Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Me Vs Stephen Tall: An Open Letter About (Oh Joy!) The Orange Book
Stephen Tall today celebrates the tenth anniversary of the much-maligned, much-magnified and in my view surprisingly dull Liberal Democrat essay collection The Orange Book with a provocative article: “Why looking back on the 2005 Lib Dem manifesto depresses me. And why The Orange Book means the 2015 manifesto will be better.” So…
Dear Stephen, you’ll be delighted to know that you’ve provoked me into thinking (and so much that it would be overdoing it a bit to submit this as a comment to you). You may be less delighted to read that I didn’t agree with very much you said…
I might summarise your article as saying ‘The Orange Book came up with some new ideas and provoked lasting debate in the Liberal Democrats, while the party’s 2005 Manifesto was largely coasting along on old policies and not very interesting*’. I’d mostly agree with that – which shows the problem with short summaries, as I mostly don’t agree with your article, and where for me you fall down fatally is in basing all your arguments on short or partisan summaries rather than at any stage examining the documents themselves.
*[Though some might ask which of those two is more useful for a political party to campaign on in a General Election.]
It’s terribly tempting to demonstrate that today’s article isn’t up to your usual standards by cutting and pasting your own words: individually, most of the criticisms are defensible. Collectively, it’s shockingly lazy and lacks all credibility except when based on hindsight.
But I’ll provide some of the context you don’t instead.
My Own Biases and My Review of The Orange Book
I’ll start with a little about my own biases. I read both The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism and Freedom, Fairness, Trust: The Liberal Democrat 2005 General Election Manifesto when they were new; I’ve not read either in any detail for a few years. In my much more active and much less ill past, I spent a few years as a ferocious critic of the Lib Dem policymaking process, getting more amendments passed by Conference than anyone save the party’s Federal Policy Committee… Then spent about a dozen years as a directly elected member of the party’s Federal Policy Committee, including some as its Vice-Chair, trying to write my amendments in at source rather than from the outside, and including work on three General Election Manifestos, of which the 2005 one was the last and in my view the least interesting (or most honed, for campaigning purposes).
One of my first substantial articles I wrote on starting this blog in early 2006 was what I think of as an even-handed review of The Orange Book (your mileage may vary). You can read it here in full, but here’s another partisan précis. I didn’t see it as anything like the coherent package it would suit its admirers and detractors to be; I thought its timing was a deliberate and cynical attempt to advance its authors rather than to advance its ideas; I praised David Laws much more than some of its contributors; I thought some chapters dull, silly or disturbingly authoritarian, but most in the Lib Dem mainstream; and I thought two chapters were absolutely crucial. One of them was by David Laws, defining Liberalism, which I said was well worth a read, mostly interesting, and wholeheartedly Liberal – with some significant caveats. The other was by Paul Marshall, who in your article comes across as your main source for framing both documents, and his introductory chapter was one of the most leaden failures in any book on Liberalism I’ve ever read.
In The Orange Book’s defence, the authors did at least get their fingers out and try to come up with some big ideas – and whether it’s truth or legend, they did win a reputation for setting off debate. That’s no mean feat, though I criticised crucial writers for “leaving [their] philosophical innovation stalled somewhere around 1908”. To be fair, although poor health gets in the way, it is also true that I’ve not only failed to launch the big idea for the party I keep meaning to, but that its philosophical innovation arguably hails from 1859. So the most remarkable thing about The Orange Book is that they did it, and then managed to get lasting attention for it.
Either way, when it comes to The Orange Book: Rewriting History, I was around for that history and require more than Paul Marshall’s highly spun hindsight as the sum total of evidence.
The Orange Book, the 2005 Manifesto and the Context
Stephen, you quote glowingly a speech by Paul Marshall long after the fact in which he puts down the 2005 Manifesto and praises his alternative by highly selective presentations of each. Let me provide a little more revealing context.
I called The Orange Book an alternative manifesto because in its timing and in its introduction (to say nothing of the editors’ spin all over the press) that is precisely how it was promoted. So it’s not unreasonable to make some direct comparisons. Way back when I reviewed The Orange Book myself, I said that Paul Marshall’s introduction was the weakest single chapter: a dully written and incoherent attempt to make an alternative manifesto of a series of disparate essays (to the obvious embarrassment of some of its authors), Mr Marshall showed more effectively than any other Lib Dem just how difficult it is to write a manifesto, because his attempt at one was so pitiful.
Not only was The Orange Book a shambles as an alternative manifesto, it was utterly useless in every regard (save to our enemies) as any basis for the actual manifesto. It was published to coincide with the party’s own pre-manifesto that was the culmination of two years’ consultation. I mean, how much “foresight” was that? Any ideas in The Orange Book, good or bad, could only be portrayed as ‘splits’ and completely useless as contributions. Imagine what the current manifesto co-ordinator – David Laws, I think his name is – would say if you were to publish an alternative manifesto in Autumn this year when his own carefully negotiated version had already been printed and circulated to every Conference representative? Had The Orange Book been published either a year earlier or a year later, it would have been timed to make a genuine contribution to ideas and been the target of far less opprobrium. In context, deliberately timed to get attention rather than to advance its ideas, it wasn’t taking part in a debate. It was merely willy-waving.
Then there’s the Manifesto itself. I’m sure you’ve read both the 2005 Manifesto and The Orange Book, but your article gives the impression that you’re taking Paul Marshall’s skimpy press releases as the entire basis of your critique of one and praise for the other. Well, I’ve said what I thought of Mr Marshall’s introduction to The Orange Book: now for the Manifesto, which I also read in full (many times, back then, as I was one of the many with a hand in writing it). Was it unambitious? Yes, in some places it was. There was a drive to cut down the length and the promises of 2001 and 1997, each of which I thought were more interesting manifestos, and I was exasperated at how hard I had to fight to get even a tiny box about our ideals into it, but as for “unrealistically high spending commitments”?
It turned out some of them were, in hindsight. In context, they weren’t. Like the 2001 and 1997 manifestos, they were based on months of hard arguing and hard costings to cut down our promises to what we could afford – as our (and the IFS’) understanding of the general economic framework went at the time. No other party bothered. It turned out that the general economic framework of the time was a bloated absurdity that vanished in a puff of debt, but no-one knew that yet. Let me turn back to sage, prophet and incredibly boring wordsmith Paul Marshall: hilarious that he now attacks that manifesto for “unrealistically high spending commitments” when his own alternative manifesto took exactly the same general economic framework as truth (just swapping what turned out to be “unrealistic” tax cuts for the spending, all based on an understanding of wealth we didn’t have).
One of my key criticisms of The Orange Book – unlike Mr Marshall’s conveniently partial claims today, from before the financial crash – was in its flagship approach to financial markets, one of the less convincing arguments written by David Laws. I wrote:
“He mentions opposition to monopoly and 1930s market failure, but that brief aside merely draws attention to this as his biggest blind spot. While many Liberal policies over the years have been directed against private monopoly, he fails to address other monopolies than state ones, or what to do in the event of other market failure – as well as raising the question, if he admits the market failed in 1930s (and that’s the only point at which he’s prepared to admit any such thing), does he have any alternative answer to such catastrophic failures or would he just have shut his eyes and hoped it would go away?”Which, though ‘I told you so’ is never very appealing, is why The Orange Book had no predictions and no solutions when a massive market failure inevitably came along all over again.
Neither did the 2005 Manifesto, you might rightly point out (though you didn’t, merely implying by elision that it lacked the foresight that The Orange Book had, and which I’ve just noted that it didn’t). What the Manifesto did have was a lot more than the ten points you published as if they were the Manifesto in its entirety. I’ve read through your article twice and I still can’t believe you’re writing as if that’s all there was, and certainly as if it was all you’d read. That’s bizarre, because you link to the whole thing, which sets out the costings right at the front and then has 38 more pages than the one you present as if it was the whole thing.
