My Liberator article on the Yorkists' New Deal

This article appears in the new Liberator – you can download the whole issue from the magazine's website. Following the best traditions of academic reviewing, I spend a lot of time stating my own views before I get on to the publication I'm meant to be writing about.

You can find The New Deal online.

Lib Dem Narrative – The Search Goes On

The 2024 general election saw 72 Liberal Democrat MPs elected, the most for a third party since the Liberals’ brief revival in 1923. It was a result that exceeded all expectations, yet, two years on, there is a feeling of deflation among many Lib Dems. May’s local elections, whose outcome was in some ways very good for the party, were followed by a series of posts on Lib Dem Voice expressing dissatisfaction with the party’s direction or at least arguing that its current approach had been exhausted and a new one was needed.

This dissatisfaction arises from a sense of disappointment. If we have so many MPs, why aren’t we more central to the political debate? You can blame the media all you like, and they certainly do us no favours, but maybe the problem lies deeper than that. If we were allowed to write out own newspaper headlines, do we know what they would be? The approach with which we fought the last election – three bullet points and a reminder that Labour can’t win here – and its continuation after that election have left us with a limited number of headline policies.

Massive failures

Where we do have them, they aren’t necessarily as strong as we try to make them sound. We won support at the last election by campaigning on the massive failures of the water companies, but what would we do about them? The answer is that we would appoint a new, tougher regulator. The trouble with this is that the model promised at privatisation – businesses that displayed market-driven efficiency and went in fear of powerful regulators – has never looked like working. There are two reasons for this, the first of which is that the water industry is a natural monopoly. The second is regulatory capture, the process by which public institutions that are set up to keep an industry in check are subverted so they come to act in its interests. Nothing about the Lib Dems’ proposals for the water industry suggests they have found the answer to either of these problems.

Then there is the party’s performance in opinion polls and local elections. When it comes to the polls, despite the collapse of the Labour vote, we are happy if we see one where we match the 12 per cent of the vote we achieved at the last general election. We may remember Zack Polanski as an ambitious Liberal Democrat who was keener on austerity than most of us, but as James Butler wrote in the London Review of Books: 

Polanski’s political journey … is sometimes framed as opportunism but in fact reflects the often radicalising economic experience of millennials now approaching middle age.

We need to have more to offer such voters than we do at present.

Our vote is now heavily concentrated in the parliamentary constituencies that we won in 2024. We gained dozens upon dozens of councillors there in May, but I saw debate as to whether we had gained or lost councillors across all the other constituencies. What is certain is that our vote in seats where we have not been active in recent years is as low as one or two per cent, as is demonstrated weekly in local by-elections. And while we are being worried, the party’s membership is generally estimated to be 60,000, which is barely half what it was in 2022.

Many of the areas we now represent are prosperous, which means we must beware of simply representing their interests. Our opposition to inheritance tax on land, for instance, is hard to defend. As far as farmers have a grievance, it’s that the price of land has lost its relationship with the income that can be derived from farming it. But if you allow land to be used as a tax shelter, that problem will not be solved, it will get worse.

In the end, the Liberal Democrat hold on the seats they gained in 2024 may be out of their hands. In order for disillusioned Conservatives to come over to the Lib Dems, it is necessary for them not to be too scared by the possibility of a Labour government. If Andy Burnham turns out to be more Socialist than anyone expects, or at least if the press succeeds in getting the public to see him that way, then there is a danger that those voters will flock back to the Tories, however sensible or moderate we have been.

Against the background of this complicated political landscape comes The New Deal: How the Liberal Democrats Should Go into the 2029 General Election. It’s billed as “a pre-manifesto strategy document from the Yorkist group of Liberal Democrat activists” and, in his foreword, William Wallace explains its purpose:

This paper aims to start a conversation within the party on the narrative we need to construct. We have at most three years until the next election. Too many voters have come to despair of any political party’s ability to overcome the country’s economic stagnation and social divides. Liberal Democrats must find a way to offer them hope that national renewal – economic, social and political – is possible and attainable.”

To that end, The New Deal offers an analysis of the electoral position of the Liberal Democrats, a narrative they should develop before the next election and the policies it says flow from that narrative.

When The New Deal was published in May, it seemed that both the Greens and Reform UK were in line to make sweeping gains at the next election and that the Liberal Democrats would have to change their strategy to take account of this. Since then, both parties have faltered. The Greens appear to have hit their ceiling in the opinion polls and the media have at last started to ask hard questions about how Reform and its leader are funded. This position may change again, of course, but at the moment it seems the 2029 election may be more like the 2024 election than we expected.

