Normally I draw the line about talking about politics on my blog, but really, this Kennedy scandal/leadership crisis/end of crap party is just too good to miss. Let's not waste time crying for Caesar, he lied and lied and lied to everyone who asked him about his drink problem but at the last election still thought himself fit to be, well of course not prime minister, but he was ready to overtake the poor, tired old Tories. I would feel sorrier for him if he hadn't always affected such a lofty moral stance whilst enacting the 21st century electoral version of the Nazi-Soviet pact - the ridiculous siding of the party of Gladstone with the anti-war movement, an electoral alliance with the LEAST liberal forces in British society, in order to take seats from ... anti-war Labour leftwingers. The man's tactics stank, as did his breath for most of the time, if what we read today is true.
Anyone who's engaged in hand to hand electoral battles with LibDems will excuse me for gloating here - but the rest of you, I know, will have no direct experience of the towering slag heap of sanctimony that best describes most liberal activists and won't understand how someone, especially one of the non-nasty Tories, can despise the LibDems so much.
Of course there are decent, centre-right liberals in existence; it's just that most of the realistic ones joined the Tory party in the 1980s. (Like: hello!). I'm not sure how to describe the economic side of Mrs Thatcher's government without recourse to the phrase "19th century manchester liberal". But there are precious few real liberals left in the LibDems - more on the Orange Bookers below, who are the exception - the LibDems are a sort of care-in-the-community project for empty-headed, tax-and-spend twits like that nonentity from Brent or the beyond-parody ghastly Simon Hughes. If you live in London you may remember Simon Hughes; he was the last pathetic liberal candidate for mayor. He was also -- and this I find a really fine exemplar of everything that stinks about the LibDems -- first elected to parliament in a quite astonishingly viciously homophobic campaign, ran against Peter Tatchell who was about the first ever openly gay parliamentary candidate. I'm saying nothing more about the sheer stinking hypocrisy of that candidate running that campaign. Any Tory out there who's run against a liberal won't be surprised.
OK so that's the left wing part of the LibDems dealt with; and if that was all there was to them they wouldn't bother me any more than any other group of semi-demented marxist clapped-out losers. But all parties are coalitions: our (Tory) party is basically a coalition between two main strands of thought: the liberal/libertarian wing, and the social conservative wing. Theirs is essentially a coalition between left-wing idiots and free-marketeers liberals. Of course it's more complicated than that, and these days most of us say some cliche like "I'm an economic and a socially liberal conservative" without understanding the first thing about what the term "liberal" implies in that context. Basically, a conservative thinks that no one single generation has the right to alter the society too much; there is an unwritten contract between ourselves and those who come after us, so it behoves us to preserve all that is best in our culture. A liberal thinks that "society" consists of a series of contracts between the individual and the state, eg I pay my tax, you give me a schooling, of course it quickly becomes messy and horrid, eg a conservative in these terms is much more likely to support gay marriage than a liberal; what's in it for the state? Anyway I digress...
Which means that the centre-right libdems must overlap intellectually and probably emotionally with the liberal conservative wing of my party. And in the 1990s, when the Conservative party decided to have a collective breakdown and appeal to no-one other than the disgusting Simon Heffer, there must have seemed a time to new intelligent politicians like Nick Clegg and Vince Cable that the most likely vehicle for getting centre-right thinking into power was through the LibDems, not the unappealing Conservatives. I can totally understand that thinking - with my tribal loyalty hat on, it used to frighten me - but guys! That was before we Conservatives got to the precipice, looked into the abyss, LISTENED to uncle Michael Howard, had a long lie down in the dark and calm room, and woke up in time to vote for David Cameron to be our new leader. There is now no vehicle for centre-right liberal thinking anywhere outside of the Conservative party; and the decent centre-right libdems must know this (why else aren't they going to challenge Sir Ming Caretaker Campbell for the leadership now?). They must have the courage of their convictions and walk away from the left-wing student politics of Hughes, Teather, Taylor et al., and come and make common cause with the decent Tories who are rejuvenating our party and making it ready for power again. The student union lark of the LibDems is over guys: come and join a serious electoral force, and help us rid Britain of this rotten, self-obsessed, sectorial government.
http://www.libdems4cameron.com/
