Has Clegg had enough of his party?

There has been some debate lately about whether Nick Clegg will survive as Liberal Democrat leader until the next general election. But increasingly, it seems that whether the Liberal Democrats have had enough of Clegg is the wrong question. It’s more a matter of whether Clegg has had enough of his party.

Over the past year, a repeated theme of Clegg’s speeches has been the baseless accusation that many of his party’s members do not want to win or hold power, accompanied by the bogus claim that, until he became leader, the Liberal Democrats were merely a party of protest. (These claims were dismantled in previous posts here, here and here). Clegg even made these accusations in a speech at this June’s ALDC conference, to an audience of councillors (or ex-councillors who had lost their seats mainly due to him), who received his patronising lecture about ‘power’ in stony silence.

There is no evidence whatever for Clegg’s depiction of his party as people uninterested in power, and he has failed to produce any evidence. Never once has he named any such party member to back up his accusations. Team Clegg has obviously decided not to let the truth to get in the way of a good story, but has made further attacks on its own party. This time, the conduit is Isabel Hardman, writing in both the Telegraph and the Spectator. The spin is wearily familiar; the Telegraph’s headline could not be more loaded if it tried:

Airy-fairy Lib Dems must face life outside the goldfish bowl

Beneath this tendentious headline, we learn:

The Lib Dems currently have an official goldfish policy – one banning the sale of the creatures at fairs – which lingers as one of the clanking skeletons in the closet of a party still getting used to people paying it any attention at all. As the 2015 election approaches, though, Nick Clegg and his colleagues are trying their best to persuade activists to adopt a more grown-up approach to policymaking that is less about goldfish and more about government.

Mr Clegg knows there is still some work to do with party members before they can sign off a grown-up set of manifesto pledges. The Lib Dem leader recently warned his councillors that they must choose between “consigning ourselves to be 'the third party’ forever” and becoming a “firm party of government”. This week he reminded activists that there could be no promise to scrap or lower tuition fees in the 2015 manifesto. Backstage, strategists have used a series of meetings to tell MPs and their staff to cheer up and talk up the party’s achievements.

These regular warnings are part of a process of softening up the party rank and file, to get them onside ahead of this year’s autumn conference. When activists meet in Glasgow in September, they will discuss a “manifesto themes” document, as well as policy papers on tax, post-16 education, defence, Europe, “balanced working life” and zero carbon. The long-standing goldfish policy won’t get a look in.

This whole narrative is dishonest from beginning to end. For a start, there never was a policy on goldfish. But look at the repeated spin about being “grown-up” and the implication that the membership (unlike Clegg and his chums) is immature and not interested in power. Excuse me, but isn’t this the same membership that gave Clegg a North Korean-style majority in favour of coalition at the special conference in 2010? The same membership that, in the latest Liberal Democrat Voice poll, chose power over opposition by 87% to 13%?

In the Spectator article, meanwhile, we are told:

The main conflict in the party at the moment, according to those pushing the grown-up line, is between pragmatists and idealists, rather than left and right.

So there we have it. The debate is being reduced to a matter of maturity. Clegg is “grown-up”, while anyone who disagrees is some sort of child or hopeless idealist. No real argument, no facts, just personal insults. It seems that Clegg and his aides are continuing to ratchet up the war against their own party members, exploiting the media template that was fixed in the 1980s, which continues to frame all internal party politics in terms of Labour’s battles with the Militant Tendency.

The problem of a leader who dislikes his own party is not unique to the Liberal Democrats. David Cameron’s aides have been repeatedly spinning against the Tory grassroots as the ‘Turnip Taliban’, revealing what is essentially a cultural divide between a metropolitan and cosmopolitan leadership, and a rural and suburban backwoods. In the Labour Party, meanwhile, Ed Miliband recently tried to pick a fight with the unions over the selection contest in Falkirk, in what appears to be more a public relations exercise intended to boost Miliband’s ‘strong man’ credentials than a genuine disciplinary issue.

Clegg’s war on his own members seems to be all of a piece with this trend. But the fact that his Tory and Labour counterparts are playing similar games doesn’t make it right. Indeed, when your membership has slumped to 42,500, it is extremely foolish to insult and alienate those few members who remain, especially when your accusations against them are false.

