Opinion: Welcome to Nursery Britain
Written by Matt Michael on 21st November 2008 – 4:45 pmAre you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.
In 1945, perhaps in a desire to continue the communal spirit of the war, Britain elected its only Socialist government. Swathes of privately-owned businesses were nationalised, capitalism was abandoned in favour of state ownership, and Liberalism, which had taken Great Britain from a dreary archipelago at the corner of Europe to a global powerhouse of industry and enterprise, was abandoned. And while the Attlee government did some great good in the creation of the NHS, after six years the British electorate had come to hate the drab, rationed austerity of the 1940s. Perhaps in a desire to resurrect some vestige of imperial prestige, they re-elected a decrepit Churchill – like Britain, a tragicomic echo of his old self.
But once in power, the Tories did nothing to reverse the Attlee revolution. Instead, they effected the mixed economy, a dismal synthesis of state socialism and capitalism that proved to be sclerotic for free trade and launched the nation into a thirty-year spiralling descent that was only arrested with the wholesale dissolution of British industry and the sale of the City of London to overseas investors.
Since the brief experiment of Socialist government between 1945 and 1951, Britain has been faced with a choice between two essentially social democratic parties, both believing that the state can – and should – intervene in every aspect of public and private life in order to impose their vision of what society should be. And even the lady who believed that there was no such thing as society couldn’t control her instincts as a curtain-twitching busybody, prying into the most personal corners of our lives, enacting unfair taxation and betraying the promise of a Liberal revolution in favour of the continuation of the social democratic consensus.
For almost 60 years we’ve tolerated – actively encouraged – government that has infantilised us “from cradle to grave”, that has taken away our freedom of choice and encouraged us to become increasingly reliant on central government to direct us: a state of affairs that removes any incentive to act as grownups. This is the insidious mollycoddling of the nanny state, and it’s therefore hardly surprising that some British people are disinclined to go to school, get a job or take responsibility for their own lives – what’s the point? The state will pick us up, stick a plaster on our knee, pat us on the head and pop us back in the playpen.
The paradox is that most people, if pressed, would prefer to choose how to spend their money or live their lives rather than abdicate that responsibility to the state. But words and figures don’t match. And for all that The Guardian might claim that Blair-Brown have created a cosy consensus that means we’re happy to pay high taxes for ever-proliferating (and more costly) government, this is only because neither of the two largest parties is actively offering an alternative.
For all that Tories might claim they want to “roll back the state” there’s scant evidence in the previous 60 years to suggest that they have any desire to limit or undo what successive Labour governments have done. In truth, their centralising impulse – manifested in opposition to devolution, prurient laws to limit personal freedom and government management of exchange rates and international trade – belies the Tories’ claims. Though the emphasis differs, they believe in a state-controlled society as much as Blair or Benn or Brown ever did. David Cameron’s Conservative Party is a social democratic party, just as Major’s, Heath’s and Thatcher’s were.
Social democracy is the problem, not the solution. A definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. It follows that electing either Labour or the Tories at the next election will simply prolong the pain. But Labour and the Tories have got us greedily suckling the milk of state welfare. Not only will Britain vote to prolong the pain, like an indulged child, we aren’t even consciously aware that there is another way. And so we’ll keep paying ever higher taxes for ever more inefficient services, giving up our freedoms, one by one, and living in Nursery Britain because the Government (Red or Blue) tells us that the world outside is a scary, dangerous place. But if we’re good children and we play nicely and do as nanny says, everything will be all right.
At the moment, the Liberal Democrats are part of this consensus. We don’t talk enough about reducing central government, empowering local communities to make their own decisions and shouting out that free trade and free markets, with socially responsible regulation, are far better at generating wealth and delivering efficient and effective services than the state has ever proved itself capable of. We don’t talk up the choice. In short, we don’t treat people like adults.
The state can’t fix every problem, and we shouldn’t perpetuate the illusion that it can. Of course there are many hard choices to be made, between taxation and public spending, the level of government provision of welfare, and about what kind of regulation is required to discourage irresponsible borrowing and unethical business practices. Devolution in itself is not the answer, without revisiting what the role and scope of central and local government should be – that’s simply exchanging one nanny for another. But to avoid debating these questions openly is to continue the infantilising of the electorate. It’s also deeply illiberal.
As a party, we are best placed to make the case for the constitutional limitation of government, the importance of devolution and the benefits of free-market capitalism. We have not been in government for almost a century and so have not been blinded to the limits of social planning by the exercise of power. We are not responsible for creating Nursery Britain. Liberalism offers the real choice for change. But only if we start talking about it.
* Matt Michael is a Liberal Democrat member in Lewisham.
Tags: david cameron
Posted in Op-eds 252 Comments »
21st November 2008 at 5:43 pm
OK, I want you, Tom Papworth, and Charlotte Gore to take over the party. Please don’t hang about. The Lib Dem ship is getting tossed all over the place at the moment and it’s making me ill.
Great article.
21st November 2008 at 6:02 pm
What about me, Boyce? Where’s my piece of pie?
21st November 2008 at 6:04 pm
The problem with this article is that the first 3 paragraphs are garbage.
The Labour share of the vote was 49.7%, 46.1, 48.8 and the Tory share 36.2%, 40.0, 44.3 in 1945, 1950, 1951 respectively (Yes the Tories won in 1951 despite being 4.5% behind). To suggest that Labour lost because the public hated the situation is silly – clearly so because if it was true then Churchill wouldnt have stuck to Labour’s vision.
To suggest that this was the only period where there was any socialism or nationalisation is also daft… but not as silly as describing Thatcher as a social democrat!
And it’s not true to say that from 1950 to 1980 was a 30 year “spiral of descent”, or if it was true it was a very slow spiral indeed – that didnt go very far.
I generally agree with some of the thrust about excessive statism, but if you start off an article with such an untrue picture of the world you’re not going to get people to take the rest seriously…
21st November 2008 at 6:07 pm
Do you mean liberalism or libtertarianism because there is a clear difference.
I will support ‘rolling back the state’ when people stop using it as code for leaving people on the trash heap…
21st November 2008 at 6:13 pm
Oh Darrell, change the record.
21st November 2008 at 6:15 pm
No, why dont you??
21st November 2008 at 6:17 pm
Of course you’re right up there Julian. More girls please!
21st November 2008 at 6:20 pm
Charlotte, I believe, is not the one making repetitive comments on other people’s blogs (and spending hours of their week dreaming up bizarre conspiracy theories about fellow party members). But this is in danger of becoming embarrassingly childish, so a change of record from all, please. And back to the point – there is very little difference between the three strands of social democracy being offered to the electorate.
(Laurence: woo! We have a deal)
21st November 2008 at 6:24 pm
I think the Conservatives and their members will be very surprised to find they are a ’social-democratic’ party…they are patently not…the notion that they offer a social democratic programm is just a nonsense….why is any form of state intervention dammed as ’social democratic’ when even this article calls for;
“socially responsible regulation”…
sounds social-democratic to me…
21st November 2008 at 6:27 pm
“Hey there, ‘poor’ people, man up and sort yourself out. Want the state to provide you with healthcare, education and a safety net? Walk it off! Hey voters, Tories not Tory enough for you? Vote Lib Dem!”
… next.
21st November 2008 at 6:29 pm
Andy – by “provide” do you mean “subsidise” or “control”?
21st November 2008 at 6:31 pm
You’re getting the hang of it Andy!
21st November 2008 at 6:35 pm
Social Democratic is probably the wrong term, but the Social Democrats and Tories are essentially the same in methodology – the state is the solution and liberalism is to be opposed.
Social democracy is the adaptation of Tory means to socialist ends.
Both are authoritarian creeds, inextricably opposed to liberalism.
Darrell: Libertarianism is not about throwing anyone on the scrapheap, its about freeing people to live their lives without being thrown on the scrapheap and allowing people to cooperate to help each other. It seeks to strike at the root of the problems which cause poverty not to cover them up with the dirty plaster of more state action.
21st November 2008 at 6:40 pm
Tristan…
I think Andy summed up rather neatly what it is all about. How, in concrete, do you propose to ’strike at the root causes of poverty’ then?? To me Clegg best summed it up when talking about the Tories economic plans which amount to, in practice, doing nothing…
21st November 2008 at 6:44 pm
Andy:
Ummm no, more “Hey poor, rise up against your oppressors and those who keep you poor.
Rise up against the authoritarians who seek to control your lives.”
Plus a bit of “Hey politicians, stop taking money from those who work to pay for your lifestyles and grant favours to your mates”
The point is there should be no need for tax funded health care or social services. Poverty is actually a solvable problem but the biggest obstacle is the state and its actions which prevent the poor from improving their lives – or others from helping them (unless you happen to be very rich)
21st November 2008 at 6:50 pm
I think the Conservatives and their members will be very surprised to find they are a ’social-democratic’ party
Err, no. The brighter and more historically alert ones wouldn’t be surprised at all, although needless to say, they’d doubtless engage in some enjoyable factionalism about whether the persistent social democratic nature of their party within recent memory is a good thing or a bad thing. But I agree with the post that we are indeed experiencing a social democratic consensus of sorts, and I do think it would be fun, to put it no more strongly than that, to see what would happen if any mainstream party was brave enough to offer a serious alternative – especially at a time when the flaws of the current arrangements are being all too apparent.
21st November 2008 at 6:52 pm
Tristan,
“The point is there should be no need for tax funded health care or social services.”
But there so patently is because unless I am very much mistaken the reason the state had to step in and provide in the first place was because the ‘free market’ wasnt and still doesnt..and this is where my initial comments because this is where you end up in practice…
It’s bitterly ironic that Americans have just voted and decided overwhelmingly that there is a need for better and more universal provision of healthcare we want to travel in the opposite direction…
21st November 2008 at 6:54 pm
Please don’t tell me you think the US has a free market in health care. It doesn’t. And it hasn’t, for a VERY long time.
21st November 2008 at 6:55 pm
Bunny,
My point would be that the Conservative Party has never come out in favour of something like the nationalisation of the commanding heights or anything like that…they have accepted the consensus around the provison of health and education and basically the priciple that there must be a safety net because that has been the political consensus for a substantial amount of time….i don’t think around the welfare state this is something new at all….
21st November 2008 at 7:00 pm
It’s not bitterly ironic Darrell – the grass is always greener. But we can get there in stages. Vouchers and top-ups are the way to go. Let’s wean ourselves off the hard drugs and onto the Methadone, and then . . . who knows? One day we might even get clean.
21st November 2008 at 7:02 pm
Anon,
Of course I dont but Obama was clearly elected on a program of extending state subsidised provision wasnt he???
21st November 2008 at 7:06 pm
The tories as social democrats? Good lord. You don’t think it more likely that they learned to live with the NHS because that’s clearly what the overwhelming majority of the electorate wanted and expected, and to do otherwise would have been be to commit electoral suicide?
That’s the thing about libertarianism; it doesn’t even matter whether there’s any merit in the ideology, because the fact is there is on way on Earth that any party advocating it will ever get elected.
21st November 2008 at 7:06 pm
Laurence,
But where after the Methadone to accept your anaology?? Are the vouchers and top-up’s taken away?? How does the state even provide or is there no provision; making Andy essentially right??
21st November 2008 at 7:10 pm
Details, details . . .
21st November 2008 at 7:11 pm
Darrell:
Why do you mention Tory policy? Are you perhaps confused that the Tories might be libertarians? Far from it.
Libertarians aim to abolish the regulations which support the rich and harm the poor, which prevent entry into the market and raise prices. The Tories support these regulations whole heartedly (as does the Labour Party).
Far from doing nothing, libertarians would seek to actually roll back the state, allow people to keep more of their wages (ideally workers would keep 100% of the product of their labour).
We would move to a free market (which is nothing like what we have today) which would benefit the poor by breaking the monopolies which ramp up prices.
21st November 2008 at 7:13 pm
http://www.lpuk.org
21st November 2008 at 7:17 pm
“That’s the thing about libertarianism; it doesn’t even matter whether there’s any merit in the ideology, because the fact is there is on way on Earth that any party advocating it will ever get elected.”
Despite my comments here, I have much sympathy with this, Iainm. I am deeply suspicious of libertarianism. But it is in terms of direction of travel that I am cheering this on. I really feel this is the way to go, but for now I am still retaining membership of the “all the libertarians I know are tools” Facebook group.
21st November 2008 at 7:19 pm
Tristan,
Because there policies are actually important in determaining whether or not they are social democrats and I explained the qualification why they werent even though they accepted the consensus in my reply to Bunny…
You see, some of that sounds good to me…until it hits the snag that this would not break up the monopolies, they would still after all have their savings and vastly larger infrastructure, and they would be left holding the loot and turning the screws so to speak…i see a dichotomy between what you say ‘breaking up the state’ would achieve and what it actually would achieve in practice….you say that workers would be allowed to keep 100% of their wages which is fine until you come up against the fact that everybody gets different wages…so, would you for example curtail executive pay which is a regulation??
21st November 2008 at 7:20 pm
*sighs*
What free market? Before the NHS reams of regulation was brought in to restrict medical care.
The rest of the market was just as unfree.
Why do you think so many people were criticising the lack of free market in the 19th Century? Why they were doing so in the 1920s and 30s?
Where was this free market which couldn’t supply? Nowhere. It was never allowed to develop.
The myth of the NHS is powerful, but it is a myth, and it wasn’t what Beveridge had even planned (not that that stops people claiming the NHS is ‘liberal’ because a Liberal designed it).
As for the US – did people vote for anything other than ‘Change’? I know Americans who are steadfast against socialised healthcare, but voted for Obama because he was the lesser of two evils.
Do you agree with every position of the people you vote for? If you do you are a very strange person (or the candidate themselves).
I’d also like to note that Obama is against an NHS style health service – he opposes mandatory health insurance (which is at least a bit liberal).
I’m not really sure what your point is though. Some Americans reject their current, state dominated system, so the free market doesn’t work?
21st November 2008 at 7:23 pm
The chief attraction of President Obama is surely that he is not totally crazy?
21st November 2008 at 7:35 pm
Darrell:
Firstly, I said that Social Democrat wasn’t the right term, so I don’t know why you’re harping on about that – the point is that the authoritarian mindset dominates and the social democrats are the dominant form of that (I think of Social Democracy as the Toryism of the left – they’re the same methods, have similar results, just differing rhetoric).
You assume that in the free market we’d have the same institutions and systems. That is very very unlikely considering how dependent upon regulation these institutions are.
True, people earn different amounts, but that’s due to differing productivity in the free market (unlike today). That is not a problem however, overall wealth will be higher and I’d argue that inequality would be lower – largely due to the equality in authority which prevents privilege and abuse of power.
21st November 2008 at 7:39 pm
You can promote a free market by abolishing nonsense like VAT, thus bringing prices to market levels.
As someone who is certainly not a libertarian, that is something I’d put my own name to.
21st November 2008 at 7:51 pm
Tristan,
Just you asked why I mentioned Tory policy which I feel is pertinant to a discussion of what they actually are. I think the difference is I dont see the main ideological divide as being between ‘authoritarians’ and ‘liberals’…
So, you are saying they will just cave as the state withers?? This is where we are disagreeing because I dont see it happening that way….I dont agree, I think truly big corporations have more than enough resource wise to ‘go it alone’ regulation or none…
By what measure are you determaning productivity though?? Is it a social one?? Because in that case a nurse is more socially productive than an executive…is it in terms of producing new capital? Because if it is that discriminates against roles which are socially productive does it not?? What I am really driving at is that I feel there are different *kinds* of productivity and not just different levels…If you are saying inequality would be lower is this because all the money would trickle down??
How would that happen; because I cant see people at the top willingly relinquishing control of it?? They are going to say ‘well I did a deal worth say £50,000′ so under the principle that a worker gets 100% of their wages or what they produce I am keeping that entire pot because I did that deal and won all that money…
21st November 2008 at 8:01 pm
This is the heart of the matter: the rigged, loaded, weighted system that protects vested interests and strangles every economic entity financially to try to compensate the ‘losers’ is *not* a free market system. It’s not what *I* want, and it’s frankly what I’m trying to get away from.
The more ’stuff’ happening, the more jobs and wealth there will be. Our system guarantees very little ’stuff’ happening, with the benefits going to very few. The solution is not to squeeze those lucky few more. The solution is to liberalise. Yet no-one dares advocated because of knee-jerk reactions that any move away from the status quo is some kind of return to the victorian era. It’s like trying to tell some that the reason they have a bleeding arm is because they keep scratching it and the solution is to stop scratching – when all they want to do is find better and faster methods of healing the wound.
21st November 2008 at 8:11 pm
I should first point out that I’m approaching this topic as a Lib Dem voter, rather than a Lib Dem member, so there’s absolutely no reason for anyone to take on board what I’m saying, but there are a couple of points I’d like to make.
1) As Mark Wright points out at the top of this thread, the writer is either being imprecise in his use of post-war electoral politics as a contextual backdrop, or is historically illiterate.
2) I’ve got to say that I’m not crazy about deprived communities being described as a ‘playpen’, so please pick a better metaphor next time.
3) As is the case with so many critiques of the welfare state, this piece is conveniently vague. In the interest of seriousness, it’d be helpful to receive some kind of guesstimate of how much Job Seekers’ Allowance should be cut by, how much child support should be cut by, how much incapacity benefit should be cut by and how much money we should put into social housing (if at all). I’d also like a confirmation that the author – in keeping with a strictly liberal reading of economics – would abolish the minimum wage. When he’s done all that, I’d like some kind of practical hypothesis for how all this should improve the lives of those with no job, no qualifications, no skills and several children to support. When he’s done with that, I’d like to know which Lib Dem seats he’s happy to lose to the Labour Party.
