Dear Nick
I delayed writing this letter until the leadership election was past, so it didn’t get lost in that campaign, but want to write to thank you for your rich contribution to the Liberal Democrats.
We owe you a great deal, not least for the wisdom, statesmanship and tenacity you have shown. It is a tribute to you and the colleagues who you led that you stepped into ministerial roles with a naturalness and fluency that belied the fact that we had not formed a majority government in living memory. It is a tribute to you personally that you withstood so many brickbats from so many quarters with such dignity.
In forming the coalition we knew we would take a pounding. You led us in putting the national interest ahead of party interest of which we can be justly proud, and which stands in stark contrast to the cynical view of politicians, then at a particularly low ebb because of the concerns over MPs expenses prior to the 2010 election.
For as long as I can remember the strongest argument against electoral reform has been that it would lead to coalitions, which were assumed to mean unstable government. One of the great, and unsung, achievements of the coalition is to trounce that argument, opening the door to a fairer electoral system far sooner than people assumed after the AV referendum was lost.
Coalition was new territory. Our media, used to speculating about splits in governments, struggled to recognise two parties working together. At the start it was essential to show unity, as you did, but I was impressed by the dignity with which you also marked out difference when that was possible — you and David Cameron gave very different responses to the Leveson report was a shining example. This raises the possibility of future coalitions happening differently, not because we got it wrong in 2010, but because the experience of that coalition will make it easier to do things differently next time.
We are now getting scary evidence of what the Tories do when left to their own devices. People had forgotten what life was like in the days of the Thatcher and Major governments. The dignity with which which you and your colleagues moderated them is a credit to you. In the short term, not trumpeting your achievements may have harmed our electoral result, but as people are shocked by what the Tories now do, their respect for you, and for the Liberal Democrats, will rise. The membership surge since the election is only the start of this.
In the television debates earlier this year, I was struck by how much more credible you were as a potential Prime Minister than either Ed Milliband or David Cameron. Sadly that was not to be. I believe history will view your contribution warmly and see you as the Liberal Democrat leader who showed that coalition is possible, opening the door to electoral change and the sorts of collaboration many of our European partners take for granted.
I suspect that your experience of collaborative working in the EU, honed by your time as an MEP, was a significant, if unacknowledged, gift to the British political process. As we think ahead to the EU referendum and putting the case for an open and internationalist engagement, we can be glad to have had in you a Deputy Prime Minister whose understanding of European culture and institutions is the polar opposite of the “Little Englander” mentality of so many eurosceptics.
People will not forget your resignation speech and its powerful argument for Liberal values, even as the electorate realised their mistake in stepping away from them.
I am profoundly sorry that your time as leader should have ended as it did, and hope that this is not the end of your rich contribution to the life of the country and the party.
Best wishes
Mark Argent
* Mark Argent was the Liberal Democrat candidate for Huntingdon in the 2019 and 2024 General Elections.
121 Comments
In any coalition neither party gets everything it wants, and can still be influenced by opponents in parliament and even by columnists in the press, but when canvassing we should focus on a small number of achievements.
1) Not to be able to sack peope by whim, was a policy supported on TV by the Tory chairman, but utterly unreasonable.
2) The ability to call a general election for the party advantage of the PM of the day was blatant corruption, stopped.
3) Nobody earning the minimum wage should be paying income tax: substantial progress.
Mark, thanks, a considered and generous letter.
I await the usual suspects with interest.
Yet another ‘re-write’ of history…. I’m reminded of the old joke about “The operation being a success but the patient dying”…
Oh dear, Not another article pointing out how great was the leader who led the party to the edge of oblivion, ignored votes in conference and insisted on carrying on when it was clear the party were heading for disaster under his desperately flawed leadership. A great speech deliverer, but never a leader and sadly until we all accept and acknowledge his mistakes we will not even start to learn, change or recover from the catastrophe of his seven years in charge.
Should have been a warning on this article :
“May cause nausea”
Thank you Mark for this post. I honestly could not better it. I am extremely proud and appreciative of Nick Clegg for his passion and commitment which shone through even in the face of the most awful abuse. His eloquence and humour was always to the fore. As you say Mark, history will remember him with respect and affection. I feel so lucky that people like Nick come along from time to time to inspire us, lead us and remind us of why we do what we do. We should all now be invigorated and look to the future with hope and get alongside Tim so that we can truly promote a liberal and fair society. If we don’t – no one else will.
Unfortunately, Richard, as long as the party continues to follow Mark Argents perspective of pretending nothing wrong was done, those points will continue to be mute. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll continue to champion them as successes. But people tend to care more about whether their loved ones will have health care, or if there is food on the table, than how much income tax the bottom bracket pays. I hope Tim Farron has a better battle plan than thanking Clegg for his contribution, because we really need a liberal answer to the challenges of tomorrow and it certainly can’t be found amongst Tories in Tory clothing.
I wouldn’t say it was all a catastrophe, David. There were many of us in 2010 who thought Clegg was the man to bring about the great Liberal revolution and I don’t think there were as many signs as are now being discussed.
TCO 3rd Aug ’15 – 10:10am “Mark, thanks, a considered and generous letter. I await the usual suspects with interest.”
And I haven’t been disappointed 😀
I was one of Nick Clegg’s biggest critics during the time of his leadership (maybe I was the biggest critic), but to some extent I agree with what is written here. I think a lot of the criticism of the Liberal Democrats during the period of the Coalition was based on the unrealistic assumption that we could have got what we liked under that situation, and also on not realising just how much further right the Conservatives had moved since they last in government, so even a hard-won compromise with them looked like a weak concession if one supposed they were still as moderate as they were under Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s leadership. I use the word “moderate” here in relative terms.
I also think we could have achieved a lot more had we a more constructive approach from Labour. What happened was that when we were trying to put out case in argument against the Conservatives’ hard right, if we turned around to look for some sort of moral support from the people who would support what we were trying to achieve, i.e. the Labour Party, we got none, just “nah nah nah nah nah, you put in the Tories” even though what actually put in the Tories was the disproportional electoral system which Labour supports and we do not.
I don’t think Nick Clegg was a bad person, but I do think his big problem was insufficient knowledge and experience of our party at grass-roots level, and from that a tendency to rely for advice on what to do from ad-men, national media commentators and well-funded policy wonks and other Westminster Bubble types – and a consistent piece of advice they have always given is “ignore the members”.
Experience suggests that the Liberal Democrats and their predecessors have done best when they’ve done the opposite of what the Westminster Bubble says they should do.
@Matthew Huntbach “and a consistent piece of advice they have always given is “ignore the members”.”
Is it the members, or is it the activists? The two are not always the same, and certainly the activist pool is much the smaller. It may shout louder, but that doesn’t mean its representative.
No one really knows what the whole membership thinks because the only time it is ever asked it’s opinion is when a leadership election is called.
“Experience suggests that the Liberal Democrats and their predecessors have done best when they’ve done the opposite of what the Westminster Bubble says they should do.”
Any examples?
Just noticed this gem.
“………even as the electorate realised their mistake..”
All Liberal Democrats need to postit note, that one phrase from Mark Argent on their fridge door. It tells you everything you need to know about why you got here, and where you are heading?
expats 3rd Aug ’15 – 10:20am “Yet another ‘re-write’ of history…. I’m reminded of the old joke about “The operation being a success but the patient dying”…” This is the argument about the party interest and the national interest. The party interest has obviously suffered. The national interest has been proteted to some extent.
Samuel Griffiths 3rd Aug ’15 – 10:42am Reducing or abolishing income tax for low paid workers does help them put food on the table. There is enormous wastage of food in the UK caused by mistaken government policies, but try as i might, i cannot eat it all.
I think Nick Clegg is a good, decent man. He is also most likely a wonderful father and devoted husband.
However, he was a disaster for this party. His fatal flaw was presenting the Coalition as a meeting of minds for the first 2-3 years. Acting as if it was a friendship with the Tories and as if there were no ideological differences between Conservatism and Liberalism. It is my personal opinion that he thought the best of the Tories and naively allowed them to walk all over him and practically abuse the LibDems as a whole. Thinking the best of others is a great quality to have in general, but not when dealing with a party so ruthless and Machiavellian as the Tories. The Tories exist to further the interests of the wealthy and powerful. They always have and always will. Nick sadly forgot this fact.
As Mr. Cable wisely said again and again, to the apparent deafness of Clegg and Danny Alexander, the Coalition should have been presented from the very start as a business arrangement and nothing more. Nick and Danny did the opposite which alienated millions of (now former) left-leaning Lib Dem voters.
Matthew:
Biggest critic? Are you sure you are not bigging yourself up?
Actually I have never properly understood the vehemence of some of your contributions, because fundamentally you have mostly been a constructive critic? The refusal to campaign and intemperate threats to leave the party did not seem to square with the content of your, in most cases, carefully considered responses.
Question about whether Nick Clegg was not sufficiently in touch with grass roots activists will remain open. NC certainly had a lot of close support from Paddy Ashdown, who cannot easily be criticised in this way. Your reference to admen etc reminded me of how much more efficiently and successfully the massively well funded Tories rely on these groups.
