It is axiomatic for liberals that power ought to be dispersed and accountable. The Liberal Democrats tends to be fairly good at articulating this when it comes to political structures – supporting an elected House of Lords, empowering local government, opposing mayors and PCCs who have "dubious democratic mandates and little scrutiny".
In contrast, the party’s approach to concentrated and unaccountable power that derives from wealth, as distinct from politics, is much more patchy. Ed Davey should be credited for his response to the Epstein scandal, and for standing up to Elon Musk on a range of issues. But he has been unwilling to move much beyond a critique of bad individual American billionaires, to the illiberal concentration of power which great wealth inevitably entails.
With reference to tech oligarchs, he writes:
I see it as the fundamental purpose of liberals … to hold the powerful to account and put real power in the hands of ordinary people. That means breaking up concentrations of power wherever we find them.
This is an excellent starting point, but needs to be supported by tangible and far-reaching policies.
The existence of all billionaires* is a structural problem. There are perhaps three broad reasons why the Liberal Democrats have not sufficiently acknowledged this, but each can be challenged.
First, some billionaires fund worthy causes, from the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery, to Sir Chris Hohn’s support for action on climate change. Joseph Rowntree died in 1925, but his philanthropy continues to do a great deal of good, inspired by liberal values. Yet even if they are sympathetic characters, that doesn’t negate the systemic problem that billionaires are inherently over-mighty.
Liberal Democrats rightly reject the ‘good chap’ approach to Britain’s political institutions, which assumes the benign personal qualities of political actors. They are right to insist on robust formal structures, based on a written constitution. We wouldn’t want hereditary peers in the House of Lords, even if they all had the sensibilities of successive Earls Russell. And the same should go for billionaires: however well-meaning, they shouldn’t be allowed to wield unaccountable power, or pass it on to their children, which means that they shouldn’t be allowed to amass wealth beyond a certain point.
Secondly, there may be electoral calculation at play. Liberal Democrat voters, and constituencies represented by the party’s MPs, tend to be wealthier than average. It is sensible to be hesitant about alienating people who earn comfortable salaries and own detached houses. But hostility to the existence of billionaires need not entail this.
The sort of affluent citizen in her fifties in Tunbridge Wells, who now votes Liberal Democrat, but previously supported Blair and Cameron, knows all about the malign effects of the concentration of wealth. She knows about her daughter's experience in the rental market, about her father's experience in a care home owned by private equity, and her own experience of a water company which exists solely to amass capital for its investors.
The party is well able to make it clear to her that hostility to the existence of billionaires is not an attack on her bourgeois lifestyle. And it is an electoral imperative, too, because we want her daughter, and the staff of her father’s care home (and her father!) to vote for the Liberal Democrats, and to become involved in the party.
The third obstacle is perhaps the most deeply rooted within Liberal Democrat thinking. There is a very sound liberal instinct to let people get on with their own personal and collective projects, without impediment or judgementalism. The distinction between public and private spheres of life is essential to liberalism. If someone wants to devote her energies to climbing the very highest Himalayas, or being the greatest ever tennis player, or winning at chess, or studying hard and becoming an eminent professor, then she is welcome to get on with it.
But being a billionaire is never a private choice: it is inherently public, because decisions about how to invest and spend so much money have an enormous effect, even if the billionaire doesn’t make overt political interventions, such as donating to a political party, or underwriting a newspaper.
And the existence of billionaires inevitably induces some politicians to serve their interests, even if less cravenly than Peter Mandelson. Great wealth is inherently different in kind, not just in scale, from the resources of the bulk of the population, and this is inherently political.
So, one of the central aims of the Liberal Democrats’ economic policy should be to inhibit the creation and continuation of billionaires. I won’t go into the details of this, but starting points would include different approaches to taxing wealth (especially land), to inheritance, to regulating monopolies and oligopolies, and to the offshore tax havens controlled by Britain.
At the moment, it seems that the Liberal Democrats are willing to be tough on (some) billionaires, but not on the causes of billionaires. This isn’t a call for the class warfare of the far left, or the inchoate left-populism of Zack Polanski’s Green Party, but to work through the implications of liberal insights when applied to economic power, as well as to political structures.
Anselm Anon has been a member of the Liberal Democrats since the 1990s.
* I use "billionaire" as a shorthand for "an individual or family possessing so much wealth that it would distort a liberal society". I suspect the relevant amount is much less than one billion pounds, but won’t pursue that here.
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