Lib Dem

 Oh dear!  Two Lib Dem peers, Tim Clement-Jones and Tim Razzall, have caused an almighty ruccus across the internet over an amendment they have tabled to the Digital Economy Bill that could, according to various opinions, end up seeing ISPs effectively told to block access to major "user contributed" web services, such as YouTube or FlickR if a copyright holder accuses those sites of hosting "substantial" amounts of copyrighted material.  

There's lots more to it, in particular that their amendment is itself almost certainly far better than what was originally in the bill giving the Secretary of State god-like powers over the internet and for changing copyright law without legislation, but this adds to an awful bill that would allow "collective punishment" by cutting off an ISP's account holder for sharing or downloading copyrighted material even if it was not them doing so but someone else using their account, and potentially put the blockers on open access Wi-Fi such as you find when you are getting your coffee in Starbucks or wherever.

Is it a misguided and probably quite naive attempt to clean up an even more nasty in intention piece of the bill, or have they been nobbled by the rights "industry" like Mandelson has before them?  Time will tell.  

But what it highlights, to my mind are several things...

The Lib Dems, despite many IT savvy members crying out for it, have not really got a policy on IT as a whole and the internet specifically.  For all the bluster over the years about being the most internet enabled party (a claim which is undoubtedly untrue), many of us have called for a proper policy debate on intellectual property, policy supporting open source software, and internet policy.  It has never happened.

The "Establishment" are shit scared of the internet.  Either they have not actually for the most part grasped its potential as an epoch changing medium of global interpersonal communications that has huge ramifications for democracy, government, blurring the often arbitrary lines drawn on maps to designate "countries" and potentially heralding an era of much heightened innovation and collaboration between people all over the planet and have fallen for the siren calls of rights owners without realising the other consequences, or they have realised it and, like the Ancien Regime, are determined to maintain control of it.

The real debate we should be having is about the very nature of and justification for intellectual property at all.  Let's face it, rights holders know the potential for the internet having to change the way they work, the way they, we make a living out of ideas, creations and innovations, and both here, with the Digital Economy Bill, earlier in the US with things like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and in Europe over the issue of software patents, have rallied their troops and arguments to capture our legislators.  This entire Bill needs to be thrown out and a proper debate framed around what are the legitimate, if any, bounds to intellectual property before you can create legislation, if any is needed, to support innovators and creators.

The one solace I take is that the internet works like a self-healing organism in many ways.  Whatever obstacles states try to put in its way, clever brains will eventually find a way around, I am sure.  But at what risk?  We already have grown used the notion that sharing songs is the linguistic equivalent of Blue Beard and his army of killer ocean going pirates.  How long before people who try to break such controls are branded "electronic terrorists" or some such?

The protectionism of intellectual property laws is an artificial intervention in the free market caused and maintained by the state.  It creates artificial scarcity that costs us billions as consumers and most of the time does very little for the actual creatives it ostensibly tries to protect, and these rich pickings are greedily snapped up by "IP farming" by giant corporations, some of whom now make more money out of enforcing IP rights against little people than they do out of the "innovations" they are supposed to be manufacturing and selling.

Intellectual Property was one of the four great evil state created monopolies that the Individualist Anarchists and Mutualists railed against as one of the ways in which the state assisted in the exploitation of labour by capital owners.  It is thoroughly illiberal in principle and it is illiberal to be supporting this bill in any shape or form until we have had this Brave New World debate about IP itself and the role of the internet more generally.  It needs killing off and starting again.

A number of policy related discussions have recently caught my eye, and my ire it has to be said, because they seem to involve people proposing state interventions in some area or another, along the lines of "something must be done" without first examining and understanding the real cause of the problem they are trying to ameliorate.  And often as not the problems can be shown to have been caused by previous state action or legislation.  And that getting rid of that previous action or legislation rather than piling on yet more legislation ought to be the first response.

To my mind it is crucial that a party that claims the mantle of "liberalism" get to understand this, and that the first reaction when something apparently needs "fixing" ought to be to examine the causes of the problem rather than just come up with another jolly wheeze for further state intervention.  Even if you do not take your skepticism of the state and state action as far as I do, that is to say to want to eradicate the entire edifice as soon as possible, I do not believe you can call yourself a liberal if you do not seek to reduce the state's involvement wherever possible, and most especially when it is the state's actions that are causing the problem you are looking at,

If Lib Dems all made honest and sincere attempts to do this before proposing some new intervention we could probably save many hours of argument between so called social liberals and so called economic liberals and whoever - because we might be more inclined to believe that those proposing something had ensured that it was the minimum intervention necessary to achieve the solution to some social problem.

