The Tory party are so short of reasons for anyone to actually support the Tory party that they're sharing ancient anti-Labour propaganda from eight years ago.
The first thing to note is that the notorious "no money" note from Liam Byrne was intended as a friendly joke with the incoming Tory administration along the lines of the "Good luck, old cock.... Sorry to leave it in such a mess." note from the former Tory Chancellor Reginald Maudling to his Labour Successor Jim Callaghan.
Then there's the fact that you'd have to be an absolute simpleton to actually believe that an assertion that there's no money left is a serious one, because the Bank of England can create money out of nothing whenever it likes (quantitative easing), and private banks create money out of nothing whenever they issue a loan, in fact the government only produces 3% of the money in circulation (coins and notes). So how can there be no money if the vast majority of money in the modern economy is simply magicked up out of nothing?
It's clear that "no money left" propaganda trope is the same kind of demeaning economic baby talk that the Tories' endlessly repeated "magic money tree" gibberish.
The fact that the Tories keep persisting with these demeaning economic fairy stories leaves us wondering whether they're so economically illiterate that they actually believe this rubbish, or whether they're so damned arrogant and elitist that they know it's absolute gibberish, but they view the general public as a hopelessly gullible bunch of halfwits who will believe literally anything they're told.
Then there's the fact that Labour are a very different party from what they were in 2010. Back then they were utterly dominated by the right-wing Progress faction who pushed ruinous hard-right policies like privatisation mania, corporate outsourcing, and bank deregulation. Now they've moved away from the hard-right neoliberal consensus that both Labour and Tory governments inflicted on the UK since 1979.
Then there's the Tory track record in government over the last eight years. We should all remember how they promised to eliminate the budget deficit by 2015, then failed so spectacularly that they're now projecting it won't be resolved until 2031. That's 21 years to achieve what they bragged that they would do in less than five!
Any Tory with a grain of sense would be hoping people forget about what was going on when they came to power in 2010, rather than actively reminding people about it.
Aside from their pathetic failure to achieve their number one headline economic target, the rest of the Tory track record is lamentable too: The longest sustained decline in the value of workers wages since records began, massive trade deficits, an unprecedented collapse in UK productivity, the lowest levels of infrastructure investment in the developed world, ruinous austerity dogma, millions of children growing up in poverty while the Tories lavish handouts on their mega-rich chums, and the impending economic chaos of Brexit too.
It's quite extraordinary that the British public have eight years of woeful Tory economic incompetence to consider, yet the Tory propaganda unit imagine that all of this demonstrable failure can be trumped by nothing more that a ridiculous joke note from eight years ago. That's how much contempt they have for the general public!
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The rumour is that Nick Clegg is due to be handed a knighthood in the New Year's Honours.
Aside from the fact that the British honours system is an absolute affront to democracy, there's surely nobody less deserving of such a politically motivated award than Nick Clegg.
If we think back to 2010 we'll recall the fact that after decades of rebuilding and restructuring, the Liberals were a genuine third party, looking at securing well over 20% of the vote.
The Liberal Democrats were in fine form, with popular and engaging policies like their pledge to oppose any more tuition fee increases, and their determination to reform our outrageously outdated and unrepresentative political system.
In Vince Cable they had another apparent asset in someone who could talk about economics in an engaging and understandable manner. Before the General Election he cautioned against the fire-sale of public assets at below their true market value, and against austerity dogma with appeals for increased public investment in infrastructure projects.
By 2017 the Lib-Dem share of the vote has collapsed to just 7%, Nick Clegg is gone as party leader, and ousted from his Sheffield Hallam constituency too.
The reasons for this collapse in fortunes are obvious.
One of the main reasons is that Clegg and his Lib-Dem chums immediately betrayed everyone who voted Lib-Dem because they believe education is a right and a social benefit, rather than a privilege to be commodified and sold at the highest possible price.
By colluding with the Tories to increase tuition fees to £9,000 per year, with interest on the debts hiked to an absolute rip-off 3% above inflation, Clegg has lumbered hundreds of thousands of students with vast debts that over three quarters of them will never pay off, despite paying 9% of their disposable income in aspiration tax for their entire working lifetimes.
When it came to much-needed reform of the political system, Clegg betrayed that core Lib-Dem demographic too.
