USP, Rennard, and other managerialist meaningless crap

Morus' Denver diary over on PBC has an interview with Chris Rennard and Ed Davey. One of Morus' questions was the fundamental question Lib Dem activists up and down the country: what are our two battleground issues (or in other words, what is our USP)? Rennard's answer is that we neither have issues nor a USP. Its truly a breathetakingly depressing answer. Apparantly the next election will be about the "stresses" in people's lives and how we can alleviate them. Sound familiar? Sound pretty bloody far from unique. The other two parties are running on variations on the theme of "strugling"/"hardworking" etc. We should not enter into a competition for who can be the for managerialist and say the word hard pressed in a sentence and make it sound meaningful. Our response to the current economic, and therefore political, climate should be about freedom. Removing barriers in people's lives, thereby increasing people's freedom over their own lives. This means removing State interfearence where possible, scaling back the nanny state, scaling back dramatically the overseer state (civil liberties), decreasing the tax burden for all those under the median income, increasing access to the levers of capitalism enjoyed by companies, incentivising liberal company and market formations not corporatist or hierarchical ones, allowing greater choice into education, moving towards cash transfers to replace some benefits, and .... you get the idea.
This is a, liberal; b, has a narrative; c, distinctive; d, honest about the limits of what government can effectively do; e, reframes the debate in a manner that we can engage with, away from Tory and Labour comfort zones.
Rennard's strategy as outlined leaves us nowhere, nothing but a pale imitation of the other two parties but with a penchant for civil liberties, more pro-european, and saner on immigration. Let the other two parties scrabble around mumbling Brent-speak. We can and must do much better.