Recently, I have been reading ‘Jo Grimond: Towards the Sound of Gunfire” by Michael McManus and, although there is much to be learnt from Grimond’s leadership of the Liberal party, it is his later years that most interested me. On Margaret Thatcher’s arrival in Downing Street, Grimond, “at first hoped that a restatement of liberalism, might come from that unlikeliest sources, a Conservative government”. Despite soon expressing his disappointment, writing, “there has been no serious assault on . . . excessive government”, Thatcher’s Conservatives, nevertheless, did in some ways successfully cannibalise a theme once strongly identified with the liberal tradition, namely, the idea of spreading ownership. Whereas Richard Cobden argued for greater peasant proprietorship, J.S Mill advocated for workers’ cooperatives, and Lloyd Geoge championed ‘three acres and a cow’, Thatcher introduced ‘Right to Buy’ and wider share ownership. Within such a context, it is, perhaps, no wonder that Grimond possessed a (very) qualified admiration for (aspects of) Thatcherism.
Now, however, with the Conservatives indulging in nativist and nationalistic tub thumping, Liberal Democrats are well positioned to replace the Conservatives as the second largest party by reclaiming our reputation as the advocates of ‘ownership for all’. This should inform our thinking at various levels, including the home, the workplace, and public services.
With data for 2022–23 showing that 39% of 25 to 34-year-olds owned their home, 20 percentage points lower than the peak (59%) seen in 2000, we urgently need to fix Britian’s broken housing market. Meanwhile, in the workplace more employees want autonomy, and familiar Liberal policies, such as workers’ cooperatives and employee ownership, are key to this.
However, it is with regard to public services that the rest of this article is concerned with. Too many citizens feel they have too little control or ownership over their public services. Although Liberal Democrats are rightly in favour of devolving power from central to regional and local government as one way to help address this, there is little point in doing so if authoritarian, unresponsive, and incompetent bureaucrats in Whitehall have only been replaced by authoritarian, unresponsive, and incompetent bureaucrats at the Town Hall.
Therefore, in addition to devolving power to local government, we should seek to devolve power to the level of the individual citizen. Choice, competition, and experimentation should be our watchwords for the provision of public services and monopoly, hierarchy, and uniformity our enemy. While the state should be the funder of public services – although, in some cases, a role for co-payment may be both necessary and desirable – greater emphasis should be placed on others, such as private companies, charities, mutuals, and others providing those services. Crucially, this should take place within a competitive environment, and possibly via the use of vouchers in various sectors, such as education, healthcare, and social care.
Not only would such reforms hopefully produce more efficient, effective, responsive, and diverse services, but it is the educative, or intellectual, benefits that are possibly the least noticed, and yet the most liberal, advantages of such reforms. For John Stuart Mill, writing in the context of challenging the tyranny of custom and extolling the benefits of expanding the range of civic duties,
The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice.
After all, as Mill continues,
The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used.
By providing citizens with greater choice over the provision of their schooling, healthcare, and social care we can help create a truly liberal polity, with an active and independent citizenry, and not a nation of passive and dependent supplicants.
* Daniel Duggan is a Liberal Democrat Councillor in Gateshead
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29 Comments
Totally agree that there is an enormous opportunity for our party in the radical centre – even centre right – of British politics, and the prize is to extingush the Conservatives as the “natural party of government – or even as a party of government at all.
Making headway against a social democratic party in power with the huge majority it has is much likely to be much harder work.
This article is worth a look: note the result of the election the author predicted: https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/02/will-the-lib-dems-seize-their-chance-to-replace-the-tories
“there is little point in doing so if authoritarian, unresponsive, and incompetent bureaucrats in Whitehall have only been replaced by authoritarian, unresponsive, and incompetent bureaucrats at the Town Hall.”
I think we’d do well without making these sorts of right wing conspiratorial attacks on hardworking (and often underpaid) public sector workers. Especially as a good number of them vote for us!
I remember in the lead up to the Coalition years Nick Clegg made a speech about the need to devolve power from local government to the individual.
In practice what this meant was that he supported free schools and academies, the policies implemented by Micheal Gove. And the problem with it turned out to be that there was no local democratic accountability. Parents were not allowed to turn down free schools and academies for their children. They had them whether they liked it or not. You can tell the policy failed because the Tory party decided afterwards that they wanted a return to grammer schools.