Usefully, The New Deal considers the parties along two axes. There is the conventional one of Progressive/Centre Left vs Authoritarian/Orthodox, which sees the Liberal Democrats lined up with Labour, the Nationalists and the Greens against the Conservatives and Reform. From their history, their members and their voters, the Liberal Democrats are inescapably an anti-Conservative party, though that doesn’t mean that, deep down, we are the same as Labour or that ‘Progressive’ is a meaningful political identity rather than just a more impressive way of saying you are against the Tories.

The second axis is System vs Anti System, which sees the Lib Dems (and we still just about deserve this) placed in the Anti-System camp along with the Greens, the Nationalists and Reform, while Labour and the Tories share the System end. 

Anti-system

This ‘anti-system’ concept is a useful one and helps explain why, to the bafflement of the simplicities of social media, there are many voters who choose between Reform and the Liberal Democrats. It’s an identity that I suspect has something to do with being a long way from the centres of power, as voters are in Cornwall or Lincolnshire, and perhaps with the area being a historical stronghold of religious Nonconformity. As academics always say, more research is needed.

The New Deal emphasises the importance of developing a narrative, identifying Keir Starmer’s failure to do this as a key reason for his premiership foundering, but I’m not sure that what they’ve come up with quite fits the bill:

We are a better country than this! We are a kind, welcoming people, proud of our traditions, keen not to be taken for fools, but happy to be a modern, compassionate civic nation. We believe in a helping-hand role for a benign state, but one that doesn’t encroach any more into private lives than is strictly necessary. We believe in giving power back to the people, and in making all votes of equal value. 

This is a collection of four sentences, two of which are immediately qualified with a “but…”, that fails to tell a story. Stories involve movement through time or space, but these words just sit there. And they are statements about the Liberal Democrats when what is needed is a story about Britain today that will make voters nod in assent.

So an effective Liberal Democrat narrative might look more like:

In recent years politicians have looked to party interest rather than what’s good for Britain, the gap between rich and poor has grown too wide, and young people are finding it too hard to get a start in life. We need to rebuild our democracy, make it easier for people from all homes to make the most of their talents, and revive social housing.

That’s what’s on the back of my envelope, anyway.

When it comes to the paper’s policy offer, the cover leads you to expect great things because it has a mock-up of FDR wearing a Lib Dem rosette. In fact, it’s not always clear how different this New Deal would be. There are places where it talks about “success and progress being about more than GDP, including measures of social wellbeing and the environment” and “markets working for society rather than society being there to support markets”, but it’s not clear what these encouraging sentiments would mean in practice. Nor is it clear what the “unashamedly Keynesian” policy it wants to see at the next election would be. It seems to envisage more government intervention in the economy, which is welcome, but Keynes’s great theoretical innovation was the idea of demand management to avoid the cycle of economic booms and slumps. I’m not sure that’s on offer here.

But there are some very good ideas in The New Deal, and not only rejoining the European Union either. There’s a welcome emphasis on localism, and the inevitable support for electoral reform is strengthened by a call for it to be “linked to some form of bottom-up democracy to allow citizens to generate legislation, and to take more control over their local affairs”. There’s a call for the provision of rented accommodation (though it doesn’t say in which sector) and for an emphasis on “doing up the housing at the bottom of the ladder which is a health hazard for many of those living in it”. Education is there too, with a thoroughly Liberal emphasis on the importance of teaching critical thinking.

Above all, it’s great to see Liberal Democrat members publishing their ideas in a long form. Since the demise of Lib Dem News and then political blogging, communication within the party has tended to be very short (hello social media) or very top down. I hope The New Deal will be the first of many such publications.

Neal Ascherson on Berlin in the second world war

Embed from Getty Images

Neil Ascherson writes about Berlin in the current issue of the London Review of Books:

Berlin is a strange, parvenu capital which shakes itself and becomes unrecognisable every few generations. The little Prussian town suddenly becomes the pompous capital of an empire, which collapses into a defeated rump republic, which turns into the powerhouse of the Third Reich, which is bombed shapeless, then divided into two by a wall. And now united again, with a new government centre worthy of that old parvenu pomposity.

Reviewing Ian Buruma's book Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-45, he says of the city during the war:

Berliners were certainly aware that 'Jew trains' were leaving for somewhere whence no passengers returned. Buruma writes that "the desire to look away, to pretend ignorance, to be wilfully oblivious, must have been the norm, even among highly educated Germans." 

As a British wartime child living near secret things and sites, I can remember easily respecting the instruction: "Just forget you saw that!" But years later in Germany, I learned how often young men on leave had confided hideous things they had seen to their mothers or sisters. 

