Ed Davey: Lib Dems are winning back trust after 2010 U-turn on pledge to scrap tuition fees

Transcript

00:00You're reminded of all the time is the fact that Liberal Democrats promised to curb student fees

00:08and in fact you ripped up that promise and they were tripled. If there's somebody watching now

00:14who's angry about austerity and angry about the level of student fees why should they trust Ed

00:20Davie? Well there were very difficult decisions that's true and that was probably the most

00:25difficult one and Liberal Democrats got punished. I lost my seat along with many many colleagues

00:30and we've had three tough elections and I've had time to really reflect on that

00:36and there are two big lessons I've learned from that experience more broadly. The first is don't

00:42promise something you can't deliver and as leader with the manifesto for a fair deal you've got on

00:47the table there I've made it clear that everything in there can be delivered practical, costed and

00:53so on. So that was the first lesson. We will come to that. The second lesson was we needed to

00:59rebuild trust because you say people might say well why can we trust him? We needed to really

01:04work on that. When I became leader in my acceptance speech I said we needed to wake up and smell the

01:09coffee and we needed to talk to people in their communities to find out what their problems were

01:15and make sure we had answers for them and that's what we've done and I think through this

01:19Parliament, whether it's the Parliamentary by-elections we've won in Conservative heartlands,

01:24whether it's the local elections we've won where we've performed extremely well, pushed the

01:27Conservatives to the third place, I think yeah I think we are.