I’ve finally got around to watching Thursday night’s Question Time Lib Dem leadership hustings. Not much for me to add that hasn’t already been said by so many others. It was no knock out, but the clear consensus (which I agree with) is that Huhne won on points although Clegg recovered well in the second half. In the interests of balance though, I have to agree with Aaron Heath at Liberal Conspiracy: Huhne’s tie should be tried at the Hague for crimes against humanity.

I’m always being told that Huhne is boring and dry. He wasn’t on Thursday. He managed to combine passion and principle with clarity and intellect. Even at his best, Clegg only really scored highly on the first two.

I’m beginning to think that it may be TV that will do for Clegg. What’s clear is that while people like myself have been quick to point out that he’s a media star, it’s the newspapers - not the broadcasters - who are saying that. The Guardian has come out for him this weekend, but failed to come up with a good reason why. Apparently he is “fluent” - well, he hasn’t been fluent in either of his major TV tests so far, unless that fluency is in waffle.

Paradoxically, while the print media is more biased it can also be more forgiving of politicians’ shortcomings. Fluff a line in a newspaper interview and the journalist will always accept your second “take”. Fluff a line on live television on the other hand and it’s there for all to see. Steve Richards, newspaper journalist would never have exposed Nick Clegg in the way that Steve Richards, television interviewer did without even trying.

Clegg must surely realise this. Why then did he allow himself to get blindsided by Dimbleby’s interjection about an article he wrote during the last leadership election when he accused Huhne of opportunism. Surely there’s someone on his campaign team working on rebuttal? Like the tax fluff the week before, this should have been swatted away with ease.

Indeed, it is interesting to watch how Clegg dealt with Dimblebum: in short he didn’t. While Huhne was always quick to interject and get the last word (with those “sharp elbows” of his he was telling us about last week) and treated Dimblebum as a steam roller would a bicycle, Clegg kept listening to him, getting steered off course.

Daniel Finklestein is at least one print journalist for whom the penny is starting to drop:

Clegg is an intelligent and charming man, which is why journalists generally like him, but he seemed lightweight and uncomfortable last night. He hadn’t very good lines to take and his position on Trident (almost the only substantive thing he said) is incoherent.

This is serious stuff for Nick Clegg. Being “telegenic” has up until now been his biggest USP. It isn’t any more. He’d better manage to knock up something bloody spectacular on the Politics Show later today or his big mo will start to sink like a stone.

Incidentally, I notice that the Scott Press has started claiming that this election is a contest between a social democrat and a liberal. All I can say to that is that as someone who was arguing earlier this week for the party to put more emphasis on taxing income less and wealth more, and who is very conscious of the fact that the candidate closest to my own view on this is Chris Huhne, I was pleased to see the Guardian remind everyone this weekend that this position has at least one high profile exponent: J. S. Mill.

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My latest article on Comment is Free is now up:

Instead of doggedly trying to outpace property prices, imagine if the exchequer went the other way. And imagine if it used the extra revenue that resulted to cut income taxes. Wouldn’t it be fairer to allow people to keep more of the money that they earn in exchange for having less inheritance to look forward to? Wouldn’t that be better for the economy: lowering the costs of labour while doing more to capture unearned wealth? Shouldn’t at least one of the main political parties be championing such a position?

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I’m afraid my brief excitement that Nick Clegg was about to ditch local income tax proved to be groundless. As Valerie pointed out, he spelt the policy out on the Guardian website earlier this week. At least I think he did:

Mr Clegg added that he is committed to replacing council tax with a local income tax, but that he wants to cut council tax for low- and middle-income families by introducing a progressive tax on those living abroad (sic - is it me or are those two clauses contradictory?).

He plans to raise £1bn from non-domiciles to fund council tax cuts for millions of households. His proposals include taxing non-domiciled taxpayers at 10% on their overseas income, in a system similar to that used in the US.

I think the idea of a tax like this on non-doms is an interesting idea, but it isn’t a progressive tax, it’s a flat rate. Secondly, if he’s committed to scrapping local income tax, why this extra policy which will only add confusion to what many regard as an already complex set of proposals?

The argument seems to be that it will take a while to introduce local income tax and we should to this in the meantime. But it will take a while - pretty much the same while - to introduce a tax on non-doms. The argument against going straight from council tax to a form of land value tax has always been that it will “take a while”; indeed the party remains committed to a land value tax in the long term. So why not just do the switch in one fell swoop and leave local income tax out of it altogether?

Clegg’s proposals also seem to contradict one of the fundamental reasons why the Lib Dems are calling for council tax to be scrapped. If the rate that a family pays in council tax is so good at determining whether they are of low- or middle-income, why scrap it at all? I thought the Lib Dem argument was that it is a regressive system? The fact is that outside of Wales, Council Tax has not been evaluated since 1991. People selling houses often find the property leaps up two or more bands once the sale is completed. What Clegg is suggesting here is a system that will benefit an awful lot of people who are currently under-taxed.

These proposals contradict the Lib Dem commitment to increasing the amount that local authorities collect locally. What he’s suggesting is a national tax to subsidise a local tax - in short, that we should go the other way.

In short, this is a mess. The truth is, there’s actually very little you can do to offset a tax that will only raise £1bn that sounds impressive; raise personal allowance by a few quid? The temptation is always to focus on those small taxes that actually raise very little but which cause the public a disproportionate amount of upset - see Gideon Osborne seeking to slash inheritance tax for example. You could do a lot with it on the spending side, but we’re not supposed to do that these days.

Ultimately, this policy is a mess and the way Clegg has presented it is a mess and it is axiomatic of the sort of thing that is all too frequent in Lib Dem policy making: a policy bite which doesn’t accord with our broader strategic vision. I’m sorry if it is “purist” to suggest we need less rather than more of this sort of approach, but that’s my view.

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Discussing Clegg’s interview with David Mills of GMTV Sunday earlier, it occurred to us that the following quote has potentially enormous implications:

Nick Clegg: Er, yes, but I mean there are other ideas. For instance there are other ideas, I mean for instance I’ve also this week been floating ideas for how I think we should introduce a 10% tax on the non-domestic earnings of so-called ‘non-doms’. In that particular case that raises about £1 billion. I would like that to go to alleviate the burden of Council Tax on those in Band A and band B properties, those on the lower rung of the property ladder, if you like. But it’s just an example of where we can be creative in trying to find that extra money in order to fulfil that pledge, and I’m absolutely confident that we will under my leadership make that fixed pledge by the next general election.

