This is a cross-post by Matthew Scott at Barrister Blogger
I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised but I am. I really am.
Liberal Democrats have often seemed lacking in principle, not really knowing whether they are free-market Gladstonians like Jeremy Browne the thoughtful and intelligent MP for Taunton who is standing down at the next election; or smug, incompetent social democratic meddlers like Vince Cable who, sadly, isn’t.
As a result the archetypical LibDem has a backbone of wet cardboard and no discernible principles at all, like Simon Hughes the monumentally pointless Justice Minister.
The MP for Wells is called Tessa Munt.
Unlike other LibDems she does have principles. She doesn’t like pylons, for example.
She is a bit more flexible on windfarms, which she approves of in principle, although preferably not in her constituency.
She bravely stood up for sweeter mincemeat when the Government proposed to cut the minimum sugar content required under the Jam and Similar Products (England) Regulations 2003 from 60% to 50%.
She is also against fracking for natural gas. She thinks that doing so may contaminate water in the Mendips, and in some way – she is no hydrologist – in Bath (where I live), and possibly in Wells too.
So far. So reasonable. I think she is talking utter rubbish, even about mincemeat, but there is no reason why MPs should not do that, lots of them do it. In any case, it is now less than 100 days until the election, her majority is only 800 and the voters of Wells will soon have a chance to get rid of her.
Back to Munt’s principles. During her time in Parliament she had risen to be Parliamentary Private Secretary to Mr Cable. In his characteristic irritating, dithering way Mr Cable is not quite so much against fracking as she is: naturally his preferred position is sitting on the fence.
The government as a whole, on the other hand, wants to allow some fracking to go ahead.
So, as a woman of principle, Ms Munt felt that she had to resign. Cynics might say that it didn’t take a great deal of principle and even less courage to resign from an unpaid non-job at a time when her election defeat and descent into even greater political obscurity were probably only a few weeks away anyway. On the other hand it’s more of a show of principle than most of the rest of her wretched Party have been able to muster about anything in the last 5 years.
By coincidence her resignation coincided with the opening of the inquiry in London into the 2006 murder of former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko. His tea was poisoned with polonium, one of the world’s most deadly poisons. His murderers were very probably two Russian agents, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun.
Do read the rest of Matthew’s post here.
