Bonus balls

Last night, Nick Clegg sounded like someone in opposition as he spouted how “something needed to be done” in the face of a banking sector that has stuck up two fingers to an ineffective ConDem government.

After months of ministers threatening a tough stance over City bonuses, a Downing Street spokesman admitted that the government did not intend to intervene in the pay of the UK's top bankers. All the pathetic deputy PM could do was offer up a stupid soundbite on how he wanted to do something on behalf of an “alarm-clock generation” that had been promised government action.

That ‘something’ appears to be a further Lib Dem policy handstand that will abandon their traditional tax-to-invest philosophy by raising the personal tax allowance for basic rate payers. This is presumably supposed to re-engage an alienated Middle Britain which has not so far benefitted from government thinking in the same way as outliers on the socio-economic bell-curve.

Commentators see the desperate degree to which this patently Conservative inspired measure has been embraced by the Lib Dem hierarchy as a clear sign that they expect a serious kicking in this week’s Saddleworth & Oldham by-election. This perception is reinforced by how campaign managers are talking up the prospect of avoiding third place as a successful outcome.

But even this objective faces problems; for despite a cynical step by Lib Dems to call an early election date that so that it falls a week before local students return to their studies, the NUS report that their campaign to promote postal votes for absentee students is going very well indeed.