I agree the message on public service reform is a fuzzy mix of devolving power to local councils, devolving power to directly elected boards and empowering individual citizens.

Geoffrey, it seems to me it’s not so much New Labour as the British public that wants ‘EU standard public services with US levels of taxation’. Voters tend to prefer tax cuts and spending increases to the opposite, at least until they wake up to the consequences of huge budget deficits, at which point they turn fire on the politicians for that.

Not that I primarily blame voters – politicians are all too eager to give the impression that they bestow gifts on the people and don’t have the guts to confront voters with the costs attached.

In any event, New Labour have delivered neither. We certainly don’t have anything like US levels of taxation – in fact our tax burden is around the EU average and higher than Germany’s (at least before the recent slump in revenues), but nor do we have public services of the standard of those in many EU countries.

It’s also notable that those European countries which have some of the best public services (France for healthcare; Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands for schools) have a more pluralistic, devolved and often competitive model than our state monopolies.

Funding and structure are both important, but given the very tight budgets that are likely over the next decade, there clearly needs to be a relentless focus on why similar levels of funding (and often similar socio-economic factors) deliver dramatically different results, and how to raise standards to the level of the best in a way that will not create all sorts of perverse incentives like central target-setting.

Finally, I’m still not clear what the party’s latest position on local income tax is. But if we are proposing to keep that policy, and keep Labour’s 50% top income tax rate, we will be pushing marginal tax rates to nearly 60% (50p plus 2p NI plus say local income tax), which would be just about the highest level in the developed world.

I remember when we had our old 50p top income tax rate, the proposal was to cap local income tax so total marginal rates (including NI and income tax) did not exceed 50% – is that still the idea?

Scrapping tuition fees is unrealistic and will almost certainly leave universities short of the funds needed to invest in first-class teaching and research. Even without the fiscal crisis it would be a wasteful use of scarce education resources, which would be better targeted at early years schooling.

Meanwhile the populist mansion tax adds complexity to our over-complex tax system and is likely to be administratively cumbersome for the small amount of money it raises. Extending our proposals for land value tax to cover residential as well as business property would be much better, or even as a second-best simply adding a couple of higher bands in the council tax schedule or (more radically) charging capital gains tax on primary residences. As a switch from taxing income to taxing wealth, there is some merit in the mansion tax, but it is an inelegant, clumsy and timid

If we get the timing right on the key policy announcements, combined with the new coverage we’ll get through the leadership debates – I believe that we will have a very successful election campaign.