Labour or the LibDems - who's worst?

Last week in a new series of occasional debates we asked: 'Ousting Maggie or Black Wednesday - Which event hurt the Tories most?' Today, as the LibDems gang up against Ming in Brighton, we ask the question: 'Labour or the LibDems - Who's worst?'

The LibDems are worst?: Just look at their beliefs... They're the most pro-European and the most anti-American.  Their plans to tax the wealth creators of Britain with 'hammering' taxation of capital and high incomes would not even be contemplated by 'New Labour'.  They're against nuclear power and if they ever got real power in Westminster they'd introduce proportional representation so that they'd hold the balance of power for the foreseeable future.  Any local Tory or Labour activists agree that the LibDems are the dirtiest campaigners.

Labour are worst?: It's a nonsense to say that the LibDems are worse than Labour.  The LibDems have hardly had any MPs until recently.  It's Labour that has been in power - handing power to the unions, raising taxes, bureaucratising the police, creating new layers of government, sending our armed forces to war without proper equipment, undermining our civil liberties... We may not like the LibDems but local Tories are much, much more likely to work with them in local councils than with Labour.   It's also true that the LibDems are the top second preference for Tory voters.  Labour are behind UKIP and the BNP (!) in the league table of our second preferences.

Discuss...

Comments

[Chad Noble]

It's probably to the LibDems credit that you are actually able to produce a sizeable list of policies that they support (even if you oppose them).

Compare with the confusion of what the Cameroons support. They espouse letting people decide then propose more and more state intervention. It is a mass of contradictions. It is confusing.

Then look at the majority of your MEP's and the authors of your Quality of Life report, how do they differ in terms of europhilia and anti-nuclear madness?

[Umbrella man]

The LibDems are worst because they want to give up our democratic powers.

(1) They'd give even more of our powers to Europe.

(2) By introducing PR and Continental European forms of perpetual coalition government they'd end our power to change the government.

[Andrew Woodman]

Lib Dems I think. Dangerous wishy washy nutters. I've never seen such loony people as those delegates they have had on stage this week.

[sbjme19]

it will be interesting to see the effect in the polls but listening to the media yesterday on the Lib conference and Northern Rock,I thought the Libdem spokespeople sounded pretty nervous and unconvincing - and the same goes for Darling.

[James Maskell]

The Lib Dems are worse. They are far more Socialist than Labour. Just listen to some of the rhetoric coming from this years Conference. That's stuff Labour was coming out with decades ago!

The Lib Dems hate libertarianism, which is ideologically bizarre given they should both agree on key issues. The Lib Dems are Liberal in name only.

[Tony Makara]

Labour are the more dangerous because their core ideology is statism. They have an instinctive drive to to centralize, to empower the state, to diminish the individual. The Liberals are driven more by an uncosted naivety. The undisciplined politics of permanent opposition.

[Matt K]

I think it's fair to say that the Labour Party HAVE DONE the most damage to the country, but that the Liberal Democrats WOULD DO even more if they were ever elected. Thankfully that's incredibly unlikely ever to happen.

[Rob D]

The Lib Dems are worst. They are the dirtiest campaigners and take the credit for anything a local Tory does. They are like some sort of cancer that takes hold of an area.

Labour is bad-the Editor's list of their misdeeds is spot on, but I am quite sure the Libbers would do far worse. Our army might be over-worked and under-equipped, but at least it HAS equipment and is not submerged totally in some Euro-Army.

I am really scared at the thought of these lefty loons getting into a coalition.

[Rob D]

I think Matt K puts it perfectly.

[Kevin Davis]

The Lib Dems are worst.

I ran a minority administartion with the Lib Dems seocnd largest party and Labour having the balance.

At least you could bargian with Labour and know they had some core beliefs. The trouble is the Lib Dems do not believe in anything and that is dangerous!

[ACT]

We're worst. Why? Because at least the other two parties can be happy about the ever leftwards ratchet effect in public life. We're supposed to be against it, we're supposed to be about standing up for things, undoing things they've done - but what, honestly, does anyone think Cameron will undo or turn back? Not a thing, and he's *proud* of that inadequacy.

[Annabel Herriott]

LibDems. They are the take advantage party. No one who has ever opened a newspaper to see a photo op of a couple of Libdem councillors standing next to some benefit/disaster/whatever - that they have had no personal input whatever to, can doubt that. They "welcome" "support" aggree with" "are against" "taking forward" put your own in here, but as Macavity isnt there, the Libdems always are!

[MikeA]

Can't stand the LibDems. At least most local labour parties (with some exceptions) have some values and integrity. Most local LibDem parties would sell granny for a few votes.
My heart swells with joy at election time whenever a LibDem MP is booted out.

[Cllr Adam Tugwell]

Neither are Conservative and both have serious faults which are bad for this Country.

Not sure that I would like to contemplate one being better than the other on the flip side of the question of preference Ed...

[Fox Muldaur]

Labour by a country mile. Nasty bunch of third rate tin pot incompetent social fascists. You cannot believe a word they say and you can guarantee only one thing from them. Whatever they do, they do it badly.

They've wrecked our constitution, given us a vaporware economy, sold us into European slavery (or nearly so),drowned our health, education and police services in targets and paperwork, abused our armed forces, broken our society and encouraged anarchy on our streets whilst turning the South East into a Concrete Jungle and our schools into Blackboard Jungles. In doing so, constantly wringing every penny they can out of us by whatever stealth tactics they can.

In ten short years they have led us to the verge of what will be the new democratic libertarian dark ages if they remain. Soon enough they will be tagging (electronically) everyone of us and demanding more taxes to pay for it!

