Liberal Vision

Liberal Vision votes in LDV’s “Liberal Voice of the Year poll”

 

Much has been said on the subject of  LDV’s “Liberal Voice of Year Poll”. Having read a good number of thoughts, on a range of blogs and posts, about who people think should (or shouldn’t) get the vote… we thought we might lob our two-penneth in.

It probably won’t surprise you to discover that we think it should be Mark Littlewood, founder of and former contributor to this very blog.

Why? Curiously NOT because he has easily been the most effective “free market freedom fighter” of the past year. That should perhaps count… but we think there are other reasons…

First off, as many of you know (and some may have forgotten) Mark is a true liberal. Not only has he done his turn working for Liberty, Mark co-founded, and was chief spokesman for, NO2ID for quite a stint. It is easy to forget that without the simply brilliant and relentless work of NO2ID (hats off here to Phil Booth and Guy Herbert as well) we would almost certainly have seen ID cards being rolled out by now. That alone should earn him some form of recognition.

And whilst on the subject of noble causes let us not forget his stint as chief spin doctor for the party. Not many people will know the extent to which he totally modernised the Lib Dem press office – recruiting and promoting some of the brightest and the best in the business (several of whom are still doing their bit for the party in government today), changing structures and practices that made party’s press operation one the best in the business.

But perhaps the real reason why we here at Liberal Vision think that he deserves to win is that he has, almost single-handedly, championed the cause of personal freedom. He has taken on ministers over regressive plans to introduce minimum pricing on alcohol; tackled lobbyists over the crippling smoking ban; called for the legalisation of drugs. He has demanded time and time again that adults should be treated as adults and not patronised; not spoken down to; not dismissed by those in power. He has been THE VOICE for all those people out there who believe that Government meddling, nannying or nudging is insane, frequently counter-productive and too often unfair – but have no opportunity to say so. He speaks for millions.

Of course we should not overlook his credentials as the “free market freedom fighter” – a term that truly reflects both the passion he has for the subject and the sheer amount of work he does (when is he NOT on the media somewhere or other?). He was without any shadow of any doubt THE free market Voice of 2011. We understand that not everyone shares his views. But what people can not deny is his willingness to engage in the intellectual argument surrounding economic liberalism.

Whilst here at LV, Mark was always insistent that whenever we ran into people who disagreed with our views, the only way to tackle it was to engage and discuss. Those of you that follow him on twitter today will know that he pursues that philosophy to this day. Liberal Democrats have always valued discussion and debate more than any other party. It is one of the things that distinguishes us from the other parties. And Mark must be one of the exemplary figures in doing just that. Yet another damn fine reason why he deserves the title of Liberal Voice of the Year.

Tags: Guy Herbert, Lib Dem Voice, Liberal Democrats, Liberal voice of the Year, Liberty, Mark Littlewood, No2ID, Phil Booth

Rent seekers seek rent

A number of trade union activists appeared in London today to hear a speech by the Leader of their Labour party franchise.

A smaller number of affiliated militants attacked a shop, reducing the amount of tax they paid.

The franchise speaker failed to spell out a credible alternative to the Government plan.

A Government spokesperson reassured the BBC their plan did not mean sacking all public sector workers.

Everyone went home.

Nothing changed.

Great Britain is 303 years old and over £1 trillion in debt.

Left Foot Forward expose anti-Christian myth

It is rare for this blog to praise Left Foot Forward, a thinking-person’s alternative to Labour Party commentary, given a regular Spirit-Level-like disposition to draw erroneous conclusions from dodgy data analysis.

But in this article, their guest writer Symon Hill reveals the facts behind yesterday’s misreported Christians versus anti-discrimination law case.

“In reality, the judges had refused to rule even on the suitability of the Johnses to be foster carers; their comment on the suitability of Christians to be foster parents was almost exactly opposite to the view the CLC attributed to them.”