And this is not a problem restricted to web discussions amongst various groups of "ordinary members"; it is a systemic problem in the party, indeed in politics as a whole, from the highest levels of policy making to the "man on the street" demanding that "something must be done".  Furthermore, rigorous application of this inherently liberal principle would be, quite frankly, a unique selling point at least amongst the bigger political parties in the UK and could be presented as a properly radical alternative to the more knee-jerk interventionism of the other two statist parties.

If we believe, as Nick said during his leadership campaign, that the majority of Britain are instinctively liberal, someone ought to be giving them genuinely liberal alternatives and at the moment Liberal Democrats are failing them as much as anyone else.  We will often, I suspect, find that the state created causes of many contemporary problems come down to only a few sorts of rights and privileges the state continues to uphold - because nobody dared to try to get rid of them, preferring instead to try to "legislate them away" each time a new adverse and perhaps previously unforeseen effect turned up.  That in turn should tell us something; point us to ways of solving whole rafts of issues with one major change and hundreds of repeals of the wasteful legislation that has in intervening years been used to try to ameliorate those issues.

Only when we have eradicated those parts of the state system that cause us so many problems will we truly be able to see whether what results is a "fair" and "just" society and whether there is need for a little redistributive effort here and there to ensure people's quality of life.  It was once called the "doctrine of the level playing field" and was long forgotten as the activist state decided that all it needed to do was to introduce yet more new legislation for each problem that arose.

 Over at Lib Dem voice there's a guest post proffering an alternative response to the Digital Economy Bill currently going through parliament.  The "people's party" has expressly committed itself to attacking the people's rights in response to incessant bleating from the Intellectual Property Farming Industry by proposing some form of mandatory cutting off of people's internet connections if they are discovered downloading or sharing copyrighted material.

The guest author, Jim Killock of the "Open Rights Group", a body campaigning against these aspects of the bill, argues from the basis that ISPs will be forced into "collective punishment" by disconnecting people who may done nothing wrong, but whose accounts have been used by other people, perhaps without the knowledge of the account holder.  I think this is the wrong tack for supposed liberals to be taking.  We should instead be focussing on the whole basis of this bill's origin - the further protection of intellectual property by the state, against the interests of the people who elect them and in favour of the interests of the corporate megaliths with the sleekest lobbying operations.

Here's the comment I left on the discussion following the post:

Wrong tack I believe. And I disagree with the notion that when you contract a service from a private company they have not got the right to set whatever rules they like. Event the nationwide universities’ network has the same rule – you as account holder are responsible for any misconduct, based on the terms and conditions of service, carried out with the account, regardless of whether it was actually someone else using your account, unless you can prove your account was hacked. 

Sure, the resulting sanction, suspension of your account, is usually temporary since we do regard it as an essential service, but, and particularly in halls of residence, it could be permanent and you could be forced to use the open computer labs instead.

That said, as I stated, this is the wrong tack for developing a new economy. It is purely based on the wishes and lobbying of the rights-holders. As usual, regulation is being captured by the industry with the biggest lobby (and no doubt the best entertainment budget) in preference to the rights of the people who elect these legislators.

We should be using the opportunity to present an alternative world view – of abolishing intellectual property rights as amounting to artificial state protection on unscarce resources that has resulted over the years in a flourishing commercial scene of IP “farming” by some of the biggest and most influential corporations in the world, certainly at the expense of the consumers (which makes it extortion and theft of our rights), and most probably also at the expense of many would be artists whose entry to the market is effectively controlled by these megaliths of corporate greed and control.

Then, if one or other ISP wants to control the download of some product or service produced by one of its corporate buddies, they can do so in their contracts, and see how they fare in competition with those who don’t. Problem solved.

Come on guys – we are Liberals, supposedly. Intellectual Property is inherently illiberal. A state enforced attack on one group by another who has the ear of government. It is a monopoly right. We don’t believe in monopolies and state created ones especially, and seek to eradicate them. Do we? There is clear water to be gained in this between the corporate cronyism of both Tories and Labour and a real Liberal marketplace. 

So said Nick Clegg today, when visiting some college somewhere with housing "supremo" Sarah Teather and national "bread head" Vince Cable to announce something or other about housing policy.

