Quote ="Cibaman"The Tories would still have implemented the welfare reductions and increased VAT (and more) without the increase in tax threshold, if they'd had a working majority.'"
Isn't that rather beside the point though? ... i.e. they didn't have a majority and have only been able to do the things that they have done because they have had Lib Dem support.
They can't say that something was all the Tories fault, what they need to be able to do is say, yes, we let them do that but it was worth it because we got this or that in exchange.
As a leader of the Lib Dems, the party most in favour of Proportional Representation and, by extension, the likelihood of coalition governments, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Clegg would very likely have been the best-prepared for coalition negotiations.
But his U-turn on the economy and cuts tells it all.
He was either so cravenly scared of what the result would be in the event of a second election or simply unprepared and not tough enough for the horse-trading required.
Maybe his declarations on economic policy, made before the election, were just a vague whim, a mere notion, nothing really serious ... so when he said, in the week of the election, “[iMy eight year- old ought to be able to work this out – you shouldn’t start slamming on the brakes when the economy is barely growing.[/i” he didn't really mean it.
Unfortunately for us, it was the most pressing, most debated issue of the day and the one on which many people decided their vote but, for him, it was disposable policy.
Earlier this year, he admitted that "[iIf I’m going to be sort of self-critical, there was this reduction in capital spending when we came into the coalition government, I think we comforted ourselves at the time that it was actually no more than what Alistair Darling spelled out anyway, so in a sense everybody was predicting a significant drop-off in capital investment.[/i”
But that's not true either, according to figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility, up to Q2 2013, the coalition had spent £12.8bn less on capital projects than was planned by Alistair Darling.
Clueless.
