London loves Business reports Nick Clegg’s recent comments on UKIP.
I think the view represented by UKIP, large parts of the Conservative Party and Paul Sykes is a betrayal of the national interest and an unpatriotic approach because it would leave many people poorer, it would leave us weaker as a country and it would throw many people out of work, and I can’t possibly see why anyone thinks that that is something that in any way represents the long-term national interest.
On the substantive point, he’s absolutely right. Leaving the EU would isolate us, cost jobs, lose us access to a massive and easily accessible market for our products. No wonder the CBI says that staying in the EU is “overwhelmingly best” for business.
Where I take issue with Nick is the use of the word unpatriotic. It’s not necessary. It’s also not helpful to us in Scotland when we’re trying to get that sort of language out of politics. Scottish Secretary Alistair Carmichael said just last week;
Let me be clear: You are not a better Scot if you support independence. Nor are you better if you don’t.
Being a part of the UK doesn’t undermine our Scottishness – our identity as Scots is not and never has been at threat.
This is not a debate about patriotism – It is a debate about our constitution and about whether or not we should continue to work togetheracross the United Kingdom, or whether we should go it alone.
On one hand we have nationalists, and not just any random nationalists, but elected representatives and even the First Minister calling Alistair a “supposed Scot” or saying that the case against independence is the case against Scotland. On the other, Better Together has described itself as the patriotic campaign. Questioning someone’s loyalty to their country then makes the debate about that rather than the actual issue. Why bother using that when all the facts back up your point of view, when you are 100% in the right.
Invocation of patriotism can turn politics toxic. It diminishes the debate. There are plenty other words I could think of to describe the ideas expressed by those on the narrow-minded Eurosceptic right. Here are a few:
- illiberal
- prejudiced
- misanthropic
- stupid
- irresponsible
- ill-informed
So, Nick, please ditch the “unpatriotic” and take them down on the actual arguments. You are right, here. The EU may not be perfect, but it’s given us an unprecedented spell of peace, has enshrined the liberal values and human rights that are at our core and millions of British jobs depend on it. Don’t detract from such a strong case.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
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13 Comments
I think calling them unpatriotic was just a slip of the tongue, but calling them stupid would be even worse. I hope that was just a mistake too.
Why can’t Clegg call UKIP ‘unpatriotic’?
UKIP clearly betray Britain’s national interests every day that their MEPs fail to vote or even turn up for a vote.
In fact, they also betray their voters by not voting against proposed EU legislation like their voters expect them to, but that’s another story.
Well if you want to play silly buggers.
It’s
illiberal
prejudiced
misanthropic
stupid
irresponsible
ill-informed
Not to allow a refurendum, as the lack of it is the main drive for UKIP votes
Spot on Caron. Not that anyone wants to dwell on Nick Cleggs every word, but lines on what to say about UKIP ought to be well thought out. Yet again I am wondering what Nick actually means . Is patriotism a good thing ? Its a short step from Nicks comments to saying the people who took us into the Common Market betrayed Britain and should be tried for treason. Still at least he was attacking UKIP rather than the Lib Dems who supposedly want the comfort of opposition 🙂
Martin Lowe’s comment hits the nail on the head. Although there antics in Brussels can occasionally be quite amusing in a back-of-the-classroom kind of way.
I blogged about Sykes here – a parallel with Victorian “patriots”
http://unequalmeasures.com/2013/11/18/paul-sykes-ukip-immigration-philanthropist-donation/
“Where I take issue with Nick is the use of the word unpatriotic. It’s not necessary. It’s also not helpful to us in Scotland when we’re trying to get that sort of language out of politics.”
the Scottish referendum is at its very core a question of patriotism!
Scotland can, if it chooses, manage very well as an independent nation.
yes, there would be problems with debt and an aging low immigration population.
yes, there would be problems with international clout as a micro nation.
but these are minor technical issues of the head, not the big questions of the heart:
“are you my family, content to be bound by a common responsibility and destiny, or merely a neighbour?”
at the end of day salmond will lose his referendum because the Scots will conclude that the other British nations are indeed their family.
whether north sea. oil can sustain 5% of Scottish revenue over the next 20 years, or only 4% and thus needing higher taxes, is kind of an irrelevance.
I understand why better off together is presenting the “no” campaign as a series of dry benefits, but the elephant in the room is whether they can cope with periodically being ruled by the Tories, with all that implys for the values of the broader society in which they form part.
this is not to say that there are good Scots and bad Scots depending on where the core of your identity lies, it is not my place (or yours), to cast judgement on another’s chosen identity.
I, as a unionist, have no problem with pro independence Scots, their chosen identity is theirs to choose, I simply hope they form a minority and that the no campaign can organise a voting majority.
the EU question boils down to the same question, too.
I think “Unpatriotic” is exactly right. Patriotism is about loving your Country because you know it. As Constable said “We should love what we know first”.
UKIP are Nationalists like The SNP, thats a completely different thing. Nationalism invoves the beleif that one lot of complete strangers are in some undefined way better than another lot. Its irrational & poisonous.