Is this just idle blue skies thinking (which you surely must never do on a TV interview) or a hint that under Clegg the Local Income Tax policy is to be scrapped or at least adapted so that council tax will remain in the picture for the foreseeable future? Because you can’t alleviate the tax for low bands if you are going to scrap the tax altogether.

Is this an unintentional slip, revealing an agenda to move the party away from its existing LIT commitment? He was apparently quoted as saying nice things about site value rating earlier this week although I don’t have chapter and verse. Is a pattern emerging?

Speaking personally, such a shift would be fantastic: despite all the wobbles it could even win my vote (notwithstanding details, etc). Amongst many other party members though it would probably be about as popular as drinking a bucket of cold sick.

This isn’t an issue to be trifled with. If Clegg is thinking along these lines, mere hints will not be good enough. He would have to press it home. It would be a high risk strategy of exactly the kind that so many of us have been calling for him to adopt over the past few weeks.

Dare to do it Nick; you know you want to!

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Nick Clegg is going on the GMTV Sunday Programme this Sunday, following Chris Huhne’s appearance last weekend. I’ve been sent a transcript and, well… I kind of get what he’s doing but it’s just so woolly.

He’s very keen to push the Pupil Premiums idea, but worryingly he appears all over the place about how to pay for it:

Nick Clegg: £1.5 billion will come from taking above average families out of the tax credit system altogether. And we’ll take that £1.5 billion out of the tax credit system, or at least we’ll take families on above average income out of the tax credit system, use that money to give to the kids from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. That leaves a gap of a million… of a billion, sorry, and it would be one of the first things I would do as a leader to say to the party that we will have to find that extra billion, so that the total sum of £2.5 billion is a fixed pledge by the time we go to the country in the next general election.

Steve Richards: You’d accept that you’ve got a black hole there. You haven’t found where the money’s going to come from, the other billion.

Nick Clegg: Er, yes, but I mean there are other ideas. For instance there are other ideas, I mean for instance I’ve also this week been floating ideas for how I think we should introduce a 10% tax on the non-domestic earnings of so-called ‘non-doms’. In that particular case that raises about £1 billion. I would like that to go to alleviate the burden of Council Tax on those in Band A and band B properties, those on the lower rung of the property ladder, if you like. But it’s just an example of where we can be creative in trying to find that extra money in order to fulfil that pledge, and I’m absolutely confident that we will under my leadership make that fixed pledge by the next general election.

Steve Richards: By one way or another taxing the better off, presumably. Because it has to come from somewhere.

Nick Clegg: Yes, er well no, hang on, or, sorry…

Steve Richards: You said yes, so tax increase?

Nick Clegg: No, no, let me correct that. I think there is plenty of scope to cut back on some of the waste in government, some of the duplication in government. I think there is a strong case to look at how government expenditure’s been duplicated in many areas. Everybody is familiar with the general degree of waste in public expenditure in the last few years, so I have given you if you like a fluctuating answer precisely because I think that I’m not fixed in my own mind about where that money would come from, but absolutely confident that with political will that money will be found.

On the page it looks awful (much worse than using a word like “Gadarene”), although obviously it might not come across as quite so vacillating on screen. But surely Team Clegg should have got the answer to this basic softball question down pat by now? This is Clegg’s CENTRAL campaign policy. What have I been saying about clarity?

As Chris Huhne said in our bloggers’ interview on Tuesday, nice guys are all very well but if they don’t look like credible potential Prime Ministers, they’re ultimately a waste of time. A potential Prime Minister needs to look credible on economic matters. Clegg doesn’t here.

And while I’ve said nice things about his position on the environment in the past, I’m beginning to wonder if it is beginning to ring hollow:

Steve Richards: … Chris Huhne when he was here last week – you’re in a contest, and maybe in that context it’s understandable – but he was, how can I put it, critical of you for criticising him. In particular, well he was quite specific, he said that you had claimed that the party had not done enough on the environment, and he actually came up with endless statistics to show how much he had personally done on the environment. Was he right to pick up the fact that you were criticising him on this or wrong?

Nick Clegg: My feeling is that many party members in the Liberal Democrats are anxious about why it is that our leadership on policy, on setting out detailed policies about how we protect the environment, how we move to a zero carbon economy, doesn’t seem to be translated into real political leadership on this. Why is it that David Cameron appears to have stolen such a march without any substantive proposals on the environment? Why is it that the green agenda has been hijacked by this very superficial appeal from Cameron? I think that is a very serious political question. It’s certainly not directed personally at Chris. It’s an issue for the party as a whole…

Steve Richards: But he is the environment spokesman for your party, so…

Nick Clegg: Well hang on a minute. It’s a question for the party as a whole. Environmentalism is something integral to my philosophy. It’s something I’ve worked on for years. I’ve written books in the past about how you, for instance, change the world trade system to make sure that it actually boosts environmental protection rather than undermining it, and I think it is quite right for me as a prospective leader to say hang on a minute, we’ve got to make sure that Cameron doesn’t get away with blue murder – or blue-green murder – by pretending that he’s an environmentalist when he isn’t, and I think that what we need to do is be very careful that we don’t berate and hector people on the environment, but inspire and motivate them to make changes and make sure that they know that we are also placing a real obligation on businesses and on government – local and national government – to meet their side of the bargain, so it isn’t just people struggling in their own homes to change their lightbulbs, save more electricity, use less water, that also that we will give them answers as to why it is at the moment they then come home every afternoon with ten tons of plastic from the supermarket, or why is it that the local authority or central government gets away with not meeting their own carbon emission targets. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about – a new language on the environment which motivates, doesn’t berate – I think that’s exactly what our party should do.

It’s true that Cameron has made the environment a big issue over recent months. It’s also true that he’s been made to look a plonker with the chauffeur incident and hugging huskies nonsense. In recent months he’s also made it clear that he is distancing himself from the more deep green policies of Zac Goldsmith.

The wheels have already come off the Green Tory Bandwagon. I have to ask therefore why Team Clegg are so busy helpfully putting them back on again. Chris Huhne has produced polling evidence that suggests Cameron is not doing that well on this issue; what is Clegg’s response to that? Why is he not attacking Cameron’s empty pledges on the environment rather than using him as a stick to beat his opponent with?