Or is this just another exercise in political theory which isn’t meant to mean anything in practice?
21st November 2008 at 8:13 pm
Charlotte,
Somewhere in there im detecting some contradictions between what you and Tristan are saying…but maybe its just the contradiction I feel there is between your stated ends and the means you employ to get their….I dont think the means will take you to the place you are stating you want to be; I dont see corporations collapsing over night or is that not the end you want??
I feel that’s where your means leave you in practice…it might not be your stated goal but that’s the hard reality of where it would lead in my opinion…
21st November 2008 at 8:19 pm
Neil, I believe some libertarians support a Citizens Basic Income to replace many benefits. It would disincentivise having large families, & would be much simpler. It would also incentivise work by removing the benefits trap. I have entertained the idea myself. I think there should be DLA/incapacity benefit as before though.
Not really in the mood for links (have been working too hard), but it’s all there on the ’sphere: it began as a leftist idea but has been taken up by libertarians.
I can’t speak for any contributors to this thread though.
21st November 2008 at 8:24 pm
The piece reads rather like the outpourings of a naive FCS member from the early 1980’s after a long night in the union bar.
Clearly, the author is too young to have met anyone who remembers what life was like before the 1945-51 Labour government, otherwise he wouldn’t write such nonsense.
Does he really think the Tories would have returned to power if they had advocated the abolition of the NHS, or handing back the collieries to the mine owners, or the repeal of the town planning legislation?
Now, let’s give the guy his due. At least he accepts that the NHS is a good thing and that some “social regulation” is necessary (even Sir Sheath Joseph said there needed to be a “safety net”). I don’t suppose he would like to see 80 hour weeks and emlpoyers having the right to horsewhip slacking staff. Or condos along the Seven Sisters and Noddy houses in Wensleydale.
As I explained to the people who were advocating the lynching of the killers of Baby P the other day, if we didn’t have the state, we would have a free-for-all in which the most powerful would come out on top. Those who don’t believe me, go and visit Somalia.
21st November 2008 at 8:29 pm
Asquith,
Yes to citizens basic income, replacing most benefits. Keep benefits for incapacity and disability (but not in current form). Create unemployment and recession insurance markets.
No marginal tax rates trapping people in poverty. A smaller state can also be more redistrubitive and egalitarian.
21st November 2008 at 8:33 pm
Quite so, James Schneider, which is why I advocate the raising of the tax threshold, the abolition of VAT, (rather controversially on these pages) an anti-EU stance, & a lot more.
I also support the encouragement of various cooperative, voluntary & mutual institutions (including trades unions), & friendly societies etc.
I envisage a need for more state than the libertarians do though, since I do think there will need to be a safety net. & in the end I’d rather have a system with a few chancers abuse it than not have one at all.
21st November 2008 at 8:37 pm
“I’d like some kind of practical hypothesis for how all this should improve the lives of those with no job, no qualifications, no skills and several children to support.”
At some point in this argument . . . somewhere along the line . . . without wishing to sound like an evil Tory . . . we absolutely have to question . . . whether someone with no qualifications . . . and no skills . . . should be having several children.
Several children? Ought they maybe to consider having no children?
21st November 2008 at 8:51 pm
Laurence Boyce wrote:
“Several children? Ought they maybe to consider having no children?”
Yes, it would be great if unemployable, chain-smoking slobs didn’t reproduce. But here’s the rub. How do you stop them?
Readers may recall that in 1976 Sir “Sheath” Joseph ruined his chances of becoming Tory Leader by saying something very similar to Laurence.
21st November 2008 at 8:55 pm
Yes, there is nothing more lethal to a political career than stating the obvious.
21st November 2008 at 9:00 pm
Asquith,
Raising of the tax threashold – good
abolition of VAT – not on all products and gradually – but in principle yes
Anti EU stance – please explain
Co-ops etc – brilliant – we should be thinking of ways in which we can incentivize this sort of ownership structure – different corporation tax levels dependent on ownership structure?
21st November 2008 at 9:04 pm
Laurence/Sesenco – if we moved to a citizens basic income people would no longer be incentivized to have lots of kids if they can’t support them (i.e. need to get society to help out). This is very different from attempting to actively stop people reproducing, but more fairly reflecting what social cost their choices have on society.
21st November 2008 at 9:08 pm
Several children? Ought they maybe to consider having no children?
I wouldn’t disagree, Lawrence. But there they are, all the same, and they need feeding every once in a while
21st November 2008 at 9:36 pm
Asquith,
Raising of tax threshold – yes
Abolition of VAT – Yes
Anti-Eu – no, sorry I am pro-european…
Co-ops and voluntaries – yes lol, we discuss this many a time
21st November 2008 at 9:38 pm
Asquith,
Thanks for that, and I think there’s certainly room for a discussion about the Basic Income. My main problem with this piece and others like it (I’ve read too many since the Baby P thing, and the Shannon Matthews incident several months before) is that it diagnoses the welfare state as the problem. It isn’t. The problem is a normative one; generations of entrenched poverty and perpetual joblessness have led to negative social norms in deprived communities, which are being passed down with every generation.
As I see it, cutting welfare – or even just replacing it with a basic income – won’t, by itself, help/force someone with no job, education, experience or tangible skills to be in a better position to get a job than they were before. Nor will it necessarily lead to more stable familes, better lives for their kids and a drop in crime.
For me, the imperative is to re-establish in deprived/socially excluded communities some of the social norms of wider society. I don’t see how libertarianism/tiny state Lib Demmery is going to achieve that, but I can envisage ways in which a social democrat government could.
21st November 2008 at 9:39 pm
Actually, on tax thereshold do you mean inheritence tax or do you mean taking the bottom percentile out of tax?? If it’s the former im going to have to perform a public u-turn lol
21st November 2008 at 9:47 pm
Asquith,
In terms of the Citizens Basic Income how would you determine it??
I take your point and I think it’s an idea I could support depending on the specifics; however, can I raise the issue that incentivising people to work would also mean looking at wages in employment and conditions as well as benefits…
21st November 2008 at 9:49 pm
It’s rather strange to moan about the public sector when public sector ethos has been more or less abandoned in favour of managerialism cribbed from the private sector.
The article also ignores the infantilising effect of housing bubbles and the lure of easy money.
21st November 2008 at 9:53 pm
If the right to have children is to be dependent upon (1) having educational qualifications, (2) a moderately healthy lifestyle, and (3) employability, Miss Y gets through hoop No 1 (she has two GCSEs), and Craig Meehan gets through hoop No 3 (he was a supermarket fishmonger).
21st November 2008 at 9:57 pm
I really don’t think living in a jungle is more desirable than being imprisoned in a nursery.
There’s also no way in the world I wish to rehabilititate Malthus as a theorist – let him stay spouting polemics in academia.
Political parties are vehicles for activity which provide a forum for ideogical debate, they are not vehicles for the proselytising of ‘the one, true’ ideology as a means to clamp down on debate and suppress original thinking.
‘Annoyingly wishy-washy LibDems, not one thing or the other’ goes the standard criticism. Well thank jiminy, at least we are broad enough to allow for some balance and include contributions from across the spectrum.
21st November 2008 at 10:04 pm
Neil,
Now we’re talking. What would you suggest to tackle the problems endemic in deprived communities? I think a citizens basic income is one step as it removes some disincentives to work. Legalisation, regulation, and taxation of drugs would be another. These are not necessarily sufficient. What do you suggest?
Darrell,
The Citizens Income would be set by three criteria: the amount of redistribution desired, the amount of money we have after restructuring spending, the amount of money that it is deemed unacceptable for anybody to live without in a developed society.
The best figures I’ve seen involve turning most benefits into the CBI and scrapping things like the DTI (or its successor – already LibDem policy). This comes to around 6.5k per annum. We could also fund education out of this and remove child tax credit. Each child would also receive the CBI into a trust. The parents/guardian would then apply to a body which controls the trust to use that money for their kids until they turn 18. This would be used to fund education. It could be used to fund child care, health insurance etc. The CBI would tapper off so that the rich don’t also receive it.
What do you mean specifically by “incentivising people to work would also mean looking at wages in employment and conditions as well as benefits…”?
21st November 2008 at 10:05 pm
Sesenco,
Is anybody really arguing that one has to prove to the State your worth as a parent? Are we really going to condone interference in reproductive rights in this manner?
21st November 2008 at 10:29 pm
Darrell wrote: “Do you mean liberalism or libtertarianism because there is a clear difference.”
If he fancies the NHS, he’s hardly a libertarian. Unfortunately many Lib Dems seems to think, that that’s the best health care system Britain could get.
21st November 2008 at 10:35 pm
James Schneider,
Of course we can’t.
But don’t think we have never done so.
When my aunt was a health visitor in Glasgow in the 1950s, one of her clients was a young woman of extremely low intelligence who had acquired the habit of “sleeping around”. Unchecked, she would have produced a baby a year for the next 20 to 25 years, leaving the state with a menagerie of simpletons who would be a burden on the public purse for life. The state solved the problem by sterilising her.
21st November 2008 at 10:37 pm
James
That seems workable enough to me….though I have to confess to a little tierdness so I reserve the right to expand on that later
…can I suggest however that something that could be included would be the possibility of ‘earning’ more by doing voluntary work etc (think Asquith will like that one 
)
I was talking in broad terms but wages would have to be at a level which made work the better option …i presume the minimum wage would still exist for example?? In terms of conditions we have to consider a whole range of issues; ie, measures that get people into work that suits them etc and that may include training etc, and incorporating education opportunities into the structure of the scheme…
21st November 2008 at 10:55 pm
Sesenco,
The State sterilized her? What?
Darrell,
Then voluntary work wouldn’t be voluntary. I don’t think I like that idea. How would it work?
21st November 2008 at 11:01 pm
James,
Yes it would; it would be entirely optional…maybe i didnt stress that enough. Over on Asquith’s blog we were talking about volunteering for the CAB;…is there not a way that if people chose to do something like that there would be a material benefit??
21st November 2008 at 11:13 pm
Oh dear. “The state will pick us up, pat us on the head and pop us back in the playpen.” Yes, and a lot more beautiful empty rhetoric besides. But what does it mean?
Should taxes be lower, if so how much lower, and what services shall we stop funding? You don’t give an opinion.
Shall we just scrap all benefits, and let people starve to death? You don’t give an opinion.
I dare say some people will like the mood music. I think most of us would prefer to see workable policies. Some of us might add that when the nation is in crisis, when ordinary people are worried sick about their jobs and livelihoods, we really don’t want to listen to abstract theoretical nihilism.
There are practical things we should be doing to make the State conduct its necessary business in a less bossy, authoritarian and centralised way. These need to be thought through and explored with care. Generalised preaching and exhortation won’t do!
21st November 2008 at 11:23 pm
Darrell,
Who decides what volunteer work counts? How much? How is this checked? How is this enforced?
It’s a nice idea, but I don’t see how it could ever work practically.
21st November 2008 at 11:25 pm
Darrell and James
The very definition of CBI is a “non-wthdrawable and unconditional” benefit, so you can’t randomly say “richer people don’t get it”. If you want to claw it back you use the tax system. An equivalent to CBI, you can use a “negative income tax” to do this more explicitly. Interestingly I read today that Obama seems interested in a negative income tax. That might at least rehabilitate the idea of CBI/Negative Income Tax in the UK as the three Obamessianic mainstream parties here rush to emulate his policy…:)
Darrell:
The point of having a CBI is that it gives labour a cushion on which they could just about scrape a living if not earning something else.
It very fundamentally, on its own, therefore shifts the balance of power from employer to employee because they have, at last, the economic freedom to say “stick your job, I can survive until I find a better employer”, and for many, this can also translate into “I can afford to stay alive while I build up my self-employed business” or “I can afford to stay alive while I go and get retrained for this better career” and so on.
The minimum wage would be removed – and before anyone gets all “but that’s essential anti-exploitation stuff” this is a position I understand to be accepted with approbation by groups even like Compass, from a blog post I read a year or so ago anyway.
Conveniently, taxing all land at full economic rent would provide just about enough cash to pay a CBI of about £100 per week to adults and a declining amount for under-18s down to infants.
21st November 2008 at 11:27 pm
I anticiapte having some mechanism for rewarding voluntary work in the form of local currency, indeed was talking to some of your fellow Oxford students about the idea last night at the inaurgural monthly meet and greet session of OxHub and OxSent…:)
21st November 2008 at 11:29 pm
James,
I dont see it being hard to check and enforce particularly; for JSA you have to provide evidence of looking for work etc. A timesheet signed and sealed would do the trick….when I worked for an agency it was all I had.
The first two are tricker to answer…i think i can be forgiven at least on the second for not nailing it down to a precise figure?? On the first one it may well be offered by advisers on the benefit itself, work that ties in with either aspirations or talents of the person in question…it could be part of a tailored package which includes the educational aspect??
21st November 2008 at 11:31 pm
Good stuff!
But the liberal party is not best known for its support of free-market capitalism.
You will wake up one day and realise you joined the wrong party!
21st November 2008 at 11:34 pm
James,
So, you invisage that it would drive up wages by increaseing bargaining power then???
I’m not going to leap on you because I can see the logic behind that position. However, I would ask how do you invisage this tieing in with other measures that improve the bargaining power of employees…?? I am thinking about specifically how our proposed works councils would be endowed or otherwise…and vis a vie trade union rights?? These things are kind of what i meant when talking about conditions…
21st November 2008 at 11:34 pm
James,
Assuming my imaginary government isn’t restrained by realpolitik, the following spring to mind:
- First, I’m operating on the basis that social dysfunction is something which happens over generations; it’s not entirely Labour’s fault, nor entirely the fault of Major/Thatcher. As such, there are some parents who simply aren’t up to the job of raising a kid, largely because their own parents weren’t up to the job, and so on. Now, bad parenting doesn’t always lead to that kid developing the kinds of behavioural problems which lead to truancy, and then crime, and then yet more broken families, but there’s still a strong connection.
- In 2007, the government piloted the Family Nurse Partnership in a few deprived areas. It operates under the increasingly accepted assumption that positive ‘Early Intervention’ in a child’s life is vital, and so nurses are dispatched to young families to offer the kind of advice and assistance in how to nurture their kids that their own parents might not have had. It’s won positive reviews thus far, and if it could be successfully expanded, you might see less need for social workers a few years down the line.
- The second thing is ensuring that SureStart remains comitted to its original goals of providing health & family support, community outreach etc, and doesn’t just contract into a glorified, state-run creche. Adult education in literacy, numeracy and computer skills is also important.
- After school clubs/youth clubs/etc. Parents (particularly single parents) aren’t always around when school finishes, and kids need somewhere safe to socialise, to avoid being dragged into gang culture.
- Somewhat related to that, I’d agree with you on drugs, though I also think there’s scope for expanded treatment of drug/alcohol misuse.
- The prison service needs radical reform to reduce reoffending: better drug treatment, psychological counselling, literacy/numeracy education and, most importantly, making sure prisoners have somewhere to live once they’re released.
Since this is a list, and I always leave stuff off lists, there’s bound to be something I’ve forgotten, but you’ve probably read enough. I realise this is enough to put me on a libertarian’s death list, but in defence of these ideas, I don’t think any of them need to be administered by Whitehall; they could be run just as effectively by PCTs & local government, and there’s a role for charities/social enterprises to play too.
Just to finish where I started, there is no quick way of resolving that which has festered for generations, and anyone who pretends otherwise is selling you snake oil. I’ll also fully accept that some of these ideas could be dismissed out of expense/impracticality. But they do, at least, address some of the root causes of social dysfunction which I touched upon earlier.
No ideology has a monopoly on good ideas, but whilst I’d love for it to be possible to diminish massive (and costly) social problems whilst cutting state spending at the same time, most of the proposals I’ve read for doing so rely heavily on magical thinking.
21st November 2008 at 11:34 pm
>I think a citizens basic income is one step as it removes some disincentives to work.
Isn’t that the minimum wage?
And what work is there to actually get? With hundreds of redundancies being announced every day at the moment?
Some of this thread reminds me of John Redwood, demonising single mothers.
Banning the poor from reproducing? Maybe we could just drop neutron bombs on sink housing estates and cut the numbers that way?
Or scrap their benefits and let them scavenge on rubbish tips.(It used to be coal tips pre-1945, but there aren’t any left).
>the parents/guardian would then apply to a body which controls the trust to use that money for their kids until they turn 18.
Teacher friends have kids turning up aged five who don’t know how to use a knife and fork. The parents have no education because they didn’t see the point when they were in school. They are unemployable, even if there were any jobs, and their idea of ‘parent power’ and involvement in the kids’ future is to go to the school and threaten violence if a teacher gives their kids a detention.
Unless you can engage today’s kids and get them to see life differently from their parents, the problems will perpetuate.
As for the NHS, the demise of NHS dentistry in many places has led to people pulling their own teeth out with pliers, because they can’t afford private insurance.
Lastly: if you think it’s so great, surviving without a welfare safety net, quit your job and try it.
21st November 2008 at 11:45 pm
Jock,
Could you let me know when the next meeting is taking place (through facebook probably).
Darrell,
What do you want to do with trade union rights? And yes I think a CBI probably would increase the bargaining power of low waged workers.
21st November 2008 at 11:49 pm
Glad if you all vote Lib Dem.
21st November 2008 at 11:56 pm
James,
I have a reply ‘in moderation’, which I guess is either for excessive linking or being a social policy dweeb. You’ll discover in due course.
22nd November 2008 at 12:01 am
James,
It would depend to me how our proposals on work councils panned out to be honest. Because our current position is merely to encourage their formation there is still going to be a need for them I would imagine.
