I have been wanting to write a blog about the danger of voting Lib Dem. They are an appalling bunch. Their main characteristic is they will do or say anything to get a vote. The sad thing is some people fall for it. Now and again when the ballot box falls right for them they can hold a balance of power. - a hopeless outcome in every respect for our nation.
I came across this article today written by Madeline Grant (in the Telegraph).
The article says everything I want to say about Ed Davey and his party. As such I have copied and pasted it as a short cut :
The Lib Dems are an increasingly unfunny joke
The party could again be political kingmakers, but they’ve given up on their true liberal traditions
Politics, it was once said, is showbiz for ugly people. I’ve always thought that wasn’t quite right: politics is more accurately a sort of holding pen for the deeply weird. Socialising for people without social skills. And even by the standards of us dweebs and nerds who follow politics closely, the Lib Dems must take the palm for lameness.
They are like a party made up entirely of odd uncles. There are the excruciating by-election stunts, whose cringe factor has to be sent to Cern for calculation; running into a stack of blue hay bales with a big orange tractor, smashing a blue wall with an orange hammer, popping a “Boris Bubble” with a giant needle.
This year’s party conference in Bournemouth has been no exception. Ed Davey thrashed gamely around in his kayak. The conference “Glee Club” rewrote the football anthem Three Lions with pro-EU lyrics (“Gold stars on the flag, four freedoms still gleaming, glory years of peace, kept us all campaigning”). Carol Vorderman and Steve Coogan appeared via videolink to demand electoral reform.
It also revealed a house divided. The liberal youth wing struck at the party’s beating Nimbyist heart by proposing to re-adopt national house-building targets. Tim Farron condemned the motion as “pure Thatcherism” and “the most Right-wing thing at party conference since we sent Liz Truss off to go and work undercover”. It passed anyway.
Telling young activists that wanting to own their own home is the height of selfish individualism isn’t perhaps the wisest move within sniffing distance of a general election. Whether this morphs into actual policy is another question. Voltaire’s joke about the Holy Roman Empire – being neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire – could equally apply to the Liberal Democrats.
The Lib Dems are certainly the jokers of politics, but they may still hold the balance of power at the next election. Incumbent governments suffering crushing by-election defeats is, on its own, no barometer of future Lib Dem success. But there are plenty of constituencies, especially in rural areas, where voters will never vote Labour, but long to stick it to the Tories.
Unlike the Messianic excesses of the last election, when Jo Swinson told everyone who’d listen that she was en route to No 10 and ended up losing her seat, this time the Lib Dems also appear to be running a targeted campaign, with resources and manpower directed only at winnable seats.
The party’s particular gift is being all things to all voters, harvesting local grievance and extrapolating it at a national level. Which is why the Lib Dems are so often a mass of contradictions; lofty parliamentary aims, relentless local obstruction; calls for uncontrolled migration but no housebuilding. In a masterclass of the genre, Sarah Green won Chesham and Amersham on an anti-HS2, anti-Planning Bill ticket, despite the Lib Dems’ national policy to support HS2 and build more houses.
They generally fare better alongside a Labour Party that people do not dread. Horror of “PM Corbyn” prompted disgruntled Remain-voting Conservatives to hold their noses and back Boris Johnson in 2019; Keir Starmer doesn’t spark the same visceral fear. Even if Starmer won an outright majority, he might still struggle to marshal his MPs, so Lib Dem support could sometimes remain necessary. Ed Davey might prove more amenable to a new-New Labour agenda than the John McDonnells and Dawn Butlers of Labour’s restive socialist wing.
But it is increasingly difficult to say what the Lib Dems are for. You might not have always agreed with the former big beasts of Liberal Democrat thought – Paddy Ashdown, Vince Cable, David Laws – but these were serious people with a hinterland. They boasted a distinct set of ideological traditions; Orange Book liberals vs Cableite social democrats. They were the party of freedom, civil liberties, anti-surveillance, the inheritors of Gladstonian liberalism.
Sadly that intellectual heft has disappeared, especially since Brexit. The Lib Dems, to put it mildly, had a bit of a mad one in 2019, running Steve Bray – the megaphone-wielding eccentric who stands outside Parliament yelling “Stop Brexit” – as a candidate. They out-spent Labour yet finished one seat down. Now they appear a wholly incoherent group; a rainbow coalition of social democrats, classical liberals, student activists, #FBPE pensioners with a penchant for interpretive dance, people who are absolutely livid about dog poo.
There’s nothing wrong with protest votes; in fact, there’s a vital place for them. Charles Kennedy’s principled stand against the Iraq war laid the groundwork for the party’s 2005 election successes. I’ve protest-voted for them myself – most recently in 2021, when they, alone among the bigger parties, opposed vaccine passports.
In an ideal world the Lib Dems would make a sensible addition to a coalition government; an Orange Book faction might inject a sense of economic prudence into a spendthrift Labour administration. Inevitably, though, they won’t demand sensible liberal things. Stand by for stubborn obstructionism; Nimbyish opposition to house-building. Their presence will amount to yet another cause of the national sclerosis that prevents us building, or doing, anything.
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