This morning, Charles Kennedy went on the Today programme to talk about tonight’s debate.
There was just a trace of frustration in his voice as he remembered that he, as a “down the line unashamed unalloyed pro-European” he couldn’t get the party to campaign on that basis, so when Nick took the initiative:
I was absolutely delighted and f I’d been in his shoes I’d have taken the same initiative but I might have been blocked or thwarted.
We are the down the line pro-European party and Nigel is the direct opposite. It’s a good clash that needs to be heard.
Norman Lamont suggested that Nick’s motivation was to harm the Conservatives by giving UKIP exposure. Charles retorted that that was far too machiavellian for him at that time in the morning. The stuff about sticking to core beliefs will resonate with many people in and outside the party.
There may be ancillary considerations, but I think the key thing is quite often politicians and parties do best when they fall back on their gut beliefs and what they really stand for. And one thing you can say about Nick Clegg personally as well as the Liberal Democrats is that he embodies Europe family wise, career wise and he can speak with utter conviction, sincerity and persuasiveness and so he should Good luck to him.
Asked if we faced wipe-out in the European elections, he said we weren’t in danger of losing all, but conceded that where we had 2 MEPs in a region, we might lose the second. Therefore, we need to up our profile and poll ratings. He looked at the wider composition of the Parliament:
The next European arliament is important. It is going to be across Europe a more eurosceptical parliament than we’ve had. We’ll have a lot of Nigel Farage types in there. so it’s important that across Europe that the Liberal Democrat pro-European voice is heard.
And the big lesson from his major gamble:
I learned as leader over Iraq that you can take a stance which is unpopular and divisive with an awful lot of people but if you have a distinctive message that needs to be heard amongst the wider populace, then you will win respect and win new friends. That’s why he should go in there not just as a card-carrying Liberal Democrat but a spear-carrying European.
You can listen to the whole exchange here from around 1:48.
* Newshound: bringing you the best Lib Dem commentary in print, on air or online.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Lord Bonkers: "Something less terrible than the truth"
Two new Makerfield by-election polls gives Burnham 5 and 12 point leads
Reform under water
paul barker
Neil Hickman
Tom Bailey
expats
David Raw
8 Comments
I thought both men were strikingly similar. Both are, as the Daily Mail put it, “Privately-educated, smoking sons of bankers, elected to Brussels and married to foreign wives.” To me both of them look like out-of-touch posh boys.
With reference to the earlier comment by Bill Chapman ‘out of touch posh boys’ I am getting so so fed up with these kind of sneering comments. I come from a modest background, state school educated BUT it does not matter to me a jot what peoples backgrounds are, if they are young/old, male/female, straight/gay.
I take people at face value and what they believe. One of my joys at being involved within the Liberal Democrats is that people from all these diverse backgrounds can come together for a common cause. Not to decry someone because of their background, upbringing.
peter kemp
Though it would matter if the person who was a “out of touch posh boy” was making attacks on others on that basis. Either direct in the way the Labour front bench do or the more indirect hints of UKIP.
If you don’t attack others background, then you shouldn’t be attacked on the basis of yours.
The thing about this that stands out for me is Charles Kennedy’s’ admission that, “he couldn’t always get the Lib Dems to campaign on that basis [pro Europe] so I might have been blocked or thwarted”. (Taken from the original audio).
Now I knew that the Party doesn’t like to campaign on EU issue for European election preferring to keep to matters that properly belong to local government but this is a new perspective for me. From the context he was referring to his time as leader which is very odd. If the Party Leader wasn’t able to lead then who was leading? Are the party’s constitutional and policy-making arrangements so beset by bureaucracy and committees that even the leader is snared in a treacly morass? Or are there powerful forces in Lib Dem Towers who took the “Don’t mention the
warEurope” approach because being too clearly pro-Europe looked like a vote looser and the policy establishment couldn’t imagine anything more complicated than the simple alternative of FOR/AGAINST?I am genuinely interested to hear others’ understanding of what was going on. And I wonder if leaders aren’t able to lead does that go some way to explaining why the Party is so unsuccessful at getting votes in national elections (as distinct from local ones).
Charles is absolutely right. As a PPC selected in 2003 I remember being told by the campaigns’ team that we were to use the 2004 European Election as a dry-run for our 2005 GE campaign and on no account were we to mention Europe! In the “European” campaign we ran lots of unflattering pictures of the Tory leader and a campaign about pensioners’ travel tokens.
Ruth – thanks for that memory which certainly fits with my experience – not that I was ever a PPC.
So, WTF. Supporters have contributed good money and good shoe-leather to past European campaigns where it now turns out the Party wasn’t actually campaigning on Europe. I think they deserve a frank explanation of the thinking – duty of candour and all that.
I think Charles Kennedy is wrong. It was not a decision made by the membership or conference. In 2004 we could have fought a pro-European campaign. The candidates wanted it and so did lots of members. However I expect it was the campaign department that didn’t want to do it. I expect Chris Rennard didn’t want it. I expect evidence was presented that we would get less votes if we ran a pro-European campaign.
Charles is right to say what he did, I remember being in Conference fringes in the run up to both 2004 and 2009, where comments we’re made about campaigning on issues like the NHS and taxation.
But we should not beat ourselves up about it, the fact is that the whole of the pro-European side in the UK has been guilty of running scared for decades! The attitude has always been “don’t frighten the horses” – and don’t make the positive case for European integration. That may have helped us get a big majority in the 1975 referendum, but at the huge cost of letting anti-Europeans set the agenda on the issue ever since, I even know some Lib Dems who are quite Eurosceptic, but as they have been reading the Daily Mail for decades so its hardly surprising, given that paper’s ‘drip drip’ of negative stories nearly every day!
Despite all this constant negativity about 36% of the population poll as pro-Europeans, and I’m very pleased that at long last Lib Dems are targeting them rather than making populist appeals for referenda like we did in 2008. The bigoted element of the British population who dislike “johnny foreigner” and yearn for the days of empire will never love the Lib Dems. At last we are beginning to realise this and go after those who might be receptive to our pro-European, but reformist message.