Candidate:Luke Leighton
From Pirate Party UK Wiki
| Pirate Party UK Candidate | |
| Luke Leighton | |
 | |
| Age | 40 |
| Constituency | South West Surrey |
| Region | South East England |
| Occupation | Free Software developer |
| Background | Software engineering |
| @lkcl | |
| l.leighton@pirateparty.org.uk | |
As a Software Engineer I understand and deal with complex issues, how to investigate them and how to explain them, clearly. As a Free Software developer, I understand the critical importance of "The Internet", and I also understand the increasingly large role that Software is playing to underpin the foundations of modern societies. Thus, I appreciate that whoever controls that Software effectively controls a country's infrastructure. Thus, in effect, the Pirate Party is reminding people of the importance of National Sovereignty and National Security, through something as "nebulous" and "intangible" as "Intellectual Property" and "Copyright".
It doesn't just end there: there are several other areas where Copyright and "Intellectual Property" impinge on peoples' lives, such as attempts to create and own food. Genetically Modified foods, aside from being incredibly dangerous, are usually patented and are considered to be "owned". Thus, by letting GM crops (patented by a foreign corporation) into our borders, a foreign power has the right to claim ownership of crops with which the GM foods cross-pollinate!
Our lives are deeply affected by these nebulous issues which we cannot touch, because they are just "ideas". However, if you look at the synonyms for the words "Intellectual Property", you come up with the phrase "Intelligence Enslavement". Thus, the purpose of "Intellectual Property" is to use the force of law to continue slavery by a different means - and we believed slavery ended over a Century ago.
So the issues that the Pirate Party are raising aren't just about "The Right To Copy Some Music", it goes much deeper than that, and that's why I'm standing as a candidate, to raise people's awareness of these incredibly deep-rooted problems that we face, as Global Corporatism gains more and more power, justified in the name of "profit".
Luke Leighton's Personal views
The issue of Sovereignty, Trident and Nuclear Proliferation
I was asked for my views on whether, if I was an MP, i would vote for the UK to continue paying for Trident; i was also asked if I would support Nuclear Weapons being banned under the Geneva Convention. The simple answers are: question 1 - that I take the position that it's not up to me to make those kinds of decisions: I will represent the will of the people, nothing more and nothing less, whilst at the same time making it absolutely clear to the people that I represent what I believe the consequences of their decision will be. question 2 - absolutely without a shadow of doubt in my mind will I support banning of Nuclear Weapons under the Geneva Convention.
This should make it clear that I believe that Nuclear Weapons are genuinely pointless to possess; they do not achieve what they are supposed to achieve - far from it, they are counter-productive. One particularly sad fact worth noting is that any Nation which enters into a "protection" arrangement with a Nuclear Power effectively becomes a vassal state, and is no longer a Sovereign Nation. But - Nation States and their Populations need to come to understand these things for themselves, and make their views known to their leaders and to the rest of the world.
I sincerely wish that Nuclear Weapons had never been created. However, that is wishful thinking. Once you are _in_ a position where Nuclear Weapons are on the table, you need extreme secrecy between Sovereign Nations in order to pull off negotiations and Diplomatic bargaining games, such that Nuclear Weapons can be made irrelevant. Then they can easily be banned and dismantled, world-wide. So I am working from a different angle on this tricky problem: to offer Nations the means to restore inviolate secrecy of communications, so that National Heads of State can work with other Nation States to restore Sovereignty to their Nations. It's a complex issue, this, and it's covered in a wonderful rambling style here.