I think i am correct in saying it’s our position to review the issue of union rights?? This is one of those issues where there has to be some kind of balance…there should be better protection for workers who participate in a lawfully constituted strike. I also think the process of balloting is unnecessarily complicated…
22nd November 2008 at 12:18 am
“You will wake up one day and realise you joined the wrong party!”
Yes, it is the repeated lament that the Tories are that unspeakable evil, a bunch of “social democrats”, that gives the game away.
Once upon a time, the Tories used to welcome bright young Vulcanites and right-wing ideologues, who could think the unthinkable to their hearts’ content. These people provided an intellectual smokescreen, while “privatisation” ran riot, and the Tories’ cronies made off with their ill-gotten gains.
But now, Cameron has taken over, with his “Don’t frighten the horses!” policy. Vulcanites are no longer welcome in today’s Tory Party. (Or at least, they had better pipe down until the election has been safely won.) So, what to do?
Well, why not look for a smaller party, run until recently by ageing leadership coasting along in the comfort zone, and try a bit of entryism?
Welcome to the Liberal Democrats. Proud, of course, of our formation from the Liberal – Social Democrats Alliance!
22nd November 2008 at 12:24 am
Well, why not look for a smaller party, run until recently by ageing leadership coasting along in the comfort zone, and try a bit of entryism?
Welcome to the Liberal Democrats.
Paranoid? Much! And somewhat insulting to be honest.
22nd November 2008 at 12:28 am
Neil,
I look forward to it.
Darrell,
Work councils? I’m not sure I know what you’re referring to. On the Union issue, I’m afraid this is an area I’m not very knowledgeable on so at this point I don’t have much to contribute.
22nd November 2008 at 12:32 am
James,
Ye, isnt one of our policy ideas in this area to encourage the formation of works councils; not make them mandatory but basically say they are a good thing and really should be done (something that incidentally could be encouraged fiscally maybe)?
I’m just thinking out loud really within the context of the debate we are having because I raised the issue of improving workplace conditions as an important part of incentivising people back to work….
22nd November 2008 at 12:37 am
“We believe that these models for works
councils are a good starting point for British businesses. We do not, however, feel they should be compulsory. Businesses which develop meaningful works councils will, we believe, be more productive and successful as the workforce will be more engaged with decision making and the future prosperity of the firm.” ….straight off the Lib Dem site…but OMG at it being from March 2005 -frown-
22nd November 2008 at 12:48 am
20 years after we get a proportional voting system the Liberal Democrats in there current form will have broken up and the successor party will look like this article. I suspect the green/left/community politics types will have migrated to and expanded and diluted Green Party.
While I enjoy the authors chucking of a hand grenade into the debate what he is proposing is impossible to put forward while we try to hold and expand the FPTP coalitions that get us our 63 seats. Why ?
- the partys cocaine addiction to oppertunism. Show me a Post Office, Shop or Bus route we won;t camapign to save.
- we have fished very heaviliy in the left liberal pool of public sector workers who rely on nursey Britain for there pay check. Just as I do !
- councillors dominate the party and just love councils whihc are a big chunk of nursery Britain
- many “liberals” didn’t go into politics to limit state power. They just want to use it to impose the values of the Guardian rather than the Daily Mail.
I often wonder which party i will join when it happens. The new Liberal Party or the Community Greens. The truth is it depends whioch mood I am in. Its that dilemma which is the best hope of keeping the party together post PR.
22nd November 2008 at 12:50 am
Darrell,
What is a work council? – Is this about industrial democracy? Please explain.
You won’t incentivize anyone to take on more work if the marginal tax rates are so high, regardless of how pleasant your employer is. Who’s going to work for effectively £2 per hour (after loss of benefits is taken into account) even if your boss is disarming, helpful, and takes you out for lunch. This is the crucial element.
22nd November 2008 at 12:53 am
David Morton,
How would the party fall apart post PR? What would happen to the other two? Which Lab or Con elements would merge with which LibDem elements?
Just a hypothetical, obviously.
22nd November 2008 at 1:08 am
James,
I refer you to my honourable friend, the Lib Dem rights and responsibilities at work policy paper;
“In Germany, France and Sweden well-established systems of information and consultation have proved to be a genuine success in developing effective partnerships in the workplace.
Meaningful dialogue
3.4 Liberal Democrats believe strongly that consultation in the workplace cannot be a device simply for legitimising decisions of employers,
especially where the workforce itself is unhappy with the outcome. The consultation process must also lead to the empowering of the employees
within the business for which they work.
Consultation should be a meaningful dialogue and not just an exchange of information.” So, it would probably have been quicker to say yes lol…and I am for looking at taxation too…i just think there is a place for the consideration of enviroment too
22nd November 2008 at 1:17 am
Ok fine.
What do you think about incentivizing co-operative ownership structures?
22nd November 2008 at 1:25 am
James,
I’m in favour of it; i have made some vauge noises on my blog about the concept of an ‘enabling state’ as discussions have evolved and my own views along with them…something which is somewhere between the two polarised positions just dismantling the state and total state ownership….
Going up and back a bit to my debate with Tristan I think that would be fertile ground for compromise…my main problem with what I guess would be called left-libertarianism is that i dont see it as practicable…and i see the means employed leading to the wrong places…
22nd November 2008 at 1:35 am
Darrell,
I think your debate with Tristan is not focusing on where it should be: gradualism. Your are both debating theoretical futures. Lets look for things that you would both support. See what its like when they are applied and then go from their. For example, the CBI is something that we can achieve broad support for. This could help bring about both a shrinking of the state, and an enabling process (whether you call that the state enabling, or the state being pull out of the way doesn’t really matter). Then we’ll inspect again. I think this should be the basis of debate. Anything we do will, and should be gradualist (even drug legalisation) so lets not get too het up about who is or isn’t trying to make people starve, scavenge for food, or engaging in entryism. We’re all liberals of one shade or another. No one is perfectly right. Lets recognize that.
22nd November 2008 at 1:42 am
James,
Well I agree and that’s where this concept comes from; but there is no doubt in my mind if a ‘maximum program’ of dismantling the state was Lib Dem policy and it was elected (which as other contributors have said, not very likely) and that is what happened then that would without a shadow of the doubt be the end outcome…
We cannot move to a state the size of a pea from day 1…it can only happen when the right structures are in place to replace those necessary ones that the state performs….would I call a CBI enabling? Yes I would because it is providing the opportunity for people to get what they need without that reliance on the state….
22nd November 2008 at 1:53 am
James,
Incidentally, the reason I introduce it is to make the point that the stated means contradict the stated ends…and in fact would lead in the opposite direction…this is the core of the point im driving at…
22nd November 2008 at 1:55 am
CBI seems to have a reasonably broad support amongst Lib dem bloggers and in comment threads. When I explain it to people, they are generally favourable. How can we popularize the idea and help make it policy?
22nd November 2008 at 1:58 am
James,
Good question. Have you ever penned an article for here as a starting point?? Then I think its a case of rolling it out to branches for discussion…getting motions in support etc,etc…
22nd November 2008 at 2:05 am
JS. I’d argue that the Liberal Democrats (probably reverting to the title Liberals) would still exist. Its just without the glue of FPTP coalition building that
- our protest voters will peel off to more radical alternatives
- many on the liberal left will have viable options to vote for and get people elected. eg the Green Party
its only in that context that a party like the one Matt Michael describes could be (re ?) born. At which point the community politicans would jump ship
I suppose I’m predicting a UK version of the FDP and the Greens.
Just look at what has happened in the list type elections we already have.
22nd November 2008 at 2:23 am
Darrell,
I’ll try to write something next week once I’ve got a few essays out the way with.
David,
Yes but under the system you suggest the labour coalition would certainly split. Would the liberal remnant that shall remain then join up with a former liberal-Labour faction?
22nd November 2008 at 8:53 am
James,
Goodo….:)
22nd November 2008 at 10:17 am
I’ve got a question about the Citizen’s income. Won’t it encourage moderately well-off people to exit the labour market? Effectively shifting the benefits culture upward. For example, someone with a modest savings pot could combine their savings with the income and live quite comfortably.
22nd November 2008 at 1:08 pm
David Morton,
I don’t recognise the split you hypothesise. Coming from private industry, I don’t have either the self-interest, or the self-loathing, that public sector people may feel when they think about the so-called “nursery state”. I just think we as a nation ought to spend more on schools, hospitals and the police, and less on blu-ray TVs, holidays in the Maldives, and a new mobe every year!
22nd November 2008 at 1:20 pm
I’ve got a question about the Citizen’s income. Won’t it encourage moderately well-off people to exit the labour market? Effectively shifting the benefits culture upward. For example, someone with a modest savings pot could combine their savings with the income and live quite comfortably.
That’s what achioeving financial freedom is all about. If it does, it will make labour more scarce and tip the balamce of power in an employer-employee relationship toward the latter, which is a good thing.
But the CBI itself would not be a “comfortable living” just an “emergency living”. The fact that it is non-withdrawable when one takes on some work means that unlike today those pople trapped in the benefits trap will be less discouraged from work.
22nd November 2008 at 1:51 pm
But if, as you suggest, wages rise due to people exiting the labour market, won’t that just lead to even more people leaving due to the security blanket offered by the CBI?
Suppose a society is losing 10% of its teachers every year because they’re saving up money and quitting their jobs to live off their investments and the CBI. If you increase teachers wages, they’ll just hit the sweet spot even faster and leave in greater numbers.
22nd November 2008 at 2:07 pm
Am I the only one who remembers that a form of Citizens’ Income was Lib Dem party policy until Conference explicitly voted to drop it in September 1994?
That was a sad day for me as CBI was one of my main reasons for joining.
22nd November 2008 at 2:18 pm
I quite like the idea of a CBI – not because it provides a security blanket which enables funding of an an unproductive lifestyle, but because it revalues jobs and rebalances the capital-labour equation to make vocational employment as valuable an option as professional employment and allow a truly flexible and personally adaptive market.
A word of warning though – it is extremely important how the financial mechanisms are set up to reflect real economic values otherwise the citizens may not recognise the origins of their stake in the system – which would reduce the ability of society to function as a whole.
Until this problem is resolved the case for CBI cannot be made successfully.
Get this right and it can also be exported as the means by which distorted wealth distributions across the globe can be equalised fairly. Get it wrong and we’re headed to hell in a hammock.
22nd November 2008 at 2:35 pm
Well, I go out (to work…) & a storm does indeed brew
I am not explicitly a supporter of a CBI, just someone who has seen the idea knocking around & is sympathetic towards it. I’d have to analyse any particular scheme before reaching a verdict on it.
Darrell, I didn’t actually say the voluntary work should be subsidised. What I actually said is that those on Jobseeker’s Allowance should be excused from looking for any old shyte job, provided they can prove they genuinely do work. This might get a bit bureaucratic (it is for the New Deal, & it’s acvtually quite hard for an organisation to get New Deal-registered) but it may work.
My specific example was one of law students getting credit towards their degrees for volunteering… but again, these should imho be schemes that don’t involve the state & I am against explicitly paying people for voluntary work as it introduces a whole new dynamic when people are there for cash (as opposed to helping others or “something for their CVs).
Especially in the recession, people can ride it out by helping others. They would obviously have to prove they are doing something good. Perhaps we could start seeing a whole new society in which people don’t simply engage with the cash nexus. Even with a CBI, very few would just sit around: perhaps they would be free to pursue their interests & it would benefit us all?
I repeat, I am wary of getting the state involved in these actions. Its “role” should be to back off & stop trying to bully vulnerable people into unsuitable jobs, rather give them space to sort themselves out with the help of supportive organisations.
22nd November 2008 at 2:36 pm
Paul Griffiths, I was not aware of this. What reasons were given?
22nd November 2008 at 2:40 pm
I thought it was 1991, but there we are – as recent as 1994. And the people who argued for us to drop it are still around.
Asquith, mostly “we can’t afford it”.
Oranjepan, that’s why I prefer to think of it how Henry George thought about it – collect all the rental value of land and disburse it equally to everyone minus whatever spending government has decided it needs to carry out its functions, which should decline over time because of the effect of “free land” on poverty reduction. “Rent sharing”, rather than “tax and benefit”.
22nd November 2008 at 3:20 pm
Asquith
Jock’s right. Basically, Conference was told that we couldn’t afford it.
I’ll quote from Opportunity and Independence For All: Proposals to Improve The Tax and Benefits System (Policy Paper No 7) which was voted on at the Federal Conference in September 1994. Obviously, Option B passed and the rest is history. Just don’t shoot the messenger …
In Common Benefit [an earlier Green Paper that introduced the policy in 1990], we proposed a partial basic income which was only slightly greater than the equivalent present personal income tax allowance. This would not initially have helped those on present benefits very much, but the intention was to progress to a partial basic income for each adult comparable to half the current Income Support payment for couples.
We have never supported a full basic income, sufficient for subsistence and enabling most existing benefits to be abolished, because income tax on all other income would then have to be levied at a very high marginal rate.
Option A:
We reaffirm our commitment to a partial basic income system for the following reasons:
(i) It would be more redistributive than the current tax system because the standard rate of income tax would be about 10 pence in the pound higher, although the majority of people would pay less than now after netting their tax credit against their income tax.
(ii) Some income-tested benefits would have to be retained, but they could be smaller than now and less steeply tapered.
(iii) It would be payable equally to all women and men, including those doing unpaid or intermittent work, as well as those earning full time.
Option B
We reject the option of a partial basic income system for the following reasons:
(i) It would leave most people now receiving means-tested benefits still in need of them and no better off.
(ii) The individuals who would benefit most – those with low incomes or no incomes but not receiving means-tested benefits – are not necessarily poor, because many of them live in households with good incomes.
(iii) An increase of ten pence in the basic rate of income tax is completely unacceptable.
22nd November 2008 at 3:23 pm
Ho hum. Perhaps it’s the case that times have changed, as the inadequacies of the extant system have been brought into even sharper focus by New Labour? I don’t know what things were like in the 90s, but there seem to be a few CBI supporters around now, more than there were until recently.
Perhaps it’s time for a return
22nd November 2008 at 3:29 pm
“Perhaps it’s time for a return”
Some of us never went away. Maybe more of us than you think.
22nd November 2008 at 3:55 pm
Jock,
land is one possible option to base the value of CBI on, but tend against it because land isn’t transferable.
I read something a while ago which suggested CBI value could be based on education/knowledge instead, but I can’t find it to quote from, so can you explain further?
22nd November 2008 at 5:53 pm
Great article, Matt. I think you may have solved the party’s “narrative problem.”
Now if only we could adopt some more liberalising policies we’d be getting somewhere. (If you are bored and fancy a laugh, compare It’s About Freedom, the party’s overall-philosophy policy paper, with any policy paper that discusses a concrete issue and see how far we are from practicing what we preach).
Just one thing: you say that “the Attlee government did some great good in the creation of the NHS”. Are you some sort of Pinko? ;oD
22nd November 2008 at 7:29 pm
“The state can’t fix every problem, and we shouldn’t perpetuate the illusion that it can. Of course there are many hard choices to be made, between taxation and public spending, the level of government provision of welfare, and about what kind of regulation is required to discourage irresponsible borrowing and unethical business practices. Devolution in itself is not the answer, without revisiting what the role and scope of central and local government should be – that’s simply exchanging one nanny for another. But to avoid debating these questions openly is to continue the infantilising of the electorate. It’s also deeply illiberal.”
Oh gosh, Matt, really? No-one’s been debating these questions, it’s all new, you’re a genius for thinking it all up by yourself? No, Matt, you’re a smug self-satisfied git, repeating what has been political truism since Thatcher/Reagan. What you say has been the dominant political ideology for a quarter of a century now. It might have been fresh in the 1980s, it’s stale and smells of shit now. If you were a worthwhile thinker, you’d have the brains to be able to move from this and think more critically, and be able to come up with something new instead off repeating parrot fashion what every trendy political commentator has been saying for years.
You remind me so much of those Trots I used to debate with back in those days – they had a nice simplistic ideology which was their answer to everything, and they were smug and so full of themselves for being so clever to hold these opinions – and of course they’d just picked up an extreme form of an ideology which had been fashionable for decades but had by then worn thin and the holes in it were obvious. Rats jumping on a sinking ship. And if one said that, their excuses for all the past failures of socialism was that it hadn’t been adopted in an extreme enough manner, and all those people who’d tried it and made a mess of it were really just another form of capitalist.
Isn’t it just TYPICAL of the Liberal Democrats that just as the world is seeing that failures in unrestrained free market economics, we have an influx of new members wanting to push it that way?
Well, Matt. I see you’re a member in Lewisham. I was one of those who built up the Lewisham constituency party for you. I still pay a monthly donation to the Lewisham 100 club. Just this morning I was out delivering Focuses in my old ward. I paid thousands of pounds of my own money and gave hours of my time to build up the strength it has now. If ever I hear that you get anywhere in the party, I will stop all my support for it, and I will publicly renounce my support for it and advise past supporters NOT to vote for it.
Matt, I mean this seriously.
Matthew Huntbach was Liberal Democrat councillor from 1994 to 2006 for Downham ward, London Borough of Lewisham. For five of those years he was group leader and hence leader of the Opposition in the Borough. When he was first elected, there were 3 Liberal Democrat councillors were 17.
22nd November 2008 at 8:02 pm
Matthew Huntbach – thank you for that unprovoked ad hominem attack on the author. A valuable, intelligent and mature contribution to the debate. Well done.
22nd November 2008 at 9:07 pm
In defence of Matthew (whose comments on the Baby P case have been so well thought out and full of insight) there is only so much right-wing tweenie drivel one can take.
