On Liberty: New edition gives Harriet Taylor her due

An edition of On Liberty published this month is the first to name Harriet Taylor Mill as co-author alongside John Stuart Mill, reports the philosophy news site Daily Nous.

John Stuart Mill acknowledged Harriet Taylor's part in the writing of the work in his Autobiography:

With regard to the thoughts [expressed in the book], it is difficult to identify any particular part or element as being more hers than all the rest. The whole mode of thinking of which the book was the expression, was emphatically hers. But I also was so thoroughly imbued with it that the same thoughts naturally occurred to us both.

Yet On Liberty has only ever appeared with just the one name on its cover.

Daily Nous says there is objective evidence that On Liberty is the work of two hands:

In a 2022 article in Utilitas (on which part of the introduction to the new On Liberty is based), Schmidt-Petri, Schefczyk, and Osburg lay out one reason: "stylometric analyses" provide some strong (though not on their own decisive) evidence to “say with some degree of confidence that JSM did not write On Liberty all by himself and that HTM played a part in putting parts of the text into words.” 

And what are stylometric analyses? "Stylometry extracts the writing style of a person from his or her texts and then compares this 'stylome' to the stylome of texts the author of which is yet to be identified."

But you don't need stylometry to tell you that On Liberty is not typical of John Stuart Mill's writings. It sets out to "assert one very simple principle", whereas Mill is usually well aware of the complexity that attends weighty questions. 

So his book Considerations on Representative Government, while supporting parliamentary democracy, hedges the principle around with all sorts of checks and safeguards in an attempt to ensure that parliament will act in the national interest rather than in the interests of a simple majority of the electorate.

Daily Nous also mentions Misha Glenny's first outing as presenter of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time, which dealt with On Liberty. 

Harriet Taylor's contribution is discussed there too and, having had occasion to read On Liberty again recently, I concur with the comment that, who every wrote it, the text could have done with a good edit before it was published.

BOOK REVIEW Liberalism by Jonathan Parry

This review appears in the latest Liberator (issue 431), which can be downloaded free of charge from the magazine's website.

Liberalism

Jonathan Parry

Agenda Publishing (2025), £19.99

In this short book, written as part of a series that promises “incisive and provocative introductions to topics, ideas and events for students wanting to know more about how we got where we are today”, Jonathan Parry provides a history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats and makes you think again about the relation between political philosophy and political practice.

The first three chapters deal with the years 1830 to 1914 – the Liberal Party’s era as a party of government – and do so thematically rather than chronologically. In the first of these, Parry discusses the widening of the franchise, the taming of the House of Lords and the intermittent Liberal enthusiasm for proportional representation.

Asquith’s battles with the Lords will be familiar to all, but the Liberal attitude to the widening of the franchise was more ambivalent than you might imagine. The Liberal Party, Parry argues, was forged in the struggle for parliamentary reform, but that was not the same thing as democratic reform. 

So the Reform Act of 1832 swept away many of the abuses of the old system – notably 143 rotten boroughs, which effectively allowed seats in the Commons to be bought – but it was not born out of zeal for any abstract principle of democracy. Rather, it was intended to make sure the Commons did its job of representing the country’s various interests and allowing the peaceful expression of grievances.

Many 19th-century Liberals had their doubts about democracy. John Stuart Mill, for instance, hedged his support for the democratic principle in his Representative Government with all sorts of conditions that would ensure educated opinion was well represented in any elected chamber. Among these conditions was the introduction of proportional representation to ensure that minority points of view were heard.

But other tendencies within the Liberal Party did not share these patrician fears, so no legislation to change the voting system appeared. Nor did it under Asquith, when the rise of the Labour Party and the consequent inevitably of three-cornered contests led Liberals to explore the virtues of the Alternative Vote.

Parry’s second chapter on Liberal history before 1914 deals with the development of the Liberal attitude towards the state. Gladstonian retrenchment had great appeal earlier in the 19th century when the party was busy attacking the corrupt old city corporations. When these were replaced by elected local councils, school boards and health boards, then the good that government, national and local, might do became of increasing interest to the party. The growth of the Empire also brought with it irresistible pressure for more spending.

The third of these chapters looks at Liberal moves towards a pluralist society, notably in religion, where the party became the champions of Nonconformists in their disputes with the power of the Established church and a supporter of Catholic emancipation, both in Britain and Ireland. Parry notes that support for Home Rule changed the social basis of the Liberal Party, with most of its members from the landowning classes becoming Liberal Unionists.

