Brian Micklethwait is right to say that the government is falling apart. It has faced revolts from its own party on foxhunting, Iraq and foundation hospitals. It is seen by many as having misled the people about the reasons for the Iraq war. Hospitals and schools are in crisis despite having more money than ever. National Rail is a bottomless pit. The payment of Tax Credits has been a disaster. Now the government is lurching even more to the Left, introducing draconian employment laws to appease its backbenchers. As for Europe, the government has completely failed to get a grip: it keeps on saying that it will not give in on items in European treaties, but each time it does exactly that.
The reality is that government is not just incompetent, it is a walking disaster. John Major’s Conservative Party might have had its problems, but it was never this bad. The Third Way is rarely heard of these days. Like a drunk, Labour’s Way involves stumbling all over the road.
Yet there is an alternative. There is one major party that broadly promotes libertarian ideas. It vocally states that we are overtaxed and over-regulated; that the European Constitution and Euro are wrong for Britain; that government-control of healthcare and education does not work; that the BBC’s business model needs “examining”; and that individuals should be free to make their own choices about their lives.
What is the name of this libertarian party?
Conservative.
Blimey. You’re as mad as me! 🙂
Alex
I’d rather have the Conservatives than Labour, new or otherwise, any day but I regard it as the better of two evils. The fact is the conservative party is only so so on personal liberties and it is as statist as new labour. Yes they would lower taxation but it would still remain high. Yes they would try to reform the NHS but it would still remain a massive government bureaucracy.
The Tories also have a marked tendency to impose their own morals on the population just witness their position on section 28. Nah, the Tory party may be a better alternative than Labour but it is not libertarian party.
No political party is going to suit your ideology completely. The differences between the Labour left and the Labour right and the Tory pro-euro/eurosceptic divide to see that they all encompass a lot of different ideologies within them.
Either New Labour or Conservatives are preferable to the Liberal?? Democrats.
If we need a rough measure of how libertarian a government is, how about this: count the regulations issued (and repealed), the official bodies created (and abolished). For a consistently libertarian government the count would be low, and probably negative for a while.
I haven’t done the exercise properly–just run my eyes over the library stacks–but the rate of authority-production seems to have continued positive and rising the whole last century, irrespective of party, except for a short stutter in 1980/81.
I don’t believe the Tories are a libertarian party, though there are undoubtedly libertarian-inclined people among them, and they may be the best of a bad lot. If a modern democracy could produce a libertarian party with a chance of government I’d be very surprised–the pork-barrel sees to that. The best one can hope is to persuade the others that specific libertarian policies are worth pursuing.
This must be love the Tories day on Samizdata.
And could someone help this somewhat ignorant Yank out? What’s the deal with Conservative vs. Tory? Is Conservative the official name of the party while Tories is the slang (for lack of a better word) that is used to define them? Is it a similar relationship to the GOP/Republicans hear in the states? Just curious, I honestly don’t know.
To Guy Herbert, I kind of like your formula for judging how libertarian a government is, but it does have some obvious problems. You could theoretically consolidate departments/bureucracies under one umbrella. You may have decreased the number of departments but you probably didn’t decrease the headcount and very likely didn’t increase the actual powers held by the department.
We’ve kind of gone through that here in America with the Homeland Security department. We reorganized several departments under the Homeland Security and have forced very territorial agencies like the FBI & CIA to work together. These were actually reforms that needed to be done, but the new Homeland Security department seems ultimately to be a bad solution to a known problem. THis probably isn’t totally analogous to what you are talking about, but I think it does illustrate how consolidatoin could be viewed as cutting government, even though it actually wouldn’t.
None of the major parties that currently exist are libertarian; each of them has elements who support liberty, but all of them have flaws. (& yes this includes the liberal democrats; in terms of freedom in your non-economic personal life, they’re infinitely preferable to either of the major players in my view).
