‘Power for All’: A Liberal agenda for the future

The question of what the Liberal Democrats should look like, and stand for, in a post-coronavirus world is being increasingly asked. Indeed, we already have hints of the future directions of Labour and the Conservatives and it would not be surprising to see both indulge in the politics of nostalgia and advocate a return to their favoured status quo in response to this health crisis.

In the case of the Conservatives this may translate into a continuation of the neo-liberal agenda that has dominated so much economic thinking for the last forty years (a call for ‘Reaganomics’ has already appeared on ConservativeHome).

In contrast, for Keir Starmer’s Labour, particularly given how many Fabians belong to his Shadow Cabinet, it may appear in the form of a call to return to a statist, corporatist, technocratic, social democracy that dominated Britain for some thirty or so years prior to the triumph of neo-liberalism.

Just as Labour and the Conservatives failed to provide a radical and transformational response to the 2008 financial crisis, the possibility that they will fail to do so in response to this crisis is not a small one.

Both responses are, however, uninspiring and backward-looking and liberals must resist the temptation to favour either. Additionally, the alternative of merely splitting the difference between the two, picking and attempting to stitch together elements from each ‘vision’, must also be opposed.

Instead, Liberals must articulate an alternative agenda that rejects holding up both the state and the market as sacred cows. Instead, our concern should be with breaking up concentrations of power, within both the market and the state, so that it is the individual that may be as free as possible. Leave’s victory in the 2016 referendum on EU membership, with its slogan ‘Take Back Control’, was, at least in part, a reflection of powerlessness felt by many citizens. It is this sense of powerlessness that liberals should relentlessly focus on as we seek to spread power amongst citizens and to tame both the overmighty state and the domineering market.

What such a narrative might mean in terms of policies is very much open. However, power must be redistributed within both the economic and the political spheres; besides our commitment co-ownership, our party has historically neglected the former relative to the latter. For example, economic power may be spread by introducing a Universal Basic Income.

In terms of dispersing and devolving political power, as well as our traditional commitment to constitutional reform, greater attention must be paid to the provision of public services, where too often too much power is concentrated in the hands of too few. Suggestions, such as replacing Police and Crime Commissioners with directly-elected police boards, or giving more power and choice to parents to determine where, and how, their child is educated with the introduction of, say, school vouchers must, at the very least, be considered.

Whereas previously the Liberal Party called for ‘Ownership for All’ today, with many feeling ignored and powerless to shape their own lives and communities, our new mantra should be ‘Power for All’.

* Daniel Duggan is a Liberal Democrat Councillor in Gateshead

Read more by .
This entry was posted in Op-eds.
Advert

21 Comments

  • The pocketbook is the thing that influences most peoples voting behaviour. Now the country is in an economic depression the question is how to get out of it and help the millions that have become marginalised.

  • ‘More power to you, and for all.’

    Thoughtful article Ollie – a good attempt at articulating a liberal values based story and some signature policies to exemplify it.

    What are your thoughts on the difference between feeling powerful and not feeling powerless? Particularly in terms of the UBI policy you suggest – is that to avoid poverty, a state of powerlessness?

    Do you think the electorate care about dispersing political power as much as the party/membership does?

  • Daniel Duggan 26th Apr '20 - 2:52pm

    Freddie – I think a keyword is independence. Independence for the individual from either dependence on the state or the market. One of the main attractions of a UBI is that it goes some way to providing this independence. Currently most people are in a state of dependence – dependant on their employers, how the market is doing or dependant on the state and whether the state judges someone as being justified to be in receipt of some benefit or not and can withdraw it if they judge it right to do so. As liberals we should aim to replace these relations of dependence with a sense of independence and a UBI, which is of course non-withdrawable, would help to achieve that.

    In terms of the public’s concern with distributing political power, it is the case that as a party we have been working for electoral reform for many years and it has still not been achieved. However, some forms of political power are less abstract and have more relation to everyday experiences, like the provision of public services and, of course, the two examples I mention in the article, the police and schools. I think many do care about the provision of power when it comes to the services they interact with on a regular basis. However, as I also state in the article, we must give greater attention to the economic realm than we have previously done.

  • All the loose change in the system has just been used to save circa 500,000 lives from Coronavirus. Pre virus UBI replacing welfare, tax allowance, etc etc would have just about been doable in the 4-5k range for adults with half for kids and twice for pensioners… post virus you will be lucky to get 2-3k (per year) out of the system. Have to look at the things the other way round and slash fixed costs for people so that they can survive on next to nowt, which in turn will let them use UBI to free up their life so they are maybe doing work they don’t like for short periods to fund more interesting stuff. The political class will never do something that diminishes their power over people, though.

