Cameron and Clegg get to work
Wednesday 12th May 2010, 3:00PM BST.
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Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on the steps of 10 Downing Street
NEW PRIME Minister David Cameron and deputy Nick Clegg today faced the world’s media and promised not just a new government but new politics for Britain.
The pair appeared side-by-side at a joint press conference in the gardens of Number 10 Dowing Street, to outline their plans for the country’s future.
The press conference came after a day which saw Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg appoint key members of the first coalition government for more than 65 years.
Top level posts were handed to George Osborne, Theresa May, William Hague and Ken Clarke. The Liberal Democrats have five posts on the new Cabinet.
Mr Cameron said the coalition was formed around three key principles of freedom, fairness and responsibility.
The Tory leader said the “national interest is more important than the party interest”.
Rivals
He added that compromise in government should not be seen as a sign of weakness but “as a sign of our strength”.
He said the new coalition would help change the face of politics across the country.
Mr Clegg said: “Until today we were rivals, now we are colleagues and that says a lot about the new politics.”
Mr Clegg pledged the coalition government would last and it would be a source of reassurance and stability.
Earlier today the pair met at Number 10 Downing Street to begin forming the new Cabinet.
Following a late-night meeting of Lib Dem MPs and the party’s federal executive to endorse the deal, Mr Clegg sought to reassure his supporters who were unhappy at the idea of a coalition with the Tories.
He said: “I want to assure you that I wouldn’t have entered into this agreement unless I was genuinely convinced that it offers a unique opportunity to deliver the kind of changes you and I believe in.”
Mr Hague said today the coalition represented a “realignment” of British politics.
He revealed that a document setting out the terms of the coalition would name areas – including the married tax allowance, nuclear power and university funding – where Liberal Democrats will be allowed to abstain from Government measures.
Mr Hague said he hoped there would not be any “difficulties” over the issue of the European Union.
“We have written into this agreement that we agree there should be no further transfer of sovereignty or powers over the course of the next Parliament, and that was not a difficult item to agree with the Liberal Democrats.”
But he said on the broad range of policy, the parties had been able to agree a platform which both could push forward.
Mr Hague confirmed the new Government intends to introduce fixed-term Parliaments, with the next election to be held on the first Thursday of May 2015.
“This Government will be judged by whether it really brings down the deficit, reforms taxes so there is a fairer tax system, and improves the education system, not by whether it reannounces and misannounces and falsely announces a whole string of things every day, which was the style of the Blair and Brown years,” said Mr Hague.
Mr Hague said Britain’s first coalition for 70 years would require some “innovations” in the way Government operates.
He Hague acknowledged there would be some people on both sides who would find the arrangement difficult to accept. But he said Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg had already shown they had a “very good working relationship”.
Details of the power-sharing arrangements hammered out over five days began to emerge last night following Gordon Brown’s resignation and Mr Cameron’s appointment as Prime Minister.
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I don’t envy the new ruling elite.
How the hell to you sort out the mess Brown and his cronies have left! I wish Labour had got back in, for 1.4 Trillion reasons.
Pity he did not leave the economy in the same state as he inherited.
Boom and Bust is a thing of the past?
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Oh behave yourself it is a worldwide problem to blame Brown was to create a scape goat many facrors were to blame.
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Unemployment up by 53,000 this quarter! blame the Tories. Labour got out just in time.
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‘Pity he did not leave the economy in the same state as he inherited.’
Yes, of course it’s a pity that we don’t still have the long NHS waiting lists, the leaking roofs and massive class sizes in primary schools, but there you have it – I’m sure the new regime will try to get us back there!
But will they do as much as is needed to recover the massive debt given to us all by greedy capitalist bankers – some 30% of our GDP? If we hang on to the banks long enough we should be able to get our money back with interest from their profits, but Osborne’s favoured plan is to sell them off as soon as possible.
My guess is that, with the uneasy, and possibly unstable coalition that’s in place we’ll see the following happen:
No Tory tax cuts for the wealthy
Some cuts to our public services – but not the swingeing, dogmatic ones favoured by the Tories
No sillines about withdrawing from Europe
None of the ‘big society – parents run your own schools’ nonsense.