Parry’s final two chapters cover the Liberal Party’s long years in the wilderness as it tried to survive as a centre party in a two-party system – and that in an era when politics was principally about economics and the struggle between capital and Labour. There were interesting Liberal economic ideas – the party was putting forward Keynesian policies on the need for public works while Asquith was still leader, and Elliott Dodds’s advocacy of an idiosyncratic blend of Distributism and private enterprise was influential after World War II – but no single one that voters identified with the party.

The Alliance years are passed over quickly, which is surely fair, as social democracy never did cohere as a force or a philosophy outside the Labour Party. The two most prominent former SDP members of the new Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy and Robert Maclennan, were already pretty much Liberals by the time the parties merged.

Nor did The Orange Book have much discernible long-term effect on the party. Its reputation was always a triumph of marketing over content, as it wasn’t the bracing call for an end to “nanny state” interventionism its adherents sometimes pretended. The chapter on social policy was thoroughly Blairite, born from middle-class impatience with the lower orders and the way they brought up their children. If only they were better raised, the authors reasoned, there would be less need for public spending on them in later life and taxes could be cut.

And maybe we have always worried too much about economic policy. Today’s Liberal Democrats have little to say on the subject, but that didn’t stop us electing 72 MPs last year.

Finally. Parry looks at the agenda that the Liberal Democrats have made their own: devolution, civil rights and Europe. Much of it has been party policy since the Grimond years – our early support for British membership of the European Economic Community, in particular, was seen as proof of our farsightedness and proof that, despite all the humiliations of life as a third party, history was on our side. This, I think, explains the reluctance, noted by Parry, of Liberal Democrats to criticise the EU in the years before the referendum.

I enjoyed this breezy and unusually accurate history of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats, but what I will remember most from Liberalism is Parry’s discussion of the relationship between a party’s philosophy and its practice.

There is a temptation – I have been guilty of this myself – to turn to works by John Stuart Mill or L.T. Hobhouse or Jo Grimond in search of an expression of Liberal philosophy that will tell us what the party should be saying today. But this is to put the philosophical cart before the horse of practice.

Parry has no truck with this view:

This book claims that Liberal leaders such as Lord John Russell, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George, Jo Grimond and Paddy Ashdown are better guides to political Liberalism than theoretical writers such as J.S. Mill or T.H. Green. It argues that politics has its own rationale, and that politicians take up bodies of ideas for specific purposes, rather than allowing works of theory to set their policy agendas for them.

This is surely right, as is his reminder that:

Hundreds of Victorian Liberal pundits made interesting and rich contributions to national political debate. We know much more about these than was once the case, so there is no longer any excuse for elevating Mill or Green into a small elite of Liberal “thinkers” who have had a transcendental impact on the party’s definition.

And when we do read the works of this elite, we are likely to misunderstand what they were about:

Liberal intellectuals such as Green, or later L.T. Hobhouse, described the aim of Liberalism as the socialisation of individuals into civil society without the intervention of a heavy-handed state that would suppress the energy and self-control that was the essence of their individuality. These writings sound more utopian and radical than they were. They were elegant ways of describing social arrangements that were increasingly visible in many towns by the end of the century.

And if that is not enough iconoclasm for you, here is Parry on Mill:

On Liberty was not intended as a political party bible but as a contribution to general educated discourse. It was also intended to be provocative. Mill knew that most Victorians would not agree with his underlying assumptions. Most educated Victorians did not see orthodox religion as a restrictive cultural force. On the contrary many of them viewed the issue of liberty through a religious lens. Individual responsibility was responsibility and accountability before God.

Again this is surely right. Gladstone, for one, certainly took this view of liberty.

I shall add Parry’s Liberalism to my shelf of very good short books alongside Bryan Magee’s ones on Karl Popper and Richard Wagner and James Hawes’s “shortest histories” of England and Germany.

Jonathan Calder

GUEST POST The Tyranny of Numbers by David Boyle

Anselm Anon pays tribute to David Boyle, who we lost earlier this year, by revisiting one of his best books.

David Boyle’s death in June this year was mourned by many in the Liberal Democrats and beyond. These tributes give a good sense of a life well lived. I barely knew him personally, but greatly admired his writing, so was prompted to re-read The Tyranny of Numbers, published in 2000.  

