Why Yellow Is Oh So Not My Colour

Some of you must be wondering just why I hate the LibDems so much (second only to the Labour left). After all, you may ask, shouldn’t we concentrate on attacking the Tories? It’s an understandable position, but a completely fallacious one because it fails to grasp just how vile and subversive the LibDems can be in daily realpolitik and how you can do deals with the Tories as long as you don’t shout about them too loudly.

The point, of course, is that one can strike tactical deals with Tories and sometimes even longer-term strategic deals. I wouldn’t be the first to propose Lab/Con pacts – although Ramsay MacDonald’s 1931 National Government did not survive for long and more recent experiments in Scotland and in Rochdale have not been entirely successful.

The bloody LibDems, on the other hand, greet you with one hand and stab you in the back with the other one. Take Castle Point, for example, where I stood at the last General Election. I join forces with LibDem James Sandbach to attack the racist Tory MP Bob Spink and what happens? The Tory vote increases, the LibDem vote increases and the Labour vote is slashed. I won’t fall for that trick again.

As I argued with Paul Anderson in 2004, he can urge people to vote tactically for the LibDems in seats where Labour starts in third place, but there is no equivalent effort by LibDems to get their supporters to vote Labour where we are the main challenge to the Tories. I wrote: "Anderson's insistence that the differences between Labour and the LibDems are nugatory can only have been written by someone who has not encountered the LibDems' vile behaviour in local government and the constant anti-Labour sniping of Lib Dem MPs. This treacherous advice should be treated with the contempt it deserves".

I made my views clear in The Times in 2001 when I wrote a paper in Lambeth praised by Tony Blair as "more New Labour than New Labour". In it I argued how New Labour could win back council seats lost because of the loony left in the 1980s. My suggested tactics included the brilliant ploy of offering pacts with the LibDems so you could subsequently to attack them when they inevitably refused the offer. More importantly, I proposed working with Tories, as I said at the time: "because they tend to hate the Liberal Democrats as much as you do".

As for Hackney, well we all know the LibDems’ record here. They tried to screw the place up with a hung Council after the "New Labour" breakaway and they’ve never contributed anything positive. On the other hand, my strategy for co-operation with the Tories is well-proven by the good relationships we’ve enjoyed with Joe and Eric over the years. So yes, green may not be my favourite colour but yellow is oh so not me!