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Aug 21 9 comments

Equality Matters

By Duncan Brack

This article was originally published in Reinventing the State: Social Liberalism for the 21st Century. We are grateful to Duncan for allowing us to reproduce this article. Visit the Methuen website to purchase the latest edition of this book for the discount price of £10.

The Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, and in which no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity … We reject all prejudice and discrimination based upon race, colour, religion, age, disability, sex or sexual orientation and oppose all forms of entrenched privilege and inequality … We recognise … that the market alone does not distribute wealth or income fairly. We support the widest possible distribution of wealth …

Extracts from the Preamble to the constitution of the Liberal Democrats

Of the three ‘fundamental values’ which the party’s constitution claims we ‘seek to balance’ – liberty, equality and community – equality has traditionally held least appeal for Liberal Democrats. The very title of the 2002 policy paper on Lib Dem philosophy, It’s About Freedom, relegates it explicitly to, at best, second place. As the paper made clear:

We place the principle of freedom above the principle of equality. Equality can be of importance to us in so far as it promotes freedom. We do not believe that it can be pursued as an end in itself, and believe that when equality is pursued as a political goal, it is invariably a failure, and the result is to limit liberty and reduce the potential for diversity.¹

I served on the working group that produced that paper, so I share the responsibility for the statement. I now believe, however, that it drastically understates the importance of the pursuit of equality as the essential underpinning of our ultimate aim of individual freedom, Similarly, equality underpins the type of communities in which individuals thrive best. The pursuit of both these other values will be compromised by a lack of attention to equality. Furthermore, I don’t mean just equality of opportunity, the Liberal get-out for most of the past century. I mean equality of outcome – or to be more accurate, a significant reduction in inequality of outcome.

This chapter will argue the case for promoting (or restoring) equality to the place where the party put it in its founding constitution, as a ‘fundamental value’ balanced against – rather than subordinate to – the other two. My case is based on three main arguments. First, that the extent of income and wealth inequality in modern-day Britain is seriously undermining the fabric of society, and needs urgently to be tackled by government – not just for the sake of those at the bottom of the income and wealth pile, but for all of us.² Second, that a commitment to reduce levels of income and wealth inequality fits naturally into our Liberal philosophy. Third, that it’s smart politics. Get the whole story »

Liberal Democrat Policy Paper 50, It’s About Freedom (Liberal Democrats, 2002), p. 8, para 1.10. The paper itself did not have a separate section on equality. [↩]
This chapter is primarily about income and wealth inequality. I recognise, of course, that other forms of inequality – e.g. those deriving from race or gender – are also serious issues, but I do not deal with them here because I think the party’s position on them is right. [↩]

Aug 18 4 comments

Reinventing the State

Reforming the NHS : A Local and Democratic Voice

By Richard S. Grayson

This article was originally published in Reinventing the State: Social Liberalism for the 21st Century. We are grateful to Richard for allowing us to reproduce this article. Visit the Methuen website to purchase the latest edition of this book for the discount price of £10.

The democratic deficit in the NHS

Of all issues in public policy, health care is the one in which the public is consistently most committed to a major role for the state. The basic principle of the National Health Service – a tax-funded state-run system free to all citizens at the point of use – is a hugely popular one. Even the most pro-market politicians are reluctant to challenge it. Of course, the principle of tax funding was undermined as early as 1951 when the Labour government introduced prescription charges for false teeth and spectacles, and charges were then expanded further under the Conservatives in 1952. However, charges make up a tiny percentage of the NHS budget today, and the core of the tax-funded system remains unchallenged in party programmes.

Is that a problem? Some believe that funding through taxation has meant that the level of financing the NHS has been too low compared to other European countries. Michael Portillo made that case in 1998, saying that the necessary money could not be found through taxation: ‘The gap between what we spend on health care today and what we ‘ought’ to spend is large, and no party is going to make it up from taxation.’¹ However, the record of the Labour government since 1997 has suggested that this analysis is wrong. They have put billions more into the NHS; one of Labour’s proudest claims is that ‘Investment into the NHS has doubled since 1997 and is set to treble by 2008 to over £90 billion.’² The funding of health care in the UK now compares favourably with other European health systems, whether publicly or privately funded.

This suggests that it is possible to fund the NHS through general taxation at levels which compare with other countries, and that Liberal Democrats should not be seduced by arguments that more funding means private funding. Moreover, Liberal Democrats should recognise that tax-funding is the surest way to ensure socially just funding. Such funding is socially just on two grounds. First, it is redistributive, in that the wealthiest in society pay the highest share of the costs. Second, and most important, access to health care is not limited (at least in principle) by an individual’s ability to pay charges, whether on a one-off basis or through an insurance premium. For these reasons, this chapter does not propose any alteration to the basic funding regime of the NHS.

In contrast, decision-making within the NHS needs radical change. Despite the increased levels of funding under the Blair government, if only from 1999, there is no sense in which the public believes that all is well with the NHS. In particular, despite the extra money, the cumulative deficit of NHS trusts has risen past £1 billion. Consequently, some hospitals are faced with losing services or even closing altogether. The case has been particularly marked in the author’s own constituency, Hemel Hempstead. In July 2006, Liberal Democrat research found that sixteen hospital trusts, running twenty-seven hospitals in England providing acute services, were under strong pressure due to their deficits. The research identified the West Hertfordshire NHS Trust, which runs St Albans City Hospital, Hemel Hempstead General Hospital and Watford General Hospital, as being under the most pressure. Others at high risk included West Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust, and Surrey and Sussex Health Care NHS Trust. The list suggests that deficits appear to be greatest in the south-east of England.³ The deficit means that trusts are obliged by the rules to make cuts, albeit after going through public ‘consultation’ exercises. Despite the huge public support for keeping all hospital services, trusts find they cannot do that because they do not have the money. But because they have little real meaningful independence from central government, and no power to raise extra public funds locally, they are unable to have a meaningful debate with local people about how local aspirations can be met. The end result is that after nearly a decade of increases in NHS funding, all that some local people see is the closure of wards. They understandably fear for the future of entire hospitals. Get the whole story »

Michael Portillo, ‘The Bevan Legacy’, Kathleen A Raven Lecture given at the Royal College of Surgeons on 10 June 1998; available at: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1113449. [↩]
http://www.betterwithlabour.co.uk/nhs/Made_by_Labour#top10. [↩]
Liberal Democrat press release, ‘Lib Dems highlight English hospital trusts most under pressure’, 25 July 2006; available at: http://www.libdems.org.uk/news/story.html?id=10674&navPage=news.html. [↩]

Feb 22 4 comments

Article, Reinventing the State

Communicating Social Liberalism

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 1 comments

Article, Reinventing the State

What is Social Liberalism?

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’¹ ), 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 »

See G. Gaus, ‘On Justifying the Moral Rights of the Moderns’ in E. Paul, F. Miller and J. Paul, Liberalism: Old and New (Cambridge University Press, 2007). [↩]