Nick Clegg was talking to a group of young readers of First News and contributors from Stand Up Be Counted, for the Hotseat series (where First News readers and Stand Up Be Counted contributors grill politicians).

Sophy Ridge (SR):Hello, and welcome to Hot Seat, a collaboration between Sky News and First News, the UK’s national newspaper for young people. Hot Seat has already seen some of the country’s most powerful men and women questioned by young people about the issues that matter to them and we’re very pleased that the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, is next in the seat. So here are the faces of who he now faces: the Hot Seat panel. They’ve been drawn from First News readers and from Stand Up Be Counted Sky News campaign to get young people engaged in politics. So we have Tyler Margetson, Hasan Mian, Jadyne Daniels, Noah Robson, Jemima Ali and Emily Horbury. Before they get started, let’s get Mr Clegg to introduce himself and explain to us why it is that he’s so important to people’s lives. 

Nick Clegg (NC):    Well, so I am a leader of one of the political parties, the Liberal Democrats, the yellow team and I am also an MP because in Sheffield, all MPs come from a particular part of the country. Sheffield Hallam is the name of my constituency and I’m also the Deputy Prime Minister of this coalition government, which was formed back in 2010 because no single party had won the election so we had to do something a bit new, which was create a government with two parties working together. 

SR:Great, well let’s get started and Tyler, you’ve got the first question. 

T:You are the first party leader to take the hot seat. Why did you agree to do it? 

NC:Because you asked me. Because I thought it would be rude to say no and because I think it’s great that you’ve got involved and the more that... How old are you? 

T:I’m eleven. 

NC:That’s fantastic. The fact that ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen year olds like you are interested in politics and want to ask questions and want to put people like me in the hot seat, it’s just a great thing because even though you can’t vote now, you will be able to vote in a few years’ time. And the more people think seriously about politics and work out why it matters, the better. 

SR:Great. Next question from Hasan. 

H:In the general election, if you could give your one vote to vote for David Cameron or Ed Miliband, who would you choose? 

NC:Oh dear. I’m going to give you my first politician’s answer. I can’t possibly answer that question. I’d always vote for my team. I’d always vote for the Liberal Democrat candidate. It’s just too, it’s a dilemma that I just hope I never have to face, to have to either vote for one of the other two parties rather than my own. 

SR:You might have the dilemma though of deciding which one to go into coalition with after the election. Could you perhaps answer that one? 

NC:It’s not really my decision to take, of course; it’s not that you’re voting but it’s your mums and your dads, and everybody else who is voting. It’s their decision; it’s the decision of the British people so last time, millions and millions of British voters decided by voting that no party was attractive enough to them to get an absolute majority, to get a sort of slam dunk result. But there was one party, the Conservative party that even though it didn’t win the contest, was still a little bit closer to the finishing line and I think it’s right that in a democracy, that should be the party that should try and assemble a government. Even if no one wins the contest, the one that’s kind of still, kind of ahead of the others when the whistle goes, I think is the party that in a democracy, should have the right to try and put together a government. And I think that’s the same principle we should adopt in the next election if no one wins an outright majority. 

SR:Jadyne, your question. 

J:Before you became Deputy Prime Minister, you promised that you wouldn’t raise tuition fees. Do you think that makes people question whether politician’s keep their promises? 

NC:I think the problem, and we just talked about how in the last election no one won a majority so what it means is that you get give and takes, and no one can do everything they want because no one has won the right to do that. And I’m obviously not Prime Minister. If I was Prime Minister, I could do all of my policies that my party wants and so there had to be some give and take because the other (without getting into all the details), the other two parties wanted to see tuition fees go up so there was no way I could insist on our policy because I hadn’t won the election. So we did the next best thing and basically, in a nutshell, it’s the fairest deal I could get in the circumstances. I think it has actually proven to be much fairer than people were worried about at the time. We’ve now got more young people going into university than ever before and thankfully, more young people from poorer families going into universities than ever before. But you know, for me to do everything I want, I would have to be Prime Minister. 

As I say, other parties have had to you know, I’m not sure if David Cameron is coming here. He said, “No ifs, no buts...” promise about immigration which he hasn’t delivered and the Labour party said they were going to end the boom and bust of the up and down in the economy. They messed up on that so politics just isn’t life; sometimes you don’t, you can’t do; you’re just not in the circumstances to do exactly what you want. And then I think you need to do the next best thing which is be open with people, like I’m trying to be open with you that you then try and do the fairest thing that you can. 

