What's the one word that defines this government?

Let's try a little thought experiment, a kind of verbal Rorschach test.

What's the first word that comes to mind if you think about this government?

Chancellor George Osborne rather hopes it is: Integrity

Did you get it right?

No?

Perhaps that just shows how the New Politics has become rather polarising.

Even as Captain Ska's Liar, Liar is promoted as the protest song of choice for the Christmas pop charts, a tribute to the Coalition's broken promises, George Osborne makes the counter-argument for the defence in the new issue of Prospect (£), critiquing himself and the Tory party for opportunism and dishonesty in voting against tuition fees in the Commons in 2004, happily seeing in the sackcloth and ashes a timely opportunity to attack the Labour opposition now. (Though the argument for policy continuity is misleading, given the scale of the withdrawal of government funding).

Gideon turns what he calls this "particularly dismal moment" into a moving parable. For, Lo, from that moment on, the Tory modernisers realised that there would be no future in political opportunism, and so they pledged to always, in future, do what was right.

"A group of new Conservative MPs, including David Cameron and myself, came to learn an important lesson from this. We decided that the most precious political commodity is intellectual integrity", he writes.

To see "intellectual integrity" as the watchword of the Cameron-Osborne opposition years might be called an audacious revisionist take on our recent political history.

Was this the same Tory opposition which supported Labour's spending plans until 2008, and then lambasted the government for over-spending, before pledging (on the Sunday before the election) to cut the deficit without needing any cuts to frontline services?

Or which campaigned to "stop Brown's NHS cuts", even as it argued that the "big state" was the primary cause of inequality and poverty?

Or, to take one of dozens of trivial examples, which proposed both fixed terms Parliaments - and a fresh election if there was a change of Prime Minister?

Progressive Conservatism always faced the charge that it was an exercise in paradox and oxymoron, as Sedgefield MP Phil Wilson has pointed out.

I checked the Oxford English Dictionary to get a definition for both words. It defined progressive as "favouring change and innovation". For conservative, it said, "averse to change or innovation".

Presumably the point of the Cameron-Osborne project is meant to be to show that this is not the case, rather than to go to extravagant lengths to prove it, particularly since it turns out that intellectual integrity is the central motivation for the project.

***

The Osborne intellectual integrity test in power

But perhaps Cameron and Osborne can do better now that they have escaped the pressures of opposition.

The easiest point to make about the government's integrity is that it has been a serial breaker of election promises, something which is going to make it very difficult for all politicians on the campaign trail next time if the evidence of their behaviour in power is that clear pledges and firm commitments have little or no weight at all in office.

Ed Miliband was effective in Wednesday's PMQs - his best performance since his PMQs debut (according to The Spectator's Lloyd Evans - in a crucial political argument linking Cameron (and not just Clegg) to the broken promises of the Coalition.

Osborne's claim to "intellectual integrity" and coherence of the government's agenda is to set the bar higher still. And it is difficult to see that the government meets that test in the Chancellor's key areas of responsibility.

The selective attack on universalism

Take Osborne's argument for the means-testing of child benefit.

“It’s very difficult to justify taxing people on low income to pay for the child benefit of those earning so much more than them.

If that argument is valid, it would clearly apply equally to the state pension, and indeed to providing services to all from a taxpayer funded NHS.

Yet Osborne is cutting universal benefits for families with children - but keeping them for pensioners. Can anybody identify an intellectual rather than electoral rationale for that?

So Osborne's underlying argument has support from those who want to end universal benefits generally, and is opposed to those who do not want a residualised safety-net system, as Tim Horton has argued, drawing on the detailed evidence base set out in the Solidarity Society book published by the Fabian Society and Webb Memorial Trust. (The argument is actually a rather weak one: higher rate recipients of child benefit are net contributors to the tax system, though this distributes across the life cycle and to families with children. As Paul Goodman has pointed out on ConservativeHome, child benefit incorporated the earlier family tax allowances, intended to recognise the costs of children to all famiilies, so Osborne's argument is rather weaker in the area where he has applied).

But what is the intellectual case for keeping the free bus pass and the winter fuel allowance while cutting child benefit for top-rate taxpayers?

