From an interview the Liberal Democrat Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne gave the Evening Standard this week:
I think there is a danger that we are defined by a relatively small set of issues that are relevant and significant but do not give a rounded picture of what the Liberal Democrats are in government in order to achieve.
As he rightly says, there’s a danger in the events of 2011 that the party ends up leaving just that impression:
It would be a mistake for the Lib-Dems to come to be known in the public minds as the party that in 2011 was the party that was in favour of AV and EU.
Being known only for those two policies would certainly be a mistake. As to what else the party should communicate, Jeremy Browne says:
I want us to communicate with more enthusiasm than on any other subject our desire to see a meritocratic, liberal, opportunity society where people regardless of the wealth of their parents can maximise their potential and thrive and prosper.
Here I disagree with him somewhat for, as I’ve written before, there are major problems with taking social mobility as the party’s core message:
“Social mobility” certainly is a phrase that many in policy-making and government circles use but, rather like “street furniture”, despite being popular in such circles it is almost never used by people outside such circles. You don’t get many people talking about how great the “street furniture” is near the flat they have just moved to nor about their hopes for the future “social mobility” of their children or grandchildren.
It would be intriguing to see quite what most people actually think the phrase means. I have a strong hunch that many people would associate improving “mobility” with getting more people to move, thinking it is just a phrase about housing policies. But regardless, when politicians lapse into vocabulary that is not found on the doorstep, it is normally time for the politicians to reach for a new vocabulary if they want to use phrases that have the power of explanation and persuasion.
The phrase also has the problem that mobility is not a one-way process – it means people moving down just as it also means people moving up. Talking up how we want people to move down is not an obvious route to political success.
But even aside from these messaging problems, the phrase leaves untouched the core question of how bothered – or not – we are about overall levels of inequality. A highly mobile and high unequal society is possible to imagine, and is one that would sit comfortably with the urgings of right-wing economists such as Milton Friedman. It was Friedman who, at the start of his famous TV series, justified inequality as long as it was accompanied by high social mobility.
Talking of social mobility has some tactical uses when in coalition with the Conservatives, given this resulting common ground. But a highly socially mobile, Friedman-style society is not a Liberal Democrat one.
Those problems are surmountable, but so far the party shows only limited signs of doing so. Moreover, whilst Jeremy Browne deserves credit for avoiding the dreaded phrase “social mobility” itself, the language he uses does not match up with that you hear from other Liberal Democrat ministers, even ones particularly good at putting over a coherent view of what Liberal Democrats in government means.
As with party conference, the party continues to face a problem of many people saying sort of roughly somewhat a bit the same things rather than having a clear and consistent message.
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26 Comments
“I want us to communicate with more enthusiasm than on any other subject our desire to see a meritocratic, liberal, opportunity society where people regardless of the wealth of their parents can maximise their potential and thrive and prosper.”
Actually, I think if you want to project some kind of distinctive party identity, you’ll have to be prepared to say something somebody disagrees with.
Well he got one half right – AV and the EU are not going to be vote winners in 2015.
The problem with everything else is that it is conflated with the Coalition and the Tories.
I do not see any sign that Jeremy Browne knows what should be done about that, not least because he agrees with them on most of the other policies anyway.
Jeremy Browne says:
“I think there is a danger that we are defined by a relatively small set of issues that are relevant and significant but do not give a rounded picture of what the Liberal Democrats are in government in order to achieve.”
I think this is known as ‘waking up and smelling the coffee’. Could this be our Rip van Winklegg moment? This is the cul-de-sac into which we have been being shunted for the past year and a half. The interesting thing is if and how the Parliamentary Party intend to address the problem now.
I think that Jeremy is right in terms of social mobility. You can have two sets of very different societies in which the index of social mobility is identical One (like the present US) allows the potential for a small set of people to have very big rises and/or very big falls, to great highs or great lows, but, in reality, leaves most roughly where they started. Another allows a much greater flux around the middle with less ‘spread’ between the very rich and very poor. If this latter is what Jeremy is after, I am with him.
@Geoffrey “I do not see any sign that Jeremy Browne knows what should be done about that, not least because he agrees with them on most of the other policies anyway.”
any evidence for this or just a bit of random abuse?
What concerns me are those who have no stake in society at all. They aren’t numerous, but they are far too many. These are families where no one even aspires to work, whether paid or unpaid. I strongly disagree with Ian Duncan Smith on Europe, but I applaud his passion for helping this “underclass” develop the self-confidence and aspiration to contribute to society.
