Liberalism is under attack. It’s time to defend its principles; and I hope that Ed Davey will lead the charge at our Spring conference next week. As Rob Davidson wrote on LibDem Voice last week, ‘liberalism and liberal democracy is facing an existential threat’ – both in England and globally.
Most Liberals do not read the Spectator, the Telegraph or Standpoint, which portray an alternative intellectual universe, in which conservatives decry ‘the liberal elite’, against which they stand for community and nation. A network of well-funded think tanks, with close links to neo-conservative think tanks in Washington, reinforces this blend of nationalist nostalgia, assumptions of Anglo-Saxon transatlantic affinity, cultural reaction and anti-Muslim prejudice: the Taxpayers Alliance, Policy Exchange, the Henry Jackson Society and others, with combined budgets larger than our party’s central income.
Repetition of the claim that Britain’s elite is liberal, and that these well-funded researchers, their rich backers in the City and offshore and the government which they support are insurgents against the dominant and corrupting liberalism of our society, feeds populist resentment. It supports attacks on the BBC as inherently left-wing, on universities and academics as having lost “the faith of the nation in some critical areas” (to quote a new Policy Exchange report), on Anglican bishops for failing to defend traditional moral principles as they see them.
Rob Davidson also pointed to the emergence of a global network of self-labelled ‘national conservatives’, strongly supported by right-wing American money, which idolises Viktor Orban’s ‘illiberal democracy’. The recent ‘NatCon’ conference in Rome, which included a number of British Conservatives, welcomed Orban as a keynote speaker. One of the other speakers told the conference that the current Pope has ‘given up his spiritual role to become political leader of the international left.’ This is the politics of unreason, in which one may even cast doubt on whether the Pope is a Catholic.
For all their rhetoric about British traditions and the importance of local community, English national conservatives are mounting an attack on the institutions of liberal democracy. Policy Exchange has a research programme on ‘judicial power’, which focusses on limiting redress to the courts to question government decisions. Last December’s Conservative Manifesto pledged to set up a ‘commission on the constitution, democracy and rights’ before the end of 2020, which is intended to reassert executive prerogative against parliamentary scrutiny – or as one minister put it ‘to return to the normal relationship between government and parliament’, on the implicit assumption that normality includes almost permanent Conservative government.
Above all, this is an attack on reasoned politics and policy-making, in which evidence should modify preferences. Strong leadership, claiming to embody ‘popular democracy’ against parliament, the civil service, and other institutional constraints, sweeps past the contradictions of the promises that Johnson, Gove and others have made. When government fails to deliver, there are enemies to blame: foreigners on the European continent, immigrants (particularly Muslims), and of course the unpatriotic liberal elite.
We need to point out, vigorously, where this will lead. Authoritarian governments become increasingly corrupt. Populist rhetoric disguises concessions for the government’s favoured financiers and businessmen. Minorities and foreigners lose rights; media become organs for populist propaganda. Intolerance oppresses society. Illiberal democracy claims to speak for ‘the people’, while narrowing its definition of the people to exclude all those who dissent.
Britain has become a much more liberal society in our lifetime. Right-wing populist are trying to reverse that achievement. The failure of successive governments, including Blair’s Labour government, to accompany the promotion of liberalism with sufficient concern for social justice and for the maintenance of a sense of national and local community, has left space for these rich populists to exploit. We must struggle to reoccupy that space.
* William Wallace is LibDem peer, a former vice-chair of the Federal Policy Committee and convenor of the party's 1997 manifesto team.
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38 Comments
Aye, Liberalism is under attack.
Some people want to bring back ID cards for some unknown reason, for example.
Our party bears some responsibility as a result of the policies we owned during the coalition with David Cameron’s Conservatives.
We now need to return to our radical Liberal roots with a policy programme similar to Lloyd George’s Yellow book and the Beveridge proposals.
How would the Liberal Democrats eliminate poverty and homelessness? What is our solution to the crisis in social care? Answer these and other key questions that affect millions, then watch our opinion poll rating soar.
Where is our platform? Without a platform we can do nothing. 100,000 leaflets, 2 seconds between letter box and bin is little use. Our twitter account puts a few good points forward, but twitter is not a platform.
