Tories can't stand 9% muscled Liberals

There are poor Tories who are all concerned that nice Mr Clegg is showing too much Lib Dem muscle since the loss of the referendum in May.

They are concerned that Lib Dems are making them steer a more liberal course on human rights; business regulation; immigration; green issues; pro-growth measures; the timing of spending cuts; Europe; NHS reforms; family policy and tuition fees.

Yeah that list is right, our dear blue painted leader was attacked for actually not doing as much on Tuition Fees that some Tories wanted to do if they had been a majority government. They want to cut faster, but have been held back by the liberal democrats. They want to take away your human rights and if you look at their stance towards Europe and Immigration you can guess how appeasing to UKIP and even slightly to the BNP and EDL this might be when they reinstate their alternative. They also wanted to make dramatic changes until Lib Dem conference reps, myself included, told our MPs otherwise and told them they couldn't go that far. Some called this last a U-Turn but conference reps did allow our party's MPs to go further than our manifesto and the coalition agreement, just not as far as the Tories wanted to take things. Of course the NHS muscle was flexed before the AV referendum was lost.

Seems like the Tories are all very good at kicking sand in others people's faces when they can, which actually is most of the time they have a Prime Minister. But as Alex Wilcock points out the electoral maths hasn't given them that muscle, yet they still want to kick sand on their junior coalition partners when they can, or secretly rejoice when Labour do it for them.

So yeah the Lib Dems are sick of both our government partners and the opposition kicking sand at us. We're beefing up, because people need to know just how liberal we are, just what changes we are bringing in to the Tories preferred trajectory. If Tories think this is only because we lost our part of voting reform, the AV referendum, while their reduction in seats went through on a common's vote, then maybe they should have just let us win that.

But of course it is not the case that the Lib Dems are only flexing muscle because of the AV referendum defeat. We flexed it in the general election and people voted for us. We need to keep flexing it to show people why they should continue to do so. If the Tories themselves are saying we are moving them leftwards, then surely we must be doing something for the people, so vote Lib Dem, you know it make sense.