This review appears in the new issue of Liberator.
When We Speak of Freedom: Radical Liberalism in an Age of Crisis Paperback
edited by Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood
Beecroft Publications, 2025, £15
When We Speak of Freedom, as a football commentator
would put it, is very much a book of two halves. The first is historical,
philosophical and a little quirky in its approach: the second has chapters by
policy experts with concrete proposals for government action in their fields.
The editors, Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood, write that the
project began over wine and sandwiches at the home of Elizabeth Bee and Michael
Meadowcroft, where a small group talked of “contemporary politics, memories of
liberal triumphs past, and our hopes for the future”. Their hope that the book is
“suffused with the warmth, intellectual curiosity, and hospitality of that
first meeting,” is met in many of the 20 chapters of this engaging collection
I had thought of writing an elegant essay that drew together
the diverse themes of the book, but so diverse are they that I decided to go
against every canon of reviewing and tell you what’s in the book.
One complaint: there’s no index. I’m sure the John Stuart
Mill Institute, who publish When We Speak of Freedom, didn’t have the
budget for a professional indexer, but Mill himself does pop up in many
chapters, and it would be good to be able to compare what different authors
have to say about the old boy. You can ask contributors to a collection like
this to highlight the names they quote or discuss, and produce an index of
sorts from that.
And so to the 20 chapters…
Michael Meadowcroft has expanded his introduction into
a pamphlet – see the note at the end. Here he writes of a “crisis of democracy”
and does not see its resolution coming from economic growth or any other of the
policy prescriptions that dominate political debate. Rather, he looks to
another Victorian sage, John Ruskin: “There is no wealth but life. Life,
including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration.”
Benjamin Wood looks to two Liberal heroes: Jo Grimond
and Hannah Arendt. He sees them as students of Classical Greece who, inspired
by a vision of the Greek city-state purged of slavery, sought a politics that
is more human in its scale and less obsessed with getting and spending. Wood
concludes in language they would approve: “Citizenship must mean more than a
flag and a passport” and be “an invitation into a shared project of civic
betterment.”
Helena Rosenblatt writes on Mill and On Liberty,
reminding us that there’s more to it than the harm principle. She emphasises
Mill’s championing of individuality and the flowering of character – both a
long way from the atomistic individualism of which Liberals are often accused.
Rosenblatt also writes of Mill’s awareness of social tyranny: he said, “the
yoke of opinion could often be heavier than the law” – Liberal Democrat habitués
of social media please note.
Christopher England and Andrew Phemister contribute a
fascinating chapter on liberalism, land and democracy – Henry George, the
Diggers and radical crofters are all there. My only regret is that they had to end
so soon in the story, as issues like the quality of food, and access to the
countryside for health, wellbeing and recreation, will only grow in importance.
Let’s take this history as an inspiration.
Emmy van Deurzen looks at the tensions today between
individuality and people’s need for community. These can give rise to
individual mental health problems and to social problems, such as a widespread
withdrawal from engagement in politics. She seeks a cure for both kinds of
problems through political change and bringing more philosophy and psychology
into our politics. Interestingly, both Mill and Hannah Arendt turn up here too.
Helen McCabe usefully reminds us that there is far
more to Mill than On Liberty. She looks at his support for women’s
suffrage, and for their liberation more widely, as well as his opposition to
domestic violence. Then there is Mill’s advocacy of workplace democracy and
producer cooperatives – causes that were still dear to the Liberal Party when I
joined it, but are now little discussed.
Timothy Stacey offers a diagnosis of modern liberalism’s
ills. He sees it as lacking “that je ne sais quoi that makes us fall in
love with political visions”, and as inclined to fuel the divisive public
debate that it hopes to dispel. His answer is that we should seek to foster
liberal virtues. This I’m happy to agree with, even though I’m not convinced by
the list of them he gives, as our view of ethics today is so dominated by
rights, with the concomitant duty falling upon the state, that we offers little
sense of what the good life looks like to a liberal.
Matthew McManus takes us back to Mill’s wider
political views, finding in them an answer to our discontents under neoliberalism.
He points to Mill’s support for worker cooperatives, a welfare state,
representative democracy with universal suffrage, and his strong commitment to
liberal rights. This he terms Mill’s “liberal socialism”, arguing rightly that its
more useful to use the plural ‘socialisms’ than to see socialism as the
monolith it once was.
