My only issue with this piece is that it was written to quick-like an after thought and it’s unfortunate because there are some really good points in there…

Funny party the Tories, not very nice people..

- Labour’s policy has failed because X

- Our approach would fix it because Y

- The Conservative alternative is basically much the same, so why bother thinking about us?

Any political message we put out should follow this meme:

- Labour’s policy has failed because X

- Our approach would fix it because Y

- The Conservative alternative is more of the same / doen’t address the real issue because Z

Sure, Paul’s piece is too shrill to make a good election leaflet. In Paul’s defence, he wasn’t writing an election leaflet. He was telling LDV readers some home truths.

No doubt the claim that Hitler was about to slaughter six million would have been far too shrill and undiplomatic for use in a 1930s German political campaign. It would not have resonated. This does not mean it would have been wrong to raise the issue.

Don’t forget that George W Bush won election in 2000 as a “Compassionate Conservative”, who appeared to be falling off the leftmost end of the Republican Party spectrum, but somehow managed to avoid being pinned down to any very major policy commitments. Remind you of anyone?

[hangs head in shame] “of which we can be critical”.

But that’s the point – where are the attacks on Labour? Instead, we get the admission that Mr Walter “quite like[s] Labour.”

That way electoral suicide lies – apart from the fact that Labour are not Liberal and have an awful lot to be critical of.

I’m puzzled as to why people think we should be ignoring or glossing over this stuff. Sure we should attack Labour on their faults, but we should not drop our guard on the Tories. If Mr and Mrs Average voter is so annoyed with Brown that they become blinkered to the Tories’ faults, we should not refrain from pointing those faults out.

Turning a blind eye to the Tories helps no-one.

Attituides like that are why we’re in the mess we are in today. If someone in 2003 had sat down and looked at the totally illiberal direction of the Labour Party (ID cards, Iraq, top-down centralisation) and started working on a 2-elections trategy to replace them when they eventually fell from grace, we would be looking at 100 MPs at the next election instead of 45.

It also allows our Conservative enemies to free rein to use terms like “Vote Yellow Get Brown” or “We are the only way you can get rid of Labour”. It makes me want to bang my head against the wall in frustration. Labour are as much a part of the problem in our politics as the Conservatives – not least on their continual reneging on their election manifesto promise to hold a referendum on elctoral reform.

If you “quite like Labour” – join the Labour Party.

Why? I quite like the Labour party as a whole.

Note I called for “Somebody somewhere … to get a grip, acknowledge that the world has changed, and get on with producing popular liberal policies for us to put before the electorate. The perhaps we will, and deserve to, do well electorally.”

I also challenge both of you to come up with a critical argument of Labour couched in the same terms as the article above, to be published here.

We modern politicians follow the lowest common denominator of public opinion, we don’t attempt to give leadership, that’s so last century.

Come 2011, the Tories will have proved you right, but by that time, nobody will remember.

Oh, the Latvian governments take on the SS legion.

http://www.am.gov.lv/en/latvia/history/legion/