Love and Liberty

Liberal Democrats! What would you say the Lib Dems stand for? How would you inspire members to stay with us? How would you persuade voters to agree with us? How would you link our philosophy to our achievements in government – and make it clear which bits of government are distinctly Lib Dem? Here’s my go at saying what we stand for. Does it make sense to you? Inspire you? Irritate you? Is it good enough, or could you do better? Then look below and join in the meme, sharing your own vision, your own enthusiasm in time for Conference.

The Liberal Democrats stand for freedom for every individual – freedom from poverty, ignorance and conformity.

To make that freedom real needs both fairness and economic responsibility: an economy that works, that encourages enterprise, and where everyone pays their fair share.

So freedom from poverty requires responsible spending, not debt, built on fairer taxes where lower earners pay less tax and the wealthiest pay more, and building green jobs for the future.

Freedom from ignorance needs better education and training, so people have the opportunity to realise their potential.

And freedom from conformity, supported by freedom from poverty and ignorance, means everyone should have the liberty to live their lives as they choose – without harming others; with equality before the law; with a better say, because no government always knows best.

That’s why Liberal Democrats are working for a stronger, greener economy in a fairer society, enabling every person to get on in life.

Yesterday, marking the Lib Dems’ twenty-fifth anniversary, I offered an older version of my ‘What the Lib Dems Stand For’ and explained in detail what the idea was about and how I’d used and changed it. So, today, I’m just giving the main ideas, and a challenge to you.

The Meme

OK, Lib Dems – can you tell me what I’ve got right, or got wrong? More importantly, can you do better?

So I’m starting a meme. Blog it. Put it in the comments below. Email me (contact in the sidebar). Tweet it (hashtag #LibDemValues). If you come up with your own version by Wednesday evening and let me know, I’ll do a round-up post with all of them on Thursday, to give us all something to go off to Conference with, inspired.

And if you blog your own version – please do – then please also tag three other people to take part. The more the merrier. And should you wish to nudge any MPs, Peers or other party grandees…

I hope you’ll think about What the Lib Dems Stand For just from reading this and not need a personal invitation, but to get the ball rolling I’m tagging not just three but six people:

• Richard Flowers (and Millennium Dome, Elephant), because he’s the person whose judgement I most trust in all the world, and a brilliant Liberal writer, and I love him.
  

• Charlotte Henry and Linda Jack, because I sometimes agree with each of them and sometimes not, and because they’re both talented Liberals with firm ideals, and because they’re about as far apart from each other as any two people in the Lib Dem family. So, Linda and Charlotte, if you can come up with a ‘What the Lib Dems Stand For’ that’s distinctive, and has some consensus across the party, and that the other can still agree with… Well, I’ll be quite surprised, but I’d be delighted!
  

• Caron Lindsay, because she’s sensible and thoughtful, and needs a special present of more work to do to mark her ascension to Co-Editor of Lib Dem Voice (congratulations!).
  

• Chris Richards, because he’s got a keen Liberal eye and has often written (previous site) about the Lib Dems’ need to hone our Liberal message.
  

• And, OK, the sixth person is two co-people: Liberal Youth Co-Chairs Kavya Kaushik and Sam Fisk, because their ideas are bound to be fresher than mine.
  

What’s It For?

• To offer something short and simple that Lib Dems members can look at and think, ‘Yes, that’s some of why we bother’, and that other people can look at and think, ‘Oh, that’s what the Lib Dems are for, and I like it’.
  

• It’s easy to lose track of what we stand for when we’re in not just government but Coalition Government. So this is my attempt to bring together our lasting values, and our priorities in government, and the party leadership’s own new ‘core message’ – not changing the principles, but showing why they’re still relevant to what we’re doing in power. Can you manage to combine all three?
  

• Be as long or as short as you like, but I’ve kept this ‘What the Lib Dems Stand For’ to about 150 words. That’s long enough to make a case, not just a soundbite – but short enough to use as part of something else. It can fit on a Focus leaflet in a medium-sized box, or in a speech in around a minute.
  

The Bits I Think Work Best

• I love the line from the Preamble to the Lib Dem Constitution that says we want to build a society “in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity.” It’s a great poetic flourish, and sums up the three biggest barriers to liberty, the heart of the Lib Dems for me.
  

