Martin Wainwright's Guardian obituary of Michael Meadowcroft

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Michael Meadowcroft, who wrote so many obituaries himself, is remembered in the Guardian by Martin Wainwright, the son of a fellow Yorkshire Liberal MP:

Michael Meadowcroft, who has died aged 84 after a short illness, was a Yorkshire Liberal politician and activist of great resource and flair. He constantly wrong-footed Labour in its former heartlands in Leeds as a nimble source of new ideas, closely in touch with voters and patient at working with them to get local problems solved.

He served as a Liberal party member of Leeds city council from 1968 to 1983, and then as an MP for Leeds West for four years.

Meadowcroft was famously the only MP in the city’s history who led a weekend jazz ensemble in the main shopping precinct, pausing between numbers to discuss political issues with passers-by.

Exuberantly self-confident, he was a natural challenger with less interest in becoming part of any status quo. But he was steeped in Liberal philosophy as well as being a rigorous organiser, central to the party’s adoption of "community politics" during its resurgence under the charismatic leadership of Jo Grimond in the 1960s.

Magnus Grimond remembers his father's Orkney elections

Here's a video of the Liberal leader Jo Grimond voting in the 1964 general election. It's unused footage shot by British Pathé, so there's no commentary, and the little boy with Grimond is his son Magnus (not Michael, as YouTube says).

Magnus Grimond recently wrote an article about his memories of Orkney elections in the Sixties and Seventies for Frontiers:

My father would ... go around all the islands to hold meetings, which were mostly in rather draughty parish halls, with the odd Calor Gas heater if you were lucky.  A few committed souls would generally show up, but I know on one occasion in Hoy my father faced an empty hall. 

He had primed Gerry Meyer, editor of The Orcadian and stringer in Orkney for the Press Association, with a copy of the speech to be distributed to the national papers. He must have rung Gerry to say that he couldn’t give the speech but it could still be sent out, to which he was told that if the words hadn’t been spoken he couldn’t possibly give it out. 

My father claimed that he therefore had to deliver his speech to an empty hall – or possibly to a few Blackface sheep.

"My name's Cole-Hamilton. Alex Cole-Hamilton"

It's not just Ed Davey who was approached by MI6. Alex Cole-Hamilton reveals in a notably friendly interview in the Scottish Sun that he was too:

Alex Cole-Hamilton could have been driving a James Bond-style Aston Martin instead of a second-hand electric Mustang – if he had chosen to join MI6.

The leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats has revealed for the first time how he was tapped-up by the secret intelligent service when he graduated from uni.

But Alex turned his back on life as a spy for the British Government due to his Quaker religion – who believe in non violence – when he was told the information he gathered could potentially lead to the loss of lives.

We've all watched enough Tinker Tailor and Slow Horses to know that life in the intelligence services is nothing like that, but what is it about Liberal Democrats that attracts the spooks? Or is it that spies are attracted to the Liberal Democrats?

I wrote in one of my Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy columns:

When Paddy Ashdown first surfaced in the old Liberal Party, it did not take the press long to notice his intriguing background. A former special forces officer who joined the diplomatic service and was appointed first secretary to the United Kingdom mission to the United Nations in Geneva? How obvious can it be? It was from Geneva that our agents behind the Iron Curtain were run.

There were those in the party who worried that Ashdown had been planted on us by the deep state, but as he was so much more appealing than anyone we had come up with ourselves, most were happy to welcome him. Besides, given our sometimes fractious relations with our partners in the SDP/Liberal Alliance, it was comforting to know we had someone who could strangle Dr David Owen with his bare hands if it came to that.

 And I still consider Paddy and Jo Grimond as the two best Liberal leaders of my lifetime.

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

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.

