't give details of what it entails. But the most interesting proposal in this document is that they want to allow 16-year-olds to vote and stand for office. I'm not too sure I agree with this. I'm all for fairness and all, but I was 16 not all that long ago and I can remember only too well what it was like. I also get to see 16- and 17- year-olds regularly as I work at a secondary school. I just don't think the average 16-year-old is in any position to make an even slightly informed vote. It's a case of "if you're gonna let them vote, you may as well let 11-, 12-, 13-, 14-, and 15-year-olds vote too."