Politics

As you might remember, I joined the Liberal Democrat party during the recent election in response to two things:

1. The party's positive stance on asylum seekers
2. The fact that finally it seemed to have gained a decent leader, which it had lacked for a long time.

I went on a day's canvassing around the neighbourhood in support of the local party, and intended to do more but felt a bit put off... The thing that got me was that the local candidate wasn't campaigning very much for his seat, but seemed more of a paper candidate.  I only realised on the day that the results were released that the same person had been standing for both a council and a Commons seat.  Which explained why he only seemed interested in supporting a council seat campaign... He'd already been very honest with me about his intention not to campaign for the Commons seat but he'd left out the bit where he was one of the council seat candidates. I thought he was simply supporting the campaign of another council candidate, in a very charitable and tactical way.  So I came away thinking he was a duplicitous arse.

Since then the local party's made a few attempts at contacting me but I've so far kept my distance. I've wanted to see how well the Lib Dems perform as part of the coalition and see what they make of the rope they've arguably been given to hang themselves. And I am waiting to see if they screw up over asylum seekers because then I would have to withdraw my support.

So far, all of their lovely, progressive rhetoric in their manifesto on the topic has come to nothing. Nothing. Even the concession that they got the Conservatives to make in promising to release child detainees has come to nothing so far. Children are still being detained. They are still being damaged by the process.  Some children try to kill themselves, otherwise become emotionally fragile in these settings. I find it all deeply immoral and nauseating.  There are a lot of problems in the asylum determination system that make it impossible to say that those who are ultimately refused asylum are "bogus asylum seekers". That they don't have real protection needs. There are a lot of reasons why the system doesn't work well and I'm very happy to share these with anyone who's really interested.

In other words, there is no real need to continue to maintain hostile, cruel policies like child and family detention. The government could, I believe, just decide to end the practice like they promised to do several months ago.  They could and they should.  Without doing so, they are responsible for the continued state abuse of children.

On Friday, a representative of the local party called me for a chat. I'm not sure what he wanted. It wasn't a good time to talk. But it's fair to assume he'll want to know what I would like to get involved in locally.  The answer at the moment is nothing. I think I'll just not answer his next call.  I really like politics, but I feel as disenfranchised as ever.