What Was the Point of the Ten-Point Plan?
Ironically, after a two-year consultation process in which the Manifesto was written between the Leader’s team, the Federal Policy Committee and the Parliamentary Spokespeople, the ten-point list was presented at the last minute by the Campaigns Department as a fait accompli, and none of the people who’d written the full Manifesto liked it. It was literally given to the FPC at the final meeting (again, after two years) to sign off the final draft of the Manifesto, and when FPC members started to move amendments – this one’s not a priority, this one doesn’t get across what the policy means, this one’s actively misleading, and so forth – we were told that we couldn’t change a single word because the posters had already been printed. So rather than a representative summary, even, of a far longer document, this list was something cobbled together in haste by the Campaigns Department without consultation because for the first time in any election the party literally had more money than it knew what to do with, as a very large donation (best not to say whose, in retrospect) had come in long after the local spending caps had come into force and so the only thing left to spend it on was posters.
I didn’t think they were very good, but whether they were or they weren’t, Stephen, what they certainly were not was the full Manifesto.
So that’s the context of the time. If you want to make up your own mind, the 2005 Liberal Democrat General Election Manifesto is here, The Orange Book is… Hey, where are all these libertarian pirates putting bootleg pdfs of it online? Well, I bought and read a copy, anyway, and you can still buy it at full price long past its sell-by date and bore yourself silly typing out long chunks to support your case. Just don’t make up your own mind on the basis of toytown spin and abuse from either side.
The Orange Book – The Legacy?
I wasn’t at Centre Forum’s meeting this week to – what? Celebrate? Commemorate? Build on? Bury? – The Orange Book, but I’d be fascinated to hear what people had to say, and to what extent that was based on the book itself, or merely on the legend. Stephen, you seem to be firmly a champion of the legend, and so your most interesting paragraph is your last, despite its assertions not being based on anything in the rest of your text:
“The Orange Book helped wake up the party, stimulating a much better quality of debate across the spectrum of views. Without The Orange Book, it’s doubtful we’d have the Social Liberal Forum. Without SLF, Liberal Reform wouldn’t exist. I like dialectic in political debate and the challenge and counter-challenge which often (not always, but often) ratchets up standards. Certainly it gives me confidence that our 2015 manifesto will be a marked improvement on its 2005 version.”I’m not convinced that it did. If anything, the self-indulgent timing of The Orange Book’s publication harmed its case and set back debate in the party. Most of it wasn’t of very good quality anyway. But I’m prepared to go along with your conclusion that it helped factionalise the Liberal Democrats into opposing teams shouting vituperate caricatures of each other – which is, obviously, always a sign of “a much better quality of debate”. Personally, I find both the self-identified “Orange Bookers” and the self-identified “Social Liberal Forum” and others depressing, lazy and unambitious for Liberalism – as well as each far smaller within the party than their self-importance would suggest. I agree that dialectic, debate and challenge and counter-challenge can ratchet up standards, but if carried out mostly by organised factions it can also lead to groupthink, entrenched positions and a lazy, never-ending exchange of misrepresentation instead of a thousand positive ideas blooming.
So here’s my own caricature: rather than arguments about the basis of Liberalism, what we all stand for and how we can inspire more people with it, much internal debate has become a values-free mud-fight about short-term economics, where one side is mean (but against debt) and the other generous (except to future generations), both say they are the only true Liberals while saying little recognisably Liberal, and neither has much to say that appeals to me.
Once again, my favourite contribution to Mark Pack’s “What do the Liberal Democrats Believe?” is on the basic conviction that unites social and economic Liberals:
“All POWER (be it government, business or other people) can both PROTECT and THREATEN LIBERTY.Stephen, what would you say that unifies rather than divides, and yet remains interesting? That’s the sort of inspiration I hope for from the 2015 Manifesto.
“Economic and Social Liberals put different emphasis on the BEST DEFENCES and the BIGGEST BULLIES.”
Yours always in hope, despite curmudgeonliness
Alex
Labels: Blogs, Books, David Laws, FPC, Ideas, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Manifesto, The Orange Book
Sunday, February 11, 2007
How Much Does the Mail Hate David Cameron?
I ask ‘How much…?’ rather than ‘Does…?’ because the ‘hate’ is obvious. It’s their mission: to hate and pour bile over anyone not four-square on Planet Mail, and to terrify all those who actually agree with them (I often think Mail-readers must be like ghost train addicts, loving to shriek in pretend horror at illusory threats). This weekend, though, the Mail and Mail On Sunday seem to have mounted a co-ordinated attack on the Conservative Leader. They’ve dug up evidence of his drug-taking (gasp!) and reported in embarrassing detail his failed attempts to persuade Liberal Democrat MPs to defect (shock!). Hat-tips to Jonathan Calder and Peter at Liberal Review.
But what has Mr Cameron done to deserve this double-barrelled attack? He’s a a ‘nice young man’ who’s been well brought-up in a very wealthy Conservative family in the home counties, and is now a Tory Leader who can supply ‘nice young family’ pictures for their supplements. The trouble is, he’s also the Tory Leader who’s been making the most naked appeals to people outside the Mail’s twitchy-curtained definition of ‘proper’ people. He’s a traitor to Mail-ism, and what could be more worthy of their bile? It doesn’t help that Mr Cameron is making less headway than all these ‘changes’ promised, something the Evening Standard (coincidentally, part of guess which newspaper group?) last week reported Edward Leigh fulminating on. The hate-fuelled outpourings of the Mail and Mr Leigh may indeed be thoroughly off-putting to all those outside their enclave, but I think they just can’t help themselves. ‘Nice… Nice… Nice…’ they chant, unconvincingly. ‘HATE!’ Whoops, it just slipped out, but they feel so much better for it.
Naturally, the ‘story’ here that’s grabbed all the attention is the personal one about Mr Cameron – people from proper Daily Mail families, of course, never do drugs (did they not watch The Line of Beauty? Ah, of course; it was all fine in that until anyone told the papers, too). But despite the ‘news’ of Mr Cameron’s drug-fuelled escapades at Eton receiving virtually continuous coverage on News 24 yesterday and still causing a feeding frenzy today, I suspect it will wind up no-one who isn’t already on the Edward Leigh / Daily Mail axis of being wound up by Mr Cameron’s touchy-feeliness anyway – though m’learned friend Mr Calder may be right that the word ‘Eton’ receiving round-the-clock coverage may hurt him, surely not what the Mail had in mind – and, after all his carefully-crafted lines on cocaine during the leadership election, it can come as a surprise to no-one.
I’m not impressed, however, by the Tory line that it doesn’t matter what you do before you enter politics as that can have no bearing on your political career. Aside from all the many politicians who use elements of their life story or life experience to aid their chances – as Mr Cameron does when posing with his family – I don’t recall anyone telling me when I first stood for Parliament that it was the modern equivalent of bathing in the sea at Paphos to restore my virginity. If an MP was suddenly discovered, say, to have committed murder before they became a candidate, would they be able to shrug and make ambiguous answers about how people are allowed to make mistakes but that it has nothing to do with their public life now? I suspect posing as Aphrodite would be a novel and not entirely effective defence with the Director of Public Prosecutions. Bizarrely, the Conservatives’ line means that someone who’s committed a criminal offence, been arrested, found guilty, taken their punishment and been rehabilitated – but with their past criminality a matter of public record – should be in a worse position than someone who successfully covers it up until they become an MP. And in this morning’s TV news bulletins, Mr Cameron has in the same soundbite said that there are private things that should remain private – so if drug use was a matter of private choice for him, why is he in favour of locking up other people for making the same private choice? – and then gone on to mention his family, which is entirely private, except when he uses it in public.