Our Web site is rubbish. However articles posted on a decent web site copied out to local party and My Councillor sites would be a start.
Has Ed got the Charisma and energy required to get the Guardian looking at us again?
And please no more motherhood and apple pie videos, like the one fronted by Ed recently
We are living in a neo-fascist age it seems.
Liberalism is alive. See the sentence in the woman and buggy on the airline case. No custodial sentence despite biting a pilot. The PC brigade writ large. Are liberals wringing their hands at the lack of justice for the pilot and people who think that rights of minorities have moved too far. No. I thought not. That is why liberals are not trusted to do the right thing. A custodial sentence was an absolute minimum but not given. The rant by the guilty woman should have been enough for contempt. Liberals can come and be with the grown ups when they respect decent values and orderly society and petition for the sacking of the judge. But not before
People are a bit confused about Liberalism, I think, on the one hand it is about the freedom of the individual (as long as they do no wrong to others) and on the other hand it is all about stealing people’s money in the form of excessive progressive taxes (whenever I see the word progressive I replace it with confiscatory, seems more apt) on income and wealth. Stealing people’s wealth and income limits their freedom. Then you have the idea of an open border with the whole world…
Well said, Frank West – to the ordinary guy on the street ‘progressive’ has become a boot on the back of their neck.
Politically speaking, progressive is the opposite of conservative, and unfortunately for the so-described progressive elite, most people tend to be conservative in nature.
Of course, once the oft-described liberal elite have carved out their own privileged space they then set about defining the limits of we lesser beings.
We at the bottom are fighting an existential battle and the ‘progressives’ have become the enemy.
It is good that we publish the nonsense above from Frank West and wg, since it shows us — better than much of what we LDs contribute — just what we are up against, for there are millions like them, right wing, selfish, and unthinking. We shall not get the votes we need until we get through to the better half of them.
And in the end, votes is what we need, if a decent society is ever to be achieved. Too much of what we write to ourselves in LDV is looking backwards, to the last century and the one before that — interesting, very well informed; but largely futile, today and in the future.
I don’t think Liberalism is so much under attack as it is suffering from the aftereffects of overreach and over-claiming on historic determinism. Basically, rather too many liberal thinkers mistake the appeal of some liberal values and changes for the wider acceptance of all liberal ideals to the point where any rejection of any particular liberal standpoint is seen as an attack on all of liberalism. This is why on the one hand you can find people with quite conservative religious views on some key aspects of personal freedom embracing “progressive” political groupings and on the other people with liberal views on those same freedoms rejecting liberalism as a political grouping. What’s really needed is a rebalancing and an understanding of the limits the reality of the electorate imposes on the reach of political ideology. Personally, I think the big mistake is a tendency to see government as a way to tell the electorate what’s what and enshrining it in law, when really it should be a means of arriving at organising a country (political systems are essentially national) in ways that broadly suite the people who live in it.
We have weakened the case for liberalism in the eyes of many ordinary people, William, I suspect, by opposing the Referendum decision, portrayed by the Right wing as the will of the people. The supposed betrayal of the people can now be carried on by the kind of thinking of two of the posters above, that the liberal elite are stealing people’s money by pursuing progressive taxes. Fortunately, however, the myth that the present Tory government will represent the majority of ordinary people cannot be long prolonged. The hardships of the present, the difficulties of living with the threat of Covid 19, will unfortunately be replaced by the greater hardships of living with a stagnant economy and the deprivations expected from Brexit. This government has neither the will nor the means actually to advance the fortunes of the many not the few, to borrow Labour’s phrase. I agree with David Warren above, let us continue to develop our good policies to deal with the pressing problems of our time, including growing poverty and health inequality, insufficient social housing and social care and inadequate job provision, and people will learn that the liberals really are on their side, unlike the moneyed elite in power now. A new Beveridge-like Social Contract between government and people can be the over-arching theme of our proposals, to genuinely serve the people, both the less well-off and disadvantaged and the majority of our citizens.
The point missing here is that if you have policies appealing to the majority of the populace, guess what happens… you win elections! Trump may be a terrible person but cutting personal taxes, closing down the borders, etc wins a majority of the votes. Same for Boris, I guess.
