The third Liberal Democrat election broadcast was shown this evening. It continues the theme in the last one, showing a woman, Helen, driving around at night listening to the radio as she makes up her mind how to vote. Unusually, most of the callers to the radio show highlight the achievements of the Lib Dems on pensions, the NHS, protecting the schools budget, fantastic, trustworthy Liberal Democrat MPs who care about their communities, cuts in income tax. Then it continues the theme of Lib Dems protecting against Labour recklessness & Conservative heartlessness. Will Helen turn right, left, or go straight on? Watch below.
Just as an aside, we love that the star of the video is called Helen. We are sure it must be a nod to the Divine Ms Duffett so beloved of party activists.
We do wonder, though, why the party doesn’t provide either subtitles or a transcript on its You Tube page, to make this more accessible.
Follow @LibDemVoice on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Shropshire zoo seeks runaway 'beloved' capybara
Fraser's West End ward surgeries later today #dundeewestend
What's next?
Firebird
Starmer making a mistake over Single Market - Davey
Reviewing the general election
Simon R
John Waller
Steve Trevethan
Chris Moore
Peter Martin
27 Comments
It’s nice that Helen is driving an electric car but odd that we hear the clatter of a petrol engine when she presses the start button. As the BWM i3 has a distinctive appearance, plenty of people will notice this mistake.
You know, I would never have noticed that. Well spotted.
Well this Helen, noticed the sale of our police station to the university. Student housing being built on prime land in the centre of the city of Bath. Cuts in funding to children’s centers. The reliance on food banks, the bedroom tax. The petitions against house building, the Inspector did get called in. The tuition fees. Lack of interest with issues like problems with child access under both Hague and Brussels 11a.
Now the Tories, your coalition partners are talking selling H/A housing stock at a reduction of 70%. If you were there now something else you could help through the passage of the Commons.
I don’t have a BMW but which way will I turn, left or right?
I look at it the other way, Helen, the Tories want to sell HA housing stock at a reduction of 70% and haven’t been able to up to now because we’ve been there to stop them.
I’m also not entirely sure why it is a bad thing to be building student housing in Bath. Presumably students in Bath need somewhere to live?
Isn’t there a proposal to make electric cars make noises so that unaware pedestrians and cyclists know they’re there?
Not unlike the cameras in mobile phones making a mechanical shutter noise.
Our local police were given a Toyota Prius to use for a few months some years ago. I was walking on a footpath in the local park and was startled to discover it noiselessly just behind me. (Prius are hybrids, but it low speeds with a well-charged battery the ICE cuts out.)
Liberal Neil, the university is taking over the center of the city. Green Park, is quite a good area, there is also other student housing too. The police station in Manvers Street, not a bad area either. They have another large property just round the corner.
5000 on the waiting list, house prices comparable with London, 40% of buyers from London now move here. I lived in a run down Georgian flat, now renovated after I was able to move on after 5 years to somewhere near Bristol, very little decent in Bath. My former flat a holiday let for wealthy tourist. Check on line, these social housing flats make a large profit for Curo.
Housing being built not accessible with lifts, some above garages.
I am a pensioner, had sight issues for years, even been blind for a while, had to leave ny family in the city, move out into an area nearer to Bristol.
But then, I have a roof over my head, I should be grateful.
As asked elsewhere – what has happened to Stronger Economy, Fairer Society? It is also missing from this broadcast (replaced with what I suppose we will have to refer to as LRX)
Yes what happened to fairness and providing a better society for all.
The Tories are talking 70% discounts on HA property to buy. These will end up in the private sector at inflated prices.
You were part of the coalition, my MP at that time Don Foster agreed with most things, I walked out of one meeting on his support of food banks.
I helped him canvass to remove Chris Patten, he in turn becomes part of what we fought to change. Sorry, but as a baby boomer I believe in a better fairer society, not a worse one.
Is, ‘we’re less economically competent than the Tories, and less nice than Labour’ really a good message to be putting out at election time?
Helen Dudden 14th Apr ’15 – 11:06am……………………The Tories are talking 70% discounts on HA property to buy. These will end up in the private sector at inflated prices………………………
So, so true…..Charles Gow, the son of Ian Gow, the Tory minister and Thatcher aide during the peak years of the right-to-buy boom, owns at least 40 ex-council properties. About a third of ex-council homes sold in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher are now owned by private landlords.
Party strategists should steal Cameron’s theme of “the good life”. I’m kicking myself that I didn’t think of it first.
Clegg is right to bang on about the Conservatives welfare cuts. It won’t be the good life for them.
Labour could say something like “the good life for the few”, but it won’t hit home anymore after their manifesto.
I thought it a dire party political broadcast – it makes the classic Clegg mistake of trying to sell a message instead of addressing peoples real concerns.
The Lib Dems are contesting just 46% of Council seats, compared to 65% as recently as last year. The very unstrange death of Liberalism continues.
