Elite hypocrisy but not from Libertarians

So often the real scandals are not the actions of our politicians, poor though these are - think of Boris Johnson and partygate or Angela Rayner and the police investigation of her 'alleged' house flipping - but the hypocrisy of their behaviour.

Until she got hoist by her own petard, no one was more up-front in calling for full disclosure and transparency than - yes - the same Angela Rayner who is now rather slower in making public the kind of documents she called for others to reveal. Many call for the very act of accusation or investigation to require resignation without bothering to wait for the allegations to be proven true: whatever happened to the old principle of 'innocent until proven guilty' - after all who cares about justice or truth in the age of trial by social media!

The chosen examples are deliberately Labour and Conservative as it applies right across our political class. Who cannot watch the legal and semantic writhings of Liberal Democrat, Ed Davey over the Post Office Horizon scandal without feeling the man is perhaps not be totally transparent, honest and up-front about his role and decisions when the Minister?

It goes back into Liberal political history with former Liberal Prime Minster David Lloyd George, desperate in the First World War to keep his own son away from the fighting whilst telling everyone else that it was their patriotic duty to serve and potentially die for King and Country.

Libertarians are by contrast generally the least hypocritical of politicians.

If you believe as we do in minimal regulation, low taxation and giving people as much freedom as possible to make their own choices then a Libertarian is far less likely to be a hypocrite. If you believe in drug and prostitution legalisation, higher speed limits, assisted dying for example, then when you do these things you may be breaking the law but you are not a hypocrite.

Too few people understand that, unlike everybody else, we libertarians in calling for freedom, choice, regulatory simplicity, few straight-forward rules with low tax levels which it scarcely hurts to pay are also trying to deliver a more honest society in the face of a hypocritical elite, a political class of every hue who always believe in both 'one rule for them and another for us' and its inevitable corollary 'don't do as I do, do as I say.

A vote for a libertarian is a vote against hypocrisy and a culture of 'cover-up'.

Tony Brown - Former Political Advisor