Effective opposition
Sir: To assert, as you did in your leader (10 January), that any increase in government funds for the opposition parties would be used well by the Conservatives and would be frittered away by the Liberal Democrats is nothing short of ridiculous.
The Liberal Democrats, who receive less than one third of the £1.2 million paid to the Conservative party, are widely acknowl- edged to be providing the only effective opposition to the Labour government.
It was the Liberal Democrats who exposed the £5 billion hole in Gordon Brown's first budget and the potential £4 billion tax hike hidden in the Chancellor's abolition of Peps and Tessas. It was the Liberal Democrats who exposed some of the worst examples of the Labour party's manipulation of the media — including the fiasco over conflicting briefings on govern- ment policy towards EMU and the bullying of the BBC Today programme. And the Liberal Democrats were the only opposi- tion to the government when they imposed unjustified cuts in benefits to mothers who choose to stay at home and bring up their children.
This effective opposition has been achieved through thorough research, fund- ed in the main by contributions from all our MPs, not, as you suggest, from the Short money. If your leader writer had bothered to research the facts, the whole speculative thesis of the piece would have been proved to be without foundation.
Paul Tyler
House of Commons, London SW1
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