Foolish, that is, unless you imagine you can pursue a purely elite-based political strategy with no further need for grassroots involvement. That is the only logical explanation for Clegg’s campaign against his own party over the past year. Presumably he hopes this campaign will culminate in the ceremonial humiliation of the membership at September’s conference. If he succeeds, he will probably win more praise from the likes of Isabel Hardman in the Telegraph, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory because its practical effect will be to weaken the party by demotivating members.

So here’s a question for Nick Clegg. Do you really want to remain party leader? You have made it abundantly clear over the past year that you dislike your own party, so much so that you are prepared to travesty your members repeatedly, culminating in what you hope will be their final humiliation at this September’s party conference. Have you thought through the practical consequences for the party? And if punishing your members on false grounds is what you really want, ask yourself whether you are in the right job. A major part of a party leader’s duties is to enthuse and motivate the members, and build the party’s strength in the process. But if you actually couldn’t give a toss about your party, shouldn’t you resign and let someone else do the job?

It’s time to piss or get off the pot. If you like your party, show some leadership (and real leadership consists of inspiring not insulting your members). If you don’t like your party, fuck off. Either way, make up your mind, and the sooner the better.

Postscript: Read Alex Marsh’s analysis of Clegg’s antics (‘The need for “grown up” policy’) on the Social Liberal Forum website. Thoroughly recommended.

Change the leader? Something else has to change first...

“Nick Clegg’s ratings get a boost” is the headline in a report on Liberal Democrat Voice of its latest readership survey. It suggests that the fall in support for the leader amongst party members has been reversed, at least for now.

Since the previous survey of members in March, Clegg’s positive ratings are up 10% to 58%, while his negative ratings are down 8% to 40%. We also learn that 55% want Clegg to remain as leader and fight the 2015 general election, compared with 38% who think he should resign before then.

So, an increase in approval, but 40% against is still a substantial hostile minority of members, which ought to worry any leader. This is particularly so when you consider that many of those on the positive side may simply be making a calculation about the wisdom of holding a leadership election before 2015 rather than expressing any wild enthusiasm for the current leader.

The problem with such popularity ratings is that they focus attention on the personality rather than the strategy, so the more important issue is neglected. No matter how bad members may think Clegg’s leadership is, there is no point getting rid of him unless his successor has a better strategy. If there is a leadership contest without a serious strategic choice, all we are left with is a vacuous personality contest.

At this stage, you may be thinking it is wrong even to raise the issue of Clegg’s leadership. Since he is likely to remain leader until the next general election, there is nothing to gain by prolonging this discussion. Well, it doesn’t matter what you think, because Clegg has decided to raise the issue anyway.

On the Social Liberal Forum website, Gareth Epps reveals that, at this September’s Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow, Clegg is planning to stage a series of ‘binary choice’ votes, intended not only to shift the party decisively to the right but also to stage a symbolic defeat of the grassroots. Predictions of a conference bust-up also appear in an article by Richard Morris on the New Statesman’s blog.

Gareth Epps’s article is the more revealing, since it explains what the thrust of Clegg’s argument will be. Clegg will say that the Liberal Democrats must go into the 2015 general election fighting the coalition’s corner rather than the party’s. Is this is what he actually means by moving to the ‘centre ground’?

No one can say they weren’t warned about this conflict. Over the past year, Clegg has made a series of speeches attacking party members who he alleges want to “turn back the clock”, create a “stop the world I want to get off” party, who are “looking in the rear view mirror”, who want to be “the third party forever”, who are calling for “an eternity in opposition” and “hankering for the comfort blanket of national opposition”.

I analysed these attacks in a post here last month, pointing out that Clegg’s stereotype of party members simply doesn’t exist:

These are straw men. We know this because in none of these attacks does Clegg ever name his critics or supply specific references to the speeches or writings where they have expressed such views. These imaginary enemies are conjured up because Clegg needs a ‘defining other’, a pantomime villain against whom he can contrast his virtues. He’d like his audience to shout out, “they’re behind you!” They won’t because they do not share his illusion.

