Vote ... anyone but Lib Dem

With the growing anger over the proposed sell of our woodland (and if you've not signed the 38 Degrees petition yet then please find time to do so) I've been pondering why I'm more angry with the Lib Dems than with the Tories over everything that's going on at the moment.

And I think when it comes down to it the answer is that what the Tories are doing is what I expected them to do. It comes as no surprise. So I'm not disappointed in them. Depressed yes, but disappointed no because that's what I expected from, as Beth so eloquently puts it, those evil Tory racist bastards.

But at the last election the Lib Dems gave me hope. I didn't expect them to win, but at least they would moderate the party they went into coalition with, which would probably be Labour. And that would be no bad thing: a Labour party which could no longer be quite so authoritarian - be forced to ditch things like control orders and ID cards - while retaining their core values might mean a Labour party more like the one I used to vote for.

Instead we've got a Lib Dem party which has not only given the Tories a mandate to bring in draconian cuts, well beyond what is necessary to sort out the deficit, and to do things like the wholesale "reform" of the NHS¹ and sell off our forests.

Even the referendum on electoral reform is for a system of PR I'm not keen on (I prefer the AV+ system advocated by the Jenkins Commission) and is being brought in on the back of legislation specifically designed to make it easier for the Tories to stay in power.

The only positive for me is the dropping of ID cards. But it's a pyrrhic victory.

So I'm bloody angry at the Lib Dems for doing all of this. What amazes me is that I can't help thinking a lot of their own members are too. I suspect the party is only holding it together on the back of the AV referendum.

I'm wondering what will happen after May. If, as seems likely, they lose a lot of local council seats and on top of that they lose the AV referendum (which may well happen: I can see a lot of voters voting against it simply because the Lib Dems are for it) then I wonder how much longer Lib Dems, from MPs down, will be prepared to continue to put up with this destruction of all that's good in our country in the interest of the few.

1. Which has failure written all over it before it even kicks off: why should GPs be better at managing the NHS than professional managers? It's nonsense. It's going to be like railway privatisation all over again.