Frank West
The open border is not with the rest of the world. It is with the Republic of Ireland.
“We have weakened the case for liberalism in the eyes of many ordinary people, William, I suspect, by opposing the Referendum decision, portrayed by the Right wing as the will of the people.”
Possibly. What is certain is you have destroyed the case for the Liberal Democrats.
Personally I don’t think the case for liberalism has changed at all. The problem I see is that the Liberal Democrat leadership are “woke”. If anything is damaging the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats it is wokism.
Katharine Pindar 7th Mar ’20 – 10:43am:
…the Referendum decision, portrayed by the Right wing as the will of the people.
It’s not just “the right wing” that believe in democracy…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bv_1z2lFlw
Oliver Craven:
That’s a cheap shot on ID cards, which ignores the arguments I was making about digital transformation and how we need to build in safeguards for privacy, access, and open data. We have to develop a Liberal response to the data revolution, not pretend it’s not happening or leave the formulation of regulations to others. We have some expert data scientists in our party who can help us craft a liberal response to the government white paper on data strategy, due this year; I hope to convene a meeting at our September party conference.
Katharine Pindar:
We need to challenge the view that democracy is simply ‘the will of the people’, as shown by a majority vote on a single issue (leave aside the money and the lies that went into the campaign, too). That’s the problem with referendums; they leave aside the views of substantial minorities that a constitutional democracy should respect, as well as the importance of checks and balances on the swings of popular opinion. Liberal democracy, as opposed to illiberal democracy, has to be a continual process of dialogue, negotiation, compromise and scrutiny. Not as easy a case to make as ‘the will of the people’, but that’s the democratic approach we need to defend; and will aim to do so as the government brings its commission on the constitution forward.
@William Wallace – Referenda do address single subject binary decisions. Leaving the EU was such a decision. I know that many of those who wanted to remain would have preferred a soft, halfway position, semi-detached as some have described it.
However, such a fudge would not deliver Brexit and the taking back of the ability to make our own decisions. Furthermore, the EU has always insisted that any type of soft Brexit would entail full compliance with all EU regulation. Even now that we have left, the EU is still making the same demands as a condition for a trade deal. This has convinced many people that we are better off out of the EU’s suffocating embrace.
The referendum is not a weakness of democracy. It is democracy in action. This party has not distinguished itself in recent times, having shown contempt for the process.
I agree with Katharine about weakening the case for Liberalism. Those of us who want to help the poorest and weakest in our society are going to be totally mistrusted because we refused to give in to a decision that we believed would further impoverish and weaken them, but which they themselves saw as a solution to all their problems.
A large majority of council house and housing association tenants voted for Brexit. How are we to get alongside them now to persuade them to support our domestic policies? Many of the people who voted Tory for the first time in the last election were doing so to “ get Brexit done” . Some don’t expect them to live up to their promises of investing in deprived areas and improving services. Brexit is the litmus test but the Tories are also introducing an environment in which disagreement equals betrayal and this appeals to ardent Brexiters. This will increase the Tories’ kudos as they go after civil servants and judges, university staff and the BBC.
I think parliamentary democracy itself is under threat with a new philosophy of obeying the will of the people and preventing parliament’s scrutiny of government.
I don’t have the answer but we need to have all the best minds in the party, councillors who represent poorer areas, MPs and Lords who see the need for us to appeal to those without money or power, trying to come up with both campaigning and policy solutions.
I don’t have the
Frank West – Trump winning the majority of votes??? Are you really that clueless?? He lost the popular vote by 3 million, he also lost the mid-term in 2018. And these happened despite voter suppression and gerrymandering from one side (dear Frank, not both sides, just one side).
Apologies – I didn’t see the repetition of ‘ I don’t have the’ until I’d pressed post, just in case you were wondering what had happened.
How interesting that when William makes an important, considered and constructive contribution to the perils we now face, only two people (in my view) actually engage with his argument in other than a trivial way. Instead we have a series of diversions (3), Twitter still debate (3), Attacks from rightwingers whose presence here is no more than trolling (6), reasonable but rather peripheral comments (3). My opinion of the comments obviously but I think fairly accurate. As William started his piece “Liberalism is under attack. It’s time to defend its principles” and liberal democracy itself is under threat. So what do we do to mount a defence and come out fighting? Is it only Kath and Sue who have any ideas at all?
