The Liberal Moment
David Cameron argues in today’s Observer that as far as ‘progressive’ (shudder) policies go, there is little distance between the Lib Dems and the Tories, and we should be working together. His case is very superficially convincing – until you remember their slogan from the last election, If You Want A Nigger For Your Neighbour, Vote Labour It’s Not Racist To Impose Limits On Immigration. And indeed, until you actually look at everything the Conservatives stand for.
Cameron is trying to recreate the ‘big tent’ informal coalition that Blair and Ashdown had in 1997, trying to get us to unite against Labour as we previously united against the Tories (by the major party definition of ‘unite’ which is ‘agree with us in everything we do, even when we’re quite clearly insane’. See also Liberal Conspiracy’s idea of big-tent coalition), but it’s fundamentally misguided. His piece is just inane drivel, and its main reason for existing appears to be to try to persuade people considering the Lib Dems that the Tories would be the same – about as far from the truth as it gets.
The reason for Cameron writing this now – other than as a spoiler for the Lib Dem conference – is because Nick Clegg has just put out his most significant contribution to liberal thought so far, a pamphlet called Liberal Moment , which seems to skewer hopes of a Tory/Lib Dem alliance for good.
In the past, I’ve never been hugely impressed by Clegg as leader, but one thing I’ve always thought impressive was the way he could articulate genuinely liberal views, but in a way that would appeal to the Daily Mail crowd (something that other people, notably Alix Mortimer, have seen as a downside). However, here he is instead putting forward a case for Liberal values as part of a progressive strand of thought, which I’m far more comfortable with.
‘Progressive’ is a much-abused term, but reading through Clegg’s paper, one can see a rough definition emerging – for Clegg, ‘progressive’ appears to mean a commitment to both freedom and equality.
Clegg’s analysis – actually similar to the Blairite ‘big tent’ analysis of the mid-90s – is that there is a fundamental split between ‘progressives’ in this sense and conservatives, but that there is a further split in the progressive side between, roughly, those who think equality is important insofar as it helps bring about greater freedom, who gravitate toward the Liberal Democrats (and before them the Liberal Party) and those who think freedom is important insofar as it helps bring about greater equality, who gravitate toward the Labour Party.
Clegg argues – correctly in my view – that the two are natural allies, despite their very real differences. He then goes on to talk about how the Labour Party overtook the Liberal Party as the dominant progressive force in British politics in the early part of the 20th century, partly as a result of electoral pacts between the two, partly because of the splits within the Liberals themselves and their partial abandonment of some of their principles, but also – as he, rather uniquely for a Liberal (Democrat) admits – because the social democratic/democratic socialist principles of the Labour Party genuinely had something to add.
However, he argues that right now, top-down, centralised, statist governance is a bad idea, for much the same reasons I argue here, and that the failures of the Labour government have been linked to its authoritarian tendencies and wish to micromanage every part of people’s lives:
So this pamphlet starts and finishes with a particular view about the great differences in the Labour and Liberal traditions of progressive thought, and an assertion that as Labour heads fordefeat at the next election the future of progressive politics lies in liberalism. In much the same way that Labour was on the right side of events over a century ago when the Liberal party was not, I will argue that a reverse ‘switch’ in which the Liberal Democrats can become the dominant progressive force in British politics is now more possible than ever before.
What Clegg is definitely not doing here is using ‘liberal’ as a synonym for moderate, as most people appear to (see for example this post by Lawrence Miles – ” To be a liberal means to shield yourself from the full horror of your society, to have a veneer of civic responsibility while still approving of a system that’s wholly founded on exploitation.” That’s what ‘liberal’ in the USian/Liberal Conspiracy sense means, but has little to do with real liberalism).
Unfortunately, in the past the Lib Dems have, in our PR if not in our actions, encouraged that understanding of ‘liberalism’ as being smack in the middle (see, for example, this incredibly irritating bit of Littlejohnism from John Cleese. This mostly came about with the alliance of the Liberal Party with the SDP – who really *were* moderate centrists with fairly wooly ideas. The old joke “What do we want? Moderate change! When do we want it? In due course!” has sometimes been all too accurate when it comes to the ‘message’ the party has put out, even though since at least the early 90s we have been far more radical in our demands for change than either of the major parties.
In truth, Liberalism is, as Clegg is finally stating explicitly, a coherent political philosophy in its own right, equidistant from both the two major parties but in the same way the apex of an isoceles triangle is equidistant from the points at the base – further away from either than they are from each other.
