Clegg under fire from all sides
By Ian Dunt
Nick Clegg found himself under fire from all sides today, as a series of crises hit his already fragile leadership.
The deputy prime minister started the day by cancelling a trip to Latin America next week so he could be in Westminster for the crucial parliamentary voting system and constituencies bill, which goes to the vote on Tuesday.
The decision shows how nervous the government has become over the bill, which would set up a referendum on electoral reform in May.
the development came as Lib Dem Lord Oakeshott quit as Treasury spokesman, just hours after savaging George Osborne’s much-trumpeted Project Merlin deal with the banks.
Lord Oakeshott, who presided over several lending deals with banks in his previous role as a City financier, said the Treasury negotiating team had a poisonous mixture of “arrogance and incompetence”.
Lib Dem Treasury spokesman quits over ‘pitiful’ bank deal
Meanwhile, over 90 prominent Liberal Democrat councillors – including 18 local authority leaders – wrote a letter to the Times criticising the government’s cuts programme.
Lib Dem communities minister Andrew Stunell pleaded with the party’s rank-and-file not to “fall out” over “pointless debate” but the letter was probably the most-coordinated act of rebellion against coalition policy from the party’s membership.
Council Lib Dems turn on coalition
Issue of the Day: Councillors attack cuts
The deputy prime minister also came under fire while trying to protect another flank, this time on tuition fees.
In a further bid to protect the Lib Dems from student anger over the issue, Mr Clegg announced a redistribution system under which universities charging over £6,000 would have to contribute to a national scholarship programme which would help bright students from poorer families.
But the idea failed to satisfy student groups while simultaneously prompting a backlash from elite universities, who reacted angrily to talk of sanctions.
“I would be very wary of targets, quotas and fines,” Dr Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group, told the Today programme.
“It would be unfair to punish universities for a problem elsewhere in the education system.”
The Liberal Democrat leader barely had time to pause for breath this morning before delivering a key speech on the influence of the private sector on service provision.
In a bid to calm fears among public sector workers and left wingers in his own party, Mr Clegg promised strict controls on the way the private sector can operate in education and health, while criticising Labour for allowing it to run out of control.
“We will not repeat the rigged market in the NHS with higher tariffs for private providers,” the deputy prime minister said.
“I categorically do not believe that private providers are inherently better than public sector providers, and I would not support an approach to reform that implied that they were.”
The Liberal Democrat leader marked one significant victory today, however, after the last 500 hard disk drives of the National Identity Scheme were destroyed in an industrial site in Essex.
