Liberal Conspiracy » Andrew Hickey

Vote Liberal Democrat

Andrew Hickey — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 09:00:18 +0000

From Hagley Road to Ladywood’s pre-election series.

A lot of people don’t get the Liberal Democrats.

I think this is to do with the fact that we’re portrayed in the media (and, indeed, used to portray ourselves) as centrists, which given that the parties of the ‘left’ and ‘right’ in the UK are both right-wing authoritarian corporatist parties with little but brand names to distinguish them, leads people to dismiss us without really bothering to investigate what we stand for.

The fact is, the Liberal Democrats are a fundamentally different kind of party to Labour and the Conservatives. Not because of our policies – though these do differ substantially from those parties – but because of our philosophy. I don’t have much space, so I’ll give two examples.

The first is this, from our constitution, printed on the membership card of every member:

“the Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society, in which we seek to balance the fundamental values of liberty, equality and community, in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity”.

Is this something you can really imagine ‘New’ Labour or the Tories saying? In particular, note the bit about conformity. Other ideologies may well accept, say, bisexual or trans people, because they believe in fairness – and I do not want, at all, to slight the very real commitments to equality that have been made by member of other parties. But only liberalism as an ideology sees non-conformity as an actual good, as something to be celebrated (and not in a ‘celebrating diversity’ way, but as the core of our beliefs) rather than tolerated.

Alex Wilcock once spent some time coming up with alternative slogans for the Lib Dems. My favourite was “If you want to tell the Daily Mail to fuck off, vote Lib Dem”.

We believe in freedom, not just the ‘freedom of choice’ the major parties talk about, but real freedom – including the freedom to do things we may personally find distasteful. We fought against the recent criminalisation of ‘extreme pornography’, for example, not because we as a party find that sort of thing of interest, but because finding something a bit icky is not actually a good reason to criminalise it.

Also, we’re the only major party that doesn’t want power.

That may sound like an odd claim, but it’s literally true. The Liberal Democrats support a form of proportional representation called ‘multi-member STV’. I don’t have space for the details, but if it was brought in in Westminster it would lead to power being shared between a lot of smaller parties co-operating, rather than alternating between two big near-identical parties as today.

The Tories and Labour talk about change and reform, but will never reform the system that keeps them in power. Were the Lib Dems to get into power, we would make sure it never happens again. That’s why you should vote for us.

TODAY’S TOP STORIES / 23rd April

Andrew Hickey — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:04:21 +0000

BUDGET – NEW 50% TAX RATE

Nationwide
Opposition label Budget ‘fantasy’
MPs expenses plan rejected by Tories and Lib Dems
Ministers to announce CO2 plans
Campaigners call for regulation of Facebook racists

International
Hundreds of Sri Lankans killed in no-fire zone
Financier at centre of US mortgage crisis found hanged
ANC take lead in election count
Bush aides approved torture, says report

DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Andrew Hickey

Mark Steel on institutionalised violence in the police.

Several people have posted about the Budget, including Darrel at the Social Liberal Forum who sees ‘Labour’s swansong’ as an opportunity for the Liberal Democrats, Charlotte Gore who considers it “tough on wealth, tough on the causes of wealth”, and Anton Vowl who has a budget-day drinking game.

Costigan Quist, on the ‘terror suspects’ who were uncharged but deported anyway.

On the same subject Septicisle thinks the Government, not the people, should be in terror.

Dorian at postmodernbarney on the conflict between wanting to denounce homophobia in the media and wanting to see good-looking men on TV.

And I have some very strong opinions about recent posts on this site.

And finally Basic Instructions tells us how to save the Earth, or browse through previous Netcasts

(ps. Apologies for the lateness of this netcast – I’ve been away from the internets. Aaron)

Why I am not a Libertarian

Andrew Hickey — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 23:02:55 +0000

Recently, there appears to have been an influx into the Liberal Democrats of Libertarians. This is typified by the members of ‘Liberal Vision‘, which is in turn part of a Tory organisation called ‘progressive voice’ (essentially a bunch of Objectivists).

Now, in many ways I agree with libertarians on many subjects – which is, of course, why we can be in the same party – I am all for more personal freedom, for a lack of government interference in people’s lives, for the restoration of recently-lost civil liberties and so on. But libertarians seem, to me, to have two big holes in their thinking, both of which are summed up by some recent comments by Nick in this thread on Liberal Conspiracy (scroll down).

