Though Cowards Flinch

Today will see schools, prisons and courts employees, represented by trade unions, take strike action against the government on the grounds that public sector workers will work longer while contributing more towards their pension pots.

Union leaders have responded ahead of today explaining their positions. Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) has called the action “regrettable” but “due to the position that the government has taken, unavoidable”. TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber pointed out that pay has been frozen for two years despite high inflation, and that the feeling is public sector workers are being punished for a poor economic outlook they had no part in creating.

Strike

It is beyond despair that Ed Miliband has dismissed the strike out of hand, given that he is the leader of the Labour party. More depressing is he’ll gain nothing for it; David Cameron will continue accusing him of being in the pockets of the unions, while the laughing tabloid press continue running headlines to suit.

Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, has hardly pledged undivided support for mass action, but what he has said is of interest. Commenting on Osborne’s strategy, he called on public sector workers not to fall into the chancellor’s trap. The trap being laid out is one, not too dissimilar from the bad snow episode – where if recovery appears slow, Osborne can raise the alarm that public sector workers are the cause.

It would seem that if Balls is saying this he knows it to be dishonest – therefore him and his party should not be giving undue credence to Osborne’s trap by withdrawing strike support.

To be sure Balls knows, and opposes, Osborne’s plans (he calls Osborne joining the Treasury another “fork in the road moment”). At a speech given at the LSE earlier this month (seen to counter the chancellor’s speech at Mansion House the day before) Balls noted that Britain’s slow recovery could cost families £3,300 by 2015, as well as leaving Britain £58bn worse off. The economies in America, France and Germany have all returned to pre-crisis levels, whereas Britain is still below that by 4%.

Commenting on recent ONS figures for growth, Balls said “These final figures confirm that in the six months since George Osborne’s spending review and VAT rise the economy has flatlined and the recovery has been choked off.”

The former children’s minister can see the risks, has been keen to point out that this is ideological (or what William Keegan calls Osborne’s “political straitjacket”) and so should respond in turn by supporting strike action, while preparing to brush aside excuses given by the chancellor for possible poor economic recovery.

What Recovery?

Esther Armstrong writing for Interactive Investor yesterday said “This was supposed to be the year economies the world over got back on track.” In fact George Osborne was hoping the whole mess would be sorted by now, but his inability to change tack through fear of looking weak has meant the British economy is shooting below target (indeed Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and former chief economist at the cabinet office, was reported saying “you do not gain credibility by sticking to a strategy that isn’t working”).

The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBS) has downgraded UK growth projections for 2011 three times now, while we also face a wave of what Duncan Weldon has called “consumer recession”.

Osborne himself admitted that recovery will take longer than he expected, but this has also been compounded with the flatlining of many low and middle income earners. In fact real wages have fallen for the last 17 months and are likely to do so until 2013 – earnings falling below inflation does nothing for consumer confidence, and as Chris Dillow noted (as one of the differences between 1981 and 2010) the ability for people to run up personal debt through loans, in turn offsetting the decline in public spending, is a privilege (if you can call it that) we cannot enjoy today while banks are reluctant to lend.

If Osborne wasn’t so stubborn about saving face, he might have listened to Ed Balls’ idea for a temporary cut to VAT, which would instantly lower inflation, increase real wages, be as easy to implement as to reverse while the cost to do so is way under borrowing forecasts (the former being around £12-13bn versus the latter of £40bn). But alas the horrible show must go on.

What do we have to lose in striking?

In spite of proper Labour support, strike action is necessary. Unions are the only bargaining chip available to the workforce, and the government have been very clear they are not listening.

The damage being done by the cabinet of millionaires (whose pensions, along with other MPs, even after changes “will be among the most generous in the country“) must be challenged. As a Labour party member I’m loathe to say this; but we cannot wait for the opposition any longer – this fight will come from the bottom up, from those most affected by Tory/LibDem bullying, and it is high time this battle was won. This country will no longer be walked all over by the undeserving rich.

Sir/Madame, tell me you can look at the cabinet without wincing emphatically and I’ll show you a liar.

Sir/Madame, must we not send these shreaking swines back to the decade from whence they came?

Sir/Madame, look at this one. Lansley. Using the parlance of the modern day this wretched would prefer the day working men and their wives sought donations from the club house to afford operations, or where one was sick you kept your trap shut if you were to eat for the next month.

