AFTER four-and-a-half years of merciless attacks on the poor by this disgraceful Government, it takes something pretty galling for someone like me to find myself agreeing with the Tories on anything.
But if there is one thing that seemingly unites Labour and the Conservatives, poles apart though we are in so many ways, it is in the shoulder-shrugging despair at the utter hypocrisy of the Liberal Democrats.
The Lib Dems truly are the most shameless of all when it comes to outrageous acts of mercenary vote chasing, posturing for the popular vote while displaying an abject inability to deliver anything.
There atrocious behaviour in relation to the bedroom tax is probably their lowest, most scandalous act of hypocrisy yet.
It was their ministers and their MPs who backed the Tories all the way when they introduced the bedroom tax, despite anyone with even the merest hint of conscience feeling thoroughly perturbed at such a socially unacceptable policy.
The so-called “spare room subsidy” was designed to pick on people who couldn’t afford it, penalising single parents, disabled people and even parents of soldiers, hitting them in the pocket for having bedrooms not in permanent use.
Did the Lib Dems tell the Tories they weren’t comfortable with such a cut-throat policy?
Did they feel strongly enough to withdraw support or use their position as kingmaker to force a change of heart?
Did they side with Labour and vote it down to protect the vulnerable people who Mr Cameron and Co were so keen to punish.
Of course they didn’t. They didn’t just sit on their hands either – they knowingly voted it through used their controlling influence to transform crackpot right-wing Tory policy into UK law.
Utterly deplorable.
Labour has opposed the bedroom tax from the outset, and Ed Miliband made it perfectly clear some time ago that a Labour Government will reverse this atrocious act against the poor.
And now, suddenly, the Lib Dems agree.
Hark! Is there a General Election in the offing?
Perhaps the most stomach-churning thing of all was reading the comments on Twitter of professional Lib Dem charlatan Vince Cable boasting how he had cancelled his meetings in order back a bill by his party to “fix the Tories’ unfair bedroom tax”.
Mr Cable is unique among Lib Dems.
He has somehow built a reputation, or at least he had prior to his party’s appalling term of office in Government, as something of a one-off – a bright spark of quality among a despairing pit of mediocrity within his party.
Yet the truth is he’s no better than the rest of them. Whether it’s Lib Dems in Westminster or Lib Dems here in Derby, they’re all the same.
In opposition, they promise the earth. They fasten on to every popular policy and tell people what they want to hear (not unlike UKIP), safe in the belief that they will never have to deliver on it.
But then when they stumble into power, the buffoonery begins. They bumble from one place to the next, breaking promises here and digging holes for themselves there.
They are the artisans of hypocrisy and the definition of dishonesty, whether it means promising not to increase student tuition fees then voting for the opposite, or this latest debacle over the bedroom tax.
We saw it in Derby during two forgettable years between 2008 and 2010, and we’ve endured it nationally for the last five sorrowful years.
But their poll ratings suggest that they've finally rumbled once and for all.
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