News that Tim was taking over the Agriculture brief sent me back to his article in Liberal Democrat News last week. It was a campaigning piece - his aim is to make the liberal democrats "the party of choice for UK farmers". And that is a great idea as far as I am concerned. One of the things I have found annoying over the years is our failure to communicate to farmers just what our policies are. There is a hugely important trade press for the farmer sector and we have many ways to get into it.

But (telephone) canvass farmers in many areas and you will find they don't know where we stand on the big issues like CAP reform. This is partly because we don't have a very clear or informed stance on these issues (and I will come back to this on my Euro blog). The big problem is that we haven't been great communicators. Tim can change that.

Sadly, Tim got a few things wrong in that article though.

He kicked off with the bold assertion that "if you want to see hard evidence of the failure and unfairness of the free market, then you need look no further than rural Britain" (meaning farmers, in practice).

This isn't my sort of language, and the idea that farmers operate in a "free market" seems pretty suspect to me. According to DEFRA statistics (sorry, no link to this) all the key categories of farmers except dairy farmers received (on aggregate) EU subsidies that exceeded Family Farm Income in 2003/2004 (the most recent year I have to hand). The situation is rather different for pig and poultry farmers who essentially fall outside the CAP. But a classic farmer with fields and a tractor was surviving (nominally at least) thanks to public subsidy.

Dairy farmers seem exceptional in terms of subsidy income - but this is because the support mechanism for dairy was the quota system - a massive scheme to restrict output (and thus maintain prices) across the EU.

So I find the whole idea that farmers are in the free market a little odd.

The second point Tim got wrong came in his second paragraph where he wrote of "the conclusion of the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) that there had been price-fixing and collusion between major supermarkets and the big dairy companies and that this price-fixing had led to profiteering to the value of £270 million at the expense of consumers and farmers".

This is a myth gaining credence in all polticial parties. But in fact the supermarkets were fined for getting together to pay the farmers more. This is from the Times report:

J Sainsbury said it would pay a £26 million fine to the OFT, which it said would help bring the investigation to a conclusion.

"We are disappointed that we have been penalised for actions that were intended to help British farmers, but recognise the benefit of a speedy settlement with the OFT," Mr King said.

"The price initiatives in 2002 and 2003, which were widely and publicly reported at the time, were designed to help British dairy farmers at a time of considerable economic pressure and public debate about whether farmers were getting a fair price for their products," he added.

In a statement, Asda said: "Everyone at Asda regrets what happened, particularly as we are passionate about lowering prices. Our intention was to provide more money for dairy farmers, who were under severe financial pressure at the time."

There may be scope for demanding more from the supermarkets (and changing the law) because this is not normally the way they behave. It is a relatively easy policy to explain at least. But if we are really going to face up to the realities of the predicament of farmers, we are going to need a critique of the impact of the (old) CAP and an understanding of the structural problems facing some parts of the industry.

Production-based subsidies (all but gone in the UK) encouraged farmers to produce more and so guaranteed a supply to wholesalers. Their impact can perhaps best be see with sheep production. Sheep farmers increased the number of animals they kept (the subsidy was paid per ewe of breeding age) leading to an overall increase in the national flock of about 50% between accession and the end of the millenium. And prices responded just the way they do in economics textbooks. Arguably the result was overgrazing in large parts of upland Britain.

The current situation seems to be that farmers are responding to the change in the subidy by reducing the number of animals they keep. This might lead to increased prices in the medium-term, but in the short-term destocking also serves to depress prices. The moral is that intervening in markets can cause as many problems as it solves.

But I don't seek to argue that going back to the market will solve the problems faced by all farmers. Arable farmers seem to be doing well out of the freedoms provided by a decoupled CAP and rising world prices. UK Dairy farmers have failed to gain anything much from the movement on world prices.

