Martin Hannan: Lib Demise is fully deserved

Last Thursday night, on either side of the country, I believe we saw the beginning of the end - if not the end itself - of the Liberal Democratic party as any kind of political force in Scotland.

The utterly humiliating result in the Inverclyde by-election and the decision by 16 Lib Dem councillors to push through the continuation of the trams project in Edinburgh at an estimated extra cost to the city of 240 million will be seen in time as the night that it became the Lib Demised party.

It is no more than this craven bunch deserves. For they will never, ever be forgiven by the Scottish electorate, and indeed large numbers of their own members, for conspiring to put the Tories back in power in Westminster. Coalition? Don't make me laugh. It's a Conservative government in all but name, with Nick Clegg playing the public school fag to head prefect David Cameron.

As for Jenny Dawe and her useless mob? As an SNP member I can only hope that my party's group is even now talking to the other parties in a bid to form a rainbow coalition that would oust the Lib Dems from power.

For what the Lib Dems have done with the trams is unpardonable folly. The SNP's call for a referendum was the correct approach because if the trams proceed, it will be the citizens of Edinburgh who will pay through the nose for years.

No party on the council had anywhere in its manifesto that it would spend hundreds of millions of extra cash on the trams. The people's views should have been sought for it is the people who will pay.

Jenny Dawe blithely claimed: "It is actually a national project so there should not be a direct burden on the Edinburgh council taxpayers."

You have to ask Ms Dawe when she left Planet Scotland. Is she not aware that in Edinburgh and the rest of the country there are taxpayers who are seething at the way this project has been run, not least those in Glasgow where they lost the airport rail link directly because the Lib Dems in the Scottish Parliament led the infliction of the trams upon us?

What part of the Scottish Government's statement "no more cash" does she not understand? And if the money is not coming from central government funds then it can only come from one source - the wallets and purses of Edinburgh's people.

Unless, of course, they are going to make massive cuts in services or sell off Lothian Buses. It would be nice to know the Lib Dems' real plans for raising the money, but I fear that such an intellectual exercise is beyond them. For in Edinburgh and across the UK, the Lib Dems are so mired in their own incompetence, and so petrified by their Tory partners, that they have become worse than useless.

Like a great many people, I used to have a soft spot for the Liberal Democrats, due largely to the fact that my father was a councillor representing the old Liberal Party, and was also a long-term office bearer in his Liberal constituency association.

I despair when I see that his good old-fashioned Scottish Liberalism has been traduced by the present crew of hopeless entities.

The party's leader in the Scottish Parliament is Willie Rennie. I am sure that Mr Rennie up close and personal is a very nice man - I can't really comment on that, as I've never met him. He comes across on television, however, especially when he is yapping in parliament, as a particularly obnoxious individual, with all the graceless demeanour of Uriah Heep trying to imitate a rottweiler but managing only to resemble an annoyingly snappy whippet.

Rennie's first major electoral test as Scottish leader could hardly have gone worse. The party polled just 627 votes in Inverclyde where they used to be a major force. Good local men like Ross Finnie and Alan Blair must be in tears at this abject devastation of the party's local base.

In the local seat in the Scottish Parliamentary elections the Lib Dems came second in 1999 and 2003, but even with Finnie, a former Scottish minister, as candidate, they slipped to fourth in the May election and were all but wiped out last week.

The people of Inverclyde did a simple calculation and concluded that Lib Dem equals Tory, and voted accordingly.

For in UK terms, that is what the people are seeing. They look at Nick Clegg, Michael Moore, Danny Alexander and Chris Huhne and see Liberal Democrats with Tory faces, Tory attitudes, even Tory accents. Yes, Vince Cable does his bit to try and keep a bit of Liberal democracy in the mix, but the Business Secretary has been sidelined as the Conservatives have mashed the Lib Dems into quiescent cooperation with their programme that may yet ruin the UK.

I should be happy that voters are turning away from the Lib Dems to the SNP, but I can't help feeling sad that a genuinely wholesome strand of Scottish political life is withering and dying in front of our eyes.

The tombstone can be erected now: "The Liberal Democrats of Scotland, perished at the hands of their own stupidity, June 30, 2011."