If last Friday’s talk in the Graduates Memorial Building (GMB) was a glowing endorsement of the supposed populist insurgency sweeping the west, today’s event with Conservative MP Kenneth Clarke was surely as close to the antithesis of that speech given by Nigel Farage as one could find.
Clarke has been a fixture in the House of Commons for nearly half a century. During that time, he has served as Chancellor of Exchequer and Home Secretary – two of the biggest jobs in British politics. He ran three times for the Conservative Party leadership but was unsuccessful on each occasion, largely due to his pro-EU views, which did not chime with the party’s eurosceptic grassroots.
Given his prominence since the 2016 EU referendum as an outspoken europhile, it was unsurprising that much of Clarke’s talk today was dedicated to what he calls the issue that has “shattered the political situation in Britain”: Brexit.
Even though Clarke began by stating that “I’m not going to sit here giving you a pro-European speech”, he found it difficult not let his biases come to the fore once he began to recount his fondness for the European project. He reminisced how at his first Conservative Party Conference in 1961, he proudly wore a “big pro-European badge” as Harold MacMillan attempted to persuade the party of the benefits of joining the European Economic Community.
“I think we’ve benefited hugely from 40 odd years as a member”, he said, pointing proudly to the role Britain played during its time as a member of the bloc, including leading some of the liberal economic reforms like the completion of the single market.
It is understandable, then, that he finds the current malaise in British politics so depressing: “It has caused quite the biggest shambles I have seen in my political life”, he said.
Clarke continued by railing against the lack of debate and clarity over what Brexit would mean once people voted to leave the EU and denounced Theresa May’s “appalling” Lancaster House speech in which she identified her infamous “red lines” such as leaving the single market and the customs union.
If the ardent europhiles in the crowd were looking for Clarke to give them some hope going forward, he could not provide it. “I am more pessimistic than most English remainers about reversing the whole thing”, he said. He announced his opposition to holding a second referendum on EU membership, though he conceded that there still might be one.
To laughter from the audience, Clarke reiterated his well-established detestation of referenda by saying that “I never want to see another referendum again in my lifetime” while passionately stating that he “believes in parliamentary democracy”.
Clarke’s surroundings were clearly not lost on him either as, unlike Farage last week, he talked about his close relationship with Irish politicians within the EU and the benefits that membership has brought the country: “Involvement in EU gave Ireland a role in the world”, he said. He also touched on the need to keep the border open between Northern Ireland and the Republic and regretted that the “vast majority of the British public had never thought of it [the Irish border] and neither had its political class”.
Despite the fact that much of Clarke’s speech was spent criticising his own party and the “headbanger Brexiteers”, he found time to discuss the general polarisation that has gripped British politics with both main parties being led by their more extreme factions and how both are in “serious danger of splitting”.
He denounced the Labour Party’s leadership as “strange unworldly ideologues” and the new young left – presumably referring to the campaign group Momentum – as “intolerant and fanatic” who are “trying to purge half their members of parliament”. He also pointed out that Labour is being led by “hardline Brexiteers” in the form of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell who have always seen the European project as “capitalist conspiracy”. That is, of course, until it became politically unfavourable to do so during the referendum.
If optimism about the future of global affairs was what students were in search of today, the GMB was not the place to find it. Clarke, however, was as impressive as an orator as he is regularly in Westminster with his charming baritone voice filling the chamber.
Ken Clarke, and the views he espouses, have moved from the mainstream to mutinous in less than two years, even if the reasons why political debate has become so toxic in such a short period of time are still unclear. With current opinion polls putting Corbyn’s Labour Party neck-and-neck with one of the most shambolic governments in a generation, one wonders whether if Clarke’s moderate philosophy of “capitalism combined with a social conscience” was actually on offer, the British public would still choose it.