And some upland sheep farmers now seem to be only slightly linked to the business of food production. The main function of those Herdwick sheep that moved the hearts of the nation during the big BSE crisis is to keep the Cumbrian mountains clear of scrub and trees and to appeal to tourists - their owners are often tenants of the National Trust. They are not part of free market agriculture at all. They are in the entertainment industry.

So, I've been tagged, and therefore must now reveal the contents of my desktop to the world. Upon realising this, my first thought was "hang on, what does my desktop look like?". I normally have so many windows open that catching sight of the desktop itself is a rare occurrence; normally only when the computer first boots up.

Having reacquainted myself with its contents, I should now point out that asking people who work in IT to show the world what's on their desktops is a very bad idea. Why? Because you get something like this:

(click the above image if you really must see the full-size version).

The explanation for the enormous desktop is that I have two monitors, one off to the left and one central. So, my 'main' desktop starts somewhere about 40% of the way in (1280 pixels in, to be precise). It's thoroughly boring, functional and, well, it's grey. No wonder I can't remember what it looks like. The contents basically consist of icons put there by applications obnoxious enough to not give me an option to avoid having the desktop icon, and a curious zip file entitled 'everything', which must have once been very important, to have merited being put on the desktop to gather dust rather than gathering dust somewhere less visible.

Now, I must tag other people:

1) My co-blogger Peter Welch
2) Rob Fenwick, who may outdo my geeky desktop
3) Will Howells, ditto
4) John Hemming, because we really need to know what MPs have on their desktops

Less than a day into the job, Nick Clegg is doubtless receiving plenty of advice, but he's unlikely to receive much better than this from James Graham:

In particular, Clegg needs to hit the road, catch a dose of initiativitis and take steps to ensure that even if the national media choose to ignore what he has to say, he is using every tool at his disposal to ensure that it comes across anyway.

But, as if to underline the scale of the challenge, the comments in reply to the post show that Nick is going to have to overcome considerable scepticism, even cynicism:

So out of the two white, westminster public school educated, right wing candidates, it was bosses' man, pro-privatisation, anti-union Clegg that won. At least big business and the rich will be happy and feel safe. - Nihon

Who knows, with a hung parliament they could swing the vote one way or the other and make a real difference. But if they are NL in pale orange ties, who's going to bother voting for them? - WillDuff

Now we have right wing Tory, centre-right Lib Dem and NuLab, and half the country are disenfranchised. This is a bad day for representative democracy for vast swathes of the population are unrepresented. I don't know where to turn. - Howie

Now, as a Lib Dem I obviously disagree with the sentiment of these commenters - that there's nothing much different between the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Conservatives. But this is a truism; if I did believe that, I wouldn't be posting here. The interesting question is "why do other people believe it?".

Some people probably just are cynics. They're happiest lambasting all sides and no amount of persuasion is going to make a difference. But the majority of people are not like that, and therefore we must accept that their view of the Lib Dems as "just another political party" is genuinely held. Nick Clegg's challenge is to overcome this.

What I'd like to see from Nick is some of the radicalism that was talked about during the leadership campaign. Nick can learn from Chris Huhne's boldness, and if he can ally that with his natural instinct for framing issues in human terms, he will be in possession of genuine political dynamite. And nothing less than dynamite will unseat the two-party consensus that dominates Britain today. I can only speak for myself, but I think that the core message of liberty is a powerful one and a radical one in today's political environment. If Nick can make people see how this will affect them, he can win new converts to the party and its cause. Can we explain to people that liberty isn't just an abstract idea, but something that will give them new power in their own lives?

Above all, Nick needs to demonstrate that there is something real behind all of this. We already have genuinely radical policies which the other parties would never emulate, but we need to make people believe it, in their guts as much as their heads. And, perhaps, we might need more such policies. I hate to talk about policy so much, simply because 'policy' bores most people, even the politically aware. But policies are nothing other than principles given expression, and people can only make sense of our message when our policies and principles are aligned. Perhaps we have to be bolder in all areas if we are to make this connection clear.

