This year I will be mainly voting Liberal Democrat

This year I plan to vote Lib Dem. I expect that they will gain a few seats at the expense of the Conservative and Labour parties. In my own constituancy of Harringey, Lib Dem, former MEP Lynne Featherstone is battling Barbara Roche, a very experienced Labour MP. The local Liberal party seem more up-beat than I can ever remember, and I think they might have a chance of taking Harringey from Labour.

I am quite happy with Barbara as an MP. She answered all of my letters promptly, often going to extrordinary lengths to pry a response from reluctant departments. Mrs Roche has an excellent liberal voting record, and seems like the sort of person who could be trusted to represent Harringey. So why have I decided to vote Liberal this election?

• A positive campaign; I find the arguments between the Labour and Conservative parties so annoying, particularly the way that each side knowingly mis-represents the opinions of the other. For the little the Lib-Dems have said, they have mainly discussed their own policies rather than attack straw-man arguments.
• Honesty about taxes; Of course taxes will have to go up if we want every child to have the opportunity of a free university education. The Conservative and Labour parties have meerly said that some forms of taxation will not go up, but been unwilling to say plainly that they too will want to put up taxes.
• ID Cards; The lib-dems have promised to abandon what I consider to be the single greatest threat to liberty - not terrorists, but the pervasive surveilance culture. Labours obsession with ID Cards seems to be like an unhealthy seige mentality. The conservative party seem to support ID Cards, because they are afraid to appear to be ’soft on terrorism’, when niether side has convincingly demonstrated that ID cards will address any of their purported goals.
• Anti War; The lib-dems consistently opposed war in Iraq, even before it was widely known that the government’s ‘WMD’ allegations were entirely bogus. While it might be too late to extract British troops from Iraq, they were correct to point out that the UK should not have got involved with this trumped-up conflict.
• Racism; Unlike the conservative party, the Lib-Dems have acknowledged that the nation benefits from immigrants. The conservative policy of enforcing fixed limits on immigration is ludicrous given our nation’s industrial skills shortage.

Now as long as the dems dont ruin things with some awful, trite campaign posters or stupid political broadcasts, then they can count on my vote…