At the very least, Lib Dems should be allowed to join the Co-operative Party and Lib Dem MPs to become Co-op MPs as well.

An excellent post.

At the Labour party conference, I was at all three for work, I went over to the Co-operative party’s stand and was asking them how the relationship worked. They made it clear they weren’t about to divorce from Labour.

I presume the same principle could apply to education as well as welfare and health?

An excellent article – a very interesting idea.

Sorry to be pedantic.

“the dye is now cast”.

From Answers.com: http://tinyurl.com/dieldvdye

“The die (singular of dice) has been cast” basically means one has committed to a decision.
It literally means, “The die has (dice have) been rolled.” The decision can’t be reversed beyond this point. It is believed to have been said first by Julius Caesar when he committed cross the Rubicon river (a related saying, crossing the Rubicon also means committed to a decision that now can’t be taken back). To protect the state from it’s own military, it was forbidden to bring a legion of Roman soldiers across the Rubicon river into Italy. It was an act of war against the state. When he cross that line he is rumored to have said, “Iacta alea est (The die has been cast).”

Note: The correct word is “die” (singular of dice) and not “dye” (substance used to stain or color something, like hair, clothing or shoes).

Aneurin Williams, Liberal MP for Plymouth 1910, was the chairman of the International Co-operative Alliance. Liberals have a historical record in the mutual sector, I was chair of the Devon CRS Members’ Relations committee in the 1990s. We need a Liberal Co-operators group.

Whilst I agree with the sentiment, there’s Buckley’s chance of it happening in my opinion. There are only a few of the 29 Co-op MPs whom I would say were truly mutualists, if *anyone* who aspires to any kind of *political* power can ever be truly described as a mutualist; certainly not a captial M Mutualist anyway.

Many in the movement moreover blame the Liberals for the divergence. Twas L-G after all who sounded the death knell of the mutual and friendly society social support infrastructure in this country, despite his assertion that 90%+ of people to be covered by his nationalised pensions and national infrastructure systems were already covered by membership of mutuals and lodges.

Perhaps the time to get them would have been when Labour shifted decisively from Free Trade and mutualist to socialist, and particularly after WWII when our policies, including Beveridge’s blueprint for the welfare state would have promoted more self-help than Bevan was prepared to allow, and our “ownership for all” and employee ownership policies were clearly more mutualist than we are today.

When we start talking like Peter Kropotkin, maybe we’d be in with a chance. Meantime, there’s no harm in joining the Co-op Group and similar and promoting motions to help fund Lib Dem politicians. I don’t think any have ever been passed, but several have tried.

True co-operativism and mutualism is anti-politics; anti-state – indeed the very idea of a coercive system is explicitly against the co-operative principles. We are neither, more’s the pity, but then we are a political party I suppose so it’s a bit much to hope.

Tabman – yes, and no. When you go to a Co-op AGM there will usually be a motion in the Co-op members section of the meeting to donate some funds to the Co-operative Party. But then at the end of the meeting (usually) everyone else will leave and the Co-op Party members will remain for business pertaining to the party rather than the Co-op Group or whichever sibling you are a member of.

What you can do, and has been tried, in vain so far as I am aware, several times, it to promote a motion at the Co-op meeting itself to donate money to some other political cause, such as the Lib Dems.

Personally, I thin kthe Co-op Party should disband, or decide to become a non-electoral party and allow mutualists of all political persuasions (to the extent that that is not a contradiction in terms!) to join. As I say above, mutualism is ideologically against the state and against politics. Linking its current political wing to one or other party seeking to gain the power mutualists believe to be the cause of the problems of the working person seems anachronistic to me.

I absolutely agree – but it should be, insomuch as anything can be, “a-political”. The main things we can do are a. adopt a stance that the voluntary free market is a priori the best means to do anything and state second (given the mutualist understanding of “free market” as above) and so anything that can reduce the state is a good thing and b. do whatever is necessary to support people and organizations developing state-subversive ways of delivering public and social goods, e.g. by removing barriers to entry,and, most importantly, by stopping our people giving their stock answer of “where has this been tried before” whenever some new idea is introduced to them (a particular bugbear of mine – and fundamentally illiberal to boot – we should not need “proof” to “control change”).

Didn’t co-operative ownership of companies used to be a Liberal Party principal in the 1970s? It seems to have got lost somewhere, to the loss of the Lib Dems in my opinion. We’d be more liberal with it.

By the way just heard Michael Meadowcroft has become a member of the Liberal Democrats.

Judith! Don’t you subscribe to Liberal Democrat News? Lands on your doormat every Friday.

Come along now girl, do keep up….

One step at a time.

First thing would be to argue that the Co-operative Party abandoned any priciples it had when it accepted subservience to Labour in the 20s.

If it is to remain in existence as an electoral party then it should renounce this formal connection and demonstrate its’ independence. This would be good for politics and the country because it would allow for a greater range of views to be represented.

Not until it has established itself as a separate entity should we even consider the potential for forming a coalition with them (we wouldn’t know the precise nature of their policies until then), although I would hold open the possibility as a carrot.

I think the option for traditional Labour-Co-op voters to be able to vote for a party willing to cooperate with any party in government would be a fantastic option which would dramatically reduce the level of damaging partisanship our parliamentary democracy suffers from and one which would be very attractive to large numbers of people.

However I think it is highly unlikely that this will happen while the Labour’s stranglehold on the Co-op party is maintained through high-level aides to the great leader (Balls) and functionaries (McFall).

Nevertheless it would certainly be interesting to see whether voters were more or less favourable towards Co-op candidates compared to Labour candidates – especially as the cycle appears to be against them.

Mouse: I grew up in a third world country. I spent the first 18 years of my life in one…

Liberalism means a healthy skepticism of the state.

They are socialists – not liberals.

No, they are co-operators and mutualists. In the purest form, adhering completely to the co-operative principles, they cannot be “state socialists”; but promoters of “social power” as opposed to “state power” that has inexorably eroded the former for centuries.

Notwithstanding what Co-operator Ben writes (and thanks for that Ben), I still find it somewhat worrisome that they have stuck by Labour through its periods of state socialism rather than its free trade origins but that’s part of its history now and cannot be rewritten. Liberalism is also supposed to be about “social power” as against “state power” but in our corrupting system we have both seemingly completely capitulated to the idea that one must win “state power” in order to advance “social power”.

But as Albert Jay Nock showed, they are mutual enemies – “state power” has always and always will eaten into “social power” and rarely, if ever, permanently, managed to give any back, just as Lloyd-George did to the mutuals and friendly societies and Bevan continued.

I rather think Ben is being a bit disingenuous about “crude pursuit of power” though given the history of the party to which they have hitched their co-operative wagon over the past sixty years. Many in this thread are correct in saying that the Liberals in the post-war years up until the seventies at least were far more genuinely mutualist and true to the self-help ethos of co-operativism than the state socialist labour party of those years.

Well, if that’s the case then we should change the Constitution.

The constitution of the Liberal Party pre-merger was significantly better anyway…

I have to laugh at the notion that we are all in hock to some think tanks funded by the rich and powerful. My own personal favourite, to which I contribute, the Centre for a Stateless Society, has just finished its fourth quarter fundraising effort, raising just over $4,000 from 80-ish donors to fund its entire operations till the end of the year.

I cannot think of when I might have been described as having mounted a defense of “big commerce”, but if you think I have, perhaps you could let me know where and I will explain why you are wrong in thinking so. Indeed, the whole Mutualist critique of the state is that it is only through the privilege granted by the monopoly state that one set of market participants – call them capitalists, landlords, employers – can ever take more of a share of the returns to production than labour, and which sllows them to grow disproportionately wealthy and powerful, all by fostering an un-free market.

Matthew,

On the contrary, I’m sure if I tried I could find 9 words more terrifying.

“I’m a Vampire and I’m here to suck you dry.” – sorry that’s 10 but it is the basis of my political stance against Vampires, sexy and bloodthristy as they are.

I also believe that no-one should die because they can’t afford to see a doctor and get basic prescription drugs. I commend you to this paragraph in the above article.

Cooperative and friendly organisations could even work alongside government welfare schemes, where universal state funding was considered necessary. For example, universal health savings accounts could involve a friendly society or co-operative bank of your choice, providing insurance for ‘catastrophic’ health set-backs and a savings account for predictable and low-cost ailments – hence maintaining a health system that would always be treat-first-settle-payment later without the risk of bankruptcy or debt, yet with more choice and less rationing.

