Matt Michael

Opinion: Welcome to Nursery Britain

By | Fri 21st November 2008 - 4:45 pm

Are 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.

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252 Comments

  • Anonymous 21st Nov '08 - 6:54pm

    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.

  • Iainm 21st Nov '08 - 7:06pm

    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.

  • asquith 21st Nov '08 - 7:13pm

    http://www.lpuk.org

  • asquith 21st Nov '08 - 7:39pm

    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.

  • asquith 21st Nov '08 - 8:19pm

    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.

  • Sesenco 21st Nov '08 - 8:24pm

    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.

  • asquith 21st Nov '08 - 8:33pm

    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.

  • Sesenco 21st Nov '08 - 8:51pm

    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.

  • Anax 21st Nov '08 - 9:49pm

    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.

  • Sesenco 21st Nov '08 - 9:53pm

    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).

  • Oranjepan 21st Nov '08 - 9:57pm

    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.

  • Anonymous 21st Nov '08 - 10:29pm

    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.

  • Sesenco 21st Nov '08 - 10:35pm

    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.

  • David Allen 21st Nov '08 - 11:13pm

    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!

  • Mouse 21st Nov '08 - 11:34pm

    >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.

  • Terry Gilbert 21st Nov '08 - 11:49pm

    Glad if you all vote Lib Dem.

  • David Allen 22nd Nov '08 - 12:18am

    “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!

  • David Morton 22nd Nov '08 - 12:48am

    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.

  • David Morton 22nd Nov '08 - 2:05am

    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.

  • Anax 22nd Nov '08 - 10:17am

    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.

  • David Allen 22nd Nov '08 - 1:08pm

    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!

  • Anax 22nd Nov '08 - 1:51pm

    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.

  • Paul Griffiths 22nd Nov '08 - 2:07pm

    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.

  • Oranjepan 22nd Nov '08 - 2:18pm

    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.

  • asquith 22nd Nov '08 - 2:35pm

    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.

  • asquith 22nd Nov '08 - 2:36pm

    Paul Griffiths, I was not aware of this. What reasons were given?

  • Paul Griffiths 22nd Nov '08 - 3:20pm

    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.

  • asquith 22nd Nov '08 - 3:23pm

    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 🙂

  • Paul Griffiths 22nd Nov '08 - 3:29pm

    “Perhaps it’s time for a return”

    Some of us never went away. Maybe more of us than you think.

  • Oranjepan 22nd Nov '08 - 3:55pm

    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?

  • Matthew Huntbach 22nd Nov '08 - 7:29pm

    “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.

  • Ruth Bright 22nd Nov '08 - 9:07pm

    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”.

  • Matthew Huntbach 22nd Nov '08 - 9:11pm

    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.

  • Neil Berry 22nd Nov '08 - 9:46pm

    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.

  • Anonymous 22nd Nov '08 - 10:26pm

    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.

  • Matthew Huntbach 22nd Nov '08 - 10:47pm

    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.

  • Matthew Huntbach 22nd Nov '08 - 10:49pm

    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.

  • Matthew Huntbach 22nd Nov '08 - 10:53pm

    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.

  • David Allen 22nd Nov '08 - 11:24pm

    “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!

  • Matthew Huntbach 23rd Nov '08 - 12:39am

    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.

  • David Morton 23rd Nov '08 - 4:43am

    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.

  • asquith 23rd Nov '08 - 10:05am

    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?

  • asquith 23rd Nov '08 - 10:06am

    *to criticism of his student-union rhetoric.

  • Sesenco 23rd Nov '08 - 2:11pm

    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.

  • asquith 23rd Nov '08 - 5:03pm

    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.

  • Matthew Huntbach 23rd Nov '08 - 6:28pm

    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.

  • Oranjepan 23rd Nov '08 - 7:31pm

    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.

  • Oranjepan 23rd Nov '08 - 8:33pm

    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.

  • Matthew Huntbach 23rd Nov '08 - 9:28pm

    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.

  • David Allen 23rd Nov '08 - 10:27pm

    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!

  • Oranjepan 23rd Nov '08 - 11:06pm

    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).

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 23rd Nov '08 - 11:12pm

    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.

  • Oranjepan 23rd Nov '08 - 11:20pm

    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!

