We need to set aside the internal wrangling and boldly promote ourselves as a radical opposition which rejects the soggy centre and useless economic dogmae which are incapable of responding to the challenges of Sir Nicholas Stern.

This argument sometimes smacks of a quick fix for those who want to panic the membership.

I look at alot of blogs and I some of the comments here are echoed elsewhere. Labour bloggers don’t even seem to even slightly threatened by his “media skills” and after an initial panic at the start of the contest, the Tories seem to have calmed down – alot.

I certainly have problems with the way that PFIs have operated in the Health Service (for example) but is that a reason to reject them absolutely and everywhere?

PFI I oppose as a fundamentally illibearl corporatist monstrosity, but I don’t oppose completely the idea of, for example, some sort of voucher scheme. I just don’t think the country would be ready for it yet, let alone some of the party activists.

Huhne has done this, and has come to some conclusions.

My beef with Clegg is that though he has clearly looked at these issues he doesn’t seem willing to tell us his conclusions.

I would like to see him just SAY SOMETHING!

Sad that a liberal party is set against the market mechanisms liberalism is meant to champion.

Perhaps the party won’t accept it, but we need to look at it. We need to do something about our public services, the NHS is increasingly failing, education fails too many children and we intend to broadly keep the status quo.

Don’t confuse PFI with marketisation, it is not, marketisation is putting power in the consumer’s hands, in the individual’s hands, not some quango or government department.

Does anyone agree that it is perverse logic to back one man when secretly wanting another?

He has dropped hints about wanting to shake the party up, particularly with his comments about moving it out of its “comfort zone”, but when it comes to actually telling us what he means by this, he has said nothing. His speeches are full of platitudinous waffle, which just hasn’t backed up the continuous claim from his supporters that he’s someone incisive who will be able to open up new avenues of support for the party.

It is, in a sense, a measure of the respect we who oppose Nick have for him as a person (or at least for the person he has been presented as by his most enthusiastic backers – outside the party as well as in), that we suppose there must be more to him that what has met us so far in the leadership election, and that therefore there must be stuff he’s hiding until he gets in.

If it really is true that he has accepted the “balance of argument is tipping very decisively against the further marketisation of public services”, then many of his strongest supporters now look very, very foolish – since they have been slagging off the Huhne campaign from the start for being too “statist” and conventional and offering no radical break from the “social democratic ” consensus.

John, I see what you say as an admission of defeat for the Clegg camp. They are not offering anything radically different from Huhne, and it’s they who should be apologising for all their slagging off of Huhne who has quite rightly from the start accepted what you now say Clegg has accepted – that further marketisation is not the way to go.