Lib Dems – daring to be different

“D” is for differentiation at this Lib Dem conference.

It was something Nick Clegg frowned on at last year’s conference but now privately thinks he probably overdid.

Lib Dems can now say where they differ from the Tories and probably need to if they are to avoid more defeats like the May local elections. But there’s differentiation within the party going on as well.

Look at the tone of Danny Alexander’s interview with the Independent On Sunday yesterday and the headline it prompted on the paper’s front page about his “scorn” for the idea of a coalition with Labour.

You wouldn’t find old SDPers like Vince Cable and Chris Huhne going down that route.

Ask Vince Cable about “equidistance” between the two main parties and he says that’s exactly what he believes in. Ask Danny Alexander and you get a pained look.

You’ll get a bit more of that internal differentiation in the speech today from Vince Cable, bashing the rich bankers and the Tories in a way Danny Alexander wouldn’t.

I suspect you’ll get more of the same from Chris Huhne in his speech tomorrow (interesting claims in the Jasper Gerard piece in the Mail today about the Huhne/Clegg relationship by the way).

But you are yet again reminded how so many of the policies and assumptions floating around this conference season could be swept away when you look at the front page of the FT.

Chris Giles’ analysis in the FT splash goes to the heart of what lower growth actually means: your sums, even in a stark deficit reduction plan, no longer add up. Whether his lower or higher estimate for the black hole is right it walks and talks like a multi-billion pound black hole.

The OBR when it publishes its official growth estimate on November 29 will have looked at very similar economic data and its longer term growth prospects can only look bleaker than its earlier ones.

I can remember a series of press conferences when the FT’s Economics Editor has been on this case questioning the structural deficit guestimate that was built into earlier OBR forecasts. Come November 29 he may be feeling vindicated.

The Treasury talks about there being many more moving parts in the economy than the FT analysis takes account of. We shall see.

Interestingly one bit of differentiation you don’t hear anything about is the government’s desperate desire for the Bank of England to re-start quantitative easing.

Vince Cable goes further than the Chancellor in scraping out an SOS in the sand for the Bank to see but I get the strong impression that he is, on this one, on very much the same page as George Osborne.

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