There are two strands to the book. One is historical: it traces the impact of ‘statistical thinking’ in Britain from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. This isn’t mathematics as such, but the application of numbers to the organisation of human society. 

The crucial figure in this history is Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).  The founder of Utilitarianism devoted his considerable, albeit idiosyncratic, intellectual gifts to the project of re-ordering society on rational and benevolent lines.  

Boyle is acutely aware of the paradoxes of Bentham’s legacy. On the one hand, it informed and inspired fundamental developments in nineteenth-century society. These included practical improvements in public policy (for instance by his disciple Edwin Chadwick, the public health pioneer), and social research (such as Charles Booth’s classic studies on poverty in London), as well as the work of the Liberal writer and MP John Stuart Mill. 

Yet at the same time, the preoccupation with ‘rational’ counting fed into the “dull authoritarian socialism” of Beatrice and Sidney Webb and others. It fostered the attitude that qualitative data is real, and lived human experience is secondary.  As Boyle puts it, this empowers “people who muddle up the numbers with the truth.”  This is at the root of many of our ills.  

The book’s second strand examines the impact of ‘statistical thinking’ on a variety of political, economic, and environmental questions.  Boyle’s argument is clear but nuanced. He criticises an inappropriate over-reliance on numerical data – the tyranny of numbers.  Operation waiting times are prioritised rather than health, school league tables rather than education, crime statistics rather than neighbourliness.

And in every area, narrow short-term financial calculation carries more weight than real yet intangible human and environmental qualities (“the strange idea that once you have counted the money, you have counted everything”). 

But Boyle isn’t an obscurantist, or a touchy-feely romantic who wants to do away with boring numbers. He recognises their value as a tool to inform and improve peoples’ lives.  One example he gives is how, in the 1960s, gathering and publishing data on air pollution drove improvements in air quality in American cities. 

As he puts it:

You do have to count – the important thing is to realize that you can’t succeed in measuring the real value of anything.

Boyle correctly identifies three interconnected looming challenges: the environment, the digital economy, and what he calls the ‘counting crisis’, as public policy becomes warped by preoccupation with its own data, rather living human experience.   

Subsequent developments have intensified the trends that Boyle identifies. In an unwittingly prescient turn of phrase, he mentions the widespread desire to “take back some kind of control” in response to the tyranny of numbers.  It is depressing that so little progress has been made. 

Yet Boyle’s response remains sensible and thought-provoking.  One element is decentralisation, which surely needs no elaboration to readers of Liberal England. Another is to address “… a massive loss of faith in our own judgement, intuition and our trust in other people”. 

This seems more important than ever, especially in a digital environment awash with malicious nonsense. There isn’t a single way to do this, but that is rather the point.  It is something we can all try to integrate into our own lives and politics.

Having enjoyed Boyle’s earlier book on local currencies, Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash, I first read The Tyranny of Numbers in 2001. The book is not explicitly party political, but the critique of New Labour’s managerialism is everywhere. 

That was part of the appeal to me at the time, as a Liberal Democrat campaigner in complacent Labour local authorities. But the book’s historical perspective gives it much more staying power.

The Tyranny of Numbers is engagingly written, and animated by an insatiable curiosity. It is sensible, clear-sighted, and humane. Alongside David Boyle’s other writing, it is well worth continued attention.

 Anselm Anon has been a member of the Liberal Democrats since the 1990s.

The Joy of Six 1357

Gary Younge says the heroism of soldiers from India, Africa and the Caribbean is often airbrushed out of the history of the second world war: "About 2.5 million personnel from the Indian subcontinent, more than 1 million African-Americans, 1 million people from Africa and tens of thousands of people from the Caribbean fought for the allies during the second world war. Among them were people of almost every religion."

Tim Leunig warns that curtailing international student migration will make Britain poorer:  "In recent work with my Public First colleagues we discovered that there are over 100 constituencies where the local university is one of the top three exporters. No other sector is in the top three in more than 100 constituencies."

"As the western world closed its doors to Russia after the 2022 invasion ... Moscow somehow managed to retain control over key chess institutions, shielding Russia from sporting sanctions and allowing its players to continue competing internationally. It even hosted lucrative tournaments in the occupied Ukrainian territories of Crimea and Donbas." Daria Meshcheriakova investigates the links between world chess and Russia's war machine.