As for “Nursery Britain”. My two year-old and five year-old receive £120 a month in child benefit from the state. In 2009 my son turns three and will enjoy six state-funded playgroup sessions a week. Presumably this makes them trainee scroungers “greedily suckling the milk of state welfare”.
22nd November 2008 at 9:11 pm
Julian, I have given my carefully considered opinions on many things over many years. Other members of the party may attest to that. What I wrote above was what I felt when I the article. And actually, given that he was just sloppily repeating what has been political trendiness for he past 25 years, it was what the author deserved.
If people like this author and other extreme free-market entryists to the Liberal Democrats wish to force lifelong members of the party like myself out of it, well, sometimes one has to cut one’s losses. I would find it hard to cut 30 years active support, but seeing more and more party members coming out with stuff like that really is making me consider whether I want to remain in this party.
If I decide to leave the party because people like Mr Michael are taking it over, well, I shall not remain silent. It would be particularly sad to smash what I spent years building up in Lewisham, but I most certainly WILL do so if I ever hear Mr Michael takes any lead role in Lewisham Borough party.
22nd November 2008 at 9:46 pm
Matthew, your personal vitriol, tribalism, and ability to take political arguments personally, shames you embarasses this party.
We are the Liberal Democrats, not the Matthew Huntbach party, and if your intolerance of the opinions of other liberals runs this deep, and expresses itself so nastily, then please do carry out your threat to leave.
22nd November 2008 at 10:21 pm
Isn’t it just TYPICAL of the Liberal Democrats that just as the world is seeing that failures in unrestrained free market economics
Jock looks: Where? I don’t see anything of the sort.
Perhaps Matthew, if I could recommend a good book for you, you could try Henry George’s “Protection or Free Trade” which should do it from a pretty well regarded liberal perspective.
we have an influx of new members wanting to push it that way?
I’ve been around a fair while now – eleven years as a member, twenty years as a voter and from a family who would never vote anything else. I’m sorry that some other party members have been unable to keep up with the pace of my own discoveries about how right the “liberal economic tradition” of free trade, taxing monopolies and externalities rather than earnings, and levelling the playing field in favour of the poor rather than just keeping them able to cling on to the bottom end through so called “redistribution” and of deep distrust of majoritarian state power is.
Our preamble does not indeed just say what’s on the front of the membership card, but that we have a deep conviction towards reducing the power of the state, devolving power, taxation and decision making to the lowest possible level which is what Matt asks us to do more vociferously and urgently and that the market is often the best way of achieving this with socially responsible regulation where necessary.
It seems to me that people criticising Matt are the ones not on board with all our aims and beliefs, at least as agreed by our own constitution. Some day, I may get round to fisking the preamble to see how our current policy direction actually furthers our stated aims.
22nd November 2008 at 10:25 pm
Oranjepan:
Jock,
land is one possible option to base the value of CBI on, but tend against it because land isn’t transferable.
I read something a while ago which suggested CBI value could be based on education/knowledge instead, but I can’t find it to quote from, so can you explain further?
I confess I don’t understand this. I would say that land is ideal precisely because it isn’t transferrable – because that is what creates its monopoly status and the ricardian rent effect. But maybe I’m misunderstanding what you are saying by “transferrable”.
If I am misunderstanding it any explanation I could give for your suggestion about education/knowledge would likely also to be wrong. I’ve never heard the suggestion to be honest, but it sounds interesting. I maintain that economic land is the best source precisely because it is a zero sum market on which every last one of us relies and which, in various ways also hinders every last one of our ability to earn and create wealth.
22nd November 2008 at 10:26 pm
Matthew Hutbach can talk the the talk, but can he walk the walk? If he one day does what he threats to do, I’m sure many bored readers will sigh on relief.
22nd November 2008 at 10:47 pm
I have very carefully argued with these people in the past, but sometimes it can be very wearisome – they are so fixed in their little simplistic ideology. It is so very much like in times past when I used to argue with the Trots when that was the fashionable simplistic ideology, while one could do it, they did seem to have inexhaustable energy, plus such a blinkered world view and lack of connection with real life, that one sometimes just couldn’t be bothered to put the effort in any more.
As I have said, since the election of the Thatcher government, we have seen a huge shift towards free market economics and the reduction of the state in the control of the economy. During this time, there have been countless opinion pieces in the right-wing media making much the same points as Mr Michael, urging us ever forward into free market nirvana. It has been the dominant political theme for decades.
So Mr Michael’s tone of voice, suggesting that it is all a bright new idea, and all mainstream politics up till now have just been socialism, strikes me as almost exactly the sort of thinking those Trots used – that all mainstream politics was just capitalism, any any problems observed with socialism in practice just meant it wasn’t extreme enough socialism.
Mr Michael makes this point at just the time the form of politics he endorses has brought us to a huge crisis – like the Trots who told us that socialism was the solution when it was groaning on its deathbed.
You say I am being intolerant, no, I am just stating that I am in very deep disagreement with the politics Mr Michael is putting forward. It is not a political view which existed in the Liberal Party when I joined it in 1978, nor in the Liberal Democrats when I decided to go along with the Liberal Party’s merger with the SDP though I had voted against that merger. Indeed, until I started quite recently to look at Liberal Democrat blogs, I did not know there was this stream of extreme free market people in our party. I think it is a very new thing, perhaps it is mainly amongst people who contribute to blogs, I don’t know.
However, I just want to make it very clear that if this stream of politics becomes a significant force in the Liberal Democrats, the Liberal Democrats will no longer be a party I wish to be associated with. Obviously, it would be a difficult step for me to take, to leave the party, given just how much I have devoted to it. But why should I remain a supporter of a party if it changes so much from what it was when I joined it?
Why do you say this is “tribalism”? It is simply disagreement. Am I not entitled to disagree with people? Why do you say it is “vitriol” when I am only replying in kind using the sort of language which Mr Michael used in his article? Look at the sort of language he uses to attack anyone who doesn’t support a form of free market so extreme that he regards Mrs Thatcher as a “social democrat”.
Having been a political campaigner all my life, I will campaign for the politics I agree with, and I will campaign against politics I disagree with. I fought against the Labour Party in Lewisham because I disagreed with them (and I disagreed with the Tories even more) – I fought hard and I put huge amounts of my time and money into it. As a result, and I don’t claim sole responsibility for it, it was many people, but I do claim a reasonable part of it, the Liberal Democrats moved from being an insignificant force in the borough to being the main challenger to Labour in the borough – political control of the borough and Members of Parliament are now within our grasp.
So, what am I to do if the Liberal Democrats gets taken over by people I disagree hugely with? I don’t have a tribal loyalty to the Liberal Democrats to the point that I will support the party no matter what its politics are. If its politics become something I strongly disagree with, then, I am a political campaigner, I will do what I can to bring it down as I did what I could to bring the Labour Party down, and in an earlier part of my life to bring the Conservative Party down in a borough where it was once hugely dominant.
Of course, it happens to be a fact that my previous position in the Liberal Democrats in Lewisham means it may be a newsworthy event if I were to decide to leave the party because of its infiltration by extremist free marketeers like Mr Michael. I live in the neighbouring borough now, but it shares the local media, and when I was active in Lewisham I knew very well how to make headlines in the local media, and to use it for political effect. I hope it would never come to that, but all you extreme free marketeer infiltrators, if you drive out those who built the party in the past and turn it into your own little chat club, how will it be? I for one would not remain silent outside the party, I simply state that, those who want to change it and will thus drive people like me out may wish to take note.
22nd November 2008 at 10:49 pm
Jock, I am very familiar with the writings of Henry George, the one speech I made at the Liberal Party Assembly was in fact a call for the Party to reassert its traditional support for Land Value Taxation.
22nd November 2008 at 10:53 pm
Anonymous, I am not afraid to use my real name.
I rather feel my record of action in the London Borough of Lewisham speaks for itself on whether I can walk the walk.
22nd November 2008 at 10:57 pm
Jock, I am very familiar with the writings of Henry George, the one speech I made at the Liberal Party Assembly was in fact a call for the Party to reassert its traditional support for Land Value Taxation.
Yet refuse, it would appear, to understand that when some of us talk about free trae and free markets our vision bears no semblance whatever to the bastardisation of that concept that has happened through successive governments and their corporate whores?
22nd November 2008 at 11:24 pm
“I’m sorry that some other party members have been unable to keep up with the pace of my own discoveries”
“But if we’re good children and we play nicely and do as nanny says, everything will be all right.”
Rush Limbaugh? Ann Coulter? George W Bush? No. The unacceptable face of the Liberal Democrats!
22nd November 2008 at 11:31 pm
Oh! FFS!
23rd November 2008 at 12:39 am
Jock, what Matt Michael has written looks just like so many opinion pieces I’ve read over the years in places like the Spectator, Telegraph, Times, Economist, either supporting the Conservative Party and in particular its economic right wing, or urging an adoption of even more extreme forms of the same policies. You say it “bears no semblance whatever to the bastardisation of that concept that has happened through successive governments and their corporate whores”, but that is rot. What Matt Michael has written bears a very close resemblance to what has been regarded as orthodox political thinking and trumpeted as the best way forward for some 25 or more years. In fact I don’t see any difference, it looks exactly like the sort of stuff right-wing Thatcherites wrote and their followers still write. It’s lazy drivel precisely because it’s just rehearsing conventional political orthodoxy with no deep thought. Oh, sure there’s a nod to liberalism if you look closely, but we all know what is really meant because this is what has been really meant when exactly the same arguments have been used before – it’s the rich arguing why they should be richer and stuff the poor, there’s plenty of jobs going as drug pedlars and prostitutes if they want. It’s what has got us to where we are now, and that’s why it’s as daft as the Trots saying that what was really needed was more extreme Leninist socialism when the USSR was manifestly collapsing.
The idea that, as Mr Michael wrote, we live in a society where all mainstream politicians believe “the state can – and should – intervene in every aspect of public and private life in order to impose their vision of what society should be” strikes me as daft. The reality is that the state has largely given up the sort of controls it used to have, has ceded them to big business. The state is powerless to dictate trends in entertainment and culture, in what we eat, in how we dress, and much else, and it is quite right that it how it should be. So to say that it is conventional and accepted by almost everyone for the state to intervene and impose its views in these things – Mr Michael wrote “every aspect” – is surely so far from reality, that one can only suppose Mr Michael can’t think and is lazily repeating political truisms from decades back when we had a more interventionist state, or is way overemphasising because he has hidden agenda – and as I’ve said, we’ve seen the hidden agenda of those who’ve used words like his in the past.
In fact, part of the malaise in politics comes about because people wrongly believe politicians have powers they don’t. How many times, when I was a councillor sitting on planning committees, and I heard people say against some plan “why can’t it be a butchers/cinema/pub/etc like it used to be?” and the answer I knew but couldn’t say was “because no-one could make a profit out of it when it was that, it’s been lying vacant for years, and we in the council can’t pick it up and run it as a loss-making business of the type it was when it closed down”. Or take the Baby P case – this great public urge which supposes it’s possible for the state always to intervene exactly and get it right all times to stop all child abuse. Who’s been saying in the blogs, “No, the state is not all powerful, sometimes these things happen, and it would be unbearably illiberal if the state were so strong it could stop everything that leads to cases like Baby P?”. Me.
I could go on, but why should I? Mr Michael said nothing positive, nothing new, just right-wing tweeny stuff, which might have sounded refreshing circa 1985 but certainly doesn’t now.
23rd November 2008 at 1:09 am
There is a continuing debate among lib dem blogs which is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Both factions are, to some extent, to blame. On the one had people like Jock are considered to be the bastard sons of Thatcher, whilst people like Darrell are considered socialists of the Old Labour trope. These misconceptions are damaging and they lie in the fact that our liberals comes from a joint source. We are the children of a anti-establishment movement which spawned the classical liberals such as Mill and Locke, but also the more “left” (alternatives to Marx) figures such as Henry George. The politics of the Jock method or the Darrell method are not those of the alternating competitive establishments that circle around and include the Labour and the Conservative parties.
We all agree on fundamentals. Power should be exercised closer to those it affects. The State shouldn’t subsidies those who happen to feed off it (corporatism – rent seeking). The State should but out of our private lives. The poor must be removed from the trap created for them. The tax system should be equitable, not protect class interest.
In short: We “exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity.”
Let us not loose sight of that. Let us argue about policies and principles but realize that Mark Huntback and Matt Michael are not enemies. They are offering different (maybe not so different proposals). Regardless (as I’ve said above) our actual approach will be gradualist. Let us role back the bits of the state we agree on (ID cards, terror detention laws, taxes on the poorest etc), and see where we go from their.
Mark Huntback, if you and the so called “entryists” (I doubt they are – how long have they been in the party?) can agree on LVT. Or Darrell and the accused group can agree on CBI, then how different are we? Rhetorics may be different, occasionally inflammatory. But we are all arguing about how to build and protect the open society. There is so much debate to be had, and so many points of accord.
Lets all take a deep breathe and stop antagonizing one another.
There aren’t two conspiratorial factions: the socialists and the uber-Thatcherites. There are liberals of differing opinions. Lets get that in perspective.
23rd November 2008 at 1:26 am
Look, it’s very easy. All this facitonal infighting will cease when you all come to agree with me…:)
23rd November 2008 at 2:03 am
As for “Nursery Britain”. My two year-old and five year-old receive £120 a month in child benefit from the state. In 2009 my son turns three and will enjoy six state-funded playgroup sessions a week. Presumably this makes them trainee scroungers “greedily suckling the milk of state welfare”.
Ruth, that you have written this with an apparently straight face is indicative of the state were in. There’s no easy way to say this, but I absolutely do not want to pay for “six state-funded playgroup sessions a week” for your boy, notwithstanding the fact that I am sure he is the most beautiful baby in the whole world. In fact I am convinced that the whole “early years intervention” fad is just an expensive piece of pseudo science. Liberal Democrats are committed to spending £500 million a year on this sort of feel-good rubbish – we should cross that off straight away.
Please pay for your own playgroup sessions if you consider them to be so worthwhile.
23rd November 2008 at 4:43 am
This thread is excellent but does rather read like the opening shots of a civil war after a bad election result. Its not the first such thread recently.
With regard to my previous posts about the party 2slitting” in future. What I really ment was that PR would disolve to some extent our current coalition.
However Simon Titley has beaten me to an excellent artcile about how the ongoing liberal core could be xpanded with new voters if oly we ever went after them.
23rd November 2008 at 10:05 am
I see Matt Michael has done a Brendan O’Neill & not deigned to give a response to his student-union rhetoric.
Why don’t you come back & tell us all about what you’d to to, for example, protect our natural environment against overdevelopment?
23rd November 2008 at 10:06 am
*to criticism of his student-union rhetoric.
23rd November 2008 at 1:46 pm
Matthew Huntbach, commenting on his own posts:
“It is simply disagreement … Why do you say it is ‘vitriol’?”
Matthew Huntbach, in an earlier post:
“Matt, you’re a smug self-satisfied git”
23rd November 2008 at 2:11 pm
Asquith wrote:
“Why don’t you come back & tell us all about what you’d to to, for example, protect our natural environment against overdevelopment?”
Indeed. The environment is a subject area on which neo-Thatcherite Lib Dems are conspicuously silent.
Would Matt Michael be happy to see Noddy houses, motorways and shopping-centres built on the Green Belt? Would he cry with joy if historic town centres were bulldozed and replaced with high-rise office buildings and carparks? Those who worship the market should be delighted by both scenarios.
23rd November 2008 at 2:14 pm
neo-Thatcherite Lib Dems
The who?
23rd November 2008 at 2:37 pm
Sesenco,
Lets cool the rhetoric a touch. Thinking that the free market is usually the best method for allocating resources does not make one a bizaro-nihilist who loves the destruction of all things quaint or rural.
Calm down.
23rd November 2008 at 5:03 pm
I also think the market is by far the best system of distribution & exchange. Whilst I’m interested in other forms of ownership than capitalism (cooperatives, etc) there’s no doubt to me that a capitalist economy is preferable to a socialist economy.
But I see a need for many constraints on the market, & I don’t see a way of doing it other than via the state. Yes, some government mechanisms are crude & often ineffective, but in their ugly way they are sometimes the only viable means to accomplish an end.
23rd November 2008 at 5:16 pm
Maybe we do need nanny after all. Certainly somebody needs to step into the room and say “Now children. Play nice!”
It is worth noting that Matthew Huntbach comes from the same local party as Matt Michael and so presumably the two have history. It is a shame it has to spill into personal animus on these pages however.
23rd November 2008 at 6:28 pm
I have no history with Matt Michael. I have never heard of him before. I moved to the neighbouring borough of Greenwich shortly before stepping down as a Lewisham councillor, so I am no longer a member of Lewisham Liberal Democrats. I do keep some links with them, but I have never heard of Matt Michael from anyone I have links with in Lewisham.
23rd November 2008 at 7:31 pm
Matthew Huntbach,
could you write an opinion piece which proposes your view in a new article please. That would be a much more effective way of countering what you disagree with.
Y’know, power to the people ‘n’ all that.
23rd November 2008 at 8:33 pm
Jock,
you’re probably right that I haven’t used the term ‘transferable’ correctly here. Maybe immobile is better.
Under land-based CBI/general dividend national borders come into play, so there’s little way to institute a universal system of equality across the globe unless you ignore levels of productivity (a bit too utopian if you don’t mind me saying so).
Taking the dividend from the factors of production rather than from the economic benefit derived from the product itself smacks of a loss of economic reality and leads to questions of how it would all be paid for.