There are parts of the Tory party who want to go down the USA route, of a brutal withdrawal of benefits leading to families in utter poverty. We need to avoid the damage to the social fabric when the poorest are utterly bereft of hope, which is the case in some deeply divided US cities.
We should be seeking a more humane way, which will lead to a less divided society.
But, apart from the fact that achieving the above is so diffiult, I agree with Mark that this won’t work as an electoral message.
I think the theme has to work more broadly across the range of policy, rather than being an altruistic policy aimed at helping the worst off.
My preference is the twin themes of being able to take tough but necessary decisions, with being committed to social justice and good public services. Of course, all parties would claim to be in favour of that. But, Labour have succumbed to short-term opportunism on the deficit, and are steadily trashing their own reputation for financial responsibility. And the Tories, if you scratch the surface, still have a lot of the “nasty party” about them.
I think there is an opportunity there, but we’re having no success yet in taking advantage of it. One way to make progress would be for our MPs to agree a common theme and to keep repeating it. Over the last year, our messaging has been all over the shop.
Another, as Mark implies, might be for our spokespeople to ask Ed Davey for some advice.
“My preference is the twin themes of being able to take tough but necessary decisions, with being committed to social justice and good public services. Of course, all parties would claim to be in favour of that. But, Labour have succumbed to short-term opportunism on the deficit, and are steadily trashing their own reputation for financial responsibility. And the Tories, if you scratch the surface, still have a lot of the “nasty party” about them.”
That makes it sound as though you’d see yourself as a Tory, if only it weren’t for the “nasty” aspects of the party.
Or do you have any _philosophical_ disagreements with the Conservative Party? If not, why not just join up, and do your bit in trying to eradicate the incidental nastiness?
While Mark is right about Ed Davey’s clear-cut focus in his ‘delivery’, I would suggest that the topics which he chose are not the most-priority issues, at the moment, to Britain’s millions of terrified swing voters. Given that identifying a ‘simple’ individual position from within the confines of coalition is hardly the simplest of tasks, maybe some talented Liberal Democrats need to go away for a couple of weeks to thrash out both a strategy and some sensible tactics. I would venture that kicking chunks out of each other in public might not be at the top of the list which they might come up with.
Good post. “Meritocratic” also implies that those with “merit” should rule and those without “merit” should be ruled – in other words, intelligent oligarchy.
One of the problems with “social mobility” and with the idea behind it, equality of opportunity (as opposed to outcome), is that the concept has a Humpty Dumpty character: it depends on where you put the goalposts. It’s fine if you are investigating possible illegal discrimination, say, and you can make a limited comparison between the way Mr Smith’s job application was treated and the way Ms Shah’s was treated. But what environmental, parental or even pre-birth influences do you regard as unfairly loading the dice and which do you discount? If Ms Shah had poor but loving parents, while Mr Smith had wealthy but abusive ones, should Mr Smith’s later insensitive behaviour which loses him opportunities be regarded as his fault and free choice, or as the consequence of the influences which shaped him? Should we consider the head start he got through money as illegitimate but the head start she got through love as legitimate? OK some people survive and flower from the most unpromising circumstances, but have you noticed they’re not very numerous?
Meritocracy turns me off completely. I want as much equality as is possible. Those with ability negotiating with those with less about how they can assist each other. Cooperation by consent. Equality of ‘power’ I suppose. This is by no means ‘sameness’. It is practical compromise. By no means perfection, but at least within human influence.
The public do associate the Liberal Democrats with social mobility but unfortunately it is the downward kind. Unless the Liberal Democrats leave the coalition and stop engaging with the Tories’ in the economic Balkanization of Britain they will always be perceived by millions of individuals to be responsible, along with the Tories, for their personal downward mobility.
@MacK:
“Unless the Liberal Democrats leave the coalition . . . . .they will always be perceived by millions of individuals to be responsible, along with the Tories, for their personal downward mobility.”
You mean you think that the Lib Dems will be thought of as trying to do what Labour consistently did, ever-widening the gap between richest and poorest?:
“Research by Professor John Hills at the London School of Economics suggests that increasing inequality in the UK after 2004 has meant that, by 2008, it had reached its highest level in the years since figures began in 1961.”
http://www.futureagenda.org/pg/cx/view#341
And maybe mimicking the poor and decreasing social mobility under Labour?
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2005/LSE_SuttonTrust_report.aspx
Social mobility takes as a given the vast inequalities of inherited wealth in each new generation.
In order to reduce dangerously increasing inequality and increase genuinely greater equality of opportunity Liberals must replace Dynastic Capitalism with a Democratic Capitalism in which those who would inherit great fortunes of unearned wealth in each new generation will pay enough tax so that all national-born citizens can inherit a basic minimum Universal Inheritance of capital at 25.
