According to the President of the discredited Liberal (not very) Democratic Party, Tim Farron, Norman Baker resigned from his minor job in the Home Office because Theresa May was running the the Department as if the Conservatives had won the 2010 General Election. Well done to him for standing up for Liberal values.
Farron then treated us to a list of Lib Dems who had fought valiantly to, and I paraphrase, temper the right wing Tory tendencies. And what a story it is.
Danny Alexander has, presumably, been highly successful in stopping his new pals bumping up VAT which always affects the poorest in society, he has stopped Osborne taking away the working tax credits for many, freezing them for many others, freezing child benefit, cutting taxes for the very richest people in society and generally being one of the nastiest Chencellors ever, even by Tory standards.
The Libs Dems also stopped Michael Gove’s attempts to wreck the education system by turning schools into exam factories and by opening ‘free schools’ that were often not needed.
Vince Cable, I imagine, abolished tuition fees, as his party promised, and certainly didn’t then triple them (calling it ‘progressive’) and didn’t sell off the Royal Mail for far less than it was worth.
Jeremy Hunt didn’t continue a mad, vastly expensive and unnecessary top down reorganisation of the NHS, privatising large parts of it in the process. The highly effective and principled Lib Dems would have prevented that, wouldn’t they?
And liberal leaning Liberal Democrat Steve Webb stopped Iain Duncan Smith ploughing ahead with the disaster Universal Credit, introducing PIP (and allowing some people to die before their benefits were even sorted out) and demonising the poor.
And Nick Clegg would surely have taken on a major government department, in addition to his worthless, vainglorious non job as deputy Prime Minister which everyone knows he really isn’t. That’s William Hague’s job in everything except name. Clegg, as a serious player in government – stop laughing – would have prevented Cameron’s rush to war win Syria last year instead of leaving it to Ed Miliband and as a card-carrying pro European he’d have stopped the PM damaging Britain’s interests abroad and threatening many jobs that exist because of Europe’s free market, all in the interests of trying to score political points in his fight with Ukip.
Yes. Everywhere you look around this ‘coalition’ government, there are the signs of Lib Dem success. Clegg in a big office with no real job, Cable criticising his Tory colleagues and the rest of them smugly carrying on as if they had made the country better.
There is one simple fact that exposes Clegg, Cable and the other Lib Dems with their snouts in the trough: look at their voting records in the House of Commons. Every sneaky move by that most political of chancellors, Osborne, nodded through without opposition. Every attack on the very poorest supported by Clegg and co. They are not a brake on the Conservatives: they are the enablers of this the most unpleasant and vicious Tory government ever, arguably more so than Thatcher’s.
Failed, failed, failed is the Liberal Democrats record.
And don’t start me on David Laws, who fiddled over £40,000 in expenses from the taxpayer to pay rent to his landlord who turned out to be his boyfriend. If he had been on benefits, claiming rent to pay his landlord who turned out to be his partner, he’d have ended up in court and maybe then prison. But in the cosy world of the Tory/Liberal coalition, he resigns from one job and, when they all hope we’ve forgotten, he turns up in another ministerial job. And because he is a very rich man, he was able to pay the money back straight away, so that’s all right then. But if he was able to pay the money back as soon as he was caught out, why did he claim it all in the first place?
At least with the Tories, you know they are nasty. But the Liberals have hidden behind this nice, cosy bearded sandal wearing tree-huggers image for years. Turns out they’re are the biggest hypocrites and shysters of the lot.
