In this excellent post, James Graham implores the Lib Dem leadership candidates to get down to basic principles. In the post, he reinforces the view that there is, at heart, a fundamental difference between Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg's aims:

Huhne’s manifesto contains two core elements that he should push home as much as possible over the next few weeks. The first is the People’s Veto - a brilliant populist move which happens to also be a democratic one. The second is his defence of equality. The latter guarantees that the likes of Andy Mayer and Tristan Mills won’t vote for him, but it marks him out as a centre left politician and contrasts with Clegg’s emphasis on meritocracy. It is an issue of principle that he can stand or fall on. For me - and others - it makes Clegg’s exhortation of liberalism sound hollow.

The gist of this argument is that Huhne places a greater emphasis on creating a society where there is more 'equality', whereas Clegg is implicitly opposed to this view, based on his championing of 'meritocracy'. What you take this to mean will largely depend upon your own assumptions. Some of you will read 'equality' as 'punitive taxation, levelling down, stifling of aspiration', whereas others will read it as 'protection of the poor, restraint of runaway greed and power, challenge to entrenched privilege'. Some of you will read 'meritocracy' as 'devil take the hindmost' and others will read it as 'opportunity to succeed according to one's talents and efforts'. Personally, I doubt that Chris Huhne favours a socialist society where success is to be looked upon with distrust and envy, and I also doubt that Nick Clegg wants to lock the poor into poverty on the basis that they deserve to be poor, but in leadership campaign situations even minor differences of opinion can appear to be inflated to these proportions.

Charlotte Gore takes Huhne to task over his focus on equality:

Is it ‘Left or Right’? It’s Left, there’s no doubt in my mind - certainly it’s way to the left of the mainstream these days. He has committed himself to Equality itself, essentially the nearest a Lib Dem will ever come to declaring himself on the ’socialist’ wing of the party.

Is it ‘liberal’? He uses the word but for me this is continuation of the ‘liberalism’ that has defined the Liberal Democrats certainly as long as I can remember. It is the same mish-mash of liberalism and socialism that has everyone scratching their heads and asking us to make up our minds about what we believe in.

I think that Charlotte is right, and that 'equality' is too vague an aim. As liberals, there are certainly some kinds of equality that we stand for unequivocally: equal treatment by the law, equal votes, equal rights, equal access to public services and with our commitments to education and fair taxation, we stand for equality of opportunity too. In my view, to go beyond this is to go further than we need to.

The problem is that I'm not sure that Huhne is really proposing this. Nobody is proposing absolute equality, a situation in which everyone is guaranteed equal wealth, equal income etc. It's politically, practically, morally, intellectually and in almost every other sense absurd. In fact, I think it's possible that Huhne is using 'equality' as shorthand, to demonstrate an awareness of the fact that some problematic inequalities exist in society today. 'Equality' is his catch-all term which covers such issues as equal votes (votes are not equal in a FPTP system), equality of opportunity (something which needs to be improved) and material inequality between the richest and poorest.

For me, Huhne's problem in communication here is that he is using technical language which conveys moral meanings to some people. When he says 'equality', it triggers reactions in his audience. Some reactions are favourable, others are not - as I outlined at the start of this post. But 'equality' (or, more accurately, inequality) can also be an objective fact. We can measure the inequality between rich and poor based on their incomes or their assets. And if we observe that this inequality is increasing, we might infer that something needs to be done about this (or that something which is presently being done needs to be stopped or done differently). In saying that he wants to 'promote equality', Huhne might be saying nothing more than that it is necessary to tackle a range of inequalities (I mentioned unequal votes already), and is certainly not implying anything much stronger than that. If he's merely saying that, by failing the poorest, we have allowed some people to slip too far behind, then I can agree with him. If he's suggesting that we should merely redistribute from the wealthy to the poor, without addressing the causes of the increase in inequality, then I can't support him.

Let's look at what he actually said on the issue of inequality of pay, in his manifesto:

It is not enough to speak of equality of opportunity, aspiration and level playing fields. If 'meritocracy' means that individuals will receive the rewards their abilities and work deserve, it produces a very unattractive society in which complacently successful people constantly look down on their less able fellow citizens, whom they firmly believe to deserve less. We need more than that. In R.H.Tawney's phrase, we need both an equal start and an open road. It is right that people should have the opportunity to climb up the ladder, which is why, for example, we should continue to support the idea of that education should be free up to and including first degree level. We should celebrate success and energy. But no one should ever lose their entitlement to self-respect or to sufficient income, wealth and health to function as a citizen simply because they have fallen off that ladder.

This is a problematic paragraph for me. The attack on meritocracy seems to me to be ill-founded and ill-judged. I think that it is only right that people should receive rewards for their abilities and work and I don't see anything unattractive about that. His closing sentence is also confusing; I do believe that everyone has an entitlement to a role in society, but I don't believe that the state can adequately guarantee 'self-respect'. He makes no mention of personal responsibility here, and that seems to suggest that, in his view, anyone who is poor or who 'falls off the ladder' does so because they have been failed by the state or society. This is, unfortunately, not always the case. Self-respect comes from finding a useful purpose for one's own life, and that is not something that can be granted by the state.

On high rates of pay, Huhne is actually much more sensible:

Part of the problem of inequality comes from the sheer lack of shame of so many of those who award themselves extraordinarily high salaries. There is everything right with top rewards for risk, effort and hard work. But the ratcheting-up of pay for corporate bureaucrats is a different matter. Thirty years ago, the average chief executive officer of a FTSE-100 company earned ten times more than the average shopfloor worker in that organisation. Now the figure is more like 77 times. As each company tries to pay more than the average, on the grounds that they need above average managers, the pay difference has soared. More publicity for very high salaries is essential, and shareholders should be asked to vote formally on corporate remuneration.

Whilst this actually reads as a stinging attack on 'extraordinary' rates of pay, in practice he proposes nothing more than social pressure - 'publicity' and shareholder votes - as a means of correcting it. Personally, I'm fine with that because I don't really regard such high rates of pay as being the fundamental problem. Or, put another way, I don't believe that the poor are being impoverished by the success of others. If my concern lies with helping the poor, then I should focus more on how best to improve their situation rather than how best to reduce the success of others. Huhne appears to agree.

In summary, he says:

But we need to think more about inequalities. We should be asking, for example, whether it makes any sense for a person on the minimum wage to be paying income tax, or whether a very rich person who inherits an estate should be liable to the same inheritance tax as a person with nothing who inherits the same estate. In an era in which it is all too easy to move income and wealth around, we must also revive thinking about land values as a source of fair tax revenue. If the public sector invests in infrastructure such as tube or tram lines, should it not be able to recoup some of the cost from the increased land value that flows from the investment? We are committed to rebasing the business rate on land values, but we should consider too land value taxation as a replacement for other personal taxes.

There's really nothing there that I can disagree with. I'm left feeling somewhat confused. Most of the practical measures that Huhne talks about - cuts in income tax for the poorest, land value taxation, social rather than interventionist measures to tackle 'too high' pay, a redoubling of the commitment to education - these are all things which I can, as an 'economic liberal' support wholeheartedly. It's not Huhne's policies that I disagree with, it's his rhetoric.