"There are so many dog whistles in those paragraphs that an audio version would sound like a rowdy day at Crufts." Mic Wright takes aim at my old classmate Allison Pearson.

Timofei Gerber reads John Stuart Mill's unfinished Chapters on Socialism.

"The ’60s left Ricky Nelson behind. He tried to branch out into other styles, he tried to shake off the Teen Idol thing. But in the era of auteurist singer-songwriters, or bands like The Beach Boys … Nelson just couldn’t compete. People wanted him for only one thing. His 'persona' was set in stone by the time he was 17 years old. He couldn’t 'grow up'. Nobody would let him." Sheila O'Malley on the fate of a teen idol,

BOOK REVIEW When We Speak of Freedom: Radical Liberalism in an Age of Crisis

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.

John Stuart Mill backs the prosecution of people who incite violence on Twitter shock

I've been known to complain that the only time you hear John Stuart Mill's On Liberty quoted is when someone is citing Mill's Harm Principle. And when they are, you can be sure they are using it to justify state intervention.

You rarely get reminded by today's Liberal Democrats that On Liberty is a hymn to individuality and its importance to our wellbeing.

But Mill lived in an age more used to political violence than we have become, so it's worth studying what he has to say on incitement:

No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions. On the contrary, even opinions lose their immunity, when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act. 

An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.

Or when broadcast on social media in a way likely to move people to violence, as I'm sure Mill adds somewhere.

Are there Liberal thinkers for good times and Liberal thinkers for hard times?

Politicians can be divided between those suited to good times and those suited to hard times, or so I suggested in a post I wrote here back in 2008.

Looking at some leading politicians of the day and of past days, I divided them like this:

Good times: Tony Blair, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, George Osborne, David Miliband.

Hard times: Gordon Brown, Margaret Thatcher, Vince Cable, Denis Healey, Alistair Darling

We have lived in hard times for so long now that it's hard to know who among today's politicians would be more suited to good times, so I'm not sure this categorisation is useful today.

But I have been wondering if, among Liberal thinkers, there are some suited to good times and some suited to hard times.

The growing threat of Russian aggression in Europe makes Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin look more relevant than they did 20 or 30 years ago. It's unfair to dismiss them as 'Cold War Liberals', as many on the left do, but their views were formed as a reaction to tyranny and the threat of tyranny.

By contrast, I am an admirer of the postmodern Liberal philosopher Richard Rorty, yet when I came to write about him for Liberator in 2017, I found I had growing doubts about him. I did question Rorty's account of George Orwell, but there was a more fundamental doubt that I steered away from.

It was whether postmodernism's relaxed view of truth was so appealing in a word where Trump was US President and the internet was choked with lies and conspiracy theories.

Rorty, it seemed, was a Liberal thinkers for good times, not hard times.

You might think of Mill as a believer in progress, and thus a good times man. But I remember writing a seminar paper about On Liberty in which I commented on its pessimistic tone. One reason Mill wanted freedom of thought and speech was that he was dissatisfied with the intellectual climate of the day.

There is definitely an element of "All great men are dead, and I'm not feeling too well myself", in Mark Twain's words, about On Liberty.

So if I put Mill in the hard times column, it's more about his temperament than the fine details of his philosophy. 

And, for the same reason, he is joined there by Charles Masterman. Though Masterman was a practical politician - he was the minister who spent countless hours taking Lloyd George's health insurance act through the Commons in the face of implacable opposition from the Conservatives and the medical profession - there is an air of melancholy about his writings - notably The Condition of England.

Jo Grimond, by contrast, has a sunny temperament and that gets him into the good times club.

What do you think? Is this distinction useful?

What did Karl Popper say about tolerance?

As an admirer of Karl Popper I've been pleased to see him getting renewed attention, even if this ubiquitous graphic gives an inadequate account of his views on tolerance.

It's been less of a pleasure to see his name co-opted by those on the left who want to censor the expression of opinion. This is the precise opposite of what Popper argued for in his work.

And this in turn has led to his becoming something of a hate figure for the no-nothing right. An example:

Nobody even knows who karl popper is but his 70-iq take on “tolerance” reeks of the marxist bullshit modern lefties regurgitate whenever given a platform 🤣

— idc (@cryharderhoeee) June 2, 2023

James Kierstead has written a post about Popper's views on tolerance, drawing on his work beyond The Open Society and its Enemies (where the Paradox of Tolerance is mentioned in a footnote) and on his correspondence.

