Surely any liberal must agree with the oxford manifesto?

“1. The suppression of economic freedom must lead to the disappearance of political freedom. We oppose such suppression, whether brought about by State ownership or control or by private monopolies, cartels and trusts.”

“The free exchange of ideas, news, goods and services between nations, as well as freedom of travel within and between all countries, unhampered by censorship, protective trade barriers and exchange regulations”

Thats a description of free markets right there

“The free exchange of goods between nations” would be what people call free trade

There’s nothing to say you can’t be capitalist and support a reasonable amount of non-statist wealth redistribution

The question is where you redistribute from and how you redistribute it

does government have the right to take more tax off successful computer programmers or plumbers than unsuccessful ones?

probably not

does government have the right to tax mines, pollution, carbon emmissions, land usage, water utilities

absolutely

I prefer to understand the terms as between those of liberals who have a primary policy focus on social or economic issues.

It is then the job of party members to show how the two areas overlap and can be reconciled before a truly workable policy can be developed and supported as a manifesto commitment – so if any proposal is either anti-social or unaffordable (or both if you’re not in any way liberal) then it is half-baked and needs further work before I am likely to campaign for it’s implementation.

He deals with much of the criticism mentioned above there.

No he doesn’t.

He explains why he thinks people such as Jock and I should be called minimalist social liberals rather than ‘economic’ or ‘classical’ liberals, but the article deals with none of the actually criticism of social liberalism – essentially, once you decide that state knows best on certain issues, when does it stop?

And will someone please define ‘fair’ for me?

He certainly is eloquent though, so eloquent in fact that it is hard to notice that it doesn’t say much…

An extra problem was added with the Liberator article – The SLF may well be happy to see the likes of Jock and I in the party, but that obviously isn’t universal within all social liberals. So David Howarth may call me a minimalist social liberal who he is happy to debate with, but whoever wrote the liberator article sees me as a closet tory waiting to install Maggie as leader…

I’ll go back to the one point that James and I agreed on – if you got data to back up your argument I will listen, if you just have platitudes then you are no different to anybody else – red, blue or yellow. Waffle about fairness, redistribution of wealth and equality is all just platitude.

Ijust wish someone would back up the assertion that these people exist with some examples. Because from what I can see, those amongst us pushing what one might call a classical liberal position haven’t been near a Tory knowingly for some while…

The political challenge is to reconcile the competing logic of each different idea in order to put it into practice.

Isn’t that what James and I just agreed on – As long as there is hard data to back up your idea, I am willing to listen to it. It is impossible to argue with “phrases”.

So let’s not waste time chatting about the preferred schema of things when there is a wider public to be engaged with and convinced of the beneficial value in their participation.

So this is a really big thing. Why vote? Not Why vote Lib Dem? Or Why vote Tory? just Why vote? In mathematical terms your vote is essentially worthless, even if you have a particular preference. Even if you do have a preference, if you live in a non-marginal seat your individual vote is worthless. Only once in a general election in the last 90 years has an individual vote been worthwhile in electing an MP (He was Labour, but even then the tories won a large majority, so the vote wouldn’t change government policy) and this is all before we get to whether a change of government would actually change policy in any meaningful way.

I am a member of the Lib Dems and even I have trouble coming up with a good reason to vote for them. I vote for them because I have a strong affection for liberalism and they are the best of a bad lot. The only strong, different policy we have is STV. What else is there?

If you are concerned with community participation in a more general sense then going down the statist route is probably the worst possibly avenue – the state actively takes participatory choices out of people’s every day lives and replaces it with single choices once every few years. Want to help the homeless? Well, you can wait until next year and then you can vote for the Labour party who want to help the homeless marginally more than the others, or you can just go and bloody help the homeless.

I’m not into ideologies, I’m into ideas.

Hopefully you will want to participate in our Ideas Factory then!

Discussion about ideology will always end in dispute and rancour because there are very few universal standard reference points and the parameters of orientation are almost exclusively personally-defined.

So let’s not waste time chatting about the preferred schema of things when there is a wider public to be engaged with and convinced of the beneficial value in their participation.