SR:So we’ve had lots of questions submitted by contributors to Stand Up Be Counted, Sky News’ campaign to engage young people in politics. So here is one from Shannon. 

S:Hi, I’m Shannon Cook and I’m from Sheffield. To be more specific, I’m from your constituency, Sheffield Hallam. My question is have you given up all hope of retaining your seat in this constituency, because we haven’t seen any evidence of a Lib Dem campaign so far? 

SR:Tough question. 

NC:Yes. I need to find out where Shannon lives. I find that very, very difficult to believe. I’ve been MP in Sheffield Hallam, it’s the greatest privilege of my political life for ten years and I’ve helped hundreds, if not thousands of people week in, week out and we do a huge amount of campaigning. Anyway, I probably need to find out where Shannon lives. Maybe she lives in an address that has just sort of for some reason slipped off the register or something. But no, no. We do a great deal of campaigning and if she hasn’t heard from me, I’m pretty sure her neighbours have. 

SR:Confident that you’re going to win, or...? 

NC:Yes, I am confident but not complacent. You know, I think elections are contests. They shouldn’t be coronations and though I’m confident that I will continue to be because it’s a great privilege to serve a community and South West Sheffield is a wonderful community, of course it should be a contest. Otherwise what’s the point in having an election? 

SR:Great, so let’s go back to the panel and Noah, I think you’ve got a question. 

N:Yeah. You recently said if David Cameron wasn’t up for facing Ed Miliband, you would do it for him. Are you still up for doing that? 

NC:Yes, I am. I am. I think the Conservatives, I think they’re just behaving a little bit sort of arrogantly sort of saying, “Oh, we can’t be bothered to turn up to debate. We can’t, we’re not going to lower ourselves to the level of everybody else.” I mean, at the end of the day, well, we’ve just been talking about the contest in my constituency in Sheffield but it’s a wider contest and for the, at the end of the day, this is your country. It’s the country which belongs to millions of people. It doesn’t belong to politicians. Our democracy doesn’t belong to politicians and the debates don’t belong to the Conservative party. They belong to the British people and I think it helped last time to see, for people to see how the different party leaders discussed things and then that allowed people to make up their own minds and that’s why I will participate in the debates. As it happens, without going into lots of detail, the way the debate has been organised is not, it’s not ideal frankly from my point of view and I worry a little bit that it’s going to be a bit of a sort of laborious exercise with so many people on the stage at one time. But look, you’ve got to; you either believe in open debate and sort of standing up for yourself or you don’t and I just don’t think it’s right for the Conservative party to grandly dismiss everybody else and say they can’t be bothered to turn up. 

SR:Thanks. So Jemima, you’ve got a question now. 

J:Do you think that it’s fair that you’re Deputy Prime Minister, the most important, the second most important in the government when your party got so few votes? 

NC:Well, my party in the last election, so that’s what counts, in the last election got 24% of the votes. So that’s one in four people. So millions and millions, and millions of people voted for the Liberal Democrats so obviously that’s the mandate. You know, the instructions you get from the people is when people vote in a general election and the last time they voted in the general election, actually millions of people voted for us. We got the highest proportion of the votes than we’ve had for a very long time. 

SR:And the actual seats as well as...

NC:Well, the problem with the seats, but this is... The way the system works is a bit unfair. So even though we got one in four of people voting for us, we’ve actually only got 9% of the MPs in the House of Commons. So that’s a system I would like to change because I think we should have a system where the number of seats, the number of MPs that parties have more broadly is a reflection of how voters have voted. We don’t have that at the moment but actually in terms of the number of people who voted for us last time, it was a very big vote. Since then, I’m not sure if you’re... Maybe you’re referring to that. Since then, of course, opinion polls have been less flattering to the Liberal Democrats for all the obvious reasons, because we’ve had to do some pretty difficult and in some cases quite unpopular things to fix the economy. But in a parliamentary democracy, you abide by the judgement that was last made for the election in which you were elected and the last time you were elected, millions of people voted for us. 

SR:Emily, what about your question? 

E:I live in Watford and I go to a very happy, high achieving, multicultural comprehensive school. I have been a bit worried about the news lately and I would like everyone to get along no matter what their beliefs are. How could you make this happen? 

NC:You mean, you say you’re worried about the news of extremism and violence? 

