Tag Archives: social liberalism

Review: The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

Posted on August 31, 2009 by James Graham| 17 Comments

I read The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better whilst watching the last two seasons of The Wire and so Chris Grayling’s claims last week that parts of the UK were beginning to resemble the Baltimore portrayed in that TV series did cause me to smile wryly. Grayling’s prescription for tackling gang culture (leaving aside the completely ridiculous comparisons) amounted to little more than getting tough, cracking down on criminals and instilling more discipline in schools. By contrast, many of the points being made in The Wire – particularly the fourth season which focuses on the school system – have strong parallels with Wilkinson and Pickett’s book. In short, this sort of “get tough” approach will achieve almost nothing whilst the underlying causes remain untreated.

At the heart of The Spirit Level is a wealth of statistical data outlining how more equal societies (defined in terms of income inequality) do better in terms of physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, crime and imprisonment, obesity, violence, teenage pregnancy, child welfare and social mobility (the latter is a bit of a killer incidentally, it would appear that “The American Dream” is more of a reality in many countries which Fox News would condemn as “socialist”). If that were all the book had to offer I would suggest you save your money and simply peruse the excellent Equality Trust website which Wilkinson and Pickett have helped to set up. What is more compelling, for me at least, is the explanation about why this may be the case. Continue reading →

Bookmark and Share

→ 17 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged ,

Money talks: a response to David Boyle

Posted on April 6, 2009 by Richard Grayson| 5 Comments

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 →

Bookmark and Share

→ 5 Comments

Posted in Article

Tagged , ,

Save us from Fabianism

Posted on April 5, 2009 by David Boyle| Leave a comment

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 →

Bookmark and Share

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Article

Tagged , ,

Reconnecting with our radical heritage

Posted on April 5, 2009 by Matthew Sowemimo| Leave a comment

This article, an adaptation of the speech Matthew Sowemimo gave at the Social Liberal Forum fringe meeting at Harrogate Spring Conference in March, originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Liberator Magazine (#332). Liberator have kindly allowed us to reproduce this here, along with David Boyle’s accompanying article.

Social Liberalism is the mainstream philosophy of the Liberal Democrats and has been so since the Grimond era. Social liberalism recognises that an individual’s material and personal circumstances can act as a constraint on them realising freedom. How meaningful is freedom if you don’t have a house or a pension? This core Social Liberal analysis is as relevant to today’s world as it was to the Edwardian era.

While political freedoms such as freedom of speech are crucial, poverty, inherited disadvantage and in today’s world, climate change, can curtail freedom. Lloyd George preceded his challenge to the landed aristocracy with the damning phrase that “a nation that ruled the waves could not even flush its own sewers.” Liberals have used state action to challenge disadvantages that prevent individuals realising their full potential. As Nick Clegg has said, “freedom and liberty mean nothing unless the barriers to progress and opportunity are removed.” Continue reading →

Bookmark and Share

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Article

Tagged , ,

In defence of broad church politics

Posted on February 20, 2009 by James Graham| 26 Comments

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.

Bookmark and Share

→ 26 Comments

Posted in Announcement

Tagged , , ,

Balancing the Dominance of Market Driven Theories

Posted on February 12, 2009 by James Graham| 10 Comments

cafecultureThis 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. Continue reading →

Bookmark and Share

→ 10 Comments

Posted in Article

Tagged , , ,

What is Social Liberalism?

Posted on February 12, 2009 by James Graham| 3 Comments

By David Howarth

reinventingthestatecover100This 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. Continue reading →

  1. 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). [↩]
Bookmark and Share

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Article, Reinventing the State

Tagged , , ,