I joined the Liberal Party in 1963 and have paid my membership fees, often grudgingly, since. I stood for parliament in 1966, lost, stood for the old Greater London Council, lost, campaigned for worthy causes, sometimes won, sometimes lost. My 12-year-old son, a reluctant leafleteer, once asked me, “Dad, why don’t you try something else?”
“Because,” I replied, coining a phrase: “there is no alternative.”
That was 50 years ago. Now, at the age of 88, I owe him a fuller explanation. I grew up during the war in a large flat with evacuees. It was a lively mixture. My parents did not discourage politics and religion at the dinner table, quite the reverse. I was a mere child, and usually kept quiet, but they argued from all points of view – communist to imperialist – but went to bed with the agreement that we must do better next time, when the war was over, which meant not neo-liberalism, the Thatcherite variant, but liberalism.
The Beveridge report
The frequent topic of discussion was the Beveridge report, written by Liberal MP William Beveridge, and his wife Janet, and published by the national government in December 1942. It was widely read across the country and described by the Daily Telegraph as “the consummation of the revolution begun by David Lloyd-George in 1911”; namely, old age pensions.
Beveridge proposed that a similar level of support should be provided for other areas of need. His welfare state aimed to conquer the five evils of want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness. During the war, there was cross-party agreement. The 1944 Butler Act raised the age of free secondary education to fifteen. The National Health Service, brought in by Labour, and the post-war blocks of flats ‘to get rid of the slums’ were all inspired by a similar vision.
The parties, however, did not agree on how this ‘prosperous future’ should be delivered. Churchill’s Tories wanted to release the ‘energy of the British people’ by freeing up the markets. Labour wanted more state control. Their post-war government embarked upon a programme of nationalising the ‘commanding heights’ (clause IV) of British industry.
Beveridge – and the Liberal Party – argued that the welfare state should be free from sectional interests and that the social security “must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual”, the ‘mixed economy’. The leading theorist on how such an economy should be delivered and managed was another Liberal, John Maynard Keynes, who died in 1946.
The influence of Keynes
He had a world-wide reputation. During the 1930s, he opposed the traditionalists by arguing that, during a recession, the government should intervene with a programme of public works, funded (if necessary) by borrowing. He believed in balancing the books, eventually, but not at the cost of lives wasted in poverty and unemployment.
Keynes’ General Theory of Unemployment, Interest and Money (1936) was an unlikely best-seller. It provided the economic theory behind Roosevelt’s New Deal, the post-war Marshall Plan for Europe and Germany’s Wirtschaftwunder, its economic miracle. He helped to frame the Bretton Woods Agreement, which established the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
He was a long-standing friend of Jean Monnet, the architect of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), and thus the European Economic Community (EEC), the EC and EU. Keynes, Monnet, and others belonged to a group of liberal thinkers, who believed that peace in Europe could only be achieved through economic and social co-operation. The London School of Economics – its first director was William Beveridge – was a major think-tank.
Reignited: liberalism claims the centre ground?
In Britain, however, the visions of Beveridge and Keynes had to be filtered through an antique political system, financed by ‘sectional interests’, and wedded to a 19th-century world view. The Conservatives still boasted of ‘freedom’ as if they owned the stuff, while the Labour Party claimed to represent the working classes, the voice of the Lumpenproletariat, the Marxist term for the ignorant masses. The British electoral process was designed to be confrontational, capital v labour, rulers v rebels, as if these distinctions were rooted in our way of life.
Both parties nonetheless sought the centre ground. Labour under Blair abandoned clause IV and the Conservatives gave up their hopes to privatise the NHS. What was meant by the ‘centre ground’? Was it some amorphous compromise between left and right? That never seemed to work. Instead, both parties returned to the liberal vision from the 1940s, the mixed economy and the welfare state. The contest was between which of the two handled them better.
An alternative to the mainstream?
Unfortunately, neither party shared the same intellectual tradition. When Beveridge wrote of “social progress”, he was not thinking solely of industrial growth or social equality. He wanted us to live healthier, better educated and more fulfilled lives. Keynes was a pioneer of the Arts Council; and both supported the independence of the BBC. Environmental protection was another liberal cause. I duly included it in my leaflet for Ealing North in 1966, at a time when Harold Wilson was promising to rejuvenate Britain through the “white heat of technology”.
Labour and the Conservatives periodically went nuts over technology. When in doubt, they turned to Jules Verne to save them. Yes, we needed an independent space programme. Yes, we needed long-range ballistic missiles. Yes, we must become the next Silicon Valley. When in the 1980s, however, Conservatives were faced with the prospect of installing broadband for a wired-up Britain, they left the decision to market forces. Parts of the country are still waiting.
When the physical sciences let them down, the behavioural ones took over. Democracy as a game was transformed by information management. Local hustings were consigned to the outer fringes. They were replaced by focus groups and polling; and then, when the information from other sources had been gathered, such as from sales and credit cards, it became possible to construct algorithms of human behaviour, district by district, ward by ward.
Politics entered the supermarket age. With modern marketing skills and a loose use of language, it was possible to find out what the punters wanted and promise to give it to them. Some campaigns became legendary. There were slogans that resonated – ‘Take Back Control’, ‘Make America Great Again’ – until some members of the public started to suspect that they were being taken for a ride. A few were better prepared, the liberals.
Popper’s liberalism
During the 1930s, the heyday of modernity, a colleague of Beveridge at the LSE named Karl Popper raised questions about the scientific method. In The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) he argued that a scientific hypothesis was valid up to the point when it could be proved wrong.
There were no absolute truths, only choices and preferences, a principle that applied as much to politics as it did to science. Democracies that reflected the differences of opinion were a more robust form of government than the alternatives in autocracies and theocracies. “All life,” he declared, “is problem solving”. He encouraged scepticism. He was a liberal.
The Open Society and its Enemies, which Popper published after the war in 1945, matched fascism and communism as equally absurd extremes. They could only cause misery and hardship by seeking to suppress the moral and aesthetic choices that all individuals should be free to make. Diversity of opinion, expressed through proportional representation, was not an obstacle to sturdy government. It was the way in which better decisions should be taken.
Keynes, Beveridge, and Popper were guardians of the liberal tradition, the successors to Lloyd-George, William Gladstone, and John Stuart Mill. There are no alternatives.
