The LibDems are being crucified by the left, Mr Cable, not the right...

As Vince Cable condemns the Tory attacks on Nick Clegg, he should be asking himself who exactly are his real enemies. In a perceptive blog, James Graham notes

A lot of Labour politicians are hellbent on a strategy that is about destroying the LibDems, even if it means effectively letting Cameron off the hook. There's no getting away from the fact that the LibDems are now seriously weakened, but what has that gained Labour? Look at Scotland. Labour let the Tories win the popular vote in England, which is an absolutely extraordinary failure.

You only have to read Polly Toynbee - doyen of the left and herself a former SDP member - to understand where such vitriol is coming from:And this is a view increasingly found across the left of British politics. The LibDems should never want power. Their job is to be a Labour party mark two - a chill out room for the main Labour event. A pale shadow of top-down, centralised, sclerotic socialism - but without the war in Iraq.

How badly they misunderstood the nature of their swelling support: they were a safe haven for voters not wanting tough choices, nice people with apolitical instincts, trusting Clegg's promised "new politics" would keep their votes clean from contamination. Had the Lib Dems stood apart and stood their ground, loudly opposing Tory plans, objecting to the savagery of the budget without quite bringing down the government, they might have kept their virginity.

In a well argued piece for Saturday's Guardian called The left is practically defined by people who hate Nick Clegg, Andrew Brown points out that on student fees - a cause seen by the left as the the LibDems greatest betrayal despite having been originally introduced by Labour against a manifesto committment 

the outcry against them comes from people who see themselves losing a privilege they had considered as a right. There's a word for that, and it's not "liberal"

He continues,

hatred of Clegg is concentrated on the fact that he betrayed some of the policies he ran on; but he did so because the country voted against them. That's democracy. Sometimes the majority is wrong. Sometimes it disagrees with you. But the majority still gets to decide, as the Lib Dems, in coalition, have discovered. There's no reason whatever that a party with 23% of the votes should get 100% of its programme through. The people who think it should are not being democratic.

As Olly Grender wrote in a piece entitled Don't Vote Against AV because you hate Nick Clegg, a week before the referendum 

both David Cameron and Nick Clegg will still be in the same jobs next week. A vote for or against AV won’t change that

It was published in the New Statesman and aimed squarely at the left - not the right.

The unpalatable truth, Mr Cable, is that the LibDems are being destroyed by the left. Just as Islam reserves the ultimate punishment for apostacy, the LibDems are being crucified by the left. Not the right.

Cable on Conservatives...

Ruthless, calculating and very tribal is how Vince Cable describes the Conservative party in an interview for Radio 4 this morning which immediately makes headline news for all the wrong reasons. If instead he had described the party as soft, woolly and disorganised, what do you imagine the reaction would have been? You just can't win...

This is coalition government

This really is copybook coalition politics. No fuss. No bother. No external briefings. Just a comprehensive and convincing restructuring of higher education funding to put British students and universities on a global footing.

Vince Cable and David Willetts have delivered - and way beyond the coalition agreement hammered out in May. They have done so with civility and in the face of deeply partisan criticism from the Labour benches whose thirteen years of government were characterised by the near destruction of university funding based on dumbed-down qualifications attached to absurdly optimistic projections for participation and without the necessary funding.

Now we have widely agreed, evidence-based, bottom-up policy that will stand the test of time. Putting students at the heart of higher education and British universities at the forefront of global educational standards. Anyone who cares about higher education should celebrate the coalition tonight.

Comrade Cable

So much adverse press for Vince Cable this morning its difficult to know where to start. Take your pick from Allister Heath, Steve Richards, or Fraser Nelson. All contemptuous of a few pointed words. Yes Mr Cable was playing to his Liberal Democrat conference audience. No the coalition is not about to become a class-based Marxist regime like Chavez's Venezuela.

Just calm down you commentators. I may not agree with Vince Cable over a Graduate tax or a Mansion tax or a latter-day Glass-Steagall Act. Indeed there may not be too much else to agree with. But he's absolutely right when he says the banks caused - and continue to cause through their lending policies - untold misery to our economy.

Thank you Mr Cable for much needed honesty amongst the braying of bankers - or at least their apologists - who are in denial of the consequences of the bankers incompetence.

Two years after the disaster became apparent, British banks continue to be supported both directly and indirectly by taxpayers money whilst they continue to pay obscene bonuses to themselves. Why? because they are reaping vast profits from lending out money at high interest rates that has been borrowed at near-zero interest rates from the British taxpayer via the money markets. You don't really need a Cambridge Mathematics Tripos to work that one out.

Did I hear Mr Cable use the word 'spiv'? Did he mean a slickly-dressed petty-criminal, dealing in black market goods of questionable authenticity? I don't think we need to sink to the level of rhyming slang for bankers here - the term 'spiv' seems pretty appropriate to me.

Meanwhile, the political class decide which welfare payments are to be cut, which school re-building project is to be scrapped and a whole host of other public spending decisions to pay for the privilege of bailing out the banking sector.

Mr Cable hasn't quite got there yet. Mervyn King is still the closest that I have seen to suggesting that banks need to actually take responsibility for their mistakes. Step one is to announce that from here out any UK bank which fails will be put into
receivership by the Bank of England. Yes that does mean that shareholders & bondholders will be wiped out - after all, they understood the risk that any investor takes. But it does NOT mean depositors like you and me - or businesses holding money on deposit - will be wiped out.

The assets of the bank - the depositors, branches, staff & customers - need to be re-bundled into a new bank, wholly owned by the taxpayer, with a clean balance sheet ready for business. Now that would really ensure competitive new lending - a new 'clean' bank with no losses, a nationwide presence on every high street and hungry for new business.

And all it took was a little imagination. They don't teach that at Oxford.