OneHourAhead

The ASI blog gives Nick a good write up after yesterday’s speech on tax policy at Policy Exchange:

“In a speech at Policy Exchange yesterday, Nick Clegg said:

When Labour came to power in 1997, the Government took three hundred billion pounds a year in tax. This year the Government will take nearly double that. They take one thousand seven hundred million pounds of our money every single day of the year. That’s more than £18,000 a second.

Indeed – and isn’t that a great way to put it? The whole speech is pretty interesting actually, as it marks a definite departure from the tax and spend, social democrat stance of the party – which characterized its last two general election campaigns – and a shift towards old-fashioned liberalism. Clegg says he wants to break the consensus on ever-higher spending and claims he ” would not be interested in spending a single penny of people’s money unless I knew it was going to give a greater benefit than leaving it in their pockets”. Which is excellent.

But while I don’t doubt Clegg’s conviction – it’s always been clear that he is much more free market than most Lib Dem activists – I suspect this speech is more the result of a political realization than an economic one. The Lib Dems know that most of their key election battles in 2010 are going to be against the Conservatives, and are positioning themselves accordingly.

In either case, this is good news for British politics. When the Lib Dems position themselves on the left, it drags the centre of political gravity in that direction, pulling the terms of debate with it. Hopefully the Lib Dems’ explicit embrace of freer markets, lower taxes and greater decentralization will have the opposite effect.”

The last paragraph is telling.  It suggests that we have the power to set the narrative with whichever way we swing.  Not entirely sure this is true but it should show that we should always look to set our own agenda and then let the other two parties follow.

He has been a bit quiet recently but these two quotes from Chris Huhne show why he and Liberalism are effing brilliant.

On Labour ignoring the advice  on the classification of Cannabis:

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said that, as its advice had been disregarded, ministers should disband the advisory council of experts and replace it with an advisory council of “tabloid newspaper editors”. BBC News

and on Boris, the new oh-so-liberal Conservative Mayor of London banning alcohol on public transport and then the Government doing possibly one of the dumbest things ever and following suit nationwide: 

Liberal Democrat spokesman Chris Huhne said: “A drinks ban on all public transport including long-distance rail would be completely over the top, widely ignored and impossible to enforce.

“This would be the nanny state gone mad. Ordinary passengers should not be punished for the misbehaviour of a minority.” Daily Mail

HT: MW and DK respectively

Currently passing the time by watching an episode of the series Tory! Tory! Tory!, a documentary about the rise of Thatcherite conservatives in the 70’s and 80’s, available on Veoh.

Peter Clarke (PA to Keith Joseph) says this:

“I think you could say that the young Keith Joseph was not unlike the young David Cameron, that they both thought, in a rather naive way, that the state, organised by gentlemen, could be benign force and it was only the experience of living in Mr Heath’s cabinet both as housing minister and then as social security secretary that inoculated him against this. He saw that the state was capable of immense catastrophes and immense cruelties”

This naivety still spreads like a cancer through the halls of Westminster, and doesn’t only afflict the statist left and the authoritarian right, I think it can be on our own benches too.

But still,  this sums up nicely how I think of the tories and DC and the differences between the beliefs that they hold and the true liberalism that they pretend to espouse but never champion.  They still want big government, they just want it to be their big government. They think that if they were in charge everything would be hunky-dory.  It doesn’t work like that.  Even with all the best will in the world, governments will balls up.  It’s in their DNA.  To be truly liberal you have to give back as much power to individuals and enable them to make their own choices. And they don’t truly believe in devolving power back to individuals and communities - they just want it for themselves and to make sure they don’t have it.

You are better than the state - I really believe this is a position we should be grabbing by the balls.

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.