Clegg in Nazi slur on UK: 'Our delusions of grandeur' at winning war are greater cross to bear than German guilt.
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Nick Clegg has claimed that the British people have ‘a more insidious cross to bear’ than Germany over the Second World War.... the Liberal Democrat leader said we suffered from ‘delusions of grandeur’ and a ‘misplaced sense of superiority’ over having defeated the horrors of Nazism. He said we found it hard to accept that Germany had become a ‘vastly more prosperous nation’ and that ‘we need to be put back in our place’.
The passionately pro-Europe Mr Clegg revealed his views in an article for the Guardian newspaper in 2002.
‘Watching Germany rise from its knees after the war and become a vastly more prosperous nation has not been easy on the febrile British psyche,’ Mr Clegg wrote, before attacking Britain’s approach to the war.
‘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.’
Tory MP Nicholas Soames, grandson of wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill, said: ‘These views will disgust people the length and breadth of the country. They show that Nick Clegg is unfit to lead his party, let alone the country.
‘They are an insult to the memory of Britain’s war dead and to a time when the British public all pulled together for the common good. They prove that Mr Clegg shares the European view of Britain rather than the British view.’
Mr Clegg, who has a Spanish wife, a Dutch mother and a Russian grandparent, began his career as a Brussels bureaucrat and moved to Westminster after a spell as a Euro MP.
Ironically, his mother was interned by the Japanese during the war.
His outburst about the Second World War was not an isolated incident. In another article from June 2003, Mr Clegg continued to denounce ‘Britain’s culture of superiority’.
Making clear his love affair with all things European, he condemned the British ‘belief in our innate difference from our mainland continental cousins’.
He went on: ‘No other culture in Europe is quite so enamoured by such a false notion of difference.
'We Brits concoct a historically illiterate notion that we are divorced from outside influences. Maybe it was loss of empire, the choppy waters of the Channel, or the last war.’
Those with recent experience of fighting for their country condemned his views.
Colonel Tim Collins, commander of the Royal Irish Regiment during the Iraq War, said: ‘What he’s articulating is the Liberal Democrat view of the British people.
‘They are ashamed of them. They are ashamed of British identity and pandering to those who don’t share it.’
Mr Clegg’s spokesman said: ‘Mail readers who see the article in full will realise that it was written in the context of an incident of anti-German prejudice. He remains against prejudice in any form.’
