It’s worth reading the whole thing: 32 pages of crisp, clear images to explain how the American armed forces will discharge soldiers, regardless of their service record, for a completely unfair reason.

(minor spoilers follow below)

The play is an epic story, spanning multiple generations from the 1960s to the present day as the protagonists fight against discrimination and prejudice. In one scene, Margaret Thatcher appears, and I found it hard to resist the temptation to boo, panto-style, as she explained to one of her ministers why the AIDS education campaign wasn’t a priority for her (“it’s pronounced ‘vagina’”).

The whole play is very political and a stark reminder of the bruising battles that the gay community has had to fight to get closer to acceptance and equality.

More importantly, it crystallised for me the reasons why, despite all the huffing and puffing during the recent election campaign, the Tories can never be the party of gay rights. David Cameron can appear on the cover of Attitude, send messages of support to Pride events and give an awkward interview about gay issues: it doesn’t change the fact that the Tories only started favouring gay rights now that it is fashionable. When it really mattered, they were united in pushing an agenda of hate and discrimination to please their middle England base. When police were storming into gay bars and arresting the patrons, where were the Tories? When AIDS was ravaging the community, where were the Tories? When the Sun was running headline after headline screaming about Poofs and Queers and Perverts, where were the Tories? I’ll tell you where they were: holed up in the Cabinet, drafting section 28. It’s going to take a lot more than a few weasel words from Cameron to undo that.

The Labour party can be criticised in many areas, but surely one of its greatest achievements is the massive advancement in gay rights which has happened since 1997. For that, we should all be grateful.

Please bear in mind that I don’t like the Conservatives and I believe that David Cameron is wrong on many issues. Some of the Tory policies (repealing the ban on fox-hunting, for example) are downright awful. That said, I’m not a big fan of the current Labour party either, largely thanks to their relentless attack on our civil liberties.

The ideal situation right now would have been a landslide victory for the Liberal Democrats, with Nick Clegg ensconced in 10 Downing Street ready to lead Britain into a new Golden Age (THAT WOULD REALLY HAVE HAPPENED). A Hung Parliament (most disappointing porn movie ever) means that unpalatable solutions have to be considered, and I believe that a Con-Lib coalition is the best option for now. DON’T HATE ME!

The main reason is simple mathematics: whichever way you look at it, the Conservatives won the most votes and the most seats. Labour were second and the Lib Dems a distant third. A Lib-Lab pact would essentially be the two losing parties ganging up to stop the first place party from forming a Government. Excellent for the soon to be Brown-less Labour party, but not really brilliant for democracy, and it may result in voters deciding to punish Labour and the Lib Dems by voting Tory next time. Given that a new election can’t be too far off, and David Cameron was reportedly short of a majority by just 16,000 votes this time round, that can’t be good.

I’m not naive, I believe that whichever alliance is eventually forged, it can never be more than a marriage of convenience and will not last very long before one of the parties pulls out the rug from under the other. Still, we may get some long-overdue electoral reform out of it. Nick Clegg and his team have a big choice to make, and none of the options are particularly wonderful. It’s good this politics lark, isn’t it?!

If, like me, you’re still confused, the Telegraph has helpfully set out where the policies of the three parties overlap.

As I write this, we are looking at a hung parliament and everything is still very much up in the air as the various parties attempt to form a coalition.

The big disappointment from last night was of course the Liberal Democrats, who only increased their vote share by 1% compared to 2005. They failed to make any significant gains, and their comedy candidate, Lembit Opik, lost his seat. There will be a lot of analysis of what happened. I think that the third debate and the final week of campaigning didn’t go too well for the Lib Dems and caused them to lose the momentum. I also think that a lot of floating voters decided to back one of the big two at the last minute, possibly due to tabloid scaremongering about the consequences a hung Parliament.

David Cameron cannot possibly claim that this is a roaring success for him, after failing to win a majority against a deeply unpopular Labour government. His campaign has not been particularly brilliant and his “big society” idea seemed to scare everyone who managed to understand it.

