I still end up with the sinking sensation that in the end all this poll movement will do nothing. the PLP and media alike will jump on it as a failure.
It’s an unpleasant place to be when literally the smallest disruption of the Tories’ plans would please me. It’s like there’s a game of Deal or No Deal going on in my head and every time a new story or poll comes out the offer is getting better and better but the chances are still so slim. So banker’s currently offering me ‘Tory victory, but only a minor one’ and I’m looking what might be left on the table and finding myself thinking ‘huh maybe I shouldn’t push it…’ and preparing myself mentally to settle for that even though I know I want something much better.
This analogy brought to you by sleepy train journey
tim farron is such a garbage boy & he’s done absolutely nothing for the lib dems since he took over. just kicked the ashes around the place and occasionally embarrassed himself. they should be talking unity & coalition now w/ labour but he’d happily piss it up the wall to make sure everyone knows he has a different opinion.
Is he really getting mauled out ? I think a majority of brits has the common sense to know where they stand on the aftermath of disastrous foreign policy that had a huge impact on the psyche of the population for years. There’s simply too much evidence on his side to simply be up in arms and manufacture a backlash as opposition always tries to do so. I think this will not hold.
Ahh. Like in certain parts it’s just either gonna be Tories or Lib Dem, because there’s just not enough Labour support. OK. I get that. I’d definitely choose Lib Dem over Tories if I had to. But say best case scenario happens and Tories lose hard, and both Labour and the Lib Dems make major gains. What happens next? Do the Libs then just spen all their time trying to stop Labour from doing good things?
So what the Lib Dems have going for them this time is that they actually bothered to oppose Brexit after the referendum, sort of. But one gets the impression that they didn’t have anything to lose anyway by doing so, having lost any goodwill they had in the coalition.
That strategy has worked for them kiiind of except that Tim Farron is absolutely worthless and lately on everything but Brexit they seem to be siding more and more with the Tories.
I’ll admit, I was gullible for a while, there, too. They were the only party taking any sort of stand against Brexit that I could potentially vote for, and I do think it’s one of the important issues, and Labour was in the middle of its leadership squabble, so I thought “well, I don’t agree with them on everything but at least they seem to be at least moving in a direction counter to the tories and not imploding”
But since then they’ve had chance after chance to occupy the political void Labour was leaving and haven’t really done so.
And now, suddenly with the new manifesto Labour look vaguely organised again all of a sudden, and if the PLP can just pretend they like Corbyn for just long enough to do this then they might actually realise he’s not quite as unelectable as they all assumed.
Of course, this still leaves the gaping question of what on earth we’re going to do about Brexit.
oh it’s completely serious they had the pick of labour or the tories to pair up with and they went with the tories for a coalition government thats now infamous for breaking just about every promise the lib dems made
they lost an enormous amount of seats in the next election and its astounding to me that they somehow still act like they are some sort of significant political force
I don’t have any hard proof for the following assertion, but it seems to me that the only reason that we don’t have a “Lib Dems divided and in crisis” meme (in the way that we do for Labour) is that it serves nobody’s political interest to push it. The ‘divided house’ narrative around Labour seems like a Conservative line that also helps out the smaller political parties, as all of them (whether Lib Dem, Plaid Cymru, or Scottish Nationalist Party) want to shore up their base by fighting Labour as well, which serves May absolutely fine.
I was an incredibly gullible dipshit in 2010. Although to be fair, at that point they were positioning themselves to the left of Brown’s New Labour mess. In 2015 I voted Green, because my constituency was a safe seat for the Tories, and I actually like the Greens. Ed wasn’t that impressive either. This time I’m with Labour because they actually have a left wing leader, albeit with some flaws, and they have a chance of actually doing something this time.
The Lib Dems absolutely destroyed themselves in the coalition. Like they were trying their hardest to grasp at an image of legitimacy and power, but it was so transparent, and so badly done, everyone could see they were just chumming up with the Tories for the most part, taking the blame for every unpopular policy, and turning their backs on every promise they made, and they got hammered at the next election as a result.
That’s exactly the situation I’m in, as I went into a little earlier in this thread. I used to quite like the Lib Dems because “the truth is always somewhere in the middle” is an enticing worldview, and until the coalition they had no actual track record in government to damn themselves with. It’s also worth remembering that the Blair era, while very successful for the party, left a lot of people feeling extremely disillusioned by Labour, but still unwilling to vote Conservative on account of what horrible bastards they are. But then the Lib Dems had their moment in the sun and it was terrible.
But I’m absolutely going to vote for my local LD candidate because a) unless things have entirely changed since the last general election, Labour don’t stand a chance here, and b) Ed Davey seems OK-ish, I guess. Every time I hear about Tim Farron it’s something bad, though. They need to ditch that guy fast.
For a bit more context (though I may be entirely wrong), I think the Liberal Democrats tend to do best in fairly well-off areas, so they’re sort of the option for people with money and a bit of a conscience but maybe not that much of one. Or are gullible, as suggested above. I was pretty gullible. I don’t suppose I have any reason to believe that’s changed.
