It really is absolutely none of your business, Mr Clegg

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Nick Clegg really doesn't have the first idea about what the word "liberal" means:

Nick Clegg has committed the government to a crackdown on excessive executive pay, saying that austerity in the public sector had to be balanced by curbs on "irresponsible and unjustifiable" pay rises in the private sector.

The clue here, Mr Clegg, lies in the word "private" - that means it is absolutely none of the government's business. How much business owners choose to pay executives is entirely a matter to be agreed between those business owners and those executives.

This is simply Mr Clegg seeking cheap headlines by playing to the gallery.

Clegg said he was particularly outraged by a recent report saying that directors working for FTSE 100 companies had had pay rises up by 49%. He said they were getting the extra money even though their firms were not doing any better and that this was "a real slap in the face for millions of people in this country who are struggling to make ends meet".

Outraged! Get that folks - now even if the headline is true (and trust me, dear reader, it isn't) it is still nothing to do with Mr Clegg unless he is a shareholder in one of those FTSE 100 companies. In which case the place to raise his concerns is the general meeting of the company not an interview on the BBC.

In the end, it isn't a zero sum game. High levels of executive pay do not lead to lower wages elsewhere. And the FTSE 100 companies are international businesses employing international executives.

Finally, Mr Clegg, let's look at the realities of this high pay. The Chief Executive of Sainsburys - a massive, multi-billion pound turnover business - earns around £900,000 per year. This is less that Carlos Tevez, who occasionally turns out to play football, earns in two months. I reckon the shareholders of Sainsburys are getting a rather better deal, don't you. Mr Clegg?

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Hey Lib Dems, you could try truth and liberalism for a change?

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Nick Clegg - I'm guessing the party has a new marketing boss or something - has been told that he needs to "rebrand" the Liberal Democrat Party.

Last week, Liberal Democrat MPs were summoned to a meeting to be told that "external brand experts" had been hired to try to boost the party's standing with the next general election still more than three years away.

In a further internal move, Mr Clegg has recruited a party donor and millionaire accountant, Neil Sherlock, to run his Cabinet Office team with the title of director of government relations.

Aha, not a marketing director - worse, an accountant!

And the strategy appears to be that old Lib Dem stand-by - taking credit for things they didn't do (a sub-set of their usual dissembling and unpleasantness). Starting with the abolition of slavery:

MPs should also, they were told, claim more credit for "Liberal" achievements of the past such as the abolition of slavery - even though the leading abolitionist, William Wilberforce, was an independent MP. 

And let me just correct the Daily Telegraph there - Wilberforce was, of course, a Tory.

However, in the interests of a coalition partner, let me suggest how the Liberal democrats might resolve their problem. It seems to me, a humble observer, that the party might do better if it:

Stopped laying claims - whether locally, nationally or historically - to things it had no hand in (this applies equally to the filling in of potholes, the abolition of slavery and the introduction of universal suffrage)

Started being a liberal party - you know one that actually believes in liberalism rather than the statist, social democratic, nanny state party it is at present

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The Liberal Democrats need "Nicks" not "Tims"

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There are, it seems to me, two sorts of Liberal Democrat. I’m going to call them “Nick” and “Tim” for the sake of explanation.

For many year’s Tim was the man. Liberal Democrats – and Liberals before – were activists, campaigners, street politicians. The purveyors of pavement politics, the champions of potholes, the organisers of dog pooh campaigns and the persistent pointers at things in the local paper – and these tactics worked, Tim and his friends got elected. 

Tim isn’t really a liberal or even much of a democrat. Tim knows the buttons to press with the local ‘community’. Tim is prepared to be inconsistent and contradictory, to say one thing on the council estate and a completely different thing in the terraced town centre. To campaign against a wind farm while, at the same time, making the right green noises to a different audience somewhere else. 

Tim doesn’t think about the philosophical basis for his liberalism but prefers instead to make the right, slightly pink-tinged remarks about tax, business and the environment. The sort of remarks that get you liked, that plays to the prejudices of people who consider themselves “liberal” but aren’t.

Because farmers like subsidies, Tim will campaign for subsidies without thought. If NIMBYs and BANANAs approach Tim, he will support them without question. Tim is progressive in that slightly mushy, largely meaningless way - as if he'd stopped thinking about politics after his first "it's not fair" thought at the age of 14.

For Tim the acme of politics is the “good constituency MP”, the man or woman who does little else than chitter and worry at little local issues, who cares more about electoral tactics and the next “Focus” leaflet than about the economy or the environment (except, of course, when those are the correct tactical topics for that “Focus” leaflet).

The Liberal Democrats were filled with Tims. The pavement politics, the deception, the inconsistency worked and the chambers began to fill with Liberal Democrats. And thoughts turned to government, to the prospect – at local level first, then nationally – of having to propose some sort of coherent believable strategy for government. Tim was lost. Tim wanted to just attack the Tories, to continue the never-ending local campaigns about potholes and cracked paving stones. Government wasn’t for Tim.