Oh yes, they want to take a bunch of my money, who does have a job but not a house, mash it up a bit in some kind of Westminster alchemy pot, which gives out less than you put in, naturally, and give it - yes, give it free, at least nearly half of it, or lend it "cheaply" to the others, to some people who own a spare sodding house but are too lazy or miserly to do anything with it, even if it would make them money if they did. 

Then, if I am lucky, which I won't be because there aren't enough of those spare houses here to make one iota of difference to me, because, you see, a lot of them are in places nobody actually wants to live, I can start shelling out to those same people to whom I have already had money stolen from me, there is no other word for it, stolen from me - I'll say it again - to give to them, to put a roof over my head.

Now, Vince and Nick, well they're both Vice-Presidents of the party's land tax campaign group, so one might think that they would know better.  Sarah, well we can forgive her cos she just glazed over when several of us tried to explain it to her a while back when we took a day off work (without expenses) paid to go to London (without expenses) for a meeting which turned out after we had arrived to be a bit inconvient for the three MPs (with expenses) we had arranged to meet with a month before.

Which Lib Dem manifesto theme does this fit into?  "Fairness"?  Bollocks does it.  Not unless fairness suddenly means taking from the beleaguered tax-payer and giving to the lazy landowner who can't be buggered to make use of the assets he or she owns.  Even if you believe it is the state's right to try and tell those landowners what to do with their property, giving them my money to do it is not "fairness".

Five years ago nearly now, when we sat around a table in a Westminster Hall committee room to inaugurate the Housing Policy Working Party the first question I asked was "when are we going to talk about Land Value Tax" to which the housing policy team responded that "oh, that's a fiscal measure, we can't discuss that, the Treasury policy team will deal with that when they do a review" and so we spent months developing housing policy with our best hand tied behind our backs.  And when the Treasury policy team, better known as the Tax Commission, did get round to discussing policy, they welched on Land Value Tax too.

Steve Goddard is a lucky man, our PPC for Oxford East is one of the nicest politicians you could want to meet, if that's not an oxymoron, and if it weren't for the fact that I so badly want Andrew Smith out of this seat, with policy like this, it might very easily be "the 964 club" rather than "the 963 club" tonight.

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Over at Lib Dem Voice Stephen Tall has a short piece on Our Glorious Leader's increasing positioning the Lib Dems as the party of "fairness" in the run up to the General Election.  He concludes that:

Nick’s stated aim – as detailed in his The Liberal Moment pamphlet last autumn – is for the party to replace Labour as the major opposition to the Tories. In which case it makes good, strategic sense to pitch the Lib Dems’ tent squarely on the territory – fairness – traditionally associated with Labour.

Perhaps the reason it has been associated with Labour is that it is possibly the most vacuous, subjective, politically hijacked notion one can think of.  Just what on earth is "fairness"?  It is a licence for politicians to make subjective judgments about which constituency to pour favours into at any one time.

Is it in the remotest sense "fair" for a bare majority to decide what is fair and then impose it on a substantial minority (that's if you can even assume that in any sense a majority has ever agreed with the winning party's notion of what's fair)?

Let's face it, democracy itself is not fair, enabling as it does the 51% to push around the 49% for a while till the positions are reversed next time around, or whenever.  Not for nothing has it been described as two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

Throughout human history, the story of the state is one that has at all times been "more fair" to one group than to another - that is, indeed, how those that rely on plebiscites to get into power actually win.  And in fact the only way one group or another can be exploited is if there is an entity with some kind of constitutional mandate to enforce the will of some on the many in support of the would-be exploiter: in other words, a state.  As Kevin Carson writes, the difference between (actually existing, exploitative...) capitalism and the free (and fair) market is state intervention.

But perhaps most importantly, the biggest issue I have with what Stephen writes above, is that it does not, in any way, follow that in order to realise some ambition to "replace Labour as the major opposition to the Tories" we need to camp on hitherto Labour territory.  Not at all.  In fact I do not want to be associated in the slightest with those who thought that the lying, authoritarian, interventionist, profligate, thieving, warmongering, scum bags who have "run" this country (as in "into the ground") for a decade were even on the right camp site.  Not for a minute.

If we cannot find a way of putting across that freedom is first and foremost about fairness, that the latter follows the former, then we are lost, and, frankly, an embarrassment to the name and the history of the liberal movement.  So please, if there is to be "change" this year, let it be the sort of change that can explain freedom, promote freedom.  Fairness will follow if that is done properly.

