I’ve had many conversations about the lack of a liberal grassroots movement, the necessary prerequiste for a future liberal Government. Here’s where I admit I was wrong. 

I was wrong… well, not wrong to say we need it. I was wrong to think it didn’t exist already.

There is a liberal grassroots movement, and joyfully it’s the, “Free Trade, Free Minds” sort of liberalism. It’s occuring independently and organically, without any help from the Lib Dems, which fills me with gushing buckets of hope: As long as the concept of liberty exists in people’s minds, so liberalism will just ‘happen’ – and it is.

Can the Lib Dems capitalise on it? Will they even be willing to acknowledge it? I somehow doubt it.

For me the spontaneous eruption of new political parties like the Social Liberalist Party and LPUK point not to a small minority but a critical mass of opinion desperately needing an outlet. Look at the distribution of political opinion online and you can see libertarians dominating – and this is because the hunger to debate and demand a sort of liberalism that was thought to have died out forever. I think it’s safe to say that this creed is not going to die and the days of political parties telling the public what “socialism” is or what “liberalism” is are over – people can work these things out for themselves and our party is institutionally unable to adapt or react quickly enough. 

But just as our democracy as a whole tends to focus on the increasingly small number of people who still vote, causing a fatal feedback loop of pandering to a less and less diverse body of public opinion, so the Lib Dems highly democratic structure has the same flaw – policy is dictated by the membership, which creates another fatal feedback loop of our policies only ever appealing to people within the Lib Dem Party and alienating everyone else. 

To get a policy through conference, it needs to be approved by social democratic members and the liberal members. So we can cut tax, but only for the poor. We can be economically liberal, but not if it involves deregulation, lowing the tax burden or removing barriers to entry. We support Liberty, unless it’s the liberty to do ‘bad things’ like smoking, drinking or driving. We can support Free Speech, but not the kind of Free Speech we don’t approve of.

I read this today:

Those who have come to us from the LibDems tell of horrific infighting, with the SDP controlled leadership squeezing the Liberal element out of the party, marginalising them at branch level and suggesting that there is no room in the modern LibDem party for them. The LibDems have lost their Liberal roots and become the Social Democratic party, set to continue where Brown leaves off. More of the same.

Now I can argue that we have MPs within our party that fall into the “Free Trade, Free Minds” school of liberalism, and clearly we’ve got a few bloggers on this side, too. But internally the party does feel dominated by lefties – I’ve been on the end of “why don’t you f**k off to the Tories then?” rants myself – which vote for policies that reinforce the perception of us as a Social Democratic rival to Labour, which causes people like me to leave, which means they win the votes easier.. and the result is a smaller and smaller political party representing a narrower and narrow range of opinion.

I’m not advocating entryism. Entryism sucks… but I am advocating leadership and empowering the leadership of the party to make decisions and set policy, so that the party can embrace a genuine grassroots liberal movement that, at the moment, would rather gouge their own eyes out than vote for what is supposed to be liberalism’s main representatives in Britain. 

This is our “Clause 4″, this is what needs to happen if the Lib Dems are ever going to be anything more than “Lib Dems: The Party for Lib Dems.

In addition to my day job, I’ve taken on some additional contract work with a very nasty deadline which is leaving no time for blogging. 

Blogging or sleeping? Hmm… decisions, decisions.

From the file marked, “You couldn’t make it up,” the Guardian has this story about two Teacher’s Unions – The NUT and the other one, whatever they’re called, threatening to strike if the other union gets their way.

The NUTters… actually, you know what, let’s not call them nutters. Talk about leaving myself open for merciless abuse. 

You see – and this is a complete diversion by they way –  my Mother got into geneology and began tracing back the family tree on her side of the family and was mortified to discover we were decended from one Alice Nutter – not the one from Chumbawamba, but the one that got burnt as a witch. A point my step-dad never let her forget. “Whole family of nutters and witches” he remarked. Thanks, Dad.

But anyway, the NUT is threatening to strike if SATs aren’t abolished, and the other one is threatening to strike if they are abolished.

Good luck sorting that one out.

“In The Loop” Director Armando Iannucci (@aIannucci), Genre… Horror.

The clips and trailers doing the rounds on the Internet promise hilarious swearing, and hilarious swearing is delivered, but at the end of the film Armando punches you ‘in the cock’ and demands the question: Why was I laughing at this?

It’s not like ‘Be Kind Rewind’ – where the trailers promised a dumb Jack Black fuelled comedy, and then delivered a quite sad, thought provoking and poignant social commentary on the nature of ‘the hood’. In the Loop, in contrast, delivers on the comedy – but you’re left wondering whether, by laughing, the joke is actually on you. 

The biggest laughs, without doubt, come from the un-PC, socially inappropriate nature of the swearing by angry Scottish spin doctors – telling an American Tourist to, “Suck mah sweaty balls, ye fat fuck!” pulled the biggest laugh of the night.

See, I laughed too. And was very much enjoying myself until the film’s climax, where Malcolm Tucker – the barely disguised Alistair Campbell – proves himself to be very much a complete monster. Doesn’t have tentacles or fangs, but he’s still a monster. 

That evil spirit from the Ring? Doesn’t kill as many people as Malcolm Tucker, played by the truly chilling Peter Capaldi. In fact, most fictional monsters don’t even come close. So I class this film as Horror – quite literally the scariest film (on reflection) that you’ll see this year. 

My favourite non-sweary joke of the film comes from James Gandolfini playing General Miller, after showing there’s 12 thousand troops available for a new war.

“12 thousand? That’s how many’s going to die. And… you need to have some troops still alive at the end… otherwise it looks like you lost.”

Highly recommend, especially for political geeks – but perhaps the subject matter is a little bit too real for the comedy to entirely conceal the very, very disturbing message at the heart of this film.

As a resident of Halifax, I know only too well how well respected Alice Mahon was as MP. A habitual rebel, she somehow created the impression that you were somehow voting against the Government by voting for her.

From a campaigning point of view then, Alice was a nightmare. Nothing Labour did could be pinned on her because she’d almost certainly rebelled. Her replacement, Linda Riorden, is little more than back-bench vote fodder.

So because Alice has resigned her membership of Labour, that’s going to send shockwaves through the local Labour (and Co-operative) party – and because it’s due to the Downing St culture, it might make national news too.

She might have been a Labour MP, and she might be far too collectivist for my tastes, but she’s always been trouble – I respect that. And even as an ex-MP she’s worth 100 Linda Riordens. Here’s to you, Alice.

Update: Guido and Iain are talking about this.