Nick Clegg was a member of CUCA
Apologies for the long delay in blogging… I’m finally back in Oxford, and so have stuff to do. And thus more reason to procrastinate by blogging…
Anyway, Dale has this great piece on Nick Clegg’s membership of the Cambridge University Conservative Association.
Ed Balls used to be in OUCA, so why shouldn’t Clegg have been involved in CUCA. His excuse was that he joined all the political associations in order to be able to hear all the speakers. I think this is fair enough to be honest, and don’t think that politicians should be overly held to their actions (and views) when they were students. Student politics is supposed to be about experimenting with ideas, and defining your views - this includes the obvious risk of error, as Clegg (and Balls) have discovered.
It is a real issue though: how much of what one writes/thinks when a student really matters? While it is important to be held to your views, and if you flip-flop or abandon principles, then that may be blameworthy, but can we really hold Clegg to account for messing around in CUCA?
April 16, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Bit of a non-story really. Clegg’s mistake was not in joining CUCA (we both know that liberals, even pretty left-wing ones, can join Conservative associations :P) but in denying it.
He should have simply admitted to it, and said that he believed things which in hindsight were mistaken, and in some cases profoundly wrong.
April 16, 2008 at 3:34 pm
As for your latter question - I think it’s good that politicians can change their minds, provided that they do it for the right reasons (eg. not merely for the pursuit of power). Dogmatism for its own sake is no good at all. If a politician has good reason to think that what they thought when they were a student was mistaken, then of course they should revise their beliefs!
So, it’s not really flip-flopping. More an honest re-evaluation. And who can object to that!?
April 19, 2008 at 8:09 am
A point I’ve raised in a few discussions of this story in the Lib Dem blogosphere: it’s possible to join, say, OUCA, OULD and OULC (and presumably their Cambridge counterparts) all at the same time, and many people do. I used to be a member of the now-defunct OUTRG because they had good speakers, and have been to a fair few OUCA and OULC events. None of these student groups require you to join the national political party, and if you’re a politically-minded student, it makes sense to go listen to as many top-class politicians as possible, whatever their persuasion.
If Clegg was a member of CUCA, I can’t remotely see a problem. The only issue is his apparent lying about it.