According to the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has announced that the politics of plenty are over. I assume by this he means plenty of war, plenty of cuts and plenty of sell-offs because he could not possibly be saying that up to now we have never had it so good. Or could he?
Yesterday Clegg set out to show what a serious bunch the third party can be by dropping a swath of its own policies as unrealistic. It's an interesting way to try to give people confidence in your manifesto by tearing half of it up shouting: "This is all rubbish! We were never going to do any of it."
In a press release entitled "Four steps to a fairer Britain," the Lib Dems criticised the Labour and Conservative parties for pretending the recession wasn't happening and not being prepared to take the necessary tough decisions to dig us out of this hole.
Describing the two largest parties as engaging in "make-believe economics" and failing to face up to the fact that we're living in difficult economic times is quite a staggering thing to say.
I really don't know where Clegg has been for the last year and a half, but the idea that the other parties' economic policies proffer an Aladdin's cave of giveaway policies seems a bit far-fetched.
The Labour Chancellor has, for instance, just promised the toughest spending cuts in 20 years. The Tories criticise them for not going far enough. Now Clegg wades in saying they are both sugar-coating their policies? That's actually quite frightening.
A number of commentators have described the coming general election as a turning point for a generation. That's over-hyping it.
The difference between the parties' spending plans are marginal at best. Particularly since the failed coup attempt against the Prime Minister last week, the new Labour Cabinet has shifted towards a more full-scale cuts approach that differs from the Conservative version only in that neither have been fully spelled out to the electorate.
One Lib Dem said the difference between the three main parties was that his party would "cut with a heavy heart."
Presumably that means if you're laid off you are meant to feel sorry for them. Perhaps redundant workers could send the Liberals a condolence card to commiserate with what they must have gone through sending out all those notices.
After describing voters as grown-ups, Clegg then announced that he would introduce caps on public-sector pay, scrap the government baby bonds scheme, ditch the commitment to free childcare and their "citizen's pension" and that he would no longer advocate free personal care for the old and disabled. Added to this the Lib Dems would keep tuition fees, at least until the good times roll again.
Clegg described this bonfire of the policies by saying: "We have stripped away everything that is not essential because the country cannot afford it."
There was me thinking that policies like free child and personal care existed because parents and the disabled couldn't afford them. Maybe they aren't part of "the country."
The abolition of tuition fees was seen as a defining policy for the Lib Dems and for the leader to describe this as "not essential" speaks volumes about the shift at the heart of mainstream politics.
Far from demonstrating how different the Lib Dems are from the other parties, this announcement demonstrates the tight consensus that exists at the top of all three parliamentary parties, which are determined to deny the voters any viable choice.
Clegg may think that you treat people like adults by reducing their living standards, but he could have taken a very different approach - one that stems the growing tide of unemployment rather than adds to it.
He disparagingly described long-held political commitments as a "shopping list of pledges" to voters, adding that he wasn't going to "buy their favour with cheap trinkets."
One moment it's a point of honour and principle to abolish tuition fees, the next the right to an education regardless of your wealth is a "cheap trinket." Fascinating stuff.
One less high-profile announcement was that the Lib Dems would create "a new national infrastructure bank to bring in private money to build the transport links, energy grid and public buildings we need for a sustainable, low-carbon economy in every part of Britain."
This commitment to deepen the privatisation agenda shared by the Conservatives and new Labour is another expression of how barren the state of progressive political ideas is today.
In the past many people who have leaned to the left of politics have voted Lib Dem. The party's stance on ID cards, tuition fees or opposing the Iraq invasion - until it started - gave it some appeal to those who could no longer stomach voting Labour. But even this option has gone now.
Ditching policies designed to help the poorest in society while giving big business the wink that there will be plenty of profits to be made out of a Lib Dem-influenced government is an indication that their leader's priorities are far from progressive, a fact that many on the left of the party are all too aware of.
If Clegg really wanted to be treated like a grown-up he should have taken the risk of presenting his party as a genuine political alternative, not another shade of the same failed approach.
He even dropped the idea of proportional representation at the very time that it is gaining a hearing, watering it down to a commitment to "abolish safe seats" - presumably those of his colleagues, judging by his current uninspired performance.
This approach, based on the idea that the country is moving to the right, is unlikely to win much support among Tory voters who already have a right-wing party to vote for and seems almost designed to put off those to the left who lent them their vote in previous elections.
Disaffected Labour voters and those who support smaller left-wing parties have been given a clear warning that the Lib Dems are not for them. They would do well to heed it.
