Nick Clegg's first speech

Nick Clegg's first speech, and a chance for us to place him on the political spectrum. Not that Clegg would recognise it as a valid exercise, of course, since the Left-Right axis died out long ago in Liberal Democratonia (for the record, he believes that there are now two axes: progressive v conservative and liberals v "advocates of big-government solutions"), but let's do it anyway - and it looks as though there is slightly more to please the rightwardly inclined than the Left.

Appealing for Labour voters

- The Tories claim to care about poor families but their only spending commitment is still a tax cut for the richest people in the country. They still want to use the tax system to make moral judgments about whether people should get married or not. They are still devoted to school selection. They are still focused on escape routes for the lucky few, not real opportunities for the many. So much for social mobility.

- The state must intervene to allocate money on a fair basis.

- The state must intervene to guarantee equality of access in our schools and hospitals.

- We must end selection. Pupils and parents should pick schools, not the other way round. If new schools improve results only by selecting the cleverest pupils, one form of educational segregation will merely be replaced by another.

- I am totally committed to the National Health Service. It must always remain free at the point of use, accessible to all.

Appealing for Tory voters

- The past ten years has shown that money is not 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".

- Socialism believes that government knows best. Liberalism believes people know best.

- In place of nationalised industries we have nationalised education, nationalised health and nationalised welfare: run by inflexible, centralised monopolies. It adds up to the nationalisation of our whole lives.

- And the State must oversee core standards and entitlements.

- The first step is to scale back the vast monster of Whitehall. Whitehall should get out of the business of the day-to-day running of public services in Britain. That strategy doesn't work. We will draw up plans for radically shrinking the size of all our public service departments - to refocus them on setting broad objectives for the local agencies and people who deliver on the ground.

- It is time to call a fail, a fail.

- Everyone should have the right to receive private treatment, paid for by the NHS, if the waiting time is not met.

Appealing to nobody

- I want [the NHS] to become a People's Health Service.

Comments

[Margaret on the Guillotine]

Shhh! Stop giving this half-baked drivel the oxygen of publicity, and eventually it will sink back into its richly-deserved irrelevance.

[Mrs.Josephine Hyde-Hartley]

Hello there. Thank you very much for your concern about the NHS. If you want my opinion; the NHS already is the people's health service virtually.