“The coalition agreement itself was my original sin. Tuition fees and so on are an add-on”

Click here to read David Goodhart’s feature on Sheffield and the Liberal Democrats

Nick Clegg is confident and candid enough to know that his reputation has taken a battering in Sheffield, where he is one of the city’s six MPs. Even some of his own party members in the city, he says, are “bewildered” by his support for the coalition’s policy on tuition fees. Having pledged to fight the policy, only 21 out of 57 Lib Dem MPs voted against the government when it won the fees vote on 9th December. But the anger isn’t mainly about his turnaround on fees, Clegg argues. Nor about Lib Dem support of the coalition’s radical deficit cuts. Nor even about the controversial cancellation of a loan to Sheffield Forgemasters. So what is it about?

“For many people in Sheffield there is a suspicion of the Tories that runs deep. They believe the Tories destroyed the city in the 1980s. So it was the coalition agreement itself that was my original sin. I got a lot of emails and letters from people asking ‘How could you do this to us?’ The other unpopular things—tuition fees and so on—are a kind of add-on to that.”

He adds: “Sheffield is still a very public-sector dependent city, and it’s going to be tough. But it won’t be like the 1980s, when there were whole settled communities dependent on a single industry, steel.”

I had been in Sheffield for a few days, probing into the political disquiet, before talking to Clegg. I asked him about morale among his party activists in the city—which is run by a Liberal Democrat council—and his own constituency of Hallam. “Well, they hate being attacked for lack of integrity—that hurts a lot because we have always seen ourselves as having a special sort of political integrity. And some of the activists are bewildered at being protested against by students and others. But that’s the real world for you.”

Things are going to get worse in May, I put to him, when the Lib Dems seem almost certain to lose control of the city council to Labour. At the same time they may also lose the national AV referendum on electoral reform. Could northern Lib Dems be the weak link in the coalition?

Clegg retorts that there is a good story to tell locally about what the Lib Dem council has been doing. “And a lot of the national policies are popular too—on pensions, tax reform, and some aspects of welfare reform. There will have to be cuts, but a lot of local investment programmes on roads and rail are going ahead.”

The tuition fees decision has caused upset in Sheffield’s two universities. “I haven’t been hiding. I‘ve been in contact with student leaders, who have of course taken it pretty badly. I want to address a group of students, but at present the police are not keen. Many of the Lib Dem activists in my constituency work in one of the universities. Some of them don’t like it, but others understand the rationale for it and are supportive.” He has important although qualified support on fees from Philip Jones, vice chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University (see Jones’s article on this subject on Prospect online).

Clegg understands that “there’s an emotional reaction to the fees decision—all the ‘Judas’ stuff does not surprise me. My reaction is to respond in a cerebral way and to go through the specifics of the new plan.” He explains, he says, “how this is in effect a ‘time limited graduate tax’ and I give details of how much less someone on average income will pay back, about £7 a week, than they do now. I also explain how much less onerous it is than a graduate tax, and how many people will not pay in full, and so on. But you often cannot defeat emotion with reason.”

He argues that critics miss the shift of spending towards the young. “If we want to improve life chances and social mobility we need to spend early. Between the years of zero and six, a lot is set in terms of academic performance and aspiration. It is right to tilt spending to the early years and ask for a bigger contribution for higher education. State spending on higher education will be still be huge at £2bn. Given the fiscal pressure, we have to rebalance the contribution or cut student numbers—and that’s not something I want.”

How about the cancellation of the £80m loan to Sheffield Forgemasters which would have let it expand in the nuclear industry? “That decision has played worse in Sheffield than the tuition fees decision partly because it links into that anti-Tory feeling, the belief that northern industry was abandoned.” But wasn’t it an odd decision, given that Britain needs to rebalance its economy from finance towards manufacturing? “I agree. The trouble is the money that Labour had provided came from a budget in the business department that was running on empty. The treasury and Vince Cable felt it wrong to take money from somewhere else. But the whole issue could be revisited.”

For all Clegg’s embrace of reasoned debate, he admits its limits, particularly in the fractious world of Sheffield politics.

Click here to read David Goodhart’s feature on Sheffield and the Liberal Democrats