The new Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg set out his stall on education, health - and whether he'd work with the Tories.

Nick Clegg MP, Lib Dem leader

ANDREW MARR: Welcome. Thank you very much for coming in.

NICK CLEGG: Morning.

ANDREW MARR: Those who say that you're quite like Cameron have a point.

A lot of the things you say, the phrases you use sound quite similar.

You know, you're both young, you're both pro market on that side of the market.

They've got a point haven't they?

NICK CLEGG: I think if you look at, if you look at our respective political histories we're roughly the same age. I can't do anything about, about that.

That's an accident of birth. I was actually propelled if you like by what I saw in the nineteen eighties, the middle of the nineteen eighties when, when I was at university and started really forming my political ideas in a more sort of firmer way. I was very much propelled towards the Liberal Democrats precisely because I was so appalled by this very soulless, bleak vision from Margaret Thatcher that there was no such thing as society. It was all dog eat dog.

And I represent a constituency in a city which was pretty well ravaged by the Conservative government of the nineteen eighties. David Cameron became a sort of foot solider of Thatcherism.

If you look at the, if you look at some of the big issues now, on Iraq, on the environment, on Europe, on immigration, on devolving power, on how we organise our public services, how we put people in charge of their lives, I think on all of those things there are major, major differences between my party and his.

ANDREW MARR: Let's get on to that because ..

NICK CLEGG: Sure.

ANDREW MARR: .. I suppose the story is maybe you may have started in different places but you may be coming to a similar sort of place at the moment. Now let me look at for instance the way that politics and power is structured in this society.

Because you both say, in strikingly similar terms, that Gordon Brown has centralised too much, that this is power for the, from the centre, and you need to push power down. You need to devolve.

When I look at your policies on for instance schools and to a certain extent hospitals, they seem quite close to some of the things that the Conservatives are saying. Not opposite but quite close.

NICK CLEGG: I think they are very significantly different. Look all politicians say that they believe that we should devolve power more. That's not something that just David Cameron or Nick Clegg says. Gordon Brown says it. Everybody says it.

There is now a cross party, rhetorical consensus that we need to devolve power. So the question is not who says it most, who has got the ideas to deliver it. We are the only party in British politics now prepared to put our money where our mouth is and says if you want to devolve real power you've got to give communities also the say about how some money is raised and spent.

Neither of the other two parties will do that. Look at the school system. We are speaking, my party, about a pupil premium. Allocating money like they do in the Netherlands directly to children who need it most, particularly in the early years, so that we have significantly more money going - the Conservatives talk about greater fairness and giving more money.

They haven't allocated a single penny to it. And just on the, on the health service, again on the health service, the Conservatives want to create a great national quango that will run the health service that will close your local hospital.

So much for local devolution. We are talking about giving people real say through the ballot box, electing health boards, or using the local authorities to run their health service in a much more democratically accountable fashion.

Giving people real entitlements which if not met, as they do in Denmark, will mean that they can be treated in the private sector, if that entitlement is not met. So there's an incentive for the NHS to deliver the services they want. And finally, finally ..

ANDREW MARR: Sorry just on that particular - what is the real difference between saying "We will give people entitlements which the NHS have to, have to come up with, have to match" and the government system saying "We have targets"? I mean entitlements and targets will operate in a similar sort of way it seems to me.

NICK CLEGG: Oh no I think, I think it's a complete reversal of the system. The present, the system you have at the moment is you've got a number of centralised targets imposed from the, from Whitehall which the system then struggles to meet.

And it's a sort of, it's an entanglement between two bureaucracies, a central bureaucracy and the NHS bureaucracy. The way that the best health systems in the world in my view run is completely the reverse. It's bottom up. It's the system, the NHS meeting those guarantees if you like which each patient has in the system. It's the way they do it in, in the most advanced and most progressive health systems in for instance Scandinavia ..

ANDREW MARR: Does this ..

NICK CLEGG: And it has, as I say, a guarantee at the end that if the, if the public health system doesn't meet those guarantees then it'll be picked up at the cost of the NHS by the private sector. And that, that provides everybody with an absolute minimum guarantee that they get what they're entitled to.

ANDREW MARR: And are you moving towards a system where there could be some local taxation for local hospitals and local health provision?

NICK CLEGG: Look we advocate a local income tax to replace, to scrap Council Tax and have a local income tax.