E:Yeah. 

NC:Yeah. No, I think we live in quite uncertain times where particularly but not exclusively, particularly through the internet, some people and unfortunately, a fairly sizeable number of young people in our own country and our own communities can develop very kind of hateful and sometimes violent kind of intentions because of what they read on the internet. And it’s an ideology, it’s a sort of set of ideas that sets people against each other and says that one religion is in a war against another, and one country is in a war against another. And I agree with you. I think one of the things that makes our country so great, one of the things that clearly makes your school so great is that even though lots of people come from lots of different places, different backgrounds, different religions, lots of differences, there are certain things we still believe in together. We believe in the rule of law, we believe in non-violence, we believe in the equality between men and women. We believe in democracy, we believe in human rights and I do think it’s important at a time when lots of kind of nasty people are trying to pull people apart that we remind ourselves not least in how we talk to each other in classrooms but also how we talk to each other in the living room, in the kitchen, around the kitchen table that there’s a lot more or at least there should be a lot more that keeps us together. 

E:So how do you believe that you could have prevented the three girls from joining ISIS? 

NC:It’s very difficult to know what anyone could have done, given that I think I’m right in saying that their families are as distressed and surprised as anyone else that they appear to have left for Syria. So if your own mum and dad, your brother and your sister don’t; I think I heard the sister of one of the girls on the radio saying she had absolutely no idea that her sister might be inclined to do that. So I think what is going on on the internet, what people are reading kind of in their bedroom, on their tablets, on their laptops is quite important. Now, clearly as a government, we can’t...

SR:You seem to have been blocking some of what the Conservatives would like to do though when it comes to monitoring communications data and so on. Is that not...

NC:That’s slightly different. So that’s something called what was dubbed the so-called Snoopers Charter and that was a plan proposed by the Conservative party with whom I’m governing in government where basically every single website you ever visit, any of you, and your mums and dads, in fact everybody across the whole country, millions and millions of people visiting billions, trillions of websites that everybody’s records of the websites that they have visited or what they do on social media, a record of that will be kept for a year. I just think why should the websites that you visit over the course of a whole year, and I hope most of you are doing entirely innocent things on the internet; why should that be stored by somebody? And you know, that’s an important, that’s actually an important principle of the values I was talking about earlier. We are not; we are a society that believes in the distinction between innocence and guilt. We don’t’ make people feel guilty who are doing nothing wrong and we have to defined that principle and here’s the difficult thing. I suppose we could make ourselves all much safer by saying everybody has to be behind closed doors in their own home at nine o’clock in the evening. Crime would disappear, almost disappear but it’s not the kind of society we want to live in and that’s the challenge. 

Because everyone is quite frightened and worried about what’s going on, what we mustn’t do is then sort of become a country which we don’t actually, where we’re all so fearful that we don’t actually enjoy the freedoms that are under attack. Do you see what I mean? And that’s a difficult balance. It’s a very, very difficult debate about how do you keep everybody safe but keep everybody safe in a way that also makes everybody feel free? 

SR:Do you feel safe? 

E:I think that I do but I know that there's probably a lot of communities out there who don’t and on my street, there’s a lot of people who talk to each other. There’s also a lot of people who just stay inside their homes and don’t want to get involved with their community and their street. And it just feels frustrating how everyone just can’t get along. 

NC:Yeah. No, it is very frustrating. I’ll tell you one thing though. I’m really struck; I don’t know whether you are. Every time there is a big public event, you know, the great celebrations around the royal family a couple of years ago or the Olympics, the Tour de France which went through a bit of my constituency in Sheffield. I’ve been really struck how anytime people have an opportunity to actually come out of their homes and do something together, far more people come out to do that than anyone predicts because I think you’re dead right. actually people, we’re all social. We all like talking to each other. We all like a friendly face and a warm welcome. People want to do things together and the more that there are things that you can do in your street, in your community, in your town, in your village where people do stuff together, it makes people feel happier. 

E:Yeah. I feel like there should be more opportunities to do that sort of...

NC:But there’s a fair amount going on in Watford, isn’t there? 

E:Yeah. There is a lot. 

SR:Yeah. 

NC:You’ve got a very good mayor in Watford. 

SR:So we’ve got three more questions now from Stand Up Be Counted. So we can hear some of these now. 

N:Hello, my name is Nancy [Aehle], and I’m from Bedford.  My question to you is, how do you feel about the rapidly increasing number of youth that are committing crimes, and what do you think you can do to stop it?

