A large part of David Cameron’s job, of course, is getting the balance right between keeping his traditional base of supporters happy, while simultaneously also appearing appealing to enough others to vote for him. In striking this balance, generally his strategy as leader has been to prioritise appealing to the new voters he needs, “detoxing” the Conservative brand, and generally trying to end the image of “the nasty party”. Part of this calculation, similarly to Tony Blair  in this respect if not in others, is surely that those on the extreme had nowhere else to go.

So declaring as he did this week that Conservative MEPs after June’s European elections will not sit as part of the European People’s Party (EPP, the main-centre grouping containing most of Europe’s governing parties) to seek an alliance with others who do not share its “federalist” ambitions, appears to go against this strategy. (Whether the EPP really is federalist or not is another question, but it’s close enough for British Conservatives of a not very internationalist bent). It does look very much as though the British Conservatives will end up in a group with some rather odd, and generally very right-wing partner parties.

But presumably Cameron and Hague have made the calculation that to the Conservatives’ core support, being “in bed with federalists” is the sort of thing that renders them spluttering into apoplexy over their Telegraph and cornflakes in the morning - whereas to the population generally, which alphabet soup of foreigners some people that they’ve never heard of sit with, is simply meaningless.

And I have to say I am starting to wonder if they might not be right. The risk they run is that opposition parties such as ourselves are able to paint the Conservatives in these European elections (and of course more importantly set the tone for next year’s General Election) as somehow in league with some very unsavoury people. And this is certainly not unjust.

But I wonder, quite simply, how much this resonance this really has with the average British voter. If I recall correctly we campaigned a few years ago to tell the public that the Conservatives were in league with Alleanza Nazionale (the Italian post-fascist party). But quite frankly I don’t think many British voters cared much.

And perhaps more psephologically importantly, on this one occasion, those to his right do have somewhere else to go: UKIP, the BNP and any other parties who will be attacking the Conservatives from the right, for being too integrationist-minded.

So maybe it is the right strategic thing for them to do. But there must surely be a risk that some normal people - those he needs to vote him into Downing St next year - do actually notice. And remember.

And it surely is odd that at the same time as he is doing his best to get the Conservatives to come over as normal people, he feels the need to leap into the arms of some thoroughly un-normal people, just to escape company which even Margaret Thatcher kept - and that was at a time when real leaps forward in integrating European policy and lawmaking were actually on the table.

I spent a happy time this weekend in Yorkshire, at the Liberal Democrat spring conference in Harrogate. Party conferences are so often dominated by rows, real or imagined, combined with other frustrations ranging from the purely logistical to policy ones, that it was good to have a conference focussed around a strong theme. We concentrated this weekend on the liberating power of education, backed up by three strong policy papers covering different aspects of this (early years, schooling, and college and university). (Mainstream journalists have written that the the conference focussed on the economy, but they are talking about the media’s conference, whereas I am talking about the actual event).

And unsurprisingly I was pleased that my own preferred outcome carried the day on the one really heated debate we did have: at its third attempt, stretching back over the last decade, the party finally managed to agree a policy on faith schools. This was one of those debates which really makes the case for democratic political decision-making: good speakers making high quality points, and as a result a hall of several hundred people making a balanced, well-informed, reasoned decision (and with a good bit of political drama and tension thrown in, in the form of a very close counted vote). There are those who doubt that this is the best way to make political decisions, but moments like Saturday afternoon’s debate remind you how well it can work, and certainly so much better than its opposite, ’sofa government’.

On the substance of faith schools, by the way, in summary, we won’t require all (state-funded) faith schools to close down, but we will require them to be inclusive in the way they work (something I myself seen achieved locally already, and which the major Christian groupings are themselves keen to promote these days).

Of all the party’s conferences that I’ve been too - and in a bored moment over the weekend I counted that this was the twenty-fifth that I have attended - this was one of the most cohesive, businesslike and, well, happy.

But it also had an element which was new for me, at least when I was using it (which, contrary to the claims of the friends I was with at the time, was not all of it!). For this weekend I participated in Twitter - reading and following very short electronic updates on what was happening at the conference, and it gave an interesting perspective on it some of it.

For those not familiar, I’ll attempt to summarise what Twitter is (ans this is also a test for whether this newby has grasped it!).

The basic point is that people on Twitter write very short (up to 140 characters long, so no more than, say, 25 words) updates on what they’re doing or thinking.  And of course you can ‘follow’ what other people are writing (”tweeting”, in the parlance). At heart it’s as simple as that.

You can update it and follow others’ updates either from your computer, or (as I do and I suspect most will do) very easily through one of several little pieces of software available you can download to your phone.