Sir/Madame, look at this other. Gove. Does he aspire to return all schools to the ethic of the three B’s, common knowledge of all public schoolboys of a certain age: bullying, beating, and buggery. The headteacher is less a patient confidant, and more an authoritarian dictator. But times have changed dear Gove. If everything is above board then what you call bureaucracy is little more than an audit towards reaping success. Keep up Gove.

Sir/Madame, are you aware of who the British Generals would denigrate as ‘gippos’ first? It was the Eyptians, during the Suez Crisis in the fifties. Do you suspect Generals today curse the Libby’s, or the Gaddy’s? Gaddy’s boys, the Gaddy Arabs? Sir/Madame, look at this one. Hague. Do you think he ever sniffs Anthony Eden’s draw box? Or do you think he ever wanted to delineate Anthony Nutting?

Sir/Madame, look at these two. Clegg and Cameron. Are you surprised? Do you wince? Do you think their compassion consists in wanting to share, nay impose, the worst of the lifestyle of the ruling class upon us grounded, not landed, folk?

Sir/Madame, are these conservative men ripping down our institutions from inside? Did they not realise we must desist from change if its success rests upon luck?

Sir/Madame, did they not realise that it was private interest and interference that slowed down and frustrated the national health service during the terms of the last cabinet. Are they aware this service, free at the point of entry, is an inscription of welfare as a right of citizenry, there to stop anyone from falling through the net, commissioned only through donations of that grandest of traditions the state?

Sir/Madame, look at this one. Duncan-Smith. Does he not acknowledge welfare as a right of citizenry?

Sir/Madame, I am under little doubt these thugs understand nothing of what they are doing. But quite why we should tolerate them while they do it is beyond me. Are we yet fit for revolt?

What I find lacking in today’s conversation about electoral reform is the merits of AV itself. Instead we skip straight to its effects. Consider this from Martin Linton, former Labour MP, recently:

The leader of the Australian answer to the BNP, Pauline Hanson, campaigned this month (April) for election to the New South Wales parliament and won 36% of the vote – and would have been declared elected under our British first-past-the-post system. Fortunately it was held under the Australian preferential voting system – and she lost. The seat went to the Greens instead.

What I gather from this is whether we’ve found the perfect electoral system which causes problems for the far right – not how far my vote counts in an election.

Chris Dillow, discussing how difficult it would be to go from AV to PR (many people’s real electoral system of choice), noted:

To get from AV to PR would require there to be dissatisfaction with how AV works, as it is very unlikely that people would agree to ditch something that works tolerably well. But such dissatisfaction would discredit many of those who had argued for AV – and these are the people who are likely to be the ones campaigning for PR. In this sense, moving towards AV might actually delay the adoption of PR.

A week is a long time in politics, and today’s coalition politicians are changing their minds radically on a weekly basis – it would not be unimaginable that those who argued for AV could support a more proportional system later on.

As for those who will be dissatisfied with AV, you can count on those for whom AV was supposed to be radically different – proof of which is slim at best.

Peter Willsman, for Left Futures, recently said:

Coalitions can occasionally occur under First-Past-The-Post but under AV they’d become the norm in Britain rather than the exception.

Dull, centrist politics is already woven into the political landscape today, and future coalition-based governments could have more to do with the dissatisfaction of the major parties than the electoral system.

Aside from all this guff all we really need to know is the following:

What is AV?

AV is the electoral system under which a candidate wins only if they’ve secured the majority of votes.

Is it difficult to understand?

No, it is as Jimmy Carr recently said “snog, marry and avoid with politicians” – voters list the candidates in order of preference.

Is it better than First Past The Post (FPTP)?

Yes. FPTP allows candidates to win on relative majorities, whereas under AV if no candidate secures 50% of the vote, then second preferences are taken into consideration. In other words, instead of letting someone very unrepresentative win, AV allows voters to choose who they’d settle for in the event that no overall winner is decided.

The key thing here is that listing second, third etc preferences is optional – so if you seriously hate all other candidates, you don’t have to vote towards allowing someone you really dislike getting into office.

Is AV proportional?

No. In fact as far as proportionality is concerned it isn’t too different from FPTP, but your vote counts for slightly more.

