Monday, October 03, 2005

Why you should subscribe to Liberator

The other day I wrote that:
Liberal Democrats love to describe themselves as "radical", but for many there seems to be an unstated assumption that to be radical means to be like the pre-Blair Labour Party.
I have since found that there is an article by Iain Sharpe in the current issue of Liberator (the one that was on sale at Blackpool) which explores this idea more fully. He writes:

For many of those in the Lib Dems who consider themselves radicals, the core belief or "golden thread" is not about decentralisation, individual freedom, environmentalism or whatever; it's about not being right-wing.

That's why the party has never truly been able to set out what it means by a radical non-socialist alternative to conservatism (to use Jo Grimond's phrase of 40 or more years ago).

The moral is clear: subscribe to Liberator!

No comments: