Tim Farron tops Guardian front page as Carmichael’s “You’re not an opposition” riposte to Thornberry gets biggest Question Time cheer
Originally published by South Lincolnshire Liberal Democrats
On Thursday night, Alistair Carmichael took full advantage of the opportunity his last minute addition to the Question Time panel gave him to give both Conservatives and Labour a blast.
Watch him tell off Labour's Emily Thornberry:
On Friday, Tim Farron was the top story on the Guardian website as he lambasted Labour's failure to put up any sort of opposition to the Tories.
In an overt attempt to steal votes from Labour in pro-remain constituencies, Farron said he believed Corbyn had put his party on the wrong side of the biggest political issue in a generation and was struggling because his MPs were increasingly split on how to respond.
"I think what Labour has done is to believe this is too difficult for them politically, let's just wait for it to go away, and the meeker we are, the quicker it will go away. I think that's the calculation they've made, and this and future generations are not going to forgive them for that," he said. "We are saying that Jeremy Corbyn and now Keir Starmer [the shadow Brexit secretary] as well - you have a Labour party from top to bottom that is failing."
Setting out his version of the differences between the Lib Dems and Labour, Farron said it was necessary to oppose the Conservatives over Brexit: "It's not divisive to hold the government to account, and not just to lamely give up as we go over a cliff, and that is what Labour are doing - they are being the most ineffective opposition in living memory."
He suggested that the political shakeup set in train by Brexit could lead to his party displacing Labour as the main opposition, as Labour did to the divided Liberals in the 1920s. He even made a comparison to Justin Trudeau's Liberals in Canada, who were third in the polls but went on to victory in 2015. "I feel like we are in a maze, and every maze has a way out. At the end of the maze is what happened in Canada."
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