Kennedy upbeat on election prospects
The leader of the Liberal Democrats yesterday said his party would not “bail out” the Government if there were a hung parliament at the next general election.
Effectively launching his party’s election campaign, Charles Kennedy said the Lib Dems had the best chance in twenty years to reap the benefits from a “mixed pattern of voting” across the UK.
Mr Kennedy said his party was a “significant” challenger to Labour in northern England and Conservative heartland in southern England.
“We are the common factor in this general election,” he said, adding the election would be fought among the three main parties.
In the advent of a hung parliament with Labour as the largest party, Mr Kennedy said the Government could not look to the Lib Dems for instant, unqualified support, as differences on Iraq, top-up fees, Foundation Hospitals, or identity cards, would prove insurmountable.
Mr Kennedy pledged to match Labour on savings in the public sector and slammed the Tories for fantastical spending policies.
He described Tory plans to save £35 billion by ‘cutting waste’ in the public sector as “fantasy economics”.
Charting his own party’s plans to cut waste, he said: “We can identify £5 billion worth of annual cuts in terms of the administration, the operation of central government. Twenty billion pounds over the course of a four-year parliament.”
He said the plan was realistic, justifiable and could be spelt out in concrete detail.
But the shimmer of Mr Kennedy’s optimism was dulled slightly with a Sunday poll that predicted Labour was set for another landslide victory.