‘Nick’ is following the libertarian ‘party line’ almost exactly: the government should not interfere with the workings of the market when companies are failing. Not only should they not spend any money bailing out the companies (a reasonable, debatable position) or on retraining the workers so they can get jobs elsewhere (a much less reasonable position in my view) – they should not even pay unemployment benefit to the people who lose their jobs, because the money would be better allocated by the market.

Now, there are two distinct errors here.

The first, and less important, is the one that pretty much every ‘free market’ advocating politician of whatever stripe for the last thirty years has fallen into – the belief that markets will always guarantee the most efficient allocation of resources. People who know a little about economics can fall into this trap, because free-market economists define ‘efficiency’, tautologically, as the state where everyone has the maximum possible without anyone else having any of their property taken from them – in other words, as ‘that state which a market will produce’.

However, ‘efficiency’ in this context is merely a local optimum, not an overall optimum. As an example, suppose that you, O Hypothetical Reader, have a pound – a whole shiny pound all to yourself. And I have nothing. Now, assuming you don’t want to just give me your money, that’s the most efficient distribution of the money possible.

But suppose that, while you don’t want to give me your money, you were forced to, and I invested the money and made ten pounds, of which I was forced to give you five. Instantly, we have *both* benefited, substantially, even though this is ‘less efficient’ in market terms.

Now, in this hypothetical situation, you would of course either just give me the money or invest it yourself. But in a real life situation involving billions of pounds in the pockets of millions of people, it can’t be guaranteed that the equivalent would happen.

A market is a very good way of ensuring, not that the economy always gets more efficient or runs at peak efficiency, for the common understanding of the word efficiency as opposed to the economists’ understanding, but rather that the economy always moves into the most efficient adjacent position in the economic phase space. These are very similar things, but they can be crucially different.

As an analogy imagine a ball rolling downhill. Now, normally, that ball will continue down until it reaches the bottom of the hill. But imagine a little dip in the hill halfway down. The ball rests there, because to go any further down it would first have to go up. That kind of situation, economically, is when it makes sense for government intervention. Sometimes a mass of people acting independently do not come up with the most efficient solution, and a change, even an arbitrary one, needs to be made to free the ball from the rut.

As an example, we need laws stating that you should only drive on one side of the road. The choice of which side is arbitrary, but not having those laws would cause infinitely more problems than the tiny amount of personal freedom given up.

Liberal v Libertarian
I think the main defining characteristic of a liberal – as opposed to a libertarian – is that a liberal recognises the need for such measures but thinks they should be as few and as minimal as possible.

However, I have left the more important error to last, which is simply this – who says ‘efficiency’ of whatever kind is the thing we need most? For a long time the right have predetermined the terms of the debate by talking about ‘economic efficiency’ and ‘modernisation’. These are probably good things, overall, but are they the be-all and end-all? I think not.

Libertarians almost all seem to believe that they have achieved everything in life entirely by themselves, having struggled against mighty odds and overwhelming enemies to become moderately successful computer programmers, despite the horrible disadvantages of being born white, English-speaking heterosexual males in middle-class families.

Their thought is ultimately a selfish one: “I did this, so anyone else can, and I had no help so I won’t help anyone else.”

I, on the other hand, have experienced poverty. I’ve never been at the lowest possible point, but the few months when I had to support my now-wife and myself on one person’s benefits were unpleasant, to say the least. So now I’m in a position where I’m working for a well-known company, earning a good income, doing a job I enjoy, I feel not only an obligation to society to pay back what I’ve taken (for I couldn’t have got this job without help both from individuals and from government institutions), but a profound *need* within myself to make sure that no-one else should have to dig around for half an hour to find twenty pence for a pack of custard creme biscuits which will be their only meal of the day…

People are inefficient, messy things. There is no possible rational justification for supporting the continued existence of the human race, let alone helping individual members of it.

But anyone who would gladly see tens of thousands of people jobless and with no source of income, either in the name of keeping a few extra pence a week in their own pocket or in the name of a heartless ‘efficiency’ has so little compassion in their heart, so little empathy, that I can’t even begin to imagine a common frame of reference for discussion, despite many surface similarities in our philosophies.

Liberals should be fighting Tories, not Labour

Andrew Hickey — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 07:19:04 +0000

I am going to make a prediction – the Liberal Democrats are going to lose the next election.