*

I’m going to vote yes to AV on Thursday, in spite of party loyalty, because it gives the voter a marginally better deal than FPTP. But I look forward to supporting a system of proportional representation next time this conversation comes up.

I tend to agree with Sunny and others that the Clegg’s attack on the top Tories is synthetic. It’ll be kiss and make up on May 6th; there isn’t anywhere else for the LibDems to go now, and I’m doubtful that the Tories will want to jettison them just yet.

What’s more interesting is the way Clegg chooses to describe Cameron and co, synthetically or not.  In calling them a ‘right wing clique’, I think he may giving away more than he knows about his experience of dealing with the Cameronian inner circle.

I’ve suggested before that what makes the Cameron regime very different from the Thatcher government is the tightness of the regime’s inner circle, based as it is less on ideological consensus (though there is a broad one) than on deeply embedded class loyalties. 

Those in the inner circle are almost exclusively, especially with the departure of Coulson, from an upper class clique that even Clegg has access to. He may be from a rich background but his European family background and marriage make him an outsider to the Eton/Oxford set nowe in charge. 

When Clegg calls the Tory elite right-wing, I don’t think he’s talking about their political economy; as a paid-up Orange Booker he is probably further to the right than Cameron is instintively.  Rather, I think Clegg is using right-wing as shorthand for even for socially elite than him.

In identifying this, of course, he’s in total agreement with David Davis.

Of course, any pain Clegg suffers at the hands of those who believe they are his betters is an irrelevance to the Left.  Even so, I think it’s important for the Left to recognise how Clegg – having seen the Tory elite up close – portrays them, because it should give us confidence to keep casting them in this light too.

To my mind Labour, and much of the Left continues to be just a little too respectful of the Cameron clique, nervous that the calls of ‘class war’ will ring out if we attack the Cameron coterie on the basis of their backgrounds and their inner circle’s utter ignorance of the lives of real people.

In part this remains a legacy of the Crewe and Nantwich byelection, which Labour’s head honchos subsequently decided had been a counter-productive approach.  This is unfortunate, because the broad strategy was ok – just partly poorly implemented through the use of poor student-style theatrics (at least that’s what got on the telly) which itself looked like the stuff of an elite with too much time on its hands.

Despite this implementational hiccough, I remain convinced that a key anti-Tory strategy is to keep banging on, not about their background for its own sake, but about how genuinely distant from the real world Cameron and his cronies are, how the policies they are pushing through simply have no connection with the real world (get a job and lose your home, for example), and how hypocritical they are to pretend they are in any way in it together like us. 

We should take confidence from Clegg.  However whiney he sounds complaining about being outside the clique, there’s a kernel of truth there.  And if even he sees it, then it’s pretty bleeding obvious.

As I said in February, I don’t think it’s correct for a person to be judged alone on the kind of support he receives – particularly if that support comes from opportunists trying to score column inches.

The same, I feel, goes for David Cameron. When he gave his speech on multiculturalism earlier in the year, the BNP called it “the Griffinisation of British Politics”, while the equally unpalatable English Defence League used the speech as fuel for their fire in Luton.

Pointing out these embarrassments should not be the crux of our criticism – since politics is not merely about doing the opposite of your counterparts. Ones political judgement should stand up by itself.

The problem with Cameron’s speech on immigration is that it reduces migrants themselves to stereotypes – namely that they pursue sham marriages, fail to assimilate and put pressure on the welfare state – while also reinforcing good immigration as the cheap commodification of labour.

However the problem does not begin and end with Cameron. This kind of low politics, deprecating immigrants, is the order of the day for the European right wing.

I found Nick Clegg’s reaction the most telling:

Cameron’s language isn’t what we would have used…but he’s a Conservative leader talking to Conservative voters in the run-up to an election.

How right Clegg is! But these are not conservatives, rather, Conservative voters who are lapping up this kind of flabby rhetoric. The worry is that this politics could fill the gap of third way politics, now in its declining hour.

In France, for example, President Sarkozy has decided to whip up tensions concerning Muslim immigrants, their headwear and assimilation, in a bid to attract voters away from Marie Le Pen’s National Front (FN).

As for Germany, during an argument inside Merkel’s cabinet about labor shortages, the chancellor chose to frame the terms of debate on the “failed approach” of multiculturalism.

