Someone asked Vince Cable if the LibDems were ‘too nice’. Well stop laughing and let’s look at their record.

Vince Cable


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Leader of the Liberal Democrats Vince Cable was fielding questions at the party’s annual conference on Sunday 16 September when an audience member asked him:

Are we being too nice?

Cable’s answer was essentially ‘yes’:

I’d say it probably is a temperamental failure that we have as a party.

But take one look at the Lib Dems’ record, both in and out of government, and Cable’s answer seems a bit disingenuous. And so does the question.

Follow the leader

Let’s start with Cable’s personal voting history:

Read on...

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Well, they’re not very nice policies. But surely he’s better on other topics:

Alright, but if you look at his overall voting record, he must come across as a good guy:

OK, it’s not looking great. But surely his desire to stop the worst effects of a hard Brexit makes him a sweetie:

Oh dear.

Not all nasty, right?

Alright, so let’s forget about Cable for a second. Surely some Lib Dems really are ‘too nice’.

Let’s turn to their former leader, Tim Farron:

Well, inferring that gay sex is a sin isn’t nice at all. But personal morals aside, surely he really cared about stopping a hard Brexit:

So where was he?

But come on, he’s a Lib Dem. He must have seen the error of his ways:

Well, luckily he knows how to apologise for his faults:

Errr…

Rancid coalition

OK, OK. So some of the Lib Dem leaders have said and done some bad things.

But the former party leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg was alright, wasn’t he?

I mean, he got a knighthood:

But he managed to put the breaks on Tory austerity, didn’t he? Oh:

Well, he didn’t have a choice, right? He was in government and had to work with what he had.

Surely now he realises that austerity wasn’t necessary:

But come on, it’s not like anyone in the Lib Dems is listening to him anymore:

Cruel to be kind

There’s no way around it. Objectively, it’s a stretch for the Liberal Democrats to say they’re nice.

They’ve broken promises on tuition fees and backed crippling austerity. They’ve run a homophobic election campaign. And now they’re reportedly trying to sabotage one of the only hopes of removing a Tory government.

So to be brutally honest, the only “temperamental failure” the Lib Dems really have is that they’re yellow Tories.

And as failures go, that’s a pretty bad one.

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Featured image via Guardian News – Youtube and Liberal Democrats – Wikimedia Commons

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