Instead of making fair votes one of his red lines in the coalition negotiations, he capitulated and agreed to nothing more than a referendum on a worst possible voting reform called Alternative Vote. A voting system Clegg himself once famously referred to as "a miserable little compromise".
The referendum was lost and reform of the House of Lords wasn't even attempted as Clegg actually sat by and watched David Cameron stuff the Lords with unelected cronies at a faster rate than any Prime Minister in British history!
Then there was Clegg's economics spokesperson Vince Cable, who went from warning against public asset fire-sales and ruinous austerity dogma, to serving in George Osborne's treasury, selling off the Royal Mail at way below it's true market value, and helping Osborne slash Britain's rate of infrastructure investment to the lowest level in the developed world.
What's worst of all is that the Lib-Dems are rabidly pro-European, and only the most blinkered of Lib-Dem fanatics could possibly try to deny the vital role Nick Clegg played in creating Brexit.
Firstly he enabled the Tories back into power and then backed their ruinous austerity fetishism and wage repression policies to the hilt, thus eroding the living standards of millions and creating the ideal situation for a massive public "fuck you" to the political establishment.
Then there's the way he normalised lying to the electorate with his absolutely brazen deceptions about opposing tuition fee increases. Watching Clegg completely get away with that extreme level of dishonesty surely emboldened the most shockingly dishonest Brexiteers like Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Priti Patel, and Iain Duncan Smith.
Then there was his refusal to press the Tories into electoral reform to make the voting system fairer and more representative. Had he made the introduction of a proportional voting system a red line in his coalition negotiations, David Cameron would never have been able to win a thumping majority with just 36.8% of the vote, and he would never have been able to gamble the entire future of the UK on a whim like he did.
Not only has Clegg wrecked his own party and rendered himself so politically toxic that his own constituency got rid of him, he's also played an instrumental role in bringing about the Lib-Dems own worst nightmare in Brexit.
Anyone with any grip on reality whatever would look at a man who wrecked his own party, lied to the electorate, wilfully imposed ruinous Tory austerity dogma and wage repression on millions of people, played an instrumental role in delivering his own worst nightmare in Brexit, and even got dumped by his own constituents, must surely conclude that he deserves a badge of shame rather than a reward.
However the Westminster establishment club are so shockingly out of touch with reality that they can look at an incompetent, profoundly dishonest, self-defeating, and massively discredited charlatan like Nick Clegg and think he deserves one of the highest honours the nation can bestow on a person!
Nick Clegg's reward for such abject failure actually tells us way more about the ridiculous bubble of delusion the Westminster establishment club exists in, than it tells us about the man himself.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
In October 2008, at the very height of the global financial sector insolvency crisis, HSBC made a very strange decision: They made a massive £214.2 million loan to a struggling company called IPGL.
To get an idea of what was more normal practice for banks during the insolvency crisis and the post-crisis recession, consider the behaviour of the (majority taxpayer-owned) bank RBS which deliberately withdrew loans or hiked repayment terms in order to drive thousands of British companies into financial difficulties, and then used their Global Restructuring Group to close down the businesses and asset strip them for their own profits.
The RBS Global Restructuring Group destroyed 12,000 businesses in this way in what executives referred to in leaked emails as "the dash for cash". After the scandal was exposed by the hard work of people like Neil Mitchell they've now had to set aside a £400 million slush fund to compensate some of their victims.
Interestingly HSBC took a very different attitude towards the struggling and massively indebted IPGL, which was being run at huge losses by the then Tory party chairman and massive Tory party donor Michael Spencer. Instead of attempting to shut it down and asset strip it, they pumped a massive £214.2 million loan into it at a time when getting loans out of a bank was like getting blood out of a stone.
Spencer then funnelled over four million in donations to the Tory party via IPLG including over £1 million for their 2010 general election fighting fund. IPLG donations also covered the cost of flying David Cameron, George Osborne and others to the Davos World Economic Forum just months before the 2010 General Election.
If HSBC propped up a failing business and that business then went on to pump millions into the Tory party to help them win the 2010 General Election, it's easy to see how people might conclude that the failing business was used by HSBC to launder money into political donations.
HSBC, the Tory party, George Osborne's office and IPGL were contacted by the investigative journalists who broke this story and offered the chance to comment. They all declined.