The only tenable reason to say that breaking the law and getting away with it before you become an MP is fine is surely if you believe the law in question is wrong and are vocal in wanting to see it changed, but that corollary seems lost on the Tories who, as ever, wish to have their cake (another dangerous drug, according to some Tory MPs) and eat it. Until they say that young people outside the privileged world of the top Tories should also not be punished for drug-taking, why should we listen to them claiming one rule for themselves and a different rule for others? I’m also curiously unimpressed with the Independent On Sunday for leading with it too (is this the first time a book has been serialised in both the Indy and the Mail? They must each feel dirty); ‘another politician might be a hypocrite if we could pin him down to having a view on anything’ isn’t a story that’ll do much to advance their campaign for legalisation.
Despite all the fun that everyone inevitably has with talking about drugs, the attack story from the Mail with the more slow-burning chance to be damaging is his much-touted campaign for high-level Lib Dem defections. The Tories have been crowing about these for a year as if it’s already happened, and – as Liberal Democrats noticed about our own claims some half-a-dozen years ago – if you have to get your publicity about a defection ‘before it happens’, it isn’t going to. A few minor defectors have been hyped up in the last few months, and it’s suited the news cycle to mention the Lib Dems going to Tories rather than those who’ve gone the other way, but disgruntled councillors, ex-unwinnable-candidates or hangers-on have always switched parties and always will. They’re rarely of much significance, even when some of those who’ve recently left the Conservatives for other parties have lost the Tories control of councils as a result. An MP is quite a different matter, which is why parties are always so eager to parade their scalps. When senior Tory MPs defected to the Liberal Democrats or Labour in the ’90s, large numbers of Labour MPs to the SDP in the ’80s or a Labour MP to the Tories in the ’70s, they were rightly seen as signs of parties in trouble.
Peter Oborne reports the abject failure of the Conservatives’ Treasury spokesperson’s crass attempts to induce Liberal Democrat MPs to defect, apparently by springing an unprompted conversation along the lines of ‘Who could fail to love me?’ ‘Me, for a start,’ which is not perhaps the most tactically brilliant of manouevres:
Richard suggested to me last night that this could be the first example of a defection that doesn’t take place actively harming the party that was too eager to claim it (at least outside of an episode of Spooks). It makes them look stupid, the approach to Lib Dems is liable to wind up Tory traditionalists, and is damages their claim to be ‘winners’ by providing a conspicuous own goal. Added to that, in the constituencies of Yeovil, Taunton and North Norfolk – all seats that the Tories would be desperate to regain in climbing their mountain to get back into power – Nich Starling rightly points out that the Conservative Leader has now given a fulsome endorsement to the sitting Liberal Democrat MP as preferable to whichever luckless Tory is selected to challenge them.
So why was the Tory Leadership so stupid as to make this move? Of course the benefits to them had David, Jeremy or Norman chosen to defect would be substantial, but wouldn’t it have been more sensible for some more subtle and deniable soundings to have been taken first to see if, you know, there was the remotest patina of interest or dissatisfaction with the party they were already in? After all, it would probably do the Liberal Democrats some good if, say, Ken Clarke and David Milliband were to join, but I suspect that if Vince Cable suddenly turned up in their offices on the spur of the moment and announced, ‘I’ve got a brilliant idea… Why don’t you sit with me!’ the resulting media attention would not be positive for the Lib Dems. The fact that you can’t imagine such a sensible figure making such an utter fool of himself says it all about the two shadow Chancellors.
There are several factors behind this huge misjudgement by Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne (oh, imagine how humiliating it must be if you lived in Tatton, and had exchanged Martin Bell for this shallow creation). The first is that they think, probably based on their life stories before they entered Parliament, that everything will be easy. Mr Cameron became Leader from nowhere, became flavour of the month in the press, and I imagine their overweening self-confidence sees the next general election in the same way. They didn’t bother slowly sounding out their Lib Dem targets because, well, who could possibly resist their charms? And, with their unfounded assumption that they’re coasting to victory, who could possibly not want a ticket to sitting in government with them? Surrounded by ambitious hangers-on eager to drop everything they stand for at the whiff of an opinion poll, they don’t seem to have considered that no-one – outside of a few small-time local politicians in areas where we’ve controlled the council for ages, but there can be precious few of those – has ever joined the Liberal Democrats with the primary aim of advancing their career. Well, not unless they’re exceedingly stupid, and Mr Laws is rather bright.
They look at David Laws in particular, and jump to yet another fallacy. As David “politely and thoughtfully explained” to Mr Osborne, he’s not a Tory. But, surely, he’s a former banker – he looks like ‘one of us,’ they assumed, so he must just have made a mistake and accidentally wandered into the wrong party. Wasn’t it all he needed for that nice Mr Osborne to point this out, and then the scales would drop from his eyes? Actually, no. It’s not the first time that Tories have jumped to this sort of fallacy. Just look at how they howled at David’s predecessor in Yeovil, because decorated army officer Paddy Ashdown should have been a Tory and it was an outrage that he wasn’t. In a mirror image of Labour at the time, they regarded Paddy as a ‘class traitor’. Look at the background of the new Tory elite, with their less confrontational style but much more old-fashioned wealth and privilege than the Tories of the ’80s, and you can see that though nowadays they’re more likely to bribe someone than rage at them, the principle’s the same. Liberals, however, do not come in ready-formed class packages. It’s a shame when some Lib Dems make the same misjudgments about David Laws, but he’s consistently proved that his ideas are Liberal ones. They’re not always the same Liberal ideas I have, but if you can’t see the same philosophical starting point, you haven’t been looking. Either that, or you only looked as far as his suit.
If I had to make a guess about defections in the near future, I’d be very surprised to see any Liberal Democrat MPs moving to the Tories, and almost as surprised if a Labour MP jumped ship. I think the days of predicting Tory defections to Lib Dem are over while Mr Cameron is able to talk up his reassuring fluffy nothingness, and no-one in their right minds would skip to Labour at the moment, surely. With several peers having already crossed from the Tories to UKIP, there’s probably an outside chance of MPs following them… But only an outside chance. The Tories show no sign of becoming any less anti-European in amongst their other fluffy poses, and any MP defecting to UKIP – as opposed to Lords who needn’t face elections – must know they’re likely to be choosing oblivion, particularly as if they’re extreme enough there’s a good chance they’ll get UKIP’s backing anyway. Besides, a lone frothing extremist waving goodbye while shouting about how much the Tories have changed under Mr Cameron would probably do even more to the Conservatives’ electoral chances than they would to those of UKIP. If I were Mr Cameron, I’d think about what I could do to prise away the more unappealing members of my own party as evidence of how safe I’ve become to vote for, rather than show up how meagre my appeal is to those in other parties.
But what has Mr Cameron done to deserve this double-barrelled attack? He’s a a ‘nice young man’ who’s been well brought-up in a very wealthy Conservative family in the home counties, and is now a Tory Leader who can supply ‘nice young family’ pictures for their supplements. The trouble is, he’s also the Tory Leader who’s been making the most naked appeals to people outside the Mail’s twitchy-curtained definition of ‘proper’ people. He’s a traitor to Mail-ism, and what could be more worthy of their bile? It doesn’t help that Mr Cameron is making less headway than all these ‘changes’ promised, something the Evening Standard (coincidentally, part of guess which newspaper group?) last week reported Edward Leigh fulminating on. The hate-fuelled outpourings of the Mail and Mr Leigh may indeed be thoroughly off-putting to all those outside their enclave, but I think they just can’t help themselves. ‘Nice… Nice… Nice…’ they chant, unconvincingly. ‘HATE!’ Whoops, it just slipped out, but they feel so much better for it.
