In his recent article, Buddy Anderson argues that the Liberal Democrats are not going to replace the Conservatives if our party moves further to the economic left. Of course, it is worth questioning the premise. Do we really want to replace the Conservatives? Nevertheless, if we take up the notion for the sake of argument, what would it actually mean? Buddy is of course right that just because an Orange Book Liberalism didn’t thrill electors after 2010 doesn’t mean it could never work. Quite so. However, the theory of Tory displacement Buddy favours, assumes a straightforward link between Conservative voters and market-led liberalism. The latter position has a number of strands, but they might be neatly divided into the following policy preferences:
- Keep state spending at or below 35% of GDP
- Keep taxes as low as possible
- Reduce the liabilities on the public balance sheet by contracting-out public services
- Remove regulatory barriers to economic growth
It is often supposed that Conservative voters display a close identification with all these positions. They point to Thatcher’s three election wins, as undeniable proof of the proposition. However, in reality, the traditional Conservative base (from say 1979 to 2019) was a complex coalition of overlapping interests, which coalesced around the notion of ‘popular Capitalism’. Inside the Thatcher tent financers jostled with small business owners, farmers jockeyed with moral conservatives, ruthless ad men jostled with blue-rinse WI fundraisers. Thatcher’s genius was her ability to neutralise dissent in her coalition by conceding limited collectivism (in the case of institutions like the NHS and the Royal Mail), offering something to cultural Conservatives e.g. Victorian values, while enthusing the economic Right by privatising public assets.
Few in Thatcher’s coalition, were totally convinced free-market liberals. This fact becomes starker when we move the clock forward to our messy present. A number of startling poles reveal that a large percentage of Tory voters support forms of public ownership in areas such as transport, water and energy. In a YouGov poll in the run-up to the 2024 General Election, of those who intended to vote Conservative, 89% supported a publicly owned NHS, 64% wanted Royal Mail in public hands, 60% supported railway re-nationalisation, 70% supported publicly owned water companies and 52% supported the re-nationalisation of energy. Tory voters are not straightforward free-market-liberals. Even if enough LibDems felt that Centre-Right prescriptions offered a better articulation of liberal philosophy, there are not enough market-liberal voters to make the exercise electorally worthwhile.
Does this mean that poor Buddy has to resign himself to a soggy centre-Left John Rawls-inspired Utopia (such as Ed Davey hinted at in the summer)? Perhaps, but as many an astute reader of Rawls will know, there is no reason that somebody with Buddy’s Centre-Right politics could not thrive there. After all, not unlike Tory voters, Social Liberalism is more complicated than the stereotype. Rawls’ ideal liberal society does not seek absolute equality of conditions, nor does it abandon competition, property or markets. Rawls accepts also the necessity of inequality of outcome as a reflection of ability and a spur to effort. However, as Rawls suggests, a liberal society can only accept inequality under narrow conditions. As Rawls defines them:
Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; They are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society. (Rawls, Theory of Justice, p. 266).
Does this mean we must live in a high-tax Scandinavian Social Democracy? Not necessarily. It is perfectly possible to read Rawls’ liberalism through Centre-Right lenses. Thus, we might conclude that helping the most disadvantaged means reducing income tax on work and markedly increasing taxes on Capital—a cause that Radical Liberals and Orange Bookers can both get behind. The common ground might go deeper still. The problem, as G.K. Chesterton once put it, is not that there are too many Capitalists, but rather comparatively too few. To remedy this, Rawls threw his support behind the notion of a property-owning democracy. Citizens need access to property not simply income transfers. In such a society, one could envisage less onerous personal taxation, alongside effective but more focused public services, serving a less unequal population. This was certainly Jo Grimond’s hope. I agree with Buddy that in principle, ‘Liberalism is for everyone. It has the depth and breadth to challenge lazy assumptions whether on the Fabian Left or the laissez-faire Right. However, to maintain this inclusive quality, we owe it to ourselves to reject strawmen and simplistic polarities.
* Ben Wood is currently an Academic Support and Skills Tutor at the University of Leeds and a Project Editor at the John Stuart Mill Institute. He is a member of Leeds Liberal Democrats.
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29 Comments
Thank you Ben for taking the time to write such a courteous response to my article. It is a breath of fresh air to see online debate take a less venomous and more constructive tone.
