The Social Liberal Forum — a group of Liberal Democrat members who advocate ‘that a democratic and open state has a positive role to play in guaranteeing individual freedom’ — met yesterday for their first conference on a high note: their mobilising role at the party’s spring conference is widely credited with having strongly influenced the Coalition’s changes to the controversial NHS reforms.
Here’s how the Independent on Sunday, with an inevitable nod towards stereotypes, reports the gathering:
Welcome to the first annual conference of the Social Liberal Forum – the home of “proper” Liberal Democrats. Not the quasi-Tory, Oxbridge-educated, Orange Bookers such as Nick Clegg, David Laws and Danny Alexander. It’s the lefty lot who despise the Tories more than sandals in a downpour. Its director, Mark Blackburn, insists they are not “anti-coalition”, nor are they the nutty fringe of the party. “We are trying to make sure that mainstream liberal values continue to be shown in mainstream party policy.” By mainstream he means social democratic. …
Two sympathetic ministers had been booked. … [Vince Cable] insisted he had to be “remorselessly on message these days”, but demanded responsible capitalism (bash rich bankers), curbing executive remuneration (pay cuts for the mega-rich) and progressive taxation (tax the rich). … [Chris Huhne] had in his sights red-tape “zealots” who want to tear up all regulation, good or bad. … He said the Lib Dems had to find a place between Labour’s “obsession with micro-management and target-setting” and the “fixation with deregulation and scrapping rules” of “right-wing ideologues”. …
It is easy to dismiss them all as irrelevant eccentrics. But who else would read the Health and Social Care Bill and spot the contradictions and dangerous consequences? The SLF are determined to make their voice heard.
For those who enjoy debating political identities and the terminology that cloak them, Jonathan Calder’s Liberal England has challenged SLF to define how social liberalism differs from social democracy, provoking a lively comments thread, including a contribution from leading SLF light, and former Lib Dem MP, Evan Harris.
There was also an active discussion thread here on Lib Dem Voice a few weks ago, prompted by our most recent members’ survey showing that the three top labels which party members are hapy to use about themselves are ‘liberal’, ‘progressive’ and ‘social liberal’.
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7 Comments
The article certainly isn’t very friendly. The pictures that have gone with it make it look as if it was only a few older party members that turned up, rather than the packed out room that had a mix of all ages. I’m suspecting the slant of the article was decided well before the conference happened.
There was a Liberal assembly in the 1960s when a long forgotten journalist wrote an article in a newspaper that no one can remember where he noticed there were a lot of hippies wearing sandals and beards so he wrote about it.
And 40+ YEARS LATER you still get journalists repeating these ridiculous stereotypes!
Honestly I don’t think there are any more beards and sandals than you will find anywhere else. But so what?
In any case this was a conference where we had excellent speakers debating very big and important issues. It is the same old story of there being 2 conferences; the real conference that most people seemed to like and the absurd parody of a conference reported in the newspaper.
The funny thing was that we very nearly had Danny Alexander speaking at our conference, he pulled out with 1 week to go.
Clearly Danny is not a member of the SLF, but the point was that we wanted to have a debate between him and the SLF. We didn’t want to have a debate where everyone agreed with each other, it misses the point.
We wanted non-SLF people to feel that this conference is for them as well, whether Orange Bookers, people not in the Liberal Democrats and even people in other parties.
In the end the conference was for people interested in the development of the Liberal Democrats and in truth it was not intended to satisfy the news agenda. Maybe on those grounds the reporter got bored and thought he would try to be funny instead. For once most of the comments underneath the article actually make more sense than the article itself.
Perhaps next year it could avoid clashing with the local government conference?
Hi Christine,
It looks like we booked the conference before the ALDC conference date had been settled and circulated. We certainly do not want to clash dates like this again. I wanted to put the date back a week in any case because some students were still taking their exams, but fixing a date was very difficult.
I would have gone, but I was committed to something else on Saturday, so I’m looking forward to more reports and feedback.
Ian – A liberal with a beard (well- trimmed) which has probably saved me months of shaving time in the recent decades. I might wear sandals to deliver Focus, but to go to a conference I would wear black oxfords with toecaps to go with my blue suit, formal shirt and tie.
The conference revitalised my faith in the party I joined as a founder member. In my experience it articulated the views of the overwhwlming majority of Party members with whom I have contact as a local party chair anf county councillor. Unfortunately it is perhaps too late to have prevented the many members who have left the party.
An amusing highlight for me was Dr Grayson’s body language when Simon Hughes was expounding a pathetic explanatin of the Parliamentary’s response to Tuition fees!
Thank you for the link to the liberal england blogpost, a fascinating discussion to read.
I was particularly drawn to the quote from David Howarth which I think explains my own problems with terminology when talking about liberalism, and the perils of its closeness to labour through an exaggerated perception of left-ness:
“The rise of illiberalism, both in the media and in the New Labour government, has been too strong in the past decade to make that a plausible stance.”
I believe the basic premise of my article here remains correct provided it is understood that i have at times conflated social liberalism with social democracy:
http://jedibeeftrix.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/compassionate-liberalism-just-deserts-%E2%80%93-escaping-the-paradox-of-the-lefts-social-authoritarianism/
This is further reinforced by Dr Evan Harris’s very useful description of the difference between the two:
“Social liberal is an unsatisfactory term in some ways because the “orange-bookers” are liberal on social issues (ie social liberals in that sense) in the main.
And many social liberals would consider themselves to be economically liberal in the sense of not being protectionist or anti-capitalist or even anti-market.
The difference between Orange-book-type economic liberal and so called social liberals is perhaps the relative priority we place on social justice (or socio-economic fairness).
I would say that most if not all social democrats (and by that I don’t just mean ex-SDP members) in the Lib Dems are social liberals. But not all social liberal are original social democrats.
The Social Liberal Forum brings social democrats together with traditional Liberals who feel more strongly about the importance of social justice as a means and an end than “neo-classical economic liberals” (or Orange-bookers for short).
So perhaps Orange-book Liberal = Social Liberal minus social democracy.”