Nick Clegg – only two and a half years before he’s gone
I remember meeting Nick Clegg , as part of a large-ish crowd at a dinner in mid-Wales in 2005. It was shortly after he’d first been elected to Parliament.
I raised with him the issue of European immigration, and of how it was forcing down the wage levels of those competing for the same sort of unskilled jobs as were being filled by young men and women from eastern Europe. He dismissed my concerns and extolled the virtues of pluralism, a reaction that was in some ways both expected and unexpected.
Expected in the sense that with his Dutch family background, Spanish wife, and career in Brussels as a protege of the dubious Leon Brittan, he is only tangentially British. How could anyone expect him to be all that bothered about the working British poor? And yet, given his fetishistic adoration of neo-liberal economics, how could he possibly deny that given an increase in supply (of labour, in this case) the price (wages) would, of necessity, be lowered?
And now here we are, half-way through the governing disaster that I dimly perceived all those years ago in that room at Brecon. Clegg has succeeded in making his name a by-word for betrayal and treachery, he has brilliantly decimated his own party’s local government base, and after a 25% fall in membership numbers in 2011, held the loss down to a mere 10% in 2012.
And the message to those who don’t agree that liberalism is all about right wing economic nonsense is that they can jolly well bugger off to Labour!
Yes, all the careful work and thought of more than a century, from many great minds, including T.H. Green, C.F.G. Masterman, Graham Wallas, and H.H. Asquith and David Lloyd George, can all be dismissed, for true Liberalism is just the market, as brought to you by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The ideological sophistication of the Lib Dem thinkers – Clegg, Laws, Richard Reeves, Stephen Tall – bears more than passing resemblance to the geological skill exhibited by six-day creationists.
It’s true that there has been a bit of an uptick for the Lib Dems in local government by-elections, but that seems to be more of a case of retrieving recently lost seats than anything else. There is certainly no evidence of any inroads into new territory. As Tony Greaves put it recently in Liberator:
“The party is being hollowed out in so many areas, members are drifting away, campaigning has stopped . . .”
Greaves recalled the days when what parliamentary seats were to be fought were decided across the country on an ad-hoc basis, and saw those days returning. But they already have! That’s what happened in England and in Wales on November 15th. In the PCC elections, most seats were not contested by the Lib Dems.
While the numbers of those in poverty in Britain increase and the party falls behind UKIP in the polls, the Gadarene rush to destruction continues. The great new crusade is for “equal marriage,” an issue that nobody mentioned in any manifesto and which may directly affect as much as 0.01% of the population. It’s positively orgasmic for well-off, semi detached, soon-to-be former MPs like Lynne Featherstone, but truly disastrous for the party.
The peculiar blindness of politicians like Clegg lies in their seeming obliviousness to the need for troops on the ground to win Liberal Democrat seats at the next general election. Of course, Clegg inherited a “safe” Lib Dem seat and before that was elected to Brussels via the party list system. More than the other two parties, the Lib Dems have relied on the “ground war” of leaflets and local campaigning, rather than the “air war” of television and national newspapers.
But come 2015, where are these local campaigners going to come from? Many have left and many will stay at home. And that, rather than the headline poll figures, is what will do for the calamity known as Clegg.
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