Author Archives: Gordon Lishman

In the recent Social Liberal Forum book, David Boyle asserts that “free trade and anti-trust lay at the heart of Liberalism and Liberal economics from the start of the party”. His essay overlaps with David Howarth’s contribution in returning Liberal and LibDem economics to its roots, rejecting the false claim that “neo-liberalism” in any way represents the liberal tradition.

David writes that: “The original Liberal idea of free trade was not a simple license to do whatever you want, if you were rich and powerful enough. It was thoroughly aware of Adam Smith’s original warning that collusion between entrenched businesses can end in “a conspiracy against the public”. Liberal free trade “was designed as a means of liberation – so that the small could challenge the big, the poor could challenge the rich with the power of the new approach, the alternative provider, the imaginative, liberating shift”.

There has been a bit of discussion recently on a couple of Party websites about community politics and whether that idea contributed to recent success in the local elections. But is this defining community politics as the delivery of multiple leaflets with bar charts and slogans?

The phrase “community politics” was coined in 1969 and it was adopted by the Liberal Party in 1970. In 1980, Bernard Greaves and I wrote the following:

Person-centred liberalism is a tautology – there’s no other form of liberalism. However, it might be useful to explore a little of what we mean when liberals talk about individualism, the freedom of everybody to be themselves and to make the best of their lives.  “Isn’t that the same as the Tories?” a lifelong Labour supporter once said to me.

The idea is central to liberalism. It says that each, precious, separate person is more important than any group of which she or he may be part.  Yes, we find and express ourselves in communities and other groups. But it’s the individuals that define the groups, not the other way round.

Take class, for instance.  In modern Britain, social class is self-defined and has little to do with income, status, work or even origin.  Look at the Labour Party’s leadership! But it still has a lot to do with Labour rhetoric and strikes a chord with their core vote. It’s often a key reference for the attitude which says: “I’ve always voted Labour; so did my parents, because we are working class”. Even so, I was surprised to see Blair’s pollster, Philip Gould, start his autobiography with a quotation from Hegel:

The human being finds his proper identity only in those relations that are in effect the negation of his isolated particularity – in his membership in a group or social class whose institutions, organisations and values determine his very individuality.

I’ve quoted that rather turgid sentence because it makes my point exactly: for Hegel and Gould, the important thing is to be defined by class, not to define yourself.  As part of the Labour mindset, it’s also an important indicator about why it’s so hard to move on from the institution that imprisons them.

“Caron’s test” for emails to Party members is good, but I think we can go further.

The underlying problem, as I’ve written before, is that too many of the emails  seem to be written by marketing professionals who are trying to achieve a specific result – often one that can be measured by funds raised.  The reason it’s a problem is that we aren’t just donors – most of us see ourselves as members of an extended family who need to be reassured, engaged and spoken with directly in ways that relate to our own experience as Party members.

It is interesting that fund-raising charities now spend a good deal of their time and money on chatting with supporters about what they do rather than just doing constant appeals based on need.

A recent piece of US experience seems to me to be useful:

Levitt and Dubner in their most recent book in their “Freakonomics” series quote the example of Brian Mullaney of Smile Train with his “once-and-done” strategy.  That involved asking potential donors to make only one donation with the option of ticking a box to say “do not ask for another donation”. That seems counter-productive: in charities, we have learned that first-time donors rarely give enough to cover the cost of making the contact. It’s only with continued donations that the charity makes a surplus on the relationship.