Right, basically, I don’t have time to read Nick Clegg’s rather long pamphlet “The Liberal Moment” before Conference. I defer to my colleagues.

What I’ve read (about a third of it now) looks like an attempt at that elusive “Lib Dem Narrative” – I’d be interested to know what Neil Stockley and Simon Goldie make of it. It’s been far too long since I took an interest in how the Lib Dems ‘sold’ themselves. The short version is: “People are realising that Labour’s means are wrong, bad, failing and dangerous. Liberalism offers them a way to get the progress they want but in an effective, working way.”

I quite like this – it’s how I’d do it (finding the common ground in ends, talk them into accepting your means), but I have my doubts that Labour voters blame anyone but the individual personalities in the Cabinet, rather than the ideas or principles behind the terrible policies we’re seeing. This is why they’re switching to the Conservatives who are presenting themselves as a tougher, leaner, more competent version of New Labour. Nick’s right to be as dismissive of this strategy, but it’s still what The People Want regardless.

When it comes to enthusing Lib Dems though, it seems to have done the trick – probably not something to be sniffed at just before a Conference. Let’s face it, it’s unlikely Nick would publish something that would make me leap with joy, but it does seem to show the gulf between us an Labour. More of this, please.

The question is (policy considerations aside) can you boil this narrative down to about 50 words? Is it something that most people, not just lib dems, will nod and agree with, or is the world view expressed too unrecognisable for most people? A narrative isn’t something you can just write – it has to be believable, understandable and feel ‘real’.

Annoyingly, as I thought this morning, there is some good stuff in there hidden in all the rather off-putting language of ‘progressivism’ and Lib Dem friendly disclaimers and caveats, but there’s also some pretty strange stuff that I don’t really understand yet, which is why I’m frustrated not to have been able to analyse it in more depth.

Still, 92 pages on liberalism from Nick Clegg is probably worth a million pages from Gordon Brown on Courage. *snigger*

I wrote this having completely forgotten I used to hide the bar on my old blog. Add this to your template in the CSS section:

div.navbar {
opacity:0.0;
display:none;
}

That’s it.

James Graham has been making much noise proclaiming the end of Equi-distance thanks to a pamphlet written by Nick Clegg that’s been published by Demos. He might be right, but it doesn’t seem that way to me from what I’ve seen so far. Then again, I wasn’t able to listen in to the briefing given to us bloggers, so perhaps this is why I’ve not yet put it into the proper ‘context’ so to speak.

It’s the most overt appeal to disillusioned Labour voters I’ve yet seen – specifically those ‘New Labour’ voters that fell to the charms of Tony Blair, rather than the hardcore collectivists that consider loyalty to Labour a virtue in and of itself. It looks like part of a strategy, not *the* strategy. The talk of “progressivism” I blame, entirely, on Obama-mania – but I seriously doubt anyone but political anoraks talk about a ‘progressive future’ anyway. This is not aimed at the general public. It’s aimed squarely at Polly Toynbee and other left wing opinion formers.

Of course, I can mostly agree with stuff like this*:

As I will argue below, liberalism’s starting point is the fairer dispersal and distribution of power. From a fairer tax system to the protection of civil liberties, from the reform of our clapped out Westminster politics to the break up of monopolistic banks, from devolved public services to a new concept of green citizenship, from social radicalism in education to a more accountable and effective European Union, dispersing power more fairly and holding the powerful to account runs as a thread through all of my ownliberal beliefs.

… except for the bit about Green Citizenship as you can possibly guess. The only environmental issues that really concern me are those relating to polluting the water supply, polluting the air with chemicals that cause breathing problems, etc. You know, the quality of our environment.

But I’ve digressed. See, Nick’s biggest problem is the Green issue, for me. If you accept that action needs to be taken, then the only real way to achieve that is co-ordinated international action, because we all know that anything we do is pure token gesture for the benefit of sending ‘a message’ – crippling token gestures at that, too. The danger is that in demanding devolution of power with your right hand whilst centralising other powers – in fact much more important powers – with your left confuses everyone and makes people doubt you’re sincere about either.

Sadly for everyone, this pamphlet is 92 pages long without an executive summary so the odds of being able to read this properly are quite low. I certainly can’t do it before I head off to work.

So far I’ve not been able to find the bit where he rules out propping up the Conservatives (as claimed by James), but I have found a bit where he says he refuses to ‘even contemplate’ doing the same for Labour. In other words… nothing’s really changed there. We’re not going to prop up either.

Hopefully more on this soon… if I can get time to read it. Where’s the executive summary for those of us not able to listen in to the briefing call? Think of the churnalists! Please, won’t someone think of the churnalists?!

*With the caveat that this is clearly in language not aimed at me. If you actually look at the principles expressed then yes, I can see some seeds of common ground.

Oh dear. Well, it had to happen sooner or later. I know people hate it when blogs get redesigned, so I’ve done my best to make sure it’s not too drastic – everything’s still in the same place and It’s mostly recognisable as the same site.

The old design for this blog was looking tired. The colours were washed out and bland and didn’t really say anything. I also had concerns about contrast and readability especially for things like…

…. quotes, which used to be practically unreadable

Any problems or difficulties please let me know.

Been a while since I’ve done an afternoon quickie, but I wanted to draw a tiny bit more attention to this post over on Heresy Corner:

Three trillion. I don’t know what that is. Technically, of course, I know what it is: it’s three followed by twelve zeroes. I just don’t know what it looks like. If for every pound this government has wasted you scooped out a teaspoonful of earth, the resulting hole (by my very approximate calculation) would be about 15 million cubic metres. That’s big enough to swallow the Great Pyramid six times. Thanks a lot, Gordon.

The full post is here and sums up perfectly the state of helpless panic we seem to inevitably feel when we start looking at the actual numbers.