Clegg ‘[refuses] to even contemplate’ ‘fall[ing] in line with Gordon Brown to hold back the rise of the Conservatives’ because in the ways that matter Labour and the Conservatives are largely indistinguishable, but he recognises in this paper that many of the aims of Labour members and supporters are ones that many Lib Dem members share. Fundamentally, though Clegg never puts it quite this way, the Lib Dem disagreement with Labour is about means, whereas with the Tories it’s about ends. Lib Dems don’t believe that government micromanagement can ever deliver a fairer world as Labour believe – let alone a freer world, which is what we want even more. But the Tories’ ‘solution’ – to punish the poor and disenfranchised for their position in society – is no solution at all.
There are individual aspects to Liberal Moment with which I find myself disagreeing – the involvement of victims in the justice system is always something that worries me, so the proposals for allowing vandals to say sorry to their victims and negotiate a way to make amends with them rather than going through the court system sound troubling. But that’s a minor point.
A more major one was pointed out by Gavin R in the comments here, when I linked this paper on Friday:
a keyword search suggests a worrying trend. Just look at these word frequencies in a text of about 70 pages:
women: 2
woman: 1
gender: 0
sex: 0
sexuality: 0
patriarchy: 0
gay: 0
Which is a very good point, and I for one would have liked to have seen something about how liberal values apply to those areas – especially as they’re a very obvious area in which we differ from the other two parties. I always liked Alex Wilcock’s suggestions for party slogans – “Liberal Democrats: the party that says sex is all right” and “To tell the Daily Mail to fuck off, vote Lib Dem”. It would have helped to contextualise the much-hyped “Real Women” policy discussion Jo Swinson is leading, as well, minor aspects of which (changing ASA rules so adverts containing photoshopped pictures would have to have a disclaimer) have been rather over-publicised, outside of a larger policy context.
But overall, Liberal Moment does its job – to put Lib Dem policy ideas into a larger political/philosophical context, and to make a clear argument for the Liberal worldview. It’s not going to replace Mill any time soon, but as a flag in the ground, saying “HERE is why we’re not Tories, and HERE is why Labour are wrong” it’s far better than I dared hope from a leader who has previously appeared to be a bit of a lightweight.
More like this, please.
Labour Conspiracy
This post will be of no interest to anyone who is not hugely interested in the minutiae of British political blogging, and the wankery that goes on therein… I hate writing posts like this, and I hate contaminating my own blog with them, but i can’t really see anything else to do. I would post this on Liberal Conspiracy, but I don’t have direct posting access there – everything I write for it goes through an editor… I’ll post something about comics tomorrow.
As some of you will know, I recently started to contribute a weekly ‘netcast’ to Liberal Conspiracy, a group blog to which I’ve also occasionally contributed longer posts (reposted from this blog or my old LJ, and heavily edited by the site’s owner, Sunny Hundall).
Now, a lot of Liberal Democrats are very wary of Liberal Conspiracy. The site is supposed to be a cross-party liberal left site, but many Lib Dems consider it to be a way of trying to co-opt us into Labour in some way or other – a Labour fifth column. Many Lib Dems refer to it as ‘Labour Conspiracy’, and most of the prominent people on the site *are* Labour supporters. However, I do think it is a good thing to work across party lines, and some of the Labour people on the site (Laurie Penny, for example) are decent, there are Greens on there, and non-aligned people like Debi Linton, and the presence of people like the very strongly opinionated Lib Dems (and friends of mine) Jennie Rigg and Mat Bowles keeps me reading and contributing.
But my patience is wearing thin.
Just over a week ago Liberal Conspiracy became overrun with tedious, masturbatory posts about a non-issue storm-in-a-teacup sleaze story that involved *A BLOGGER!* and therefore must be talked about at excruciating length by all other bloggers, apparently. Charlotte Gore summed up my thoughts about that pretty well. Several people started calling for the site to stop being up its own arse and actually start talking about politics, rather than blogging about bloggers blogging about bloggers blogging (and now you see why I didn’t want to post this…)
But I thought when that nonsense died down, the site would get some semblance of a reasonable editorial line again. I was wrong. In just the last few days we’ve had a post headed “Our Ethic of Progressive Blogging”, the very first line of which started “We are a group of Labour party members and supporters”. The disclaimer at the top was added later, by Jennie RIgg, who *does* speak for me at least when she says in the comments “YOU might be a collection of Labour Bloggers but I’M not, and nor are any of the other Lib Dem or Green or unaligned contributors, and this is the sort of thing that makes us feel pushed out of the theoretical “big tent” which appears to only exist as long as Labour members are the ones in charge of the tent pegs.”