He concludes:

In the final analysis, Popper’s proposal that we should tolerate each other up to the point of violence doesn’t constitute an exhaustive account of where we might have to set limits on speech or expression. As the Victoria University legal scholar Eddie Clarke has noted, in a few situations our current laws do enforce some penalties against speech even in the absence of violence (in cases of perjury, say). 

Nevertheless, Popper’s writings on toleration, including his famous ‘paradox of toleration,’ remind us that coercion is as good a place as any to set a hard limit for toleration. Setting the bar as high as coercion leaves citizens space to develop their own ideas and life-paths freely. We should therefore approach any limits to expression below this high bar with some scepticism.  

This emphasis on violence as the line we must not cross puts Popper firmly in the main stream of liberal political thought running through Max Weber (with his emphasis on the state as the possessor of a monopoly on force) as well as John Stuart Mill (who similarly insisted that citizens should be free to develop their ideas uncoerced by others).

So Popper should not be adopted as a champion by those who want to curtail the simple expression of opinion. His work and his instincts place him squarely on the other side of that debate.

How the Lib Dems were trapped in the Coalition rose garden

I've come across a paper on the Liberal Democrat experience of being in coalition with the Conservatives and of defending that record at the 2015 general election.

It is written by Dr Matt Cole from the University of Birmingham, who interviewed Liberal Democrat campaign teams in 12 constituencies that the party had won at the 2010 general election. His research was conducted after the 2015 election and published in September 2016.

The whole paper is worth reading, but I shall pick out three areas of particular interest here.

First there is the Fixed-term Parliament Act. Ending the ability of prime ministers to call an election when they thought it would favour their party has long been Liberal and then Lib Dem policy, and it was thought that we could not enter coalition without such an act.

The thinking was that we needed to be sure the Tories could not pull the rug out from under us as soon as they judged it would be to their advantage.

But was the act really to Lib Dem advantage? Because it left us unable to cut short the coalition too.

In the unexpectedly perspicacious words of David Davis, we had "the best seats on the plane but no parachute".

As Matt Cole points out, when the Liberals left the Lib-Lab Pact in 1978 it marked the start of a period in which the party’s poll rating rose from 6 per cent to 14 per cent before the 1979 election. No such strategy was open to the Lib Dems before 2015.

Then there was our attitude to finding ourselves in government. Cole quotes one MP as saying that we "spent the first two years apologising for being in government".

That is a succinct summing up of the approach of Richard Reeves, Nick Clegg's director of strategy until 2012:

In a presentation to Lib Dem MPs then, Mr Reeves mapped out three phases for the Coalition. The first had to be about unity on cutting the deficit, to show that coalition works and put down firm foundations. Phase two would be "differentiation" to show voters the Lib Dems were not the same as the Tories, before a natural divergence ahead of the 2015 election.

As it turned out, we should have been showing voters that we were not the same as the Tories from the first day of the coalition. A large chunk of our voters concluded that we were the same and withdrew their support as a result. By the time we were thinking about differentiation they were no longer intereted in us.

Reeves, if he is remembered at all, is remembered for social liberals that they should join the Labour Party, but he is a notable interpreter of John Stuart Mill.

Finally, the views Matt Cole gathered on the 2015 election campaign are depressingly familiar because people have been saying much the same thing about that of 2019. 

Try:

The national campaign accompanying the manifesto was widely and severely criticised amongst interviewees for its failure to integrate with their constituency campaigns or to win support from the public.

and:

Some complained … that materials prepared for delivery in the constituency … had to be abandoned as unsuitable.

More generally, there were tensions between the campaign teams in the constituencies and an overbearing Liberal Democrat HQ. To illustrate them, Cole included this artwork from the cover of the February 2015 Liberator.

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.

Six of the Best 863

David V. Johnson defends Mill's On Liberty in an age of conspiracy theories.

"Several anecdotal reports have highlighted the increased community cohesion resulting from both the organisation process on a street and the ‘playing out’ sessions themselves. The University of Bristol study found both a strengthening of existing connections and building new connections between neighbours." Alice Ferguson on the benefits brought by the 'playing out' movement.

Barb Drummond offers a cultural history of the scarecrow, taking in Henry Williamson, Traffic and the Watersons.

