David Cameron. How will history remember him,
do you think?
He was not a bad coalition prime minister.
It's a tricky thing. He had to sort of pretend
to the Daily Mail and his own party that he
hated having to share power with these pesky
Lib Dems and once the Conservatives were back
in their rightful place, you know, power in
their own right, all would be well.
What actually turned out was that the year
that George Osborne and David Cameron were
in government on their own was absolutely,
you know, it was a farce. I mean, two budgets
in a row in the space of ten months, I think,
they couldn't even get through parliament
and then of course they had this self-inflicted
plan to hold this referendum on Europe.
Brexit. Sheffield voted to leave. My own home
town voted to leave!
My constituency didn't.
Your constituency was exactly an exception
to that but, nonetheless, why did Sheffield
vote to leave the European Union do you think?
I think a lot of people have different reasons.
I remember in the last day that I was campaigning
in Crooks, which is a part of my constituency,
I remember I met one bloke who said he was
voting for Brexit because he wanted to buy
a house and he wanted to see house prices
come down.
Another one who was a big supporter of mine,
said: 'Oh, I'm voting ...' He said: 'Oh hello,
Nick,' he said cheerily, 'I'm voting Brexit.'
I said: 'Why are you doing that?'
He said: 'Oh, I think it would just be quite
fun to, sort of, mess things up.'
And then I said to him: 'But erm ...'
Oh no, then he said to me: 'Oh, but you guys
will win.'
And then I said: 'But how are you going to
feel if you win?'
He said: 'Oh, well that would be terrible.'
Ha ha! It'll be fine.
So there were lots of different views but
I tell you one thing that, of the many, many
obvious reasons and there were many obvious
reasons. You know, people angry about stagnant
wages, insufficient housing, general sort
of air of frustration and so on. What came
up over and over again was this was a vote
for lots, not all, for lots of Brexit voters
that I met in Sheffield against London more
than it was against Brussels. Them down there
in London are not listening to me, they haven't
listened to me for ages so I'm going to vote
against. It was a punch in the nose for London.
And I got in touch with David Cameron by email
and I said: 'Look, I think the emotional case
for remain is being lost.' My suggestion – and
I have no idea whether it would have made
the blindest bit of difference – was that
for the last week or so of the campaign to
sort of do proper battle with the very emotionally
pungent Brexit slogan of 'take back control'.
I said: 'Why don't you say 'vote remain to
keep us safe, to keep our kids safe.' Safe
from recession, safe from climate change,
safe from cross border crime.'
I just thought, you know, keeping us safe
was a more emotionally powerful slogan. Anyway,
he sort of politely replied and said: 'No,
no. We're going to stick to our economic risk
message'.
Do you hold him partly responsible for the
loss?
Ach! I personally find, you know, over-personalising
politics to say it's all one person's fault
... Did I disagree then and disagree still
now, to this day, with David Cameron's decision
to hold the referendum in the way that he
did? Yes, of course I do.
The holding of the referendum was spectacularly
misjudged and the way in which the remain
campaign was conducted was very bloodless
and it allowed a much more emotionally impactful
argument in favour of dollops of money for
the NHS, VAT cuts, you know, an economic utopia,
the traffic would flow, the sun would shine.
I mean, it allowed the other side to make
these kind of ludicrous claims that Brexit
would deliver a panacea and it almost allowed
them to make those claims in a relatively
unchallenged way.
Making claims they couldn't keep. We're clearly
heading for a hard Brexit, out of the single
market, what's that going to do this country?
Well, I think it will leave us poorer and
it'll leave us more economically insecure
and that will strain the social fabric of
our society even more.
I sometimes think when you listen to the Brexiteers
that they kind of appear to think that distance
or Geography doesn't matter.
It's sort of so naive. There is a reason why
we trade so much more with our neighbours:
because they are our neighbours.
You got it this week with this breathless
talk from Boris Johnson: 'Oooh look! Goody,
goody, we're at the front of the queue now.'
That's a good impression.
It's ridiculous! Does that mean that that
American trade deal, whenever it materialises,
is going to replace 40 years of economic integration
with our nearest geographical neighbours?
No, of course it's not.
Could it supplement it? Yes, but it's not
going to replace it.
We are inescapably a part of Europe and no
amount of huffing and puffing from the Daily
Mail and from John Redwood and others is going
to change that geological fact.
If you are the prime minister of such a deeply
divided country, you have a duty to try and
find a compromise – and that means lashing
of fudge, compromise, papering over the cracks.
What does that mean? Yes, it means maybe some
changes to how immigration works across Europe
but it means trying to safeguard our place
in the single market. It doesn't mean unilaterally
saying you're going to quit everything, to
hell with the economic and social consequences
and basically delegitimising the aspirations
and dreams and needs of 48% of the voting
public.