You’re very welcome Buddy. Keep writing and challenging us. 🙂
I don’t think it was Orange Book Liberalism that didn’t thrill voters after 2010, it was some disastrous decisions that the party supported while in coalition. Tuition fees, benefit cuts and the bedroom tax spring to mind.
As for Thatcher as someone who lived and suffered through her premiership I would have to say her success came from luck rather than ideology. Under her leadership the Tories won big victories as a result of a divided opposition. Poor Labour leaders also helped.
The Alliance vote was high in both the 1983 and 1987 elections, under a PR system the Tories would have almost certainly been in opposition.
The tragedy post 2010 is that having made considerable progress in many Labour areas and during the General Election campaign overtaken them in some opinion polls it was all thrown away. Looking forward the idea of replacing the Conservatives is nonsense, they will revive in opposition as they did post 1997 and many other times in their history.
The task for Liberals is to continue to build our party as an viable alternative to the many varieties of authoritarianism on offer.
“Replacing” is ambiguous.
Nobody wants to morph into a conservative party i.e. replacing the Tories as the conservative option.
But we do have the chance to replace the conservatives as the default dominant party in our southern heartlands. We do this by offering a liberal policy programme focused on the issues that concern ordinary people. We did this in July and it worked well.
The other advantage of presenting a liberal programme focused on positive liberty is that that appeals to typical Labour voters too.
If it was the case that moving “to the right” was the way to win even more ex-Conservative voters, then this would in the same act lead to us losing support from “left-wing” voters.
It would be a strategic error based on underlying incorrect psephological premises. The electorate is not stretched out on an X-axis and we have to move “nearer” to them to win their vote.
We have to get former Tory voters – many of whom will not define themselves as “right-wing” or even “political” – to realise that a liberal approach is in their own (and wider) interests.
Obviously, to do that we can’t return to being an inward-looking narrow party focused on activist enthusiasms such as PR or Single Market.
And we also need to be a broad church.
The whole concept of Orange Book Liberalism is a myth. Look at the people who wrote ion the orange book and you see a wide range of Liberal thinkers not all wild eyed Neo Libs. There has been an attempt by anti LibDem politicians to invent “Orange book” Liberalism to attack and vilify the party and try to pretend that it’s a real thing.
Sure, many mistakes were made during the coalition and we have to get over that, but hopefully we did learn from those mistakes. The most important in my view is NO COALITION WITHOUT ELECTORAL REFORM. Or put it another way, no PR no deal.
Might it help if L D policies and communications were motivated by a drive to make our society effective, equitable, dynamic and benign for all our citizens and their children, rather than play “zero-sum games” with other political parties?
The aim is not to become the Conservative Party (if you want that a better choice would be to merge with it) ) but to replace it as (firstly) Official opposition on the way the Government
The thing is, a right of centre party will re-emerge sooner or later. It could be neo-liberal, it could be a nasty isolationist/nationalist force, or it could be a mix of social conservatism and economic liberalism.
Mark Pack often makes the point that the UK has become more socially liberal over recent years. A liberal party that offers both social liberalism AND economic liberalism ought to be well placed to make progress
Sorry, Tristan, but your yellow brick road is going nowhere if it heads towards a pale blue destination. The last time the Lib Dems followed such a philosophical track popular support dropped from nearly seven million (2010) to just under two and a half million (2015).
If there’s a long term gap anywhere (as Jo Grimond suggested many years ago) it’s to replace an increasingly right wing Labour Government with a radical alternative before the inevitable tide turns and the Tories regain their popularity. As Jo often proclaimed : “We in the Liberal Party are members of a radical party. We are a party of Reform”. I heard him say it dozens of times in my youth.
The party, which I first joined way back in 1961, was also the party of Keynes and Beveridge
The Orange Book was a clever use of hedge fund wealth to buy up a centre-left political party and turn it into a centre-right party which could ally with the Tories. The lead perpetrator, Paul Marshall, flattered a select cohort of up-and-coming right-wing Lib Dems, such as Clegg and Laws, by giving them space to publicise their opinions and themselves. It was the beginning of what Clegg’s allies called the “Clegg coup”.
