Now for their business document. Once again, there's very little here, and it's all covering old ground; mention of the extra option they'll give to new mothers (paid for by the state rather than businesses), reduced business rates for small businesses, the (hoped-for) improvements in employee skills that some of their education ideas will bring. And...that's it, really.

In their health document, there's some interesting ideas. They want to scrap charges for eye and dental checks, and extend the range of long-term medical conditions that are exempted from prescription charges. They want to improve cleanliness in hospitals and put less importance on artificial waiting list targets - targets that focus only on some kinds of waiting lists, at the expense of others, similar to a number of the Conservatives' ideas.

I skimmed briefly through the document on disabilities. Almost the entire thing is just re-hashing proposals already made in previous documents. The two extras are the provision of government information (that in pamphlets and that on websites) in forms accessible to e.g. the visually impaired, and the improving of wheelchair access and so on to government buildings, to allow for greater participation in government by people with disabilities. Admirable ideas, it remains to be seen how well they'd be implemented.

It's a similar situation with their document on older people. Again, just like the Conservatives, they want to scrap arbitrary retirement ages and enforce age discrimination legislation. Once again, I must utter my reservations about such an idea. There are a good many jobs where being of an older age is, in almsot all cases, detrimental to the quality of work you can do, and sometimes a real barrier. Not simply because of your age, but due to other factors that are affected by your age. The problem is, I can see all to well, that what would happen in some such situations is that older people would still be allowed to do such jobs because the employer would fear having accusations of age discrimination brought against them. There's PC, and then there's too far. And once you go too far, it's difficult to get back to a reasonable place, and all too easy to slip and slide waaay down the slope.

The Liberal Democrats are the only one of the three main parties to have a specific document covering the parts of their manifesto that would benefit women. The way they're playing it up, you'd think it was the Victorian age, or something. Seriously though, there's very little in here that doesn't actually apply to more than just women. The biggest two things are the extra choice covering mothers' rights to work and pay, and the levelling of the pensions field that apparently, in its current state, favours men more than women, although this disparity is more to do with the state of the country several decades ago than the state of it as it is now. Not that I'm against the Lib Dems' proposal on pensions, I do think it a good idea.