I just looked at the shiny-ness, the glossiness, the aspirational-ness of the actress and overall presentation, and thought ‘this is an ad for a party that only wants affluent and well-off people to vote for it’. I felt no conection with this at all, which is odd in someone who is a party member.
Liberal Neil “I’m also not entirely sure why it is a bad thing to be building student housing in Bath.”
The issue is they are being built in the city centre. Near me the local college/university has a large campus on the northern edge of town (with 5000+ houses due to built just a little further north). It has been decided that what it really needs is a shiny new city centre campus and so is preparing to sell it’s current campus (for housing) and relocate closer to the city centre and station, in a new development, taking advantage of the government ‘enterprise’ funding that this venture qualifies for… Naturally, politicians are selling this as the something wonderful as they can attach an ‘enterprise’ park on the side of it (something the existing campus has room for, given they are building 5,000+ houses nearby) and so get publicity and further government funding…
@roland – you havent explained why this is a problem ?
I think the Tories new “right to buy” proposal is a very clear own goal and should be mercilessly exploited. I thought David Cameron believed in the “Big Society” and wanted a vibrant third-sector? Also what is the difference between a Housing association and any other business/private landlord? from what I can see the only real difference is that one intends to reinvest profits in the business and the other to extract profits…
Also I thought, that after Margaret Thatcher, many landlords changed their agreements, so that tenants never actually accrued any residency rights greater than the period of time specified in the agreement, which was always less than one year.
@Simon – thanks for the prompt.
There are several issues firstly the misuse of government money to relocate the campus (although a case could be made that it will create jobs in the construction industry for a few years). The second is that the current campus is a true campus, namely self contained with room for expansion etc. whereas the new city centre campus will (due to land constraints) be an open campus and multi-site (and for certain courses still require facilities that the current ‘out-of’town’ campus provides). Finally, I (and others) find it odd that given the value of city centre land close to the railway station, that the best use seems to be to locate a college there.
After watching this, I decided to abandon the tyranny of left and right handedness and communicate solely using the middle. Or that’s my excuse for why I was banging my head on the desk after watching it.
(Oh, and does this ‘neither left, nor right, but somewhere in between’ stuff make anybody else think of Spitting Image?)
No it reminds me of dismal Liberal days in the mid-1950s before Jo Grimond got the party moving. “Not Left Not Right but Forward”. Nonsense then, nonsense now.
Tony Greaves
“The Lib Dems are contesting just 46% of Council seats, compared to 65% as recently as last year. The very unstrange death of Liberalism continues.”
Comparing this cycle with last cycle is very much chalk and cheese. There is very little overlap and many more seats to be contested. That said it does sound on the low side and I don’t know what it was in 2011 or 2007 (the sensible comparison points).
According to analysis from independent local government experts Michael Thrasher and Colin Rallings, the proportion of seats fought by the Lib Dems in previous years was 81 per cent in 2008, 80 per cent in 2004 and 79 per cent in 2000, in 2012 it was 70%, the lowest proportion for 12 years !
Yes the number of seats varies with the areas up for election, but there is a general election on and we have the lowest proportion of local government candidates since probably the creation of the party – yet we have Party Political Broadcast with Nick Clegg telling people about the Lib Dems working in your area and about to knock on your door.
In 2011 the Tories are contested, 93.4% of all seats compared with 72.1% for Labour and 59.1% for the Lib Dems
The Lib Dem proportion was the lowest since 1999.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/apr/08/liberal-democrats-local-election-struggle
OK that is a worrying sign (the reason why this can be a questionable measure though is that it takes 17 people to stand in every seat in Calderdale (two constituencies) and (IIRC) 34 to stand in every seat in West Somerset (about half a constituency.)
Roland, how was the purchase of the former Bath Police Station sold?
I also feel we should not allow politics to get into removing public toilets and not allowing any ideas to be put forward on other ways to provide.
I could add the narrow minded local Lib Dems not understanding on the subject of disability, and the need for toilets.
Bath is for people like Helen,, who drives a BMW and obviously has nothing in her life other than think how she will vote, is she now a typical voter of your Party?
Helen – I have no knowledge of the details of the situation in Bath. But I can understand your frustration.
As for public toilets, drinking fountains, parks and other attributes of public spaces the Victorians provided, well there decline as is the rise of private high streets, is a telling comment on our modern society.
As for Helen, what I find telling is that the video was obviously shot late at night and hence no traffic etc., which seems to say something about Helen’s connection with the town she is driving through.
I would not drive around alone at night.
A bit if a joke all this, a woman in a BMW with nothing useful to do.
Just returned from Shul, today is the 70th anniversary of the release of those from Belsen, quite different. Not long ago 70 years.
Lack of social housing, bedroom tax, is there nothing more positive you can write about. The NHS.