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Nick Clegg: my original sin

The deputy prime minister tells David Goodhart how he shrugs off the cries of “Judas” and accepts that “you often cannot defeat emotion with reason”

by David Goodhart / December 15, 2010 / Leave a comment
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Published in January 2011 issue of Prospect Magazine

“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…

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Comments

  1. Belinda Webb
    December 16, 2010 at 19:22
    Cannot defeat emotion with reason? We're trying to defeat destructive and inhumane Tory ideology with reason and humanity! (comment via Facebook)
  2. Normski
    December 17, 2010 at 18:39
    Quisling!
  3. Liz
    December 18, 2010 at 18:56
    Nick Clegg is such a hypocrite. Their excuse for cancelling the loan to Sheffield Forgemasters at that time was that they had no money. So where is the money going to come from now when they revisit the issue? No wonder he is called Judas - noone trusts him because he has no principles and is always lying for political expediency.
  4. Owen Smith
    December 30, 2010 at 09:47
    Clegg's comment that you cannot defeat emotion with reason smacks of the kind of belittling politics that question the integrity that he thinks still imbues his party. They lost students at the first hurdle with this policy, when they continued to tell them that they just didn't understand the detail. Many had read it, understood it and they didn't agree with it, but he continues to arrogantly side-swipe their views.
  5. Jen
    January 18, 2011 at 01:01
    The Forgemasters loan was just one of the things that blew the gaff on why Labour's coalition negotiations had been so half-hearted. They knew how big a mess they'd made especially in the last three years of trying to buy the election by throwing money the country no longer had at any sectionalist group that might be bought.
  6. Alyson
    May 27, 2014 at 18:44
    ...public sector 'dependent'... ?? He has gone over to the dark side...

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David Goodhart
David Goodhart is Director of the Integration Hub at the Policy Exchange think tank and editor at large, Prospect Magazine
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