Your point about the Labour Party hits the sourest chord for me. They really were prepared to shoot themselves in the foot in the way they were keen to attack us. Ironically, the fall out means that in our relative absence, many in Labour are now directing the very same ire against their own senior politicians and whatever the outcome are rendering their party unmanageable.
I always considered that to show a coalition can operate effectively was one of the most important objectives, but I had not envisaged a cost on this scale. The cost of coalition has gone up by an order of magnitude. The result is that although a future coalition is no unthinkable, the price for any possible partner is unlikely to be agreed to. Tim Farron has said as much: when asked about future coalitions, he said that he would consider coalition with either Labour or Conservatives, so long as any agreement accepts implementation of proportional representation. I agree with him: the biggest disappointment of the Coalition was lack of movement on electoral reform. At one stage there was a danger that reducing seats would make FPTP even worse. Those who blame Nick Clegg really are missing the target. Powerful groups in Labour and the Tories were hell bent on scuppering any reform and anything that we could claim as a success.
Naïvety is a just criticism. We have to learn the lessons. In particular, I am concerned that we are not suckered in by the two big parties in an EU referendum. They will be out to use us as a whipping boy, we need to get our retaliation in first!
Thank you for this piece. I was a firm backer of Coalition but so were the great majority of the membership, including the activists. Obviously I was wrong about the potential damage, but so were the great majority of the membership. Those few who opposed going into coalition from the start excepted, we were all wrong. Trying to make Clegg a scapegoat for the Party,s collective mistakes may help some of us feel better but its unfair, irrational & illiberal.
Two words. Spot on.
If we disregard anyone who isn’t confident enough to put their full name (and a photo?) with their comments then it hones down the discussion to the useful.. saves a lot of time reading the predictable dross as well. Well done, Mark, so right.
TCO3rd Aug ’15 – 10:10am
“I await the usual suspects with interest.”
Is it appropriate for TCO to be able to refer to a significant number of contributers in this way?
It is a term he/she uses regularly to dismiss the comments of others and is, I would suggest, a form of the forbidden ad hom comment.
Samuel, Rosie, Neil and Peter. When Nick became leader we had 65,000 members; 4,400 councillors; 62 MPs; 16 MSPs; 12 MEPs and 6 Welsh AMs. We were represented on most councils, and if a local activist stood and had a half decent campaign, he or she could realistically expect to get at least 20% of the vote, such was the good will felt for the Lib Dems. Goodwill that had been earned over decades by councillors, MPs, activists etc etc.
By the time the General Election on 2015 was over membership had fallen to less than 47,000; we had less than 1,900 councillors; 8 MPs; 5 MSPs; 1 MEP and 5 AMs. Last Thursday in one council by-election we stood in seat where there had been a Lib Dem Councillor until 2011. In May 2015 no Lib Dem stood. In a by election in July the Lib Dems got 22 votes – 3% of the vote, and we finished fifth.
Now in many parts of the UK there are vast areas where there is no Lib Dem at any level of government to represent local residents. That is a catastrophe.
@Stephen Hesketh I enjoy the contributions of Matthew Huntbach because whilst they are invariable critical of the former leader he is open to reason, self-reflective, and able to engage in debate. The same cannot be said for every anti-Clegg poster.
As to my comment about “the usual suspects”, I have mentioned no names and made no value judgement, so how can it be “ad hominem”?
peter tyzack3rd Aug ’15 – 12:31pm
“If we disregard anyone who isn’t confident enough to put their full name (and a photo?) with their comments then it hones down the discussion to the useful.. saves a lot of time reading the predictable dross as well.”
I tried that with the Sun, Star, Mail, Express and even LDV. It doesn’t help. Names and photographs certainly don’t prevent people from writing dross.
It is Important that history is not re-written.
So Mark, why do you include this in your paean of praise? —
“. I believe history will view your contribution warmly …”
An objective view by actual historians might take into account the number of Liberal Democrat MPs. MEPs, members of the Edinburgh Parliament and the Wales Assembly, Councillors at all levels and number of members of the party when Nick Clegg became leader and the numbers when he resigned.
Historians only use words like ‘disastrous’ if there is some evidence.
Similarly, historians do not usually praise people who by their own measures are failures; it was Nick Clegg himself who boasted in 2007 that within two general elections with him as leader he would double the existing number of MPs.
The fact is that two general elections with Nick Clegg as leader did not double the number of Liberal Democrat MPs.
We ended up with just 8 MPs.
It was the worst general election result for any Liberal Leader for over sixty years.
Instead of more than 120 MPs promised by Nick Clegg we got only 8.
I suppose a Conservative historian might look on that result and smile warmly but I don’t think that is what you meant.
The Lib Dems are truly a kind and forgiving bunch. Celebrating and humbly thanking a man who has destroyed your party wiped out your local Councillors and seen you battered across the country. I salute you.
@John Tilley “Historians only use words like ‘disastrous’ if there is some evidence.”
Indeed. A proper historian, rather than looking at numbers of MPs (which in and of themselves are not indicative of much; Labour had 5 times as many MPs as we did in the last Parliament but were totally ineffective because they were in opposition) will perhaps look at the effect of the government in terms of the legislation it enacted and the impact that legislation made in changing people’s lives.
It is of course too early to tell, but given the rate that the current government is looking to reverse policies implemented by the coalition, the signs are good for Nick Clegg on that front.
What Jonathan Calder tweeted, but without the question mark … or the wink.
Bill le Breton
For those of us not on Twitter, what did Jonathan Calder tweet?
Having taken us to the disaster that many feared, the best thing Nick can do now is lay low, let his successor build his own public image, and let a new generation reform the Party’s reputation. If Nick really wanted history to be kind, he could have stood down last summer – and he would have had a much more noble story to retell. As it happened, he didn’t, but like the Aesop’s Fable ‘The Dog and Its Reflection’, he stayed in office for the chance of influence in another hung parliament, ignored internal critics, and then got a dose of savage reality to everyone’s mutual loss. It didn’t have to be this way.
Nick Clegg: ‘Who all coveteth, oft he loseth all.’
The majority of any blame is on Ashdown not Clegg..
TCO I wholeheartedly agree. It is a warm and generous piece about a very decent man who achieved a great deal more than any other Liberal in living memory. Thank you for posting it. That he has paid such a high personal price and the party suffered such large electoral defeats says far more abouut the state of UK politics and our political system than it does about Nick.
I wonder when the editors of LDV will grow tired of adding to the already substantial library of Clegg hagiography? It’s hardly a serious attempt to start writing the history as, if any historian can be bothered, they are going to see straight through this type of thing.
@Paul Barker “Those few who opposed going into coalition from the start excepted, we were all wrong”
Actually, many who supported us going into the coalition predicted an incredibly difficult time. I was by no means the only one.
See https://www.libdemvoice.org/opinion-enter-the-storm-with-our-eyes-wide-open-19653.html
Mike Biden 3rd Aug ’15 – 3:54pm……………TCO I wholeheartedly agree. It is a warm and generous piece about a very decent man who achieved a great deal more than any other Liberal in living memory. Thank you for posting it. That he has paid such a high personal price and the party suffered such large electoral defeats says far more abouut the state of UK politics and our political system than it does about Nick…………..
So now we blame UK politics? This is the ‘business’ the LibDem party, including Nick, are in. As a statesman ( who history will judge far more favourably than Nick) said, “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen” .
So TCO you really consider the signs are good for Nick that the Tories are undoing so much of what he did, so quickly. Most people aim for a legacy of something good that is at least long lasting if not permanent. In that regard Nick’s legacy may well be 8MPs. With friends like you …
@David Evans “So TCO you really consider the signs are good for Nick that the Tories are undoing so much of what he did, so quickly.”
Yes, I do think it’s good. It also rather challenges yours, Tilley’s, Allen’s and Hesketh’s thesis that the Coalition was a disaster and that Nick was a Tory in disguise. For if he was, and the coalition did no good, why would they be rushing to dismantle what he put in place?
That rather goes to show that what we did was Liberal, and that those who didn’t support Nick or the coalition, but set about sabotaging his legacy, were wrong.
George you are probably right on quite a few people realising how difficult it would be very early on. However, we did assume we would have a half competent leader who would consult widely and learn quickly. Sadly none of those things came about. Indeed those who suggested consulting more widely were ignored.
That is why I don’t accept the “it was a collective failure of the party” line of Paul Barker and others. The coalition deal was done and dusted when it went to the Special Conference, Nick had agreed and Cameron has gone to Buck Pal. There was no way the party as a whole could turn down the agreement even if they saw Nick’s weaknesses with Cameron and intransigence with the party at such an early stage. That would have been immediate suicide. Instead we had the slow torture of death by a thousand mistakes.