Naturally, the ‘story’ here that’s grabbed all the attention is the personal one about Mr Cameron – people from proper Daily Mail families, of course, never do drugs (did they not watch The Line of Beauty? Ah, of course; it was all fine in that until anyone told the papers, too). But despite the ‘news’ of Mr Cameron’s drug-fuelled escapades at Eton receiving virtually continuous coverage on News 24 yesterday and still causing a feeding frenzy today, I suspect it will wind up no-one who isn’t already on the Edward Leigh / Daily Mail axis of being wound up by Mr Cameron’s touchy-feeliness anyway – though m’learned friend Mr Calder may be right that the word ‘Eton’ receiving round-the-clock coverage may hurt him, surely not what the Mail had in mind – and, after all his carefully-crafted lines on cocaine during the leadership election, it can come as a surprise to no-one.
I’m not impressed, however, by the Tory line that it doesn’t matter what you do before you enter politics as that can have no bearing on your political career. Aside from all the many politicians who use elements of their life story or life experience to aid their chances – as Mr Cameron does when posing with his family – I don’t recall anyone telling me when I first stood for Parliament that it was the modern equivalent of bathing in the sea at Paphos to restore my virginity. If an MP was suddenly discovered, say, to have committed murder before they became a candidate, would they be able to shrug and make ambiguous answers about how people are allowed to make mistakes but that it has nothing to do with their public life now? I suspect posing as Aphrodite would be a novel and not entirely effective defence with the Director of Public Prosecutions. Bizarrely, the Conservatives’ line means that someone who’s committed a criminal offence, been arrested, found guilty, taken their punishment and been rehabilitated – but with their past criminality a matter of public record – should be in a worse position than someone who successfully covers it up until they become an MP. And in this morning’s TV news bulletins, Mr Cameron has in the same soundbite said that there are private things that should remain private – so if drug use was a matter of private choice for him, why is he in favour of locking up other people for making the same private choice? – and then gone on to mention his family, which is entirely private, except when he uses it in public.
The only tenable reason to say that breaking the law and getting away with it before you become an MP is fine is surely if you believe the law in question is wrong and are vocal in wanting to see it changed, but that corollary seems lost on the Tories who, as ever, wish to have their cake (another dangerous drug, according to some Tory MPs) and eat it. Until they say that young people outside the privileged world of the top Tories should also not be punished for drug-taking, why should we listen to them claiming one rule for themselves and a different rule for others? I’m also curiously unimpressed with the Independent On Sunday for leading with it too (is this the first time a book has been serialised in both the Indy and the Mail? They must each feel dirty); ‘another politician might be a hypocrite if we could pin him down to having a view on anything’ isn’t a story that’ll do much to advance their campaign for legalisation.
Despite all the fun that everyone inevitably has with talking about drugs, the attack story from the Mail with the more slow-burning chance to be damaging is his much-touted campaign for high-level Lib Dem defections. The Tories have been crowing about these for a year as if it’s already happened, and – as Liberal Democrats noticed about our own claims some half-a-dozen years ago – if you have to get your publicity about a defection ‘before it happens’, it isn’t going to. A few minor defectors have been hyped up in the last few months, and it’s suited the news cycle to mention the Lib Dems going to Tories rather than those who’ve gone the other way, but disgruntled councillors, ex-unwinnable-candidates or hangers-on have always switched parties and always will. They’re rarely of much significance, even when some of those who’ve recently left the Conservatives for other parties have lost the Tories control of councils as a result. An MP is quite a different matter, which is why parties are always so eager to parade their scalps. When senior Tory MPs defected to the Liberal Democrats or Labour in the ’90s, large numbers of Labour MPs to the SDP in the ’80s or a Labour MP to the Tories in the ’70s, they were rightly seen as signs of parties in trouble.
Peter Oborne reports the abject failure of the Conservatives’ Treasury spokesperson’s crass attempts to induce Liberal Democrat MPs to defect, apparently by springing an unprompted conversation along the lines of ‘Who could fail to love me?’ ‘Me, for a start,’ which is not perhaps the most tactically brilliant of manouevres:
“Osborne suggested to David Laws, LibDem work and pensions spokesman, that he should consider defecting to the Conservative Party. In return, he would be offered a shadow cabinet job. At this point, Laws politely and thoughtfully explained that he was not a Tory.”This has to be damaging to George Osborne, both for the reflection on his judgement and for the fact that – the unforgivable sin in the new Tory pitch to win – he failed. While you get the feeling that, whenever he sees Mr Osborne appear on the modern moving television, Mr Oborne feels the need to bark ‘No relation!’ this is also rather bad news for Mr Cameron, reported as having given his personal authority to the approach (evidently, by sending his chief lieutenant). I can’t remember this sort of report appearing as breaking news before, which suggests the Mail really does have it in for them.
Richard suggested to me last night that this could be the first example of a defection that doesn’t take place actively harming the party that was too eager to claim it (at least outside of an episode of Spooks). It makes them look stupid, the approach to Lib Dems is liable to wind up Tory traditionalists, and is damages their claim to be ‘winners’ by providing a conspicuous own goal. Added to that, in the constituencies of Yeovil, Taunton and North Norfolk – all seats that the Tories would be desperate to regain in climbing their mountain to get back into power – Nich Starling rightly points out that the Conservative Leader has now given a fulsome endorsement to the sitting Liberal Democrat MP as preferable to whichever luckless Tory is selected to challenge them.
So why was the Tory Leadership so stupid as to make this move? Of course the benefits to them had David, Jeremy or Norman chosen to defect would be substantial, but wouldn’t it have been more sensible for some more subtle and deniable soundings to have been taken first to see if, you know, there was the remotest patina of interest or dissatisfaction with the party they were already in? After all, it would probably do the Liberal Democrats some good if, say, Ken Clarke and David Milliband were to join, but I suspect that if Vince Cable suddenly turned up in their offices on the spur of the moment and announced, ‘I’ve got a brilliant idea… Why don’t you sit with me!’ the resulting media attention would not be positive for the Lib Dems. The fact that you can’t imagine such a sensible figure making such an utter fool of himself says it all about the two shadow Chancellors.
There are several factors behind this huge misjudgement by Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne (oh, imagine how humiliating it must be if you lived in Tatton, and had exchanged Martin Bell for this shallow creation). The first is that they think, probably based on their life stories before they entered Parliament, that everything will be easy. Mr Cameron became Leader from nowhere, became flavour of the month in the press, and I imagine their overweening self-confidence sees the next general election in the same way. They didn’t bother slowly sounding out their Lib Dem targets because, well, who could possibly resist their charms? And, with their unfounded assumption that they’re coasting to victory, who could possibly not want a ticket to sitting in government with them? Surrounded by ambitious hangers-on eager to drop everything they stand for at the whiff of an opinion poll, they don’t seem to have considered that no-one – outside of a few small-time local politicians in areas where we’ve controlled the council for ages, but there can be precious few of those – has ever joined the Liberal Democrats with the primary aim of advancing their career. Well, not unless they’re exceedingly stupid, and Mr Laws is rather bright.
