Budget Blues*

The rhetoric has been getting more and more over the top.

I suspect this means that the budget today will be less extravagant than people fear.

I do hope that the coalition doesn't whack VAT up across the board. I fear however it will.

My only budget prediction is Labour hypocrisy. Remember they promised in the budget last year, that if re-elected, they'd perform £44bn of public sector cuts. However suddenly sticking to Labour's plans is cruel and regressive and nasty and...

This is not going to be a fun day to be a Liberal Democrat.

* and, to be fair, yellows too.

Why are all LibDem bloggers also SciFi fans

There does seem to be a Dr Who theme amongst LibDems of a certain age. How many of the LibDem bloggers write about Dr Who? I know of many non-blogging activists who are similarly afflicted.


Anyway me too. Although I am an amateur next to my wife, and she confesses to the same amateur status when compared to Millenium Elephant's daddy who knows everything. I'm, sadly, very impressed by his analyses.

I really enjoyed Saturday's episode and can't wait for the next one. Spoilers now follow.

The wife and I discussed possible ways out of the hole that we've been written into and they all seem to point to Amy.


I reckon she's a timelord. My wife reckon she's the Doctor's Daughter from The Doctor's Daughter. This will allow her to regenerate.

Unfortunately I think my wife might be right: Moffat asked that the DD not be killed, and it'd explain the strength of the Doctor's reaction to Amy's pass at him. I'd rather it was the Rani. I'm not keen on the DD to be honest.


The other possibility is that Amy's house could be a Tardis. The Lodger hinted at a building that was wrong being a Tardis, and the Doctor challenged Amy on this point last night ("too many rooms", "nothing in your life makes sense"). This also allows a Tardis to explode without removing Tardis access from the Doctor. How many times can I write Tardis in such a short paragraph? It would also explain the door: "perception filters" were mentioned in the Eleventh Hour about one door in her house, and were also in The Lodger. I'll admit I checked the former.


The house being Amy's Tardis would also explain why the cracks follow Amy.


I did for a while think we were just in Amy's head but that leads to a disappointing "it was all a dream" ending. Caron's Musing suggest another way we can get a cop out ending linking back. I think we can rule both out.


Or is Amy part of the trap? Is that why nothing makes sense? If so why do the Autons kill her?


Now I'm looking forward to being proved totally and utterly wrong. I'm wishing my life away again. In the meantime here is some football.

Breaking the Mould?

I have just got back from the Hay Festival, which was an outing of stereotypical Guardian readers to a field in Wales. Good fun but rather depressing in some ways. Sadly I will be back at some point.

I will write about some of the sessions I attended at some point, especially when I've finished reading the books that go with them.

However I did sneak into the second hand bookshops and pick up a few books to add to my backlog of unread books.

One that jumped out at me cost the princely sum of £1.50 and is pictured right. It was written in 1981 and outlines from a broadly sympathetic (I think) position the reasons for the creation of the SDP and what might happen. Ian Bradley went on to different things than you might expect (and yes it is the same person!)

Overall the book reads easily and, at only 161pp, quickly. Ian Bradley is a lively writer. I think his sections on polls had all the health warnings, but the conclusions don't seem to include them. However his final conclusions are interesting:

If the SDP does well at the next election [1983], it will almost certainly help the party which it has broken away from [...]

To be fair to Ian Bradley he couldn't have foreseen the Falklands.

He seems more prescient in the next sentence:

The effect of it's arrival may well be to help the Liberals [...] It is not difficult to imagine after the next election a victorious alliance contingence of MPs which consists of only a handful of Social Democrats, perhaps just 3 or 4 of the exisiting MPs, and a substantial number -- perhaps fifty or more -- of Liberals.

The Liberals did remain the senior grouping in 1983 (17 against 6) and 1987 (17 against 5). But never matched poll levels. Predicting a level of 50 for the Liberal (Democrat) parliamentary party seems reasonable now, but would have been unheard of in the 1980s.

In chapter 2 he gives an overview of new parties. He says that they need 20-30 years to enter government, or vanish in about 5-10 years. The SDP may be unique in doing both: it took 16 years for New Labour to emerge as an arguably Social Democratic government (albeit a bureaucratic centralising one), or 29 years for the LibDems to enter the coalition, but the SDP as a real force vanished in the merger after only 6 years.

Well worth a read if you can find a copy. Which looks easy enough. I may track down a copy of his Strange Rebirth of Liberal England when I've read more of the backlog.

Been a while hasn't it...

Well the election happened in my absence. I was somewhat busy campaigning and didn't write much. In the parliamentary campaigns I was involved in (to various extents) the news was mixed but on balance disappointing. A win, a good loss (as it were) and three disappointing defeats.

Some questions I may rant about arising from the election are...

• Why is it we keep believing good opinion polls and ignore the bad ones?
• Why do we lose in three way marginals?
• How do we chose target seats so badly?
• Why are we disappointed with our best ever total vote as LibDems?

Some have easier answers than others...

However for now I think things have moved on enough to ignore these and instead move on to issues that don't concern me.

Things That Don't Concern Me 1: The Deputy Leadership

I had no idea the membership didn't vote for the deputy leader of the party. Mind you I ought to have done the '06 and '03 elections were done the same way and I was a member for both.

So we have two candidates:

Tim Farron backed publicly by Ming, Tessa Munt and Chris Huhne.
Simon Hughes backed publicly by Beith, Vince and Sarah.

See the list on LD Voice for current state of play.

In my opinion Hughes must win. His speech at the special conference was superb. He is a voice from the outside of the coalition. He is a liberal fighting against Labour by being better than them at fighting for social justice.

So I hope my MP votes for Hughes, and I hope he wins. Then we have a strong, experienced voice critical of the coalition within it. Hooray!

Things that don't concern me 2: Which Milliband

I really don't care. Balls would be less of a disaster for Labour than some people seem to think. People say they dislike combative opposition but the mud will stick. Milliband E and D are interchangable.

New candidate in Cambridge

I must be honest: I am a LD activist and not a neutral commentator.

I was at the selection and the person who was by far the best candidate won: Julian Huppert.

His speach came last when we were all tired and feeling politic-ed out and yet it energised the hall. It lifted me. Made me want to get out there and, erm, deliver leaflets.

The sentiment was that we had 6 excellent candidates who would all make excellent MPs yadda yadda. This may be true but wasn't shown on the night. One candidate I felt would do well suffered from nerves, another fell flat, a third over ran: a dreadful sin. I won't say who as they will know who they are and I know they will do better in future. All 5 who didn't make it would make excellent MPs and shouldn't give up.

However I will say that at least one ought to think carefully about whether Cambridge is the right city for them.

Imagine pigs flying...
I do hope that if we get STV that they will come forward as our second/third etc candidates.
End flying pigs.

What I expected to be a draining and rather tiresome evening was actually excellent. Cambridge seems to have a talented local party.