Good afternoon, Mr. Deputy Prime Minister…Interview with Nick Clegg

SHUlife’s Nathaneal Sansam speaks exclusively to Nick Clegg

Photography: Christian Bagnall

“This might sound awkward but…” starts Nick Clegg after a few  moments of looking at his BlackBerry.

For a moment I fear that something urgent may have occurred in government. Had the Eurozone finally collapsed? Were the Unions escalating strike action? Or perhaps the Lib-Dem’s coalition partners were performing some sort of political manoeuvre on policy behind the scenes that he, as Deputy Prime Minister, has to keep tabs on.

Whatever it is, after a moment he sets his phone down and declares he’s was ready to go ahead, his phone at his side in case anything urgent happens.

A week, it is said, is a long time in politics, and 18 months is practically a lifetime. During that time, Nick Clegg’s reputation has gone from relative anonymity, to brief adulation, to active and almost visceral hatred in some quarters. A coalition formed with the Conservatives (the first since the Second World War), a massive backlash over tuition fees and a spring conference in Sheffield picketed by protesters. In May last year it culminated in a Lib-Dem loss of Sheffield City Council, along with many others.

2011 was looking like a year the Liberal Democrats might want to forget. Since then they can argue they’ve had some  significant victories – demanding changes to controversial NHS reforms, and helping to force an inquiry into phone hacking at the News Of The World.

That said, there seems to be no change in the perception among many students that the Liberal Democrats said one thing during the  election, and did the opposite.

Given all the strong opinions voiced by students about the Lib-Dems and Nick Clegg in particular, SHUlife felt it was even more important contact was made so we could hear the politician’s side of the story.

As a constituency meeting over-runs, we take and seat and notice the very home-spun, lived-in feel the office provides – with boxes of old flyers and books around the sides of the hall space, and constituency maps dotting the walls. Taken aback by the humble setting, far away from the lush and historical office space you might expect at Westminster, it’s hardly seems like the office for the deputy leader of the country.

Nick Clegg is the first out of the door from the meeting, and offers a firm greeting: “Hello, how are you? Sorry I’m running a bit late,” he says, offering his hand. The meeting room, much like the rest of the office, is another lived-in space that’s cluttered with documents and election material, dominated by a large table to the side of the room, with a larger office chair and small slit windows behind it.

I ask him about unemployment, which hit a 17 year high last November, and whether or not he felt it would get worse in 2012: “Well of course I hope not, and I think it means that as the storm clouds in the European economy darken and as the uncertainties deepen, as they clearly have, it’s self-evidently the case that the situation now is worse than we anticipated a year and a half ago.

“But on jobs it means that we do need to do more, and we are now going to do more in the Youth Contract, which I have just announced, to provide hundreds of thousands of young people with a route back into work which didn’t exist.”

This is a policy that he announced in November, in response to the worrying youth unem­ployment figures. But why was it that we’ve gotten to the point where 21 per cent of young people are out of work compared to just eight per cent overall?

“Well, the first kind of unpalatable truth is that young people have always experienced a sharper rise in unemployment when the country experiences economic difficulties, you can see this in previous recessions. The second uncomfortable truth on youth unemployment is this – it didn’t happen overnight if you look at the figures for youth unemployment, they’ve been rising remorselessly since 2004.”

 He mentions the Future Jobs Fund, a fund set up by the previous government which has been among the many public organisations closed amid great controversy. While Clegg agrees with the principle behind it, he feels it wasn’t effective enough.

“The problem with it was the jobs were here today and gone tomorrow, so it actually meant if you look at the figures of the future jobs fund, about half of the young people on the future jobs fund were back on the dole and taking and receiving benefits within a few weeks or months of leaving the fund.

“What we are doing is learning from that by saying we’re going to give a job subsidy, still a significant one at around half the national minimum wage, half the basic pay. And we’re going to give it to the private sector because that’s where jobs tend to last longer.”

But given that many economists are now saying that the jobs market may not stabilise until 2016, will these schemes be enough to keep down unemployment?

“One thing I’ve learned from a year and a half in Government is that people who make very firm predictions about the future of the economy, whether the British economy or the world economies, almost always end up being wrong.” He then pulls back in order to make a point about the economy more generally:

“One thing that I think is true and does need to be said – back in 2008, in the banking crisis, we didn’t just suffer any old recession which we just sort of effortlessly bounced back from. Our economy literally got smaller, and I think when people say ‘oh, you should do this, you shouldn’t do that’ they have to…just kind of get real. Our economy has literally gone like that, just got smaller.”

This last point was accompanied by an inward hand gesture that makes it all the more marked. He moves on to try and explain why our economy is imbalanced: “Basically, the way our economy has been run non-stop by different parties since the mid-Eighties [when] Margret Thatcher introduced the Big Bang in 1986. What’s happened since then was the Conservative and Labour governments did the same thing, they said ‘oh, look at this amazing golden-egg laying goose in the City of London, its wonderful! It keeps giving us loads and loads of tax receipts, and we’re going to take those tax receipts and transport them up the M1 and we’ll distribute them in Rotherham and Sheffield and everywhere through public subsidies to make everybody feel good,’ and everybody feels good. That whole merry-go-round has just stopped. The goose isn’t laying the golden eggs anymore.

There was perhaps one set of questions that I knew this interview would have to include, and that’s on the subject of tuition fees. For so many friends, this was the totemic reason for supporting the Lib-Dem’s a year-and-a-half ago.

Earlier this year we were shocked when we realised that the total of our tuition and maintenance for this year was still less than the £8, 500 that Hallam plans to charge for tuition alone from next year. However you view this, it’s a massive increase in just one year.

“I think the thing I have perhaps utterly failed to explain successfully is that even though the price of the fee has gone up – the way you repay has gone down. It’s really important to remember this.” His reply has the assertiveness that you might expect, it’s a question he’s had to answer over and over for the last year. Nonetheless, his answer has a jaded quality to it. Despite the controversy, he is adamant about the progressive qualities of the funding changes.

“For the first time since Labour introduced fees, every single student at Sheffield Hallam will not pay fees as a student. You, at the moment [in Hallam] have got hundreds of students on part-time courses that are paying fees. We are removing the obligation on part-time student. Secondly, you’ll pay back less every week and every month in the future under the new system than you do under the current system. And that is because, yes, we are asking people to pay longer but we’re only asking to repay when you can afford to do so.”

The problem though is that the anger is two-fold, at the raise in fees and at the fantastic volt-fast by the Lib-Dem over what had been a defining issue. Again, Clegg is unrepentant over the necessity of the reform. “I understand when people say to me ‘oh, you said this and that in opposition’. But the fact, I’m afraid, is that I lead a party which got eight per cent of MP’s in Parliament. I am not the Prime Minister. I can­not deliver the Liberal Democrat manifesto in full. If people want that, they’ve got to vote for a Liberal Democrat government, but it didn’t happen.”

But while fees in England are tripling from 2012, in the UK’s Celtic fringes, where higher education is a devolved issue, and none of them intend to follow Westmin­ster’s lead, the SNP government in Scotland has abolished them out­right. Why is there no agreement between the coalition and the devolved governments?

“Well I think you’ve got to look at this in the long term. Let’s see in the long term whether it does their universities any good to short change their universities of badly needed revenue. Because you’ve got to get the money from somewhere, where do you take it from? From pensioners? From small children?”

As we wrap up the interview, it is clear that there is no real act of repentance that many students might want on the tuition fees decision. While the topic might haunt Nick Clegg and the Lib-Dems for years to come, he will remain adamant that he did the best he could with the hand he was given at the general election.

The question is who will agree with Nick next time round?