Daily Mail and Nick Clegg: pot calls kettle Blackshirt

Posted on Thursday 22 April, 2010
Filed Under Liberal Democrats

 

‘HURRAH for the Blackshirts’ is probably the most famous headline in Daily Mail history. But today’s ‘Clegg in Nazi Slur on Britain’ will one day surely rank right up there with its well-known predecessor.

Let us not forget that the middle market tabloid was openly sympathetic to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and repeatedly eulogised Hitler and Mussolini in editorials throughout the 1930s.  It is, in short, the last newspaper that should be in the business of accusing people of ‘Nazi slurs’.

On the off chance that you are not a Mail reader, here are the offending quotes from Nick Clegg that are said to constitute an ‘astonishing attack on our national pride’:

‘All nations have a cross to bear, and none more so than Germany with its memories of Nazism. But the British cross is more insidious still.

‘A misplaced sense of superiority, sustained by delusions of grandeur and a tenacious obsession with the last war, is much harder to shake off. We need to be put back in our place.’

Such remarks are neither original nor particularly profound. It is observably true that sections of the British ruling class mistakenly cling to the idea that Britain plays a leading role in world affairs.

This is encapsulated in the notion of ‘punching above our weight’, a concept popularised by John Major’s foreign secretary Douglas Hurd during a briefing at Chatham House.

The reality – as everyone who has ever picked up an international relations textbook will be well aware – is that the Suez crisis pretty much put paid to that. For well over 50 years, British foreign policy has taken its direction from Washington.

I am currently reading Andrew Rawnsley’s ‘The End of the Party’, a detailed account of the 2001 and 2005 New Labour administrations. The early chapters centre on the process whereby Blair committed this country to participation in the US-led invasion of Iraq.

The notion that he was at all times subservient to Bush, seeking only such concessions as would enable him to market the war to the electorate, is hardly a new one to me. Even so, Rawnsley’s documentation of the extent of the sheer extent of his prostration is enough to take even a hardened Stopper like yours truly by surprise.

I am not by any means an admirer of Clegg or his party, and would not seek to deflect even the most savagely-worded legitimate attack on their policies. But today’s flimsily-concocted, mean-spirited and totally disproportionate broadside is, even by the standards of Paul Dacre, something of a low.

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