The good, the bad and the jokes
Peter Hoskin 1:39pm
In the end, I'd say Nick Clegg's speech at the Lib Dem conference was so-so. The very good parts were offset by the very bad parts, and there was a chunk of neither-here-nor-there material in between. And all delivered in the now-ubiquitous, walk-around-the-stage-with-no-notes manner. If you want to read the whole thing, there's a copy of it here. I'll just deal with the two extremes:
The very bad
Clegg's speech began like a stand-up routine. And a terrible one, at that. There was joke, after joke, after joke, at the expense of both Labour and the Tories. The Government were likened to the "living dead -They are a Zombie government. A cross between Shaun of the Dead and I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue." Whilst the Cameroons are "blue - but so are the Smurfs and toilet duck". If the audience hadn't been made up of the Lib Dem faithful, you'd have seen tumble weed roll across the conference centre floor.
But putting the humour (or lack thereof) aside, Clegg's jokes were simply unwise to make in the light of some of the clangers he's dropped over the past few days. Ribbing Cameron for being the "Andrex puppy of British politics - a cuddly symbol, perhaps, but fundamentally irrelevant to the product he's promoting" can seem the slightest bit hypocritical from someone who, only yesterday, revealed he had no idea what the state pension is worth. And who announced that the Lib Dems are going to cold call 250,00 lucky members of the public tonight - in the middle of Coronation Street and Champions League football.
As for Clegg's energy policy, a 'Stevie' on the BBC message boards gives a great response:
"I thought his speech was quite good until he said there will be no more nuclear power - how does he hope to reduce dependancy on rogue nations and fossil fuels when he thinks we can close down all our coal and gas power plants too? It's nonsense - we cannot only rely on windpower and solar and certainly not ovenight. I mean, my so-called re-chargeable batttery for my phone only lasts 2 days!"
The very good
Once he'd stopped the ten-jokes-a-second shtick, Clegg started to outline how the Lib Dems would set about cutting taxes. Sure, there's - rightly - plenty of scepticism about their back-of-an-envelope sums. But Clegg's rhetorical approach is spot-on. The emphasis was very much on those members of the public who are struggling most in the face of the credit crunch, and on cutting government waste to free up funds. Here's how Clegg put it:
"Using just a little of the money the government wastes every day to help people in their everyday lives - that doesn’t mean cutting help for the poorest, of course. It doesn’t mean stopping vital investment in hospitals and schools. It just means taking a cold, hard look at all government spending and asking a basic question: Is it working?Every family in Britain is tightening their belts for the hard times ahead. It is time for government to tighten its belt too.
Labour has doubled government spending from £300bn a year to £600bn a year. That’s 18,000 pounds a second. They’ve taken, give or take a few, 16 million pounds of your money since I started speaking. It’ll be 38 million by the time I’ve finished. And if you clap for too long, it will cost us billions.
Does anyone in this room believe every single pound is spent well?"
It's a simple message, but it's one that wasn't said much during the past decade, when the Labour mantra of "spending = investment; cuts = disinvestment" ruled supreme. Clegg is doing far more than most to further erode that crumbing consensus, and other politicians can learn from the language he's employing in the process. It's hard to agree completely with his claim that the Lib Dems are the "vanguard of British politics". But in this single respect, that may be partially right.
Of course, this is just one viewer's opinion. How will it play with a wider audience? I'm not sure. The fairer economy stuff has the potential to be popular, but the Lib Dems' sliding opinion poll ratings suggest they're hardly connecting with the voting public. The conference hall audience did seem to approve of speech - even the bits about cutting taxes. Clegg got warm applause throughout, and a standing ovation at the end - for all his talk of the Lib Dems heading for Government, I suspect he'll be pleased enough with that.
Previous
TrevorsDen
September 17th, 2008 2:53pm Report this commentHBOS - Lloyds takeover
(OK of topic)
Where are the barking dogs? ie the unions and SNP?
Massive job losses (in Edinburgh and Halifax?) - all encouraged by Gordon Brown?
back on topic.
Clegg keeps saying tory tax cuts are from the top down. How long is he going to be allowed to get away with this? Never mind he is not really talking about tax cuts at all, just redistribution of the existing spend.
And really just for how much longer are we going to continue with this fiction that Vince Cable is some kin d of economic genius/expert?
TrevorsDen
September 17th, 2008 3:08pm Report this commentThe problem for the Tories is that whilst the economy - the entire country - will need serious surgery, its politically difficult to get this across, certainly right now. The govt deficit is huge and rising, the govt is wasting money hand over fist. A correction will mean economic pain if taxes are to be cut and also keep economic stability.
