Love and Liberty

How would you sum up what the Liberal Democrats stand for in, at most, 140 characters? That’s Darrell’s Twitter-inspired question today. Though I admit I read some people’s Tweets, regular readers will realise that extreme brevity isn’t really me – but, always up for a challenge, here are my first two bashes:

• “Freedom, fairness, future: freedom from poverty, ignorance and conformity; fairness and financial sense; green action to protect the future.”

• “Lib Dem Principles: freedom, fairness, looking out for the future. Best way to do it? Give you the power in your own life and community.”

What would you say? And, Darrell, what’s yours?

I’m sure I can come up with better, but those are just off the top of my head. I’m happier with 140 words, of course. Or 140 paragraphs. But that’s for another day.

Darrell got his idea originally from Conservative Home; I have to say, I like one of their entries, “Dislike of stuff does not equal a law against that stuff. Humans more important than machine algorithms. And love; always.” Send that man a Liberal Democrat membership form, because that bears no relation to any Conservative Party in history.

A poster called resident leftie, whom I subtly suspect of not being a member of the Conservative Party, suggests, “If you believe that the Britain is broken, that the past is better than the future and that poverty is fault of the poor, vote Conservative.” Less flattering, but more accurate.

Spot-on for Mr Cameron’s policy agenda, davidtbreaker sums up the next election campaign from the largest Opposition party: “Conservatives, we aren’t the Labour Party”.


Updates: Despite being known for ten-hour Budget speeches, Mr Gladstone very nearly made it to Tweet length with one of his most famous couplets, and one that’s easy to edit down to fit Twitter:

“The principle of Liberalism is trust in the people, qualified by prudence. The principle of Conservatism is mistrust of the people, qualified by fear.”

I’d say that the principle of the Labour Party is mistrust of the people, qualified by the tabloids, but of course the Labour Party doesn’t actually have any principles left.


Last year, Lib Dem Voice asked a similar question – “Can you sum up the purpose of the Lib Dems in a sentence? (Or ‘The Quest for the Lib Dem Holy Grail’)” – which is almost at the Twitter limit on its own, and I came up with several suggestions, all of them improbably under 140 characters. Search the thread for what I said there, but my suggestions fell into two categories. Most of them were after something that gets Lib Dems nodding, but puts some people off – because if you can’t disagree with it, it doesn’t mean anything important or different – and the last one, which wasn’t very good, was trying to think of ‘the sort of thing you might say in conversation, rather than in a speech or a slogan’:

• “Liberal Democrats: the party that says sex is all right.”

• “Liberal Democrats. For people and things the Daily Mail doesn’t like.”

• “For government by the Daily Mail, vote for the other two. To tell the Daily Mail to fuck off, vote Lib Dem.”

• “We won’t boss you about. We want to give you a leg up and pull some barriers down so you can live your own life the way you choose.”

And the Labour Party’s core message – which you’ll be seeing an awful lot over the next year – is blatantly:

“We’re shit, and we know we are, but, ooohh! The Tories! Scary!”

And another new one I’ve just thought of, this time a bit less positive:

• “Can’t afford Labour? We won’t boss you about. We won’t knacker the environment. & we won’t waste your money on nukes, invasions or ID cards.”

That’s not a million miles from the Nineteenth Century Liberal Party’s “Peace, Retrenchment and Reform,” is it? Which reminds me that, particularly these days, I should probably add something populist about cleaning up politics, given we’ve been talking reform for a hundred and fifty years…

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