Tony Greaves
Neither democracy, not liberal democracy (whatever that is), is under threat. Indeed democracy is working very well. At the last GE voters got the government they wanted for the tasks ahead, and on course to get the Brexit voters wanted.
As a bonus, a fully functioning democracy swept out of parliament a huge swath of undemocratic remainer MPs, not least your very own Jo Swinson, whose arrogance got the result she well deserved.
There is nothing wrong with democracy, but there is a lot wrong with folk who have a tendency for sour-grapes when voters don’t agree with their narrow liberal view.
As for the nonsensical idea of authoritarianism, if Boris does what is expected of him he might well get another term in 5 years.
But be under no illusion, the Red Wall is only on loan to the Tories, and if next weeks budget doesn’t signal the beginning of improvement to their lives, his honeymoon period is well and truly over.
So, if liberalism is under threat, its because it got resoundingly rejected democratically at the ballot box. Democracy is working and voters are in control Mr Greaves, whether Lib Dems like it or not.
Frank West
Trump did not win the majority of the popular vote in 2016.
Tony
A bit of community politics wouldn’t hurt. The big problem is the media. Liberal Democrats have the ideas but how best to promote them.
We have the ideas,how to promote them. One—-Our ‘We exist to ——— should be put on ALL leaflets ALL the time to encourage debate feed back etc.
Two— our policies should equally be put on our leaflets NOT JUST LOCAL ISSUES. and get feedback
Three—– Open up a Policy discussion group that can discuss policies and refer them to MP’s to formulate WINNABLE policies.
Four—- again PUSH our policies on twitter ,facebook etca lot more AND ,again,learn from the comments.
FiveI—- I.D. or not to I.D.!? That is the question. Use humour more for a laugh ,they can be remenbered
Six— Voter suppression (those without I.D. or even not). To kill this bit of ‘gerrymandering’campaign for ALL to have a postal vote
We do things that attract attention,stimulate discussion, good and bad, all publicity is better than non.
TO OWN THE AGENDA WE HAVE TO MAKE A NOISE not NAVEL GAZE.
People can start it off by NOT having dry amendment discussions at Conference but put PASSION into them. The media can then look up and take notice.
A Greta who can link with the future voters should also be found. Make Conference a start to a Liberal revival. NOT ENDLESS WAFFLING!
Any Questions had a question on Cannabis for 5 mins at the end and I have noticed other articles discussion on it. WE MUST OWN and hammer away the future. Our policies (Land Value Tax etc) are fine and we should hold our heads up high for our time will come. We will not get anywhere if voters do not know what we stand for SO GET THOSE POLICIES OUT ON LEAFLETS, LETTERS TO PAPERS, ONTO THE NET.
In the long run, probably within a year, I think, Sue and Tony, that the forces of unreason and self-serving populism will melt away, with the evident failure of this government actually to serve the people. We have lived through some years of frantic partisanship, unease, confusion, and misuse of language which have greatly heightened tension among the people. There is actually no such thing as ‘the will of the people’, and the treasured concept ‘democracy’ has been devalued by misuse.
The Referendum, John Peters and Jeff, was a political act. As happens in our advanced democracy, it was bound to be succeeded by another political act. It was as legitimate to disagree with that particular political act and seek another to reverse its consequences, as it is to disagree with the election of a particular government and campaign to oust that government at the next election. Meantime, as William says, liberal democracy proceeds through dialogue, negotiation, compromise and scrutiny.
There are people, including some posting here, who never did and presumably never will understand this reasoning. But I believe most of our people cannot be fooled all of the time, and in these less heated times – even a time of some unity at last, possibly one helpful product of this virus – people will begin to understand that this government is a hollow sham in its pretensions. Then they will begin to listen to us again, if we speak clearly and simply, but with great conviction, of our capacity to serve and genuinely to help.
