All through the New Labour Years Simon Hughes was generally less annoying to listen to than most Labour MPs. As the photo shows he was the only MP to bother turning up at a small demonstration in support of the Vestas strikers held about ten minutes’ walk from Parliament.

To this very day the issues he identifies as important are “opposition to a like for like replacement of Trident; opposition to nuclear power; scrapping tuition fees; defending human rights and civil liberties and always campaigning against obscene profits and obscene bonuses whilst others struggle to make ends meet”. It’s not altogether clear what “like for like replacement of Trident” means but you can’t argue with the rest of it. In the same speech to the Liberal Democrat conference this week he even threw in a quote from Marx just to show that he is really quite subversive – ‘Men make their own histories but not in circumstances of their own choosing’.

He was a bit less straightforward about how his party is planning to make history. It’s certainly not in a manner of which Marx would have approved, or maybe even Charles Kennedy for all we know. Hiking up VAT to make the poor pay more; cutting housing benefit for long-term claimants by 10% by 2013; forcing single mothers with five year old children to work; obliging 2.4 million people on disability benefit to be reassessed; cutting £11 billion from benefits… You know the rest.

It’s all out class war of the rich against the poor and working class with the express aim of transferring billions of pounds to the institutions which caused the deficit in the first place. The Con Dems have all sort of other options available such as restoring the level of taxation on company profits and people earning over £100 000 a year to what it was in Thatcher’s time.

If Lib Dems are to be believed, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t, they have seen an increase in membership since the election.

The news of significant growth in party membership and party coffers is very interesting and rather off-sets the Labour narrative (enthusiastically promoted by the BBC and the Guardian as the conference began) that the Lib Dems face a choice of electoral oblivion or absorption into the Conservatives.

Here’s hoping it won’t last. They attracted a lot of votes from people who saw them as an anti-Tory alternative to Labour. After the spending review has been announced and the Con Dems’ project for destroying the post 1945 settlement becomes obvious to tens of millions of people there will be no political space for Thatcherism with a liberal face. And it’s pretty unlikely we’ll ever see Simon Hughes at a protest to defend jobs again.