Of the six recognised pillars of Liberalism – liberty, equality, community, democracy, environment, and internationalism – each can wax and wane in prominence depending on the Zeitgeist. When human rights are under attack, liberty should be highlighted. When Britain’s role in the world is centre-stage, internationalism comes to the fore. All six are always important, but there are times when we need to lean into one pillar more than others.
The most crucial pillar of Liberalism as we gear up for elections in 2026 (and every year up to the next general election) will be community. In saying this, I’m fighting hard not to let the agenda be dictated by the populists, but as Roz Savage beautifully put it in her LDV column on 30 September, we have to be tough on Farage but also tough on the causes of Farage. And the erosion of people’s sense of community is a big cause.
It’s easy to forget that, until about 300 years ago, most people in this country never went more than 50 miles from their place of birth in their entire lifetime. They identified with their locality, they sometimes had to defend it from hostile threats from without, and they may have had rituals that bound them together as a geographical community. Therein lay their sense of security.
The modern era of technology, travel and television has blown all that out of the water. We can go to the other side of the globe for a couple of days, we can ‘see’ life in the Antarctic, we can become ‘friends’ with people we’ve never met, and we can have our stag and hen parties in eastern European cities. That has brought social change, and shifting assumptions about what is acceptable to do and say. Which is fine if we’re all in it, but once you get large numbers of people who feel left behind, what security can they grab hold of? If that has been swept away by the forces of progress, resentment builds up.
That is a partial explanation of why far-right parties which hark back to a past of community cohesion – whether real or imagined – are doing so well. To save the post-war liberal democracy that is the bedrock of our quality of life, we have to give people their security. And that means fashioning a new incarnation of community, so people feel they belong. Many who want to vote for far-right populists know deep-down that these parties don’t have the answers, but the emotional frustration is so great they vote for them anyway. It’s that emotional attachment we need to break.
I felt Keir Starmer was on the right lines in his Labour conference speech when he asked rhetorically (and repeatedly) “Is this a country that’s broken?” Citing a number of individuals from across Britain who had done admirable things, from starting a girls’ football team to wiping away racist graffiti, he told a story about a country we can feel good about. Yes, it was a bit cheap at times, but the underlying thought process was right.
We Lib Dems need to find our own story to tell about why we’re all in this together. It may be as simple as getting behind our sports teams, even if we don’t like the sport (I found it moving to see so many people supporting the England women’s rugby team over the summer with flags draped on lamp posts, at least I assume that’s who the flags were for), just so we show we’re part of this community. It’s also about highlighting that national icons like Freddie Mercury and Mo Farah were once immigrants we welcomed to Britain.
Patriotism should be part of Liberalism: the nation part of community. But it’s not just about our country. We can celebrate the community of our village, town, city, county, nation, even continent (I wonder how many Brexit voters cheered on Europe’s victorious Ryder Cup team). It can also be the community of our social groups, so it’s important our progressivism doesn’t go so far as to leave too many people scratching their heads and muttering that the world has gone mad.
Community isn’t everything. The Liberal pillars of equality and democracy are also vital to making people feel we are all in this together, but a sense that we’re all from a coherent entity is an important starting point.
The threat from far-right populism is real, and we only have to look at America, Argentina, Hungary, etc, to see how dangerous this threat is. So let’s tackle the threat at its root, and make people feel they belong. Liberalism is an outward-looking creed, but a sense of belonging is not outside its remit. That’s why we have to elevate the pillar of community to make the Lib Dems a force at coming elections – a force that really understands where people’s sense of insecurity comes from.
* Chris Bowers is a two-term district councillor and four-time parliamentary candidate. He writes on cross-party cooperation, was the lead author of the New Liberal Manifesto, and is unofficial coordinator of the Yorkists.
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7 Comments
Lots of factors involved and a sense of community needs effective communication, hence friendly door-knocking, support for local groups and good local council communication is needed. Will the proposed abolition of district councils make this more difficult?
A sense of belonging begins with overcoming people’s feeling of being ignored or left out, thus linking with inequality of provision. It also includes acceptance of diversity on their part and hence the need to overcome prejudice and stereotyping, focussing on individuals more than groups.
Another factor is that some people feel their way of life, culture and access to goods and services is threatened. This impinges on immigration and I think it vital that people get to know that alongside care for asylum seekers, we do believe in controlling immigration and share the view that people coming over in these boats is wrong.
“Over the years that followed, those opportunities passed millions by. For these people, the new global market meant only grinding deindustrialisation, acute demographic change and rapid cultural transformation.
The gospel which the Labour party has been preaching for the past three decades has little resonance across today’s Britain, particularly those parts of it beyond our fashionable cities and university towns. Globalisation and radical progressivism may have brought financial and spiritual enrichment to a lucky few – but they have failed the masses. That’s a truth that parts of the party are finally beginning to acknowledge”
Paul Emery – Blue Labour – on Tony Blair’s 2005 conference speech citing Globalization.
Same could be said of any progressive party that’s followed suit. Populists are here to stay. The progressive left only has itself to blame.
Chris, I must point out that your opening statement isn’t accurate. There are seven, not six, ‘recognised pillars of liberalism’. The seventh, Human Rights, was included in an amendment to the F22 motion ‘What Liberal Democrats believe’, passed at the autumn 2021 Conference. Though you concentrate in your article on Community, a very important part of our beliefs, I am sure you recognise the importance of Human Rights, particularly at this time when the Rightist parties are threatening to do away with the European Human Rights Convention and related crucial British laws.
I think this is a great article. The importance of community is something I often feel gets neglected in liberal politics, so it’s welcome to see someone calling that out. And I think @Chris you are spot on about how that neglect has opened the door for Reform.
To emphasize that, Katharine’s comment inspired me to look up F22 (here https://www.libdems.org.uk/conference/motions/autumn-2021/f22), and it seems to me that, despite being a kind-of definition of our philosophy, that motion totally missed the mark on community. A sense of community is in large part about, feeling that you belong, that there is some cohesiveness in the people around you, the the people in your neighbourhood aren’t hostile to your values, etc. and you feel safe with them. But in that motion, the paragraph on ‘community’ instead gives a definition of what would more correctly be called, ‘civic society’ and fails to say anything about real, actual, community. That makes me despair – honestly, if even the people who wrote our policy on community don’t get what community is about, then we really have a lot of work to do in this area.
Greg, spot on. Sadly, if the progressive left were indeed starting to grasp this simple fact in 2005, they promptly dropped it and still haven’t got a clue where it is.
Thank you to everyone who has commented, although I’m struggling to see the relevance of Greg’s point – I agree with much of it, I just don’t quite see how it fits into the discussion about community needing to be stressed, other than in the very broadest sense. Katharine, I’m happy to acknowledge human rights as a seventh pillar of Liberalism, though I had rather seen it as an offshoot of liberty and equality, rather than a pillar in its own right (just as I tend to see environment more as a sub-section of the principle of protecting the common good rather than nature protection, sustainability, etc, for its own sake). I happen to believe that inequality is the biggest issue in the sense that too many people are being unfairly treated (maybe that’s at the root of Greg’s point about globalisation?), but in electoral terms there are plenty of voters tempted by Reform who are comfortably off, and we break their emotional attraction to Reform by letting them know that the community they know is still intact and it is a source of comfort. Thanks to everyone for engaging.
Belonging is a fundamental human need. What we belong to or are a part of can change. Whether it is a football team or a political party it fulfils the same function. We are all also part of the human race or life on earth. We can decide to alter what is the priority for us at this time. Whatever it is love is the glue that keeps it together.