I also strongly dislike zero-sum markets based on monopolies, as this justifies exclusion of non-contributors when these are precisely the people who the system is designed to help (that is if CBI is to replace a culture of dependency – isn’t it?).
I think I spotted the idea of knowledge credits back in a cooperative paper on the background to stakeholding and child trust funds (before they were corrupted by Labour’s narrow opt-in view) and the arguments sounded very similar to those for CBI.
Strategically this approach might also have the interesting by-product of getting the Cooperative party to reconsider its subservience to Labour – now there’s some wishful thinking!
Though CBI and LVT form similar-type criticisms of the current economic system they are proposals which must each be based on different reasoning to avoid the accusation that we’re counting our sums twice, so I think it is helpful to keep them separate.
23rd November 2008 at 9:28 pm
Oranjepan, I do not have time to sit down and write a lengthy article explaining in detail my complete political views. I have said here that I disagree with the idea that what our society needs is much more extreme free market economics, in fact so extreme that what we have seen since the 1950s intervention is trivial. I think what I am saying is in line with mainstream Liberal Democrat policy. I do not recall our party saying in the 1980s that it agreed with Mrs Thatcher only the problem was that she was too much like a social democrat, and what we wanted was something much, much more extreme, with the removal of all state protection for the poor, the environment etc. I used to suppose that sort of thinking was associated with the extreme right-wing fringes of the Conservative Party. If the Liberal Democrats have now reached the stage where it is considered a fairly normal thing to hold that sort of view, and those of us who disagree with it have to explain in detail why, otherwise we’re considered suspect and our removal from the party would be good riddance, as some contributors to this thread have suggested, there have been some rather big changes. I think perhaps some of the people who vote for us ought to be made aware of these changes to see if we’re really the party they still want to vote for. If I’m in the wrong, and Matt Michael now represents normal Lib Dem opinion, please let me know, and I’m out.
23rd November 2008 at 9:44 pm
“If … Matt Michael now represents normal Lib Dem opinion, please let me know, and I’m out”.
Purely out of interest, whose judgement would you accept on this?
23rd November 2008 at 10:23 pm
There does indeed appear to be a strong current in the party, perhaps most strong, ironically, amongst those who kept the “flames flickering” in some of the darkest times for the Liberal Party, that seems to have renounced that which united the left at the turn of the last century – free trade.
This is not the stuff of the Tory 1979 revolution which was often as not just as protectionist as the Tories always were: selling off state monopolies to become private monopolies; handing effective monopolies to friends like Murdoch; corporate snouts in the trough with politicians – a bad mix.
LVT only makes real sense in this context of free trade, so I would have expected people who stood up at the Liberal Party Assembly to talk about LVT to understand that crucial difference.
23rd November 2008 at 10:27 pm
Oranjepan, James Schneider,
You obviously believe that our party should be a “broad church” which tolerates differences of opinion. I agree – up to a point. But we have to draw the line somewhere. We would not, I think, admit a “liberal” with a burning ambition to roll back the state and a conviction that he belongs to a superior race.
Let’s go through some of the points made on this thread. I would really like you to give your opinions. Do the following people sound like suitable members of the Lib Dems?
Matt Michael (paraphrased): Thatcher was a social democrat. “Social democracy is the problem…. At the moment, the Liberal Democrats are part of the (social democrat) consensus. … We don’t treat people like adults.”
Tristan Mills: “Social democracy is …. inextricably opposed to liberalism.”
“…there should be no need for tax funded health care or social services.”
Laurence Boyce: “…we absolutely have to question . . . whether someone with no qualifications . . . and no skills . . . should be having several children.”
As far as I’m concerned, I don’t care how many Focuses these guys deliver, or the fact that they have a few votes to cast. We would be a lot better off without them.
I’m sure the Tories would want to reject all three of the above candidates as crazy right-wing extremists, on the basis of what they have said on this thread. Are we so desperate for deliverers etc that we won’t do likewise?
This isn’t the Matthew Huntbach party, or the David Allen party. But it does, in a real sense, belong to its long-term leaders – Steel, Ashdown, Kennedy, and, to take one particular example, Shirley Williams. If you join, you express your broad support for their political philosophy.
You’re perfectly entitled to say that you have some differences with Shirley Willams. But, if you despise everything she has ever said or stood for – as clearly some of our blog contributors do – then you simply don’t belong with us.
You need to go away and join a new party, where you can express your own views honestly, and make your own case to the public. And leave us with our integrity intact!
23rd November 2008 at 10:39 pm
Well at least now it’s perfectly clear who is telling whom to get out of the party. If you don’t pass the Shirley test, then you know what you can do. That will teach me to advocate parental responsibility. Because if you remove the blinkers for a moment, you will see that is all I did.
23rd November 2008 at 11:06 pm
David Allen,
if the only preconditions to membership are paying subs, supporting the general aims and ambitions in the preamble, to tolerate differences of opinion and to accept democratic votes which decide on party policy, then we are very much worse off if we start excluding people who hold different opinions for arguing their case.
Let everyone complain and argue and debate as much as we can, but let’s all accept that we are all part of a process which weeds out inconsistency and incoherence – if you disagree with something then make an alternative case.
And so long as we respect the process by which decisions are arrived at everyone is welcome (a bit more legwork too is always helpful).
23rd November 2008 at 11:12 pm
My God!
If this party is going to accept people who publicly question whether people with insufficient educational qualifications should be having children (!!) then it belongs on the scrapheap.
23rd November 2008 at 11:20 pm
CCF,
everyone has a right to their own opinions and everyone has a right to ask questions. Nobody, not even you has any god-given monopoly on the truth.
In fact I’d say that it’s precisely because we accept people who may hold opinions which are rather outre that we won’t ever end up on the scrapheap – this is a political party not a fan club for the most famous of our cohort!
23rd November 2008 at 11:30 pm
Oranjepan
Whatever next? “Jews spread diseases”?
Even Nazis have a right to their own opinions, I suppose …
23rd November 2008 at 11:41 pm
Ownership of an opinion does not give that opinion a factual base.
FWIW all people are capable of spreading diseases if they don’t take sufficient precautions against it.
23rd November 2008 at 11:48 pm
“Ownership of an opinion does not give that opinion a factual base.”
More incomprehensible gibberish. And it’s not made any better by your flippant response regarding Jews spreading diseases.
Are you really saying that the party should embrace members who believe that people without educational qualifications should not have children?
If so, where on earth would you draw the line? Or does absolutely anything go in the Lib Dems these days?
23rd November 2008 at 11:58 pm
CCF,
I don’t like your accusation that I was being flippant when I was trying to be accurate.
I’m not saying that parties should embrace whomsoever they can get to sign up, I’m saying that people should embrace politics and participate in the political process and that the best way to do that is by being involved with a party.
It seems you are more interested in defining preferred outcomes than getting the processes functioning smoothly. In which case it is no wonder that you get frustrated so easily.
24th November 2008 at 12:07 am
I think we should have a formal posting every weekend on “who shouldn’t be in the party this week; discuss.” Just to prevent people using a serious post to do it on week in, week out.
But it does, in a real sense, belong to its long-term leaders – Steel, Ashdown, Kennedy, and, to take one particular example, Shirley Williams. If you join, you express your broad support for their political philosophy.
I think this is seriously mistaken. For a start I still find people on the doorstep equating us with Grimond, whom you missed! For second, we are, of all parties, one that should have a healthy distrust of “leadership” and especially the ownership by the “leader” of the party’s direction.
Actually the thing that links those leaders, and our most recent ones, and the breadth of debate allowable in the party, is the fact that “On Liberty” remains the symbol of office and the remembrance that On Liberty is itself only a part of liberal thinking that has gone on for centuries in this country – at least from Locke and Hobbes.
Whilst my first political memory is of writing, aged 11, to the employment secretary of the day, a Mrs Williams, I personally doubt that she herself would thank anyone for making a cult of her.
Matt is right; we languish where we are in our political fortunes because we are seen as part of the consensus. Even Nick seemed to acknowledge that when he stated he wanted to make us stand out from that consensus. And Campbell seemed to acknowledge as much too when he wanted to make us more “spikey”.
The battle is no longer about how we steer a course between socialists stealing all sorts of private property and making a hash of running it via the state and Tories protecting their interests at the expense of the least well off, but in how to critique the past three decades of pseudo-liberalism and provide an alternative.
The alternative to pseudo-liberalism is real liberalism; the liberalism of free trade and voluntary co-operation as much as possible, the state, if you must (but with a debate about what state – Headington, Oxford, Oxfordshire, the South East, England, UK or Europe – if you will) where necessary.
But true liberalism, addressing the monopolies that allow the state itself to create vast wealth by protecting its corporate friends and vested interests, will itself make the state less and less necessary. That much, I think Mill would celebrate even today, even if he saw little in the party that passes his book down from leader to leader that he would call his idea nowadays.
24th November 2008 at 12:08 am
“Ownership of an opinion does not give that opinion a factual base.”
I’m sure you’ll agree, then, that the fantastical history outlined in the OP is devoid of any factual base. Sixty years of handing ever more control to ‘Nanny’ – find a single historian who can agree with that. What about scrapping the death penalty, ID cards, national service and the ration book?
24th November 2008 at 12:17 am
I think there is a perfectly valid debate to be had about the extent to which the state provides a safety net for people who continue to have children they cannot afford to look after for themselves. And about whether there can be an equitable mechanism for discouraging them – such as being clear that families are first and foremost the support network for themselves and not the taxpayer.
If there are people who think a baby is a must have accessory or a passport to more and perhaps perpetual welfare payments this sort of attitude needs to be challenged.
24th November 2008 at 12:32 am
Oranjepan,
About CBI/LVT etc. I think there are two easily conflated “types” of CBI and we are conflating them. The one is a response to “how do we improve the welfare system”. And for that, I guess you can use any source of funding the state can muster.
When I talk about LVT and CBI it is about entitlement. And “Dividend” is probably the better word to describe that. Or “rent sharing”. We all have an absolute common birthright to a piece of this “third rock” on which to eke out our lives. There is no alternative. Land values, or economic rents, are a representation of how difficult it is for people in a particular location to do so. To a purist, it’s not a national thing in any case. The boundaries of a “rent sharing” community are the points at which land values tail off to nothing – for beyond there there is no scarcity in economic terms. But it is a replicable system. That rent sharing community could be within the margins of production of Iringa in Tanzania just as much as it might be within the margins of production of Oxford or London.
24th November 2008 at 12:39 am
“I think there is a perfectly valid debate to be had about the extent to which the state provides a safety net for people who continue to have children they cannot afford to look after for themselves.”
Except that – if you can read – you know very well that wasn’t what was said, and what was taken exception to.
What was said was that we should question whether “someone with no qualifications . . . and no skills” should be having children.
If it’s considered acceptable for party members to be putting that view forward publicly – if it is not considered that such behaviour brings the party into disrepute – then I’m glad I left the party, because I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with a political party in which such views were considered acceptable.
24th November 2008 at 12:42 am
I see what you’re saying Jock, but ‘rent-sharing’ in different areas where productivity levels vary does little to address issues of need and could exacerbate current structural inequalities.
24th November 2008 at 12:43 am
CCF, moral dictator!
24th November 2008 at 1:10 am
I see what you’re saying Jock, but ‘rent-sharing’ in different areas where productivity levels vary does little to address issues of need and could exacerbate current structural inequalities.
It’s too late for me to think too deeply about that one! I see what you are suggesting. That sort of dividend is not necessarily a replacement for all welfare, indeed. Though the creation of what is known for some reason as “free land” via LVT is just as important in levelling the playing field. Indeed I know one very left wing LVTer who says that LVT would make such a difference to the levelness of the playing field on its own that it would be as efective if we threw the proceeds into the sea instead of giving it out as a dividend or using it as a source of revenue for collective action.
But free trade has a crucial part of play as well. Poor rent sharing areas are given more economic potential by being linked to other markets. Those links themselves drive up rental values and therefore the value of rent sharing to the poorest in those communities and the opportunities for economic participation for them.
And remember it should not just be about the ground under our feet. This rent sharing should also share equitably the value to a place of its mineral wealth and so on, currently so often appropriated by corrupt regimes with little respect for their own people.
So yes, I agree that LVT->CD is not a replacement for all welfare, but the economic circumstances it would lead to, and coupled with properly free trade between rent sharing communities, is probably as close as we could get to a really universal “predistribution” *system* that could be replicated anywhere and still have similar effects.
24th November 2008 at 1:58 am
Except that – if you can read – you know very well that wasn’t what was said, and what was taken exception to.
What was said was that we should question whether “someone with no qualifications . . . and no skills” should be having children.
Actually, since you (perhaps conveniently) missed the bit about “no job”, I think it is the self same question. People who bring children into the world need to have at least half an eye on how they are going to support those children, surely, just purely out of personal responsibility. All Laurence, and the person he responded to, are asking is how much we should support people with no visible means of supporting themselves or prospects for doing so in adding to the burden they already impose, however unwillingly, undeservedly usually, on the rest of society (for they in turn have been failed by that same society).
However I don’t think it is controversial is it to suggest that educational opportunity and attainment, especially for women, do correlate to the number of children they have. The world over, not just here, and most evident in countries where there is effectively no education for women.
I think it is evidence of failure of the education system that in a wealthy country like ours some people seem to take this same route even after years of compulsory education. A failure that puts those it has failed in a position of near perpetual dependency which is no good for them, their children or the rest of us (and I wold add, one that none of the current government proposals for forcing those the system has failed to go out to work in whatever poor jobs their lack of skills has prepared them for).
24th November 2008 at 8:52 am
“Actually, since you (perhaps conveniently) missed the bit about “no job”, …”
I missed out nothing. I quoted precisely what Laurence Boyce said. Go back and read the post.
24th November 2008 at 9:17 am
Thanks for backing me up Jock. Even the Guardian is starting to question the welfare state. We just can’t go on like this. That is all.
24th November 2008 at 9:18 am
I thinkk you must be a very sad friend indeed to dissect conversational postings on a website as if they were parliamentary drafting. It seems clear to me that Laurence is quoting bits out of the sentence he repeats from an earlier poster. Lots of ellipses are the clue. The sense is the same. No prospects of looking after yourself, let alone a child, just how far is the state supposed to support such a choice (and, for the avoidance of doubt I do also recognize that for some there is little element of choice or of culpability).
24th November 2008 at 9:26 am
I think this article is a nonsense.
Joseph Stiglitz argues convincingly that free market fundamentalism has lead to our current demise, just as it did in the 1930s. The economic crises we face today is made in America.
“This is a man-made crisis. It didn’t have to happen. It was the result of macroeconomic policies in the United States – in particular, a tax cut for the rich which did not stimulate the economy – combined with the Iraq war, which led to soaring oil prices. These put the burden of keeping the economy going on monetary policy. The Federal Reserve responded in a shortsighted way: It provided ample credit with low interest rates. Combined with lax regulations, it was an explosive mixture, and it exploded.”
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/18/business/glob19.php
24th November 2008 at 9:28 am
Jock
You accused me of omitting something “perhaps conveniently” when I quoted Laurence Boyce’s post – with a clear implication that I had done so intentionally. I repeat: I quoted exactly what he said.
It was Laurence Boyce who omitted “no job”, and if you give it a moment’s thought you may be able to work out why he did so.
24th November 2008 at 9:30 am
I left out “no job” because that can be a temporary state of affairs. Everyone may face redundancy at some point in their life. But even qualifications and skills may be obtained. I’m not condemning anyone.
All I’m saying is that there are some people who presently should not be having children. You see them every day. Hey, I’m one of them, if that makes it any better!
But at the moment, the state is encouraging us.
24th November 2008 at 9:38 am
Of course the state is encouraging all and sundry to have children – government officials don’t want their own little darlings to take a bullet to protect the system they benefit from.
24th November 2008 at 9:48 am
Since the 1950s, there has been a decline in unskilled employment, especially unskilled male employment.
For that reason alone it is harmful to the community if people of low intelligence have more children than people of high or average intelligence. It will inevitably result in the creation of a pool of unemployable people who will need to be maintained out of the public purse.
Everyone other than Marxists and neo-Marxists who insist that all children are born with the same IQ should accept that what I have just said is valid.
The real issue is what we do about it. For a liberal, coercion cannot be the answer.
Oh, sorry. It isn’t just Marxists and neo-Marxists who say that. Dr David Owen did as well.
24th November 2008 at 10:07 am
Sesenco, just for interest, at what age is it possible to start testing IQ level? Is IQ really a wholly genetic inheritance? Since when was IQ the only and only valuable measure of human intelligence?
24th November 2008 at 10:13 am
“For that reason alone it is harmful to the community if people of low intelligence have more children than people of high or average intelligence. It will inevitably result in the creation of a pool of unemployable people who will need to be maintained out of the public purse.”
It was the expression of precisely this view, albeit in milder terms, that made Keith Joseph unacceptable as a potential leader of the Conservative Party nearly 35 years ago!
Have we really got to the stage now where this view is acceptable among Liberal Democrats?
24th November 2008 at 10:22 am
“Is IQ really a wholly genetic inheritance?”
No, hardly anything is. But it is partly genetic.
24th November 2008 at 10:35 am
It was the expression of precisely this view, albeit in milder terms, that made Keith Joseph unacceptable as a potential leader of the Conservative Party nearly 35 years ago!
Have we really got to the stage now where this view is acceptable among Liberal Democrats?
ISTM that it’s a debate that has been going on amongst liberals since Herbert Spencer argued with J S Mill regarding compulsory education and state support for bringing up children.
24th November 2008 at 10:36 am
CCF, are you the thought police?
The general membership can think what we like, these things are only an issue for potential leaders.