@ Tony Greaves on 7/3 at 3.07
I am so glad you praised Katharine,because she always talks sense, and her heart is in the right place. But alas, glad also because IMO she exemplifies 2 of my points above, at 10.30 am. By all means, let’s have a Social Contract (to use the use the language of Rousseau in 1762). And Katharine’s “new Beveridge-like Social Contract between government and people” is just what we do need.
But we must not *call* it that, I believe: it simply hasn’t the ring of fruitful collaboration, but of official and officious punishment. ‘Contracts’ are enforcible nowadays, and notions of honour and trust lie dormant almost.
So I suggest another route to our goal of a fair deal for all, releasing the numerous poorest from their wretched status as supplicants “in a rich and fruitful land, babes reduced to misery, fed with cold and usurous hand” (C18 again!). The route that I believe would give our disunited kingdom what it desires and needs goes by a name just as unattractive to millions of voters as would a ‘social contract’. I shall not utter it, but describe it below:
[Continued from above]
Parliament should establish a “National Income Dividend”: all three words *sound* positive, don’t they? — and entirely opposite to the words ‘basic’, and ‘universal’. And it is Income that concerns the family, not ‘Product’, the bosses’ business and concern.
The high spot in the Chancellor’s annual Budget speech would be the rate of the Dividend announced. That would tell the nation that for the coming year a new percentage of the total National Income would be distributed to every adult, irrespective of his or her personal income from other sources, as an inalienable right. It would be paid for by appropriate changes in Income Tax rates. The figure would be pretty small initially, to enable the populace to get used to the idea, but in succeeding years the Manifestos would contend on traditional party lines. LDs would head for a fair rate, to narrow the gap between the poor and the affluent, while not robbing the Joneses of their relative positions in the roost. On the other side of the tracks life would be transformed from the pain and the shame of ‘Austerity’. I think it would turn out to be Katharine’s Social Contract, with a new and winning name.
Some people would call this a Universal Basic Income. That is NOT a name to warm the cockles of the beating heart, and will not win ELECTIONS!
Dividends are paid out of profit, long time since a govn has run a surplus. UBI is a good idea if it replaces welfare, personal tax allowance etc and could be a core idea at the centre of Liberalism, based on freeing up the individual. It would not appeal to a large chunk of the welfare crowd as they would be expected to work to top it up and actually pay tax on their income. Add in removing fixed costs such as council tax, TV licence, standing charges on energy, etc would really give people a chance to lead the lives they want without being wedded to the 40 hour week for 50 years.
A very thoughtful piece as usual from William Wallace. Little to add and, sadly, as Tony Greaves points out most of the comments add very little to the discussion.
We really need to look to the wider picture; this I take to be William’s message. The last twenty years have seen a massive increase into unaccountable intrusion into people’s personal lives. Technology has run ahead of traditional Liberal arguments about individual rights and has created centres of unaccountable power for whom politics is just part of their game plan.
Liberalism is under attack both directly and indirectly. Rousseau style populist appeals to The Will of the People and Social Contracts provide encouragement for manipulative authoritarians. A strong Liberal critique and vision is urgently required to combat the authoritarian creep that diminishes our status as individual citizens and turns us into manipulated subjects, pawns of the powerful.
That so many responses comprise petty nit-picking or craven compliance with authoritarian attitudes is depressing and symptomatic of the problem that William Wallace articulates.
@Frank West at 8.16 am.
Frank, thanks for your comments, which are helpful. First though, I should say that i’m using ‘dividends’ to mean any total which is to be divided up for distribution to those entitled. As I see it (rusty, now, so maybe wrong) the nation’s individual and almost innumerable Incomes add up to the ‘National Income’. Essentially that is the same amount of money as our old favourite the GDP, if we ignore the G. The P for Product is the value of the goods and services created , and that is what has been or will be paid for them. And that payment is the total Incomes of the producers, whether, say, nurses or bankers.
So I am suggesting that HMG should ask the ONS what was the total paid to people ‘last year’ as their personal incomes, and then after gathering in a wad of that money, hand a slice of it to each and every one of us — the same slice or divi to each. In practice, the money handed out will be the money gathered in Income Taxes (I’m ignoring all the details which do raise quibbles, since this is a page not a book!). So notionally, everyone gets the divi, and everyone gets taxed on it: the poor pay next to nothing in Income Tax, the rich pay considerably more than they get: it balances out, thanks to the Chancellor, who will redesign the structure of Income Tax rates to suit.