Since when does a prime minister basically
say that the needs and aspirations and interests
of 16.1 million people of your fellow citizens
counts for nothing?
Back in 2010, I remember this so vividly and
I knew people, younger people who were particularly
enthused by the Liberal Democrats. This was
their first taste of democracy.
One of the things that inspired them, of course,
was that pledge on tuition fees. Do you think
it's true that that pledge, which obviously
you went back on, undermined people's face
in our democratic system.
I'm afraid I won't be the first or the last
politician who finds that the realities of
power are quite different to the hopes of
what you might do with power before you get
into office. I think every time that happens,
yes of course it does.
I mean, I overestimated what I felt was kind
of obvious, which is that I hadn't won the
election. I wasn't prime minister, therefore,
I couldn't – I had no right, I didn't have
the mandate – to apply the Liberal Democrat
manifesto in full.
The failing, and of course it was a massive
failing, and I don't want to in any way duck
it was that we were making a commitment on
the basis of a scenario – i.e. Nick Clegg
as prime minister with pots of money to spare
– which was not remotely on offer.
A very unlikely scenario.
Now, am I the first or the last politician
to paint a kind of picture of an outcome which,
with hindsight, appears to actually appear
either naive or highly unlikely. No, of course
not. Of course not.
And so in answer to your question: does that
damage people's confidence in and faith? Well,
of course it does. Of course it does, yeah.
The income tax threshold – because this
was a flagship Lib Dem policy, which the Tories
then said that they had basically come up
with, rebranded it as their policy, which
I know annoyed you. But it wasn't...
Well, interestingly, they only did that once
Linton Crosby came onto the scene.
Good old Linton.
I remember feeling very nonplussed why they
didn't see the attractions of this policy
and so I was very merrily, quite rightly,
taking ownership of it and then Linton Crosby
came along and discovered it's a hugely popular
policy and then suddenly started claiming
credit for it.
Well, that's the thing because superficially
it sounds ... I mean, it's great. We'll bring
the poorest people out of tax and so on and
so forth. But it's not that effective, is
it? When it comes to...
It diminishes in effectiveness, yes.
4.6 million people earned to little to pay
income tax anyway, so it didn't help them
and, according to the IFS, 69% of the gains
went to working families in the top half,
so it's not targeted at poorer people.
No, no. I always find this a very false argument.
Look, firstly, I totally accept that the higher
and higher it goes, the less it helps the
poorest because they're already...
Because it's tiny ...
No, but I'm sorry, where we started when we
first came into office ... What was it: 6,000
or thereabouts?
Lifting it from there to 10,000, which was
our manifesto commitment is a very progressive
thing to do. No one can say that someone who's
earning £8,000 is not poor. I mean, that's
absurd.
You're basically saying that someone who benefits
from a tax cut who are at earning of £11,000
or £12,000 don't deserve that tax cut. That's
a nonsense.
What I totally accept, however, is if you
spend billions and billions of pounds increasing
it further and further and further, of course,
it no longer benefits those who have been
taken out of it all together.
Actually, if you want to do something progressive
for those, it's better to switch attention
to the National Insurance threshold, which
is still in place.
Of course, yeah, because that was a huge sum
of money and at the same time there was this
argument that we need to make savings on social
security. So you got an increase in VAT, which
means a lot to people on those lower income
scales, also, a lot of those people had their
benefits cut or frozen.
So, if you look at the graph. I've got a graph
here. If you're at the bottom, then in terms
of the policies implemented by the coalition
in those five years, even taking into account
the tax threshold going up, they still lost
out. They got poorer overall. The government
took with two hands what they gave with one
hand with the tax threshold.
Yeah, the problem is we're now going to...
I don't have my sheath of papers here but
the last time I looked at the figures that
wasn't the case at all.
As I explained to you, particularly in the
first instances, when you move from six, to
seven, to eight, to nine, to ten, it's just
ludicrous to somehow condemn taking people
who earn £6,000, £7,000, £8,000, £9,000
out of paying any income tax as not a progressive
thing to do.
But they're then penalised with VAT and then
cuts to benefits though, that's the issue.
Well, actually the evidence on who pays most
VAT is a lot more ambivalent than you might
imagine it to be.
Would I do everything exactly as we did if
I was on power on my own in 2010-2015? No,
of course not.
Clearly, if you had a Liberal Democrat government
you would have had even more of an accent
on taxes as opposed to spending reductions.
I think few policies in the coalition generated
such passion, maybe, as the bedroom tax.
I've got an example here, I mean, Sue Jones.
She had a disabled daughter. Her disabled
daughter died, thus she had a spare bedroom,
thus she had to pay the bedroom tax. She said
'it's been an epic nightmare. Shameful and
cruel.'