Aiming to reduce inequality by making the tax system less progressive

A second area of significant intellectual confusion for Osborne and the government is income inequality. This blog was cheered by Osborne's clear campaign statement that he thinks it is the responsibility of government to narrow the gap between rich and poor, but worried about whether he had the means to do so.

At the same time, Osborne now endorses Nick Clegg's view that income inequality measures are arbitrary, and not relevant to the ambition of equalising life chances and increasing social mobility.

As a result, this government has endorsed a target of reducing income inequality, in accepting the child poverty targets, but its discretionary policy choices are increasing child poverty, as the Institute of Fiscal Studies reported yesterday.

This was predictable. Indeed it was very accurately predicted by Richard Reeves, now Nick Clegg's chief political adviser, when he was director of Demos, writing [of David Cameron making a similar argument] that:

[Cameron] is signing himself up to Labour-style poverty and inequality measures, even as he rejects Labour-style redistribution. In other words, he is setting his own big trap, and trotting gamely towards it ... it makes literally no sense to argue that inequality needs to be reduced and then to call for a reduction in state benefits. The issue is not ideology; its not politics; its just arithmetic ...

One can have intellectual integrity in rejecting this IFS finding as irrelevant, because one does not believe in a relative measure of poverty, as Policy Exchange and The Spectator are arguing, or once can argue for different policies, because relative poverty does matter, which is the argument made by the Child Poverty Action Group, the Fabians and other civic anti-poverty groups.

The government is somewhere in between, managing to argue that it does believe in reducing relative poverty, while criticising measures of it as arbitrary and irrelevant, and having policies which increase it.

That Osborne is a long-standing advocate of flatter taxes captures the intellectual incoherence which underpins his conflicting positions. He told the Spectator this week that the 50p rate is temporary, but the VAT rise is permanent, continuing a long-standing Tory strategy to remove progressiveness from the tax system. David Cameron has said he is "a Lawsonian basically" on flatter taxes.

So intellectual integrity means that advocates of flatter taxes should endorse the greater income inequality which results as fair in increasing the rewards to effort and dynamism. ('Let our children grow tall' as Margaret Thatcher argued, in rejecting equality as a 'mirage').

Or one can favour reducing income inequality, such as reducing child poverty, and so rejects flattening the progressive elements out of the tax system.

Whatever the positioning benefits in appealing to different audiences in being in favour of flatter taxes and reducing inequality, there isn't much intellectual integrity in that, George.

***

The defence from the right of George Osborne would be that his thinking has more intellectual coherence than he can admit, because it is driven primarily by an ideological smaller state argument which dare not speak its name.

If any minister articulated Michael Gove's underlying beliefs in a privatised higher education system they would harm the prospects of a policy which delivers precisely that, as long as a different and more pragmatic case is made for it.

The government can win the argument on spending cuts if people believe that they are an unavoidable necessity; they are losing the argument when the speed and scale of cuts is seen as a matter of discretionary choice. The principled case for less government spending is very unpopular - but those who believe in it might get a long way towards their goal under the banner of unavoidable necessity.

How can we resolve the issue of whether the government's measures are pragmatic (as they say in public) or more ideological (as their friends hope)?

A key test is which measures are temporary or permanent. Where the government has had to break a pre-election pledge, alleging regrettable necessity, will it time limit the changes - and make restoring these pledges its highest priority as resources allow?

Refusing to do that would prove the election promises were not made honestly or sincerely - but they may also reveal that the contradictions in George Osborne's public politics are only skin deep.

If this government will now struggle to stake a claim for political integrity, Next Left may have to concede that the Osborne agenda has a fair amount of intellectual coherence after all.

Nick Clegg wants government to u-turn on Sheffield Forgemasters loan

There's lots of top-notch politics in the new Prospect, about to hit the newstand. Next Left hopes to return to James Purnell's case for re-examining Marxism, and an unintentionally amusing political parable from George Osborne, because top billing goes to some little local difficulties for deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

With Bronwen Maddox now the new editor of the cerebral monthly, her predecessor David Goodhart takes advantage of his new roaming editor-at-large brief by taking the temperature of Nick Clegg's Sheffield. [The full piece should appear on the Prospect website Wed lunchtime: we'll also add a link here].