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Thanks to Stephen Glenn for pointing me to this lovely new descriptive word for the supermarket giants, and to the Lib Dem media release website for highlighting this issue via Tim Farron.  But I'm afraid unlike Stephen or Tim I cannot actually see just in what way the Lib Dems have any better policies than the other two vacuous parties on the issue of how to protect our farmers from exploitation by the supermarket oligrarchy, or, as the title says, the "trolleygarchy".

What I do see is all three parties falling over themselves to think of new things for the state to do to address some perceived problem that even the Competition Commission seems to have suggested was not such a big issue.  But I suppose it was a farming conference so they're bound to have been wanting to promise these potential voters that they would each do something to defend their interests in return for their earth salted votes - such is what politicians do.

But it provides a useful example as to what the real, liberal, process should be to such issues.  Why on earth are we, or anyone else, calling for more regulation, more bureaucracy, more costs?  Why don't we look at how this market got to this position?  At the state's role previously and now, in disadvantaging one group and protecting the other.  And see whether there are things the state should stop doing to make this a fairer market rather than creating another state bureaucracy to try and fix problems still being created by state action?

For on both the demand and the supply side of the market for this most basic of commodities, the food that keeps us all alive, we find a trail of evidence leading back to state action that has made it ever more likely that these giant retailers would emerge in the first place and dominate from then.  Not that I am saying that big is necessarily bad of course - if they are delivering what consumers want at the right price and quality, they could have a monopoly for all I care, so long as there are no barriers for others to enter the market should they see that efficiency slip and see a way of doing better for the consumer. 

But they have had help in achieving that dominance.  There's a huge amount of food regulation that, inevitably, the bigger firm is better placed to meet, and not just to meet, but to lobby regulators to suit them too.  On the demand side, state mismanagement of everything from money supply to housing markets has resulted in a vanishingly small number of households now being able to house themselves on one income, and so hard pressed home-makers juggling jobs and home life demand more convenience foods.  No longer is a leisurely trip to a local market for raw ingredients, freshness and quality decided by eye, nose and trust in the local man or woman behind the counter, followed by an hour by the stove and time to feed the family all at once the familiar way of doing things.  So there is more demand for, and thence regulation of, more conveniently packaged and ready-prepared food - ever more ranges to stock; ever larger stores to accommodate them.

On the supply side, we caved into the EU some years ago now in losing most of our local abattoirs, so farmers are more likely to have to sell into a mass market with smaller margins than be able to sell more locally with fewer middle-men taking a cut.  The fact that we do not charge for road use means that there are benefits of scale in moving food in huge quantities around the country, again meaning you are less likely to sell direct to local retailers, but through buying groups that aggregate whole regional and even national production and put pressure on prices.  This same factor means we are happier jumping in the car and traveling ten miles to a superstore than patronising local stores in a local supply chain - and those out of town stores are not fairly taxed on their land use, as they can offer massive free car parks with no rates on them.

As premium produce tends to be more labour intensive, our tax system, based on employment, creates big disincentives in an already narrow margin industry to employing those extra people and getting better prices for premium goods.  And on the retail side, low skill jobs that sometimes probably would not be worth the minimum wage to smaller retailers can be better afforded by big operators offering shift work and annualised hours to enable them to operate when family owned retailers would all want to be in bed because their overheads for waiting up for one romantic couple in aisle three at three in the morning are just too high.

So, whilst it is obvious that this is all a lot more complicated that merely being about defending the farmer against the trolleygarchy, it should also be quite clear that the trail of blame as often as not lies in earlier and ongoing state action that helps protect the big retailers and squeeze the farmers - we have not even looked at the history of land subsidy (how do farmers expect to make money out of things that only a few years ago, relatively speaking, we kept lakes and mountains of across Europe?).  Instead of having yet more bureaucracy and regulation, the liberal response should be to look at where the market is already heavily skewed by state action and stop doing it!

Employment regulation, food laws and "consumer protection" (once it was enough to ensure that the meat wasn't green and smelly when you bought it, now it all expires days or weeks before it would actually be unfit and so in thrown out), transport policy, taxation policy, the openness of our political system to lobbying for favours - always benefiting the bigger players, all these need looking at before another layer of regulatory bollocks is imposed.

But has anyone spotted the little irony - that one of the biggest retailers the farmers are complaining about, ASDA, was once a farmers' collective, and their last Chief Executive was also a Tory MP!

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So there could possibly not have been a better week in which to have launched the new party group "Lib Dems for Drug Policy Reform". Please, if you want your anger channeled into a useful cause, go have a look, sign up, and ensure that the Lib Dems are the party of the "big three" who dare to take this debate forward in a responsible way.

