Nick Clegg on political anger and the need to be a patriotic liberal

By LONDON | S.N.

In 2010 the Liberal Democrats teamed up with the Conservative Party to form Britain’s first post-war coalition government. The Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, became deputy prime minister. On his watch the coalition government introduced several reforms, including same-sex marriage, which cheered liberals. But five years later his party lost 49 seats and Mr Clegg resigned as party leader. He then lost his seat in 2017.

Since then Mr Clegg has spoken out against Brexit and written a book, “How To Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again)”. He remains one of the few liberal voices in British politics today. On May 24th Mr Clegg discussed the threat to open societies with The Economist, alongside the newspaper's Pride and Prejudice conference (a video of his session is here). The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Nick Clegg will be speaking at the Open Future Festival in September. Buy your tickets here.

The Economist: What is the greatest threat to open societies?

Nick Clegg: Fear. Because fear turns people inwards. And if people’s politics, if people’s reactions to each other…are driven by fear, then as night follows day, the reaction won’t be open. It will be fearful and closed and divisive and anxious. So I think probably the greatest threat to openness generally is when people are fearful. And people are, totally understandably, very fearful at the moment.

The greatest threat to openness generally is when people are fearful

The Economist: If we’re trying to make sense of post-referendum Britain, what role does fear play in that? And how does one go about turning that around and making sure society doesn’t become closed?

Mr Clegg: It’s important to remember that for many millions of British people they had been told, not inaccurately, for ages that the euro-zone economy was spluttering. [Combined with this there was] a general feeling that the economies over there, on the other side of the channel, were suffering and one domino was falling after the next.

And then on top of that, in the crucial weeks in the run-up to the [Brexit] referendum, their television screens were full of really alarming pictures of people perishing in the Mediterranean, and all this conflict and violence in the Middle East and then people flooding into Europe and the EU...And it seems to me totally natural that a lot of people recoil from that and say “woah, woah, woah, we don’t want to have very much to do with that.”

People like me can try to rationally disaggregate these things and say the Mediterranean refugee crisis is not synonymous with Britain’s membership of the EU. But I totally understand and found it wholly predictable that that would create a climate of anxiety and fear and a wish to distance oneself from the source of those fears, or at least the perceived sources of those fears.

So I think in many ways, the more I look back at it, I think it’s a miracle that so many people voted to remain. Because the countervailing case was put so poorly. There was no countervailing case to explain that actually one of the greatest ways to protect yourself from fear these days and from insecurity is safety in numbers. It’s quite a visceral human emotion: gathering round the campfire, huddling together behind the battlements, we’ve been doing this for millennia as different communities and tribes.

And instead of making an appeal for safety in numbers, the pro-Remain case was made in this rather bloodless statistical claim and counterclaim about the ever more minute predictions about what it would do to the British economy. That’s why I think fear played a big role and it wasn’t surprising that it had such an effect.

The Economist: How do you square identity politics as a phenomenon with liberalism?

Mr Clegg: There is undoubtedly a tension. If your worldview is premised—and I’m simplifying dramatically here—on the primacy of the individual, on individual liberty, on individual privacy, on the belief that human beings generally do well if they’re left to their own devices…[then] there is undoubtedly a tension between that worldview and the more collectivist politics of belonging.

You have to equally try and reconcile a progressive outward-looking liberalism with a pride in community, a pride in belonging

That’s why liberals have always been a bit squeamish and had a bit of a problem about patriotism. And I think liberals need to get over that. There is a tension, we have to acknowledge that, but I think you have to equally try and reconcile a progressive outward-looking liberalism with a pride in community, a pride in belonging.

I’ve seen over and over again that liberalism fails in the hothouse of electoral contests because it is either deemed to be, or might even in reality be, just a little too stand-offish about a very primitive, understandable and very strong instinct that we all have to belong to some wider entity. So I guess to anyone beating a path into liberal politics now I always say: think hard about how you can be a liberal but also be a patriotic liberal. But it’s not straightforward; there is definitely a tension without a doubt.

The Economist: Is any of this new?

Mr Clegg: What is new, and this is a well-worn observation, is...people don’t identify with the same political parties and political philosophies as their parents or grandparents did. As a sort of automatic hand-me-down form of identity.

[Combined with this] we’ve all become dramatically empowered as consumers in recent times and yet we are still quite disempowered as citizens and I think that has created a huge tension. Until very recently you couldn’t just push a button on your keyboard and marshall encyclopedic volumes of information in the way you wanted.

We’ve become empowered...and yet in the United Kingdom we still have to go with a pencil on a Thursday to put a little scratchy tick next to someone’s name. So the dissonance between our lives outside politics and in politics is definitely new.

The bigger forces, the labour markets, the globalised economy, does seem to have instilled quite profound insecurity for many people where before you had lifelong work, provided in a very predictable way. That’s all gone as well. So I think there are some quite new things which have eroded those slightly pillar-like associations between certain types of work, certain regions, certain classes, certain identities and certain political affiliations.

The Economist: With all the understandable focus on group rights and belonging, do you fear that the individual is being drowned out?

Mr Clegg: I find it very difficult to answer that simply…In one sense in mature democracies, however angry and polarised politics gets...there’s still ample space for people to live lives the way they want in a pretty unmolested way. And yet you feel—partly because of social media, partly because of the collapse in those old political tribal loyalties—people are casting around trying to find new groups to belong to.

There is definitely an almost hysterical sanctimony now about the way individuals will be condemned for being not enough this, or too much that. There’s an odd censoriousness around now which I find quite peculiar. I’m 51 so my political consciousness was formed in the 70s and 80s. There's an amazing intolerance against other people.

Frankly some of the debates about gender, politics of sexuality, transgender rights and so on, you can’t claim that the tone—maybe that’s what I’m talking about more than anything else—is a live-and-let-live tolerant shrug of the shoulders. It isn’t. It’s kind of endless finger jabbing, I mean everybody has to take a view about how they judge other people.

The dissonance between our lives outside politics and in politics is definitely new

So yeah there’s a censoriousness now which I have to say, perhaps now as a sort of dinosaur liberal, I find very off-putting because I do slightly cleave to the view that so long as you’re not messing up someone else’s life or doing something to the detriment of others, then part of what a liberal society is is that we let people get on with stuff, even if we don’t agree with it.

The Economist: We started with fear. To end on a hopeful note: what’s the thing that gives you hope about society’s ability to be open?

Mr Clegg: It sounds rather mawkish and cheesy, for which apologies, but I take, certainly here in [Britain], massive comfort from a lot of the young folks I meet. They’ve got good values on the whole, they are much more interested in wider values and the impact of their behaviour on other people than my generation was.

I grew up in the kind of dog-eat-dog Thatcher time, everybody I was at university with wanted to rush to the city, make a huge amount of money or go into advertising. So I think there are lots of really good values actually.

And, dare I say it, and I don’t want to see everything through the prism of Brexit...but of course it’s heartening to think that you have got 70% of youngsters who voted saying “well actually we want a different future.” And in the end, you can’t keep the young down. Because they’ll be around a lot longer than anybody else.