It is not difficult to see why these are tough times for the LibDem leader on the home front, even in leafy Hallam. Clegg has become perhaps the most prominent advocate for a government promoting deep cuts which are bound to affect "a city where the state counts for well over half of GDP", as Goodhart reports. Throw in 60,000 students at the two universities - ("I haven't been in hiding. I've been in contact with student leaders, who have of course taken it pretty badly. I want to address a group of students, but at present the police are not keen", says Clegg) - and another 7,000 16-18 year olds who are losing their educational maintenance allowances, along with a host of other spending impacts feared, it isn't surprising that Unison's Cleggzilla posters of the deputy PM wreaking havoc on Sheffield have proved a local hit.

In a Prospect interview, Clegg does not think it is tuition fees that have gone down worst in his adopted city, instead citing the cancellation of the loan to Sheffield Forgemasters.

[Clegg]: "For many people in Sheffield there is a suspicion of the Tories that runs deep. They believe the Tories destroyed the city in the 1980s. So it was the coalition agreement itself that was my original sin. I got a lot of emails and letters from people asking 'How could you do this to us?' The other unpopular things - tuition fees and so on - are a kind of add-on to that.
...

How about the cancellation of the £80 million loan to Sheffield Forgemasters which would have let it expand in the nuclear industry?

[Clegg]: "That decision has played worse in Sheffield than the tuition fees decision partly because it links into that anti-Tory feeling, the belief that northern industry was abandoned".

But wasn't it an odd decision, given that Britain needs to rebalance its economy from financial services towards manufacturing?

[Clegg}: "I agree. The trouble is the money that Labour had provided came from a budget in the business department that was running on empty. The treasury and Vince Cable felt it was wrong to take the money from somewhere else. But the whole issue could be revisited".

This is not a promise to reverse the decision, or even a firm commitment to reopen it. Yet what could reasonably be concluded from Clegg endorsing the idea that the decision was "odd" is that he thinks not just that the decision could be reopened, but that it should be reversed too.

In a separate development, the Business Select Committee yesterday called for a government rethink specifically rejecting several of Nick Clegg's claims about why the loan had been cancelled. In this context, Clegg would be risking further - and unforced - errors were he to be publicly floating hopes of a change of approach if he does not know yet if he can follow through on it.

The LibDems will surely lose control of Sheffield Council in May, despite local LibDem council leader Paul Scriven doing his best to empathise with the discontented, telling Goodhart

"Of course, the national mood music is not very good for us, some people do feel do let down, but it is my job to say where I think the government has got things right and where it has got things wrong - over tuition fees and council tenancies for example - and to focus on what we have achieved locally.

Political Blogging After Dale

I was sorry to see Iain Dale quit regular blogging today.

Iain did more than anyone to popularise political blogging, particularly offering a navigational role for both new readers and the mainstream media. His high profile reflected not just an effective personal conversational blogging voice, but also a savvy use of that 'first mover advantage' to champion the medium, and act as a media ambassador for it. His playing that role of First Lord of the Blogosphere, while it did not go unchallenged, will have encouraged people to engage with blogs and try it out for themselves.

Iain reports that he is also leaving behind active political engagement more broadly. Personally, I thought it was a shame he didn't succeed in his ambition to secure a Tory candidacy - demonstrating the limits to blogosphere fame in the political world even for one of his party's best connected networkers. Iain is highly amiable, and is probably correctly seen as a voice broadly on the socially liberal and somewhat sensiblist wing of the Tory party. That he holds pretty solidly Thatcherite, anti-spending, low tax and Eurosceptic principles probably therefore demonstrates how that ideological position remains dominant even among Tory mods. (Though I was surprised that he was part of the Tory climate-sceptic consensus, rather than developing a more Cameronite view of climate change).

But politics' loss will be a boon for the media and publishing world. And now that he is broadcasting for three hours a night on LBC, it isn't surprising that Dale hasn't really been able to give blogging the attention that he feels it needs. It has been good to see Biteback publishing succeed - having been prepared to make niche political books still possible, it is publishing major titles, such as David Laws on the Coalition and Anthony Seldon on Gordon Brown.

Dale's profile means that this has become an occasion for not just for post-blog tributes-cum-obits but also a fair amount of musing about the state of the blogosphere .

This mostly develops the theme of the last year of the growing confidence of the online left with a fair amount of anxiety, on the other side, about the weakening and fragmenting of the political right online.

