Murnaghan Interview with Nick Clegg MP, former Deputy Prime Minister, 18.09.16
ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Welcome back to Westminster which this week has one less MP until the by-election after the shock resignation of David Cameron. The former Prime Minister stood down declaring he didn’t want to become a distraction to the new Prime Minister, Theresa May. His former coalition partner, Nick Clegg, has gone nowhere though holding out hope that even with just eight MPs the Lib Dems could be back in power in just a few years. The former Deputy PM who has written a new book about his time in government joins me now from Putney, a very good morning to you Mr Clegg. Well let me ask you about your reaction to Mr Cameron leaving parliament, it is said he went in a bit of a huff at Theresa May dismantling his legacy and that of course is in part your legacy.
NICK CLEGG: I think to be fair to David Cameron I would just take his reasons at face value. My experience after many years in politics is that people always look for ulterior or hidden motives but sometimes the answer is just as given by the politician who has made the decision. I think he clearly thought over the summer that … of course it’s difficult to be a deputy, sorry a former Prime Minister and indeed difficult sometimes to be a former deputy Prime Minister in Westminster but in his case most especially when his party is still in power and when clearly his successor will have different priorities so I think it’s probably a bit harsh to say he has gone off in a huff, I can actually understand why he kind of thinks it might be better for everyone, including for his own party, for Theresa May, if he moves on to other things.
DM: But what about the second part of the second part of the question, that it is in part your legacy as Deputy Prime Minister during those coalition years and you point out you are very proud of the some of the achievements the Lib Dems managed to bring in during that time. Do you think Theresa May, you also describe her now as throwing red meat to some of her backbenchers, do you think she will go about dismantling some of those achievements?
NICK CLEGG: Well from my point of view, from the Liberal Democrat point of view, of course it’s been a double whammy because after we were unceremoniously ejected from office in May of last year, George Osborne and David Cameron went around busily dismantling a lot of what was good progressive centre ground stuff that we’d insisted should happen prior to the election. You’ll remember the two disastrous budgets from George Osborne which were distinguished by something which would never have happened in coalition, namely huge tax cuts, Capital Gains tax cuts for instance, reversing something we’d done in office only aimed at the rich and an assault on benefits for the disabled and so on, the kind of thing that would never have happened in the more moderate times of the coalition. But then on top of that, you’re quite right, Theresa May has decided to add a further twist to all of this by reintroducing things like selection across the school system which incidentally wasn’t even in the Conservative manifesto so we have the extraordinary spectacle of a Prime Minister who hasn’t even deigned to get a mandate of her own from the British people, whose party last year got just less than a quarter of the eligible vote, introducing radical new policies to all of our schools for which she doesn’t have a mandate.
DM: You’d rather have seen George Osborne go wouldn’t you? In your book you don’t pull your punches on him, seeing welfare savings as a bottomless pit, he’s callous and there he was last week still batting for that Northern Powerhouse.
NICK CLEGG: Look, it’s hardly a state secret that I’m a Liberal Democrat and George Osborne and David Cameron are Conservatives so we don’t agree. I actually agree with George Osborne on his actually longstanding and admirable support for British research institutions and science. I believe of course as a Sheffield MP that of course we need to rebalance power away from the over-centralised system in Whitehall towards the north and other parts of the country but on the balance of who pays for dealing with the fiscal damage that was done to the public finances in the crash of 2008. Of course we called in different directions, the Conservatives constantly wanted to yank more and more money away from people who are on benefits and the Liberal Democrats constantly wanted to ask those with the broadest shoulders to make the biggest contribution, that was one of the fundamental tensions in the coalition which of course I reflect in my book but it is not a surprising reflection and the interesting thing is that it actually most of the time – not all of the time – led to moderate compromises which I think meant that the kind of difficult unpopular decisions we were making in terms of saving money were done in the most balanced way possible.
DM: Okay, so let’s turn to the task ahead for the Liberal Democrats and first of all, we didn’t hear it explicitly from you but underline it for us, you are fighting the next election for the Lib Dems?
NICK CLEGG: Oh I said to my constituents in Sheffield Hallam I am not going to do a David Cameron, I’m not going to trigger a by-election, I will see this parliament through but like any MP, it is four years away and I will obviously make a decision between now and 2020 about whether I carry on in the parliament between 2020 and 2025, I should think most MPs are in a similar position.