We Liberals (and now LibDems) have a) a belief in intelligent solutions to real problems – that is actually what is needed but it doesn’t chime with a society that has been brainwashed into slogan based solutions b) Despite warnings from us old greybeards our younger frontrunners believed that they could trust the Tories to work constructively with us. Instead they shafted us at every opportunity almost from day one assisted by a press most of the proprietors of which leave a deal to be desired c) we have an chronic aversion to negative campaigning. The Tory campaign was almost totally negative – sadly it works. It got George W Bush elected – twice – remember the trashing (later proven to be lies) of John Kerry’s war record etc. Politics is a dirty business. You preserve your principles, play clean, demonstrate integrity and lose. Or you play dirty better than the other guy. I know that sounds dreadfully sad & cynical & I hate saying it but it fits my 80yrs experience of life. You treasure individuals & organisations that are not like that
Sorry to join the usual suspects but when Nick Clegg led the party into breaking the pledge I felt absolutely and completely kicked in the guts by him. Without trust you can achieve nothing in politics (unless you have big vested interests behind you, which we do not…)
If he would ever apologise for breaking it, rather than just for making it I might begin to forgive him for taking my political party away from me for 5 years.
I did not oppose the coalition BTW. I supported it up to the point the pledge was broken. I firmly believe that without that single action we would have 25-30 MP’s right now (which everyone would of course be calling a complete disaster).
It is nice to be back though! Feels much better than the political wilderness for me personally…
Mark,
Thank you . I have been waiting for someone on this site to write an appreciation of Nick and have been dismayed at how long it has taken.
Forget arguments over policies, it is the grace , dignity and humour with which he has led this party that has impressed
me most . I have been appalled at the carping that has gone on this site ever since the coalition began.
Fortunately, I note that Nick will be giving a conference speech on 21 September and that will give us the chance to say thank you. It will be worth a day down in Bournmouth.
Sadly Elizabeth, I didn’t see a lot of ‘grace , dignity and humour’ at Bedford where a questioner suggested Nick consulted more with some of the older generation of councillors who had suffered and survived dealing with the Conservatives. That question was the last one answered, curtly followed by a swift exit. Do you really want to say thank you to Nick for sacrificing 50 years of hard work by countless individuals? If some say that I and others carped because we saw the huge damage being done to our party and its values, so be it. I know it is reassuring to believe in heroes, but they only occur in fairy tales, and they certainly will not save us from the huge peril we now face.
I don’t think Nick Clegg, would have supported Corbyn, but many Lib Dems, wanted Nick Clegg, out. I didn’t. But, thankfully we have a new great Leader, sadly you all want Corbyn. We will fail , unless people in, the Lib Dems, actually support, the Party, they are in.
I did not support the coalition because it was in the national interest – which is a very slippery and dubious concept when discussing political parties. I supported it because on balance it damaged the Liberal Democrats less than saying no to coalition. How it was subsequently presented was something else, arguably bad for the country and bad for the Lib Dems.
The Coalition, was a decent thing to do, because, the Party, sacrificed itself for the country. A rare thing, these days.
Very prudent to thank Nick in writing, with his legendary tin ear he is unlikely to hear a verbally expression of your appreciation.
AN OPEN LETTER TO LDV
I sincerely wish LDV would stop printing this sort of non-article.
Every time such a story appears it brings up old differences and repolarises opinion.
Nick Clegg was the most divisive and least successful leader the Liberal Democrats have had since our formation. Whichever side of the debate we find ourselves we must recognise this or, alternatively, simply agree to differ and move on for the sake of Liberal values and our party.
I have not seen a flow of articles published from any of the so-called “the usual suspects” saying how we were right all along but only counter arguments stating the facts each time this sort of nonsense appears.
There are real issues (OMOV) on which I actually agree with certain members from the opposite side of the Clegg divide but the constant drip drip of ‘we were right all along’ is having a totally negative impact on the rebuilding party cohesion.
LDV have a responsibility to let this be the last in the long line of history-rewriting claptrap.
Maybe as well Nick wasn’t a football manager…….., imagine Chelsea in the Conference League. He wouldn’t have lasted as MD of a FTSE 100 company…. or as Leader of the Tory Party. The fact he lasted so long says more about the innate decency and kindness of colleagues in the Party rather than on hard headed realism.
It feels wrong to kick a man when he is down….. so it’s more in sorrow than in anger, and I’m sure on a personal level he is a kind decent and honourable man – but a radical in the long established social liberal tradition he is not.
It should be compulsory for all new Leaders to read a bit of history to see what happened to Liberal Leaders in past coalitions. The fates of Asquith, Lloyd George and Herbert Samuel demonstrated if you ride the Tory tiger or a Tory crocodile don’t be surprised if you get gobbled up. Lesson one….remember you are dealing with a smiling ruthless voracious dangerous beast who scruples at nothing to win outright power.
TCO
“Experience suggests that the Liberal Democrats and their predecessors have done best when they’ve done the opposite of what the Westminster Bubble says they should do.”
Any examples?
Well, who was winning all the council seats in the 1980s? The SDP who were doing what the ad-men and Bubble types said should be done, or the Liberal Party who were being dismissed as “sleepy” or “beards and sandals” types?
TCO
Is it the members, or is it the activists? The two are not always the same, and certainly the activist pool is much the smaller. It may shout louder, but that doesn’t mean its representative.
Actually I’ve not found that there’s a huge difference. I think you are just following the Westminster Bubble’s assumption about these things, which is based more on the experience of the Labour Party. One thing that makes it different for the Liberal Democrats is that there aren’t any Liberal Democrat safe seats. So if the activists are out of touch with ordinary people, the party doesn’t win seats and so disappears.
Martin
The refusal to campaign and intemperate threats to leave the party did not seem to square with the content of your, in most cases, carefully considered responses.
What really got me was that Clegg and the Cleggies were constantly undermining the defence I was willing to give them.
Stephen Hesketh.
OMOV should mean, I get a vote on everything, same as everyone else. if LDV is representitive of the party, then we are done. Because it seems, most aren’t very Liberal, if at all. Too much nonsense about support for Labour, we can’t carry on.
As for the Polls, well, I am a member of YouGov, but look how wrong they were. I remember election night on BBC, never seen so many angry Labour supporters, in one room. That was just the presenters.
Nick Clegg, did well for the Party. We have to run with that success, we made an impact, improved lives, got more people into University, cut taxation, increased Liberty. And, now Tim Farron, takes that even further.
I want to know what it is, ‘we’ as a Party can do, to engage all Liberals, that will fight Nationalism, Socialism, and Toryism, or whatever they do these days.
paul barker
Those few who opposed going into coalition from the start excepted, we were all wrong.
Sorry, but no. I accepted and argued the case for going into the coalition from the start, but from the start I was also aware of how damaging it would be to us. You are completely wrong when you say there were just two positions anyone could take: either to oppose the very idea of going into the coalition, or to support it and think it would be wonderful and increase our support. I took neither of those positions.
Silvio 3rd Aug ’15 – 1:36pm The point is that the leader is not a dictator in the Liberal Democrats. Please compare what William Hague said about the Tories during the coalition negotiations “If he (Cameron) and I (Hague) agree that is it”.
In the Liberal Democrats there w as the leader, a negotiating team including some strong characters, for instance Chris Huhne had stood against Nick Clegg for the leadership. Then there was the parliamentary party. Then there was a special conference. The responsibility was widely shared.
Andrew
Sorry to join the usual suspects but when Nick Clegg led the party into breaking the pledge I felt absolutely and completely kicked in the guts by him
As I have said, many times, the party was in a difficult situation. Had it insisted on keeping the pledge, the result would have been hugely damaging, big cuts in universities as there have been in local government and further education, and big cuts elsewhere to pay for the remaining straight subsidy. By agreeing to the tuition fees and loans system, but in return demanding full loans available to everyone and very generous repayment and write-off conditions, the Liberal Democrats saved the English university system.
Either way was not nice, but that is politics, if you aren’t in complete control you cannot get everything you want, and you have to work out what is the best compromise that the others will accept.
The problem was that Clegg undermined this defence, here as in much else, by painting the coalition as super-duper wonderful, and making out that everything it did was our ideal, what we’d have done if we alone were in government, rather than making it clear that it was a compromise far from our ideal, necessary because of the weakness of our position due to the disproportional electoral system (the one Labour is so keen on, and in the AV referendum argued is so good because if the way it props up the biggest party i.e. the Tories).
TCO 3rd Aug ’15 – 5:05pm
Highly significant that you know and can recite the names of a tiny minority of the mainstream Liberals who have opposed your ‘analysis’ over the past 15 months or so – particularly when you don’t even use your real name or even your real initials!
P.S. Please see my comment re OMOV!
You need to decide if you wish to discuss real future progress or simply carry on insisting that failure is success?
Richard Underhill
In the Liberal Democrats there w as the leader, a negotiating team including some strong characters, for instance Chris Huhne had stood against Nick Clegg for the leadership. Then there was the parliamentary party. Then there was a special conference. The responsibility was widely shared.
No.
The party’s democratic mechanisms did NOT agree to the coalition being presented as it was. Accepting the reality of the coalition (because the alternative WOULD have been another general election fought on the basis “get rid of the LibDems so this country can have a stable government” with the Old Pals Act doing what they did in the AV referendum) was NOT the same as going on and on about how super-duper wonderful it was and making out that we were equal to it in our contribution to the Tories, or even that it was 75% our way.
Clegg and the Cleggies deliberately mixed up two very different things – support for forming the coalition and support for the way Clegg and the Cleggies acted in the coalition. They used that to silence critics by claiming, quite falsely, that anyone who argued against them was opposed to the very idea of having a coalition and ths lacked a sense of realism.
Matthew Huntbach 3rd Aug ’15 – 10:34pm
I was not a conference delgate at the time of the special conference and therefore did not attend.
I am proud to stand as one of the usual suspects.
In June 2010 I resigned from the party, mostly because I disagreed totally with the party getting into bed with a Tory party every bit as nasty as the Conservative Party of the Thatcher era, but also because I knew what was going to happen. We had good standing in the country as a party of principle, of doing the right thing We now have a reputation for being the willing proxy of Cameron. I rejoined the party two years ago in order to fight for the party to embrace once again that liberal principle.
Simon Arnold.
Before the decision to sell out party principle, liberal principle, and go into coalition I heard a lot of waffle about us never again being open to the allegation of not having the experience of government and that this would enhance our electoral chances. I heard nothing, nothing, about how we were going to sacrifice our members, our councillors, our MPs and our good standing with the electorate in service to the country – further, I bitterly resent you or anyone else claiming this given that I was ridiculed on this site and elsewhere for stating that this would be the result of a coalition.
Stephen Hesketh
LDV have a responsibility to let this be the last in the long line of history-rewriting claptrap.
I disagree.
I think it will make us look ridiculous if we now push the line “everything we did in the coalition was wrong, and we could have done something very different”. People will just think “Well, that shows you are just incompetent, and how do we know if you ever get power again you won’t get it all wrong again?”.
Most of the attacks made against us were on the ridiculous basis that somehow 57 Liberal Democrat MPs could get whatever they wanted out of 307 Tory MPs. I don’t think we should now be going along and agreeing with those ridiculous attacks. However, it hardly helped our case that instead of putting this line in the general election, our then leader pushed the line that we should worry because 57 or so SNP MPs would be able to get whatever they wanted out of 307 Labour MPs. That is a classic example of what I mean by undermining the defence I was willing to give.
Richard Underhill
I was not a conference delegate at the time of the special conference and therefore did not attend.
I did not attend either.
However, from what I recall of the actual motion passed and general discussion at the time, the special conference did NOT agree for the Coalition to be promoted and used as Clegg and the Cleggies used it. The coalition was not a “marriage” (which implies a real love between the two and a wish for permanent union) and the conference did not vote for it to be such or promoted as such. Clegg SHOULD have angrily jumped on all those commentators who wrote it up as such and said “No, it is not that – it’s a compromise forced on us by the situation”. He didn’t, he kept silent, and so let this false belief grow. Even if he saw it that way, as leader it was his job to lead it as the party as a whole wanted it, not as he personally wanted. But he didn’t, he didn’t listen to the party as a whole. Instead he listened to advisers he had recruited like Richard Reeves, who has already expressed his opinion that the party should be destroyed by encouraging its activists to defect to Labour.
This article is too much for me, I’m afraid.
My problem with the Coalition and Nick Clegg is that he made no permanent changes. Stopping the Tories being Tories for five years is hardly anything to shout about. Without PR by STV (not a referendum but the real thing), an elected HoL or some real change to this party’s ghastly structure – what was the point?
Matthew Huntbach 3rd Aug ’15 – 11:18pm
Matthew, of course we must be able discuss issues surrounding those (often good) policies we introduced and supported during the coalition. In personal discussions I frequently point out the limitations we had due to the much larger Tory party. I don’t any issues with this.
The point I am making is that ongoing articles telling us how wonderful and successful a leader Nick Clegg was will only serve to continuously reopen a deep but scabbing over wound.
You only have to read the article and thread to see that the differences in analysis are so fundamentally different that it will probably be several years before the accepted perspective emerges.
Additionally we have five short years to re-establish ourselves in the public eye and in representative terms as a major force in British politics. Raking over an ex-leader’s personal reputation is an unnecessary distraction. All I am suggesting is that this particular red rag is now given a rest.
I am completely happy with your main point made at 11:28 last night. It would be interesting to know what members such as Mark Argent, ‘TCO’, Simon Arnold and Elizabeth Patterson think about it though.
In spite of what I have said above, if everyone is able to accept your point, I will be delighted.
Matthew Huntbach 3rd Aug ’15 – 11:18pm ………………Most of the attacks made against us were on the ridiculous basis that somehow 57 Liberal Democrat MPs could get whatever they wanted out of 307 Tory MPs. I don’t think we should now be going along and agreeing with those ridiculous attacks. However, it hardly helped our case that instead of putting this line in the general election, our then leader pushed the line that we should worry because 57 or so SNP MPs would be able to get whatever they wanted out of 307 Labour MPs. That is a classic example of what I mean by undermining the defence I was willing to give……………
Now it’s you re-writing history! I don’t remember anyone who expected to get “whatever they wanted”….I was against the coalition because I believed it would destroy us as an independent party but, when it happened, I expected that, when policies that we were against pre-2010 were implemented, it would be made clear that these were reluctant compromises of the inbalance in MPs.
Instead our leadership ( especially Alexander) seemed to relish being in the public eye supporting these policies. And it was not only the ‘great and good’; for instance, who came up with the “75% of coalition policies are LibDem” slogan?
As a leader Clegg has been an unmitigated disaster; threads like this are a sign that, for some, having a ‘nice man’ as leader outweighs the loss of hundreds of hardworking councillors, 9 MEPs and 49MPs….
oNot only our leaders a compromises were made, they would be policies that we had opposed pre-2010 were implementthe it
@Matthew Huntbach “One thing that makes it different for the Liberal Democrats is that there aren’t any Liberal Democrat safe seats. So if the activists are out of touch with ordinary people, the party doesn’t win seats and so disappears.”
I was asking if the activists were representative of the members, not of the populace in general. We won’t know this until we get OMOV.
@Stephen Hesketh “Highly significant that you know and can recite the names of a tiny minority of the mainstream Liberals who have opposed your ‘analysis’ over the past 15 months or so.”
The names given were 4 out of the 5 highlighted by one of the moderators of this site as “leading anti-Clegg posters”, responsible for some 18,000 posts between them. It should be noted also that frequency brings familiarity, as the phenomenon of learning by rote shows us – so it’s hardly surprising that I can recall those names given how often they appear on these pages.
“P.S. Please see my comment re OMOV!
You need to decide if you wish to discuss real future progress or simply carry on insisting that failure is success?”
I’m glad that you agree with me that OMOV is essential if the party is truly to reflect the wishes of its members. However, I think it’s important that the small, but prolific, body of commenters who provide a consistently negative view of the past have their views balanced with another point of view.
expats
Now it’s you re-writing history! I don’t remember anyone who expected to get “whatever they wanted”….
It’s the core of the argument that has been used against us. We were under constant attack for supporting policies that were not what we said we wanted in the 2010 manifesto, and the implication of those attacks was that we could have implemented those manifesto policies if we had wanted to, and it was us who had decided not to and instead support Tory policies.
That is why our vote crumbled in 2015, so we are told, because of all those Tory policies we supported. The only way that argument makes sense is to assume we could have got 307 Tory MPs to jump to our tune, and we are bad people because either we weren’t able or weren’t willing to do that.
The reality was that with 57 MPs to 307 Tory MPs and no alternative viable coalition that could be formed, and us being the likely biggest losers in an early general election (we were clearly already on the way down when the May 2010 general election happened and we got way below the predicted vote), we had almost no bargaining power. What our party achieved under the circumstances was about what I expected it could achieve. The resulting government was about what one would expect from a 5 to 1 Tory-LibDem mix. I don’t think we have anything to apologise for, and we should not make things worse for ourselves by giving into our attackers and making out we do.
However, I entirely agree with you that the way the situation was presented by our leadership was disastrous, and made the difficult circumstances a whole lot worse. As for who came up with the “75% of coalition policies are LibDem” slogan (it was not actually that, but easily misinterpreted as that), well if it wasn’t our current leader, I do remember him being at the forefront of promoting it. Which is why I was never a great fan of him, and voted for him in the leadership election only because the alternative was worse.
TCO
I was asking if the activists were representative of the members, not of the populace in general. We won’t know this until we get OMOV
Yes, and I was saying in my experience I don’t see a big difference in opinion and attitude between those of our members who are active campaigners and those who pay their fees but are not otherwise involved.
The idea that our problem is activists who don’t represent the opinion of members is something the Westminster Bubble pushed just on the assumption that we were like the Labour Party as it was in the 1980s. The people who pushed it had no idea what our party was actually like, and their pushing this line shows it.
The Labour Party has and had many safe seats, so people who were active in it could afford to direct their activity to other things such as internal activity to promote particular policies and just assume the votes would come their way anyway. So that did indeed lead to the danger of unrepresentative activists. The Liberal Democrats and Liberal Party before that are and were just not like that. In our party, being an activist means you devote your time to winning votes. That has very much had the Darwinian effect that where there are activists whose views are unrepresentative of the wider party membership let alone it voters, the party dies out.
Sara Scarlett
Without PR by STV (not a referendum but the real thing), an elected HoL or some real change to this party’s ghastly structure – what was the point?
So how do you suppose 57 Liberal Democrat MPs were going to achieve this in a Parliament of 650 MPs, 564 of whom were Labervative MPs and so firmly opposed to proportional representation?
This really is what I am getting at – there was this ridiculous assumption that somehow our 57 MPs could get whatever they wanted in the situation they found themselves in, so they were bad people for not doing so, or they had not told the truth and didn’t really want what they said they had wanted.