Every person in this country will benefit from being rid of Oberfuerher Brown and his foul pointless useless muppets!

As for the Libdems - if they ever form a government in my lifetime I will be highly surprised but deeply concerned. Can you imagine it?

Currently, they remind me of that push-me pull-you animal in the original film of 'Doctor Dolittle'(quite cute seemingly but with a nasty bite). On one side you have Clegg and co trying to defend the centre ground from the Conservative liberation forces led by Messrs Davis, Cameron and Hague whilst battling Labour's ever increasing oppression of the masses.

On the other they seem to be leapfrogging Labour to vye with the BNP as to who can screw the rich the most for taxes (and in some cases the not so rich - watch out for the sucker punch of LVT)!

As for the rest of their policies - ever seen a loony tunes cartoon?

Schizophrenic, possibly not, but I can see an identity crisis looming for the Libdems soon. Who do they woo ? - disenchanted Labour or Conservative voters?

Do they lurch to the left or to the right (no wonder Ming is trying to say that left and right are as meaningless as he is - get it? 'Ming The Meaningless'?)

No wonder David Owen is going back to his roots! At least he knows what to expect from Brown's Nu Labour Nasty Party.

As I said to start Labour by a country mile!

[David Lindsay]

Whoever wrote this title is WORSE than either of them. That's public school and Oxbridge, is it? What a waste of money!

[Shaun Bennett]

What on earth is the point of David Lindsay's statement above? If you don't like the contentof the site, just don't read it!

But to answer the question, the answer is easily the Lib Dem's as being the worse the two parties. It would seem from the comments above that the majority of Tory activists seem to agree with that.

You can at least respect Labour for their policies. Lib Dem representatives are just nasty and highly distasteful people, Lib Dem supporters are a mixture of the mad, bad and dangerous as well as a bunch of nice but thoroughly wet and misguided people who don't live in the real world, whilst Lib Dem voters don't know what they are voting for and seem to be opting for the 'nice, harmless, center' party.

And this is the party we are all now trying to cosy up to??? I would love to see the two parties come together in a hung parliament to exclude the Lib Dems!

[eugene]

Labour are worse than LibDems. LibDems are worse than Labour. Hell is worse than both of them and both are worse than hell. They are all worse than each other

[David Lindsay]

You still don't get it, then, Shaun?

Anyway, it is a matter of record (unless anyone official comes on here and denies it) that Menzies Campbell had wanted to support the Iraq War, but Charles Kennedy stopped him. Paddy Ashdown supported it, and the Lib Dems had of course pioneered support for neocon wars under him, enthusiastically cheering on the dismemberment of Yugoslavia.

Together with the neoliberal economics that leads to it and which provides its only rationale, neconservative geopolitics is the coming force among the Lib Dems, along with Euroscepticism (jolly good, though incompatible with neoliberal economics or neoconservative geopolitics).

And, I confidently predict, along with opposition to the former Holy Grail of the Single Transferable Vote for multimember constituencies (again, jolly good), as the penny drops about just how ill-served the Lib Dem heartlands of the West Country, the North and South of Scotland, and Mid-Wales would be by such a system.

It is also possible that Highland, Island, Border and Mid-Welsh disaffection with the Central Scottish Parliament and the South Welsh Assembly, as well as the Alliance Party's disaffection with the DUP-Sinn Fein carve-up at Stormont, might turn the Lib Dems into (jolly good) hardline Unionists.

All in all, the Lib Dems as we have known them are finished.

[The Culture Warrior]

I agree with someone above, who said Labour have done more damage, but the Liberals would do worse if in power. The only reason Labour are worse is because they have power.

For us as a party, and for the country, they are the greatest threat. They are a threat to us as a party because they have established themselves as the seemingly moderate left opposition to us in the south, and the only opposition to Labour in the north. In fact, they are undoubtedly to the left of Labour (at least, the Labour leadership). Their existence also allows the use of tactical voting. All of this (the fact they hold us back in the south; they hold us even further back in the north; and they allow triangulation and tactical campaigning) makes them our greatest danger as a party.

For us as a country, they are also a danger. They'd introduce PR which would weaken irreperably the institution of government; they'd seek to further entrench cultural relativism; they'd gladly cavort in the process of European federalisation; they'd pull as away from the United States and they'd restrict our economic strength through overregulation and weirdly insane policies.

Our task should be no less than their destruction. We should welcome the right of their party in, entice the centre, and push the left into the arms of Labour. We should also make it very clear that 'Vote Yellow, Get Red' is the reality. We should make it clear that the major area of disagreement between the Lib Dems and Labour is Iraq - which is nonideological, and that fundamentally they are both tax-happy, aspiration-bashing, politically-correct, anti-culturalist woolly nutters.

[Richard Calhoun]

Labour are the worst of the two simply because the Libdems are not even in the race.
They seek short term popularity at the expense of serious politics.
They will be punished by the electorate by winning less than 20 seats at the next election

[Paul Seery]

In terms of which party is worse than the other then it is a no contest. It would have to be the Liberal Democrats. The basis for my argument is that I was a member of their organisation for a couple of years and I have never come accross such a pompous, arrogant, full them selves and opportuntists who just come up with policy just for the shake of it.

[Joe James Broughton]

The Lib Dems are by far the worst.
They have an agenda which is to muck up our political and constitutional system, by getting in the way of proper debate, and holding the country to ransom in a hung Parliament. Moreover, they want to give powers away.

They are poor financial managers - look at their record in local government.

I usually find Labour people well intended even although disagree with them, but the Lib Dems are almost always extremely unpleasant - at local level they are virtually unemployable people - that's why they are free in the day (usually living off council allowances or researcher jobs for their MPs).