Nick clegg

Yet another day here in Westminster that's all about the economy. Nick Clegg has just delivered a speech on the subject to Mansion House, focusing on ‘responsible capitalism’, which we'll blog shortly. And two prominent forecasting groups, the Ernst & Young ITEM Club and the Centre for Economic and Business Research, have suggested that we're effectively back in recession. They both reckon that the economy shrank in the final quarter of last year, and is wilting even further in this current quarter. But, like the OECD, they also predict that this ‘double dip’ will be relatively short-lived and relatively mild. Against that backdrop, enter George Osborne.

Miliband survives! That news should steady Labour nerves. For today at least. Their leader has the knack of turning near-certain defeat into absolutely-certain catastrophe, but he bumbled through PMQs this afternoon without suffering a serious setback. He has so little ground from which to attack the government that he had to lead on a niche issue. Rail fares. He asked the prime minister why the operating companies have managed to hike prices by 11 per cent on the busiest routes. Cameron: ‘Because of a power given to them by the last Labour government.’   With that lethally terse response the PM sat down. To his credit, Miliband wasn’t rattled.

James has already blogged the Sunday Telegraph's interview with David Cameron, but some other things stand out from it — and not just the PM's unthinking attack on Ed Balls either, for which he has since apologised. Take these paragraphs on tax, for instance: ‘The Prime Minister effectively rules out any move towards a “mansion tax” — a levy on high-priced properties proposed by the Liberal Democrats — or indeed any new tax on wealth. “I don’t believe, generally speaking, we should be looking at endless additional taxes.

After being mostly absent in an embarrassing week, which culminates in today's Sun headline of 'Block Ed' referring to the Labour leader's Twitter gaffe yesterday, Ed Miliband has emerged with a self-assured interview in the Guardian. In parts, he is even boastful. Miliband declares himself 'someone of real steel and grit' and brags 'I am the guy who took on Murdoch... I am the guy that said the rules of capitalism as played in the last 30 years have got to change'. He claims – contrary to Maurice Glasman's criticism this week – to have 'a very clear plan' about what needs to change in Britain. And what is it exactly?

Tucked away on page 15 of today's Times, there's an insightful story about Lords reform (£) by Roland Watson. And it's insightful not just for the new information it contains, but also for the familiar truth it confirms: reforming the House of Lords is going to be one helluva difficult task. You see, while both halves of the coalition committed to a fully- or ‘mainly-elected’ upper chamber in their respective manifestos, only one half of the coalition is particularly eager to force it through now.

Who can be toughest on the ‘undeserving rich’ is shaping up to be one of the main political battlegrounds of 2012. David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s comments today on tax avoidance are an attempt to get ahead of this debate.    Clegg, though, is keen to make this issue his own. As I say in the politics column this week, he is planning a big speech later this month on ‘responsible capitalism’. He will use it to argue that there need to be more checks and balances within companies and call for more shareholder power over executive pay. One Cleggite tells me, in reference to the Labour leader’s conference speech trying to sketch out a new capitalism, ‘it is the speech Ed Miliband should have given.

Whenever politicians talk about social care, they tend to promise ‘cross-party talks’. It's their little euphemism for ‘we don't want to commit to a policy by ourselves.’ Don't get them wrong, it's not that they don't have ideas for fixing a system that is straining under the weight of an ageing population; the Dilnot report, released earlier this year, gave them plenty of recommendations to work with. It's just that they don't want to be the ones to implement the tax hikes or spending cuts that will be necessary to fund it. If they can talk it through with the other parties — the thinking goes — then this crucial policy area can be detoxified, the blame spread more or less evenly.

It's a strange sort of Christmas present; interviews with Ed Miliband and Ed Balls — but that's what the papers have seen fit to deliver us this morning. There's not much political content in the Miliband one, which is more of an At Home With Ed and Justine sort of deal. But Ed Balls's interview with the Independent is a totally different matter. Here are five points distilled from the shadow chancellor's words: 1) We'd cut, I tell ya. Rarely has Balls sounded as much of a deficit hawk as he does here. Sure, he drops in the usual lines about the Tories going ‘too far, too fast’, and Labour providing an ‘alternative’ — but then he blurs his dividing lines far more than usual.

Officially, of course, the answer to that question is William Hague - who has put in some decent work since assuming office, particularly during the Arab Spring. But, still, I ask it because, following the European Council, Nick Clegg seems to have usurped the Foreign Secretary's role in a number of key areas. It was the Deputy Prime Minister who engaged the newly-elected Spanish leader, for example. It was also Clegg, not Hague, who was instrumental in bringing German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle to Britain on a 'we still love you' visit yesterday. And when it comes to phoning European leaders to press a UK position, it is the Deputy Prime Minister who is asked to put in the hours, not the veto-wielding Prime Minister or Britain's chief diplomat.

Under cover of discussing the Open Society and its enemies, Nick Clegg today set out his personal agenda for the next year of this government. Indeed, Clegg's speech to Demos earlier was perhaps the purest distillation of his politics since the big set-piece number he delivered at the Lib Dem conference in 2008. It contained many of the same themes as that earlier speech: ‘social mobility’, ‘civil liberties’, and ‘democracy’. And it added a couple more for good measure: ‘political pluralism’ and ‘internationalism’. The Deputy Prime Minister described these five political impulses as ‘the source of my liberalism’.

A few months after the coalition was formed, I went for lunch with a close ally of Nick Clegg. After an hour or so of discussing what the coalition’s agenda would be, this Liberal Democrat said to me: ‘now, David Cameron can’t really be serious about this marriage stuff, can he?’ When I replied that I thought he was, he looked at me with total incomprehension. He then launched into a speech about how no ‘liberal’ could possibly want to see the state promote marriage. This is the thinking that lies behind Clegg’s latest attack on the idea of tax breaks for married couple; it has become an identity issue for the Liberal Democrats.

Coalition tensions over Europe are again threatening to be the story this morning. Nick Clegg has told The Guardian's Patrick Wintour that Britain has 'signalled we are happy for them [the Eurozone plus group of countries] to use EU institutions' to enforce any new treaty they agree between themselves. This is a striking claim given that David Cameron has not publicly said that he would accept this. If the Deputy Prime Minister's summary of the coalition position is accurate, then Cameron will face criticism from eurosceptics that he is backsliding on his veto. But for all Clegg's criticism of Cameron handling off the summit, he remains unconvinced by the plans that the eurozone plus countries are now pursuing.

The Times has a very interesting story (£) today on page 17. It claims that David Cameron had agreed to inform Nick Clegg if it appeared that Britain was going to be isolated at last week’s European Council. The significance of this is that it suggests that the Lib Dems believed they would be consulted before the government vetoed anything. This news emerges after senior Liberal Democrats have privately questioned why their leader did not insist that Cameron only use the veto once he had Clegg’s explicit agreement. The Times also reports that this negotiating protocol did not envisage a situation where Britain was left in a minority of only a couple of countries.