Tag Archives: social contract

Leading Tory commentator and former MP Matthew Parris commented in his last Saturday’s Times column on our party’s appeal in the by-election to people he sees as decent, middle-of-the road Conservatives who have a ‘distaste’ for Boris Johnson. However, he complained that our party avoids hard choices, “wobbles off the highway into the ditch of localism, neighbourhood grumbles, government intervention and ‘whatever your gripe is (its) ours too”.

He even rudely accuses us of having “a big yellow streak” beyond our orange bird, and says that to have a fighting chance at the next election we will need to “learn to show steel, to say no to someone, something, anything …”

The choices of Mr Parris, who voted Lib Dem at the last election but only, he says, out of ‘repulsion’ at the alternatives, are not those of Centre-Left Liberal Democrats, but I suggest he makes good points. We do tend to assume that with our excellent principles and good policies, Middle England only needs to know about them to support them. Yet even to the educated middle-classes we can easily appear ‘Labour-lite’ or else too Conservative-friendly offending adherents of either big party, or else so indefinite that supporting the Greens who appear definitely right for these times is an easier choice for the politically homeless. The old slogan of being anti-Brexit and pro-Europe isn’t sufficient now.

Where do we stand on free trade, people could ask us? We can’t give the clear-cut answer which our nineteenth-century forbears could. So what can we be definite about?

On a lunchtime edition for Radio 4 Professor Peter Hennessy, the well-known historian of contemporary British history, recommended taking up the ideas of the Liberal Sir William Beveridge. In 1942 Beveridge wrote of ‘five giant evils’ that must be combatted through the reforms he sought which resulted after the Second World War in the Modern Welfare State and the National Health Service.

There are five evils in our society today that need fighting, said Professor Hennessy, listing what he believes they are, to make the changes necessary after the current health crisis. His ideas were then discussed in the programme, the World at One, by Kenneth Clarke and Alastair Darling. The two well-known retired politicians, from the Conservative and Labour parties respectively, agreed on the principle and several of the five suggested ills, adding modifications of their own.

Perhaps Peter Hennessy had been reading Liberal Democrat Voice. Five great ills of today, matching the Beveridge evils, have been extensively discussed in articles this year. They have placed them in the context of the need for a new Social Contract since the Beveridge-inspired reforms after the Second World War were seen as a social contract between government and people.