Thursday's Letters,Yorks Post: Published Date: 05 May 2010.The floating voter will now be more confused than ever with the meteoric rise of the Lib Dems. All three main parties have had to make big adjustments in order to improve their appeal to the voters. Labour under Tony Blair, for example, was compelled to move to the right to make the party electable again. He and Gordon Brown adopted market- orientated economic policies that brought considerable success, favoured by the inheritance of a very sound financial foundation from the outgoing John Major government and an extremely benign low inflation global economic climate. But Brown eventually dissipated all this as his socialist instincts, combined with his hubristic over-confidence, went into overdrive to plunge the country into a ruinous debt situation. Likewise, David Cameron was lumbered with a Conservative Party in a deeply demoralised state resulting from the ERM debacle and sleaze fiasco. To cleanse the party's sullied reputation Cameron embarked on a green-leaning environmental campaign with the adoption of a more liberal social outlook.The Lib Dems under Nick Clegg also changed their election strategy to move to a more popular consensus. With his Indiana Jones performance on television, exploiting his undoubted skills in personable presentation, Clegg has managed to differentiate his party's challenge from Labour and the Tories with a refreshing new look appeal. But there are fundamental flaws in the Lib Dem position. Like his party, Clegg is an internationalist to the very entrails, completely indifferent to the intrinsic democratic deficit enshrined in the EU constitution and our continuing loss of sovereignty. Furthermore, the party is probably left of Labour in its core attitude to immigration, with its amnesty policy, I believe, a locomotive to demographic disaster. So far, attacks on these standpoints, by the Tories, have been weak and ineffectual but represent the difficulty of bringing these issues on to the election stage.Nevertheless, it reveals the politically correct nature of Clegg's party, that, with its opposition to nuclear power stations and its subservience to everything green would scar our countryside with countless wind farms while their toughness on crime discloses a genuine softness. Generally, however, on the doorstep, Lib Dems present a more moderate agenda, masking their core beliefs in an "all things to all men" opportunistic approach with their political colour ranging across the spectrum in the fashion of a chameleon slithering across some early Picasso. Fundamentally the colour is a shocking pink so watch the gloss when you vote; it may be seductive but the consequences for the country will be for real. From: Gordon Lawrence, Stumperlowe View, Sheffield.
(Right about the tories - but should have pointed out their detachment from traditional supporters; that their leftward lurch makes them largely indistinguishable from the other centre left parties; that the nation no longer has a centre right option (Step forward UKIP, please!) and that the move probably cost 'Dave' the election!
