One of the reasons that I’m backing Nick for leader is his enthusiastic and wide-ranging interest in policy ideas - and this afternoon in a major (not to say fairly lengthy!) speech, he set out what he stands for, as a potential Leader of our party.

He identified five major challenges for defining what his vision for Liberal Britain means, across a whole range of policy ideas:

”¢ how to tackle what he called ”˜the epidemic of powerlessness’;
Ӣ how to create real social mobility;
Ӣ where to strike the balance between national security and individual liberty;
Ӣ how actually to engage the public and business in real action to tackle global warming;
Ӣ and how to make sense of globalisation.

So nothing if not a daunting agenda!

I hope the full speech will become available (Update: it is now here) so I’m certainly not going to run through all six closely-typed pages of it here, but a few things that particularly struck me were these.

On the ”˜power’ questions he made a strong case for reversing the trend of recent years for power to be increasingly taken from individuals to a central and centralised state. This means a range of steps, from sorting out an electoral system which disenfranchises most people most of the time, to ”˜a radical transfer of powers and resources from central government to local government’, and giving users of public services much greater say over them. This last element included a potentially exciting challenge for new ideas about how public services are funded and delivered, perhaps learning from other European countries - while all still within a framework of being both free to use and universally accessible.

He argued - perhaps unoriginally, but powerfully - that education is the key to reversing the decline in social mobility under Brown and Blair, and repeated the case for a ”˜pupil premium’ to provide additional targeted support in education to those that need it most - a case that (although he didn’t mention this this afternoon), I first remember him making in a pamphlet for the Centre for European Reform that he co-authored with Richard Grayson about what British public services could learn from the rest of Europe, about five years ago.

To tackle terrorism he made the case, strikingly to me, for a whole range of measures which would make it easier to bring terrorist suspects to court, from making allowing post-charge questioning, and intercept evidence in court, to a national anti-terrorism police force. He argued that these, unlike the government’s proposals, crucially are “liberal ideas which are not only effective in practice but go with the grain of due process rather than overturning the fundamental tenets of British justice”.

On green stuff he made what I thought was an important point that, for all that green issues are all the rage this year among the chattering classes, there is a real challenge to find a way which will motivate people who, as he said “when we say ”˜green tax’, hear only the word ”˜tax’”. And when he argued that the UK and EU should both be arguing in the ongoing Doha trade talks for the removal of all tariffs on the global trade in environmental goods and services, he managed to remind us that world trade talks are a world in which he used to live, and knows his way around backwards.

All these were ideas which entirely go with the grain of Liberal Democrat thinking, and it was interesting to see which challenges for Britain he identified as the crucial ones for us as a party to be addressing and presenting answers to. And he was, unsurprisingly, particularly compelling when talking about areas where he is a genuine expert, such as home affairs and liberty, and international trade affairs.

But if there was one thing that struck me most of all it was his concluding section on how we can best manage the process of globalisation. He said:

“The great external threats that we face - from climate change to terrorism to cross border crime - are all linked by one fact: that power has been globalised, but our methods for controlling it have not. The challenge before us then is to construct a system of global governance capable of controlling global power. Only Liberalism, with its easy accommodation both with the market economies that drive globalisation and the internationalist politics needed to regulate it, is capable of guiding us in this process.”

This strikes me as not only true, but the key insight into how we should be seeking to affect politics and the world around us in the twenty-first century. If there is one way in which above all else we can seek to exercise democratic control over conditions both in the UK and in the wider world, to promote liberal objectives of bringing people out of poverty and giving them control over the factors which affect their lives, it is through working towards systems which will control the many elements of power which have now migrated beyond national borders. Simply cutting Britain off from some of the best ways of doing this, such as through the EU, as the Conservatives would do, simply leaves most people of our generation, as he put it, “open-mouthed in astonishment”.

Personally I would say too that this is also the crucial element in seeking to address the ”˜epidemic of powerlessness’ in national and local politics that we so often speak of. When even governments and Prime Ministers speak of issues being beyond their control because of globalisation, is it any wonder that normal people think they have little control over their own lives and that it’s not worth voting? Getting globalised power under popular control, as power within developed states has been for a century or more, seems to me the absolute heart of the Liberal narrative of giving people control over their lives.

So this is crucial territory for us as Liberal Democrats, and it is clear that Nick is passionate about it too, and that he has the right liberal instincts. For me, frankly, even if this speech had contained nothing else but this point, it would still have identified the key liberal insight for the twenty-first century.

But of course it did identify many more points beyond that too, and as always, Nick communicated them very effectively.

I am glad too that he is continuing to look beyond our own issues as a party, and maintain a strong focus on a Liberal Democrat approach to the key questions facing Britain and the world. And as he said this afternoon, if we as a party hope to influence them then “third place is not good enough”¦If we can address the concerns of the British people and the challenges facing our country, then the next big shift of opinion will be towards Liberalism”.