Image: Liberal Democrats via Flickr.
The Conservative Party’s origin story of the financial crisis has always been that the Labour Party had a significant role to play. Speaking with Chris Mullin at the Durham Book Festival sell-out event at Durham Town Hall on Saturday, Vince Cable was quick to dispute this myth. “It is not true that the Labour Party grossly mismanaged finances up to the crisis of 2008,” he claims. Rather, the Conservatives’ claim was swept up by the right-wing media and soon became the “established story” of the crisis.
The event was organised to discuss Dr Cable’s new book, ‘After The Storm’, which looks back at the financial crisis seven years on. In discussing the crisis, he was keen to emphasise his high regard for Gordon Brown, complimenting his “basic integrity” in the face of public scrutiny. He praised Mr Brown’s passionate concern for the economy in Europe, claiming that his good work has been largely forgotten in the UK. The former prime minister’s first two terms, he maintained, “did create a framework of stability” that has led to a highly-regarded reputation abroad that continues to this day.
Asked about the 2010 coalition government, Dr Cable said that the collaboration was inevitable. “We were propelled by parliamentary numbers and a sense that this was where the national interest lay.” Meanwhile, he said, the Labour Party made it clear that they had “no trust” in the coalition, and instead wanted to “get back into opposition and sort themselves out.”
Turning to his new book, a sequel to his 2009 bestseller ‘The Storm’, Dr Cable made it clear that it is not a memoir, but rather “an attempt to be serious about the economy.” He commented on the importance of reviewing the 2008 financial crisis at a greater distance: “The shock that we had back in 2008 was much more profound than any politician has looked at in the short term.”
With the focus of the interview turning to the current Conservative government, Dr Cable was critical of George Osbourne’s upcoming financial decisions. Commenting on the growing housing crisis, he said: “When you’ve got a fire blazing out of control, you stop putting fuel on it.” Asked whether he would halt the sale of council houses, he expressed his anxiety about the loss of affordable housing, calling it a “great tragedy”. He told Mullin that the sales are missed opportunities – that if councils were given the freedom to operate, they could be building more affordable housing to counter the growing housing emergency, particularly in the South East.
He was also critical of the spending cuts planned by Osbourne and the Conservative Party. In 2011 and 2012, some of the planned cuts were wiped off by Osbourne after extensive Liberal Democrat opposition. Now, without the balancing force of a coalition to restrain them, Dr Cable expressed his concern for the severity of future cuts, stating that Osbourne has “redefined what the deficit is in a much more extreme way” than what was originally planned under the coalition government.
For the last fifteen minutes of the session, Chris Mullin opened up the floor for questions. Inevitably, the issue of tuition fees was raised. Dr Cable expressed his unhappiness of being faced with such a decision. “Any government was going to be faced with that problem,” he said. He was tasked with making 25% cuts to the sector, and to take funding away from universities would have had an “absolutely crippling effect” on the quality of university teaching. “What we created”, he suggested, “was a more progressive system.”
One of the final questions of the evening was whether Dr Cable could see his party returning to popularity in the future. He offered a hopeful reply, suggesting that the movement of the left to a more radical space under Corbyn, and the potential movement further right under a new Conservative leader, could leave an “enormous space” in the centre with a chance to expand into it. Already, Newcastle has a “changing mood” under the new government, and Dr Cable expressed his belief that his party’s local government base will be restored. Although there is hope, he said, “it’s not going to be easy”.
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