Quote and Analogy for the day - Beans, Beef and Hypocrisy

Stumbled across on the Virtually Naked blog a view that sums up my general feeling about politics and the Lib Dems in Coalition. Being called charlatans, sell-outs, lacking a mandate, ignoring our values and such like is something we've rather got used to. Charlotte Henry sums it up nicely.

"It hasn’t been easy being a Liberal Democrat in recent months. Being told you sold out your principles, when nobody ever bothered to actually find out what they were in the first place, has become rather grating after nearly 13 months."

Well quite. I've got a slightly clumsy analogy that I'm now going to hector people with for the next few weeks, and it's this:

A can of baked beans [liberalism] says "Hello. My name is Heinz. I'm a tin of baked beans: would you like to eat me?". The response comes "Look! A tin of corned beef [social democracy]! Let's buy that and take it home."

Then comes the time to eat it "Wait a minute, this isn't corned beef, this is baked beans. This corned beef manufacturer has sold out on its processed meat credentials!"

Meanwhile the poor bedraggled tin of baked beans keeps pointing out that if you read the big and small-print on his label, it clearly says "baked beans". If we were in fact Tesco Value baked beans, you could perhaps have accused us of failing to adhere to our true baked bean principles. But telling us we're not corned beef is just bizarre. We know we're not corned beef. Why the hell did you think we were corned beef? We said we were baked beans! If you don't like baked beans, stop buying them, but we think if you take the time to taste us properly they'll grow on you.