Nick Clegg has said that the Liberal Democrats would not enter into a coalition with a party that refused to implement its education funding policy, setting out the first of a series of “red lines” which he will announce in the days running up to the general election.
Speaking on the party’s campaign bus on Monday, the deputy prime minister said that the Lib Dem commitment to increase per-pupil spending for two to 19-year-olds in real terms over the next parliament was non-negotiable and would have to be included in any coalition deal.
“As the outcome of the election appears increasingly uncertain and the risk of instability immediately afterwards appears increasingly worrisome, I have decided I think we need to be increasingly clear and certain and categorical with people about what the Liberal Democrats will do after 7 May come hell or high water if people vote for the Liberal Democrats,” said Clegg.
“In other words, I think the more fluid and uncertain the possible outcome is becoming, the more we need to provide people with good reason, with fixed points as far as what Liberal Democrats would do after the election.”
Clegg said his party would not accept either of the two biggest parties’ plans on education spending. The Conservative party has promised to maintain per-pupil spending at current levels for five to 16-year-olds, amounting to a real-terms cut, whereas the Labour party has pledged to protect the education budget in real terms but has not accounted for the 460,000 extra pupils expected to enter the school system over the next parliament.
The Liberal Democrats say that they would increase education spending from £49.6bn to £55.3bn by the end of the next parliament, representing £5bn more than Conservative plans and £2.5bn more than Labour.
The Liberal Democrat leader admitted that he had previously been “quite reluctant to talk about the language of ‘deal-breakers’ and ‘red lines’ and so on” but that in the late stages of the election campaign the party needed to set out what its deal-breakers would be. Clegg said that he would be announcing further non-negotiable policies in the days running up to voting day.
The front page of the party’s general election manifesto is reserved for five policies that would be its priorities if it enters government.
“We’ve always been quite open about the fact there are some sort of Premier League policies and others [that] don’t assume quite the same significance,” said Clegg. “But I really don’t want that to lead you to the conclusion that somehow we are indifferent to the other policies. We will fight very hard obviously to decant as much of our manifesto into any coalition agreement as we very successfully did last time.”
Asked whether he regretted not setting out the party’s red lines ahead of the 2010 general election, something which might have saved his party some of the reputational damage caused by their failure to scrap tuition fees, Nick Clegg said: “It is from my point of view of course a shame that a policy we were not able to put into practice, which wasn’t on the front page of our manifesto, has eclipsed the very remarkable achievement of being a party with only 8% of MPs [that] has delivered everything on the front page of our manifesto, but therein lie the twists and turns of politics.”
Clegg has described education as the policy area he feels most passionately about and has expressed a desire for his party to wield more influence over the Department for Education if it were to enter government again. “With hindsight I wish we’d taken charge of education and not wasted time on gimmicky fripperies from Michael Gove and his advisers,” he said.
