Mother always said, “If you’ve got nothing nice to say, shut it.”

Bosses have repeatedly said, “If you’ve got nothing constructive to contribute, perhaps you should focus your organisational efforts on a step-change to the coffee machine moving forward, releasing the locked synergies of potential for everyone else”

And, as the local Lib Dems say, “Blogging? What sort of southern woofter rubbish is that? Writing? Oh, la de dar! Hark at you! Now, I don’t care about your blogganing, or your fancy schmansy writing or whatever it is you do to waste your time: Here’s 100 Focus leaflets – make yourself useful or get t’fuck.”

In other words, please forgive me, but I’m just going to leave the crazies to it and concentrate on important things like exactly how long should you leave bread under a grill to make the perfect toast, or, seriously, why do I keep drinking tea even though I’m mildly allergic to milk?

I mean, what with two women falling foul of the Guild Of Professional Childminders (after all, what IS the point of putting extreme barriers to entry for a job that virtually everyone’s capable of doing if you don’t crush people who just ignore your poxy, stupid, ridiculous rules, and treat you with the respect you deserve?), and with the Government trying to get people sectioned based on the opinion of just one doctor, you’d really think people had better things to talk about, wouldn’t you?

I know, I know. We’re all hoping to catch a glimpse of Gordon quietly sobbing to himself, or a photo of Mandelson rubbing his hands together, Dastardly style and no doubt David Milliband’s hotel is being camped by photographers offering free bananas… but really, look, it’s a desperately sad time for them and I think it’s fair and proper we give them a bit of space. They’re on the Party Political equivalent of the Mother of all Whiteys, blowing chunks into the toilet, complaining about the room spinning and stubbornly refusing to be moved out of the bathroom to somewhere more appropriate for someone in their unfortunate state.

They deserve our pity, yes, but they have been smoking the ‘bong of populism’ for 10 years straight. Was bound to catch up with them eventually.

I’m taking off my cynical, iconoclastic libertarian hat and replacing it with my rather dusty and unloved, “get the Lib Dems elected” hat for a minute.

Lib Dems have one killer policy: Set the threshold for Income Tax and National Insurance contributions at £10,000 a year (or roughly minimum wage). It’s so good Labour activists want their party to steal it. I wouldn’t be surprised if similar pressure is being put on David Cameron to do the same, although he won’t (tax cuts are for ‘Same Old Tories’ not modern, Compassionate With Your Money Conservatives)

Now, I’ll be honest, I love this policy for a number of reasons. First, it’s a tax cut, which I like. I’m against anything that punishes people for working or being successful, because working and being successful are actually good things that provide jobs and wealth and in doing that improves our health, increases our free time for leisure and personal pursuits and generally improves our quality of life.

It’s also a tax cut that does something about the problems faced by people moving from benefits into work, where, thanks to tax if you’ve got 2 kids you’re actually better off on benefits than a minimum wage job. That is, unless you’re willing to risk the tax credits system. Its painfully obvious that if you don’t take tax off people in the first place, you don’t need a monolithic, incompetent bureaucracy to then give it back again, wasting money for the sheer hell of it. Redistributing wealth from one group of poor people (those without kids) to another group of poor people is a whole new level of messed up politics, and one that people seem to blindly support.

I also love this policy for the message it sends: Tax Hurts.

Admitting that tax hurts, that tax is a bad thing is a major step forward. We saw a bit of it with the campaign against Council Tax. This was a big one, for me – I realised that increases in Council Tax are a consumptive plague on those on minimum wage, on pensioners and pretty much everyone. There’s nothing a council can do with extra money that would compensate for the damage done to someone on a fixed income having to find another £100 a year.

Income tax is the same. We’re making people at the very bottom of the employment ladder pay £700 a year in income tax. £700!!! That’s not small beans. That’s the difference between being able to get a car through the MOT so staying mobile, or being able to add more fruit to your kids diet, or any of the other things that people might want to do with an extra £58 a month.

One of my little soundbites I used at the Conference was this:

The amount that Labour has increased spending by since 1997 is more than it currently takes in Income Tax. In other words, without the increase in spending, we could be Income Tax Free by this point.

For Lib Dems, this £10k threshold is our best policy. It says that public money should not be wasted, that tax should not be a punishing, economy crippling burden. Good.

The security that this tax money buys for public sector workers makes private sector workers increasingly insecure, increasingly less likely to find work in a rigid, “I’ve got my safe job for life and fat pension, so fuck you” culture. The more Lib Dems can be authentically liberal on the tax issue, the more we stand out as being against those things that keep people poor.

We need more of this. Well, a lot lot more actually… but as far as seeds go, this is a welcome one.

In what might be a good idea (and if it is I’ll keep doing it), I’m going to start rounding up what’s making the Wikio Top 100 blogs the most excited today. I can do this by finding out which blogs and stories in the news are attracting the most interest from political bloggers, then linking to them.