The Joy of Six 1335

"We may think that the dangers we face today are unprecedented (and in some ways perhaps they are) but history has a way of circling back on itself. When Jo warned that 'Europe still needs Britain, and Britain, Europe' and called for a moment of 'political initiative' to build partnerships, it feels as timely and as necessary now as it did then." Marking 75 years since Jo Grimond was first elected as MP for Orkney and Shetland, Alistair Carmichael finds inspiration in a famous speech by the former Liberal leader.

Rachel Hewitt argues that telling boys and men that they're disadvantaged only hinders them further - and, anyway, it's not true: "If we really want to help boys and men be happier, then perhaps, as a society, we could forge a different and more positive outlook on masculinity, in which we focus less on how men are purportedly hard done by and emasculated compared to the last century, and more on the genuinely fulfilling opportunities that are open to them in this brave new world."

Liam Geraghty on a report that finds new housing estates are forcing their residents to rely on cars.

Only a quarter of students at the University of Edinburgh are Scottish, with the result, says Melissa Knight, that they have found themselves the unwanted target of discrimination from English snobs who often look down on, and mock them due to their accents or working-class backgrounds.

Alwyn Turner reminds us of an earlier politician who had ambitions to take over a party led by Nigel Farage." As far as the media were concerned, Kilroy-Silk was 'UKIP’s star turn', its leader-in-waiting. But he didn’t wish to wait. The man who’d once called on socialists to act with ‘a tint of arrogance’ was now sixty-two and impatient. At the party conference in October 2004, he set out his stall in a typically assured performance."

"Gormenghast is an edifice of stasis: ultra-conservatism and unchangingness is in a sense the whole point of the castle, and its society. Yet it is a place where there is the most amazing grotesque diversity and variety. When Titus leaves it and enters modernity he encounters many things, but a kind of flatness, a sameiness enters the telling." After many years, Adam Roberts reads the Gormenghast trilogy again.

Alistair Carmichael marks 75th anniversary of Jo Grimond’s election

Alistair Carmichael is the latest guest on Iain Dale's All Talk podcast, talking about his own career and about the former Liberal Party leader Jo Grimond. 

The Liberals and then Liberal Democrats have held the Orkney and Shetlands seat ever since Grimond won it at the 1950 election.

Thanks to Caron Lindsay for flagging this up on Lib Dem Voice - follow that link to see a photograph of a very young Alistair. He is his usual engaging self in the podcast.

I never met Jo Grimond. The nearest I came to it was in the 1983 general election, when he did a public meeting for us in Kew. Being a good activist, I went canvassing instead - and there were no certificates and medals from Mark Pack in those days.

He gave his speech, I was told later, and then said, looking at the timetable he'd been given:

"It says 'Questions' here, but as I'm stone deaf these days, that's no use. I'll just come round the hall and meet you all."

And so he did, charming everybody.

But I did meet Laura Grimond, a significant figure in the party in her own right in her day, and also the wife of Jo, daughter of Violent Bonham Carter, the gender-fluid gangster even the Krays feared Violet Bonham Carter and granddaughter of Mr Asquith.

She came to Market Harborough a couple of times in the Eighties, and I've found a photo from those days in the British Newspaper Archive. It shows Laura Grimond, Phil Knowles (the current leader of Harborough District Council) and me. One day I'll share it with you.

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?

Lord Bonkers' Diary: "Call them Orkney and Shetland"

When I tweeted a picture of a couple of my Liberal Party membership cards from the 1980s, something about the map on them attracted the attention of the President of the Liberal Democrats. 

He commented in reply: 

I'm not sure @amcarmichaelMP  would approve of his constituency being left off :)

Which got me thinking...

Saturday

I first met Jo Grimond during the 1950 general election campaign. He proved a charming companion, and as we made inroads into a bottle of Auld Johnston, that most prized of Highland malts, he laid out his plans to me. 

“Britain needs a strong Liberal Party, yet it’s practically impossible to get elected in our colours these days. So I’ve decided to invent a constituency and just turn up at Westminster after the election with all the new MPs. I’ve dreamt up two groups of islands off the North coast of Scotland - call them Orkney and Shetland - as I don’t suppose anyone at Westminster will have been sea bathing at Thurso. Besides, my father fagged for the Serjeant at Arms, so there won’t be any awkward questions.” 

