How do you know when Nick Clegg is in trouble? It’s when Paddy Ashdown comes to defend him. The former Lib Dem leader is presumably seen as much more popular than the current one – with Liberal activists and the public – as he’s always running defence for the DPM whenever times get tough. Whether it was tuition fees, the economy of AV, Paddy has been relentlessly loyal to his successor. And so he is again today over Lords reform(£). Yet Clegg should be wary – the Ashdown backing is now a sure sign of a policy in trouble, and crucially, this one lacks Tory support too.
The Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is in London today for an Anglo-Chinese summit on trade. Two questions arise from this – what constitutes a summit? (Is it just when one side or the other wants to make a meeting sound especially important?) And will there ever be a meeting between a Chinese leader and a western leader in which the “human right concerns will be raised in private” line isn’t trotted out?
And there’s an unseen but crucial impact of the cuts looming large – but councils may well get the blame for the outcome. Age UK claims that adult social care faces cuts of 8.4% as local government budgets are squeezed. That’s cuts for the most vulnerable adults in our communities, and we can’t even care for them adequately. That’s one budget that should be going up, and not down. And that shames our society.
More from LabourList
Assisted dying vote tracker: How does each Labour MP plan to vote on bill?
‘Making Whitehall work: Why Spads should be paid more than they are today’
May elections: Party warned GE handling of ‘non-battlegrounds’ could cost votes