Friday, August 27, 2010

Nick Clegg "faces more hostility from Lib Dem members than the public"

Nick Clegg is quoted in a short piece on the Guardian website this evening:
The reception he had received was "quite different in different parts of the country," he told the Times. "There is a particularly acute anxiety about the future at the moment in some of the big northern cities. I think it's principally because people remember the 1980s as a particularly vicious recession for them and their families."
The article also quotes Mike Hancock as saying that Nick faces a "sticky" party conference.

Speak for yourself, Mr Hancock.

2 comments:

Nich Starling said...

Its true that if Nick Clegg was due to attend our annual dinner, I wouldn't attend.

I was speaking to a friend of mine who works with a Lib Dem activist in Bristol who said he was still seething about Clegg, so I don't think Mike Hancock is wrong.

dreamingspire said...

While I can understand many LD voters now keeping their heads down, to have activists being angry or worse about Clegg and Co gets me angry. I may have written the following before, but why don't they think of the unpleasantness of the alternatives and then get to work on helping the current Coalition get on with it? A Tory party, not ready to govern, could have tried to form a minority administration, or else tired Labour with its Stalinist central dictat fixation could have carried on with minority govt. And a Lib/Lab coalition would have been about the worst result. The real battle is to get our civil service to move on from its own central dictat ethos that was born in the 1970s and which drove some of our best public servants across the Channel to join the much more progressive EU administration. What was it that Jacqui Smith said of Louise Casey? Not a "traditional civil servant" (BBC R4 Profile Sat/Sun 21/22 Aug) - that showed that Jacqui is also stuck in the 1970s.