In his classic study The Strange Death of Liberal England, George Dangerfield wrapped an insight into a killer line. The Liberal landslide of 1906 was, he wrote, a victory from which the party never recovered. In the narrow terms of political fortune, a party that supplies the Deputy Prime Minister can hardly be said not to have recovered at all but, as the 2015 election skirmishes began, the Liberal Democrats came in at 5 per cent in one opinion poll. It has been a long descent from the triumphant peak of 1906. The fall poses once again a hidden question of British politics which is rarely posed explicitly: which party should a liberal join?
The decline of the main liberal party is all the more puzzling because Dangerfield’s insight kept on being updated. The history of British politics a century after David Lloyd George has been a series of liberal victories from which the Liberal Party never recovered. The first authentically liberal victories belonged to Lloyd George and Herbert Henry Asquith. Social insurance laid the seeds of what was later to become a comprehensive welfare state. The Liberal government of 1906 began the move, never since completed alas, to shift the burden of taxation from income to wealth, from earned income to unearned capital.
There is still a healthy historical dispute about whether the rise of the Labour Party was a sociological necessity or whether a more adept Liberal Party could not have enfolded the newly enfranchised working class. Certainly, there was no latent socialist mentality in the British working class. In A Strange, Eventful History, his masterpiece of interpretation of the Labour movement, Edmund Dell locates the abiding error of the British left in its failure to understand that there has never been a democratic majority for socialism. If the great tragedy of the British left is its division into two parties, as David Marquand famously observed in The Progressive Dilemma, then the true disaster is the demise of the Liberal Party. If only the Liberals could have avoided implosion the left’s detour into the blind alley of democratic socialism might have been avoided.
In the event, the Labour Party had to stand on the shoulders of Liberals before it could achieve anything. The second great liberal triumph was the enactment, by the Clement Attlee government, of the 1942 report into Social Insurance and Allied Services by a Liberal parliamentary candidate by the name of William Beveridge. Labour’s next lasting achievement was the unequivocal progress of the liberal laws enacted by Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary. More liberal censorship laws, the legalisation of abortion, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, divorce law reform—most of it carried out against the wishes of the puritan Prime Minister Harold Wilson—liberalised and civilised the nation for people whose right to live as they chose was impeded by nasty, restrictive laws.
It was liberals of a different stamp who presided over the third great triumph. When the residual planners in the Labour Party, the “watery Labour men” in JM Keynes’s wonderful formulation, had gradually run the economy into the quicksands of industrial strife, low productivity in public enterprises and a tax regime that stifled creative output, the classical liberals stepped in. Under the aegis of Keith Joseph the discredited planned economy was replaced by the economics of Adam Smith.
It is obvious, from this rapid potted history of British political liberalism, that the term “liberal” is capacious, perhaps emptily so. Any word that can stretch from Margaret Thatcher to Roy Jenkins is close to breaking point. The question of political allegiance for a liberal depends, in the first instance, on the species of liberal concerned. Philosophers who really share very little apart from the title—Friedrich Hayek, Adam Smith, JS Mill and John Rawls—are all described as liberals.
"British politics is full of liberals who disown the appellation"Politically, the liberal has no settled home. In Argentina, Canada and Colombia, the liberal party is on the left. In Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Japan and Australia, the liberal party is on the right. In America, “liberal” is a term of abuse. There are echoes of derogatory usage in Britain. The fabled out-of-touch elite is always metropolitan but usually liberal to boot. Any proposal that is deemed to be too soft on criminals or too unconcerned about immigration can be damned with the epithet “liberal.” The stress on civil liberties at a time of heightened security is written off in the same way.
British politics, however, is full of liberals who disown the appellation and there is little point trying to extract one true meaning from this tangled web of different liberalisms. If you add to Smith and Mill, as I would, Leonard Hobhouse’s radical liberal view that the state, properly used, can help to make a nation more just, the rational course appears to be to join Labour and wait for the period when the party, reluctantly, lets its liberals in. This is one way of describing the elite capture of Labour under Tony Blair, the man whose relationship with the party was described by Roy Jenkins as that of someone who “climbed up the building from the outside.”
