OneHourAhead

Written by Madsen Pirie on the Adam Smith Institute blog today:

“Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has a real problem. Last week one of his MPs tabled a bill in Parliament to force pubs and bars to sell wine in small measures only, while one of his party’s MEPs called for a ban on patio heaters.

Greg Mulholland, Lib-Dem health spokesman, wants to make it illegal for bars and pubs to sell wine in anything other than the little 125ml size popular over a decade ago. These were the tiny little glass bowls that didn’t allow the wine’s aromas to develop in the glass. His excuse is that “people don’t realize how much they’re drinking.”

Meanwhile Fiona Hall, Liberal Democrat MEP for the North East, called for the EU Parliament to urge the Commission to ban patio heaters on the grounds that they contribute to global warming. Of course they have a negligible impact; it’s just one of those gesture politics tricks to create whipping boys. The surge in the sale of them is probably down to the government’s ill-conceived smoking ban anyway.

The result is that poor Nick Clegg has seen his party made to look stupid yet again. He needs to take a lesson from Peter Mandelson, who introduced tight controls over what initiatives individual Labour politicians might launch or pontificate about. It made him unpopular, but it made his party able to control its image. Nick Clegg will have to do something similar or risk seeing idiots and charlatans make his party a laughing stock week after week. “

Beyond what you may think of the individual items (Madsen Pirie seems to have misinterpreted Greg Mulholland’s idea - I don’t think he wanted to ban larger glasses, did he? - and I can almost see his point although I still think it too much and I wholly fail to see the point in banning patio heaters beyond simple gesture) I think Madsen Pirie really has a point here. The public perception of the party is that we just want to get in the way, that we are no different from Labour in our approach to state interference. If we are serious about doubling the number of MP’s within 10 years and after that government then we have to decide now what is the right course to achieve our aim.

Are we truly liberal? If so then we have to come to terms with the fact that people are free to make their own mistakes. We can produce policy that gives people incentives to behave in a certain way but beyond that surely the vote winner principle for out party should be that we are happy to leave people alone to pursue their own lives - that we will be the only party to admit individuals know better how to live their lives than the state. Conservatives want to tell you what to think, Labour want to tell you what to do, Liberal Democrats want you to think and do for yourself.