What's with that Lib Dems button?

I've put a little Lib Dems button at the top of the site. Why? I'd like to put a little Labour one next to it, because my advice to voters would normally be: tactically vote for either Labour or the Liberals, whichever one has the best chance of beating a Tory. That still applies to this election, but I can't bring myself to add any buttons with Tony Blair's smug grin on it to the site.

It has become trendy for Labour supporters to moan about their party becoming as right-wing as the Tories. I don't think it has. Though Labour has privatised public services (or quasi privatised them), supported the war and tried to introduce various authoritarian anti-human rights laws, the Tories would have done the same, and did indeed support them (The Liberals did not). Further, the "Labour" that supported these policies was in fact Tony Blair, and fortunately the backbenchers and a few who managed to infiltrate the cabinet have managed to restrain him on many issues.

The major issue is that everything I've moaned about here has been new laws and actions, not a funding issue. People don't notice issues when they're going well, only when they're not. Remember Alistair Darling? He was the transport secretary a few years ago. Who replaced him? Erm.. oh, he still is the transport secretary. It was only when I saw Alistair Darling's name next to "transport secretary" the other day that I realised the decline of the railways had reversed. And for all Michael Howard's hot air about money being wasted on the NHS, and his team trying desperately to find somebody whose had as many operations cancelled as would have been common ten years ago, the decline of the NHS has reversed. While I'd love people to go to the polls and vote anybody but Labour just to send a message to Blair that we all hate what he's done to the Labour party, due to our suboptimal parliamentary system to do so would be to give parliament to the Tories, a party who would pass the same authoritarian laws and start the same wars, but would also let the country fall apart as well. And the look on Blair's face is not worth the NHS. (This is where somebody starts an argument over the exchange rate between the NHS and the lives of people in the next country Blair tries to liberate, but again, if it wasn't Blair it would be Howard.)

Another issue is that even if Blair is, as accused, right-wing, he still has to live in symbiosis with the rest of the party. However much the party needs a strong leader, they'd surely rather be in opposition than have the same policies as the Tories. Which is why Blair does let them have their way on many of the things that aren't his own pet project, the minimum wage being the oft cited example.

In summary: Labour bad; Tories much much worse; vote Lib Dem.

PS: I do actually agree with most of the Liberals' current policies, and their parliamentary voting over the past few years, but the message of my post is Tories worse. I did also intend to write something about why I was bothering to campaign on a weblog. Something about the American effort to oust Bush.