UK: Clegg warns of 'difficult' year ahead

Source: Press TV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/159492.html


British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg says 2011 will be a “difficult” year for the country as government spending cuts start to take their toll.

Clegg told the BBC Radio 4 Today program that millions of Britons face “challenging circumstances” amid severe austerity measures which he insisted are necessary as an economic “repair job.”

"For the country as a whole, clearly this is the year when the savings that we have announced are going to start having an impact. That clearly will be difficult,” Clegg said.

"I think it will be a crucial year… of some very challenging circumstances for millions of people in this country, but I hope the beginning of a real turnaround as we move forward and as we successfully implement the repair job on the economy," he added.

He also touched on an increasingly dominant mood that Lib Dems betrayed their voters by going back on the key elements of their election pledges claiming his party is not fully accountable for going back on its commitments as they failed to secure enough votes in the election.

"I want to challenge this idea that we are not delivering on those ideas we put front and centre in our manifesto,” he said. “The fact is, we didn't win the election, we came third.”

Lib Dems' reversal on their election pledge to prevent any rise in university tuition fees sparked protests by tens of thousands of angry demonstrators, which analysts said, were the most serious challenge to the British establishment in decades.

Yet Clegg insisted that a Lib Dem coalition with Labour would have shot up tuition fees even higher than the current arrangements trying to justify the coalition government's decisions in the context of the economic woes.

"Whoever was in government would have to take very difficult decisions because Britain was genuinely standing, I think teetering, on the edge of a sovereign debt crisis," he said.