Inside Nick Clegg’s fantasy world

Someone needs to deliver a message to Nick Clegg and his team of speechwriters (which going by the number of Special Advisers he has, we can assume is sizeable in number): just because you repeatedly reframe and avoid facts, it doesn’t make them any less true.

Clegg took to the stage on the closing day of Lib Dem party conference today with a misplaced sense of self-confidence. He also brought with him a completely disillusioned understanding of the past four and a half years he and his party have been in government.

He spent the majority of his speech today trying to paint a picture of British politics in which there’s a nasty Tory ‘right’, an ineffective Labour ‘left’, and, conveniently, a sensible centre ground occupied by the Lib Dems, of course.

Without the Lib Dems, “British politics our country will be meaner, poorer and weaker as a result,” he said. While we all choked down the irony, he managed to get through the whole speech without so much as cracking a smile.

However, even as Clegg was speaking, the supposed stable “centre ground” was shifting under his feet. Facts are facts. Since the Liberal Democrats teamed up with the Conservatives they’ve not just been complicit in shuttling damaging policies out of Westminster to the poorest areas of the country. They’ve been active partners in doing so.

Take a deep breath, the list of the damages they’ve done is a long one – and what’s below isn’t even comprehensive.

Clegg and (most of) his cohort voted for the trebling of tuition fees, despite having said they’d scrap them (the point in his speech when he said “We are the party of education” confirmed what we’d all been suspecting, that we’d wandered into Clegg’s fantasy world); they supported the Bedroom Tax, then earlier this week their conference voted against pledging to repeal it; and, to cut one million public sector jobs by the end of this Parliament, cuts which affect women, minority ethnics groups and disabled people the hardest. What’s more, since the Lib Dems (along with the Tories) took the reigns, wages have been falling consistently.

Even his welcome announcement that over two years the Lib Dems would invest £120m to help set new waiting time targets for mental health patients (a measure that’s sorely needed) is set against a background of cuts. Over the past two years, the Lib Dems, along with their Tory partners, cut funding to mental health trusts by 2.3% (that’s equivalent to £253 million). Funnily enough, depriving such vital services the money they need for staff doesn’t do much good for the one in four of us who have mental health difficulties.

So when Clegg told a room full of Lib Dems that they should “go to country with heads held high” and “build on everything we’ve achieved”, forgive me for not knowing whether to laugh with disbelief or cry with exasperation.

All in all, Clegg’s speech was brimming with predictable disingenuousness – watching it felt a pretty pointless way to spend my Wednesday afternoonc. But it made me angry. Part of the reason our politics is in such a mess is because of opportunistic politicians like Nick Clegg.

However, by the end of the journey he took us on – through his very own fictional world –  I was a little more convinced by the message that I think was buried within his omissions. He did, after all, conclude by doing the opposite of what he’d spent his whole speech doing – he finally stated a fact. He said, what people “want desperately from their politics is hope”. He’s right.

The Labour leadership have a long way to go before they show they’re the ones to offer a hopeful and truly radical alternative to the current state of our politics. But, one thing is for sure, Clegg’s speech today once again reminded us that if a positive vision of the future – which includes a clear and decisive break from the status quo – is what we need, there’s no point in giving the Lib Dems a second thought.