I don’t tend to be the type to give more qualified people lectures about what to do and think, however in this case I feel it is of the utmost importance.
As a party it feels that we forget what our politics is really about, Liberalism. We chase headlines and create policy as a result of emotion and popularity rather than using our liberal roots to form it. Whether it’s Ed complaining about a banknote or a hapless policy of moving departments to Birmingham, we seem to lack core liberal ideas.
As a young person I can see what issues I will face as I enter adulthood. This is scary but also allows me to give a unique view of how I think we can create a better future for me and my peers. I see real Liberalism as the answer, not culture wars or hapless policy, but real liberal values that can build a stronger Britain. I also see other young people and how they see the world. A lot of them tend to be left-wing socialists who have a rather silly view of economics. However, I cannot say I blame them, they are being given a rather dross start in life and they are right to demand better. However, despite my left-wing sympathies I am a critic of class politics, I see it as no better than the race or gender politics of others.
The idea of a group of people less well-off and struggling is not the result of an oppressive class system but rather a distinct failure of the state. Keynes always said the state should aim to provide employment and the constant privatisation and de-regulation under Tory governments has led to difficulty when trying to employ people under the state. As well as this we seem incompetent at building any sort of infrastructure. HS2 has been a monumental failure highlights the key issue of our country. I tend to be more of the mind that giving someone a job is ten times as productive for everyone as giving them benefits. This of course does lack general nuance but under the assumption they can work it becomes more plausible, if the state cannot give a person a job what is the point of the state?
Government schemes are the best way to improve a nation, in my general opinion, create infrastructure while also giving jobs and removing dependency on welfare is a win for everyone, teach a man to fish and you’ll get good economic growth and so on.
But how does this relate to being a young liberal? In case you couldn’t tell by my lack of eloquence I am a lowly teenager, so what do I know! I don’t pay tax; I don’t have a job and so on. But what I do have is hope, unlike many young people I genuinely believe in Britain. I don’t think it’s as hopeless as some say. Yes we have our issues, but it’s important to realise these are issues of the state, not the people. Wealth inequality isn’t a conspiracy by Ronald McDonald to make people buy Big Macs rather than the grossly overpriced Burger King. It’s a failure of the state to go back to its Liberal roots! So, in my humble opinion, I say we get out the Ouija board and ask our good mate Keynes what to do next!
* Charlie Larkin is a teenaged Young Liberal who wants to study politics and go into it as a career.
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17 Comments
Hiya Charlie,
On the point of class, I wouldn’t say I disagree with the concept of class-based politics, but I disagree with how it is used by people on the further left. I am, personally, a liberal social democrat, so I believe that a blend of liberalism and social democracy is where we, as a party and a country, are strongest.
That means, yes, accepting that class exists, but viewing it as a reformable factor that a person can be moved up from in times of prosperity, and, unfortunately, move back down to in times of hardship. But that moving down is the important part: ensuring someone doesn’t remain in hardship for long, and that they are prepared to reenter society, should (in my opinion) be the mission of a liberal party.
Freedom, for me, doesn’t stop at a philosophical societal level, but is tangible in all parts of life. Freedom from want, freedom from illness, freedom from poverty, freedom from abuse, freedom from exploitation, etc.
And not only negative freedoms, but positive, too; freedom of speech, freedom of enterprise, freedom of association, freedom of movement, freedom of religion, and so on.
I think you’ve written a very interesting article, and I look forward to reading more from you in the future!
“… if the state cannot give a person a job what is the point of the state?”
Thanks for making this contribution but I have to take issue with the above statement.
Liberals do not believe it is the role of the state to give people jobs. Most people who work, do so in the private sector. We are not communists who believe that the state should supply jobs to everyone but we do believe that the government should create the conditions to let the private sector crest employment. Keynes would have agreed with this: he viewed unemployment as a sign of insufficient aggregate demand and one way to increase aggregate demand is to cut taxes, thereby stimulating spending, resulting in businesses then expanding production and needing more workers.
