Day 2093: Hang On…

Tuesday:


I wave a fluffy foot to "Halloo!" to two new diaries from my friends Mr Andy and Mr Theo.

Mr Andy has a piece talking about talking about a hung parliament. This is good because we cannot just keep DUCKING this question.

There are a lot of things to indicate that this might actually happen at the next election – although the Martin Baxter election predictor that all the journalists seem to use is NOT one of them: it always gets the number of seats wrong because it always underestimates the Liberal Democrats.

Nevertheless, the calculation goes something like this: the Labour are BOUND to lose seats; the Conservatories might gain some but since they still have fewer than 200 MP's (worse that the Labour's worst ever post-War result) it is too hard for them to gain a majority; now that the Liberal Democrats have a solid sixty seats in parliament they will always stand between the Conservatories and the door to Number Ten.

So it is certainly not IMPOSSIBLE that after the next election, no one will control a majority of the MPs in the House of Commons. (Mind you, the British public have an uncanny knack of avoiding that happening so do not bet your granny on it!)

This means that the media are more interested than ever in asking the Liberals who will you back – the Labour or the Conservatories.

Why should we not say: "back us and we will keep whoever wins honest"?

But wait! From whom does this sensible seeming suggestion come? None other than Master Matthew Plaster of Parris, arch Conservatory and high priestess of the Cult of Thatchianity.

This same Mr Plaster admits in the same article to FIBBING OUTRAGEOUSLY in order to steel votes from the Liberals.

Is it possible that he does not have our BEST INTERESTS at heart?

The trap here is that Mr Plaster invites us to say to Conservatory voters: your man cannot win here but vote for us and we'll stop the Labour left taking over; and to say to the Labour voters: your lady will come third here, but vote for us and we will stop those swivel-eyed Conservatories from wrecking nice Mr Balloon's plans.

Yes, he is suggesting that we say one thing in one place and the opposite thing in another.

Hmmm, THAT could never come back to haunt us!


It also presents the election as a FALSE CHOICE: nice, moderate, centrist policies from Mr Frown/Mr Balloon (delete as applicable) or nasty, extremist versions of the same.

(Did you spot the IMPLICIT endorsement of Mr Balloon's "I’m a Liberal Conservatory" pose?)

Funnily enough the Liberal Democrats exist because this is HOGWASH.

By the next election, Great Britain will have been run for THIRTY YEARS by "New Tory Labour", the AUTHORITARIAN party. The faces may have changed in 1997 but remarkably few of the policies did.

And to my FLUFFY ASTONISHMENT, Mr David Millipede actually ADMITTED as much on the Newsnight show. He said:

"You do have a choice between change and more of the same at the next election, and we will be the change."

So even Mr Millipede thinks that the Conservatories will just be MORE OF THE SAME!

We know that ALREADY one in five people are voting LIBERAL DEMOCRAT because they do not want MORE of the "New Tory Labour" Party's authoritarian policies – they want LIBERAL policies that are fair and local and green.

We also know that LOTS MORE people would vote for the Liberal Democrats if it were not for the unfair electoral system that gives them no choice but which face from the "New Tory Labour" Party they want to see gloating over them.

We are NOT standing just to get kinder gentler versions of "New Tory Labour" policies for centralisation and class division and stifling of opportunity and neglect of climate change.

We are standing to get OUR policies, our LIBERAL policies, into action.

So here is MY answer:

"No, we would not support the Labour if they no longer had a majority after the next election: the people would have spoken clearly that they wanted the Labour to go and it would not be up to us to prop up a discredited, unwanted government.

"But no, we would not support the Conservatories because Mr Balloon's warm words do not amount to a hill of beans, much less a policy for government, and all of his actions say that we could not support his kind of authoritarianism any more than we could support the other lot."

Mr Balloon has backed Lord Blairimort's government on schools and on civil liberties and on Iraq. Why should we not expect him to carry on like that after the next election?

"New Tory Labour" have been in power for LONG ENOUGH. It is time for a better answer.