Liberal Landslide

This entire election campaign has seemed significantly more exciting than the last one, not least because the only scandal and intrigue has actually pushed us up in the polls. There is a genuine feeling that the party is on the march and that both candidates have been very able in setting out what it truly means to be a Liberal Democrat.

My choice, from the start, has never been in doubt. Nick Clegg has not just lived up to my expectations as a candidate, he has surpassed them. He represents, in my mind, a truly bright future for our party and one in which I believe there is hope once again for demolishing the two party megalith.

Chris has fought an undeniably valiant campaign, but his negativity, epitomised in his choice to fight in the instinctive fight or flight response to Sopel’s production of his briefing against Clegg, was unedifying and divisive. I also believe that he has been rather disingenuous in trying to break off the anti-trident wing of the party (of which I am an ardent member) by painting a picture of himself as a disarmer when actually he wants to maintain a minimum deterrent with a new land based missile system.

So for me, and many of my counter parts, it has to be Nick and then let him lead us for a good long time to come as I would much rather devote my campaigning efforts to blooding the Tories, the Nats and Labour than arguing the toss with friends and colleagues in my own Party.

It took all of 18 seconds for the SNP to renege on the first of many manifesto commitments in this afternoon’s announcement on the Strategic Spending Review. Graduate debt will go unserviced, quell suprise, and that was just the start. It was stunning, the finance minister got to his feet and had the brass cohones to suggest that the SNP had ditched some of its manifesto commitments, not because of some inherent flaw in their spending calculations, but because they knew that in minority administration they would fail to obtain enough Parliamentary support. I have never heard, until now, of an administration jettisoning its manifesto commitments so early on and without a struggle in parliament except as part of some sort of coalition negotiation. Will the SNP be able to convince the electorate of anything at the next election if it is so prepared to cut and run at the first sign of trouble?

Nicol was excellent, delivering body blow after body blow to the SNP’s ‘sham politics and shifty accounting’. Once again Kenny McKaskill’s Newsnight words came back to haunt him when Nicol recited the transcript of Monday night’s interview in which Kenny admitted police number increases might drop to zero and that he didn’t know exactly how many police officers were on active duty at any one time as training courses and the like made them difficult to count. The wheels are off the wagon and the honeymoon is over.

And it is the Liberal Democrats alone, who offer that last bastion of resistance to these reforms. Nick Clegg has already stated his willingness to resist ID cards up to and including incarceration; whilst Vince Cable, yesterday, delivered a hammer blow to the logic behind extended detention when he pointed out that not a single case has collapsed to date due to the lack of time in which police and security forces currently have to gather evidence.

Even in Scotland, the SNP have nailed their colours to the mast by stating their commitment to expanding DNA retention legislation to ensure that it is retained for those who are arrested but not charged and for those under the age of 16. At present almost 150,000 children have records in the Government’s National DNA database. What kind of a future can someone construct for themselves knowing that misdemeanours in adolescence and childhood may have a bearing on their relative innocence in the eyes of the law for the rest of their life?

On detention without charge, DNA retention and ID cards, New Labour, is seeking to out gun the Tories on right wing agendas by designing the architecture of a very different kind of Britain. A Britain in which the principle of guilty until proven innocence will be turned on its head and every last one of us will end up having to submit our bio metric data, our identities and even our genetic coding for retention and analysis in the dark vaults of Government.

Let's make one thing clear from the start, I utterly oppose the renewal of Trident on the river Clyde and for that matter any where else in the UK, (unlike the SNP who just want it pushed south of the border). It is utterly repellent to every fibre of my moral outlook and, I believe, utterly irrelevant as a tool of 21^st century diplomacy except perhaps as a final tool in the architecture of global disarmament. It is from that position that I, and many of my Lib Dem colleagues approach the decision of who should lead the federal party and in that regard we remain convinced that in this issue as in many others it should be Nick Clegg.

In a race in which the Party is spoilt for choice between two very credible candidates and the media is seeking to find ideological difference between 2 men who come from a very similar perspective, there were always going to be over simplifications of position, but to suggest that Nick is pro trident is utterly misleading. Nick has adopted a position which displays an unequivocal commitment to disarmament not just in the UK but around the world. He wishes to use the means by which we divest ourselves of the trident menace for one purpose only, the reignition of global disarmament in the Non Proliferation Treaty talks of 2010. Chris Huhne however proposes the replacement of trident with a 'minimum nuclear deterrent' which would arguably violate our commitments to the NPT as much as the weapon system's renewal. On this issue, I am in no doubt that Nick offers the more robust commitment to disarmament and many of the Lib Dems with whom I marched in Edinburgh today agree wholeheartedly with that assessment.