Isn't it time to apologise to people who suffered
this bedroom tax?
So, I mean, let's just go back to square one.
In the private rented sector you only get
support for the number of bedrooms you need.
If you're a neighbour in the social rented
sector, you don't. And so you can have two
houses literally adjacent to each other where
one gets money only for the number of bedrooms
that they need, the other one doesn't.
And so, the principle of saying no you should
equalise treatment to both did not seem nearly
as controversial as it quite rightly has become
since.
The huge, huge failing was what do you do
with people for whom there is no other alternative
then but to move out and move into another
property in their own community.
If there is nowhere for them to move you are
clearly putting people, wilfully, between
a rock and a hard place and when that became
obvious, which I totally accept should have
been...
Obvious.
Yeah, no. I totally accept that. It should
have been totally obvious to the DWP at the
time. What we then ended up doing was basically
providing – I've forgotten what the jargon
was – discretionary housing payments, which
we massively increased to local authorities
to basically provide the fundings that was
there in the first place.
The whole thing became a completely circular,
self-defeating...
But surely it should have been obvious for
you because... Because of both the failure
of Labour and the Conservatives in government
to build the council housing that this country
so desperately needs, hundreds of thousands
of families, as we well know, waiting on social
housing waiting lists because of the failure
of all of those governments together, it was
obvious. There just was nowhere for people
to go. By 2014 6 percent of the people hit
by the bedroom tax had moved home.
I mean, don't you think it's just time to
apologise to them?
No, no. I think the policy not only didn't
work but then spending millions and millions
of taxpayers money to basically compensate
people for a policy that wasn't working was
clearly a complete failure.
But would you apologise because you backed
it?
Look, I mean, we can if you like, go through
everything over the last half a decade that
you think I should or shouldn't apologise
for.
Well, it was just government policy...
I'm explaining to you the original logic.
I'm explaining to you where I think it went
wrong. I'm explaining to you that I think
it was a failure and it's certainly something
which, if I was in government, we would clearly
scrap. It was wrong.
But you regret it backing it to begin with?
Yes, of course I did but, you know, you've
got to understand that if you're in government,
particularly if you're a prime minister or
a deputy prime minister, you're dealing with
hundreds and hundreds of decisions a day.
This is a decision that then is put forward
by a particular department and I'm not, I'm
not... You know, of course, everything quite
rightly falls on the shoulders of the people
at the top but, as I say, the starting logic
of saying that the state should treat people
in social rented accommodation on the same
footing as their neighbours in private rented
accommodation ... You know, it was not a sort
of wilful desire to penalise vulnerable folk
but I totally, totally accept your assertion
and there's just absolutely no ducking it,
that it should have been pretty obvious and
certainly is obvious with the benefit of hindsight
that if those people have nowhere to move,
then the mess that ensued, ensued.
Then you spend tens of millions of pounds
compensating people for a policy which shouldn't
have been introduced in the first place.
Because people said, campaigners said at the
beginning, so, you know, it's bizarre that
ministers, people with civil servants, experts
... given, you know, I was writing half-baked
whinging articles about it and it was just
obvious because there was nowhere to go.
Yeah.
Erm, ok, you went through, from the 2010 election
to 2015, quite a shift. There was that famous
Times headline: 'Nearly as popular as Winston
Churchill', Cleggmania and all the rest of
it. It ended with the near-extinction of the
Lib Dems as a major political force. That
must have hurt but crucially though, how do
you want to be remembered?
Oh god, I'm too young to start writing historical
epitaphs.
Oh, go on.
No, come on, I've only just turned 50. I'm
not some old doddery bloke who say's 'Oh I
want this to be etched on my gravestone.'
If there's more to come then...
Listen, I will continue as long as I'm in
politics to fight for the kind of liberalism
that I believe in.
And will you stay in parliament next election?
Oh, I don't know. I don't know yet. I mean,
you know, the next election I think is going
to be in May 2020 and obviously I'll tell
my constituents before I tell you, if I may,
Owen.
But a lot of the things I believe in, stand
for, have fought for, however imperfectly,
are clearly hugely under threat now and so
I will continue in whatever way I can to speak
up for internationalism, for the kind of moderate,
progressive liberalism that I believe in.
But how and in what configuration, in what
role.... pffft, I dunno. That's for the...
That is for the history books.
What did you think? Were you persuaded? Were
you convinced? Do you like Nick Clegg a little
bit more or, I don't know, are you a bit frustrated
he didn't apologise for some of the more egregious
policies? I want to hear what you think so,
as ever, do leave your comments below the
line and we've got loads of other interviews.
You can click on them somewhere, probably,
Adam will sort it out.
As ever, subscribe please. I'll see you next
time.
