On a more serious point I agreed with a lot of what you wrote and, if I thought people would be interested, could spend an afternoon writing a response.

A few thoughts though. Firstly, it has been the desire of the Liberals/Liberal Democrats to have power for generations. Wouldn’t all our other post-war leaders have done as badly as Mr Clegg? My guess is probably not. His roots in the party and understanding of the party seem rather shallow. I don’t really think you could say that about anyone else. Secondly, you state the Liberal Democrats should think about what they are going to do in their wilderness years. There is another scenario for 2015 namely another hung parliament followed by another coalition. If there is another coalition with the Conservative Party many on the centre-left will just resign pushing the party further to the right.

As for EMA, while I accept it was on the placards as well, the focus of the protests was on the votes on tuition fees – EMA was simply not given the same priority. It was an asterisk when it should have been the focus.

I’m not singling out the protest movement here by the way. Labour, the unions and the left wing media were all complicit. Fundamentally, the biggest problem with the left is what it has always been: a preference for infighting over coordination. Contrast that with the flagrant bed hopping of the right, with think tanks, astroturfers and major donors all succeeding in coordinating activity within the Tories, UKIP and, yes, the Lib Dems.

Labour deludes itself it is the movement, is fixated on triangulation and to the limited extent it embraces pluralism at all it is only in the context of persuading everyone else to agree with them. The unions are only interested in shoring up their own rapidly declining and irrelevant power base. The protest movement too shows little interest in engaging with the rest of the left either.

The proverbial Martian visiting Earth would assume that Gramsci was a rightwinger looking at who seems to have learned his lessons.

When we launched the Social Liberal Forum I naively agreed with you that the party was big enough to contain both identities – and said so on numerous occasions. Despite that, we were regularly attacked by Orange Bookers and told to leave the party, not least of all by Richard Reeves himself whose attacks resulted in him being appointed head of strategy by Clegg himself – an implicit endorsement of that position. Well, you got your wish in my respect at least. But it hasn’t actually resulted in any polling success.

Economic liberalism is endorsed by a substantial proportion of the Conservatives and a significant wing of the Labour Party. Those battles will continue to rage within those parties. Meanwhile, the debate within the Lib Dems for the next decade will be far more existential. If the party can’t agree on an economic policy it is dead. It’s that simple.

Finally, it is a simple fact that social liberals outnumber economic liberals by at least 2 to 1. It seems to me that staying in the party and stopping the party from simply resolving its identity will achieve nothing to help the other aspects of liberalism which you espouse. You’re better off fighting that corner inside another party than damaging the cause of liberalism within the Lib Dems by making it harder to settle on an economic identity. That’s up to you though.

No hope of a return for “king over the water” Chatshow Charlie, then? Certainly a lot less “damaged goods” than Clegg and his fellow-travellers, not least from an ideological perspective, and a fondness for the electric soup never hurt Winston Churchill or Harold Wilson (or even That Woman) while in office.

Few quick words about the disproportionate numbers on the student demos compared to other issues. Firstly, the 2010 marches were all not just about tuition fees but also EMA, and a lot of the people out were EMA recipients and even younger students who were fighting for their EMA. Similarly, the uni occupations focused on this.

Secondly, there were actually some NHS actions which were comparable in size with the student ones, but didn’t get any media attention whatsoever. (I wrote up one where we blocked a road, ran round London and had guns pointed at us http://stavvers.wordpress.com/2012/03/18/the-nhs-demo-and-the-failure-to-report/). Similarly, disability benefit claimants have been regularly chaining themselves up in roads in protest against cuts (though in smaller numbers, which has been a general trend with any of the welfare protests as the day-to-day issues means it’s much harder for the people to mobilise for demos). Again this hasn’t been reported.

While I can only speculate as to the lack of media profile associated with all this action going on, I suspect it’s a combination of two things: (1) the tuition fees issue was a really good thing for a predominantly Tory-supporting media (and betrayed Lib Dem supporting media) to have a pop at the Lib Dems and (2) more importantly, there wasn’t any “violence” to hang a story off, which bored the media, because they love a good OH MY GOD THEY’RE BREAKING WINDOWS FEAR FOR YOUR PROPERTY story.

So yeah, there’s been a lot going on, but a lot of people aren’t hearing about it.