No scrapping of Trident (Lib Dem policy)
No Lib Dem asylum seeker amnesty
No full implmentation of proportional representation – instead a transfer to the AV system.
Many of the Lib Dem ‘green’ policies diluted.
Now the supreme irony it seems to me is this: take a look at the policy list above – does it not look like exactly the policies that New Labour had in its manifesto?
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Peter please! The election is over perhaps it is time to now stop electioneering! The conservative party manifesto did not include anything at all that could be construed as a promise to leave the EU, in fact just the opposite. Had it done so then you can be quite certain that they would not now be sharing power with the LDs. I do hope that after 13 years of lies and misinformation we can now get back to some honest debate.But it seems the left is incapable of dealing with the truth and must invent bogeymen. There were no swinging dogmatics cuts to public services suggested by the tories only a delay in introducing the jobs tax.
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Ken,
I’m not electioneering, simply looking at the post-election reality.
The Tories had planned to cut up to 20% from the public sector in 2011 – pretty swingeing if you ask me – but I don’t believe that will now happen. Historically, under the last Tory regime, we saw deep and damaging cuts to essential public services – I think that’s precedent enough to have been concerned.
The dogma has come by way of ill-advised privatisations in the past, ostensibly to save money, but which in the end have cost us all – I’m thinking in particular of Railtrack, and a number of public sector IT privatisations, all of which were done by the last Tory adminstration. If we’d had a full Tory government, I could have seen a lot more of that coming, under the pretext of short term cost-cutting and ‘efficiency’.
As for Europe, I saw Tory MP Bill Cash interviewed whilst the handover of PMs was underway. He gave his personal list of priorities in the following order:
Europe, immigration and only then the economy.
Clearly a pretty silly view of the priorities. Again, that particular section of the Tory party has effectively had its wings clipped by the Lib dem involvement.
Sadly, the worst aspects of the Tories haven’t been completely ironed out – instead of the much more fairly distributed NI increase, it seems they have decided to increase VAT to 20%.
VAT as you will know is a tax which inevitably hits the poorest hardest, since a larger proportion of their income is spent on goods and services. So much for the Tories ‘inclusive’ approach – if they now cut inheritance tax or corporation tax it will be an obscenity.
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There is a bit much here to respond to completely, I responded to your “No sillines about withdrawing from Europe”
It was not part of Tory policy to do so, hence you are inventing something that was never on the cards. You now quote Bill Cash who said the Eu was a priority, he did not say withdrawing was a priority?
Vat is an insidious tax in any event and is more about control than raising revenue, of course we can do little about it as it is an EU controlled tax hence perhaps the comment by Cash that the EU should be priority, it should be because it impacts on every other area.
But it never was made so by any of the three main parties during the election and I do not suppose it will be for the the term of this government, I feel that would have been the case had the Conservative gained an overall majority.
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Ken, It is certainly on Bill Cash’s agenda to withdraw from Europe. He is amongst the most Euro sceptic of the Tory right, and is certainly a long way from the stated aims of the new coalition.
The proposed increase in VAT is not coming from Europe – it is coming from the new government. The alternative of an NI increase would be a fairer tax. The Tories describe this as a ‘tax on jobs’- what to they think an increase of 2.5% on VAT will do to retail jobs?
I can’t help but smile at the inference that somehow Europe is bad for our democracy. Meanwhile, the new government are attempting to make fundamental changes to our democracy by insisting on a 55% majority before they can be kicked out. Not for them the traditional vote of confidence.
I have no problem with the rules changing for the future for fixed-term parliaments, but not within the same parliament that votes the changes in.
When the public voted for no overall majority for any party, we were not voting on the basis of a fixed-term. To change horses mid stream is undemocratic. If we had voted on the basis of a fixed term, the outcome may well have been different.
I cannot see how the move to a fixed-term benefits the Lib-Dems – they are effectively giving up their power in the government, since the 55% majority would make it much harder to get the Tries out of power when they begin attacking public services – we’re already seeing proposed cuts in education from Osbourne.
