Our cross to bear

Terrific stuff from Nick Clegg, reported in the Daily Mail here. Nick suggests Britain has a misplaced sense of superiority as a consequence of winning the second world war, should recognize that Germany has become a “vastly” more prosperous country and that we have a “greater cross to bear” than the Germans for the events of 1939-45.

This is interesting because it is precisely the views of almost all foreigners, except for maybe the Norwegians. Nick seemed to have formed these notions while serving as an MEP, open to the influence of those Europeans around him and to whom he was inclined to suck up, and maybe also the input from his Spanish missus (they really hate us) and his own Dutch ancestry. From Skagen to the Straits of Gibraltar we are disliked – largely, I always thought, because we were one of very few European countries to emerge from the second world war with any credit, and that this credit was resented. But for the leader of a party which wishes to devolve all of our powers to people whom we either liberated or defeated, these are entirely fitting views. He is in step with Brussels.