Unusually, I thought what Nick Clegg said was spot on.

Maybe you could be a bit more specific about what you mean by “facing people’s grievances”?

When all is said and done the BNP polled less votes than in 2004, and even in percentage terms advanced by only one point.

I am all for addressing people’s legitimate concerns. But I should hate it if the party started to complain about day centres for Afro-Caribbean elders – for example – just to garner a few votes.

They’re opposed to the Lisbon Treaty on the grounds that the structures it puts in place are not democratic enough.

However as it’s the only thing on offer at the moment, I think the Treaty is a small step in the right direction and better than the existing situation.

I would imagine that they are in favour of globalising ‘green’ issues; nevertheless as an EU political group, they probably have the strongest pan European identity.

The problem is for the Tories that they will be obliged to offer a referendum on any subsequent treaty and the nature of these treaties is that there is always some compromise that is hard to accept.

The horrible truth is that there is a large anti-EU majority at the moment. Apart from the Liberals only the Greens are clearly supporters of the EU. Labour has done nothing to promote the image of the EU; it has been content to blame the EU for anything unpopular,but claim more popular actions for itself. The argument against withdrawal from the EU has simply not been sufficiently addressed.

The result has been a drift towards a widespread view that the EU does not matter, all it does is waste money and that the UK would be better off outside the EU. The other parties clearly try to use the issue to marginalise the Liberals, but their disengagement with the EU results in the marginalisation of the UK.

STV would obviously be the best alternative. Howver In Denmark they also use D’Hondt, but the parties are able to enter into electoral pacts so that when it comes to the last seat, the party with most support in each pact gets all the votes in that pact. I doubt that the BNP would have won any seats under that system.

A Danish Social Democrat said that it’s better that a vote for them results in a seat for the Social Liberals than any votes being wasted. If only UK politicians were so enlightened.

The moderate left have lost because people forgot it once had criticisms of all this. The BNP has won because it managed to milk sentiments which once would have led to left votes, indeed it can claim to now to be Britain’s most successful socialist party (albeit a national socialist one …). The Greens pick up the middle class pseudo-intellectual left vote.

The far left are such ridiculous people to have failed to get any “see we told you so?” reaction here. One might have understood their priorities in the past few years (i.e. find out what the USA is doing, take the opposite position) had they still been paid by Moscow gold.

And us? We have been piffling around with trifles rather than building a real narrative on what’s gone wrong, why the rich got rich and the poor got poor and it’s jut become a lot worse with no signs of it getting better. We got the vote we deserved here. So did Labour. UKIP and the Conservatives got far more than they deserved. The BNP may be horrible, but they have found a gap and exploited it.

The problem was encapsulated for me by two clips on the BBC results programme last night. One was a brief interview with Graham Watson, leader of the ALDE group in Brussels. He welcomed the modest increase in the number of liberal MEPs. So what?

The second clip was the brief speech by Daniel Hannan who topped the poll for the Coservatives in the SE. The media has lapped up his adaptation of Dr Seuss into a call for Brown to go. More significant however, was how he explicitly linked rejecting Lisbon to a process of political reform, empowerment and democratisation extending right down to the local grass roots. The point he was making is that there is a continuum from Europe at one end of the spectrum through Westminster to the parish council at the other end. All are deficient democratically-speaking, all need reform.

Now that’s an interesting thought. It’s also very far from the Clegistas position. They are fixated with selling a lipsticked pig.

What will this do the the reputation of this country, I ask you?

The lion’s share of the blame must surely go to the Labour Party, which has done so little to counteract the growing BNP threat. Liberal Democrats, by contrast, have nothing to be ashamed of. It was Liberal Democrats who stopped the Nazis in their tracks in Lewisham, and it is Liberal Democrats who have pushed them out of Burnley. Labour has simply ignored the problem, and Griffin and Brons are the result.

Partly because we always do badly, and partly because my Eurosceptic Liberal views don’t sit well in the party mainstream.

I’m afraid that on my patch evidence of either an air war or a ground war was difficult to find!

The decrease in LibDem votes (down almost half a million) is humiliating but nothing compared to Labour losing over 40% (over 1.5 million!) of theirs.
(The Conservatives received almost 400k fewer votes and even the UKIP vote fell by 200k.)

For me, this a sign of the electorate’s disenchantment with the parliamentary FPTP party system and it’s perceived endemic corruption.
Isn’t it time for PR to become the primary objective?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/elections/euro/09/html/ukregion_10.stm

Our net gain of one is notional, based on the 2004 results in the current (reduced) constituencies. Compared with our seats in the previous allocation we have lost one (from twelve to eleven). But even if notional it’s still nice!