Rage, rage against the piling up of shite.

It’s Local Election Day in Cardiff, and on my way out with the dog, I am greeted by the smiling faces of the Liberal Democrats’ Plasnewydd Focus Team.

I had naively believed that I might go one day without being harassed by the Liberal Democrats, but obviously today was not going to be that day. Nonetheless, it was the final straw for me and my paper-thin patience.

A little history, and some contemporaneous comment, would be useful right about now I think. The Lib Dems have led the council in Cardiff since 2004. My sources in the Welsh Conservative Party have indicated that they are about to take a complete pasting in today’s local election, with Labour way out in front, likely to come close to the 50 members they had back in 1999. In my opinion, this is a justified spanking.

And yet I am unable to justify this on a political level. According to some of the bombastic nonsense that comes through my door unbidden every single day of the week and often on weekends too, the Lib Dem-led council is making great strides in doing lots of interesting things, like saving libraries, cleaning up parks and putting gates across back lanes (lanes which, I would have thought, provided fire escapes and also access for fire fighters to and from properties in the area). Whilst these essential community-focused activities are obstructed at every turn by their Labour colleagues, so they repeat ad nauseam, they tell me that they have my interests at heart and are working for me. This all sounds lovely, but in truth, I cannot tell the difference between their 8 years and the preceding 9 (apart from the absence of the objectionable Russell Goodway), when Cardiff was run by those evil socialist union bosses who dictate the every move of the Welsh Labour Party. In every communiqué Plasnewydd’s limp yellow muckrakers ram through my letter box, they tell me how much better off I am, how the city is better served and better administered by the Lib Dems, and take every opportunity to position themselves as the saviours with a community mandate (The Focus Team) against the corpulent and corrupt “Labour Bosses” replete with spectre of belligerent and obfuscatory trade union bullies.

No, indeed the pleasure I will feel when hearing that Labour are back in (hopefully with a few more independents like the lovely Plaid Werdd Cymru candidate in my area – check out their vision for Cardiff at their website), will be due to a very simple human reaction – relief. Undoubtedly the campaign to smear Labour will continue unabated, but if their behaviour before and no doubt after this election result confirms anything it is this:

1)      That the Welsh Liberal Democrats, despite 8 years of leading my council, have little idea what makes a difference to me and people like me in this city, and expend too much energy on the wrong things at a great cost to their own political effectiveness. They are political imbeciles, preferring to slander opposition with claims that I don’t have the time or energy to research and rebut and thus exposing themselves as worse than either of the two internecine American parties. The Lib Dems in Wales are so quick to “go negative” that it turns my stomach. This may be acceptable politicianeering in some areas, counties or countries, but it makes me sick and pushes me further from a party that could, in time, appeal to the liberal values that my upbringing instilled (which, thanks to a sustained campaign of communitarianism from my wonderful and empathetic wife, is being eroded in favour of a more holistic approach to world change) and closer to other parties with whom I may have no abiding affiliation but who are simply NOT the Welsh Liberal Democrats.

[At this point I might make an unnecessary clarification – I tend to move to the left, not the right, when punched in the middle]

2)      That the Welsh Liberal Democrats abhor democracy. How dare they tell me that if I am not in thrall to the big parties that my vote is wasted? The first time I read it I had to blink, look twice, and get my wife to re-read it to me. They tell me that it’s a two-horse race in this area, that Plaid and the Tories couldn’t possibly win (let alone the worthy but unconsidered Independents) so any vote that didn’t bloat the ballot of the big boys was a vote wasted. Wasted! How else would they like me to register my displeasure with the status quo if not by the exercise of active suffrage? I’m nearly completely disengaged from the political process at the best of times, but this makes me so angry that I can’t help but become involved. Hey, maybe they deserve some credit for that. Not from me.

How much money, time and effort has been directed into this misbegotten campaign to carpet the streets of Plasnewydd and Roath (and probably other areas too) with the waste paper printed by numpties on behalf of the other numpties on Woodville Road? What makes it worse is that at the last general election, after a similar deluge of slanderous rubbish, I emailed Nigel Howells, whose name appeared on many of the offending items, to ask why the Lib Dems took this approach, to ask him to think of alternative methods to engage with the community, and to stop sending me so much fucking junk mail. I am still waiting for a reply*.

That time, it cost the Lib Dems my vote. This time, I am thinking of reporting them to the Electoral Commission. For what, I’m not sure, but I’m certain I can think of something.

My wife is a French citizen, and as such gets to vote by post in the Presidential elections. They don’t bombard her with crap every day. They don’t badger and harass her with campaigning and slander. They don’t mount a physical assault on her property with waste paper delivery, putting her full name and address on every other pamphlet meaning that it can’t go straight in the recycling for fear of identity theft. They send one neat package of each of the candidates’ manifestos along with her ballot paper. The manifestos themselves focus on what each candidate will do, not on how much the others are bastards, or liars, or puppets of corrupt union bosses. I was so smitten by this positive outlook that we immediately discussed moving to France for ever. Then we saw Marine Le Pen’s statement of intent and decided not to.

UK – indeed Anglo-Saxon – politics could learn a little from the French model. And the Welsh Liberal Democrats could save time and money by stopping this bombardment. Plus, they would stop pissing me off. Of course, the real irony here is that I'm a registered postal voter, something they would know if they reference the electoral register, so I voted two weeks ago.

* The reason for this might be that I threatened to drive to his house in Adamsdown and "deliver" every piece of political pamphleteering that he had foisted on me through his letter box. But probably not.