I tried twice to try to put on electronic paper my disquiet at recent events in politics, and ended up with nothing much worth recording. It all mashes together my own personal position, the somewhat ambiguous Lib Dem results and some quite clear difficulties with discerning a clear position in Liberalism that I can relate to. If it exists, I am fortunate enough that it can be found at CF; the stuff I read in Lib Dem news and the Liberator swerves between quite hard-headed recognition of the inevitable trade-offs necessary to policy making and a wishy-washy pressure group anti-capitalist politics that adds up to nothing much.
The great luxury of being in one of the extreme wings of political thought is the avoidance of any need to strike difficult balances. At the LSE you could find it in the dominant left-wing anti-markets rhetoric that is somehow easier to spout if you've never worked at all; and anything that seemed to oppose this could be acceptable. The right-wing side, on the other hand, can be found all over the online broadsheet commentariat (Heffer, Littlejohn, anyone from the Telegraph) and the raving commenters below. I suspect that any discomfort I currently feel is simply symptomatic of being a moderate, and is moreover common across all parties; I imagine how the left of the Tory party winces at the anti-immigration line is rather similar to how the Right of the Lib dems wince when some blowhard starts fulminating against consumerism.
This is worthless rambling; what was deleted was far more so. Ramble over.
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