Cable and Fox tug at the Coalition’s centre

The leaders of both coalition parties are seeing ministerial colleagues and backbenchers trying to push them further way from the centre at present. Nick Clegg has Vince Cable continuing to push for what Ed Miliband might call ‘good borrowing’, telling the Today programme that he’d borrow to improve the economy, rather than to keep an inefficient economic model going. He said:

‘There’s borrowing for different reasons, and this was the point I was trying to make last week, that you can borrow simply to plug the hole in the deficit… The metaphor I’ve used which helps to explain it – there’s a difference between increasing your credit card in order to keep a gas-guzzling car on the road, and taking out a loan in order to get a more fuel-efficient car, and the latter is a more sensible form of borrowing. And that’s what, when people talk about capital investment, that’s what we mean.