One of the most frustrating things about reading criticism of the Lib Dems for being too timid or too similar to the other parties is that I know how many people in the party are here precisely because it's the only place that will give them the space to explore radical ideas. The intellectual life of the party remains vibrant; bloggers like Joe Otten and Jock Coats have been exploring the policies and principles of the liberal tradition for a long time now. Yet on forums like Comment is Free, people still regularly accuse the Lib Dems of lacking vision, radicalism and distinctiveness.

Nick Clegg isn't going to find it easy. There are plenty of people who don't want to give him a fair hearing. He needs to deliver the goods, in presentation, policy and principles. Anything less than this will be a failure. But he's got a chance, and, despite the narrowness of the result, he has a party behind him which believes in those principles and is impatient to see them play a larger role in British political life. It's a chance, and he's got the best opportunity to take it that any liberal leader has had for 80 years.

So, the result of the Lib Dem leadership is to be announced shortly.

Since I haven't declared it yet, I ended up voting for Chris Huhne. But, in the final reckoning, I'm sure that both candidates are capable of doing the job that needs to be done. I could never get worked up in a partisan way about this campaign, simply because I can easily imagine either man leading us to success. The questions that interest me are not questions of the leader's personality. The situation of the Liberal Democrats as a party matters a lot more than the characteristics of the leader, especially when the choice is between two able, presentable and intelligent candidates.

Despite the occasional arguments about negative campaigning, there hasn't been a great sense of negativity about the election. Both Nick and Chris have talked about the need for ambition, and I suspect that they're going to have to work together to meet those ambitions. And, of course, the party will have to unite behind them.

It feels like a time of change now. Gordon Brown's government is growing increasingly discredited, and they have missed the opportunity to set themselves on a more liberal course, by continuing with ID cards and proposing an unnecessary extension of pre-charge detention. So, as we approach the changing of the seasons with Yule a few days away, we also approach a changing of the political season, with the New Labour era firmly drawing to a close. 2008 must be the year that the Liberal Democrats fight back, and put the liberal agenda squarely at the centre of British political life. To do that, we'll need to unite as a party, behind whoever emerges as leader later today.

A few weeks ago, the Liberal Conspiracy website launched, with a bold claim of representing the 'liberal left'. This provoked a less-than-enthusiastic response from those who felt that 'liberal' was not the right word. I meant to write this post while the question was a bit more topical, but now is as good a time as any: just what is the liberal left?

Any analysis of this problem tends to suffer from semantic confusion: there's little agreement over what 'left' really means in a political context, or even what 'liberal' means. So, if this question is to be answered meaningfully, we'll have to define the terms.

Liberalism is a broad concern with human liberty. It is a belief that individual decision-making is important and that, insofar as it is possible, people should be free to control their own lives. Liberals tend to believe that the only good reason for coercing a person - preventing them from taking a course of action - is to protect the rights of others. Liberalism rejects the notion that we need to be commanded from above by wiser, cleverer, richer, more powerful, more articulate or more organised groups; instead, liberalism favours free association and voluntary arrangements wherever possible.

'Left' is a broad political term which has changed in meaning over the period of its use. I think it's fair to characterise 'left-wing' as 'concerned about improving the conditions of those who are suffering most from the present arrangement of society'. Yes, that's a long-winded way of saying it, but it's better to be long-winded than to leave anything open to interpretation. So, a left-wing perspective on economic issues might involve concern about poverty, or the status of mistreated workers, or the effects of imbalances of power on those with the least power to control their own lives. Left-wingers are primarily concerned with promoting the interests of the weak.

So, what does 'liberal left' mean? They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I'll try to illustrate by use of a diagram:

Put simply, 'liberal left' is that area in which 'liberal' and 'left' overlap. (I apologise if this is a bit obvious; As I said earlier, there's so much confusion about this issue that it pays to be clear).

