In several weeks time, Nick Clegg may no longer be the leader of the Liberal Democrats. I hope he is, because if he remains so that will probably bode well for the Lib Dems. But there are so many different scenarios in which Nick could step down, I have to concede its looming reality.
Like the title of my article states, I think that a decade from now, the out and out hatred of Nick Clegg we’ve seen constantly over this parliament will be one of those things used by comedians and sitcom writers to evoke the weirdness of the age we currently live in, like they use pregnant women smoking in Mad Men as a shortcut to demonstrate the peculiarities of the early 1960’s. People a decade hence will have such a hard time remembering why such feeling was so rife. This is because the anger directed at Nick is so much a symptom of other factors. You can see this when Clegg does things like The Last Leg, where the public goes, “This Clegg guy is all right.” Yet still the negative feelings towards Nick fail to subside.
I can hear at the same time people saying, “People can’t forgive Clegg for breaking the tuition fees pledge and that where the anger comes from”, but that’s crap. For some middle class students that might be the case, but that would in no way account for the strength of feeling demonstrated against Clegg over the last five years. I feel sure that even if there had never been a pledge about tuition fees given by Nick, the rage towards him for going into coalition with the Tories would still be exactly what it is today, and has been over this parliament.
The reason Clegg has been such a target of angst, from both the Left and the Right, is that he has essentially, unconsciously, stopped both from forcing themselves to confront their own massive problems. Rather, the Coalition Government has, but Nick is simply the personification of this and thus an easy target for the feelings I’m about to elaborate on.
The Left has spent the last five years burying its head inside its collective behind. I don’t say this as someone who wants a stick to beat the Left with; I wish the last five years had been different in this regard, I sincerely do. After Labour had left office and gone back into opposition, it was beholden on the party to create a bold new vision for what social democracy might look like going forward. One that accepted that radical things were probably necessary to keep public services at the level they were in 2010, never mind improving them in future. An agenda that said that the alternative to Tory cuts wasn’t Keynesian stimulus, but rather a radical rethink about to create a society in which the gap between rich and poor got thinner, and standards of living could somehow continue to increase for everyone.
They did not need to re-invent the wheel to accomplish this. They could have looked at what Scandinavian countries have done in some senses; what Germany and Switzerland have managed to achieve in regards to things like apprenticeships, which if taken on board here might mean that jobs which are now low paid in Britain could become reasonably handsomely rewarded within a generation or less.
This didn’t happen for several reasons. One, it was assumed that the Coalition was going to break apart sooner rather than later, so why do anything radical when you’re just going to inherit government when the other two main parties go down in flames anyhow? Two, it would have involved annoying a lot of people and tearing down some sacred Left shibboleths. Trying to find efficiency savings in the NHS and other public bodies would have been met with extreme union resistance. CLPs would have blanched at changes to local government structure that would have shaken things up for them. This is where the Clegg hatred came in handy.
“Jesus, turns out sorting out the country is really hard work.”
“I know. Let’s forget about it for now and burn some more Clegg effigies instead.”
“Brilliant.”
For the Right, Clegg stood precisely on the main faultline of the Conservative party and indeed, centre-right thinking. Did the party want to become essentially a classical liberal party – small state, socially liberal, forward looking, internationalist, less enamoured of institutions – or did it want to be what UKIP have slowly morphed into – backwards looking, relaxed about the size of the state so long as it props up “conservative values”, anti-immigration, anti-Europe? The election of Cameron as leader had made some of the people in the former camp think they’d won the argument. Then came 2010, a confusing election result, and government with the Lib Dems.
Both sides of the Right dislike Clegg because it feels to them like he’s the one in the way of having this final fight to the death about what it is a whole side of British politics, and indeed its oldest political party, is supposed to be about. He isn’t, but because of the way the Coalition is structured, I can see how it feels like that. So Nick bears the brunt of this anger from the Right.
