The Joy of Six 1504

"To everyone's surprise, Orbán conceded early – before 9.30pm – and cheers erupted from all corners of Budapest’s centre. One small but mighty party was organised by the centrist Momentum Movement. On the large screen was the prime minister glumly telling his supporters that it was over, and the defeat was 'painful'. In the crowds were dozens of people giving him the finger." Marie Le Conte was in Budapest when Viktor Orbán fell.

Eyal Weizman on the destruction of Gaza: "Two and a half years after 7 October 2023, most of the Gaza Strip – cities, refugee camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure, agriculture, wells and the soil itself – has been destroyed and made toxic by bombs, artillery, tank shells and sappers. The most systematic destruction was caused by D9 bulldozers made by the US company Caterpillar. These giant armoured machines stabbed their blades into the ground, churning up fields, felling orchards, flattening homes, tearing through roads and ploughing through cemeteries."

"France builds 300,000 homes every year. If that number sounds familiar, it's because that's the target that the UK misses year after year. So far this century, a new tramway has opened in France every six months. Is this a coincidence, or are they linked?" Thomas Ableman describes what happened when a group of transport and housing aficionados took British policymakers to France to see first hand the country’s fast growing tram network.

Matthew McManus says the right wants voters to be stupid: "In Poisoning the Minds of the Low Orders, his great book on early modern conservatism, Don Herzog notes how British conservatives relentlessly argued that the lower orders ought not to be educated lest it provoke 'insubordination'."

Diana Resnik reports on two new studies that suggest wind turbines pose very little risk to birds.

 "I’m always amazed by the technical knowledge that CFF kids seem to have, too. In our next film, The Cat Gang, a small boy's suspicions about another gang of smugglers are raised by one of the villains wanting a battery for his car. 'Most modern cars have 12 volt batteries, so why does he want a 6 volt battery?'. He’s about eight..." Bob Fischer and Vic Pratt review a new DVD compilation of Children's Film Foundation gems.

The Lib Dems should terrify the Tories

That's the headline on George Eaton's New Statesman piece on the Liberal Democrats' ambitions for May's local elections - and he's not talking about Lord Bonkers' tactic of lurking outside rural polling stations in his gorilla suit.

Eaton has been talking to party "strategists"  - the insiders must have been taking a rare day off. 

He tells us they:

speak of "Project 312" - the number of councillors held by the Tories in seats they lost or narrowly won at the general election

He set's these forthcoming local elections against the results of the last general election:

At the last election, the Blue Wall was battered rather than toppled - but it could be next time. Of the Lib Dems’ 30 notional target seats, all but four are held by the Tories (and would fall with a swing of 8.8 points).

What puzzles Eaton is the Conservatives lack of concern at the Lib Dem threat. Last year the Conservatives lost 12 times as many seats to the Lib Dems (60) as to Reform (five).

He sees Kemi Badenoch's disparaging remarks about Lib Dems being the sort of people who repair the church roof as revealing a lot about her:

It was the kind of comment that makes you question whether Badenoch has any acquaintance with the Conservatives' traditional base. The Blue Wall is a land, as John Major once put it, of "long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers" and, one could add, of village fundraisers to fix the church roof. But Badenoch, too often trapped in an online filter bubble, has little feel for the Burkeans who cherish all of this.

But then, it seems to me, few Tories seem to have that feel today. Their politics are piped in from across the Atlantic and they spend more time online than they do in the community.

Don't force Clive Lewis to take an oath he doesn't mean

If you force someone to swear an oath, you are not trying to change their mind but humiliating them.

It was, I believe, Conor Cruise O'Brien who said that, in his biography of Edmund Burke, thinking of the British Crown's treatment of the people of Ireland in the eighteenth century.

I thought of his point when I heard that Clive Lewis was being made to take his oath of allegiance to the king again because be omitted some words the first time.

It ought to be possible for MPs to be republicans, just is at possible for them to be atheists. MPs are given the option of affirming rather than swearing on a holy book, and everyone thinks that's right and proper.

