What future will the Lib Dems have by 2015?

First topic message reminder :

The Lib-Dems will not let Nick Clegg lead them into the next general election because Clegg will definitely be a liability.

The Lib-Dems won't have their leadership challenge too near the general election because this will be seen as a vote grabber.

The Lib-Dems must have their leadership challenge ages before the next general election to be seen as a genuine change of leadership.

So, when do you think their leadership challenge will be ?

Adele Carlyon wrote:Do you know something SC, they are nowt but a set of bent enablers! They've sold out on every single principal they supposedly ever had. For me they are worse than the tories and I hope they get wiped off the political map till kingdom come. They're grasping little two faced cowards.

I just do not know when they are going to get it through there thick heads they are "Dead Men Walking" as far as there political careers are concerned, maybe November the 15th will drive it home to them when they loose there three deposits and the people on the street tell them too EFF OFF or abuse them in the street.

sickchip wrote:Why on earth are the Lib-Dems still clinging to the tories?

They need to abandon ship or instigate a mutiny.

sickchip, things are going to hot up in both parties as the months roll on toward the next G/E, you can bet on it.

Ivanhoe wrote:

sickchip wrote:Why on earth are the Lib-Dems still clinging to the tories?

They need to abandon ship or instigate a mutiny.

sickchip, things are going to hot up in both parties as the months roll on toward the next G/E, you can bet on it.

I agree Ivanhoe, and the heat will increase come April 2013 when the other 80% of the Tory and L/D cuts come in, by the way do you know that ordinary people can join the Union march on the 20th October I myself will be there with bells on, they are going to be held all over the Uk so come on fellow boarders join in.

by the way do you know that ordinary people can join the Union march on the 20th October I myself will be there with bells on, they are going to be held all over the Uk so come on fellow boarders join in.

Redflag,

Definitely - and I would encourage as many people as possible to take part.

sickchip wrote:

by the way do you know that ordinary people can join the Union march on the 20th October I myself will be there with bells on, they are going to be held all over the Uk so come on fellow boarders join in.

Redflag,

Definitely - and I would encourage as many people as possible to take part.

Than you so much sickchip if you can spread the word the more people on the streets on the 20th October the more toilet paper the tories will need, and maybe secondly the L/Ds will eventually see some sense," alright there is a possibility".

If there is anyone out there who still takes Clegg and his useless party of Tory sycophants seriously, please watch this one minute video:-


Source: YouTube

Ivan,

Why do I feel sorry for Nick Clegg ?. The voters put Nick Clegg in this situation in 2010. What was he supposed to do for his party ?

The Queen wanted stable Government, Clegg had no choice but to put the Tories back into power again.

Ivanhoe. Knowing how desperate the Tories always are for power, and how they think they have a divine right to it, Clegg should not have budged one iota on the Lib Dem demand for PR, and he should not have settled for a referendum on AV. He should also have insisted that Vince Cable, a trained economist, should have become Chancellor of the Exchequer, not Cameron's restaurant-smashing chum Osborne, whose knowledge of economics wouldn't fill the back of a postage stamp.

In those five days in May 2010, Clegg negated democracy, destroyed his party and landed the country with the most right-wing, corrupt and vicious government in the last couple of centuries. No, I don't feel in the least bit sorry for Clegg.

Tittle tattle among newspaper lobbyists suggests that the next General Election will produce a similar result to the one in 2010 - a hung parliament, because electors don't trust any one party to be better than the others.

But, as they say, even a week can be a long time in Politics. Either Labour or Conservative could run a minority government by negotiation with Clegg's successor on specific measures.

Ivan wrote:Ivanhoe. Knowing how desperate the Tories always are for power, and how they think they have a divine right to it, Clegg should not have budged one iota on the Lib Dem demand for PR, and he should not have settled for a referendum on AV. He should also have insisted that Vince Cable, a trained economist, should have become Chancellor of the Exchequer, not Cameron's restaurant-smashing chum Osborne, whose knowledge of economics wouldn't fill the back of a postage stamp.