The point of the coalition was that Britain needs a government and that was the only stable one that could have been formed from the Parliament that was elected in May 2010. The policies of the coalition reflected its balance, and that is what politics is about, it is about representatives coming to a compromise which reflects the overall balance of their views. Quite obviously that means agreeing in the end to something which is not your ideal. That is democracy. Debating and coming to a conclusion is what we do in a democracy. It is better than people trying to push their own views by force and thinking they can impose them regardless of wider opinion so long as they can seize power.
Of course, what came out of the coalition was greatly affected by the distortion in party balance given by our electoral system. Had the two parties in the coalition had a number of MPs reflecting their share of the vote, it would have been very different, three to two Tory MPs to LibDem MPs rather than five to one. This is what we should have made clear at the start. The big mistake was not to do so, and give the impression we had an equal say when we didn’t.
Then we had that referendum where Labour and Tory MPs joined together to say what a good thing that distortion is, and for some strange reason people voted to support them in that in order to express their disgust at the effects of that distortion. As I said, voting “No” in the referendum to “punish the LibDems” was rather like kicking the cat in order to show your opposition to cruelty to animals.
I very much enjoyed reading this, Mark. Generosity of spirit is something I have been brought up to admire and emulate. I agree with everything you say and think it is vital that we keep on saying it.
@Matthew Huntbach “That has very much had the Darwinian effect that where there are activists whose views are unrepresentative of the wider party membership let alone it voters, the party dies out.”
But that presupposes that all voters in all constituencies vote in the same way for the same reasons, which is patently incorrect. In my experience party activists in Tory-held seats tend to be anti-Tory and in Labour-held seats are anti-Labour and their viewpoints are coloured accordingly.
Mathew Huntbach said
“So how do you suppose 57 Liberal Democrat MPs were going to achieve this in a Parliament of 650 MPs, 564 of whom were Labervative MPs and so firmly opposed to proportional representation?
This really is what I am getting at – there was this ridiculous assumption that somehow our 57 MPs could get whatever they wanted in the situation they found themselves in, so they were bad people for not doing so, or they had not told the truth and didn’t really want what they said they had wanted.”
We had an agreement to hold a referendum on AV – that the referendum was to have been about STV should have been a red line in the agreement. But then would it have mattered anyway when we had a red line on reform of the HoL and we allowed our partners to renege on it? What we should have done is abstain as a party on all bills until the Tories brought back the reform bill.
57 MPs had the ability to stop Cameron dead, they chose not to! Our leadership chose not to!!
@ASL “57 MPs had the ability to stop Cameron dead”
Not if Labour voted with the Conservatives.
@Jean Evans – I was brought up to admire honesty, so I would be interested in your views on precisely why the party should carry on saying this sort of thing and how you think it will help us to win back public support. It seems to me that there is a very real danger of Clegg’s continuing supporters adopting the position of the remaining Thatcherites in the Tory Party or the remaining Blairites in the Labour Party and so doing our chances of recovery very real damage.
“So how do you suppose 57 Liberal Democrat MPs were going to achieve this in a Parliament of 650 MPs, 564 of whom were Labervative MPs and so firmly opposed to proportional representation?”
By not going into Coalition with the Tories unless this was on the table. The Coalition was a wasted opportunity. The LibDems had a greter position of power in 2010 than they realised. It’s over now. Go home.
“there was this ridiculous assumption that somehow our 57 MPs could get whatever they wanted in the situation they found themselves in, so they were bad people for not doing so, or they had not told the truth and didn’t really want what they said they had wanted.”
They’re not bad people but they’re certainly not effective diplomacists guided by as good and as wise a leader as this article makes out.
It is said that you can learn more from one thing that goes wrong than from ten things that go right. With that in mind and particularly the failed AV Referendum in 2012, I really feel it would be good for all if Nick Clegg took a leading role going forward on constitutional reform. We presently have all leading GB political parties except the CONS (we should call them CONS rather than Tories) supporting a Constitutional Convention, particularly regarding EVEL related matters. My reason for encouraging a new role for Nick is because I see constitutional reform as absolutely central to raising the fortunes of the Lib Dems and all liberal minded people in the UK Union. I note that several former CON Party leaders have been willing to play major supporting roles for a new leader. So come on Nick – you are relatively young, so finish off licking your wounds and get involved again, supporting Tim, please.
Gerry M4th Aug ’15 – 12:57pm
Gerry, that requires the all important learning step. If his supporters are unwilling to even accept that mistakes were made (I cite the drip drip of ‘what a great job we did in coalition’ posts) can we really assume Nick Clegg has?
If we are serious about a constitutional convention and achieving reform we are going to have to work with other parties including Labour. Nick Clegg would not be the right person to lead us in discussions with them, in part because it would involve them forgiving the man who made Gordon Brown resigning as PM a condition of Lib Dem cooperation in the aftermath of the 2010 GE.
NC had his chances with our party and the electorate and blew them both. I do not say this with any glee as it was he who enthused me to become actively involved again in 2010. I only finally withdrew my support for the coalition in 2014 on the basis of the then ever-growing evidence.
I do still have some warm feelings for Nick Clegg, and feel history will judge him sympathetically, although not as a success (which is basically what has happened with Ramsay Macdonald, if you aren’t a Labour loyallist).
But there is a lot of sound commonsense in what Stephen Hesketh says: “Every time such a story appears it brings up old differences and repolarises opinion …. Whichever side of the debate we find ourselves we must … simply agree to differ and move on for the sake of Liberal values and our party.”
And also in what Sarah Scarlett says here: “My problem with the Coalition and Nick Clegg is that he made no permanent changes. Stopping the Tories being Tories for five years is hardly anything to shout about. ”
What can be said for Clegg is that he is the first third party leader in British history to lead his party into a peacetime coalition and see the party emerge from that coalition without a split or mass defections. I’m not sure whether he, the party or the massive electoral shaming and MP-ejection of this year should take the credit for that, though.
But as Stephen says, there is a choice: we can re-fight the period 2010 to 2015 endlessly on here (much as Labour are doing), or we can work out what we need to do to do what Sarah says and change things.
Excellent post Mark. I absolutely agree with everything you said
David Raw – “The fact he lasted so long says more about the innate decency and kindness of colleagues in the Party rather than on hard headed realism.”
Right.
A Social Liberal (with Sara Scarlett saying something similar)
We had an agreement to hold a referendum on AV – that the referendum was to have been about STV should have been a red line in the agreement. But then would it have mattered anyway when we had a red line on reform of the HoL and we allowed our partners to renege on it? What we should have done is abstain as a party on all bills until the Tories brought back the reform bill.
To us, these things are very important. To most people, and almost everyone who is not a political wonk (i.e. about 99% of the population), they are not. This would have been seen as self-indulgence, as the Liberal Democrats grinding the country to a halt by denying it a stable government, and all for the sake of some issue which no-one else cares about, and the LibDems (as it would be painted) only care about because it puts more power into their grubby little hands.
I’m sorry, I’m a passionate supporter of STV and have been since I was a teenager, but I have learnt the hard way that most other people don’t share my passion and don’t understand it.
It is quite clear to me that had the Liberal Democrats tried anything like this, Labour and the Conservatives, with the support of the right-wing press, would have united in opposition against it, as they did with the AV referendum, and called for another general election to get rid of us on the grounds “these people only care for themselves, and want to wreck the country for some self-indulgent thing, their very existence makes this country ungovernable, so get rid of them”.
We do actually need to sell the case for STV, and Clegg even failed at that by ignoring the obvious argument raised for it: the disproportionate share of seats between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives caused by the distortions of the current electoral system. Why did he never mention that? Why did he not say how that limited our power and how it meant the government was far too skewed towards the Conservatives than it should have been? By pushing the line that we were almost equal in power to the Tories in the Coalition, he undermined us there as well.
(Matt Bristol)
What can be said for Clegg is that he is the first third party leader in British history to lead his party into a peacetime coalition and see the party emerge from that coalition without a split or mass defections.
No, but the equivalent happened with the drip-drip-drip dropping out of support and activists. It might have been better had there been a dramatic standing up to him rather than people dropping out slowly, each reaching their own line where they could not continue, but at no point so many that they were willing to stand together against what was happening rather than quietly drop out.
TCO
In my experience party activists in Tory-held seats tend to be anti-Tory and in Labour-held seats are anti-Labour and their viewpoints are coloured accordingly.
I have worked for the Liberal Democrats and Liberal Party before that in both strong Tory areas and strong Labour areas, and have found in both cases it’s much the same sort of people with much the same general principles. Once again, I think you are going on what the Westminster Bubble likes to say about us rather than reality.
A thoroughly decent and fair analysis Mark. Those who believe everything can be achieved, in a national government from a position of being a minority, without any sacrifices, compromises or mistakes have, I suspect, little experience of the reality of power and hold the notion of coalition in contempt. In my view that is an incongruous and selfish position for a LibDem to adopt when dealing with our flawed system and its huge democratic deficit.
Matthew Huntbach 3rd Aug ’15 – 11:28pm
Part of what happened is that in government we did not get the “Short money” which was designed for different circumstances, so that Nick Clegg needed to spend time fund-raising when he was also new to the job of DPM.
