Newspaper Articles
News article on the coalition government
It is now just a month since the new coalition government was formed and I was invited to be a minister. It has a bit of whirlwind and it has not quite sunk in. There are times still when I hear the words “The Government has announced..” and I wonder what Gordon Brown is up to this time!
What has struck me over the last few weeks has been how much we and our coalition partners have in common. This might surprise those of you who heard Mike Hancock and I getting stuck into each other on the radio during the General Election campaign. But as we went through the process of agreeing our plan for government, it became apparent there is more that unites as than divides us.
I know this from personal experience. I am writing this having just been in the chamber of the House of Commons listening to my Treasury colleague, Danny Alexander, making a statement on the post dated cheques written by the Labour Government in the days and weeks before the last election. Once Danny finished his statement, I made one on the reform of financial regulation based on a shared commitment to sort out the mess that we inherited from Labour.
In local government, both the Conservatives and the Liberals are keen to give back power to local councils: decisions which will be popular with both Sean Woodward, the Conservative Leader of Fareham Borough Council and Gerald Vernon-Jackson, the Liberal Democrat Leader of Portsmouth City Council. Local residents will be pleased that the coalition government will give councils greater say over planning including giving the powers to stop garden grabbing.
I am sure that, as in any new relationship, there will be teething troubles, but the last few weeks have been a baptism of fire as we make the difficult decisions to tackle the deficit and there will be more to come in tomorrow’s Budget. Adversity forges strong relationships. So whilst coalitions are a novelty in politics, I believe that this new relationship will endure and go the full term.