• I’ve rewritten it so it works on its own. As part of a longer paragraph in three sets of three it’s fine, but taken out of that it’s too passive. So by making it “Freedom from…” it becomes positive, a rallying cry for active politics.
  

• To say what you stand for, it’s useful to say what you stand against as contrast. I wrote yesterday why I didn’t want to slag off Labour and the Tories (moving targets, and some of them sometimes liberal allies against poverty or ignorance, though rarely conformity) – freedom’s enemies aren’t other parties, but real-life evils.
  

The Bits I Think Probably Need More Work

• I like the structure I’ve got now. My first go at this update mostly shoved in new bits while still trying to keep the word count down, and turned into an ugly mash-up of buzzwords with no real narrative. The one I’ve published here flows, it’s easy to follow, and makes logical sense – not quite a story, but at least an argument. It’s a bit repetitive, though that does get the message across.
  

• More problematic is that it suggests a ‘shopping list’ list approach – for each type of freedom, I’ve just picked out a couple of examples that chime with our priorities, but it could suggest that’s all there is, and prompt people to ask ‘But what about…?’ The one I’m most unsure about would be part of “Freedom From Poverty”. By putting it first and saying it supports other freedoms, I think it’s implicit that people need to be free from poverty, and talk instead about how the big economic decisions can make that possible. Should I have stated explicitly that we must ensure everyone has the basics on which most other freedoms depend? And where would that fit?
  

• My main problem comes from the bit that works best – in structuring it around the three freedoms, filled out with our current priorities, it squeezes out some ideals close to the Lib Dem heart. I don’t see a way to get them in without either rewriting the whole thing or adding a lot more words. There’s nothing about internationalism, it only hints at political reform, and the environment only fits in on the economy. If you’re doing your own, I’d be interested to see if you can manage each of those.
  

Stronger Economy, Fairer Society: The New ‘Core Message’

• I wrote last week about the ‘official’ new Lib Dem ‘core message’ from Nick Clegg and Ryan Coetzee –building a stronger economy in a fairer society. You can read the whole thing on the Liberator blog, where Simon Titley overdoes his dislike of it. There’s no extermination if campaigners don’t use it; it’s simply an attempt to establish some sort of identity when pretty much every Lib Dem knows most people have trouble saying what we stand for. I know when I was a candidate, the facts and figures would have been useful, even though I was very capable of summing up our beliefs. So, for me, it’s a useful start – and I suspect Simon would have been less hostile to the concept if he’d agreed with what it said…
  

• What’s good about it is that someone’s thought about how to get our message across with some basis in what we’re actually doing, a great improvement on our recent vacuous slogans. Essentially, it’s back to the ’80s: a sharper, more priority-driven version of the Alliance’s ‘Head and the Heart’ message, saying we can split the difference between Tories and Labour and give you only the good bits of each. The full briefing trumpets our achievements, but is heavily based on attacking Labour and Tories equally over different ‘rubbish on the economy’ / ‘rubbish on fairness’ issues. It gets across our priorities in government.
  

• Where it’s not sufficient is in communicating our ideals as well as our immediate practical aims, let alone joining them up. There’s only the faintest whiff of ideology, in “Fairer”. That has three problems. Without being distinctively, positively us, but more of a reaction to the other two, we’re looking for a very bland, centrist gap in the market – which leaves us vulnerable if anyone else gets their act together to fill it. “Fairness” is part of our message but, as shown when that being our only principle in the last Election came back to bite us on the bum, in a time of austerity people don’t think it’s “Fair” if they suffer at all – even if the suffering’s shared equally, it doesn’t feel like it, so they don’t believe us. And with nothing green, or about freedom, it not only fails to inspire the idealists we need to do all the hard work, but means that if we try to kick up a fuss in government about the green or freedom issues that we really care about (and which themselves strongly distinguish us from the other parties), voters might well say, ‘But why? You haven’t mentioned them, so they can’t be that important’.
  

But that’s enough from me. Over to you – what do you say the Lib Dems Stand For?

Labels: Coalition, Education, Environment, Ideas, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Liberator, Memes, Nick Clegg, Personal, Top Tips, What the Lib Dems Stand For