A Social Liberal
57 MPs had the ability to stop Cameron dead, they chose not to! Our leadership chose not to!!
And there we go, there is my answer to “expats” when s/he claimed “I don’t remember anyone who expected to get “whatever they wanted”. Here is “A Social Liberal” saying just that.
Sorry, but it just doesn’t work that way. Look across the world, and you don’t see small parties which hold the balance able to get whatever they want.
The small parties which are most successful in this are those who have limited aims which are not in conflict with those of the big parties, so they can easily be bought off, and also who have strong committed supporters who will always vote for them, so they won’t go away when the party supports other things. Obvious examples are the Israeli religious parties (bought off by concessions to the religious orthodox) and the Ulster Unionists (bought off by concessions to Northern Ireland, and the knowledge that their supporters are never going to defect to the Republicans). We are not like that, we are the opposite of that.
I’m sorry, but this line that we could have got whatever we wanted out of the coalition and did not (which must mean because we were bad people or weak people) is just so HUGELY DAMAGING to us. So, please, please, please, please, don’t carry on damaging us by pushing it.
@Matthew Huntbach “I have worked for the Liberal Democrats and Liberal Party before that in both strong Tory areas and strong Labour areas, and have found in both cases it’s much the same sort of people with much the same general principles. Once again, I think you are going on what the Westminster Bubble likes to say about us rather than reality.”
Matthew, I can’t square this with the people I’ve met who in Tory-controlled areas were happy to work with Labour seeing them as fellow leftist anti-Tories, with those in Labour-controlled areas who loathed and despised the Labour Party.
Richard Underhill 4th Aug ’15 – 3:46pm
“….. in government we did not get the “Short money” which was designed for different circumstances, so that Nick Clegg needed to spend time fund-raising …”
Richard,
This is a daft excuse which I am sure if you think it through you will agree does not stand up because —
1— As DPM with special personal responsibility for Constitutional Reform Clegg could have changed the allocation rules.
2— The funding of political parties was in the Coalition Programme for Government, which promised – “…reforming party funding in order to remove big money from politics.”
3— Inviting rich potential donors to Chevening did not actually take up that much of the DPM’s time
4—Cameron probably devoted far more time and effort to fund-raising yet that did not stop him getting most of what he wanted out of the Coalition, being PM and going on to campaign almost daily in Liberal Democrat seats during the election and winning virtually every one that he campaigned in.
Re: Stephen Hesketh 4th Aug ’15 – 1:41pm AND Gerry M 4th Aug ’15 – 12:57pm
Stephen, IF we (Lib Dems) concentrate on moving forward and learning lessons it isn’t actually essential for NC or his supporters to accept that mistakes were made; it only needs Tim Farron and his team to agree that constitutional reform should be front and centre of any new way forward strategy. However, for any such strategy to be credible on constitutional reform it MUST reflect the relevant lessons learnt by NC and his former team. Under the Coalition, NC got the chance in 2012 to convince the country to support electoral reform (as a first step to constitutional reform) and the country rejected it. We currently have unworkable and chaotic CON proposals regarding EVEL and we now appear to have fairly strong support about the need for constitutional reform amongst all GB parties other than the CONS. So how best should we go forward? The first thing is to frame the issues at the heart of the current opportunity and then ask the question that IF NC had his time again what would he do differently.
Lots of senior Lib Dem people are capable of taking part in a relevant Root Cause Analysis (RCA) exercise to get to the bottom of what, in hindsight, should or would now be done differently and very preferably NC should be involved. RCA is not rocket science and simply summarised it involves asking ‘why?’ five times on each related issue. For example, NC might say: we trusted the CONS too much to honour what they agreed to do on electoral reform. So the first ‘why?’ would be: why did you (NC) trust the CONS to honour what they agreed to do? Then whatever the answer(s) you ask the question ‘why?’ again and again, five times. At the end of this process you can usually thoroughly understand what went wrong.
I agree with other views about avoiding posting comments that repolarise opinions and camps because it seems fruitless. Surely we need to concentrate on moving forward in a liberal (tolerant, pluralistic, whatever) way and the first steps are to objectively recognise where we are now, where we want to go and what the constraints are between these two positions. Only then can we start to plot a realistic course (strategy) between the two positions, which hopefully will win the support of the electorate.
Nick Clegg wisely kept his head down after the election.
Shifting the party to the neo-classical liberal right with Orange Book nostrums lost us many activists and much support – which undermined his negotiating hand in the Coalition. Countless hard working Councillors took the hit. A pale blue version of ‘austerity lite’ was not acceptable to many activists, membership declined ………… The verdict ? The electorate has spoken….especially in the West Country and Scotland.
It’s time to move on – don’t forget the lessons – but start rebuilding a proper Liberal radical future.
Really Lib Dems? Just when supporters are starting to flock back to the Party, you think it is a good idea to print this eulogy to the very person who drove tens of thousands of voters away from the Party and pretty well destroyed the Party for five years of a ‘love-in’ with David Cameron? It’s time to be very quiet about Clegg. He was not a good or a wise leader and he was neither good for the Party nor good for the country. He made the Lib Dems toxic and de-toxified the Tories thus ensuring their majority in 2015 and the destruction of the Lib Dems.
Richard Underhill
You say that “The responsibility was widely shared.” However as i pointed out earlier in this thread it wasn’t. Specifically I said
That is why I don’t accept the “it was a collective failure of the party” line of Paul Barker and others. The coalition deal was done and dusted when it went to the Special Conference, Nick had agreed and Cameron has gone to Buck Pal. There was no way the party as a whole could turn down the agreement. That would have been immediate suicide. Instead we had the slow torture of death by a thousand mistakes.
I really don’t think the “It’s everyone’s fault” has any foundation in fact whatsoever. Do you really think Conference had the slightest influence over the process or was it just the “rubber stamp.”
David Evans 4th Aug ’15 – 7:30pm I was not at the special conference because I was not an elected representative at that time and they initially said that non-voting members would not be allowed to attend.
On your timing “Cameron has gone to Buck Pal.” which means Gordon Brown had resigned as PM and Cameron was in position to lead a minority government.
I would compare it with the Special Assembly of the Liberal Party, which I did attend in Blackpool. That could have gone either way. Nancy Seear said to me that she could have made a speech either way. It came down to a pledge by the outgoing leader, David Steel, that “The new party will be a Liberal party, or I would be voting against merger”. He then held up his voting card in favour of the resolution.
It seems likely to me that delegates voted to support the leader, in both cases, but “No Way” is too strong. That would make the special conference an irrelevance and the party’s prized democracy a piece of history.
There is a great danger of hindsight here. At the time people were somewhat dazed by what had happened, Paddy Ashdown had negotiated with Labour and said his piece, but Nick Clegg’s alleged quote to Gordon brown “You lot are knackered” is probably justified, being in government does wear people down.
The choices included a minority Tory government and a minority Lib-Lab coalition, with, possibly, some support from 3-5 other MPs and with one seat undecided for a month because a candidate had died.
people who think we are nearr oblivion with 8 mps and all these members has short memories of liberal parties past.
as for the neo classicak right-no idea whats meant by that-nick wrote a chapter in the ornage book-he wasnt party leader when he wrote it….but his chapter wasnt right woing..it was a positive reformist case for eu membership…the exact cas lots of you will be making when the referendum comes-are you all on the neo-classical right as well?
david thrope 4th Aug ’15 – 9:05pm
“people who think we are nearr oblivion with 8 mps and all these members has short memories of liberal parties past.”
What makes you think that the Party won’t be reduced further from 8 MPs ? There is nothing to suggest that the Party has reached rock bottom yet. And it’s not a fair comparison to recall “liberal parties past”. Not one of those was tainted by passing highly illiberal laws. No, you can place a fairly safe bet that Clegg is a goner in 2020 without all those Tory votes propping him up and I’m sure he won’t be the only loss.
Richard, I suggest you read the following for m the BBC Website dated Wednesday, 12 May 2010. It is one of many.
David Cameron is UK’s new prime minister
David Cameron gave his first speech as prime minister outside 10 Downing Street
Conservative leader David Cameron has become the UK’s new prime minister after the resignation of Gordon Brown.
Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg will be his deputy after they agreed to the UK’s first coalition government in 70 years.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/election_2010/8675265.stm
Conference rubber stamped it on May 16th.
It’s not hindsight, it is fact. The party was bounced into it, possibly willingly on the part of some, definitely believing Nick would stand up to Cameron in government on the part of many, but bounced nonetheless. Conference only had only two options, accept or reject. There was never a “Nick, Go back and negotiate harder” option.
Matthew Huntbach 4th Aug ’15 – 3:52pm…………….A Social Liberal….. 57 MPs had the ability to stop Cameron dead, they chose not to! Our leadership chose not to!!
And there we go, there is my answer to “expats” when s/he claimed “I don’t remember anyone who expected to get “whatever they wanted”. Here is “A Social Liberal” saying just that…..
He’s not saying that! He’s saying that we had the ability to stop legislation….
