What do we Liberal Democrats believe in?Jane Watkinson thinks it is equality, which is news to me. I would say it is personal liberty and after that it is the freedom of local communities to make decisions for themselves. Labour believes in central control, the Tories would leave it all to market forces and we believe in flourishing local communities.
Simples.
Which makes me sad to read Mick Bates, Lib Dem AM for Montgomeryshire, saying:
“We need swift progress to harness the vast power of the Severn estuary and the removal of the planning barriers which hold up the development of renewable energy across the country. If this action and investment had taken place a decade ago, we would already have the energy infrastructure and capacity in place to secure our energy supply for the future.”Remove planning barriers? What kind of ideology is it that gives in when it is faced with a serious problem?
One expects Ed Miliband to think like that. He and his brother used to sit in their pyjamas while their father told them stories of how Stalin had diverted the rivers of Central Asia to water the Uzbek cotton fields.
But Mick Bates is a Liberal. And Liberals believe in local determination of planning matters.
Don't we?
Thanks to Freedom Central.
5 comments:
Thanks for the link.
Wouldn't you say that to have personal liberty you have to have the context of equality in order to properly express it? Equality of opportunity is needed in order to obtain liberty?
Poverty certainly militates against personal liberty and Liberals should act against it for that reason (amongst others).
I am less convinced that inequality per se does so, though I know there are arguments that it is harmful in other ways.
I also believe we should foster institutions that bring people from different income brackets together.
I find the concept of equality of opportunity becomes more difficult (and more demanding) the more you look at it.
I should write more on this one day.
Do you find the Liberal Democrats are that keen on equality? These days we seem to talk about "fairness" which is a bit of a playground word and means very different things to different people.
Well i appreciate your view, but i would say that inequality per se does influence your ability to achieve personal liberty. It influences the structural context of realising your capacity as an individual.
I agree we need to further encourage institutions to bring people of different income brackets together. That would help equality and personal liberty.
Well as i said in my blog, i think whilst equality is a core value of our party, recently, in practice we have not really been meeting this. Therefore, i agree that equality has been kind of forgotten as a key pledge by the party of late.
As Mick does not 'do blogs' I will attempt to answer for him though I may be inadvertently misrepresenting him. I think the planning barriers he is referring to are the need to get permission to install micro generators such as solar panels. You now do not need permission to install these in Wales as the government has just classed them as permitted development.
While I'm aware that Germany in particular has moved far ahead of us in micro schemes for renewable energy, I doubt the 'decade ago' assertion. We have more of a maritime climate than continental Europe, and thus need highly efficient collectors of natural energy, technology that was not really there 10 years ago.
Also a crude Severn barrage would dramatically upset the local ecosystem and disturb commerce. The newer proposals are much more sympathetic to local conditions.
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