By David Cronin

It is a measure of how little separates Britain’s three major parties on issues of substance that the worst insult flung at the Liberal Democrats so far is an accusation that their policies are “eccentric”.

The recently deceased Malcolm McLaren showed the world what being eccentric was all about by revolting against prog rock, elephant flares and the monarchy.

Nick Clegg, by contrast, is a middle-of-the-road politician whose career has been mainly dedicated to widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

Clegg should have no difficulty settling into a coalition with the Conservatives in the event of a hung parliament. For he already has ample experience of working for an eminent Tory; during the 1990s he was an adviser to Leon Brittan, then the EU’s trade commissioner.

Driven by the same toxic ideology as Margaret Thatcher, Brittan did everything he could to usher in a new global dictatorship, where corporations would call the shots.

Not all Brittan’s plans to build a world safe for “investment” (a euphemism for ceding power to major firms) succeeded, because some politicians were still attached to old-fashioned concepts like sovereignty and democracy.

“Investment is a desirable and desired thing,” he told a 1998 meeting in Paris (according to the book Europe Inc). “Nonetheless, governments still sometimes find it threatening because free direct investment limits administrations’ ability to control and shape their countries’ economic destiny. This is a small price to pay for allowing private sector decision-makers to generate economic gains worldwide. But it is a price that some governments still find difficult to pay. That is a tragedy.”

A year after Brittan made those comments Clegg was elected to the European Parliament. Understandably, Clegg put the knowledge he had acquired in his old job to use by regularly participating in the assembly’s debates on trade policy.

I’ve checked his archive of speeches to see if he ever hinted that his old boss might have been a little too extreme for his liking.

Not only did he never drop such a hint, he continued to support the aggressive stance taken by EU representatives in international trade talks. In 2003, he was the lead author of a resolution urging that Europe’s banks should have greater freedom to operate across borders. This call chimed with efforts by the banking lobby to deprive poorer countries of the possibility to build up their own financial services sectors in a way that served their own populations, rather than the interests of foreign capital.

The Lib Dems’ manifesto for next week’s election still fails to recognise that Europe’s trade agenda is inimical to the world’s poor. It commits the party to breaking down international “trade barriers” – shorthand for labour laws or pollution standards that corporations consider as too pesky.

A separate pledge to work towards making the World Trade Organisation accept the need for environmental protection is likely to prove meaningless as the WTO has invariably opposed green rules when it perceives them as an impediment to business.

European Voice, a newspaper published by The Economist, has reported that muck-raking British hacks are busy investigating Clegg’s time in Brussels in a bid to unearth some unsavoury truths about him. So far, though, I have seen no critical analysis of how Clegg was a champion of some of the most harmful initiatives undertaken at EU level.

Clegg strongly endorsed a plan by the European Commission to open up the Union’s services sector to competition, known as the Bolkestein directive after its author, veteran Dutch politician Frits Bolkestein.

David Rowland, an academic, correctly noted how the Commission’s proposal “applies the same rules to healthcare and social services as it does to estate agents, fairground providers, advertising companies and private security firms.”

Despite the risk that the quality of healthcare would deteriorate once profit was considered more important than keeping patients alive, Clegg happily backed Bolkestein. I vividly recall attending a reception at which Clegg spoke in 2003; he alleged that MEPs who had rejected the directive were trying to flush Europe’s economy “down the toilet”.

Of course, the Lib Dems have often sounded more sensible than their rivals. Yet the idea they are fundamentally different is wide of the mark. Even their opposition to the war in Iraq merits no more than qualified praise because they have often proved as hawkish on foreign affairs as the Labour and Tory elite. Declaring themselves as “critical supporters” of the war in Afghanistan, they have only asked questions about the tactics employed in this imperial invasion, not whether it was legal or justified in the first place.

Nick Clegg might well be the most dapper and articulate of the three main party leaders. He might well be a nice chap. But when it comes to the things that really matter, he is just as dodgy as the other two.