Liberty Alone

Because that’s what some seem to think.

I get the impression that many LibDems think we should vote for Ken Livingstone so we can keep Boris, and by extension, the Tories out of power.

If I was in politics to keep the Tories out of power I’d have joined the Labour Party. That is not my aim however, my aim to to promote liberalism and freedom for the individual. The party I judge to be best positioned to work towards this is the Liberal Democrats.

Frankly, I find the Tories, in general, slightly less odious than the current Labour Party, although I’ll grant you that in some areas the Tories are worse (in my home town they’re both equally despicable and I couldn’t vote for either) and they leave a massive amount to be desired.
True, there are the old Tory snobs and a fair smattering of idiots, but at least their snobbery and idiocy is out there for all to see. The Labour party contains its fair share of such people, but they hide behind being ‘progressive’ and ‘left wing’ which supposedly makes it all okay.

When it comes to the mayoral elections - I believe Brian Paddick would genuinely make the best Mayor - and that’s not just party loyalty speaking. After that however I see the twin horrors of Ken and Boris. Out of the two, I find Boris less objectionable. He at least has some liberal bones in his body unlike Ken who is an enemy of all things liberal and free.
I also rather like inefficient politicians, they’re less likely to get things done, encouraging us to depend less on government and more on individual and community efforts.

Frankly, if the London Mayor has so much power that he could destroy London then he has too much power unfortunately the only way to drive this home would be for someone to abuse that power, perhaps then we can start acting to reducing the power of politicians.

Acknowledging the fact that Brian Paddick is very unlikely to win, I’d rather have Boris with an Assembly which will oppose him than anything else. For me, Boris is just the lesser of two evils.

From SpyBlog I see that the government is trying to pass its ‘abolition of parliament’ act again.

Given this allows a minister to alter any Act of Parliament without any debate.

Surely this is equivalent to the Enabling Act? It allows a minister to change any piece of legislation, a power which could be used to modify legislation to give the power to enact legislation without it passing through Parliament. It could even be used to remove the need for Royal Assent.

Whilst I doubt that the current government wishes to use the powers quite like that (preferring to alter things like detention without trial and the National Identity Database no doubt), such powers should never exists in anything close to a liberal constitution.

I find it funny that the leftist, Labour supporting, media is screaming about the Tory party lurching to the right…

Why?
Because on the issues which they actually are being right wing on, namely law and order and immigration they’re saying the same things as the Government. Hardly a lurch to the right there…

Needless to say, I disagree with both parties on these issues, but there isn’t really much to choose between them, except perhaps Labour is better at spin and has the difficulty of actually implementing policy.

I am glad that the Grauniad is now reporting that Ming has ruled out LibDems in Brown’s cabinet.

I do wonder what this has all been about. The mess with his spring conference speech and now this. Is this just poor handling or does someone have an agenda?
As far as I can see, those who’d benefit most would be the Tories, it would cause even more anti-Labour votes to go to them, but I don’t see how they could push this story. Perhaps there are some in the LibDems and Labour who’d like to see this sort of thing and they’re floating the idea, or it could be there’s people opposed to it who are leaking the idea in an attempt to halt any discussions.
Both these are unlikely as they both carry great risks and given the party’s apparent ineptitude in dealing with the media I’m tempted to say this was just a fuck up.

It will probably come as no surprise that such a deal would be a resigning matter for me. I am implacably opposed to the Labour party and its whole ideology, what is needed in British politics is not another centre-left party or Labour-lite, what is needed is a liberal party. Getting into bed with Labour (or for that matter the Tories) will not deliver this, it will just make us look like an attachment of the other party (particularly in the case of Labour).

If there’s one thing guaranteed to put people off politics I think it must be politicians and political bloggers after elections.

The Tories had a good result, you’d expect them to be rather crowing. I will take it as a compliment that many Tories have been attacking the LibDems far more than Labour - it shows that they are taking us seriously, even if they pretend that we’re not a threat.

Labour had a very poor result, yet to hear Labour MPs and pundits its not that bad. Its even a good platform for a general election win apparently. Come on, admit it, for the most part you did horribly and you are losing support in the country.

The Liberal Democrats also had a generally poor election. Perhaps its possible to spin bits of it - we did gain some ground against both the Tories and Labour in some areas, but we lost it, especially to the Tories, in other areas. We must admit that, and look at why and what we can do.

