Jeremy Corbyn didn’t radicalise me – Nick Clegg did

Ahead of the release of his book next week, former leader of the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg has stepped back into the limelight in a brazen attempt to justify forming a coalition government with the Conservatives. For me and many others, the implications of the decisions taken by Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats are not only economic, but political too.

Clegg was the figure who first sparked my interest in politics. Here stood a centre-left figure fighting for progressive change, in particular free education for all. A lot of young people will testify that it was the Liberal Democrat campaign of 2010 that first got them thinking about the kind of society that they wanted to live in as they ascended to adulthood.

At the age of 14, perhaps naively inspired by ‘Cleggmania’, I found myself going door to door for a party I would later despise. But after seeing what it sacrificed to get into power, I never looked back. Clegg and David Cameron’s press conference in the rose garden of 10 Downing Street felt like a sucker punch to the gut. My completed membership form was in the bin before I even got the chance to send it off.

It was Clegg’s spine of jelly that radicalised my politics. After his staggering capitulation to a Conservative Party hell-bent on targeting the young and the poor, my conclusion was that if we were to see real change in this country, it would not be via the careerist centre-left – who seemingly embraced progressive politics only to be the first to cave into the current economic orthodoxy.

During the coalition years, we witnessed a tepid Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, both completely unable to stand up for their own ideas against the austerity agenda. They were clearly not bastions of political change.

Now at university, I am reaping what the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in their capacity as useful idiots have sown. Millennials are rapidly becoming the most indebted generation to ever exist. One cause of that is Clegg’s complicity in the marketisation of higher education – despite his previously stated commitment to abolish tuition fees.

Similarly, Clegg and his party stood back while the Conservatives cut the top rate of income tax and slashed corporation tax while burdening the poorest in society with an austerity project that has since been deemed a disastrous failure. The only consolation is that they got exactly what they deserved in the form of a calamitous performance in the subsequent election.

As a member of the Labour Party who is working to ensure that Jeremy Corbyn is re-elected as leader in a few weeks, it is bewildering for me to see accusations levelled at Corbyn by the press and his parliamentary colleagues that he is responsible for pushing the membership in a leftwards direction. This is simply not the case, and before making such claims, they ought to look at their own failings.

During the coalition years, in an age of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor, it was Clegg’s duplicity and a toothless centre-left in the form of Miliband’s Labour that radicalised my distrust in the politics and policies they both espoused. Jeremy Corbyn was the antithesis of the cookie cutter politics in question, and was simply the first person to galvanise the distrust people have felt after years of abandonment by mainstream politicians.

To quote Nick Clegg’s own pitch to the public in the infamous 2010 television debates, in Corbyn I see someone who believes that “the way things are is not the way things have to be” and that “we can do something new, something different”. Nick Clegg has not done me many favours, but the role he played in my political epiphany was one of them. He clearly wasn’t the architect of a new and better way, but Jeremy Corbyn could well be.