And his plan worked better than I had imagined possible. Over the years he got rather carried away with inventing new features in his constituency – ancient stone circles, a Viking cathedral, a Nissan hut turned into a gem of a chapel by an Italian prisoner of war – but no one smelled a rat. 

When the time came for Grimond to stand down, we agreed that the scheme was too clever to be allowed to die, so first Jim Wallace and then Alistair Carmichael were let into the secret. 

From time to time, I come across maps in our party’s policy documents or on membership cards that leave off Shetland or even Orkney, and have to make urgent phone calls to get them made consistent with our story. 

I say, it’s a good thing there’s a lock on this diary!

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10

Earlier this week....

• Their eyes hollow from think-tank reports and self-abuse
• The outside risk of drowning
• Have a Go with Thérèse Coffey
• A Norman Lamb dhansak with naan bread
• "You didn't argue with Violent"

GUEST POST A lifetime among the Liberals

Paddy Briggs looks back over a lifetime's political involvement and forwards to the next election.

I was 13 and for the first time I started to take an interest in politics. It was JFK wot did it. That summer of 1960 a man born in the same century as me was campaigning to be President of the United States. He was beautiful as was his wife. He wasn't Harold Macmillan or Ike or de Gaulle. He had charisma (though I don't think I knew that word at the time). He won!

 

In 1962 I got a bit excited again. Now Eric Lubbock wasn’t JFK but he made me momentarily famous at my boarding school. You see I lived in Orpington which hitherto had only been famous for its chickens. I decided to be a Liberal when he won. Of course I did.

 

As a student in the late 1960s there were plenty of good causes for liberals to care about. The old men defended the deadly nonsense of Vietnam. I didn't. They defended even the racial obscenity of Apartheid. I didn't. 

 

Surely the Liberal day had dawned ? But what did that mean ? Well it wasn’t Socialist (Good). Or Conservative (even better). So I knew what it wasn't – but what actually was it? That was more difficult.

 

The real dawn of the liberalism I believed in wasn't to come until the 1980s. Like Charles Kennedy and a few other good men and true I joined the SDP. Social Democracy and Liberalism. Perfect match. The SDP did well actually but the electoral system killed us. Charlie survived and a few others. I was mortified.

 

The Liberal Democrats were a decent post-SDP refuge and they did pretty well. Mainly as a home for those of the Centre/Left who lived in constituencies where Labour was nowhere and the Tories weren't that popular. Including mine – Twickenham. Vince was an old colleague of mine in Shell and a kindred spirit. Easy call. 

 

I liked the Coalition and thought the love-in in the Rose Garden was fine. My wife told me it was a public schoolboy alliance. She was certainly right but it suited me. But Nick didn't use his power as wisely as he could have. 2015 was a disaster. Even Vince lost. 2016 was the beginning of the end. The hideous referendum. Trump. Liberalism and pro Europeanism (my watchwords) became dirty words. 

 

So what now? Well first and foremost there’s Keir Starmer. He must be a man that the Libs can do business with. Surely to goodness. The policy is staring us in the face. Labour and the Lib Dems have much in common. An electoral alliance please. Labour to stand down in Lib Dem constituencies and in Tory constituencies where the LD’s are running second. The Lib Dems to do the same. Don't stand in Tory Conservative/Labour marginals.

You can follow Paddy Briggs on Twitter.

Rediscovering the Liberalism of the left-behind

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Populism, all right-thinking people agree, is a Bad Thing. Yet in the far-off days when I was a Liberal activist and then councillor, there was a definite populist strand to our campaigning.

We were the people who stood up for the unfashionable end of town. We were the people who stood up for the voters against council ruling groups and senior officers.