This is actually a bad day to start this, the Blogosphere’s pretty quiet at the moment with the biggest story generating only 4 links.

#4 Cable and Clegg Quit Politics Home Panel

He make think I’m out to get him, but James Graham’s ‘exclusive’ that Clegg and Cable are pulling out of the PoliticsHome panel now that it’s full of Ashcroft money earns him a link from Guido, and some socialists. Not from me though, obviously, because I’m out to get him.

#3 Britblog Round-up

The Britblog round-up is out on ‘Nourishing Obscurity’, always recommended.

#2 Polly Toynbee

Polly Toynbee’s resignation letter for Brown gets the attention of the Heresiarch who writes an absolutely brilliant piece, and  both LfaT and and Tory Bear make her Quote of the Day.

UPDATE: The thing about this is that the picture changes rapidly, so it all depends on what’s going on when I take the snapshot. As it happens, there’s a new big story in town although half the links are going to Guido, the other half to Iain.

#1 Is Brown on Pills?

Guido and Iain Dale both cover the story of Andrew Marr asking Brown, “Are you taking pills” and the evasive shuffling that happened afterwards.

So reader beware – these are anecdotes, and it may be that the friends who had these experiences are the exception. I wasn’t going to write about it on my blog, but then Gordon decides to launch Labour’s wake with announcements he’s going to crush the bankers and make them lend responsibly and increase their capital reserve requirements. The hypocrisy of it made me angry enough to post.

About a month ago I was talking to a friend, who banks with Nat West (owned by RBS, thus Nationalised) about their experience the last time they popped into their local branch. My friend is unemployed – no job, no income – and what did they offer him? That’s right! They offered him a credit card and a loan. He told them no. He said, you know, I’m unemployed and the last thing I need is a credit card.

But, they said, it’s got a 6 month payment holiday. You won’t have to start paying it back for 6 months!

Yes, he said. But I’m still unemployed.

Maybe that’s just Nat West, so let’s cross over the High Street to Lloyds – another Nationalised bank – where another friend attempts to take out a 3k business loan. The advisor tells them that they’re actually “entitled” to 15k. I only need 3k, they say. You can have 15k though, the advisor insists, shocked that anyone would turn down “free money”. Are you sure you don’t want more, he asks? They’re then told that ‘to buy a business’ isn’t a valid excuse for this particular type of loan, so if anyone asks they should say it’s to buy a sofa. They say, “it’s to buy a sofa” and the advisor winks and says, “that’s fine then.”

These are the Nationalised banks, doing business in the very worst possible way. And, you know what? We’ve invited this. The banks can’t fail. They know they can’t fail. Offering credit to absolutely anyone, without considering whether or not they have the means to pay it back, is perfectly fine when you know the taxpayer’s underwriting bad debts, and positively essential when you have Government stooges on the board of directors demanding you increase the amount of lending you’re doing in order to ‘save the economy’.

The economy’s not been saved. We’ve just dumped even more credit into people’s hands (by printing money to buy crap from the banks), postponing the inevitable until after the General Election.

Please, people, don’t reward Gordon for this. I’m begging you.

When Sky News asked me the question…  you know the one? The only question journalists ever ask Lib Dems. No? Okay, here’s a reminder:

Will the Lib Dems support Labour or the Conservatives in the event of a hung parliament?

Yes, that question. I admit I fluffed it:

Well.. that’s the question isn’t it? It’s hard to get anyone to ask us any other question. I’m on record as saying I couldn’t support a Liberal Democrat Party that propped up this Labour Government, and Nick’s on record as ruling that out.

Funnily enough, when preparing for the programme, it never occured to me that they’d ask that question, even though, as I’ve said before, it’s the only question journalists ever ask any Lib Dem. I thought it had been answered. No supporting Labour, end of story. Will we support the Tories… who knows?

As I was thinking about this today, it struck me that we’ve come out of this conference period with all the same problems we had before we started:

1 – People still don’t understand what the party stands for.

2 – People still think our only relevance to British Politics is what happens in the event of a hung parliament (and that’s arguably true unless something spectacular happens)

3 – People see us as a party with a shopping list of contradictory policies.

We like to call ourselves a progressive party, as the champions of change… but change starts at home. We can demonstrate our capacity to change by reforming our own party. Our failure to do this, our failure to address the screamingly obvious problems that everyone keeps telling us over and over we need to resolve, makes a mockery of our claims to be a reforming Government.

What we’re really saying is that we’re blind to criticism and indifferent to complaint and unable to see our own faults. Not exactly characteristics people look for in a future Government.

We have very clear and well defined obstacles and difficulties, yet we’ve spent a fortune getting together and not solved a single one of them.