Really Facing the Future has just been published on the Liberator website.
We have written it as an alternative to the Liberal Democrats’ policy development agenda, Facing the Future (PDF): this was published in August 2011, and intended to set out the party’s values, highlight the main challenges and summarise policy development priorities for the remainder of the current parliament – it will be debated at party conference this coming Monday morning.
We believe that Facing the Future fails to face the future. It lacks political imagination, it lacks a coherent analysis of the challenges we face and it lacks passion, seeming to have been approached as a dry academic exercise.
Our alternative, Really Facing the Future, sets out ten new directions for policy. They are not exhaustive or definitive. They represent the views of two Liberal Democrats (albeit with 68 years of membership between them). But they are an attempt to encourage Liberal Democrat policy makers to think more radically – partly because the challenges that lie ahead require more radical thinking and partly as an antidote to the idea that party policy is at its most effective when it tentatively suggests a few tiny changes that don’t threaten the status quo.
If the Liberal Democrats want to face the future, they must look at the real world as it is – not as it seems from the peculiar prism of Westminster – and respond. That is what Really Facing the Future tries to do.
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2 Comments
Well, I’ve not read the whole thing, I’m a tiny bit worried about the idea of conflating ideology and values/principles, but I’ll see how this all goes! (for me principles are the end goal and ideology is ignoring evidence in favour of a particular way of attaining it)
Okay, that concern wasn’t warranted in the text itself. A few oversimplifications (I don’t think that you can characterise the 80s onwards as purely being Britain becoming a less fair and equal society in its entirety – the early New Labour years would constitute a slight bucking of the trend) and sometimes I wanted more content (for instance in the section on macroeconomics I was left a bit unclear as to your exact position), but not too bad at all.
A tiny bit concerned at what I see as support for free schools in one section (which have actually not been performing well in Sweden recently).
Otherwise very, very good. Particularly the sections on Europe and the ageing economy.