You’re confusing civil liberty with common liberty.

We accept limits on absolute freedom within specific, targetted, conditional boundaries such as geographic or time limits (we accept prison sentences for example).

And we accept there are processes for deciding how this is done properly and democratically.

The Redruth curfew satisfies both of these criteria. So it may represent an undesirable precedent but it doesn’t institute any dangerous utopian doctrine and the community will quickly revert to effective normalcy.

“civil liberties is more totemic than ever before.”

Juilia Goldsworthy needs to be reminded of this.

If anything, there were gaps in our agenda which have required fuller development. Particularly in the economic brief, in which we have since built up a store of credit. I disagree therefore with critics who say Cable is changing our party policy, rather we are cementing our foundations as the competent and pragmatic party, able to cope with an economic situation which is becoming graver by the week.

1997 was a massive change as it caused a sudden maturing of our Parliamentary power base and changed our role to one with realistic medium-term hopes of national power. We’ve since consolidated this position and have gone about changing up to the next level: we’ve been on the side of the environmental angels since the beginning, but Iraq was a step-change, our economic competence is now a vital cog and our defence of civil liberties is more totemic than ever before.

Having a balanced approach (to regulation or taxation or whatever) is liberal and correct, but it does have the disadvantage of being cumbersome to explain in the heat of debate – especially when there always remains the possibility that a better balance can be found, that we can be more coherent and we can be more liberal.

Do you really not think it’s just a bit incoherent to have as your core principle a state that stands back and simply provides a regulatory framework – even for such traditional public service areas as health and education – and then to call for a state bank to be set up to bypass the financial markets?

Or to be calling one month for cuts in overall public spending and – literally – the next month to be calling for a big increase in overall public spending?

In fact I think the situation is almost the diametrical opposite of what you say – Vince Cable is changing the party’s economic policy almost on a weekly basis, but because he has such a plausible manner no one notices. Unfortunately the same is not true of Nick Clegg.

Your last para, Sesenco, makes my point about people equating “incoherent” with “disagreeable to me” all over again. Where is your evidence that the liberalism apparently recognised by name by the Times is incoherent? It doesn’t matter that, as Matthew puts it, they’re fair-weather friends. It matters that they’re using the word and recognising the concept.

Let’s be clear about the party’s role as Clegg and his puppet-masters in big business and the media see it. Our job is to hoover up a few protest votes that might otherwise go to nuisance parties (ie, the Greens or UKIP) and prop up a minority Tory government after the General Election. It’s obvious, isn’t it?

Our increased vote in 2005 came from left-wing opponents of the Iraq War and students objecting to increased tuition fees.

In order to build solid, long-term support, we need more than single issues. We have to have a distinctive philosophy and a coherent set of policies. But we don’t have either. And we’re not going to get one, not while we have a leader who wants to take the party to the right, and is preternaturally aversed to clarity.

As a discontent, I’ve consistently argued that 2005 was the most incoherent election campaign we’ve ever run – I’ve been arguing that pretty much since the middle of the 2005 election campaign (it was even more of a dog’s dinner where I was campaigning in Scotland). I would agree that we have more coherence now, but I largely credit the work done under Ming for that, although he wasn’t around long enough to get the credit. For every step forward Clegg has taken us, he has taken us backward in this respect – a fact which helps explain our stagnation in the polls.

Two issues struck me. The first where I disagree with Alix. Yes the media disdained Steel ( the spitting image puppet), Ashdown (Pants down, Action Man) and Kennedy ( Journo’s knew he was on the sauce even if the entire parliamentry party pleads innocence…) however they all in the end managed to trancend it and find a voice, a niche, a connection. So far Clegg has not and no one knows if he will.

However the real problem is that we offered up Ming as Danegeld and now they are back for more. Its just pavlovs dog really. We stood by Steel, Ashdown and for 6 years kennedy and in the end the media went away ( abit). After 18 months we gave them there blood sacrifice and now they want another.

Where I agree with you is not being too bothered about the gaffes but been really worried by the lack of stunts.

Imagine the following counter factual. Imagine we had voted against the banking bail out and pulled a Lisbon style stunt when the Grey Party’s wouldn’t allow us floor time for a proper debate.

Imagine if we had said “No, because x, y, and z isn’t in it”.

We went along with Camerons line that we couldn’t have happen here what happened in America. What did happen there ? The House voted down a bad package in accordance with popular opinion and the government came back with a much improved one.

How terrible.

The Times artcile is right in part. You can reposition all you want but we have to get noticed and that will involve more risk.

