Smelling
faintly of brimstone, The Orange Book:
Reclaiming Liberalism has arrived. If you get past the ugly front cover, you
will find that The Orange Book
consists of ten essays by prominent Liberal Democrats and a carefully worded
foreword by Charles Kennedy: Not all of the ideas
are existing party policy, but all are compatible with our Liberal
heritage.
That
heritage is the concern of the first contribution as David Laws looks at the
various strands of liberalism: personal, political, economic and social. He is
particularly interested in economic liberalism and the way that
modern liberals seem embarrassed by it. The reason, I would argue, is
that for most of the twentieth century liberalism was in decline and socialism
was seen as the ideology of the future. It was not surprising that some liberals
concluded that the way to prove that liberalism was still relevant was to show
that it had anticipated socialism or was really a form of socialism too. So it
was that we never mentioned free trade but missed no opportunity to refer to
Keynes and Beveridge. The Conservatives' discovery of free-market economics in
the 1970s only encouraged this trend.
Laws
looks at the party's economic thinking, concluding that economic liberalism
has waxed and waned within the party over the past fifty years, reflecting on
the whole the state of contemporary political debate, rather than long-held and
cherished Liberal convictions". He is particularly good on the Alliance
years: "Liberals and Social Democrats were merely left arguing lamely that
the boundary between the public and private sectors should be left undisturbed,
wherever it happened to be at the time."
Laws
applies his enthusiasm for economic liberalism in a later essay on health,
calling for the replacement of the National Health Service by a national health
insurance scheme. He envisages a combination of public, private and voluntary
providers, with people either choosing to use a state insurance scheme funded by
a health tax on their income or joining an independent scheme. Such is the
status of the NHS that any criticism of it is seen as near blasphemous, yet the
ideas Laws puts forward operate in many Western European states which are every
bit as civilised as Britain and which enjoy better health than we do. Nor is it
ridiculous to ask whether the NHS can continue indefinitely as it is presently
constituted if scientific innovation continues but people remain no keener to
pay higher taxes to fund the resulting increased costs.
Other
essays in The Orange Book will not raise the reader's temperature so much.
Among them, Paul Marshall writes on
pensions, Susan Kramer on using market mechanisms to achieve environmental goals
and Chris Huhne on global governance. In what is in many ways the most
impressive piece in the book, Huhne concludes that globalisation promises great
benefits but that international institutions must be reformed to allow them to
operate effectively in a changed political and economic landscape.
Nick
Clegg will alarm some readers by calling for powers over social and agricultural
policy to be taken from European institutions and restored to national
governments, but in reality his essay marks an advance in the party's thinking
on Europe. Throughout those long years when people made unkind jokes about
telephone boxes and bar stools, the argument that Liberal
members deployed to show that their party was still relevant was that it
had been the first to advocate British membership of the Common Market. And in
many ways we are still refighting the 1975 referendum campaign. We are happier
defending that membership than we are recognising that we have been "in
Europe" for more than 30 years (and are going to remain there) and then
moving on to examine our views about how the European project should be
developing.
Clegg
argues that EU powers have developed in a lopsided way. He asks why the EU
possesses detailed legislation on the design of a buses, the use of seatbelts in
cars and noise levels in the workplace yet "remains invisible as an entity
in the UN, ineffective in promoting peace in the Middle East, toothless in
tackling international crime and terrorism". Being in favour of Europe is
no longer enough: we have to decide what sort of Europe we want. Clegg's
formulation is compelling: "the EU must only act if there is a clear
cross-border issue at stake, or when collective EU action brings obvious
benefits to all member states that they would not be able to secure on their
own".
Vince
Cable also has things to say about Europe, notably that "the CAP is an
economic, environmental and moral disaster". In arguing this he is, of
course, quite correct. It is, though, worth pointing out that British farmers
were being subsidised 30 years before we signed up to the Common Agricultural
Policy. Advocating free trade in agriculture would mean taking on this powerful
interest group whether we were in the EU or not. In any case, Cable's
contribution is not an anti-Europe rant but an appealing exploration of the
tensions between free trade and social justice. He comes to the conclusion that
government intervention often does more harm than good, making trade barriers
seem something akin to the old nuclear arms race they impoverish us all
nations but they do not trust one another sufficiently to do away with them.
