Nick Clegg's pledge: Conservative pact is for one term only

Nick Clegg will today seek to reassure his anxious party that the Liberal Democrat identity is secure by promising there will be no electoral pact with the Conservatives and holding out the prospect of a coalition deal with Labour after the next election.

During a sometimes uneasy hour-long question and answer session with delegates on the first full day of the party's conference yesterday, the Lib Dem leader refused to give ground on the running of the coalition. He insisted that he would not manufacture synthetic rows with the Conservatives simply to raise his party's progressive identity.

He also admitted he was under constant pressure from friends and colleagues to pick a fight with the prime minister, David Cameron, and to show the extent to which his party was distinct from the Conservatives.

Discussing the spending cuts he also conceded that "people are starting to believe a lot of this hype that we are imposing these things for a swivel-eyed ideological zeal overnight".

In his set piece speech to conference this afternoon he will emphasise the temporary nature of the coalition by telling his party: "The Liberal Democrats and Conservatives are, and always will be, separate parties with distinct histories and different futures. But for this parliament we work together to fix the problems we face and put the country on a better path. That is the right government for now."

He will also restate the case for entering into coalition: "People have got used to us being outsiders against every government that comes along. Maybe we have got used to it ourselves. But the door to change we want was opened, for the first time in most of our lifetimes. Imagine if we had turned away. How could we ever have asked the voters to take us seriously again?"

In a sign of the unease on the left that the party is being squeezed, in terms of visibility and its poll rating, the former Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris writes in the Guardian: "We need closer identification of Lib Dems in parliament, in the media and in government with those coalition plans that are Lib Dem-inspired and conversely some distancing from Tory-imposed policies."

He also urged his party to take a leaf out of the Tory right's book by communicating unhappiness about illiberal policies.

The remarks calling for greater Lib Dem ownership of policies do not represent a revolt, however, but more of a warning shot that the party has to work harder to maintain its distinctive identity.

In a sign that the leadership is aware of the mood of many ordinary members, the main policy announcement today was a promise to be ruthless with the rich who avoid or evade paying tax. HM Revenue & Customs will be granted £900m to tackle those who, in the words of the Treasury chief secretary, Danny Alexander, had made "a lifestyle choice" not to pay taxes. He also promised to focus more revenue resources on those on the new 50p rate earning more than £150,000.

The phrase was a deliberate echo of the chancellor George Osborne's threat to get tough with those who had made "a lifestyle choice" to be benefit cheats.

Clegg, however, was adamant that he would not "manufacture synthetic rows" inside the coalition or hang out dirty washing of internal disputes just to placate grassroots members.

Such tactics "might give you a good feeling for about five minutes", he said. "But it would do something much, much worse in the long run. It would destroy what we are trying to create, which is showing the country at large that doing politics differently, that coalition politics, is possible. That is the big prize."

He said the public were yearning for an end to adversarial politics and craved pluralism and diversity in politics. "It is a long game," he insisted.

He said he was confident about the party's identity and denied the party would "suffer some mysterious cross-contamination in Whitehall which means that we will suddenly warp into something different. You can share power with others and still retain your values".

Much of today's speech will be focused on explaining the coalition's decision to eradicate the structural deficit in one parliament. He admitted that the charge of betrayal levelled against his party by Labour largely stemmed from claims that he had changed his stance on the deficit as the price for gaining power.

He admitted he heard "quite a lot the charge that the party is being beaten up by Labour … and that we are not hitting back hard enough".

He said this criticism came down to the Labour cry of betrayal over the deficit. In some of his toughest criticism of Labour he claimed they had resorted to an "absurd cardboard cut-out argument that there is this la-la land where you do not have to take any difficult decisions, no jobs are lost, no cuts are made, there is no pain, where everything recovers miraculously by osmosis – the Ed Balls view of the future – and that we are like modern day Herods, slaying the first born".

He said the true distinction between Labour and the coalition is that Labour was planning to cut over eight years, while the coalition would do so over five years.