Yet it took a long battle by Charles Bradlaugh, a Liberal MP from Northampton, to win the right to affirm.

Would those who have accused Lewis of "student politics" say the same of Bradlaugh?

What the authorities should do is devise a tweak to the oath, producing either one that every MP can take or a subtly different version that republicans can take.

There would be a row at first, but soon we would be congratulating ourselves on a typically British piece if pragmatism. And not long after that, we would imagine that it has always been like that.

Photo by Rwendland.

GUEST POST Why am I a Liberal Democrat?

Simon Beard explains, with help from Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Clarkson.

It seems to me that Liberals have a peculiar obsession with self-justification. Keynes first posed the question "Am I A Liberal?" (he was) in 1925, and many have asked it, or something like it, since.

Indeed, Bertrand Russel felt called to provide two justifications "why I am not a communist" and "why I am not a Christian", while even Margaret Thatcher's favourite Liberal Fredrick Hayek wanted to explain to his readers "why I am not a conservative".

This is hardly surprising. Liberals are, after all, in favour of the individual, while Liberalism is a social movement. We are not natural joiners we Liberals, and so many of us feel the desire to consider ourselves apart.

Yet still, we recognise that what we believe in is worth believing, and what we fight for is worth defending. I think this may be part of the reason why so many 'ordinary people' claim not to know what the Lib Dems 'really believe’. It is not that we do not believe in things; but we feel slightly awkward about it and would really rather discuss something else.

So why am I a Liberal?

First and foremost, I think I am a Burkean. Edmund Burke is often held up as the grandfather of British Conservatism, but that is a load of piffle. Burke was a radical of his day who fought against empire and privilege. He simply did not accept the justification being offered for the French revolution, and that meant he was disowned by other radicals of his day.

Burke's philosophy is not easy to encapsulate in a few words, but let me try. Burke believed in government by agreement and consent; he was a proponent of the social contract. However, in contrast with the doctrine of the time, he saw this agreement as not primarily between the rich and the poor, that would be manifestly unfair. Instead, he proposed a contract between the generations.

Each of us, in turn, takes the place of a dependent child, an independent adult and a supportive elder, and Burke thought that we should view society in this light. He also believed that what the social contract was fundamentally about was building and maintaining institutions that allowed people to get along. However, ultimately, these were only means to the end of a fully flourishing society. As he wrote:

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.

When the state takes it upon itself to disregard these institutions and reorganise society around one big idea (as the French revolutionaries tried to do) Burke believed that the social contract was violated and society would fall apart. Now, of course, we might make the same point about our stewardship of the environment, and I think Burke would have agreed.

Finally, Burke believed that when we engage in politics, we do so person to person, not thought to thought or idea to idea. Thus, we should choose MPs who we trust to act wisely, not those who would merely represent some pattern or ideal that we share.

Burke was not quite a Liberal in the modern sense of the term, but he certainly was never a Conservative. He was a passionate social humanist, and one of the most profound thinkers our country has produced.

To Burke, I owe my distrust of those (like Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn) who seek to remake our country according to their own designs and who view the institutions we have built up as mere obstacles to be overcome.

Secondly, I am a utilitarian. In my heart and soul what I most believe is that any policy, any choice, must be justified on the grounds that it will benefit the people affected by it, by making their lives fuller and better and contributing to their wellbeing.

However, I am a utilitarian of the school of John Stewart Mill, who saw so clearly that happiness could not be bought or sold or counted or controlled, but had to be cultivated. Our joy, he wrote, will 'come like the air that we breath', but only when we are liberated, supported and empowered, with good health, education, work, a nourishing environment, social connections and a flourishing culture.

I was part of the Federal Policy Committee on Wellbeing and Quality of Life, and one of the things I wanted to say in our report was that government has a huge role to play in supporting people's wellbeing, but that so often people's experiences of the state where that it made them unhappy, by forcing them into a social straitjacket or failing to deliver on its promises.