The more I read your comments, the more I’m convinced you’re a Reaganite plant – sent here to make the left look as unhinged, unreasonable and obtuse as possible. Keep up the good work!!

Matthew! For the love of God / Baal / Jehovah. First you’re a “busy working man”, too hassled by the day’s chores to read a book – even though you’re able to devote almost every hour of every day to 700 word rants on this blog. Meanwhile, because I haven’t searched “Matthew Huntbach” on here and dug out quotations relating to something or other, I’m “unable” to do so. Rather, I am at work, and really don’t have the time to try to convince you personally of something you’re dogmatically opposed to. It’s a waste of time. Now go and have a cup of tea and calm down.

Jo, you’re a quitter so get off your high horse.

I’m really enjoying this thread – I hope it’s disposing of many of the misconceptions about what one section or another think, so I also disagree with David that it’s a waste of time.

Oh, I dunno Mark, as one involved in Community Land Trusts I have a bit of a soft spot for David Drew (Stroud). But there certainly are others (Ian Davidson springs to mind) who do not seem so co-operative.

Yes it does, it means you (and she) quit liberalism to join a bunch of neo-Malthusian nutters.

Looks like I do need to give lessons on English ‘Yes it does it means you both quit Liberalism’ rather than ‘you (and she)’ surely? Are you amongst the Oxbridge Liberals too? Tut tut!

A typo on this sh**ty site isn’t the same as an English error!

Jo,
No, the party is about having a positive impact in the public arena rather than self-indulgently and sanctimoniously shouting from the sidelines.

I can completely understand that you may not wholly subscribe to the views of every other single member of the party. But you have a shock in store for you if you think that will be different anywhere else, and if not then your reason for leaving the LibDems is completely hollow.

So it’s a shame you’ve shown your lack of resolution, as I thought you had the potential to be a strong voice for some of the principles this party stands for. As it is your attack on Sara is completely misplaced – read Adam Bell’s comment: it isn’t conservative to support a diverse range of economic models which undermines the status quo and includes mutual answers.

Your obvious bitterness and negativity does you no favours – methinks a little more pragmatism would help balance out some of your overdependence on idealism.

I also wonder about your selective perspective on matters, it only exposes your lack of insight into the party. While I’m at it, let me call you exactly the type of navel-gazer we’re regularly criticised for harbouring. So although I can admit I’m sorry to lose you and hope you do ultimately fulfil your potential, I have a clear conscience in reconciling myself to the fact.

Good luck on the commute from Devon to Sussex.

Is she the only candidate you like?

It’s the supporting statements I was looking at in Sara’s stuff. All this stuff about the evils of big government, but strangely nothing at all about the evils of big private companies.

Because this is a piece about Welfare provision which the state currently has the monopoly over.

Plenty of stuff about the evils of the welfare statement and the wonders of the free market. In fact, just the sort of stuff one hears from very rich people and the political parties they run and the newspapers that print their propaganda about how the rich should be taxed less and live lives of even more luxury, and the poor should be left to suffer by having state services cut.

The Free Market is good for both the rich and the poor.

One rather supposes the stuff about the mutualist organisations was just to try and paint the right-wing “make life nicer for the rich and nastier for the poor” ideology with a sort of left-wing dressing to fool the ignorant.

The state is the biggest cause of injustice in our society today. It holds us all back. It’s not a left/right question it’s an anti-state question. It is the biggest impediment to social justice in Britain today. 60 years of a welfare state and we have one of the worst social mobility rates in the developed world.

If this were not the case, we would be hearing so very much more from the likes of Sara Scarlett about how the big private companies seek to dominate and exert control over all of us to raise lives of unbelievable luxury for those at their top, while squeezing down on ordinary workers who will never get into that smart set. But we never hear any of that – she and her sort have very selective vision when it comes to the way the powerful abuse and dominate everyone else.

Big private companies seek to dominate and exert control over all of us by getting in bed with big government. You seem to have the idea that “the powerful abusing and dominating everyone else” are everyone except the state. Capitalists don’t like a truly free market. They like a monopoly. They get in bed with the government in order to have government impose a monopoly. Look at the manufacturers of Tamiflu.

How can you be a real human being. You’re a plant, aren’t you? There’s not way you can actually be a real human being.