I remember doing a survey on council house repairs here in Harborough and being told the next day that the council offices were thronged with people we had encouraged to make complaints. I was proud of that.

Somewhere along the way we have lost much of that spirit. As Peter Sloman reminded us in 2017:

If the party’s sociological heartland is middle-class and cosmopolitan, its geographical heartland lies in the windswept constituencies of the Celtic fringe. It was here that Nonconformist farmers and shopkeepers stuck with the party through the 1940s and 50s, and that the party found it easiest to turn votes into seats during the 1970s and 80s. 

Jo Grimond spent most of the 1959 campaign holed up in his Orkney and Shetland constituency; fifteen years later, Jeremy Thorpe had a cable installed so that he could address press conferences at the National Liberal Club from his seat in Barnstaple. 

From the 1970s onwards, 'community politics' campaigners also established the party as the main challengers to Labour in a string of northern towns and cities hit hard by deindustrialisation. By 2010, the Liberal Democrats ran the council in Liverpool, Sheffield and Hull and had MPs in Bradford, Burnley and Redcar.

I have too much personal nostalgia for the Liberal Party of the 1970s and 80s to be an objective judge, but I do think we need to rediscover what Peter Sloman calls the Liberalism of the left-behind.

Peter asked me on Twitter yesterday whether I thought the gains made in the West Country by the Lib Dems in May's local election were a sign that we were beginning to win back the support of our former 'left behind' voters.

If they were, Thursdays results there suggest we still have a long way to go.

Five thoughts on The Independent Group and the Lib Dems

One
Something had to happen and I am glad that it did. The two main parties have both been captured by groups of extremists that have more in common with each other than they do with the political mainstream.

You only have to see the happy faces of The Independent Group MPs to see what a strain it has been to fight for mainstream values in the Conservative and Labour Parties.

The response from Corbyn loyalists, at least, has shown how broken our political system now is.

I have no idea what will happen next, but I have a feeling it will be more fun than the last few years have been,

Two
Tim Farron rushed to offer us as an army to help the TIGgers to power. But, pleased as I am by the turn events have taken, I believe we Liberal Democrats need to be more wary than that.

No doubt there have been talks between us and the new group, but are we certain that they wish us well? Already Anna Soubry has urged Lib Dems to join her instead.

Remembering the endless hours expended on seat negotiations by the Liberal Party and the SDP, I would be tempted to pursue a selfish strategy if I were in charge of TIG and it had grown into a national party

I would give the Lib Dems a clear run in the seats they hold and in another dozen where they had realistic chances of winning. After that, I would stand a candidate in every seat in the country and let the Lib Dems stand against me if they dared.

So low is the present Lib Dem support across much of the country, I would reason, that if we can’t supplant then we TIGgers have no future as a party anyway.

Three
Another worry about TIG is that it will all be a little vague. How could it be otherwise when they had to begin by attracting both Labour and Conservative MPs?

The question for TIG is whether it can move on from its launch Statement and become the driver of the reforms Britain needs.

Just for starters, we need to rebuild local democracy and our public services, reform our democracy and put the environment at the heart of our politics.

Is this really the group do it?

Four
So what should the Liberal Democrats do next?

Richard Kemp offers some characteristically sensible advice: we must concentrate on the May local elections and gain as many seats as possible and leave grand strategy on the back burner for a while.

The better we do in those elections, the stronger the hand we will have to play in whatever happens next.

Five
If we doubt that TIG has the coherence or intellectual heft to put forward the reforms Britain needs, then we Lib Dems are going to have to do some of the work.

Commentators used to accuse the Liberal Party of living off the intellectual capital of the Grimond years. Sometimes I wonder if the Lib Dems have any intellectual capital at all.

If that sounds harsh, think of how quickly we moved from being a party that wanted better-funded public services to one that supported George Osborne’s austerity.

We need some good internal rows over policy. We need to be a bit less of a family and a bit more of a political party.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Keep the box around Shetland

Today the old boy gives us an interesting piece of Scottish Liberal history that has hitherto escaped publication.

