Roz Savage’s piece earlier this week, and Jack Meredith’s response to it, have done something worth building on. This is an attempt to follow the logic a few steps further, because I think it leads somewhere important.
The strongest thing in Savage’s piece is the power axis. “Power hoarded versus power shared” is not just better messaging than left versus right. It’s a more honest description of what’s actually happening in Britain. Decisions that shape people’s lives are made in places they can’t reach, by institutions they didn’t choose, in processes they can’t scrutinise. That’s a liberal problem, not just a left-wing one.
Meredith picks this up thoughtfully. He’s right that different liberal traditions notice different concentrations of power. Social liberals see material inequality. Market liberals see monopoly and cartel behaviour. Civil libertarians see the state. Bring them into the same room, and they converge, even if they arrive from different directions.
But there’s a step still to take.
If dispersing power is the organising principle, it can’t stop at constitutional reform. Democratic reform is necessary, but formal political power gets hollowed out when economic power remains sufficiently concentrated. In theory, everyone gets one vote. In practice, sufficient accumulation of wealth means your money votes for you in ways the ballot box never could: through political donations, through media ownership, through the ability to fund strategic litigation, through the simple fact that governments worry about the confidence of capital in ways they never worry about the confidence of people on a zero-hours contract. The dispersal of political power and the dispersal of economic power are the same argument. You can’t complete one without the other.
Concentrated wealth isn’t simply an inequality problem, though it is that too. It’s a power problem. When wealth compounds across generations, when returns to capital consistently outpace returns to labour, when a small number of individuals accumulate resources sufficient to shape political culture and purchase influence over public debate, that is a liberal emergency. Not a socialist one. A liberal one.
A serious liberal response starts with the material conditions of freedom. Universal basic services, the guarantee of healthcare, education, housing security and public transport as the civic floor on which genuine choice becomes possible, isn’t statism dressed in liberal language. It’s what freedom from poverty, ignorance, and conformity actually looks like when you try to build it. And a progressive levy on extreme wealth, capping the accumulation that makes concentrated power possible, is what the power-sharing principle requires when applied to economic life, not just constitutional arrangements. A Just Society has been making this case from liberal rather than socialist foundations, and the full argument is at ajustsociety.uk.
Meredith frames pluralism as a description of what the Liberal Democrats are. That’s accurate and worth defending. But pluralism also does something more active. The different traditions he describes each track a real form of unfreedom, and a party that takes all of them seriously ends up somewhere more radical than any single tradition would reach on its own, because it can’t dismiss the problem the next tradition keeps pointing to. That’s a more demanding account of liberal pluralism than “we contain multitudes.” It’s also, I think, a more honest one.
Both pieces push in the right direction. The question we face as Liberal Democrats is whether we’ll follow the argument where it leads. “Power shared, not hoarded” is a serious principle, and serious principles have uncomfortable implications. They point towards electoral systems that genuinely redistribute political power. They point towards economic arrangements that break up the concentrations of wealth that hollow out democratic life. They point towards a politics willing to name who holds power, how they hold it, and what would have to change.
The hunger for conviction that the Manchester result revealed isn’t simply an appetite for clearer messaging. It’s an appetite for politics that means something, that identifies real obstacles to freedom and names them plainly. Liberalism has the philosophical resources to do that. The question is whether we use them.
* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.
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11 Comments
“Power hoarded versus power shared……”
This sounds fine superficially, but this sentiment, I believe, is ignoring the realities of the macroeconomic responsibilities of a currency issuing government. There can only be one government with responsibility for monetary and fiscal policy in its currency area. In the UK it is, for monetary policy, the BoE, effectively part of the Westminster govt, and which could be termed the BoUK.
It’s impossible for a devolved Scottish government to have a different monetary policy from the rest of the UK. It would need its own currency and full independence. It has some limited control over fiscal policy. It can raise or lower taxes locally and adjust its spending accordingly. It depends on the Barnett formula, decided by Westminster, to keep Scottish economy running. It couldn’t act decisively to support the Scottish economy during the Covid crisis, for example.
The Eurozone countries have tried to circumvent this problem with arbitrary rules. They don’t work well. The ECB tries to be an effective EU government, by breaking those rules, and buying up the government bonds of the debtor countries. Even so, France and many other countries need looser fiscal policies to revitalise their economies but have to have just the opposite to try to remain with EU rules.
This wouldn’t be a problem if the EU had a single Federal government. But this isn’t consistent with the concept of sharing or devolving power to the extent LIb Dems wish for.
This series of articles has explored fundamental political philosophy well. However, there is one big problem left to deal with – The real world. As the anarchists put it “Whoever you vote for, the Government will get in.”
