By Karim El-Bar
ANKARA
Nick Clegg, leader of the centrist Liberal Democrat Party, unveiled his party’s manifesto Wednesday, pledging an extra £2.5 billion for education and to prevent the next government “lurching off to extremes.”
He started his speech in Battersea, south-west London, by defending his party's decision to enter into a coalition with the center-right Conservative government in 2010, after elections in the same year ended in a hung parliament.
“We could have watched the Conservatives make the poorest in society pay the price. Then I could have stood in front of you on platforms like this and criticized them for it,” he said.
“But the Liberal Democrats didn't do that,” he continued. “We did the gutsy thing. We stepped up to the plate and put the good of the country first even though it meant working with people we disagreed with.”
‘Single-party government is over’
He openly stated that while either David Cameron of the center-right Conservative Party or Ed Miliband of the center left Labour party will become prime minister, “neither of them will have a majority in Parliament.”
“The era of single-party government is over,” he bluntly declared.
Clegg used this fact to stress the central theme of his speech, asking the electorate to choose who will hold the balance of power after the election: himself and the centrist Liberal Democrats, Nigel Farage and the right-wing UKIP or Alex Salmond and the left-wing separatist Scottish National Party.
“Do you want David Cameron, accompanied by Nigel Farage, dancing to the tune of swivel-eyed rightwing backbenchers, or do you want a hapless Labour minority administration dancing to the tune of Alex Salmond?” he told the left-liberal Guardian newspaper Wednesday morning.
Clegg spoke forcefully about what his party would aim to achieve in a coalition government.
“The Liberal Democrats will add a heart to a Conservative government and a brain to a Labour one. We won’t allow the Conservatives to cut too much and jeopardize our schools and hospitals and we won’t allow Labour to borrow too much and risk our economy again,” he said.
Turning to the manifesto itself, he said its key theme was “opportunity.”
“No matter who you are, where you were born, what sexuality or religion you are or what colour your skin is, you should have the same opportunity to get on in life,” he said.
Education
In what can only be described as a bold and daring move, the Liberal Democrats have placed education at the heart of their manifesto.
In 2010, the Liberal Democrats ran on a left-of-Labour platform with their core pledge being the total abolishment of tuition fees.
That their candidates took photos with students with this pledge written on placards during the election campaign only added to the sense of fury and anguish when the coalition government they helped form not only kept tuition fees in place -- but tripled them to £9,000 per year.
The party’s approval ratings plummeted to unfathomable depths in opinion polls and have struggled to recover ever since.
Undeterred, the Liberal Democrats are attempting to use education to outflank the Conservatives, which have pledged to protect per-pupil spending in real terms, and Labour who have pledged to protect school budgets against inflation.
In an attempt to do both, the Liberal Democrats pledged an extra investment of £2.5 billion in education to protect per-pupil spending in real terms, with the calculations taking into account an extra 460,000 pupils at a time of rising pupil numbers.
Clegg said the extra investment would be the equivalent of 70,000 teachers and 10,000 learning support assistants and would limit class sizes and increase the availability of one-to-one tuition.
The Liberal Democrats claim this pledge means spending on pupils aged between two and 19 would be £2.5 billion more than Labour and £5 billion more than the Conservatives.
Five manifesto pledges have ‘near religious status’
In light of the tuition fees fiasco, and the collapse in trust suffered by the Liberal Democrats in its aftermath, the party’s five key pledges were plastered on the front page of their manifesto in bright colors.
They were: promising to balance the budget fairly by 2017/18; guaranteed funding from nursery to 19-year-olds; increasing the personal tax allowance to £12,500; spending £8 billion more on health per year by 2020 and equal status for mental health and five green laws to fight climate change, such as decarbonization targets for electricity production.
Clegg told the Guardian that these five manifesto pledges would have a “near religious status” for his party when it comes to negotiating any post-election coalition deal.
David Laws, the Liberal Democrat education minister, was grilled on BBC Radio 5 Live on Wednesday morning about how cast iron his party’s pledges on education were, considering their record on tuition fees.
"Look, we have learned some lessons from this parliament, not least on tuition fees... and I think you can rest assured that if we put these things on the front page of our manifesto, we are going to deliver these things if we're in government," he said.
Helen Lewis, deputy editor of the left-wing New Statesman magazine, said Liberal Democrats were pursuing “a strategy of retrenchment."
"I think it's the most sensible, well-funded manifesto we've seen," she said, speaking to the BBC’s Election Today program.
"They're not going to win over any new voters, this is all about what they'd do after the election. And they are so bruised by tuition fees that they're determined this time they are only going to make promises they can really stick to."
