Catching up on some reading I’ve come across a very interesting article by David Boyle in the most recent Liberator:“A way out of the 1997 trap”. David is a colleague in party policy discussions, as well as a friend, so what he says is not entirely a surprise to me but it is interesting so I wanted to comment on this piece.
He has two propositions. The first is that too much of the party’s campaigning is campaigning simply for campaigning’s sake: because various techniques and particular lines have served us well, we use them ubiquitously in our pursuit of votes. But without a clear underlying ideology, there is a danger of forgetting the big picture of what it is that we are going out and trying to win votes for - and apart from anything else, anyone going out and pounding the streets needs to be doing it because they believe in it. It’s not that campaigning is lacking in the right Liberal Democrat political content - there is, as he says, plenty of campaigning going on, for example, for greater local control of services - but that the underlying philosophy or ideology beneath it, is not sufficiently clear in it.
I basically completely agree with this. It’s not that we are not saying political things, and the right political things - it’s that the elements are not drawn together sufficiently clearly.
His second proposition is that, “quietly and without the fanfare of the Orange Book or the frustration of the Beveridge Group”, there is a consensus on a “New Liberalism” developing on what such an “intellectual backbone” should be. This is based on a critique of “sclerotic centralisation, giant inhuman institutions, patronising technocratic systems and the deliberate destruction of the social fabric that holds everything else together” - and it leads us to a Lib Dem prescription (which Brown and Cameron could not accept), of:
“Triple devolution: to frontline staff, to public service clients and to democratic local institutions
Human-scale institutions: where human relationships between professionals and clients - teachers and pupils, doctors and patients too - are possible, because they are the only engines of real change
Tough, trust-busting competition policy: tackling Tesco-fication, reclaiming the concept of free trade from the giant corporates, to give a genuine level playing field for local enterprise and imagination
Thrift: recognising the sheer waste of public services that don’t work because they are centralised, and the criminal waste of giant government infrastructure projects - ID cards, nuclear energy, Trident and Iraq
New bottom lines: if well-being and not economic growth is the objective, that means reshaping our institutions to drive that.”
I broadly agree with these points, and I think they go to the heart of some of the major challenges that we as a party should be identifying and prescribing solutions to. They could perhaps be summarised as all being around the issue of “social fabric”.
Clearly they need further development - so far they are a box headed “The new liberalism at a glance”, not a 100-page manifesto - but I also think these ideas need expanding more generally. Localism or small-scale-ism seems to me a useful point, but not in itself a guiding political ideology; there are a lot of political questions to which it seems to me it provides one useful angle, but not the whole answer.
But what do others think?
August 8th, 2007 at 11:08
Its always good, and sometimes mildly astonishing, that anyone reads what I write in Liberator - especially by a sympathetic and thoughtful voice like yours, Jeremy. I’ve just got two responses, if you don’t mind.
The first is to say exactly why ‘campaigning on empty’ is such a problem for us. Because it irritates the opinion-formers, because it fails to draw in enthusiastic long-term activists and supporters, but most of all because - without underlying ideas, and without making it obvious what the Lib Dems are for - what we say becomes instantly forgetable. We use political language forgetting just how corroded it is, how much it goes in one ear and out the other.
That is the reason for a ‘narrative’ approach. Because, if we were explaining the point in the party to an uninformed American, that is how we would do it - we would tell a story, stretching back to where the great problem that we exist to solve began, and extend it through the present and into the future. And we would hold their attention in a way that slogans - especially political ones - never do.
Second point. I’m not sure I would sum up what I call ‘New Liberalism’ as ’social fabric issues’. Social fabric issues are much more important than we currently give them credit for. But my intention is to re-cast Liberalism as a 21st entury crusade - as much economic as it is social - against monoculture, dehumanising technocratic systems where we are supplicants, and in favour of diversity and humanity.
That seems to me to be the core of Liberalism back to William Cobbett, but we have yet to articulate it in the face of the issues threatening our liberty now. It is democratic in its broadest sense, but it borrows traditional Liberal concern - like monopolies - which we have allowed to lapse over the past few decades.
When I was editor of Lib Dem News, I commissioned Conrad Russell to write a regular monthly column on history because I felt our problem was an insufficient grounding in the roots of Liberalism. Now we are far more grounded in the ideology - not just because of that, of course! - but still do not connect it clearly and unambiguously to 21st century threats.
Sory to take up so much space. Thanks for thinking about it so intelligently.
August 8th, 2007 at 11:12
The subtitles are a bit of jargon. And “New liberalism” has already an established meaning, that of the more interventionist form of liberalism, which largely replaced “Classical liberalism” in the beginning of the 20th century.
