Vince Cable Nails His Colours To The Mast.

Nick Clegg spent much of yesterday trailing around the TV studios trying to defuse in advance whatever Vince Cable might say about the Tories and the Coalition government at the Lib Dem conference. He needn't have bothered. Screwing up all his courage Vince told the Lib Dem conference that the Tories are "ugly" and "blinkered", he suggested that the Tories had made scapegoats of the unions, benefit claimants and immigrants and that they had "reverted to type" as "the nasty party." He darkly intimated that he had several private "red lines" which, if crossed, would trigger his resignation from the Coalition government. Unfortunately he then went on to tell the conference that the Lib Dems are right to support the deeply unfair and entirely selfish economic policy of austerity for the poor while millionaires are rewarded for their greed. Nor did he reveal what his personal "red lines" might be. In fact any analysis of Vince Cables speech will find it long on rhetoric and very, very short on anything that might pin him down in the future. Essentially he blamed the Tories for every nasty, spiteful policy sponsored by the Coalition government while mounting the Nuremburg Defence for himself and the Lib Dem party. He and the rest of his two-faced Lib Dem colleagues will not shoulder any responsibility for the last three years because they are only following orders.