But there was “Nick” to help. Nick was different. He hadn’t grown up as a local activist; he’d been on the international stage. Nick was well-educated – top schools, Oxford – and worked in banking, management consultancy and the European bureaucracy. Nick actually believed in something called ‘liberalism’, actually had a philosophical basis for the arguments he made and put forward policies that weren’t simply a tactical response to whoever in the local constituency shouted loudest.

Nick provided some gravitas, a sense that this was a party with a real programme rather than a collection of slightly odd people brought together mostly by a desire for power and a shared dislike of Labour and/or Conservative. Nick began to think, to propose policies based on local power, on the effectiveness of markets and on personal choice. For sure, Nick’s ideas were dragged back by Tim who wasn’t quite ready (or rather worried that his carefully manufactured activist image would be damaged by actually having to believe in something) for a coherent policy for government, but those ideas began to get a purchase with supporters. And Nick came to lead.

Now times are tricky. Nick took the liberal democrats into government, made them support some tough policies necessary for that government to work. And Tim isn’t happy. Tim liked it when he didn’t have to defend the difficult decisions of government. Tim preferred the time when the prospect of eternal opposition allowed him simply to say the things that got the best response from his voters. Tim just wants to be a “good constituency MP”, some form of self-directed delegate of the loud voices in some part of England. Tim wants the Liberal Democrat comfort zone.

And Tim is wrong. Tim will make the Liberal Democrats irrelevant again. A bunch of irritating blow flies rather than a diligent hive. An opportunistic, devious, untrustworthy and prejudiced bunch of slightly left-wing activists rather than a serious party with a set of serious policies based on a coherent, believable political philosophy.

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To say "property-owning democracy" is tautology - there is no other kind

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OK, I know that the term "property-owning democracy" refers mostly to houses. And this allows people to write utter nonsense about property:

Yet even though the property-owning democracy idea has achieved neither its social nor its financial goals (the housing market has manifestly not developed in an orderly fashion that seamlessly matches supply and demand), there remains a truculent insistence from the right that somehow it is still interference from the state that is the problem, rather than the lack of it.

Now setting aside that the housing market is so constrained by regulation - be it financial, planning or legal - that to describe it as free is utter claptrap, we need to stop with this critique, catch a breath and ask what exactly is the problem?

The reason this critique is wrong - and verging on immoral - is that you cannot have a liberal democracy without property rights. Whether those rights apply to land, housing, paintings or that old pair of boots in the bottom of the cupboard. What is worse is that we are now telling people that owning property is just something for the rich:

We are, arguably, at another point of potential momentous change: the centre-ground voter is increasingly well-knowing about the foolishness and falsity of the home-owning democracy myth; the actual facts reveal that new home ownership, especially among the young, was steadily declining even before the 2008 credit crunch; and the gradual, tentative, dismantling of the previously cherished RTB has not led to any popular revolt.

The liberalisation of property finance and the "Right to Buy" brought about perhaps the biggest redistribution of wealth in England's history - shifting valuable property from the state and from big landlords into the ownership of ordinary men and women.  There are over 6 million homes in the UK that do not have a mortgage and, for those with a mortgage, there are plenty where it is neither a financial burden nor a significant proportion of spending.

The real question is how we allowed the vested interests within the housing system - landowners, existing householders, finance companies and the government - to fix the system so as to make it ever more expensive to 'get onto the housing ladder'.

What these critiques are telling us is that owning things is for the wealthy - ordinary people should not have such aspirations, should satisfy themselves with the outlook of the serf. Indeed the criticism includes - shock-horror - that some folk don't understand (and by implication shouldn't be allowed to play):

A Shelter UK survey indicates that one in four mortgage holders have no idea what the UK base rate is. These mortgage holders are playing with significant financial risks while being unaware of their exposure. Data from Legal & General indicated that maybe 90% of UK mortgages are on variable rather than fixed rate of interest. That's up from 60% from 2007. In something of an understatement, Shelter UK said that when the Bank of England does raise rates, this could push risk-ignorant owner-occupiers and those assuming permanently low interest rates, into a 'spiral of debt and repossession';

I bet those mortgage holders know what rate they are paying, how much they pay out each month and what their limit is in terms of payment. And - since Shelter are stupid - let's point out that all those poor fools on variable rate mortgages got the full advantage of the lowest interest rates ever, unlike the clever chaps with fixed rate mortgages.
 
Ownership is a good thing. It gives us a real stake, a commitment that renting or living for daily consumption doesn't bring. Ownership allows us to pass things along to our children should we so wish. And ownership stores up value - even if house prices aren't rising I still end up with a valuable property having had the benefit of living in it all the while!
 
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with renting (although the housing subsidy implicit in social housing is a massive distortion to this market) but we shouldn't go around telling less well off people not to aspire to such wealth. That owning things is not for you working class folk.
 