While this HSBC-IPGL-Tory party business was going on HSBC were also laundering hundreds of millions of pounds in drug money for Mexican drug cartels and funds for terrorist organisations.
After the Tories came to power in 2010 the conduct of George Osborne and David Cameron clearly continued to favour HSBC and Michael Spencer's business interests. Their attempted favours towards Spencer continued even after their fall from grace over the spectacular failure of their EU referendum gamble in June 2016.
- In March 2012 Spencer was named by the disgraced former Tory party co-treasurer Peter Cruddas as one of the millionaires to have benefited from the "cash for access scandal".
- Although Spencer didn't make it into the unelected House of Lords in David Cameron's resignation honours list Camilla Cavendish (the former Times editor who spiked the HSBC fraud story) did.
The £214 million HSBC loan to the failing IPGL and their subsequent donations to the Tory party have now been referred to the Electoral Commission by the SNP's Roger Mullin, who is calling for an immediate investigation. The Labour MP John Mann has called for a public inquiry into what he called "the biggest party donor scandal ever".
Coverup/whitewash?
The French libertarian philosopher and economist Frédéric Bastiat once wrote that "when plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it", which stands as true today as when he wrote it in the 1840s.
There are so many revolving doors between Westminster politics, the financial system, the financial regulators and the media that it seems unlikely anyone will ever be properly held to account.
The Canary and Move Your Money broke this story on April 28th, but 5 days later the mainstream media has yet to move on it, preferring instead to focus the public attention on "vital" issues like the Shadow Home Secretary getting her figures muddled up in a radio interview and then subsequently correcting them.
The whole thing reeks of corruption, but we all know by now how these things tend to play out. Even if the story does eventually get some limited mainstream media coverage it'll doubtlessly all be brushed under the carpet again, and if anyone ever does end up getting the chop for it, it'll almost certainly be some lowly minion who gets fed to the wolves, not any of the big players.
But at least you know some of the murky details now.
Credits
The investigative work into the HSBC-IPGL-Tory party money flow was done by Fionn Travers-Smith of Move Your Money. The story was publicised by Steve Topple of The Canary.
The SNP's Roger Mullin deserves credit for publicly raising this issue with the Electoral Commission and Labour's John Mann deserves some too for calling for a public inquiry.
Follow them here:
Fionn Travers-Smith (Twitter)
Move Your Money (Twitter/Facebook)
Steve Topple (Twitter)
The Canary (Twitter/Facebook)
Roger Mullin (Twitter)
John Mann (Twitter)
You should also follow the HSBC whistleblower Nicholas Wilson (Twitter) for more corruption coverage.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
George Osborne was never even remotely qualified to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Before he used his family connections to work his way into the Tory party elite he had only ever done two jobs in the real word, a spot of towel re-folding at Selfridges and some simple data entry work for the NHS.
When the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories to sneak back into power in 2010 Osborne's economic incompetence was unleashed on the nation. He repeatedly promised that his bonkers evidence-denying austerity agenda would clear the entire budget deficit by 2015.
Of course he failed. He failed spectacularly. It was well before the 2015 General Election where his level of public borrowing (measured as a % of GDP) exceeded the public borrowing of every single Labour government in history combined.
In the run up to the 2015 General Election the mainstream press gave the Tories a total free pass on this inept failure to deliver their number one headline policy objective of eradicating the budget deficit, instead allowing them to redefine their pathetic failure as a glorious success by letting the boast "we've cut the deficit by a third" and letting it go totally unchallenged.
The Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls did more than anyone to help his mate George Osborne out by devising the weakest, least inspiring Labour Party election campaign imaginable.
On paper Balls had one of the easiest jobs in politics; making himself appear more economically competent than the floundering, target-missing economic illiterate George Osborne. However instead of opposing Osborne's economically ruinous austerity agenda outright, and pointing out all of Osborne's excess borrowing, missed targets and failed objectives, Balls decided to meekly imitate Osborne's austerity agenda with austerity-lite.
Ed Balls suffered the humiliation of losing his seat in parliament, but Osborne survived to continue his socially and economically devastating austerity agenda, unhindered even by Lib-Dem enablers like Vince Cable and Danny Alexander.
By the time Osborne leaves the House of Commons for the last time the deficit will still not have been cleared, and nowhere near it. The most recent Tory predictions admit that the deficit won't be cleared even by 2021, so that's 11+ years to achieve what they said they would do in under 5!