No doubt Lib Dem Voice and others will have more about this interview.

UPDATE: The Guardian have picked up on this.

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I thought I’d give Huhne’s manifesto the same treatment that I gave Clegg’s speech last week.

Once again, I’ll give each main section marks out of five for how much the section is in the party’s comfort zone, how much it is reaching out beyond our traditional supporter base and how much I personally agree with it. I realise the first two are tests which Nick Clegg first set, but they are valid ones.

Changing the system, not just the Government

Huhne starts off by talking about the electoral system, a matter close to Liberal Democrats’ hearts but not neccesarily the wider public. To be fair, it is the first matter of substance that Clegg referred to in his speech last week as well.

Not much I can add here. Obviously I agree with the policy. I’m not sure this is how I would articulate it, particularly if I had one eye on the wider public. I would want to emphasise the importance of choice and competition, not simply fairness.

Comfort rating: PR, nuff said. 5/5
Reaching out rating: he doesn’t mention “PR” explicitly, at least. 2/5
Personal rating: just to be picky, I’d have phrased it differently and find “fairness” a bit woolly. 4/5

Giving back power to people and communities

This is a radical vision of decentralisation which I think both the party and the public like the sound of. When Lib Dems talk of localism, we mean it, and this is a particularly well articulated section.

Comfort rating: localism is an easy sell internally. 5/5
Reaching out rating: well trod turf, but it is a message which I think is resonating increasingly. 4/5
Personal rating: sounds good to me. 5/5

Fixed term parliaments

This section is actually about more than that. Rather, it is a summary of issues relating to Parliament. I think fixed term parliaments resonate more widely at the moment because of the phoney election debacle, but that is quickly fading. The stuff that is of wider interest I think is the stuff about gender balance in the Lords, not because it will set the world on fire but because I think it shows an interest in how the party looks, which is important.

Comfort rating: some might shuffle their feet about gender balance in the elected Lords. 3/5.
Reaching out rating: some stuff of interest, but mostly the public won’t care about this section. The gender balance stuff gets a point for its long term boost to the party’s image though. 3/5.
Personal rating: if this gender balance stuff is a combination of existing party practice (the “one third” rule), training and mentoring and pro-activity, then great. 4/5.

The people’s veto

Yay! A constitutional reform which is not only truly democratic but is likely to resonate with the average Sun reader. Personally, as readers may have gathered, I’d go further, but a veto system such as this would be a powerful tool and would ensure that all laws had the assent - passive or otherwise - of the people.

Huhne doesn’t mention treaties here (can you say “Lisbon”?), but surely he wouldn’t make them exempt?

Comfort rating: I suspect many people in the party may be uncomfortable about this, but this limited form of participatory democracy will probably win them round in the end. 3/5
Reaching out rating: The public would love this. 5/5
Personal rating: I’d go further, but this is great progress. 5/5

A Freedom Bill to give back liberties

A Freedom Bill? That sounds a bit like a Nick Clegg idea! And Clegg was right - it is indicative of quite how scared he is of his own shadow that he didn’t mention it in his launch.

Is it good politics? Well, it is a great way to communicate our values - symbolism with substance attached. On the other hand it risks having us presented as the middle class liberati. On balance though, I think the consistency would be its own reward and would find its own audience. Not everyone will agree, but significant numbers on both the left and right will.

Comfort rating: can’t see the party having an issue with it. 5/5
Reaching out rating: it will find its own audience. 3/5 (I nearly gave it a 4)
Personal rating: sounds great to me. 5/5

Stopping money politics

This section is all very well as far as it goes, but is a little light on detail. What, for example, does Huhne propose to do about party funding? In fairness to him, he was probably simply being responsible given the Hayden Phillips talks and was not in a position to write his manifesto on the basis that they would collapse the day before.

On corruption, this section is stronger. The Saudi issue is good politics for us and Vince Cable has played it very well this week (maybe we should keep him…).

Comfort rating: not many people vote for corruption. 5/5
Reaching out rating: doesn’t exactly set the world on fire, but there is at least sympathy for our position. 3/5
Personal rating: would want more detail on party funding, notwithstanding the practicalities. 3/5

Markets in public services, or local control?

This section is very interesting. In short it is an argument for localism and against marketisation of public services. In doing so, he actually goes further than I would, dismissing school vouchers for example which is a policy which I have some sympathy for.

He does at least articulate a clear case however. You can agree with him or not, but you can’t accuse him of mincing his words in the way that Clegg was doing last week. This is a line that Steve Webb would have no difficulty with and David Laws would hate, but at least it is a line. I’ve been arguing for consistency in our policy, and this is certainly consistent.

On the down side, is it an issue which will resonate with the public? I think they are for localism, but this section doesn’t address how we will deal with the inevitable complaints about “postcode lotteries” and the like. While the internal conflict is certainly over the extent to which economic liberalism and social liberalism should hold sway in the public services debate, I think the wider public have other priorities that this section does not address.

Comfort rating: it’s broadly existing party policy, but a lot of people will be uncomfortable about going down on one side to such an extent. 2/5
Reaching out rating: this isn’t the debate the public particularly cares about, but at least it is a clear policy. 2/5
Personal rating: I broadly go along with it, but I think there are different balances to strike in health and education policies. 4/5

Solving the housing crisis

This is one of the issues I took Clegg to task for not mentioning last week. I still maintain that you can’t be serious about addressing social mobility without saying something about housing. So, full marks to Huhne for addressing precisely that, and indirectly my other issue - intergenerational equity.

Once again, Huhne here gives us a well argued case for the limits and strengths of council housing. He isn’t being prescriptive here but shows a depth of knowledge. He sits on the fence here to a certain extent, but it is certainly true that it is largely an issue that should be decided locally.

I’m not sure he satisfactorily addresses how he intends us to build 3 million homes over 10 years. There is no easy answer of course (unless you propose bankrupting the state by insisting the government should build every last one of them), but a bit more detail here - and less detail on the public services section - would have been welcome.

Comfort zone: he doesn’t mention anything like building on greenbelt land. 5/5
Reaching out zone: to both the young and the working class, this is one of the biggest issues. He should have made it more central in my view, and linked it to other issues such as immigration, but the fact that he mentioned it at all puts him light years ahead of his opponent. 4/5
Personal rating: he doesn’t mention anything truly radical that might interest me such as contemplating some building on the greenbelt. 3/5

No to Trident

I’ve already banged on about this enough.