In the Netherlands, fear of the immigrant is not restricted to Geert Wilder and his clan of PR-savvy stunt fascists; Netherlands immigration law now requires citizens to pass difficult tests demonstrating Dutch language fluency and cultural knowledge. 

Earlier in the month, on this site, Paul identified three types of actors around the core executive of the new Conservative regime. The first being the upper class elite comfortable with high politics, the second as neo-liberal pacemakers defining the shrinkage of the state, and the third being the apologists whose presence is simply CV development. Though I think this is helpful, in order to properly understand the root of Cameron’s immigration speech, and the Tory party on social issues in general, we cannot ignore the emerging new rightist politics in Europe - immoderate on presentation, and epistemically closed in substance.

David Cameron is playing an interesting game at the moment. After promising to “cut the deficit, not the NHS” he went and did both anyway. In fact he went further still: NHS reforms include abolishing Primary Care Trusts and handing 60% of the NHS budget to new GP-led consortia.

Under Cameron’s watch, health secretary Andrew Lansley has done nothing else but implement the very measures the Tories have always wanted to do to the NHS, but never before being so stupid as to.

In return for Lansley’s loyalty to the cause, Cameron has given the minister a cold shoulder.

Nicholas Watt put it this way:

In public the prime minister expresses support for the hapless minister. In private few are left in doubt that the minister has been placed on the naughty step or, in the case of Andrew Lansley, on the you-have-had-the-political-stuffing-knocked-out-of-you step.

The BMA stopped short recently of delivering Lansley a vote of no confidence, concentrating on his poor reforms only, but that’s not the message put out today by nurses who will debate a motion of “no confidence” – informed in part by Lansley’s refusal to address the Royal College of Nursing conference in Liverpool, instead limiting himself to a 45-minute Q&A with 50 select nurses.

If that wasn’t bad enough for the minister, his spats with Lord Owen – who has called on Cameron to “replace existing health ministers” – and Norman Lamb have caused a public embarrassment.

The influential Lamb, who has threatened to resign unless the government acts favourably upon a series of demands on the NHS reforms, joins a number of rebel Lib Dem figures who have proposed changes to Lansley’s plans.

Cameron has responded by saying he regrets “charging ahead” on reform without support – a change of heart which will not bode well for the health minister, who will be first in the firing line if Cameron wants to save face.

Clearly Lansley should be sacked on merit of his terrible reforms, which threaten the very heart and soul of the NHS, and aims only to swamp the service with pro-privatisation measures.

But we should remember the minister is merely the architect of the plans. The Tories under Cameron are only delivering the destructive ethos they know and love.

In a thinly veiled attempt to rock the boat a bit, Rawnsley asked on Sunday:

Andrew Lansley is clearly in trouble … Does Mr Cameron need to find himself a new health secretary?

Martin Smith, Professor of Politics at Sheffield University, presents a necessarily simplified but still useful model of the way central government works in Britain.  He calls it the ‘core executive’:

All actors in the core executive have resources, with no actor, or institution, having a monopoly….Because no actor or institution controls all the resources necessary to achieve their goals (for example, although the Prime Minister may have authority, he or she does not have all the information necessary for policy making) actors within the central state depend on each other (p.1)

In my still developing analysis of the New Conservative regime, there are broadly three types of actor within and around its core executive.

First, there is the upper class inner circle of Cameron and his Eton/Oxford coterie, about whom I’ve written in detail here. 

This socially homogenous grouping is very different from the Thatcherite leadership to which it is most often compared by its opponents.  Under early Thatcherism, public spending rose because she and her colleagues recognised the social strains under which her economic vision was putting the working class, and that the maintenance of a welfare state was an essential pacifier. The New Conservatives simply don’t get that.

Beneath the thin common man veneer of Cameron is a member of the ruling class most comfortable with the high politics of state, who simply doesn’t get the low politics of what has come, since 1945, to be accepted as the job of government.  Cameron and his chums are a throw back to the 1920s and 1930s, not simply because this is where their economic policy is rooted, but because their idea of estate management is to do with grouse, not social housing.

Second within the core executive is the grouping of ardent neoliberals, including Lansley, Shapps, Pickles and a few influential think-tankers from the likes of Policy Exchange, the Adam Smith Institute and even the Tax Payers Alliance (as attack dog), a sort of diffuse British Mont Pelerin society for the 21st century, complete with plenty of dosh from mysterious sources.