"Nothing like it had ever been seen on BBC television and even the natives, already familiar with the more surreal reaches of British comedy on BBC radio, took a while to adjust to this new kind of visual humour in which nothing was too sacred to be lampooned." Clive Irving attends the birth of Monty Python.

Before Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (and long before Steven Soderbergh's) there was an adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s novel on Russian television, reports Michael Brooke.

Notts Lit takes us on a tour of D.H. Lawrence's Nottingham.

John Stuart Mill's paper dolls

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Albert Pionke, Professor of English Literature at the University of Alabama, has written an article for The Conversation on the marginalia to be found in John Stuart Mill's library:

Like many serious readers, Mill read with pen or pencil in hand, marking passages he found interesting, protesting against premises and conclusions he judged facile, and sometimes summarising his own thoughts in annotations on unprinted pages.

Mill's annotations are now the subject of an international research project: Mill Marginalia Online.

I was struck, however, by a more human discovery in one of Mill's volumes:

tucked between pages 674 and 675 of Arnoldus Vinnius’s Institutionum Imperialium – a weighty and much-reprinted history of Justinian law – are two paper dolls, with a third waiting between pages 866 and 867. ... 

But the question is, whose dolls were they? Printed in 1665, the book is old enough to have been in the Mill family library when the young John Stuart was tutoring his sisters. Left in the library at Blackheath after his death, it might also have served as a toy depository for Harriet Taylor Mill’s daughter Helen (Mill’s stepdaughter) about whose childhood relationship with Mill we know very little.

Rutland councillor convicted over Facebook posts will lose his seat

Remember Richard Alderman, the Rutland councillor convicted over his Facebook posts?

In October I wrote:

Richard Alderman, the 'Democracy Rutland' councillor, today received a six-month community order for his posts on Facebook. 

He will have to wear an electronic ankle tag to monitor a 7pm to 7am curfew. 

As the Leicester Mercury has said he intends to carry on as a councillor, he had better hope there are no evening meetings.

But there are evening meetings. The council's meetings all start at 7pm.

And today BBC News reported that Rutland County Council had decided not to grant him dispensation to miss meetings.

Which means - unless there is a stray afternoon subcommittee or working party meeting he can attend - he faces disqualification for not attending a meeting for six months.

Reader's voice: Shouldn't a liberal be shocked that a councillor faces the loss of his seat for stating his opinion?

Liberal England replies: More and more, I view free speech, not as an individual right, but as a social good. My favourite liberal philosophers - Mill and Popper - treat it in that way. They emphasise the role of free discussion in revealing error and allowing progress.

So the question becomes how we foster institutions that allow and promote free speech.

Online forums have the potential to do this. But, as we have all learnt, they are often poisonous places dealing in abuse and driving people away rather than arenas for reasoned debate.

So someone who behaves as Alderman did is not promoting free speech but curbing it.

Six of the Best 821

Anne Applebaum says Viktor Orbán has duped the Brexiteers: "Whatever language about ‘European ideals’ or ‘Christianity’ Orbán’s disciples use at their government-sponsored think-tank events, in practice their destruction of institutions, including the media and the courts, has led directly to corruption and the entrenchment of their own power."

Do universities liberalise students? Paula Surridge says the connections between education and political behaviour should be studied.

Victoria Bateman thinks John Stuart Mill's ideas could save capitalism.

"Years before Seinfeld, Hancock’s Half Hour – a show about nothing. And like Seinfeld, George Costanza, Elaine and Kramer, the dysfunctional household of Hancock, Sid, Bill & Miss Pugh were amiable losers adrift, eccentric, a non-nuclear family in a world that revered gentility and respectability." Julian Dutton pays tribute to Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.

Valerie Simadis talks to Sixties actor and musician Peter Noone.

The architect Fothergill Watson is best known for his work in Nottingham, but he was born in Mansfield. Lucy Brouwer takes us on a tour of that town, looking at what remains of his work.

Listen to a podcast about On Liberty to celebrate Mill's birthday

Let us pass rapidly over Richard Reeves spell as chief of staff to Nick Clegg and instead celebrate him as a leading scholar of John Stuart Mill, whose birthday it is today.

You can hear Reeves talking about Mill and On Liberty in a short Philosophy Bites podcast.

The point he makes that the Harm Principle is not what is most interesting or important in the essay cannot be made often enough.