DM: So looking at the numbers, eight MPs, the last time the then Liberals were at that kind of level was what, 70 years ago. Is it that kind of length of time to scrabble back to where you were?
NICK CLEGG: No, it will be much quicker. Firstly of course eight MPs which I know is the thing quite understandably you wish to cite adding a sort of rump parliamentary party, does disguise something a little bit more significant – namely two and a half million people who voted for the Liberal Democrats in the general election last year, at the lowest point in our fortunes. Two and a half million by the way is a million more than voted for the triumphant Scottish Nationalist Party and it’s only because we’ve got this totally crackers electoral system that a party such as ours can get a million more votes and have eight seats and a party which gets a million less gets 56 seats so I think the idea that the eight seats reflects our strength across country is somewhat misleading and that I think has always been borne out by the spectacular local by-election victories which we have been chalking up since the general election. In the city where I’m an MP, in Sheffield just last week we leapt from fourth place to first place in a by-election against Labour for instance so the reason why I don't think it is going to take 70 years back to your question, is because I think politics is immensely volatile, I think there is a great deal of untapped desire out in the country for moderate liberal reforming internationalist politics which the Liberal Democrats and Tim Farron espouse and the centre has been vacated of course as the Tories go off to the right and the Labour party basically becomes a debating society talking amongst themselves, so I just think what goes down goes up and what goes up goes down. I think the volatility of these times suggests that our recovery could be much quicker, maybe not quite as sudden as our decline but certainly more quick than many people anticipate.
DM: What shape, Mr Clegg? Could it be that Farronesque co-operation as you touch upon there of progressive parties or a more formal merger? In your lifetime it has happened when the Liberals merged with the SDP.
NICK CLEGG: I think to be honest, the honest answer is your crystal ball, mine, no one is clear about the future. We are entering into a very, very volatile period in politics, in one sense anything could happen because in an odd way Theresa May’s rather methodical demeanour gives an impression of solidity in government which actually disguises in my view a very brittle, very fragile government, a Prime Minister without a mandate of her own, a small parliamentary majority and, most importantly, a government which has absolutely no clue to fight its way out of this Brexit paper bag that it has found itself in. I think that there is going to be a real appetite as that becomes more and more obvious in the years ahead, there is going to be a growing appetite amongst British people for politicians of the kind of decent moderate turn of mind to work together to put the country first because I just do not believe the Conservatives are going to put the interests of the country and the British economy first as they navigate our way out of the European Union. So I think it is important to work across party lines, that’s something I’ve always done of course, not least in coalition with the Conservatives and been condemned roundly for doing so but it is the kind of politics I believe in and I think it is the kind of politics which we will have to practice again if we are going to do the right thing for the country in the years ahead.
DM: So is Tim Farron right then that almost the key banner to rally around is that issue of Brexit and the idea that there should be some sort of second vote on the Brexit settlement, be it in a general election or indeed in a second referendum or isn’t that just then denying democracy in that we’ve had that referendum and we know that result?
NICK CLEGG: Sure, so we know the result which is that the United Kingdom is going to leave the European Union, the problem is the Brexiteers are trying to reinvent history now and claim they have got a mandate to do this, that and the other, pull us out of the single market, change this, change that. They didn’t actually bother to tell the British people what Brexit means, they can’t even agree amongst themselves what Brexit means so if you like we have departed on this journey, a Brexit journey but the people who advocated Brexit never bothered to spell out what it means, what the destination is. Once they have finally worked that out for themselves and painstakingly negotiated the settlement for the United Kingdom outside the European Union and I might add, stitching together all the trade relationships all around the world which will be disrupted by our departure from the European Union, at that point in keeping with the principle of democracy, of the referendum, it should be the British people who give the final thumbs up or thumbs down to that final deal. I totally admit that if the Brexit camp had spelled out in any detail what Brexit meant before the 23rd June they would have had a mandate to deliver that. They didn’t, they just argued for Brexit but never actually bothered to explain what it means in practice. When we know that, all of us, not them, all of us should have a say.
DM: Mr Clegg, thank you very much indeed for your time. Nick Clegg, former Deputy PM there.