This is why in ten years, bashing Clegg will seem so strange as to be instantly humorous. Like I say, it’s easy to imagine Nick walking away from frontline politics in a few weeks time – and the Left and the Right will still have the crushing problems I’ve outlined above. Only now they won’t have Nick to kick around anymore. I don’t know what they’ll do with themselves then.
Oh but if that were true (I do hope you are correct), but history is written in short hand. It may go something like this…. ‘Hero to zero – broke signed student pledge for power’..
I do hope im wrong – but the Blair memory so far isn’t very rosy.
“I feel sure that even if there had never been a pledge about tuition fees given by Nick, the rage towards him for going into coalition with the Tories would still be exactly what it is today, and has been over this parliament”
Well that’s pretty conclusive – I on the other hand feel there would not have been. One, Clegg could have kept his pledge and still lost the vote on tuition fees, people might have understood that, or he could have kept the currents system in place for 5 years and fought the coming general election on a new policy. Or he could have abstained – as George Osborne told him to do which would have kept the word if not the spirit of his pledge (and ignored his manifesto policy) but instead he fought the election on ‘no more broken promises’ the one policy Nick was identified with was tuition fees and he broke his promise. I am not a student and I will not forgive him, He lied, he didn’t support the policy in private but made a public pledge on it, he has never apologised for breaking a promise, merely for making it. Worse still the new policy is rubbish and I wouldn’t have supported it had it been honestly promoted in 2010.
So have you forgiven labour for trebling tuition fees despite promising not to, or the Tories for their ‘no top down reorganisation of the NHS’.
Singling Clegg out for failing on just one policy is simply lazy.
Possibly, but saying “Singling Clegg out for failing on just one policy is simply lazy”, while ignoring the fact that Nick is unpopular for braking his one and only pledge after saying “An end to broken promises” to my mind is lazy.
Unusually for a student I think both that the drama about tuition fee policy is absurd, and that the liberal democrats voting for something they pledged not to doesn’t particularly change how I feel about them as a party.
I believe it’s more meritocratic as it is only paid once a graduate is earning above £21,000 – as opposed to the previous £15,000. I think this is a pretty big improvement, and brings tuition fees closer to the pseudo-taxation that makes sense (i.e. paid indefinitely by those who financially benefit from their degree). A situation in which the taxpayer foots the bill is unfair (in terms of the distribution of wealth) and unfeasible.
That minority parties in coalition make concessions is unsurprising, and to think otherwise verges on the immature. I would say that this was a reasonable sacrifice to make in order to follow more significant policies – raising the personal tax allowance in particular.
I support and will vote for the Lib Dems on the basis of them being the party that (albeit erratically) is the closest to my own ‘old liberal’ views.
If people were to realise the true meaning of the word “hate” and not use it so readily the whole political scene would be different.I dont believe Nick Clegg is hated. I feel the fault lies with the willing to be misinformed sometimes ignorant, not to be able to see the facts or even truth. Its easy to be wise after the event.
The mistake was in saying “Sorry” over tuition fees but even that could have been misconstrued. After all, the people voted democratically for a Leader not to be able to go to University free. Were it to be so, Nick Clegg wouldnt have found himself in coalition. Voters need to realise a whole lot more before the outcome of a General Election is precisely what the electorate wanted.
I think the Party ought to realise the heavy weights in the Party who have been in coalition and remember it in the days to come when speaking to the public. Tell it to them straight because it seems that isnt happening. At least set a target for changing the scene as Nick Clegg did before #GE2010 to balance the effect.
A lot of people I discuss politics with really do hate Clegg. I can’t really think of any non-murderous character they hate more.
Rob, you really have a problem. No wonder there is so much violence in the world. To hate a young family man for having different ideas to you. Well ! Get yourself a hobby or help people who have disabilities.
I think it’s likely that in the excitement of the result at last going in favour of a coalition, combined with Brown’s unwillingness to fulfil his constitutional duty to remain in power, the Lib Dems thought that a broken promise on tuition fees would be no bigger deal than Labour’s secret plan to implement tuition fees and certainly not as bad as the botched invasion of Iraq. How wrong they were.