Baroness Shirley Williams will be speaking at a special Fabian Society event on 10 March to answer the question “How liberal is Labour?” in conversation with Newsnight’s Michael Crick.
Tickets are free for Fabian Society members and £10 for non-members. In addition, you can buy a six-month introductory membership for £9.95 which includes a free ticket to the event (do you see what they did there?).
Posted in Announcement
Tagged event, fabian society, labour party, liberalism, shirley williams
Steve Webb MP, the Liberal Democrat Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary (and Chair of the Social Liberal Forum’s Advisory Board), will be leading a policy discussion at Portcullis House, Westminster, on Wednesday 25 February.
To give people some food for thought, we have also republished Steve and Jo Holland’s article on Communicating Social Liberalism from Reinventing the State: Social Liberalism for the 21st Century on the Social Liberal Forum website (the full Reinventing the State will be back in print next month).
If you can’t attend this Wednesday, Steve has said he will be developing a short talking points briefing which can be adapted for any local party discussion evening. This will be published on the Social Liberal Forum website soon.
Finally, we hope to see you at our fringe meeting at Harrogate Spring Conference, where you can learn more about why we have decided to set up the Social Liberal Forum and our plans for the next few months.
PS Our Ideas Factory is starting to result in some interesting debates. Please do add your own feedback – and send us your own ideas!
The Ideas Factory is a chance for you to pitch your own idea of what should be in the next Liberal Democrat manifesto. The proposal here is not the policy of the Social Liberal Forum. We will however be passing it – and the response it generates – onto the Manifesto Working Group.
James Graham: work with the industry to develop incentives to dramatically switch from supermarket use to home delivery.
A couple of disclaimers to start with: this isn’t an attack on supermarkets. Nor is it a fully fleshed out policy agenda. Ideally it could be achieved with minimal state intervention, but government may be able to play a role in terms of creating incentives to make it easier for industry to adapt. Continue reading
Posted in The Ideas Factory
By Steve Webb and Jo Holland
This article was originally published in Reinventing the State: Social Liberalism for the 21st Century. We are grateful to Steve and Jo for allowing us to reproduce this article.
Liberal Democrats are good at coming up with policies. Probably the best policy decision of New Labour – independence for the Bank of England – was actually a policy from the 1992 and 1997 Liberal Democrat manifestos. In many other areas, notably on environmental issues and international affairs, Liberal Democrat policies have set the agenda, only to be picked up in whole or in part by other parties.
But where Liberal Democrats have sometimes failed has been in converting those strong policy ideas into a coherent story about the sort of party that we are and the kind of society that we want to create. In short, we have often got across Liberal Democrat policies, but failed to communicate Liberal Democracy. We have made electoral progress by ruthless targeting of key seats and vigorous grassroots campaigning, but we have failed to promote Liberal Democracy in a way that has won the hearts and minds of large sections of the British public. How, then, do we communicate our philosophy and our principles in a way that will connect with the reality of people’s lives, hopes and fears? Continue reading
Posted in Article, Reinventing the State
There has been a bit of a debate waging over the past week about “classical (or economic) liberals versus social liberals,” partly due to the launch of the Social Liberal Forum and exacerbated by a recent editorial in Liberator Magazine.
For the record, while the Social Liberal Forum does indeed believe that social liberalism is the mainstream ideology of the Liberal Democrats, we do not believe it is incompatible with other strands of liberalism. Being a broad church, and having its tenets challenged from time to time is healthy for a political party.
We established the Social Liberal Forum to encourage debate within the party not to shut it down. Everything we have done thus far (the Ideas Factory, the policy discussion evenings) has revolved around this. We very deliberately chose to launch this website with David Howarth’s article examining the different strands of liberal thought precisely to move on from debate which at times can be dogmatic and based on the assumption (often promoted by the media) that this is a zero-sum game in which for economic liberals to ‘win’ social liberals must automatically ‘lose’, and vice versa.