To the utilitarians, and especially to Mill, I owe my belief in an empowering and enabling state whose job it is to provide people with education, healthcare and financial support, but also to allow them to be who they most want to be. A state that cultivates everyone's garden, but allows their flowers to bloom as they will.

The Liberal Democrats are consistently the party who plan to give most direct support to the poorest in society - while the Conservatives choose to ignore them and Labour focus on implementing their grand schemes - that is as it should be.

Thirdly, I am a Georgist and a Social Liberal. Power, as well as wealth, is distributed incredibly unequally throughout our society, and in so far as we need reform, it should be primarily aimed at removing the blockages built up over centuries to preserve this status quo.

The philosophy and economics of this get terribly complicated; even I struggle with the level of cultishness that can surround them (and that's before we get to the School of Economic Science, an actual cult).

However, two key points are 1) that we pay far too little attention to the distribution of the ownership of land (nature) and its implications on how our society is structured and 2) that corporations are given the same, if not more, protection in how they act than ordinary people and are allowed to get away with massive corruption, even though are without emotions, social connections, family ties and love for humanity and the world around them.

This is not merely about redistribution; it is about calling out the inconsistencies and hypocrisies that lie at the heart of government policy, making it serve the interest of a tiny fraction of the population. Every classical Liberal, from Smith to Mill, envisioned a market of free individuals trading fairly, while every new Liberal, from Green to Beveridge, understood that the distortions of land and corporate power meant this had never been realised.

Yet, somehow people still feel able to describe the deregulation of markets as if it made them freer, rather than more totally controlled by a few special interests.

To the New Liberals, I owe my support for the voices of the small, for small business against big business, for renters against landlords, and for communities against developers. I also owe them my commitment to introducing Land Value Taxation and stronger restrictions on corporations.

These things matter even more than redistributing money, yet they are routinely overlooked by other parties. I think this is also why I am so glad the UK still manages to maintain a third party of national significance and wish we would introduce an electoral system that did not reduce everything to a binary choice, because there is always another perspective on any argument and it needs to be heard.

Fourthly, I am a supporter of human rights. In that old Liberal phrase, I believe that everyone is created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, and I mean everyone and I mean inalienable. Asylum seekers, single mothers, convicted criminals, disabled people, even straight, white, older men, all have the same fundamental rights.

Among these are the right to exist, publicly and as themselves, to pursue their own lifestyle and to play as full a part as possible in society. We must give prisoners the vote; we must give asylum seekers a decent level of support; we must allow gang members to express themselves culturally; we must ensure that everyone can walk the streets safely at night and that people can have a reasonable expectation of being able to get away with making mistakes.

Why? Because we are all human, we are all persons, we fundamentally have more in common than what divides us. And at heart, as those who first codified human rights after the second world war realised, these rights are ultimately protections against the power of others, and in particular the power of the state.

Rights should always stand outside the law and hem it on all sides. From these thinkers, I take an instinctive horror of anyone who sets up groups in opposition to each other, or who adopt dehumanising language for anyone – be they terrorists or billionaires.

Finally, I am an internationalist. Of course, that means I believe in nations, in groups of people who share a culture, a social ideal and a way of life. The hard-straight lines of the state must always be made to bend around the people it claims to serve.

However, it also means I believe that the boundaries of nations and peoples are flexible and fluid and that we realise the best in ourselves when we are open, tolerant and diverse and when we work with others to form a closer international union.

I understand that for many, we need to stay in the EU for economic reasons, for its social and environmental protections, or for peace and security; and I value all these things. However, ultimately, I am with Jeremy Clarkson, of all people, who said:

Whether I'm sitting in a railway concourse in Brussels or pottering down the canals of southwestern France or hurtling along a motorway in Croatia, I feel way more at home than I do when I'm trying to get something to eat in Dallas or Sacramento. I love Europe, and to me that's important.

I love Europe too (though I also love America), and I love what it stands for. I love my village, and my county, and my nation, and my country but I also love that 28 countries have joined together and are trying to form something bigger than themselves. I cannot give up on loving that, and nobody has any right to tell me to do so. Our party cannot give up on loving it either, and that is why I love it too.

