Sadly, we must postpone the celebrations until reaching the end of the article. Edward Pearce writes a piece thoroughly keen on us as we are at the moment, saying, amongst other things:
Best of all their attractions is the regular charge of being amateur. They are guilty and should glory in the offence. Limited funds and natural disinclination [emphasis mine, see below] have limited the consultancies, the business models, the saturation polling; everything about contemporary politics, false, plastic and metallic. The fact that so many seats have been won, whether at byelections or the long application, by energetic individuals, makes for this essential health.Having said all this, he has to go and spoil things by saying:Norman Baker is a thoroughgoing bloody nuisance, wonderfully so ... New Labour and eternal Conservatism don't care for that sort of thing. Tony Blair would have spoken directly to his party chair, loyalists would have been activated, rules suspended and conformity exacted.
I'm not sure I want them in government. The business consultants and the image masseurs would move in.
...Their party exists as an arguing, intellectually curious and libertarian island in a sea of management. Given respectable numbers, the intelligence and freedom matter far more than office.
Erm... OK, but since you don't seem to like anything much about the leadership of the other two parties, and have already admitted in the previous quote that we are as a party not naturally inclined to go the way of the "business consultants and the image masseurs", would it really have killed you to say that a Lib Dem government might not be such a terrible thing?
Nevertheless, I for one found it refreshing to find a piece on CiF being nice about us for a change. My paranoid side wonders what might be waiting in the wings to balance it...
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