Nick Clegg on life with the Conservatives, tuition fees and the coalition’s future

Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg is interviewed today in the Independent on Sunday. The report inevitably features tuition fees:

He says he is still determined to tackle social disadvantage and educational underperformance, and says that a £150m national scholarship scheme will give a year’s free tuition to 18,000 students on free school meals. Universities wanting to breach the £6,000 cap on fees, to charge up to £9,000, will have to give another free year to the poorest students.

In the coming weeks, months and years he will need to “grit my teeth, display a bit of resilience, and explain calmly and logically over and over again why we are doing what we are doing” …

He is anxious to point out that both Labour and Conservatives were “wedded” to a tuition fees rise before the election and students would have faced an increase whoever won.

But he admits the deep anger felt towards the Lib Dems, the “passion, the hurt feelings, the demos and the slogans and the vitriol”, risk deterring those from poorer backgrounds from going to university. “It’s immensely frustrating to me to see a policy which lowers barriers of entry to university being portrayed as putting up barriers.” …

Mr Clegg launches into a detailed explanation of what is planned to make university funding fairer. Upfront fees for the 40 per cent of students who are part-time have been scrapped and the repayment threshold raised. “If you were a care worker starting on £21,000 you pay about £7 a month. Under the current scheme you pay £81 a month and under the 2 per cent graduate tax proposed by Ed Miliband it’s about £36.”

There is also a further acknowledgement that, as often talked about on this blog, the approach of loving everything the coalition is doing in public (even when there have been significant disagreements and concessions from the Conservatives in private) is not what is now needed:

He complains repeatedly that despite “punching above our weight in the coalition” the Lib Dems are not getting “a hearing at all on the policy stuff”. Having come third in the election and made major concessions to the Tories, he says he must be upfront about the difficult decisions as early as possible. “Don’t try and run away from it. Don’t try to hide it, don’t try and paper over it.”

And finally, on his relations with David Cameron, Nick Clegg says,

I don’t think what the country wants is for us to become best mates. It’s about, can we sort stuff together?

You can read the full interview here.

UPDATE
The Telegraph has this: Vince Cable and Nick Clegg at loggerheads over tuition fees.