Joining the Liberal Democrats doesn't make you a liberal!

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A while ago I wrote a little comment explaining why “Jack of Kent” – the estimable David Allen Green, lawyer, blogger, skeptic and sometimes journalist – isn’t a liberal. It is a mark of David’s popularity (and his assiduous self-promotion) that this little blog post remains one of the most visited at The View from Cullingworth.

It seems now that “Jack of Kent” has gone the whole hog and joined the Liberal Democrat Party:

The Labour opposition is impotent. In government they were illiberal and often brutal. There is only one political force which is having an actual liberal effect in our polity as it is presently constituted, and it is the Liberal Democrats.

Yet – as I pointed out – David isn’t a liberal but a social democrat. No genuine liberal could believe this:

The liberal endorses an individual's autonomy unless there is a greater public interest in interfering with that autonomy.

Such a position is indistinguishable from the essential social democrat position – it places society’s interests above those of the individual. The problem – or confusion – may lie in a differing understanding of what the term ‘liberal’ actually means. I fear that David’s view owes less to Gladstone and more to Herbert Croly, the godfather of Roosevelt’s politics and founding editor of New Republic:

Government, according to Croly, could no longer be content with protecting negative rights; it needed to actively promote the welfare of its citizens.

This position, the championing of positive rights and the embracing of regulation to correct “market failure” are the essence of “progressive” politics. Indeed, Britain’s Liberal Democrats remain overwhelmingly a party of social democracy – a marriage between the Fabianism of people such as Shirley Williams and the grass roots activism that typified the old Liberal Party.

My argument before was that, in rejecting ‘market orthodoxy’, David was rejecting the basis of liberalism – that free exchange between individuals represents the best way to order things.  Instead we get American “liberalism” – a mish-mash of social democracy, ‘progressivism’ and above all the promotion of group rights above personal rights. Indeed, the preamble to the Liberal Democrat’s Constitution makes explicit that the party is not a liberal party:

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 champion the freedom, dignity and well-being of individuals, we acknowledge and respect their right to freedom of conscience and their right to develop their talents to the full. We aim to disperse power, to foster diversity and to nurture creativity. We believe that the role of the state is to enable all citizens to attain these ideals, to contribute fully to their communities and to take part in the decisions which affect their lives.

So “Jack of Kent”, who isn’t a liberal, will feel quite at home in what isn’t a liberal part.

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Here's the bread, now where's the circus?

"..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon..."

It's one of the questions we ask, you know, is the government pulling the wool across our eyes? Or worse feeding us bread and circuses so as to take us away from our slavery, our lives tied to the grind of the workplace where we earn money to pay taxes. Taxes that mean the government can give us "services".


And the scaring us - waving the "terrorist threat" before us, speaking of the "fear of crime" at every opportunity and feeding the news media with endless tales of death, disease and illness.


Behind these words lies a central message - the core message of social democracy:

"Everything in the state, nothing outside the state."

From our earliest childhood we are taught of government's benign mission - the lawyers and lawmakers are held up to us as shining beacons of goodness. And to do this as Jane Addams said:

"We must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many."

This fascism of the spirit - this denial of independence is the dull curse of the fabian. The belief that a clever elite, sitting over us, can direct towards a better society and more that the route to that better society is through the perfection of people and the denial of individual rights.


This is the corrupted world of nudge - where we hand out the soma to those good enough to comply but punish, cast out, those refuseniks who reject the state's promised betterment. This is the ghastly world where our governors sell us freedom within the collective but punish us should we step beyond that and declare ourselves independent - in the words of Thomas Paine:

"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren and to do good is my religion."

This idea of liberty - that rights are innate, not something granted by a benevolent ruler or else passed to us on tablets of gold - is crushed by the social democratic groupthink and the evils of 'progressivism'. There is no liberty in government. As someone once said:

"I am not a number, I am a free man."

So tell me, where are the circuses?

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