Paul Marshall hasn’t gone away. He no longer claims to be a Lib Dem supporter, however. He is a major investor in GB News and has just bought the Spectator. Clearly, he is good at what he is doing. The BBC call it “his bid to build an empire of right-wing media outlets”. Wrecking the Lib Dems was how Marshall cut his political teeth. Where next?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8l35xl1l2o
I don’t believe that the Lib Dems are going to replace the Tories just as we weren’t going to replace Labour in 2019. People get carried away at moments like these. “Finishing the job” is the wrong priority the real aim should be to develop a loyal vote so the party retains more than 50% of its voters between elections.
He didn’t wreck the Lib Dems: have you forgotten we’ve just had our best result in over a hundred years!?
Paul Marshall has moved rightwards since his LD days. There is another famous example.
The reason austerity was imposed on Italy and Greece by the ECB was that they had very high debt interest rates whereas the UK did not. Austerity or certainly the way it was done was quite needless.
Voter churn is much higher now than a generation ago. This is true for all parties.
There will always be right-wing options to the right of us and left-wing options to the left.
We need to be a viable alternative for voters who would otherwise vote Tory unthinkingly. The Canadian Liberals are an example.
This doesn’t mean a conservative option will cease to exist.
OK Chris Moore, after the Orange Book the Lib Dems did eventually bounce right back – after 15 wasted years in the coalition and/or the doldrums, that is!
Half of the LD’s old supporters have still not come back, though perhaps Starmer’s manifold failings will now drive some of them them back.
Getting back to what is actually discussed in this article, I’d say the big problem with Rawlson justifiable inequality is that pretty much every right winger will argue that they’re policies will benefit the economy enough to help everyone, regardless of whether or not they actually do. And economics very complex and difficult to predict so they might not be proven wrong until a long time after a policy is implemented and even then it may not be clear.
Consequently the only useful way to interpret Rawls in the real world is to place a heavy burden of profe on those advocating things that could increase inequality. I.e. there must be overwhelming evidence or an overwhelming consensus among economists that a policy will be of net benefit to the poorest.
How many of Liberal Reform’s members and supporters would agree to this I really don’t know; they appear to be more reasonable than Liberal Vision used to be, but are they THAT reasonable?
I don’t think I’d particularly agree with Ben’s definition of ‘market-led liberalism’: His list includes several points that I would say are not an essential part of market-led liberalism but misses some things that are. To my mind, market-led liberalism requires
Acceptance of competition and the free market as the best way to generate wealth
Respect for the profit motive (and in particular, understanding that if large companies make large profits, that’s normally a good thing not a bad thing)
Acceptance that in a free society, there will inevitably be a significant degree of income inequality, and that is also a good thing to the extent that it reflects people having the freedom to build their own economic lives.
That’s not incompatible with things like support for public ownership where it’s appropriate (usually, because competition is impossible) or for taxes and Government spending being higher than today, but it would normally tend to go with a scepticism for solutions that always reduce to, expecting the Government to spending more or regulating more, or get involved with ever more spheres of activity.
@ Ben Wood,
I can understand the points about “regulatory barriers and economic growth” and “taxes as low as possible”, but I’m having trouble with these:
“Keep state spending at or below 35% of GDP”
What’s special about 35%? Many of the EU countries have considerably higher public spending than this. What would be the advantage in cutting taxes when we inevitably would have to pay even more than we’d saved for private health care, school fees , university tuition costs etc.
em> “Reduce the liabilities on the public balance sheet by contracting-out public services”
‘Contracting out’ might hide future liabilities from the balance sheet but it doesn’t reduce them. For example we could get the private sector to construct a building, (or a bridge or a road etc) intended for public use and lease it back.
True, the costs of the the construction wouldn’t appear on the government balance sheet but all we’d be doing is replacing future interest costs with much higher rental costs.
I doubt any of us, even the most committed of “pro-market liberals”, would advise our own children to avoid buying a house, to keep their debt levels down, and stick to renting instead!
@David Allen.
David, you say this . “OK …..after the Orange Book the Lib Dems did eventually bounce right back – after 15 wasted years in the coalition and/or the doldrums, that is!
Half of the LD’s old supporters have still not come back, though perhaps Starmer’s manifold failings will now drive some of them them back.”
In reverse order: I’m not sure what you are referring to by “half” of the LDs’ old supporters. Far less than half those who voted for us in 2010 will have voted for us in 2024. 23% national vote in 2010; 13% in 2024. But of those who voted for us in 2010, some will have died. And the distribution of our vote was pretty different. So many in formerly strong areas won’t have voted for us this time. On the other hand, we also attracted many new voters, particularly in winnable areas!