This apparently made Jennie and Mat and Tez Burke and myself and the other Lib Dems who commented there ‘mindlessly tribal’. But fine – the disclaimer was added, it was an obvious crosspost, mistakes happen – though they do tend very much to happen in one direction. But Sunny Hundall is an honourable man, and he says that he genuinely wants the site to be cross-party, so let it go.
The next day we get this nasty piece of bile, an attack on a decent ex-Labour MP (a proper Old Labour MP on the Stop The War Coalition committee and so forth) for leaving the party. I actually think it’s meant to be an anti-Labour piece, but I can’t tell because it’s just complete gibberish – sub-literate nonsense written by someone who hadn’t even read the resignation letter in question. Someone thought this was worth posting to the third most-read political blog in the UK…
Then we get a post about how “It’s Time For Socialists To Rejoin The Labour Party”, which unfortunately calls to mind nothing more than a spousal abuser begging for one more chance and promising he’ll change.
And finally we get this post, which conflates the ‘progressive, liberal left’ with the Labour Party and states that there is no ‘major national poltical party’ to represent ‘progressives’, while still also going on about how much Labour has to be ‘proud’ of (he mentions increased spending on the NHS – which would be good were it not that much of it is PFI spending and much of that is actually detrimental to patient care – I’ll explain why another time, the minimum wage – an actual good policy, from twelve years ago, and Sure Start childcare, which I know little about. Hardly a record to compare with the great reforming governments of the past, even if you discount the huge negative side).
Now, at least two of these posts are ‘guest posts’, which means that it’s not as if the writer just hit ‘post’ and didn’t think about it – they had to be submitted, and someone had to look them over and say “Yes, this is what we think should be published on this site.”
It seems to me that there are two types of posts on that site. The first, and so far still the majority, though a small one, are ones by members of many parties (including Labour) arguing for various policies because they are, in the view of the writer, correct. Those posts are often worth reading, and include some of the best political writers out there.
Then there are the posts which talk about ‘positioning’ and ‘narratives’. Almost all of these advocate the same policies as the other posts, but they also claim that those policies can *only* work if implemented by the Labour party. They usually, in fact, just assume implicitly that the readers are Labour members. Many of them talk about ‘saving Labour from itself’ as if it’s up to those of us who aren’t members to join a party that has committed war crimes, removed civil liberties, taken from the poor and given to the rich, and generally spent the last 12 years acting exactly like the Tories had for the eighteen years before, because otherwise ‘the Tories will get in *and it’ll be your fault!*’
If this doesn’t change, and very, very soon, then I shall have to come to the conclusion that this is not just a series of embarassing cock-ups and stupid comments, but a calculated attempt to marginalise those of us who consider ourselves ‘liberal’ and ‘left’, but who consider that a political party has to actually do something we agree with more than once a decade to be worthy of our support.
I Despair…
This is, I’m afraid, another political post. There’ll be both comics and Doctor Who ones tomorrow, all being well – I’m acutely aware that whenever I write a long stream of posts on one subject, a whole chunk of my ‘audience’ (such as it is) switches off (my only consolation here being that comparatively few of you are *only* interested in my opinions on one of the things I write about to the exclusion of the others. I am lucky to belong to a political party where if you say “Be pure, be vigilant, behave!” or “Your ideas are too narrow, too crippled. I am a citizen of the universe, and a gentleman to boot!” people will be able to join in…) and I do try to balance what I post here, but sometimes one thing is in my head more than other things.
My pet peeve today is Liberal Democrat communication skills.
The Lib Dems include some extraordinarily talented writers, experienced designers, and intelligent thinkers, so why is it never them who are put in charge of communicating messages both from the party and from groups within the party to the public? Individual Lib Dems can produce blog posts that could serve as manifestos for change that could inspire the world. Put two or more of them in a room together though and they turn into the Committee For Equitable Plebiscite Administration and start producing badly-photocopied pamphlets full of misspellings, exclamation marks and clip art.
Now, as anyone reading this can see, I’m all for content over form, but there comes a point where the form is so bad that the content can’t be understood, and this happens all too often.