I had previously regarded the Lib Dems as a democratic party – I didn’t agree with many of their policies, but at least their democracy could be respected. They will have lost a great deal of that respect, from both within and outside their membership as a result of their Faustian pact.
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I suppose seeing sooty and sweep running around the garden in the sun must be what i assume a gay wedding in california must be like.
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There will be difficult times ahead for the lobbyists and Cash for Honours wannabees who knew how to manipulate the old-style govenment of the day. Presumably they will now have to write two cheques in order to circumvent the democratic process.
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I am a Tory supporter yet I did not want the Tories to win. Whoever had taken over this government after Brown’s disastrous innings will have damned his party for evermore. That’s why I was hoping that Brown had won and for awhile, after he clearly hadn’t, I was hoping against hope that the Lib/Lab pact would come off, then both the Lib Dems and Labour would have had to take the extreme policies to get this country on it’s feet again. I think Ed Balls saw the writing on the wall and spiked the talks sponsored by the unelected Mandelson, Campbell and Adonis. Sadly the talks were scuppered by Balls and I have been denied the pleasure to gloat over Labour further wrecking the country as they implemented their demented antics to try and get us financially sound again. Cameron needs his head read, he has taken over the worst economy in this countries history and he is going to do now what Labour would have had to do in 12 months time had they got in but being the opportunist double dealing lot that they are, they would only implement their policies way after the election.
Over the past few days we have witnessed the worst possible examples of “democracy” at work, what we have in this country is a charade that would insult Zimbabwe or a South American banana republic, please nobody tell me I should be proud of the democracy in my country. The only good thing to come out of it is the total demise of Brown and the lost seats of almost 100 other Labourites and the worst possible thing to come out of it is the fact that Brown has managed to escape the obligation to put right, the disaster he has caused.
“There may be trouble ahead”, hold onto your hollyhocks, the Miners strike’s may seem more like the teddy bear’s picnic than what lies in store for us when the necessary cuts take hold. Foolish Cameron, why did you do it.
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‘I am a Tory supporter yet I did not want the Tories to win. ‘ – That’s good because they didn’t.
‘Whoever had taken over this government after Brown’s disastrous innings will have damned his party for evermore.’ – Not true, unless they’re more disastrous or the definition of evermore has changed recently.
‘Over the past few days we have witnessed the worst possible examples of “democracy” at work, what we have in this country is a charade that would insult Zimbabwe or a South American banana republic’ – Overstatement, nobody got shot at, we got bit of manoeuvring with a hung parliament and a few polling stations closed with voters still queuing in safe seats is all.
‘Foolish Cameron, why did you do it.’ – Because he’s a career politician so his primary driver is power whatever the cost.
‘Cameron needs his head read’ – as do all politicians, something is fundamentally wrong with anyone who seeks control over other people’s lives, it’s a hairs-breath away from the mind-set of a psychopath.
‘I have been denied the pleasure to gloat over Labour further wrecking the country’ – I assume you’re referring to masochistic pleasure otherwise that’s akin to Glenn Beck’s infamous rant that he’d like a terrorist attack on the US to show up the weakness of Barack Obama.
Otherwise, and the conjecture bit aside, I concur somewhat with several of the points you make.
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Stuart My initial reaction was the same; I would have preferred the Tories to take a back seat this time, and watch as Brown was forced to take the consequences. Why did they do it you ask!
Can we really disregard the idea that they did it for the good of the country to make a start on putting it back onto its feet after the past 13 years of Labour?
If we do then we are left with the idea that Cameron only wanted the power, or perhaps better, he realised that Labour would introduce further changes to the election system making it almost impossible for the Tories to ever gain power again.
If you think about the STV system Labour said it would introduce without a referendum, one would imagine that most Lib and Lab voters would put Lab and Lib as second choice, making it a racing certainty that we would always end up with Labour in power, as a conservative who would choose as second choice?
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So Stuart and Ken, how long before we hear the excuse -’Don’t blame us, we voted Tory (but we didn’t really want them to win!).
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I did not vote Tory
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I remember so well in the recession of the early 1990s how it was NOT the Tories fault, it was a world recession for which they were victims as much as anyone else. :)
[Cameron needs his head read,]
He and the rest of his party have shown us that Tories are and always have only been interested in personal short term gain.