Iain Dale pointed out in the Autumn that the right's blogosphere decline could be seen in how one of the few new stars on the right has been the young Norman Tebbit, who demonstrates considerable talent for reader engagement. The right is fortunate in having two very professional spaces - in ConservativeHome, and The Spectator's CoffeeHouse - but it increasingly looks a little thin, beyond the professional hacks and politicos. There has been more new energy on the broad political left.

Dale also suggested today that blogging has become too personalised and nasty. That isn't my experience, or not the dominant part of it anyway. While Guido Fawkes has most traffic - and somewhat defines the public image of the political blogosphere - the site's approach seems to me distinctive and atypical. On the whole, I detect a shift in the centre-of-gravity has moved away from the once dominant angry and sweary libertarian blogs, or hyper-partisan mudslinging towards sites on both left and right characterised by the editorial quality and engagement of sites like LeftFootForward, ConservativeHome and Labour Uncut and others. Tim Montgomerie makes some similar points at ConservativeHome.

Don’t vote for the AV turkey

In a recent blogpost covering the launch of Labour Yes, the Next Left blog invited Fabians from any side of the electoral reform argument to continue the debate about next year's referendum on the Alternative Vote. In this guest post, Fabian Executive member Austin Mitchell, MP for Great Grimsby, sets out why he disagrees with those supporters of proportional representation who think AV would be an advance on the status quo.

***

Ever since I’ve been an MP I’ve supported Proportional Representation. It’s the only fair system, relating seats to votes. It weakens the elective dictatorship and stops parties winning disproportionate majorities by effectively disenfranchising everyone who votes for minor political parties or for the opposition in seats the majority wins. It forces the parties to run national campaigns and mobilise support in safe seats rather than concentrating everything on a few score marginals. It allows us to cope with the emerging multi-party system in which ever smaller proportions vote for the two major parties.

For all these reasons I’ll be opposing the Alternative Vote (AV) and campaigning against my PR supporting friends who’re feeble mindedly supporting AV as a step along the road to reform, which it isn’t, or just for a change. When it’s a change for the worse.

We’re having a referendum on AV because the LibDems didn’t have the guts to demand a referendum on PR which they’ve always wanted. They weakly opted for AV instead because it’s the one system which benefits the LibDems as everyone’s soft second preference. That can give them up to 20 seats. It’s also a means of cementing the coalition with their new friends by winning Tory second preferences.

Some in the Labour Party have supported AV in the past because they want to show themselves as reformers, but didn’t have the guts or the brains to go for PR. This makes no sense, AV will be damaging to Labour. We’ll be no one’s second preference, not even that of the Scottish Nationalists, having been in bitter conflict for years. It constitutes a block on any party which can be projected as dangerously radical (as the Tory Press will portray us). In Australia, the Catholic Democratic Labour Party kept the Australian Labour Party out of power for nearly two decades after 1955 by giving their second preference to the Liberal Coalition.

I’m hoping that in the referendum we defeat AV. Referenda are conservative devices which tend to favour the status quo, particularly when the proposers are as unpopular as the coalition will be next May. In that case what’s the use of Labour associating itself with failure? Even if it wins, we lose through AV, and what’s also clear is that this is a massive dirty deal.

The redistribution required by a reduction in the number of MPs to 600 will benefit the Tories by up to twenty seats. Do we seriously want to double that by adding AV's benefit of twenty seats to the LibDems?

We’d be as soft in the head as we have always been in the heart to vote for such a double gerrymander. So I say to Ed Miliband and my PR supporting friends “think before you vote and even more before you campaign for this squalid system.”

Austin Mitchell is MP for Great Grimsby and a member of the Fabian Executive. All Fabian outputs represent the view of their authors, not the collective view of the Society. The Fabian Society will not take a collective view on the referendum, but we do want to encourage members to engage with the issues and campaigns engaged in this first national referendum for 35 years. The Next Left blog would welcome offers of further contributions from members on this topic.

For now, the pupil premium is another broken Coalition promise

The pupil premium is a good idea, which has been sacrificed on the altar of austerity.

The Coalition Agreement makes a very clear commitment about how the pupil premium will be funded.

"we will fund a significant premium for disadvantaged pupils from outside the schools budget by reductions in spending elsewhere".

So has this promise been kept?

