Pauline Jenkins welcomes two national newspaper endorsing Liberal Democrats (Newark Liberal Democrats)

Newark Liberal Democrats <info@newarklibdems.org.uk>

Pauline Jenkins welcomes two national newspaper endorsing Liberal Democrats

May 3, 2010 11:17 PM

Lib Dem candidate in Newark Constituency, Pauline Jenkins, has welcomed the endorsement of the Liberal Democrats by The Guardian and Observer newspapers. Pauline said: "I felt very pleased to read this endorsement and proud to belong to such a party, especially after the negativity in some other newspapers".

Here are extracts from The Guardian of April 20th which carried this endorsement:-

"Citizens have votes. Newspapers do not. However, if the Guardian had a vote in the 2010 general election it would be cast enthusiastically for the Liberal Democrats"

"Surveying the wider agenda and the experience of the past decade, however, there is little doubt that in many areas of policy and tone, the Liberal Democrats have for some time most closely matched our own priorities and instincts. On political and constitutional change, they articulate and represent the change which is now so widely wanted. On civil liberty and criminal justice, they have remained true to liberal values and human rights in ways that the other parties, Labour more than the Tories in some respects, have not. They are less tied to reactionary and sectional class interests than either of the other parties."

"The Liberal Democrats were green before the other parties and remain so. Their commitment to education is bred in the bone. So is their comfort with a European project which, for all its flaws, remains central to this country's destiny. They are willing to contemplate a British defence policy without Trident renewal. They were right about Iraq, the biggest foreign policy judgment call of the past half-century, when Labour and the Tories were both catastrophically and stupidly wrong. They have resisted the rush to the overmighty centralised state when others have not. At key moments, when tough issues of press freedom have been at stake, they have been the first to rally in support. Above all, they believe in and stand for full, not semi-skimmed, electoral reform. And they have had a revelatory campaign. Trapped in the arid, name-calling two-party politics of the House of Commons, Nick Clegg has seldom had the chance to shine. Released into the daylight of equal debate, he has given the other two parties the fright of their lives."

"A newspaper that is proudly rooted in the liberal as well as the labour tradition - and whose advocacy of constitutional reform stretches back to the debates of 1831-32 - cannot ignore such a record. If not now, when? The answer is clear and proud. Now."