Nick Clegg blasts Tory 'snobs' and attacks 'bile' of Coalition rivals
Nick Clegg turned his guns on David Cameron and the Tories with the most aggressive attack yet on the “frenzied bile” of his Coalition partners.
In his keynote speech to the Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow, he took off his gloves after four years of power-sharing government. “David Cameron — you can copy our ideas but you will never imitate our values,” he said scathingly, after accusing the Prime Minister of stealing the Lib-Dem flagship policy of tax cuts for the poor.
He railed at the “dated snobbery” of Conservative Right-wingers who sneered at vocational qualifications pushed in government by Lib-Dems.
And in a dig aimed at former education secretary Michael Gove, now Chief Whip, he said: “Did you know Michael Gove raided the budget for much-needed school places in order to fund his Free School obsession? Did you see the frenzied bile from the Tory Right against our plan to give young children at primary school a healthy meal at lunchtime?”
The Deputy Prime Minister fired a volley at Home Secretary Theresa May for accusing him of putting lives at risk by blocking her “Snooper” laws, which would empower police to see people’s internet use: “I say this to Theresa May: stop playing party politics with national security; stop playing on people’s fears simply to try and get your own way.
“Your Communications Data Bill was disproportionate, disempowering — we blocked it once and we’d do it again.”
Mr Clegg attacked Labour too, saying Ed Miliband had failed to learn from his mistakes in the Brown government and was “promising a new nirvana where everyone will be well-off, no one will be out of pocket, we don’t need to cut government spending and the public finances will be miraculously fixed”.
He rounded on Ukip’s Nigel Farage for trying to divide Britain with “bitter tribalism” and false solutions, adding: “Resentment, the politics of fear, doesn’t pay the bills or create a single job.” It was a fighting speech from a party leader whose personal ratings are at a record low and whose party is at six per cent in the polls. Mr Clegg admitted he and the Liberal Democrats were “tainted” by office. He said he had learned from his “mistakes”, and appealed for redemption for his most damaging error: failing to honour his 2010 pledge not to raise tuition fees.
“How will you judge us?” he asked voters. “By the one policy we couldn’t deliver in government, or by the countless policies we did deliver in government? When I apologised for the disappointment and anger caused by our inability to scrap tuition fees, I knew we could never, ever make that mistake again. And we won’t.”
Mr Clegg began by warning Islamist fanatics, including British jihadists, that they will be hunted down. After paying tribute to murdered British hostages Alan Henning and David Haines, he said Britain had to “take on the cowards who took their lives”.
Addressing Islamic State, he added: “All you have done is unite the people of Britain — Muslim and non-Muslim, of all faiths and none — around a single aim. We and our allies ... are going to find you, we are going to destroy your bases, we will cut off your supplies, isolate you from your support — and for the sake of peace, democracy and the freedom of all those you terrorise, we are not going to stop until it’s done.”
Mr Clegg predicted the Tories would fail in their claim to curb immigration and scrap human rights, and said an in-out EU referendum would cost Britain dear. Mr Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne were guilty of pretending that “every worry can be fixed with a big wave of the Union Jack,” he said.
Turning his fire on Labour, Mr Clegg added: “Ed Miliband — you might have forgotten what you did to our economy, but we have not. This is a man who was part of the government which wasted their chance and ruined the economy, destroying jobs and slashing incomes — yet not a single word on the deficit.”
He claimed of his party: “We may no longer be untainted ... I may no longer be the fresh faced outsider. But we still stand for a different kind of politics ... Treating people like adults. Not shirking the difficult dilemmas this country faces, but confronting them head on.”