We think it is right - and again this is the way they do it in North America, in large parts of Europe, that if you're going to give local communities more say over their health service they should, should also be able to vary, maybe raise extra money or maybe even if they think they don't need all that money, cut the local income tax to reflect their health priorities in their area.

ANDREW MARR: So the inevitable consequence of localism is that what you call the people's health service will be less fairly distributed across the country than the National Health Service. The national guarantees are bound to be eroded the more you give people local power.

NICK CLEGG: Well this ..

ANDREW MARR: Has to be.

NICK CLEGG: This I think gets right to the crux of it. If only the National Health Service was a national health service. In the city ..

ANDREW MARR: So it's gone already you're saying?

NICK CLEGG: It is one of the most unequal health services in the modern world. In Sheffield, the city where I'm an MP if you're a child born in the poorest ward in Sheffield you will die, today, in two thousand and eight, fourteen years before a child born five miles down the road in the wealthiest ward. And the health service, the National Health Service isn't providing equitable outcome. It is failing those people who need it most. And this is the great irony. It's difficult to explain.

I accept that. But if you actually look at some of the best health services that produce the most equal outcomes - Sweden, Finland, Denmark and so on - they actually have let go, have let go control from the centre and that has released if you like the genius of local accountability and the genius of sort of grass roots demand and entitlements which lifts standards across the board.

ANDREW MARR: Having said that we have an unequal health service you do accept that it, the more local you go, that inequality is bound, in some respects, to increase.

NICK CLEGG: No. No.

ANDREW MARR: Because you can't, you can't ..

NICK CLEGG: No Andrew.

ANDREW MARR: .. you can't have both. You can't say at the same time I'm giving power to local people and we're going to control things nationally.

NICK CLEGG: No. You are making, you're making I think, but dare I say it, a completely false link between devolution, giving people more control and inequality. Giving people more control over their lives. That's what I'm about. That's what liberalism is about, always has been in British politics.

ANDREW MARR: So some will do some things and some will do others.

NICK CLEGG: And the great, and the great crisis in the National Health Service - and this is what we have to face as a nation - is that we've had ten years of unprecedented spending, I think was justified decision for the government to spend so much money on the NHS. An unprecedented experiment ..

ANDREW MARR: Okay.

NICK CLEGG: .. in top down governance of the health system. And it's produced, still produced one of the most unequal health systems in the world. That seems to me to beg big questions, whether we've got the design right. I think we need to reverse the burden of the whole, the way the thing operates ..

ANDREW MARR: Okay.

NICK CLEGG: .. so it's bottom up, not top down.

ANDREW MARR: Fair enough. Let's move on to one of the controversies coming up, the forty two day detention issue.

NICK CLEGG: Sure.

ANDREW MARR: Are you absolutely clear that you will continue to vote against this?

NICK CLEGG: Absolutely. Because there is no evidence. I mean don't just believe me.

ANDREW MARR: Sure. No.

NICK CLEGG: The Director of Public Prosecutions ..

ANDREW MARR: We'll come on to this.

NICK CLEGG: .. the Home Affairs Select Committee. You cannot in my view ask parliament to legislate hypothetically when there is no evidence that you really need to do so on something as important as the balance between how long the police can lock you and I up before actually bringing a charge.

And also, just on a final thing, there are so many other alternatives. I've said this to Jacqui Smith when I was the Home Affairs spokesperson before. There are so many other alternatives where all parties could work together, in my view, meeting the same objective.

ANDREW MARR: You've been looking at the numbers. Are you pretty clear in your mind that this will be defeated in the House of Commons?

NICK CLEGG: I, I'm pretty clear that the government is, is sailing very close to the wind. I have to tell you the numbers game I think comes down to what they, what the government manages to do with their own troops, with their own MPs. And I'm not privy frankly to all the arm twisting that goes on in the Labour Party.

ANDREW MARR: Whatever happens in the House of Commons it looks as if you and the Conservatives can defeat this in the House of Lords. Will you?

NICK CLEGG: Yes.

ANDREW MARR: So this is going to fall as far as you're concerned?

NICK CLEGG: Yes.

ANDREW MARR: And there's nothing that Jacqui Smith has said about the concessions that she's been offering that's moved you at all?

NICK CLEGG: Well the concessions - they're false concessions. I mean the main concession is greater parliamentary oversight. But if you actually look at the detail, the greater parliamentary over sight would lead us to the absurd position that you could have someone locked up for that long a period of time and parliament would only be able to decide on whether that was justified or not after that longer period of detention has already expired. That is, that is not a meaningful concession.

