Sir Vince Cable visited Taunton to speak at the Liberal Democrat Regional Conference

Sir Vince Cable was in the county on Saturday to speak at the Liberal Democrat Regional Conference at Woodlands Castle in Ruishton.

He talked about a variety of issues surrounding developments in Taunton, the commitment of his party to the EU, and his views on newly-elected Donald Trump.

Sir Vince was one of the leading politicians in the Conservative and Liberal Democrat cabinet during the coalition from 2010 to 2015.

An experienced politician, he was appointed as the secretary of state for business, innovation and skills for the entirety of the parliament term.

He was MP for Twickenham between 1997 and 2015, when he was voted out, and has also been the leader and deputy leader of the Lib Dems.

Drawing on his experience, he said one of his concerns was of Taunton taking the “easy” way out when it comes to Firepool, and that the council should not fill the space with yet another supermarket.

“There is a danger of just going for easy option like more supermarkets,” he said.

“There is a demand around the country for more housing, especially more social housing but the developers [at Firepool] have had ten years to do that and haven’t done it.

“We have got to look for some other way of promoting development.

“I think my friends here are promoting the idea of a campus for having further education.

“I commissioned a very big study by Andrew Witty, who was the head of the pharmaceutical company GSK, and what he found was that all the towns and cities that had universities and higher education institutions did much better than the others.

“This is because you have brought in an influx of people with high levels of skill and it keeps local young people in the community rather than moving away.

“That would be a very good way of making use of this.”

Sir Vince agrees with the Taunton Lib Dems in that developments like Firepool could be seen as missed opportunities, and called for more imagination from the local authorities to progress the site.

He said: “The team here are campaigning strongly on this, they feel this is a massive missed opportunity – this is a very important town in the West Country and it is blighted by this development that has been here for ten years and I understand that nothing has been done.

“That is not good local government and particularly nationally when there is a stagnation taking place across business investment.

“It needs some imagination to get development going.

“Our colleagues here have got various ideas for development and using it for high further education by using one of the existing institutions or a new one and those organisations have cash, they are able to invest and expand.

“But it does need somebody to unlock the relationship with the local council which has been sitting on this for years and years and has failed.”

Another contentious issue within the area is the looming merger of Taunton Deane Borough Council and West Somerset Council.

Sir Vince said that councils in his area are facing similar issues.

“I am seeing this in my own area where local councils are merging,” he said.

“I am all for having more efficient local government and you don’t want waste – I understand that.

“The danger is that when you have these mergers, senior management is totally preoccupied and they take their attention away from other issues they should be focusing on and it can make the local government more remote.

“People are having to go much further afield for dealing with local problems like planning applications so there definitely is a down side to mergers.”

Parts of Somerset were previously yellow seats until the 2015 general election. Jeremy Browne was the Lib Dem member of parliament for Taunton Deane and David Laws was the MP for Yeovil from 2005 until 2015.

Sir Vince reflected on what it would take to win back these seats in the next general election: “I have been meeting our council candidates for the election in May and I think they have good prospects of breaking through, I think we have got a good record in Somerset – both at parliamentary and council level.

“We are seeing all over the country that we are now starting to win local authority by-elections and we had a very good run in Witney – people are looking for an alternative to the government, I think.

“Labour aren’t going anywhere and we are a plausible opposition, we have had experience of government competence and I think we will come back very strongly in the next year or so.”

Nationwide the country is dealing with the aftermath of the UK’s decision to leave the European union.

Sir Vince said that the Liberal Democrats were the only party to be consistently against Brexit.

He said: “The Liberal Democrats were the only party that was consistently in support of our membership in the European Union and we are leading the criticism for the way the government has handled it, the chaotic management of it.

“We want to make absolutely sure that the good things about the EU, like the single market, the customers union, the collaboration of research, the environmental rules and the social rules, are preserved in the negotiations.

“We only have a small number of MPs at the moment, but we will come back in due course, a lot of lords and between them we will try to make as much noise as possible to defend the good things.”

Thinking further afield, Sir Vince used his experience in business to consider whether USA President-elect Donald Trump, a businessman, could make a good president.

“We don’t know whether he is going to behave as a president as he did as a candidate, we have got to have an open mind about that.

“It is a massively over simplified view.

“This isn’t someone who has created or manufactured anything, he is essentially a property developer and the techniques of property development don’t really translate easily into the complexities of government, particularly issues around national defence – you need somebody with a very calm temperament and considered judgement and from what we can see, he doesn’t seem to have that.”