The cutting agenda

I have found Clegg’s repositioning on the issue of cuts this year disappointing. As I have said, I have no problem with compromises or changed minds. But politicians need to be more open and honest with the voters if they want to avoid being seen as just another lot of lying, power-hungry opportunists, doing what is necessary to keep themselves in power.

I would love to have heard Clegg say: "As you know the LDs were against making the cuts too soon. We still believe this to be the case. However, our Conservative partners won the most votes on a platform of promising cuts sooner rather than later, and therefore we feel they have a mandate to do that. We have made our concerns very clear, and have indicated the areas we think would be most harmful to an economic recovery.” Hopefully exceptions could be made if they had concerns in specific areas and they could say they had managed to influence policy in those areas, but conceded there was perhaps a little room for cutting in some other areas.

Another option, of course, would be to say: “Now we have seen the books, and considering what has happened with Greece, we feel we lost the argument on this one. In the current circumstances, the Tory position has been vindicated. Let’s get cutting.” Some kind of hybrid of the two would be perfectly acceptable too.

I guess the second option is more or less what they are saying, but I would like to see it put a little more explicitly. I just don’t buy this argument that they didn’t really know what was going on with our books: they might not have had the specifics but they must have known things were dire. Likewise, while the Greece situation has taken us by surprise with its ferocity, we all knew it was on the cards. That’s what this whole debate about the urgency of cutting has been about – maintaining the confidence of the markets. Greece is just a live show – a reminder about what the stakes of this game are.

Surely coalition government doesn’t have to be about reinventing or glossing over the past, refusing to ever admit you got something wrong or pretending the two parties agree on everything.

Maybe Im in the minority on this. Presumably political PR believes any admission of having made an error will be a sign of political weakness, a chink in the armour that other parties will exploit. Maybe, taking everybody into account, it is better to keep trying to sound omniscient, rather than take a more plain-spoken approach. But I personally would find it refreshing.