Why I am (or am not) liberal....

This is the question we want you - whoever you are, whatever your political affiliation, and wherever you're from - to answer. Tell us why and how you are liberal. Tell us why you are not liberal - perhaps there are flaws in liberal values that make you uneasy? It's up to you and we'd love to hear from you.


All submissions will be published on this blog, with a selection being published in a book in late 2012/early 2013. Please send your thoughts to louisa.yates@gladlib.org, with either 'Why I am liberal' or 'Why I am not liberal' in the subject line.

'Why I am liberal' - Nicholas Murray, Biographer and Publisher at Rack Press

It must be, after the experience of this Coalition government, a small “l” but the word, often used as a term of disparagement in the United States, is one that still resonates in Europe where it is almost always a term of praise. 

It is the spirit which animates, in Gladstone’s century, works like John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy and its work is still not done because its antithesis – authoritarianism, hierarchy, power-worship, is still very much with us.

It is in two areas that liberalism matters to me (since I have little interest in economics): freedom of thought and freedom to live in the way one wishes.  The liberal wants to permit, to allow, to grant freedom, believing that the very concept of toleration is in itself a social, moral and intellectual good.  Pluralism, toleration, multiplicity, are, by contrast, what the illiberal mind finds odious.  The authoritarian or the dictator is stirred by visceral feelings of hatred, resentment, anger at the proliferation of what it cannot control. The illiberal mind wants there to be only one way: its way.

Liberalism, by contrast, wants to see freedom, diversity, multiplicity, the absence of unnecessary constraint.  It trusts people to work out their own salvation.  The illiberal mind, often fuelled by religious or sectarian or race hatred is maddened by the prospect of free minds exercising themselves according to their own principles and values.  The dictator is for this reason a ridiculous figure, a strutting absurdity who knows nothing beyond the limits of his or her own mind.

Liberalism is tolerant.  It does not see any virtue in imposing only one way, in declaring some lifestyles, preferences, beliefs, practices to be impermissible.  Liberalism, however, is weak – it can be seen to vacillate – when it merely tolerates and does not engage with what it knows to be wrong.  Some beliefs and practices must be challenged and contested, but not with illiberal weapons of repression.  Open debate, vigorous advocacy, dissent, challenge, dialogue are the tools of liberalism.  Censorship, bullying, suppression, closure of debate, are the tools of its enemies.

I am a liberal because I want to live in a free society and live in my own way, in so far as this is compatible with social responsibility and respect for others.  I am a liberal because I believe in human freedom, in the fathomless resources and creativity of the human spirit when it is unconstrained and can follow the laws of its own being.  To be free is to be fully human.

Nicholas Murray's blog

Nicholas Murray's website

'Defining Liberalism' - Alan Durant, Author and Poet

My main area of interest in defining liberalism is in the role education – in a wide sense, not just the curriculum – plays now and in the future. How will we in the books we write, the lessons we teach and the examples we set encourage and inspire a new generation of compassionate, independent-minded liberal thinkers – men like Gladstone, not monsters like Anders Breivik? I first came across William Gladstone as part of my A level history course, but I was a teenager, he a Victorian and the teaching uninspiring so then he passed me by. Like him, however, I have a Christian faith (followed with fluctuating intensity since adolescence) and my political and ethical views have always been liberal.

I write for and work with children of all ages – from toddlers to teenagers – often in a multi-racial context. Schools are a microcosm of society and, at a time when radicalism of the young is rife, it is essential that the liberal voice should be heard – particularly in the light of recent events around the country and at a time when political Liberalism in this country appears to have lost its way. In a world in which religious conflicts have become more acute and intransigent and fundamentalist terrorism ubiquitous, traditional liberal values such as tolerance, empathy and the willingness to listen to the views of others without prejudice, are of greater importance than ever, but also increasingly at threat. Young people need to see that liberalism is alive and (vigorously) kicking.