Q:[From Larissa Kennedy] The Liberal Democrat Constitution states that they reject discrimination based on gender.  So, I’d like to ask, why there are so few female candidates to the Party.

A:Hi, I’m Alisha [Berkoh], and I’m from Huddersfield, and my question to the Deputy Prime Minister is, what are your views on lowering the voting age to 16?

SR:There we go, three questions for you.

NC:Yes.  So, taking them backwards maybe.  Lowering the voting age, yes, I do think…there are so many things you can do, or you will be able to do in effect as adults when you’re 17, why can’t you vote.   I mean, I think you’ll be able to serve, perhaps not quite on the front line, but you’ll be able to serve in the Armed Forces, so if you can serve in the Armed Forces, and politicians can send you, sort of, to War, why can you not vote for those politicians. So, I do think…and, the Scottish Referendum recently, they had votes at 16, I think that was a great thing, lots of young people got involved.  So, I do think we need to lower the voting age, I’ve always thought that, the good thing is the Labour Party now agrees, the Conservatives are still saying, no, but I think we will win the argument eventually.  Because, I just think it’s a bit patronising to say that a 17 year old can’t decide the future of our country.

SR:Women in the Party?

NC:Yes, well, there aren’t enough women in Parliament as a whole, and there aren’t enough women in the Liberal Democrats.  But, you know, just generally, Parliament is not divers enough.  My Party, the MPs of the Liberal Democrats are too male and pale, and if we want to represent modern Britain, then modern Britain should be represented in us.  There’s lots of things we’re doing to try and change that, so for instance, in the 11 constituencies where Liberal MPs have decide to retire, the majority of those who are trying to succeed them, and to follow them up, are people from underrepresented groups, men, women, individuals from black, minority and ethnic backgrounds, and so on.  There is a…it’s a quite arcane thing, but it’s quite a heated debate amongst politicians is, if you want to have more women in Parliament, should you have quotas for women in the political parties and say, you know, if you want to be a candidate in this part of the country, you can only be a candidate if you are a women. And, that divides opinion, some people say, no, that sounds like a tokenistic thing.  I must say, my own personal view is, if my Party doesn’t become more diverse in the way in which we are in Parliament, then I’d be looking at doing something like that after the next election.

And, the first question was?

SR:What was the first question, remind me?  It was on crime.

NC:Look, I think all crime, I think the thing that we need to do with crime, there’s so many things we need to do with crime, but the main thing we need to do with crime is remember, if you chuck someone in prison, just for a few weeks, and throw the key away, and leave someone to languish in prison for a few weeks, what tends to happen is that far from sorting the crime, you actually end up seeing more crime happen later. Because, what happens is, someone goes in as a, sort of, young offender, put it like that, and they come out as a hardened criminal, because they’ve spent time with other hardened criminals, they commit more crime and they go back in.  It’s that revolving door of crime, into prison, out of prison, committing crime, back into prison, out of prison, committing more crime.  That’s what we need to stop, and that’s often almost more important what you do both in prison, education and helping people to get back on the straight and narrow when they leave prison, but it’s also making sure that people have got jobs, places to live in, once they’ve left prison.  And, thankfully, that’s now starting, so as prisoners leave, literally the prison gates, they’re going to be met, because of decisions this Government has taken, they’re going to be met by someone whose responsibility it is to help that prisoner, or ex-prisoner to stay on the straight and narrow and not commit another crime.

SR:Great.  So, let’s go back to the panel.  Tyler what’s your next question?

T:What sort of dad are you, and do you see enough of your children?

NC:Well, I’m a completely besotted dad, I have three adorable little children, three boys, 13, ten and six.  And, they mean actually everything to me, I mean, they are so much more important to me than anything I do in the office, or in politics.  I try and keep them completely, and Miriam and I try and keep them completely out of the public eye, so hopefully you won’t see any photographs or anything.  And, we still live in the home that we lived in before I became Deputy Prime Minister, and they go to local schools, and they’re all football crazy.  The two oldest ones are Arsenal fantastic and I spend, of course, as much time as I can.  My wife, Miriam, so I don’t know whether your mum and dad both work, but my wife, Miriam, also works, so we have to juggle things, so we’re constantly saying, who is going to be putting them to bed tonight, and who is going to be getting them ready for school on that day.  So, yes, I try and see them…I’m their dad and I try and be, sort of, with them every step of the way, as much as I possibly can.

