Lying Libertarians

Sunny Hundal faintly misses the point.

He is of course quite right that UKIP's thoroughly anti-capitalist stand on immigration is incompatible with its position on everything else. But both on that and on the definition of marriage, both it and "the libertarian poster boy, Douglas Carswell" do not really mean a word of it.

The number of real opponents of same-sex "marriage" on the Conservative benches is no greater than the number of Labour and Lib Dem opponents combined, each of those parties having far fewer MPs overall. There may not even be as many as that. This privatisation of marriage is the ultimate in Thatcherism, in neoliberalism, in anarcho-capitalism, in everything for which most Conservative backbenchers, and not a few frontbenchers, now stand. As does UKIP.

Every Labour or Lib Dem MP who voted against this really is opposed to it. Every Labour or Lib Dem MP who abstained, including by being absent in the full knowledge that this vote was going to be held, really does have grave misgivings about it. As have many more who made thoroughly unhappy speeches and who will certainly oppose the extremely unlikely Third Reading of this Bill if it remains in its present, and only possible, form.

But many, probably most, of the Conservative votes against were for show, and designed to prevent Constituency Associations from moving to replace the MPs in question with Tories. I am not fooled. Nor ought they to be. And nor, dear reader, ought you to be. The same goes for UKIP.