The Horsell's Mouth Politics, pedantry and personal interests

“The two old parties” – that is how Nick Clegg described both the Conservatives and Labour in his manifesto and the media has been quick to latch onto this descriptive. It’s the usual bare-faced Liberal trick – to claim the exact opposite of what you really stand for or really are on the basis that no-one would ever believe that a political party would hope to get away with such outrageous variances.

So let’s just remind ourselves for a second where the Liberal Democrats come from - a merger 22 years ago of the SDP, itself formed from the “old” Labour party and the Liberal Party, which dated back to the dawn of British parliamentary democracy. The Conservatives and Labour may both be single old parties – but if anyone can claim to be made up of “two old parties”, it is the Liberal Democrats!