Challenging the existing "war on drugs" mentality of drugs policy does not mean supporting or promoting drug use. It simply means dealing with it in some other way than treating everyone involved as criminals. Joining LDDPR does not mean you want to see the streets full of doped up multi-substance abusing drop outs. It simply means we want to see a sensible and responsible debate about other approaches. Especially in the light of evidence from other countries - such as Portugal - that have recently shown that a less criminal policy approach and a more health policy approach can both reduce harm and overall consumption quite significantly.

Expert body after expert body over the past decade has challenged the prevailing classification and criminalization based policy, both those produced by government appointed advisors and external groups such as the RSA. All have been comprehensively ignored or even ignobly trashed by government. This is a complete dereliction of duty on the part of government. Either drugs, or the current system of dealing with them (whichever side of the fence you sit on) cause great harm, including serious illness and death, and the "war on drugs" contributes to misery and death in communities around the world, including here.

For the government to have ignored suggestions that might mitigate these appalling effects of the drug trade and the way we police it, is for them to say "we're putting public opinion before lives". Or "we are happy that some people die so long as we look macho". It is an utterly immoral stance. If this is indeed a "war" on drugs, then those who make such immoral decisions, as government ministers consistently have, are the "war criminals" in this war, and must face justice for their actions.

Earlier this month Margaret Godden and I steered a motion through South Central regional conference to call on Federal Policy Committee to ensure that drugs policy is amongst the first things to be reviewed in a new round of policy work. We did not wish to disrupt preparations for a General Election with what can be a contentious issue. Following Johnson's disgraceful behaviour however, for which I assume the entire cabinet has some collective responsibility (at least nobody has demurred so far), I think we should be taking a much more forthright line immediately. This immoral government has handed the last shreds of so called "evidence based policy making" to us on a plate for all the public to see.

If you excuse the pun, Johnson and his ilk need a good "nutting" and the sooner the better.

There is ... an impression that if actual recessions [as in "state power receding" not economic recessions. Ed.] do not come about by themselves, they may be brought about by the expedient of voting one party out and another one in. This idea rests upon certain assumptions that experience has shown to be unsound; the first one being that the power of the ballot is what republican political theory makes it out to be, and that therefore the electorate has an effective choice in the matter. It is a matter of open and notorious fact that nothing like this is true. Our nominally republican system is actually built on an imperial model, with our professional politicians standing in the place of the praetorian guards; they meet from time to time, decide what can be “got away with,” and how, and who is to do it; and the electorate votes according to their prescriptions. Under these conditions it is easy to provide the appearance of any desired concession of State power, without the reality; our history shows innumerable instances of very easy dealing with problems in practical politics much more difficult than that. One may remark that in this connexion also the notoriously baseless assumption that party-designations connote principles, and that party-pledges imply performance. Moreover, underlying these assumptions and all others that faith in “political action” contemplates, is the assumption that the interests of the State and the interests of society are, at least theoretically, identical; whereas in theory they are directly opposed, and this opposition invariably declares itself in practice to the precise extent that circumstances permit. However, without pursuing these matters further at the moment, it is probably enough to observe here that in the nature of things the exercise of personal government, the control of a huge and growing bureaucracy, and the management of an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power, are as agreeable to one stripe of politician as they are to another. Presumably they interest a Republican or a Progressive as much as they do a Democrat, Communist, Farmer- Labourite, Socialist, or whatever a politician may, for electioneering purposes, see fit to call himself. This was demonstrated in the local campaigns of 1934 by the practical attitude of politicians who represented nominal opposition parties. It is now being further demonstrated by the derisible haste that the leaders of the official opposition are making towards what they call “reorganization” of their party. One may well be inattentive to their words; their actions, however, mean simply that the recent accretions of State power are here to stay, and that they are aware of it; and that, such being the case, they are preparing to dispose themselves most advantageously in a contest for their control and management. This is all that “reorganization” of the Republican party means, and all it is meant to mean; and this is in itself quite enough to show that any expectation of an essential change of regime through a change of party-administration is illusory. On the contrary, it is clear that whatever party-competition we shall see hereafter will be on the same terms as heretofore. It will be a competition for control and management, and it would naturally issue in still closer centralization, still further extension of the bureaucratic principle, and still larger concessions to subsidized voting-power. This course would be strictly historical, and is furthermore to be expected as lying in the nature of things, as it so obviously does.

...twas always thus.

