Interview: Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister

NICK Clegg is looking forward to a break from the Westminster bear pit. In London on Friday morning he was preparing to head up the A1 for a surgery with his Sheffield constituents.

“Sitting down with people, no matter what battering we are taking, to be told that actually what Mrs Smith on 36 Orchard Road really cares about is her neighbour’s Leylandii, helps a lot,” he says. For many ministers with busy political lives there is always some welcome perspective to be found in the normal way of things.

For the Deputy Prime Minister, who at the end of this week heads to Inverness for the party’s conference in Scotland, the dilemmas of ministerial life are stacking up.

On 21 March there is Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget, which could define the second period of the first term of coalition government. There are the fractious internal politics of the coalition, which currently include Lib Dem anger over Tory-led NHS reforms, and Tory opposition to Lib Dem-led reforms to the House of Lords.

There is also the small matter of the constitutional turmoil erupting across the country, with its epicentre in Edinburgh. Amid all this, it is not for nothing that reports have re-emerged to suggest that the Tory-Lib Dem coalition is heading for the divorce courts.

Clegg is having none of it. “I think if we have made it this far, then we can make it to the finishing line. I really do,” he insists, in an interview with Scotland on Sunday. “I have simply lost count of the number of people on a weekly basis who have predicted this. Every time I have told them it is not going to happen. Every time I tell them, ‘We are going to confound you,’ and we do.”

It is almost two years now since Clegg took the momentous decision to join up with the Conservatives after voters returned a hung parliament in 2010. In Scotland – where the party’s 17 MSPs were subsequently hacked back to just five in last year’s Holyrood elections – the political impact on his party has been devastating. Clegg has noted sardonically in the past that the decision was akin to committing “original sin”.

But he remains unrepentant. “There are some people, and this is particularly true in the north of England, in Wales and in Scotland, where, just because of the memories of what happened under the Conservatives in the 1980s, the distrust of the Conservatives is so profound that anyone who has any association with them is hysterical.”

Voters who believe this, he accepts, are “so angry... they aren’t going to vote for us again, maybe not for a very long time”. But that does not make what he did the wrong thing. The choice, he insists, was between going into government, and “grinding political uncertainty”, leading to higher interest rates and worse unemployment.

“I am not going to apologise for the fact that we did the right thing for the country as a whole. If some people don’t like that, and some people prefer shrill, tribal politics, so be it.”

Now, having made the plunge, he holds out the hope that if he can’t persuade previous Lib Dem voters to come back, a new set of voters who have never backed the party before might do so.

“I think there are other people who might over time, and I accept this may take time, who have never voted Liberal Democrat in the past – because they thought we were never capable of taking difficult decisions – who might consider voting for us. So I think we might lose people, I think we might gain people.”

Front and centre of this fresh campaign are the policies which Clegg argues would not have been adopted if the Lib Dems had stayed on the sidelines: guarantees on a higher pension, a higher basic rate income tax threshold, more support for out-of-work youngsters, and (in England) extra cash for schools with low-income pupils. He hints heavily that the Lib Dem pledge to push the basic rate income tax threshold up to £10,000 is being fast-tracked for next month’s Budget.

“I hope to do much more of that in the coming Budget”, he says. He believes he is persuading his Conservative partners to cut tax on income, and pile more on “unearned wealth”. Could that mean Osborne backing the Lib Dem mansion tax?

“I think it is very difficult for anybody – Conservative, Lib Dem or Labour – to contest that there is something seriously wrong with a system in which, if you are a Russian Oligarch, in a £10 million mansion, you pay the same council tax as someone in a home of a few hundred thousand. I don’t see how anyone can see that as OK.”

Away from tax, he also believes he will get full backing on reforming the House of Lords. Those Tory MPs preparing to back it, he says, are “extreme”.

Turning to the Scottish constitutional debate, Clegg claims events are moving in the Lib Dems’ direction. With a new campaign backing “devo-plus” being launched in Edinburgh this week, the Deputy Prime Minister says the Liberal policy of Home Rule for Scotland is at the centre-ground.

“The evidence shows that, despite all of Alex Salmond’s pyrotechnics, actually there is a sizeable body of opinion that wants what we have always wanted from the day we were founded”, he says. That, in other words, is a parliament in Edinburgh which has the power to decide on its own income through tax-raising, but remains within the UK. He goes on: “I have got no doubt that if you want to make Home Rule a reality, who controls the money is one of the key, if not the key, questions.

“Again I am very proud of the fact that my party has never shied away from that. You can’t be sincere over devolution if you are not prepared to relax, if not entirely lift, the central controls of money from London.”

“I’m clear in my own mind if you believe in the ongoing process of devolution, if you believe in Home Rule, then that has got to involve money and it has got to involve giving Scotland far greater freedom and responsibility in how money is raised in Scotland.”

“For a nation as great as Scotland, with its own strong identity, I personally think it is just logical that that should be increasingly expressed in the way that money is spent and raised as well.”

David Cameron, he suggests, is coming towards the Lib Dem solution on the constitution, following his speech earlier this month backing a fresh look at the devolution settlement. There is, Clegg argues, an “underlying consensus, which I think is reflected in a consensus among Scottish people, that devolution isn’t a process which stopped on that Tuesday.”

But, like Cameron, he argues that the prospect of independence makes this process all the more difficult. The referendum on independence is, he says, a “disruptive distraction” to the “family of nations” in the UK moving on. “Like in any family it grows up, it develops and things need to change. You can’t talk to each other if one member of the family up sticks and leaves altogether.”

The SNP may well point out at this juncture that it is only the prospect of independence that has got politicians like Clegg to wake up to Scotland after years of neglect. Clegg argues that is unfair in the Lib Dem case. He notes how his party is coming up with fresh proposals on devolution under a commission headed by Sir Menzies Campbell.

But like Cameron and Alistair Darling, the previous Labour Chancellor, before him, he insists that that stage of Scotland’s future can only be discussed rationally once the issue of independence is out of the way.

“We can’t really have this sensible debate about further powers if we don’t know whether Scotland is going to be part of the United Kingdom or not. So I regard Alex Salmond’s personal obsession with yanking Scotland out of the UK as an impediment to getting the growing strong autonomy within the United Kingdom.”