well appeal. Their most immediate problem appears to be that they have not got their act together in anything like enough time." The party decided to contest the Scottish Parliamentary Election in May 2003, fielding 16 candidates. However, the party received a small proportion of the vote and won no seats. This was despite the fact that two of the Peoples Alliance candidates, Lyndsay McIntosh and Keith Harding, were outgoing Conservative Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs). They had defected after being ranked further down the Conservative list for the election. The New Party Disappointed with its performance after spending £188,889 on the election, the party was relaunched in October 2003 with a revamped manifesto (direct democracy and Universal Benefit were dropped) and a revised statement of philosophy and principles, under the name 'The New Party'. The party took no part in the 2004 European Parliament Elections. At the end of 2004, United Kingdom Independence Party MEP Robert Kilroy-Silk approached the New Party with a view to becoming leader. The executive declined 5 to 4, and several senior members of the New Party subsequently departed to join Kilroy-Silk's Veritas party at its launch in February 2005, including policy director Jonathan Lockhart, Richard Vass, the first party chairman of Veritas, and Patrick Eston, Kilroy-Silk's successor as leader. The New Party did not contest the 2005 General Election. In 2007 a member and two times local election candidate for the New Party, Stewart Dimmock, with backing from Viscount Monckton, the author of the party's first manifesto, launched a partly successful court case to seek to prevent the showing of the film An Inconvenient Truth in UK schools claiming that the film is political rather than scientific in nature. The court ruled that the film could be shown in schools only if teachers pointed out nine errors. In July 2008 David Pinder, the national spokesman, became the party's first UK parliamentary candidate at the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, polling 135 votes. In August 2009 Richard Vass was named leader, declaring the party's intention to contest the 2010 General Election. On 1 July 2010, the New Party was de-registered with the Electoral Commission and is no longer able to field candidates. Policy The New Party describes its philosophy as follows: The New Party is a party of economic liberalism, political reform and internationalism. We stand for individual freedom and personal responsibility in preference to