Illiberal democrat.

Not for the first time I'm going to reach for my dictionary and check the definition of the word 'liberal'.

liberal |ˈlib(ə)rəl|adjective1 open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values : they have more liberal views toward marriage and divorce than some people.• favorable to or respectful of individual rights and freedoms : liberal citizenship laws.• (in a political context) favoring maximum individual liberty in political and social reform : a liberal democratic state.• ( Liberal) of or characteristic of Liberals or a Liberal Party.• ( Liberal) (in the UK) of or relating to the Liberal Democrat Party : the Liberal leader.• Theology regarding many traditional beliefs as dispensable, invalidated by modern thought, or liable to change.2 [ attrib. ] (of education) concerned mainly with broadening a person's general knowledge and experience, rather than with technical or professional training.3 (esp. of an interpretation of a law) broadly construed or understood; not strictly literal or exact : they could have given the 1968 Act a more liberal interpretation.4 given, used, or occurring in generous amounts : liberal amounts of wine had been consumed.• (of a person) giving generously : Sam was too liberal with the wine.nouna person of liberal views.• ( Liberal) a supporter or member of a Liberal Party.DERIVATIVESliberalism |-ˌlizəm| nounliberalist |-rəlist| nounliberalistic |ˌlib(ə)rəˈlistik| adjectiveliberally adverbliberalness nounORIGIN Middle English : via Old French fromLatin liberalis, from liber ‘free (man).’ The original sense was [suitable for a free man,]hence [suitable for a gentleman] (one not tied to a trade), surviving in liberal arts. Another early sense [generous] ( compare with sense 4) gave rise to an obsolete meaning [free from restraint,] leading to sense 1 (late 18th cent.).

Okay, got all that? I'm thinking in particular about the second bit of definition 1, the one that mentions favouring maximum individual liberty, and how political parties with the word liberal in their name seem so often to oppose individual liberty. So without further ado let's introduce today's antonym of the word liberal, Vince Cable, (i)Liberal Democrat and Business Secretary of Her Maj's Cobbleition. Vince, (i)Liberal kind of guy that he is, wants to force private banks to lend more money to businesses whether they want to or not, and will withhold their bonuses if they don't play ball.

And the fucker dares to call himself a liberal?

... it is the green paper from Mr Cable’s Department for Business that could prove most controversial. It is clear that the Business Secretary has run out of patience with banks. “I don’t think the banks get it,” he said yesterday. “We are very worried about their behaviour. They are not acting in the national interest.”

I don't think you get it, Vince, you fucknuts. Private companies don't have any responsibility to act in the national interest. They're only supposed to act in their own interests, and by extension those of their customers and shareholders. If the national interests coincide with those then great, but if not that's not their problem because they're private companies, see?

“At the moment we are talking to them in an amicable way and we are monitoring them, but if this doesn’t work there are combinations of carrots and sticks that can be employed.
“What we would question is whether banks should be paying out dividends and bonuses when that money could be used to … support small business lending.”

What I would question is how someone with so poor a grasp of business can be the fucking Business Secretary. Look, Vince, where do you think the money for bonuses comes from? I'll help you out here, when a business makes more money than it needs to spend it's what we call a profit, and sometimes what a company does is give a proportion of those profits to the people who helped make the money. Banks make profits by, among other things, loaning money to people who can pay it all back with interest. However, it's important to understand that they make losses by loaning money to people who can't fucking pay it back at all.

Does that last bit ring any bells, Vince? Because it should do. Loaning money that couldn't be repaid was pretty much what got the banks into the shit in the first place. Poor bastards got it in the neck for lending money and everyone demanded they stop, and when they did the same bastards demand they start lending again. And were the banks that did this encouraged to do so by government policy? Well, fuck me, so they were if the New York Times in 1999 is anything to go by.

Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.

In addition, banks, thrift institutions and mortgage companies have been pressing Fannie Mae to help them make more loans to so-called subprime borrowers. These borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans, can only get loans from finance companies that charge much higher interest rates...

Of course we'll never know but it seems at least possible that without the massive market distortion of several decades of subprime lending underwritten by Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac - ultimately the US taxpayer, natch, but eventually knocked on to nearly every other shitehole's taxpayers too - the banks that every politician in the fucking world is blaming for their reckless lending might have been a bit more discerning.

Tell me, Vince, apart from lending to businesses rather than wannabe homeowners how is what you're doing any different? Oh, of course. You want to just force them to do it, don't you?

And don't go thinking Vince only plans to do this with the banks that Gordon and his badger browed sock puppet bought. Oh no, he means all of them.

Mr Cable will threaten to impose a new code on all banks rather than opt for a voluntary one applying only to those banks majority-owned by the state.

Surely it would be in the national interest to help reduce the numbers of vehicles with dodgy shockers, two village brakes and bald tyres, so will the Transport Secretary be threatening Kwik-Fit if they don't repair enough cars? He may be a Tory but mostly they're no less illiberal than Vince, and just because Kwik-Fit is a private company, so what? Vince, liberal chap that he is, has decided that government can tell private companies how to run themselves, all in the national interest.

At least the bastard isn't enjoying himself.

“Government is not fun,” he said. “It is a huge responsibility because the decisions we are taking affect people’s lives.”

Of course, but Vince is going so much further. He's not advocating things that affect people's lives, which in itself would be bad enough. He's talking about interfering directly and running things that have absolutely nothing to do with the government. Nice to see it didn't take too long for me to start really despising at least some members of the Cobbleition.

Fuck you, Vince, you appalling cunt. Fuck you and fuck your corruption of the word 'Liberal'.