Liberal Democrats - not even a dim light...

It is becoming a theme of the day, I find myself agreeing with another unlikely person – this time Nick Clegg. Regular readers will know that I don’t much rate Calamity Clegg at all, but I have to agree with his sentiments here:

In a closing conference speech, he said the "one dim light" in the current crisis was that it "opens the door to a genuinely new way of doing things".

Of course, as there was with Hain, there is a point of departure between myself and Clegg. Because Clegg’s one dim light is the Liberal Demcrats. You’d expect Clegg to say this, of course. He’s in charge of that fucking party. But really, the Liberal Democrats aren’t a solution to any problem. Unless, of course, your problem is that you really need to find a bunch of wooly thinking, statist Europhiles.

The Liberal Democrats are really Social Democrats. Hell, they are the dregs of the old Social Democratic Party. And as a result, they offer nothing new. In fact, what they do have to offer is pretty much what the Labour party offers. It is just that the Labour Party is far more effective at getting into power and implementing the godawful mishmash of half-baked policies that makes up Social Democracy than the Liberal Democrats are.

And the euphemistically titled Social Democracy is nothing new – in fact, we’ve been getting it recently both barrels as Brown lurches from policy initiative to policy initiative. There is nothing new that the Liberal Democrats have to offer – in fact it could best be summed up as the same old, same old. Consider new ideas in light of the recession; the ideologically redundant Liberal Democrats do not have any new ideas.

There is an alternative – a radical alternative to the status quo. But it won’t come from the main parties, who intrinsically believe in the state led consensus. It is the Libertarian agenda and ideology that offers a genuinely new way of doing things. That is the real alternative; it is there for you if you want to take it.