I’ve just recently been doorstepped by a political candidate for the upcoming local elections. Now I know this guy from seeing him out and about and I know that he’s a damned good councillor. For example: He’s done an enormous amount of work to get a run down playground revamped by the local council and is generally a good egg. The problem is I will not vote for him because he is a Liberal Democrat.

Anyway, he knocked on my front door just as I was about to go out and water the chickens and introduced himself. ‘Oh hello Mr XXX’ I replied and he started to try to convince me to vote for him. I said ‘I’m afraid that as much as I genuinely admire your work as a councillor and what you’ve done I cannot bring myself to vote for the Liberal Democrats’. He then asked me why and I said that his national party had been taking donations from pharmaceutical companies that produced puberty blockers and is intimately connected therefore to the cult of trans and in particular a policy of paediatric gender reassignment that I find particularly repulsive. He replied to this by saying ‘well that’s a national issue but the Lib Dems are very good in local government’.

Unfortunately for this council election canvasser he had the misfortune to run into someone, me, who knew a lot more about his party’s activities in local government than he seemed to know himself. To his statement about Lib Dems being good in local government I brought up the case of the Bath and North East Somerset Lib Dem run council that is implementing business and freedom killing Low Traffic Networks and said that I feared the Lib Dems would also bring that where I lived.

In addition to that I brought up the disgraceful recent episode where, at the height of a fuel and energy crisis, Lib Dem peers in the House of Lords had passed motions banning any new coal mines in the UK.

He then asked me who I would vote for if not the Lib Dems and I said that if there was not a Reform Party or SDP candidate or half decent independent on the ballot then I would spoil my ballot paper.

I was very polite to this man but I left him in no doubt that I would not vote for the Lib Dems and was able to give valid reasons why I could not. Sometimes it’s possible to put aside political badges and see and vote for the person up for election, however there are other times when political badges and political party loyalties matter and this was one occasion when I believed that it did. I can’t vote Lib Dem, I’ve read enough about them and know enough about them to know that to give my vote to this bunch of Janus-faced chancers is to vote against my own interests.

There’s no Labour candidate in my ward so I will not be getting the Labour canvasser next which robs me of the opportunity to be considerably less polite to him or her. I would behave in this manner as I’ve had the misfortune to live in a number of different Labour run shitholes in the past and having seen how this party operates when it has control, I’d rather eat my own earwax than vote Labour.