I am shocked that the Lib Dems are trying to be on both sides of an issue.

Good work, Sunny.

I think it would be good to print off a few of those leaflets and hang around Westminster, see if I can get any Lib Dems to sign them.

Apart from the Yes/No referendum there is the euro question:

“Lower inflation and greater exchange rate stability can be better secured by working with Britain’s European partners. The best framework for this is a single European currency and it is in Britain’s interests to take part in this.”
With hindsight, those words sound terrible. Eurozone inflation is real (ask any consumer) yet lost in statistical translation. Exhange rate stability is bought thanks to the low deficit dogma and sometimes merciless austerity.
To be fair, I was also for the euro before and when it was introduced. But… “When the facts change, I change my mind.” Those words from Keynes are maybe on Nick Clegg’s mind.
A referendum is needed. And the sooner the better.

but the important thing the electorate want to know is did he leave home without his f**king onsie

“When the facts change, I change my mind.”

A clever turn of phrase to avoid admitting he had no sound basis for his polemics. Facts don’t actually change.

Simon Hughes, Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats, informed Friday’s Any Questions audience that his party had never been in favour of joining the euro at the given time rather than merely in principle, and that “We are a lot better off with our own currency, thank you very much.” But then, he abstained on Maastricht, while Sir Nick Harvey, as he now is, went so far as to vote against it.

I am not convinced that most Lib Dems are all that pro-EU at all. I have a strong suspicion that they are more like the characters in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. One by one, each of the members of an anarchist cell turns out to be an undercover policeman.

Vicious campaigners though they undeniably are, there really are Lib Dems, doubtless clear majorities of their members and voters, and probably even of their MPs and Peers, who believe profoundly in the election, appropriate or otherwise, of pretty much everything that exercises any sort of power.

In absolute openness and freedom of information, prudent or otherwise. In the highest possible degree, sensible or otherwise, of decentralisation and localism. In the heritage of uncompromising opposition to political extremism everywhere from Moscow to Pretoria abroad, and from the Communist Party to the Monday Club at home.

In (unlike me) the tradition of anti-protectionism against everyone from nineteenth-century agricultural Tories to 1970s industrial trade unionists. In the rural Radicalism that has always stood against the pouring of lucre into the pockets of the landlords. And in the interests of the arc of Lib Dem fishing seats from Cornwall via North Norfolk, Berwick, and North East Fife, to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

Mild to strong Eurosceptics, including a goodly number of the latter, probably keep quiet within the Lib Dems because they assume that they are a tiny minority. But I bet that they are not. In fact, I bet that they are not really a minority at all. And now, they have to make legislative and executive decisions.

Ed Davey is in the Cabinet, while the similarly non-Eurofanatical David Heath and Norman Lamb are on the cusp of it, with Alistair Carmichael as the party’s Chief and the Government’s Deputy Chief Whip. Heath, as Deputy Leader of the House, also has an important role in progressing business.

The Party President, Tim Farron, is very much of the same mind as Simon Hughes, on this as on most other things. Longstanding readers will be aware of my view that David Laws belongs in the same prison as anyone who had stolen that much in Housing Benefit. But the fact remains that he is not.

And Vince Cable has proposed an industrial strategy wholly incompatible with the Eurofederalist project, as in fact any industrial strategy is; it has only taken the SDP 30 years to catch up with the Labour right-wingers, for want of a better term, whom they left behind.

@ David,

you’re wrong, I fear. If you showed the average Lib Dem a book by Sir Ernest Benn or another old-school liberal they’d recoil in horror at such reactionary ideas as personal integrity, morality and opposition to government intervention.

They may believe in principle in democracy, which could lead them to oppose the Brussels project, but they delude themselves that the answer to this massive contradiction is to democratise the EU – which ain’t gonna happen.

@ Richard Carey

“A clever turn of phrase to avoid admitting he had no sound basis for his polemics. Facts don’t actually change.”

New facts arise, and the available information changes. It’s not just a clever turn of phrase, it’s a vital attitude if you don’t want to spend your entire life bullheadedly wrong about almost everything.