They look at David Laws in particular, and jump to yet another fallacy. As David “politely and thoughtfully explained” to Mr Osborne, he’s not a Tory. But, surely, he’s a former banker – he looks like ‘one of us,’ they assumed, so he must just have made a mistake and accidentally wandered into the wrong party. Wasn’t it all he needed for that nice Mr Osborne to point this out, and then the scales would drop from his eyes? Actually, no. It’s not the first time that Tories have jumped to this sort of fallacy. Just look at how they howled at David’s predecessor in Yeovil, because decorated army officer Paddy Ashdown should have been a Tory and it was an outrage that he wasn’t. In a mirror image of Labour at the time, they regarded Paddy as a ‘class traitor’. Look at the background of the new Tory elite, with their less confrontational style but much more old-fashioned wealth and privilege than the Tories of the ’80s, and you can see that though nowadays they’re more likely to bribe someone than rage at them, the principle’s the same. Liberals, however, do not come in ready-formed class packages. It’s a shame when some Lib Dems make the same misjudgments about David Laws, but he’s consistently proved that his ideas are Liberal ones. They’re not always the same Liberal ideas I have, but if you can’t see the same philosophical starting point, you haven’t been looking. Either that, or you only looked as far as his suit.
If I had to make a guess about defections in the near future, I’d be very surprised to see any Liberal Democrat MPs moving to the Tories, and almost as surprised if a Labour MP jumped ship. I think the days of predicting Tory defections to Lib Dem are over while Mr Cameron is able to talk up his reassuring fluffy nothingness, and no-one in their right minds would skip to Labour at the moment, surely. With several peers having already crossed from the Tories to UKIP, there’s probably an outside chance of MPs following them… But only an outside chance. The Tories show no sign of becoming any less anti-European in amongst their other fluffy poses, and any MP defecting to UKIP – as opposed to Lords who needn’t face elections – must know they’re likely to be choosing oblivion, particularly as if they’re extreme enough there’s a good chance they’ll get UKIP’s backing anyway. Besides, a lone frothing extremist waving goodbye while shouting about how much the Tories have changed under Mr Cameron would probably do even more to the Conservatives’ electoral chances than they would to those of UKIP. If I were Mr Cameron, I’d think about what I could do to prise away the more unappealing members of my own party as evidence of how safe I’ve become to vote for, rather than show up how meagre my appeal is to those in other parties.
Labels: British Politics, Conservatives, David Laws, Defections, Drugs, Stupid Ideas
Thursday, March 23, 2006
A Laws Unto Himself
Tonight’s Question Time features David Laws MP for the Liberal Democrats. There – I saw you flinch. When that shameless stirrer Ken Clarke last week spun that some Lib Dems were really Tories, most Lib Dems will have laughed at the accusation about Ming, been bewildered by the mention of Nick Clegg, known from Vince Cable’s record that it’s untrue… And thought that, with David, Ken probably has a point. Rubbish. A partisan Tory's trying to split us for a laugh, but David’s undoubtedly a Liberal, if an idiosyncratic one – and I’ll examine The Orange Book to prove it.
A lot of people don’t like David Laws, and The Orange Book’s not the only reason why. Several of the reasons are more to do with things associated with him than the man himself – that Tory/Labour-supporting papers often look favourably on him, for example, either through genuine appreciation (for example, I've read stories based on his digging out facts about benefits simply because he does that very effectively) or a Clarke-like attempt to smother him in their embrace, or that before he became an MP he made a lot of money. Well, I’m not fussed about that, and I’m much happier with people making a lot of money and then deciding to go into public service than with people making lots of money as a result of their time in public service.
As it happens, I like him, and have always found him easy to get on with – if not always to agree with. I had some dealings with him in my early years on the Federal Policy Committee, though his period as Lib Dem Director of Policy was while I’d stood down from the FPC for the first time. Unlike many, he always assembled a good case and could answer difficult questions on it, which is why I remember him winning me over for a new pensions policy in around 2000. It became the first time I’d spoken on the more conservative economic side in a Conference debate (though against several MPs and aspiring MPs, which was more in character), on the simple basis that I wanted a pensions policy that wouldn’t go bankrupt before I came to claim on it. Pensions and education between them were still by a long way our biggest spending commitments in the 2001 election, but we refused to promise to restore an earnings link that, a couple of decades down the line, there’d be no way we could pay for. I rate Steve Webb highly as well, but when a few years ago he brought populist proposals to the FPC that we do a complete U-turn on that policy, he simply dodged the question of what would happen a little way into the future. So I suspect I share with David – now our Pensions Spokesperson, ironically – a worry about our attitude to pensions provision, at least one Lib Dem dividing line. I also can’t help smiling at the memory of him telling me about canvassing for his first election in Yeovil, when an elderly family friend presented him with possibly the most terrifying question ever put to a Lib Dem candidate on the doorstep: “What do you think of Alex Wilcock?”
I was less impressed with David’s most famous printed contribution to Lib Dem thinking, though I wasn’t one of those who at the party’s 2004 Conference advocated putting him inside a giant wicker Orange Book and burning it on Bournemouth beach. At the time, I was Vice-Chair of the FPC, putting a lot of effort into the consultation process about the Pre-Manifesto, Freedom, Fairness, Trust, and thought some people trying to come up with a bundle of new policies at the last minute when the party would have no chance to vote on them before the election was, well, less than useful. I realised the rest of the party shared this view when I mentioned The Orange Book entirely neutrally at a packed fringe meeting on the Pre-Manifesto on the first night of Conference and the audience broke into spontaneous hissing, one of the few times I’ve been unable to stop myself laughing on a public platform. Feeling I should read the thing rather than just slag it off, I waded through it that week and so was able to slag it off from an informed position. For some reason, people seemed to think my criticism of the Tories when I summated in the Freedom, Fairness, Trust debate later that week was something to do with it: warning people to beware of imitations – yes, even before Mr Balloon, they were trying to sound like Lib Dems on tuition fees and long-term care, but without spending any money – I concluded that “It’s not the first time something’s been marketed as orange, but you’ve been sold a lemon.”
Surely the most controversial publication by any Liberal Democrats since the party was formed, The Orange Book is far more mediocre than its cheerleaders or its demonisers like to claim. Not as interesting as Passports to Liberty, by a very long way less persuasive than An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Liberalism, its two main claims to controversy are its timing and, yes, David Laws. I mentioned some of the reasons people aren’t too keen on him earlier, but the timing and content of The Orange Book sum up perhaps the key ones, a peculiar mixture of naïvety and pig-headedness. His speech at Harrogate where he talked about cutting benefits to single parents caused a storm not just because what he said was perceived as right-wing, but because it was seen as dropping on the party from a great height - I should, however, point out that many years on the FPC have made it clear to me that he is far from the only spokesperson to make policy on the hoof (he’s either more brazen or just better-reported). The Liberal Democrats have a lengthy and deliberative process of consultation to create policy, at the end of which we get to vote on it. A spokesperson’s speech coming out of the blue, giving no chance for a vote, and grabbing the headlines over the issues the party was actually debating, is not the best way to start a discussion, still less make friends and influence people. It was, however, entirely in line with the painfully bad timing of The Orange Book.
Had The Orange Book been published for, say, Harrogate Conference this year or Blackpool last year, there would still have been plenty of internal gossip about what this faction ‘meant’, but far less rancour. It would also have meant that fewer people might have bought it, but perhaps more would have read and agreed with it, or at least starting a debate within the party rather than most Lib Dems hurling it into the outer darkness and its band of supporters bleating what martyrs they were. Published just before a General Election and with absolutely zero chance that the new ideas in it could make it to a Manifesto already near completion, all it did was set itself up as an alternative manifesto – and not only did that wind everyone up so much that they wouldn’t listen to what was in it even if it had been brilliant (pretty much the definition of ‘self-defeating’), it just wasn’t up to the job. Paul Marshall’s ‘Introduction’ explicitly tries to make a manifesto of a series of disparate essays, to the obvious later embarrassment of some of its authors, and his attempt to tie them together falls flat. It doesn’t help that it’s by a long way the most dull and poorly written piece in the book, and the fact that Mr Marshall’s apparent financial abilities are in no way matched by literary ones probably meant a lot of people started at the beginning and didn’t make it any further. That’s a shame, less because they’ve missed out on something wonderful than because they were therefore unable to take the heat out of the internal party row by a massed chorus of “Oh, is that it?”