This recent election really got me down; not just because of the result (though that was terrible) but because of the way everything seemed to get lost in the question of who could win or who could stop Brexit.

Please Liberal Democrats, do not forget who you are and why you are like that. Do not give up on your history and values and fall into the lie that this was simply a numbers exercise in tactical voting.

We are Liberals, and we have every right and reason to be so. Jeremy Corbyn is not, nor is Nicola Sturgeon. That does not make them bad people, but when it comes to fundamental questions of politics, philosophy and economics, I think it makes them wrong and I feel perfectly justified in saying that!

Simon Beard has a PhD in philosophy and works at the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. He has twice stood as the Lib Dem candidate for Dartford and tweets @simon_beard.

Does Jacob Rees-Mogg want Britain to be governed by pot plants?

A pot plant yesterday

Jacob Rees-Mogg was eloquent in the House yesterday afternoon:

Those who are appealing now to parliamentary scrutiny are in fact rejecting an Act passed through this House, and worse, they are rejecting our employers - our bosses, our liege lords - the British people, who decided this matter for us.

But was he right?

This new Rees-Mogg Doctrine is a rejection of the central tenet of representative democracy - that, in the words of Edmund Burke:

"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."

Which is odd, because Conservatives have always been keen to claim Burke as their philosophical inspiration (even if you wonder how many had actually read him).

But the real problem with the Rees-Mogg Docrtine is that I doubt Rees-Mogg believes a word of it.

Here's why.

Back in 2006 the Conservatives were criticised because so many of their parliamentary candidates came from privileged backgrounds.

This is how the Independent reported Rees-Mogg's response:

One of the leading members of the David Cameron generation of new Tories created a storm yesterday by comparing people who were not privately educated and did not go to Oxford or Cambridge universities to "potted plants". 

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who will be fighting one of the Tories' target seats at the next election, also gave the impression that he thinks that anyone educated in the state sector is incapable of writing an "articulate" letter.

And that, I suspect, is what he still believes today.

If you put those words together with the Rees-Moff Doctrine, it follows that he wants Britain to be governed by pot plants.

But I suspect that Rees-Mogg does not believe a word of that doctrine. He has adopted it, not because he believes in the wisdom of the people, but because he sees them as easily duped.

Pot plants, they are. People who didn't go to public schools.

Please note that I have written this post without laughing at Rees-Mogg for his poshness...

In a sane world Jacob Rees-Mogg would, whenever he appears, be followed by a gaggle of urchins who point at him then double up with laughter

— Jonathan Calder (@lordbonkers) November 11, 2016

A warning for the Tories: Chasing public opinion can end in tears

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The government thinks it is on to a good thing. Brexit won a majority in the referendum, so if it carries it out then it will be popular with the voters.

Except that public opinion doesn't work like that.

Take the Iraq War.

A Daily Telegraph article in July looked at new polling by YouGov.

It was no surprise to find that there had been a major shift in opinion on Iraq. In 2003 53 per cent of voters thought the war was right. Now only 26 per cent think it was right.

But more significant - and more worrying for the Conservatives - is another figure.

Today, only 37 per cent of voters think they thought the war was right in 2003, while 43 per cent think they thought it was wrong and 20 per cent don't know.

From which I conclude that if Brexit starts to go wrong - and there is every sign that it will - then the voters will decide that they never wanted it in the first place.

Public opinion can be volatile and voters are more likely to blame politicians when things go wrong than blame themselves.

So if MPs - Tories included - think Brexit will harm Britain then they should have the courage to say so and vote accordingly.

In the words of that great Whig Edmund Burke (Conservatives claim him as their own but do not read him):

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Later. More detail on YouGov's Iraq polling here.

Why Twitter doesn't work, Labour won't win and the Lib Dems are irrationally cheerful

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It's hard to have sensible conversations with people from other parties on Twitter. Too often, name-calling or petty point-scoring takes over from rational discussion early in the proceedings.