Comfort rating: plays well with a certain cleavage but seems to have already backfired to an extent. 3/5
Reaching out rating: I just don’t see many people joining the throng. 1/5
Personal rating: good policy, wrong politics. 3/5

Rebalancing our foreign policy

Again, Iraq War aside, I can’t help but think this will largely leave the average person in the street cold. We’ve acquired a good reputation with regards to foreign policy in the past, but most of the people who support us on this issue have already come over to us. There is some anti-American sentiment out there, but there’s more anti-European sentiment.

None of which is to say that there is much here I would take issue with, although I’m curious why it mentions the English-speaking Commonwealth and not just the Commonwealth; are there not ties there which if anything will grow in importance over the next few decades? He deserves points for bravery for even mentioning the Euro, and has a clear answer for why joining is an option but certainly not yet.

In terms of low politics, it is also interesting that he appears to position himself as broadly more Euro-sceptic than Clegg, who was rather fulsome in his praise for the EU.

Comfort rating: some feathers might be ruffled by being rude about the EU and mentioning the Euro, but nothing to get in a lather over. 4/5
Reaching out rating: very mild Euro-scepticism and anti-Americanism reaches out of a certain extent, but this won’t get them talking at the Dog and Duck. 2/5
Personal rating: broadly fine but uninspired. 4/5

Fairness: a core belief for social liberals

Here Huhne firmly nails his colours to the mast and outs himself as a social liberal. Good. We have a real contest now as Clegg is clearly on the economic wing.

There is a lot here I can’t imagine Clegg saying, based on his speech last week. If I had a rather larger ego than I do, I might even think that this section was tailor-made to get my attention:

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 truth, I suspect this section has rather more to do with Duncan Brack than it has to do with me.

For me, this is the most important section in the whole document. It is about our core beliefs and reclaiming equality at a time when so many Lib Dems seem keen to drop it as a priority altogether. It is clarity such as this section that recharges my political batteries and convinces me there is actually a point.

Comfort rating: actually, I think that much of this will cause the wider party difficulty. This is a debate we haven’t had in years and it is time we did so. 2/5
Reaching out rating: Will this resonate in the posh suburbs of Kensington? No. Will it resonate in the down-at-heel streets of Manchester where I cut my political teeth? Absolutely. 4/5
Personal rating: I need to hear this sort of thing from my leader, not bloodless exhortations for ‘meritocracy’. 5/5

Tall poppies and tall stories

I believe this is the section which opponents of Huhne may wish to caricature as ‘hammering the rich’. He doesn’t use that phrase, but if I have a criticism it is that he does very little to disabuse people of that notion.

There is an important issue to address in terms of company directors awarding themselves outrageous pay bonuses, but we need to be careful to avoid appearing to play the politics of jealousy. The language here could be more balanced and emollient.

That says, the underlying theme - that we should be concerned more about taxing wealth than incomes - is one of my pet hobby horses. Huhne is cagey about land value taxation but is warm about it in principle. In all honesty, that’s as good as I’m likely to get in this election.

Comfort rating: perhaps a little too much emphasis on bashing high earners. 4/5
Reaching out rating: we need to think about how we might sell this. The stuff about high earners will resonate with a few, but not enough. 2/5
Personal rating: as good as I’m going to get. 4/5

Talking straight on crime

An impeccably liberal approach, but not one that is likely to dispel any caricatures about woolly liberals sadly. It isn’t woolly - it is well argued and succinct - but for many acknowledging home truths such as the fact that fear of crime in this country is disproportionate to the level of actual crime will lead to them simply dismissing the whole argument.

This section presents to me a dilemma. I don’t disagree with any of it, but I know it is a hard sell. Huhne doesn’t give us much of an idea of how he plans to sell all this either.

How do we get this balance right? I have to admit I think Clegg does it better. Sometimes it is just a matter of not saying certain things that don’t need to be said. We can’t afford to alienate people; we have to talk in a language they understand.

Comfort rating: will ruffle quite a few feathers actually - Lib Dems can be quite reactionary at times. 3/5
Reaching out rating: I’d love it if people listened to common sense on crime, but they broadly don’t. We need to communicate this better. 1/5
Personal rating: I can’t deny it doesn’t appeal to me personally. 5/5

Sustainability: challenging on the environment

There’s a lot here that doesn’t need to be said. You’ve already won the argument Chris. Once again though, he doesn’t address how we engage with the public on this issue in a language they understand. Clegg’s critique that when we talk about green taxes, most people just hear ‘taxes’ is correct. Huhne needs to address that point. Calling for further cuts in the basic rate of income tax does that to an extent, but it doesn’t address Clegg’s other point about people being able to see their sacrifices making a difference.

In this respect, I would actually argue that Huhne is currently weaker than Clegg on the environment. Not because he’s wrong on policy but that he is wrong on emphasis. The next battle is on selling this policy, not simply entrenching it. Huhne needs to engage with that fact.

Comfort rating: broadly established party policy. 5/5
Reaching out rating: communication counts. 1/5
Personal rating: fine as far as it goes but barely moves us forward from 2 years ago. 3/5

Our party can win

Thus far, and point me to where if I’m wrong, but Clegg has barely addressed the issue of party organisation. Huhne therefore deserves credit for including this section.

The emphasis on local party development is important as is the emphasis on diversity. His approach on mentoring and training is welcome.

His point about constitutional change being a prerequisite to partnership government is vital. It addresses the Oaten lament that coalition is an issue that the party hasn’t been talking about enough but doesn’t get us distracted in self-defeating speculation about horse-trading.

Finally, the final paragraph succinctly sums up what the party is about. This is a strong section.

Comfort rating: the party will find little to disagree with here. Making it happen though is another matter. 5/5
Reaching out rating: a strong, better trained and more diverse-looking party across the country would inevitably reach out to more people. Simple, but true. 4/5
Personal rating: Again, my concern is making it happen. An uncharitable 3/5 (because I’ve been here before).

