It's Like Being Told There's No Santa

This is a snippet of the conversation that took place between LibDem MP John Hemming and Radio 4’s always brilliant Eddie Mair on Tuesday’s PM. Mr Hemming’s constituency office had been occupied by student protesters who where more than a little pissy about his party’s U-turn over their definite pledge not to increase tuition fee,

EM: How are you going to vote on Thursday?
JH: At the moment I’m very likely to vote for the increase simply because we cannot reward the bad behaviour from today. I have … [interrupted]
EM: Just a second. Part of your thinking might be to punish protesters?
JH: The problem you’ve got is this. If you reward this form of behaviour, if it has any effect which is a positive effect, you’re encouraging the behaviour in the future.
EM: Part of the reason you’re going to reach your decision is based on the protests?
JH: Part of the reason has to be based on the protests because I cannot allow that to influence me in any favourable manner whatsoever.

And that was it; if you’d have listened very carefully you could have hear my heart breaking.

I have hung on as long as I could and have tried to understand their role within the coalition but I just couldn’t do it any more. I am no longer a Liberal Democrat.

Well, in spirit I am I suppose but in a direct, financial, card carrying way I am not. I have cancelled my membership of the party.  I still share many of the goals and ideas that the grass roots members hold dear but I feel that we all have been let down/betrayed by the leadership.

 I did not vote for and give money to a party that wanted raise tuition fees, part privatise vast sections of the NHS, make massive cuts in public spending (including welfare cuts, cuts in local council budgets, rise in state pension age and, oddly for Tories, cuts in Defence spending), constantly attack, undermine and take money from the BBC, sell off forests and not punish bankers who got us into this position in the first place (I mean a 0.05% levy is nothing, 0.75% would pay off the deficit) yet that is what they are enabling the Tories to do.

  Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the party is a collection of people with different ideas and points of view and that it is not there just for me and it’s not as if I signed up to all of their ideas 100% but I definitively did not vote for the Conservative party which is what we have. I struggle to find any LibDem influence on the policies of the coalition.

 I want to make it clear that this is not just a childish, knee jerk or petulant reaction to the situation but it is a consider action, the tuition fees debacle was just the cherry on top of a less than tasty looking cake and Mr Hemming was the straw that broke this mixed metaphor’s back.

 This brings a new problem, who to vote for next time? Suggestions on a postcard please.

To cheer myself up, let’s do some awards,

The Award for Worst Short Cut of the Week,

This has to go to who ever decided that it might be a good idea to take Charles and Camilla home from the Royal Verity Performance through the middle of a riot.

They didn’t look happy, although they had just seen Michael McIntyre and Cheryl Cole so what can you expect?

The Award for Best Use of Police Time of the Week,

We keep being told that we face multiple terror treats from absolutely everywhere but, as usual, we look without rather than within. Thank the Lord then for the police of Oxfordshire. These dedicated officers are never taking their collective eyes off of the metaphoric ball.

 What dedicated cell of terrorist fundamentalists have they broken? Was it Al-Qaida, the Real IRA or ETA? Umm, no, it is the type that advertises it’s self on Facebook and is organised by a 12 year old of course.

 Nicky Wishart, a pupil at Bartholomew School, Eynsham was interviewed by Thames Valley police and the school was contacted anti-terrorism after he was planning to picket David Cameron's constituency office.

 He was taken out of his lessons and, speaking to the Guardian, said: "In my lesson, [a school secretary] came and said my head of year wanted to talk to me. She was in her office with a police officer who wanted to talk to me about the protest. He said, 'if a riot breaks out we will arrest people and if anything happens you will get arrested because you are the organiser'."He said even if I didn't turn up I would be arrested and he also said that if David Cameron was in, his armed officers will be there 'so if anything out of line happens ...' and then he stopped."

Scaring 12 year olds, nice, you must be very proud of yourselves. Sleep soundly in your beds British citizens of the UK because your Police force is here to protect you (by abusing their power, illegally, possibly, interviewing a child and insinuating threats of violence).

In the run up to Christmas time is precious (my mince pie production line takes up a lot of time) and this is true for nearly all of us so not much blogging or podcasting for a little while. There will definitely be no blog next Sunday because we will be in that London. We are seeing Robin Ince’s 9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People on Saturday evening and are very much looking forward to it.

Have a lovely week.

Vote LibDem? Maybe? Please? Just Think About It.

So tomorrow is Election day, vote-agedon if you like, and I would ask you to go out and vote but before you do consider these points.

 You can, of course, vote for who you like and I'm pretty sure that I would no influence over you decision at all but that isn't going to stop me trying. I would ask you to considering voting Liberal Democrat.

 Now some of you will be having a rather significant knee jerk reaction to this but have you thought about it properly? If you are the reader of a Tory newspaper then you will have been told that a Hung parliament would be a disaster for the country and the economy. Their argument is that the credit rating agencies (they said that derivatives were fine you know) would down grade us from a AAA investment and that the markets would hate it. This is untrue. Did you know that of the 16 countries that have AAA rating - 10 have hung parliaments, 12 use system of PR So it is a lie, scaremongering if you will.

 There is also the point that do you think that your decision should be influenced by international money men? People that have no interest in our country and only in your money?

 Let us consider the really big issue, the Economy. Whose fault is it that we are in the situation were it is (maybe) necessary to have massive cuts in Public Spending and that we had a recession? That would be the Tories and Labour. 

