This Essay was written in January 2006 for the website of Meeting the Challenge, the Liberal Democrats’ policy review, as a contribution to the debate about the Liberal Democrats’ narrative.

Meeting the Challenge grew out of a desire to set out a coherent and planned programme for the party’s policy development over the next few years. It is not a re-examining of the philosophical underpinnings of what we believe (we did that excellently in the last Parliament, with It’s About Freedom, which remains the philosophical basis for the current exercise); it is certainly not a line-by-line review of existing policy, giving us the chance to enjoy those old rows all over again; and it is definitely not a comprehensive document listing all the policies we will want to go to the electorate with in three years’ time.

What the narrative it comes up with should be, is an attempt to draw together the things we believe in, at both a detailed and a philosophical level, into a simple statement of our overall pitch to the electorate. Our narrative, our pitch, our story, our approach, call it what you will: it should be the simple statement of what the Liberal Democrats believe, what we would do, and why people should vote for us. We (by and large) know what we believe: we are going to remain fully committed to, for example, all of the six themes which we set out in the Meeting the Challenge consultation paper (freedom, fairness, localism, internationalism, prosperity and sustainability). The narrative should be the statement that draws those together, the “thread that joins the beads”, which explains to the electorate our overall view, which would allow them to work out the approach we would be likely to take to something, even without knowing our specific policies. It should be firmly rooted in our principles, and with a clear link to our specific policies. It should help people (as Charles Kennedy put it at the consultation session at Blackpool) instinctively know what the Liberal Democrats would think about something.

During the course of the wide Meeting the Challenge consultation process, two other examples of political parties with clear narratives have been well used: the incoming Labour government’s in 1945, and Margaret Thatcher’s in 1979.

In 1945 the Labour government was clearly all about creating a welfare state. Even if you hadn’t read the specific section of their manifesto about, say, dentistry, you could have a pretty good idea of the approach they would be likely to take to it.

In 1979 Margaret Thatcher was about taking on the trades unions, and giving the country an economic cold shower. Even if you hadn’t read the section of her manifesto about the electricity industry, say, you could have a pretty good idea of the sort of approach she wanted to take – even if it took her a few years to reach its final embodiment of privatisation which was (for her) its logical conclusion.

Our narrative, or story, needs to tell an equally simple and clear story.

The people behind those two examples had something else in common, as well. They had a clear idea of the historical problem they were trying to solve – and their narrative was their answer to it. In retrospect we can all now see why Thatcher thought that radical change to Britain’s economy was needed after the 1970s (and many may, in the deepest parts of their soul, now admit that it was more justified than they said at the time; as someone who was just five when she was elected, personally I’m spared that). And we can all see now why Attlee and his government thought they had to do something to correct the complete lack of support which people had had from their Government before the war.

So what now is the historical problem we are trying to put forward the answer to? What will people look back at in sixty years’ time and be unable to believe was true about Britain in 2009, because that problem has since been solved and forgotten? Any narrative we come up with needs to answer this question too.

So our narrative should be firmly founded on our fundamental principles, it should be the common thread running through our specific policies – and crucially, it must be clear, simple and appealing to the electorate. That means something extremely basic, and something which resonates with the feelings that the public already has about the government.

So what should our narrative be?

I believe the answer arises out of our commitment to the individual, to giving freedom to individuals, to actively empowering them to have as much control over their own lives as possible, and to putting them in the driving seat, not only of their own lives, but of our shared society as a whole. And as a result it makes other things – governmental institutions, for example, but also private organisations and other elements of society – subservient and accountable to individuals.

I believe our narrative should be: It’s About You: putting you in control of your own life (and actively equipping you to be so), and making our shared institutions accountable to you.

Why do I think this should be our ‘narrative’?

Well, firstly, it arises directly and clearly out of our central belief. Liberalism is surely nothing if not about giving power to the individual, making them free and empowering them. We believe – as we often say but we don’t always take to its conclusion – in devolving power to the lowest possible level: the individual.

And it goes on to link up to many of our most important beliefs and policies about the nature of government.

Promoting and protecting the individual is clearly an important principle behind everything we are saying about the government’s authoritarian attitude towards civil liberties.

We believe strongly in localism, in making those things which are currently run by local government (like education), as well as those which aren’t (like health), more directly accountable to local people. In the terms of this narrative, we want to put individuals in control.

We believe passionately in internationalism, in making what happens on the world stage, more accountable. And that doesn’t just mean how we decide whether or not to invade Iraq: the thing which makes many informed people feel most disempowered of all, that it’s not worth getting involved, is the almost complete lack of control or accountability of the process of globalisation. In the same way that we want what happens in our local district to be subject to a rule of law under a democratically-accountable government, we want the activities of global organisations which can have a huge impact on our daily lives to be subject to – well, first of all, any sort of effective control at all, frankly, and then for that control to be accountable to us.

We believe passionately – though thank goodness we’ve stopped saying so quite so constantly – in a fair and sensible constitutional settlement for the UK, whether that’s having a national parliament and government that reflects the numbers of votes actually cast, or ending the situation in which the UK is the only country I can readily think of where the second chamber of the legislature is actually appointed by the Executive.

