What a difference eight months make

The google search above encapsulates why you can't trust the Liberal Democrats. Back on 9th February, the Lib Dem leader was promising in The Guardian that he would scrap tuition fees for university students.

As recently as July of this year, one of his most senior MPs, Evan Harris, who represents the University half of Oxford was continuing to spin this line, claiming: ??the media are wrong if they think that tuition fee abolition with student debt reduction will not be one of our key proposals to put before the British public."

Back in 2005 the Lib Dems saw students as a key target group - and so came up with their "abolish tuition fees" line. It won them a handful of university seats and 41% of the student vote.

Now they've calculated that this week it's more important to out-Tory the Tories on slashing public services, so the students can be forgotten about. Remember that this follows the jettisoning of their promise to raise income tax by 1p to fund education; the jettisoning of their pledge to stop post office closures and the jettisoning of a pledge to lift thousands of the poorest from paying income tax.

As someone passionate about politics, I by and large don't subscribe to the view that politicians say anything to win a vote. But I tend to find that it is the Liberal Democrats who are the exception to that rule. In a by-election not that long ago, they campaigned for a motorway bypass to relieve congestion in the town of Newbury. There's nothing wrong with that, except that in the rural parts of that same constituency which the bypass would have run through, the Lib Dems were campaigning against it! This would be funny if it weren't so cynical.

Some of us still believe in honour in politics. The way too many Liberal Democrats behave is not honourable. Supporting one policy in one general election, and the diametric opposite of it - as with tuition fees - at the next is not honourable.

You just can't trust the Lib Dems, I'm afraid.