Strong and Something or Other

While Mr Justice Stapley has suffered a missive from Team Tessie with the expectable degree of gladness, I am in receipt of a leaflet from the team of Jonathan Davies, who hopes to be the new parliamentary representative for the ex-Deputy Conservatives. "A disastrous hard Brexit will hit people in the pocket across the country, with the poorest families hit hardest," warns the party that voted through the disastrous Osbornomic recession, which hit people in the pocket across the country, with the poorest families hit hardest. "Liberal Democrats are the only party that has always fought for Britain's membership of the European Union;" this may be true, but there was a time when Liberal Democrats always fought for proportional representation, and we all know what happened to that after a quick knee-trembler in the rose garden and the whiff of a red box or two.

There is a certain forlorn chutzpah in the co-architects of the bedroom tax, the Gig Economy and their intimate neighbour Food Bank Britain posturing as friends of the poor; but the idea of the ex-Deputy Conservatives "standing up for the NHS" should really have been consigned to tactful oblivion. The present crisis has its roots a good deal further back than the Conservative government of 2010-15; but the short-staffing, underpaying and general demoralisation are all direct legacies from the expensive chaos of the Health and Social Care Act, endorsed with enthusiasm by the Deputy Conservatives. Jonathan Davies gives no indication as to which iniquitous coalition policies the Liberal Democrats would now reverse; the party promises only to give the NHS "the funds it needs," which might be jolly encouraging if every other party at every other election didn't promise to do the same.

Jonathan Davies also pledges to oppose school cuts, which presumably result from the swingeing cuts to local authority budgets which were initiated by the Conservatives with the help of somebody or other - the Green Party, perhaps? Anyway, Jonathan Davies at least has the modesty to keep this particular pledge within the confines of the Borough of Barnet, where the Conservatives have "stopped listening to local people" such as the Liberal Democrats. It really is too bad of them.

"Our country needs a strong opposition," urges the leaflet, and apparently the implication is meant to be that such an opposition will emerge from the party that sold out its policies, its councillors, its activists and forty-nine of its MPs in return for the privilege of fagging for a handful of sniggering public-school louts. We have, at least, the small mercy that Jonathan Davies' team decided against going the whole hog in imitating their erstwhile masters, and excised the words "and stable" before going to print.