I am not clear that there is a problem in local government with “authoritarian bureaucrats. Maybe the author can give some specific examples so that we know what we are talking about? What is true is that there is chronic underfunding of local government after years of austerity, and we need to have proportional representation. If local politicians want to deliver local services via voluntary organisations that may work as long as voters are clear that they are the ones accountable for making those decisions.
The era of economic Thatcherism is over, we saw what happened to Liz Truss and the Tory party at the last general election. Look at the changing political outlook of younger people, considerably more to the left than the older generations. Today we need to find other sources for new ideas.
@ Geoffrey
Re the refoms to educatuon implemented by the coalition -firstly tjey are generally agreed to have ben a success, at least in yerms of improving exam results) and secondly David Laws was education minister at the time, so the Lib Dems may derlserve a shre of the credit – though I think he concentrated more on the pupli premium.
Of course improving education is about more than improving exam results. It’s worth recalling that JS Mill was very sceptical about the state controlling education though he accepted the state must pay. I agree on both counts.
Our 2024 voters prefer Labour to The Tories by about 5 to 1, moving Right is not a good idea if we want to grow.
Like most Libdems I am a Social Democrat & a Liberal so I prefer Democracy to Market forces, as Local as possible for Education.
Ownership without availability is what an increasing majority of citizens have/be offered at the moment.
Might it be that until/unless H M. G funds vitally needed infrastructure services properly, theorising about « ownership » is not (yet) relevant?
In the contexts of vital infrastructure contexts, what does « ownership » mean?
Who has « ownership » of the some 25% of our children who are chronically underfed/starving?
@Paul I’m pretty sure that the reason voters currently prefer Labour to the Tories has nothing to do with which party is left or right-wing: It’s because the Tories have a known recent history of extraordinary incompetence, a reputation for corruption, and voters see them as responsible for lots of bad things that have happened recently. So that doesn’t work as an argument for right-wing being in principle electorally unpopular (As amply demonstrated by Reform, who, starting almost from scratch, gained more votes than us despite being very right wing).
And it’s not an either/or choice between democracy and market forces: The two are not at all incompatible. In fact I’d argue that, at least in the economic sphere, market forces are absolutely essential if we want people to be able to choose how they live their lives.
@Steve: Could you explain why you continue to keep repeating false claims along the lines of 25% of UK children starving, despite that in other threads where you’ve posted it, that claim has been debunked?
I’m a bit dubious about some of this. Polite reminder: J. S. Mill lived in the pre-digital age! One thought is using AI to help the intelligent consumption of public services, making informed choice easier.
@ Simon,
To be fair to Steve he did say starving or underfed .
Underfed could mean that their diet was inadequate.
Rather than arguing about precise definitions we should be looking at why diseases such as scurvy and rickets have reappeared in the numbers they have, and deciding what we are going to do about it.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/18/retur-of-victorian-era-diseases-to-the-uk-scabies-measles-rickets-scurvy
Sorry. That last link doesn’t work. Try this.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/18/return-of-victorian-era-diseases-to-the-uk-scabies-measles-rickets-scurvy
I worked a great deal with Jo Grimond at Liberal HQ in the early 1960s. In paticular I was responsible for all his arrangements at the 1966 general election. There is a great deal to be written about Jo as a fine leader but, in the context of the recent general election, I recall being asked from time to time by the party press office, “Can you get Jo to do such and such a ‘photo opportunity?'” Jo would always refuse, once saying to me, “Michael, politics is too important for gimmicks.’ There are no photos of Jo in embarrassing circumstances, but he had considerable influence on politics by his writings and speeches.
Michael, I suppose the definition of a stunt has completely changed hasn’t it? They say Lord Hailsham (as he later was) lost the Tory leadership race over being seen publicly feeding his baby daughter when he took her to party conference. That would now be seen as an adorable clip of an authentic young dad and it would go viral!
It is absolutely fascinating – as someone who was a member pre-2015, albeit briefly – to watch the old left-right split rebirth itself once you work up to a large enough number of MPs. Again the question of whether to chase more Tory voters versus the risk of alienating the people who just voted tactically to support a Labor government and keep the Tories out. Again a victory built around pointing at potholes and one or two specific policy platforms which doesn’t enable the voters to get a clear sense of the party activists’ diverse aspirations, and therefore builds in a potential risk of buyer remorse.
