Populism and Nationalism

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)]

My Lords, there is a newspaper headline today, “Don’t mention the war”. I will do precisely that, because I lived through it. Although I was very small and did not understand its full implications, and lived in a rural community in north Wales, I still remember the thrum of bombers going over from Germany to bomb Liverpool, and I remember the aftermath of the war and the determination there was everywhere that war should not occur again.

What attracted me to the Liberal Party was Jo Grimond’s book The Liberal Future, and his emphasis on the importance of strengthening international institutions and supporting international law and the United Nations, which campaigned against aggressive wars and instituted a global fight against disease and poverty that recognised human rights. Those were messages that appealed to me as a young man. I had looked at Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales, and, as, as I mentioned earlier this week, I voted for the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, when he was a Plaid Cymru candidate in my hometown, but I quickly discovered that Plaid Cymru, as a nationalist party, was defined and defined itself by its enemy. It was not a set of values or policies: the enemy was Westminster.

The day before yesterday, when Plaid Cymru, in the National Assembly in Cardiff, considered the Wales Bill and the referred powers model under the Bill—its powers over taxation, its increased borrowing powers—the reaction of its leader was to say: “We are of the view that the very basis of the Bill is flawed. We blame the flaws in the Bill clearly on Westminster and Whitehall. We do not want to accept crumbs from the table of Westminster”. You will see nationalism, whether it is in Scotland or Wales, defined by its opposition to Westminster rather than anything else.

The enemy for UKIP and the right-wing of the Tory Party is Brussels. What is often said is the problem with Brussels is red tape—regulation imposing standards on us we do not want as a nation. What are those standards about? Generally, they cover workers’ rights, environmental controls, food standards, and matters of that sort. The nationalists in this country in UKIP and elsewhere seem to think that these are imposed on us, a yoke that we have to bear. They also oppose the European Court of Human Rights. What a great concept it was for those who devised the European convention: those who thought that, in a war-torn Europe, it will be a good idea to have a common set of principles—such as the belief in the rule of law, respect for life, the prohibition of torture, respect for family life, and a common standard of justice—and that those principles should be supported in the European Court of Human Rights.

Yet those of the right wing—of UKIP and others—say that this is all wrong: that we as British people should withdraw within our own boundaries and create our own standards, as though our standards should be different from those that appertain in Europe. The European Court of Justice, another institution which creates common law across Europe, is also attacked in the same way.

Populism—the real people against the elite—is headless, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby said a moment ago. Being headless, it is open to demagogues. We have seen that populism is taken over by those who do not feel that they are real people themselves, in the sense that they use that expression. They do not come from the poorer parts of our community. These are people with wealth, and so on. They show contempt for experts and promote extravagant lies—as my noble friend Lord Ashdown put it—which is so against the interests of everybody in this country.

We have to fight for liberal values. We have to maintain them in the face of all the current problems and perils. I share the pessimism of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, about where we are at present.