Labour activists find it particular hard to talk to Conservatives because they have convinced themselves that the Labour Party is the fount of virtue. Therefore, they reason, anyone who votes Tory must be an evil person.

Let's call it the Hesmondhalgh Doctrine.

It's predominance in Corbyn's Labour Party mean that it cannot talk to the many voters who have no great love for the Conservative Party but suspect that it is more to be trusted from an economic point of view than Labour.

Meanwhile many Liberal Democrats, when they have been traumatised by the result of the last general election, shrugged, declared a #libdemfightback and carried on as if not much had happened.

An article in the New York Times by David Brooks puts a finger on the social changes that are behind these phenomena.

He writes:

In healthy societies, people live their lives within a galaxy of warm places. They are members of a family, neighborhood, school, civic organization, hobby group, company, faith, regional culture, nation, continent and world. Each layer of life is nestled in the others to form a varied but coherent whole. 

But starting just after World War II, America’s community/membership mind-set gave way to an individualistic/autonomy mind-set. The idea was that individuals should be liberated to live as they chose, so long as they didn’t interfere with the rights of others. ... 

The individualist turn had great effects but also accumulating downsides. By 2005, 47 percent of Americans reported that they knew none or just a few of their neighbors by name. There’s been a sharp rise in the number of people who report that they have no close friends to confide in.

Brooks cites Marc J. Dunkelman, author of The Vanishing Neighbor, as arguing that

people are good at tending their inner-ring relationships - their family and friends. They’re pretty good at tending to outer-ring relationships - their hundreds of Facebook acquaintances, their fellow progressives, or their TED and Harley fans. 

But Americans spend less time with middle-ring township relationships - the PTA, the neighborhood watch.

These middle-ring relationships sound like Edmund Burke's little platoons and Dunkelman sounds very like Robert Putnam, whose Bowling Alone we all read at the turn of the century.

What has this to do with the state of party politics?

Brooks continues:

With fewer sources of ethnic and local identity, people ask politics to fill the void. Being a Democrat or a Republican becomes their ethnicity. People put politics at the center of their psychological, emotional and even spiritual life. This is asking too much of politics.

Once politics becomes your ethnic and moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor. If you put politics at the center of identity, you end up asking the state to eclipse every social authority but itself. Presidential campaigns become these gargantuan two-year national rituals that swallow everything else in national life. 

If we’re going to salvage our politics, we probably have to shrink politics, and nurture the thick local membership web that politics rests within.

He goes on to say we should "scale back the culture of autonomy," which makes my liberal hackles rise and suggests Brooks too is in danger of wanting the state to eclipse every other social authority.

As a liberal I believe in individuality, and we express our individuality through the groups we choose to join. There must be a liberal route to the revival of social bonds.

But the idea that we are asking too much of politics is one I have long been toying with.

Political activists do tend to make their political affiliation central to their identity. More than that, they find their social life, their friends, even their partners, through their activism.

That party membership is such a minority taste now suggests that the 19th-century model of political parties we still embrace is hopelessly outdated.

Yet no politician has the vision or overweening ambition to wrench it apart and allowing something more attuned to our needs today to take its place.

Dickens and Burke warn on extreme altruism

There is a common assumption that altruism is always a good thing. This puzzles me, because one can do wrong out of love another as well as out of love for oneself.

A second assumption that tends to follow the first is that, if altruism is always a good thing, the more we have of it the better.

There is an article in the Guardian today by Larissa MacFarquhar about those who are inspired by this idea.

It reminds me inescapably of Mrs Jellaby in Bleak House, who is obsessed with educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha ("on the left bank of the Niger") while her own family goes to rack and ruin around her. (I have visited more than one Liberal household like that.):

Soon after seven o'clock we went down to dinner, carefully, by Mrs. Jellyby's advice, for the stair-carpets, besides being very deficient in stair-wires, were so torn as to be absolute traps. We had a fine cod-fish, a piece of roast beef, a dish of cutlets, and a pudding; an excellent dinner, if it had had any cooking to speak of, but it was almost raw. ... 

