Fuddled Fiddles

Nick Clegg is just facing reality. Neither Labour nor the Tories would touch the Lib Dems as a coalition partner. Whereas, in the (quite likely) event of a hung Parliament, those two socially, culturally and politically indentical and interdependent rump organisations would go into coalition with each other without a second thought. And, just as in the extremely improbable event of an outright Tory victory, nobody would be able to tell the slightest difference. So the Lib Dems, as a party, might as well disband now. Their existence depends on the fantasy that they would matter in a hung Parliament. They would not.

But why does it have to be a Lib Dem who wants to abolish non-domicile tax status, or at least come as close as anyone dare to saying so? There are many annoying things about the Lib Dems, but one of the very worst is that so many of them are individually interesting and industrious politicians, hammers of parliamentary corruption, or secretive and sloppy family courts, or the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act. One of the best of those is Vince Cable.

Yet, taken as whole, the Lib Dems are at once poisonous and preposterous. They are now off about “patient choice” like the other two, when most people want no such thing. We just want a hospital (or school, or whatever) to be within reasonably easy reach of our homes, and to be good. Why can’t any politician understand that? What is so hard about it?

And while the Lib Dems are right about not taxing million pound homes at an extra-high rate after all (we should tax income and consumption, not the necessarily theoretical value of an asset that people cannot sell, if they own it in the first place), they have only come round to this view because they have few activists, fewer target voters, and possibly no MPs whom that tax would not have hit. Yet how many people like that are there in the country at large?

Oh, and whatever happened to Nick Harvey (who voted against Maastricht) or Simon Hughes (who abstained over Maastricht)? Neither voted for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Are they saving themselves for Third Reading in order to oppose this illiberal and undemocratic Treaty exactly because of its content, without any need for a referendum? We shall see.