PMQs verdict: Clegg gets the message right

Finally, the right line from Prime Minister’s Questions – and it’s one that Gordon Brown will fear the most. “What people need now is more money in their pockets. He could deliver big tax cuts for people who desperately need help”. It was from Nick Clegg. You can argue – as I do –  that the Liberal Democrats’ proposed tax cut is paltry. But the rhetoric and positioning is precisely right. It’s a binary distinction: Brown trusts the state, and wants to spend his way out of a recession. Clegg is saying he trusts the British public, and wants to stimulate the economy by letting them keep more of their own money. When Brown retorted that the “Liberal Party” would somehow damage the British economy by taking out £20 billion of spending, it sounded irrelevant. Clegg has astutely judged that the Tories are missing an open goal because of internal struggles with the concept of tax cuts.