> My local council (ie municipal authority) Islington is held by the Liberal
> Democrats with a slim majority....
> Coincidentally, it is also the school that those local councillors making the
> decision have secured for their own children, so that the richest children in
> the borough got their school dinners free, while the poorest paid.
I could tell similar stories to James about where I live in Oxford: the Liberal vote is concentrated in the more affluent parts of the city, and so when the party gets a majority on the City Council (which it does from time to time), it starts redirecting public money from the poorer parts of the city in the south and (especially) east back towards service provision in leafy North Oxford.
On civil liberties questions, sure, the Lib Dems are far more liberal than the authoritarian New Labour government (but that's not hard). And many of the party's activists do take pride in thinking of themselves as more left than Labour (and some of them probably are). But in this election, for strategic reasons (given the distribution of Lib Dem votes across marginal seats) the party is running towards the centre-right, trying to peel voters away from the Conservatives. Lib Dem tax policy is pretty regressive, for example, and their approach to state support for young people -- abolishing both the child trust fund and university tuition fees -- would also work to redistribute money from poorer to better-off families.
It's fun watching the Lib Dem surge, though, as it makes it much less likely that David Cameron's Tories will get an overall majority. It's just like 1923 all over again.
Chris