No. Instead, the 'premium' will be funded by redistributing money within a shrinking schools budget, so that most schools will see their funding cut.

A shared challenge for Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative supporters who believe the pupil premium principle is a good one should now be to identify how to fund it, as the Coalition promised, an issue we will develop in the next issue of the Fabian Review.

The deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg did fight hard inside government for genuinely new money for the pupil premium. He even tried to settle the Whitehall battle by publicly declaring victory, stressing he had secured "additional" money when announcing the policy on the Friday before the spending review. 

"This is real new money from elsewhere in Whitehall, from outside the education budget. We are not just rearranging the furniture", a Downing Street spokesman told the Guardian.

But it wasn't, as Michael Gove acknowledged immediately after the spending review, in admitting the money would come from cutting some schools' budgets.

If you exclude the deep cuts of around 60 per cent in capital spending on schools, along with cuts to ’non-essential‘ activities such as sport and music, there is an increase in real terms of ’current‘ schools spending of 0.1 per cent a year - but only once the pupil 'premium' money is counted.

Rising pupil numbers easily outstrip this: when this is factored in, Luke Sibieta of the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) calculates that the spending settlement means that average spending per pupil will in fact fall by 0.6 per cent a year, or 2.25 per cent in real terms over four years, even once the "premium" is counted in. (The premium cash softens this blow: spending per pupil would fall 10 per cent in real terms without it).

There are both policy and political problems in failing to resource the pupil premium as planned.

The question now becomes: which schools will have their funding cut?

As Michael Gove has said, we have to wait for the government to announce the detail of the policy to find out where the school cuts will now fall.

"whether or not we allow the pupil premium to go to slightly more children or we target it very narrowly on the very poorest... you can then make a calculation about which schools will find that they're actually losing funding, and which schools will find that they're gaining funding."

This risks turning a popular policy into a source of resentment, and there will be strong political cross-pressures which could undermine the whole principle of the premium further.

The worse outcome will be if the policy design were to lead to the perverse outcome that means the premium formula takes money away from the schools with most poor pupils and towards more affluent areas, as the government's preferred policy design would have done.

Fortunately, warnings about this from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, from London Councils and others seem to have had some effect. The government has at least delayed its plans to have a higher pupil premium for eligible pupils in more affluent areas (a suggestion made on the grounds that less well off pupils in these more affluent areas have been traditionally underfunded). Analysis suggests the government risked over-gearing its response. The IFS concluded that a flat rate premium - not worth more in affluent Wokingham than disadvantaged Tower Hamlets - would be "simpler and more consistent with the Government’s stated objectives" for the premium.

The point has apparently been conceded, for now. But the government may change its mind next year, reports The Guardian today.

The Clegg letter, received last week, says there is a case for giving higher levels of additional funding for deprived pupils in areas where the overall funding for schools is lower. A spokesman confirmed that this year the pupil premium would be a flat rate but in subsequent years it could be bigger for areas that have been traditionally underfunded.

Those "traditionally underfunded" areas are the more affluent areas, showing how the government's policy thinking risks pulling in opposite directions.

It wants to do more for poor pupils (because they need greater financial support to have equal chances with their peers) yet at the same time argues that the poorest areas and schools have got too great a share of resources under the current spending formulas.

Holding both thoughts in mind while redistributing within a shrinking budget will lead to unintended consequences.

This will also be reinforced by countervailing political pressure, as shown in The Telegraph's fear of funding being cut in better-off areas, were the premium principle to be used for a strong funding pitch to disadvantage (as indeed it should be). The Telegraph could be reassured somewhat if the government does indeed move away from a flat rate premium -
to address what government perceives as the overfunding of disadvantaged areas - but quite probably at a cost to the central purpose of the pupil premium policy.

That pressure will prove much harder to handle, politically, because the premium is no longer about choosing a progressive distribution of "additional" resources. Instead, a strong pupil premium agenda would now require most Conservative MPs to support real cuts in funding for schools in their constituencies. This probably isn't going to happen. And so, while the introduction of the premium is hailed, it won't be surprising if this has an impact on the policy choices made about the premium over time - as with the initial year one 'premium' being smaller than anticipated, at £625 million or £430 per pupil, or the idea of a higher premium for affluent areas being kept in play for future years.