If you went to bed and missed the excitement, don’t worry: I have a sneaking suspicion we’ll be having another election before too long.

I am off to see Canary at the Liverpool Playhouse tonight, but will hopefully be back home in time to see the results pour in. I will be twittering away throughout the night (or at least until I fall asleep).

My own prediction? I’d love to see Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats win, of course, but it looks like the Conservatives will get the most seats. However, will it be enough to get an overall majority, or are we looking at a hung Parliament with all the apocalyptic doom that brings (according to the Daily Mail, anyway)?

There is real excitement here. Will there be a Portillo moment? Will Brown try to cling on and form a coalition? Will any of the small fringe parties have success? Anyone who says politics is boring is WRONG.

(picture above shamelessly pinched from the Guardian election live blog.

I sent my postal vote on Friday morning, the ballot paper enthusiastically marked for the Liberal Democrats. In the remainder of this post, I am going to set out the reasons why they have earned my vote and also why Labour should not win another term.

Let’s be clear: I was a Lib Dem voter before Cleggmania made it cool. I have voted for them in every election since I was eligible to vote. It wasn’t a protest vote: I genuinely believed, as I do now, that the party’s policies were closest to my own views.

This time, however, I have taken things a step further: I actually made a donation to the party for the first time. I put up a sign in my window, and you may have noticed the subtle banner at the top of my home page and the twibbon on my Twitter feed.

I wanted to do something more useful than simply voting, especially since I am in the safe Labour seat of Liverpool Riverside where, according to the Voter Power Index, my vote is worth 14 times less than the UK average. Labour’s Louise Ellman will almost certainly be heading back to the House of Commons to “represent” me, but I can still say I helped the Liberal Democrat cause, in some small way.

I should, according to logic, be a Labour voter. I come from a working class family, I grew up in a relatively poor area. I was over the moon when they swept to power in 1997 and wasn’t too unhappy when they more or less maintained their huge majority in 2001. I am also fully conscious of the progress that the country has made since 1997: the national minimum wage, welfare reform, great improvements in health care, comprehensive gay rights laws, to name but a few. Significantly, many of these steps forward appear to changed attitudes generally: in contrast to the old Tories of the 1980s, David Cameron is keen to portray himself as a supporter of the NHS and gay rights (not always successfully).

So, Labour have much to be proud of after 13 years of government. However, in recent years the wheels have started falling off dramatically. The Iraq war remains a particular sore point for me. David Miliband recently told the Guardian: ‘You’ve punished us enough about Iraq’ — on the contrary, I don’t think they’ve been punished nearly enough for leading the country into a dangerous, borderline illegal war against a regime which did not possess the weapons of mass destruction we were told they had. The Liberal Democrats opposed the war, leading Tony Blair to declare that they were “united in opportunism and error”. I think history has proved who was ultimately right.

Draconian anti-terror legislation has been introduced, leading to craziness such as photographers being arrested for taking perfectly innocent pictures.

The unpleasant ID card scheme is slowly being rolled out. It would, if Labour remain in power, eventually become mandatory, meaning every British citizen would be forced to spend money for the privilege of having their name and biometric details on a hugely expensive national computer for no readily-apparent benefit.

Civil liberties, as far as I’m concerned, are not an option; not something that can be quietly dropped on the basis that “if you’re not doing anything wrong you’ve got nothing to worry about”. While Labour continues to be so cavalier about the subject, I cannot even think about voting for them. Compare and contrast to the Lib Dems who have an unequivocal commitment to civil liberties.

I had hoped that Gordon Brown would provide a much needed change of direction. Unfortunately, his time as Prime Minister seems to have been marked by a distinct lack of any direction at all. Increasingly, over the past year or so, the Government seemed to have no idea what it was doing. On a multitude of issues, from anti-social behaviour to drugs policy, the Government seemed to be making it up as it went along, based on what would look good on the front of the Daily Mail. This culminated in the Digital Economy Bill, a bad piece of law cynically forced through Parliament in its final week before dissolution.

