Category Archives: Op-eds

Much of the focus, understandably enough, has been on Nick Clegg’s TV debates performances boosting the party’s standing. But actually that’s not what has most impressed me about the Lib Dem campaign: it’s been the disciplined professionalism shown by Lib Dem HQ.

Let’s start off with the two key campaign themes … Change that works for you, and Building a fairer Britain. They received a fair amount of derision when they first appeared – and yet they worked, and worked well. (I wonder if we’ll read that in the next issue of Liberator?)

First, by recognising that this would be a …

Okay, so the heady days of ‘Cleggmania’ – with the Lib Dems briefly in first place in the polls as high as 34% – did not last until election day itself.

Few of us expected it to, really, though it was delicious while it lasted. The fact that every single one of the nine final polls showed the Lib Dems in the 26-29% range, neck-and-neck with Labour, would have been beyond our wildest imaginations just one month ago.

But, still, there’s a percpetion in the media that the Lib Dems have somehow faded in the final week of the campaign …

Cross-posted from the International Business Times:

If I were one of the legions of undecided waverers up and down the country still making up my mind who to vote for I would feel just a little cheated by this election campaign.

For almost four weeks the politicians from all three major parties have argued and debated and discussed, but still none has answered the fundamental question: how is the UK going to cut the deficit over the course of the next parliament?

For sure, all have talked a good game. Lib Dems, Labour and Tories have all declared that their …

I don’t think even our most politically obsessed reader would be able to complain about the quantity of election coverage over the past month. Quality’s another issue, of course – and yes I am looking at you BBC1’s This Week, with your ridiculous Abbott and Portillo pantomime.

But there is one area where this election has found TV severely lacking: intelligent political comedy.

True, there’s Have I Got News For You, still (amazingly) fresh and funny after 21 years on screen. But such has been the pace of this election campaign, that its weekly appearances have nearly always been playing …

So today the Guardian officially, and surprisingly, came out in support of the Lib Dems for the coming general election. Most of us who are resolved to ‘Keep Calm & Clegg On’ are happy to recognise that newspaper endorsements – certainly by left-of-centre newspapers – do not swing elections.

But, equally, it would be wrong to dismiss the Grauniad’s conversion to the Lib Dem cause as irrelevant. For a start, it is the first time since 1974 that the paper has unreservedly supported the party. That alone is a real fillip to activists.

It’s good for morale, therefore. But …

If there’s one thing worse than being talked about, it’s not being talked about. That might be true normally, but perhaps not when the subject is hung parliaments and what the Lib Dems might do in the event thereof.

Nick Clegg made a perfectly uncontroversial point on Sunday: that it would be inconceivable for the Lib Dems to prop up Gordon Brown as prime minister if Labour came third in terms of votes cast on 6th May. Of course it would be, no matter what the constitutional niceties might say about the right of an incumbent prime minister to try …