Question time
Posted on
February 08, 2011 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
Viewers! The beloved Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is coming to Bath this [EDIT: Friday] for "an open question and answer session" with the electorate.
As a Lib Dem voter for the past 20 years, I feel I ought to pop along and hear his views on the topics of the day. What should I ask him?
Ask him how, in respect to Lib Dem's vote share pre and post election, its massive fall, how this indicates how singularly he failed his voters more than any other party leader at the election – what does he think this indicates best?
Alternatively, bring up that Britain's liberal prime minister, David Lloyd George, did a deal with the Conservatives which left him as the sole Liberal in a Conservative house, and how while it benefited him by keeping him in power, it utterly destroyed the Liberal party. Ask if he feels that he has repeated history in any way.
Ask him if he’s worried by the fact that by getting into bed with the Tories now means that the Lib Dems will never see themselves in government again (at least according to opinion polls).
Also why he’s acted like such a twat and reneged on his promises. Not that he’ll be honest about that of course.
Ask him precisely which of the Lib dem policies pre election have been implemented. No wait that would just give him some kind of soap box to go on about how he has actually implemented a lot of lib dem polices actually.
Just ask him why he's a slimy two faced cunt instead then.
Don't ask him anything. Just say, 'You, sir, are a cunt.' Then twiddle your moustache, click your heels, and leave the room.
Ask him how long it took to draft and type up their pre-election manifesto, then ask him if he wished they had spent that time down the pub or playing poker or watching football instead for all it ended up being worth.
Ask him to fix your calendar. He's coming on Friday, you berk.
And I suppose it’s MY fault that the stupid website says “February 8” right under “Nick Clegg to meet Bath’s residents” and I’m too stupid to read it properly, bumface? Oh well, more time to think of good questions.
Ask him how he can sleep at night now that he’s shown us all how much of an two-bob cunt he is.
It's gone beyond the point where asking questions is going to do anything at all. We don't live in a democracy any more.
Ask him if he can remember in all the excitement how many times you fired.
"Nick – when you bend, do you spread ?"
Tell him to keep his and his greedy Tory mates' grubby little hands off of our forests. Git.
As him if he knows how you can 'be' Goro.
How can we know that a true Egyptian democracy will elect a leadership favorable to United States interests, and, in the interest of spreading democracy for the greater good, should we fix their election if things get hairy?
Ask him how democracy is supposed to work when people can't believe what they are told prior to an election, and what the populous can do about it until another general election?
Ask Clegg: did he deliberately turned the LibDems into a bootleg copy of the German FDP, or is it just a coincidence? (FDP = socially-liberal yet Thatcherite party, props up a conservative government, supplies a deeply unpopular deputy premier, and is flatlining in opinion polls.)
Ask him if he knows what happened to the Australian equivalent of his party, the Democrats, after they propped up a tory government in 1998 (hint: they polled 10.8% then and 0.6% last year).
Alternatively, ask him if he's going to join the Tory party when it becomes clear he'll never hold his Sheffield seat.
Ask him what exactly the conservatives would have to do to make him break out of the coalition. Also, ask him why the lib dems have seen fit to do support moves neither parties promised to do: drastically altering the NHS
Ask him why Gamesmaster gave out 'COOPER TEAM' as a god-mode cheat for Syndicate, when it was 'MARKS TEAM' that worked. Or was it the other way around?
Ask him his opinion of the controversial purple alien levels in Cannon Fodder II.
Tell him "Cavey agrees with Nick" and "Welcome to the fold. Cigar old boy?" (On a more serious note, you might also like to mention that much of the debacle concerning university education funding could so easily be avoided if we reversed the dumbing down of GCSEs and particularly A-Levels as seen under 13 years of Labour, such that only those academically deserving of high grades actually got them and furthermore, a limitation on the number of university places available should be applied to ensure that only those who are actually academically suited to go to university would actually go. Unlike, say, Labour's ludicrously PC and patently misguided desire to send half of all young people to our overloaded universities when many of them would do far better to get jobs with vocational training, meaning in turn that only the thick kids with rich parents underwriting their student debt are likely to go. Etc. Sigh).
As an aside, Bath seems quite a fitting venue I'd say – surely the veritable capital of Middle Class, Middle England; an aspirational Mecca for most. Heck, if they don't love him here, they certainly won't be too chuffed about him back in Sheffield…
Oh, and to those that doubt our slide in educational standards, that now place us in twenty eighth place in Mathematics as compared to eighth place in 2000, this BBC piece should make interesting reading:
link to bbc.co.uk
"… The survey by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) is designed to compare standards between different education systems around the world.
In 2000, when 32 countries took part in the survey, the UK came 7th in reading skills – but the figures for 2009 show that out of 65 countries and regions, the UK has fallen to 25th place.
Countries such as Poland, Estonia, Canada, Norway and Singapore are above the UK in reading ability, in a table headed by South Korea and Finland. …"
Good job all that money thrown at our education system has paid handsomely, eh? Oh no. Also, when aspiring to send half of our kids to Uni, it kind of helps to get the absolute bare basics right first, like other countries seem to do with a fraction of the resources, i.e. they can read properly and are numerate…
In a word then, useless, as I've been saying here and elsewhere for the last 5 or more years.
New Labour were great and we supported them all the way!
Yes, I know. :p
(Seriously though, bear in mind that our current secondary school education system was 'masterminded' by the likes of Dame Shirley Williams, now stalwart of the LIberal Democrats? So, it's fair to say that any retrospective criticism of the self evident abject failure of said system in comparison to that which preceded it and also contemporary current systems of other countries as well, should not simply be levelled at New Labour! Whilst they perpetuated it and made things far worse with their dumbing down of exams etc. because, presumably, political vanity precluded facing up to the facts of the situation, they did not actually conceive it).
Perhaps that's something else worthy of mention to good ol' Nick…