Well done Mr. Clegg, after a bit of a wobble you stopped the bilge leak.
We have seen 2 statements from Clegg in the last 24 hours, and the first had me groaning “Bilge, absolute nonsense, oh do shut up” as usual.
He said something along the lines of “Both Labour and the Conservatives are not being straight with people about the difficult decisions required to sort out the public finances”, which as far as I can tell translates as “wah wah wah…why won’t anyone ask meee…”, which is hardly a proper response to all the speculating and land grabbing that the other parties have been engaging in on our turf.
Early this morning we had a much better rebuttal to all that when he popped up again and finally came out and clarified that our core policies are not going to be sold down the river in some death pact with the conservative party, nor will we prop up the wounded Labour government.
“The Liberal Democrats…are not for sale,” he said, and he asserted that we won’t compromise on four key policies like Fairer Taxes, Electoral Reform, the Green Tax Switch, and smaller class sizes. This is finally a proper offensive on our part, having been rather on the back foot. On Radio Four this morning, he used an open question to talk about redistributive tax (and I thought he was on the right of the party…) as a dividing line between us and the Tories. He also said that he is quite happy to leave a minority government to push it’s agenda, although once again the four key policies aren’t going anywhere, and there won’t be any backroom compromise.
We have also missed a trick in holding back on attacking David Cameron’s wobble on his discrimination tax on religious freedom – he said yesterday that he could no longer afford to fund a tax break for marriage, which is ridiculous as it is a veiled subsidy on faith as a laughable throwback to the right wing moral conservatives at the Daily Mail, with a flop to follow the flip as he then reasserted the commitment in much less substantial terms later in the day. Honestly, these guys are sitting ducks.