The ‘anti-Christian’ meme has become an important campaigning mission for social Conservatives. The CLC in this case for example is the Christian Legal Centre whose statement:

“In a landmark judgment, which will have a serious impact on the future of fostering and adoption in the UK, the High Court has suggested that Christians with traditional views on sexual ethics are unsuitable as foster carers.”

prompted much of the ‘Christians banned from adopting’ coverage. Tradition in this case means literalist ‘thou shalt not’ Bible-believing kind, rather than say the more pluralist liberal, Greco-Roman, or Judeo-Christian humanist traditions that influences our culture.

This and other evidence for the meme then is fairly thin; the last example being the Christian couple required not to discriminate against homosexuals in their B&B.

If that, and this case are the summit of anti-Christian prejudice in the United Kingdom, whilst homosexuals still risk being beaten to death by thugs, some sense of perspective is required.

The classical liberal view on the preferred treatment of religion by the law, and nuances of this case, is well articulated in this article, and it is worth repeating their summary:

“[T]he state should adopt an entirely neutral stance towards religion, which involves permitting any form of belief or religion, but only to the extent that each is compatible with the law of the land. Thus there should be no religious exemptions to employment contracts (unless freely agreed between the contracting parties) or school uniforms (unless the school itself decides to permit it as part of its own policy on uniforms) or taxation. If a religion is undertaking charitable activities then those activities themselves should qualify for tax exemption, not the religious aspect. Nor should religious (or, equally, anti-religious) sensitivities be permitted to override freedom of speech, as in the Rushdie affair or any number of less extreme examples.”

Or as an influential Christian thinker is reported to have put it:

“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s”

Life on Mars with the Federal Executive

It’s notable that the highest Liberal Democrat governing body, the Federal Executive,  is deemed so important by the governed, that their page on the party website has not been updated since July 2008.

To get some sense of who is on it today you might go to the internal election fan siteof Councillor Colin Rosenthiel, or find a back-issue of Lib Dem News, the equivalent of hiding the results in a locked cupboard marked ‘Beware of the Leopard’.

So effective is the Federal Executive, that the Leadership set up an appointed Chief Officers Group in 2008 to get stuff done, rather than just talk about it. This leaves the FE with a somewhat nebulous role in debating political strategy and no power to implement it.

An example of this can be seen in today’s Guardian that reports:

“Liberal Democrats to fight next election as totally independent party”

“Party executive agrees to fight next general election campaign with ‘no preference for potential future coalition partners’ and reasserts party’s left-of-centre roots”

“Conference re-asserts that the UK Liberal Democrats are based firmly in the historical and global traditions of the liberal and social democratic philosophy”

On the last point first, just how dead does the SDP parrot have to be before the FE pop the corpse in the swing bin? I’m almost surprised the sentence didn’t conclude with an attack on Thatcherism and worries about whether phone privatisation is really working.

Further the end of history implications that no relaigments mattered before the Alliance, none since, and definitively no more in future, concluding with a call for “modern liberalism” makes no sense.

On the first point, the reality of political campaign planning means that come late 2014/15, when the Party Leader, Chief Executive and hundreds of local organisers are deciding what to do and say, this statement of intent in January 2011 will have no meaning or force.

How close or not the party wishes to be seen to the Conservatives, Labour, others or none will in no small part depend on what those parties do. Are we for example really saying that if either main party split, as say happened with the formation of the SDP, we wouldn’t be interested in collaboration with the more liberal faction.

More to the point why isn’t it explicit political strategy to encourage that outcome?

We cannot move from third place by organic growth. Running incremental by-elections worked poorly in opposition and won’t work at all in Government.

The Conservatives further are quite nakedly running a “hug them close” strategy with the party mainstream in order to encourage a National Liberal realignment and antagonise the left.

Nick Clegg should reverse this discomfort. I’d like to see more statements welcoming centrist Conservatives embrace of liberal democracy, and offering a home to New Labourites abandoned by the double-Eded-disaster leading their party.

If the Federal Executive had an ounce of political guile they’d be poking a stick at the fragility of the Conservative and Labour coalitions, rather than amplifying concerns about our own

But I fear this latest statement has once again shown a group obsessed with internal positioning, persistently fighting the last war, and adding little value to the party’s growth and progress. Give them a real internal scrutiny purpose, or scrap it. Save the Cowley Street biscuit budget for something more useful.