But people are free to use these things – friendly societies, co-operatives etc exist. If people don’t choose them it’s because they choose not to. Is Sara suggesting that people should be forced to use them rather than the big banks etc which they actually do use in preference? If not, what is the point she is making? People have voted with their wallets and they have voted, mostly, not to use mutualist organisations.

It doesn’t mean the same thing when so much of our income goes to the state already. The only thing mandatory would be a health savings account which could be held in a “big bank” or a coop depending on personal preference (as obviously there would be no NHS).

The point I am making is this: without the welfare state there will still be welfare (as there was before it) and it will be better and more efficient because the welfare agreement is a voluntary one with a friendly society and not the state.

If Tesco were able to force you to pay them whether or not you shopped in their stores they’d have an extraordinarily protected position. Competition Commission rulings I think usually work on an effective monopoly being something around a third of market share held by one organization. By any realistic definition the state has a monopoly. People with several thousand pounds to throw away on someone else’s healthcare are able to opt out to other providers.

It was one of the key principles of the Beveridge report that the institutions resulting from it should provide a minimum equitable service and that nobody should be discouraged from enhancing that from their private means. Bevan disagreed and banned co-payments. It’s a monopoly.

Er…because it’s not a *liberal* state, perhaps?

I should image Messrs. Cobden & Bright being feted by Liberals everywhere for observing such a reality in their day.

If I recall the argument Beveridge used was that there are certain exceptions to the rule due to their universalism and so the term monopoly does not apply. The particular one he identified was ‘health’.

In that sense it makes an interesting comparison with ‘land’. So I’d look again at your definitions of commodity and resource – health simply isn’t transferable, that is, unless you support organ sale (which raises further ethical dilemmas). So it’s apples and oranges to make a comparison with Tesco.

I’m perfectly happy that there is a state to ensure a minimum standard exists, and it then becomes a question of what is the acceptable level of minimum. Labour wants to raise this beyond our national means and the tories aren’t afraid of punishing the vulnerable, so there is a clear opportunity for us to make a constructive contribution to the debate.

I’m also concerned about how co-ops, mutuals and friendly societies may present the appearance of expanded choice but in reality can actually do the reverse. In urban areas it may well be true that allowing a choice of provider does create conditions where levels of service increase, but in smaller towns and rural areas the reduction of scale means maintaining the universality of coverage remains the greater importance.

The way round this is to increase accessibility by more fully integrating the network of facilities. In banking this means a national clearing system and being able to use your card in any machine; in health this means non-state-owned hospitals are used to perform procedures a la carte and village surgeries are not closed, among other things.

Either way fully-private, mutuals and fully-state options must be part of the overall mix to ensure there is a balance of options available to everybody.

In a political sense, however, the Co-operative Party fixed the scales so that the balance broke and as a consequence their claim to the name a very dubious one – they’re only prepared to co-operate with one side, and they don’t even set the terms of their own co-operation.

Utterly brilliant article.

Whatever the chances of this happening, it’s important that the opportunity is taken now to end the Labour Party, it’s brought nothing but tragedy to the UK since inception. Peeling off Co-operative party members (or splitting the two, however it’s done) is the obvious starting point and I don’t care who does it, just so long as somebody gives it a go.

As for the issue that they may be not so liberal – well the Lib Dems aren’t liberal at all so they shouldn’t worry about taking on a few more social democrats.

Gandhi,
“the Lib Dems aren’t liberal at all”

Well if you say it then of course it must be true! Silly me.

Sorry that was from “Mutualism – The Third Way”, not “The Third Estate”… I’ll f___ off now. :-S

Matthew, why do you think that if a majority of people today vote for a gun to be put to their own head in order to remind them to pay for everyone else, that they would not do so voluntarily, given twice the income they would have to spend on it.

The vast majority of the sick and infirm are someone’s father, mother, sibling, friend, colleague, neighbour, whatever. Do you not think that given the spare money, you would not look after such if you could? Would *you* rather see such a person die for lack of a state to compel everyone else to help you with the bills? How extraordinary for a supposedly caring person!

On the other hand, I do not see why I should pay for someone else’s bad choices, or misfortunes that do not do them harm. *You* say, through your state, that I should pay for others to have IVF treatment. Or abortion, which I regard as murder. Or heroic treatment for an avoidable lifestyle created illness.