Few people can now remember most of the essays the book contained on various policy areas, whether the likes of Ed Davey on localism, Susan Kramer on using the market to protect the environment, Paul Marshall (yawn) on pensions or Chris Huhne on international institutions, which was probably the one I most agreed with at the time but also where I saw potential for a row to erupt that didn’t. Steve Webb’s piece is the authoritarian odd one out, thinking the state should have more power – over families – but ducking away from a head-on collision with the pro-marketeers. Even Mark Oaten’s piece was relatively persuasive, despite dropping the really dodgy proposal into his ‘Conclusion’ (sigh). But, be honest, you don’t remember any of those, do you, nor Nick or Vince? No, it’s David Laws’ essay on health that was the radical, pig-headed, naïve and doomed one. His advocacy of a national health insurance scheme has been described by Joe Otten in an excellent demolition as pulling a rabbit out of a hat, which rather sums up David’s tendency to come up with magic solutions that surprise but don’t delight. Not only was it tactically unwise to say the party should dismantle the NHS immediately before a General Election, but the proposal had already been considered by Chris Huhne’s Public Services Commission and roundly rejected. In other words, if the consultation doesn’t work, just pretend it’s never been mentioned before and that it’s a brilliant panacea no-one in their right minds could disagree with. Unfortunately, the party concluded almost to a member that David wasn’t the messiah, but a very naughty boy.
There are two reasons why my blood didn’t boil about David’s health proposals, other than the obvious one that I think he was trying to do some good. Firstly, I knew they’d already been rejected and that, by attempting to bounce them on the party in this way, he’d ensured they were not just dead but buried at a crossroads with a stake through them. Secondly, wonk though I am, I’m still more interested in the big picture than in individual policies, and I thought everyone was reading the wrong chapter. If you want to know what makes David tick, ignore the self-immolating health controversy and turn to his essay applying Liberal philosophy at the beginning. It’s really rather good. Well, up to a point…
David Laws’ first chapter – ‘Reclaiming Liberalism’ – is by my lights roughly 75% good, 20% all over the place and 5% out of place, but in any case easily the most interesting thing in the book. Anyone who believes he’s a Tory should read it. No, anyone who’s a Liberal should read it. You won’t agree with all of it, but I’ve never found an essay on Liberalism yet that didn’t have things I could disagree with in it, even in John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor or in Conrad Russell. David Laws’ personal creed has plenty that I wouldn’t go along with, but I can’t see how it’s possible to read it and not recognise that he’s a Liberal. Lib Dems familiar only with the caricature of David might be surprised by how much and how well he writes on how social liberalism is needed to make freedom meaningful, or how inspiringly he writes on liberal internationalism or personal liberalism. You might be slightly bemused at his detour under political liberalism, but ‘How liberal are the Liberal Democrats?’ is entirely the right question to raise for this sort of analysis, even if I don’t agree with all the answers. His pet phrase is to argue that well-meaning liberals don’t always practise their beliefs but instead choose “Liberalism à la carte,” a persuasive critique of the blind spots that all politicians can develop. Perhaps his holier-than-thou attitude would have been more influential, however, if he’d asked someone from a different school of Liberal thought to read through it and give an honest appraisal of what his own blind spots were (I suspect I’d often do better if I did the same).
Probably the essay’s biggest failing is its complete inability to see that there are ways of meeting the same Liberal principles with different approaches, instead taking every policy in grand dogmatic sweeps, and this is most true of economics. David really needs to make a little more effort not to act as if he’s unquestionably right all the time. When Charles Kennedy wrote in the foreword that “Not all of the ideas… are existing party policy, but all are compatible with our Liberal heritage,” it was as good a warning to the writers as to the readers. David dismisses Liberal economics all the way from the 1930s to the 1980s as a corporatist cop-out, seeing the Liberal Democrats as only just starting to head back in the right direction in the 1990s. I’m sure that, like the Tories, the Liberals had elements of ‘me-tooism’ about then-exciting, then-modern socialism, and he’s right that the Alliance’s obsession with putting itself in ‘the middle’ was difficult to base on solid principle. However, David’s essay seems to make market solutions a dogmatic imperative, without stopping to consider when they might not deliver the best value to the taxpayer, whether there are alternatives or even if they’d work at all. For example, in the ‘corporatist’ 1970s he dismisses so entirely, there was a distinctively Liberal policy (now all but withered to dust, one of my few large regrets in mostly the best policy landscape for us post-war) of industrial democracy and worker participation, bridging political and economic Liberalism and the absolute opposite of soggy socialism – anti-state, non-unionised, bottom-up. If I’ve been aware of it for a good many years, David must be, and I can only think that he fails to mention this inconvenient fact because it would get in the way of his ‘us or them’ thesis. He mentions opposition to monopoly and 1930s market failure, but that brief aside merely draws attention to this as his biggest blind spot. While many Liberal policies over the years have been directed against private monopoly, he fails to address other monopolies than state ones, or what to do in the event of other market failure – as well as raising the question, if he admits the market failed in 1930s (and that’s the only point at which he’s prepared to admit any such thing), does he have any alternative answer to such catastrophic failures or would he just have shut his eyes and hoped it would go away?
Bizarrely, ‘Reclaiming Liberalism’ lets the Tories get away with ‘economic liberalism’, and commits one of the worst essayist’s sins: producing a highly contentious and unsupported new assertion in his conclusion. At the time, it was the bit of the essay that really leapt out at me, and, yes, Post Office privatisation has since become a bit of an issue in the Lib Dems. Well, I read it here first. One of the reasons that I was sorry to miss the Harrogate Conference was that I’d have liked to hear the debate, as - some way from the ‘if you have anything to do with privatisation you must be a Tory’ earache - Richard Gadsden’s argument against was quite persuasive, but so were some of the arguments in favour. Less impressive were those along the lines of ‘we must be disciplined / send a signal / win over Rupert Murdoch in one bound’ rather than on the policy’s merits, and unfortunately its sudden appearance in David’s essay was just such a piece of willy-waving. No justification was supplied for suddenly springing Post Office privatisation as one of ten ‘minimum’ items for a Liberal programme, and it’s far more specialised than any of the others, making it stand out still further. There are Liberal cases for and against, but not all privatisations have been the best option – compare Telecom, mostly good with some bad features, with rail, mostly bad but with some nice trains – and again his naïve cheerleading for private ownership fails even to mention other Liberal economic alternatives such as mutualism. Notably, the version of this policy that finally made it through a Conference was after assiduous consultation, rather than David’s habit of ‘bouncing’, and by combining it with a return to the workers’ participation he overlooks. His authoritarian tone on single parents (yes, that was in there too) also sits poorly with his excellent piece on personal liberalism. And his list of illiberal measures by Lib Dems excludes councils who’ve banned drinking in public, perhaps an oversight but I suspect because there are several signs that his own ‘à la carte well-meaning illiberal instincts’ emerge on law and order.