The Labour Party was, as Eric Hobsbawm has written, the progeny of the radical liberal left but it has become a distinctly illiberal party on at least two dimensions. Its vintage form is too statist, too prone to suppose that social problems are best solved by the command of the central state. No party whose primary method of change is central state power can easily fit the description “liberal.” That tendency to interfere extends to an account of private things that the state should take a view on which does not fit well with a less tidy, liberal view of the world. William Wordsworth captures this interfering spirit in “The Old Cumberland Beggar” when he deplores those statesmen “who are so restless in your wisdom, ye / Who have a broom still ready in your hands / To rid the world of nuisances.” The Labour Party is full of people who have a strong view on private conduct, on drinking and smoking for example, and see no problem with using the force of regulation to compel the behaviour deemed to be appropriate.
Great British Liberals past and present:
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This is Labour’s variant of noblesse oblige. It is a benign paternalism, a belief that experts are best placed to tinker and direct the way towards the good society. It is a view that combines social liberalism with a belief in the capacity and the efficacy of the state to make granular changes to the nation, in pursuit of the ideal of equality. It is, at root, a failure to trust the good sense of individuals in the matters of their own lives, which is surely a defining trait of any liberalism properly conceived.
The Conservative Party also has an uneasy relationship with liberalism. Though someone who had taken their classical liberalism from Adam Smith’s Wealth Of Nations without opening his Theory Of Moral Sentiments might find a home in the modern Conservative Party, the Tories have been only episodic friends to open markets and free trade. It was for siding with the merchants against the consumers of agriculture that led to the Conservative Party split of 1849. Protectionism returned with imperial preference and Stanley Baldwin made his contribution to the rise of the Labour Party by being on the wrong side of this argument. Baldwin called an election in 1923 on the question of tariffs. The free traders, Labour and the Liberals, were deemed to have won the argument even though the Tories were the largest single party and Labour took its first experience as a serious party of office.
Even today, after Margaret Thatcher’s revolution in the Conservative Party, there are echoes of national protection in the Tory party hostility to the European Union. The easy promise that David Cameron made in opposition, that he would be a liberal Conservative, has proved hard to live up to in government. Though, to his credit, his government has put gay marriage on the statute book, the Conservative part of the coalition has been pulled, by the recalcitrant right of the party, to positions on tax and the EU which are hard to reconcile with even a term as capacious as “liberal.” The more we have seen of Cameron the more he appears, insofar as he thinks anything at all, to be a conservative of an old-fashioned vintage.
In the heady days before 2010, it seemed that a liberal Conservatism was a viable course for a self-professed liberal. For anyone whose political views are a blend of Smith’s economics and Mill’s desire to leave people to lives of their own devising, there appeared to be ample reason to join the Tories and try to liberalise from within. The George Osbornes, Michael Goves and Oliver Letwins will recognise the description, but they have found their project is a lot harder than they at first thought. Perhaps the task of liberalising his party was lost when he failed to win the overall majority that would have granted him political space. Perhaps his heart was never really in the task in the first place. Whatever the reason, the cause of liberal Conservatism does not look healthy as the Conservative Party faces two years, should it be returned to power, of internal discord about Europe.
Labour is, at root, a social democratic party and the Conservative Party has its impulse in its name. Surely, therefore, the obvious thing to do, for a liberal, is to vote for the one party that announces its similar allegiance, the Liberal Democrats. During the debate on the EU with Nigel Farage, it struck me that Nick Clegg had a clearer and more coherent thread to his politics than any of the other leaders, indeed any other senior politician. Live on television, at prime time, he was making a liberal case for immigration, open markets and the importance of the EU. They were hardly popular causes and, for that reason, he was deemed to have “lost” the debate. However, it is not straightforwardly obvious that a liberal should be a Liberal Democrat.
The Liberal Democrats, as the hybrid party formed of two traditions, are nothing like as liberal as a liberal might like. An alliance of former Liberals and Social Democrats was founded on the philosophical fault-line of British politics. You can see this vividly in evidence every autumn, when the tribes gather for their respective party conferences. Every year, I am struck by the fact that a disobliging remark about the wastefulness of the state will elicit a cheer from a Tory fringe meeting. A reference to the inadequacy of the market is a certain prompt for applause at a Labour meeting. The Liberal Democrats, though, will cheer both of those propositions. Half the audience wants to ban all fizzy drinks. The other half wants people carrying state secrets to walk unhindered through airport lounges.
There is an unreconciled argument between the Liberals and the Social Democrats that takes place as much within the Liberal Democrats as it does between the Liberal Democrats and the other parties. It manifests itself most obviously in debates that turn on the role of the producers in public services. The Liberal Democrat membership is drawn heavily from public sector workers who do not take kindly to liberal reform schemes that would open up their monopolies to competition. It was, for example, Shirley Williams, the former Labour Cabinet minister, who led the Liberal Democrat opposition to Andrew Lansley’s rather innocuous health and social care bill.
