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?).
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!
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.
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
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.
The Social Liberal Forum exists to foster debate within and beyond the Liberal Democrats, with the aim of developing social liberal solutions and approaches which reflect these principles and which find popular support.
See the about page for more information.