As an example, I decided today I’d like to find out more about Land Value Tax. This is one of those ideas that seem to preoccupy Liberal Democrats (roughly speaking you can split the party three ways into those obsessed with Land Value Tax, those obsessed with decriminalising or legalising all drugs, and those obsessed with electoral reform) but it’s not something I know a great deal about – I understand the basic concept (the name Land Value Tax is fairly self-explanatory) and something of the history of the idea (at least to the extent I associate the concept with the name Henry George and so on) but I certainly don’t know what the answers are to the immediate intuitive objections (I presume they do have answers – immediate intuitive objections almost always do).
So I decided to visit the website for Liberal Democrats ALTER (Action for Land Taxation and Economic Reform – an unwieldy title but one that is at least a reasonable acronym), the pressure group within the party for Land Value Tax. Now this is an ‘independent’ pressure group, but one that has as its President Chris Huhne (our Home Affairs spokesman) and as two of the Vice Presidents Nick Clegg (the party leader) and Vince Cable (our economics spokesman and deputy leader), so it would be reasonable to expect this to be a strong effort to persuade the party (and the general public) of the ideas of Land Value Taxation.
Go and have a look at the website. I’ll wait.
Now, there are a myriad small problems with the site, but a few major ones – so major, I decided to take the very unusual step (for me) of emailing info@libdemsalter.org.uk , the address given on the front page of the site. This is the email I sent:
Just thought I’d pass on a small (well, actually, rather large) criticism of your site. I’ve been a member of the Lib Dems for a few
years, but have never been hugely interested in economic ideas (I joined primarily because of civil liberties concerns, with
environmental causes a close second). However, I’ve heard a number of people talk about the idea of Land Value Taxation, and I was interested enough to look at your site to try to find out about it. I couldn’t. The front page has news that is only of interest to people who already agree with you, while the FAQs are split into several sections with no indication as to which section should be read by someone who wants to discover the basics of your ideas. Not only that, but they’re apparently in PDF format – a much more cumbersome format than plain HTML. However, that doesn’t matter, as they’re not actually
there – I get file not found errors when I try to look at them.Please understand, this is not meant as an attack in any way – I am genuinely interested in finding out about your ideas, but your site as it is provides me with no way of finding out what they are. It appears designed for those who already agree with you, and who already know they agree with you, rather than being aimed towards informing people of your ideas (which may well be good ones – I am an admirer of several of the politicians you list as supporting your cause). If you actually want to increase support for your views, perhaps you could replace your home page with a simple summary of what they are, and
keep the news about Lib Dem policy motions on a separate news page?
And here is the reply I got:
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at www.r-hosts.com.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.info@libdemsalter.org.uk:
This address no longer accepts mail.
Sometimes only this post by Jennie can really sum things up…
(ETA Not *all* Lib Dem communication efforts are at that level – the Social Liberal forum I linked to the other day is pretty much exemplary in that it has a single paragraph explanation at the top of every page, and links to “Who we are” and “what we stand for” prominently displayed on every page, as well as some other useful navigation features without appearing overly cluttered. But it’s definitely in the minority, sadly…)
Why the Liberal Democrats? Part 1 in an occasional series
Several of my political posts may seem like they’re attacking the party I belong to, the Liberal Democrats (especially those posts that have been reposted and ‘improved’ over on Labour ‘Liberal’ Conspiracy). This is the prerogative of members in the Lib Dems – get two Lib Dems into a room together and you’ll have three opinions, and unlike the other parties, who put great stock in the appearance of unity and in the ‘party line’, Lib Dem policy is created by the membership, in public, and public debate is part of the culture of the party.
But having said that, since I started this blog a few months ago I’ve never explained in any sort of coherent way exactly why I support the Lib Dems, and why I think you should.
As this may be an election year (it would probably be suicidal for Brown to call one, but he’s done enough bizarre things in the last couple of years that it wouldn’t surprise me) I’m going to do a series of short posts whenever the mood takes me on why you should vote Liberal Democrat. I’m assuming when writing these that the ‘you’ reading this are eligible to vote in the UK, an undecided voter open to persuasion, and with political views at least within eyesight of the mainstream. If you believe that elections can change nothing and we need a violent proletarian revolution, or conversely if you believe that the main thing wrong with the country is that there are too many brown-skinned people in it, then the Lib Dems probably aren’t for you (and if you’re in the latter of those groups, please stop reading my blog now, thanks). Given that, each of these posts will be an ‘assuming all else is equal’ argument
The first of these arguments is that Liberal Democrat elected representatives work harder. There are very few Lib Dem ‘safe seats’, and Liberal Democrats, unlike members of the Big Two parties, can only keep their positions by working hard. There’s also the fact that no-one goes into Liberal Democrat politics to seek power – it would be an absolutely insane thing to do – with very few exceptions Lib Dem elected representatives went into politics out of a desire to help people or to advance a political philosophy, not for personal gain.