In those five days in May 2010, Clegg negated democracy, destroyed his party and landed the country with the most right-wing, corrupt and vicious government in the last couple of centuries. No, I don't feel in the least bit sorry for Clegg.

Your video just shows the kind of person he is Ivan, I agree that the Tories think they have a right to be in power if you know your history it was only the Tories that ruled until the Labour party was brought into being by the Torpuddle Martyrs and that is what it is going to take with some honesty from the Labour party so that in May 2015 the general public will put the Labour party as the majority party without the help of the L/Ds, I think it would taint Labour if they have too go into coalition with the L/Ds.

Ivan said: Clegg should not have budged one iota on the Lib Dem demand for PR, and he should not have settled for a referendum on AV.

Which proves just how out of depth the Clegg Kid is when trying to join in a big boys game. He has been and will continue to be hoodwinked by someone who is even more deveous and adept at lying than he is.

bobby wrote:Ivan said: Clegg should not have budged one iota on the Lib Dem demand for PR, and he should not have settled for a referendum on AV.

Which proves just how out of depth the Clegg Kid is when trying to join in a big boys game. He has been and will continue to be hoodwinked by someone who is even more deveous and adept at lying than he is.

Or bobby there was nothing he would not do to get into power and that includes selling the L/D voters down the river, but he will pay a high price and so will his party and they could end up with no MPs in the H.O.C.

I see two possible outcomes. Maybe the real volatility could come on the Tory side as boundary reform sinks in, EU developments provoke Eurosceptic "fury" and the Tory slide in the polls drives a poll-tax-type panic. Cameron/Osborne could start to look an even bigger liability than Clegg. Then the pieces really would be thrown in the air. But a simpler outcome could be if voters just leech to Labour or Ukip, Ed romps home, hung parliaments become a distant memory, and the Lib Dems revert to the easier life of permanent talking shop; in which case, who will care who leads them?

I think we assume too easily that we've entered a new age of coalition politics. In fact a hung parliament is an extremely unlikely outcome given our arithmetically volatile (and ridiculous) electoral system.

Referring to the topic there is only one word to answer it

PRAY

Prayer is always useful. Parties always have troughs and peaks, so why should the Lib Dems be any different? For a minority party like the Lib Dems, a hung parliament has always been the dream. Have they now had their fingers burned? If so, what are they for? Back to being an ivory tower talking shop/think tank? The gustier approach is to sell their coalition role as moderators of Tory extremism hard and shamlessly, grit their teeth for the probably inevitable massacre, and re-group.

The only way I can see another hung parliament being even remotely likely is if Scotland votes for independence, which would mean that Labour loses more than 40 seats at Westminster.

The Liberal Democrats (and their predecessors, the Liberals) have had to wait nearly 90 years since the Tories last stitched them up and, quite frankly, they’ve blown it, which is why they’re neck-and-neck with UKIP in the polls. They were bounced into a coalition in four days (Belgium managed for a whole year without a government), caved in on their ‘red line’ of PR and failed to insist on having one of the really top jobs (Cable is a qualified economist, while Osborne is a towel folder from Selfridge’s). Having won seats in places like Norwich and Cambridge with the help of students, they reneged on their pledge to abolish tuition fees and agreed to treble them.



Having campaigned against a possible Tory “VAT bombshell”, they voted for an immediate rise in the tax to 20%, something which they omit to mention when they trumpet the increase in the starting threshold for income tax.



The Tories could have carried out none of their dastardly deeds without the Lib Dems, no dismantling of the NHS, no destruction of the welfare state. We have the most right-wing – and most corrupt – government of modern times, and yet it’s supposed to be a coalition involving a centre-left party! Most people who were charmed by TV debates into voting for Nick Clegg didn’t expect to get policies of which Genghis Khan could have been proud.

