Sustainable Communities Bill

That is absolutely true. Speaking as someone involved in serious politics, I learned early on that politics is about taking honest and difficult decisions. Sometimes we have to be accountable for those decisions, but politics is not simply using rhetoric and whipping up local feeling—a different feeling in one area than in another—and assuming that somehow, by a complicated process of metamorphosis, everything will be right in the end. That is not serious politics, but, to be honest, that is precisely what the Liberal Democrats have historically and contemporaneously engaged in. If they are serious about ever becoming a party of government, it is a lesson that they will have to learn.