My own position is irrelevant
On the contrary it is critically relevant. If you're criticising a political party on these grounds then you are obliged to answer the following:
i) Do you believe in an open-borders philosophy? If so, how could you possibly achieve this politically (worldwide revolution notwithstanding) and consistently with *any* notion of a nation state?
ii) if you don't believe in an open-borders philosophy, then it behooves you to explain why.
The fact remains that if you are theoretically for the free movement of goods, capital and people,
Every political party of every stripe is theoretically "for" (or "against") many things that cannot be realised immediately. Every such party has to work within the restraints already operating on it's environment (in this case, the electoral system, and powers and privileges granted to people at its various levels plus the realpolitik implications of being in the nation-state known as the U.K.), it can then gradually remove those restraints, and/or realise it's ideological aims. As this applies to all political parties, I take it you won't vote for any of them as they can't be instant idealists?
dumping the "people" aspect for whatever reason, making no particular moves towards it
Uhm...
LPUK said:
As a party we are committed to establishing the free movement of goods, capital and people. However, the free movement of people into the UK is not yet practical while we have both a large welfare state and most other countries are themselves not broadly Libertarian in nature.
As soon as it is practical to establish free movement between individual countries we will do so.
and in fact encouraging a _harsher_ attitude to movement of certain people (asylum seekers, here) means you are not terribly convincing as being ideologically consistent, and instead appear to be aping current authoritarian points.
Not ideologically consistent? Really? Asylum seekers != economic migrants. You're using a cheap shot there because of the prevailing attitude of largesse given over to asylum seekers by leftists on this board.
Similarly for lots of other parts; insisting on a strong military
capable of "projecting force" across the globe, for instance, doesn't say to me "the state should only be engaging in military action for the explicit purposes of self-defence",
I'm more sympathetic to this point. I'm not keen on the "projecting force" idea either. However, we're talking
realpolitik here and there are a number of factors you appear to be ignoring. You're also (purposefully?) missing the context this was written in (others reading this - read for yourself
here instead of going by the off the wrist misrepresentations given here on Urban by "critics").
The UK still has a number of far flung territories that would require protection, plus the *next* point in the manifesto is that armed forces would be needed to "protect supply lines and commercial shipping and fisheries from piracy". This requires some kind of "force projection" whether you like it or not. Perhaps the country's commercial (and civilian) interests on the high seas and in far flung territories could be protected by simple goodwill eh?
There's also the fact that while the U.K. doesn't present an appealing target for invasion on account of it having little of value, if it makes substantive moves towards a miniarchist society, in a world of corporatist entities, we're going to have to face the
very likely prospect of attack. This is a really important facet that seems to be perpetually overlooked in left wing radical circles (with the exception of state socialists specifically seeking a strong state, which is likely to have a strong military as a corollary).
And then there's the complexities involved in still having to deal with the postures of the U.S. and the E.U. (Assuming by that point they haven't become largely hostile anyway).
it says "we are mimicking traditional tough-on-defence policies that exist in current right-wing parties and using 'pre-emptive defence' as an excuse" (something which US libertarians are generally not at all keen on, actually, or at least the serious ones).
Where on earth in the Manifesto does it talk about "pre-emptive defence"? You just made that up. And it is perfectly clear that the LPUK intends to follow the non-interventionist philosophy of the US Libertarians. The manifesto also makes clear that energy independence is a major goal.
. So it's tough shit for you really. Interestingly the right-libertarian understandings of "anarchism" accomodate and allow for left-libertarian understandings but - as you've made abundantly clear, the converse isn't true.