TOTAL COMFORT RATING: 59/75
TOTAL REACHING OUT RATING: 41/75
TOTAL PERSONAL RATING: 60/75

You can’t compare like with like with these scores and Clegg’s in my earlier article. Overall, in my view there is more meat here for the general public to grapple with than was in Clegg’s speech last week. There is also more for the party faithful to potentially object to. Interestingly, although I really liked certain bits, as an overall package I found myself less comfortable with it than with Clegg.

Huhne is clearly taking risks, and he should be congratulated for that. He has brought substance to a debate which until now has been distinctly wanting for it. On a number of issues however, he simply doesn’t seem to appreciate the communication issue. On the environment, on crime and on taxation it isn’t that he is wrong on detail, but that he hasn’t worked enough on communicating the message. This is at least a much bigger concern of Nick Clegg’s.

But on consistency, he wins hands down. You can’t fault him for not being prepared to answer difficult questions. This is an issue my scoring system doesn’t measure, yet it is important. Developing a clear Liberal Democrat identity is crucial. It gives us a brand - not something that 100% of the population will agree with, but something which a substantial minority certainly will. Longer term, such consistency will help us bridge the gap between the 10% of the public who identify as a big-el-Lib big-dee-Dem and the 50% of the public who identify as a small-el-liberal. It is not something that Clegg has begun to grapple with thus far, nor can he if he is afraid to reach out beyond existing party policy.

On balance then, this is definitely a stronger package than what I’ve seen from Clegg so far. It is however a package for long term growth - to what extent that is a luxury we can currently afford is not something I have formed a firm view on yet. It certainly isn’t the killing blow that Huhne needs to deliver to defeat his rival. Perhaps I should wait however until Clegg produces a comparable document.

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I wrote this article in Summer 2006 for Liberalism - something to shout about, published by Graham Watson MEP and edited by Simon Titley. I’m taking the liberty of republishing it here, but if you want to read the other articles - by Graham, Simon, Ros Scott, Jonathan Calder and Simon Bryceson, follow the above link for an order form.

Any article on this topic will inevitably date quickly, so please bear that in mind. In particular, “Hands off our future” is a reference to an abortive attempt of mine to set up a campaign website on the topic which in the end I didn’t have the time to keep going.

Demographic change is creating a dangerous situation, one where younger generations are suffering increasing economic injustice. A system of ‘neo-feudalism’ will emerge unless radical steps are taken. Do the Liberal Democrats have the courage to campaign for justice – or will they miss the boat?

Introduction
There’s no easy way to put this, and I can almost hear the shrieks of outrage as I type, but young people are being expected to shoulder too much of the UK economy while older people are getting away with shouldering too little.

That isn’t to say that pensioner poverty doesn’t exist, nor is it to deny that some young people are extremely wealthy. As in any discussion on economics, we are talking in generalities here. It is however to say that, as well as being unfair, it is having a deleterious effect on our economy and stands to reinforce class barriers and social immobility at a time when we are flattering ourselves that such things have been relegated to our past.

Young people are hit by a sextuple whammy of costs that older people do not have to worry about to the same extent. These are: graduate debt, credit, saving for the future, environmental taxation, income-based taxes and housing costs. We should take a moment to consider each one in turn:

The problems
Housing costs
The owner-occupier dream of the Thatcherite 1980s is coming to an end. Only 20% of 20-24 year olds are homeowners, compared with 34% in 1994. First-time buyers now make up only 38% of total buyers¹.

Why is this? Simply enough, house prices have got out of control. According to the Department for Communities and Local Government², the average house price across the UK is now £190,051; in London it is £279,418. Median earnings meanwhile are £22,412 (less than one-eighth of the average house price) across the UK and £28,912 in London (less than one-ninth of the average London house price)³. According to Nationwide, the median home loan is now worth 3.21 times the incomes of those buying the property, compared with just 2.39 in 1994⁴. That of course means that half of new loans are being lent at even higher multiples. According to the Halifax⁵, public sector workers cannot afford average priced homes in 65% of towns, compared with just 24% five years ago. Mortgage repayments typically now use up 42% of take home income.

Unsurprisingly, 40% of first-time buyers now get parental help⁶. For many more people however, the solution is to simply rent. There again, the options available to people 20 years ago simply do not exist. The right-to-buy policies of the 1980s, which got so many people onto the housing ladder (earning many of them small fortunes in the process), were unsustainable as they depended on selling council housing that was not replaced.

One other option is buy-to-let: buy a house in a more affordable area than the one you live in and use the income from that as security. This in turn of course helps bloat the housing market even further, pricing even more first-time-buyers out of the market.

Ultimately, all of this must be unsustainable, although the bubble is still looking fairly robust at the moment. If the housing market does crash however, it is again young people who will predominantly suffer.

The obvious solution to all this is to build more affordable homes. Yet that has been official government policy for years now and little progress is being made. We cannot escape the fact that, under the current system, property developers have very little interest in building large numbers of affordable homes.

Graduate debt
People graduating from university this year owe an average of £13,500, according to the Association of Investment Trust Companies (AITC)⁷. As with many of these figures, it needs to be emphasised that this is an average: graduates from wealthy families typically have far less debt to repay, while poorer graduates will have significantly more. This figure also does not take into account variable top-up tuition fees, introduced this year: at a stroke, such fees will increase debt for graduates from the top universities by £9,000 to £12,000.

Liberal Democrat policy is to scrap tuition fees. This has been very popular, but it should be remembered that students from the poorest backgrounds don’t pay fees anyway while students running up average debts and paying full tuition fees would still end up graduating with £10,000 hanging over their heads.

One argument used to justify the increased burden that individuals themselves pay is that graduates earn more; the Dearing Report⁸ claimed that graduates would, on average, earn £400,000 more over their lifetime. Yet, as higher education has expanded, so the worth of each individual degree has fallen. The University of Swansea estimates⁹ that the ‘value’ of a degree for a male arts graduate is now just £22,000. Yet with degrees now a minimum requirement for so many jobs these days, non-graduates find themselves severely disadvantaged regardless of their ability.

Credit
71% of young people (aged 18-29) have an overdraft facility and one-in-five are permanently overdrawn¹⁰. 18.7% of all bankrupts were aged 18-29 in 2004/5, compared with just 7.8% in 2001/2.

There is a temptation to dismiss these figures as simply young people spending irresponsibly, yet that is to ignore how credit has been promoted quite as fiercely as it has been over the past couple of decades. It is also to ignore the fact that banks will tend to refuse lower interest loans to customers with little credit history while being quite happy to give them credit cards. Borrowing is treated as a rite of passage that young people are expected to go through and, whether individuals struggle or not, banks are guaranteed a profit.