Hi Jana, I appreciate your point but I think it’s a slight misunderstanding, I meant it as in if the state is going to spend money on benefits, it’s better off spending that money on infrastructure projects to give the unemployed jobs, rather than giving them benefits.
@ Charlie,
There’s no need to get out the Ouija board. 🙂
Keynes wrote quite extensively on Economics but reading through his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money can be tough going. If you are thinking of studying the subject yourself at uni you need to be careful and choose the right course otherwise you’ll end up sounding like Rachel Reeves! So try to find a course that teaches from a post Keynesian heterodox perspective.
” it is better off spending that money on infrastructure projects to give the unemployed jobs, rather than giving them benefits.”
Absolutely.
I don’t know if Lib Dems appreciate this but unemployment is used as a disciplinary tool against the working classes. The idea is that there needs to be a pool of unemployed to keep wages down and prevent inflation.
If anyone doubts this they might want to look up the concept of the NAIRU. Non Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment. I’d add an extra U for Underemployment.
I’m not sure how this is consistent with Lib Dem ideals of no-one being enslaved by poverty. It obviously isn’t but it’s hard to find anyone suggesting an alternative on LDV.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAIRU
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@Peter – ” it is better off spending that money on infrastructure projects to give the unemployed jobs, rather than giving them benefits.”
It is obvious where the Conservatives went wrong, they spent the money on tax breaks etc. rather than job creation / infrastructure projects in the belief “The Market” would do the job creation etc.
@Jana. We face a very uncertain future as far as employment is concerned. AI threatens to create mass unemployment as large companies try to replace people with machines. To seek to create real jobs, when the rich business owners are seeking ever growing profits through deliberate unemployment, is hardly communism. It is a sensible Post Keynesian response. Encouraging cooperatives and worker managed businesses, focusing government purchases to retain jobs is truly Liberal. Paying money to ensure people have jobs is surely better than paying people a pittance not to work. Sweden, for example, insists that people take jobs after a period of unemployment and guarantees a year’s employment usually in state jobs. Hardly communism.
@Peter Martin since you’re advising Charlie on reading Keynes carefully, you should know the “unemployment maintained deliberately to discipline labour” argument isn’t from the General Theory, it’s Kalecki, from his 1943 essay on the political aspects of full employment. Keynes’s concern was deficient aggregate demand, not a class strategy to hold down wages. Different diagnosis, different politics. Probably worth not collapsing the two if you’re going to correct other people’s reading of him.
On your closing point, it’s not hard to find a liberal alternative on LDV, you just have to look. A Just Society’s case for UBI and Universal Basic Services does exactly what you’re asking for: it breaks the link between employment and income security, so the threat of unemployment stops functioning as leverage over wages in the first place. That’s not a job guarantee and it’s not laissez-faire, it’s a liberal answer that takes your NAIRU point seriously rather than shrugging at it. Funded through a wealth levy on the very asset holders who benefit most from wage discipline, as it happens.
@Mick Taylor The AI point is the right one to be worried about, and it’s worth following through on. A job guarantee, Swedish-style or otherwise, still assumes the state can keep finding productive work to place people into. That’s a reasonable bet against cyclical unemployment. It’s a much shakier one if AI is eroding demand for labour across whole categories of work, not just through a downturn. At that point, you’re not smoothing a business cycle; you’re manufacturing jobs to justify paying people, which has its own long and not very inspiring history.
UBI and Universal Basic Services are a more durable answer to that specific risk, because they don’t depend on the state successfully inventing enough work. They also preserve something a job guarantee doesn’t: freedom of occupation. Income security that isn’t conditional on taking whatever job the state arranges is a liberal position, not just a practical one. Cooperatives and worker ownership are worth backing on their own terms, but as a answer to structural technological unemployment they don’t solve the underlying problem the way income security does.