So, we could have done ok "without a government" for a whole year?! Because Belgium (population 11 m) did. This is akin to those Eurosceptics who are currently enjoining us to become Switzerland (7.9m) or Norway (4.95m). We need to get real. UK banks would have gone down in 2010/11. The real suffering this would have caused is unimaginable. But, we think, the Lib Dems' lily-white principles would have remained intact, the nasty Tories would have been, what? Kept out of office? despite winning most seats? Converted to progressivism? So now we'd all love and respect the Lib Dems for their brave and honourable conduct? I don't think so.

cybercheshired. Firstly, I didn’t say that we could have a gone a year without a government, although a ‘caretaker’ one led by Brown and Darling could have continued for some time. As we learned with hindsight, the country was coming out of recession by the time of the 2010 election, only for the “green shoots of recovery” to be snuffed out by Osborne’s crackpot policies. What I am saying is that the negotiations should have taken longer, and there was no need for the Lib Dems to throw all their policies and principles in the bin when dealing with a party as desperate for power as the Tories.

I don’t accept the argument that the largest party must automatically be in a coalition. (On that basis, what right has the third party to share in power?) In my opinion, there were two outcomes to the hung parliament which would have been better. Firstly, although I accept there were a few Labour big-hitters who opposed the idea, a greater effort should have been made to secure a ‘rainbow alliance’ out of the 343 non-Tory MPs, to govern for say 18 months and bring in proportional representation in time for another election.

The second possibility was that the Tories should have ruled as a minority government, which would have meant their policies on welfare, the NHS and the VAT and student tuition fees could have been prevented. I don’t accept the Lib Dem argument that in such circumstances, the Tories would have called another election and won a majority. If they couldn’t win in May 2010, in the most favourable of circumstances and against the unpopular Gordon Brown, I can’t see how an electorate, annoyed at being asked to vote again so quickly, would have given them a majority.

Still, that’s all conjecture, and what’s done is done. I accept that the election result was a nightmare scenario for the Lib Dems, but I also think that Clegg and his Orange Book friends were overwhelmed by the prospect of power and made a terrible judgement. They campaigned as a centre-left party but have propped up an extreme right-wing, incompetent and corrupt government, so who will vote for them again? Those who like this government will vote Tory, while all social democrats and others on the centre-left have no credible alternative than to vote Labour, leaving the Lib Dems to another 90 years in the wilderness, or maybe terminal decline.

Ivan, there is nothing "incompetent" about the Tory right wing. They have an Agenda and they stick to it.

The incompetence is via the British electrate, who have given Britain over 30 years of right wing rule.

Ivanhoe. Yes, the Tories are relentlessly pursuing the Friedmanite agenda which is so eloquently described in detail by Naomi Klein in ‘The Shock Doctrine’:-
https://cuttingedge2.forumotion.co.uk/t601-the-shock-doctrine-by-naomi-klein

However, that doesn’t stop this bunch of very nasty hooray-henries from being incompetent as well. We had the passports fiasco, Maude causing panic buying of fuel in preparation for a strike that was never announced, and Theresa May not knowing what day it was when it came to Abu Hamza’s extradition. Osborne’s budget this year was so incompetent it unravelled within a few weeks, and more recently we’ve had the stupidity of putting G4S in charge of Olympic security (and subsequently awarding the company more contracts) and the West Coast trains debacle. Maybe other members can think of further examples.

(There really is no need to quote entire messages, especially when they are lengthy. For example, it wasn't necessary to reproduce my message just to highlight ‘incompetent’. If you’re answering the previous message, you could just write your response.)

Obviously the voting public are "to blame" for the 2010 election result, but we're likely to have to get used to the idea of "no overall majority" results as long as the main Parties continue to jostle each other for the centre ground.

