'Why I am (probably) not liberal' - Peter Kellner, Journalist, Political Commentator and Founder of YouGov

As Professor Joad used to say on the Brains Trust, (a popular, if somewhat patronising, discussion programme on BBC radio in the 1940’s), it all depends on what you mean by “liberal”. Here are three different ways in which the word has been defined in recent times:

1.       By supporters of the free-market right, to mean maximum economic freedom for businesses and individuals, with the minimum of state spending, intervention and regulation

2.       By civil and human rights activists and social libertarians, to mean the maximum possible personal freedom, especially in regard to sexuality, abortion, drugs, religion, free speech and the rights of defendants

3.       By Americans – by the Right as a term of abuse, by progressives as a badge of pride – to mean federal laws and spending to build a more equal society, and to defend the rights and advance the interests of less well-off Americans

I am definitely a liberal in terms of definition 3, and mainly one in terms of definition 2. I am not a liberal in terms of definition 1. So why do I say that, all in all, I am probably not a liberal?

For a start, I dislike labels whose meaning is either unclear or ambiguous. And in the contest to define “liberal” my sympathies are with the European mainland concept of a philosophy that puts personal autonomy ahead of collective decisions. To me, a thorough-going liberal is someone who wants the state to keep out of both private morality and business decisions.

On that definition, few people are true, 100 per cent Liberals – some libertarians, perhaps, but not many others. Quite a few people are economically liberal and socially conservative (the new Right in Europe and the US); lined against them are those who are economically interventionist and socially liberal (most of Britain’s left, including the Greens).

I belong broadly to the second group – except that I am queasy about taking an absolute position on the rights of defendants accused of terrorism. It’s not that I want them to lose their freedom without a proper trial, or to be convicted on the basis of secret evidence that can’t be tested: we lose the right to call ourselves civilised if we abandon habeas corpus and punish them too readily. But I do believe that we must balance the rights of suspects and the rights of the potential victims of terrorism – that is, all of us, or society as a whole.

And that is the point, for it has a wider application. Balances must be struck in all kinds of ways between the liberal rights of individuals and the collective rights of society. In strict terms, the minimum wage is an illiberal policy, as it interferes in the freedoms of employers and workers to negotiate pay. So is the ban on smoking in offices, pubs and restaurants. Speed limits curb our right to drive as fast as we like, and taxes curb our right to spend what we want.  Race Relations Acts and the laws of libel and contempt restrict our freedom of speech. As I support the minimum wage, smoking bans, speed limits, generous, tax-funded state provision, and some checks on what we can say in public, I am reluctant to claim to be a liberal.

Now, there are many people, including good friends of mine, who share these views and insist that they are good liberals. Their argument, as I understand it, is that liberalism has never been a purist doctrine, and that it is perfectly happy with restrictions on personal liberty where the benefits of collectively agreed restrictions outweigh the virtues of individual freedom.

The trouble is that this approach dilutes the definition of liberalism so much that it embraces virtually everyone except crooks, sociopaths and some recent bankers. Who, from the Thatcherite Right to Old Labour’s left-wing, would NOT defend their policies in terms of finding the right balance between personal freedom and collective rules? They would differ sharply about WHERE to strike that balance but not about the FACT that a balance is needed.

If “liberal” is to be saved from being diluted to death, it must revert to its proper, indeed noble, concept of a philosophy that values individual liberty above all else.  I want a society in which there are plenty of such liberals, perpetually questioning arguments for collective rules and challenging accretions of state (and, indeed, private) power.  They are vital irritants, ensuring that the proper quest for balance does not tip into authoritarianism.  However, I believe that many of the biggest problems we face today – from poverty to climate change – require collective action. So while I want liberals to question everything the state does, to probe the motives and measures of every government minister and corporate mogul, and generally kick up a fuss, I don’t actually want them in charge.

And if I don’t want them in charge, I can’t really call myself one of them.

Peter Kellner's YouGov blog

'Why I am Liberal' - Cathy Galvin, Journalist

Soon a For Sale board will appear outside the 1930’s house where I grew up in Coventry. It’s difficult to know how to value a home. To my father, who died last year, the house was his legacy to my sister and I. Sitting in the back room after tea once a week, we would watch as he opened a little red tin and divided his weekly pay-packet from the tractor factory where he worked in to different compartments: building society, bills, food, clothes, holiday.  Occasionally, when he was on strike, the little tin lay empty but it triumphed in the end: he clocked in and out of the factory and the bills were paid. The house is now ours. Almost.

Leave its bay-window behind, walk for fifteen minutes and you confront the architectural scars of the City Centre - what remains of a great medieval metropolis shattered when two-thirds of its buildings disappeared in the blitz, stitched bluntly back together with 1950’s modernist bravado. It’s difficult to know how to value a city. This blend of old and new was once thrilling to those who flooded in to work in the booming factories.  After the horrors of two world wars, it represented a dignified post-war settlement. “The principle of Liberalism is trust in the people, qualified by prudence, “, the great Liberal Prime-Minister Gladstone offered in 1885. In Coventry, the decent liberal values of hard-work and egalitarianism finally rose, phoenix-like, from the indecent ashes of war. Almost.

While my Dad was counting his pennies, I’d either be doing my homework or day-dreaming. It’s difficult to know how to value a culture. I read the Daily Mirror. I read the New Statesman. I read poetry. I knew from family history the tyranny of the English oppression of the Irish, the English oppression of its own working-class. “Get yourself an education, then you can go and clean toilets”, was the puzzling mantra from my Irish maternal line. My Mum was, indeed, a cleaner. Her money added a few nicer touches to the house. My Dad was wary about all this aspiration. Working wasn’t about gaining materially, it was about buying a life safe from both the authorities and the vagaries of market forces. He sensed it could all disappear so easily.  Yet I believed in an inevitable political and social progress.  We had peace and democracy. My sister and I would be the first in our family to study at university. Children, fulfilling work, sexual freedom, economic independence. I had it all, as would my daughters. Almost.  

As the For Sale board goes up, I have to wonder. What do we own in the end, those of us whose parents were allowed the promise of a better life while it was convenient to offer it to them? Those whose grandparents were shovelled in to a mass grave when Coventry was bombed? This city is worth little now that its industry has gone and the semi-detached houses even less.  My progress allowed me a place as a senior editor at The Sunday Times for many years but now I am redundant, I know how fragile that was.  I was not entitled.

For Sale boards dot our collective consciousness: we, who thought we owned the benefits of houses, hospitals, schools and universities, are invited to sell up before things get even worse but someone else is benefitting from what we are giving away.  My place in the world appeared to come from the top-down: governments embracing liberal values ensured the likes of us were given the security of the welfare state, pensions and work. In fact, it came from the bottom-up: men and women fighting for generations for the right to a decent wage and the vote.

Liberalism has to be more than a luxury bestowed with largesse. It is freedom from debt and bondage. It is guaranteed by the people, not the market or the state. In our little semi, it tasted sweet. Now my children must buy debt simply to be educated. Is some kind of bondage to a floundering economic next? Their legacy, should they choose it, is the knowledge that neither austerity nor progress are inevitable and that everything must be fought for.  As early as 1839, the workers who published The Chartist Circular in Glasgow stated this:  “For a nation to love liberty, it is sufficient that she knows it; and to be free, it is sufficient that she wills it. “

Let’s pause for a moment and relish those thoughts, before we sell anything else. 

Cathy Galvin's Twitter