John Prescott: 'It's time for Charles Kennedy's party to grow up'

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Leading article: The Lib-Lab affair is over

Prescott lands first blow against Lib Dems

It's been a busy week for the Liberal Democrats. They embraced a Labour defector and used their unelected peers to frustrate our anti-terrorism measures.

It's no secret that I have never been one of the Lib Dems' greatest fans. But under Paddy Ashdown, they did, at least at times, look like a serious party with serious aims and – almost – serious policies.

It was perhaps easier than many people thought for Tony Blair to convince me that, on occasions, we could and should work together for the good of the country as we did, for instance, on constitutional reform. At least that's one good thing that's happened under the leadership of Charles Kennedy. That arrangement has ended. But it is about the only good thing I could say about his party now.

Any link with principle or seriousness has now been ditched for opportunism and the easy headline. But you can't go on being all things to all people as some of the shrewder Lib Dems are beginning to realise.

You can't, for example, keep getting away with posing nationally as a pro-European party while suggesting at a local level that you are against Brussels and all its evils.

You can't continually wring your hands about the horrors of youth unemployment while opposing the New Deal which has cut it by more than 70 per cent.

I'm proud that this government when I was at Transport extended at least half-price bus travel to every pensioner in the country. But what can you make of a party in which two-thirds of all Lib Dem councils didn't do this already? While at national level, their policy – uncosted – was not half-price but free bus travel for pensioners.

What are you to make of a party whose health spokesman is against new NHS hospitals built under PFI, whose leader claims they have no hang-up about public versus private, while some leading Lib Dem MPs float the idea of charging for some NHS services?

And how can you expect to be taken seriously, as Paddy Ashdown himself warned recently, if your only answer for improving public services is extra money while opposing every reform to ensure this investment delivers real results.

Above all else, you can't go on pretending that you can find billions of pounds extra for health, education, pensions and every other area without saying where it's going to come from.

On health, they promised in 1997 to invest an extra £3.5bn in total over five years in the NHS. We are investing around £5bn more each year, year on year. On education, we are spending nearly £7bn more this year than the Lib Dems said they would have done if elected in 1997.

It's not that I believe this Labour government is above criticism. We've achieved a great deal since 1997 but there is an awful lot more to do. And we have to ensure we learn from experience.

We are now putting record and sustained investment into health, into schools, into the police and into transport. Only a party as out of touch as the Tories could believe it is not needed.

It is because we know that government is about taking the hard decisions, not just the easy ones, that we are determined that real reform will go with this record investment in our public services. We are committed to making sure every penny of taxpayers' money helps to deliver the improvements in schools and hospitals the country wants.

At times, this is also going to be controversial. But I disagree strongly with those, for instance, who suggest that using the private sector more effectively to help to open a new NHS hospital quicker so delays for treatment are cut is somehow against the principles of our party or the health service. It is not. The NHS was created to relieve pain, not to prolong it.

I would welcome a proper debate on all these issues. We also need a serious dialogue, as Tony Blair has proposed, on how we can together bring politics and public closer. If we are to believe Lib Dem claims that that the Tories are so useless that they are now the real opposition, we might expect them to be taking part. But you have to be a serious party before you can be a serious opposition, which means it's time for the Lib Dems to grow up.