I hope you have all genuinely learnt from the last 15 years, it rather feels like you’re in a Groundhog Day moment.
Now the ‘message discipline’ (ie politely hiding your activists’ views from the public) of the election period is over, the fantasist castles-in-the-sky building of the party factions can begin, in which each faction feels free to publicly imagine entirely rebuilding a very large and oddly shaped mutative tent on four-square foundations that relate ONE very specific understanding of the party, without feeling responsible for what that might do at the other ends/corners/bends of the ‘tent’….
Michael M: I drafted most of the newspaper articles published in Jo Grimond’s name in the 21966 election – and I’m not sure that I’d agree with much of what was in them now. The issues were very different then – and the style (and amateurism) of campaigning was of a totally different order to what we see today. I’m not at all sure that Jo would want to shrink the state today, given the changes in demography and life expectancy, health-care, environmental degradation and technological development. But he’d still be strong on local autonomy and shared ownership.
The opening paragraphs of the Liberal Manifesto for the 1966 election http://www.libdemmanifesto.com/1966/1966-liberal-manifesto.shtml could be repeated in 2026, 60 years on from that election…
“Eighteen months ago many people had high hopes that a change of Government from Conservative to Labour would bring about a real change in the country’s fortunes.
…Now events have shown that, for all their talk about modernisation, Labour too cannot find the answer to our problems. However admirable their intentions. they, like the Conservatives, have been unable to implement workable solutions.
There are very simple reasons for this. Both parties have their roots firmly in one section of the community or another. The Conservatives, both ideologically and financially, are still tied to the interests of capital. Equally Labour are tied to the interests of the Unions, often to the detriment of both.
,,,the unique position of the Liberal Party enables us to bring new thinking and a fresh, objective approach to Britain’s economic and social problems and to put forward solutions that work. We can do this precisely because we have no vested interest in protecting one group or another. We are not a class party’. We draw our support from all groups and classes and we are free to reconcile conflicting interests for the benefit of the whole community. We are the party of all individuals, no matter what their background.”
starving
1) Dying of hunger
2) Very hungry; ravenous
(Collins Dictionary)
Is it O. K. to have increasing numbers of children and adults suffering cumulative disadvantage/handicap by being, at the present, permanently underfed?
How is our nation going to be economically sound when its present and future workforce is being physically, emotionally and mentally damaged, in some cases permanently, by long term food deprivation?
Is it O. K. when so many of our children are always really hungry but not dying?
A tip of the hat to Peter Martin!
@Matt (Bristol): extrapolating from a handful of remarks by habitual posters on an obscure party blog is NOT a sound method for gauging the internal moods of the party. (Btw those posters are on average much older than the average age of party members.) You currently know nothing about the party’s internal moods.
Moreover those habitual posters have been arguing about positioning for years: nothing to do with the decent recent result.
@ Joe,
You quote from the 1966 Liberal Manifesto about the supposed deficiencies of both main political parties
The Labour Party did win that election quite comfortably and with an increased majority so they must have been doing something right. Maybe their left wing credentials weren’t doing them any harm at the time. This was to change in the next 4 years.
The difference now is that it isn’t just “The Conservatives, both ideologically and financially, (who) are still tied to the interests of capital. ”
The Labour Party is just the same.
Finally, you say, the “victory” was built around “potholes” and one or two policy platforms.
That is total tosh, Matt. The LDs barely mentioned potholes: certainly no more than the other parties. And the emphasis on health and social care was coherent and well thought through and engaged historical liberal commitments to positive liberty. Moreover, we are the only party seriously linking health and care. A topic on which several LD MPs have authoritative experience.
@Steve that’s evading the question. Of course it’s not OK for any child to have to go without adequate food. That there are families in the UK who are, through no fault of their own, unable to buy enough healthy food is an awful problem that does need to be addressed.
But it’s also not OK to massively exaggerate the problem and falsely make out that the numbers involved are far greater than they actually are. Development of policy as well as debates do need to be based on honesty about the problems we face.
