YES, says Jean Fooks, Lib Dem leader on Oxford City Council No one party ‘won’ the General Election in 2010, so it was right the Government was formed from a coalition of parties to address the dire financial situation inherited from the Labour administration.

Households have to balance their budgets and nations are no different. What the Liberal Democrats have done is to focus cuts as far as possible on those most able to bear them – the fact the Tory right feels hard done by is a tribute to the success of the moderating influence of the Lib Dems.

Two million low-paid people taken out of paying tax altogether, the tax bill for anyone paying basic rate cut by £45 a month. Taxes on the wealthy raised so those on annual incomes of more than £150,000 will pay on average an extra £1,300 a year in tax.

The Green Deal, to be launched in the autumn, will see the biggest home insulation programme ever, reducing energy bills and providing more than 65,000 new jobs.

As a junior partner we cannot get everything our way, but the country is better for having us in government.

NO, says Mike Rowley, Labour councillor for Barton and Sandhills THE coalition’s economic policy is as fantastical, ideologically-bound and doomed as that of the Soviet Union.

The Tories and the Lib Dems are completely failing to deliver the change they promised. The Prime Minister said on Tuesday he wants austerity to be renamed “efficiency”, but after two years of it they have delivered a double-dip recession and increased unemployment, with more than a million 18- to 24-year-olds unable to find a job.

For those out of work through ill-health or simply because there are no jobs, benefits – already among the least generous in Europe – are becoming smaller and harder to get. Pensions are being cut. People are undergoing real suffering. Meanwhile, the coalition Government is spending billions on an unnecessary top-down reorganisation of the NHS that is opposed by the professionals.

Now Cameron and Clegg declare that there will be no change in these policies, at the same time as they are being rejected across Europe.

It is time for the Liberal Democrats and Tories to draw their heads out of the sand and reverse their disastrous policies before it is too late.