Clashing Yellow

Red-Purple-Blue. Blue-Purple-Red. Either would work. Local people know what the purple is about. No, it is not UKIP. Well, not directly, anyway. Yellow would clash, wouldn't it?

Yet, with blue and yellow as the colours of the Teaching Assistants, it will be in there, indicating my intention to have Lib Dems on my constituency staff alongside Labourites, Independents and Conservatives.

And if possible to have one or two on my Westminster staff as well, at the national and international centre of developing and articulating the alternative to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy.

But on the latter front, the signs are not promising that they would have even have any desire to be there. Vince Cable has today declared his opposition to any nationalisation of Carillion. Well, of course he has. The roots of Thatcherism, like the roots of Thatcher, were Liberal, not Tory.

I voted for the sole and successful Lib Dem candidate for Lanchester Parish Council last year, while also voting for the sole and successful Conservative candidate, for all of the successful Independent candidates, for successful and unsuccessful Labour candidates, and for both of the unsuccessful candidates with No Description.

At the General Election, I voted for Owen Temple, the Teaching Assistants' Champion, whose victory would have delivered theirs as surely as would have done Labour's loss of overall control of Durham County Council.

But that Whig tradition is not mine.