In the last year of the war, as Buruma confirms, the fear that gripped Berliners was not just of military defeat but of vengeance.

Labour and the Liberals in 1924 and today

Malcolm Petrie reviewed two books on the first Labour government for the London Review of Books a couple of years ago. The books were The Men of 1924: Britain’s First Labour Government by Peter Clark and The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government by David Torrance.

In the course of his article, Petrie cast light on the relation between Labour and the Liberals – in 1924 and even, to an extent, today:

Rather than seeking to implement a distinctive socialist programme, then, the Labour cabinet had two main ambitions in 1924. The first was to cement the party's position as the progressive alternative to the Conservatives and to prevent a Liberal revival. 

It’s striking, given Labour's ideological debt to Liberalism, how visceral the dislike of the Liberal Party was among its senior figures. One reason for Labour’s emergence had been the unwillingness of local Liberal associations to accept working-class parliamentary candidates; in addition, Liberal MPs had tended to see their Labour counterparts as subordinate elements in the prewar Liberal coalition: useful, but not equal. 

The result was that Labour MPs felt, often justifiably, that the Liberals were unbearable snobs; and, in the case of Lloyd George and his followers, corrupt, dishonest hypocrites. 

As Torrance remarks, MacDonald thought he "could get on with the Tories": while there might be disagreements over policy, they ‘were gentlemen’; the Liberals, however, "were cads". There was also a sharp awareness that Labour and the Liberals were, in effect, competing for a single vacancy: if Labour was to have a long-term future as a governing party, the goal had to be, as Clark argues, "to destroy" the Liberals.

That point about competing for a single vacancy explains a paradox about the Liberals and Liberal Democrats. Liberal in the West Country often sound rather right wing to the rest of the party, yet they and the Conservative Party are at each other's throats there. Equally, Northern urban Liberals sound left wing, but hate the Labour Party.

And Labour's second attitude in 1924 reminds me of that of many Labourites and Liberals over my political lifetime:

The second objective was to repudiate the accusation, voiced most bluntly by Winston Churchill in 1920 when he was still a Liberal, that Labour wasn’t fit to govern. This explains the composition of the cabinet, and Labour ministers' willingness to appear in court dress, despite the unease this provoked on the political left. It is also the reason some of the party’s most prominent policies were discarded as soon as it became clear that Labour could form a government. 

The proposed wealth tax, the capital levy, was dumped: Snowden called it "an electoral millstone". Scottish home rule, a cause inherited from Radical Liberalism, was also abandoned. When, in May 1924, George Buchanan, the ILP MP for Glasgow Gorbals, introduced a Private Members’ Bill on the issue, it was talked out by Conservative backbenchers. 

Buchanan, backed by his fellow Clydesiders, pleaded with MacDonald to grant additional parliamentary time, but MacDonald, who was Scottish and had been a supporter of home rule, refused. Torrance, who makes excellent use of material from the Royal Archives, reveals that MacDonald, in his updates to George V, was happy to criticise, and even ridicule, the advocates of home rule.

Which suggests that the monarch had more political nous than his prime minister, as George V is widely reported to have said to MacDonald: 

"What fools we were not to listen to Gladstone on Ireland!"

Two snorts and a smile: A new study of James Bryce reviewed

James Bryce was an academic who became a Liberal MP and then a diplomat – he served as Britain's ambassador in Washington from 1907 to 1913. He doesn't sound or look the sort of person to give rise to humour, but Jonathan Parry's review of a new study of Bryce for the London Review of Books won two snorts and a smile from me.

First snort (I have a dark sense of humour):

His schoolmaster father, a devoted geologist and botanist, taught him to observe the beauties of the natural world, believing that revelation and natural science were God’s complementary ways of communicating his love for mankind. He was killed in a rockfall while exploring above Loch Ness.

Second snort (some seats always have generated more casework):

He found the workload as MP for Tower Hamlets unmanageable, and escaped to a smaller constituency, Aberdeen South, in 1885.

The smile (I've always had a weakness for donnish humour):

Bryce’s book offered a comprehensive analysis of American political institutions, including state legislatures and political parties, and was founded on much reading and many interviews with Americans (Stefan Collini once suggested that his "genius largely consisted in an infinite capacity for taking trains.")

This is a good opportunity to recommend again Parry's recent short book Liberalism, which I reviewed for Liberator last year. 

He argues that we should not see thinkers like T.H. Green and L.T. Hobhouse as staking out a new path, which the Liberal Party then followed. Rather, they were attempting to systematise and justify what Liberal politicians and journalists were already doing and saying.