Lib Dems: not just liars but (allegedly) murderers too

In continuing evidence that voting for the Liberal Democrats may cause misery and suffering, the man arrested (and currently on bail as a suspect) on suspicion of murdering poor Joanna Yeates is not just a religious activist but also a Liberal Democrat volunteer.*

*Innocent until proven guilty. But let's not forget the dog-murdering former leader of the Liberal Party (acquitted of incitement to murder a human too).

Let's face it: they're a bad lot.

"Haven't the rich suffered enough?"

Astonishingly, that's a quote from Peter Mandelson, supposedly a Labour politician, in negotiations with the Liberal Democrats before they decided to go with the Tories: the Lib Dems toyed with an extra tax for those who owned houses worth more than £2 million.

The simple answer from those of us who don't habitually hob-nob with the super-rich is that they appear not to have suffered at all. Bankers' bonuses are going to be around £7 billion pounds this year. On the other hand, the poor are going to suffer an awful lot.

This is why Mandelson's hated in the Labour Party.

Meanwhile, the National Union of Students has come up with a cunning wheeze. The Lib Dems proposed a recall election if 10% of a constituency signed a petition, so the NUS are planning to recall all the Lib Dems who lied about tuition fees. If the government doesn't bring in the law, they'll look like cowards. If they do, many Lib Dems might lose their seats and the government may fall. Excellent.

Also: support the national day of action on campuses, 24th November.

Coalitions: a lesson from history

We've been here before, as this poster from the early 1930s shows. I took it at the excellent People's History Museum in Manchester, on my phone. They should be selling copies.

The morning after the night before

Good morning. I assume that, if you're in the UK, you're suffering from a massive politics hangover, having listened to the Chancellor explain that, while we're all in this together, the poor are going to have to pay for the deficit. Not the rich, not the banks, not corporations (their tax is actually going down), but the poor and the young.

Oddly, I was teaching King Lear yesterday. The story of an arrogant, deluded ruler with no grasp of reality who destroyed his country out of selfishness, greed and narcisssism chimed with the day's events, though I doubt that Osborne will ever come to a soul-destroying moment of realisation - he'll always be rich and he's never wanted friends.

How revolting it was to see Liberal Democrats, who campaigned as the 'nice' party, patting the Tory Scum on the back, clapping and laughing as Osborne reduced the state to a shell company for the rich and put the poor and disabled out of their homes. When the election comes, they deserve oblivion.

I couldn't stand it anymore and headed over to Shrewsbury for my regular fencing session. Weirdly, given I was in a terrible mood, it was one of those nights on which everything went brilliantly - I fenced lots of seriously good (and nice) people and beat them all. For the first time in ages, I chose my shots and they all worked. Perhaps cold fury is the key to effective fencing.

Liberal…with the truth

Well, well well. Who'd have thought the Lib Dems would learn the Dark Arts of grown-up politics so quickly? We really should commend them for their speed-learning.

It seems only 6 months ago that every single Liberal Democrat MP and candidate publicly signed big pledge cards promising to vote against increasing university fees, and to seek ways to abolish them completely. Not just the odd ones - all of them. Someone called Nick Clegg, who turned out to be their leader, even called potential fee increases 'a disaster'.

Nick Clegg signing a statement reading 'I pledge to vote against any increase in fees…'

Well, it was a long time ago. Now the government's adviser, Lord Browne (the massively rich BP chairman who had to resign because he'd committed perjury) has recommended unlimited fee increases and loans charged at commercial rates - that'll get people flocking to teaching, nursing and social work.

Of course, the coalition will find some way to soften the blow: they'll use Browne as a fear-inducing option before doing whatever it was they already wanted to do, but the bottom line is that these Lib Dem MPs will find themselves voting to increase fees, making liars of them and fools of us all.

This is no surprise to me of course. The Liberal Democrats were founded in treason: the SDP consisted of Labour MPs who decided they could no longer stay in the room with smelly proletarian types with their working-class fixations, and bailed out to campaign for better coffee and plusher sandals. Then they merged with the remains of the old Liberal Party, and the rest was bullshit history, right up to the 2010 election, when they appealed directly to students to vote for them to stop Labour and Tory fee increases.

There's a simple lesson. The Tories are honest scum. They'll stab you in the front so they can see your face. The Lib Dems have built a political machine on stabbing people in the back. They can't stop now.