Try this scenario, The Tory manifest specifically promised “No top-down reorganisation of the NHS”…On that issue,in discussion, Clegg should have said, “No!”…Would the Tories have made a major public issue of it with all it’s ramifications? I very much doubt it…Landsley’s proposal would not have seen the light of day….
Bedroom Tax and Secret courts could/should have been handled the same way….
Matthew and TCO:
About the outlook of activists in Tory facing and Labour facing seats. I think you are both right. In general, they are (obviously) similar in that activists do tend to be Liberals. However we have often built up support where there has been years of complacency from either the Tories or Labour and this does colour the outlook.
Regaining these seats is problematic since our recent occupancy means that we have lost the extra advantage of the previous history of complacency. Moreover a Corbyn win (I am still thinking that he might not manage it), will make it harder for us to present a distinctive radical outlook and may force us into the precarious shifting sands of the centre ground.
@Martin ” Moreover a Corbyn win (I am still thinking that he might not manage it), will make it harder for us to present a distinctive radical outlook and may force us into the precarious shifting sands of the centre ground.”
I disagree. Corbyn is an old-fashioned socialist and if he steers the Labour Party in that direction then he will be abandoning the part-Liberal agenda that was a feature of Labour in the Blair years. The adoption of socialist policies by Labour will free us up to put forward a distinctly Liberal agenda.
Our problems as a party have come from both Labour and the Tories cherry-picking bits of Liberalism to wrap up their authoritarian instincts in an attractive package.
@Martin – take a look at Ed Fordham’s piece on Jeremy Corbyn which reinforces my contention about a difference in outlook between Labour and Tory-facing Lib Dems.
TCO
Matthew, I can’t square this with the people I’ve met who in Tory-controlled areas were happy to work with Labour seeing them as fellow leftist anti-Tories, with those in Labour-controlled areas who loathed and despised the Labour Party
This suggests you’ve never been involved in practical politics. Of course the Labour Party are much more tolerable in places where they’re a small minority than they are in places where they are an almost unchallenged power. The same applies to the Tories. Also in practical politics, yes, one has to work with people with whom one disagrees. Again, this is basic democracy, it’s about people of different views coming to a compromise. Isn’t that what happened in the Coalition?
I have to say though, that when I was working in a Tory-dominated area, it tended to be us in competition with Labour as to who would come out as the main opponents to the Tories, and we and Labour actually spent a lot of time attacking each other in that basis, as we were in contest for the most obvious non-Tory seats. Why is Hove now the one Labour-held seat in south-east England outside London? Because the LibDems lost that battle and Labour won. Why is almost everywhere else in southern England Tory-held? Because where the LibDems had won, Labour fought back in 2015, thus handing the seats back to the Tories.
we were in contest for the most obvious non-Tory seats
To clarify, I mean “wards” here.
Hove really was nowhere near as “true blue Tory” as many people imagined, but people saw it electing Tory MPs and Tory councillors and thought it was. But actually a lot of the Labour and LibDem effort was out into fighting each other. When the LibDems lost out, Labour swiftly moved ahead and won control of the borough (before it merged with Brighton) and won the constituency at Parliamentary level.
I don’t think this is a lesson for the whole of south-east England, as I think there are plenty of constituencies which don’t have the level of poverty and deprivation that Hove had, and so wouldn’t so easily go Labour, so it’s still the LibDems who can emerge there as the main contenders to the Tories. However, one lesson that can be learnt is that the level of real support for the Tories in the south may be a lot lower than the Westminster Bubble supposes. And so when the Bubble says “Oooh, we need to be more like the Tories to win in those places”, they are wrong.
TCO
I disagree. Corbyn is an old-fashioned socialist and if he steers the Labour Party in that direction then he will be abandoning the part-Liberal agenda that was a feature of Labour in the Blair years.
Is he going to come out against gay marriage? Or support tighter restrictions on immigration? Or oppose free speech? Is he going to support enslavement by poverty, ignorance or conformity? Or when you say “part-Liberal” here do you actually mean “part-Thatcherite”?
expats
Try this scenario, The Tory manifest specifically promised “No top-down reorganisation of the NHS”…On that issue,in discussion, Clegg should have said, “No!”
Yes, I agree, and have said so myself.
My line always was that we should have made sure the Coalition had a get-out clause, and used it when appropriate.
Given that the Coalition agreement had “No top-down reorganisation of the NHS” as a major point, and that is what we as a party agreed to, yes, I do think this is the issue where we should have put our foot down. Also, unlike constitutional reform, this is an issue where if we had stood more firm I think we would have got a lot of public sympathy for doing so.
I attended as a delegate the Liberal Democrat conference in Gateshead where there was a vote on this topic. Seeing how Clegg and the Cleggies reacted to that was a key factor in pushing me out of actively campaigning for the party.
@Matthew Huntbach “Or when you say “part-Liberal” here do you actually mean “part-Thatcherite”?”
No, I mean wholly socialist (in Corbyn’s case). As in the state owning the means of production and directing top-down one-size-fits-all authoritarian solutions.
TCO: about
I disagree. Corbyn is an old-fashioned socialist and if he steers the Labour Party in that direction then he will be abandoning the part-Liberal agenda
You are right, we will certainly see the difference. Corbyn would be centralising and often authoritarian, but to a less attentive general public, rather than to dedicated politicos, these things, particularly when in opposition, would not be so evident: it would look more like a bidding process in who criticises the Tories more. The Tories meanwhile would be all too keen to paint all the antis as one and the same.
TCO 5th Aug ’15 – 12:13pm ………………………No, I mean wholly socialist (in Corbyn’s case). As in the state owning the means of production and directing top-down one-size-fits-all authoritarian solutions………..
Where has he said that (apart from in the minds of those who oppose his views) His plans for Rail and Utilities are supported by a large proportion of the UK, he is anti-Trident (as are/were we). In fact, most of his views would be considered reasonable by the Liberal party I once knew…
TCO
No, I mean wholly socialist (in Corbyn’s case). As in the state owning the means of production and directing top-down one-size-fits-all authoritarian solutions
Well, here is a classic example of the free-market fanatics’ illiberal way of thinking. You just cannot accept anyone who challenges your assumptions. Your think everything has to go your way. Like the socialists of old, you think your way is inevitable, and therefore it has to be accepted without discussion and treated as if it is “progress” that cannot be reversed. So anyone who even dares to question your assumptions is written off as mad and bad. You are opposed to free speech and free political discussion, the only discussion you permit is one which is about slight variations of what you assume to be unchallengeable truth rather than mere opinion.
As “expats” puts it, whether the railways or energy and water companies are state owned or private owned is NOT in my opinion an issue of liberalism, and to write off someone who proposes returning them to state ownership in the way you do is a disgrace. In the 19th century William Gladstone supported nationalisation of the railways, and Joseph Chamberlain made his name by taking gas and water provision into state ownership in Birmingham – far from being illiberal, this was seen as the core of what the Liberal Party was about then.
There is, of course, quite correctly, a debate about the best balance between state and private control of things, and an aspect of liberalism would be resistance to the idea that state control of some service is always the best way to make it freely available in the best form to all. However, to me the true liberal line is to be pragmatic on these things, and as Gladstone and Chamberlain recognised, accept that the greater democratic control through the state of some services may be the way to enhance general freedom.
We have for too long, certainly since Blair took over the Labour Party, had a closing down of that debate, a removal of peoples’ ability to choose what they think is best. I don’t agree with all Corbyn says, but I am pleased to see that his success has opened up the debate again, and pulled politics away from the effective one-party state system we were moving towards (nominally multi-party, but all parties just standing for just variants of the one ideology).
Socialism, is, Illiberal. It crushed individuality. It gives the ways and means of production, to a tiny authoritarian cabal, that will control everything. The worker. The individual, won’t own anything. A better way is surely a Liberal, Federal, Mutualist society. That will mean we co-operate and respect one another, work together as individuals for the good of all people. Power, spread equally, among the people. This, is, the only way forward. Corbyn, will form an axis of nonsense, with nationalist, to gain power and takeway more Liberty. Whatever, you like to call Corbyn’s vision? it has always failed, caused division and death. Thank God, for Nick Clegg and Tim Farron. If you want Corbyn that badly, then maybe a move to labour, maybe best. Then Liberals, can do, what Liberals are meant to do; Cheering on Corbyn, isn’t one of them.
The ‘State’ isn’t democratic. It takes away Liberty, even down to the smallest measure of freedom. It gives you bits of paper, telling you what you are now allowed to do. What business, of , the state is it what anyone does?, unless they break laws, that have existed from the earliest history of man. Liberty and, the Free Market, is like water, it is fluid, you cannot stop it, it will always find its own level. If you try to contain it, or collectivism, within a wall…… it fight its way out. We saw this when, the Berlin wall fell down.
We pay far too much tax, via indirect taxation via 1001 various taxes. We don’t get tens of thousands, when we are born, so why should, the state, get tens of thousands of pounds, when we die?
We have seen the damage Labour have done to this country since 1945, they gave us a half baked pretend Stalin, blueprint, that destroyed this country.
Has Conservatism worked? No
Has Labour worked? No
Has SNP worked? No.
So why support those, that will support the others, in all cases?
@Simon Arnold
The only logical conclusion from your comments is that you think we need to give anarchism a go.
Steve.
