LIBERAL DEMOCRAT leader and deputy UK prime minister Nick Clegg yesterday vowed to take a tougher stand in coalition with the Conservatives on the government’s first anniversary in power, but urged his bruised party to focus on the gains that it had made in power, including lower taxes for the less well-off.
Promising to put “muscular liberalism” at the heart of the coalition, Mr Clegg, who suffered major losses in last week’s local and Scottish elections and the defeat of the reform to change the rules for electing MPs, insisted that arguments over policies with Conservatives would be done in such a way as to avoid threatening the life of the administration.
“In the next phase of the coalition,” said Mr Clegg in a speech in the National Liberal Club in London, “both partners will be able to be clearer in their identities, but equally clear about the need to support government and government policy. We will stand together, but not so closely that we stand in each other’s shadow.”
Disagreements currently exist between the parties over stalled reforms of the NHS, though both parties are now claiming that they are the best ones to protect the service.
Illustrating the competition between the two over the increasingly divisive issue, Mr Clegg was left discomforted in the House of Commons just hours after his speech when Conservative prime minister David Cameron told MPs: “There is only one party to trust on the NHS and that is the party that I lead.”
During a speech to the influential Conservative backbenchers’ committee last evening, Mr Cameron insisted repeatedly that the decision to hold up the passage of the reform legislation for two months pending a new round of consultations had been taken by him alone and not under pressure from Mr Clegg.
In his own speech, Mr Clegg insisted that some of the Liberal Democrats’ achievements to date have been to stop the Conservatives from pushing ahead with the replacement of the Trident nuclear submarine, stopping them from cutting inheritance taxes for the wealthy, building more prisons and renegotiating the Human Rights Act.
Following heavy losses in council elections and in the Scottish parliamentary contest, Mr Clegg said his party had been hurt “by the deep, visceral memories” of the cuts imposed by the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and the fears that the north of England and Scotland would be economically harmed by cutbacks.
“The 1980s won’t happen again. We are not in government to turn back the clock, but to move forward to a better, stronger and more balanced economy. In the Thatcher years, whole communities were uprooted. Because too many areas were dependent on just one industry, economic upheaval led to social upheaval. Industries went, and communities went with them. Never again,” he said.
Moving to dismiss fears of the party grassroots that the Lib Dems were becoming too closely tied to the Conservatives, Mr Clegg said: “There has also been some talk of a so-called ‘centre-right realignment’ since [the coalition’s] formation. This is just nonsensical and naive. As I said earlier, this is a coalition of necessity, not of conviction.”