All through dinner—which was long, in consequence of such accidents as the dish of potatoes being mislaid in the coal skuttle and the handle of the corkscrew coming off and striking the young woman in the chin—Mrs. Jellyby preserved the evenness of her disposition. She told us a great deal that was interesting about Borrioboola-Gha and the natives, and received so many letters that Richard, who sat by her, saw four envelopes in the gravy at once. 

Some of the letters were proceedings of ladies' committees or resolutions of ladies' meetings, which she read to us; others were applications from people excited in various ways about the cultivation of coffee, and natives; others required answers, and these she sent her eldest daughter from the table three or four times to write. She was full of business and undoubtedly was, as she had told us, devoted to the cause.

I also remember Edmund Burke's dismissal of Rousseau:

He melts with tenderness for those who only touch him by the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young; but bears are not philosophers. 

Vanity, however, finds its account in reversing the train of our natural affections. Thousands admire the sentimental writer; the affectionate father is hardly known in his parish.

In part it's the sort of ad hominem attack that has always been made on left-wing intellectuals, but I think Burke is on to something when he sees exaggerated altruism as a variety of vanity.

I suppose I am saying, as Mr Brooke would in Middlemarch, that altruism is fine "up to a point".

Why MPs should not job share

There is a danger, as a traditionally minded Liberal, of saying that you are in favour of more women MPs but finding yourself opposed to any measure proposed of bringing that end about.

That said, I do worry about the idea of two people sharing the role of constituency MP, as suggested in a proposal to be put to the spring Lib Dem Conference.

I worry because I fear it would further undermine the basic premise of representative democracy - that is that an MP uses his or her judgement on the issues that come before parliament and is judged by constituents at the next election.

Yes, that view ignores the overwhelming importance of parties, but I would not to see it undermined any further.

We seem now to be governed by politicians who regard elections, not as a chance to justify the way they have voted over the past few years, but as an occasional hazard thrown up by the profession they have chosen.

So all parties have found Europe too hot to handle in general elections and instead pushed the issue away, saying it will one day be the subject of a referendum - a referendum that ever seems to take place.

And at the last election there was something approaching a conspiracy between the parties that saw no one admitting just how severe were the economic problems we face.

Having people sharing the role of MP risks accepting the view that they party politicians are more or less interchangeable. The way that British MEPs think themselves justified in resigning their seats and passing them on to someone else on their party's list halfway through a term suggests it is already accepted in those circles.

And what happens if the two people sharing disagree on an issue? I suspect the answer would be that they would both abstain, which would do nothing for out politics either.

Perhaps this is too pessimistic. There are plenty of MPs who are not smooth professional politicians or party animals. In fact I suspect this parliament has set some sort of record for rebellions against the whip, thought that is probably a function of the unique circumstances of the coalition.

But I still cling to Edmund Burke's view of the role of an MP:

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

I fear that job sharing would accelerate the retreat from that approach. Perhaps our problem is precisely that we now see being an MP as a 'job'.

Six of the Best 170

David Boyle on The Real Blog celebrates the "genius" of Nick Clegg's bank share giveaway: "The Thatcherite privatisations involved a minority who did not exercise their ownership rights. This plan will involve a majority and the possibility of popular control."

Birkdale Focus has been reading Matt Cole's new biography of Richard Wainwright.

Edmund Burke is generally claimed as the intellectual father of British Conservatism, yet for most of his career he was a Whig and he was the most important ally of Charles James Fox. Liberal Vision has been reading his prophetic Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Next week, the London School of Economics hosts an Index on Censorship debate under the title "Injunctions are a necessary evil: Privacy, free speech and a feral press." MEDIAPAL@LSE looks at the issues.

Sptialfields Life meets the 97-year-old writer Emanuel Litvinoff.

Those who believe the world is going mad will find plenty of supportive evidence on Wartime Housewife: "Boy the Elder came home from school today with the following information. There are nine hundred children at his school between the age of 11 and 14 and they have a large playing field with lovely country views … which they have not been allowed to use for recreation at lunch or break time. They have now been told that they may use the field in groups of no more than twenty two children at a time and, if they do manage to get a go, they have to wear hi visibility tabards."

