Liberal Democrat may be liberal.

There's a very good posting at LibDem Voice by someone called Christopher Leslie (wasn't he on Blue Peter once?).

Both Clegg and Cameron are right to support free schools: they offer a great chance to increase civil society, to provide better education in Britain, a greater level of plurality, and parents and children having increased choice and control in their education.

By declaring that the Conservatives will not allow firms to make a profit from the free school system, however, Cameron is failing to fully utilise the opportunities free schools could offer, and which can only be accessed by allowing profit-making into the system. This might be the tokenistic suspicion of any institution making profit from state money; a refusal to take that idea to a public he fears won’t accept it; or that he’d rather see free schools be the sole domain of NGOs - which reveals a scary amount of paternalism. Whichever is the case, Clegg should not make the same mistake.

So while the Tories are saying no to profit-making, here we have a LibDem saying that the profit motive is what will make our schools work properly. Funny times we're living in, funny times.

One of the concerns that people have over free schools is that too many of them will be run by religious extremists who will set about filling the children's heads with all sorts of dangerous nonsense (and that's different to state schools how?) My solution to this is to only allow schools that are profit-making - privatise the lot of them. When the money-making impulse comes up against the religious one, it's Mammon that will win. Bye-bye religious extremists.