While economically I have problems with the Lib_Dems, I do tend to agree with A_t on the issue of which actually has things to say about liberty.
Horse feathers. The conservatives are Britain’s Republican party. They talk of low taxes to libertarians, cane-and-gallows to moral authoritarians, macroeconomic tinkering to keynesians, “improving public services” to guardian readers. Then when in power they do all of it and none of it, half-heartedly, chase press outrage fads, and pass most of the dumb-ass laws we currently suffer under.
The main advantage the Conservatives have over Labor is that they are venal, and hence inclined to “milk the cow”, rather than shoot it for well-meaning ideological reasons.
It’s come to something when the Tories under IDSlook better than “New” Labour.
I wouldn’t bother wasting my vote these days until a politician has the guts to stand up and recognise that admiting you’re wrong every now and then isn’t a weakness.
This is, however, unlikely to happen.
Fundamentally, the conservatives are more likely to leave me alone. That’s a good a start as any.
I agree that the Labour government is falling apart, and I even agree that the Conservatives are doing better. However, I am a very long way from being convinced that the Conservatives are especially liberatarian. And as a former lefty my number one objection to the Conservatives (which is that they are conservative) is a very long way from being eased.
Russ,
Yes – Tory is slang. I believe that it was originally the name of an Irish bandit gang.
The word turns up in American history, too, for those who opposed the Revolution
I’d be as likely to vote for a Tory here as I’d be to vote for a Republican over there. The best of two is still an evil.
I think both sides are right on this thread.
What strikes me as important is this question “Is there a minority of libertarian-inclined individuals in any big British party?”
Off the top of my head, my guess would be that fewer than one per cent of Labour Party members are really interested in liberty as a priority – they mainly want to protect, as they see it, poorer people from the liberties enjoyed by the richer.
Whereas I reckon perhaps as many as ten per cent of Conservatives are some kind of libertarian.
If that party was back in office, that group might be able to negotiate one or two things libertarians want into reality.
Forgive me for sounding overly down on this, but I think that is about as good as it is likely to get.
And substantially better than a government with no effective internal lobby at all restraining it from moving Britain further in the collectivist anti-freedom direction.
Recently it’s started to feel like this blog is “Conservative Samizdata”.
Sorry Alex… no party with statists like Ken Clarke and Chris Patten in it is even close to being ‘libertarian’. Are you going to tell me that Anne Widdicombe’s views on hunting or criminal justice are ‘libertarian’?
The Tories are at best the lesser of three evils. And not by much.
Perry:
But Ken Clarke, Chris Patten and Anne Widdecome are hardly mainstream Conservative MPs anymore. Come to mention it, Patten isn’t even an Conservative MP at all.
I think concentrating on the merits or otherwise of the Conservatives misses the point. They are a product of the political system, which is inherently 2 party in the UK, both of which define themselves in relation to some middle ground orthodoxy, which is substantially media defined. I think the Americans whose politics are much more issue based, understand this better than the Brits. The best you can hope for in a electable party is a bit better than the other mob.
I see two main ways of getting a more Libertarian (or any other kind of) government. One is change the two party system, for example by introducing binding referendums. The other is to change the orthodoxy and the political parties will naturally shift in relation to the new orthodoxy.
When I read Samizdata’s Blog Glossary and saw the definition of Anti-Idiotarian generally hawkish sentiments and transcendent loathing of Noam Chomsky. My reaction was, ‘And for all those years I thought I was the only person who loathed Chomsky with a special loathing I reserved only for him.’ But Chomsky knew how to use the media to influence the orthodoxy.
I hate to sound like some Libertarian equivalent of a Sandalista grass-roots activist, but we are already seeing how the Blogosphere is challenging established media like the NYT and the BBC. So get out there and spread the word. Challenge Statist and socialist arguements and assumptions. Fisk the BBC or CNN.
I like to speculate on the impact of technology on society, and we may already be moving towards the mass media being less influencial in shaping ideas, and more like the Nineteenth century when individual exchange of ideas was important.