A couple of examples (out of many) of Lib Dem representatives going further to help me than I would have expected. These both involve my MP, but I could tell similar stories about my local councillors and MEP:
When I first moved here, I was not a member of the party, but had voted for them in every election since I was eligible to vote (except one council election where I voted Green). I had, however, never had a Liberal Democrat representing me.
I have opinions, as you may have noticed, and one of the things I do on a regular basis is to write to my MP expressing outrage at whatever outrageous thing has outraged me that week. My previous MP (Graham Stringer, Labour MP for Manchester Blackley) had never bothered to respond to anything I’d written to him. I’d thought that this was because of my intemperate writing style, til I saw on writetothem that he had a 0% response rate to constituents at the time (this has now improved to around 50%, a few years later).
So when I wrote to John Leech, the MP for the area I moved to after I got married, a little under three years ago, about some abhorrent bill that was going through Parliament, I didn’t expect any reply from him, either. In fact, I didn’t even need one – I’d looked at his voting record (on the excellent website theyworkforyou and knew he was almost certain to vote the way I wanted him to, and the letter was as much as anything a way of letting him know the issue was important to at least one constituent. So I was pleasantly surprised to get back a form letter along the lines of “Dear Mr Hickey, I agree with you that the Widows and Orphans (Torture and Murder) Bill currently going through Parliament is very wrong, and wish to reiterate that I am in full agreement with Liberal Democrat policy, which says that torture of widows and orphans is something to be avoided wherever possible, and murdering them very naughty indeed. As such, I shall be voting against the bill”.
That basic acknowledgement was more than I’d expected, and I was satisfied with that, but then two weeks later an envelope came through the door containing a huge wodge of documents – it was copies of a set of correspondence between Leech and the minister responsible, chasing him up on all sorts of fine points about the bill in question. Having an MP who was putting that level of attention both into the policies he was voting on and into keeping constituents who had expressed an interest informed was what changed me from being a passive voter to joining the party and becoming active in the local party – he has a slim majority and I want to do all I can to keep him in.
A couple of years later, I wrote to him again (having written to him, of course, several times in the interim – although not that often, because I was fairly sure he was doing his job properly). A Lib Dem front bench spokesperson had made what I considered to be an astoundingly moronic and illiberal statement about a possible future policy. This is nothing new – every party has at least one front bencher per week say something stupid (it may even be that I have said stupid things myself upon occasion) but this statement hit a couple of my buttons, and I fired off an angry email – “Absolute disgrace, as a representative of the same party how can you stand by and listen to this nonsense, rhubarb rhubarb” – just because that’s the kind of thing I do. I got an email back asking for my phone number.
He then ‘phoned me up a few days later, and spent an hour talking over the policy position that was being spoken about (and which he’d helped come up with) in great detail, explaining how the spokesperson had misspoken (a relatively trivial error of the kind we all make when speaking extemporaneously, but which had changed the meaning of the sentence quite significantly), talking about the nuances of the policy in question, and persuading me that what was actually being proposed was, while imperfect (and he acknowledged the imperfections as well, as political necessities), a reasonable response to the situation in question, and one I could accept, if not wholeheartedly support.
Remember, for the first of these stories I was someone who Mr Leech had never heard of, and who wasn’t even yet a registered voter in his constituency. The second time, I was someone who’d met him for two minutes a couple of times who he might be vaguely aware of as a Focus-deliverer and person who sent stroppy emails. Neither time was I anyone ‘important’.
And I don’t think John Leech is exceptional as a Lib Dem MP in this regard – Lib Dem representatives at every level go out of their way to work for their constituents, in a way that members of the other two parties don’t. If you want to be sure that when you actually need your MP to take up a case for you, or when you need the council to sort out the pavement in front of your house, or any of the other myriad reasons you could have for needing your local representative to do something for you, they’ll actually bother to help, then consider voting Lib Dem. Because Lib Dems work harder.
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