What they stand for

 Last week’s Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth have provided their new leader Jo Swinson with another platform to trawl her vacuous views in front of the dissident Tories who they hope to win over in time for the next general election.

            In the old days the Liberals posed as a radical alternative to Labour. Their youth wing embraced the Palestinian cause and campaigned against the racist, apartheid South African regime while championing early calls for devolution in Scotland and Wales. But those days are long gone.

            Nowadays the Liberal-Democrats are just a refuge for third-rate Blairite MPs looking for a new platform to prolong their political careers and a handful of Tory Remainers who jumped before being dumped by Boris Johnson.  Chuka Umunna, an ambitious Labour turn-coat who joined them in February now claims that Jeremy Corbyn is “acting as an apologist for a hard-right  Russian government that thinks it can poison people on British soil, lauding authoritarian regimes in Venezuela and Iran, failing to support the proscription of Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation”. Others repeat Zionist smears about “anti-semitism” in the Labour Party while saying little or nothing about their dismal record in support of austerity as a junior partner in David Cameron’s coalition government.

The growth of the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties has largely made the Liberal-Democrat take on devolution irrelevant while their self-serving demand for proportional representation has little appeal to the millions trying to live on bread-line wages or the miserable hand-outs of the benefits regime.

In Bournemouth Ms Swinson dumped their old demand for a “People’s Vote” and replaced it with a blatant call to revoke the withdrawal procedure and simply ignore the 2016 referendum.

These are the people that talk about a “fair, free and open society” while brushing aside the 17.4 million people who voted to Leave the European Union in 2016.These are the people who will be calling on Labour supporters to “tactically vote” in their favour at the next election. There’s nothing “liberal” about the Liberal-Democrats.

Bi Bi Netanyahu?

 It seems that Benjamin Netanyahu’s days at the helm of the State of Israel have finally come to an end following a general election that saw the Likud leader’s party pipped at the post by General Benny Gantz’s new Blue and White bloc. While the Blue and Whites are only one seat ahead this should give Gantz first crack at forming a coalition with the minor parties that will control almost half the seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

            Though the views of General Gantz barely differs from those of Netanyahu, his Blue and White alliance defines itself as a “liberal” centre party and the retired general at least pays lip-service to resuming negotiations with the Palestinian leadership.

            The leaders of the communist-led ‘Joint List’, which draws much of its support from the Arab Palestinian minority in Israel, were pleased at their own showing in the polls with a projected win of 13 seats in the new parliament.

“We’re back to being the third largest party in the Knesset,” said Joint List head, Ayman Odeh, who expressed the hope that “the era of Netanyahu is over and he will now either have to go home or to prison.” Odeh agreed with observers that, if the final results indeed match the exit polls, Arab voters will have “prevented Netanyahu from forming a government”.

Let’s hope so…