Welcome To The Postliberal Majority

Very many thanks to David Goodhart, a stalwart encourager of my work, who emails me this piece of his, which was published on Saturday behind the FT paywall:

Politics in Britain feels stuck. The Conservative party has not won a parliamentary majority since 1992 and last week’s local election results rubbed in its continuing weakness in the urban north – there is not a single Tory councillor in Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester or Sheffield.

Meanwhile, Ed Miliband’s Labour inspires little enthusiasm. It is unelectable in large parts of the south and vulnerable everywhere to half-credible alternatives: witness recent results in Scotland, Brighton, Bradford and London.

Some of this can be put down to long-term trends – the decline in party loyalty and a grumpy disaffection with all leaders and elites in a less deferential age.

But what if there is more to it? What if majorities are still there to be won, but no party has the intellectual resources or history to speak to most people in Britain?

What if a lot of people feel that there’s no point in voting because whoever you vote for you get the same old mix of economic liberalism and social liberalism – Margaret Thatcher tempered by Roy Jenkins. Whereas what a large slice of the electorate wants is more like David Owen: one-nation economics plus a liberalism that is about common decency, not “anything goes”.

In fact the next majority that is struggling to be born is “post-liberal” – though few would express it in such highfalutin terms.

Why post-liberal? The two liberalisms – the 1960s (social) and 1980s (economic) – have dominated politics for a generation, with good reason. Post-liberalism does not want to go back to corporatist economics nor to reverse the progress towards race and sex equality. Britain is a better place for these changes.

But post-liberalism does want to attend to the silences, excesses and unintended consequences of economic and social liberalism – exemplified in recent years by, respectively, the financial crash and last August’s shocking riots.

With their emphasis on freedom from constraint the two liberalisms have had too little to say about our dependence on each another. They have taken for granted the glue that holds society together and have preferred regulations and targets to tending to the institutions that help to shape us. As the philosopher Michael Sandel puts it: “In our public life we are more entangled, but less attached, than ever before.”

And the two liberalisms have reflected too closely the interests of the mobile, secular, graduate elite that dominates Britain, both politically and culturally. It usually favours loose, wide commitments and has generally embraced globalisation.

This is not the experience of the majority. Almost half of the UK-born population live within five miles of where they lived when they were 14. For those who do not make it into the magic circle of secure professional careers, the two liberalisms have been a mixed blessing over the past 25 years.

Many of these people hear politicians speaking a different moral language from them, about abstract rights and communities in name only. The welfare state is a particular point of conflict. There is an increasing reluctance among middle and lower income citizens to pay their taxes into today’s welfare state. They do not believe in universal welfare, they believe that welfare should go to those who have paid into the system or who deserve to be supported by the community.

These are the people that post-liberalism can win back to politics. Not just by managing the economy and public services competently, but by reconnecting with an idea of moral community.

Post-liberalism is comfortable with the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving – among the highly paid as well as the welfare-dependent. It seeks to foster national belonging, seeing a special attachment to fellow citizens not as a prejudice but as a priceless asset in an individualistic society.

In recent years, what would post-liberalism have done differently? It would have controlled immigration more carefully and mitigated its effects by building far more social housing.Housing policy would have amounted to more than inflating prices. More emphasis would have been put on the contributory principle in welfare. In education, discipline and character would have received as much attention as exam results and there would have been as much energy expended on apprenticeships as on universities.

Post-liberalism would also have concerned itself with how to give more meaning and status to routine service-sector jobs. How can disaffected inner-city males be persuaded that there is honour and dignity in working in a care home?

Is post-liberalism just a label for people disillusioned with the failings of social liberalism who don’t want to call themselves Tory? The Tories are, after all, currently trying to cut immigration and reform welfare in a more or less post-liberal manner.

No. Post-liberalism shares much of the centre-left critique of “bad” capitalism and wants to counter the drift towards greater inequality. It also worries about the status and wellbeing of the least successful and wants to apply notions of loyalty, reciprocity and just deserts to the workplace as well as to welfare and community. Its mission is to reform capitalism, not just collect taxes and “share the proceeds of growth”.

There is a distinct combination of ideas here – of market-friendly social democracy and a greater respect for “flag, faith and family” social conservatism – that has a natural majority in most rich countries, one that was squandered by the left in the 1980s. (Though the first Blair government had some echoes of it.)

Groups such as Maurice Glasman’s “Blue Labour” and Philip Blond’s “Red Toryism” have tried to turn their parties in a post-liberal direction, with limited success. But the interest in those two movements is in itself a sign that there may be a new intellectual consensus emerging to rebalance politics after the reign of the two liberalisms.

The story of British politics since Margaret Thatcher has been described as the right winning the economic argument and the left winning the cultural one. Starting from where we are today the reverse would make better post-liberal sense and, if the current fiscal orthodoxy fails, it may be the only way to unstick British politics. 

The writer is director of the think-tank Demos and editor at large of Prospect. The piece was written in collaboration with Duncan O’Leary, deputy director of Demos.