His ten-policy ‘minimum’ list for a Liberal programme seems less a rational set of the most important issues than an attempt to dissociate himself from other parts of the party and claim they aren’t Liberal if they don’t follow his precise prescription – like those Green Party spin doctors who say what the Lib Dems must do to be ‘green’ in their view by setting out differences, not looking at where any party would start from (incidentally, you may have noticed that independent groups like Friends of the Earth said the Lib Dem manifesto last year was greener on a number of issues than the Green Party’s, so don’t think that because they’re small and dogmatic their prescription must be stronger). If you rightly want to seize the environmental agenda for the Liberal Democrats, however, David isn’t much help to you. His essay ignores the environmental aspects of modern Liberalism, so in the complete absence of that development of the last couple of decades and the participatory agenda of a couple of decades before, and having rejected the ‘corporatism’ developed in the earlier part of the last century, he’s in the rather striking position for a ‘moderniser’ of leaving his philosophical innovation stalled somewhere around 1908.
I like David, and though I often disagree with him, when he sounds thoughtful he can be very persuasive. It’s just when he tries to lay down the law out of nowhere that he gets my back up. I hope he won’t shoot from the hip too much on Questionable Time tonight, and that when he gives his own views rather than giving the party line he decides to be thoughtful rather than prescriptive. Equally, don’t assume that because he doesn’t share some of your own prescriptions for Liberalism that he isn’t a Liberal too. Both David and his detractors would do better to recognise that asking questions and having arguments rather than just accepting a revealed truth is pretty much what Liberals do.
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A lot of people don’t like David Laws, and The Orange Book’s not the only reason why. Several of the reasons are more to do with things associated with him than the man himself – that Tory/Labour-supporting papers often look favourably on him, for example, either through genuine appreciation (for example, I've read stories based on his digging out facts about benefits simply because he does that very effectively) or a Clarke-like attempt to smother him in their embrace, or that before he became an MP he made a lot of money. Well, I’m not fussed about that, and I’m much happier with people making a lot of money and then deciding to go into public service than with people making lots of money as a result of their time in public service.
David Laws: Alex’s Reminiscences
As it happens, I like him, and have always found him easy to get on with – if not always to agree with. I had some dealings with him in my early years on the Federal Policy Committee, though his period as Lib Dem Director of Policy was while I’d stood down from the FPC for the first time. Unlike many, he always assembled a good case and could answer difficult questions on it, which is why I remember him winning me over for a new pensions policy in around 2000. It became the first time I’d spoken on the more conservative economic side in a Conference debate (though against several MPs and aspiring MPs, which was more in character), on the simple basis that I wanted a pensions policy that wouldn’t go bankrupt before I came to claim on it. Pensions and education between them were still by a long way our biggest spending commitments in the 2001 election, but we refused to promise to restore an earnings link that, a couple of decades down the line, there’d be no way we could pay for. I rate Steve Webb highly as well, but when a few years ago he brought populist proposals to the FPC that we do a complete U-turn on that policy, he simply dodged the question of what would happen a little way into the future. So I suspect I share with David – now our Pensions Spokesperson, ironically – a worry about our attitude to pensions provision, at least one Lib Dem dividing line. I also can’t help smiling at the memory of him telling me about canvassing for his first election in Yeovil, when an elderly family friend presented him with possibly the most terrifying question ever put to a Lib Dem candidate on the doorstep: “What do you think of Alex Wilcock?”
I was less impressed with David’s most famous printed contribution to Lib Dem thinking, though I wasn’t one of those who at the party’s 2004 Conference advocated putting him inside a giant wicker Orange Book and burning it on Bournemouth beach. At the time, I was Vice-Chair of the FPC, putting a lot of effort into the consultation process about the Pre-Manifesto, Freedom, Fairness, Trust, and thought some people trying to come up with a bundle of new policies at the last minute when the party would have no chance to vote on them before the election was, well, less than useful. I realised the rest of the party shared this view when I mentioned The Orange Book entirely neutrally at a packed fringe meeting on the Pre-Manifesto on the first night of Conference and the audience broke into spontaneous hissing, one of the few times I’ve been unable to stop myself laughing on a public platform. Feeling I should read the thing rather than just slag it off, I waded through it that week and so was able to slag it off from an informed position. For some reason, people seemed to think my criticism of the Tories when I summated in the Freedom, Fairness, Trust debate later that week was something to do with it: warning people to beware of imitations – yes, even before Mr Balloon, they were trying to sound like Lib Dems on tuition fees and long-term care, but without spending any money – I concluded that “It’s not the first time something’s been marketed as orange, but you’ve been sold a lemon.”
The Orange Book: Reclaiming Liberalism
Surely the most controversial publication by any Liberal Democrats since the party was formed, The Orange Book is far more mediocre than its cheerleaders or its demonisers like to claim. Not as interesting as Passports to Liberty, by a very long way less persuasive than An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Liberalism, its two main claims to controversy are its timing and, yes, David Laws. I mentioned some of the reasons people aren’t too keen on him earlier, but the timing and content of The Orange Book sum up perhaps the key ones, a peculiar mixture of naïvety and pig-headedness. His speech at Harrogate where he talked about cutting benefits to single parents caused a storm not just because what he said was perceived as right-wing, but because it was seen as dropping on the party from a great height - I should, however, point out that many years on the FPC have made it clear to me that he is far from the only spokesperson to make policy on the hoof (he’s either more brazen or just better-reported). The Liberal Democrats have a lengthy and deliberative process of consultation to create policy, at the end of which we get to vote on it. A spokesperson’s speech coming out of the blue, giving no chance for a vote, and grabbing the headlines over the issues the party was actually debating, is not the best way to start a discussion, still less make friends and influence people. It was, however, entirely in line with the painfully bad timing of The Orange Book.
Had The Orange Book been published for, say, Harrogate Conference this year or Blackpool last year, there would still have been plenty of internal gossip about what this faction ‘meant’, but far less rancour. It would also have meant that fewer people might have bought it, but perhaps more would have read and agreed with it, or at least starting a debate within the party rather than most Lib Dems hurling it into the outer darkness and its band of supporters bleating what martyrs they were. Published just before a General Election and with absolutely zero chance that the new ideas in it could make it to a Manifesto already near completion, all it did was set itself up as an alternative manifesto – and not only did that wind everyone up so much that they wouldn’t listen to what was in it even if it had been brilliant (pretty much the definition of ‘self-defeating’), it just wasn’t up to the job. Paul Marshall’s ‘Introduction’ explicitly tries to make a manifesto of a series of disparate essays, to the obvious later embarrassment of some of its authors, and his attempt to tie them together falls flat. It doesn’t help that it’s by a long way the most dull and poorly written piece in the book, and the fact that Mr Marshall’s apparent financial abilities are in no way matched by literary ones probably meant a lot of people started at the beginning and didn’t make it any further. That’s a shame, less because they’ve missed out on something wonderful than because they were therefore unable to take the heat out of the internal party row by a massed chorus of “Oh, is that it?”
The Orange Content
Few people can now remember most of the essays the book contained on various policy areas, whether the likes of Ed Davey on localism, Susan Kramer on using the market to protect the environment, Paul Marshall (yawn) on pensions or Chris Huhne on international institutions, which was probably the one I most agreed with at the time but also where I saw potential for a row to erupt that didn’t. Steve Webb’s piece is the authoritarian odd one out, thinking the state should have more power – over families – but ducking away from a head-on collision with the pro-marketeers. Even Mark Oaten’s piece was relatively persuasive, despite dropping the really dodgy proposal into his ‘Conclusion’ (sigh). But, be honest, you don’t remember any of those, do you, nor Nick or Vince? No, it’s David Laws’ essay on health that was the radical, pig-headed, naïve and doomed one. His advocacy of a national health insurance scheme has been described by Joe Otten in an excellent demolition as pulling a rabbit out of a hat, which rather sums up David’s tendency to come up with magic solutions that surprise but don’t delight. Not only was it tactically unwise to say the party should dismantle the NHS immediately before a General Election, but the proposal had already been considered by Chris Huhne’s Public Services Commission and roundly rejected. In other words, if the consultation doesn’t work, just pretend it’s never been mentioned before and that it’s a brilliant panacea no-one in their right minds could disagree with. Unfortunately, the party concluded almost to a member that David wasn’t the messiah, but a very naughty boy.