Society is not the state. Society is all the associations that we make, voluntarily, with other people. If *your* vision of society has disposable people, and you need a state to enforce otherwise, I feel sorry for you, but it is not an idea that sits easily with the otion that for a century a majority of people have thought it worth voting for some form of welfare.

Given the state and federal government interference in the US healthcare market – not merely the Medicare/Medicaid systems, it is absolutely nothing like a free market system. That’s the trouble with this sort of debate – everyone *thinks* they know an example, and there really isn’t one.

There are huge barriers to entry in the US, both on an individual level for medical practitioners ( as mentioned above), and for the insurance companies. And even where socially minded doctors attempt to do the right thing themselves, like the guy in New York that was offering an annual subscription service very cheaply for people to have a medical and basic in-year treatments for a minimal cost, they are hounded out by the government at the behest of the insurance companies.

Even here, recent research by the King’s Fund and IPPR both suggest that in the future medical costs as a proportion of GDP could be expected to rise to more like 30% of GDP over the next 50 years as new treatments come on stream and demand for them rises. It is simply not tenable that the state can take such an amount of money out of the economy to fund that. And unable to do that, it will inevitably have to ration. And rationing by bureaucrat is, I reckon, so much more unfair than rationing by the individual choosing or not to try and plan for a particular treatment in their lives for themselves.

The entire welfare system – especially healthcare and pensions – is ultimately unsustainable the way we currently do it owing to demographics and technological advance. We *have* to get to grips with this idea. Far from writing poor people off, what I am saying is that we have to rethink the entire role of the state in this, and work towards what the radicals of the nineteenth century saw so clearly – that by taking away the ability of the state to uphold privileges that enable an unfair share of production to go to capital and land, we can make people at the lower end of the scale wealthier – much wealthier – and able to plan for most of their future for themselves. This year the state will spend more than the entire wages portion of GDP – this is *not* a distant prospect, bankruptcy of the system is imminent – within a generation at the most.

For the likes of Matthew who simply parrot that this is so right wing – and who I think did say he had bought ALTER’s book at conference, perhaps you should read, or re-read, Margaret Godden’s chapter on the Welfare State, saying much the same as this, and then write to Margaret and tell her she is a Thatcherite crony. Go on. I dare you! Better still – do it to her face and conference sometime – her walking stick would no doubt leave quite a dent in human flesh!

You are such a diplomat Orajepan!

But for my part, the start of that solution is a relatively simple one. We do, effectively, what John Hoskyns started for the Tories in the late seventies – a thorough review of all interventions the state makes to try and “follow the money” to see what unintended conseuqences they have and whether there are other ways that would avoid those consequences. As it happens I don’t think that he started from the right place – he seems to have been looking at “Britain” rather than at the “government” and so his prescriptions were, for example, against unions. Either that or he did do it right but the Tories then only picked and chose those bits that would not upset their followers.

Zero-base the state. With an open mind. It’s no use going into such an exercise with a priori assumptions about what “only the state can do” because the answer to that is, in fact, nothing: there is nothing that *only* the state could do; it may be the best way of doing something in a particular set of circumstances but since it is only an arrangement of people working more or less together it can never be the *only* way.

Even just suggesting such a review will take some balls. But it is the “big idea” that now needs to happen, and happen urgently, especially for people of my generation and younger, because we’re going to be the ones paying the most to support an old system that we will no longer benefit from eventually.

But if every time radicals open their mouths they’re going to get accused by some of being Thatcherites it’s never going to happen.

Well, funnily enough, I did not take this attitude. Nor does it at all follow from what I have said.

I didn’t say you did. But why do you think other people would behave differently from you, absent the state. In which you were earning nearly twice as much, without tax, and the costs of such care would be much lessened by removing the interferences of the state that maintain the high cost high profitability for their friends in the health business?

You would help people voluntarily, but since nobody else can be truested to do so we need to have all the apparatus of the coercive state to ensure they do, to your satisfaction. Is that t?

Hmm, the premise of this article looks very familiar.

*glares at Sara*

When I have drunken conversations in which I make unworkable but great ideas that turn into blog posts, it’s normally Jennie that writes them up, but you’ve done a good job methinks.

Um, yeah, as always I pretty much agree with Jock and despair at the idea of Matthew ever actually reading anything an opponent has said. There’s an Oddfellow’s around the corner from us, when next I have an income above 0, I plan to join, even though their raison d’etre has been removed by the state.

