One of the unalloyed pleasures of the 2024 Election Campaign was speaking to friends about policies, which, it seemed to me, represented the very best of us as a Party. We called for a fair contribution from the energy companies, Social Media giants, and higher rate taxpayers to repair our mental health services and social care system while strengthening the safety net for carers. We campaigned against the pollution of our beloved waterways, the diminution of the Health Service, and threw our weight behind a national strategy to tackle the often-invisible blight of loneliness.

However, something niggled at me throughout the Campaign: How do we draw our policies and positions together into a coherent whole? After all parties are not just shopping lists of policies, they embody traditions of thought and feeling which transcend the electoral cycle. I was left thinking: What are we trying to say cumulatively about our Party and the society of which our movement is part? It seems to me that the Manifesto was a beginning in answering some of these questions, but the existential query of ‘what we’re for’ still feels unsatisfactorily blurry, even after all the stunning electoral victories in July.

What do we need to do in order to weave our policies together? The answer it seems to me lies in renewing our distinctive Liberal Democrat understanding of freedom.

In a powerful article from December 2022, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams argued that the thing that most blights contemporary Britain is endemic social insecurity. People are going hungry, millions of jobs in the economy are failing to meet basic financial needs, individuals, families and communities are struggling to keep their heads above water. Williams dusts off a slogan from the Covid-19 pandemic, ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe’ and asks us to apply it to the economy. What would it mean if we adopted a systematic understanding of communal security? The answer, thinks Williams, is that we would end up with a more expansive vision of acting and choosing.

As Williams writes:

It is not just that insecurity literally threatens lives; it is also that all those things financial security makes possible – the freedom to celebrate, to plan for your children, to give gifts to people you love – become monstrously complicated. Living with any fullness or imagination recedes over the horizon when choices are all about survival.

Williams’ point is helpful for Liberal Democrats as we navigate this new Parliament and its choices and trade-offs. For us Liberty has always been about the safety to live and care in community. This is where we differ so drastically from Trussite Libertarians and orthodox Thatcherites. We cherish the freedom to love and care, give and create, imagine, and yes, make our lives gloriously complicated. Not everything can or should be reduced to the bottom-line. Liberty should never be narrowed down to personal earning-power, property-rights, tax cuts, or consumer goods.

There was a time when the Labour Party intuitively understood the kind of freedom Williams is talking about. However, the last few months suggests they are struggling to keep hold of it. So imprisoned are Labour’s frontbench by the spectre of the Truss mini-budget that they have reduced every political decision to short-term economic loss or gain. This government, with its epic majority is still afraid it will drop the Ming vase. In the process Labour have become the mirror image of what they say they reject; abstract economisers who do not understand people’s lives. Austerity is back, this time with a Social Democratic accent.

Not only will Labour’s appetite for fiscal over-correction likely produce more of the false economy and short-termist irrationality we saw under the Conservatives, it will doubtless entrench an already impoverished vision of freedom where we know the price of everything but the enduring value of very little. This grim observation alone should help us in the Liberal Democrats recover our sense of purpose.

Yes, we are here to make the case for practical repair long-term investment and many and sundry worthy causes. However, we are also here to provide a fuller vision of a good society, one that says your freedom is also my freedom, where we value not simply what we buy but what we cherish together. Not only do we want a politics, which works at a human scale, we want our politics to be humane, guided by fellow feeling and justice.

As Jo Grimond once put it:

For me Liberalism is not about laissez-faire or Free Trade, or indeed any economic doctrine. It is about the broader questions of humanity and society, or if about economics, then about the wider sort of political economy Adam Smith wrote about.

Broad questions of society and humanity should keep us occupied until the next General Election!

* 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.