Is it time to ditch “fair” and “green”?

For this blog’s 800th published post, and reflecting on Nick Clegg’s five-day old New Year message to supporters, the concluding slogan, particularly two words have been bugging me.

“We will continue to build the liberal, fairer, greener Britain that we all believe in.”

There’s nothing particularly noxious or exciting about it. It’s a fairly typical party triptych. I don’t even have a particular issue with the sentiments expressed. Who doesn’t want a fairer society? Who is actively in favour of an unpleasant environment? Who still thinks over 20 years on from merger that the party’s philosophy needs more explanation than ‘liberal’?

The niggle is more a sense of defensive over-explanation.

Nick Clegg was at his most lucid philosophically when an MEP. He frequently used to write about wanting a more liberal Europe, and if further explanation was required he would talk about reform, a popular shorthand for change before Obama. The benefits of the EU in respect of greener action and delivering a fairer society were certainly discussed. But Nick did not, at that time, feel the need to punctuate his argument with these phrases.

The problem with both is they neither differentiate nor explain anything meaningful. There is no enemy out there campaigning for an unfair society and horrible environment; or constituency to whom they appeal. Fairness is largely used by the left as shorthand for socialism and by the right for the opposite. Green can mean anything you want it to mean in respect of methods or outcomes, and can be a negative when associated with the anti-progressive Ludditism of the green extreme.

The expression liberalin itself is enough for most people to understand that you are concerned with a fairer… more equitable… rights-based… opportunity-focused…  society. When Nick says we want liberalism and fairness, it comes across as a lack of confidence in the former, not an affirmation of a concrete mission.

Nick bravely, is attempting to avoid the Labour elephant traps around distribution and poverty targets, by trying to redefine what fairness means in less relative terms. But this is like trying to sell cold turkey to crack addicts. The more you talk about it the more the junkies highlight their withdrawal symptoms. The long-term benefits are not an easy story. If talking about fairness at all it is safer to focus on concrete examples where something transparently unfair, like child detention, has been fixed, rather than waffle about a fairer society.  

Green liberalism does mean something distinct from Green authoritarianism or the pastoral patneralism of green Tories. Generally it is a preference for nudges and incentives to internalise environmental choices within markets and only use more coercive mechanisms pragmatically. But is it so important that as the campaign handbook puts it, ’a green thread should run through all our campaigning?’. Is it really one of our three ‘things to remember’? Is it really helped by being liberal and green, as though these are distinct positions?

I’m not sure that it is. There is precious little difference between the environmental policies of the three major parties, and that that existed in the last Parliament tended to cast the Liberal Democrats as fussy busybodies obsessed with parking charges, recycling targets, and rubbishing nuclear power. None are good examples of green liberalism. In Coalition there is even less distinction.

Further it is not a major issue for most voters and rarely has been. At a time when 61% of people rate the economy as the most important issue facing Britain, 27% unemployment, and only 4% the environment, is this one of the three things we want people to think of when they think Liberal Democrat? Looking at both ends of that poll we might wish to take a leaf out of BP’s pre-crisis repositioning and talk more about responsibility, covering both an economic and environmental approach.

Nick’s other central issue is the need to define what the Liberal Democrats bring to the table in Government. Listing percentage manifesto commitments met is not memorable. Talking about values we don’t own and mean little of substance is little better.

He needs instead I think to talk more about this being a liberal Government. A liberal Coalition. Repeatedly and with confidence. In doing so his message will be helpfully amplified by howls of outrage from the Conservative right, and incoherent linguistic gymnastics from the Miliband Tendency. This happens to an extent already, but by retaining all his other dog whistles to old allies the liberal bit always sounds like an apology rather than an assertion of ownership of the dominant philosophy of our party and the Government.

If other handles are needed, responsibility and reformare currently more resonate descriptions of what the party is about in Government than green and fair. Both Clegg can articulate with confidence and both for example explain the otherwise wretched politics of the tuition fees reversal. But liberal remains king. All Nick needed to say in his sign-off was

“We will continue to build the liberal Britain that we all believe in.”

That is enough.