That isn’t what I am saying. If you thought that, then you are wrong.
It is very worrying , that this forum. Is anti-Clegg, anti-Farron. But seems to support Corbyn. Thank goodness, this is a fringe group forum, and, not, the whole party.
I support Farron, I thought, Clegg, did the best that he could at the time. Steering to The Right or Left, economically isn’t the answer. Liberal Democracy, is the route. Time we all got on board and head there. Because, if, we can’t all support the party, while seeming to be having ‘romantic’ views about Labour and Corbyn. Then, the party is in danger.
Many positive policies were born, 2010-2015, we should rejoice what was done. Student fees, managed to get more poorer people into university, that increased equality. The idea, that everything should be free, or somebody else, should pay for it, means giving up Liberty. As, I said, recently ownership, means you control it, it doesn’t control you.
Simon,
Well, I am glad you like Tim Farron! So do I!
What Corbyn has to say about mutualism:
“I believe in public ownership, but I have never favoured the remote nationalised model that prevailed in the post-war era. Like a majority of the population and a majority of even Tory voters, I want the railways back in public ownership. But public control should mean just that, not simply state control: so we should have passengers, rail workers and government too, co-operatively running the railways to ensure they are run in our interests and not for private profit.
This model should replace both the old Labour model of topdown operation by central diktat and Tories favoured model of unaccountable privatised operators running our public services for their own ends.”
from http://www.thenews.coop/96639/news/co-operatives/labour-leader-candidates-debate-co-operation/
I am not getting involved in the Corbyn = Saviour vs Corbyn = Antichrist debate but it is only fair to attribute actual rather than imagined views to him…
Simon Arnold
It is very worrying , that this forum. Is anti-Clegg, anti-Farron. But seems to support Corbyn. Thank goodness, this is a fringe group forum, and, not, the whole party.
I welcome the way in which the rise of Corbyn has opened up debate and if he is successful will give a wider political choice at election time. I did not like the way in which Clegg and the Cleggies seemed to be about closing down debate, giving a narrower political choice, and moving us to a situation where all three major parties stood for a version of the ideology we used to call “Thatcherism”.
That does not mean I agree with Corbyn in terms of his actual policy preferences and attitude towards politics.
Andrew (quoting Jeremy Corbyn)
so we should have passengers, rail workers and government too, co-operatively running the railways to ensure they are run in our interests and not for private profit.
However, this sort of thing USED to be what the Liberal Party stood for. When I joined the Liberal Party, this sort of thing used to be at the core of what we stood for. Tories were about running things through big business, Labour about running things through a centralised state, and we were about running things through decentralised co-operatives.
Sure, we were sometimes a little unrealistic about it, and motivated by an idealism that could be questioned if it ever did come to practical implementation. But doesn’t the same apply to those energetically pushing their own lines, such as those who believe running things through cash markets is the answer to everything? Why are the market extremist accepted as a legitimate and valuable component of the Conservative and now the Liberal Democrat parties, while someone who is a little bit too idealistic about a socialist approach is written off as hugely damaging and treated as if he has no right even to express his opinion and seek to push his party that way?
When we look at an argument presented at length by someone of whom we know little, we do well to both look at the substance of the argument and the antecedents of the author.
I note that Mark Argent’s candidacy in North West Leicestershire at the General Election saw a reduction of over 75 per cent in the Lib Dem vote in that constituency which almost matches (but stil doesn’t) the decline in the parliamentary and other representation of the Liberal Democrats under six years of Nick Clegg’s leadership.
Nick Clegg appears to me to be a very nice man, a fine father, an able linguist and someone who was passable in at least some of his government roles. As a leader of a political party, however, the statistics stand up and speak for themselves, declaring his record to be poorer than poor. Others have debated with me elsewhere as to whether there are one or two other leaders of ‘western’ mainstream political parties who have managed to preside over such a substantial demise or decline in their party’s electoral fortunes in the past century or so. It is rather depressing that the only defence to this objective criticism of Nick Clegg’s performance in this role has been for some to say: “he may have been terrible but there are possibly a couple of others who might have done just as poorly.”
Those of us who have battled to hold on and even improve our electoral fortunes from a previously-good position during the Clegg years might maybe be grateful to Nick for forcing us to hone up our electoral swords to the razor sharpness needed to survive or even prosper in such a dreadful environment. That could never be any compensation for the dramatic damage done to the Party as a whole through a series of entirely predictable (and predicted) errors.
Can we please have no more of this reel-tape of denial and start looking forward to re-building and developing Liberal Democracy in this country from the ashes which we have had bequeathed to us?
Tony Dawson
Nick Clegg appears to me to be a very nice man, a fine father, an able linguist and someone who was passable in at least some of his government roles. As a leader of a political party, however, the statistics stand up and speak for themselves, declaring his record to be poorer than poor.
I don’t think you can blame it all on Nick Clegg. I think that we’d have been severely damaged by the post-election Parliament in 2010 whoever was leading us. If you look across the world, small parties that go into coalition in situations where coalitions aren’t the norm and the small party hasn’t been in one before almost always end up in the small party being severely damaged. However, I’m quite certain that had we not gone into the coalition, Labour and Conservative would have united to see us destroyed in another general election held a few months later with them fighting it under the message “The existence of the Liberal Democrats makes this country impossible to govern, get rid of them so we can have a stable government”. We saw a taste of that in how Labour and Conservative worked together in the AV referendum.
The underlying problem is that people tend to have unrealistic assumptions about what a small party can achieve in coalition. In reality we had almost no negotiating power, so all we really could do was swing things our way when the Tory Party was fairly evenly split. However, it was portrayed as if somehow we had complete control of everything, so everything that government did was because that was what we really wanted.
It did not help that Clegg played almost every aspect of the situation wrong, in every way in which predictable but unfair attacks would be made on us, he turned round and said and did things which ensured those attacks would hit harder and be more damaging. Right to the end he did this, even up to pushing the argument that we should be really scared of the SNP, because if it ended up with, say 57 seats, to Labour having, say 307 seats, it could get whatever it wanted. Rather obviously not a good message to put when our survival depended on us getting the opposite message across in regards to our role in the Coalition.
I agree it is unfair to blame it all on Nick, but when people were standing up and saying things needed to change, he stood foursquare and made it clear that the entire approach was his (“grown up politics” etc) and if people wanted to change things they would have to change him. People were rolled out to belittle those who said as much – remember the Lib Dem Friends of Cake being used to belittle Lib Dems for change? In effect he was saying split the party if you want, but I will not stand down. Most people thought that it would be best to hunker down and pray for a fair wind in 2015. Many of them now realise that they were disastrously wrong, but we can’t go back. We can only change for the future.
@Matthew Huntbach :
“I don’t think you can blame it all on Nick Clegg.”
No, nor do I. There was bound to be a downside to the coalition alone, although no one can really say what the inevitable scale of this would be: the question is whether the leader, parliamentary party and national executive were prepared to do what they could to (a) minimise the damage and (b) possibly even reverse it to a greater or lesser extent.
The evidence is that far from recoginsing and addressing these issues, Nick Clegg and a significant part of the Parliamentary Party were in complete denial. In addition for taking major responsibility for the failure of leadership in these circumstances, Nick Clegg was also an iconic figure of derision and to some extent hatred for which his behaviour while in office often threw kerosine onto the flames.
The electoral fortunes of Liberal Democrats in these dire circumstances depend on local circumstances and local skills which make it impossible to generalise comprehensively. It is, though, I believe fair to say that (a) there would be a significant different in Lib Dem fortunes with only a relatively small variation in national support levels and (b) there is a multiplier effect in certain areas of ill fortune without a centrally-led turnaround. Even holding on to one or two council seats in Manchester, for example, might have given hope which might have helped to stem the tide in successive years.
I think Nick Clegg achieved some great things in Government and will be credited for them when people look back. Yes he made some mistakes. He is a human being after all. No one is perfect. To those haters who insist on kicking him – do you really think he is solely responsible for some of the things you complain about? Sorry, but no one man is that powerful, not even the Prime Minister.
I have to agree with the majority of Mark’s letter. I think more and more people are beginning to realise how strong we were in government and what Nick was up against in dealing with the Tories. It took a heartbreaking resignation speech to make 20,000 people wake up and see exactly what had been going on for the past five years. Where were they when we needed them?
I think history will treat Nick kindly. I’m so sorry he had to sacrifice his own career to get those liberal policies through government, amid backlash from the public and even his own party. Give him a break.
@Tracy
“I think Nick Clegg achieved some great things in Government and will be credited for them when people look back.
You really do not seem to get it. Such achievements as Nick made in government are more than matched by profound failures but neither of these reflect in the least upon the issue of leadership and long-term responsibility to both our Party and the country. Unless you adress these realities, you will remain part of the problem, not the solution. The use of perjorative and OTT words/phrases such as ‘haters’ also does you no service. Hatred is an emotion to be reserved for serious nasties, not to be wasted upon politicians, either disastrous or mediocre.
Yes he made some mistakes. He is a human being after all. No one is perfect. To those haters who insist on kicking him – do you really think he is solely responsible for some of the things you complain about? Sorry, but no one man is that powerful, not even the Prime Minister.
I have to agree with the majority of Mark’s letter.