Over at his New Statesman blog, David Allen Green — the magazine’s legal correspondent and author of the Jack of Kent blog — has explained his decision last week to become a fully paid-up member of the Liberal Democrats.
To be more accurate, he first lists all the reasons why he will be a dissenting member of the Lib Dems [is there any other kind? – Ed.]… before then highlighting how he was finally persuaded to join by ConservativeHome’s founding editor Tim Montgomerie analyses that ‘the current government is significantly more liberal than an entirely Conservative administration would otherwise be’.
David concludes:
Politics is about power. The Labour opposition is impotent. In government they were illiberal and often brutal. There is only one political force which is having an actual liberal effect in our polity as it is presently constituted, and it is the Liberal Democrats. It may not be as strong a power as it should be. The Liberal Democrats may do well to leave the coalition and force a minority Conservative administration to gain concessions on a vote-by-vote basis. But Montgomerie’s “concession-o-meter” shows why anyone who wants policy to be more liberal than it otherwise would be should support the effect the Liberal Democrats are having on Coalition government.
What the Liberal Democrats are doing in practice may not be popular, but it certainly should be commended by any liberal person.
You can read David’s post in full here — and welcome him to the party by following him on Twitter here.
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3 Comments
I disagree with some of his views but for any political party to succeed it has to be a broad church. The key consideration is does the person who joined agree with the preamble of the constitution? In that regard I think he does and he should be welcomed accordingly.
Geoff hits the point as usual. There’s certainly more to agree with David than to disagree. He does a very good job displaying the big differences between Labour and the Lib Dems.
The comments on the New Statesmen article show how a lot of people don’t get the whole civil liberties things, nor pay much attention to a lot of what the governments doing beyond their own headline issues and biased viewpoints unfortunately.
This post made my day today, I’ve been an avid follower of David’s since the #twitterjoketrial and really made up that he’s one of us now – and been shouting it from the rooftops!