I very much welcome the challenge laid down by David Boyle to the Social Liberal Forum. Indeed, there is very little in it with which I can disagree. In particular, I share the view held by David that the view that ‘everything can be solved by tax and spending’ is mistaken. I strongly believe that we need a revolution in the way that decisions are made in this country, and that we need to take a totally different approach, a sustainable approach, to our day to day lives. We need a more local, more democratic and greener way of approaching politics. That would mean a paradigm shift in the way that we think of power and economics, and these are issues which will be at the heart of the SLF’s work.
Much of David’s article is about the causes of inequality. He rightly cites centralisation, education, snobbery and passivity. In the way that David describes them, none of them are about ‘tax and spending’. I would add another to this list, which crosses over with at least two in David’s list (snobbery and education): the persistence of social class, which leads to generation on generation holding on to power that it has, and perpetuating it through networks which outsiders can seldom access. The persistence of class is sometimes about money, but it is just as often about family connections and schooling, both of which can have an enormous impact on the kinds of informal opportunities and feet-in-the-door that are so often life-defining. Continue reading
