Nick Clegg's Plan to Stop Brexit Is a Sad Attempt to Re-Live Cleggmania

Nick Clegg’s new book How To Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again) begins with an epigraph from Sophocles, which, alongside a quotation from David Davis, Secretary of State for Leaving the European Union, is supposed to be read as a critique of those in government who are going ahead with a Brexit that they privately oppose:

It’s funny that Nick Clegg could put this quotation at the beginning of a book with his name on it and not realise that every reader would immediately think it was a reference to himself. There are few figures in British political life who embrace the “wrong course”, and refuse to yield, with such oblivious brio as the former MP for Sheffield Hallam.

Aside from starting with a self-own, this book wants to be a call-to-arms for the sensible voter. The achingly declarative title sets out its stall as a manifesto for those polarised between two parties that are seemingly committed to leaving the European Union. It purports to offer a clear analysis of the conditions that enabled the Leave campaign’s referendum victory and a strategy for reversing the path to Brexit. All in accordance with the democratic right of “changing our mind”.

After a few pages it becomes clear that, in terms of Brexit analysis, Clegg has little to offer but right-wing talking points interpreted with reheated neoliberalism. He asserts the value of immigration but then writes that it was a mistake from the point-of-view of Britain’s “indigenous workers” – a category that would please the BNP – for New Labour to have “[opened] our borders” to Europeans rather than better “[manage] the numbers”. On the tabloid hysteria that the movement of refugees into Europe is a Trojan horse for jihadists, the racist background noise to the referendum “debate” on migration, he writes that “it wasn’t a baseless worry”. Clegg presumably thinks his book’s subtitle – Make Britain Great Again – is an ironic subversion of Trump’s fascist campaign slogan, but he is more than happy to reproduce its xenophobic content, albeit with a considered, reasonable sheen.

We should remember that Clegg is the ideal subject of a bourgeois, cosmopolitan EU: he was educated at the prestigious College D’Europe, a finishing school for the European political elite; as the author biography proudly asserts, “he speaks five languages.” Brexit pisses him off so much because it represents an assault on his way of life.

His Europhile background also leads him to a idealistic understanding of why the EU exists. Sketching a history of Britain’s relationship with Europe in the first chapter, he succumbs to the EU’s foundational myth: that it was embraced by European nations to ensure “war would not ravage the continent” after World War Two. In fact, the development of the EU, which began as a coal and steel cartel, is best explained as a symptom of Cold War politics and crude power-plays: the US financed and encouraged the development of a redeveloped, unified Europe to create a buffer against Soviet Communism. For French and German political elites, pooling sovereignty was attractive because it allowed them to institutionalise their political and economic might, respectively, across the continent.

Without a proper understanding of the institution he cherishes, Clegg is blind to the causes of the EU’s many real problems – not right-wing tropes about bendy bananas but the calamity of the Greek bailout crisis. Despite what he claims, the “chronic weakness of the Greek economy” was not to blame for its fate: it was the power of French and German banks, which exploited the common currency to lock countries like Greece into unpayable levels of debt. Clegg praises Britain for “enforcing better…budgetary housekeeping” into the EU’s economic disposition, but fails to see how this fetish for balanced budgets is depressing the Eurozone’s southern economies.

This links us to the most galling omission in the book: the inability to admit that the Coalition Government’s austerity politics, which he enabled, lay the groundwork for the Brexit vote. Although the Leave campaign was no triumph of the “left behind” – with middle-class voters providing the bulk of the vote and grubby millionaires financing the campaign – many who voted to leave had experienced a decade of intensified wage stagnation and insecurity since the 2008 financial crash. This strengthened the framing of the referendum as an opportunity to revolt against the elites. Clegg writes piously about the lies of “£350 million a week for the NHS”. But he does not consider why voters were susceptible to the promise of more public spending; the squeeze on NHS funding started while he was Deputy Prime Minister. He writes that he wants to “restore certainty and stability to our country”, but is uninterested in the people whose lives have never been certain or stable. Brexit might have made food prices increase, but it isn’t responsible for zero-hour contracts, crippling debt or exploitative bosses.

When we reach Clegg’s master plan for reversing Brexit it is so curiously banal that the whole book suddenly feels like a practical joke. The solution, he argues, is to join the Labour Party, go to local meetings, and encourage a pro-European approach. Not a fan of Jeremy Corbyn? Then join the Conservative Party instead and go to their Party Conference. If it turns out that centrist entryism doesn’t reap rewards then you can also strike up conversations with strangers while “[enjoying] a pint in your local pub”, he writes, like an alien observing human society. He encourages organising demonstrations (the student movement, anyone?) and even includes a template letter in the appendix to send to Corbyn and Theresa May, encouraging them to alter course. One lesson of the Leave campaign’s victory is that positive ideas that promise a break with the way things are can mobilise people; sending letters to the Prime Minister is not a counter-strategy.

This all comes after a section in which he compares himself to Corbyn, whose success he sees as comparable to that brief moment of “Cleggmania” in 2010: “I briefly experienced being the political flavour of the month. It’s a good feeling. I’m sure Corbyn is enjoying his moment. But, as I know all too well, that moment won’t last forever.” Putting to one side whether the Corbyn phenomenon – which has made Labour the largest political party in Western Europe – is equivalent to performing well in a television debate against Gordon Brown, it remains a profoundly revealing comment. How much of How To Stop Brexit – and Clegg’s return to public life in general, having just bagged a knighthood – springs from his desire to recreate that warm moment in the back of his mind, when the sun shined on the Rose Garden in Downing Street, and he and David Cameron had the world before them?

The question put me in mind of a political broadcast the Liberal Democrats made in 2010, during the height of their short-lived popularity, in which the then-leader walks through an empty Westminster, the streets littered with pages of “broken promises” made by the two major parties. Nick Clegg is still trapped in that imagined world, walking through an empty city, hawking ideas to nobody’s passing interest. This time it is the pages of his own book blowing in the wind, as the world moves on without him.

@Yohannk