-
Airstrikes on Syria - the 5 tests that have not been met
December 01, 2015 12:41 PM
Parliament is set to debate and vote on whether to support airstrikes on Syria. On the 24th November, Tim Farron outlined the 5 tests that would need to be met before Liberal Democrat MP's would consider supporting airstrikes on Syria. Indeed, the media report that the Liberal Democrat MP's have yet to come to a position.
I don't believe those tests have been satisfied and here is why: -
Debt and Security - A social liberal response to the spending review
November 28, 2015 10:00 AM
The central claim of the Chancellor’s much-anticipated spending review was that it would deliver economic security. Much of the debate since those opening remarks has focussed on his u-turn over tax credit changes, and on the dire response by John McDonnell that saw Mao's Little Red Book racing towards an increasingly amused George Osborne.
It is that central claim, though, which is of the greatest interest to liberals - that in Osborne's view, the key to achieving economic security for a country lies in having not even a balanced budget, but in fact a surplus; a rare event for the UK economy since the 1980s. That surplus, he argues, provides for a buffer against the inevitable day on which the UK economy enters recession once more. The problem with this argument is that there's increasing evidence that the resilience of an economy owes less to public debt than it does to private debt.
-
Tory obsession with Budget surplus harmful to most vulnerable… and the economy
November 26, 2015 10:20 AM
After George Osborne’s Autumn statement, Prateek Buch gives the Social Liberal Forum’s response.
The Chancellor’s Autumn statement made this Tory government’s priorities clear: achieving a budget surplus matters far more than avoiding a crisis in social care and further education. Osborne's obsession with rolling back the state is weakening the very foundations of the economy he is claiming he wants to fix.
The Social Liberal Forum welcomes the belated U-turn on tax credits, which Tim Farron and Liberal Democrats peers were right to call for. But, as is nearly always the case with this Chancellor, the devil is in the detail. Despite Osborne’s claim to have ‘listened', families on universal credit will still lose out. As such, millions more will lose out once Universal Credit is rolled out nationwide. This will cause unacceptable damage to the living standards of some of the most vulnerable people in our country.
-
Waiting for Godot: or anticipated reform?
October 21, 2015 11:55 AM
The General election of 2015 in the UK has variously been described as ‘the death of liberalism’ or ‘the death of the Labour party’ and so on. Might it not be better, more accurate too, simply to refer to it as The Death of Politics – certainly for a decade or so to come?
-
What kind of Keynesianism? Some reflections on Liberal history
October 01, 2015 12:16 PM
This is a guest post from Peter Sloman who is a lecturer in British politics at the University of Cambridge.
I read Simon Radford’s series of articles on liberal economics after the crash with a mixture of agreement and frustration, so I am grateful for the opportunity to respond with some historical reflections. Simon’s clarion-call for the Liberal Democrats to re-engage with economic theory is persuasive and well-timed: I could not agree more that,
"the opening up of economic debate post-2008 has given liberals an opportunity to unearth the liberal tradition in economics and assert its relevance, both for economics as a field, and for a voting public starving for a new progressive vision."
Yet the notion that there is a single liberal tradition in economics is as problematic coming from Simon on the post-Keynesian left as it is coming from David Laws in The Orange Book. If liberalism is at root a political movement, seeking ‘to provide the greatest possible array of capabilities and opportunities to everyone’, we should not be surprised that British liberals have drawn on a wide range of theoretical perspectives. Rightly or wrongly, the Liberal Party has consistently sought to hold the ‘orthodoxy’ of (neo)classical economics and the heterodoxy of figures such as Henry George, J. A. Hobson, and John Maynard Keynes in a kind of creative tension.
-
A Progressive Alliance
September 29, 2015 9:55 PM
Earlier this week, I was lucky enough to be invited to speak on a panel at a fringe meeting in Brighton at the Labour Party conference. Organised by Compass, the theme was Building progressive alliances for a new economy. The main thrust of what I spoke about is below, but I thought it might make for an interesting blog post to share some of my thoughts about the conference and the mood in the room.
As I pitched up in Brighton, it felt like any other Lib Dem conference I'd attended. There were lots of people walking around with lanyards, rushing to the next fringe meeting, or propping up the Metropole's bar. There were journalists, famous political faces from now and days gone by, and plenty of eager young charity execs trying to thrust flyers in to the hands of hungover delegates.
-
A social liberal's response to overtures to the 'left'
September 18, 2015 8:02 PM
Rejoice! After nine long years as one of those formerly derided as a 'trot' at federal party conference by a Special Advisor to Nick Clegg, I awake today ahead of conference to find I can come in from the cold. No longer are we progressive, lefty lib dems to be derided as wet socialists - indeed we can look forward to a bright future in a party that appears to be making an opportunistic volte face in the light of Corbynmania.
-
How The Liberal Democrats Should Respond to Jeremy Corbyn
September 15, 2015 7:15 AM
The almost impossible has happened. The left wing rebel MP, Jeremy Corbyn, has been elected to lead the Labour Party. From being an absolute outsider, Corbyn has seen a huge surge in support over recent weeks that has been so great, that he won Labour’s leadership election in the first round. Labour now has its most left wing leader since Michael Foot. Despite Tony Blair’s ability to win elections, he failed to provide many people with hope or social justice. It’s this disillusionment and mistrust of Blairism that fuelled Corbyn’s victory. But how should the Liberal Democrats respond to the Corbyn victory?
If Corbyn is successful in moving Labour to the left, it’ll be the first time in a generation that the entire Liberal Democrats are less left wing than the Labour Party. The Liberal Democrats are not a socialist party, we are a liberal party. The distinctive philosophies of democratic socialism and social liberalism will naturally find areas of both agreement and conflict. Liberal Democrats must oppose some of Corbyn’s more left wing policies such as leaving NATO, re-nationalising the energy companies and re-opening the coal mines. In addition, there is some doubt as to whether Corbyn is a pro-European or whether he harbours some of the Euroscepticism of the traditional Old Labour Party.
-
Liberalism
September 10, 2015 8:31 AM
By Nigel Dower
The following essay forms part of the book “Unlocking Liberalism”, edited by Robert Brown, Gillian Gloyer and Nigel Lindsay. The author has kindly given permission for the Social Liberal Forum to reproduce it here.
Introduction
In the chapter I defend a version of liberalism which is similar to the ‘new liberalism’ of the early twentieth century of T. H. Green and L. T. Hobhouse, sometimes called social liberalism, liberal socialism or welfare liberalism. It also owes a lot to the ideas of two more modern ‘liberal’ thinkers, namely John Rawls and Amartya Sen. As such it is in broad contrast to the old or classical liberalism of the 19th Century which stressed laissez faire and the minimal state, and also to a modern influential version of liberalism called libertarianism or neo-liberalism which in some respects harks back to the earlier classical liberalism. The guiding question for me is: what makes liberty valuable? The answer put simply is that whilst it is good to have liberty in the sense of not being prevented from doing certain things, what makes it really valuable is one being able to exercise one’s liberty or exercise it properly; that is, it is in large measure valuable if the conditions are in place for the effective exercise of liberty. For instance, it is one thing to have free speech (e.g. there is no law preventing one from speaking one’s mind), it is another to be able to exercise it articulately because one has had a reasonable education. It is one thing to be free to pursue whatever hobbies one wants to (e.g. public opinion or social conventions do not make it difficult), it is another to have sufficient resources to be able to pursue interesting hobbies. For these conditions to exist for everyone in society, many things need to be in place – certain political and legal institutions, the provision of education, access to health care and various forms of social protection. For these to be in place there needs to a general commitment to social justice. Furthermore, in the modern world, if this conception of liberalism is accepted, it has serious implications for any society in the rest of the world and also to future generations who will need the conditions of liberty in place for them too. The idea of liberalism as ‘social liberalism’ does not strictly entail it, but in fact, I shall argue later in the chapter, liberalism needs to be cosmopolitan and committed to sustainability.
What follows is largely a personal exploration of what liberalism means to me today: it does not pretend to be an authoritative analysis of what diffferent liberals today may say, let alone map onto actual Libdem policies.