The Lib Dems’ policies have been described as crazy, mainly by the Daily Mail and Murdoch press who have a vested interest in seeing David Cameron installed as Prime Minister. As I pointed out myself just the other day, many of their policies actually make a great deal of sense, even if they don’t easily translate into a positive Sun headline.

The Liberal Democrats are hindered by their perennial third place position and an electoral system which means that a big increase in vote share doesn’t necessarily translate into an equivalent increase in Commons seats. Electoral reform is the answer, but until that happens, it is important that as many Liberal Democrat MPs as possible are voted in on May 6th.

It makes very little difference to me, thanks to my living in one of the safest Labour seats in the country. But for those of you in marginal seats who are still worried about the consequences of voting Lib Dem, here are three of the biggest myths smashed. I strongly recommend you read the manifesto, if you haven’t done so already.

The Lib Dems will scrap the nuclear deterrent, leaving us less safe

They’ve not actually said they would get rid of Britain’s nuclear deterrent, merely hold a review into the replacement of Trident to see if a cheaper alternative is available. They’ve also stated that nuclear disarmament would be multilateral (i.e. as part of an agreement with other countries). Trident was designed during the Cold War — do we really still need to be pointing so many weapons at Russia?

They are going to have an amnesty for illegal immigrants

They are here, living and working in the shadows, often under the control of illegal gangs. An amnesty (which would be a one-off event, offered only to the English-speaking and law-abiding) offers illegal workers the chance to come out into the open without fear. They can then contribute to British society, work and pay taxes into the system — in other words, the exact opposite of the “spongers” that you read about in the Daily Express.

They will sell us out to Europe!

I hate to break this to you, but the British Empire no longer exists. Most of our trade these days is with the European Union member countries, which is why Britain needs to be an active participant in the EU and have a strong voice, not least so it can campaign for some much-needed reform. As for joining the Euro, the manifesto clearly states: when the time is right and only if the British people vote for it in a referendum.

Let’s not forget some of the other things they do want to do: scrap ID cards, scale back Labour’s surveillance state, repeal the Digital Economy Bill, encourage reopening of closed rail lines.

On many issues, the Liberal Democrats seem to be proposing to do what is right, rather than what is popular. That may well turn out to be politically inconvenient come polling day, but at least they will score a moral victory (note: under British electoral law, moral victories do not count for anything).

There was an even better image from the day, though, and it was the reaction of Gillian Duffy when she was told what the Prime Minister had said about her behind her back:

Is Gillian Duffy a bigot? On balance, no. She was expressing concerns a lot of people have about immigration. I don’t agree with her, but the correct way to engage with people on the subject is through rational, reasoned debate, not name-calling.

Should Gordon Brown be vilified the way he has for a thoughtless comment uttered in the heat of the moment? No. Has the press reaction been predictably over the top? Yes. Will this change the way people vote? Probably not as much as you think: a new poll says half of the electorate don’t think worse of Brown after the incident. (this poll was commissioned by the Sun but the result not published by them — fancy that!)

The third debate starts on the telly soon. I fully expect David Cameron to attempt a lame gag about the incident.

I now learn that political reporters from the Tory-backing papers were called in one by one to discuss how Team Cameron would deal with “Cleggmania” and to be offered Tory HQ’s favourite titbits about the Lib Dems – much of which appears in today’s papers.

The same post also confirms that the Telegraph’s front page splash (about Nick Clegg accepting donations into his personal bank account) is completely without substance — the LibDem leader did not pocket any cash for himself, he declared the donations to the Electoral Commission and he actually paid a further £700 of his own money out on top of this.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail did what it does best: taking quotes from an eight-year-old Guardian article completely out-of-context in a half-arsed attempt to question Clegg’s patriotism.

As the Guardian reports, there is widespread panic in the right-wing press at the prospect of the Liberal Democrats denying the Conservative party the win they supposedly “deserve”.

When people are asking questions like “could Murdoch lose Britain?” you can see why they’re worried.

Anti-authoritarianism and the protection of civil liberties is a key part of the Liberal Democrat manifesto. Just saying.