On the launch of Liberty Central:

“Civil liberties are all very well, but if it’s the Labour Party shitting on them there’s no way I’m getting in their way.”

That just sums it up doesn’t it?

Here’s a good one.

I’ve got an immediate aversion to anything which smells of coalition…

Interesting. What does that even mean? A bit of Labour Party history may be a help here. Because the Labour Party began as a coalition of various left-wing political parties, the Fabian Society, trade unions and other working class organisations. And there’s this from Wikipedia:

The [Labour Representation Committee] won 29 seats in the 1906 election, helped by the secret 1903 pact between Ramsay Macdonald and Liberal Chief Whip Herbert Gladstone which aimed at avoiding Labour/Liberal contests in the interest of removing the Conservatives from office. In their first meeting after the election, the group’s Members of Parliament decided to take the name “The Labour Party”… [T]he party did not have an individual membership until 1918 and operated as a conglomerate of affiliated bodies until that date.

I suppose he’ll be ripping up his Labour membership card this evening then, especially given that his party today is in coalition with the Co-operative Party. Besides which, surely all political parties are coalitions of one form or another, given that they are all alliances of people who, given that they are individuals (although you can never quite be sure of this with Labour), must have subtly differing political views?

Let’s see if Bob Piper can reply with something that isn’t just abusive name-calling, which is his usual debating technique.

Okay, so here’s the promised post on Liberty Central. MatGB’s post last week seemed to strike a particular chord with a lot of people, me included (despite my initial nit to pick). It has a lot of potential, because it taps into the strange phenomenon whereby most bloggers — whether they’re from the left or right or whatever — seem to be liberal.

Mat posted several update posts. One thing led to another, blah-de-blah, and now hundreds of bloggers are all of a sudden rising up against Labour in a brand new “anyone-but-Labour” coalition.

It got too big too quickly, and I fear that this Liberty Central idea will falter. At the last election, don’t forget, there were at least three or four anyone-but-Labour internet campaigns. They often gave conflicting advice, and none of them got very much serious attention, apart from perhaps Backing Blair. As I recall, Backing Blair advised me to vote SNP. As if!

And that’s the thing. It’s all very well to oppose Labour, as I and the ‘coalition’ do. But does that mean we should vote for anyone but Labour? No.

A few bloggers, like Garry, Chris Applegate and myself, pointed out that voting Conservative is hardly any worse than voting Labour. Does that mean I’m going to vote Conservative at the next election though? No. I am more likely to vote Conservative than Labour, but being slightly preferable to Labour is not much for the Conservatives to shout about.

And just because Labour are so bad, does that justify voting for anybody but Labour? Of course not — Labour aren’t the only party who are kicking liberty in the nuts. All of the parties are to an extent, but some are much worse than others, and it is obvious that some are worse than Labour.

The bottom line here is that if Liberty Central is going to tell me to vote for the second-placed party in my constituency to try and boot out Labour, I am going to ignore the advice. While the SNP are pretty sound on civil liberties issues, civil liberties are not the only issues. SNP power would involve the small matter of decapitating the country, and I’m not very keen on the idea.

Liberty Central will work if it has a clear focus on issues. Apart from being anti-Labour (because there is no use supporting even supposedly “decent, honest” Labour MPs any more; they could have crossed the floor if they really cared about liberty), we needn’t think along party political lines. It ought to be a focussed campaign to persuade all political parties and advise voters as to how they might vote if they want to send a message about civil liberties.

But if the site is just going to be barking orders from the top-down along the lines of “vote SNP because they’re second in your constituency,” or “vote Conservative because they’re the largest opposition party,” as many such websites have done before, Liberty Central is going to interest few.

Please also read these posts from Jawbox and Chris Applegate.

Update: I forgot to mention, though, I that I would strongly encourage anybody with opinions to set up their own blog. As Tim Ireland points out, it is dead easy. If you don’t want to do that, get commenting!