From here on, the chapters are less philosophical and more devoted
to particular policy areas and what Liberalism can contribute to them.
Edward Robinson on Liberalism and the environmental
crisis is the first of these, and he commends three writers to us. First, Mark
Stoll, an economic historian who has studied the British economist William
Stanley Jevons – Jevons grasped in the mid 19th century that extractive
industries would not last for ever and wrote about the moral implications.
Second, Brett Christophers, who argues that energy cannot be produced and
traded like a conventional commodity. Third, Dieter Helm, who argues that the
marketisation of public goods has been a mistake.
Denis Robertson Sullivan argues there has been market
failure and policy failure in the provision of housing, meaning government
intervention is needed. Home ownership is in retreat, so there need to be
policies for providing the sort of rented accommodation that people want. Banks
and pension funds must be encouraged or forced to invest more in social housing,
and there needs to be new urgency in the fight against homelessness, with
government setting targets and publicising the progress made.
Stuart White looks for practical means to bring about
the economy of cooperatives that Mill advocated. He discusses the role of trade
unions and a sovereign wealth fund, and suggests, I think fairly, that modern
Liberals are slow to recognise the existence of structural inequalities in
society or the need to organise to challenge them.
Paul Hindley writes on spreading ownership through
society, throwing in a good quotation from G.K. Chesterton: “Too much
capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.” He
sees this spread as a way of countering the effects of insecure employment and
an increasingly punitive welfare state, and repeats the traditional Liberal call
for more taxation of wealth and less of income.
Gordon Lishman examines some dilemmas Liberals face
around community, diversity and nonconformity. He doesn’t offer neat problems
or neat solutions – in a way his point is that there aren’t any – but he is
surely right to conclude that the decline of voluntary associations and the
rise of the internet have made it hard to conduct community politics in the way
that Liberals learnt to do in the 1970s.
Bob Marshall-Andrews looks at current and not so
current challenges to civil liberties – there’s a lot about his opposition to
his own party’s more draconian proposals in his years as a Labour MP between
1997 and 2010). He is very good on the way that governments generate fear in
order to win support for repressive measures.
Andrea Coomber and Noor Khan write well about prison
policy: “The cliff edge on which the prison system finds itself was not
approached at speed, but one that we slowly but surely trudged towards.” They
argue, unfashionably, that excessive punishment damages not only the
individuals concerned, but also the fabric of society, and call for a reduction
in the number of people in prison.
Vince Cable, like several other authors of these
later chapters, looks to have been given more space. This may be out of
deference to his standing or out of a belief in the importance of his subject
of immigration. Vince writes very much with his economist’s fedora on,
concluding that Enoch Powell was completely wrong about the social and political
consequences of immigration, but that a rising population means we must face both
our chronic inability to expand the housing stock sufficiently and our decaying
infrastructure.
Ross Finnie takes us through Britain’s experience of
federalism and looks at its possible future. He is billed as writing from a
Scottish perspective, but much of what he has to say is relevant to England.
How do we deal with this whale in the bathtub of British government? Ross is an
enthusiast for devolving power to England’s regions, as Jo Grimond was before
him, but it’s never been clear that the English share this enthusiasm. Still,
as Ross points out, the idea has its English enthusiasts today.
David Howarth frames his proposals for constitutional
reform as a way of easing Britain’s return to the European Union, or at least
of making it possible. Since he wrote this chapter, events in the US have made
us wonder how secure our present constitutional arrangements are. Would we have
much defence against an executive that usurped powers that did not belong to
it? You fear not, given Britain’s dependence upon the ‘good chap’ theory of
government. We saw during Boris Johnson’s time at Number 10 what havoc someone
who is not a good chap can wreak. As ever with David, his chapter is well worth
reading.
Lawrence Freedman writes on Liberals and war, and
those same events in the US make you wonder if his chapter should not have been
placed first. Yet his conclusion holds: “After Iraq and Afghanistan, and
because of Ukraine, there is less interest now in taking the military
initiative in the name of liberal values and much more of a focus on the need
to defend those values against aggressive states.”
And then Paul Hindley and Benjamin Wood return to sum up the
book’s arguments, quoting Wordsworth and William Morris as well as Mill.
Some will question the relevance of parts of When We Speak
of Freedom – and I’m aware that those are probably the parts that appealed
to me most. But I urge you to read this book. The Conservatives are showing us
every day the gruesome fate that awaits a party that forgets its own history
and its philosophy.