Ivan wrote:Ivanhoe. Yes, the Tories are relentlessly pursuing the Friedmanite agenda which is so eloquently described in detail by Naomi Klein in ‘The Shock Doctrine’:-
https://cuttingedge2.forumotion.co.uk/t601-the-shock-doctrine-by-naomi-klein

However, that doesn’t stop this bunch of very nasty hooray-henries from being incompetent as well. We had the passports fiasco, Maude causing panic buying of fuel in preparation for a strike that was never announced, and Theresa May not knowing what day it was when it came to Abu Hamza’s extradition. Osborne’s budget this year was so incompetent it unravelled within a few weeks, and more recently we’ve had the stupidity of putting G4S in charge of Olympic security (and subsequently awarding the company more contracts) and the West Coast trains debacle. Maybe other members can think of further examples.

(There really is no need to quote entire messages, especially when they are lengthy. For example, it wasn't necessary to reproduce my message just to highlight ‘incompetent’. If you’re answering the previous message, you could just write your response.)

Ivam. I am not refering to their fringe policies. Im refering to their grass roots agenda which is set ideologically to ruin people's lives. If only the vast majority could see it.?

"(There really is no need to quote entire messages, especially when they are lengthy. For example, it wasn't necessary to reproduce my message just to highlight ‘incompetent’. If you’re answering the previous message, you could just write your response.)"

Ivan, have you ever thought you are just pissing in the wind?

oftenwrong wrote:Obviously the voting public are "to blame" for the 2010 election result, but we're likely to have to get used to the idea of "no overall majority" results as long as the main Parties continue to jostle each other for the centre ground.

Do you not think OW that people who made mistakes in there voting preference in the 2010 G.E have learned a very hard lesson ?

One broad conclusion seems to be that the British just don't like coalitions, prefer the silly aspects of first past the post to those of PR systems, and don't basically want minority parties except as pressure groups.

cybercheshired wrote:One broad conclusion seems to be that the British just don't like coalitions, prefer the silly aspects of first past the post to those of PR systems, and don't basically want minority parties except as pressure groups.

You are right. Politics is not in the British mindset. We vote the way we've always voted, with our wallets, and pensioners vote the way their parents did.

No political savvy whatsoever.

You're dead right. Coalition politics is just too sophisticated for us.

cybercheshired wrote:You're dead right. Coalition politics is just too sophisticated for us.

And intellectual. We British are'nt intellecuals. We are Phillistines.

Ivanhoe wrote:

cybercheshired wrote:You're dead right. Coalition politics is just too sophisticated for us.

And intellectual. We British are'nt intellecuals. We are Phillistines.

I hope you are talking about yourself Ivanhoe, I am not saying that I know everything about politics but enough to make a decision based on what I see and hear. And yes both my parents and grand parents voted Labour REASON they are the only party that really looks after ALL working people not just the bankers hedge fund managers and company CEOs.

Redflag wrote:

Ivanhoe wrote:

cybercheshired wrote:You're dead right. Coalition politics is just too sophisticated for us.

And intellectual. We British are'nt intellecuals. We are Phillistines.

I hope you are talking about yourself Ivanhoe, I am not saying that I know everything about politics but enough to make a decision based on what I see and hear. And yes both my parents and grand parents voted Labour REASON they are the only party that really looks after ALL working people not just the bankers hedge fund managers and company CEOs.

Redflag, No offence to your parents, but we British largely, are simply not politically motivated.

"we British largely, are simply not politically motivated."

The poor turnout at most elections would seem to bear that out, but is voting for a delegate MP an abdication of personal responsibility?

Ivanhoe wrote:

Redflag wrote:

Ivanhoe wrote:

cybercheshired wrote:You're dead right. Coalition politics is just too sophisticated for us.

And intellectual. We British are'nt intellecuals. We are Phillistines.

I hope you are talking about yourself Ivanhoe, I am not saying that I know everything about politics but enough to make a decision based on what I see and hear. And yes both my parents and grand parents voted Labour REASON they are the only party that really looks after ALL working people not just the bankers hedge fund managers and company CEOs.