Change the starting positions in order to give liberty, property and security for all, as called for by the traditional and far sighted preamble to the Liberal Party Constitution.
Liberals need to decide whether they want to be Tory Human shields or a centre party with clear policies. At the moment we are prisoners of the eurosceptics and the slash and burn of Osbornes economic policies. If we keep going as we are what is to prevent an electoral meltdown?
What do you stand for? You’re pro-Europe and pro-electoral reform stance one you a lot of support. Without these you have no defining issues left to differentiate yourselves from the centrist tories after 20 months of ‘coalition’.
For those concerned that we’ll be remembered for policies like AV and the EU – fear not.
That electoral goldmine of ‘House of Lords reform’ will soon ride to our rescue…..
Ian Butler
You write “Liberals need to decide whether they want to be Tory Human shields or a centre party with clear policies. At the moment we are prisoners of the eurosceptics”
You are not Liberals: you are Liberal Democrats. Liberals ARE eurosceptics! See http://www.liberal.org.uk.
It is you Liberal Democrats who are prisoners of your own self-imposed prison of blind Euro-and EU-enthusiasm. You would have taken us into the Euro. Some of you still would. You are not to be trusted again collectively until the UK has left full membership ot the EU.
@Dane
liberals are free from ideological prescriptions, so your statement is self-annihilating.
Re: social mobility
social mobility is an admirable aim, but it is only an end in itself. It does not suggest any means for allowing positive movement, and therefore alone it does not raise people up. Equally in difficult economic times the phrase takes on negative perceptions.
So ‘social mobility’ is half-right, half the time.
And typically, the aims of ‘social mobility’ should be allied to the practise of ‘economic mobility’ as the means to achieve them.
It has somehow escaped the attantion of commentators that the most socially-mobile members of society are also the most economically-mobile, and this is no coincidence.
For example we can criticise bankers for evading taxes, but we don’t take this further to understand the reason why they have this ability is not simply because they are wealthier, but because they are most able to move their capital compared to the rest of us.
In that way ‘social mobility’ is similar to ‘social justice’, if you don’t have real mobility and real justice, no amount of artificial fixing of the system will create it and you end up setting people against each other to cause ‘social conflict’.
Social mobility is a measure of the movement of individuals between different levels of the social hierarchy and is usually defined occupationally. Education is the most important determinant of social mobility. It affects both intergenerational and intragenerational mobility. Yes, the poverty gap increased under Thatcher and continued to increase under Major and Blair but social mobility was potentially sustained by Labour because it widely expanded the higher education system making it possible for many more people to potentially move up the occupational hierarchy. The coalition has put an end to educational opportunity by raising the potential level of student debt to such a high level that it has frightened off potential university students. And by its shortsighted economic policies the coalition has made hundreds of thousands of the students Labour educated unemployed and terminated (hopefully for the present) their social mobility aspirations. These people did not graduate from university with first and second class degrees in order to fill supermarket shelves for nothing — er, sorry, work experience — or to qualify them for their pittance in the form of benefits. If you can’t get a better job than your parents had or a better job than you personally had a year ago then you can’t be described as socially mobile. And more and more people are finding that they are losing their jobs every day and therefore their position in the occupational hierarchy. The Liberal Democrats and the Tories are putting more and more people daily in the position of downward mobility. When the 700,000 public sector workers all lose their jobs by 2015 I don’t think they will listen sympathetically to homilies in your campaign literature about social mobility. Don’t just blame Labour for the lack of social mobility. You are in charge now. It’s up to you to do something about it.
@Mack
Social mobility comes with a health warning, just as with investing in the stock market, values can go down as well as up.
I don’t accept that access expansion of the higher education system alone is a sustainable basis for improving social mobility – which you yourself suggest is indicated by the numbers of unemployed graduates. Nor do I accept that locking young people into a lifetime of debt in order to gain access to HE is anything more than a gamble on the future of the jobs market given the number of unemployed graduates suggests the relative additional economic value of HE qualifications has fallen.
The value of education has fallen because debt levels under the Labour government became too expensive and this reduced the potential returns. Anecdotally at least a graduate’s lifetime earnings grow by £1m on average, but £1m doesn’t buy what it did a decade ago – simply put, the value gain has fallen behind inflation rises.
A fair conclusion would be that less emphasis should be placed on education as the sole policy area to provide the means to achieve the policy aim of social mobility.
I proposed above that social mobility should be linked with economic mobility.