This would indeed, as you do say, be a great freeing up of the individual, and especially it would liberate the poorest from the indignity of being forced to endure the demeaning servitude of having to jump through bureaucratic and punitive hoops — a process as wounding to the officials paid to say No as to their hapless victims. Every man and woman could look his neighbour, or the PM, in the eye and claim “I too am a taxpayer”.
It is, I agree with you, very unlikely that the electorate would vote for such large NI Dividends or UBI that anyone could live at all comfortable on the alone for income.
Roger Lake – “It is good that we publish the nonsense above from Frank West and wg, since it shows us — better than much of what we LDs contribute — just what we are up against, for there are millions like them, right wing, selfish, and unthinking. We shall not get the votes we need until we get through to the better half of them.” – you mean, millions of Boomers? Because according to the last election, this is not the case for under-45 people. You have chosen the wrong side of history, the Boomers are fading away, and Coronavirus will accelerate the process (well, especially with the hilariously laissez-faire approach of the Tories in handling the virus).
Martin, you wrote yesterday that ‘A strong liberal critique and vision is urgently required.’ I agree with you completely on that. However, you also reiterate the idea you put in the thread on A new Social Contract which was launched here on 8th February, and in stating that liberalism is under attack you wrongly equate ‘Rousseau-style popular appeals to The Will of the People and Social Contracts’, accusing both of providing encouragement for manipulative authoritarianism. I strongly reject that association of ideas.
In the discussion under the previous thread, Gordon Lishman answered your alarm about the supposed dangers of the Social Contract idea. He pointed out that Michael and I in advocating a renewed Social Contract were following not Rousseau but Locke, from whose philosophy comes the principle of consent. Gordon explained that the key idea there is that people (not The people) should freely consent to government and its actions. However, Gordon wisely continued, where there are found imbalances of power income, wealth and health, the problem for o party is to contest the Conservative narrative of scroungers and wastrels, and this has become dominant in our society today.
“Our strategy should be about building trust in democratic policies and the sense of shared responsibility for each other”, he continued. “The principle is the dialogue with ordinary people to establish the basis of active consent for those ideas.”
I suggest that the dialogue with ordinary people, well intended, has not sufficiently taken place as yet, and hence there is indeed a danger that people may mistake Social Contract for an authoritarian philosophy.health inequality are part of our attempt to restore the failed social contract most recently established by Beveridge, and develop it for our people today.
My comment above had to be truncated as being too long. The last paragraph should read: I suggest that the dialogue with ordinary people, well intended, has not sufficiently taken place as yet, and hence there is indeed a danger that people may mistake Social Contract for an authoritarian philosophy. Our party should in dialogue with people explain that in advocating such necessities as the relief of poverty and the end of health inequality, we are attempting to restore the failed social contract most recently established by Beveridge, and to develop it for today’s society.’
Getting the regulations around our media right is fundamental to our liberalism. We must have a free media that strikes the right balance between protecting public privacy, distinguishing between facts and opinions and investigating public bodies without the fear of unfair treatment. Adverts and sales fund most media and they must not interfere with the pursuit of information.
I think I have to disagree rather with Katharine, just above:
“Our party should in dialogue with people explain that in advocating such necessities as the relief of poverty and the end of health inequality, we are attempting to restore the failed social contract most recently established by Beveridge, and to develop it for today’s society.’”
I think we try too much to ‘explain’, failing to recognise that explanation is pointless, aimed at those who are not listening. The first thing we need to do is to get them listening. We must learn to do this by paying more attention to what *they* sound like, and take up the same voice, so to speak, but in a Liberal tone. (Badly put, but I hope any LD readers get my meaning!).
Those we have to engage with have never heard of Beveridge: I was born when his name was known by all, along with Hitler’s and Montgomery’s. Let us say farewell to the last century, and talk post-Falklands, and aim at those who often do not vote, and those who cannot have voted more than five times for a Parliament. OK — Eight, then.