Snobbish. Sneering. But the worst thing about Clegg and Cable is their disdain for democracy

HAVING the word ‘Democratic’ or ‘Democrat’ in a name does not mean anything. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (i.e. North Korea) is the least democratic country in the world — its leader Kim Jong-un an insane martinet.

To compare Britain’s Liberal Democrats to such a murderous communist regime is, on the face of it, absurd and unfair. Yet there is, I’m afraid, one unappealing way in which the modern, pitifully marginalised Liberal Democrats resemble the tyranny of North Korea, and it has been on display this week.

People at the top of their party seem very much to dislike democracy.

When it comes to accepting the voters’ verdict, they reject it like constipated cats spitting out a dose of medicinal paraffin.

First we heard from Sir Vince Cable, who is about to take over as the party’s leader.

He is bound to win that contest because there is no other candidate. That’s right, the party with ‘democrat’ in its name is holding a coronation instead of an election for its leader. Hey ho.

Left-winger Sir Vince, an ardent Europhile, took an angry swipe at electors who voted Leave in last year’s EU referendum.

Arrogant

Brexit voters, he sneered, were ‘overwhelmingly elderly people who were obsessed by the worry of 80million Turks coming to their village’.

Sir Vince himself, since you ask, is 74 years old. Should he therefore not understand how outrageously snobbish — and ageist — that remark sounds?

His comments reek of antidemocratic, arrogant elitism.

Older citizens are surely more likely to have some worldly experience about them.

They have worked and paid their taxes for decades and have learned something about the untrustworthiness of politicians. They have seen Britain lied to about — and changed by — mass immigration.

(The volatile Turkish president Recep Erdogan has already demanded that his overwhelmingly Muslim population should have the right to visa-free travel in the Schengen open borders area of the EU — which would allow them to journey to Calais more easily.)

These older British voters may also be of the generation that understands what can happen when European unity is pushed through in the name of an over-mighty Germany.

For Sir Vince to suggest Brexit was merely the result of ageing southern Tory voters is so untrue that one fears for the Lib Dems’ future prospects as a national political party. If he is this dim, how will the yellow team ever prosper?

Brexit captured the imagination of working-class Labour voters, too. Has he forgotten the result from Sunderland on referendum night, when that Labour city voted Leave by a higher margin than expected?

One reason Jeremy Corbyn did not do as badly as expected in the General Election was that he managed to move Labour sufficiently away from its former Europhilia to a more pro-Brexit position.

The Lib Dems ran on a promise to re-run the referendum, and it did not serve them well.

Yet it’s not stopped the putative party leader from continuing mad generalisations about those whose referendum votes won the day.

Sir Vince explained that Brexiteers he met were old folk in church halls in Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire, ‘mostly Conservative voters’ who voted for Brexit out of nostalgia.

A tone of vinegary ‘just you wait and see’ entering his voice, he predicted that Leave voters would not live to see their democratic wish fulfilled because ‘more and more people — politicians and civil servants — are saying actually Brexit is not going to happen’.

Sir Vince was delighted with this alleged prospect, unlikely though it is.

Meanwhile, the nation was also treated to the thoughts of Nick Clegg, former Lib Dem leader and, until 2015, our devotedly pro-European deputy prime minister.

Mr Clegg, who lost his Sheffield Hallam seat in last month’s General Election (to the Labour candidate), no longer has a parliamentary pulpit, so he took to the pages of a low-circulation newspaper to pen a rant headlined ‘Britain’s Superiority Complex’.

Somewhat petulant, it was an attack on British parliamentary democracy, questioning its seriousness and calling it ‘flabby, corrupt and hollowed out by narrow vested interests, big money and unrepresentative elites’.

Mr Clegg explained how he recently spoke in a studentstyle debate in Germany and found its audience to be far more grown-up and serious about politics than the scurvy British were.

Our former deputy PM now finds us to be a thoroughly unsatisfactory people.

Though one could easily dismiss all this as the tantrums of two embittered losers, I fear they need to be taken more seriously than that.

Yes, the Lib Dems’ policies mean they are a negligible force in the Commons (12 MPs), but they have almost 100 peers in the House of Lords (an institution they affect to dislike) and Sir Vince and Mr Clegg are treated as figures of substance by the outrageously anti-Brexit BBC.

Fool

So let us take on these arguments. First, that fool Clegg.

He calls our democracy flabby. Rot. The EU referendum and the 2017 General Election both saw high turnouts, with youngsters and previously unregistered voters casting their ballots.

Neither may have produced a satisfactory result for Mr Clegg (and the June 8 vote certainly did the Tories no favours) but it is simply not possible to argue they were anything but electrifying plebiscites, producing unexpected verdicts which gripped the public.

Perhaps the most striking thing about both elections was that they gave a splendid kick up the backside to the very ‘vested interests, big money and unrepresentative elites’ Mr Clegg mentions. And hang on: is posh boy Clegg, with his richly-paid lawyer wife, his unashamedly privileged background, his jollies to German debates and his hefty lecture fees not very much a member of the unrepresentative elite of which Brussels is surely the most egregious example?

At the root of both Sir Vince and Mr Clegg’s arguments is an anger with those blasted idiots, the voters.

These two Lib Dem grandees think they are better than the people. They scorn the democratic outcome. They loathe the fact that the masses can have a say in the future of this country.

Revenge

Though we may be tempted to laugh, we should also be chilled by such disdain. What is the point of holding elections if our political class wants to ignore election outcomes?

This may be the way in Brussels — where they have a track record of re-running referendums that produce the ‘wrong’ result — but if pushed too hard here, it could lead to eruptions of public disorder.

But then Mr Clegg, who says he disapproves of referendums, has a terrible record on democracy. When people failed to support his view in the Alternative Vote referendum on changing our electoral system, he took revenge by reneging on an agreement to approve long-overdue alterations to MPs’ constituency boundaries — which would, shock horror, have improved the electoral maths for the Tories.

It not only showed him for the duplicitous man he is (remember his university fees U-turn?), but also, and far worse, it robbed many voters of a fairer say at Westminster.

Our Commons is well shot of him. When he lost Sheffield Hallam on June 8 it was not just ‘Labour gain’. It was ‘British gain’.

The Lib Dems’ parting leader, Tim Farron, did not have an easy time and he made a few mistakes, as do we all, but at least you were able to feel he was a decent man who had the best interests of Britain at heart.

I am not sure that can be said entirely about Sir Vince, or said in any respect about that slaloming slug Nick Clegg.