“Power hoarded” is a well-chosen enemy. But there are huge incentives, rarely resisted in practice, for all governments to hoard power.
Meredith writes: “We should say, clearly, that we are the party of sharing power…. constitutional reform: proportional representation, an elected second chamber, real devolution, and stronger local government. But it cannot stop there. … Sharing power means competitive markets that break monopoly rents … a stronger voice at work and rules that make rights real in practice…” Fine words. But only words. The voters know that almost all these laudable ambitions won’t be realised for decades.
What voters need to see are simple promises, delivered. Compensate the sub-postmasters. Prosecute a sewage-dumping water company and get the worst bosses sacked or jailed. That’s what fighting “power hoarding” really means.
From the Conservative Party’s 1945 election manifesto:
“Progress must be extended and accelerated not by subordinating the individual to the authority of the State, but by providing the conditions in which no one shall be precluded by poverty, ignorance, insecurity, or the selfishness of others from making the best of the gifts with which Providence has endowed him”.
@ Tristan Ward “from the Conservative Party’s 1945 election manifesto “.
That went well, didn’t it ?
@ David Raw.
Please don’t be silly David. It went considerably better than whatever it was the Liberals put out,
Or are you suggesting we delete the reference to enslavement by reason of poverty, ignorance and conformity from the preamble?
“That went well, didn’t it”.
Nothing silly about Labour getting a landslide victory, Tristan, 393 seats to 197 Tories. One of my earliest memories is of Mum (daughter of a Durham miner) cheering and jumping for joy. Dad was still away in Denmark with 175 Squadron, RAF….. but he later told me he was chuffed. People wanted change. IMHO Clem Attlee was one of our very greatest Prime Ministers and that Government was one of our greatest too (NHS etc.,) , so, with respect, I don’t think I’m the one being silly. As for Providence ??
As for the Libs, hardly any seats (zero in Scotland for the first time and Party Leader Archie Sinclair lost his seat).
Don’t suppose it went down too well in Tunbridge Wells.
@David, that’s a fair challenge, and I don’t want to dodge it. You’re right that voters need to see power actually checked, not just described. Prosecuting a sewage-dumping water company, or genuinely compensating the sub-postmasters, are exactly the kind of moments that demonstrate a politics willing to name who holds power and hold them to account for it.
But I’d push back gently on the implied choice between immediate accountability and structural change. A politics that only delivers the former, without addressing why power concentrates in the first place, finds itself fighting the same battles in a generation’s time. The next water company scandal is already being set up. The structural argument isn’t instead of the immediate one; it’s in addition to. It’s what makes the immediate victories stick.
@ Tanya Park Thanks for the comment, Tanya, especially, “when returns to capital consistently outpace returns to labour, when a small number of individuals accumulate resources sufficient to shape political culture and purchase influence over public debate, that is a liberal emergency. Not a socialist one. A liberal one.”
Theoretically that should be right, but historically it’s not. This year is the centenary of the 1926 General Strike. I learned about it from Mum, from my former Durham miner Granddad……. and later academically at UCL.
The miners were treated abominably by amongst others the Edens, the Londonderrys (mates of the Asquiths). the Vane, Tempest Stewarts and the Guests (mates and financiers of Lloyd George). Sir John Simon (Liberal ‘shadow cabinet’) wanted to prosecute and imprison people like my Granddad for striking when his wages were cut (see Hansard) – just when ten year old Mum had to collect pit waste to keep the home warm.
I wish the Liberals had been better – they should have been – but alas, they were not. The Durham miners mostly voted Liberal before WW1 but I know why it stopped. I suggest you also look up Walter Runciman’s attitude to the Jarrow ship yards a few years later.
@David Raw, my apologies, my previous reply wasn’t to your comment but to David Allen’s.
Tanya, you’re right. An immediate action to repudiate “power hoarded” can only be a start. Indeed, it can be basically a sham. Witness somebody finally finding enough governmental small-change to give Alan Bates what looks like a reasonable level of compensation at last, while leaving most of the other sub-postmasters still stuck in limbo.
One response is to advocate and develop recipes for long term structural change. These will carry conviction as and when political leaders such as Ed Davey can be persuaded to adopt them, make repeated speeches about them, demand that they must be done, and write them into manifestos.
An alternative response is to look for different politicians who might, just might, really mean what they say about change. So OK, nobody can be sure how Polanski might react when faced with an army of commercial lobbyists waving bribes (alongside threats). But perhaps, with all his faults, he might manage to stick to his principles.
If wealth is accumulated in the service of others then some might argue this gives the wealthy the right for some power over others. But in the private sector it does not and gives the wealthy enormous power and influence over the rest of us. Then if we really want to tackle inequality more democratic power should be given to those who have less wealth. I’m not sure how to do this.