Boris/Local Elections/Crewe

I know it was all a long time ago now and I hate to remind you all but I wasn’t overly optimistic after the results.  I thought the local election results were okay but for both Crewe and London the squeeze took hold and we seemed almost resigned to the fact afterwards.

As for Boris, well, he has nicely shown his true colours in the first couple of months in power.  More rules and policies to hit the poor.  He shows as stupidity the idea that conservatism and liberalism go together.  He has also shown that the modern Tory is just as authoritarian as anyone in the Labour party.  I hope this will all come back to bite the Tories in the arse come 2010 but I won’t hold my breath.

Double-D and Double-H

First off, Nick made the right decision.  I can’t quite fathom why people think he didn’t. The only way for him to have possibly done better was to be psychic and get someone to resign first.  By staying out of the fight we got to have our say against 42 days and without looking like the crank that Davis did.  Fine, we don’t command the pulpit on civil liberties but this little debacle has thrown into light DD’s other less liberal positions with which we can go after him when he returns to the backbenches.  Plus it adds a little to the inner turmoil of the Tory party that is just aching to boil over as the scent of victory draws ever nearer.  The worst thing we could have done was stand, it would have leant weight to one of our opponents most promising attacks against us - that we are simply opportunistic, political scavengers waiting for some bloated carcass of politician to hove into view.

Ros4Prez

I have nothing against Lembit and am happy to have a Hello! celebrity in our midst but think the position would be better taken by someone with perhaps a smaller profile who can get on with the hard slog associated with being president and doing all the general party things, allowing the MPs to get on with furthering our cause in the wider sphere.  Plus she and Mark now live in the splendid surroundings of Suffolk, where all the best people come from.

Henley

Certainly not great, but not absolutely awful either.  Time to look at our overall campaigning technique though.  We have made a lot of our invincible by-election team but in these days of a Tory resurgence we will have to look for other avenues in to voters minds.

One thing though, I have to disagree with John at Liberal Revolution. I thought that the website wasn’t good, neither modern nor stylish, and although a lot of information was contained, it was simply too busy, best exemplified by the fact they couldn’t find anywhere to put the youtube video, so made it tiny and put it over a banner.  John Howell’s website wasn’t great but the main page was a lot simpler allowing the information on it to be taken in quickly (although at 1400 the day after they haven’t updated their website with the fact that they, er, won).

Brown’s woes

Wow, where to start.  The big man has taken a battering in the last couple of months, but he soldiers on as only a dour Scot can.  But I don’t understand why he continues to come out with more and more moronic ideas?  Surely it’s obvious that you shouldn’t lock people up for 42 days?   If your administration keeps losing people’s data, why do you think they would then trust you with being the sole repository for their identities?  If your party is the supposed champion of the people, why try to take more and more money from the poorest?

Even though Labour has dived in the polls I don’t think its beyond saving.  Less than a year ago Brown was riding high.  Who’s to say what will happen in the next two years to change to political scene before the next general election?  What it would take though I do not know, and I don’t think GB does either.

Cameron’s woes

Samantha may already be wondering what colour carpets to have in the No. 10 flat but I bet while she sits there looking at swatches, Dave is beside her wondering how long he can keep his group of parliamentary odd-bods all pointing in the same direction, or if he does make it into the black door, how long he will stay there before the knife comes down swiftly between his shoulderblades. The loons on the back benches and in the constituency parties are staying with him for now as he is a winner, but with no real substance behind his not very good style, he will trip up.

The cliche is that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them and I don’t think that will be any truer than in the general election of 2010.    

Nick’s woes

The polls ain’t good, but have they ever been?  Caught in the middle between the increasingly crazed Labour party and the resurgent Cons we really have to begin fighting our way out of the sandwich.  Importantly, we have to regain our own story.  At the moment we are taken over by the ‘protest vote’ story and the ‘opportunistic’ story, the latter not helped by Nick’s decision on the Lisbon referendum. 

I think the direction of the party is good, more in keeping with the original liberalism of the party.  This emphasis on putting individuals back in charge of their own lives is good, as it is the way the general consensus is going, with people more and more despondent with the burgeoning state.  I think we have to be willing to make tough decisions, such as proposing tough taxes, and also make radical decisions, such as proposing LVT or drug legalisation.

Most importantly though, we have to push away from the mainstream politics of the big two.  Currently we are seen as the poor man’s version of both, whereas moving away from them to a more radical standpoint would get us noticed above normal politics.  We need to admit that we don’t have the answer to all life’s ills, that the answers lie with individuals and small communities rather than anyone 50,100, 200 miles away in London.  This was nicely illustrated by Nick in a recent speech on education.

So, the country is moving away from Labour, as their ideas of social democracy move ever closer to pure socialism.  However, the country shows no real passion for the compassionate conservatism of the current right.  As with all good Englishmen, they really just want to be left alone.  Appealing to this nature of the country is the key to winning, IMHO.

The programme (and others in the Kemp’s Gangs series) is really worth watching.

However, the thing that shocked me most was that when asked the question of who was supplying the guns the answer, not only from the gangbangers but also community workers was - “The Government”.  This really astounded me.  Coming from a nice peaceful Suffolk town where the only guns are the ones for shooting rabbits then the concept that people in the inner city are so truly despondent and mistrustful of “the government” that they think they are trying to kill them is truly worrying.  What do people with a more experienced view of the inner city think of this?  Was it just editing or is this really the way that the kids in south London think of the guys in the palace on the north bank? or is “The Government” just code for society, me and you?  How would you get it through to these children that everyone isn’t against them?  Lots of questions to which I don’t know the answers.

What was more worrying though was that when Ross Kemp talked to John Reid (the then Home Sec) he obviously didn’t either, he just talked exactly like any moron politician with a chance for a soundbite, and although he seemed slightly shocked at the idea that he was the one putting the guns on the streets, he was quickly back on message and I doubt took much away from the encounter.

What is the LibDem response in London (and countrywide) to these inner city problems?

“Childhood? That’s dead man, died a long time ago” - Quote from one of the Gang kids

Peter Clarke (PA to Keith Joseph) says this:

“I think you could say that the young Keith Joseph was not unlike the young David Cameron, that they both thought, in a rather naive way, that the state, organised by gentlemen, could be benign force and it was only the experience of living in Mr Heath’s cabinet both as housing minister and then as social security secretary that inoculated him against this. He saw that the state was capable of immense catastrophes and immense cruelties”

This naivety still spreads like a cancer through the halls of Westminster, and doesn’t only afflict the statist left and the authoritarian right, I think it can be on our own benches too.

But still,  this sums up nicely how I think of the tories and DC and the differences between the beliefs that they hold and the true liberalism that they pretend to espouse but never champion.  They still want big government, they just want it to be their big government. They think that if they were in charge everything would be hunky-dory.  It doesn’t work like that.  Even with all the best will in the world, governments will balls up.  It’s in their DNA.  To be truly liberal you have to give back as much power to individuals and enable them to make their own choices. And they don’t truly believe in devolving power back to individuals and communities - they just want it for themselves and to make sure they don’t have it.

You are better than the state - I really believe this is a position we should be grabbing by the balls.

Both people termed their decisions ‘unwise’. If politicians want people to trust them then why do they do such things. Emily Thornberry’s quote was about low voter turnout. How does this kind of thing help? Why not be honest? For future reference Em, you can install a ‘Track changes’ add-on in Word that allows you to add comments of your own to other peoples work.