Yet that is precisely what the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Shelter and a plethora of left-wing commenters are doing. And not only are they wrong but their arguments erode the central element of a free society - property rights. It really scares me that some see the constraint of property rights as essential to a liberal democracy:
 
Yet, still there remains in place an obstinate refusal to see that, without a determinedly redistributive infrastructure, liberal democracy simply cannot exist
 
The left believe that Government must have the right to confiscate property so as to allow for a liberal democracy?
 
Herein lies the fundamental reason why the left are illiberal. Such arbitrary powers - we cannot predict precisely which property the government plans on seizing so as to "redistribute" - are the short road to autocracy. Whatever the pain of owning property it is preferable to a ghastly socialist world of confiscation, rationing and centrally-planned chaos.
 
For me such a position is immoral, it patronises ordinary people and it maintains the myth that if it all goes wrong it's someone else's fault. And the government will bail us out.
 
this is the myth that got us into this mess. For heaven's sake let's not do it again.
 
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The sorry end of liberalism in the liberal democrats

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The papers have been filled with Clegg inspired testosterone as the might Deputy prime Minister regales his followers with all the things he has stopped from happening - you know the things like developing choice and competition in care, health and education.

And this is pretty sad because I thought Nick was a liberal. You know what I mean? The sort of politician who believes in the power of independence, in giving people choice and that responsibility comes from freedom not from government dictat.

It would appear not. It would appear that the last vestiges of liberalism have faded - Clegg now leads a social democratic party virtually indistinguishable from the social democratic party led by Ed Miliband.

I'd hoped that having liberals in the coalition would push my party away from the state-directed controls to which we were wedded - be it on the environment, on crime or in public health.

Sadly it appears not. Indeed I hear more genuinely liberal voices from the right of my party and (inconsistently it must be said) from UKIP.

The Liberal Democrats are no longer a 'liberal' party, Shame really as Britain needs one.

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Not very liberal...or democratic for that matter!

But then this is the Liberal Democrats after all!

A group of more than 115 leading Liberal Democrat councillors has called on the Government to abandon its plans for elected police commissioners.

The group, which includes LGA Liberal Democrat leader, Cllr Richard Kemp, and Portsmouth City Council leader, Cllr Gerald Vernon-Jackson, have called on the Government to drop the idea and replace them with local police boards.

In a letter published today in The Times, the councillors said the recent controversies about phone hacking and tabloid journalists mean there is a need for'a clear separation between politicians and the police'.

Surely having the person in charge - the police commissioner - accountable to the public is an improvement to democracy? More liberal? Less likely to be corrupted?

Apparently Cllr Kemp and his pals want something else:

For this reason, we ask the Government to drop the proposal for elected police commissioners, and to replace them with police boards that will work with local government and provide the transparency that is so badly needed.'

And how this is more transparent than electing the police chief, I have no idea? It simply fiddles about with the current system of Police Authorities - unaccountable, distant bodies made up of appointed individuals.

But then the Liberal Democrats always struggled with the idea of being liberal and democratic, didn't they!

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Dr Harris and the sexual health debate - a tale of judgemental intolerance

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The Government has announced the membership of its Sexual Health Forum including the anti-abortion charity, Life but dropping the British Pregnancy Advice Service. Apparently this is a truly terrible thing:

...former Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris said Life's presence could prevent the panel from functioning properly.

He told the newspaper: "When you have an organisation campaigning against the law and against current policy on sexual health, which is pro-contraception and about ensuring that abortion is a choice, then the risk is that you prevent the panel being given access to confidential information."

Quite why this is I don’t know but it reveals – in a man who lays claim to the mantle of “liberalism” – a considerable degree of intolerance. Who is he to say that one or other view on any issue should not be represented to ministers? But then Dr Harris has a bit of a track record of such judgemental intolerance, for example in condemning anti-abortion GP, Tammie Downes:

The Guardian reported that Liberal Democrat MP and noted abortion and euthanasia campaigner, Evan Harris, denounced Dr. Downes to Health Minister Dawn Primarolo and asked for an investigation.

And, as a member of the BMA’s ethics board Dr Harris tried to:

...remove the legal right of doctors to refuse to refer for or arrange abortions.

None of this makes Dr Harris wrong – there is a genuine debate to be had about abortion and I am willing to listen to the arguments for and against the status quo, tighter controls or liberalisation. Sadly, Dr Harris wants Government to only receive advice from those who share his view that abortion should be much easier to obtain. As with so many on the left – and Dr Harris certainly isn’t what I would call a liberal – the intention seems to be to close off the debate and to characterise those who take a different view as brainwashed religious zealots.

What concerns me most in all this – and I worry far more about the issue of “mercy-killing” than I do about abortion – is that by closing out the debate, Dr Harris directly contradicts his own oft-stated belief in free speech. By saying that only pro-abortion views should be presented to the Government’s deliberations about sexual health is to deny access on the basis of prejudice rather than to promote free speech.

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