In a blast from the past, the UK’s onetime deputy prime minister Nick Clegg popped up again in London today to muse, 15 years on, about his party’s coalition with the Conservatives. But despite this being the purpose of his talk, it didn’t take the arch-Remainer long to get to the subject of the European Union. Lauding the coalition he helped lead as a ‘five-year haven of stability’ between the earlier financial crisis and the referendum on the EU that followed, Clegg blamed Brexit for slowing UK economic growth – and dubbed it ‘one of the greatest acts of economic self-harm in modern times’. Is he happy then that Prime Minister Keir Starmer yesterday struck a new deal with our European allies? Er, no. ‘It’s a bit of a damp squib,’ he huffed.
Despite Sir Keir’s agreement with the European Union suggesting closer ties on issues from defence to borders to energy, Clegg is unimpressed. The former leader of the Lib Dems is annoyed that the PM had not gone far enough on forging better bonds with the EU. Taking aim at the ‘ducking and weaving’ he says the UK government has engaged in over recent weeks, Clegg fumed that the government had negotiated just ‘trade scraps from the high tables in Washington and then Brussels’. Ouch.
He went on:
Now, whilst no one should begrudge the government’s attempts to eke out concessions from the larger economies to our east and west, we should be under no illusion that Britain is now reduced to the negotiating status of a mid-sized state with far less leverage over the Europeans and Americans that that than at any time in the last 50 years. All this is made worse by the government’s needless red lines against the EU’s customs union and single market, without which a major resuscitation of the British economy will always prove difficult. Fear of the red wall appears to have produced red lines, which just don’t make much sense in the real world.
Are we a satellite state of the United States or a leading member of our own continent? The answer for now seems to be that we’re trying to be both, but in truth, we will be neither until we decide to be one of them. For generations, we have fancied ourselves a bridge between Europe and America. But a bridge connects to solid ground. A Eurosceptic minority in Britain have spent a generation chipping away at one end, only for nationalists in America to tear up the foundations on the other.
Tell us what you really think, Nick!
The ex-politician added:
The European deal is hailed as being a great triumph by the government and condemned by all the normal people still having the same debate of ten years ago saying it’s a terrible betrayal. It’s neither. It’s actually a bit of a damp squib. You know, the world has changed. And yet, after months of negotiation, they still can’t work out how to allow young people to travel effortlessly across the channel. I mean, what an underwhelming response for the moment we’re in.
Not that Clegg has been subtle about his stance on rejoining the EU in recent years. Putting his cards on the table, he confessed again today: ‘It will come as no surprise that my preference would be a full throated return to a reformed European Union.’ After almost a decade, Mr S notes he continues to be as bitter as ever about the 2016 result. Typical Remainer, eh?
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