This grouping has an archetypal (Martin) Smithian resource dependent relationship with Cameron’s inner circle.  They get patronage from the inner circle, on the basis that they will remain subservient at an official level, while the inner circle gets the policy ideas it needs to keep the troublesome non-Core parts of the party happy in their quest to appeal to the Daily Mail. 

It doesn’t generally matter to the inner circle that most of the policy ideas coming forward are either impossible to implement, or only implementable at huge social cost.  What matters is that it make it look like Cameron has some kind of social programme beyond attending royal weddings.

Nick Clegg, despite his upper class background, is probably better assigned to this group.

Third, and the final piece in the core xecutive jigsaw, are the apologists.  These are the group of people who receive patronage, and therefore enhanced social status and power within their own networks (aside from the core executive).  In return they offer credibility to the other two groupings with the core executive; they do the dirty work, seeking to persuade people on the receiving end of the New Conservative regime that there is sense in the apparent madness.

Within the politicians, Vince Cable is the most obvious of these.  Unlike Charles Kennedy, for example, he has allied himself to the regime for reasons of personal status, and perhaps also initially because he was under the hubristic impression that he had more resources at his disposal than he actually has. 

Vince Cable is an intelligent man, and perhaps he felt that his powers of persuasion might actually have some effect on government policy, only to find quickly enough that intelligence in itself is not a sought-after resource.  That’s why he now languishes in the political dog-house, in just the same way as Paul Sagar and I languish in the lower divisions of the blogosphere; we’re good, intelligent bloggers, but it takes more than intelligence to win the Orwell prize for blogging.

Vince must by now be a very unhappy man.  It’s unfashionable to do so, but I feel sorry for him.   It’s easy to say he should have acted more in line with his political principles and his decent understanding of economics, but what would you have done in his shoes?  Take the ministerial car and hope against hope that the Tories will listen to sense, or walk away and never know what might have been?

He still has a choice.  Closely allied to Smith’s core executive model is the ‘Exit, Voice and Loyalty’ model, developed in the 1970s by Albert Hirschman but adapted to Richard Rose’s analysis of the British civil service under Thatcher.

Under this model, Vince has tried ‘voice’, but found that he could not be heard.  it waits to be seen whether he will now stay loyal to the core executive, or whether the pressures of his own conscience (and the non-Core private and semi-public networks with which he also has a resource-dependent relationship) will mean that exit becomes the best option.

But Vince is a spent force, and from a political point of view his loyalty or exit makes little difference. 

If he stays loyal to the Tories, Vince will remain a forgotten man. Just watch next week for who’ll announce the 1o0,000 job creation from his own department’s Regional Growth Fund, then mouth the words ‘bastard Clegg’. 

And if he exits, Vince will be a forgotten man, though his old mucker Ken Livingstone may invite him back into the Labour fold in May 2o12.

Of more interest in the LibDem apologist brigade is Chris Huhne.  Like Vince Cable, Chris Huhne is an intelligent politician, who actually gets stuff.  Like Vince Cable, as and when he becomes leader of the LibDems, perhaps as early as September 2011, he will have choices.  His initial choice will be to try and speak with a louder ‘voice’ than Clegg did (because Clegg is in group 2 of the core executive) for the concerns of his party.

When this voice goes unheeded, he may stay loyal to the coaltion, or he may exit. I don’t know which will happen, and it’s something that the Left will have very little influence over anyway, so it’s not really worth second-guessing to any great extent at this stage.

Where I think the Left may have a part to play in chipping away at the core executive edifice is with other actors who make up the apologist group.  

The obvious example here is Phillip Blond.  Like Vince Cable, he has tied himself to the Tory mast for the present, but in setting out his Red Tory thesis in the first place he has left himself wiggle room. 

This isn’t to say that Phillip can bring anything useful to the Left - his work is little more than a collage of previous thoughts around co-operative business models and, er, being nice to each other – but simply his removal from the core executive (if indeed he still remains within it) will be a useful little act. 

Phillip’s not a bad bloke - I had a slightly bleary chat with him about 3am at Labour conference, and the fact that he was there is indicative – and he’ll be happier if he’s given the right opportunity by Labour to speak out  against what he will perceive as Cameron’s betrayal of the befuddled ideas he convinced himself had been bought into by the Tory elite.

