The SLF are not Social Democrats
The Social Liberal Forum, a left leaning lobby within the Liberal Democrats, held their first conference on Saturday. The event and lobby have been characterised as a gathering of social democrats.
“‘We are trying to make sure that mainstream liberal values continue to be shown in mainstream party policy.’ By mainstream he means social democratic.” – Independent on Sunday
“a group that represents social democrats within the Lib Dems” – Guardian
It’s an easy assumption, but anachronistic. The Social Democrats were the pragmatic right of the 1980s Labour Party, generally comfortable with markets and capitalism. Former members such as Andrew Lansley, Andrew Adonis, and Chris Huhne sit in all three major parties today.
That opposing the direction of travel in public service reform of the first two, and coming closing to tearing up the public services position of the Liberal Democrat Commission bearing the name of the latter, is principally what the SLF is known for, is a pretty big hint.
The SLF, like LV, and unlike the SDP, tend to be sceptical of central government and imperial adventures. There is nothing inherently objectionable in their desire to see more local democratic accountability over local public services. We just wish they would see that there is nothing inherently objectionable in using market mechanisms to make institutions accountable to individuals.
The SLF and LV both sit on a liberal spectrum. We’re all social liberals. We differ in our concept of social justice.
LV leans towards redistribution as a means to an end, for example tackling ignorance and poverty. SLF leans towards redistribution as an end in itself, in the belief that a flatter society is a better one.
We differ in our economic preferences. We support a more Hayekian model of sound money and a night watchman state, they tend to Keynesianism and activist government.
As SLF member James Graham notes in an excellent piece of analysis, most of the labels are unsatisfactory. I’m not entirely convinced by his conclusion though that social liberal is least dissatsifactory. His ealier pick of socialist liberal is the most accurate description of the SLF’s bias towards redistribution, sympathy for public ownership, scepticism of markets, and bottom-up change.
It’s a better counter-point to the use of economic liberal to describe the right, and largely defines what we oppose in the SLF agenda, their socialism.
The SDP was a victim of it’s own analysis. It highlighted that the early 1980s Labour party was too extreme, too left-wing, and too unwilling to compromise with the real world to be electable. Having made that point, most forcibly in the 1983 election where only geography and first past the post saved the reds from meltdown, Labour’s modernisers set about expelling Militant, ditching Old Labour poses, and creating the election powerhouse that was New Labour.
They became the SDP.
The SDP itself was dead over 20 years ago.
The SLF is very much alive, exploiting the circumstances of coalition with Conservatives, and a long-standing weakness amongst our ‘Orange-Book’ leadership to take party management seriously. SLF have every reason to believe that should we continue on that trend, that the next Leader of the party could be from the left.
That is the long-game. That is the risk to which those of us who regard liberalism’s anti-socialist tradition as important should be most alert.
That though is the battle with the SLF, not a re-run of the merger debates of the 1980s.