Matthew Dancona

Clegg steps up

I spent the morning at the LSE, listening to Nick Clegg’s first big speech at Lib Dem leader and then participating in a panel on the issues he had raised. After a scrappy campaign, this was Clegg back to his formidable best. All comparisons with Blair’s Clause Four moment are flawed in one way or another, but this was certainly the moment when the new leader made clear to his party that he intends to take them on and to shake up some of their laziest preconceptions.

Try this for size:

The last ten years has shown that money isn’t everything. The big questions now are these: how do we make Britain a fairer place without raising the overall tax burden? How do we promote real social mobility without relying on the discredited politics of Big Government? In seeking to make Britain fairer, we need to stop just asking “how much”, and to start thinking hard about “how”.

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