Little mentioned in the Lib Dem Voice open thread on Thursday night's Question Time Leadership special was the prolonged discussion on coalition. And in particular an exciting, intriguing possibility that I find myself returning to frequently; the notion that we could have a Labourvative or Conservalab government with a genuinely and revolutionary Liberal opposition ready to wow the electorate with a "REAL alternative"® (or even a "real ALTERnative"®) at the following election.

Such a suggestion is usually derided as fanciful by even the most optimistic Lib Dem commentators, and it had its share of derision from some in the QT audience. Indeed, at this exact moment, I believe our policies are still too timid to count as such a revolutionary vision that could trigger a widespread sense amongst the electorate that a different type of political economy is possible and could win.

But I do think that if we had the cojones (Lib Dem word of the week?) truly to push our liberal credentials, in the way that Nick Clegg seemed to suggest when he said he would like to move us "out of our comfort zone" in this leadership contest (but neither candidate has yet managed to do at least from my perspective), the circumstances are right for it to grab the public imagination.

The fact that Gideon can be named "Politician of the Year" for making what must be the single most insignificant tax reorganization policy announcement in modern history simply proves the poverty of political discourse currently going on in our country, how completely we are in thrall to spin over substance. Since the Liberal Party were last in government at Westminster we have seen nearly a century of swings from rampant socialism (and let us not forget just how close to total state control of industry we were at by the seventies) to government by the aristocratic friends of capital. Yet as the socialist experiment failed and was consigned to history by Margaret Thatcher so also her remedy, a sort of authoritarian free market capitalism, failed because it did not address the most fundamental flaws of the unequal distribution of the common wealth caused and exacerbated by her party's protectionist past.

Labour remained unelectable until they abandoned as much of their socialist background as they could get away with and became the Managerial Party, a strange utilitarian beast whose only aim was to gain power and keep it, tinkering with this and that as public opinion shifted but essentially ideology free. David Cameron is taking the Tories the same way. And yet what they seek to manage, both of them, is decline, just as John Hoskyns suggested to Margaret Thatcher in the seventies.

And so we have the possibility of a new two party state. One party is the two halves of the Managerial Party, both untroubled by ideology, vacuously rearranging the deck-chairs according to opinion polls and focus groups in their marginal battlegrounds. On the other side there is room for a party that not just disagrees on minor aspects of management but which offers, as it did a century ago, a completely alternative ideologically driven vision of self-ownership, minimal government ("small government", as a term, is now meaningless as everyone seems to promise it but ends up being corrupted by the power of big government), free trade on a fair and level playing field where protectionism and its devil-spawn monopoly is ruthlessly rooted out, and where everyone is entitled as of right to their fair share of the common wealth as their primary safety net.

A few months ago the Libertarian Alliance posed the question, in their annual essay competition, of whether Britain needs a specifically libertarian political party. Having once decided to make common cause with the Tories when it appeared that Thatcher was adopting some of their ideals, they too have, it appears, grown tired of the banal micro-management politics from their former champions. I'd say that it's not a specifically libertarian party we need but a radically Liberal one.

To be that party, however, we have to sing from the same hymn sheet. No more of these artificial divisions, largely in the minds of others of course, between "social liberals" and "economic liberals". We have to believe, and believe instinctively, that individual choice enabled by self-ownership is the ultimate goal that can set people free to achieve their optimum potential. That intervention is for when there is total market failure and should be seen as an essentially temporary measure to redress some economic issue that has got so far out of balance it leaves a good number of people unable to engage in a truly free voluntary exchange for some good. We need to rediscover that the way to increase the returns to labour is to eradicate protectionism and monopoly, especially the great monopolies of enclosure of our planet's common wealth, of the creation of credit and the monopolization of ideas. We need to recognize that interference very often if not always fails in the longer term to address the needs of the most unfortunate because it tries to provide for the fortunate as well. As Herbert Spencer observed a century and a half ago:

To mitigate distress appearing needful for the production of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned upwards of one hundred acts in Parliament having this end in view, each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. Men are nevertheless still discontented with the Poor Laws, and we are seemingly as far as ever from their satisfactory settlement. [Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, 1851, Introduction]

Now we spend upwards of £150bn on pensions and social security, yet the poorest pensioners end up with a very low quality of life and the poorest benefits recipients literally cannot afford to work. We spend £85bn on education yet we find ourselves having to compel people to stay in education till 18 and create 7.5 million new training places, says Broon, to make up for the lack of skills our economy needs to function properly. We spend £110bn on illness and still cannot provide cutting edge treatments to people who might benefit from them or prevent people making life decisions that will lead them to medical complications sooner or later and once in hospital their chances of catching something fatal are increased.

Transforming Britain into an ultra-competitive, free trade based nation of individuals empowered by their own economic productivity will be a huge job. Not a one parliament affair to be sure. But just as Thatcher caught the public mood by introducing people to quite complex ideas like monetary austerity as the "big idea" towards which she would work in power, so we don't have to have all the answers as to exactly how bits of the state of welfare and dependency we have become will evolve in Liberal Britain. It's the big vision, the end game, one so totally different and beneficial to the vast majority of people that counts. And we can start selling that tomorrow if we choose to. As the leadership candidates said - it's an "unprecedented opportunity". And one for me that deserves serious consideration more than derision.