Then there’s Nat Wei, the Tories captive Big Society guru.  He’s a very special case for the Left, I contend, but he’ll have to be next time as I’ve got other stuff to do.

James Forsyth said on Sunday:

When trying to understand George Osborne Budgets, you need to bear in mind the mantra that he and his team live by: in opposition you move to the centre, in government you move the centre.

Lo and behold, Brendan Barber notes that:

Lib Dems are “abandoning centre-ground”

Or perhaps not. Maybe Osborne is simply moving the centre, as his team’s mantra describes.

I certainly hope so, because I know a certain party who are only too happy to fill in for the absence of centre-ground politics.

(A clue: he’s not actually that red at all)

Watch your squeezed middle…

This morning I read in the FT:

Andrew Lansley, health secretary, has opened the door to further concessions on the NHS bill, as the Liberal Democrat party overwhelmingly rejected his sweeping reform plans

This pertains to the decision by a majority of Liberal Democrats over the weekend, at their Sheffield conference, to vote for an “extensive and radical re-write of the government’s NHS bill”.

After this, the health secretary suggested he could “amend” his reforms.

Already a bad day for the UK health minister.

Then at around 11.45am, 15 March, the British Medical Association (BMA) “voted to call upon Andrew Lansley to withdraw the bill” adding that “any willing provider will hurt the provision of healthcare in the NHS in favour of private industry“.

Paul, in the comments thread of my last entry said: “Any resistance [re the health bill] will have to be from outside”. This is to suggest that the LibDem rebels will only manage to frame the ground with which they intend to rub up the coalition, which is not likely to bring it down. However, as acknowledged, this doesn’t preclude damage being made by the BMA.

Richard Blogger, who I owe a word of thanks to for pointing out the errors in my previous entry, also said in the comments thread:

The BMA SRM [Special Representative Meeting] is very interesting. This meeting will let off a lot of steam, but more important is what the BMA council will decide to do afterwards. If there is a decision not to take part in AWP [Any Willing Provider] then Lansley will be stuffed.

Today has shown that the BMA has little trust in AWP – it is possible, by Richard’s reckoning, that Lansley could be stuffed by this (if the BMA do stick to their guns with their opposition). However, Richard goes on:

is he likely to kill the Bill? I suspect not. He’s very much a bludgeon, he believes in AWP and so he will not remove it from the Bill.

[...]

If we (“the opposition” whatever that is) are to oppose Lansley, we have to attack and bring down his argument of “patient choice”. Either prove that patients do not want it (some do, many don’t care) or that it is ineffectual in delivering better healthcare (there is some evidence that shows this), or that it is more costly (IMO this would be quite a powerful argument if constructed properly).

The general attitude here is that though Lansley will find little confidence in his health bill, he is a firm believer in opening out provision to more private companies and may press on with that regardless. But moreover to what Richard suggests, a recent report by an organisation called Patient Opinion, found that provider choice was not part of a patients’ top priorities. I wrote regarding that report:

Ever since Andrew Lansley signed off the soundbite “no decision about me without me” journalists and bloggers have questioned whether it really is this vague notion of choice that could drive NHS improvement, or whether this is just another cover over our eyes, while slowly the national health system is privatised.

A recent report carried out by Patient Opinion (pdf file) – an online service to collate local concerns and praises of service – has added further doubt that Lansley’s line is a winner. The findings show that provider choice and inclusivity feature low in patients’ opinion, being trumped instead by concerns of care and staff attitudes.

[...]

Though it is vital people feel their wants and needs are being responded to, what is most important to the NHS is knowledge and quality provision. By focusing on something that it would seem patients feel less worried about, the health department have shown themselves to be out of touch on the issues, instead just pushing through ideology.

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To add insult to injury, it has been reported by the BBC (at 12.06pm) that the “BMA is calling for Lansley to resign”.

Clegg, 10th January 2011:

Britain was genuinely standing I think teetering on the edge of a sovereign debt crisis, it’s as simple as that.

Clegg, 60 days later, 13th March 2011:

[W]e have restored confidence in Britain……It has meant making difficult choices.  But at least they have been our choices, not forced on us by the bond markets as they have been in Greece and Ireland.

Clegg’s a liar. Simple as that.

(Via Duncan)