Great article, Charlie. You have made some great points. I also believe everyone has the right to a job. There are so many people on benefits and I expect a lot are, or believe they are, not well enough to work. Rehabilitating them is not easy. So a lot of investment is needed here. I think the government is trying?? Good luck with your career, I have a feeling you will go far!
@Tanya,
Keynes was aware of the need to restrain wages to prevent inflation. His solution was for governments to regulate prices and wages to maintain full employment without creating high inflation. This worked reasonably well during WW2 and for some years afterwards but broke down quite spectacularly in the 70s when the Trades Unions openly challenged the concept of regulating the economy by means of prices and incomes policies.
Older readers will remember some of the formula that were applied. £1 + 4% p.a. comes to mind. It was the attempted application of a socialist policy in a capitalist economy. It didn’t find favour with either the political left or right. As a young worker at the time it always seemed that it was all about wages and not at all about prices.
The whole point of the current monetary and fiscal system is to get us all to work to do the things that are necessary to be done. We don’t pay our taxes to provide the Government with money per se. Rather, the government levies taxes so that we need to work to get the money to pay the taxes. The UBI is a nice idea but it is essentially short circuiting the present system.
@ Mick,
It’s not just the workers who should be concerned about AI. If workers aren’t going to be needed any longer, who’s going to buy all the products of a capitalist economy? We’ll all just be given enough UBI money to make up for our lost wages and salaries?
I can’t see that happening, somehow!
It is perhaps important to point out that the state, in its various forms, already directly employs or finds the money for lots of people, like teachers, civil servants, NHS staff, university staff, care workers not to mention lots of manual jobs like street cleaning, dustbin emptying. That will shortly likely be joined by railway workers and those in utilities, as they are gradually brought back in to public ownership.. We already know that there are severe shortages in the care and NHS sectors and that new immigration restrictions are severly limiting overseas recruitment. There is a lot of scope to put people back to work in all these sectors, funded at least in part by a reducing Welfare Bill.
Of course, wages will have to increase if people are to be persuaded to take these jobs. Retraining will be vitally necessary along with schemes to get the long term unemployed used to the workplace too.
@Peter Martin Calling UBI a short circuit assumes the system it’s bypassing is worth keeping. Right now, that system runs on the threat of poverty to get people to work, and that’s not much of a case for keeping it wired the way it is.
@ Tanya,
I take your point. However the system works reasonably well for most people so we can’t simply jettison it because of its obvious problems without coming up with a better alternative.
That would be taking up a revolutionary position without any clear plan for what needs to come next.
@Peter Martin “Works reasonably well for most people.” Maybe so. It works for people who stay employed, healthy, and un-sanctioned. It works considerably less well for the people currently living with the threat of destitution as their main experience of the system.
There are clear plans out there for what needs to come next with regards to the thinking around UBI & S. For instance, my own A Just Society’s policy (linked below) offers one such coherent pathway.
https://dmuoylywzrlfzdftwwni.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/policy-documents/Policy%20-%20Universal%20Basic%20Income%20and%20Services.pdf
@Jana,
“Liberals do not believe it is the role of the state to give people jobs”
Keynes was a Liberal and he always argued for full employment. If LibDems are looking for new policies then a commitment to full employment would be taking a progressive stance.
This could mean using the idea of offering a State job as a last resort. If the State demands that we all pay our taxes then shouldn’t it also accept the responsibility for ensuring that we all have a way to pay them?
“AI threatens to create mass unemployment as large companies try to replace people with machines.” and then find they have to rehire many of the people they laid off because AI can’t actually replace them. AI is good for automating repetitive menial mental tasks but will never pass muster for anything that requires human judgement. It’s way overhyped, we’re in a bubble that could burst any time. Businesses that think they can replace their workforce with machines will learn the hard way that it doesn’t work. Whether that’s replacing real human journalists with bots that churn out AI slop or law firms hallucinating legal cases, there has to be a reckoning some time soon.