Dear Friend, ...

[coldjwplay]

An excerpted hand-written letter, addressed personally to me, from my local Lib Dem candidate:

"Most people agree that the Labour government has been a grave disappointment. Local people have a clear choice - on May 7th either I will be our new Lib Dem MP or we will have a Labour MP. No other result is possible. At the last General Election, this

Comments

[colesey]

Hand-written? That's remarkable, not even my local LD-PPC went for that, the fresh-faced Nick Radford, who owns a local solar panel business.

I'm resigning myself to life under the Tories, which seems grim as hell. The 'silver lining' of future conservative unelectability (real word?) seems scant consolation given that it will be hard-earned through unthinkable slash-and-burn privatisation and general suffering.

I'd usually be more upbeat at getting shot of a centre-right government with an addiction to PFIs and illegal wars abroad. If you squint and tilt your head a bit, it's easy to see why the Lib Dems seem like a viable progressive option to so many people.

[coldjwplay]

I should clarify that it was a hand-written letter than had then been scanned and printed. But it was definitely a scan of a hand-written original, rather than a computer handwriting font - it was too erratic to be otherwise (there was even one bit where she'd started writing an 'e' and changed it to an 'a' halfway through, leaving a funny 'a' with a line through it!). Given the Lib Dem surge conventional wisdom has it that Islington South should be a safe seat for them, since Labour only took it by so few votes last time - but, intriguingly, close analysis of the voting intent figures in the opinion polls indicates that almost all of the Lib Dem increase has come from the Tories, with Labour still pulling in the same sort of figures that they were a few months ago when the Tories were hitting 40% and the Lib Dems were languishing in the teens, and this means that taking Labour seats where there are few Tories votes to pick up may be a bigger challenge for the Lib Dems than many people expect

[colesey]

Testify, quite frankly. I basically agree totally, without wanting to sound like a sop. My only difference is a personal one, I think. After all, I fit the ideal demographic criteria to be one of Cameron's chums, and I also live in a fairly secure Conservative constituency where the Lib Dems are the only threat. So it's sometimes less acute.

The media has been appalling, much of it getting more and more hawkishly right-wing while the rest simply stands for less and less. Unfortunately I feel that where the public are aware of policies it's meaningless at best.

Heavens above. £3 a week to be married. Who isn't psyched for Cameron's Britain?

[coldjwplay]

"The media ... simply stands for less and less."

This. Take the Indie and the Graun - what do they stand for today? The quality of the Guardian's reporting has plummeted over the last couple of years to the point where, for all that I still read it, it's almost just a lifestyle magazine; the Independent is a stablemate of the Evening Standard, which I think needs no further comment. The Times is a shadow cast by a puppet whose strings are in the firm grip of Murdoch. And The Mirror is just a tabloid. And yet, despite being so pale and sickly, they cast their deathly pall over everything, preventing the possibility of anything new emerging. Here is how bad the situation is: I've taken to buying Private Eye for the news, as well as for the gags, because nowhere else do I feel confident about getting the serious stories that speak truth to power, the most unattractively mundane but important stories. And the media connive in the transition to a single, Presidential talking head because it's easier to construct a narrative around the