There are a few vocal Lib Dem members who appear to delight in every possible opportunity to denigrate libertarians in the party, and to dismiss us as the vanguard of a neo-Thatcherite "right" that they (correctly) feel would be incompatible with our party. I say that such denigrators are not only only being unpardonably rude and abusive to fellow party members, bringing the historical commitment to pluralism of opinion of the party and movement descended from the likes of J S Mill into disrepute, but also that they are themselves demonstrating a fundamental and pitiful ignorance of their own party's and philosophy's history. A history which both those who are now called libertarians on the one hand and the "social democratic liberals" that have tended to dominate the party and its descendents on the other for much of the past century share.

I can trace the moment of the beginning of my journey to libertarianism to a specific date, 28th May 2002, a lovely Tuesday afternoon in the Assembly Room at Oxford Town Hall. It was the first meeting of the tongue-twistingly Orwellian named "Economic and Social Wellbeing Overview and Scrutiny Committee" after I had been defeated in the local elections. I had been chair of the said committee prior to the elections and had been asked by the chair-elect, Lib Dem councillor Fiyaz Mughal, if I would mind attending the first one of the new council year as an observer in case there were any issues carried over from the previous year that I might assist with.

Being on the council one tends to get all wrapped up in the feeling that you are doing important work; that you are "making a difference"; "contributing to your community". And throughout my period on the council I had been known as someone who strongly believed that if we could only make government run service delivery that bit more efficient it would indeed be better than leaving it to private profiteering operators; that we might even make similar "profits" ourselves that could be used to fund other "good works" out of running quality services. So much enamoured was I of the possibility of public sector delivery being such a generator rather than consumer of resources I was known within the local party, and described at AGMs as "Jock, the one sitting over there on the far left".

This meeting blew a gaping hole in that rosy view of public sector delivery. I have always subsequently described it as a "meeting to discuss what they wanted to talk about next time they met to discuss what it was they were going to discuss in future meetings". It's not that I don't believe that most of the "elected ones" sincerely believe, or have convinced themselves at least, that they are well intentioned, and that a few of them actually are, but if they could see what I saw, "from the outside", I really felt that most of them, at least any with the vaguest modicum of intelligence, would begin to see that there could, nay must, be other, better, more efficient and even more "democratic" ways of delivering the sort of things they believed needed to be done.

I cannot think of any other sort of an organization that would allow policy and delivery to be handled through multiple meetings of rank amateurs who often don't really understand the report they are reading, and certainly don't appear to appreciate how tortuously slow the process is compared with any efficient organization whose ability to survive financially if nothing else would be compromised by such Byzantine processes demanded of a "democratically elected body" that was responsible for "spending others' money wisely".

But nothing, in that moment at that meeting, changed the reasons I had wanted to be on the council in the first place: that I thought that was the preferred way of helping make a difference for people less well off. I merely felt, albeit very powerfully, that this "representative government" thing was not the mechanism that could make people better off, more equal, more free. How I have moved from that small realization, to the position I hold today that almost no other mechanism could in fact be worse than this "representative government" thing; indeed that the heavy hand even of local government and other state sponsored interventions in fact stifles other potentially much better ways (such as through my own experience working on Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts) is a much longer tale.

I have long said it, but since the topic of who, if anyone, Lib Dems might do a deal with after a General Election has once again raised its ugly head, I will say it again - doing a deal with a Labour party having been given a good kicking, but just not quite a big enough one to allow the Tories to take control on their own would be a resignation issue for me.

It is not that I like the Tories, or Labour. I think the one is arrogant but incompetent, and I am not at all sure what he other stands for except that every time they get anywhere a bunch of dinosaurs appear and lurch to the right, whatever direction their leaders might want to portray the party as following. But to shore up this multiple war-mongering, civil liberties trashing, in-denial about the state's and their role in the worst financial crisis for decades, shower of shits would be unconscionable to me.

Nearly a hundred years ago it was Labour that managed to turn the "left" over to collective coercive socialism and away from liberal free-trading mutualism. Labopur is not liberal, and never will be, as Churchill nearly said (in fact he referred to socialism rather than the Labour Party for obvious reasons - it didn't exist). There would be no pride in achieving our long desired aim of electoral reform by deliberately doing more to discredit the current system than is presently obvious to many by so crassly contradicting the message the electorate would be sending - "we need change, but we're not quite sure what type".

I realize that the whole issue is more complicated than all this, which is why I would rather the party maintained strict neutrality and equidistance ahead of an election and did not give any signals ruling out any option.