But the point is this. Of course we want to protect ourselves to the maximum possible way against the threat of terrorism. But you have to do it in a way that respects our traditions of law, of openness in the way in which law is applied. And not, and not, and not rush towards an arbitrary - and forty two days is entirely arbitrary. An arbitrary longer period of detention without charge when there are better days to deal with the same problem.

ANDREW MARR: When you talk about issues like that, when you talk about your hopes for the health service and schools it sounds to a lot of people as if there's an interesting debate among colleagues, as between you and the Conservatives and David Cameron. Have you taken, are you taking your party a little bit to the right?

NICK CLEGG: No. I don't believe so at all. I'm taking the, I'm keen to be ..

ANDREW MARR: You're an orange book Liberal Democrat. And this was, this was always said to be the pro market, more, slightly more right wing part of the party?

NICK CLEGG: Look I think this, this whole talk about right, left, market, non-market is dare I say it, the sort of rhetoric of the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties. The big dividing lines in British politics now are between those parties who recognise that the state has, has tried to do too much and we need to devolve power back to families, communities and individuals.

Really empower people from the bottom up as I've been explaining in the health service. It is also I think, I think it also revolves round which parties fully understand the crisis of climate change and would do something about it. Fully understand that our political system is broken.

ANDREW MARR: Now the political system ..

NICK CLEGG: That has become clapped out.

ANDREW MARR: On which subject, on which subject David Cameron wanted to sit down with you and talk about how to mend the political system. Gordon Brown has also made noises. You've talked about a constitutional convention. Everyone says the system's broke and yet the three leaders of the major parties don't yet seem to be able to sit down together and work out ways of trying to fix it.

NICK CLEGG: I wrote to both David Cameron and Gordon Brown over the Christmas break and said look, I've read what you say. You say we need to restore trust in politics and so on. I said I entirely agree with that. So let's sit down together and look across the piece of what's gone wrong.

What's gone wrong with our electoral system, what's gone wrong with the way in which parliament is run, this yahboo politics that turns everybody off. What's gone wrong with the fact that we've still got a largely unelected House of Lords. What's gone wrong with the fact that people ..

ANDREW MARR: Yeah sure.

NICK CLEGG: .. don't have a ..

ANDREW MARR: So why not?

NICK CLEGG: Well I haven't, I haven't, haven't frankly had a, I hadn't had a reply from Gordon Brown and David Cameron, instead of actually understanding that what you need to do to really renew the political system is look across the piece at all the issues said oh yes - he said basically let's, let's talk to each other ..

ANDREW MARR: He only wanted to talk to you. That's not such an unreasonable thing.

NICK CLEGG: No. I am firmly of the view that the politics of the past is, is for parties to sort of gang up against each other.

ANDREW MARR: All right.

NICK CLEGG: The politics of the future is for all parties to agree together how we renew politics. Because politics is in my view in a bit of a state of crisis.

ANDREW MARR: Today the polls suggest that there's going to be a hung parliament, that the Conservatives would be short of an over all majority, but not far from there. You could work with David Cameron. You could do deals with him in those circumstances couldn't you?

NICK CLEGG: If you're asking me am I more attracted or repelled by the Conservative or Labour Party ..

ANDREW MARR: No I'm asking you whether you could work with him and form a coalition government with him.

NICK CLEGG: Of course I'm not going to answer that question because I can't ..

ANDREW MARR: Why not?

NICK CLEGG: Well for the simple reason firstly that the electorate have not spoken. It would be extremely arrogant for any politician to peer into their crystal ball and decide what might happen before the electorate has decided what they want to do.

And because there are major dividing lines in British politics that set the Liberal Democrats apart from both Labour and the Conservatives. And the Conservatives, their swivel-eyed approach to immigration, to Europe ..

ANDREW MARR: So you could work with either party? You could work with either party? It's just that you say let's have more honesty and frankness in politics ..

NICK CLEGG: Sure.

ANDREW MARR: And everyone is interested in this issue and you won't talk about it.

NICK CLEGG: Well hang on, it's not honest or frank to second guess the electorate.

ANDREW MARR: All right. For now Nick Clegg thank you very much indeed.

INTERVIEW ENDS

Please note "The Andrew Marr Show" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

NB: This transcript was typed from a recording and not copied from an original script.

Because of the possibility of mis-hearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, the BBC cannot vouch for its accuracy

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