It goes like this: ‘Hard times; tough choices. Grown up debate. Honesty. Realism. Cuts. Real cuts. More cuts than the other lot. Values. Fairness. Climate Change. Afghanistan. Gurkhas”.

Actually, the Gurkhas bit is only for the Liberal Democrats, since winning the battle to allow the Nepalese warriors to settle in Britain is their UK leader, Nick Clegg’s singular achievement of the year.

After his conference speech in Bournemouth at the weekend you half expected him to cry Ayo Gorkhali!, and whip out his kukri.

Young Nick Clegg wants to sound tough. He is promising “savage cuts” in public spending, in a pre-emptive strike on a conference season that is going to be dominated by public spending, or rather reducing it. I’m not quite sure if I buy the new, improved Nick Clegg with his fiscal sadomasochism, but he is determined to show that he can crack the whip, even if there are doubts he can wield the knife.

Child benefits public sector pay and pensions, tuition fees, you name it, Nick says he will chop it. No wonder David Cameron is saying there isn’t a cigarette papar between them – not that Lib Dems would dream of sharing a roll-up with the Tories.

This is a radical departure for a party whose policy in the past was to take every other spending plan and double it. The Liberal Democrats were the tax and spend party long after Labour abandoned it. At their annual conference they invariably called for a new higher rate of income tax and for better funded public services.

This wasn’t an unsuccessful strategy. In fact, they did rather well out of it becoming, under Paddy Ashdown and then Charles Kennedy, a serious force in politics for the first time in 80 years.

The Liberal Democrats traded as the party of compassion, of social democratic values, and in office they were as good as their word.

As the leading edge of the Scottish Liberal-Labour coalitions in the Scottish parliament in the early years of the 21st Century, they were responsible for pushing Labour to introduce free personal care for the elderly and abolish university tuition fees.

It looks as if Nick Clegg is now about to abandon the UK party’s commitment to free higher education, which is going to make life rather difficult for his party in Scotland.

Indeed, Nick Clegg’s entire shift to the right, and his very vocal hostility towards “old fashioned top-down social democracy” is going to force his Scottish party to junk many of its traditional themes and lose lose many of its protest votes.

Many urban Scots have voted Liberal Democrat by elections like Dunfermline and West Fife, because they were a bit more left wing than New Labour but weren’t nationalist.

But now they are beginning to emulate the Cameron Conservatives, which might make sense in England where the Cameron Tories are leading the field, but is surely a liability in Scotland, where the Conservatives still remain a toxic brand in large parts of the county.

It’s not entirely clear that opening to the right makes a lot of sense for the Liberal Democrats south of the Border, either, as Charles Kennedy pointed out yesterday on the Andrew Marr programme.

It could antagonise the party grass roots while not really convincing Conservative voters.

The ideological conversion has taken place too rapidly for people to keep up. Lib Dem spokespeople insist that Nick Clegg made clear two years ago when he took over as leader that he was determined to make a break with the social democrat past.

But that is a blink of an eye in electoral terms, and I bet that any focus group you choose will find it extremely odd to hear the ‘nice’ Liberal Democrats ranting on about savage cuts.

The voters are mostly living two leaders ago, in the days when charming Charlie Kennedy would come on and say all the right things about nurses pay, taxing on the rich and hiring more teachers.

But is it the right thing to do? The correct policy for the times? The Liberal Democrats have made the same calculation that the other parties have: that the public realise the economy is in a dire predicament and will not look kindly on political leaders who try to pretend that nothing has changed.

Note how Ed Balls, the Labour schools secretary has caught the drift, and is suddenly talking about deep cuts in education by getting rid of senior staff (is that policy in Scotland too?).

Politicians of all parties realise there is a growing resentment among voters that the public sector is being feather-bedded. Things like civil servants’ bonuses, final salary pensions, annual pay rises and job security in the public sector are a slap in the face for workers in the private sector who no longer enjoy these benefits and yet have to pay for them through their taxes.

Regrettably, this public sector/

private sector split is likely to become one of the great political divides of 21st-century Britain. Public sector workers will not take the loss of their privileges lightly and there could be a couple of winters of discontent ahead.

The public sector unions, unlike in the private sector, are still pretty well organised.

The Liberal Democrats are determined to be on the right side, since there are a lot more voters in the private sector than the public sector, and don’t want to go down with the public spending ship.

But is there not room, also, for a party which seeks to challenge the real vested interests?

By focusing entirely on cuts, the politicians are missing the point, which is that the crisis was not caused by the public sector but by the financial sector.

And while the state will have to be cut to pay for the cost of the banking bail out, it is criminal to exclude from any reckoning the people who were largely responsible for the crisis. It is bad economics, too.

For the very same people in the City, earning the same bonuses, are rebooting the very same speculative financial machine that blew up so spectacularly last year. Perhaps Nick Clegg could do with showing a bit of tough love there as well.