Nick Clegg was in Nottingham on 8th November and it was the first time I’d heard him use this “unpatriotic” line. It got quite a round of applause, but he did it much better then than he did on TV at the weekend. It was juxtaposed against the idea UKIP have that their movement is “a proud, British, patriotic thing”, and that to jeopardise three and half million jobs was quite the opposite of proud, British and patriotic. It worked much better in this context.
Maybe he thought it was the patriotic bit that got him the applause, or maybe he just fluffed the line the second time around???
One would have thought that given the widespread LibDem distaste for the Dail Mail’s ‘The Man Who Hated Britain’ excursion, the party knew where it stood on wrapping yourself in the flag as an easy win in political debates, ie it’s in poor taste and a cynical ploy.
Winning the argument without resorting to cheap shots is what this party should be about; it’s also the harder way to do it and I can understand why, after years of bashing from those who view the EU-UK issue in black and white, someone would try this approach. But it’s ultimately tactically self-defeating, as Caron points out.
I disagree with the sentiment of this article. Here, I agree with Nick.
It is often a very effective from of attack on one’s political opponents not to accuse then of being what they claim to be, but to accuse them of not being that. For example, if one wishes to unsettle Conservative Party supporters and get them to think again about their loyalty to that party, one of the most effective ways of doing so is to point out that the Conservative Party in recent decades has been profoundly anti-conservative in almost all it does, it and its extreme free market policies have been a destructive factor, bringing to an end so much of what is traditional to Britain. This would seem to me to be a better line than accusing it of not wanting to change things, because the belief that it is the party of keeping things the same still attracts a big proportion of its vote.
Anti-EU types make a lot out of being “patriotic”. It’s a similar thing to the Scottish issue, Caron – if the pro-independence people go on and on about themselves being patriotic, you have to counter that and not let them get away with the claim that if your are a Scottish person who loves his or her country, you must therefore be pro independence. I find UKIP to be a fraudulent party, because they go on and on about “UK independence” and make out that the EU is the biggest threat to it, but they show no interest in all the other ways in which UK independence is and has been threatened, such as the way privatisation has placed so much of what is vital to us in the hands of foreign owners. We on the left are scared to use that sort of language because of the way anti-foreigner language has been used so nastily by the political right, but in refusing even to make appropriate use of it in a way that isn’t actually attacking people for not being British, we are letting the political right win. UKIP gives the shallow impression of wanting to return to a 1950s style Britain, and gets most of its vote from people who think of it in those sort of sentimental terms, but in endorsing extreme free market policies it is in fact in favour of all that has ended old-style Britain. If we REALLY wanted to go back to the1950s, we’d need mass nationalisation, and a big move against free trade.
So here is how the political right has triumphed so well – they have supported the economic changes which makes conservative-minded people nervous and fearful, and then they get votes from those same people because of that fearfulness. It is like selling a drug which causes the very symptoms it is supposed to cure. If you can persuade people to buy it and keep taking it, you’ve got it made.
I appreciate that the word “patriotic” can be, and often is, misused. However, it needn’t be. To love one’s own country does not mean one has to hate everyone else’s country, just as to love one’s own mother does not mean one has to hate everyone else’s mother. If we on the left believe in an active state, as I think we do (or most of us), it is because we believe there is such a thing as a common good and a mutual obligation of the people living in our country to each other. If one uses the word “patriotism” for this notion, what is wrong with that?
Mat Bristol et al
Aren’t we in danger of dodging the dilemma issue here? The EU guarantees free capital movement, which means profits are switched to any of the 140 or so tax-havens (many under British protection) and vast sums of potential tax income are lost to the Treasury, enough on some estimates to easily deal with the ‘deficit’. Until we regain control of this and ensure earnings made in UK are taxed here, the tax-burden will continue to be unfair, bec ause it falls on workers here while big company taxations and the taxation of the wealthy becomes merely optional. We are unable to divert profit-flows to productive rather than financial use in order to rebuild our nation; and that, combined with the Coalition’s anti-union stance, means wages stagnate as they have done for decades while the incomes of the wealthy rise – mostly shielded from tax.
Worse still, personal indebtedness in UK – on cards and mortgage pledges – have rocketed as people struggle to survive, and now are estimated as equal to the entire UK GDP. Catastrophe it seem is looming, and debt cancellation will be called for (God save us from bailouts!!).
So: to redeem our national impoversihment and debt and institute fair taxation between rich and poor we need to control capital and profit flows: and that can’t be done without leaving/flouting EU rules. And there’s the dilemma.
Caron’s absolutely correct.
With Alistair Carmichael having taken up considerable airtime last week explaining how both sides of the independence debate in Scotland are seeking different takes on what they consider to be in the best interest of Scotland, and that to suggest your opponents should be considered unpatriotic (as some have done) for holding a different view, it beggars belief that Clegg has played the same card in relation to UKIP.
They may be somewhere between batshit crazy and just wrong but I suspect they believe that what they are doing is in the best interests of their country.
Joined up thinking before gobs are opened please.