To his enormous credit, Vince Cable MP has been making a noise¹¹ about the problems associated with unsustainable levels of debt for some time now. The party should pay him more attention.

Saving for old age
Young people are now expected to save for their own old age in a way that their parents’ generation never need worry about. Final salary pension schemes are a thing of the past. The Turner proposals¹², largely accepted by the government, offer some hope for the future, but there is no escaping the fact that, for them to work, people must contribute more out of their own salaries.

Yet as the importance of saving for the future has increased, in fact the opposite has happened. According to Pensions Minister James Purnell in July 2006¹³, the number of young people saving for a pension has fallen from one-in-three to one-in-four since 2000. Purnell was quick to pin the blame on young people themselves for their “live fast, die poor” lifestyles. Can we really simply dismiss this trend as shortsightedness, or are young people simply expected to cope with debt? This is a vital question for politicians to answer if they hope to make opt-out stakeholder pensions – one of the lynchpins behind the government’s new pensions strategy – a success. If it is financial pressures that are putting young people off from taking out second pensions, there is a real risk that a disproportionate number will opt-out under the new scheme.

Income-based taxes
There is no denying that income taxes fell significantly during the 1980s and 1990s. I mention them here because it needs to be emphasised that this form of taxation is paid predominantly by economically active middle-income earners: the rich avoid them while the poor and economically inactive pay very little.

In the recent past, income taxes have begun to creep up again, under the guise of national insurance contributions. Liberal Democrat policy in 2005 would have added an additional 4p in the pound due to the introduction of a local income tax.

Climate change and resource taxation
It is now largely accepted that the human race is responsible for global warming and climate change. Because of inaction in the past and little scope of major improvements in at least the short term, significant climate change is also now regarded as all but an inevitability. Mean temperatures are expected to increase by two degrees Celsius by 2050¹⁴. Today’s young people, their children and their grandchildren will be paying the price in the future.

Today’s young people, however, are also expected to pay the price now; environmental taxes will either creep up if the timidity of the current government continues, or significantly increase if a more environmentally responsible government takes control. Either way, today’s young people will be expected to bear the brunt, on top of everything else, in a way that their parents’ generation was never expected to.

The future – neo-feudalism?
What no-one should be blind to here is that these factors do not affect all young people equally. Families with assets are able to help their children out by subsidising student costs, housing and ultimately by passing on an inheritance. They help out in other ways too. A recent report from the Sutton Trust¹⁵ found that 54% of top journalists went to public school, up from 49% in 1986. Similar statistics can be found for the legal profession and other white-collar jobs.

One factor driving this is that, as more and more people have degrees, employers are increasingly dependent on other ways of assessing candidates. A simple mechanism used by a lot of employers is to offer internships and most young people who take up unpaid work experience in this way are dependent on their families to see them through. Thus the expansion of higher education seems to be doing little to improve opportunities for young people from poor backgrounds; indeed, it could actually be entrenching privilege.

There are other ways as well in which the ‘haves’ can consolidate their position. The subsidised loans available to students may be intended to help poorer students feed and house themselves at university, but increasingly they are used by wealthier families as an investment: invest the money in an ISA and pocket the difference. Inheritance tax, properly managed, is effectively voluntary, with wealth handed down the generations long before the aging relative dies – and the bigger the estate, the greater the likelihood that families will have made such provision.

The important question we should be asking ourselves is, where is this taking us? I have dubbed the (avoidable) nightmare scenario ‘neo-feudalism’. Through a combination of some talent, some hard work and a large amount of luck, some families are consolidating their position at the expense of other families. The current fad for buy-to-let could be the tip of the iceberg: there is every reason to believe that the people who play the system well will increase their property portfolios over time, pricing ever more people out of the property market in turn.

For the new underclass, the future is bleak, with the rising middle-class operating an effective closed shop in a way that would make the most militant shop steward baulk. Meanwhile, the children within these ‘landed’ families will be trapped in a cycle of dependency. These mini-Princes of Wales will be forced to wait impatiently for their inheritances to come through, conflicted by love for their parents and the desire for freedom and independence. Entrepreneurship, creativity and hard work will be stifled by an economy dominated by class and privilege.

Policy solutions
Higher education policy
The Liberal Democrats’ policy to scrap tuition fees has served the party well, but there are at least two major reasons for reviewing it.

A principled reason is that it doesn’t actually help the poorest. We may well wish to argue that students from lower middle class backgrounds can ill-afford the tuition fees they are forced to pay under the present system, but it is highly doubtful that scrapping fees will see a massive influx of students from the poorest backgrounds.

The pragmatic reason is that tuition fees have been with us for seven years now. Hundreds of thousands of young people have already paid them, and there is an increasing danger that this policy will decline in popularity as young people and their families increasingly ask themselves “well, we had to pay fees, so why shouldn’t they?”

One equitable solution to this would be to offer tax relief on student debt repayments. The full amount may not be affordable, but a significant proportion would not only amount to the same thing as paying full tuition costs, but would benefit all graduates.

Going further, we could replace our existing spending commitment to scrap fees with a return to the means-tested maintenance grant. This would target our funding at those least able to pay.

It is unlikely to amount to much while the massive expansion of higher education continues however, and this leads me to consider an even more radical proposal. Why not remove the universal state subsidy on university tuition altogether, replacing it with means-tested cover for both tuition and maintenance? This more targeted approach would enable us to help students most in need, while giving the market a greater role in determining demand for higher education.

There are bound to be howls of protest regarding this proposal and I have to admit I am not fully convinced of it myself: how would we preserve liberal arts departments for instance? How can the market determine how many medievalists the country to fund? I am merely throwing these ideas in to provoke a discussion I believe the party desperately needs to be having.

The bottom line for me is that, at the next general election, we need to have much more to say to both graduates and the poorest students. With the party committed to keeping spending commitments down to a minimum, this cannot be done without significantly changing our existing policy of tuition fees.