“15 wasted years?” You are a born Jeremiah. In Coalition, we had the opportunity to legislate many liberal changes: Gay marriage, raising tax thresholds for those at the bottom, advancing renewable power, commissioning a nuclear power plant, poor pupil premium and others. We also seized the opportunity to make several serious policy errors. But scarcely wasted years.
And the long fight back, gathering pace over the last few years…. wasted?
Come on, cheer up.
@Peter Martin: off balance sheet liabilities are often a red flag at company level!
Much PFI creates perverse incentives for private companies to cut quality. One reason this happens is that tendering is done at unrealistically low levels to win contracts, requiring penny pinching later. Significant costs involved in tendering also have to be recovered.
Chris Moore – I really would advise against talking down to fellow Lib Dems with terms like “You are a born Jerimiah.” I think you should be ashamed of yourself as it is nothing less than name calling and a thoroughly disdainful put down and I suggest you apologise to David Allan at once.
Tbh, David, I personally wouldn’t mind being called a “born Jeremiah” as I would regard it as obviously friendly humour.
Does not this debate indicate that Ed Davey is inaccurate in describing our task as finishing the job of ousting the Conservatives ? Yes we totally disagree with much of what the recent Conservative government did but there are people among previous Conservative voters whose support we can welcome AND there are many among previous and recent Labour voters whose support we could also win. We are different from both and need to set out a clear vision for the future focussed on helping those most in need to develop themselves and helping most people to obtain or maintain a good quality of life. Groups of people should be our focus so that policies are linked together around that. I used to think it was all about being people of principle, but that is wrong if those principles are too dogmatically stated and not centred on the needs of individual people.
Speaking as a neutral, I would say Lib Dems have now made as much progress as could reasonably be expected against the Tories. Lib Dems did well in July because the Tories became incredibly unpopular.
However, now the Labour Party are in government it will be their turn to become unpopular. The Tories will inevitably recover some lost ground so the opportunities for further gains in Tory areas will be far lower. There may well be no chance at all in this Parliament.
On the other hand just as there are many erstwhile Tories who will vote Lib Dem but won’t ever vote Labour, there are many previously Labour voters who won’t ever vote Tory, but they may well vote Lib Dem if Labour’s policies fail to deliver what was promised.
Time for Lib Dems to switch their focus?
This author writes Politicians often miscalculate public opinion when making unpopular decisions“Politicians often make unpopular decisions at great electoral cost, despite ever-increasing tools to gauge public opinion. Exploring three high-profile cases, interviews with decision-makers in the UK Government reveal a bias towards personal preferences over evidence of electoral damage, the misjudgement of an issue’s salience, and an assumption that voters prioritise policy outcomes. The study underscores the importance of diverse perspectives in the policy process to counteract biased reasoning.”
“From my interviews, the most common theme that emerged was “motivated reasoning” – key decision-makers wanted to pursue these policies and overlooked evidence of their potential electoral damage.”
“Several senior Liberal Democrats MPs had never believed in the merits of abolishing tuition fees:”
“There were plenty of other policies which frankly I think people in government for the Liberal Democrats believed in far, far more which we wanted to pursue. Frankly we weren’t willing to throw it all away over a policy of which numerous attempts were made to refine or ditch in the run up to the 2010 election. (Interview with former Special Adviser, 2018)”
Hi Chris (Moore)
When you say “Tbh, David, I personally wouldn’t mind being called a “born Jeremiah” as I would regard it as obviously friendly humour,” I fear that instead of taking time to think and reflect upon the point I made, you have rushed in with another quick one liner.
While you as writer may choose to regard it as “obviously friendly humour” as Lib Dems believing in diversity, we need to take into account how those who read it may take it as well.
From that wider viewpoint, I would suggest it is certainly not obvious that it is friendly humour except to you, but sounds much more like name calling and disdainful put down.
I really do suggest you reconsider what you have posted considering the wider context of those who read it and not just of one person who wrote it and perhaps also consider whether you do or do not wish to apologise at the very least for not making it clear it was solely intended to be friendly humour.
Weren’t Jeremiah’s prophesies of doom proven correct? We could have done with him in 2010.
“Citizens need access to property not simply income transfers”. The problem with trying to equalise wealth is that you don’t really own wealth unless you have the right to spend it all. The benefits of wealth (investment income and capital gains) are much easier to tax.