How to break a promise spectacularly.

I seem to talk about tuition fees a lot recently, but humour me for one more post, because this might just make you sick if you were one of those unfortunate souls to vote Lib Dem last election. It's clear for all to see now that the Libs are spineless puppets with no principals, but until now it wasn't clear just how far back that state of affairs went.

It now turns out (having been revealed in the Guardian, the very paper that swapped parties to support them in the General Election) that senior Lib Dems decided they wouldn't pursue their pledge to scrap tuition fees in the event of a coalition (the only way they were ever going to get to implement their policies) a full two months before polling day! That's before Clegg and co. signed their pledges in the desperate attempt to win the student vote, and before he released his video promising to get rid of broken promises in politics. Hypocrisy, thy name is Clegg.

Here's what Danny Alexander said in the document:

"On tuition fees we should seek agreement on part-time students and leave the rest. We will have clear yellow water with the other [parties] on raising the tuition fee cap, so let us not cause ourselves more headaches."

'Leave the rest'. Three words which in one swoop destroy any last vestige of respectability that the Lib Dems had left. And this isn't just about tuition fees, they did the exact same thing with the economy. When people cast their votes, over 60% of people voted for parties on the basis that they had committed to a slow cutting of the deficit, and not taking the risk of plunging millions into unemployment. But the bottles of champagne and the ministerial car proved to much of a temptation, and so now we're going through a devastating round of cuts even deeper than the Conservatives had promised. Instead of compromise, they've just agreed to everything that Cameron has fed them.

The idea that events have changed so much since before the election to cause this change of heart is laughable. The events in Greece were not a sign of things to come for us, we were and are in a much stronger position than Greece was at the time, and the idea that they hadn't realised how bad the countries finances were until they got into office is the biggest sham of all. First of all, they campaigned relentlessly on how bad they thought the countries finances were, and second, every indicator over that period suggested that we were actually in better shape than even Darling had thought.

Those who climb the highest, have the furthest to fall. And maybe that's why I loathe Nick Clegg so much right now. I expected to be sold down the river by slime balls like Cameron, but I'd always respected Clegg and thought he was an honest politician. How wrong I was.