David Howarth adds:
My views on this are well known – ‘economic’ vs ‘social’ is a debate within social liberalism about means, not ends. ‘Classical’ vs ‘social’ liberalism is a different debate within liberalism about whether the core commitments of liberalism should be supplemented by commitments to the redistribution of wealth and power and to democracy for its own sake. It’s important not to get these two debates confused.
But I do think the Liberator ‘Blues under the Bed’ editorial is quite wrong when it claims that classical and social liberalism cannot exist within the same party. That depends on what the leading issues of the day are. When current politics is exclusively about the redistribution of wealth it might well be difficult to keep a combined liberal party together. But if the issues of the day include a large element of having to defend core liberal values – such as political freedom and civil liberties and keeping the state out of private lives – I can’t see why liberals of all kinds could not work together, even in government.
Posted in Announcement
Tagged classical liberalism, economic liberalism, liberator, social liberalism
The Ideas Factory is a chance for you to pitch your own idea of what should be in the next Liberal Democrat manifesto. The proposal here is not the policy of the Social Liberal Forum. We will however be passing it – and the response it generates – onto the Manifesto Working Group.
Dr Tim Leunig: Those in social housing should be allowed to require their landlord to sell their home and buy a place of their choice.
Council and housing association tenants get little choice over where they live and are rarely able to move: many are in properties that do not suit their individual needs and preferences.
This can and should change. In a paper published by the Policy Exchange, The Right to Move, I argue that social tenants should have the right to move, the right to require their landlord to sell their current home and use the money to buy a place chosen by the tenant.
The new property would be owned by the landlord, and rented out as before. Tenants would be better off: they would get to live in a house of their choice. Continue reading
The Ideas Factory is a chance for you to pitch your own idea of what should be in the next Liberal Democrat manifesto. The proposal here is not the policy of the Social Liberal Forum. We will however be passing it – and the response it generates – onto the Manifesto Working Group.
Thomas Hemsley: As part of a wider effort in strenghtening select committees (through allowing members to be elected by the Commons/Lords themselves) and democratising the second chamber, I feel we should look into having US-style ratifications for government appointees.
These ratifications would not be for ministers, but for members and heads of QUANGOs/NDPBs. So, for example, ratifications would be held for the Director General of the BBC, as well as the Chairman of the Trust and its members, and would be done so by the second chamber’s DCMS committee.
Similarly, the Chairman of the Environment Agency would be ratified by the second chamber’s DEFRA committee. I feel this would increase accountability over the executive and allow the second chamber a key role in scrutinising the Govt. Continue reading
Got an idea you think should be in the Lib Dem manifesto? We want to hear it!
As part of the Social Liberal Forum’s contribution to the Liberal Democrat policy making process, we are inviting people (whether they are party members or not) to write a short article about their big idea, and invite a debate on the subject.
To kick start the debate, we will be getting members of the Social Liberal Forum’s Executive Team and Advisory Board to add a short response and then open the topic to general discussion. Visitors to the website will also be allowed to vote on whether they like the idea or not. We will send the ideas – and their responses – to the Liberal Democrat Manifesto Working Group.
So if you have an idea, send your short article (max 500 words) to manifesto *at* socialliberal.net
Posted in Announcement
As reported in the Liberal Democrat News yesterday, the Social Liberal Forum has now been launched. Our Director, Matthew Sowemimo, has also written a short article on Lib Dem Voice.
Our launch appears to have caused a bit of a stir – which is kind of the point. You can follow the debate by going to Cobden’s Comments, The People’s Republic of Mortimer, Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! and Charlotte Gore Blog (apologies if I missed anyone out – just add them in the comments below and I will append).
UPDATE: more coverage on Eaten by Missionaries.
The Social Liberal Forum website is now live! We’ll be adding lots more to this website as it develops, but in the meantime, you might want to check out the following:
Make sure you keep in touch with us, either by joining our Facebook page, following us on Twitter, or subscribing to our email list.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments.
Posted in Announcement
