I don’t want to bother politicos with this stuff, so I’m using SpoilerVision™ again to keep this stuff out of their face. I’m a huge Lost fan and have wanted to write about it for ages but I always managed to restrain myself… until now.

I have a guess about what’s going to happen in the next episode, and I thought I’d be brave and post it on the off chance someone out there is equally obsessive who actually understands what I’m talking about. You never know.

Yes, I’m fully up to date on Lost, I have seen “Across the Sea” (Broadcast in the UK on Friday  14th May) and I won’t hold you responsible if your wild speculation turns out to have been right. Please show me the full post using the magic of SpoilerVision™.

Tony Blair was a smooth old manipulator of people’s brains. He took a crazy, unelectable party of beardy weirdies and made them electable by promising that they’d changed, that the days of epic splurge and leaving the economy on the brink of bankruptcy were over. They even got rid of the beards. Labour was dead: Long live New Labour.

And the outcome? After 13 years it turns out they did go on an epic spending splurge and they have left the country on the brink of bankruptcy. The grumpy, miserable old Tories were right, and the ageing peace loving hippies that told me that the last Labour Government was a paragon of peace, love and socialism were spectacularly wrong.

The change for Labour was superficial while the real substance hadn’t changed at all. Their failure, and the country’s failure, is this toxic inability to put the two things – epic splurge and brink of bankruptcy – together, to realise that the same action will produce the same reaction every single time.

So is it any wonder that ‘Heir to Blair’ Cameron struggled to persuade everyone that his party had really changed? Haven’t we been here before? Isn’t the lesson of New Labour that parties find it much easier to say they’ve changed than they do to actually change?

Cameron, I’m certain, understands that the decontamination strategy has failed – and that he’s now got 5 years to give people an experience of Tories in power that replaces the legends and myths surrounding the last Tory Government. Was it true that in 1997 things could only get better, that Britain really was at its lowest possible moment? I don’t think so.

That’s why this Coalition shouldn’t have come as a surprise, in hindsight. There’s an inevitability about it. He’s decontaminated the Tories just enough to get into Number 10, but not enough to override the fear and visceral hatred that exists for the Tories outside of the South of England.

But like Thatcher, Cameron has inherited a toxic financial situation with no change in the attitudes that once someone is working in the public sector that’s got to be a job for life “or else”.

So things are going to get ugly. In what will probably prove to be a portent of things to come, I recall that last year, in Leeds, Unite members agitated against a Tory/Liberal coalition running the council there, forcing the people to endure a bin strike that lasted months.

No matter how many times we go through this cycle of bringing the country to its knees, then leaving some other poor sod to clean up the mess, we still blame that poor sod. Whether the Coalition helps that remains to be seen. The hope, I assume, is that by being ‘nice’ they keep the support of the public.

But, for some reason, I’m left pondering a quote from Pulp Fiction. It’s from when Jules is talking about why he won’t eat pork (“don’t eat nothing that don’t have sense enough to disregard it’s own faeces”). He’s asked if he’d eat pork if a pig had a better personality:

“It’d have to be one charming mother fucking pig”

Quite.

It occurs to me that while there’s been this lovely – and very welcome – support for Civil Liberties from The Coalition, there’s something we absolutely don’t know about yet.

Let’s face it, the images coming from Cameron and Clegg together are beautiful. They’re funny, relaxed and surprisingly open and honest. They benefit from the virtue of being squeaky clean and shiny, brand new.

But there’s another area of policy where many Tories and Lib Dems agree with each other (and disagree with Internet Libertarians like me), and that’s on State Puritanism. You know the kind of thing - punitive sin taxs on tobacco and alcohol and mutterings about price fixing and ‘nudging’. Crucially, there’s Drug Prohibition too.

Look at how the Lib Dem’s amnesty policy was dropped – the rationale for the Amnesty was that it’s impossible to find them (by the very nature of illegal immigrants existing below the State’s radar) and the only people who really benefit are the criminal gangs who exploit them. The argument against, ‘moral hazard’ or encouraging people to sneak into Britain in the hope of another Amnesty 10 years from now is the same logic that keeps Drug Prohibition in place – legalisation will encourage use and development of recreational drugs, and this would be worse (apparently) than allowing the continued engorgement of the pockets of the black market drugs industry.

The Lib Dems have no real power, or motivation, or desire – to do anything about this. While a battle against Labour’s worst authoritarian instincts appears to have been won, we can’t really be so certain the battle against mainstream politics’ desire to nanny us has seen any progress at all.

Yet this Coalition is going to enjoy a honeymoon period no matter what. To grumble now appears churlish and wilfully difficult… but perhaps, as bloggers, that’s what we’re for.

Watch this space…

So, the good and the bad. I did promise, didn’t I? Well the section on Civil Liberties is better than any of us dared hope, thanks to the addition of a Freedom Bill/Great Repeal Bill which could cover anything not already cover. The list of things we know for a fact we’re getting includes:

ID Cards, Identity Register, Child Register and Next-Gen biometric passports? GONE

No Fingerprinting of Children without parental consent. SORTED

Extension of Freedom of Information Act. GOOD

A switch to Scottish model of DNA retention. AT LAST

Protection of right to trial by jury and right to non-violent protest. AWESOME

Reform of the libel laws to protect freedom of speech. SUPERB

And more. Seriously, there’s MORE. And this doesn’t include what might end up in the Great Repeal/Freedom Bill (HINT: Digital Economy Act three strikes, site blocking).

This is extremely promising and marks the first time our Government has done anything that I’ve gone, “Wow! Cool!” at for… well.. over ten years, I guess. I’m genuinely surprised and amazed and hope that this shows a willingness to be bold in this area.

The bad for me is the section on the ‘Green’ economy stuff, which represents quite an ambitious program of economic planning (irrespective of the perceived need to do so.) Will be interested to see if this gets the same focus and attention.

Back to good we have the end of child detention in immigration centres. On the bad side we appear to have merged the Lib Dem and the Tory policy on dealing with illegal immigrants. If you’ll recall, the Lib Dems intended to find some of the illegal immigrants and give them an amnesty to stay. The Tories wanted to deport them but can’t actually find them. The new policy is find them and deport them. Compromise, eh? Wonderful.

More on this as it sinks in and the actual behaviour of the Government becomes apparent… but put it this way: I’m a bit worried about the odds of getting pieces onto Liberal Central at the Guardian if the Coalition carries on like this. My career as a semi-professional writer may be killed off before it’s started.

Damn.

Leaked by Liberal Conspiracy. Looks pretty real. It’s big, so I’ve hidden it with SpoilerVision™

Yes please, show me the leaked agreement. I’m genuinely interested.

UPDATE: Turns out it was real after all. Now available on the Lib Dem website For Reals, Yo! THE AGREEMENT!