I originally wrote this in mid-August, and although politics has come at us fast over the following couple of months, I feel like this is still relevant.
It’s funny how politics can burn you. It’s not that long ago that I remember thinking of the Liberal Democrats as a potential force for progress and positive change in the UK. Call me naive, because when it came to electoral and party politics, I certainly was.
Before 2010 the Lib Dems had long pushed for voting reform and abolition of First Past the Post. I welcomed it. Such reform, I believed, would undermine what I saw as a contemptible convergence between Blairite Labour and Cameronian Toryism, each squabbling over the swing voter demographic of whatever middle England was imagined to be, proposing similar policies and twitching the curtain of the Overton window as they scapegoated the nebulous figure of ‘the immigrant’. Anything but more Blairism, I thought, but never the Tories.
