It's that the MP campaigning and his or her personal viewpoints doesn't really mean anything. People vote for or against the leader of the party, and it seems that people would rather deal with austerity (although the deficit isn't ballooning) than Jeremy Corbyn who rightly or wrongly is associated with communism, the IRA, lots of immigration and a lack of patriotism.

What we need in this country is a decent Liberal Party, not the milquetoast centrist Lib Dems or so called liberals from the corporatist wings of the Labour right or Tory left. A Liberal Party in the tradition of Asquith and Gladstone that can balance fiscal responsibility with giving communities in trouble a helping hand and making sure that our essential services are well maintained, a party with a pragmatic approach to foreign policy that is neither hawkish nor dogmatically pacifist, a party that encourages pride in the national and civic culture and identity of this country without being exclusivist while at the same time encouraging tolerance of different nations and cultures without being unpatriotic or deprecating.

I don't see how this isn't obvious, and how people much smarter than me with much more power than I ever will have haven't seen what I'm seeing — instead we're stuck with a choice between Cruella DeVille and Trotsky's ghost.