But then, as a proper liberal, I do tend to take Mill’s vision of a liberal socialist society to heart.

Dammit Sara, you beat me to it! I had been thinking of putting forward similar ideas in my first LDV article. But yours is probably much better argued than how I could have explained my ideas so I don’t mind 🙂

I personally would define liberalism as “opposition to any unaccountable concentration of power”, which would include not just the overcentralised British state but also many overcentralised PLCs and (whisper it) the NHS as currently constituted. Re-organising companies to give employees much greater power is very possible – the large Swedish bank Handelsbanken is a case in point, and they are still a stockmarket-listed PLC. But it is important to remember that the impetus to do this can only come from within, not from the state. The state should stop discriminating against small and cooperative businesses but not start trying to intervene in internal organisation – it can only end in tears, not empowerment. Where I do think mutuals ought to have a much greater role is in the welfare “state” – I would like to see a situation where most people are actively involved in running or choosing their welfare services.

Matthew,

The state has a monopoly over the provision of welfare. They take almost 50% of your salary in NI contributions which you have no choice over to pay for it. They have a monopoly. It’s not a complete monopoly as you have rightly pointed out. Yes, the United States may have worse social mobility but that doesn’t change the fact that the UK has one of the worst social mobility rates in the – as was the conclusion the LSE came to when they did their study.

It surprises me that you’re human not because you challenge me but because of how you challenge me, Mathew. You deliberately misconstrue practically everything I say in order to make personal attacks on myself and my colleagues. You spend an awful lot of time writing reams and reams where you essentially think that everything the state does is wonderful and big bad corporations are out to murder us in our sleep….

You’ve completely miss the point of my article and why I was writing it. We all have lives to lead, Matthew. We all have lives to lead. 120 comments wtf. I think I think you’re all bonkers.

Ah, yes the Godwin’s law of a debate on LDV – the “you’re not a liberal” card.

I deserve to be able to float an idea on LDV without being assaulted by personal venom. That’s what free speech means, Matthew. Maybe you’re argument would have stood up better if it had not begun with a personal attack on my integrity. I am not on the payroll of big business. I am a student. Liberal Vision don’t pay me. I wrote this because I think this. I have no vested interest. You have consistently attacked me personally and not my ideas.

Sadly I won’t learn to be a liberal from the comments section of LDV…

That’s a good point Gandhi – now it may be that Matthew does not know, nor have I explained clearly – though I’d disagree personally; I think I have taken considerable pains to explain – what Mutualists (that’s “big M” – the movement taking after the Individualist Anarchists rather than anything specific to co-operatives) believe. But having done so, I do not feel the need constantly and publicly to attack a business form that is anathematsed implicitly by that Mutualist ideology.

I’ll quote from Kevin Carson’s “Studies in Mutualist Political Economy” (first lines of the preface) and perhaps Matthew would point out which bits he does not understand (I mean that, since you say that I have never explained it clearly – or simply – enough, so I want to clear it up for you to avoid this bickering in the future if we can):

In the mid-nineteenth century, a vibrant native American school of anarchism, known as individualist anarchism, existed alongside the other varieties. Like most other contemporary socialist thought, it was based on a radical interpretation of Ricardian economics. The classical individualist anarchism of Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner was both a socialist movement and a subcurrent of classical liberalism. It agreed with the rest of the socialist movement that labor was the source of exchange-value, and that labor was entitled to its full product. Unlike the rest of the socialist movement, the individualist anarchists believed that the natural wage of labor in a free market was its product, and that economic exploitation could only take place when capitalists and landlords harnessed the power of the state in their interests. Thus, individualist anarchism was an alternative both to the increasing statism of the mainstream socialist movement, and to a classical liberal movement that was moving toward a mere apologetic for the power of big business.

@Oranjepan: Hear hear!

Congratulations on tolerating some appalling personal abuse on this thread ( e.g. “plant” and “not human” )

Hmmm – doesn’t seem quite as bad as continually being told we’re Thatcherite entryists with no place in the party though. Which is Matthew’s stock-in-trade insult. But, bless ‘im; we know he does not understand.

Martin,
this leaflet monkey is enjoying the debate. I think it is necessary to do both in a fully functioning party. It is interesting to see the dividing lines and it is useful to work out how to reconcile them.

