The Fibs are revolting - sort of.

The growing Lib Dem revolt against Clegg



It's worth bearing in mind that Lib Dem Voice isn't exactly a hotbed of radical dissent, either.

Twelve months before the election, so they can say they're different now. That's when he'll go.

The Coalition has more than enough ideas to survive after this parliament, according to the Liberal Democrat architect of the pact with the Conservatives.

David Laws, a former Cabinet minister and key negotiator of the post-election deal, said the coalition’s agenda would take ‘well beyond’ just one parliament to deliver - and he gave the government a score of nine out of ten for strength.

He cautioned that introducing a raft of new policies would distract the government from implementing the already ambitious promises they had made.

...

David Cameron and Nick Clegg should also privately hammer out an agreement on how they manage the coalition’s last year in the lead up to the 2015 election so that ‘the country does not think that the government has given up and is fighting itself’, Mr Laws said.

He signalled that the Tory-Lib Dem pact could continue, saying: ‘In spite of the perception around the Queen’s Speech that there was not new legislation in health, education and welfare, the agenda we set out in the coalition agreement was massively ambitious and will take whichever party was in government not just one parliament but well beyond that to deliver.

Just how do the Tories get away with it? Since they were founded as a modern political force in 1834, the Conservatives have acted as the parliamentary wing of the wealthy elite. When I was at university, a one-time very senior Tory figure put it succinctly at an off-the-record gathering: the Conservative Party, he explained, was a "coalition of privileged interests. Its main purpose is to defend that privilege. And the way it wins elections is by giving just enough to just enough other people".

Firstly, we must keep the faith with economic liberalism, notwithstanding the problems in the global economy since 2007.

Free market capitalism, including competition, consumer power and private sector innovation offer the best prospect for increasing wealth and reducing poverty and poor living conditions – including in the developing world.

This is probably my favourite quote from the Laws article:



http://www.libdemvoice.org/liblink-davi ... l#comments

As if the global neoliberal financial crisis (now in its fifth year) is just a minor blip. The rest of it is similarly nauseating market fundamentalist shite.

I say this to show that I bear no personal animosity when I say that Clegg and his party are in even deeper trouble than the headline numbers suggest. We know that they have lost more than half their general election support, and that Clegg has the worst ratings of the three main party leaders. We know that they have been hammered in local elections, and humiliated in the London mayoral contest and parliamentary by-elections. But look under the bonnet of our recent polls for the Sun and Sunday Times, and we find their plight is even worse:

Only 23% of those who voted Lib Dem in 2010 think Clegg is doing well as party leader. As many as one in three of the die-hards – those who have stayed loyal to the party – think he is doing badly.

Almost one in three of the die-hards now oppose the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition. Among all voters, the proportion of Lib Dem-voting coalition supporters who would vote Lib Dem is now just 6%.

Until recently, most Lib Dem loyalists favoured a continuation of a Conservative-led government after the next election. Now they are evenly divided between Tories and Labour. Among those who voted Lib Dem in 2010, a clear majority now wants a Labour-led government after the next election.