There are two reasons why my blood didn’t boil about David’s health proposals, other than the obvious one that I think he was trying to do some good. Firstly, I knew they’d already been rejected and that, by attempting to bounce them on the party in this way, he’d ensured they were not just dead but buried at a crossroads with a stake through them. Secondly, wonk though I am, I’m still more interested in the big picture than in individual policies, and I thought everyone was reading the wrong chapter. If you want to know what makes David tick, ignore the self-immolating health controversy and turn to his essay applying Liberal philosophy at the beginning. It’s really rather good. Well, up to a point…
David’s Philosophy
David Laws’ first chapter – ‘Reclaiming Liberalism’ – is by my lights roughly 75% good, 20% all over the place and 5% out of place, but in any case easily the most interesting thing in the book. Anyone who believes he’s a Tory should read it. No, anyone who’s a Liberal should read it. You won’t agree with all of it, but I’ve never found an essay on Liberalism yet that didn’t have things I could disagree with in it, even in John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor or in Conrad Russell. David Laws’ personal creed has plenty that I wouldn’t go along with, but I can’t see how it’s possible to read it and not recognise that he’s a Liberal. Lib Dems familiar only with the caricature of David might be surprised by how much and how well he writes on how social liberalism is needed to make freedom meaningful, or how inspiringly he writes on liberal internationalism or personal liberalism. You might be slightly bemused at his detour under political liberalism, but ‘How liberal are the Liberal Democrats?’ is entirely the right question to raise for this sort of analysis, even if I don’t agree with all the answers. His pet phrase is to argue that well-meaning liberals don’t always practise their beliefs but instead choose “Liberalism à la carte,” a persuasive critique of the blind spots that all politicians can develop. Perhaps his holier-than-thou attitude would have been more influential, however, if he’d asked someone from a different school of Liberal thought to read through it and give an honest appraisal of what his own blind spots were (I suspect I’d often do better if I did the same).
Probably the essay’s biggest failing is its complete inability to see that there are ways of meeting the same Liberal principles with different approaches, instead taking every policy in grand dogmatic sweeps, and this is most true of economics. David really needs to make a little more effort not to act as if he’s unquestionably right all the time. When Charles Kennedy wrote in the foreword that “Not all of the ideas… are existing party policy, but all are compatible with our Liberal heritage,” it was as good a warning to the writers as to the readers. David dismisses Liberal economics all the way from the 1930s to the 1980s as a corporatist cop-out, seeing the Liberal Democrats as only just starting to head back in the right direction in the 1990s. I’m sure that, like the Tories, the Liberals had elements of ‘me-tooism’ about then-exciting, then-modern socialism, and he’s right that the Alliance’s obsession with putting itself in ‘the middle’ was difficult to base on solid principle. However, David’s essay seems to make market solutions a dogmatic imperative, without stopping to consider when they might not deliver the best value to the taxpayer, whether there are alternatives or even if they’d work at all. For example, in the ‘corporatist’ 1970s he dismisses so entirely, there was a distinctively Liberal policy (now all but withered to dust, one of my few large regrets in mostly the best policy landscape for us post-war) of industrial democracy and worker participation, bridging political and economic Liberalism and the absolute opposite of soggy socialism – anti-state, non-unionised, bottom-up. If I’ve been aware of it for a good many years, David must be, and I can only think that he fails to mention this inconvenient fact because it would get in the way of his ‘us or them’ thesis. He mentions opposition to monopoly and 1930s market failure, but that brief aside merely draws attention to this as his biggest blind spot. While many Liberal policies over the years have been directed against private monopoly, he fails to address other monopolies than state ones, or what to do in the event of other market failure – as well as raising the question, if he admits the market failed in 1930s (and that’s the only point at which he’s prepared to admit any such thing), does he have any alternative answer to such catastrophic failures or would he just have shut his eyes and hoped it would go away?
Bizarrely, ‘Reclaiming Liberalism’ lets the Tories get away with ‘economic liberalism’, and commits one of the worst essayist’s sins: producing a highly contentious and unsupported new assertion in his conclusion. At the time, it was the bit of the essay that really leapt out at me, and, yes, Post Office privatisation has since become a bit of an issue in the Lib Dems. Well, I read it here first. One of the reasons that I was sorry to miss the Harrogate Conference was that I’d have liked to hear the debate, as - some way from the ‘if you have anything to do with privatisation you must be a Tory’ earache - Richard Gadsden’s argument against was quite persuasive, but so were some of the arguments in favour. Less impressive were those along the lines of ‘we must be disciplined / send a signal / win over Rupert Murdoch in one bound’ rather than on the policy’s merits, and unfortunately its sudden appearance in David’s essay was just such a piece of willy-waving. No justification was supplied for suddenly springing Post Office privatisation as one of ten ‘minimum’ items for a Liberal programme, and it’s far more specialised than any of the others, making it stand out still further. There are Liberal cases for and against, but not all privatisations have been the best option – compare Telecom, mostly good with some bad features, with rail, mostly bad but with some nice trains – and again his naïve cheerleading for private ownership fails even to mention other Liberal economic alternatives such as mutualism. Notably, the version of this policy that finally made it through a Conference was after assiduous consultation, rather than David’s habit of ‘bouncing’, and by combining it with a return to the workers’ participation he overlooks. His authoritarian tone on single parents (yes, that was in there too) also sits poorly with his excellent piece on personal liberalism. And his list of illiberal measures by Lib Dems excludes councils who’ve banned drinking in public, perhaps an oversight but I suspect because there are several signs that his own ‘à la carte well-meaning illiberal instincts’ emerge on law and order.
His ten-policy ‘minimum’ list for a Liberal programme seems less a rational set of the most important issues than an attempt to dissociate himself from other parts of the party and claim they aren’t Liberal if they don’t follow his precise prescription – like those Green Party spin doctors who say what the Lib Dems must do to be ‘green’ in their view by setting out differences, not looking at where any party would start from (incidentally, you may have noticed that independent groups like Friends of the Earth said the Lib Dem manifesto last year was greener on a number of issues than the Green Party’s, so don’t think that because they’re small and dogmatic their prescription must be stronger). If you rightly want to seize the environmental agenda for the Liberal Democrats, however, David isn’t much help to you. His essay ignores the environmental aspects of modern Liberalism, so in the complete absence of that development of the last couple of decades and the participatory agenda of a couple of decades before, and having rejected the ‘corporatism’ developed in the earlier part of the last century, he’s in the rather striking position for a ‘moderniser’ of leaving his philosophical innovation stalled somewhere around 1908.
I like David, and though I often disagree with him, when he sounds thoughtful he can be very persuasive. It’s just when he tries to lay down the law out of nowhere that he gets my back up. I hope he won’t shoot from the hip too much on Questionable Time tonight, and that when he gives his own views rather than giving the party line he decides to be thoughtful rather than prescriptive. Equally, don’t assume that because he doesn’t share some of your own prescriptions for Liberalism that he isn’t a Liberal too. Both David and his detractors would do better to recognise that asking questions and having arguments rather than just accepting a revealed truth is pretty much what Liberals do.
Labels: British Politics, David Laws, Ideas, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism
