Clegg faces Oldham voters
Nick Clegg did not escape his first town hall meeting since the tuition fees vote completely unscathed in Oldham East and Saddleworth.
The deputy prime minister soon found himself under pressure when a heckler told him “I’m disgusted by the way you stabbed my generation in the back”, the BBC reported.
Mr Clegg is seeking to win over wavering voters just one week from the coalition government’s first by-election test.
He is arguing that his party’s decision to enter government with the Conservatives has resulted in better decisions for the country than would have taken place under Labour.
But the Liberal Democrat leader and his candidate Elwyn Watkins, who fell just 103 votes short of Labour in 2010, faces anger from some voters over the Lib Dems’ decision to abandon their pledge opposing increases in tuition fees.
Mr Clegg is keen to emphasise that the Oldham East and Saddleworth contest is a two-horse race.
That reflects the message being advanced by Lib Dem election literature in the constituency, which has repeatedly flagged up the narrow gap with Labour. It ignores the fact that Tory candidate Kashif Ali improved the third-place vote from 17.8% in 2005 to 26.4%, making the seat a three-way marginal.
But Mr Clegg’s two-horse race rhetoric also helps underline the suggestion that the Conservatives are not fighting the seat especially hard. David Cameron attracted criticism from some party members before Christmas when he suggested he hoped the Lib Dems would win the seat.
The prime minister is expected to use the by-election to downplay Tory suspicions that an electoral pact is a possibility at the 2015 general election.
“There are no secret pacts,” a Downing Street source was quoted as saying by the Mail newspaper.
“We are fighting a proper campaign for every vote. We’ll remain separate parties.”
The deputy prime minister reiterated that line to the Evening Standard newspaper, ruling out an electoral pact in 2015.
“Let me be absolutely clear once and for all,” he said.
“The Liberal Democrats will fight the next election as we did the last – as an independent political party in every constituency in the country.”
