Gladstone, Chamberlain, the New Liberals and the Orange Book

Richard Grayson, Charles Kennedy's former speechwriter (and now a lecture at Goldsmiths) has an interesting commentary piece in today's Independent (and for once, the Indy hasn't made it subscriber-only). He gives short shrift to those -both within and outside the party - who seem to think The Orange Book is a sign of 'civil war' in the Liberal Democrats:

There is a good case for being relaxed about The Orange Book. Its critics might reflect that parties of government are broad churches. Labour still includes both Tony Blair and Tony Benn. Edward Heath remained in Margaret Thatcher's party. Roy Jenkins, knowing all about the sectarianism of the left, warned against being a "right, tight little party": such parties do not govern. That sage advice is not always heeded by Liberal Democrat activists.

He then goes on to discuss how the Liberal Democrats need to be able to bring the strands of policy into one big idea that will help to explain the party and its aims better to voters:

Crucially, New Liberals did not set an absolute standard about how "big" government should be. Instead, they said that where government existed, it should be as local as possible. Government per se is not wrong, but there is plenty wrong with too much central government. Government can be a place where people come together to promote freedom, if decisions are made more locally.

That distinction is not heard enough from Liberal Democrats. Charles Kennedy has spoken of letting "local communities and the local doctors and local nurses make the decisions". Rather than scrapping government, that means refocusing it to local decision-making. What the Liberal Democrats are seeking to do is reshape government, yet the country doesn't know that. The Liberals did it in 1906; Labour did it in 1945, and the Conservatives did it in 1979. Each party persuaded people that they would revolutionise government. Yet the Liberal Democrats are today often too timid in advocating their new localism.

The thinkers of New Liberalism, and local government radicals such as Joseph Chamberlain, offer a guide for the future. An active government role in tackling poverty through a mixture of state-run redistribution and local initiatives (often voluntary) where possible is an attractive option. Britain's political tragedy is that social liberalism was sidelined as the Liberal Party fell apart. Now that we have three-party politics, the country has a second chance to choose social liberalism. But it can happen only if the Liberal Democrats persuade people that a change of government will mean a real change in the way the country is governed.

I haven't had time to do much more than skim through The Orange Book so far (I want to finish Martin Rees' Our Final Century first) but it seems as though it contains some interesting policy suggestions, in line with what Grayson suggests. Of course, going by media reports, it's amde to sound like David Laws' personal manifesto for privatising the NHS so he can then use banned medical technologies to turn himself into Margaret Thatcher. As far as I can see so far, that's just one chapter of a ten chapter book.

So, in order to try and do my bit to raise awareness of the other nine chapters of the book, as I read it I'm going to do a kind of summary/review of each one as I go along and hopefully provoke some discussion of the issues in the comments section. It's similar to what Chris Bertram did with Libertarianism and Inequality on Crooked Timber last year, though probably not with the same intellectual rigour or author participation. Hopefully, I'll have the first post on Chapter 1 (the Introduction's just a summary of the book, and not really of much interest in itself) up by Wednesday. Given that several of my readers probably picked up copies in Bournemouth last week, they should have had the chance to recover from Conference and start reading by then.