Why Charlotte Henry’s purity test of “real” liberalism is misguided

Charlotte Henry has a curious article on the Total Politics blog, suggesting that Clegg’s speech on a more participatory form of industrial democracy will help us to seperate the “real liberals” from the “SDP-statist-sandal wearers”.

There are several problems with this diagnosis. For one thing, the famed “sandal wearers” and the SDP members are very different people. Indeed, when I joined the party in the mid-90s, the two were at daggers drawn. The “sandal wearers” – a term generally used to describe the aging young liberals “red guard” of the 60s and 70s would cling to their copies of Liberator, openly mocking the “sogs” who had produced their own Reformer (which eventually became the house organ of the Centre for Reform) in response. The two groups could not have been more different; indeed, if anything it was the SDPers – with their support for “the Project” – who were perceived as more rightwing than the basket weaving liberals, the latter with whom I personally identified more closely with at the time. Indeed, the forerunner to Liberal Vision and the Orange Book, Liberal Future, was an odd hodge-podge of SDPers and former pro-Euro Conservatives.

A decade and a half later, the people on both sides of that rather silly schism have moved on. A great many SDPers now identify closely with the what is lazily known as Orange Book tendency as well as the Social Liberal Forum. The people from the liberal wing of the party find themselves on both sides of the debate as well.

But is there a disagreement with them on employee-ownership schemes? I don’t see it. The first Social Liberal Forum Chair Richard Grayson, who is quite proud of his SDP heritage, was especially keen that we take on the task of reviving industrial democracy as a central plank of the Lib Dem platform, and argued to this effect when the party was drawing up its last manifesto (indeed, one of the SLF’s first meetings was on this topic).

Much as I might like to pretend that the more classical liberally inclined members of the party would have a problem with Clegg’s speech, I doubt it very much. I would humbly suggest that this is probably for two reasons: 1) the people Charlotte feels free to take potshots at may be rather more liberal than she assumes and 2) there is probably rather more to unite the party than some of our more factional members like to think.

As David Howarth points out in Reinventing the State, the party is essentially social liberal – the only real dispute between groups like the SLF and the Orange Book tendency is a rather pragmatic one about what method of public service delivery works best (admittedly, this is a debate which can get pretty heated at times; rightly so, given the stakes). There certainly is a fairly deep schism between those who identify with a narrowly defined view of classical liberalism and the rest of the party, but you can count the number of these people on the fingers of one hand.

Calling people out on some kind of “real” liberal purity test is self-destructive at best and claiming employee-ownership is likely to be a sticking point is to fundamentally misunderstand the real debate within the party. Let’s not try to make up disagreements which aren’t there.