If Theresa May is reelected in June 2017 and then sets about marching the UK off a "no deal" Brexit cliff edge Osborne's promise to clear the deficit by 2015 will obviously be missed my even further.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimate that a cliff edge "no deal" Brexit would wipe between 6.3% and 9.5% off the UK's GDP, making it a much bigger economic hit than the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis that we've still not recovered from thanks in a large part to George Osborne's ideologically driven ineptitude.
Unfortunately the appalling social and economic legacies of George Osborne's ideologically driven austerity agenda will continue to haunt the UK long after he's gone, and the hard-right press will continue filling gullible idiots' minds with the bizarely counter-factual economic fairy story that the Tories are the party of economic competence!
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
In claiming that austerity means "living within our means" Theresa May has made it absolutely clear that she's intent on promoting the exact same simplistic, reality-denying, economically illiterate drivel as David Cameron did before her.
The Tories know that the vast majority of the 93% of people who attend state schools end up receiving absolutely no training in the economic basics, so they know that we're susceptible to accepting misleading economic platitudes like "there's no money left", "Labour bankrupted Britain" or "living within our means".
When they say stuff like that, they either actually believe it, or much more likely, they know it's abject counter-factual rubbish that only the economically uneducated could fall for, but they claim to believe it anyway because they hold the electorate in such contempt that they think they can spew toxic economically illiterate drivel all over the place, and we'll all just lap it up like it's manna from heaven, then repeat it to our friends as if it's our own well-founded economic opinion.
Theresa May's performance at her first Prime Ministers' Questions made it absolutely clear that nothing has really changed. Theresa May has replaced David Cameron, but she's still relying on the exact same scriptwriters to feed her misleading economic platitudes, snidey put-downs and ways of avoiding answering direct questions.
Just days after writing the biggest blank cheque in parliamentary history to the corporations that stand to make £billions from Trident renewal Theresa May had the absolute gall to try to claim that Tory austerity is about "living within our means".
Apparently we're so broke as a nation that since the Lib-Dems enabled them back into power in 2010 the Tories have laid off 36,000 police, 7,000 firemen, 30,000 military personnel, tens of thousands of NHS staff, and they've shut down hundreds of libraries, Sure Start centres, public toilets and dozens of firestations and NHS facilities like A&E and maternity wards. But despite apparently being so broke we can't afford to properly fund our military or public services, we can afford to squander hundreds of billions on renewing our stockpile of pointless doomsday machines!
It's spectacularly easy to contrast Theresa May's ridiculous "living within our means" platitude with her decision to write the biggest blank cheque in parliamentary history just days before, but it's also easy to demonstrate that if "living within our means" is the objective of Tory austerity, then it's abjectly failed.
If austerity is about "living within our means", then how is it possible to explain the facts that the national debt has risen by well over half a trillion pounds since George Osborne introduced his austerity agenda? How is it possible that George Osborne spectacularly failed to eliminate the budget deficit by 2015 as he promised? How is it possible that the Tories are now admitting that they have no hope of eliminating the budget deficit by 2020? How is it possible to explain how George Osborne created more new debt than every Labour government in history combined? How is it possible that household debt levels have soared back above pre-crisis levels?
If this last six years of massively increasing debt was a Tory effort to "live within our means" then I'd hate to see what a Tory spending spree might look like!
The reason austerity has failed so spectacularly in terms of "living within our means" is that "let's cut our way to growth" is an economically illiterate proposition. It doesn't take a great deal of brainpower to realise that the best way to reduce debt is through evidence based economic policy where more money is channelled into investments and services that produce more economic activity than they cost, while cuts are only considered to areas of government spending with poor returns on investment.
The failure of austerity isn't really a failure at all though, because the point of it was never really to reduce debt levels at all, it was always to use a load of debt fearmongering and misleading economic platitudes to justify a massive upwards redistribution of wealth.
If austerity is judged in terms of "living within our means", then surely even the most rabid Tory tribalist would have to admit that Osborne failing to eliminate the budget deficit in five years was bad enough, but causing a lost decade of investment and failing to eliminate the deficit by 2020 is going to be a spectacularly abject failure.
