My prediction for this week: we’re going to see a whole lot of defiant frontage from Nick Clegg. The last parliamentary session closed with him under attack over tuition fees; this one begins with the possibility of heavy defeat in Oldham East – and he’s got to respond accordingly. Hence his interview on Today this morning, in which he dismissed the idea of a Lib Dem drubbing in May’s local elections as “total nonsense,” and stressed that the coalition is “setting in motion a number of very liberal reforms”. There was also a warning over bonuses, along the usual lines, for state-owned banks.
But the most intriguing news in Lib Dem Land is much more sedate than all that – revealed, as it was, in an unassuming paragraph at the bottom of a Sunday Times story (£) yesterday. It’s that David Laws is going to be “recalled” by Clegg to work on policies for helping out “alarm clock Britons,” defined as “basic-rate taxpayers who struggle to make ends meet”. In other words: the Lib Dems are working on identifying, and catering for, their own target group. Details are practically non-existent so far – on all sides – but it sounds as though this group overlaps, at the lower end, with Ed Miliband’s “squeezed middle” and the “Cameron couples” so insightfully described by James last October.
If so, then it’s an understandable move. For starters, Clegg needs to find new voters – and quick, if he is to reassure his jittery MPs. And he might as well base that search around what was one of the most eyecatching policies to feature in the election, and one of the most admirable policies now being implemented by the government. Yesterday, David Cameron (rightly) advertised that the coalition will lift 800,000 people out of income tax. You can be sure that Clegg will (just as rightly) claim credit for that, by way of an appeal for these “alarm clock Britons”.
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