David Cameron.
How will history remember him, do you think?
He was not a bad coalition prime minister.
It's a tricky thing.
He had to sort of pretend to the Daily Mail and his own party that he hated having to
share power with these pesky Lib Dems and once the Conservatives were back in their
rightful place, you know, power in their own right, all would be well.
What actually turned out was that the year that George Osborne and David Cameron were
in government on their own was absolutely, you know, it was a farce.
I mean, two budgets in a row in the space of ten months, I think, they couldn't even
get through parliament and then of course they had this self-inflicted plan to hold
this referendum on Europe.
Brexit.
Sheffield voted to leave.
My own home town voted to leave!
My constituency didn't.
Your constituency was exactly an exception to that but, nonetheless, why did Sheffield
vote to leave the European Union do you think?
I think a lot of people have different reasons.
I remember in the last day that I was campaigning in Crooks, which is a part of my constituency,
I remember I met one bloke who said he was voting for Brexit because he wanted to buy
a house and he wanted to see house prices come down.
Another one who was a big supporter of mine, said: 'Oh, I'm voting ...' He said: 'Oh hello,
Nick,' he said cheerily, 'I'm voting Brexit.'
I said: 'Why are you doing that?'
He said: 'Oh, I think it would just be quite fun to, sort of, mess things up.'
And then I said to him: 'But erm ...'
Oh no, then he said to me: 'Oh, but you guys will win.'
And then I said: 'But how are you going to feel if you win?'
He said: 'Oh, well that would be terrible.'
Ha ha!
It'll be fine.
So there were lots of different views but I tell you one thing that, of the many, many
obvious reasons and there were many obvious reasons.
You know, people angry about stagnant wages, insufficient housing, general sort of air
of frustration and so on.
What came up over and over again was this was a vote for lots, not all, for lots of
Brexit voters that I met in Sheffield against London more than it was against Brussels.
Them down there in London are not listening to me, they haven't listened to me for ages
so I'm going to vote against.
It was a punch in the nose for London.
And I got in touch with David Cameron by email and I said: 'Look, I think the emotional case
for remain is being lost.'
My suggestion – and I have no idea whether it would have made the blindest bit of difference
– was that for the last week or so of the campaign to sort of do proper battle with
the very emotionally pungent Brexit slogan of 'take back control'.
I said: 'Why don't you say 'vote remain to keep us safe, to keep our kids safe.'
Safe from recession, safe from climate change, safe from cross border crime.'
I just thought, you know, keeping us safe was a more emotionally powerful slogan.
Anyway, he sort of politely replied and said: 'No, no.
We're going to stick to our economic risk message'.
Do you hold him partly responsible for the loss?
Ach!
I personally find, you know, over-personalising politics to say it's all one person's fault
... Did I disagree then and disagree still now, to this day, with David Cameron's decision
to hold the referendum in the way that he did?
Yes, of course I do.
The holding of the referendum was spectacularly misjudged and the way in which the remain
campaign was conducted was very bloodless and it allowed a much more emotionally impactful
argument in favour of dollops of money for the NHS, VAT cuts, you know, an economic utopia,
the traffic would flow, the sun would shine.
I mean, it allowed the other side to make these kind of ludicrous claims that Brexit
would deliver a panacea and it almost allowed them to make those claims in a relatively
unchallenged way.
Making claims they couldn't keep.
We're clearly heading for a hard Brexit, out of the single market, what's that going to
do this country?
Well, I think it will leave us poorer and it'll leave us more economically insecure
and that will strain the social fabric of our society even more.
I sometimes think when you listen to the Brexiteers that they kind of appear to think that distance
or Geography doesn't matter.
It's sort of so naive.
There is a reason why we trade so much more with our neighbours: because they are our
neighbours.
You got it this week with this breathless talk from Boris Johnson: 'Oooh look!
Goody, goody, we're at the front of the queue now.'
That's a good impression.
It's ridiculous!
Does that mean that that American trade deal, whenever it materialises, is going to replace
40 years of economic integration with our nearest geographical neighbours?
No, of course it's not.
Could it supplement it?
Yes, but it's not going to replace it.
We are inescapably a part of Europe and no amount of huffing and puffing from the Daily
Mail and from John Redwood and others is going to change that geological fact.
If you are the prime minister of such a deeply divided country, you have a duty to try and
find a compromise – and that means lashing of fudge, compromise, papering over the cracks.
What does that mean?
Yes, it means maybe some changes to how immigration works across Europe but it means trying to
safeguard our place in the single market.
It doesn't mean unilaterally saying you're going to quit everything, to hell with the
economic and social consequences and basically delegitimising the aspirations and dreams
and needs of 48% of the voting public.
