Welcome To Nowhere Mr Clegg.
Wat Tyler Sun Dec 23, 2007 at 07:51:34 PM GMT 
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Why the election of Nick Clegg as Lib Dem leader means even less than you thought.
After a long and at times farcical race to win the post Nick Clegg has finally been unveiled as the new leader of the Liberal Democrats.
He is, by all accounts, a charming man, photogenic in the way any politician with a touch of ambition has to be these days and capable of spouting the required lblandishments about wanting a different kind of politcs with an admirably straight face.
Charming though he is I doubt very much that Mr Clegg will make any real impact on the political scene.
Two significant problems will prevent him from doing so, the first is specific to his own party and the second should worry the leaders of all three main parties.
Nobody, including I suspect quite a few of its members, really knows what the Liberal Democrat Party is for these days, most of the opinions on the environment, equality and the economy that made it distinctive twenty years ago have become thoroughly mainstream and it has been all but crushed by Labour and the Conservatives as they abandoned the traditional fight between the left and the right for a mad dash for the centre ground.
The second and more serious problem that may scupper Mr Clegg is the growing indifference of the public to all things connected to politics.
For example a friend of mine, an educated and otherwise well informed woman went recently to see someone she thought might be her MP, she wasn’t sure because , as she put it, whenever politicians came on the radio or the television she ‘turned off’.
I don’t entirely blame her for doing so, never has politics seemed to be so trivial. We hear endless stories about the failings, both in and out of office hours, of ministers but little or nothing about what they, or their opponents on the other side of the house for that matter, actually stand for.
Granted we can never return to some halcyon age when the quality press printed parliamentary debates in full because they were something the public actually wanted to read and people raised their hat to the local MP whenever they encountered him in the street, but until we recognise that politics is about ideas and not just personality clashes and spin neither Nick Clegg or anyone else will be able to halt the decline of public interest in democracy.
He is, by all accounts, a charming man, photogenic in the way any politician with a touch of ambition has to be these days and capable of spouting the required lblandishments about wanting a different kind of politcs with an admirably straight face.
Charming though he is I doubt very much that Mr Clegg will make any real impact on the political scene.
Two significant problems will prevent him from doing so, the first is specific to his own party and the second should worry the leaders of all three main parties.
Nobody, including I suspect quite a few of its members, really knows what the Liberal Democrat Party is for these days, most of the opinions on the environment, equality and the economy that made it distinctive twenty years ago have become thoroughly mainstream and it has been all but crushed by Labour and the Conservatives as they abandoned the traditional fight between the left and the right for a mad dash for the centre ground.
The second and more serious problem that may scupper Mr Clegg is the growing indifference of the public to all things connected to politics.
For example a friend of mine, an educated and otherwise well informed woman went recently to see someone she thought might be her MP, she wasn’t sure because , as she put it, whenever politicians came on the radio or the television she ‘turned off’.
I don’t entirely blame her for doing so, never has politics seemed to be so trivial. We hear endless stories about the failings, both in and out of office hours, of ministers but little or nothing about what they, or their opponents on the other side of the house for that matter, actually stand for.
Granted we can never return to some halcyon age when the quality press printed parliamentary debates in full because they were something the public actually wanted to read and people raised their hat to the local MP whenever they encountered him in the street, but until we recognise that politics is about ideas and not just personality clashes and spin neither Nick Clegg or anyone else will be able to halt the decline of public interest in democracy.
Welcome To Nowhere Mr Clegg. | 3 comments (3 topical)
Welcome To Nowhere Mr Clegg. | 3 comments (3 topical)