Matthew,
I agree that it does strike a note of dissonance that an arch-libertarian would depend so strongly on the authority of references rather than the clarity of logic alone, but I put that down to personal style.

However, reacting to the opponents of our partys’ black-and-white arguments and drawing guilt by association with them is a trap which is all too easy to fall into.

We’ve already established that everybody here does agree to some extent that it is more a matter of degree than one of absolutes, so lets hang on to the constructive side of the contributions and be a bit less negative about what we don’t want and a bit more positive about what we do want. We know we don’t want Tory or Labour in government or we wouldn’t be here, so let’s take it as a given that we want something different.

I for one think it is a fallacy for the primary measure of welfare to be as a proportion of the economy, since this directs our attention towards the accountants and bureaucrats rather than the people and patients, thereby making everyone unhappy.

However much welfare we decide we need it will always be unaffordable if we spend all day counting the cost and none of it reaping the rewards. And if we do we just create a circular argument going back and forth at crossed purposes.

It is possible to have more better services and pay less both in nominal terms and as a proportion of the total – this is politics, and we must create that choice. If we don’t then what is the point of our party?

I have no idea what is the best final outcome between state, private, mutual and mixed options, but I do know we need to have an opportunity to find the correct balance and that this requires us to allow for some flexibility according to conditions.

Which brings me back to the Coop party’s political strategy – they currently have no flexibility in their relationship with Labour, and it would be massively positive for the national politics if they found some.

Niklas,
I’ll buy you that drink later.

Matthew…

That’s an interesting choice, sticking my neck out here…

Mutualists are supposed to believe that a free market would not result in large land/property accumulation, that these effects are caused by State manipulation/privilege; their position is that property consists of your possessions: the things you are personally actively using (so buy-to-let is not supposed to happen).

The term “free market” has been wrongly used to describe the Thatcher/Reagan position, but they are capitalists (IE: capital accumulation and exploitationists), NOT free marketers in the sense understood by a mutualist/voluntarist/classical liberal etc. They are happy to leave the controls which cause capital accumulation. (Side point: if Thatcher had implemented Hayek’s ideas – that she claimed to hold to – rather than Friedman, this might not be the case at all!)

Jock describes himself as a geo-mutualist or geo-libertarian, which perhaps means mutualist who favours Land Value Tax (which is supposed to prevent land accumulation). This appears to me as a far left position motivated by a very strong desire to end land accumulation and rent exploitation (by implication); I assume he takes this position, because either a) he doesn’t have 100% confidence in the claims that mutualists make for land accumulation in a free market, or b) he sees LVT as a palliative or stop-gap in the meantime.

Hopefully JC will correct me because I have not read Henry George (LVT man) and as I say, don’t know much about mutualism.

Actually – here’s a simple formulation of the difference, perhaps too simple, between Thatcher-Reagan and a *certain* (but rather small I’d suggest) section of libertarianism, and the much greater position of more libertarians (including in fact Austrians but I suspect they might not acknowledge it so easily):

Thatcher-Reagan types *said* that the state was a bad thing because it *prevented* big business operating freely. Mutualists and many other libertarians, espcially historically, have believed that teh state is a bad thing because it *protects big business*. I believe the evidence is overwhelmingly on my side, including the evidence of the results of the “Thatcher-Reagan” flirtation with what they called “libertarianism” which was nothing of the sort in reality.

Malcolm, can’t speak for Jock (or indeed Sara), but I’ve favoured the introduction of a Citizen’s Basic Income for a long time. It used to be Lib Dem policy, but was I’m told dropped as it’s unaffordable within one Parliament which is what the manifesto is for, but is Green policy and is backed also by the Adam Smith Institute among others, and should be a long term goal of a Liberal govt in my view.

Combine that with insurance based schemes and pension schemes and you have a workable solution; a big advantage to a CBI is it completely removes the benefits trap that the poorest fall into, you never lose it, so there’s an incentive to take and do what work you can, even if it’s only a few hours a week, and it also eliminates most of the black cash only economy, as it’s no longer necessary to avoid official oversight.

Long term pipe dreams, which is basically what we’re talking about in the whole thread–gotta love ’em.

Sorry about spelling/punctuation etc – posting from my phone – couldn’t really read properly what was going on the screen!