Nick Clegg appeared on BBC Breakfast this morning. He was in Bristol handing out money as part of the drive to give greater powers to communities and cities.
I have a few words of unsolicited advice for him on his performance.
First up, I do get decentralisation. I’m a liberal. Of course I do. I am not, however, that happy about Nick’s rather melodramatic description of what he was doing as “Taking money out of the clammy hands of bureaucrats in Whitehall and giving it to local communities.” It’s the sort of hyperbolic language that we would rightly have a go at if it came from Farage. These people Nick sees in offices in Whitehall every day presumably take pride in their work and have feelings – and votes. The language is slightly reminiscent of the way he used to speak of our friends in the House of Lords – you remember, the “they just turn up and get £300” line when actually our lot were working their behinds off. It’s a bit counter-productive. He actually had a half decent line that he didn’t really need to add to:
Every day in government I’ve been trying to end “Whitehall knows best” culture which has been holding country back for far too long.
Secondly, he needs to get his election message round the other way. When he’s talking about the things we’ve delivered that he’s proud of, like apprenticeships and pensions reform and the raising of the tax threshold, he’s really on it. When he’s doing the managerial stuff about balancing the books and cutting less than the Tories and borrowing less than Labour, whether or not he’s invoking body parts like heart and spine, he’s not quite as engaged. To be honest, neither are we. I appreciate that I’m not the target audience of this message, but, seriously, is there anybody in this country who punched the air over the Corn Flakes because we’re going to balance the books? I know that when you are not one of the major two parties, you have to show how you will moderate the others. It’s not rocket science. We should be showing where our heart is up front, though.
Another quick tip, too. Charlie Stayt had a bit of a go at him when he was talking about a fairer society. Nick was fine on that, saying that he wasn’t taking any pious lectures from the Labour party who only put up the top rate of tax for the last 15 days of their term. Why doesn’t he say, though, that one of the first things the Liberal Democrats insisted on was shoving Capital Gains Tax up by 10% for higher rate taxpayers. We haven’t made nearly enough of that.
All in all, he did fine, but I think a bit of fine tuning could make his message a lot more effective.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
