Mr. Waffle was chatting to an English colleague about Brexit. “I can’t understand,” said Mr. Waffle, “why the political parties aren’t going after the 48% remain vote, it seems odd not to capitalise on it.” There was a long pause and then the English man said, “As treasurer of my local branch of the Lib Dems in North London, I share your bafflement.” Poor old Lib Dems.
Lib Dems exist so that everyone else can feel better about their lives, after all they are neither liberal or democratic, but to be even handed no-one in Labour has ever done a days work and the Conservatives have failed to to conserve a majority, most of their cabinet or their professed love of the eu.
Are you a teeny bit cynical? I suspect that, if I lived in the UK I would be destined to be a perpetually disappointed Lib Dem voter. When I was 10 or 11 (neither today nor yesterday), an English friend of my mother’s was staying with us and I asked her what political parties there were in England and she said, “Well, there are the Conservatives and Labour and, oh yes, the Liberal Democrats.” My father commented that it was a pretty accurate summary of the situation; I don’t see that much has changed in the intervening decades.
I am the perpetually disappointed Lib Dem voter, well not so much disappointed as resigned really. I understand why certain groups within the UK voted for Brexit but the thing as a whole made no sense when I was still living in the UK and makes even less sense from across the Atlantic.
Oh dear Rue, it is all a bit baffling, isn’t it? I fear a lost decade for the UK and Ireland dragged into the vortex. You know this business of when England (with apologies to other parts of UK but they just don’t feature in our consciousness in quite the same way) sneezes, Ireland catches a cold.
Well I’ve certainly got a cold at the moment.
Actual or metaphorical?