So the pupil premium is a good idea which needs rescuing.

That depends on thinking more imaginatively about how to fund it, so as to avoid cutting most schools' budgets. I hope that is a debate we can open up, involving Labour voices, social liberals and indeed with progressive Conservatives too and others interested in educational inequality, wherever people are convinced by the government's idea that the premium could be an important way to close gaps in educational opportunity and attainment.

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How not to restore trust


Danny Alexander, this weekend, found a misleading formula to tacitly acknowledge that spending per pupil will fall in real terms, while appearing to claim the opposite.

Pressed on whether the pupil premium means some schools would receive extra funding at the expense of others, Mr Alexander added: "It is included within the overall settlement, but the schools budget, the cash amount per pupil is going to stay the same going forward."

This 'protected in cash terms' formula to refer to cuts in real terms is designed to mislead the casual viewer or listener.

Using it does absolutely nothing for a government which has issues of public trust. Interviewers and reporters should consistently challenge it ("so that means a cut, after inflation, in real terms"), until using this formula becomes more trouble than it is worth.

Have the LibDems made a difference? Their own voters think not

Liberal Democrat ministers will seek to respond to the party's difficulties after the tuition fees vote by stressing the difference the party is making in government.

But Liberal Democrat voters do not agree with them about that.

On most issues, the majority of those who voted LibDem think that party has made no significant impact, for better or for worse.

The main exception is university fees - but that isn't good news either. Fully 49% of those who voted LibDem think the party's presence in government made the policy worse than it would have been, while only 11% think they improved it. That will strike LibDems as harsh - they will point to the policy concessions they tried to get in the detail of the scheme, but the brute political fact is that the Conservative minority couldn't have done any of it without them. In any event, when it is their own voters who are four times more likely to say that the policy was made worse by LibDem output, it shows how much their change of position rankles with their supporters.

These are perhaps the most striking findings of Michael Ashcroft's extensive LibDem specific polling, reported on ConservativeHome, where you can read the full PDF.

The perceptions held by LibDem voters do not strike me as entirely fair. They are surely right that the party has made no difference on spending cuts - we know from both Nick Clegg and David Laws' account that the LibDems did not seek to negotiate or substantively shift the Conservative policy - and it is plausible to say the same about defence and housing benefit among other areas.

Strangely, the areas where their own voters are most likely to say they have made no difference - Europe and Crime/Sentencing [and possibly environment (*), though the correct data there is unclear] - are those where LibDem ministers probably have the strongest policy evidence for having shifted the government's approach in a way that most LibDems, and broader centre-left opinion, would welcome. (And they get most credit for having an influence on welfare reform, where it is rather harder to see a distinctive LibDem contribution to the government's agenda, which has been driven by Iain Duncan Smith).

***

Here are the findings as to where those who voted for LibDem MPs in May feel the party is or isn't making a difference in power:

Spending cuts

Better: 28%
No difference: 46%
Worse: 26%

Changes to housing benefit

Better: 26%
No difference: 50%
Worse: 24%

University tuition fees

Better: 11%
No difference: 41%
Worse: 49%

Defence

Better: 17%
No difference: 57%
Worse: 26%

Trident

Better: 18%
No difference: 65%
Worse: 17%

Tax levels

Better: 25%
No difference: 53%
Worse: 21%

Crime and sentencing

Better: 17%
No difference: 67%
Worse: 16%

Europe

Better: 22%
No difference: 65%
Worse: 16%

Welfare reform

Better: 37%
No difference: 45%
Worse: 19%

Environment*

Better: 32%
No difference: 62% [?*]
Worse: 21%

* There must be a typo in the Ashcroft publication on environment numbers, which add up to 115%. (It may well be that 'no difference' should read 47% rather than 62% though that is a guess. At least one of the three figures must be misreported).

The poll is of 2000 people who voted Liberal Democrat in May 2010 in seats which the party won, conducted between 18th and 29th November 2010.

***

There may be two lessons for the LibDem Parliamentary party.

One may be that overclaiming doesn't work if the details don't stack up.

For example, the government plans to get on the front foot by heradling the "pupil premium" tomorrow. It is a good idea, but they have failed to deliver it, which means that boasting too much about it may backfire.

