This article originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Liberator Magazine (#332). Liberator have kindly allowed us to reproduce this here, along with Matthew Sowemimo’s accompanying article.
We have a new Liberal Democrat think-tank. And when there has been little or no thinking around the party for two decades, that has to be a good thing. So why am I uneasy about the appearance of the Social Liberal Forum?
It isn’t that I am suspicious of social liberalism. Heaven knows, I was even a contributor to the excellent essay collection Reinventing the State.
Nor am I a closet ‘market liberal’ – if there is such a thing – dedicated to handing over health and education to faceless American corporates.
No, this is an argument inside social liberalism, but it is an urgent one. Because there is more than one kind of social liberalism, and we can’t afford for the backward-looking Fabian variety to dominate again.
When the electorate demands something progressive, it would be disastrous for us to exhume the soulless old language of the 1970s and argue that we just never tried Fabianism hard enough.
This article is me asserting my right to try to claw back a genuinely Liberal social liberalism from the jaws of the Fabian beast.
It is a kind of open letter to Matthew Sowemimo, Richard Grayson, Duncan Brack, and all the others involved in the Forum, to look forwards – to look for the real reasons why Britain is becoming so unequal. To be Liberals, which means, I believe, rejecting the Fabian idea that everything can be solved by tax and spending. Continue reading