Everyone says they like the discipline of having to keep their updates very short, and you can follow either your real friends or celebs - @stephenfry is popular, apparently (it’s regarded as good practice when referring to fellow Twitterers to preface their username with @ so the the system tells them they’ve been mentioned), Peter Mandelson recently did a trial month on it, and there is a rather contrived Boris Johnson version too. I follow several Lib Dem MPs such as Jo Swinson, Lynne Featherstone (dedicated new technology pioneers both), Norman Lamb, Susan Kramer and leading PPC Bridget Fox, as well as various other friends.

Just like Facebook status updates, which with it has quite a lot in common, it can be quite interesting to see what people are doing. But, as you can probably imagine, very quickly you can feel that you’re getting more information than you really need. And it is much ridiculed for being a channel for people to update their friends just on the fact that they’re going to the loo, having lunch, or whatever - do you really need permanently to be fully up to date with the fact that all your friends are now enjoying sitting down and reading the paper?

So many people I think seem to use it to send more occasional updates, of more interesting things. I know several politicans who use it as a way of telling people of the work they’re doing in their constituency, and I guess you can imagine that some people might find it interesting to get an update that their local MP has just, I don’t know, opened a new facility in their area, or raised a local issue in Parliament, or something similar (although perhaps more importantly, MPs would be interested in telling their constituents this).

I can’t imagine that I’ll spend a huge amount of time on it, and perhaps will use it as similar to Facebook status update (with which it can be automatically linked). But it might fill the odd bored moment on a bus and, like Facebook, be a good way of keeping up with people I don’t see often. And last week, when some controversy surrounding the International Criminal Court indicting a head of State for the first time was in the news, I used it to tell my ‘followers’ on my own strong views (as written often on this blog) on this question.

But the weekend was something different. People at the conference were asked to include in their messages about conference the word #ldconf (this is known as a ‘hashtag’). There’s an easy electronic way to follow all messages with #ldconf in them - and so effectively you are then following all messages being posted by people at the conference. This meant (for me, at least) a far higher volume of messages and so, just for the weekend, a different type of use developing - something a bit closer to a conversation. At peak times this might have reached an average of perhaps 3 or 4 “tweets” a minute.

Where I thought this worked really well, and I enjoyed it, was in a couple of the big events - specifically the big debate on schools policy, the leader’s speech, and Howard Dean’s speech. People were able to post their instant responses - ranging from simply repeating phrases that a speaker in the debate had said that they thought was especially telling, or indeed thought were nonsense, to other people (one in particular) using many points made in the real debate to repeat his request via Twitter for us to vote a particular way, to attempts at satire or humour. People post directly from sitting in the hall: in many ways it’s a supercharged version of the practice of texting other people in the same meeting as you to offer a commentary on what’s being said (a temptation to which I confess I have occasionally succumbed).

In some ways this therefore become a sub-debate, happening beneath the surface of the ‘real’ debate, and it was at times quite interesting, and at others just amusing. It allowed you to get some idea of how well ideas were going down - for example, an instant judgement that some of the points in Nick Clegg’s leader’s speech were popular. As you come out of a leader’s speech there are always some TV crews around the place waiting to vox pop you about what you thought about the speech, and looking at the Twitter #ldconf feed would give them a wider range of responses so you could actually start to make a slightly more scientific judgement on how a particular point has gone down with the party (if arguably not making quite as good telly!).

Some of us used this as an opportunity to make points and respond to each other within #ldconf; others, especially MPs and PPCs, still seemed to have their eyes mostly on constituents back home they were hoping would receive the messages, so tended to be more along the lines of “Nick Clegg has just made another good point about how the LDs will save the nation by xxxx”

The times I was less keen on how it worked were when an enthusiastic user used the system to report on a fringe meeting in real time as it was happening (this is known as “livetweeting”). This was probably quite interesting to anyone at home wanting to know just how a meeting was developing, minute by minute and point by point (but are there really any such people?). But otherwise it meant you turned on your phone to suddenly 40 messages detailing an intricate blow by blow account of a meeting you had already decided not to go to… But it’s not difficult to ignore them if you want, of course.

At its best however, I did quite enjoy it - it was an opportunity to give instant feedback on what you’re hearing, and of course, like blogging and indeed speaking, whether that’s worth listening to depends on whether you want to listen to the person speaking.

It was, however, quite different (at least I hope so) from ‘normal’ Twitter use - I certainly couldn’t cope with that kind of intensity away from what is already an intense event.