It would be fairer to say that the economic mobility afforded by youngsters moving out of home and going up to read a course at Uni provides at least an equal boost to upward social mobility as any qualification, and there is much more which could be done to to broaden effective access to these market opportunities – I, for example, think the government should do more to encourage schools to teach foreign languages to a professional standard rather than a tourist standard, as language skills are fundamental to social integration and communication, and the EU’s internal market is a massively underexploited opportunity for the job-hungry in Britain.
If you want to look into it you’ll find a one-year home-study GCSE in Serbo-Croat or Hungarian is much more time and cost effective than a 4-year residential degree in European Studies, and in many cases much more appropriate too. So I’d hesitate before making the assumptions about institutions you have here.
ugh, 2nd para should read “access to an expanded higher education system alone”
@Oranjepan
But education is not simply linked to social mobility it is a determinant of it. A complex society requires more and more complex skills for the jobs it creates. If people are not trained or educated for those skills they will not achieve social mobility. Failing to create those jobs and putting people off applying for the institutions where they can learn those skills by levying massive increases in fees means that the Coalition is creating the conditions for downward social mobility.
“It would be fairer to say that the economic mobility afforded by youngsters moving out of home and going up to read a course at Uni provides at least an equal boost to upward social mobility as any qualification, ”
But if the jobs aren’t there at the end of it all there will be no social mobility. Social mobility is defined occupationally. The economic base determines the superstructure.
Social mobility is important, but so is the economic and social starting position. Levelling the starting line is as important as moving up the scale. Why is so little thought given here to redistributing the inheritance of wealth in each new generation?
Could someone please use their up to date political skills to make the case for Popular or Democratic Capitalism – or Liberal Democratic Capitalism? – with Universal Inheritance for all young UK-born UK citizens as opposed to the current Dynastic Captalism in which some inherit billions and others inherit nothing?
Liberty, property and security for all?
“Oranjepan”
Please note – a Liberal ideological prescription! See the Preamble to the Liberal Party Constitution.
@Mack
I agree totally that more skills are required in a complex society, and yet without standard skills (including basic literacy and numeracy) these cannot be attained. Why should employers need to provide remedial training to new employees for these? Certainly you might say the banking industry has been severely lacking in some quarters!
@Dane
idealistic aims and ideological prescriptions are very different things. It’s a skill not to confuse or conflate the two.
I’ll take you back to the Europe question: the conditions of our economic base (thanks Mack) may mean closer economic integration with our neighbours is difficult at current, but that doesn’t change the underlying desirability of a full internal market or deep cooperation on issues of cross-border and shared interest.
‘Europe’ has become ideologised (particularly by the French) and this has separated debate from these important interests – I don’t support Europe for it’s own sake, but precisely because it affords a pragmatic and (potentially far more) effective means to achieve a range of ends beyond the scope of national governments. I mean, if Britain could instill a bit more of a pragmatic mindset in our continental partners it would turn into a gift to ourselves!
Jeremy Browne is wholly correct in that liberals shouldn’t get sucked into being identified with dogmatic prescriptions – it just plays to insensible prejudices which distort the real issues.
Just look at the triumphalism of the anti-European camp after Cameron’s veto-that-wasn’t, one might almost think you wanted an economic depression!
“Oranjepan”
“idealistic aims and ideological prescriptions are very different things. It’s a skill not to confuse or conflate the two.”
Waffle!
Next! Why have closer integration with neighbouring countries in an increasingly global world?
Lastly, of course those who wish to leave the EU do not want an economic depression. What a silly idea! But that is what is likely to be caused by the Euro being the modern day deflationary equivalent of the 1930’s Gold Standard.
@Chris
I said: “My preference is the twin themes of being able to take tough but necessary decisions, with being committed to social justice and good public services. Of course, all parties would claim to be in favour of that. But, Labour have succumbed to short-term opportunism on the deficit, and are steadily trashing their own reputation for financial responsibility. And the Tories, if you scratch the surface, still have a lot of the “nasty party” about them.”
You said: “That makes it sound as though you’d see yourself as a Tory, if only it weren’t for the “nasty” aspects of the party.”
My differences with the Tory party run deep, most of all that, though they deny it, the central thrust of their party is to defend the interests of the wealthy. The issue I was adderessing was what our pitch to the electorate should be. And I think we should pitch in the same way successful centre-left parties have since time immemorial – as a party of centre left values *and* economic competence.
I don’t see why my statement above makes me sound like a Tory. A party that is unable to take tough but necessary decisions is not a party of the left, but just a party that is kicking the problems down the road for someone else to deal with. Tories sneer that that is exactly what centre-left politics is, I completely disagree.