Vince Cable gave his first big interview as probably-the-next-leader of the Lib Dems to Sophy Ridge on Sky News this morning. You can read the full transcript but here are some of the highlights.
It was, as you would expect, a reasoned, calm and accomplished performance. He certainly comes across as the grown-up in the room.
First of all, he was asked about austerity and whether or not it could continue. You could, he said, spend more money wisely:
I think what there is a big public mood for, and I think it’s right, is that we shift the balance and instead of just cutting, cutting public spending we have people willing to pay more tax and indeed my party campaigned in the general election saying a penny in the pound on income tax for the health service and I think people are up for that kind of change. Similarly public sector pay, I mean you can’t just have unlimited public sector pay but we should be lifting public sector pay above the present cap which pushes people’s incomes down in real terms and again we argued in the election for a phased increase and so at least people’s pay – teachers, nurses – is protected in real terms. I would also argue that it makes sense to use government’s borrowing capacity at very low interest rates to do more investment, you know, social housing, infrastructure – these are things that we could do very sensibly within sound public finance.
Asked about tuition fees, he says that we need to look at how the system has worked, but there are bigger priorities for education at the moment. He also pointed out that more needs to be done for the young people who don’t go to university. I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more from him on that in the meantime.
Well the Labour party have a ridiculously populist programme which doesn’t really stand up to investigation. I mean if you don’t have any form of fees, who pays for universities? How do you end this discrimination between the 40% of students who go to university and who would be subsidised as opposed to the 60% who don’t? So that would be highly inequitable.
But we have to be careful of doing things for populist reasons:
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