Edmund Burke, the Coalition's favourite philosopher?

Amol Rajan, in an essay in the Independent yesterday, argued that Edmund Burke is:

a thinker who personifies the spirit and philosophy of the present government, and the fusion of these two leaders, who share more than the members of their parties care to admit or are comfortable with.

In his embodiment of the common ground between liberals and conservatives, his understanding that the Big Society is really just an agglomeration of small societies, and his rewriting of Rousseau's contract within society as a contract between the generations, Edmund Burke is the authentic voice of the coalition agreement – a centuries-old Cleggeron, or Cameregg, if you prefer.

Another step in the long-overdue rehabilitation of Burke's reputation among Liberals?

Edmund Burke, liberals and social democrats

I have lost track of which party David Marquand is in these days, but I was pleased to see him nominate Edmund Burke as his hero in the Guardian this morning.

These days Burke is usually described as the founder of British Conservatism, but that is a description chiefly used by people who have not read him. The truth is that he was for many years the intellectual force behind the Whig leader Charles James Fox.

Burke broke with him only after Fox uncritically endorsed the French Revolution. Burke foresaw the inevitably of the succeeding Terror, much as some 19th century anarchists realised that Marx's teachings would lead to tyranny.

Marquand puts it well:

A profound, sometimes anguished fellow-feeling for the victims of arbitrary power ran, like a golden thread, through Burke's 30 years in parliament. He loathed the Protestant ascendancy in his native Ireland, was a persistent thorn in the flesh of George III, whom he suspected of seeking to undermine the Commons, and fought to conciliate the disaffected American colonies, instead of repressing them.

He spent more than a decade campaigning for the voiceless millions subjected to oppression at the hands of Britain's East India Company. His campaign against the French revolution sprang from the same loathing for injustice: to him, mob rule was as oppressive as the unchecked rule of a king.

The last is a hard lesson for liberals and social democrats. All the more necessary for the left to reclaim him.

The only thing I would add is that it is probably a harder lesson for social democrats than it is for liberals. We have, or at least good liberals have, an instinctive feel for the dangers of government power. Social democrats tend to be more relaxed about (or blind to) it.

I recall that in the Alliance years it was perfectly possible for liberals and social democrats to agree on a faintly uninspiring programme of moderate reforms. But if the talk between us ever turned to ideology or philosophy, the debate often became heated.

Conor Cruise O'Brien and Edmund Burke

The newspapers have all carried respectful obituaries Conor Cruise O'Brien - the Daily Telegraph is a good example. The Guardian website, characteristically, has a piece attacking him for not sharing that paper's views. It is written by Roy Greenslade.

My own debt to O'Brien is for Edmund Burke - an abridged version of his book The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke.

Burke is often claimed by English Conservatives as their intellectual ancestor, but that suggests they do not know much about him. As Christopher Hitchens has said:

Edmund Burke was neither an Englishman nor a Tory. He was an Irishman, probably a Catholic Irishman at that (even if perhaps a secret sympathizer), and for the greater part of his life he upheld the more liberal principles of the Whig faction.
He was an advanced opponent of the slave trade, whose "Sketch of a Negro Code" was written in the early 1780s, and who before that had opposed the seating of American slaveholders at Westminster. His epic parliamentary campaign for the impeachment of Warren Hastings and the arraignment of the East India Company was the finest example in its day of a battle against pelf and perks and privilege.

More than that, Burke supported the American revolutionaries and was for many years the great political ally and intellectual support of the Whig leader Charles James Fox. They fell out after the French Revolution, which Burke condemned while Fox insouciantly looked forward to its spreading to Britain. That falling out took place, very publicly, during a Commons debate, and O'Brien description of the exchanges is memorable.

Burke's defection from the Whig campaign has generally been seen as apostasy, but O'Brien argues that Burke was consistent because of his Catholicism (or at least his Catholic sympathies). He sided with the Whigs because of their support for religious toleration, but joined the Tories because of the Jacobins anti-clericism.