SR:Hasan, what’s your next question?

H:If you were on a desert island, which MP would you choose to take with you and why?

NC:What a superb question.  What a superb question.  Well, if I can just, sort of, exclude friends of mine, because I’ve got some fellow Liberal Democrats that Danny Alexander, and David Laws, who are old friends of mine.  But, do you know, who I think I’d probably pick, I’d pick a man called Ken Clarke, who is not from my Party, he’s from the Conservatives, he’s a lot older than I am, but he’s wonderful company, he has so many stories, and I could listen to his stories for a considerable amount of time.  I suspect we’d have a considerable amount of time on a desert island.

SR:Is that someone you could potentially work with as a leader of the Conservative Party?

NC:Him as a leader?  I don’t think he’s even pretending he’s going to be the leader. But, no, he used to sit next to me in a table in Downing Street, where you have the meetings every week of the Cabinet.  Obviously, he and I don’t agree on everything, because he’s from a different Party, but I think he’s a very good natured bloke, and talks a lot of sense.

SR:Great.  Jadyne you’re next.

J:What do you think of Nigel Farage?

NC:As a person, or…  Well, his views, I obviously don’t agree with his views.  He seems…I mean, as a person, to be honest, as a person I never try and be too, kind of, you know, personal about other politicians, because I always think you can respect someone as an individual, slightly back to your point, even if you disagree with their views.  And, what little I know of him as a person, you know, he seems a fairly colourful character, but I have nothing against him personally, I just think his views, I just think it would be disastrous for the country, for us as a country, and for you and for your generation, if we did what he wants.  He wants us to basically turn our back on the outside world, and pull out of the EU and, kind of, say, oh, you know, the rest of the world can go away.  And, in this day and age, where people move from one country to another, and the jobs that hopefully you will be taking up when you’re older, will no doubt, or some of them, will no doubt be jobs because people from other parts of the world have invested in offices, and factors in this country.  You can’t cut yourself off from the rest of the world, you’ve got to be an open and generous hearted country, and I think his vision is a bit, sort of, mean spirited and, sort of, lock the door and go to the Cliffs of Dover and put a poster up and say, everybody else go home.  It’s not the kind of country I want my children to grow up in.

SR:So, you’re ruling out being in a coalition with UKIP then?

NC:I’d never…people ask me this about…there’s a Scottish Party called the SNP, you may have heard of, and I always say, look, in the same way I would never put UKIP and Nigel Farage in charge of Europe, because he wants to pull it apart, I wouldn’t put the SNP in charge of our country because they want to pull it apart as well.  So, it’s just not going to happen.

SR:Noah, you’re next.

N:You’ve been in the news lately saying that drugs should be decriminalised, don’t you think this gives a bad impression to young people, and might encourage them to take them?

NC:No, I don’t, I think there the reverse, and let me try and explain.  So, the first thing is, drugs are really, really bad, you know, they’re harmful, there’s nothing good about taking drugs which harm your health.  So, the question is not, are they harmful, of course they are, some are more harmful than others, but you know.  It’s how do you reduce the harm?  And, I think, locking people up behind bars, we talked earlier about prison, who need treatment, they need help to get off the drugs, are letting the criminals who sold them the drugs in the first place and are getting very rich, to walk scot free, it should be the other way around.  We should be putting the criminals behind bars, and giving the people who’ve got…you know, maybe they made terrible mistakes in their lives, and all the rest of it, and are harming their health, they need treatment, and that’s all I’m saying.  

Of course, if you do the other way around, if you lock up the people who need treatment, and let the people who need to be locked up to walk through, all you’re going to do is just allow the criminals to get richer, and the drug addicts to not get better, and to not get the treatment they need.  So, that’s why I think you need a different approach.  And, what frustrates me on this is, it’s a very good example of people talking terribly tough, war on drugs, and all the rest of it, and then everybody goes, oh absolutely.  But, the evidence shows that the war on drugs isn’t working, we’ve got more and more people…in fact more and more younger people getting, sort of, hooked onto drugs, you’ve got the criminal bosses getting richer and richer and richer.  And, I just have this old fashioned view that, if something isn’t working, do something different which might be better.

SR:Okay.  Jemima it’s your question next.

J:The Welsh Assembly decided not to ban smacking last week.  Do you smack your children, and do you think it should be against the law?

