The President of Britain’s Liberal Democrat Party is a man called Tim Farron.
Tim Farron is a man who is basically after Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s other job. The one that bears the title ‘Leader of the Liberal Democrats’.
He’s also a man who appeared on Sky News this morning to tell us (emphasis added):
“UKIPs position is clear and actually I respect it because at least it’s clear, but it’s wrong, staggeringly wrong for the future of this country. There are at least three million jobs that depend on our relationship with the European Union, our ability to tackle climate change across borders depends on being in the EU, so does our ability to catch criminals.”
BetterOffOut has brought this issue to light using social media today. Because only seven months ago, the would-be replacement to Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said something completely different.
During the Liberal Democrat Annual Conference in September 2013, Farron told New Statesman journalist Rafael Behr. He told Behr this (emphasis added):
“The polling indicates that an in/out referendum – I am a fairly confident, would be won. I don’t think any other referendum on Europe would be but an in/our referendum would be won for hard, pragmatic, economic reasons. We mustn’t be overly shrill about it and we musn’t say ‘we will lose 3m jobs tomorrow if we leave the EU’ because that’s not credible’ …but you’ve already got Nissan saying we would not be in the north-east of England if you were not in the European Union.”
Oops.
I didn’t realise three million jobs had suddenly become dependent on the UK’s membership of the EU. I suppose 3 million people would be immediately destitute if Britain left the European Union. Families would starve, children would cry, and all three branches of Waitrose in Cornwall might close.
Quite an embarrassing flip-flop overall for the Liberal Democrats, further undermining their already precarious position in recent European Election polls.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.