Personally, I think that we must evaluate the party and be staunchly liberal. I hear people saying so often that they don’t know what we stand for - true its difficult to get our policies across being the third party and true people not knowing what the Greens really stand for helps them enourmously, but we must start getting ideas across.
We must stop talking about liberal democracy and start talking of liberalism. Focus leaflets should espouse liberalism and frame our policies in the terms of liberalism. We must consider radical liberal policies and espouse individual freedom, rights and responsibilities.
We must seek to show we want to enable people to take control of their lives, to stop keeping people from having opportunity which they’d have without the government policies.

Everything we do should have the overriding theme of liberalism, of freedom and the individual. We must show why individualism isn’t selfish. We must stand on principle against interference in people’s lives, we must allow people to make their own decisions, even if the consequences to themselves are negative.

Everything we do should be based around a message of liberalism. In this age of spin and blandness we have an opportunity to put forward a liberal vision, to take the debate from the moribund left/right debate to one of liberty vs. authority, the individual vs. collectivism and of freedom vs. coercion.

We are the party with the strongest uniting principles, we should demonstrate them and promote them.

There have been quite a few very instructive responses to mt recent post on the BNP, and they’ve caused me to review my position.

The BNP are the most blatent anti-liberal party in the country at the moment (although Respect come a close second). The areas where they will naturally be strong are not going to be areas where there is a strong liberal presense (of any party) and since the Liberal Democrats are the closest to a consistent liberal party we have it stands to reason that Liberal Democrat support will be low in such areas.
The support the BNP garner will not, generally, come from LibDem voters. It is popular to say that they gain support from Tory voters, and this is true for a certain consituency of authoritarian anti-liberal Tory voters - this is largely what we see in well off places like Loughton. In other areas the natural target of the BNP are old Labour voters. Economically they have a lot in common. The command economy of old labour and the socialist firebrands naturally leads to nationalism and to an ‘us vs. them’ mentality, which the BNP feed upon.

The lower number of LibDem opponents to the BNP should be seen as these areas not being areas where we have the organisation on the ground and part of that reason is that area has a strong level of anti-liberal sentiment. Sentiment which the Tories and Labour obviously feed upon and nurture, a policy which is now having the effect of making the BNP palatable.

I may not be Simon Hughes’s greatest fan, but I thought him more sensible than this:

“The Labour Party has betrayed, sadly, what I thought were its libertarian principles”

- Simon Hughes, Question Time, BBC1, Thursday 8th February 2007

Umm… in what parallel universe does Labour have libertarian principles? Some individuals may have them (although I suspect they are now few and far between) but from the very outset Labour was a collectivist party, founded to represent the interests of the Trade Unions, largely influenced by the socialism of the Fabians and other groups. This is the party which pursued the nationalisation of the British economy and has now embarked on an attempt to nationalise the British people.
At no point in its history has Labour been libertarian, it is not in its nature.

There’s been much debate in Tory circles about the possibility of a Tory/LibDem coalition in the event of a hung parliament. Rather predictably the hard Tories are opposed to any thought of a deal, often due to what I see as misunderstandings of what the LibDems stand for (I fail to see this radically left wing party we’re told we are for example).

Looking at this from the other side, I doubt the LibDem membership would be happy with joining the Tories in a coalition, I certainly would have misgivings (and I’m not as rabidly anti-Tory as some members are).
The other side is a deal with Labour, which is something I would have serious problems with. The view that the LibDems and Labour are similar is wrong and deals with Labour have never gone well for Liberals in national politics. Like Cameron, Brown is no liberal.

To enter a full coalition we’d require things which neither party looks likely to give. PR for the Commons is necessary (either full STV or STV in cities and AV in large rural constituencies seem most likely, we should never settle for closed list systems or systems engineered to give any party an advantage). We would require the abolition of ID Cards and the database and many other laws (such as the limitations on protest) and a major reassessment of things like the DNA database.

The most likely situation, if a hung parliament does occur (it is not certain at all) is to vote on each issue singly, unless Tabman’s idea of a coalition of liberalscould come to fruition (and given the nature of party politics this doesn’t seem likely unfortunately)

Alex at Love and Liberty has an excellent post on the rule of law and why Labour just doesn’t believe in it - and why we need it.

Simply put is that there is a combination of the old socialist utopianism which has driven many leftist regimes, they are building a utopia, nothing should get in the way of that, the ability to reject principles to gain and then maintain power the New Labour project brought to the Labour Party and finally Tony Blair’s messianic zeal and unrelenting belief in his own rightness.

These combine to create what we see now - a government with no regard for the rule of law and the protections which that affords people.

Alex puts this better than I do, go and have a read.