No truth in this Cable

Just who does this merchant banker turned politician think he is?

The public, he tells us, would have little patience for talk of strike action over cuts, job losses, butchery of local authority programmes and all the rest of the coalition's assault on public spending.

There's little in Mr Cable's insulting diatribe to indicate that this is the very same public that he's talking about who will be losing their jobs, getting shorn of their local services and having to deal with a government which won't raise taxes on the rich, while whacking the poor with every penalty it can dream up.

And all in order to underwrite a pack of bankers and speculators who nearly drove the economy of the country into bankruptcy.

It's also a public, and Mr Cable would do well to remember it, which didn't vote for a Conservative government, a Lib Dem government or even the bastard child of the two.

It's a public which was put off voting for the new Labour cutters, Tory cutters or Lib Dem cutters and, despite the efforts of this coalition government and the combined ranks of the reactionary press, still does not have any clear consensus on what should be cut back, if indeed anything.

The Business Secretary said that he was "disappointed" by the withdrawal of his invitation to address the Manchester TUC Congress, but insisted that his door was always open for dialogue with the unions.

Well, isn't that nice of him. One trembles to imagine what sort of dialogue that would be.

Perhaps it would consist of Mr Cable trying to convince the assembled ranks of trade unionists that the TUC is wrong when it points out that employment will not return to pre-recession levels for 14 years and could take longer in some parts of the country hardest hit by government spending cuts.

Or maybe he would like to tell us all just what "the trade-offs to be made between pay and jobs and between willingness to discuss job flexibility and redundancies" are.

Mr Cable could intend to assert that an overall 1.3 per cent rise in take-home pay is a good thing, even though inflation is running at triple that level.

He might even want to explain why it's just and equ-itable that company directors are flaunting pension pots worth an average of £3.8 million while the rest of us are facing having to work years longer to get any pension at all. And maybe he could clarify why it is that most directors will draw their pensions at 60.

Possibly, just possibly, Mr Cable might have the bottle to meet the nearly 1,000 BAE engineering workers who are now facing redundancy and explain to them why it's all in their best interests that they are going onto the dole, although you wouldn't want to be in his shoes if he had the brass neck to try.

But he's unlikely to want to answer the question that we'd all like to ask him and that is what it feels like to go through an election fighting against the Tories, only to end up after the election supporting nearly every policy that he opposed during the hustings.

And it isn't likely that, even if he was willing to try, he would be able to explain how putting tens of thousands of more people out of work during the coming year is going to assist in reviving the economy.

We'll tell you one thing though, Mr Cable, free and for nothing, and that is that no slippery explanations are going to save your discredited and shamed party from electoral disaster.

And while there may be people at the top of the trade unions still prepared to talk to you behind closed doors, most of us see you clearly for the plain-clothes Tories that you and the rest of your party are.