Clegg feels he is "constantly being urged by commentators, by party activists" to "express identity by tearing strips off the Tories" and by brandishing "trophies of achievement to show the Liberal Democrats have secured this or that concession".
One of the big points he wants to make to his party is that "this temptation" ought to be resisted. "The moment we get drawn into that sort of dynamic, two things will happen. Firstly, it will actually make us seem more irrelevant than we are because it will perpetuate the idea that the point of being in the coalition for the Liberal Democrats is to have a little shopping list of achievements, the assumption being the rest of it is Conservative policy. The truth is much more radical than that. All the big judgments are genuinely jointly taken by David Cameron and myself. That's why I didn't want to have a department, that's why I'm a hop and a skip from his office."
Nick Clegg, March 2011:
Would a Government without Liberal Democrats have ended child detention? Got an extra ten billion out of the banks? Would it have held a referendum on the voting system? Or put up capital gains tax? Ordered an inquiry into torture? Brought in a pupil premium? Or replaced Control Orders? Would a Government without Liberal Democrats have cut taxes for the poorest?
I don’t think so.
I can’t see the Tories being happy with this.
3 comments:
There's 2 things I don't like about Clegg - his face.
Not going to go through all of these, but the reference to a pupil premium is genuinely bemusing. The Conservative manifesto explicitly promised a pupil premium in so many words. The structure or implementation may have been different, but there is no way the Lib Dems can claim a pupil premium in itself as a hard-won concession.
More than that, the Labour manifesto also explicitly promised a pupil premium in so many words. So Clegg's claiming credit for achieving something supported by around 95% of parliament.
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