If they have made a bad decision now Stuart, according to you (as well as their misreading of how to deal with the banking crisis a while back) then how do we have any confidence in them tackling the future problems that the country has to get through and in a fair and equitable way?
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locally our lib dem candidates may as well not bother stadning again, this is a new dawn or labour versus tory in politics
bye bye liberals
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Surely if the liberals and conservatives bring in electoral reform, then more people will feel that their voice counts and that they have a stake in the way our country is run, more candidates will bother standing, and new life will be injected into our democracy.
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Peter, look back through all my blogs, not once will you find an explicit statement from me saying that I wished the Tories to win. Even when they were 21 points ahead in the polls, I said that government after Brown was a poison chalice which they should not take up.
I voted because, like some I do not believe in hypocracy, tactical voting or shirking something that is precious, the right to vote with honesty and conviction. If the wheel comes off with this coalition, I will be the first to admit that my own vote helped to put Cameron there. I sincerely hope that they will weather the coming inevitable storm, that would have come next year anyway had Labour got in. Cameron is going to do now what Labour would have done in 2011. I am hoping against hope that he will get things right although the remedies will be hard to swallow.
As for “short term gain” from eva land, my god, after the most knee jerk, opportunistic government of all time in Blair and Brown’s Labour, without a shred of evidence, the Tories are now accused of the same thing. We forget of course, the disreputable cure for the 10 pence tax faux pas by Brown, thought up on the spur of the moment and all the other electioneering ploys thought up on the hoof by the Labourites. Perhaps we can have a few examples of Tory “short term gain”, they have not been anywhere near power for 13 years.
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I agree gary, the short term gain applies to Clegg also and it is very likely the end of the Lib Dems as a party.
Michael Heseltine and Simon Hughes both suffered massive humiliation in Question Time last night on television.
It was also noted how the financial problems of recent times are back to being a global problem now Libcon’s in power! Or is it Conlib? ;)
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You clearly watched a different programme to that watched by millions of other people. The most resounding clapping, cheering and applause was for Heseltine, no if’s, but’s, or maybe’s and Simon Hughes didn’t do to bad either. Apart from an idiot from the New Statesman who got everyone wound up by his rants and bad mannered interjections, the only other “anti” was Melanie Phillips the rag writer from the Daily Mail and Little Lord Fauntelroy, the Labourite apologist, who surprisingly in the usual twisted, deceitful Labour way appeared to agree with the coalition.
I asked once before eva land, please do not take us for fools, you are not the only one to have watched Questiontime – albeit yours may have been a special edition produced specifically for yourself and denied to us.
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The point many seem to be missing is the LibDems have an internal system to control the leader, Mr Clegg had to get agreement from the party’s hierarchy before he could enter the coalition.
They were always global financial problems the argument being that Brown made them worse – We must hope the spin merchants left government with the Labour party.
For once I did watch Question Time and thought the ranting from the New Statesman idiot was just that, no honesty no substance. I have to say much the same about Melanie Phillips, both were offering different sides of the same coin. Like Stuart I think Eva must have been watching a special edition.
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Eva, the only humiliation on last night’s QT was suffered by the audience who, for the most part, couldn’t even ask their questions in an intelligent and coherent manner. No change there, TBH.
I loved it when Mike Heseltine asked, ‘Is that really a serious question?’.
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If the Liberal Democrats don’t want it to appear that they
have been conned by the Tories then I
suggest ConDems,
‘the party that will keep you out of trouble!’
This could be construed as them maybe being being ribbed? :)
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This election result has to be the biggest disaster since the instating of ” that bloody woman” as P.M.. A coalition may be a good idea but, a forced coalition is a recipe for disaster. The two leaders could agree on nothing during the campaign yet now they are best buddies working together, and, let’s not forget what Camerons favourite joke is. Once again the British public have been taken for a ride and when it comes to paying the fare they will realise what a bumpy ride it is. I wonder who holds the reins now, not Cameron that’s for sure, Clegg will have made his demands and had them agreed to. Methinks I detect a nasty smell of “sell-out”. Marry in haste, repent at leisure.
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