Which
brings us to Mark Oaten. His almost tangible ambition gives him an unrivalled
ability to get up the noses of people
in the party, but successful political parties are full of ambitious young men,
so we had better get used to the breed. In any case, though he is a little too
eager to be thought "tough" his essay here is sensible, calling for a
stronger emphasis on education in prison and revealing that 95 per cent of
prisoners need help with basic literacy. This surely suggests there is something
seriously wrong with out schools if young people can emerge unable to read or
write after 11 years of compulsory schooling, and also emphasises the missing
chapter in The Orange Book one on education.
Ed
Davey's essay is easier to disagree with. He calls for liberals to embrace
localism, yet his vision of local government is not attractive. He puts much
emphasis on people's lack of respect for councils, yet where this exists it is
can be put down to badly run bodies or ones run by the left of the Labour Party,
and in both cases people are showing an increasing willingness to vote those
responsible out. Davey wants to see fewer local councillors and to have them
paid a salary, yet he does not consider the danger that this will distance local
politicians from the people they represent and worsen the problem he sets out to
solve.
Though
there is little about it here, Davey is an enthusiast for regional government,
even to the extent of backing John Prescott's version of it. This has little to
do with local accountability members of the new London authority have larger
constituencies than MPs do and much more to do with forcing through
large-scale public projects like housing schemes and
motorways. Local government should be more diverse, more spiky and more local than that.
And
then there is Steve Webb. Webb argues that liberals should not take a
laissez-faire approach to the family, yet his views are not as ground-breaking
as he seems to think. With the exception of a pamphlet I published last year, I
cannot recall any Liberal Democrat questioning the move, rapidly accelerated
under this government, towards more state intervention in family life.
Certainly, none of the 64 references in his essay point the reader towards a
dissident view.
Webb
offers an apocalyptic view: our children are suffering more mental health
problems than ever before, they are
starting school unable to talk or listen, they are turning to drink. What is
strange is that this view is supported only by references to surveys and
magazine articles. As an MP Webb must regularly meet all sorts of people who
work for children, yet nowhere does he mention them. Basing his arguments on
their testimony would have made for a more interesting essay and quite
possibly a very different one too. As it is, his work reads like a collection of
press cuttings; it may be no coincidence, that Webb is the only person in the
book to make his research assistant the joint author of his paper.
The
answer to our predicament, Webb argues, lies in massive state intervention,
delivered through the voluntary sector. He lists a number of schemes with
approval, but it is hard to judge them because we have no direct knowledge of
them. What is more worrying is that there is no sign that Webb has direct
knowledge of them either. Again, he relies upon published references and gives
no sign that he has met the people whose work he is praising. And,
while liberals will favour government support for the voluntary sector,
its essence lies in the personal qualities of those who work in it and its local
nature. Any attempt to roll out a scheme nationally will inevitably tend to
reduce it to a trite formula that fails to reproduce the unique characteristics
that made the original model work.
Somewhere
in Webb's essay is the ghost of a more interesting, more personal contribution.
One senses that he really sees our salvation as lying in a revival of marriage
he spends a couple of pages convincing himself that welfare benefits do not
encourage young women to have babies out of marriage and a greater role for
religion. It is a shame that Webb did not write that other essay, because it
might have offered the beginnings of an interesting critique of free-market
economics. The traditional criticism of it is the Marxist one that capitalism
will impoverish the workers, but we know by now that this is not true. A more
subtle critique is the conservative, communitarian one which sees the free
market as hollowing out important social institutions and acting as more of a
destructive than a creative force.
Webb's
essay as it stands, however, turns our idea of what constitutes virtue on its
head. A healthy society sees it as residing locally in the family and
friendship and in strong local communities and is distrustful of national
government because it is distant and anonymous. To Webb, however, virtue resides
in the state and in the professionals and volunteers whom it licenses, while
families and individuals are weak and morally suspect.
The
best thing about liberal economics is that is trusts the individual citizens.
Socialists see them as dupes of
advertisers and victims of rapacious bosses, but liberals take a more confident
view. Webb risks sneaking this patronising view back into the picture under the
label of "social liberalism". He lends The
Orange Book an authoritarian tone that may remind the reader of Larry
Elliott's observation that the Thatcher years set capital free but left people
more constrained than before.
So
there you have The Orange Book or The Orange
Part. Criticise it by all means, but if you do so from a "radical"
position do please use arguments that go beyond warmed up labourism.