    One of things people are going to lose is cheap travel, both because planes will have to be about a quarter full for social spacing and because of much heavier taxes so the govn gets back the money it has spent saving the industry. Paying £500 to go to Spain and £2000 to go to Thailand will be an interesting sell to the populace who may have to get used to Butlins again.

  • Nonconformistradical 26th Apr '20 - 6:11pm

    @Frank West
    “One of things people are going to lose is cheap travel”

    We can’t go back to cheap air travel if we are even remotely serious about addressing climate change.

  • A very interesting article.
    One little point.
    There is a reference to other parties’ responses to the 2008 financial crisis. Where was our original thinking?
    We do need it rather urgently at the moment.

  • “The coronavirus pandemic will change the fundamental relationship between the state and the economy in Germany, Wolfgang Schäuble, the former finance minister and current president of the Bundestag, told the Der Tagesspiegel newspaper.”
    https://www.dw.com/en/wolfgang-sch%C3%A4uble-coronavirus-to-cause-structural-economic-change/a-53252869

  • Thanks Daniel (no idea where Ollie came from!)

    Independence is thoughtful expansion on the idea but is there not a contraction with being dependent on the government to make you independent?

    I take your point re: political power (and agree we need to be even handed with policy focus). Re: police boards and schools vouchers – purely my own view is that there isn’t a clamour for the former (why do the police need to be told to prevent and investigate crime?).

    For school vouchers, the party would need to be prepared for the logical consequences of those who use their independence (‘upper class’ subsidising private schools, thrusting middle class flocking to the best schools which have finite capacity) at the perceived cost of those what aren’t prepared or able or motivated to use their independence (working class will leave their kids in local bog standard comp which turns into a sink school because all the middle class kids and good teachers have gone elsewhere).

    As I understand them, school vouchers are a market proxy mechanism that allows unmet demand for high quality schooling to flow to where it is supplied (which may need to be able to expand – academy models etc?). Conceding there is a distribution of outcomes amongst schools (if there wasn’t, no need for vouchers as your local school is as good as any other), the overall aim of DoE should be to push the distribution of the school system to the right, partly through allowing vouchers to chase the top quartile but also through allowing bottom quartile to ‘fail’ and redeploying their resources into ‘new’ schools (could still be on same site etc so not left with school deserts). Otherwise, you are left with a crippled market mechanism which allows the upside but not the downside, leading to unjust inequality, with kids trapped in failing schools which aren’t allow to fail.

    It’s making me think, always a good thing. Definitely something to quiz the leadership candidates on.

  • I’m pleased to see so many favourable references to UBI in the responses. In particular, how many of them refer not so much to the cost of it and how to meet that cost (apparently the main LDV interest in the recent past) as to its liberating effect for all those who currently find themselves in humiliating and hobbling thrall to the grudging machinery of ‘Benefits’.

    So may I float again the suggestion that LibDems should more energetically adopt not “UBI” — a term largely misunderstood, even by LDV contributors , as well as the wider UK world — and proclaim the Lib Dem policy of instituting a replacement of the current Benefits world with a National Income Dividend, the “N.I.D.”?

    I won’t here argue how much more positive-sounding this new title sounds, to me and I believe to anyone with half an interest in how British society works. I won’t, for brevity’s sake, argue anything today. What I will do, now, is to suggest that the NID not only sounds more positive — it also explains the essence of how it would work,and why it should.

    So, simplifying to the utmost:
    First, it redirects national thinking about the Economy from that old god, the GDP, to a better one (or the old one reappraised: a Reformed god) the National Income. That is (simplifying still) not the sum of all that’s paid in creating and selling stuff, from bread to electricity, but the sum of all that’s received by the makers of said stuff — bakers’ incomes, electrical engineers’ incomes, bankers’ incomes. The national income tots up all our earnings (and unearnings), nearly all of them received for collaborating in joint endeavours small and large. We all in various ways share the goods and services created: and we should all to some extent share collectively, as well as individually, in the enjoyment of it all. We should all, that is, get by right of residence a Dividend, a slice, of the total National Income.

  • Richard Underhill 27th Apr '20 - 12:31pm

    Daniel Duggan | Sun 26th April 2020 – 1:33 pm
    Ronald Reagan’s Vice-President was George Bush (Senior) who, when a rival, referred to “Voodoo economics”. As a potential successor he insisted that their policies were identical. After he was elected as President Bush needed, of course, to deal with the realities of the modern world, such as the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq under Saddam Hussein, who set all the oil fields on fire.
    As a marine Paddy Ashdown had been landed in Kuwait to help to deter Saddam Hussein’s predecessor, as he wrote in the Liberal (Democrat) News.

