CAMPAIGN TRAIL:Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg is finding it difficult to persuade loyalists to break the two-party monolith, writes MARK HENNESSY
TWELVE-YEAR-old Tomas Baldwin stood yesterday among the crowd in the Asda supermarket in Harrogate in Yorkshire, with his brother Jack by his side, patiently waiting for his chance to question Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg.
“Jack has been told by his school that he won’t get extra help. What are you going to do to be able to help him?” asked a nervous but determined Tomas. The boys’ mother Joanne stood behind, beaming with pride.
“I think that that is absolutely appalling. I don’t think any child in whatever circumstances, of whatever age should ever be told that they can’t be helped. I am absolutely appalled to hear that,” declared Clegg, who, like the other party leaders, has talked often during the campaign about the need to do more on education.
“No child should ever be told that you are on your own. No child should ever be told you are not going to get any help, whether it is special-needs children in mainstream schools, or in other schools.
“Every single child must be cherished, supported and given the care and particularly the one-to-one support I passionately believe in,” said the Liberal Democrats leader, who has pushed for £2.5 billion (€2.8 billion) more for education.
“Jack needs extra help, but he was told by the school that he wouldn’t qualify for the Action Plus programme because he wasn’t good enough to benefit from it,” Tomas said later.
His mother said: “They are saying that he can get the odd 20-minutes; the headmistress said that she didn’t have the resources. She said Jack was very bright and could be a scientist. I told her he won’t if they don’t teach him to read and write.” Standing quietly with his mother and brother, Jack, his lips trembling, said simply, but to effect: “I want to have more help. I don’t want to go down and down and fail all the time and have a bad life.”
The day for Clegg, an atheist, had begun in Burnley’s Pentecostalist Life Church, where 300 members had gathered. Everywhere he went from there to a finish in Redcar in Teeside last night, the crowds were the same.
So, too, was the speech: a single, transferable plea to voters just days away from the May 6th general election to break the two-party monolith controlled for decades by Labour and the Conservatives.
In Marsden, in the Colne Valley constituency, Clegg told a crowd in the village’s park: “They have had it red and blue for 65 years. It isn’t for me to persuade them for electoral reform. They won’t do it. It is for you the voters to tell them.
“Everywhere I go I hear from people who have voted Labour all their lives, whose parents and grandparents have voted Labour. I understand it, that people see Labour as part of their identity,” he told them. “But you have not betrayed Labour. Labour has betrayed you. Take a chance to make it right. It is our last chance to get it right,” he said, in speeches from Burnley; on to Marsden and Harrogate in Yorkshire before ending in Redcar on Teeside last night.
However, weekend polls showed the Liberal Democrats’ surge is softening, partly, it would seem, because some voters have been turned off by the party’s plans for an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Under the Liberals’ plans, illegals in the UK for 10 years would be entitled to claim citizenship, if they had been law-abiding since they arrived and if they fulfil a number of other conditions.
“Both Labour and the Conservatives have had an unofficial amnesty after 14 years, but they don’t tell people about it,” Clegg said on the campaign bus. Clegg’s difficulty is that he is trying to explain a difficult policy during a campaign.
In a Redcar town hall meeting last night, hundreds gathered in a town that has been Labour for so long, yet now struggles with catastrophically-high jobless figures – particularly following the closure of the Corus steel plant.
By now, Clegg, who had looked exhausted during the afternoon, had been restored: “People ask me why I am here. I say, Labour doesn’t own the northeast. It doesn’t have the birthright to represent you in Westminster.
“They have taken you for granted for too long,” said Clegg, who was met with nodding heads.
The Liberal Democrats need nodding heads to turn into votes on Thursday. Clegg still is not sure that they will in sufficient numbers.