I’m pretty sure you hold some opinions other people find controversial and unjustifiable from a liberal perspective.
Sometimes I consider under what conditions I’d find the death penalty acceptable…
Sometimes I consider the possibility of who to vote for if not a LibDem…
24th November 2008 at 10:48 am
“CCF, are you the thought police?”
So – to be clear – as far as you are concerned, there are absolutely no limits on what views it is acceptable for party members to hold, and to express in public on a party forum?
If someone said, for example “it’s questionable whether black people should be having children”, or “it’s questionable whether Jews should be having children”, and someone suggested these views shouldn’t be acceptable within the party – you would accuse them of being the “thought police”?
24th November 2008 at 10:55 am
CCF:
So you consider it DESIRABLE that people of low intelligence should have more children than people of high and average intelligence?
If there was a surfeit of unskilled employment, you would probably be right. But there isn’t.
What can we do about it? Well, not a lot. Cutting off their benefits would be far too harsh. Cutting off other things wuld be even harsher.
Remember that immigrants imported to do the dirty jobs will move upwards. The very fact that someone has had the wherewithall to emigrate suggests that this will be the case.
24th November 2008 at 11:05 am
No CCF, that’s not what I said and not how I intended what I said to be interpreted, but please don’t feel inhibited from passing judgement on any account of mine.
I really don’t know what you mean by ‘acceptable’, perhaps you could expand upon this as I have so far in my life failed to be convinced that censorship works to any positive end.
Now honesty, transparency and accountability on the other hand can be informative, educational and entertaining (to coin a phrase). And speaking of coins, to understand anything completely it must surely be necessary to consider all sides of an issue, so why the prohibition?
24th November 2008 at 11:10 am
“So you consider it DESIRABLE that people of low intelligence should have more children than people of high and average intelligence?”
Of course, I’ve said no such thing.
How ironical that so many of those pontificating about other people’s skills and qualifications should have such serious problems with basic English comprehension!
[Cue a procession of people saying "CCF is always complaining people don't understand English". You're dead right I am!]
24th November 2008 at 11:17 am
Oranjepan
OK. Suppose you explain what you do think. I asked you previously and you ignored my question. Then you came out with “The general membership can think what we like …”, which suggests to me that you think there are no limits.
And to be absolutely concrete about the word “acceptable”. As far as I understand, the party can and does discipline members who publicly express views that are deemed to bring it into disrepute. Are you saying that that shouldn’t be the case?
24th November 2008 at 11:18 am
Sorry, CFF, but I did rather reasonably assume that your evident rage at the proposition that it is undesirable for people of low intelligence to have more children than people of high or average intelligence meant that you consider it desirable.
24th November 2008 at 11:25 am
Matt Michael has said what he is against, but he has not said what he is for. Part of the reason I reacted so strongly against him is that I just don’t see the state as some dominating nanny presence in my life, in the way he claims it is. When I think of all the things that restrict what I might want to do, the state telling me I am not allowed to is not a major factor. The state had pulled out of a lot of things it used to control, and has become rather powerless. I am also against him because his lines are just those that have been used in the past by right-wing politicians to justify policy which means the rich gets richer and the poor get poorer and lead more miserable lives. It is, of course, particularly silly that free market fundamentalism seems to be making a presence in our party at precisely the time when, as Geoffrey Payne notes, the pursuit of these policies has led the world into a serious crisis.
Jock says “we languish where we are in our political fortunes because we are seen as part of the consensus”, but I am not convinced there is a big group of frustrated voters just waiting for a political party so extremely fundamentalist free market that it regards Margaret Thatcher as a social democrat. It is, of course, commonplace for all fringe political movements to claim that the mainstream political paarties are all a consensus and all those non-voters are really supporters of their ideology – the BNP say that, the Greens say that, extreme Socialists say that. How all those people who when you knock on their doors say “Nah, mate, not interested” are multiple counted …
Now, is your “Nah mate” person really someone who wants to abolish the NHS, and make all schools fee-paying, and whatever else Matt Michael might mean by moving away from all this social democracy he decries? I don’t think so. As I’ve said, keenness for free market ideology has been a dominant feature amongst the intelligentsia in recent years. There is indeed, an article which the right wing press regularly brings out in various forms around the time of the Liberal Democrat conference which runs “these people should become real liberals, then they’d prosper” and by that they mean extreme free market fundamentalists. This article is always written by people who are otherwise supporters of the far economic right of the Conservative Party or the US Republican Party. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Just as, if you asked a BNP supporter to write an article “What the Liberal Democrats should do to get more votes”, he most likely would say things like “stop all immigration, bring back capital punishment etc”.
I’m not saying that Matt Michael and those in this thread who have supported him should not be allowed into the Liberal Democrats. I think they are rather far removed from what the party has stood for, but they are entitled to join and try and change it so long as they aren’t so in conflict with its aims and objectives that they could be barred under those grounds. All I’m saying is thst if they were to become in any way a significant presence, I would reconsider my support for the party. Trying to convert the party from within, and driving out the moderates is, of course, classic entryist tactics. It worked in the Labour Party because the Labour Party has a big block of people who will always vote for it, and had more so in the past. It won’t work in the Liberal Democrats. I think in fact it will destroy the party completely, because I don’t think the people of this country are gasping for that sort of ideology, and the people that are keen on it don’t seem to be keen on the sort of work that actually wins votes and don’t seem to have a clue about what ordinary people are really thinking and want in terms of politics.
I respect Jock more than I respect many others who urge on us “19th century liberal economics” because I agree with him that a social dividend from Land Value Taxation removes some of the problems that concern me about unrestricted free market economics. Still, I think Jock and others are really a bit of a nostalgia party. We don’t live in the 19th century, things have changed. In those days, people’s economic lives were dominated by small scale local industries, those sort of things hardly exist any more, big multinational corporations have completely changed that. 19th century economics could also much more than now assume there was an infinite supply of various commodities. The value of a human being merely for what his or her body or even mind could provide was much greater then than it is now, for now we have mechanisation doing much of what had to be done by humans then. I suspect the support for extreme free market economics in the USA is a function of that country’s history, to some extent it is a nostalgia for the days when there was a western frontier, so anyone could go out there and make his fortune.
Jenni Russel’s Guardian article, which Laurence Boyce references, was a silly one, because it was all about a situation which doesn’t exist any more. She tells us of an acquaintance who was given a three bedroomed then a four bedroomed council house. That doesn’t happen any more – most of those houses have gone from council control due to the “Right to Buy”. Trust me, as a councillor, I’ve had plenty of families weeping in my surgery because they live in horribly overcrowded situations, they’ve come to me because they’ve been told “see your councillor” and all I can say to them is what they were already told “No, sorry, you may have five kids squeezed into a two bedroomed flat, but these days there aren’t enough council houses being given back to the council to be given to people like you who only have that degree of deprivation”. Does anyone reading this believe those families weeping in my councillor’s surgery have more freedom due to there no longer being council houses for them? Matt Michael does, it seems, that is the only way I can interpret his article. I might also note, to those who say they are “19th century liberals” – folks, you might not have noticed, but there is no western frontier that family could cross and build a homestead, there is no Empire they could go out and grab land from to become free, you may not have realised it but we live in the 21st century now.
24th November 2008 at 11:28 am
Sesenco
What I consider is that it’s simply not a question on which politicians should be telling people what to do.
Suppose some crank suggested we should be concerned that red-headed people were having more children than the rest of the population. And I objected. Would you then pop up and say “So you think it’s DESIRABLE for red-headed people to have more children than everyone else”?
I can’t believe I’m wasting my time responding to such tripe!
24th November 2008 at 12:05 pm
CCF,
please tell us how you define ‘disrepute’.
It seems to me that you wish to emplace a centrally controlled litmus test on who may or may not belong to a democratically constituted political party, yet you have also resigned your membership because you don’t agree with every line of current party policy.
So why don’t you set up your own party – I’m sure you’ll find lots of like-minded people willing to join with you.
24th November 2008 at 12:23 pm
IQ is both genertic & inherited, obviously. But the people with the worst raw material will also get the worst upbringing for the most part, so there are many underclass people of very low intelligence.
The standard disclaimer is that there are many very poor people who are average or well above average. My own parents, having a well below average income & living on a horrendous estate (we were among the tiny number of right to buy benefiiciaries) were badly off. But I benefited from a supportive environment at home, which compensated somewhat for the inevitable badness of the school.
Indeed, in the 1950s someone with an IQ of 80-90 would have had no trouble in getting a council house & an unskilled job, even if illiterate. Things have changed in this day & age. It really would be better for some people not to have children, yes.
But these are the people least receptive to education & contraception.
People may well grow up with Wiis & plasma screen TVs, but a lot of children do not have what they need & are thereby even poorer in a real sense than someone who goes hungry but can forge a way forward.
24th November 2008 at 12:23 pm
Laurence, the universal childcare provision I outlined is hardly the work of mad lefties – even the IDS Report sees the benefits to society of giving extra help to mothers when their children are in their first three years of life. Where would the “rolling back the state” brigade stop? Abolish the state funded post-natal visiting service? Abolish child benefit? If we shouldn’t have funded care at 3 why provide it at 5?
A number of contributors have implied that families should rely on themselves like families did in the “good old days” before the wicked welfare state. The reality is that the burdens of family life still fall disproportionately on women and push them back into the home – something many of the contributors here would seem to welcome.
24th November 2008 at 12:37 pm
Oranjepan
If you’re not willing to answer the question, that’s up to you. But please don’t complain if people take your comment “The general membership can think what we like …” at face value.
Of course there have to be common principles for the membership of any party, and there have to be some lines that can’t be crossed. What’s the point of a party that accepts any members whatsoever, and considers any views whatsoever acceptable? None.
24th November 2008 at 12:46 pm
CCF,
What is so objectionable about considering it undesirable that people of low intelligence have more children than people of high or average intelligence?
24th November 2008 at 12:52 pm
Sesenco
How can I state it any more simply?
IT’S NOT A MATTER POLITICIANS SHOULD BE MEDDLING IN.
I had hoped that at least the right-wingers in the party were against the state telling people how to run their personal lives. But maybe that just applies to “our sort of people” …
24th November 2008 at 1:00 pm
CCF,
Should the state be telling women not to smoke during pregnancy?
Should the state be telling brothers and sisters not to commit incest?
If you read what I said carefully, you will see that I expressed the view that there is little that the state can do to stop people of low intelligence procreating, at least things that liberals could support.
24th November 2008 at 1:02 pm
IT’S NOT A MATTER POLITICIANS SHOULD BE MEDDLING IN.
Aside from the shouting – isn’t that what most of us are saying. The state does meddle by creating very perverse incentives for some people to stay at home and churn out babies that, without the state, they would have no reasonable prospect of supporting for themselves. I’d prefer it didn’t meddle in such a way at all and that having a family should be something you do in the full knowledge that it is an 18 year near full time commitment that requires a lot of resources (and preferably by two or more adults acting together where possible) to do properly.
I don’t regard it as anyone’s human right to have a child of their own. Do we, as a whole?
24th November 2008 at 1:03 pm
CCF,
what you consider to be acceptable appears to be purely based on the assumed conclusions of some morally absolute political position.
I take the view that what is acceptable is what can be justified through rational argument and logic – if you can convince me then I’ll support you.
I think it is important to be open-minded for the very simple reason that the future is not set.
Look at the current economic situation for a good example – does anyone know the precise formula which will get us out of trouble with the least amount of pain?
Your absolute certainty would normally be a cause for concern.
24th November 2008 at 1:14 pm
“Laurence, the universal childcare provision I outlined is hardly the work of mad lefties – even the IDS Report sees the benefits to society of giving extra help to mothers when their children are in their first three years of life.”
No Ruth, it’s the work of people who have bought into the myth of the first three years hook, line and sinker. Iain Duncan Smith was displaying more or less the same slides at Tory conference as George Hosking was at ours. Both gentlemen are doubtless well intentioned – their aim is to knock on the head certain undesirable traits, such as a tendency towards violence, which can manifest at a very early stage. But their thinking is clouded in my view by a refusal to countenance the role of genes. Genetic determinism is the great bogey man, but the irony is that they merely wind up with another form of genetic determinism – one which begins at age three.
I do not believe that your son will gain any lasting benefit through attending playgroup sessions. Of course that doesn’t mean they are not transiently beneficial. He gets out of the house, has fun, starts interacting with other kids – when he begins proper school, it won’t be such a shock. That’s wonderful. You pay for it.
24th November 2008 at 1:25 pm
“I take the view that what is acceptable is what can be justified through rational argument and logic – if you can convince me then I’ll support you.”
You’re completely missing the point.
Of course people have different views about politics, and they don’t have to “convince” you or anyone else that those views are right in order for them to be considered acceptable.
The point I’m making is that there have to be some views that the party considers unacceptable, and some lines that can’t be crossed – particularly when it comes to members publicly expressing those views on a party website.
I think most people would consider racism and anti-semitism should be beyond the pale (though curiously you seem shy of agreeing). And I think during most of my time in the party suggestions that a lack of academic qualifications should debar people from having children would have been equally unacceptable.
And your typically silly comments about “moral dictator” and “thought police” are also wide of the mark. As you say, I am no longer a member of the party. But what I am saying is that if the party has changed so much that these views are now generally acceptable within the party, I’m glad I’m out of it.
24th November 2008 at 1:36 pm
“And I think during most of my time in the party suggestions that a lack of academic qualifications should debar people from having children would have been equally unacceptable.”
CCF, you are grossly distorting what I said, and doing it behind the cowardly mask of anonymity to boot.
24th November 2008 at 1:57 pm
CCF,
continue stating that you are glad to have resigned your membership and some of us will start to question your purpose in being here.
Is it trollery? Or is it just to cause gratuitous offence?
FWIW I draw a line at people who are malicious and intentionally destructive, and you are straying very close to that line if you haven’t already crossed it.
I could quite easily be wrong, but I repeat that I’m pretty sure we’ve crossed swords in real life. You are quite distinctive.
24th November 2008 at 1:58 pm
“CCF, you are grossly distorting what I said …”
I’m getting a bit sick of these continual whinges that I’ve “distorted” something, or “conveniently” omitted something.
You said “we absolutely have to question . . . whether someone with no qualifications . . . and no skills . . . should be having several children.
Several children? Ought they maybe to consider having no children?”
How have I distorted anything? You were quite clearly suggesting that people without educational qualifications shouldn’t have children.
24th November 2008 at 2:13 pm
Oranjepan
As for damaging the party, you’re in cloud cuckoo land if you think anything said here has any significant effect on the party’s fortunes. If you really behave as you do here out of a belief that you’re somehow doing your duty and defending the party, you’re completely wasting your time.
And as for this nonsense about our having “crossed swords in real life”, just think about how unlikely that is. Remember that I have no more idea of who you are than you do of who I am. But if you want to give me a clue about who you think I am – or even about who you are – I’m sure I can disabuse you.
But please drop this silly personal stuff. Debate the issues if you will, but the personal stuff is a waste of time.
24th November 2008 at 2:22 pm
CCF,
it’s interesting how you happily breeze over your own inconsistencies.
You also have an interesting line in cliches.
Consequently I have a clear idea of who I think you are – such are idiosyncracies!
24th November 2008 at 2:27 pm
CCF, you are still managing to distort what I said. First you say “academic qualifications” then “educational qualifications.” I never said either. I just said “qualifications” and “skills” which in turn was a clear reference to the post I was responding to. Nor did I ever say that anyone should be “debarred” from having children. I repeat, you are being very cowardly.
24th November 2008 at 2:31 pm
Oranjepan
I assure you, if you don’t live in my constituency it’s very unlikely we will have met.
But please give this silly personal stuff a rest.
24th November 2008 at 2:36 pm
You get what you’ve earnt.
24th November 2008 at 2:38 pm
Laurence
If the objection is to the word “debar”, then of course I agree you didn’t say the unqualified should be forcibly prevented from having children. But clearly you implied they shouldn’t have children.
As for quibbling over the difference between “qualifications” and “academic/educational qualifications”, what are you getting at? It’s OK for them to have children provided they can drive a fork-lift truck or something?
I think further discussion really is a waste of time when things get to this level.
24th November 2008 at 2:52 pm
CCF,
What would you do about Mr X and Miss Y (the two killers of Baby P we are still not allowed to name)?
He:
A neo-Nazi headcase of very low intelligence, so low in fact that he can neither read nor write and is terrified of having to talk to people. He is covered in tattoos, smokes, and lives in a flat infested with the rats he breeds to feed to the family python. Having tired of flaying guinea pigs alive and pulling the legs off frogs, he tortures a child to death for kicks.
She:
A good-for-nothing slob who stays in bed until noon and spends the rest of the day and night sitting in front of the computer, fag in one hand, vodka and coke in the other, surfing internet gambling and porn sites (all paid for by us, please note). She is far too bone idle to engage with her children, who are so neglected their heads are swarming with lice. And she sits back and let’s her boyfriend kill her youngest child because she doesn’t want him to walk out on her.
Should these people be allowed to reproduce, CCF?
Might not the surgeon’s scalpal directed at certain body parts not be the best solution in such extreme cases?
I can’t say I have the answer myself. What do YOU think?
24th November 2008 at 3:00 pm
Well obviously the whole point is to be able to support one’s family. It this respect, it doesn’t matter what type of qualifications, nor indeed whether there are any qualifications at all. I was merely referencing another post. As you well know.
Do you think that people who are in no position to support a family should have children?
24th November 2008 at 3:01 pm
Sesenco
I thought we were discussing whether those without qualifications should have children.
If the best arguments you can produce are based on likening sex between those without qualifications to incest, or on dragging in the tragedy of “Baby P”, to be honest I think you are only underlining the weakness of your case.
