Tim Farron's Conference Speech

For anyone who hasn't seen it here is Tim Farron's excellent speech from last weekend's Lib Dem Spring Conference:

 In my opinion he is doing an excellent job, he is the voice we need at the moment.  I am supporting the coalition, however everything isn't perfect and Tim is doing a good job of speaking out when there's something that we shouldn't  be agreeing with.  My particular favourite quote was:

 "If you listen to some, then apparently because I am in coalition with the conservatives, or ‘in bed with the Tories’ then I must be a Tory. Are they mad? Look, for flips sake, I share a bed with my wife, it doesn't make me a woman."

But on a more serious point the highlighting of:

"Labour’s enduring legacy, far worse even than Iraq, is their decision in 1997 to deregulate the banks, to out-Thatcher Mrs Thatcher. To idolise the markets, to make greed a virtue, to stoke up a fake boom. Then they left office and changed their tune. Labour spent 13 years in power behaving like Tories and now 10 months in opposition behaving like trots. And they deserve to be derided and ridiculed for both."

This is really true.  Obviously the vast majority were praising this move whilst it was stoking up the boom years (remembering that the prudent Mr Brown had made the bust impossible) yet Vince was warning against a crash for a long time.  Labour weren't the sole creators of our recession, but they helped make it this extreme.  It was the decisions they made that allowed our banks to hold us to ransom, is was Gordon's "prudent" budgets that racked up spending beyond what we were taking in (in already inflated tax revenues) that made the current deficit and the debt mountain this extreme.  Yet now they have no answer, I can understand this, there's no need for them to have politically, but in reality I think they are just clueless to what they'd actually do so instead they just criticize the coalition's every move in order to paint them as the bad guy, make no mistake if Labour were in power now things would also be getting cut, but they would be getting cut for longer (or they'd give up half way through leaving future generations with an even bigger problem to face) at the same time they wouldn't have done some of the things we've implemented in 10 months in office (that they had 13 years to do).  


I for one hope Tim Farron gets as much air time as possible over the coming weeks as it is people like him who make the Liberal Democrats a much easier sell.