The current local elections are the first to be held under a new law which permits the official registration of political parties. Readers may like to know that as well as Labour, Liberal Democrats, Conservatives and Greens another party has been officially registered - the Morecambe Bay Independents.

This means that the claim so often made by the MBI that they are not a political party is quite simply untrue. The chief agent for MBI candidates is G Knight. It is interesting to discover that G Knight is also agent for candidates who variously describe themselves as Official Independent, Official Lancaster Independent and Skerton Independent. I think we can conclude that candidates described in this way are also part of the MBI party. It is usually argued that the test of true independence is not being connected with a political party. On this basis MBI candidates and their allies are not truly independent. indeed it would appear that there are only four truly independent candidates standing at the forthcoming local elections. All the rest are members of a political party, although in some cases they are pretending not to be. The MBI often claim to be more open than others. On this occasion it looks to me rather more likely that they are simply trying to mislead the electorate.

Stanley Henig

Labour group leader

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.