Redflag, No offence to your parents, but we British largely, are simply not politically motivated.

I was not politically motivated until May 2010, and in May 2010 I became a Labour party member because after the Maggot I knew what was coming and the last two and half years have proved me right. Are you going on the Union march this Saturday 20th October?

Ivan wrote:The only way I can see another hung parliament being even remotely likely is if Scotland votes for independence, which would mean that Labour loses more than 40 seats at Westminster.

The Liberal Democrats (and their predecessors, the Liberals) have had to wait nearly 90 years since the Tories last stitched them up and, quite frankly, they’ve blown it, which is why they’re neck-and-neck with UKIP in the polls. They were bounced into a coalition in four days (Belgium managed for a whole year without a government), caved in on their ‘red line’ of PR and failed to insist on having one of the really top jobs (Cable is a qualified economist, while Osborne is a towel folder from Selfridge’s). Having won seats in places like Norwich and Cambridge with the help of students, they reneged on their pledge to abolish tuition fees and agreed to treble them.



Having campaigned against a possible Tory “VAT bombshell”, they voted for an immediate rise in the tax to 20%, something which they omit to mention when they trumpet the increase in the starting threshold for income tax.



Just to let you know Ivan Scotland will not vote for Independence in 2014 us Scots are not stupid as Salmond likes to think we are, plus mak my words it will be Scam..e..on and Ozzy that will pull the plug on that one as they will not be legal for the Bank of England to be the Bank of last resort for Scotland.

The Tories could have carried out none of their dastardly deeds without the Lib Dems, no dismantling of the NHS, no destruction of the welfare state. We have the most right-wing – and most corrupt – government of modern times, and yet it’s supposed to be a coalition involving a centre-left party! Most people who were charmed by TV debates into voting for Nick Clegg didn’t expect to get policies of which Genghis Khan could have been proud.

Just to let you know Ivan Scotland will not vote for Independence in 2014 us Scots are not stupid as Salmond likes to think we are, plus mak my words it will be Scam..e..on and Ozzy that will pull the plug on that one as they will not be legal for the Bank of England to be the Bank of last resort for Scotland.

I hope you're right about Scotland voting to stay in the Union.

It wouldn't bode well for Labour without Scottish voters.
The LibDems would be the least of their worries.

Just to let you know Ivan Scotland will not vote for Independence in 2014

We will see in 2014.

us Scots are not stupid as Salmond likes to think we are,

It is sheer stupidity to speak on behalf of Salmond and the Scots.

plus mak my words it will be Scam..e..on and Ozzy that will pull the plug on that one as they will not be legal for the Bank of England to be the Bank of last resort for Scotland.

.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing:

IF Scotland retains Sterling as its currency then there is nothing illegal about it, whether the BoE is the lender of last resort or not, you seem to forget the BoE has not been under the control of Westminster since 1997.
It’s hardly unusual for newly independent nations( Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to start off with their currency being pegged to the currency they’ve just stopped using, and it would benefit the BoE whose capital requirements for fractional lending are actually tied to Oil.....ie North Sea oil, to the tune of £36 billion per year. If Scotland immediately opted for its own currency then this would create a 36 billion hole in the UKs balance of payments, this would create a rather large hole in the BoE's capital requirements, and it is these requirements that determine interest rates.

In the Channel Islands we use pounds sterling and we are independent from the uk.
Jersey, Guernsey, English and Scottish bank notes are all legal tender here

One million Channel Islanders like this posting.

We seem to be getting off topic again, but if Scotland votes for independence and wishes to be in the EU, will it be treated as a 'new' member country and be required to use the euro (if it's still in existence by then)?

" required to use the euro"
.... required to worship idols of Neville Chamberlain and/or Alex Salmond.

"Political Suicide in our time!"