Why the relaunch? Liberal Landslide was first removed when it looked like I was going to the Scottish Parliament in 2007 and the Party high command were worried I'd get wired into the Shiraz and say something unfortunate, which admittedly had happened once or twice before. It then had a momentary revival during Nick's leadership campaign, when the Liberal blogsphere descended into open warfare as spin and invective flew back and forth in HTML code strings between Huhneites and Cleggists, as the battle raged for the soul of the party. I stopped then because I became a dad, and blogging just seemed somehow ephemeral and an unnecessary burden when coupled with the focused energy of parenthood. Managing Kevin Lang's(ultimately unsuccessful) campaign to oust Labour in Edinburgh North and Leith ensured that any non-family time was put to better use than the web based mutterings of a self indulgent political hack, and I was always, frankly, too tired to find anything of interest to say.
So why now? Well, since the days of my last foray into blogging, the political landscapes of Scotland, the UK and the rest of the world have become far too interesting not to write about. I'm also ready to pick up the fight again. Far from being happy to accept the scab of defeat in my own small neck of the woods and drift placidly into the night, I want to pick at it, scratch it till it bleeds and pitch head first into the next electoral test with tenacity and guts.
In the days that followed that first spellbindingly brilliant leaders debate, the 90 minutes that changed British Politics forever, my party finally got to glimpse the promised land. We were even allowed to pitch a tent there for a few short weeks before being mercilessly evicted in the small hours of May 7th.
I'm ready to blog again because I refuse to believe that that's all there is, that with the taste of milk and honey still fresh in our mouths we now become the whipping boy for the bad or unpopular decisions of the new coalition government. I refuse to believe that we have seen the best days of our party or that we have to accept the slights and innuendo of our detractors.
Liberal Landslide is back because at least 32% of people somewhere and on some level still agree with Nick. I want to remind them of that.