Now, this may not strike you as one of the great feats of prognostication. The Liberal Democrats have never won an election and the Liberals last won an election before the first world war. Even though in the council elections and the Henley by-election we came in second place, I don’t think there’s a single person in the country who actually believes we’re going to win a General Election in the near future.

But I don’t mean we’re not going to gain the majority of seats; I mean we’re actively working against our own interests. The decisions being made are going to actively damage the party – and, more importantly, damage the chances of getting some of our principles put into practice.

The important thing to note about the next election is that Labour are going to lose. A miracle might happen and they might scrape a single-digit majority, but that’s now a best-case scenario for them.

So why the hell are we cosying up to the Tories with things like not opposing David Davies’ bid for re-election in one of our key marginals? Why are we putting *any energy at all* into fighting Labour?

Any close Labour/Lib Dem race is going to go to us in the next election anyway. We should – of course – continue to hammer home our opposition to the increasingly draconian and ineffective ‘anti-terrorist’ measures the government brings in, the growing inequality between rich and poor, the lack of movement on environmental issues and so on and so on. But that’s a matter for grassroots efforts to prevent those things from being brought in, not for electoral strategy.

When it comes to the election the people we’re going to have to worry about are the Tories. They’re the ones we’re not, at present, going to be able to beat in marginals. They’re the ones where we’re going to have a fight on our hands.

No cosying up to the Tories
I suspect the current strategy is an attempt to create a Blair-style ‘big tent’ against an unpopular government. Cosy up to the Tories and help them take down big bad Brown. But this will do us no good for a variety of reasons:

Firstly, the Tories are almost certainly going to win anyway – they don’t need our help.

Secondly, a lot of Liberals (myself included) would rather see Labour stay in than see another Conservative government. I don’t *want* either, but given a choice between the two (about as appealing as a choice between testicular cancer and multiple sclerosis) I would very reluctantly choose Labour. In fact, were the party ever to enter into any kind of formal pact with the Tories I would have to leave the party – I couldn’t in all conscience remain in a party that was allied to the party that gave us the poll tax, the sus laws and the destruction of the unions amongst other horrors.

Third, whoever we choose to ally ourselves with, it’s in the best interests of the Liberal Democrats – and, I believe, of the country, for unrelated reasons – to have a government with as small a majority as possible. Fighting Labour while ignoring the Tories’ attempts to win over the Guardian readers seems designed to increase the Conservatives’ majority.

And most importantly of all, there has to be a clear alternative for voters. If we let the Tories’ attempts to present themselves as fluffy liberals go unchallenged, and keep attacking Labour, then we end up with three parties that are all representing themselves the same way – Thatcherism with a friendly face – with the real policy differences going unnoticed. The dissatisfied Labour voters won’t go to us if they think we’re siding with the Tories – rather, some of them will go to the Greens or whatever name the SWP’s ‘coalition’ are going under today (not in itself a bad thing – in a PR system I’d like to see an increased representation of the fringe parties), and a lot of them will, as we saw yesterday, go to the BNP.

The nasty party
When the fucking *NAZIS* are getting more votes than Labour, it’s maybe not a good time to be attacking Labour, and maybe we should concentrate on fighting the people who’ll be our real opponents in the next election (and, indeed, on fighting Nazi scum).

We can’t allow the Tories to position themselves as defenders of liberty – their own record suggests otherwise. The party of Michael Howard, Ann Widdecombe, Norman Tebbit and Nadine Dorries is not the party of freedom. We can’t allow people like David Davies to represent themselves as civil libertarians when they vote against gay rights and for hanging.

We need to highlight the splits in the Tories and the fact that most of the parliamentary party are hardline ultra-right-wingers. Some sort of ‘vote blue, get Nadine‘ campaign.

We also need to stop the move in the party towards ‘modernisation’ which seems to mean moving to the right-wing. We have two Conservative parties – if we want the electorate to have a choice, and avoid the horrifying prospect of a BNP MP, then we need to present a real alternative.

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An edited version of this was first posted on Andrew’s LiveJournal.

Liberal Conspiracy » Andrew Hickey

Vote Liberal Democrat

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TODAY’S TOP STORIES / 23rd April

Top Stories & Blog Review – Thursday 16th April

Top Stories & Blog Review Thursday April 9th

DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Andrew Hickey

Top Stories and Blog Review Thursday 2nd April

DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Andrew Hickey

Top Stories and Blog Review Wednesday 25th March

Top Stories and Blog Review Wednesday 18th March

Why I am not a Libertarian

Liberals should be fighting Tories, not Labour