I watched Clegg introducing the debate on the Lords Reform Bill in the commons. He was being barracked by both sides, but particularly by the Tories behind him. He looked lost, bewildered, and utterly hopeless.

It struck me that his leadership of the Liberal Democrat Party has been an absolute disaster from start to finish. Ostensibly wreathed in glory as the first Lib Dem leader to lead his party into government for generations, his deal with the Tories has instead been close to catastrophic. Complicity with and encouragement for savage Tory spending cuts, the dismantling and privatisation of our precious NHS, trebling of tuition fees, complicity in the wholesale ruination of education by a secretary of state who is about as unsuitable for that (or any) brief as Peter Sutcliffe, a hopelessly botched referendum on a change in the voting system to another non-proportional system that will effectively keep PR off the political agenda for another generation, and now an attempt to reform the House of Lords that is seemingly doomed because of Clegg's disastrous choice of coalition partners.

The Lib Dems under Clegg will have achieved nothing, nada, zilch - other, that is, than to aid and abet a government seemingly more set on the systematic asset stripping of society's fabric for private profit than any since Thatcher. And to have decimated (at a generous estimate), the electoral support that the party formerly had.

Excellent post and I'm quoting it so it shows up at the top of the new page.

Lordy. Hitchens debating with Russell Brand on drugs and is about to explode.

"Why is a recovered addict, who therefore knows from first hand experience far more about the subject than me, being given a show on the BBC to give his opinions on drugs ????"

I swear you could see the veins on his temples throbbing.......