The policy announced will, in fact, break the promise in the Coalition Agreement that ""we will fund a significant premium for disadvantaged pupils from outside the schools budget", so the 'premium' is now being funded by cutting spending for most schools instead. So it will be necessary to watch the detail carefully to see if the perverse consequence is to take money away from schools with the most disadvantaged pupils.

Secondly, the polling results will play into the central strategic debate among LibDems who continue to believe they can make the Coalition work.

While half of these LibDem voters do not currently support the party, the proportion believing the party has made a positive difference is between a fifth and a quarter on most issues, and presumably the party does want to try to get some of its lost voters back too.

So these findings seem certain to harden party opinion against Nick Clegg's opposition to projecting a distinctive LibDem contribution - speaking openly about the yellow and blue influences within the Coalition - rather than seeking joint ownership of everything the Coalition does.

The leader does not have the support in his Parliamentary Party to continue that argument, and we can expect to see a continued shift in how LibDems seek to argue that their presence in the Coalition is making a difference.

Is David Cameron more trustworthy than Nick Clegg?

The British people seem to think so. Poor Nick Clegg was a high trust politician in April, with two-thirds of voters ready to trust him.

Now 61% of the electorate say they don't trust the deputy PM.

Only 25% trust Nick Clegg.

The British public began rather more sceptical about David Cameron, which is why he knew in advance that he had failed to win the election.

But 43% said they felt Cameron could be trusted before the election.

41% still think Cameron can be trusted now.

It has become time for Next Left to mount a "Be Fair to Nick Clegg" campaign.

Granted, we can not mount a completely convincing case against Clegg's own falling trust ratings: our client did not assist the brief by seeking those initial highs by posing as an "its time for promises to be kept" kind of guy. Nick Clegg changing his story over when he changed his mind over public spending, after his key witness refused to confirm his alibi, hasn't helped either.

But we do think, ahead of electoral sentencing, that Nick Clegg could plead in mitigation that David Cameron, his partner in the 'New Politics', has made a pretty good bid to do just as much to bust political trust.

"We both want a Britain where our political system is looked at with admiration not anger", as Cameron and Clegg wrote together in their foreword to the Coalition Agreement.

Let's take a look at just some of the evidence of Dave's contribution to trying to achieve that.

Five top David Cameron trust-busting moments

1. Cameron's promise to reduce the deficit without cutting any services

On the final weekend before the General Election, David Cameron went onto the flagship BBC1 Sunday morning programme with Andrew Marr to tell voters that he could reduce the deficit without any cuts to frontline services at all.

"What I can tell you is any cabinet minister, if I win the election, who comes to me and says: 'Here are my plans' and they involve frontline reductions, they'll be sent straight back to their department to go away and think again. After 13 years of Labour, there is a lot of wasteful spending, a lot of money that doesn't reach the frontline."

This one ought to be right up there with the LibDem university fees u-turn. No party was open and honest about the spending choices ahead. But on the very biggest issue in British politics. It was our current Prime Minister who told the biggest porkie in the final days of the campaign.

Could David Cameron have believed this when he said it on May 2nd 2010? We can not make windows into men's souls but we do know that it was not the Tory position by the time substantive Coalition talks on were well underway the following weekend.

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2. Misinforming his backbenchers during the Coalition talks

But what has lost David Cameron most trust among his own Conservative MPs at Westminster is less his public pledge over spending and cuts but, whether by accident or design, telling his own MPs things that turned out not to be true during the Coalition talks, including that the Tories had to offer the LibDems an AV referendum because Labour had offered to introduce AV without a referendum (which they hadn't).

Newsnight political editor Michael Crick put it starkly.

One Conservative MP - far from a right-winger - reckons David Cameron lied to the shadow Cabinet and his backbench MPs at least four times in the hours leading up to the coalition agreement with the Lib Dems on 11 May.

So was the Coalition built on a lie?, as Crick asked. In England, many may prefer to call this a "misunderstanding", though what neither Cameron nor Clegg have ever been able to illuminate in their evasive interviews is quite how the misunderstanding arose.

As Philip Cowley and Denis Kavanagh report:

Cameron’s defence is that he did not deceive his backbenchers, because he believed it at the time.

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3. Not needing to raise VAT in the first budget

"We have absolutely no plans to raise VAT. Our first budget is all about recognising we need to get spending under control rather than putting up tax."

