I was tagged on Facebook today and told that I really should share this article from on the Liberal Democrats’ General Election campaign on this site. It was talked up by a fair few people whose judgement I respect but I have to say that when I read it, I was underwhelmed. There was much that I agreed with – the total inadequacy of our general election messaging for a start, but most of it seemed to me to be a mixture of stating the bleedin’ obvious, lazy assumptions and, to be honest, not much that we didn’t know already.
There were, of course some parts that made my blood boil. It bought heavily into the idea that we were a party of protest, for a start. For me, that is a ridiculous notion. We have always been about getting into government wherever we can, in councils, at national level and at UK level. We spent 8 years keeping Labour honest at Holyrood.
That successful coalition is mentioned in the article almost accusingly, as something we should have achieved at Westminster without any analysis of why such a comparison is a false one. For a start, the Holyrood coalition governed at a time of prosperity. There was stacks of cash around and we were able to do radical things with it. Taking over the economic reins during the worst economic crisis in 80 years is an entirely different challenge. Secondly, the electorate in Scotland largely gets the Parliament it asks for. At Westminster this is not the case. If we had a proportionate number of seats, we’d have had 140 MPs, not 57 and a much bigger voice in government.
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