Clegg waves at the left

Nick Clegg arrived at the Brighton Conference Centre a short while ago – shaking two police officers by the hand as he got out of the car … does he always do that or is it a special post-“pleb” innovation?
He marched into the building with an entourage of 14 aides/security etc. Ringing in his ears, the news that the musical version of his “sorry” broadcast has hit 37 in the i-tunes pop charts.

Few in the country can have missed what some aides worried might have been a non-event. And the Andrew Mitchell saga has provided a timely fire-break in news coverage for the Lib Dem leader when he most needed it.

Across a whole raft of policy areas the Lib Dems are proclaiming their more left-wing side in policy declarations at Brighton.

Tory strategists say they’re ok with this – they recognise Nick Clegg needs to win back support, if Lib Dems plummet too far in the next election it’ll damage the Tories in marginal seats where they need the Lib Dem in third place to syphon off Labour votes.

So, amongst other calls going out this weekend, that Robespierre of Liberal Democracy, Danny Alexander, has attacked the greying of the Tory green policies. Nick Clegg is making noises against welfare cuts and in favour of wealth taxes. But what does it all amount to?

There will be more welfare cuts announced soon beyond the ones already detailed for this Parliament because within the overall budget agreed for the DWP not all the detail has yet been agreed. In these negotiations, Nick Clegg IS ruling out a temporary freeze on benefits… he isn’t ruling out re-indexing welfare payments, though nothing is agreed.

And as for the £10bn to welfare cuts that George Osborne said he’d like to make in the first year of the next parliament, Nick CLegg says he wants balancing measures he can point to that deliver a sizeable (maybe even equivalent or much bigger) hit on the better off through something he can label a “wealth tax.”

Nailing down that compromise will be some challenge but they have a few months to do it.

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And what exactly is the state of the next spending review? The current spending plans run out several weeks before the election in May 2015.

You can’t have a void but the Lib Dems caught collective fright when Danny Alexander told Newsnight after the 2012 Budget that he’d signed up to a two year additional spending round two years into the next government.

Many Lib Dems hated the idea of being bound to the Tories in detailed policy going into the next election.

The compromise is that the coalition parties will agree the cash envelope for two years into the next parliament but only agree details for how they’d cut and where they’d spend for the first year of the next parliament.

A theme emerges here that Lib Dems are making more left-wing noises but the broad strategy and positioning central to Nick Clegg’s leadership isn’t shifting too much. Will it be enough for the activists?

Enough for the lost voters of the left who Mr Clegg used to say he’d given up on ever winning back?

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