For those claiming that child poverty is exaggerated :
Source : ‘House of Lords Library, Paper on Child Poverty, 2024’
1.2 Selected stakeholder comment
In a press release issued following the DWP release, the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) said the estimates represented a “record high” for child poverty in the UK. The group said the release showed that “100,000 more children were pulled into relative poverty (after housing costs)” when compared with a year earlier. It added that this meant “4.3 million children (30% of all UK children) were in poverty” in 2022/23, “up from 3.6 million in 2010/11”. The group’s press release continued:
69% of poor children lived in working families
46% of children in families with three or more children were in poverty, up from 36% in 2011/12
poor families have fallen deeper into poverty: 2.9 million children were in deep poverty (i.e. with a household income below 50% of after-housing-costs equivalised median income), 600,000 more than in 2010/11
36% of all children in poverty were in families with a youngest child aged under five
47% of children in Asian and British Asian families were in poverty, 51% of children in Black/African/Caribbean and Black British families, and 24% of children in white families
44% of children in lone parent families were in poverty
34% of children living in families where someone has a disability were in poverty
Here is some data on poverty, including food poverty:
https://www.trusselltrust.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/05/State-of-Hunger-2021-Report-Final.pdf
When something generally and particularly is effectively done to remove this avoidable problem, then I shall cease to draw attention to it. Otherwise I shall continue to draw attention to it.
Where can data on poverty reduction be found?
The newly elected Labour MP, Torsten Bell, has been vociferously arguing for scapping of the two child limit for years posting a strong argument weeks before the election We can easily end child poverty in the UK. Here are five things to know
“If we combine market reforms to tilt labour and housing markets in the interests of lower-income families, with redistribution, then poverty can and will fall. Let’s make that concrete. Scrapping the two-child benefit cap has real costs (£2.5bn) but they are nothing compared to the costs of keeping it: abolition will immediately lift about half a million children out of poverty.”
He did not support the SNP amendment arguing “… you don’t often see big changes to social security outside of fiscal events because decisions have to be made in the round (underpinned by fiscal forecasts). I spent long enough as an HMT [Treasury] civil servant to know the alternative is chaos. We’ve had quite enough of that.
“Ultimately the government, and all of us, will be judged not on votes during parliamentary game playing but on whether we deliver rising living standards and growing opportunities for the most disadvantaged in society in Swansea and across the country Welsh Labour MP who’s an expert on child poverty defends voting to keep the two child benefit cap
@Steve: It’s great that you are willing to draw attention to an important issue, but have you considered that it is possible to draw attention to it without continually posting falsehoods about the extent of the problem? You may note that the report you linked to claims that in 2019-20, 4% of households were moderately food insecure – which you can roughly correlate with at least occasionally having to skip meals. The proportion of people regularly going hungry would be some subset of that – so, less than 4%. Granted those numbers will have increased since then, and it’s also a reasonable guess that households with children are more likely to be in that 4% than households without, but even so, that’s clearly absolutely nothing like the 25% of UK children that you keep repeatedly claiming without evidence are hungry/starving.
(Still a serious problem that needs addressing though).
@ David Duggan Yes, indeed, Lloyd George championed land reform, David (and split the Liberal Party in the process in the 1920’s), but ‘Three Acres and A Cow’ as a slogan originated much earlier with Jesse Collings MP in the 1880’s.
Collings was a Birmingham Liberal chum of Joe Chamberlain……. and followed him into the Liberal Unionists when Gladstone advocated Home Rule (another split).
Oops – just wanted to clarify that I think it is great that politicians can now be candid about caring and parenting responsibilities. I felt I had to hide those when I was a PPC twenty years ago and it was miserable.
Land reform today is about housing and council tax reform. Being able to build enough housing at affordable prices means local councils and other quasi-governmantal bodies being able to compulsorily acquire land for development at agricultural prices, grant planning permission without excessive bureucracy and have sufficiently resourced architectural and planning departments to ensure adequate amenties are provided for. Additionaly, there needs to be a major focus on apprenticeships for skilled construction trades if there is to be any prospect of developing the number of homes required.
Council tax is among the most regressive of taxes levied in the UK and needs to be levied at a local level in proportion to the value of propery with a suitable homeowner allowance built-in.
With public services, the public want effective delivery and are less concerned with choice of deliverer. However there must be strong regulation with accountability. Involving users meaningfully in this monitoring is obvious though less easy to implement.