Alan Durant's website 

'(Re)defining Liberal Values' - Stella Duffy, Novelist

I write this from Brixton, the morning after looters smashed in my local shop windows. The morning after ‘Gay’s the Word’ was the only shop in its street to suffer violence. The morning after a weekend of sadness for London. I see young (mostly) men attacking property in their own neighbourhoods. I see our politicians on holiday and not coming home to address the problems. I see that their neighbourhoods are well away from any signs of unrest.

I am a white, living-middle-class, raised-working-class, Labour-voting, feminist, lesbian, woman. And not one of these labels even begins to speak for me.

I want change and an equitable society, and I don’t want a violent revolution to get there. I see no evidence that any revolution anywhere has ever worked.

I believe in dialogue and discussion and hope, and I don’t care if that sounds airy-fairy or hippy, I care that we get on with talking to each other and making a difference. I do that by being out to a group of 100+ fourteen-year-olds in Enfield when I taught writing for my niece’s boyfriend’s school. I do that by working with a local community for a pre-Olympics arts project on the south London council estate where I was born. I do that by speaking out, sometimes to my own detriment, always as honestly as possible.

I don’t have an academic take on liberal values – I do have heartfelt commitment to positive change and hope. I believe they are the same thing.

Stella Duffy's blog

'Redefining Liberalism' - Gill McEvoy, Poet

As a poet I know the sustaining and enriching quality of closeness to the natural world. I try to observe nature as it is, cruel but also awe-inspiring in its inter-related balance. Everything depends on everything else, as we do. Take away a plant, you take away an insect, take away an insect you remove a bird, etc. Agricultural practice no longer curates our world but exploits it. In my writing I try, as the poet Charles Tomlinson does, to harvest my observations to create poems that draw the reader into the grace, delight and reality of the natural world. Nature is itself, and in its extraordinary and delicate balance I see the hand of God. For me liberal values towards peace, tolerance and dignity begin with cherishing and respecting our planet.

            We have cut ourselves off from our spiritual roots by damaging in irreparable ways the very earth on which our lives depend. Without a spiritual sense we cannot live in the ‘peace and dignity’ that Gladstone advocated in his 1850 speech on the Don Pacifico affair. Without spiritual depth it is hard for us to be tolerant, to respect the rights of others to be who they are, to live in peace and dignity. In the Big Brother world we now inhabit where phones, computers can be hacked, Google has its satellite eye on us, surveillance cameras are everywhere, it is not surprising that material preoccupations, the least sustaining aspects of life, have taken the place of spiritual reflection.

Poetry Workshops with Poem Catchers

Gill's blog

'Why I am (or am not) liberal...'

This is the question that we want you - whoever you are, whatever your political affiliation, and wherever you're from - to answer. Tell us why and how you are liberal. Tell us why you are not liberal. It's up to you and we'd love to hear from you.

All submissions will be published on this blog. Please send your thoughts to louisa.yates@gladlib.org, with either 'Why I am liberal' or 'Why I am not liberal' in the subject line.

'Redefining Liberal Values' - Ian Parks, Poet and Writing Fellow at De Montfort University, Leicester

As a poet, I see myself as embracing liberal values in the broadest sense. I believe that poetry is, in itself, a form of liberal expression, in that it can articulate ideas of freedom, social equality, respect for diversity, and a celebration of the human spirit, in a language that has the potential to be non-political in the narrowest sense. My poems have appeared regularly in The Liberal magazine along with articles dealing with contemporary issues and I feel very strongly that poetry has a social function to perform at the beginning of the twenty-first century. At a time when the language of liberalism is being appropriated by both the marketplace and the political elite, poetry has the qualities that can help restore that language to its proper place, encouraging as it does receptiveness and open-mindedness on the part of the reader. I also feel that poetry appeals with the best in the human spirit. An admirer of the poetry of W. H. Auden, I would, however, strongly disagree with his conclusion that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Poetry, I think, has the potential to work powerfully in the political sphere although its trajectory might not be easy to trace. I feel that poetry has a part to play in an ongoing debate about what it means to be human, to participate in a free and open society, to appeal to the generosity of spirit which is so firmly rooted in the Liberal Tradition. It has a part to play also, I believe, in the redefining of liberal values.