For me, one of the delightful and satisfying things about the recent General Election was not only the massive win for the Tories and the decimation of the Labour Party, but the almost complete annihalation of the Liberal Democrats. It gave me great pleasure to see the untrustworthy, anti-British, Janus-faced Liberal Democrats reduced from 21 MP’s to a mere 11. There are now so few Lib Dem MPs in fact that it is all but impossible for the party to make a division between backbench MP’s and Lib Dem ministerial shadows. The Lib Dems are now a shadow of their former selves and they’ve only got themselves to blame.

If the Lib Dems had been truly liberal and truly democratic then they would not have positioned themselves as being the party opposed to the idea of respecting the 2016 vote to leave the EU. They should have welcomed the idea of Britain being free of EU control and to building in Britain a culture of liberty. But they did not. The Lib Dems thought that the echo chambers of Twitter where pro-EU fanatics hang out, was representative of the views of the entire nation. On this they were so very, very wrong. The public overwhelmingly rejected not only the haughty refusal to abide by the Referendum vote, but also the Lib Dems ‘woke’ nonsense about a multitude of genders and the party’s sneering snobbery towards working class Britons.

Even in areas where the Lib Dems have been nurturing their support over many years and trying to capture the middle class left/green vote, such as in Jesse Norman’s Tory held seat of Herefordshire South, the Lib Dems were rejected. The Lib Dem candidate in this seat, Lucy ‘Windscale’ Hurds, found herself pushed into third place on 12% of the vote behind the winner Mr Norman and a very lacklustre Labour candidate who came in second. However this was a slight improvement from Ms Hurds usual fourth place in the seat. The Lib Dems also suffered the embarrassment of losing the seat held by their leader Jo Swinson. A Liberal or Lib Dem leader had not lost their seat at a General Election since 1979 when scandal hit Jeremy Thorpe lost his North Devon seat.

For many years the Lib Dems have been cocking a snook at the concerns of the wider electorate and have been the party of a very small part of the middle class Left and as such have got increasingly ‘woke’. It is fitting therefore that the Lib Dems have gone woke and also gone broke.

The Lib Dems have managed to survive all these years by trying to be all things to all men. They are one thing in rural areas and something quite different in more urban and wealthy areas. Before they entered government as part of the Coalition in 2010, they could get away with this two faced and slippery behaviour, as they were not that visible on the national political stage. Unfortunately for the Liberal Democrats, their time in the limelight of Government showed the entire country what a complete crock of dishonest, sleazy, untrustworthy shit the Lib Dems were as a party. A party can get away with being one thing in one area and another thing in another area provided that they are not in possession of any government power and are merely a localist party feeding of disparate local issues. Being under the sort of scrutiny that was given to the Lib Dems after 2010 was a major factor in why the Lib Dems have become a byword for base and cynical political opportunism.

There is I believe a place in British politics for a party of the centre and a party that is genuinely liberal and which will support such things as freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and individual choice. Sadly for the Lib Dems I think that they’ve gone so far down the ‘woke’ and anti-democratic paths that I doubt that the Lib Dems can be the genuinely liberal and centrist party that they could be. The Lib Dems are on life support at the moment and the sort of ‘woke joke’ politician that now represents the much diminished Lib Dems, may well be the ones to finally switch the party off and let the Lib Dems join the ranks of other defunct parties such as the League of Empire Loyalists, the Senior Citizens Party and the Social Democrat party.