Tuesday

A recent issue of The Shetland Times has been drawn to my attention. In it our own Tavish Scott celebrates the fact that those islands will no longer be shown on weather maps and the like in a box.

All I can say is that he must be a singularly unobservant fellow, as that box is not figment of a cartographer’s imagination but a thing of bricks and mortar.

It was Jo Grimond who ordered it to be built: he wanted to protect Shetland’s fishing grounds, discourage Viking raids and keep out canvassers from other parties. Much of the donkey work was undertaken by his wife Laura, with the young Jim Wallace making the tea.

I sincerely hope Scott does not intend to undo Jo’s work by having the Shetland Box taken down. What will be next? Adrian Sanders’ wall?

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Liberal Democrats will compromise and do want national power

Embed from Getty Images

Miranda Green has an article in the Guardian looking at the prospects for Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the coming year.

I was struck by this passage:

For the Lib Dems, polling day was cruel: not only a massacre of MPs, but a rebuke to the very idea of power-sharing. Coalition had blunted the party’s identity and destroyed at a stroke its appeal to anti-establishment protest voters. 

Tim Farron, never a minister, has chosen “a fresh start” as his new backdrop: while careful not to disown the Clegg era, he is more at home with the Liberal tradition of dissent than the necessary compromises of government. 

Activists in both opposition parties have dug out dog-eared copies of the old scripts: the one (Labour) rehearsing traditional scenes of internal feuding, the other (Lib Dem) doggedly clawing back council seats and denouncing Westminster as a distraction from local campaigning.

There are two questionable assumptions here: that Liberal Democrat members do not grasp the necessity for compromise in politics and that there is a conflict between local campaigning and winning power nationally, with those members' hearts being in the former.

First, compromise. For the 1983 general election the Liberal Party agreed to form an alliance with the SDP, standing down its candidates in half the constituencies.

A few years later the Liberals voted to merge with the SDP to form a new party that its leader hoped would be known as the Democrats. The SDP voted the same way, with a larger minority against.

And after the 2010 general election the Lib Dem members voted to join a governing coalition with almost no one against.

When I wrote my post saying we should "accept David Cameron's offer in some form" I thought a) I was being terribly daring and b) that we would go in for some variety of confidence and supply arrangement.

But it turned out that I was being timid and, for better or worse, the membership was keen to endorse Nick Clegg's wish for a full coalition. No sign of an unwillingness to compromise there.

On the contrary, at least in those Alliance years of the 1980s compromise had an almost mystical attraction for Liberals. Many gave the impression of believing that, if only we compromised on enough things, we were bound to win power.

Looking back, this may have been a generational difference. Many of the older Liberal activists I met had been brought into the party by Jo Grimond and were tired after years of campaigning. Not surprisingly, they welcomed the short cut to power that the Alliance appeared to offer.

Me? I was young enough to have energy in those days and stupid enough to find ideological purity appealing.

Second, national power and local campaigning. That enthusiasm for coalition in 2010 does not suggest any ambivalence about taking power nationally.

Nor is there any necessary opposition between the local and national. What was remarkable in the early years of the Lib Dems, particularly under the influence of Chris Rennard, was the way that local success was afterwards turned into victories in Westminster elections.

Besides, local campaigning is also about power - there was as a time recently when the Lib Dems ran many large cities across the country. If some party members became disenchanted with Nick Clegg it was in part because they felt he had lost them that power.

Nor was the party a stranger to power before Nick came along. We were in government at Holyrood before he was even elected to the European parliament.

The great problem with the Liberal Democrats is not the two discussed above: it is (and I suspect Miranda would agree with me here) is that we have failed to establish a clear identity in the public mind.

But this post has gone on long enough and I will write about that another day.