Do we really suppose our fair weather friends in the Times are going to be quite so supportive if and when the details of those rules and regulations and taxes on the rich and companies come out? I hardly think so, given that they scream blue murder at any attempt to tax the rich more or tie down complete freedom in the market.

The game here is to make Clegg appear to be a “tax the rich less, they’ll make more money and it’ll get to the rest somehow” man or a “anything goes, any regulation of the market is an attack on enterprise” man. So they can then give the impression that this is the way the world is going, all sensible people agree with them, look the Liberal Democrats have capitulated for example.

A lot of the Times leader was straw man stuff – I do not recognise the caricature of Liberal Democrats who were on the side of public service trade unions against the people raised here, nor the caricature of Liberal Democrat “activists” who hated the idea of freedom of choice and wanted state monopoly supply, which the Times and other media organisations promoting what is loosely the “right” in our party uses. The Times has no idea of how our party works, so falls back on sloppy assumptions based on supposing it’s like the left v. right squabbles in the Labour Party in the 1980s.

I didn’t see Clegg’s statement as a radical repositioning of our party to attack Labour from the right, as the Times is trying to paint it. It seemed to me to be a fairly routine and platitudinous statement of where we have always been. Labour’s endorsement of the unregulated economy which led to the current bust part of the boom and bust cycle placed it so far right that what’s the point of being even further right? There seems to be an idea that management of public services by target setting is somehow a sign of socialist urges, this is rot, it forgets that this sort of management was introduced by the Thatcher government as an attack on what she saw as nasty lefties doing their own thing at local level, and it was seen as a way of imposing private industry ways of running things onto public services. Labour’s continuation and strengthening of management of public services by target setting is more a sign of how far right it’s moved, than of a desire to be red-blooded socialists.

It helps those who really are right-wing friends of the rich to portray us as if we’re with them, but you can be sure they’ll drop us in favour of their true friends in the Conservative Party almost irrespective of what we do, when the election comes.

As I’ve already pointed out to you, I post the results of every poll I see, unless someone else gets there first.

And as I’ve also pointed out to you, so far from “ignoring the latest ICM poll” as you suggested, I posted the ICM figures on the appropriate thread.

So I really don’t understand what you’re trying to say. But if you do want to have another attempt, I suggest you post your comments in the “Polls” section, rather than posting further irrelevant material here.

(As an aside I saw a number of excellent Tory leaflets at Crewe and Nantwich which demonstrated how the pupils have long since passed the teachers…)

It’s at best a scorched earth policy that only really worked in 1997. It’s achievement is 63 MP’s; it’s disgrace, an AVERAGE of around 90 members per constituency.

Amazed Dr Hawking spends so much time researching into how black holes are created. There are people in Cowley Street who could tell him for free.

Amusingly, the egregious Lord Ashcroft is now playing the same game (I believe with the excellent S Gilbert!).

Depressingly, I suspect they will be more more successful than we were in 2001 and 2005. Less ‘groupthink’?

I think it is a bit simplistic as you rightly say; for example, I am not in favour of ‘tax cuts for all’ because i believe in progressive and redistributive taxation and to me that doesnt mean tax to just fund public spending but also allow where the tax burden actually falls to be redressed.

Thinking in that context Labour can be attacked from the left without calling for a substantial increase on their spending plans surely….

Why is that?

Then why on earth did you write “I guess you’ll be ignoring the latest ICM poll”? Even more bizarre than usual.

I had read that you noted the result, but I hadn’t noticed you were able to account for it.

Darrell:

In any case why does attacking from the left automatically equate to your mind with offering a program of substantially more public spending?? Is this really the only thing that can be done to ‘attack a party from the left’??

Well, since I like to separate the authoritarian/libertarian axis from the economic left/right axis, as has become widespread practice by many when locating people and parties on a political map, then yes, broadly, left = the state should tax and spend more, right = the state should tax and spend less. I know it’s simplistic, but it’ll do for this conversation about Clegg’s broad positioning, and it’s the sense which the Times meant, I would think.

Give me some terms and difinitions you would rather I use, and I will endeavour to describe my position on your terms.

…

But not tonight, I’m off to bed.

I know you didnt….I did, i just dont think tacking to the right of the Tories and becoming a party of ‘automatic spending cuts’ which The Times thinks we already are is going to woo many ex-Labour voters in those target seats is it…

No – I’ve already posted the details in the “polls” section.

You seem to have elevated the concept of not having the faintest idea of what you’re talking about almost to an artform.