I once wrote an article for Liberator on why John Stuart Mill is the greatest Liberal that owed an indecent amount to Richard Reeves' ideas.

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"I became involved with Labour Against Antisemitism, and looked at what local Labour members had been doing online. I saw Holocaust denial sitting side by side with Corbyn worship; accusations that ‘Israhell’ and ‘the Rothschilds’ were organ harvesting alongside heartfelt prayers for aliens to ‘kill the Zionists’." An anonymous contributor to Bristol Live shares her experience of antisemitism in the city.

"If political and TV programming decisions are determined by opinion polls and focus groups – and failing that by some image of a narrow-minded voting and viewing public with no attention spans– there’ll be no room for the high-minded. Debate will be replaced by an exchange of sound-bites." Chris Dillow blogs about Britain's intellectual decline.

John Stuart Mill's annotations in the margins of the books in his library tell us a lot about his mind, says Albert Pionke.

Andy Boddington explains how Joe from the Windrush generation helped shape his life. "As a shy, skinny weakling, I learnt the principles of equality even before I knew what those words meant. I got to understand the value of friendship. Joe treated me as an equal."

In Britain hauntings don't just occur in ancient manor houses, old inns and Gothic asylums. as Ray Newman shows.

NG and Beyond explores Nottingham's Lenton railway triangle.

The Wood for the Trees by Richard Fortey wins the Richard Jefferies Society/White Horse Bookshop Writer's Prize

From Marlborough News Online:

John Price, Chairman of the Richard Jefferies Society, announced - "with great pleasure" - that the book which best reflected the spirit of Jefferies' writing was The Wood for the Trees by Professor Richard Fortey ... “With a strong sense of place in Fortey's recording of the passage of the year in the woodland, we felt that the book was a worthy successor to Jefferies' writing.”

And the blurb on Amazon reveals a Liberal connection:

"The woods are the great beauty of this country… A fine forest-like beech wood far more beautiful than anything else which we have seen in its vicinity" is how John Stuart Mill described a small patch of beech-and bluebell woodland, buried deeply in the Chiltern Hills and now owned by Richard Fortey. 

Drawing upon a lifetime of scientific expertise and abiding love of nature, Fortey uses his small wood to tell a wider story of the ever-changing British landscape, human influence on the countryside over many centuries and the vital interactions between flora, fauna and fungi.

Six of the Best 607

"The first real sign of trouble began as early as October 2010 when there was a mini-rebellion by 37 Tory MPs on the UK’s financial contribution to the EU, and things just went downhill from then on." Tim Bale on David Cameron's doomed attempt to keep his party from banging on about Europe.

Adam Ramsay suggests Scotland could remain a member of the EU even without independence.

"The distrust of specialist, professional intelligence, abstracted from the 'real' world of tradition and experience, has a long tradition in British political culture, especially within what John Stuart Mill called ‘the stupid party’." Joe Moran looks at our scepticism about experts.

Ronnie Hughes goes for a walk through lost Liverpool with Stephen Roberts (whom I think I knew at university in an earlier life).

Unofficial Britain interviews Nina Lyon about her new book 'Uprooted: On the Trail of the Green Man'.

Curious British Telly watches The Changes, a children's serial from 1975.

Happy birthday John Stuart Mill

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Time to post a link to an old Liberator article of mine:

So read Rorty, Popper and Berlin. Read L.T. Hobhouse if you want and pretend to have read T.H.Green if you must. But above all read the Mill of On Liberty.

Happy Birthday John Stuart Mill

The great Liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill was born in Rodney Street, Pentonville, on 20 May 1806.

To mark the day, let me point you to an article I wrote about the old boy for Liberator some years ago:

It seems we have become obsessed by Mill’s harm principle. Yet it is only a small part of On Liberty: the essence of that work is not concerned with curbing liberty at all but is a glorious hymn in favour of its expansion. 

Writing in Prospect magazine last year, Richard Reeves put it well: 

for Mill, liberty consists of much more than being left alone. It requires choice-making by the individual. "He who lets the world… choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation," he writes. "He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties." For Mill, a good life must be a chosen life. 

Or as The Levellers said more recently: "There's only one way of life, and that's your own, your own, your own."

As it was to turn out, Reeves was a very good Mill scholar but less skilled as a special adviser to Nick Clegg.