Nick Clegg fails to assure party conference he has heard the message of discontent, writes MARK HENNESSYin Sheffield
ESCAPING FROM the rain outside, Liberal Democrats crowded into a hotel meeting room in Sheffield on Saturday evening to listen to Prof Paul Whiteley's examination of detailed polling results on the party's fortunes. The title for his lecture, How Bad Is It?, offered a clue, even to the most optimistic.
Just 10 months in power, the Liberal Democrats’ opinion poll ratings have collapsed, with just 52 per cent of those who voted for the party last May saying that they would now do so again. Whiteley argued though that the figures also showed that the support once held, if only briefly, could be persuaded to come back.
Everything hinges on the economy. The Conservative- Liberal Democrat game plan is simple: restore economic growth, rid the UK of its current deficit by 2015, along with reaping billions from a sell-off of the stakes taken in a clutch of banks by Labour’s last chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling.
However, the plan is clashing with reality. Economic growth is weak to non-existent, while Middle East turmoil has already brought higher oil prices and, perhaps, threatens a repeat of the 1970s oil crisis. Public spending cuts are beginning to bite, with the prospect of a summer of industrial discontent to come. Now, the Japanese earthquake will affect world trade.
Liberal Democrat leader and deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has a number of clear messages to his supporters, which he repeated at every opportunity on stage in Sheffield City Hall and on its margins: power bring with it challenges, the party must hold its nerve and government, no matter how difficult, is better than opposition.
Clegg faces problems on a number of fronts: he must show UK voters that coalition does work, that it does not bring chaos, yet he must also emphasise the party’s own identity, particularly as it prepares to face local elections to half of all councils in England, along with contests in Scotland and Wales.
One delegate, greeting Clegg in Sheffield, took him by surprise by saying, “It’s so nice to see you back. I thought we’d lost you when you walked through that door of Number 10”. Recounting the anecdote to delegates yesterday, Clegg said: “Let me reassure you, David Cameron hasn’t kidnapped me.” Often, however, he does not go far enough for his own party.
The legacy left by his decision to accept tuition fees has, as Prof Whiteley pointed out to murmurs of approval from party members, fundamentally damaged the party’s trust standing with voters, even with those who are not affected financially.
Meanwhile, delegates on Saturday unanimously criticised Conservative health secretary Andrew Lansley’s reforms of the National Health Service – the biggest in 60 years – which did not feature in the election manifestos of either the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats, or even in their post-election pact.
Under the reforms, GPs would directly commission £80 billion (€92.6 billion) worth of health services in England. However, the Liberal Democrats fear that doctors will be faced with conflicting loyalties to their patients and their budgets, and that without having the experience to handle business on such a scale, they will simply sub-contract commissioning to contractors, who will favour private health companies.
In a bid to take the sting out of the delegates’ clear anger, Clegg accepted a series of amendments, but, faced with the need to maintain relations with Conservative prime minister David Cameron, neither then nor later did Clegg convince that he has heard the message from the Sheffield hall.
However, it is the outcome of the referendum on May 5th on the replacement of the first-past-the- post voting rules for the House of Commons with the alternative vote that will really poison relations between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, regardless of which way voters decide to go.
On Friday, Liberal Democrat president Tim Farron said the passage of AV – which requires all MPs to win 50 per of the vote in their constituencies – was “incomparably essential”, but an opinion poll published in a British Sunday newspaper yesterday for the first time gave the No camp a slight lead.