24th November 2008 at 3:04 pm
Laurence
If all you meant was that people who can’t afford to support a family shouldn’t start one, then why didn’t you say that? We could all have saved a hell of a lot of time.
24th November 2008 at 3:54 pm
CCF wrote:
“I thought we were discussing whether those without qualifications should have children.”
No, I wasn’t. I was referring to people of low intelligence. Absence of formal qualifications is merely one idicator of low intelligence. I did, further up the thread, point out that Miss Y does in fact have two GCSEs.
Very clearly, you wre intensely unwilling to engage with any of the issues or answer my questions. Instead, you attempt to shut down debate by claiming that the subject matter is out of bounds for party members.
I am beginning to get a bit exasperated.
24th November 2008 at 4:13 pm
Senesco
Then try to be clear about what you’re asking. Are you asking whether people of “low intelligence” should be forcibly prevented from having children?
Or what?
24th November 2008 at 4:21 pm
“you’re in cloud cuckoo land if you think anything said here has any significant effect on the party’s fortunes”
Well, I have had things I’ve written in political forums (way back when it was usenet rather than blogs) taken, quoted out of context, and thrown back at me by my Labour Party opponents when they could actually manage to get a leaflet out in my ward (which was about every four years when elections came round again …).
So don’t believe that things written in a publicly accessible website like this go entirely without attention. If I were a Labour Party activist in Lewisham, and I saw someone who claimed to be a Liberal Democrat member in Lewisham and who wrote an article saying Mrs Thatcher wasn’t nearly so keen a supporter of extreme free markets as he is, and who wrote stuff that can only be interpreted as a wish to abolish the NHS, council housing, state paid education etc, I think I’d be making a note of it. And I think I’d make it the headlines in my eve of poll leaflet:
“LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HERE ARE REALLY EXTREME RIGHT WINGERS WHO THINK THATCHER DID NOT GO FAR ENOUGH”.
In fact, knowing Lewisham Labour, I feel it’s quite likely they’ve caught hold of this and are planning just that.
Well done, Matt Michael, you may well have lost us two MPs and control of a London Borough.
24th November 2008 at 4:21 pm
David Allen,
You paraphrased (perhaps a little unfairly):
“Matt Michael (paraphrased): Thatcher was a social democrat. “Social democracy is the problem…. At the moment, the Liberal Democrats are part of the (social democrat) consensus. … We don’t treat people like adults.”
Tristan Mills: “Social democracy is …. inextricably opposed to liberalism.”
“…there should be no need for tax funded health care or social services.”
Laurence Boyce: “…we absolutely have to question . . . whether someone with no qualifications . . . and no skills . . . should be having several children.”
And asked Oranjepan and myself whether we thought these views acceptable in our party. I.E. do they promote an open society etc etc (preamble).
I think Matt Michael was being deliberately inflammatory by calling Thatcher a social democrat. She wasn’t. She was a bread of authoritarian, who did have some liberal elements (Jock’s superb critiques not withstanding). I do not believe the statement that our party is too much part of a cosy social-democratic consensus is so mad that it is a view which cannot be tolerated. I think all three parties often do not treat people like adults and a fair amount of infantilization does go on (i’m thinking in the social and person spheres, not public services). I see no reason why this view cannot sit in our party.
I think you’ve taken Tristan out of context. I disagree that social democracy is the polar opposite of liberalism but in some cases they do contradict each other. We do have to recognize that. As for health care, I don’t think you are being fair to Tristan position. On social services, I support a CBI which would replace the vast majority of these. So there is a circumstance when I’d hold that position.
As for Laurence Boyce, He presented himself very badly, but I think he is raising the fundamental question of the burden of children on society. This is not out of kilter with liberal thought (remember your Mill). If, however, Laurence was suggesting sterilization or some aggressive state interference with reproductive rights, then no no and no (which I think I said up thread). However, I really doubt he was being so terrifyingly illiberal, just raising a legitimate point.
So, in short, I can see easily how all three of these people and their statements can fit in within a liberal democratic discourse, if they are not misrepresented and explain themselves clearly.
24th November 2008 at 4:24 pm
“Well done, Matt Michael, you may well have lost us two MPs and control of a London Borough”
Please, please – stop embarrassing yourself.
24th November 2008 at 4:25 pm
CCF,
“people without educational qualifications should not have children”
I think if you peel back this statement a little you’ll find that laurence was not advocated enforce sterilisation, or anything else equally abhorent.
This is the problem with this debate. Most people are so hett up attacking each other or defending themselves they are not bothering to listen to the points the others are trying to make.
Note to everyone. Nobody is trying to destroy the party. Nobody can destroy the party. We are engaging in debate. So debate hard, but for goodness sake cool it a little.
24th November 2008 at 4:33 pm
“I think if you peel back this statement a little you’ll find that laurence was not advocated enforce sterilisation, or anything else equally abhorent.”
No – I just said I agreed that he wasn’t saying they should be forcibly prevented from having children. My choice of the word “debar” was a bad one.
On the other hand, some people do like to post provocative statements here, and if they succeed in provoking people I don’t think they should complain.
24th November 2008 at 4:35 pm
Sorry CCF, could you please answer the question? Do you think that people who are in no position to support a family should have children?
24th November 2008 at 4:40 pm
Ruth Bright,
If I would like to roll up child tax credit in favour of a citizens basic income, am I a free market fundamentalist?
24th November 2008 at 4:55 pm
Laurence
No, of course not. As I said, if you had written that in the first place, we could all have saved a lot of time (and temper).
Instead, you wrote that people without qualifications and skills shouldn’t have children. You even edited out the part about not having a job, which one would have thought was the most pertinent part, if their ability to support children was what you were talking about.
24th November 2008 at 4:55 pm
Julian H – I have several times been the victim of Labour taking things I’ve said out of context and making a big thing out of it. I do know what I am talking about here.
24th November 2008 at 5:05 pm
CCF, I was referencing another post which everyone can see apart from you (except of course when you are trying to make an issue out of the bit I did not reference).
24th November 2008 at 5:10 pm
Yes but those were your comments and you were standing.
“A party member thinks this…” is not a story. If it were, the Tories would never win anything – have you read ConsHome?(!)
In fact, on this subject, I should stress that once upon a time, before LDV (B.L.) I used to mainly post on politicalbetting.com and ConsHome. On the former my views were far more in tune with the other LDs than with the Tories, and on ConsHome I was regularly derided as a “bloody liberal” and sometimes, God forbid, a “Lib Dem”.
There may be splits but, to borrow Mr Schneider’s wise and conciliatory tone, we shouldn’t forget the large areas we have in common. Thatcher, of course, introduced Section 28 (which I’d hope no one here supports) and in recent years the Tories have largely supported the wars and, of late, argued that lesbians should be deprived of IVF treatment unless they prove to the government that a “male father figure” will be involved in the child’s upbringing(!)
On all these points I’d expect a wide consensus in these parts (as there also is on ID cards, 42 days et cetera).
24th November 2008 at 5:10 pm
Matthew
Yes, I don’t doubt that if people write things on the Internet (or elsewhere) under their own names, and later stand in elections, what they have written can be used against them, both fairly and unfairly.
But what I don’t believe for a moment is that what’s said on either side in the arguments here has any significant impact on the voting public.
24th November 2008 at 5:38 pm
James – no.
24th November 2008 at 5:55 pm
CCF – “I don’t believe for a moment is that what’s said on either side in the arguments here has any significant impact on the voting public.”
–Too right.
Ruth,
Thanks.
24th November 2008 at 5:55 pm
Matthew Huntbach wrote:
I respect Jock more than I respect many others who urge on us “19th century liberal economics” because I agree with him that a social dividend from Land Value Taxation removes some of the problems that concern me about unrestricted free market economics.
Err, thanks, I think; but as pretty much a “market anarchist” as a Mutualist I also think you are still wrong. I do have a problem, a slight one, that I have not yet reconciled, between my support for LVT (which some other libertarians would call theft of private property) and the dividend from it, and those market anarchists who say that land can be justly acquired. I *tend* to side with Spencer on the origins of land ownership and with George on the best rememdy (rent sharing).
However the main point (and I agree that libertarians have to be careful about our choice of words when describing the “market” lest people like you think that “market fundamentalism” is something that Thatcher tried and nearly suceeded with – see this post at Cato Unbound to which I linked from my blog the other day) is that what I see as what you are terming “market fundamentalism” is so far removed from what you believe I mean.
The state creates the conditions in which large firms thrive, protect their markets, increase their exposure to risk beyond what would normally be acceptable without government protection (such as banks for example backed by the so-called lender of last resort).
Market anarchists would see the abolition of intellectual property rights, limited liability protection, and of course, without a state there would be no boondoggling government contracts and grants of monopoly or favoured trade rules. We see the corporation as being inherently as hierarchical and coercive as government. Mutualists, indeed, would hope to see the emergence of voluntary co-operation between workers instead of submission to capitalist employers.
Thatcher’s regime was, to many of us, the absolute antithesis of this – selling off public monopolies to become, for long enough to get a market advantage at least, as monopolies or cartels; granting near monopoly status to people like Murdoch in the satellite broadcasting market.
I was interested to read that one who is probably seen as a bete noir of Thatcher’s government, John Redwood (an avowed libertarian as I understand it), saw the Tower Colliery workers’ buy-out as the model to follow and urged Thatcher and that American she brought in to ruin the NCB to mutualize the coal mining industry instead of closing it down.
For Mutualists, as with most of the Individualist Anarchists of the nineteenth century, the four great monopolies of land, banking and credit creation, intellectual property rights and state tariffs and regulations as key to creating a more human scale economy. None of these problems have gone away, and we have just witnessed the grossest manipulation of two of them at least – land and banking, lead to further tinkering with the fourth, government tariffs and regulation.
We are a long long way from “free market fundamentalism” as understood by the vast majority of the “libertarian” tradition.
24th November 2008 at 5:59 pm
Mutualism is well described by Kevin Carson’s “Free Market Anti-Capitalist” blog and website by the way.
24th November 2008 at 6:06 pm
Matthew Huntbach said:
“I’m not saying that Matt Michael and those in this thread who have supported him should not be allowed into the Liberal Democrats. I think they are rather far removed from what the party has stood for, but they are entitled to join and try and change it so long as they aren’t so in conflict with its aims and objectives that they could be barred under those grounds. All I’m saying is thst if they were to become in any way a significant presence, I would reconsider my support for the party. Trying to convert the party from within, and driving out the moderates is, of course, classic entryist tactics. … I think in fact it will destroy the party completely, because … the people that are keen on it …. don’t seem to have a clue about what ordinary people are really thinking and want in terms of politics.”
Yes, that sums up the dilemma pretty well. Banning people is an extreme thing to do, and it has to be restricted to those whose views are not just weird but downright offensive. Laurence Boyce’s words did come pretty near the knuckle, but I see that he claims that he didn’t really mean what people thought he meant. Let’s accept that.
I was really more worried by Matt Michael’s basic attitude. He is contemptuous of what the Lib Dems stand for. He has clearly joined the party primarily in order to change it. That is entryism, and he has at least been honest enough to admit to it. Some people think we should welcome it. Some birds, no doubt, would welcome a cuckoo into the nest!
24th November 2008 at 10:25 pm
“Laurence Boyce’s words did come pretty near the knuckle, but I see that he claims that he didn’t really mean what people thought he meant.”
Well some people seemed to know what I meant. What I meant was not of course that I wanted to interfere with anyone’s body parts, but my message is nonetheless fairly harsh. It is that I don’t want to pay for parents who are having children they can’t afford. I no longer wish to pay for other people’s mistakes. Frankly, I make enough mistakes of my own.
I find it strange that some of you think the timing of Matt’s article is off. Coming on the day of a record projected £118 billion borrowing figure, it could hardly be more apt. Far from being in the wrong party, I am in fact in the only party that is committed to cutting government spending, as opposed to slowing the rate of spending growth or whatever bollocks Cameron is saying. Of course £20 billion is a paltry amount, but at least it’s a start.
In reality, it probably will fall to the Conservatives to cut spending. People will call them nasty. (Some of them are nasty.) But they will have no choice really. We are living way beyond our means and it is time to cut back. What better place to start than the welfare state which seems to have gone from a being a safety net to pretty much a way of life for some. You guys can huff and puff all you like, but at the end of the day we just can’t go on like this. We can’t go on spending money we simply don’t have.
We need to find some pretty substantial and lasting savings. Suppose we start with Ruth’s playgroup sessions and then take it from there?
24th November 2008 at 10:32 pm
Laurence:
“I am in fact in the only party that is committed to cutting government spending, as opposed to slowing the rate of spending growth or whatever bollocks Cameron is saying. Of course £20 billion is a paltry amount, but at least it’s a start.”
But the party was never committed to cutting (overall) public spending by £20bn – only by what (if anything) was left over after an unquantified part of those savings had been redirected to other spending priorities.
But even that aspiration has now been cast to the winds – certainly in the short term. The Guardian’s report of Vince Cable’s pre-pre-budget-report briefing said:
“… Cable called for swingeing tax cuts equivalent to 4p in the pound, which he said would be worth £16bn-£18bn, coupled with a massive increase in public spending.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/nov/20/economy-vincentcable
24th November 2008 at 10:41 pm
Well the £20 billion figure was always hedged about with ambiguity. But from now on, whenever we are accused of wishing to cut public spending by £20 billion, I recommend we plead guilty as charged.
24th November 2008 at 11:31 pm
Yup, cut funded playgroup sessions that will help free women up so they can go back to work and pay taxes. Mothers can’t win with you can they Laurence? If they’re thick they probably shouldn’t breed. If they’re well-qualified and want to go back to work (but wouldn’t earn enough to afford the childcare without state help) they can go hang as well. You still haven’t had the guts to tell us that you think child benefit should be abolished as well.
Anyway – I’m off to change a nappy – that’s all us girlies are fit for after all.
24th November 2008 at 11:46 pm
Laurence:
“Well the £20 billion figure was always hedged about with ambiguity. But from now on, whenever we are accused of wishing to cut public spending by £20 billion, I recommend we plead guilty as charged.”
Suggest what you like (never let it be said that I’m a moral dictator or a member of the thought police) but even in the fondest dreams of the Right this was never going to be a reduction of £20bn in overall public spending.
And quite clearly Vince Cable has now thought better of advocating any overall spending cuts at all during a recession.
A small victory for Shirley Williams fans within the party, I think.
25th November 2008 at 12:19 am
“Mothers can’t win with you can they Laurence?”
Depends. If they play their cards right . . .
“You still haven’t had the guts to tell us that you think child benefit should be abolished as well.”
To be honest, I have never really understood the reasoning behind child benefit. Perhaps someone can explain it. If you are asking me whether I personally wish to fund your children at £120 per month, then in all honesty I can’t see why I should. Could you not manage without that amount?
25th November 2008 at 2:46 am
Yup, cut funded playgroup sessions that will help free women up so they can go back to work and pay taxes.
But you know what I look forward to, as a minimal state mutualist, is the day when the state’s influence that has thus far acted to increase the power of capital at the expense of the returns to labour wanes and labour can finally get its true worth. In such a society, financial independence would be relatively easy, and parent(s) could save enough to be able to take whatever time off one partner or another (if there are two parents) feels is appropriate for their child, and have the financial wherewithal to pay for the bespoke childcare they want for their child. Wouldn’t that be a better scenario all round – real choice, real independence?
Sadly we have spent a century ignoring the problems that, once fixed, could bring this about – our liberal forebears to a large extent understood these and tried, in 1909 in particular, to start to put it right. Their prescriptions have never since been implemented. So instead, the ever burgeoning state has made capital richer and has then to get more involved in supporting more people whose labour is not equitably rewarded as a result of that power of capital. Less choice, less independence, for us all.
For better or worse, that is what market anarchists, mutualists, libertarians, tend to believe and hope for. You may very well think us hopelessly naive or similar, but kindly don’t treat us as right wing corporate shills. We have more loathing of state capitalism and state sponsored concentration of wealth than most in this party I suspect. And a lot more optimism about humanity’s inherent ability to break free from that given half a chance.
25th November 2008 at 9:57 am
I suppose the justification behind child benefit is that someone raising a child is doing something economically useful that absorbs their time, time they would otherwise spend on other forms of production. Child benefit is the notional “salary” you get for those particular units of production. I can see the point of that.
I’ll be interested to see what Ruth thinks of Jock’s ideal scenario. This is one of those moments when we find out whether someone is a willing slave or not.
25th November 2008 at 10:23 am
So children are units of production for which mothers should be in receipt of a state salary? Did Chairman Mao say that?
25th November 2008 at 11:07 am
That’s a very materialistic and mechanical view, Laurence.
I guess child benefit is just an inadequate compromise between a partial wage and partial CBI which allows for such inhuman misinterpretations.
Reproduction is a natural human vocation which is a matter of choice and circumstance – I don’t see why it should be encouraged or discouraged, but at the same time I understand that it is impossible for the state to remain neutral on the subject.
If the state treated everyone equally in the first place rather than trying to balance the favours it gives to every interest group then this wouldn’t be an issue.
25th November 2008 at 11:14 pm
Jock
“The state creates the conditions in which large firms thrive, protect their markets, increase their exposure to risk beyond what would normally be acceptable without government protection (such as banks for example backed by the so-called lender of last resort)”
Actually, I think the modern economy depends on such firms because the economy of scale they provide gives us a wider range of choices and cheaper prices.
Are you suggesting it is entirely due to the state that most of our food now comes through a few large supermarket chains, and without the state we’d all be using small corner shops? No, that’s daft. The way that small banks and building societies have coalesced into larger ones – all due to the state? No, I don’t think so. Each town would have its own small builder of motor cars were it not for the state … oh, come on, now.