Since when does a prime minister basically say that the needs and aspirations and interests
of 16.1 million people of your fellow citizens counts for nothing?
Back in 2010, I remember this so vividly and I knew people, younger people who were particularly
enthused by the Liberal Democrats.
This was their first taste of democracy.
One of the things that inspired them, of course, was that pledge on tuition fees.
Do you think it's true that that pledge, which obviously you went back on, undermined people's
face in our democratic system.
I'm afraid I won't be the first or the last politician who finds that the realities of
power are quite different to the hopes of what you might do with power before you get
into office.
I think every time that happens, yes of course it does.
I mean, I overestimated what I felt was kind of obvious, which is that I hadn't won the
election.
I wasn't prime minister, therefore, I couldn't – I had no right, I didn't have the mandate
– to apply the Liberal Democrat manifesto in full.
The failing, and of course it was a massive failing, and I don't want to in any way duck
it was that we were making a commitment on the basis of a scenario – i.e. Nick Clegg
as prime minister with pots of money to spare – which was not remotely on offer.
A very unlikely scenario.
Now, am I the first or the last politician to paint a kind of picture of an outcome which,
with hindsight, appears to actually appear either naive or highly unlikely.
No, of course not.
Of course not.
And so in answer to your question: does that damage people's confidence in and faith?
Well, of course it does.
Of course it does, yeah.
The income tax threshold – because this was a flagship Lib Dem policy, which the Tories
then said that they had basically come up with, rebranded it as their policy, which
I know annoyed you.
But it wasn't...
Well, interestingly, they only did that once Linton Crosby came onto the scene.
Good old Linton.
I remember feeling very nonplussed why they didn't see the attractions of this policy
and so I was very merrily, quite rightly, taking ownership of it and then Linton Crosby
came along and discovered it's a hugely popular policy and then suddenly started claiming
credit for it.
Well, that's the thing because superficially it sounds ... I mean, it's great.
We'll bring the poorest people out of tax and so on and so forth.
But it's not that effective, is it?
When it comes to...
It diminishes in effectiveness, yes.
4.6 million people earned to little to pay income tax anyway, so it didn't help them
and, according to the IFS, 69% of the gains went to working families in the top half,
so it's not targeted at poorer people.
No, no.
I always find this a very false argument.
Look, firstly, I totally accept that the higher and higher it goes, the less it helps the
poorest because they're already...
Because it's tiny ...
No, but I'm sorry, where we started when we first came into office ... What was it: 6,000
or thereabouts?
Lifting it from there to 10,000, which was our manifesto commitment is a very progressive
thing to do.
No one can say that someone who's earning £8,000 is not poor.
I mean, that's absurd.
You're basically saying that someone who benefits from a tax cut who are at earning of £11,000
or £12,000 don't deserve that tax cut.
That's a nonsense.
What I totally accept, however, is if you spend billions and billions of pounds increasing
it further and further and further, of course, it no longer benefits those who have been
taken out of it all together.
Actually, if you want to do something progressive for those, it's better to switch attention
to the National Insurance threshold, which is still in place.
Of course, yeah, because that was a huge sum of money and at the same time there was this
argument that we need to make savings on social security.
So you got an increase in VAT, which means a lot to people on those lower income scales,
also, a lot of those people had their benefits cut or frozen.
So, if you look at the graph.
I've got a graph here.
If you're at the bottom, then in terms of the policies implemented by the coalition
in those five years, even taking into account the tax threshold going up, they still lost
out.
They got poorer overall.
The government took with two hands what they gave with one hand with the tax threshold.
Yeah, the problem is we're now going to...
I don't have my sheath of papers here but the last time I looked at the figures that
wasn't the case at all.
As I explained to you, particularly in the first instances, when you move from six, to
seven, to eight, to nine, to ten, it's just ludicrous to somehow condemn taking people
who earn £6,000, £7,000, £8,000, £9,000 out of paying any income tax as not a progressive
thing to do.
But they're then penalised with VAT and then cuts to benefits though, that's the issue.
Well, actually the evidence on who pays most VAT is a lot more ambivalent than you might
imagine it to be.
Would I do everything exactly as we did if I was on power on my own in 2010-2015?
No, of course not.
Clearly, if you had a Liberal Democrat government you would have had even more of an accent
on taxes as opposed to spending reductions.
I think few policies in the coalition generated such passion, maybe, as the bedroom tax.
I've got an example here, I mean, Sue Jones.
She had a disabled daughter.
Her disabled daughter died, thus she had a spare bedroom, thus she had to pay the bedroom
tax.
