Mar
27
Today’s news that the Liberal Democrats have reviewed the pledge to cut the overall burden of taxation is timely and welcome.
It was obvious that financial pressures were disproportionately hitting those on the lowest incomes, even before the start of the recession. Labour’s 10p tax fiasco showed by public reaction that hitting the poorest is not only no way to achieve a fair society – it offended the public as a whole.
Liberals should applaud a commitment to tax the lowest paid, less. That commitment must go hand in hand with measures that promote equality; as we recently confirmed, extending access to further and higher education, as well as committing to invest in vital infrastructure works that create jobs, are the right answers in the teeth of a financial crisis. Those commitments cannot be lost amid the well-trailed squeeze on public finances.
Neither, however, can Liberal Democrats avoid facing up to a financial squeeze that looks inevitable regardless of the colour of the carpets in Number 10 in 2010. The early thinking is promising. There is no shortage of waste within the public sector, and social Liberals cannot be too unhappy about the areas Nick Clegg has earmarked in his interview with the FT. What is now needed – as far as it is possible – is clarity of an approach that protects the most critical elements of our public services, in order to avoid the obvious attack from the Left that a review of public spending – even if that means scrapping Trident – is in some way an attack on those core services.
Today’s statement also helps by putting right what appeared to be a fudge; that statement of wider, unspecified tax cuts last Autumn rapidly looked hard to achieve. Nick Clegg has sharpened the focus of the Liberal Democrat message, and done so in a way that strengthens our position as the only party committed to greater equality and social justice.
Gareth Epps is leader of the Lib Dem Council Group in Reading and the candidate in Reading East
Mar
09
At the launch of the Social Liberal Forum in Harrogate, there was considerable enthusiasm among those attending for talking to people outside the Liberal Democrats where there is scope for developing policy ideas together. One organisation specifically suggested was Compass.
Coincidentally, an article appeared in the New Statesman just a few days ago which suggests just how much common ground there is for such discussions with Compass. In ‘No Turning Back’, the Compass Chair, Neal Lawson, and journalist John Harris, put forward perspectives which I think many Liberal Democrats share, and which I believe we should engage with constructively. Get the whole story »
Feb
22
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? Get the whole story »
Feb
12
This article is based on a speech given by Dr Richard Grayson at the Urban Café, Newcastle upon Tyne on Monday 2nd February 2009 (event hosted by Cafe Culture North East).
Here, Richard sets out what he believes are distinct limitations to the market. Richard will assert that there is still a very clearly designed role for the state, one that is creative and enabling, rather than centralising and stifling.
I’m going to try to tackle three broad issues this evening. First of all, how recent events have affected views of the state. I then want to look at how social liberals approach the state, and finally consider what a social liberal state would be like. Get the whole story »
Feb
12
By David Howarth
This article was originally published in Reinventing the State: Social Liberalism for the 21st Century. We are grateful to David for allowing us to reproduce this article.
Sometime in the late nineteenth century, liberalism began to divide into two different streams. One stream, which came to be called ‘classical liberalism’, confined liberalism’s ambitions to establishing a robust framework to protect individuals from a rapacious and power-hungry state. It aimed to control the size of the state, especially its military expenditure, and to promote international free trade, both for its own sake and as a way to encourage peace. Its ideal was a state that left us alone to get on with our lives. It valued political freedoms – especially of speech and of belief – but also tended to see property rights in themselves as an important bulwark against oppression.
Some classical liberals shaded into what ought to be called libertarianism rather than liberalism. They came to view property rights as natural rights existing outside the framework of the state, so that the state may not even redefine property rights without committing a wrong.
The other stream, which has come to be called ‘social liberalism’ (but which might better be called ‘social justice liberalism’ ), also valued political freedom, also thought that the state should as far as possible leave us alone to make our own decisions on how to live our lives, also opposed militarism and also believed that international free trade was a way to preserve peace, but it believed in addition that liberalism required a commitment to a fair distribution of wealth and power, which in turn led to support for redistributive taxation and public services as ways of fairly distributing wealth and for democracy as a way of fairly distributing power. Get the whole story »