Stephen Hodgson writes:
Recently it’s started to feel like this blog is “Conservative Samizdata”.
I prefer to think of it as “covert wolfish libertarians, in conservative sheep’s clothing, seeking to sneak Rothbardian economics, Popperian philosophy, and Hayekian ethics, upon the body politic of the UK, Samizdata”! 🙂
But interesting things are stirring, and the plot is thickening. No sooner does Brian Micklethwait write a seminal article on a related topic, than the conservatives start chiming in with speeches against the Euro, against the Euro constitution, and against the state’s monopolies on health and education.
One even dares to suspect the two are not unrelated! 🙂
Gabriel takes a rather… ah… different view
Phil Bradley
we are already seeing how the Blogosphere is challenging established media like the NYT and the BBC
Not in a million years. Try bringing the subject of blogging up in any social gathering outside of the Blogoshere and you will get looks of blank incomprehension. Mention the BBC and see what happens.
There is no “challenge”.
Eamon
On PBS tonight, the commentator admited that the first thing he does apon waking up each morning is to check Andrew Sullivan’s blog. I would say that is a challenge Eamon.
Arjuna
You challenge established media when you have the same penetration as established media among the general public, not other media types.
Eamon
Eamonn is quite right. Blogging is certainly making an impact but talk of shaking the foundations of BigMedia are rather premature.
However if I was a betting man, I would say the tipping point for really large scale blog readership is less than 5 years away… possibly quite a bit less.
We are still small fry and contrary to what some bloggers think, we are not in competition with established news media… we are in competition with the editorial columns of established news media, and I think in the not-so-long run, that is a battle the pundit bloggers will actually win. We cannot generally change how newspapers are written but we can, and indeed do, change how people read them. That is the whole point of why I blog in fact, not because I like the sound of my own pixels.
What’s this about the Lib-Dems and individual freedom… One, they’re the party that wants us to pay even more tax than we do already, and they boast about it: confiscating people’s money substantially damages their freedom of action and hence their liberty. Two, when in power at local levels, the Lib-Dems’ lust for intereference becomes much more visible: as soon as they achieved a majority on both Somerset and Devon County Councils, they attempted to introduce back-door bans on fox hunting. Granted hunting is not the most important issue, but…
Eamon/Perry, I am under no illusions about the number of people blogs reach. We are talking about a small fraction of 1% of western populations.
My point was that what matters is influencing the orthodoxy and to so, you only have to reach a very small number of people, and I suspect that blogs reach a substantial number of those people.
As for 5 years time, I have severe reservations about the scalability of current blogging models. Stephen Den Beste (www.denbeste.nu) documents one problem today.
Tony H…. speak for yourself… I specifically said “non-economic”; acknowledging already that their policy on taxation would not sit well with most posters to this site. On issues of individual liberty in other areas, they have been far more consistantly outspoken than either of the other major parties. In terms of my own life, the loss of income due to increased taxation would be amply compensated for by the license to relax with a joint without fear of arrest, not to mention not fearing the introduction of more authoritarian mail-reader pleasing repression. The only trouble is, in order to get into power in the first place, they would probably have to readjust many of their positions until they were near-indistinguishable from the 2 major players.
This is the essence of why I get bugged by the seemingly-instinctive left-bashing ’round here. Particularly in the UK, where oppositional party-based politics rule, & lack of proportional reperesentation means ‘minority’ interests have a hard time getting any say, anyone interested in liberty should embrace politicians who are interested in personal liberty, and note aspects of the parties’ policies which align with their own; blanket condemnation of either side is likely to be knee-jerk, & mired in personal assumptions.
the most libertarian party in GB at the moment is the UK independence party. granted they are a one-policy party, but the other areas of their manifesto are broadly acceptable, if they still need work. ive been working on a libertarian manifesto, and it borrows heavily from the UKIP manifesto.