I like a speech with a new idea or two in it. They are rare beasts, and I don't expect such a treat even when the politicians I most admire speak. Nick Clegg inched in that direction on Wednesday.

His theme was the corrosive impact of (Labour's) politics of fear on the prospects for a progressive politics in the UK. Clegg suggested that

it is a doomed strategy, and will prove especially fatal to what is left of the progressive promise of New Labour. The politics of fear will drive Governments in an ever more regressive, illiberal direction exactly at a time when progressive parties need to think beyond the paradigm of the traditional “big state”.

I agree with this, but don't think it counts as new thinking. Indeed it is familiar rhetoric. Few people follow through and puts some flesh on the idea. Clegg doesn't either, but he does say (and I am compressing the quote enormously)

Liberals...believe radical decentralization is indispensable to the creation of empowered citizens, to the dispersal and accountability of political power itself.

Yet there remains a challenge for Liberals to define devolution in a way which is politically compelling.

This at least faces up to the problem that it is not enough to make speeches about localism, nor indeed to make proposals for localism: it needs to respond to the issues about which people feel strongly. This might just be an impossible constraint (although I hope it isn't).

I think the implicit argument here is that decentralisation does not simply mean a bigger role for local government.

The most interesting passage - and again I don't think it tremendously original in itself - is this

disengagement from the political process does not equate to an indifference to political issues: the environment, the Iraq war, international development, animal testing and many other emotive issues now engage people from a range of backgrounds, and ages, in unprecedented numbers.

I do not intend to rehearse here the point made by many others – most forcefully by the Power Inquiry earlier this year – that political parties need to change, or die.

In the Liberal Democrats, the emphasis on improving and updating how our party works has been a theme which our leader, Ming Campbell, has rightly championed from the moment he was elected as leader.

How we formulate policy, how we bring people into the party, how we nurture greater diversity in our candidates, the methods we use to communicate with the electorate, the techniques we use to campaign at election time.

All must be strengthened and revamped if we are to thrive in an age where party political allegiances are looser and more fickle.

The inevitable tension which exists between the preferences and prejudices of party members – of all parties – and the growing pressure for politicians to reach out to the vast bulk of the electorate who do not identify consistently with any single party will, I think, increase rather than decrease.

Political parties which speak only to themselves will be given short shrift by an impatient, sceptical electorate intolerant of party political niceties.

It is anathema to many Liberal Democrats to say that we should question our policy heritage. But if we don't we certainly risk the fate of 'speaking only to ourselves'. So I hope Clegg will put this speech into practice.