Will Twitter last? Who knows. There is much discussion of the lack of business model of the company behind it. Like most things on the internet, it is free - but with such very tight constraints on content, it is very difficult to see how you could introduce advertising into it (and there seems to be an assumption that if you introduced regular adverts in amongst the tweets from your friends, it would be so intrusive that users would simply move to another system that someone else would set up without them). I’m not convinced that status updates alone will achieve sufficient critical mass of interest to drive people to something over time. And I’m also not hugely confident in all my fellow citizens’ ability to produce a steady stream of finely-crafted and stimulating epigrams (with some striking exceptions, such as the supremely articulate @alexmortimer).On the other hand, Twitter does seem to have snowballed in the last few weeks and has also survived a fairly major change in product when they were forced (in this country) to stop sending out text message updates: it adapted and is now a somewhat different product. And maybe we will, as some predict, just get much more discerning about who we decide to ‘follow’ and culling those who issue too many toilet trip updates and not enough interesting thought.

Purely personally, it feels to me more like a craze which some people will enjoy for a while (much as when I was about nine we all madly played with some odd sticky plastic spider thing for a few months), than Facebook, which I can see having a more enduring use as a manageable way of keeping in touch with people.

Whatever, I quite enjoyed it!  (Oh, and by the way, for anyone who feels they could never understand it, if you’ve read this far,  you now know everything you need to to use it - and even more you even speak the language!)

Of all the arguments that this government has put up to justify their attempted smash-and-grab raid on the natural rights of us all, the most wrong-headed, spurious and downright pernicious is perhaps the claim that “if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear”.

To someone who has an absolute trusting faith in the state, this is true. Entrusting a perfect state, which both never did anything wrong and also never did anything with their data that a reasonable citizen might wish to disagree with, is one thing.

But this is of course not exactly what’s an offer, what with us living with a state apparatus that not many of us would regard as perfect, and reasonable people taking different views on things.

What is being, slowly, forced on us, is entrusting pretty much all our personal information to someone else. And although the nature of our relationship with the state is rather different to, say, deciding whether we want to give our phone number out to some random person we’ve just met, or allowing someone access to our personal details on Facebook, at root it is the same. Before you give any information about yourself to someone, you ask yourself: do you trust them?

And what I think makes my run a bit cold is that it simply does not occur to most people who utter this phrase – at least some of whom are sensible and relatively alert human beings – that it is only true if one has pure, unquestioning faith in the apparatus of the state. If you put to such people - Ministers, for example - the proposition that the state could do no wrong – well, if it is were in public they would deny that they think such a thing, and if it were in private, they would surely just giggle. It is not a claim that, put in those terms, almost anyone I know would seek to defend.
But yet this phrase is trotted out as some kind of reassurance that if you’re not a criminal – you’re just a normal person – then you have nothing to fear in giving your information to the state.

And this is the second aspect of its use that makes every alarm bell in my body ring. For in the armoury of governments that start off meaning well but end up falling into totalitarianism, in the drawer just next to collecting huge amounts of personal information about their citizens, is dividing off, bit by bit, one section of society from another. This government is already well down this route in exploiting this supremely cynical tactic, in the way it is implementing ID cards. Throwing off casually to one side one of the hardest-won rights of a free society, living under the rule of law, that the law applies to all equally, they are introducing this category by category.

And of course they start by imposing it on all the unpopular groups of people – foreigners, students, people without an effective voice – basically, every group demonised by the Daily Mail. Yes, Prime Minister called this tactic “salami slicing”. Pastor Martin Niemöller made the same point in his famous lines about the way in which German society was picked apart in the 1930s, group by group. I am not, before someone accuses me of it, saying that this government has the same intentions as that regime. But the tactic is absolutely the same: imposing an unpopular view by “dividing and ruling” may be – despite its extreme cynicism – a powerful way of a government achieving its way, and therefore in a way unsurprising. But even leaving aside what it tells us about this government that it is prepared to employ such tactics to achieve its aims – in a democratic society that does not oblige us all simply to roll over and accept it.

If you believe that you are innocent, that you have “done nothing wrong”, and you are completely confident in every respect in your government, then you might feel tempted to accept this argument.

But even if you are, you shouldn’t accept it. Because you should be worried about protecting not only your own rights but those of your fellow-citizens, some of them perhaps with more non-standard or complex lives than you.

The use of this phrase is the very opposite of reassurance that if you are just a normal person then you have nothing to fear – because it can only be said either by someone who has no idea what they’re saying, or by someone who believes that we can never have anything to fear from any one of the millions of individuals who might ever have their fingers on one of the levers of the state.

Even the supremely innocent person - let alone the rest of us - DOES have something to fear from the government taking all their information