Cuts dominate Nick Clegg's return to Tyneside
The last time Nick Clegg visited the North East he was angling for Lib Dem votes in Durham.
How quickly politics has moved on.
Today he arrived in Tyneside as a key member of a coalition government with the Conservatives.
In fact, with David Cameron on holiday, arrived in charge of the country.
He was here to talk about and to meet voters in one of his Town Hall-style gatherings.
But Labour greeted his arrival with derision.
They were keen to highlight his recent admission that he'd changed his mind about the need to make faster, harder cuts during the election.
They say he should apologise to North East voters for failing to mention that during his campaign visits to the region.
And they want him to explain why he's propping up a Conservative government intent on Thatcherite policies.
Nick Clegg though was prepared to tackle those accusations head-on.
During a speech in South Tyneside he rubbished suggestions that the current cuts would take the region back to the 1980s.
He accused his opponents of scaremongering, and said the cuts would not lead to the kind of destruction of communities seen then.
The speech was made at the launch of Operation Green - a plan to create 10,000 low carbon jobs in the North East.
Curiously though this was not a government plan but one belonging to the company .
I couldn't see any government role in the plan and indeed since Tedco has had funding from the Regional Development Agency (soon to be abolished) they could even be accused of hindering it.
He did tackle that issue too.
The Government is proposing to replace the agencies with Local Enterprise Partnerships.
Nick Clegg said the North East could still opt for one covering the whole region (a kind of mutated development agency he called it), but his critics might point out that it won't have the same budget or powers.
He then moved his focus on to what he called the the government was planning.
He announced one particular new proposal.
By 2012, he promised . Under the plan householders will get free advice on how to make their homes more energy-efficient.
They'd then be able to pay for insulation and other energy-saving measures gradually through their energy bills.
The Deputy PM then moved onto to be questioned by voters on higher education, benefits, the NHS, and the Regional Development Agencies again.
It was a thorough work-out, from which he emerged relatively unscathed, apart from forgettting that it was the Government and not the local health trust that put a stop to the new hospital at Wynyard in Teesside.
Inevitably, though everything seemed to come back to cuts. There was one particularly feisty exchange with a voter who accused the coalition of picking on the poor.
But Nick Clegg asked the audience in Newcastle to judge him after five years not 101 days.
I suppose that means he'll know he's in trouble in 2015, if cuts are still the dominant issue on the political agenda.
I'm Richard Moss, the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s Political Editor for the North East and Cumbria. Welcome to my irreverent - but hopefully insightful - northern take on reporting politics for Look North and the Politics Show.
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