Thoughts on politics and life from a liberal perspective

Thursday 27 November 2014

This is why people hate you Gloria

Labour MP Gloria De Piero has a piece on LabourList today where she highlights Lib Dem "hypocrisy" on pay transparency.

She talks about how Jo Swinson has been going around saying that compulsory pay transparency is now Lib Dem policy and how it is necessary to help close the gender pay gap.

But the twist in the tale is that Labour are organising a vote on this issue on 16th December and the Lib Dems are not going to vote for it. Hence all the talk of hypocrisy.

I'm not a Lib Dem any more and I don't blog as often as I used to mainly because I feel so often like I am just repeating myself but I'll have another go.

Gloria, the reason why the Lib Dems cannot vote with you is. Wait for it. Because....

They. Are. In. Coalition.

That means they cannot just go around voting on things that are not agreed government policy. If they were to do that the government would collapse.

Gloria knows this of course. She's just playing political games in the hope of "embarrassing" the Lib Dems.

A couple of years ago Gloria went round the country speaking to people on her "Why do you hate me?" tour, trying to find out why people dislike politicians so much. Well here is a prime example. An MP pretending she does not understand how collective government responsibility works in order to score political points from one of her rivals. I'd say that's a good reason why people hate MPs Gloria.

There is a way to redeem yourself though. If there is another hung parliament after the next election, and if Labour find themselves in coalition with a smaller party, you will need to argue vociferously for that smaller party to be able to vote any way they wish on any issue. And Labour will just have to put up with the consequences of this.

After all, anything else would mean that party being "hypocritical" wouldn't it Gloria?

And we can't have that now can we?