She said 'it's been an epic nightmare.
Shameful and cruel.'
Isn't it time to apologise to people who suffered this bedroom tax?
So, I mean, let's just go back to square one.
In the private rented sector you only get support for the number of bedrooms you need.
If you're a neighbour in the social rented sector, you don't.
And so you can have two houses literally adjacent to each other where one gets money only for
the number of bedrooms that they need, the other one doesn't.
And so, the principle of saying no you should equalise treatment to both did not seem nearly
as controversial as it quite rightly has become since.
The huge, huge failing was what do you do with people for whom there is no other alternative
then but to move out and move into another property in their own community.
If there is nowhere for them to move you are clearly putting people, wilfully, between
a rock and a hard place and when that became obvious, which I totally accept should have
been...
Obvious.
Yeah, no.
I totally accept that.
It should have been totally obvious to the DWP at the time.
What we then ended up doing was basically providing – I've forgotten what the jargon
was – discretionary housing payments, which we massively increased to local authorities
to basically provide the fundings that was there in the first place.
The whole thing became a completely circular, self-defeating...
But surely it should have been obvious for you because...
Because of both the failure of Labour and the Conservatives in government to build the
council housing that this country so desperately needs, hundreds of thousands of families,
as we well know, waiting on social housing waiting lists because of the failure of all
of those governments together, it was obvious.
There just was nowhere for people to go.
By 2014 6 percent of the people hit by the bedroom tax had moved home.
I mean, don't you think it's just time to apologise to them?
No, no.
I think the policy not only didn't work but then spending millions and millions of taxpayers
money to basically compensate people for a policy that wasn't working was clearly a complete
failure.
But would you apologise because you backed it?
Look, I mean, we can if you like, go through everything over the last half a decade that
you think I should or shouldn't apologise for.
Well, it was just government policy...
I'm explaining to you the original logic.
I'm explaining to you where I think it went wrong.
I'm explaining to you that I think it was a failure and it's certainly something which,
if I was in government, we would clearly scrap.
It was wrong.
But you regret it backing it to begin with?
Yes, of course I did but, you know, you've got to understand that if you're in government,
particularly if you're a prime minister or a deputy prime minister, you're dealing with
hundreds and hundreds of decisions a day.
This is a decision that then is put forward by a particular department and I'm not, I'm
not...
You know, of course, everything quite rightly falls on the shoulders of the people at the
top but, as I say, the starting logic of saying that the state should treat people in social
rented accommodation on the same footing as their neighbours in private rented accommodation
... You know, it was not a sort of wilful desire to penalise vulnerable folk but I totally,
totally accept your assertion and there's just absolutely no ducking it, that it should
have been pretty obvious and certainly is obvious with the benefit of hindsight that
if those people have nowhere to move, then the mess that ensued, ensued.
Then you spend tens of millions of pounds compensating people for a policy which shouldn't
have been introduced in the first place.
Because people said, campaigners said at the beginning, so, you know, it's bizarre that
ministers, people with civil servants, experts ... given, you know, I was writing half-baked
whinging articles about it and it was just obvious because there was nowhere to go.
Yeah.
Erm, ok, you went through, from the 2010 election to 2015, quite a shift.
There was that famous Times headline: 'Nearly as popular as Winston Churchill', Cleggmania
and all the rest of it.
It ended with the near-extinction of the Lib Dems as a major political force.
That must have hurt but crucially though, how do you want to be remembered?
Oh god, I'm too young to start writing historical epitaphs.
Oh, go on.
No, come on, I've only just turned 50.
I'm not some old doddery bloke who say's 'Oh I want this to be etched on my gravestone.'
If there's more to come then...
Listen, I will continue as long as I'm in politics to fight for the kind of liberalism
that I believe in.
And will you stay in parliament next election?
Oh, I don't know.
I don't know yet.
I mean, you know, the next election I think is going to be in May 2020 and obviously I'll
tell my constituents before I tell you, if I may, Owen.
But a lot of the things I believe in, stand for, have fought for, however imperfectly,
are clearly hugely under threat now and so I will continue in whatever way I can to speak
up for internationalism, for the kind of moderate, progressive liberalism that I believe in.
But how and in what configuration, in what role.... pffft, I dunno.
That's for the...
That is for the history books.
What did you think?
Were you persuaded?
Were you convinced?
Do you like Nick Clegg a little bit more or, I don't know, are you a bit frustrated he
didn't apologise for some of the more egregious policies?
I want to hear what you think so, as ever, do leave your comments below the line and
we've got loads of other interviews.
You can click on them somewhere, probably, Adam will sort it out.
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I'll see you next time.