Tag Archives: radicalism

Why are we so timid?

The Liberal Party I joined in 1964 was not a timid party. Under Grimond’s leadership, it wanted major changes to the UK. It wanted devolution, voting and parliamentary reform, sexual and racial equality, supported joining the EEC, wanted nuclear disarmament and wanted more cooperatives amongst many other things. And it wasn’t afraid to say so.

Fast forward to today and we seem afraid of our own shadow. We say little or nothing on controversial issues for fear of offending anybody. Dig a little deeper and you find we probably support the same things that we did before but you’d never know. We are criticising Starner for being too cautious, whilst doing exactly the same ourselves.

Often our leadership wrings its hands about a perceived problem but makes no proposals to change them. Take the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of sex. We all know that the right thing to do is to change the law to make the equality act mean what we thought it did, but our leadership’s silence has helped the growth of anti-trans sentiment and made the lives of trans people more difficult. We have gained nothing but contempt for our stance and lost the support of many in the trans community.

We continue with the pretence that the answer to Brexit is to join a custom’s union, when the real problem is not being in the single marker. Obviously, some focus group has been telling the party that support for the SM or joining the EU will upset voters in some undefined demographic.

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 8 Comments
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Recent Comments

  • Peter Martin
    @ Charlie, There's no need to get out the Ouija board. :-) Keynes wrote quite extensively on Economics but reading through his General Theory of Employme...
  • Nonconformistradical
    There's a TV program - shown recently - called 'Flood: When the Thames drowned London'. About the actual 1928 flood - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1928_Thames_...
  • Cassie
    Well put. 'Have grace and listen to each other' would make a wonderful slogan everywhere, by the way....
  • Peter Davies
    or both. We could also add new town corporations. The current "new towns" use a different model from those that delivered the likes of Milton Keynes. As far as ...
  • Dennis Delice
    Thanks for reading, your feedback means a lot to me! I had a level of trepidation about how it would be read and come across, but I thought it was important to ...