Author Archives: Richard Hall

The Lib Dems are the party the country needs

By Richard Hall | Sat 4th March 2017 - 11:20 am

I’ve been following politics for about 15 years and I joined the Liberal Democrats in January. When I was first interested in politics, I was pretty right-wing. I was mired in stereotypes about race, sexuality, gender, and the unemployed. I was an avid reader of the Daily Mail and would hang on every word written by Richard Littlejohn. Then Michael Foot died. Now I’m too young to remember Michael Foot, but I’m sure older readers will remember him as being very divisive. Well Littlejohn just couldn’t help but call him a “useful idiot” just 3 days after he died and after that I was out. I slowly embraced liberalism and left right-wing dogma behind.

After a journey that started in US politics and included a lot of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” I developed left leaning views, open to reason but annoyed at the way people where being scapegoated for the mistakes of the powerful instead of being helped. But I became too cynical about politicians and started towards the far left. There I realised they were full of dogma too, were too anti-capitalist and fond of false equivalences about Republicans and Democrats, as well as being disrespectful of reasonable points of view. On top of that I realised that as much as the right-wing has been duped by The Sun and the Daily Mail, they were being taken in by Russia Today and Press TV.