‘Hell, yes, I am proud of this,’ said Nick Clegg in the first of the BBC’s leaders interviews, broadcast at 7.30pm this evening. He’s lucky to get such a slot to list his achievements: the Lib Dems are vying with the Greens for fifth place right now. And he performed pretty well, in my opinion, coming across as decent and reasonable guy, using humour – and even anger, what it was called for.
Evan Davis seemed to be out to provoke him. He started by playing the Lib Dem election broadcast where Clegg piously said he was fed up with broken promises, then promised not to increase increase tuition fees. Yes, said Clegg, guilty as charged. Also, Davis reminded Clegg that he once said his eight-year-old son knew that you can’t cut state spending at a time of economic stagnation – but that’s what his party then did. A lot of people voted Lib Dem (especially Guardian readers) to stop the Tories but ended up with David Cameron – so he betrayed them.
So what did the LibDems manage to get right? ‘We exploded the myth forever that the government of this country is decided by buggins’ turn,’ he said, and created a coalition country. (I’d argue that David Cameron and Ed Miliband have played their part in creating a a situation where neither could broaden their party’s appeal, but there you go.)
Clegg rightly claimed credit (or, rather, the blame) for the 45p tax because he forced Osborne to raise it from a proposed 40p. Raising the tax threshold to £10,000. Giving free school meals to the children of millionaires (although he didn’t quite phrase it like that). For Clegg, the last five years have been about drawing up this list for precisely occasions like tonight’s interview. Still, when he listed LibDem achievements, it didn’t seem so significant. It’s very, very hard for him to extract even the credit that his party is due.
And those Tory plans to cut £12 billion from welfare? Clegg suggested he would refuse to enter coalition again unless the plans were scrapped:-
“In exactly the same way that I could never countenance recommending to the Liberal Democrats that we enter into coalition with a Labour Party that isn’t serious about balancing the books … equally I would not recommend to the Lib Dems that we go into coalition with the Conservatives if they insist on a plan which is wilfully a remarkable departure from what we’ve done in this coalition.”
The dramatic highlight of the interview came when Davies focused on Clegg’s status as a multi-national global citizen, and played him a clip of his speaking Dutch:
He then put to Clegg that Britain works better for jet-setting citizens of the world than for 'the British working class who have seem foreigners come here and undercut their wages.'
Clegg liked that not one bit. Here's his reaction:
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