It would be wonderful if this philosophical shambles could be magically corrected and all the proper liberals left the three parties in which they are marooned and formed a serious liberal party. If British politics were properly aligned with its philosophical traditions, Cameron could be a vintage Conservative Party leader. His colleagues would include William Hague, Liam Fox, Eric Pickles and Iain Duncan Smith. This Conservative Party would represent that large bloc that likes fiscal conservatism and is sceptical about grand state schemes financed by taxpayers. These Conservative voters are reluctant to submit institutions to critical reflection and would be generally happy with the order of things, in which, miraculously, they appear to be faring rather well. It is a party that the electorate would judge highly for its economic prudence and its law and order credentials. But it would worry that it might be a rather brutal government.
"The obvious and characteristic deficiencies of conservatism and social democracy is why, time and again, the electorate seeks out the party that comes closest to a combination of Conservative stolidity and Labour compassion."Ed Miliband would lead a Labour Party animated by the noble desire to make Britain a more egalitarian society, in which the gap between rich and poor would be controlled by more overtly progressive taxation and spending on public services. Neil Kinnock would have his party back and Ed Balls and Andy Burnham would enjoy making a full-throated case for publicly provided services, undaunted by the vastly complex task of fine-tuning a bureaucracy until it meets individual needs. They would be joined on this platform by a reinvigorated Vince Cable. Voters would no doubt find some appeal in their rhetoric of solidarity. They might worry, though, that it comes at too high a price.
The obvious and characteristic deficiencies of conservatism and social democracy is why, time and again, the electorate seeks out the party that comes closest to a combination of Conservative stolidity and Labour compassion. In 2010 no party was in the right place but the electorate brilliantly conceived a coalition. It would be made up of the modernisers in every party. They would all believe in a cautious fiscal policy and public services that push power to users, away from the state. The leading lights of the party would have been, from Labour, Andrew Adonis and Peter Mandelson, from the Conservatives Oliver Letwin, Kenneth Clarke and George Osborne, and David Laws, Danny Alexander and Nick Clegg would be happier in this gathering than they are in the pantomime horse of a party to which they actually belong.
Yet, even in a fragmented polity, there is no genuine hope that such a realignment will happen. The philosophical question is therefore inevitably reduced to a tactical question. By what method are liberal policies best enacted? There are now Liberal Cabinet ministers for the first time in eight decades and the Liberal contribution to the coalition—notably in raising the threshold above which people are taxed—has not been negligible. But coalition, and philosophical incoherence, has exacted a heavy price on the Liberal Democrats, most of whose left-of-centre supporters could not resist the notion that going into government with the Conservatives was a betrayal. It is possible that the arithmetic may allow the Liberal Democrats to rejoin a coalition, on a lower number of seats.
Yet liberals in the Liberal Democrats face exactly the same philosophical battle for supremacy that liberals in the other parties face. There is therefore a good case for a liberal in pursuit of power to set about trying to liberalise either Labour or the Conservatives. If coalition politics is the new norm, politics is bound to pulled to the centre, even though the main parties want to diverge. Hence it seems a rational choice to join the senior partner in any future coalition, rather than the junior party.
There are periods when both Labour and the Conservatives realise that their own electoral fortunes are best served by granting power to their liberal entryists. At the moment, the parties are relishing the warm glow of their own philosophical assumptions but they will be dragged back. That is what the electorate does to ideological extremes in Britain. It pulls them back. Of the two main parties, the one in which the radical liberal tradition seems most hospitable is surely the Labour Party. Labour is an infuriatingly puritanical party at times, too set upon heresy-hunting, declaring betrayal and impugning the motives of opponents yet, if liberalism is a doctrine of redistributing power, that impulse seems more alive in the Labour Party than in the Conservative Party. In the end liberalism is a questioning doctrine, not a settled orthodoxy.
In The Future of Socialism, Tony Crosland defined the 12 streams that make up Labour thinking. There is a 13th, the luckiest of the lot. It is called liberalism. The Labour Party has its own radical roots in the scepticism about the state that inspired the early trade union movement and the voluntary associations. It is a tradition to which it should return and by doing so improve its own fortunes and those of the doctrine of liberalism, the secret ingredient of British politics.