That too can be summed up as putting you, the individual, in greater control.

The ‘put the individual in charge’ narrative links up too to our economic approach. We want individuals to have the greatest freedom we can engineer, to get the jobs they want. That means equipping them with the education and training they need. Our emphasis on the individual doesn’t mean simply abandoning them to their own devices, it means actively supporting the individual, and as an individual, to exercise their own maximum freedom.

It means ensuring that when they apply for a job their chances are not limited by prejudice because of their gender, race, age, disability, sexuality or other features.

And it means giving power to the individual to pursue the career they want, whether they want to take the decision to re-skill and get a different job, and whether they want to spend the money they have earned on, say, children or on their own pension.

It links up too to what we say about the big questions for public services – whether that is the support we give to the more individualised approach to education for teenagers proposed by Tomlinson, in which the individual student has much greater opportunity to choose what they want to be educated in and how they want to be educated in it; or whether that is the greater control that we want individual patients to have over the treatment that they receive from the health service.

This narrative lies behind our existing approach in a whole range of other policy areas too, from international development, where we are surely about doing what works best to put whole peoples and individual citizens in developing countries in control of their own lives, to reform of agricultural policy, where we want to give individual farmers and others, in the context of diminishing public financial support, the greatest control over what they do next.

This narrative: giving power over their own lives and over our shared institutions, back to individuals, underpins our policies across the spectrum, and is founded on our fundamental liberal principles.

What is the historical problem that it is the answer to? Well, surely it’s the problem of industrial-scale systems in both the private and public sectors serving us all up the same thing they want to give us, rather than what we individually want to receive. For all the talk of our current government, and of globalised big business, of having put power into the hands of the consumer, the services that on offer to us are incredibly uniform – whether that’s the kind of service the public hospital or state school you go to can offer you, or the films that the privately-owned cinema offers you on a Saturday night. ‘Choice’, where it exists at all, means you can choose A or B, and if you fancy a bit of M, or wouldn’t mind trying a touch of Z with a twist of Q, you can forget it. One is put in mind of the school which after a big campaign abolished compulsory school uniform, only to find that the following day the entire school turned up voluntarily wearing the same trainers.

Social democratic capitalism (well at least in Europe it’s social democratic) may have defeated communism, but in our system of what Philip Bobbitt calls ’market states’, it too is too often in danger of destroying individuality. An electoral system in which most votes cast have no realistic prospect of affecting the outcome reinforces this.

Our focus on the individual counters this: with the individual properly in control, ‘choice’ means something more real, and promotes also greater diversity (another important liberal principle).

We should be about reclaiming all this, about allowing people to be individuals, and giving them the opportunity to challenge the power of large organisations in the private as well as public sectors: not destroying them, but putting individuals back in the driving seat.

Of course our narrative or story can not be just the overall basis underlying our policies: it also needs to be the short and simple message that we use to convey what our approach is to voters.

Putting you, the individual, in control, performs well for us here too. People want to be in control of their own lives (everyone from the pollsters to the psychologists confirms this, as well surely as our own experience). The appeal to put them back in their own driving seat is a powerful one: more powerful than some other, probably nobler, appeals to their nature. Whatever we might like to think, people may think that a ‘fair’ society, and helping other people is a good idea, and something that all other things being equal they would like to support, but what they really care about, in the final analysis, is their own interest. Giving power genuinely to the individual actually means in practice doing many of the things that we sometimes think of as coming under the heading of ‘fairness’, but in the end ‘putting you in control’ has a much stronger appeal.

So for me the party’s narrative or story which should be behind the development of our policies, and in which terms we should frame them, is: giving power to you, the individual.

What does that mean in practice?

Well, first it means that this is the core of expressing what we stand for. We need, as Chris Rennard said at the Meeting the Challenge conference in January, to refine it as a message and as a story and be able to express it in 3 words, in 30 words, in 300 words, and 30 pages.

We then need to repeat it over and over again, so that ordinary voters, not remotely interested in policy, instinctively associate it with the Liberal Democrats, and knowing what we stand for. Every press backdrop and every leaflet we put out over the next three years should carry it.

And we then need too to use it as the political approach and context in which we put all our other policies, and our policy development for the rest of this Parliament. That doesn’t mean ditching our existing policies, but it means expressing them in terms that flow from this story – and using it as the basic approach to the areas where we develop new policy. I used to work for an organisation which insisted that every document it produced started with a short explanation of how it related to the organisation’s two-word mission statement. Every policy paper, every press release and every briefing we produce needs to explain how whatever topic is covered in it relates to our overall narrative.

‘Giving you control’ has the wide appeal, the simplicity of purpose, the links both to our detailed policies and our fundamental principles – and above all the resonance with the voters – to be that narrative. It says what we think the problem is that we are trying to solve, and outlines our answer. It meets the challenge of being a powerful and attractive Liberal Democrat narrative in 2006-9 to stand alongside the Conservative narrative in 1979, and the Labour narrative in 1945.