NC:I don’t smack my children, but having said that, it’s quite…and, of course, by the way, there are laws to stop anyone, parents or anyone else being violent to a child.  Of course, we need to protect you, we need to protect everyone from being hurt, people being violent towards each other.  The difficulty I think is, if you try and write a law, being really specific, I mean, I’m not going to embarrass you by asking you, but I bet you, I don’t know, when you were younger, you’re all so grown up and responsible now, but I bet you when you were younger, you weren’t angels all the time were you.  You behaved badly, and maybe your mum or dad grabbed you by the arm when you were playing up in a supermarket, or pulled you when you were…I don’t know, pulled you quickly so you wouldn’t get into danger crossing the street.  

I don’t know, I’m just trying to...  The idea that parents don’t touch their children, and sometimes touch them a little bit, kind of, with a bit of frustration, or even anger, you can’t…I think it’s quite difficult to write a law and say, you know, mums and dads you can do this, but you can’t do that.  And, that’s why I’m a bit…I don’t quite see how the law would work.  And, on the whole, on the whole, I just would like mums and dads to be responsible and good to their children, and not think that it’s always got to be Parliament telling parents how to be mums and dads, that should…at the end of the day Parliament can’t or shouldn’t try and fix everything in the family home.

SR:Emily, your question now.

E:Is there a lot of stress being in the Government, and if so, how do you relax in your spare time?

NC:I suppose there…I mean, look, I think there’s a lot of stress in lots of jobs and, at the end of the day, it’s just a massive privilege for me to do what I’m doing.  So, no, I’m sure there are lots of other jobs which are just as, if not much more, stressful.  Well, I love sports, I love watching and playing sports, I play a lot of football with my children.  I love reading, I always read a book, particularly late at night.   And, do you know what, I suppose the main thing, I’m very lucky in a sense that I’ve got lots of friends and family who, they don’t regard me as Nick Clegg Deputy Prime Minister, I’m just Nick to them, and so I spend time with them, and they couldn’t really care what I do between nine and five.  And so, I hope, I like to think that I keep my feet, or at least they keep my feet firmly planted on the ground, and that, sort of, helps me deal with all the ups and downs, and stresses and strains of the job.

SR:Right, we’re going to have a quick fire round of question so…

NC:Oh, these are the ones that always go horribly wrong.

SR:Try and keep your answers as short as you can.

NC:Yes, I will.

SR:That would be great.  Tyler.

T:What is your biggest regret in politics?

NC:Not being Prime Minister.

SR:Hasan.

H:What would you like to be remembered for?

NC:For pulling the country, kind of, sort of, back from the brink, I think we were in a really, really dangerous place five years ago, and we’re now not.

SR:Jadyne.

J:How do you feel about being in a Coalition Government, which a Party that has completely different ideas to yours?

NC:It’s as you imagine, you work with people who you don’t agree with, but you try and work together, because that’s what’s best for the country, and I suspect…how can I put this, I’m sure you’ve got people in your class who you sit next to, you don’t particularly agree with, but you can still just rub along.

SR:Noah, what’s your question?

N:You told our Editor you would be rubbish at maths questions but good at spelling, so how do you spell accommodation?

NC:A-C-C-O-M-M-O-D-A-T-I-O-N.

SR:Yes.  Relief.  What’s the next question?

Q:Can you give us an exclusive story?

NC:The last film I saw was Big Hero 6 and it was brilliant.   Have you seen it?

Q:Yes.

NC:Isn’t it great.  Is that exclusive enough?

Q:Yes.

NC:Yes come on.

SR:That would just about pass.  Emily, what’s your question?

E:The cost of transport, housing and living are rising above wages, what could you do to make sure that living in the UK is more affordable?

NC:The main thing is to make sure the people, particularly those for whom it’s difficult to pay for the rent, pay for the bus, you know, passes and all the rest of it, have got more money in their pockets, so the Government takes less away from them in tax.  That’s the biggest thing.  So, for instance, one of the things I’m proudest off is that, because of something I championed, and my Party championed for years, over three million, can you believe it, over three million people who aren’t paid very much, don’t pay any income tax at all, because we’ve taken them out of paying tax.  There’s a good example.

SR:Well, that’s it for another hot seat, our thanks to our panel and to our Stand Up and Be Counted contributors who sent in video questions, and, of course, thank you to the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg.

NC:Thank you.  Thank you.