Though Cowards Flinch

The Daily Mail this morning carries one of the most shocking smear stories I’ve ever read in British politics. Admittedly, perhaps, because I wasn’t alive during the 1980s, when the target was Labour, Labour, Labour all the time. The target in editorials is still Labour all the time – I’ve been following Express, Mail and Telegraph coverage – and the News of the World and Sun too have been at it. But with the success of Clegg in the previous television debate (which I didn’t watch), ahead of this one, our media seems to want to plant his feet in the ground.

Thus we have “Clegg in Nazi slur on UK” headlines, and the style of the reportage is familiar to anyone not an ardent Tory.

Nick Clegg has claimed that the British people have ‘a more insidious cross to bear’ than Germany over the Second World War.

In an astonishing attack on our national pride, the Liberal Democrat leader said we suffered from ‘delusions of grandeur’ and a ‘misplaced sense of superiority’ over having defeated the horrors of Nazism.

He said we found it hard to accept that Germany had become a ‘vastly more prosperous nation’ and that ‘we need to be put back in our place’.

His views, outlined in a newspaper article when he was a member of the European Parliament, cast grave doubts over his judgment of international affairs ahead of the second leaders’ debate this evening, when the topic will be foreign policy.

The jibes threatened to undermine the surge which has taken Mr Clegg from also-ran to serious player in the opinion polls.

Truth is, Tim Shipman at the Mail can’t possibly know what effect this will have – bearing in mind it has been dug up from years ago, and, once you get past the sentiments of “OMG unpatriotic!!11!!” that Nick Clegg has a point. Is it not the case that our inflated sense of place in the world, as one of the key victor nations in World War II, is more insidious than the more open (and openly expressed) war guilt of the German people? Our sense of place finds expression time and again in body bags and international faux pas: from the A-bomb, Suez and Malaya to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Of course when you get down to brass tacks, our foreign interventions and our sense of place are both symptoms of something else. The attempt to utilize the success of World War II as basis for that sense of place is really an attempt to hegemonise the past as part of a wider political project, a wider way of looking at the world which gives primacy to ideas, which exist, almost free-floating, down the ages. This is a very common way of looking at things amongst journalists and populist politicians, who pick their favourite narrative of cause and effect and stick with it.

The other side to this approach is evident in Nick Clegg’s characterisations of the ‘British psyche’ as ‘febrile’ is – if ideas can float free, then characteristics can likewise exist independently of individuals. This sort of inaccurate, lazy shorthand is no different to what you find every day in papers like, say, the Daily Mail. In fact, further down, you find Shipman approvingly quoting former Colonel of the Royal Irish Regiment Tim Collins, who denounces Clegg for not supporting “British identity”, ignorant of the fact that blithely asserting such identity regardless of what actual British people think is the acme of totalitarianism.

Tim Shipman then continues his article from something written a year later by Nick Clegg:

‘No other culture in Europe is quite so enamoured by such a false notion of difference…We Brits concoct a historically illiterate notion that we are divorced from outside influences. Maybe it was loss of empire, the choppy waters of the Channel, or the last war.’

Clegg does make a mistake here. He generalizes. He essentially accepts certain follies of right-wing narrative as part of our ‘culture’. ‘We Brits’ concoct such notions. In actual fact, we Brits don’t. For Brits of my generation, for example, empire is just a word. Our history syllabus does make the mistake of presenting habitation of these islands as a continuity, and mentions the influences on us, without ever really discussing the significance of changes forced by successive invasions – Roman, Saxon or Norman, or other less tangible pressures.

There Clegg is absolutely right. Henry VIII, for example, who looms large in our history, is a minor princeling when compared to Charles V, or even Francis I, which is what makes the foreign policy of Henry’s reign so enjoyable – he fits into that archetype so favoured by the ‘febrile’ British: the underdog. But to extend this sort of view beyond the history curriculum – which is essentially still a top-down view of society and history – is to give far too much to potted right-wing histories of these islands, perpetuated by ignorant columnists.

Not to say that people don’t feel a bit removed from the wider continent of Europe, and developments going on there – but rather than look for cod-historical justifications, it might be better to look at how modern society and attitudes are shaped, and in whose interest they are shaped. But presumably that would leave Clegg as leader of a Marxist party and not the Lib-Dems. Nevertheless Clegg’s comments are an attempt to engage with an argument, and demonstrate a reasoning mind at work, however I may disagree with him.

In this, he’s light years ahead of Tim Shipman, Tim Collins or Tory dinosaur, Nicholas Soames, who was also wheeled out to attack him as unfaithful to Britain’s war dead. Like Soames, being a life-long Tory, doesn’t have ulterior motives or anything.