Clegg ‘has to show how he is curbing Tories’

After the party slumped to sixth in the Barnsley Central by-election, the Lib Dem leadership will use the spring conference starting in Sheffield today to spell out the party’s achievements in the coalition,

But Mr Clegg is being urged to go further and explain to voters how the party is being a “controlling” influence on the Conservatives by blocking more controversial policies. Backbenchers are anxious to establish more clear water between the two coalition partners, although the leadership is likely to be more cautious about taking an approach which risks creating rifts within the Government.

David Ward, MP for Bradford East, said the Lib Dems had a “good story to tell” having axed ID cards, raised the income tax threshold and agreed to restore the link between pensions and earnings.

But he added: “We’ve got to keep putting across the message of what we’ve managed to achieve – and what we’ve stopped the Tories doing.

“If we had not gone into a coalition with the Tories we’d already have had a General Election, probably last autumn. I think the Tories would have absolutely walked that election – they’ve got twenty odd million pounds in the bank and Labour and ourselves are practically skint.

“They would have fabricated some crisis between ourselves and the Tories, they would have said the country’s a financial mess, we can’t govern without a full majority, and we would have found ourselves with an outright Tory majority for the next five or ten years.

“If you look at what we’ve done to control the Tories. Would the Tories really have abandoned their inheritance tax plans, would they really have kept the 50p income tax rate, do you really think they would have increased the income tax threshold for people on lower incomes? It’s inconceivable some of the things we’ve managed to do the Tories would have done.”

Delegates arriving in Sheffield today are being handed pledge cards with five Lib Dem achievements as the party seeks to move on from the Barnsley defeat ahead of May’s local elections, where they face another tough battle in the wake of council spending cuts.

The leadership wants to strike an upbeat tone to reassure activists that tough decisions being taken now will be rewarded in the long term.

Defeated Barnsley Central candidate Dominic Carman said after the by-election that voters could not distinguish between the two coalition partners, and many Lib Dems are concerned that coalition successes are credited to the Conservatives while problems are disproportionately blamed on the minority partner.

Claire Kelley, who narrowly lost in the Harrogate and Knaresborough seat last May, said a line should be drawn between party policy and coalition policy: “All of this anger about sticking to pledges – clearly we are not sticking to all of them because we are not running things on our own.

“This is not a Lib Dem policy, or Tory policy, it is coalition policy but everyone is so used to single- party government, people find it very hard to understand that.

“To get that message across all we can do is keep banging on about it every time we meet the public, show them the positive impact we are having on Government. We have also seen a group of Lib Dem council leaders write to the Government complaining about coalition policies towards local government.

“We need more of that to make it clear what we would want to do should we be in control.”

Defeated Hull North candidate Denis Healy said: “I do see the Lib Dems as a restraining influence on the Conservatives.

“There are a number of key policies on income tax, voting reform, the pupil premium, that would not have happened under a Tory government.

“Clearly compromises have had to be made, but I believe we have got a very different looking country – a much fairer country – because of the influence we have had.”