August 8th, 2007 at 11:24
Jeremy, I think you are right to say that there is growing consensus developing around a comtemporary Liberalism which is defined and understood in terms which we come to own, rather that in movements left or right. These ideas do sound like just the thing.
I fully support the need for more thrift - both in government and in the economy as a whole. However I worry about your attack on investment in major infrastructure. Investment is one of those words that has been robbed of any real meaning by 10 years of New Labour. Spending on Iraq, ID cards consultants, and even Trident replacement may be a great waste. However, investment in modern infrastructure, such as communications networks, has been hugely beneficial and cost-effective both in the private sector in the case of mobile telephony and residential broadband, and where it has been deployed in the public sector such as in education and the health service. We see the consequences all too clearly where investment in infrastructure has been wholly inadequate: the railways and urban mass transit systems.
It would be foolish for us to turn our face from vital investment, just because New Labour has given it a bad name.
August 8th, 2007 at 11:56
I think the ideas themselves sound good, and yes, you could indeed frame some of this under the heading of a “new liberalism”, but I’m not convinced about using a frame about “social fabric”; to me it sounds like aping David Cameron, not setting our own course. A really good campaign could instantly capture the idea for us, but a mediocre one would be instantly written off as “broken society-lite”, I would have thought.
August 8th, 2007 at 12:15
The points made are interesting. On the issue of campaigning, it has always been a concern to me that, once the enthusiasm of our campaigning wanes, as it surely must if we do not achieve a breakthrough within a few years, there may be nothing beneath. This would be a tragedy, since the Liberal and Social Democratic traditions are so rich and really do run through our society at so many levels. We need to be more bullish about our core philosophy. We’re all about freedom and opportunity and that’s something to shout about.
On the issue of low level services against big government, this always seems to come down to that bogey word of the 1980s - subsidiarity. The principle of subsidiarity, that power should be exercised at the most practical level, remains unbeatable as an idea.
Federal government, anyone?
August 8th, 2007 at 14:47
Thanks everyone for comments.
Duncan - I think you may be attributing some comments to me which were actually me attempting to report David’s argument in his article. I probably didn’t do a very good of reporting his full argument, which I think sets a broader context of accepting your point but argues that “simply more money is not the whole answer” - but if you have a copy of Liberator it’s probably worth referring back to the original article. However I hope David himself will respond on this.
Andy - I obviously also didn’t get it quite right it attempting to sum up David’s argument in the “social fabric” phrase, as he himself comments.
Personally I agree with David about the link between freedom and liberalism on the one hand, and on the other bringing control back to the individual - in a globalised world where does control lie really lie? and in many places it is not accountable. When even Prime Ministers say they have no choice, and have very little control over events, it comes across the public as very disempowering! However as I said I do wonder if saying this is really on its own enough.
August 8th, 2007 at 17:14
The problem in giving much more autonomy to local levels of organisation is that there is the risk of making society much more feudal…
August 10th, 2007 at 2:10
I think you would be hard pressed to find many people who disagree with them as they are now. The harder thing is when you work out what they mean for actual policies.
I am happy with the idea (for example) of decentralising lots of services. For example, there has been a debate on LDV on post offices recently. Since there are few externalities for POs, we could devolve those (and the money to fund them) to county level. David and Jeremy would probably agree with that. But then some counties might decide to massively reduce the numbers and spend the money on other things. If we oppose identikit High Streets, are we happy to have High Streets without POs?
Similarly rural buses - do we really need a national rural bus grant? Couldn’t local areas decide how much to spend - if any - on subsidising buses in their areas?
That’s when it would get tough: “LibDems say councils should be allowed to end all bus services in our area” etc etc.
But yes, I am at one with David (as so often) and Jeremy on both the big message - let’s not campaigning mindlessly - and on what the substance of our party is all about: subsidiarity and choice.
August 10th, 2007 at 9:27
Tim I think that’s a fair question - but personally I am quite prepared to be robust about allowing local authorities that sort of power. It is of course quite a different thing to say that you are allowing a local council the power to, for example, shut post offices, and a Lib Dem council actually proposing to do that. Giving that sort of power back to councils would certainly reinvigorate public interest in who actually controls them and what decisions they are taking.
This would all be better than the present situation in the NHS, where different PCTs have found it almost impossible to follow NICE guidance in an individual way, allowing one drug in one area but not the next - the crucial difference being between councils being accountable to local people in their decision-making, and PCTs not being accountable (regular readers will recognise a theme here…)