On Liberty

Labour won the 2005 General Election on the, admittedly somewhat vacuous slogan of ‘Forward not Back’, but now we learn from Philip Collins that we could go simultaneously forward and back – to the 1906 General Election victory of the Liberals.

In his article in last months Prospect (‘Liberalise or Die’), Collins argues that we should abandon social democracy in favour of liberalism.

He equates social democracy with authoritarianism and makes apparently random claims: where he agrees with a policy (say, being more green or raising inheritance tax), he describes it as ‘liberal’, and if he disagrees (as on tackling childhood obesity or regulating new casinos) he calls it ‘social democratic.

This gets him into a tangle.

Collins is, for example, scathing about the Government’s play strategy. But it is a problem that today the average 10 year old is allowed out to play only100 yards from home compared with 800 yards 30 years ago. This is bad for children’s physical, social and emotional development and if we are to give children back their freedom then it is right to invest more in parks and playgrounds and to bring down road traffic speeds. These are political issues. And ironically, the first person to recognise this was Lloyd George, who said “Play is the child’s first claim on the community”.

The fundamental problem with Collins’ article is that he has a rather limited idea of what freedom is. He says ‘the big political argument is how to ensure people are in control of their lives’. Against the backdrop of global warming and rising commodity prices this may not be right, but, for the sake of argument, let us accept it and ask: what does freedom mean?

Enhancing liberty has a number of dimensions, and conceiving liberty as a means of giving people more control over their lives does not necessarily equate to the sum of unimpeded individual choices. Your choice to open a lap-dancing club may, for example, impinge on my teenage daughter’s freedom to walk safely down the street.

Decisions about the public space are necessarily shared: our aim is to ensure that they are democratised, open and accountable, which is why this government is continuing with its programme of constitutional renewal at the national level and is bringing forward measures for empowerment at local level this summer.

There is far more to freedom than the way we manage public services. An obsession with the mechanism of choice is not the same as enhancing freedom overall. Undoubtedly people do like to have a choice over which hospital they can attend, but they would far rather be free from the strokes and heart attacks which require them to visit hospital. And these are neither inevitable nor acts of God.

We still have significant health inequalities in this country. As Alan Johnson pointed out last week, a man living in Kensington and Chelsea will on average live ten years longer than a man living in Manchester, and for every stop on the Jubilee line from Westminster to Canning Town, life expectancy goes down by one year.

Tackling this involves public health measures to reduce smoking and childhood obesity. Controlling the advertising of unhealthy food during children’s television may look different from the great Victorian engineering feats of building sewage systems or introducing controls on child labour, but it comes from the same tradition of taking collective action for the public good and preventing the strong from exploiting the weak.

As Alan Ryan wrote in his Fabian Essay Liberty and Socialism , ‘what I am anxious to do is scotch any suggestion that…we are arguing about sacrificing some or a lot of liberty in return for some or a lot more equality, security, justice etc’.

Liberty is also about enhancing people’s opportunities, and the route is social democratic. This government’s massive programme of investing in education in schools – where the number of children able to read has improved by 26% – in universities – where participation is rising – and in apprenticeships – where employers are being funded to provide 1,200 different skills – is driven by a moral commitment to enable all people to fulfil their potential. What could be more liberal than that?

 

 

An abridged version of this artice appeared in the July 2008 edition of Prospect