Taxation
Just as we are sometimes guilty of portraying our policy of tuition fees as a social justice issue when the poorest are unaffected, so the same is true with our policy to replace council tax with a local income tax. The claim is frequently made that it would benefit the poorest, and specifically pensioners. Yet the poorest are entitled to Council Tax Benefit and are thus exempt.
We aren’t, to be fair, alone in this. Help the Aged’s website¹⁶ claims that an elderly couple with just £182 per week income “could end up paying the same level of Council Tax as their neighbours, a young and wealthy couple with an income of tens of thousands”. Yet if you look elsewhere on this website, it helpfully explains that an elderly person on that level of income is exempt from the tax. A curious game of deception is at hand here, and unfortunately the Lib Dems bear much responsibility for it.

The real problem with our existing policy is that it represents a massive tax cut for the owners of some of the most valuable properties in the country, while shifting the entire burden of taxation onto economically active young people. This makes no economic sense at all and will help to increase property prices still further, enriching the wealthy and pricing even more people out of the housing market.

We are frequently told that this policy is important because it helps old people who may have large wealth, but have little income. In fact, asset rich, cash poor pensioners form a tiny minority. In his submission¹⁷ to the Tax Commission report, Prof Iain McLean cited research from Warwick University, which shows that just 1.2%-2% of the population fits into this category. There are other ways to ensure that this small group does not unduly suffer without introducing a system that would unfairly penalise others.

The signs coming from the party’s Tax Commission unfortunately sound remarkably confused. By the time you read this essay, its final report¹⁸ will have been published but, at the time of writing, it looks as if it will be a strange mix, calling for national income taxes on the one hand while introducing even higher local income taxes on the other. This strange, hybrid ‘pushmepullyou’ is unlikely to please anyone and is likely to confuse seriously both journalists and the general public.

So what’s the solution? Simply put, our new taxation policies have a property tax-shaped hole in them. We should fill it with our historical commitment to introduce a system of land value taxation. This would encourage greater efficiency of land, lower property prices, and discourage second home ownership and buy-to-lets. Safeguards could be introduced to ensure that old people would not be taxed out of their homes, such as a system whereby people could voluntarily choose to defer tax payments until after they realise the asset.

Funding the future
Britain is appalling at squandering its assets. North Sea oil, now rapidly drying up, has been used as a cash cow by successive chancellors for the past 30 years, with Gordon Brown using it to fund spending commitments last winter. Yet once this natural resource is gone, it’s gone.
Other countries have a more enlightened view. Since 1995, Norway has invested its North Sea oil receipts into its National Petroleum Fund (recently renamed the National Pension Fund)¹⁹. This fund, worth 1.48 trillion Kroner (about £125 billion or €185 billion) in 2006 and administered by the Central Bank, is designed to ensure that this short-term windfall is enjoyed by future generations.

Alaska operates a similar scheme called the Permanent Fund²⁰. Though much smaller – $32 billion (about £17 billion or €25 billion) at the end of 2005 – the fund is enough to pay out a dividend to Alaskan residents of around $1,000 per capita per year.

It is mostly too late to put Britain’s North Sea oil receipts into a similar fund, but as climate change is taken more seriously, this could be a useful way to handle receipts from environmental taxation.

Using environmental taxes to fund general expenditure is problematic at best, particularly at high levels, because if they are successful we can find ourselves with a shortfall. Climate change is likely to make the twenty-first century a very unstable period. Establishing a fund in this way would help give future generations a helping hand.

Getting our message across
One major objection to the party shifting its policy more towards young people is that older people vote in greater numbers and should therefore be our main target. I would repeat that I am not calling for us to ignore old people in elections, and strongly support our policy positions on a Citizens’ Pension and increasing the basic rate.

But, despite the fact that we all but stuffed their mouths with gold coins in the last election, old people did not generally vote for us. This is partly because of tribal loyalty, and partly because of a perception of the party brands – indeed, where we do well amongst older voters it is because they recognise our strengths as community campaigners. By contrast, younger people flocked to us in the last general election, despite us having very little to offer them. We have a real opportunity here not simply to capitalise on the votes of under-40s but to create lifelong Liberal Democrat supporters.

For such a campaign to work, however, it cannot simply be conducted by the occasional press release. At the moment, the media is largely unaware of this issue, normally reporting rises in property prices as an unequivocally good thing. For us to make an impact on this issue, our frontbench team must be seen championing it. It should get mentioned in every speech Ming Campbell makes between now and polling day.

The good news about a campaign aimed specifically at young people is that much of our target audience is web-savvy. What’s more, the people whom these issues affect are getting increasingly organised – see websites such as housepricecrash.co.uk, pricedout.org.uk and Hands Off Our Future. It is clear from reading the forums on sites such as these that there is a real sense of injustice out there and that people are crying out for a political party to take these issues on. If we miss this opportunity now, we may find ourselves paying the price in the future.

References
1 BBC (2006). How hard is it to afford a house? BBC News Online, 6 July; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5145090.stm
2 UK Department for Communities and Local Government (2006). House Price Index – May 2006 (DCLG Statistical Release 2006/0051). Press release, 10 July; www.communities.gov.uk/index.asp?id=1002882&PressNoticeID=2197
3 Bachelor, L. & Flanagan, B. (2005). On average, you can’t afford it. Observer, 4 December; http://money.guardian.co.uk/houseprices/story/0,1456,1658132,00.html
4 BBC (2006). ibid.
5 Halifax plc (2006). Halifax Key Worker Housing Review. Press release, 29 July; www.hbosplc.com/economy/includes/KeyWorkerAffordability(UK).doc
6 BBC (2006). ibid.
7 AITC (2006). Press release, 9 August; www.aitc.co.uk/press_centre/default.asp?id=5439
8 The National Committee of Enquiry into Higher Education (1997). www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/
9 O’Leary, N. & Sloane, P. (2005). The Changing Wage Return to an Undergraduate Education. IZA Discussion Paper No. 1549. http://ssrn.com/abstract=702781
10 Credit Action (2006). Debt statistics. www.creditaction.org.uk/debtstats.htm
11 Cable, V. (2006). Press release, 23 July; www.libdems.org.uk/news/young-peoples-debt-spiralling-out-of-control-cable.html
12 The Pensions Commission (2005). Second report. www.pensionscommission.org.uk
13 Purnell, J. (2006). Speech, 12 July; www.dwp.gov.uk/aboutus/2006/12-07-06.asp
14 UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (2001). Literature review of the implications of climate change for species, habitats and the wider UK countryside. www.defra.gov.uk/wildlife-countryside/ewd/rrrpac/lreview/06.htm
15 The Sutton Trust (2006). The Educational Background of Leading Journalists. www.suttontrust.com/reports/Journalists-backgrounds-final-report.pdf
16 Help the Aged (2006). www.helptheaged.org.uk/en-gb/Campaigns/PensionsAndBenefits/CouncilTax/
17 McLean, I. (2006). www.libdemsalter.org.uk/archives/000078.php
18 Liberal Democrats (2006). Fairer, Simpler, Greener. Policy paper 75. www.libdems.org.uk/media/documents/policies/PP75%20Fairer%20Simpler%20Greener.pdf
19 Wikipedia (2006). The Government Pension Fund of Norway. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway
20 Wikipedia (2006). Alaska Permanent Fund. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

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God, Labour really are in a full scale rout at the moment, aren’t they?

