The new book Reinventing the State is an attempt to update social liberalism for the present day. The origins of social liberalism lie in the party’s re-creation of itself in the early 20th century as a party not just of political reform but also of social reform, when radical Liberals added a commitment to social justice and democracy to the older Liberal commitments to expanding civil and political rights. The question is what that tradition means now.

Unlike socialists, liberals never allowed the desirability of greater equality to undermine their belief in individuality or their belief in the primacy of politics. Part of the process of updating social liberalism, however, is to remind ourselves that it does mean taking equality seriously - at a minimum level because of the political importance of not letting the super-rich take control of politics (either directly through donations to parties or through their control over the media) and, beyond the minimum, as a requirement of fairness. That means, for example, taxation policies that are designed not just to raise money for public goods but also to rein in economic inequality.

Another part of the process of updating social liberalism is to incorporate into our theoretical approach issues that the party has taken very seriously at the level of practical politics - for example climate change. What limits would we put on the power of the state to stop carbon emissions? Climate change is an existential threat (unlike terrorism), and that must influence our view of the fundamental social contract. As liberals, and not libertarians, we believe that property rights are tools to be designed, and redesigned, to maximise social welfare, not inviolable natural rights, and that is precisely what has to happen if we are to avoid catastrophe. But we would not permit the state to undermine democracy itself, no matter what the goal.

There are a number of other issues that the party has not taken seriously enough that require both theoretical incorporation and practical proposals - for example the mainly harmful transformation of everyday life that has taken place as a result of the replacement of personal relationships within families and communities by impersonal relationships via the media and the market. Democracy itself becomes highly unstable if it is seen solely as a different way of summing what individuals desire (which is what a market does). Democracy should be a process of deciding what we ought to desire, not just a mechanical device for deciding whose desires should be acted on. But in a fractured, atomised, media-dominated society, it is difficult to maintain any kind of debate about what we, as a body of citizens, ought to want.

We need ways of re-creating communities - preferably liberal communities. That means, for example, re-launching community politics as being about making new communities, not merely reflecting the views of existing communities (and even less a device for collecting votes). It also means thorough-going localism in politics, a politics in which people can take a meaningful part, and which really will make a difference to their lives.

Reinventing the State is not intended as a riposte to the Orange Book - indeed the list of authors of the two books overlaps to a considerable degree, and its working definition of social liberalism (as a form of liberalism committed to social justice and democracy, not just to individual rights) covers the vast majority of ‘economic liberals’ within the party, who are largely ‘economically liberal’ (i.e. want to use market mechanisms) about means, not ends. But ‘Reinventing the State’ does differ from the ‘Orange Book‘ in taking into account the social and cultural consequences of handing over all collective decisions to market mechanisms. Markets in their proper place have considerable appeal for liberals, because they allow for variation and experiment and they disperse power, but their effects when uncontrolled, not only on equality but also on community and thus on the possibility of democracy, mean that they should not be allowed to displace politics. Localism also encourages variation and experimentation, and also disperses power, but, in contrast with the market, it has the power to create communities and to reinforce democracy.

David Howarth is MP for Cambridge, Lib Dem Shadow Solicitor General and a co-editor of ‘Reinventing the State’, which will be launched at our Brighton conference next week.

I’ve been asked to preview the conclusions and argument for my book Location Matters: Recycling Britain’s Wealth here. If you subscribe to Liberator or Challenge (the Green Lib Dems’ journal) you will get reviews by others of the book before Conference. In the current Challenge you will also see a piece by me about how the Liberal Democrats’ Tax Commission got in such a depressingly non-radical place with Land Value Taxation (LVT) - which is what my book is about.

What I want to do here is explain the conception of the book, its purpose and what I hope happens next. But first, as requested, in a single sentence: conclusions and arguments. If the Liberal Democrats do not go into the next General Election campaign with a pledge to retain some form of nation-wide property tax at the same time as scrapping Council Tax, they will have betrayed their forebears and - more importantly - future generations of British people and will not deserve the support of voters. Read more »

Some of you may know that I have recently finished authoring a book on coalition governments. I wanted to speak directly to Lib Dem members to explain my conclusions, having spent the best part of the past nine months researching and writing the book, and how and why I have come to them. It’s not easy to explain in a brief article but I hope it goes some way to illuminating why I have come to the view that for our party and the country, we need to be both prepared for and wary of sharing power.

For most of my 18-year career in politics, I have seen such a deal as an exciting prospect. For a third party in a majoritarian electoral system, coalition government is our quickest route to power, and perhaps the only way we will achieve proportional representation. But my study of the history of coalition governments has given me a new insight into coalitions and the myriad pitfalls that accompany them. Read more »