Does the general public expect the Liberal Democrats, as the smallest of the major political parties, to have the same range of heavyweight policy pronouncements on every national topic, as the two main parties? I don’t think so. But they do expect a some eye-catching and distinctive policies that define what they’re about.

Here’s today’s page from the Politics Home website. No sign of any new distictiveness, just the ‘ditching’ of one of their distinctive policies.

Paul Waugh, deputy political editor of the London Evening Standard, serves up a particularly ascerbic article in his blog, saying, 

“As for the Lib Dem shift on tuition fees, it is the singlemost politically stupid idea I’ve heard in a long time. … But for the Lib Dems to at a stroke alienate their key voting bloc is a masterpiece of ineptitude masquerading as ‘boldness’.”

The commenters on the LibDemVoice website are unhappy at loss of this flagship policy.

Meanwhile, striving to create a distictive Lib Dem policy on spending cuts, to talk about ’savage’ cuts seems certain to frighten the voters. With that one word – ’savage’ - the LibDems appear to be positioning themselves as the likely harshest cutters of public spending, which is something of a surprise. Their leader, Nick Clegg, said yesterday,

“In some cases we will be quite bold, or even savage, on current spending, …”

Savage, a most odd word to use. Subtle it’s not. The public knows spending cuts are coming. But, there’s still one heck of a lot of  persuasion needed from politicians on the spending cut choices, before we ever get round to using the word ’savage’.