The Liberal Democrats, sometimes mocked as the Illiberal Undemocrats because they’ve abandoned any proper support for liberal things like free speech and their hostility to referendum results that don’t go their way, do a good job of presenting themselves as all things to all men. The party can present different images to different constituencies to get the vote to go their way. They can be appear respectful of tradition and of local people’s desires in campaigns in rural and semi-rural areas but also as radical middle class leftists in areas where this plays well.

The Lib Dems are also very good at keeping the party in public view outside of election time. Their ground game is pretty effective at making potential voters aware of the party’s existence by leafleting at times when other parties are not doing so. The main image that people see of the Lib Dems, especially at election time or in the run up to them, is one of reasonable people without the ideological baggage of either the Tories or Labour. That image appeals to those who are middling and moderate in their views and to be quite frank are not that politically motivated and are willing to vote for what they see as a safe pair of hands.

Unfortunately for the people who wake up one morning after local elections and find that they have a Lib Dem council or that the Lib Dems hold the balance of power, that image is often just that, an image. The voters don’t realise what they’ve got running their area until their council tax bills go up or find that their council has implemented outrageous and sometimes extreme policies that the voter is certain they didn’t actively choose when they marked their ‘X’ on the ballot paper next to the name of the Lib Dem candidate. It’s often not until its too late do voters find out that the Lib Dems are a damned freak show of people who hate private transport, want to ban meat in council offices and who can’t properly define what a woman is.

This year the Lib Dem freak show has in South London been exposed before the election rather than afterwards, for a change. A Lib Dem candidate in Herne Hill who identifies as transgender has gone completely apeshit over an incident that they described as making them feel ‘unsafe’. Lib Dem candidate Charley Hasted, who is alleged by a commenter on the linked piece to have been identifying as male in 2017, screamed like a lunatic on social media about how gender critical women were in her home area and making the area ‘unsafe’ for transgender people. His whines garnered a lot of support from across the board from within the Lib Dems including from some in senior positions both within the party and in wider politics. Sadly for Hasted it was swiftly revealed that the gender critical feminists were not ‘in their home area’ but instead outside of a public election hustings. This is most certainly a place where one would expect to hear and see a lot of competing views. Also the thing that Hasted said made them feel ‘unsafe’ was merely some leaflets published by a women’s group campaigning to retain single sex spaces and carrying the slogan ‘If you don’t respect my sex then you will not get my ‘X’.

Basically Halsted fraggled out and fraggled out very publicly over nothing more than a perfectly legitimate bit of leafleting by women at a hustings and some plainly legal leaflets. Halsted’s reaction begs the question just how suitable is this person for elected office if he’s scared shitless about a few leaflets? Not very I would guess.

I found out about this story and managed to get a great deal of detail about this story from a writer going by the name of Democracy Coma whose excellent and informative piece can be found over at Graham Linehan’s Substack page. I found that as I read this story my jaw dropped further and further to the floor as I read about not just this incident with Halsted’s overreaction about the gender critical women’s leaflets, but also how readily the Lib Dem establishment, both those involved in party organisation and those Lib Dems who have achieved elected office backed up the viewpoints of this fraggle.

Democracy Coma started their piece by reporting exactly what Halsted had said by reproducing Halsted’s Tweet o the matter. Here’s the Tweet:

Democracy Coma then pointed out that the ‘Terfs’ Halsted was whining about were voters and that the leaflets were merely calling for women’s rights, rights that I probably do not have to remind readers have been very hard won, to be protected. Democracy Coma then mocked Halsted for being so frightened of women leafleting about protecting sex based rights that they already enjoy.

Democracy Coma added:

Charley Hasted is a Liberal Democrat candidate in next week’s London-wide council elections. They previously stood as a candidate in the 2019 General Election and the 2021 London Assembly election. Why our party keeps thinking Charley a suitable person to represent it I cannot fathom.

