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Maybe my blog reader is faltering, but I seem to be getting enough comment on the Irish EU Treaty vote from eurosceptic types. But very little from members of the most avowedly "pro-EU" political party in Britain. Are the Lib Dems collectively stunned by the result?

As that strangest of beasts a pretty anti-EU Lib Dem I'm personally kind of pleased.

Congratulations.

If any of the naysayers come across to Rome I may have to leave. One arrogant Messianic prick was nearly enough to make me leave.

Simon Mollan writes in Inner West: Another reason to vote for Ming – he is not a wonk that a "wonk" might not set the world alight, give us the profile we need. I disagree. There's been a lot of talk in both Labour and Tory parties in recent years of "blue sky thinking" yet it has all fallen flat because of the drudgery of parliament, government and opposition and the altar of focus group acceptance.

And the area most likely to give us that radical policy edge is the discovery, that Chris Huhne has already made for himself, that the economic orthodoxy we have been buried in since the seventies, the rise and apparent victory of monetarism, is not the fixed and rigid set of natural laws others would have us accept that it is. Some of us have spent most of our waking lives trying to persuade this party to listen to radical alternative viewpoints with few listeners, but Chris is one of those few.

I believe that smashing that consensus, particularly on the economic bases on which all British politics functions at present can give us the answer to so many pressing problems that we, with the others, are at present just tinkering - the pensions hole, world trade, the distribution of global wealth, offering what Bernard Lietaer calls "Sustainable Abundance". And smashing it will need someone who is economically literate enough to explain why it is not threatening, not frightening, and on the contrary liberating, ushering in a whole, at present practically unseen and certainly not understood, new economic order.

Now, I am not a hundred per cent certain that Chris has the balls for this task either. I know at least that he understands the arguments and is prepared to have them given an airing in the party. I'm clear it cannot be done from somewhere else on the front-bench, so important is it and potentially underpinning a huge amount of other policy. But he is the only one of the three that in my opinion could achieve that.

The current economic order in this country, and much of the western (at least) world, means that politicians are reduced to bidding for the PFI contract for deckchair management on the Titanic. We need someone who is literate enough to steer us away from the impending economic ice-bergs. And we have an opportunity to make the running on this. I'm only surprised that other economic radical, David Boyle, disagrees.

Apparently there's a story going around (in another Murdoch rag) that certain "important funders" of the Lib Dems are threatening to withdraw financial support for the party if Simon wins. They say he is "unfit" as a result of his leftward stance and his supposed "dishonesty" about his sexual identity.

I find this pretty nasty stuff. My reaction is "do your worst, we're bigger than the odd individual, whatever you are worth".

That it costs so much to "play at the top table" is one of the worst aspects of modern politics and it seems to me driven by people who want more influence than they warrant in a democracy. Whilst I'm not likely to be voting Simon at number one, this certainly makes me want to put him ahead of Ming in my preferences, and I would be very pleased to see us eschew such undue influences very publicly in an attempt to reposition ourselves in the public eye as the decent party.

I have some respect, moreso than most in the party I suspect, for the "economic liberal" argument, or at least my "unorthodox" economic outlook permits me to find a way in which freedom of economic life can be maximised whilst retaining a strong social safety net democratically run and managed, but if this is the game the main proponents of "economic liberalsim" within the party want to play, they are welcome to take it elsewhere.

As to Muslim members who are supposedly threatening to resign if Simon were to win because of his sexual history, I say to them, if they are any more than a figment of the Sunday Times's imagination (and we already know that the 20 they claim in Birmingham Hodge Hill are absolutely nothing to do with this but inter-Muslim community politics), I don't want to be in the same party as you. And on this I believe I am the liberal. So find a way to accommodate your faith within liberalism or find an illiberal party to support - there are plenty of them.