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May 11, 2010
The Liberal Democrats are currently centre stage in the UK due to a hung parliament resulting from the recent UK election. If the Lib Dems stand for the Liberal tradition, and are its defenders, then how do they understand what Liberalism means in the 21st century? It is social liberalism, which receives few defenders in Australia these days, even though social liberalism is the philosophical underpinnings of social democracy.
An example is Reinventing the State: Social Liberalism in the 21st Century from the Beveridge Group produced by the centre-left ginger group within the Liberal Democrat party.The Introduction to Reinventing the State is a defence of social liberalism:
The limitations of the market, however, are becoming increasingly obvious. Conservative and Labour governments obsessed with market-based solutions have built a more unequal and unfair society than Britain has experienced at any time since before the Second World War. The ever-more serious threat of uncontrolled climate change cannot be met by market mechanisms alone. And the introduction of markets into the public services has had – at best – mixed results.
This is nothing new to British Liberals, who have argued for well over a century that the market suffers from a number of limitations, and that there is, therefore, an important role for the state. This was the social liberal approach of the New Liberalism of the early twentieth century that laid the foundations of the British welfare state. At the same time, however, Liberals have always recognised the danger of government- based solutions that rely on, or lead to the establishment of, remote and insensitive bureaucracies.
It says that the last decade New Labour of Blair and Brown has presided over an expansion of precisely this kind of remote bureaucracy. Furthermore, it has governed in an increasingly authoritarian and controlling manner. The positive argument for the role of the state has become accordingly more difficult to make because the idea of government action has become tainted by New Labour’s approach.
Their analysis is spot on:
Britain is seen as a divided and unfair society, where individu-als and communities are powerless in the face of bureaucracies and com-panies which treat them only as passive consumers. People feel that they cannot control their own destinies – or even their own local services, from schools and hospitals to post offices and community facilities. The Labour and Conservative approach to the breakdown of traditional social structures is to descend to mere consumerism, promising the voters more of everything – or at least more services and possessions, but never values, or community spirit, or social solidarity.
Their response is to put the case for reinventing the state so that it is creative and enabling, rather than centralising and stifling. So they work in the social liberal tradition:
social liberals believed in the core value of freedom. They held that the state should as far as possible leave people alone to make their own decisions on how to live their lives, but they believed in addition that freedom was not attainable without a fair distribution of wealth and power. This in turn led to support for redistributive taxation as a way of fairly distributing wealth, and for democracy as a way of fairly distributing power.
The social liberal argument has three steps. First, relying exclusively on unfettered market mechanisms to deliver a liberal and democratic society is doomed to failure. Second, positive state intervention to tackle market failures is not only perfectly compatible with Liberalism, it may be actively necessary for a full understanding of individual freedom. Third, Liberal interventions in markets are different in kind from socialist interventions, being always as local as possible and as accountable as possible.
The goal of social liberalism is to enable the individual to make the most of his or her life. This will not happen if the state stands idly by. Nor will it happen if the state steps in to control. But it will happen if the state enables, if the state hands power back and if the state tames the power of the market.
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