In the same blog post, I also quoted various other party members who had become tired of Clegg’s repeated travestying of his own members. Others have since commented along similar lines.

The latest party blogger to grow weary of Clegg’s fantasy enemies is Mark Pack. In a blog post on 25 July, he produces conclusive poll evidence that Clegg’s straw man is 87% straw. Meanwhile, in a more detailed analysis in his latest monthly Newswire, he observes that Clegg has jettisoned community politics:

Community Politics, never a favourite subject of Nick Clegg’s (and all but totally absent from his public utterances from his first day in the party), does not feature in the party’s message, despite Tim Farron’s calls for Community Politics to be a priority for the party.

It not only does not feature, but it is repeatedly implicitly rubbished as a result of what else Nick Clegg does regularly say. He and the party officially keep on hammering on about the importance of being in government in order to implement policies, without even a passing caveat about how people outside of political office can also achieve things. The idea that political parties should be all about winning political office as being the only way to bring about change is in a completely different political world from that of Community Politics with its emphasis on enabling people to take power over their own communities, working both within and outside the political system.

Mark Pack also takes apart Clegg’s timid strategy of being only “one step ahead”:

The politics of being one step ahead of the centre ground on its own is not enough to recruit and motivate an enthusiastic group of party activists, especially if you wish (as the party should) to have a core of activists who have something more than their dislike of potholes and their love of pointing in common.

What to do about this? We know that Clegg’s strategy is to soften up opinion before conference by travestying the membership as “not serious about power”, in contrast to his hard-headed and practical leadership. His strategy relies on establishing a narrative: “I'm competent, anyone who disagrees is a dilettante”.

The focus of any counterattack should be to bust that bogus narrative. Clegg has no right to a monopoly of the language of competence and experience, so he must be deprived of it. There are plenty of parliamentarians and councillors in the party who were exercising power when Clegg was still in short trousers, and they should take no patronising lectures from him about ‘power’.

More than that, Clegg has no right to monopolise this language because of his own record of incompetence:

• The number of Liberal Democrat MPs actually fell at the last general election. The people who Clegg put in charge of the election campaign had insufficient experience of political campaigning, as demonstrated by the campaign’s complete inability to exploit ‘Cleggmania’. The opportunity for a coalition came about more as a result of the accident of the parliamentary arithmetic than any carefully crafted strategy on Clegg’s part.
• Liberal Democrat poll ratings have been stuck at about 10% since the autumn of 2010, and local election results have been abysmal. Clegg has no idea how to reverse this trend.
• The party’s membership has fallen by over a third since 2010, and many of those members who’ve stayed have scaled back their activities. Clegg’s repeated attacks on his own members suggest that he thinks this doesn’t matter. He seems to have no idea how to, in Mark Pack’s words, “recruit and motivate an enthusiastic group of party activists”.
• Clegg believes that most voters congregate in an imaginary ‘middle’, and that politics is therefore about competing with the other parties for these same voters. But talk of the ‘centre ground’ is psephological nonsense – in practice, it means competing with the Tories and Labour for the sort of voters who never vote Liberal Democrat anyway, while alienating the party’s natural constituency (explained in more detail in an earlier post). Clegg does not understand his party’s core vote or what makes it tick – indeed, he actually seems to hold this core vote in contempt, mistakenly dismissing it as a ‘protest vote’ that can be safely dispensed with.
• As Mark Pack said in his Newswire quoted above, Clegg’s strategy effectively repudiates community politics. Clegg seems to think that success resides in becoming more conventional, when all the signs are that the patience of the public with conventional politics is coming to an end. Furthermore, Clegg’s approach makes his party more indistinguishable from the Tories and Labour, which deprives voters of any good reason to vote Liberal Democrat.
• The economic orthodoxy of the 1980s continues to dominate Tory and Labour thinking, even though that ideology has been living on borrowed time since the great crash of 2008-9. Future success depends on moving beyond those redundant ideas. Clegg’s belief that his party must align more closely with the old orthodoxy is nothing short of disastrous.

Clegg’s strategy is failing and, long term, it will doom the party to irrelevance. He wants to convert the Liberal Democrats from a radical campaigning party to a right-of-centre, conventional party of government. But this strategy deprives the party of a USP and, with nothing distinctive to offer, it loses votes and members, and demotivates those members who remain.

If Clegg wants to monopolise the language of competence and experience, he must demonstrate his superiority as a strategist and manager. His practical failures and the absurdities of his arguments suggest he has no right to monopolise this language. The trick is therefore to deny him this monopoly and thus force him to stop talking in clichés.

But to return to the question originally raised at the beginning of this post, the strategy should not be to demand Clegg’s resignation. It’s not worth removing him unless there is a credible replacement with a coherent alternative strategy. Sadly, no such Liberal Democrat MP currently exists.

Meanwhile, in other news of attempted internal coups, Alex Marsh reports the latest wheeze of Mark Littlewood and his right-wing libertarian chums. A forthcoming summer school will include discussions about how they can take over the Liberal Democrats after the 2015 general election. I’m not saying these fruitcakes and their fantasies should be ignored entirely, but we should focus on winning this year’s battle before we fight the next.

Postscript: Oh dear. It seems that the final paragraph has offended some right-wing libertarians, who responded with comments that will not be published because they were anonymous (and if they’d bothered to read our comments policy, they would have realised that). However, the gist of their complaints is that their summer school is not “forthcoming” but has already happened, and that their debate about taking over the Liberal Democrats was merely “a joke”. Well, I’m glad that’s settled. As long as they’re preoccupied with obsessing about how many angels can dance on a pinhead, the rest of us can get on with the serious business of politics.

Why have company CEOs become anti-social?

Yesterday, this blog linked to research that proved extremely high pay does not improve CEO performance. But why do CEOs behave worse yet receive more pay?

In the journal Democracy, Chrystia Freeland reviews a new book by Mark Mizruchi, The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite, which examines the fundamental shift in corporate culture that took place in the 1980s. Unlike today, big business in the 1950s and 1960s wanted strong government, for “steering the economy and underwriting the well-being of the middle class”:

The business heroes in this narrative are the leaders of the “moderate, pragmatic corporate elite [that] had emerged, based primarily in the largest American corporations” by the end of World War II. This elite and its views were “epitomized” by the organization whose history forms the backbone of Mizruchi’s narrative, the Committee for Economic Development (CED). Formally incorporated in 1942, the CED brought together engaged, moderate businessmen from across the country and advanced their views in the major national debates of the subsequent decades. They were an illustrious group: As of July 1945, the CED’s trustees included a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, the chairman of Coca-Cola, the president of General Electric, and the presidents of the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and St. Louis.

The CED, in Mizruchi’s telling, thought the days of untrammeled free-market capitalism were gone, and that both private and government-led economic management would be necessary for a market economy to survive. In order to maintain the system from which their privileges derived, they believed it would be necessary to attend to the welfare of the broader population. This meant supporting a high level of employment, the alleviation of poverty, the amelioration of racial disadvantage, and the provision of sufficient purchasing power in the population to consume the goods that American business was so proficient at producing.

This was the creed of the nation’s most influential corporate leaders, a group that supplied Cabinet secretaries to both Republican and Democratic Administrations. Today, with so much of the national economic conversation consumed by the budget deficit and which middle-class entitlements need to be cut to reduce it, that platform would place you on the left wing of the Democratic Party, and no leading business organization would advocate it.

Why since the 1980s has business treated government almost as an enemy? Freeland thinks the answer is one that Mizruchi is reluctant to acknowledge, probably because it is an uncomfortable answer for Liberals. It is an unintended consequence of the cultural shift in the 1960s:

[Mizruchi] doesn’t pursue the truly unexpected and uncomfortable paradox his historical study reveals. When America’s postwar corporate elites were sexist, racist company men who prized conformity above originality and were intolerant of outsiders, they were also more willing to sacrifice their immediate gain for the greater good. The postwar America of declining income inequality and a corporate elite that put the community’s interest above its own was also a closed-minded, restrictive world that the left rebelled against—hence, the 1960s. It is unpleasant to consider the possibility that the personal liberation the left fought for also liberated corporate elites to become more selfish, ultimately to the detriment of us all—but that may be part of what happened. The book sidles up to but doesn’t confront head-on the vexing notion that as the business elite became more open and meritocratic, it also became more selfish and short-termist.

The most wounding criticism of liberalism is that, in liberating the individual, it destroys society. That is the basis of the opposition to liberalism pursued by communitarians from both the Red Tories and Blue Labour.

Liberals (but not right-wing libertarians) understand that no one can be truly ‘free’ without the support of society and community. No one has the ability to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps”. Yet because the Liberal Democrats are in coalition with a party that has little time for society, and because Liberal Democrat members pursue the tactics of  ‘community politics’ divorced from the underlying philosophy, Liberals in Britain are vulnerable to their communitarian critics.

A few days ago, David Boyle called for a new kind of Liberalism that emphasises what we share, not merely our individual interests. He is quite right because, as the present economic crisis demonstrates, if liberalism is interpreted simply as an absence of limits, liberty is diminished for all but the wealthiest few.

What’s wrong with rights

Our thanks to the grumpy old blogger Grumpy Old Liberal, who recommends a new book called Defending Politics by Professor Matthew Flinders of the University of Sheffield. The publisher’s website summarises the book’s central thesis:

Matthew Flinders makes a highly unfashionable but incredibly important argument of almost primitive simplicity: democratic politics delivers far more than most members of the public appear to acknowledge and understand. If more and more people are disappointed with what modern democratic politics delivers then is it possible that the fault lies with those who demand too much, fail to acknowledge the essence of democratic engagement and ignore the complexities of governing in the twentieth century rather than with democratic politics itself? Is it possible that the public in many advanced liberal democracies have become ‘democratically decadent’ in the sense that they take what democratic politics delivers for granted? Would politics be interpreted as failing a little less if we all spent a little less time emphasising our individual rights and a little more time reflecting on our responsibilities to society and future generations?

If this publisher’s blurb is anything to go by, Flinders is right on the money. We need more emphasis on the need for a just society, in which people’s life chances are not diminished by social class, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or any other factor beyond their control. The emphasis on individual rights has hindered not helped the cause of social justice. It has turned the debate into a pissing contest between self-interested groups with competing claims to victimhood, while those most in need have been left behind.

Things went wrong in the 1980s. The main reason the left completely failed to mount a serious intellectual challenge to Thatcherism is that it had become self-obsessed. As I wrote in my chapter of Reinventing the State:

The right may have believed that ‘there is no such thing as society’ but there is a tendency to forget that, during the 1980s, the left became just as self-indulgent. It was the decade of being ‘right on’, when the left abandoned its traditional social concerns and instead emphasised the solipsistic obsessions of identity politics, a movement that rapidly descended into our present-day culture of victimhood.

We can see this phenomenon at work within the Liberal Democrats. The party has set up a ‘Candidate Leadership Programme’ “to identify, develop and support some of the best candidates from under-represented groups within the Party”. Yet some of the 40 places on this programme have been allocated to privileged white women at the expense of ethnic minority candidates, which has led to a furious dispute between those responsible for the programme and Ethnic Minority Liberal Democrats. Such outcomes are inevitable when attempts to create greater justice are perverted by competing claims to victimhood, especially when this enables the sharp elbows of the middle classes to hog resources and opportunities originally intended for those who are genuinely disadvantaged.

Self-centred demands also create a problem for democratic politics in general, because they are bound to lead to dissatisfaction. With the best will in the world, democratic politics simply cannot satisfy millions of individualised wants simultaneously. Markets can do that, which if fine if you are choosing a car, a washing machine or a packet of breakfast cereal – and you have sufficient money to make a real choice. But when it comes to the ‘commonweal’, our shared interests, democratic politics is the only power available to most people to make meaningful choices. However, the job of democratic politics is to reconcile rather than gratify. It cannot function properly without a sense that we share the same space and are not merely out to seek personal advantage or instant gratification.

Liberals are always vulnerable to charges of promoting selfish individualism. We must always be clear that, when we talk about individual liberty, we are cherishing the uniqueness of each and every person, and seeking liberty and life chances for each and every person. But this approach can work only in the context of a society in which mutual respect is fostered. That is why we should always place individual rights in the context of an overall demand for social justice, and why demands for ‘rights’ irrespective of other people’s needs are wrong.

So the next time you hear a wealthy and privileged party member pleading victimhood to gain personal advantage, challenge them with this simple question: “Why is it always about you?”

Secret courts: Richard Morris in the New Statesman

Liberal Democrat blogger Richard Morris has published an excellent post on the New Statesman’s blog, which gets to the heart of the matter:

Every wing, arm and leg of the party is livid about this. They won’t win another Eastleigh without the activists – and there’s now a move by activists to refuse to support any parliamentary candidate who wandered through the yes lobby the other week. That’s how seriously people take it.

The leadership are no doubt sitting at home, cursing Jo Shaw’s name and wondering why the grass roots aren’t busy repeating the mantra set down from now till 2015 rather than what we are saying – “no to secret courts”.

It’s because we are liberals. And we are democrats. And Nick – we’re against this sort of thing.

Richard Morris has published an addendum on his own blog.

Quote of the Conference

David Howarth, former MP for Cambridge, speaking in today’s debate on secret courts at Liberal Democrat conference:

This is not about policy or about deals: it is about who we are. This bill does nothing to help the security services to gain more information or foil more plots. All it does is give them an unfair advantage in cases where they are accused of kidnapping and torture. Again, anyone who cannot see that is fundamentally wrong and not liberal.

Howarth also had a message for Tom McNally, Liberal Democrat leader in the House of Lords:

Tom, I know the Lords can stop this bill. You know the Lords can stop this bill. They should stop this bill.

Lest we forget...

The reason we are Liberals. The reason we are not Tories. The need to oppose this sort of thing.

Why pseudo-science threatens Liberal values

Hardly a day goes by without a report in the media claiming that some activity or other harms your health. Being smug liberal types, we assume these scare stories are the province of the Daily Mail (the subject of well-deserved satire here, here and here).

Actually, you are just as likely to find such health scares in the Guardian or the BBC. On the Spiked website, Dr Michael Fitzpatrick tackles the pseudo-scientific links lobby that produces these stories. The ‘science’ is usually an epidemiological study whose tentative findings or dubious claims enter straight into conventional wisdom without being subject to serious scrutiny.

Fitzpatrick observes that these scares often relate to an activity that is already the subject of social disapproval, such as drinking alcohol or eating fast food. This should make us immediately suspicious that science is being abused to support fashionable prejudices.

Once an allegation of risk enters the public realm via the media, it alters behaviour, but not necessarily in a good way. Irrespective of whether a scientific claim is valid, people react by seeking compensation or quack remedies. Worse, these scare stories can kill. For example, the claim (subsequently exposed as fraudulent) that the MMR vaccine causes autism led to the deaths of several children from measles.

Quite apart from the unnecessary distress and physical harm, Liberals should be concerned about pseudo-science for two important reasons.

First, the roots of Liberalism can be traced to the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment, when free thought and scientific discovery replaced superstition enforced by despots. Accordingly, we should reject the trendy sentimental belief that emotions and feelings trump rationality and logic, otherwise we are fostering a climate that allows superstition to resume its historical role.

Second, the depiction of the world as a place full of risks diminishes us as human beings. It says we are all helpless victims and denies our capacity to take responsibility for our actions. It even promotes victimhood as something to embrace as part of our identities. As a result, there is a thriving industry in quack remedies and quack therapists.

Yes, there are risks and dangers out there. But that is no excuse for confusing correlation with causation. Before we start to panic, any claim of causation should be subject to rigorous scientific enquiry. Stringent scientific standards should not be set aside just to satisfy a fashionable prejudice. Let’s reserve our disapproval for genuinely proven dangers.

The difference between David Laws and Nick Clegg

There is a narrative of current trends in the Liberal Democrats (repeated most recently in some of the comments here) that says David Laws and Nick Clegg are joined in some sort of conspiracy to move the party rightwards. It’s not as simple as that. There is an important philosophical difference between Laws, who is motivated by ideology, and Clegg, who is motivated by an idea of pragmatism.

Laws believes that Liberalism once existed in a pure form, the classical liberalism of the mid-nineteenth century. Since then, it became polluted by association with socialism and social democracy. The task is therefore to “reclaim liberalism” (as the cover of the Orange Book put it), purify the party and return it to an unsullied state – hence all the low tax, small state stuff. (This view is shared by Clegg’s former adviser Richard Reeves).

Clegg, on the other hand, believes in a notion of pragmatism (explored more fully in an earlier post). He is too young to have any adult memory of politics before the Berlin Wall fell, so has no recall of politics as a battle of ideas. He assumes that the basic ideological questions have been settled for good and sees himself as a post-ideological pragmatist (rather like Tony Blair and David Cameron – the coalition works in part because Clegg and Cameron share the creed of politics-as-management).

Clegg does in fact have an ideological standpoint (which is evident in the whole set of tacit assumptions he makes about moral questions concerning public policy) but he doesn’t see it that way, preferring to present his opinions as self-evident truths or incontestable facts. It’s only other people who have ideologies, which get in the way of what needs to be done. This is why Clegg turns impatient and tetchy with anyone in the party who disagrees with him. “Can’t you see?” he seems to be saying, “My way is the only possible way. If you disagree, you are living in the past, an immature and hopeless idealist who doesn’t recognise the realities of modern government.”

While Laws has a surfeit of imagination (so much that he believes he can restore an imaginary past), Clegg has a poverty of imagination (so little that he cannot imagine an alternative future). What they share is a denial of possibilities, which stifles debate about the sort of society we want to live in.

Laws and Clegg remain close allies because the former’s ideology happens to overlap with the latter’s idea of what is pragmatic. But when the orthodoxy about ‘what works’ changes (and it will), they will no longer see eye to eye.

Pragmatism is not all it’s cracked up to be

One thing that unites our political leaders is a belief in pragmatism. It conveys a positive buzz, which is why politicians like to associate with the concept. But as Alex Worsnip explains on Prospect magazine’s blog, “it allows politicians to subtly stifle dissent, and causes us to neglect the most fundamental questions about what our society ought to look like”:

Tony Blair told us on his election in 1997 that what counts is not “outdated ideology” but “what works.” David Cameron famously wrote that he doesn’t “believe in ‘isms’” because “words like communism, socialism, capitalism and republicanism all conjure up one image in [his] mind: extremism.” Earlier this year, Nick Clegg eagerly urged a group of business leaders that the Liberal Democrats would be “sensible and centrist; pragmatic – not dogmatic – at all times.”

These claims to some sort of down-to-earth, no-nonsense practicality do not stand up to close scrutiny:

Talk of “pragmatism,” especially in Britain, is a part of a narrative that proclaims that we have reached an era of post-ideological politics. But the term is extremely slippery, and the first problem with this cult of pragmatism is that no one seems willing to pin down exactly what they mean by “pragmatic.”

Worsnip considers various possible meanings and concludes that what politicians mean by ‘pragmatic’ is a Baldwinesque “what matters is what works”. But this remains highly problematic:

The notion of “what works” is amorphous and vague. One can only assess whether something is working against some kind of a standard for what a well-functioning society looks like; for what it is that you want to work and how. As an economist might put the point, you have to have a utility function to maximise; you can’t just maximise.

Is a society “working” if GDP rises steadily but citizens are drastically unequal? What about if people of different races and religions have different access to opportunities and goods? These questions are ineliminably moral, and must be answered in detail before we can have a useable notion of “what works.” The attempt to find some value-neutral standpoint from which to assess what works – the aspiration for an escape from ideology altogether – is an impossible one. Deciding how to weigh up different social benefits and harms is hard; it goes to the core of what we want our society to be like. But these questions are just made harder by reducing a vast swathe of distinct and often competing considerations to a single, sweeping judgement of “what works.”

The error here is not just a philosophical one. When politicians talk about what works, they make tacit assumptions about various moral questions concerning the proper aims of public policy. But by presenting themselves as “non-ideological pragmatists,” they get away with leaving these assumptions unarticulated and undefended. And so we get a particular value-laden agenda – often, though not always, that of the ruling class – smuggled in, under the banner of anodyne pronouncements about the need to sometimes make compromises or to be sensitive to empirical evidence.

At its worst, this can amount to making a set of value-assumptions seem like incontestable and ineradicable features of the world; to what the sociologist Max Weber called the “routinisation” of value. Those who oppose a particular agenda are characterised as “living in the past’ or as failing to recognise the facts of the modern world. Likewise, talk of “possibility” is frequently used to delimit the range of political options, without it being made clear in what sense and why a particular course of action is supposedly “impossible.”

Worsnip points out that the claim to be non-ideological is often deployed in the service of an ideological agenda, which can be conservative or radical. Politicians who make this claim are trying to convince us that there is no space from which to oppose them:

Cameron, Osborne, and to some extent Clegg have elided questions about the burdens of austerity measures, and how they have been distributed across different social classes, by implicitly characterising their opponents as head-in-the-sand, “unrealistic” idealists failing to acknowledge that something needed to be done about the deficit. Yet that is simply not the question in play when intelligent critics wonder if the burden of austerity measures could not have fallen more squarely on the rich. Clegg [in a speech last October] again provides a striking example, proclaiming – as if it were some sort of heroically straight-talking admission of what no one else will say – that “bluntly, with the economy still fragile, this is not the time for dogma.” In this way, the vague language of “pragmatism” attempts to justify the status quo without providing any kind of substantive argument.

Whereas the old “ideologues” were at least honest about their agenda, the new “pragmatists” do not even tell us what theirs is. The language of pragmatism is thus a far cry from “straight-talking”; rather, it is a way of depriving citizens of the language in which to voice dissent.

So politicians need a coherent vision and clear values – and an honest agenda – before they can talk meaningfully about acting pragmatically. Pragmatism cannot exist outside that context, unless it is a dishonest attempt to disguise one’s agenda or obstruct opponents.

Before Nick Clegg became an MP, he was a member of the Liberal Democrats’ working group that in 2002 produced the party’s vision and values document Freedom, Liberty and Fairness. He would do well to revisit Alan Beith’s foreword to that document:

The Parliamentary Question in February 2002 which left Tony Blair uncharacteristically lost for words was not about adverse health statistics, ministerial failures or foreign policy: it was a modest request from his own side that he should give the House of Commons a brief characterisation of the political philosophy and beliefs which underpin his policies. His inability to do so, and his hasty retreat into health service investment figures, spoke volumes. If you want to know whether to vote for a political party – even more if you want to join one – it is more important to know something about its underlying beliefs than to know about its policies for this year or next. The policies will almost certainly change, and if there is no underlying framework of belief or philosophy, the direction in which they may change is unpredictable. That has been many Labour voters’ unhappy experience of New Labour in government.

If Nick Clegg succeeds in making a similarly vacuous ‘pragmatism’ the core of the Liberal Democrat offer, our voters can expect a similarly unhappy experience.

An important message for extroverts

The central conceit of (small ‘c’) conservatives is that each of them believes that they are ‘normal’. Anyone who doesn’t conform is unwell, evil or foreign.

This is in contrast to (small ‘l’) liberals, who oppose conformity and believe, in the immortal words of Brian, that “you’re all individuals!”

Understanding this point is not simply a matter of selfishly asserting your individuality. It is also about appreciating and respecting other people’s differences.

With this in mind, here is an important message for extroverts. It will help them understand why introverts find extroverts’ well-intended but persistent social demands an annoying drain on their energy.

Freedom & Diversity

Multiculturalism has always posed problems for liberals. How do you reconcile tolerance of a diversity of ethnicity and faith with intolerance of, say, forced marriage?

The ‘politically correct’ response to this dilemma has been cultural relativism, which has required much contortion and hypocrisy, with some liberals arguing fiercely against racism while defending the illiberal practices of some minorities on the grounds that “it’s their culture”.

Timothy Garton Ash has squared this circle much more intelligently with “a Liberal pentagram for living together”. His article in the New York Review of Books is thoroughly recommended.