Later. Miranda has kindly replied:

@lordbonkers I don't disagree with any of your blog. My preoccupation in this piece is more with what voters want and how they judge LDs

— Miranda Green (@greenmiranda) January 1, 2016

Say it ain't so, Jo

Tom Mangold writes about his attempts to investigate Jeremy Thorpe for the BBC:

I had been on the story for less than two weeks when I got a phone call from Jo Grimond, one of Thorpe’s predecessors as Liberal leader. ‘What you are doing is outrageous!’ he barked down the line. ‘Unless you stop at once, I’ll have you dismissed within hours by the [BBC’s] Director General, who I happen to know extremely well.’

It's always sad to learn that one of your heroes has feet of clay.

Still, this incident does give me an excuse for reposting one of my favourite videos from Youtube.

This song was written and first recorded by Murray (older brother of Anthony) Head and is here performed by, amongst others, three-quarters of The Who.

Jeremy Thorpe remembered

#79658659 / gettyimages.com

The fall of Jeremy Thorpe had already taken place by the time I joined the Liberal Party, but he was its leader when it won the by-election victories in the early 1970s that helped get me interested in politics.

In his pomp Thorpe was a dazzling figure - though without the intellectual appeal of Jo Grimond - and Jonathan Fryer was from just the generation to be dazzled by him:

I first met Jeremy when I was Secretary of the Oxford University Liberal Club about 1971 and he came to speak at the Oxford Union, as Liberal Leader. He was funny and gracious, a scintillating speaker and at heart a great showman. Which other party leader in those days would have dreamt of conducting an election tour by hovercraft?

As Jonathan goes on to say, Thorpe  nearly destroyed the Liberal Party by his "feasting with panthers". Legend has it that some Young Liberals were so alarmed by the company he was keeping and the risks he was running that they went to the chief whip.

There were others who disliked Thorpe because of the way he ran the party and its finances, though the details of those arguments are probably lost in time by now.

Then came the court case at the Old Bailey where he was tried for conspiracy to murder and acquitted. Thorpe's Telegraph obituary has the basics of this, though several books were written about the case and Thorpe's wider career.

Thorpe's career was very much an act, and that act was a little too blatantly Eton and Oxford Union for my tastes - though if you read that obituary you will find his background was a little more complicated than he made it appear.

Auberon Waugh, who enlivened the 1979 contest in North Devon by standing for the Dog Lovers' Party, once said he disliked Thorpe because he dressed exactly like the bucks at his own public school.

Let's leave the last words with Nick Harvey, the current MP for the constituency:

In North Devon he was a greatly loved champion of the community and is remembered with huge affection to this day. 

It would be wrong to recall only the tragedy of his downfall - where in hindsight he can be seen largely as a casualty of the era in which he lived. Instead we should celebrate a towering force in shaping the political landscape of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

George Grimes Watson 1927-2013

[Later. More on George Watson here.]

I learn from Mark Pack that the Liberal Party thinker George Watson died last year. I am sorry that I missed his death at the time

Watson was part of the party's intellectual renaissance under Jo Grimond. Mark links to a tribute by Julian Huppert:

“George Grimes Watson was a great thinker, an English don and a life-long liberal. 

“He stood for Parliament in 1959 in Cheltenham, unsuccessfully, and then became a Fellow at St John’s College Cambridge, where he became a noted scholar in literature, literary criticism and liberal political thought, including being a key member of the unservile state group, rethinking liberalism and welfare. 

“His 1959 campaign literature shows how little has changed, with one section saying 'Liberals made them get rid of identity-cards – but the State Still has far too much power in our lives’, ‘The Home Secretary thinks the police ought to tap private phone-calls’ and 'We need the European Common Market – Tory policy closes the door of Europe in our faces.' 

“He was a deep thinker and a great liberal, and is much missed.”

As Julian's tribute was posted today, I fear I may not be the only person to have missed George Watson's death.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Watson was taught by C.S. Lewis and went on to teach Douglas Adams himself.

I have read Watson's The English Ideology, which was subtitled "Studies in the Language of Victorian Politics".