The tax system should reward married couples, a cabinet minister has said.

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Andy Burnham told the Daily Telegraph: “It’s not wrong that the tax system should recognise commitment and marriage.”

He did not advocate specific changes to the tax system, but said there was a “moral case” for using tax to promote the traditional family unit.

On the claim that there is a ‘moral case’ for using tax to promote marriage, he could not be more wrong. One of the least moral reasons going for getting married is acquiring tax advantages and if the system ends up penalising single parents, many of whom are not single through choice, then already unstable families will end up doing worse out of the system.

If there is a moral argument for marriage, money ought to be immaterial. You can’t tax and spend your way to righteousness.

Presumably we can depend on Harriet Harman, the only member of the Brown government to have a mandate from the party, to put the opposing view? After all, she’s been lambasting Cameron on this issue for months. But of course Harman’s first act as a government minister back in 1997 was to cut benefits for single mothers. I’m sure she’ll find a way to reconcile her own stated views with Andy Burnham’s. Her idea of radicalism in office is to call on Gordon Brown to do something that he committed himself to doing in a White Paper published three months ago, and which will not materially affect anything (if the Prime Minister has a majority in the Commons and demanded an election, do you seriously believe the party would turn him down?).

What amazes and appalls me the most though is how, in the space of a fortnight, Labour have seemingly done everything they can to transform Gideon Osborne’s reputation from whining top hatted toff who is totally out of his depth to a Svengali-figure who sets the entire political agenda of the UK. It’s utter madness. He came up with a few proposals that were economically irresponsible and fundamentally didn’t add up, and the entire Labour front bench falls down in a heap, struggling to emulate him in every way they can. Truly this is the single greatest mystery of modern politics.

Labour in freefall: huge Lib Dem opportunity. Time to step up a gear perhaps?

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Polly Toynbee mourned the death of social democracy in the Guardian yesterday which, based on her definition, is not something I will be shedding many tears over. He kneejerk reaction that what Brown should have done instead of raising the IHT threshold was to increase income tax on people with incomes above £100,000 was akin to arguing that instead of shooting himself in the foot he should have simply shot himself in the head. Not only would such a move have been massively unpopular, but it wouldn’t have made much economic sense either.

Fortunately, calmer voices were also to be found in the Grauniad, with Shelter’s Chief Executive Adam Sampson giving a much more lucid account about why wealth taxes are a good thing and the government so wholly wrong this week. In doing so, he breaks a major taboo, suggesting that our home owning economy might not be the unambiguous good that the cross-party consensus asserts.

The problem, which Sampson readily acknowledges, is that when you live in a society where 70% of the electorate are home-owners, making the national interest case for wealth taxes is a thankless task. Quite what a mountain we have to climb is summed up by Andy Beckett’s article on IHT which explores quite how unpopular the tax is and why. Beckett or more precisely Professor Stuart White, for that is who he is quoting, manages to both sum up the conundrum and miss the point with this sentence:

“What seems to have come through in Britain, post-Thatcher, is not so much a meritocracy as a feeling that what you get is what you’re entitled to.”

Michael Young, the man who coined the term meritocracy in 1958, became exasperated towards the end of his life at the way in which politicians came to adopt the term uncritically. His 2001 essay on this is even more relevant now than it was back then. The point is that exhorting meritocracy leads precisely to the view that people get what they deserve. The political establishment’s failure to challenge the idea that it is okay for the rich to get ever richer so long as you piously acknowledge the importance of “equality of opportunity” is precisely why the general public seem so resistant to wealth taxes. The fact that it could lead to, among other things, lower income taxes, increased social mobility and a more entrepreneurial culture falls on deaf ears.

The vested interests which ultimately defeated the 1909 People’s Budget sat in the House of Lords. Sadly, those same vested interests now dominate the electorate (although I suspect that over the longer term these mini-property empires will begin to aggregate as some manage to press home their inbuilt advantage better than others). For a substantial minority of the population that represents the death of hope: a life of no accumulation of assets, high income taxes and high user charges on services.

I see this as a profoundly depressing future; the very antithesis of progress whether you are coming at it from a liberal or a socialist perspective. Yet the Lib Dems can’t really give Gordon Brown too hard a time over it. While the rhetoric of our taxation policies is quite sound, almost everything we are committed to doing in our hypothetical first term of government is to compound the problem. In the long term, we’re committed to land value taxation; in the short term we’re committed to scrapping municipal property tax (making the eventual implementation of LVT much harder). In the long term, we’re committed to reforming IHT into an acquisitions tax, thus closing off a major loophole; in the short term we’re committed to raising the IHT threshold as well. Ming was careful at is conference speech to talk of transferring the burden of taxation from incomes and onto pollution - not resources. At a time when he desperately needs a USP, and the cause of progressive taxation needs a champion, he’s being advised to back away slowly from the sound of gunfire.

But perhaps I’m being too harsh on political parties. They are, after all, prisoners of an electoral system that gives enormous power to a handful of swing voters. All the time the parties are forced to chase the same small part of the electorate around like Pepe le Peu, the scope for making the case for broader policies will always be limited. Somehow we need to capture the public’s imagination outside the party political sphere. Anyone got any ideas?

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Which party was the first in this Parliament to call for an increase in the IHT threshold?

The Liberal Democrats

Which party was the first to call for replacing air passenger duty with a tax on planes?

The Liberal Democrats

I ask, because Gideon Osborne has today been branding the “theft” of policies as “scrabbling around in a panic,” a “cynical stunt” and “followership not leadership.” If the cap fits…

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