  • Daniel Duggan 27th Apr '20 - 12:32pm

    Freddie – I think the dependence on the government when receiving UBI is mitigated by two points 1. if the government is democratically controlled and 2. the government is limited, or at least restricted, in what it can do i.e. UBI is a right and not a withdrawable benefit. Of course to some extent even those appear very independent are often not – the millionaire who has their wealth tied up on the stock market, or some venture, is dependant on factors beyond their control . Nevertheless, moving away from dependence to independence, as much as can ever be practically achieved in a world where we are interconnected and do not each live on our own desert island, is a benefit of UBI.

    I have thought about the precise problem you identify with school vouchers for a long time and it concerns me too. One response might be to restrict where they can be used – no subsiding private schools, for example. Or another option might be to restrict their use to certain groups as in parts of the USA e.g. those whose current schools are judged to be failing or to those who live in deprived areas. I like the principle of choice within the education sector, but to have real value people have to want, and be prepared, to use that choice.

  • Richard Underhill 27th Apr '20 - 12:36pm

    Manfarang 26th Apr ’20 – 8:31pm
    Rees-Mogg (son of Rees-Mogg) told the Commons that the Black Death had caused the closure of the parliament (in 12??)
    More recently the parliament was closed when the Thames became a stinking sewer.

  • Richard Underhill 27th Apr '20 - 12:43pm

    Freddie 27th Apr ’20 – 8:24am
    Should contraction be contradiction?

  • Peter Martin 27th Apr '20 - 1:35pm

    There’s still a lot of talk about a UBI. An income for all is essentially a part of the process of dividing up the total GDP. The National Cake -if you like. Everyone has an opinion on how it should be sliced up.

    But how about having some sort of opinion on what everyone needs to do to help create the GDP? Shouldn’t everyone be expected to, if they are able, give something as well as take?

    @ Paul Fisher,

    ‘The Socialist Mantra “What’s yours in mine, and what’s mine is my own” ‘

    You’ve put this in quotes. Where does it come from? I haven’t heard of it before but I have heard of:

    “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”

    Maybe this is what you mean?

  • Dilettante Eye 27th Apr '20 - 9:41pm

    I think Roger Lake’s idea, (if I understand it correctly?) of a National Income Dividend (NID), makes far more sense that a UBI.

    For a start a Universal Basic Income, gives the impression that it is a sum of state allocated money which can be ‘lived on’, bur clearly for most individuals and families a UBI will not be nearly enough to live on.

    With a NID, National Income Dividend, it gives the impression of a bonus, over and above your natural earnings, which gives a kind of ‘John Lewis’ effect on production in the economy?

    A UBI is too passive, suggesting you need no effort to get it, whereas a NID is logically designed as a bonus payment for a national cumulative effort of GDP.

    I support a National Income Dividend.

  • @Dilettante Eye
    Thank you for your encouraging comment. I believe you have understood me very largely, so I’ll make one little point. That is that I would expect a DNI to be much the same size as a UBI. My suggested label for it has three merits. It reminds the nation how it works and how it is determined: it sounds better, as more positive and congenial and less stingey than Universal Basic Income: and dividends sound like profits or loot, from bank shares or bank robberies, for example. And all of those ‘sounds likes’ are true.

    How would it work, though? Not as most seem to suppose. Lib Dems are not very good at radical thinking these days, and the NID would not be matter of haggling over percentages, or the definition of ‘poverty’. It will not be the product of tweaking, but of starting afresh, from the NID, not the UBI way of thinking.

    As the word Dividend suggests, I think, it will be reckoned annually, and declared in the Budget statement, by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. What he will declare, and what every voter and newshound will be waiting to hear, will be this: ” For the coming year the NID will be at the rate of X% of last year’s National Income, as calculated in the usual way by the O.N.S.”

    In other words, it may fluctuate year by year. And Government by Government. It will be a political decision, and come General Election time a major part of every Party’s manifesto will be their promise to raise the current X% to Y%, or cut it to Z%. So those who vote in the Election will be the choosers of the size of the N.I.D. for the coming year, and the succeeding years till the next G.E. (I am presuming PR not FPTP, of course: that is surely coming?)

    The NID would be added to each individual’s total Taxable Income and taxed accordingly, and obviously Income Tax rates and bands will be adjusted according to HMG’s lights, but beginning at a rate below the rate of NID. That would ensure that every adult could look every other in the eye, as a fellow taxpayer.