So, there are some policies and beliefs which are both liberal and left-wing, some which are liberal but not especially left-wing and some which are left-wing but not liberal. For example, a left-winger could advocate state control of the major national industries on the basis that this would (in theory) enable them to be run in the interests of all. A liberal would reject this idea on the basis that it would create monopolies, thus denying people choice and control, or that it would simply create a new concentration of power in the hands of politicians and lobbyists. Alternatively, a liberal might suggest drastic tax cuts in order to give people more control over how their money is spent, whilst a left-winger might reject this because it would, in the extreme, lead to greater inequalities; the poorest might not be able to afford healthcare if it was not tax-funded.

So, to call oneself 'liberal left' or 'left liberal' requires that you be willing to rule out ideas which fall outside of either liberalism or left-wing sympathies. It means that you can't support paternalist policies which take control away from people even if your intention is to help them, and it means that you can't advocate greater liberty if it only means greater liberty for the few. Jock Coats has an insightful post today about how liberal economic ideas must benefit everyone if they are to be popular; to me, this illustrates the issue perfectly. It is possible to achieve left-wing aims - a better deal for the poor and the powerless - without resorting to illiberalism and paternalism. The challenge for the liberal left is to demonstrate that there is a complete programme for government within the sphere of liberal left ideas.

So, this might be 'left-wing' politics, but not as we know it. The insistence on liberty as a guiding principle should win the support of those who want to see a more equitable society without wanting to surrender control over their own lives, and the insistence on a care for the interests of the weak - already an idea most liberals will instinctively subscribe to - will ensure that liberty is not just the freedom of the strong to exploit the weak.

Forging this kind of movement will not be easy. It's tempting to subscribe to the 'bloggertarian' viewpoint, and damn all government action as unjustified meddling. It's also tempting to propose that this particular government intervention is justified, even if it results in a loss of liberty. Both views are in tension with each other, and have to be balanced. Many of the discussions on Liberal Conspiracy so far have demonstrated that tension. But I don't think that liberalism and leftism are irreconcilable; now, more than ever, with both New Labour and the Conservatives occupying the centre-right, a progressive centre-left has a great opportunity. We need to promote liberty as a virtue and not a weakness, and explain how liberty can bring society together, not drive it apart.

Iain Dale sees it as too close to call. The overall figures (all those mentioning a candidate) were 56% for Clegg, 44% for Huhne. In principle it is a sizeable lead but not out of reach.

The complication is that many people have already voted. YouGov put the figure at about 50% - and calculate that Clegg has a 58% to 42% lead among those who have already cast their vote.

If this is correct it suggests that Clegg has a lead of around 5000 votes in the urns (assuming around 32000 people have voted). So to win, Huhne needs a lead of more than 5000 from those voters still to cast their votes. What makes it difficult is that
a) they won't all vote (turnout last time was 72% - there are probably only 16000 votes to be cast in the election
b) Clegg still leads among those who haven't cast their votes (by 54% to 46% if one excludes the don't knows).

So if you accept the poll as representative, Huhne now needs a massive vote from the last remaining voters - he would need more than two-thirds of the vote from this bunch of voters. This poll cannot be used as evidence that the result is in much doubt (and this is the way Sky now report it).

You can of course discount the poll completely. No one knows how representative the Liberal Democrat members in the YouGov database are. and the poll last time around was hugely innaccurate (leading questions may have contributed to this). I'm normally a critic of YouGov, and perfectly happy to join in.

But some of the details of this poll ring true. The turnout to date looks about right, and I believe both leadership campaigns have identified a higher Clegg score in votes cast already. And I see that Mike Smithson responded to it by putting as much money on Clegg as the bookies would accept.

I'm a Clegg supporter and will be happy enough if the poll is correct. Indeed I think we will have had a pretty good leadership campaign: an attractive new leader who will worry both Labour and Tory parties, a credible opponent who has raised his profile, and of course an absolute blinder from the interim leader. We haven't had the tabloid coverage we had last time around. But hey, you can't have everything...