Nick Clegg has accused former chancellor George Osborne of casually cutting the benefits of the poorest people in society because he believed taking the austerity axe to welfare would boost Conservative popularity.
In a candid interview looking back on his five years as deputy prime minister in the Tory-LibDem coalition, Clegg said he found the behaviour of his senior Conservative partner “very unattractive, very cynical”.
“Welfare for Osborne was just a bottomless pit of savings, and it didn’t really matter what the human consequences were, because focus groups had shown that the voters they wanted to appeal to were very anti-welfare, and therefore there was almost no limit to those anti-welfare prejudices,” he told the Guardian.
Speaking before the publication of his anticipated political memoir, written after his party was reduced to eight seats in last year’s general election, Clegg hit out at David Cameron and his Conservative partners in government. He said the former Tory leader or the chancellor – “I honestly can’t remember whom – looked genuinely nonplussed and said: ‘I don’t understand why you keep going on about the need for more social housing – it just creates Labour voters.’ They genuinely saw housing as a Petri dish for voters. It was unbelievable.”
The LibDem MP also had harsh words for the current Prime Minister, Theresa May, with whom he clashed repeatedly when she was home secretary. He claimed that she – and advisers who have since become the joint chiefs of staff in Downing Street – tried to manipulate a Home Office report on immigration that was part of a cross-government exercise into the costs and benefits of EU membership.
“She kept saying there was this terrible ‘abuse’ of freedom of movement, when simply describing EU citizens exercising their right to come and work in the UK. They tried to insert statistics suggesting the number of UK citizens living and working in other EU countries was half a million lower than any other mainstream estimate,” he said.
Clegg argued that May would not miss an opportunity to “pander to the cardboard-cutout prejudices that large parts of her party have about Europe”. “That’s clearly what she and her team were doing when they were trying to insert erroneous facts into this report on freedom of movement.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Clegg expressed deep frustration that his party had received little credit for its work in the coalition, and admitted to “big mistakes”.
He also said he could now see that his decision to back a policy that would triple tuition fees to £9,000, breaking a LibDem pledge, was like delivering a punch in the face to parents who dreamed of watching their children graduate.
Clegg: accuses Osborne of ‘anti-welfare prejudices’
