Sniping at Liberals
Sir: Every year, September 1 marks the opening of the season for sniping at the Liberal Party. This year we find Hugh Macpher son stuffing his blunderbuss with rusty old epitaphs, clichés and death sentences and blasting them off with an aim so wide that he might reasonably expect to bring down one of this country's two million Liberal voters.
His article, last week, was read with mirth in this Liberal household. If the Liberal Party is dead, who are these people — Lord Wade, Jeremy Thorpe and so on — who have spoken out swiftly and emphatically on our obligations to Uganda's British refugees, while Wilson and company lie deep in their dugouts, squinting through trench periscopes for a glimpse of public opinion. Are they ghosts?
Nor is it surprising to find Mr Macpherson in the role of bodysnatcher, desperately trying to revive the corpse of the myth that Young Liberals are hairy revolutionaries bent on digging up cricket pitches or taking public buildings by storm. The Young Liberal campaign on the urban environment crisis (just over) and on the plight of the disabled (just begun) mysteriously escape the scrutiny of commentators like Macpherson. • Finally we have Macpherson the transplanter, hoping to graft leading Liberals on to the interal organs of the two big parties. If he were to open his eyes he might notice that leading Liberals are flourishing in their present surroundings and that it is the Tory and Labour surgeons who are roaming around with knives to cut off those parts of their parties that offend them.
Martin Wainwright The Heath, Long Causeway, Adel, Leeds 16
Previous page