If austerity is judged in terms of creating a massive upwards transfer of wealth on the other hand, then it's undeniably been a roaring success, with the super-rich taking ever larger slices of the national pie while the young, the disabled, children and the working poor have had the burden of Tory austerity loaded onto their shoulders.
The sad thing is that there are still millions of economically uneducated people out there who buy into misleading Tory economic platitudes like "living within our means" and still, even after six gruelling years, fail to realise that austerity is a con, and the platitudes are just a smokescreen to distract the economically naive from the real agenda.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
In the aftermath of the catastrophic Liberal Democrat wipeout at the 2015 General Election (that everyone saw coming apart from them) I've seen many comments from shell-shocked Lib-Dem supporters and deposed Lib-Dem politicians. There are three recurring themes to these comments, all of which are wrongheaded, and if persisted with, a severe impediment to the recovery of the party that I'm sure that they all want to actually see happen.
In the wake of having the number of Liberal Democrat seats in Westminster reduced from 57 to just 8 out of the 650, the three main themes put forward by Lib-Dems are as follows.
1. "I'm sticking by what we did. Going into government with the Tories was the right thing to do."
2. "Just you wait and see. Things are going to get a whole lot worse now, then you'll miss us."
3. "The 2015 General Election result was a terrible defeat for liberalism in the UK."
I'm going to run through these themes one at a time explaining what is so wrong about them.
"Going into government with the Tories was the right thing to do"
This thought is like a mantra that Lib-Dems keep endlessly repeating to themselves and to each other, even though it's completely obvious to everyone else outside the Lib-Dem bubble that it isn't true at all.
The evisceration of the Liberal Democrats in election after election since they signed their pact with the Tories in 2010 would tend to indicate that the general public think that they were wrong to do it. The fact that they've lost almost two in three of their voters since the last election indicates that even most of the people who are sympathetic to the Liberal Democrats think that they were wrong to do it.
The desertion of support from the party and the absolute hammerings they've taken in various elections indicate that what the Lib-Dems are saying when they repeat their mantra about having been unfairly punished for having done the right thing, is that "we are right and the public are wrong".
I'd suggest that taking a "we are right and the public are wrong" stance is hardly a great strategy for winning back public support, and neither is the playing the victim card when there is still an awful lot of public anger about what you've done.
I'd suggest that a "we're sorry, we made a big mistake and we want to atone for it" might play a lot better with the public than telling the public how wrong they are and playing the victim card. Maybe the next Lib-Dem leader will be smart enough to realise this and try to change the Lib-Dem message, but probably they won't and we'll have to listen to them talk themselves deeper and deeper into their political graves for the next five years.
"Just you wait and see"
One of the problems with this "just you wait and see" stance is that anyone who has actually been watching for the last five years will have seen plenty of Lib-Dem politicians voting for all kinds of rotten legislation (see next section), and is nowhere near as convinced that they did as much to constrain the Tories as the Lib-Dems are themselves.
Another huge problem with this "just you wait and see" stance is that it's very unlikely that the Tories would be in such a powerful position to impose their extremist ideology had the Liberal Democrats not been so strategically inept and enabled the Tories in the first place. I mean, where did all of the extra Tory seats that gave the Tories a majority in 2015 come from? Almost all of them were taken from the Liberal Democrats, that's where.
In order to understand the strategic ineptitude of the Liberal Democrats we have to look back to the situation in 2010. An unpopular Tory party had somehow failed to win a majority, even though they were standing against an unpopular government led by an unpopular man that had been in power during the worst financial sector meltdown in history. The Lib-Dems had done alright in terms of the vote share, and lots of progressive people still had the "I agree with Nick" factor clear in their minds.
The Lib-Dems made the awful mistake of going into the coalition negotiations from a weak debating position (we've got fewer seats than you so we'll agree to most of your terms) instead of taking a strong debating stance (you need us more than we need you) and drawing a number of red lines (some suggestions listed below), without which no coalition agreement would be signed. Some of these red lines should have included:
- Right of recall for corrupt MPs (a very popular policy when the expenses scandal was still fresh in people's minds)
- A proper referendum on voting reform (a referendum between two new voting systems, not one between a "miserable little compromise" and maintaining the status quo)
- Democratisation of the unelected House of Lords (featuring a public consultation on what is wanted instead)
- No increases in tuition fees (to do so after making a high profile pledge not to would be political suicide)
- Increasing the basic income tax threshold (a very popular policy evidenced by the way the Tories stole it and paraded it about as if it were their own)
- Establishment of the infrastructure investment bank detailed in the Lib Dem manifesto (this would have acted as a bulwark against George Osborne's ideological austerity agenda).