Clegg is promising a lot based on doing a very little.
And it ill behoves him to make TV related jokes. How can we have a PM named after a character in Last of the Summer Wine?
Nick Kaplan
September 17th, 2008 3:20pm Report this commentReally? I thought Cleggover’s speech was awful! Aside from the obvious fact that he was clearly trying to copy Cameron’s speaking without notes, how annoying was his painfully condescending intonation? At the start it sounded as though he was speaking to a nursery school (admittedly many in his party probably don’t have the intellectual capacity to comprehend anything above nursery level). Thank God this man hasn’t got a hope in hell of winning an election; he’s the only thing that could plausibly be worse than our current bunch of incompetents.
The only joke that didn’t make me cringe, and did make me laugh, was when he said “when you strip out all the offensive parts of the conservative party there isn’t much left.”
Unfortunately for Clegg when you strip out all the mind-numbingly stupid, politically correct and painfully opportunistic parts of the Lib Dem party there is absolutely nothing left!
There was very little of serious content. The only real proposal he has is to cut taxes for the poor. Well bravo for him... until he explained that this was to be achieved by socking it to the rich. If this idiot thinks it’s a good to start taxing the wealth and job creating sectors even more as we enter a recession then nobody will have a job left for tax cuts to be relevant.
And yesterday Clegg made clear that he aint going to be reducing public spending, nope, just letting the councils waste it instead.
“Every family in Britain is tightening their belts for the hard times ahead. It is time for government to tighten its belt to,” makes a nice slogan but all the big government social democrats (thieves) in that party aren’t even remotely interested in tightening the belt of government, instead Clegg had far more fun elucidating how he was going to kick the financial sector when it’s down with even more burdensome regulation (how very liberal of him).
And you say that Clegg is helping to destroy the consensus that “spending = investment; cuts = disinvestment” but he called government spending ‘investment’ throughout the whole speech!!
One last bugbear, when will the Lib Dems stop calling themselves Liberal? They aren’t, and they never will be. They are nothing more than Labour’s slightly more incompetent sister party. Normally they complain they get no coverage and are not taken seriously. I find myself wondering why they get any coverage at all, in reality they are the joke of Westminster, and like Clegg’s the joke isn’t even funny.
Pete Hoskin
September 17th, 2008 3:47pm Report this commentNick Kaplan: "And you say that Clegg is helping to destroy the consensus that “spending = investment; cuts = disinvestment” but he called government spending ‘investment’ throughout the whole speech!!"
Yes, but he didn't add the "cuts = disinvestment" bit...
dennis
September 17th, 2008 3:49pm Report this commentI was struck by this bit of Clegg’s speech, which takes aim at David Cameron:
…that arrogance.
That born-to-rule conceit.....
....Power must be earned, not inherited.
Are alumni of Westminster School usually quite so chippy?
Tiberius
September 17th, 2008 3:57pm Report this commentI heard some of his speech on the radio earlier, and it was a cringe. It sounded to me as if he thought he was William Hague or Vince Cable.
And he's, er, not.
Nick Kaplan
September 17th, 2008 4:27pm Report this commentPete; Is the latter part not implied?
BCS
September 17th, 2008 4:30pm Report this commentThe attractive idea that the Liberal Democrats are planning to cut taxes, reducing spending and shrink the state is a delusion. For all Clegg's rhetoric, almost all of the cited £20 billion figure will simply be redeployed to fund other spending priorities, whilst the income tax cuts for poor and middle-income taxpayers will be financed mainly be increasing the burden on the rich. Thus, far from representing a shift to the Right, Clegg's policy is massively redistributive.
Liz Brown
September 17th, 2008 4:37pm Report this commentpots calling kettles black - Cleggover is a multi millionaire, formerly Westminster School.
I had to switch him orf
Arthur Gibson
September 17th, 2008 4:59pm Report this commentThe speech is an attempt to get the LibDems used to the idea that they could go into a coalition with the Tories after the next election. No-one will want to keep Labour in power, so their only route to government is on Conservative coat-tails.
David Lindsay
September 17th, 2008 5:42pm Report this commentYes, you heard aright. Nick Clegg really did say that the Lib Dems were "the vanguard" of "a revolution". Not much reading between the lines is needed this time.
A revolution, moreover, with no place for coal, no place for nuclear power, and no place for the DTI (or whatever it now calls itself), including everything that the DTI does, not least with old miners and their families. What was all that about winning seats in the North?
mitch
September 17th, 2008 5:51pm Report this commentHe can pretty much say what he likes he has no chance to implement any of it? Torys at 52% limps at 12. he is wasting his life and our time.
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