What actually seems to be the case is that small scale mutualist industry and services have survived better in those parts of Europe which have more rigid control of the economy with laws designed to protect them.
The fact is that though you CLAIM to be oh so different from the free market types such as Thatcher and Bush, whose policy was essentially to defend the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor, the language you use is just so very similar, and your arguments as to why it would turn out so different if you had your way than it has when they had their way are just so airy fairy. That is why I see quite a similarity between people like you who claim your fundamentalist free market is true liberalism and the Trots of old. They too had airy fairy language as to why their socialism wouldn’t turn out at all to be like socialism as we experienced it so far. They too had ready excuses as to why anything that was tried out that looked like what they wanted when it started was labelled as “oh, that’s just state capitalism” when it didn’t work. They too promised pie in the sky if you followed their simplistic little ideology that had all the answers, but when there was no pie in the sky, it was always the wrong sort of sky, or some wicked bad man got in and stole it, or some such excuse.
The reality is that the sort of small scale local business on which your 19th century economical liberalism worked has disappeared. The game has changed because the large scale of things – which provides us with many benefits – means it just doesn’t work in the way it did when it was much easier to regard a simplistic free market approach as quintessentially liberal.
25th November 2008 at 11:57 pm
Jock,
I have looked at your “Mutualist” web site, and I am pleased to see there a lot of reading which has influenced me in the past. Good to see Chesterton and Belloc there, for example, I retain my membership of the Chesterton Society, but I do note when one mixes with these people one finds they tend to be right-wing Catholics.
So here’s one problem – modern day people who admire that sort do often tend to see in it what they want, and are thus far more kind to modern market economics than Chesterton would be. The distributists wanted real property to be distributed, not paper property. Chesterton was horrified at the idea of one many owning two shops, how would he have coped with Tesco’s? The big problem with distributism, it seems to me, was for it to work as intended it would actually require a very heavy state which investigated everything you owned, and if it was more than enough to support you, would take it from you and give it to those who had less. Chesterton himself, in some places, does seem to support taking from the rich and giving to the poor, but very few of his modern admirers have picked that up, and modern supporters of the free market believe any form of wealth tax or the like to be anathema.
The other thing is that Chesterton and his admirers supposed quite a strong moral force in society, which would cause people to interact naturally in a mutualist way. That was why Chesterton was also part of the Catholic revival. Chesterton gained a reputation as an anti-semite which he has never been able to shake off because the Jew to him became symbolic of the outsider who wasn’t part of the cultural norm and who thus disrupted the unspoken but universally respected rules of interaction between people on which mutualism depended.
So Chesterton was very keen on marriage and the family, and suspicious of social libertarianism. I suspect the modern liberal who tends to froth at the mouth at the very mention of Christianity (Laurence … ) would find this side of him very hard to take, yet it was integral to his view of how society could and should be.
25th November 2008 at 11:58 pm
“. . . free market types such as Thatcher and Bush, whose policy was essentially to defend the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor . . .”
I think it may now be your turn to “come on” Matthew. I despise Thatcher with all of my heart, but how exactly did she defend the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor? Surely what you have said there is so much easy lefty banter?
26th November 2008 at 12:13 am
And yes, I despise Chesterton too!
26th November 2008 at 1:12 am
Matthew Huntbach wrote:
Actually, I think the modern economy depends on such firms because the economy of scale they provide gives us a wider range of choices and cheaper prices.
Cheaper than what? Cheaper than Microsoft products perhaps? Cheaper than food would be without subsidy and barriers to entry (like the loss of small abattoirs through EU regulation, say)?
Are you suggesting it is entirely due to the state that most of our food now comes through a few large supermarket chains, and without the state we’d all be using small corner shops?
The fourth and fifth biggest of which are mutuals. The second biggest was described last year as a “ten billion pound property company with a small grocery business on the side” by one of its largest shareholders. They get us cheaper food because they are able to screw farmers who have already been screwed by landlords because of subsidies and for the larger ones increase the cost of our food because of the same subsidies. That’s a huge mess of intervention right there. I thought people understood almost as a given that our food was way more costly than it could be because of state intervention, and that the big supermarkets rely as much on their monopolistic presence, bolstered by state planning regulations and their skewed use of land compared with independents.
The way that small banks and building societies have coalesced into larger ones – all due to the state?
Banking is the supreme example of state manipulation. Setting absurdly high barriers to entry so only the biggest can really compete. The very stuff they deal in is manipulated by the state on their behalf (need you be reminded who demanded the creation of the Federal Reserve system – clue, it wasn’t exactly the Meatpackers union).
Each town would have its own small builder of motor cars were it not for the state … oh, come on, now.
Interesting that in Britain, until nationalization (that’s confiscation by the state – the height of interference), that’s not far off the truth.
What actually seems to be the case is that small scale mutualist industry and services have survived better in those parts of Europe which have more rigid control of the economy with laws designed to protect them.
I think you put too much emphasis on size. Mutuals do not need to be small – look at Mondragon in Spain, €36bn in assets. I tend to think they would be smaller. But since you cited the motor industry, there are hundreds of small and medium sized enterprises go into the creation of a car, even by the biggest auto-giant.
Look at your own “industry” – we would not even be discussing this in this fantastic medium that’s going to change the world if it weren’t for individuals coming together in mutualist type arrangements – if it were left to Microsoft, all we’d have is a bunch of patents and hugely expensive software and little choice.
The fact is that though you CLAIM to be oh so different
Patronizing, much! Not enough to get me to leave the party though, sorry!
from the free market types such as Thatcher and Bush
You still haven’t grasped the gulf of difference I’m afraid. In what way is creating vast private monopolies in place of public ones, giving sweet deals to your mates like Murdoch and Halliburton and defending a monetary and property system that robs the poor and concentrates wealth remotely like someone who wants to see those monopolies of power busted apart?
you who claim your fundamentalist free market is true liberalism and the Trots of old.
Whatever.
The reality is that the sort of small scale local business on which your 19th century economical liberalism worked has disappeared.
Indeed, in many cases, it has all but disappeared. But it has disappeared because of corporate welfare not despite it. Corporate welfare is nearly always directed at organizations that can supply the requirements of some grand scheme or other.
The game has changed because the large scale of things – which provides us with many benefits – means it just doesn’t work in the way it did when it was much easier to regard a simplistic free market approach as quintessentially liberal.
Benefits of scale were far more important when people were less able to communicate directly with other people. Large trans-national corporations doing deals on our behalf to buy coffee from Ecuador or chocolate from Ghana were also massively boosted by the skewed financial system they controlled (many of the biggest commodities firms have seats in the IMF/World Bank structure so they can help pick and choose which countries to screw next by application of the same monopolistic monetary system as screws the rest of us). Nobody is arguing that at some stage in the development of world trade such merchant adventurers were necessary and the firms they gave rise to useful.
But that was then, too, and we are on the cusp of such global interconnectivity that their importance will wane, unless you are really saying that the world has become so bland that everyone needs Coke and Nestle cereals because they don’t have the imagination to want anything more individualistic, even as the world and its multitude of different cultures is opened up to us on such a grand scale.
When you joined this party, from what you said, we still needed to book most international calls, it took three flights to get to Nairobi (no weekend breaks in Mombassa then – in fact very few overseas holidays in general), and if we wanted a pen pal our schools organized them for us, and we did it in long hand with something called paper and a pen. The world has swung back in favour of the individual, and if states refuse to recognize that it could become very messy indeed (especially as we can now so much more readily see how psychopathic our “leaders” are compared with Mr Wilson sitting behind a BBC desk to deliver his party broadcast).
Then you go on to comment at length about Chesterton happening to be one of about two hundred “suggested reading” as if mutualists somehow take him as gospel. If you looked through that list a bit more, I think you’d find that “suggested reading” does not mean “these people are all mutualists and you have to believe what they said”. After all, the list contains work from both Naomi Klein and William Kristol – I can’t think of any outlook on life that would regard both of them, simultaneously, as gospel.
26th November 2008 at 1:22 am
And, after all we’ve seen in the past year, tell me that the land and banking monopolies are not just as important as they were a century ago. Same with the intellectual property market – we now indeed have vast firms virtually living solely on intellectual property cash cows and very probably preventing better products coming to market as a result. And I return to this medium as a shining example of a near anarchic development environment in which the only way the corporate behemoths can truly compete is by stifling competition and preventing people improving on their products. And if rachetting up government debt to unheard of levels is not interference on the grandest scale I’ll be buggered sideways by a blunt root vegetable.
These four monopolies have not been touched. They assert more influence than ever before. Influence that always tends to screw the poorest and enrich the richest. And if we continue to tinker without offering a rememdy for these influences we are part of that consensus. Maybe a nicer, cuddlier, less well known part, but a part nonetheless.
So sad when it was our ideological forebears that grasped those problems and began to try to do something about it before the socialists took over the left.
27th November 2008 at 11:03 am
Jock,
I mention Chesterton because I’m fairly familiar with his work, and he did come top of the reading list your referenced. Despite his whimsical style, underneath he was often spot on where most other thinkers at that time were badly wrong, and he had a good grasp of human nature, which I’m afraid, many others even in this same line of mutualism small-scale etc don’t have. Unfortunately, he has rather been captured by right-wing Catholics who see in him what they want and ignore what doesn’t fit in with their ideology. He did himself no good either with his jokey anti-semitism, which looks particularly horrible in the light of events which occurred after his death.
A point I have been making elsewhere is that there’s something of a tradeoff between society working because everyone fits into traditional roles set by custom and that society’s sense of morality, and a society which is more free in what people can do, but then requires more state intervention to pick up the pieces – this is why in my comments on the Baby P case I’ve posed the issue that if we are going to allow people to live fairly loose lives and have children as they will, inevitably we must balance that either by expensive state intervention in child protection issues, or just accept that sometimes Baby P cases will happen. Chesterton’s “home, family and Church” line picked up on this, in a way which many advocates of a state-free or at least loose state society skirt round.
Now, I can see your heart’s in the right place, but I’m afraid your line “we’d all be using small scale local services if it wasn’t for the wicked state” just doesn’t wash with me. For example, sure I too like the idea of small scale local suppliers feeding and clothing me, but guess what – when I go shopping, I go to the big chains. So do most other people. When given a choice and ask to cast their pound vote in the free market, they cast it for the biggies. I can’t agree they do this entirely because they have been forced to. So to me the idea that a more free market state is going to break down into small suppliers is nonsense. But, yes, I do see the big suppliers as in many ways just as responsible for making us dependent in a “nursery Britain” way as the welfare state.
You note Microsoft as big bad business, yes, it got in at the right time and established a standard. People use Microsoft products because they like the idea of a product they can pick up and use anywhere they are because everyone else uses it.
Am I saying “the world has become so bland that everyone needs Coke and Nestle cereals because they don’t have the imagination to want anything more individualistic”? No, but I’m noting that’s what people do buy. Are you going to step in as Nanny and tell them they shouldn’t? Sure, it would be nice if they didn’t, but in the real world they do, and I know even I do. I do it because it’s readily available, and I know what I’m going to get wherever I am. And, sorry, but the economies of scale in manufacturing mass market products DO make them cheaper than alternatives. Sometimes it’s nice to experiment with new things, but sometimes comfort leads me to the familiar, and I can’t be bothered to research into the alternative. And, yes, small scale bespoke products do cost more, I buy my clothes from a big supplier because I can’t afford my own tailor. So, I suspect, do you. One may very well hope that changes in technology will change that, but I’m not convinced that the sort of “let the market rip” ideology of the article which started this thread would lead to that happening. It certainly hasn’t during the times this ideology has been dominant since it became the fashion in the 1980s.
Sorry, Jock, but what you say on this reminds me so much of how the Trotskists refused to see how real human beings work, and were so convinced by their ideology that they fitted the real world round it rather than vice versa, with villains conveniently brought in to blame every time things didn’t work out as they said it should.
27th November 2008 at 11:22 am
I’m not going to continue this discussion (just because it seems to have reached a point where it’s just yo and me) so I won’t respond in detail. But out of interest, since you are a member of the GKCS, do you know what’s happened to the library/collection. I live next to what was Plater College where it was housed until the church got rid of it three or four years ago, but don’t know what happened to the collection.
I was thinking of blogging about Prince Charles the other day blaming the economic situation on “consumerism”. I think he’s got it the wrong way around, and your comments above fit into this – consumerism is what we are “forced” into by the banking and land systems.
cf “The Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt Slavery and Destructive Economics” (Michael Rowbotham)
27th November 2008 at 12:35 pm
G K Chsterton’s cousin, A K Chesterton (1896-1973) was the founding Chairman of the National Front. He fell out with the unreconstructed Nazis, John Tyndall, Martin Webster, et al, and left shortly before his death..
27th November 2008 at 1:03 pm
Plater College – from what I recall, like a lot of RC establishments in the UK slowly ran out of money and ran down because of that. These places tend to be expensive to maintain.
The library may well have gone to Seton Hall, as it has a big GKC establishment:
http://academic.shu.edu/chesterton
the work of which, I think, rather illustrates my comment about GKC being held firmly in the grip of right-wing Catholics.
27th November 2008 at 1:55 pm
Matthew Huntbach,
“small scale bespoke products do cost more”
maybe you need to be reminded of the ‘diseconomies of scale’ argument put forward by EF Schumacher in Small is Beautiful.
I agree that bespoke products sometimes cost more, but often they offer better value too.
I also agree that industrialised mass-production can be more efficient, but much as fast food is convenient the michelin guide doesn’t include any noodle bars or hamburger chains.
If we are to satisfy every individual need we must ensure the availablity of the widest possible variety of choice.
27th November 2008 at 3:10 pm
“He [Chesterton] had a good grasp of human nature.”
A good grasp of human nature is rooted in an understanding of evolutionary biology. Chesterton did not understand evolution. In fact he rather arrogantly denied it. His essay The Man in the Cave is favourite reading for creationists.
27th November 2008 at 5:28 pm
Oranjepan:
“If we are to satisfy every individual need we must ensure the availability of the widest possible variety of choice.”
Who’s “we”?
Bespoke products may offer better value, it’s surely up to the market whether people are prepared to pay for it or not. Is it up to nanny state to ensure the more costly but “better” product is available? Who says it’s “better”? Nanny state?
The Michelin guide may not have noodle bars and hamburger chains in it, so how come my High Street is full of these things and has no Michelin starred restaurants? If a Michelin starred restaurant opened up, it would fail – people aren’t willing to pay what it costs to run one of those. It’s up to anyone to buy a local shop and run whatever business they can run in it and make a profit. Noodle bars, kebab joints and burger chains tend to prosper best. Are you saying nanny state should take the line “it’s good for you, I’ll take your tax money and subsidise Michelin starred restaurants in your High Street”?
27th November 2008 at 5:39 pm
“Who’s “we”? … it’s surely up to the market”
Hurrah! Now you’re talking, old bean!
27th November 2008 at 5:46 pm
I see that 6 days later, Matt Michael has still not deigned to return.
27th November 2008 at 5:51 pm
Why should he? It’s perfectly legitimate to write an article and leave it at that; not everyone indulges in our endless blog-banter. I can think of numerous LDV threads in which the author hasn’t contributed beyond their initial words.
27th November 2008 at 5:56 pm
I think he could at least drop in and say hello . . .
27th November 2008 at 6:51 pm
Matthew,
‘We’ are the participants in the market who comprise it.
‘We’ are subjected to our state whether or not we like what it offers.
‘We’ are having this conversation.
It is not up to the state to ensure availability, it is up to the state to ensure the limits of availablity are to our satisfaction and enforce these limits.
I don’t see that you can predict with any accuracy whether or not a top-notch restaurant on your high street would fail (though I suggest the high street of most town centres probably isn’t the best location for such operations).
Finally, you can’t have your cake and eat it – either it is the costs or the profitability of the business which prevents it from existing: if the market supports it the costs will be borne. So no, you are incorrect to suggest that I’m making the case for central planning.
It is shockingly obviously you haven’t read Schumacher (either that or you couldn’t be bothered to read the three-word title of the book) in which he rejects both big-state and small-state absolutist solutions and settles on an intermediate state which defends the mixed market.
Frankly it is bizarre that you could misinterpret my comment in the way that you have.
27th November 2008 at 10:08 pm
Oranjepan,
I don’t know what you are talking about, as I thought it’s obvious from my comments that I am in favour of “an intermediate state which defends the mixed market”.
I am happy to argue about the extent to which the state should intervene to defend variety and small businesses against the tendency for large chains to dominate.
The comments I was making were aimed at fundamentalists of the sort who would accuse Mrs Thatcher of being a “social democrat”, who it seems to me must regard any such intervention as “nanny state”.
27th November 2008 at 10:20 pm
There seems to be an implication there that where the state intervenes it is most likely to be beneficial to the operations of the market. The point I make is that the state, through mechanisms like the inherently inflationary central banking system, the monopolizing of land values it sanctions, the barriers to entry it creates by regulation, the protection it gives to investors by limited liability and by the tariffs and taxes it imposes, distorts what could be a healthy market more than it benefits it.
These are not natural things and processes. Mankind, through governments, created them, and can change them, even radically. It is paucity of imagination and, as Galbraith effectively said, the smoke and mirrors created by those who set economic policy to make it appear more complicated than it need be in turn to justify intervention, that conspires to perpetuate these great injustices – almost all of them disbenefitting the vast majority and benefitting the rich, tiny, minority.
28th November 2008 at 11:26 am
Sorry Matthew, that was not obvious. Thank you for being explicit.