Had the Liberal Democrats held out on these red line issues, the Tories would have either have had to agree and we'd be looking at a completely different political landscape right now, or they would have had to refuse and opt to work as a weak minority government (which would also have been good for the Lib-Dems and good for the progressive agenda).
It's obvious that the progressive agenda would have benefited if the red lines had been agreed to, but even if they hadn't and the Tories had opted for minority rule (under some kind of confidence and supply deal with the Lib-Dems), the Lib-Dems could have gleefully shot down every rotten and unpopular piece of Tory legislation (such as Caroline Spelman's attempt to sell off our public forests) until the next election was called.
The Lib-Dem narrative at the next election (whenever it would have been called) would have been a very strong one indeed, meaning they could conceivably have significantly increased their share of the vote at the next election rather than getting almost completely wiped out as they did in 2015.
Their stance should have been "we wanted to form a stable coalition with the Conservatives for the good of the country, but they refused our offer because they want corrupt MPs to remain untouchable, they want the House of Lords to remain undemocratic, and they want to keep the outdated and unrepresentative Westminster voting system because it works so heavily in their own favour ... We wanted to put the interests of the country first but the Tories refused to work with us because they wanted to defend corruption, the old establishment order, undemocratic practices and an apathy inducing voting system that is rigged in their favour" and so on ...
If the Lib-Dems hadn't been so strategically inept, the Tories wouldn't have been able to spend the last five years laying the groundwork for what is to come next, and it's by no means certain that they would even have been in power at all. Imagine if the Lib-Dems and Labour had called a vote of no confidence in the Tory government when the economy was flatlining as a result of harsh ideological austerity in 2012 (around the time George Osborne was being booed at the Paralympics). Anyone who imagines that the Tories would have won a majority government at that point must be living in a fantasy world.
The "just you wait and see" attitude is completely ridiculous because without the Lib-Dems' strategically inept decision to bind themselves into a five year government with the Tories, there's absolutely no guarantee that the Tories would even actually have a majority government now anyway.
"A terrible defeat for liberalism"
As someone with strong liberal principles I find this Lib-Dem attitude especially irksome.The reason being that after five years of propping up a right-wing authoritarian Tory government, I think the Lib-Dems have lost all right to even call themselves liberals, let alone speak as if they represent some kind of unique voice of liberalism in this country.
As a liberally minded person, each time I saw the introduction draconian right-wing authoritarian legislation by the coalition government, with the support of Lib-Dem votes, I saw it as a defeat for liberalism.
- When Lib-Dem MPs voted in favour of the introduction of the "Gagging Law" (designed to prevent criticism of government policy by charities and voluntary organisations) I saw that as a defeat for liberalism.
The idea that after all of this, the Liberal Democrats are still self-righteously thinking of themselves some kind of unique "voice of liberalism in the UK" makes me absolutely furious. What right have they got to think of themselves as liberals after all of that? What right do they even have to include the word "Liberal" in the name of their party after all of that? No defenders of liberalism would ever have voted in favour of any of that, and to continue to sanctimoniously cast themselves as "the defenders of liberalism" is to spit in the eye of all genuine liberals.
Conclusion
I have established my objections to the delusional, self-pitying and sanctimonious narratives emanating from within the Lib-Dem bubble. I haven't pointed these things out because of a tribalistic hatred of the Lib-Dems. Far from it. I have a great deal of sympathy for the dozens of hard working Lib-Dem MPs, MSPs and MEPs to have paid with their political careers for Nick Clegg's strategic ineptitude, and for the thousands of Lib-Dem councilors up and down the country to have suffered the severe public backlash against it too.
I say these things because I sincerely believe that without a significant change of tone from the Liberal Democrats (to "we're sorry, we made lots of mistakes, we acknowledge them and we want to learn from them and make amends for them"), then they're only ever going to suffer even more severe backlashes from a public sick of being told that they were wrong and the Lib-Dems were right, how the Lib-Dems are actually the innocent victims in all of this, and a load of sanctimonious rubbish about how the Lib-Dems are the only legitimate voice of liberalism in this country.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