Whatever the truth of this, one important fact stands out. Burke was right and Fox was wrong.

I had always assumed that Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was written as a response to French Revolutionary terror. In fact it was published in 1790, before the blood began to flow and when much English Whig opinion, like Fox, were broadly sympathetic to the Revolutionaries and their aims.

Burke's foresight - his realisation that terror would come in the wake of revolution - reminds me of the way that anarchist thinkers like Bakunin realised the dictatorship inherent in Marx's call for proletarian revolution.

British Liberals probably feel an instinctive sympathy for the French Revolution, but we should not forget that Karl Popper and Isiah Berlin, perhaps the greatest Liberal philosophers of the 20th century, were both profoundly anti-revolutionary thinkers.

Anyway, read O'Brien and read Burke. Hitchens quotes the unimpeachably radical William Hazlitt as saying:

It has always been with me a test of the sense and candour of any one belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great man.

Later. And read Lib Dem blogger Iain Sharpe too. He takes a similar line on reclaiming Burke from the Tories.

"Small minds in some grey zone of human experience"

My House Points column from yesterday's Liberal Democrat News.

Risky business
In 1774 Edmund Burke (who was an Irish Whig and not the English Tory that most English Tories imagine) told his Bristol constituents that “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” In other words, MPs and councillors should do what they think is right, not what they think will be popular.

I was reminded of Burke’s words by the artwork Another Place -- the sculptor Antony Gormley's collection of 100 cast iron statues on Crosby beach. There a local Conservative councillor and prospective parliamentary candidate was quoted as saying she thought the work “brilliant”, and then persuaded the council to have it uprooted.

If you think something is brilliant, shouldn’t you be campaigning for it rather than against it?
A more complicated example was to be found on Monday when Henry Bellingham opened a debate on firework nuisance. The Tory MP for North West Norfolk (he lost the seat to Labour in 1997 and won it back in 2001) began with extravagant praise for a constituent who had collected a petition calling for an outright ban on the sale of fireworks. She was “indefatigable, resolute, determined and passionate”.

Yet it turned out that, despite helping deliver the petition to Number 10, Bellingham did not agree with her. He spoke engagingly of the pleasure he had derived from a recent family firework display. His tenuous argument was that unless the House agreed to further restrictions on fireworks a total ban was inevitable.

That counts as trying to slip your judgment through unobserved in a conspicuous display of industry.

Still, it was not the silliest argument we have heard on fireworks lately. Barry Sheerman described bonfire night as a “cataclysmic disaster” for the environment. Not just a disaster, you note, but a cataclysmic one - the very worst sort.

Never mind that the press could find no expert opinion to support him: Sheerman’s views are perfectly in tune with our times. As Anthony Gormley said of the removal of his sculptures: “There is no logic to this other than small minds in some grey zone of human experience wanting to deny the unusual … This is another example of risk-resistant Britain.”

Edmund Burke

I have added a quotation from my new hero Edmund Burke to Serendib.

I make the same point against Rousseau in Defending Families. Such ad hominem arguments often sound cheap - Paul Johnson filled a book with them in his Intellectuals - but Burke's identification of Rousseau's hypocrisy as a form of vanity lifts him above all that.

Besides I love the phrases "the tribute which opulence owes to genius" and "Thousands admire the sentimental writer; the affectionate father is hardly known in his parish."

The Conservatives claim Burke as their spiritual father, but I doubt if many of them read him. For most of his career he was the intellectual leader of the Whigs, only breaking from them over his opposition to the French Revolution.

Burke was right in that he foresaw the Terror that was to follow it, much as anarchists thinkers identified the totalitarianism inherent in Marx. He wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France, not as a reaction to the Terror, but in 1790 when the consequences of the Revolution still seemed benign to many British observers.

It is time that we reclaimed Burke. After all, the most important 20th century Liberals are also anti-revolutionaries; think of Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin. Only those with ideology envy - those who really wish they were socialists - will feel uneasy at welcoming Burke home.