Note to Lib Dem Parliamentarians: We Are Not Stupid. Please stop treating us like we are.

[miss_s_b]

As is my wont on a Saturday morning, I am listening to The Week in Westminster. One of the items they have had on it was about rumblings of discontent in the party that we are not having enough influence on the coalition. Stephen Gilbert, of the whip's office, tried to counter this by listing policies which we have had influence on which are currently being enacted... and the first one he came up with was also a Tory policy.

HOW FUCKING STUPID DO YOU THINK WE ARE?

The thing about being a Lib Dem is that you have to fight tooth and nail for every vote, and the thing about fighting tooth and nail for every vote is that you know the manifestos of your oppponents as well as you know your own. HOW DARE YOU try to hoodwink us? How dare you try to spin doctor those of us who campaigned like hell to get YOU elected?

Sandra Gidley was right, you cannot ignore the rumblings of discontent from within the party, or dismiss it by telling us we are not being grown up. I was one of those who voted enthusiastically for the coalition, I am fully aware that coalition involves compromise, but compromise, to my mind, does NOT involve pretending to be ecstatically happy about a desperate fudge that nobody actually wants (AV), and nor does it involve being an uncritical fawning abused partner in a marriage with very unequal power footings. I've seen where that leads, thank you, and I'm not going to participate enthusiastically in the macro version.

If you keep trying to dismiss and ignore the feelings of the grassroots of the party, you are going to reap a whirlwind in Liverpool, you smug, arrogant, dismissive tosser. And that's a long time before we get wiped out at the next election, which it's looking more and more like we will...

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Comments

[(Anonymous)]

well said,I do wish dissent wasn't treated like some sort of teenage rebellion.Listen to us, take us seriously and we will get on with the job of doing our best to sell the coalition.Right now I'm totally disillusioned and we haven't even started seeing the effects of the deficit reduction.Things need to get better, quickly.

[bagfish]

I too heard this and started shouting at the radio. What an utter fuckwit who is showing a complete loss of any contact with the reality of the party members and the activists at the grassroots who are horribly uncomfortable with what is happening.

On the other had I thought Sandra's comments were extremely good, especially the one about how we need to learn from our experience in local government, i.e. don't forget about the grassroots campaigners just because we now have some power.

My one ray of hope this weekend was Tim F's comments picked up by the BBC where he actually comes out and expresses some concern with the coalition.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10740530

Lib Dem Parliamentariens

[(Anonymous)]

Tony Greaves said it all on BBC yesterday and he has the bottle to put his name to his criticisms. Clegg is being eaten up and spat out by the Tories and he doesn't have the political nouse to see it coming! Those of us who spent over 40 years working for Liberalism object to Clegg throwing it all away to get his backside in a Ministerial car!

[staceyuk]

Right now with the Coalition's stance on disability benefits I feel very let down. My DLA money is a lifeline. Without it, I definitely would not have a car and be housebound.

I feel I am being punished for the minority that do abuse it, and for the state of the economy. I wish it was easy for me to get a job and support myself but it isn't.

I keep telling myself not to worry about it but it's there in the back of my mind...

I was awarded DLA at the higher rate for life for a reason. Mum has to do most things for me. I could never live alone and I need someone around 24/7.

I seem quite capable sitting in my chair. Things start to fall apart when I have to move. *big sigh*

[burkesworks]

I'm waiting for the glorious day when the party splits into market-liberal and social-liberal factions, as has happened in the Netherlands. I would give my eye teeth to join a party along the same lines as that country's D66, possibly with Charles Kennedy at the helm, and I dare say there are many LibDems who would cheerfully join me on board.

[scarier.wordpress.com]

IAWTP. I too was listening to the discussion on the radio this morning, and was pretty appalled by Stephen Gilbert.

I was resigned to the idea that people would accuse the party of selling out for nothing in return, that there would always be bitching from the Labour left and their craven support base; it's the seriously weak counter-arguments currently being put out by our own partisans that worry me. If Stephen Gilbert listing some of the policies we shared with the Tories *before* the coalition is the best they can do, we should all pack up and go home now. Sandra Gidley was eminently sensible this morning, and Gilbert sounded like every Labour-bot who ever tried to defend the last government. I hope that someone in the parliamentary party gives him a good slap on behalf of the grassroots who had the misfortune to be listening to him this morning.

[lizw]

I think what's happening is that a lot of our parliamentarians are answering any question about what the coalition is achieving by reciting the set "Lib Dem policies that can be implemented in this government that wouldn't have been implemented under Labour", which contains some policies on which the Tories agreed with us before the election as well as some on which they didn't - whereas what a lot of activists want to hear is the smaller sub-set "Lib Dem policies that can be implemented in this government that wouldn't have been implemented under the Tories alone". Personally, as long as we maximise the first set I don't care too much how many of those policies are also in the smaller set - if we can undo a lot of Labour's damage, I want to be part of that regardless of whether the Tories would have done it anyway.

And yes, we're going to get wiped out at the next election, but I knew that going into the coalition. I think it was inevitable whether we went in or not, because if we did then Labour-leaning floating voters were going to desert us and if we didn't, then Tory-leaning ones were (and conversely if a rainbow coalition had seriously been on the table). Floating voters who thought we were radically different from the other parties were also inevitably going to drift away, because if we went into coalition they were always going to punish us for looking too ordinary, which I think is unavoidable when the day-to-day reality of Government hits, and if we didn't go in they were going to punish us for not taking the once-in-a-generation opportunity that they felt they'd handed us.

[pmoodie]

Well said. Keep rumbling away, and do not let yousrelves be swept under the carpet.