    Footnote: Some of what we call ‘Benefits’ would survive, unrelated to the NID. These would be for those with special needs, to help support those with with disabilities, or perhaps the universal Child Allowance for example.

  • Dilettante Eye 28th Apr '20 - 11:25am

    Roger Lake
    Thanks for the update on the NID, and its broader plan.

    I suggest that you reconsider the idea of starting the NID at an equivalent level to a UBI?

    I would instead, consider starting it very low, possibly as low as £10 per month and paid to every adult and child. Starting so low has advantages.

    ~ It puts a NID into the public domain as ‘a thing’, which will be there to be paid out to every individual (and child), every year.
    ~ it implies that it will have a yearly increase linked to GDP of previous year.
    ~ If a person (or for a child), allocates their NID directly into a pension fund, they get it tax free, or alternately it would (as you say), be taxed if taken as income above their personal allowance.
    ~ The NID should rise annually by at least the cost of living, even if GDP shows a negative for the previous year.
    ~ As the NID rises to a point comparable with other benefits, those other benefits could be frozen (i.e. no cost of living rise), in a subsequent annual budget.

    Examples –
    1. As the NID rises to £85 per month given to every adult and child, then child benefit could be frozen permanently at £21.05 (per week) at the next available budget.
    2. As the NID rises to £30 per week, winter fuel allowance could be frozen permanently, at the next budget.

    The general rule of such a low start NID would be that as it rises annually over two decades or so, to the kind of levels of a UBI, it could potentially, be used as a £ for £ swap-out for existing benefits over time which would be more manageable within the economy, than an immediate and huge UBI shock would have on the nations finances.

    In short : Maybe start the NID small, and build it by annual bite-size increases into a gradually adapting society over many years?

  • Peter Hirst 28th Apr '20 - 3:43pm

    What your post fails to deal with is the uncertainty that will follow Covid and the probability of further national and international crises in the medium term. We need a better form of governance and society to deal with these. This should include more collaboration, a better safety net and more involvement in decision making and its results. Society needs to be better prepared for unforeseen events and this includes education, savings and flexibility in the jobs market.

  • Dilettante Eye, thank you again for contributing to the notion of the NID, though I have some tiny niggles. But your main point, that NID should start small and grow annually, is, I believe, spot on. The election manifestos I mentioned would probably all propose that. And I like your notion that as
    the NID grows, the current generation of Benefits would largely just wither away. The transition might be administratively burdensome for a very few years: but once the Benefits had gone, so would the need for all the hoops for jumping through, that oppress the needy (and which cannot be good for those civil servants compelled to enforce them. They would be fewer, but it would be better work, helping people instead of obstructing them with those hoops.) (That was in brackets, but it would be an important small B benefit all round!)

    I try to avoid naming figures of £ X per week or year, in order to concentrate thinking on the basic thing: its universality (every adult genuinely resident in the kingdom) , and the idea that it is based not on complicated rules, and comparisons with existing benefits: instead it begins with the notion that we’re all in it together, our economy, and we all share some needs — food, roof, health,etc. Once everyone has those, then other considerations arise, in agreeing how to distribute the rest of the National Income. Those considerations are, perhaps, practical and economic, as opposed to the essentially moral or social assessments of how big the NID shall be. All to get enough cake — but icing as well, for most, in variable thicknesses!

Post a Comment

Lib Dem Voice welcomes comments from everyone but we ask you to be polite, to be on topic and to be who you say you are. You can read our comments policy in full here. Please respect it and all readers of the site.

To have your photo next to your comment please signup your email address with Gravatar.

Your email is never published. Required fields are marked *

*
*
Please complete the name of this site, Liberal Democrat ...?

Advert

Recent Comments

  • Katharine Pindar
    Suzanne, I absolutely agree with you, and am shocked that I am not aware of a statement from our party condemning the new policy of people deemed to have entere...
  • Paul R
    “That means guaranteeing fair wages, empowering communities to shape the policies that affect their lives, and fostering a culture of accountability” The...
  • Mary Fulton
    So increases in income tax and cuts to large part of the public sector? Sounds like a recipe to ensure Reform UK builds its support even further…...
  • Ellyott
    The strange aspect is that the UK functioned relatively better, in terms of getting houses built, labour intensive industries, much bigger numbers in the armed ...
  • Linda Chung
    Vince - a great article, wide ranging and thought provoking. Even more interesting are the comments - but I find the China-bashing a bit superficial. Linda Ch...