  The Tories removed most of the regulation for banking, such as the separation of high street banks and investment banks, and Labour didn't put it back. Labour decided on “light touch” regulation of the City which lead to the Banks becoming to big to fail. Everyone invested in derivatives and many other forms of incredibly complicated financial products, with our money, so that when the failed it effected every economy in the world. Governments, who up until that point were all for independence for the markets and not getting involved, suddenly found themselves forced to bail out private companies. They had lost our money and because of this they had to helped with our money. I am not criticizing Private companies or the Government Bailouts (they had no choice), I am merely pointing out the facts.

 The recession was caused by foolish investments by companies that were allowed to hold Governments to ransom by those very Governments.

The Tories and Labour both have many friends in the City and are only proposing light, cosmetic changes to Banking regulation. Not the LibDems. They want to bring back the separation of High Street and Investment Banks. With this they can let large investment banks fail if they get themselves into trouble because they won't take huge swathes of the economy with them.

 Fairer Tax policies as well. The rich, as they can afford it, should pay more and no income tax on the first £10,000 you earn. The Tories want to change Inheritance Tax in order to help the 3000 richest families in the Country, are you one of those families? If so, vote Tory, if you are not, think about who they will run the country for.

They also support Mutuals, Co-operative and Credit Unions.

On Trident the LibDems don't want to replace it with something that is exactly the same. This will be needed in 20 years time but it is out of date now. It is a Cold War system in a post Cold War World. Why do we need an independent Nuclear Deterrent anyway? Who is deterred? Did it deter other countries from building Nuclear Weapons? I think you will find that that is a no. If anything it probably encouraged them to.

 The threats that we face today are not from other Countries or States but from Terrorist organisations. Did all of America's nuclear might deter Osama Bin Laden and his pilot friends from attacking New York? How about the London Bombers, were they put off by our lovely submarines? No, no they weren't. It is an awful lot of money for just making some uninformed people sleep well in their beds whilst not actually protecting them.

On immigration their policies are the ones that stands out the most. Those that complain about foreigners coming over here and taking our jobs should ask themselves this, would you pick lettuces for minimum wage? Or how about clean toilets, gut fish or pack meat? If we did these jobs ourselves then maybe we wouldn't need outside assistance.

Another example of a this is within the NHS. Many years ago the NHS went to the rest of the World to ask them for some nurses. Why was this? It was because they had to. The Tory government had cut funding for nurses training and were paying them a pittance so we didn't have any nurses.

The rest of the World bailed us out so now I think they deserve a little gratitude. Labour and the Tories say deport all illegal immigrants, interesting proposal but they don't know where they are. That's sort of the point about being here illegally, you have a tendency to hide. The LibDems propose an amnesty on these people. Get them registered and paying tax. If they are here illegally they are not claiming benefits because they can't, so they must be doing something to support themselves. They are working. A lot of the time they are working for gang masters who barely pay them and treat them badly. Why not utilise these people and make their lives better at the same time.

We also have to admit to ourselves that with a rapidly ageing population we are going to need some imported young people to do the work and pay some tax so that we can pay for our care homes, unless, of course, we think that Government mandated minimum family sizes is a good thing? How would the Daily Mail feel about the Government telling you to have at least 3 children?

 They are the only Party with proper green policies, a proper feed-in tariff for micro-generators. Setting aside extra money for schools who want to improve the energy efficiency of their buildings. They will pay back the loan over time from energy savings, creating a rolling fund to help insulate every public building. Investing £400 million in refurbishing Northern Shipyards so that they can make wind turbines. Investing £140 million in a bus scrappage scheme that helps bus companies to replace old polluting buses with new, accessible low carbon ones and creates jobs.

There are many other very good reason to vote LibDem, have a read of the manifesto here, such as a proper relationship with Europe, smaller class sizes, ring-fenced science funding, grown up, evidence based drug policies, tackling tax avoidance and evasion, scrapping the IT card scheme, restoring the link between State Pensions and earnings, Winter fuel payments to be extended to the severely disabled, I could go on but it would bore you, (that is assuming that you are not bored already) all I would ask is that you give serious consideration to voting Liberal Democrat tomorrow.

 I understand that this is not my most well formed arguement or snappily written piece but it is truely what I passionately believe. Please don't be scared into to voting for someone that you don't really like because of newspaper headlines or Politicians trying to scare you, vote for what you believe.

Conservative Support Amongst Sheep

The Liberal Democrats have always been quite strong here for some reason, perhaps it’s because they used to be a bit of a tree hugging, lentil eating, sandal wearing hippies that appeals to middle class “spiritual” sorts, but recently they have been doing really rather well.

 Our current MP, Oliver Letwin(d) (I know it’s a childish joke but it was first made by a child so there) who is a Conservative, works for a bank and seems to have had his Wikipedia page changed since the election was called (it used to mention that he has changed his name from Gideon because he thought it too posh and that he is the heir to a Baronship (or whatever the correct word) but this isn’t the kind of  image the Tories are trying to portray in this campaign. Although he’s not as posh as the bloke standing for Dorset South, owner of 7,000 aches of land, Richard Drax, or to give him his full name, Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax ), only has a majority of just over 2,000.

 During this election campaign I have noticed something a little strange, only large areas of open land seem to be supporting the Tories, mostly boggy fields, such as here



and here.

All over Dorchester are little orange diamonds expressing their support for Sue Farrant



but I have found only one supporter for Mr Letwin(d) and he didn’t seem that proud (I’m sure there are more but I haven’t seen their signs).

 Is this proof that we have a large swing to the Lib Dems following the leadership debates and hard work by local activists or that the Conservatives aren’t that proud of being Conservatives and only sheep are untroubled by looking as though they might vote that way? Who knows? We will all find out on May the 7^th. To be honest the Tories probably don’t have any posters for homes but that would ruin my narrative and we can’t have that.