David Cameron, April 23rd 2010, in an interview with Jeremy Paxman, broadcast eight weeks before the government's first budget did put up VAT after all.

David Cameron had long been clear that a VAT hike this would go against his commitment to "progressive" changes in tax and spending, saying this in April 2009:

“You could try as you say put it on VAT, sales tax, but again if you look at the effect of sales tax, it’s very regressive, it hits the poorest the hardest. It does, I absolutely promise you. Any sales tax, anything that goes on purchases that you make in shops tends to… if you look at it, where VAT goes now it doesn’t go on food obviously but it goes very very widely and VAT is a more regressive tax than income tax or council tax.”

Cameron and George Osborne worked hard to dismiss Labour claims a VAT hike was always the Tory tax rise of choice, so that friendly media outlets prominently reported this. This led Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome to argue that "the trust issue may hurt on VAT", once the decision to include the VAT hike in the budget was announced.

However, in fairness, Next Left had noted that the Conservatives took care to keep open the chance to emulate Geoffrey Howe's VAT dodge, by claiming they had never actually made a firm commitment to rule out a VAT hike. And the LibDems warned about this too, with Nick Clegg saying: "We will not have to raise VAT to deliver our promises. The Conservatives will. Let me repeat that: Our plans do not require a rise in VAT. The Tory plans do”.

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4. Cutting child benefit

‘I’m not going to flannel you, I’m going to give it to you straight. I like the child benefit, I wouldn’t change child benefit, I wouldn’t means test it, I don’t think that is a good idea’, a David Cameron pre-election pledge at a Cameron Direct event in Bolton

David Cameron has apologised for this one.

"We did not outline all those cuts, we did not know exactly the situation we were going to inherit. But I acknowledge this was not in our manifesto. Of course I am sorry about that".

The usual excuse for having to drop a cherished policy is that Coalition partners have to compromise with each other. It doesn't work here, because keeping child benefit universal was a promise which both Coalition parties made during the election campaign.

But the furore about this broken promise did lead to David Cameron dropping his plan to ditch more of his own most prominent election pledges.

It is by changing his mind about whether he could ditch those "read my lips" promises that David Cameron has avoided the ignominy being heaped on the LibDems. He may be a serial offender, but no single one of his own broken pledges having yet gained such totemic status.

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5. The cast iron guarantee over Lisbon

But a vocal group on his own side have had major trust issues with David Cameron long before the Coalition government.

The most important moment was his u-turn over a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, having offered a "cast iron guarantee" of a referendum.

While this enraged Eurosceptics, this u-turn was sensible. Cameron explained that it was because the Treaty had been ratified. However, the need for Treaty revisions meant that the opportunity opened up again.

As Daniel Hannan pointed out, however small, these "would allow David Cameron to hold the referendum which the late dissolution denied him". Except, of course, that Cameron didn't want to keep the pledge by then. And Cameron has promised Angela Merkel he can support some Treaty revisions without a British referendum.

Fortunately for the Eurosceptic right, David Cameron wants them to know that he has not given up on them, with a new referendum lock bill presented as guaranteeing a referendum on any transfer of powers, though Eurosceptics consider it worthless.

The Prime Minister disagrees.

Surely they should realise that, on this one, they can trust Dave.

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Yet not just a large minority of the public, but even some of our most serious political commentators buy into the idea - mainly thanks to the 360 degree turn on pensioner benefits, reversing the u-turn before it had been announced - that David Cameron has not been as cavalier as Nick Clegg in breaking his word.

Here is the usually incisive James Forsyth, writing in today's Mail On Sunday, on the premise that Ken Clarke ditching the Tory election pledge on jail sentences for knife crime somehow crosses the rubicon:

Breaking one of Cameron’s personal promises is one of the great no-nos of this Government. All the way through the spending review, great care – and cost – was taken to protect any commitment that Cameron himself had made.

Downing Street is desperate to protect the Cameron brand. They know that a leader’s word has to mean something; the problems that the Lib Dems are having right now stem from the fact that Nick Clegg has had to break one of his own personal pledges.

David Cameron has certainly been a serial breaker of his own promises, despite Downing Street's attempts to propagate a myth to the contrary. If he is more trusted than Nick Clegg it may be largely because he has been rather better at hiding it.