Democracy Coma then mentioned that Halsted believes in the unscientific guff which states that there are not two but six biological sexes, something that is quite frankly and quite obviously bullshit.

Democracy Coma said:

If a political candidate cannot cope with being exposed to viewpoints that differ from their own and only wish to represent people who think exactly the same way as they do, then electoral politics is not for them.

Spot on there DC.

I’d strongly advise that you read the original piece by Democracy Coma which can be found via the link below as it not only has a lot of detail about this case but also, by showing the response to the incident by senior Lib Dems, illustrates just how far the gender identity cult has penetrated the party and to a worrying extent has taken over the Liberal Democrats.

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/neither-liberal-nor-democratic-women?s=r

If Halsted was a lone, over emotional, authoritarian gender cult nutcase who had slipped through the selection net and been put forward as a candidate, then this would merely be a comedic episode about a local Lib Dem party. But the fact that so many Lib Dems, some in quite senior or influential party positions and even a former Lib Dem police and crime commissioner candidate for Staffordshire and a Lib Dem councillor have supported Halsted should worry voters. It means that the gender identity cult is not a fringe issue for the Lib Dems but one that appears to have a lot of support within the party’s operatives and that is not should be taken lightly. Because the gender identity cult is so deeply embedded within the Lib Dems then it goes without saying that for the Lib Dems it is likely to be the case that women trying to protect hard won rights are not going to be this party’s political priority.

The Lib Dems are a freak show and the Halsted incident should illustrate that fact to the voter with all the clarity of the edge of the shadows cast by a noonday sun.

Addendum:

Below is a link  that show that the rot in the Lib Dems and the willingness of some in the party to not just tolerate some serious and disturbed oddballs but also allow them to advance their ideologies.  This post on the abovementioned Linehan Substack is a deep and extremely disturbing dive into the murky personal life of one Aston/Aimee Challoner a MTF transgender who resigned from the Greens citing ‘transphobia’ after safeguarding concerns were raised about Challoner’s decision to employ her father as an election agent even though Challoner senior had been arrested for a very serious noncing offence and was awaiting trial.  Challoner Junior then decamped to the Lib Dems where they stayed for a short while until the party became aware that Challoner Junior’s partner had some pretty disturbing and definitely non-consensual fantasies that they’d written about.

This furore involving Challoner and the Lib Dems happened whilst Jo Swinson was the leader of the Lib Dems which goes some way to show that iffy people with iffy ideologies and their connections to the trans caucus of the Lib Dems is not a recent or a new problem.

Please note:  You will need either  strong stomach or a supply of jumbo sized sick bags when reading the linked piece about Challoner Junior and Challoner senior.  I have a pretty liberal view of what consenting adults do in the bedroom or in a specialised club, even if it involves people voluntarily nailing their scrotums to a bit of wood, but some of what the article on the Challoners talks about and what Aston / Aimee Challoner and her partners are into such as ‘age play’ and the wilder shores of the ‘Furry’ community look like massive and un-ignorable set of red flags.

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/ashton-challenor-the-boy-who-disappeared?s=r

Addendum II

More on the Aimee Challoner situation via the link below.  Whilst the Lib Dems did the right thing in suspending Challoner Junior from the party in 2019 this still leaves open the question is why didn’t the Lib Dems say no to her in the first place?  A reasonably politically savvy Lib Dem head office type should have been aware of the shenanigans going on in the Green Party about Challoner as there were civil actions brought by Green high ups to try to silence a Green who was concerned about Challoner Junior and safeguarding issues.  It’s quite possible that the Lib Dems either didn’t know about the shenanigans in the Green Party re Challoner Jnr or unwisely gave Challoner Jnr the benefit of the doubt.  I also suspect that because of Challoner Jnr’s association with a police backed LGBT youth group called Prism Coventry who Aimee Challoner had worked in the past might have helped strengthen that quite unwarranted in my view benefit of the doubt.

Aimee Challenor