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 23rd Nov '08 - 11:30pm

    Oranjepan

    Whatever next? “Jews spread diseases”?

    Even Nazis have a right to their own opinions, I suppose …

  • Oranjepan 23rd Nov '08 - 11:41pm

    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.

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 23rd Nov '08 - 11:48pm

    “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?

  • Oranjepan 23rd Nov '08 - 11:58pm

    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.

  • Anax 24th Nov '08 - 12:08am

    “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?

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 12:39am

    “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.

  • Oranjepan 24th Nov '08 - 12:42am

    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.

  • Oranjepan 24th Nov '08 - 12:43am

    CCF, moral dictator!

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 8:52am

    “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.

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 9:28am

    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.

  • Oranjepan 24th Nov '08 - 9:38am

    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.

  • Sesenco 24th Nov '08 - 9:48am

    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.

  • Oranjepan 24th Nov '08 - 10:07am

    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?

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 10:13am

    “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?

  • Oranjepan 24th Nov '08 - 10:36am

    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…

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 10:48am

    “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”?

  • Sesenco 24th Nov '08 - 10:55am

    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.

  • Oranjepan 24th Nov '08 - 11:05am

    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?

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 11:10am

    “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!]

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 11:17am

    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?

  • Sesenco 24th Nov '08 - 11:18am

    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.

  • Matthew Huntbach 24th Nov '08 - 11:25am

    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.

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 11:28am

    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!

  • Oranjepan 24th Nov '08 - 12:05pm

    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.

  • asquith 24th Nov '08 - 12:23pm

    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.

  • Ruth Bright 24th Nov '08 - 12:23pm

    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.

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 12:37pm

    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.

  • Sesenco 24th Nov '08 - 12:46pm

    CCF,

    What is so objectionable about considering it undesirable that people of low intelligence have more children than people of high or average intelligence?

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 12:52pm

    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” …

  • Sesenco 24th Nov '08 - 1:00pm

    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.

  • Oranjepan 24th Nov '08 - 1:03pm

    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.

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 1:25pm

    “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.

  • Oranjepan 24th Nov '08 - 1:57pm

    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.

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 1:58pm

    “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.

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 2:13pm

    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.

  • Oranjepan 24th Nov '08 - 2:22pm

    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!

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 2:31pm

    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.

  • Oranjepan 24th Nov '08 - 2:36pm

    You get what you’ve earnt.

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 2:38pm

    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.

  • Sesenco 24th Nov '08 - 2:52pm

    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?

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 3:01pm

    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.

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 3:04pm

    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.

  • Sesenco 24th Nov '08 - 3:54pm

    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.

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 4:13pm

    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?

  • Matthew Huntbach 24th Nov '08 - 4:21pm

    “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.

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 4:33pm

    “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.

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 4:55pm

    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.

  • Matthew Huntbach 24th Nov '08 - 4:55pm

    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.

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 5:10pm

    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.

  • Ruth Bright 24th Nov '08 - 5:38pm

    James – no.

  • David Allen 24th Nov '08 - 6:06pm

    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!

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 10:32pm

    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

  • Ruth Bright 24th Nov '08 - 11:31pm

    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.

  • Clegg's Candid Fan 24th Nov '08 - 11:46pm

    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.

  • Oranjepan 25th Nov '08 - 11:07am

    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.

  • Matthew Huntbach 25th Nov '08 - 11:14pm

    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.

  • Matthew Huntbach 25th Nov '08 - 11:57pm

    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.

  • Matthew Huntbach 27th Nov '08 - 11:03am

    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.

  • Sesenco 27th Nov '08 - 12:35pm

    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..

  • Matthew Huntbach 27th Nov '08 - 1:03pm

    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.

  • Oranjepan 27th Nov '08 - 1:55pm

    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.

  • Matthew Huntbach 27th Nov '08 - 5:28pm

    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”?

  • asquith 27th Nov '08 - 5:46pm

    I see that 6 days later, Matt Michael has still not deigned to return.

  • Oranjepan 27th Nov '08 - 6:51pm

    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.

  • Matthew Huntbach 27th Nov '08 - 10:08pm

    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”.

  • Oranjepan 28th Nov '08 - 11:26am

    Sorry Matthew, that was not obvious. Thank you for being explicit.

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