Love and Liberty

Scottish Liberal Andrew Page has doubly inspired me to return to my occasional series of Liberal Mondays quotations. Last week he wrote a post championing a very different political ideology* to my own Liberalism, but with a great line from Roy Jenkins, one of his political heroes, whose inspiring call for individual freedom is worth sharing:

“Let us be on the side of those who want people to be free to live their own lives, to make their own mistakes, and on the side of experiment and brightness... of fuller lives and greater freedom.”

Andrew also interviewed me amongst others at last year’s Liberal Democrat Conference in Glasgow. You can see here Andrew’s choice of Lib Dem “Conference People” and our array of thoughtful and positive (well, all but one of us, anyway) answers to his questions about the Lib Dems and the LiberaTory Coalition. I would have blogged about it before, but, er, it just so happens that he published his video the week after I stopped blogging for six months. None of our lines are as memorable as Roy’s, though.


*Andrew wrote that Roy “was not directly referring to the question of Scotland’s political future,” which did make me laugh. I suspect based on nothing but Roy’s entire political career that this is indeed not whistling Dixie, but what do I know? The nearest I ever got to meeting the Lord Jenkins was when he walked off the stage after my first ever Conference speech, so he may well not have agreed with me either.

Labels: Ideas, Liberal Mondays, Liberalism, Roy Jenkins