As I recall, it is more interesting than that may make it sound, Watson argues that the English ideology is representative government and that the writers who described and championed it, such as Disraeli and Trollope, deserve more attention than its flashier critics such as Ruskin and Carlyle.

The reason for Mark's post today is that the Electoral Commission’s table of party donations for the third quarter of 2014 reveals that George Watson left almost a million pounds to the Liberal Democrats in his will.

I hope we spend it wisely.

Karl Popper on human knowledge

I heard Karl Popper give a lecture at York while I was an undergraduate there. I think it was the inaugural lecture of a series sponsored by some variety of Rowntree money and I remember that Jo Grimond was present.

Here is Popper speaking some years after that. He took part in three programmes under the title Uncertain Truth - you can find the others on Youtube if you search - but this one on knowledge gets to the heart of his philosophy. You can watch part 2 of it too.

If you want to know more about Popper and his philosophy - he has some claim to be the most important liberal thinker of the 20th century - then I recommend the short introduction by Bryan Magee.

Why Nick Clegg is like the Duke of Wellington

Could the political climate be changing? Because we are starting to see opinion pieces praising the Liberal Democrats in the newspapers again.

The other day it was Jane Merrick in the Independent. Today it was Allan Massie in The Scotsman.

Massie praises us for entering the Coalition in the first place - and makes an implicit comparison I that had not occurred to me:

In politics, the Duke of Wellington did not match his achievements in war, but he held to one sound and important principle: the Queen’s government must be carried on. This means that you must have an administration that commands a majority in the Commons and is capable of governing. 

In 2010, this was absolutely essential, given the dire state of both the British and the world economy. By agreeing to the coalition, Clegg and those around him acted in the interest of the country. They exchanged the pleasures of easy opposition for the responsibility of a share in the government. And they have had the courage to persist in government and not to run away from the duty they had assumed.

He also endorses the party in May's European elections:

If there was no other reason to vote Liberal Democrat, the party’s commitment to the EU, and to the principles of its founding fathers, would be an adequate one. Given the rise of Ukip, and the aims and character of that party, anyone who believes in the value of the European Union should certainly think of voting Liberal Democrat at the election for the European Parliament in May – and, indeed, do more than think about it.

I also like his observation on the strange alchemy of political popularity:

Jo Grimond once said he had supported two causes throughout his career: the EU and Home Rule for Scotland. Asked to vote on these matters in referendums, his constituents in Orkney and Shetland voted No to both – but they continued to return Jo to parliament.

Jo Grimond and the Soviet invasion of Shetland

Chris Glew on Estonian World tells the story of Erich Teayn, a crewman on a Soviet factory ship who, on the night of 25 June 1958, commandeered a motor boat and made his bid for freedom in the West by landing on Shetland:

He had realised that his journey wouldn’t be easy and might even be dangerous, but he hadn’t counted on 30 of his Russian crew-mates giving chase, hoping to foil his escape. In choosing a faster boat, he managed to land slightly ahead of his pursuers, on the ragged coast near the small village of Walls, West Shetland. 

Teayn spent five hours trekking through bare and treeless terrain in the late daylight with the Russian crew scouring the area, looking for any trace of their former colleague. He eventually stumbled upon the cottage of a local crofter, David Fraser and his son.

The Soviets searched the island seeking Teayn and passed within 50 yards of the cottage where he was hiding:

The two police sergeants arrested Teayn under the Aliens Act (he was an illegal immigrant, after all) and took him back to Lerwick, where he was placed in custody. 

The next day, the three senior Russian commanders of the fishing fleet landed in Lerwick to demand Teayn’s transfer to their custody. The Provost and senior police officer were both on leave and despite their apparent politeness and friendly manner, the police refused them all access to Teayn.

The affair was raised in the Commons by Jo Grimond, the local MP and leader of the Liberal Party. And Erich Teayn was last heard of living with an Estonian family in Shipley and looking for work.