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Smith is the Liberal Democrats’ Defence Spokesperson in the House of Lords. She joined the Liberal Democrats from the SDP. She has served as a councillor and as Vice Chair of the Liberal Democrats’ Policy Committee. She is a Cambridge University academic, specialising in European politics.
Stephen Williams is the Liberal Democrats’ candidate for Mayor of the West of England. He joined the Liberal Democrats from the SDP. He has served as a county and city councillor. While MP for Bristol West, he was Liberal Democrat Shadow Minister for Schools, and a minister in the Department for Communities and Local Government. He was the only member of the Coalition government to have been on free school meals as a child.
Colin McDougall, George Kendall and Wendy Chamberlain MP
This book is written to grapple with the serious challenges the country faces in the coming decades and is inspired by the example of those who wrote the Limehouse Declaration 40 years ago. We have invited contributors to reflect on these challenges, and to propose realistic solutions. We have also encouraged them to think boldly and feel free to disagree with each other.
January 2021 marks the 40th anniversary of the Limehouse Declaration and the launch of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) that followed. Through the 1980s, the SDP offered the most coherent ideas to challenge Thatcherism; these became the intellectual bedrock for the best of New Labour. They were also central to the ethos of the Liberal Democrats, which was formed from a merger of the SDP and the Liberals.
The Social Democrat Group was formed in 2015 to promote this social democratic heritage within the Liberal Democrats and to build on these ideas to address the challenges of the future. These include appalling levels of poverty, the aftermath of our exit from the European Union (EU) and the rise of populists, who fill digital platforms with intolerance and have an increasing voice in mainstream media.
This collection of essays is an important part of that ongoing work. We are enormously grateful to the leading politicians who have produced the excellent essays that make up this book.
While the Social Democrat Group is a Liberal Democrat group, there are many social democrats in other parties and none, such as Roger Liddle, one of the contributors to this book. The group has always sought to engage with them. If this is you, this book is for you too.
The world has changed dramatically since the Limehouse Declaration set out the underlying principles of a new party. It is extraordinary to think that words written in a world with only three television channels and no smartphones, and that was closer to the Second World War than today, should be relevant today.
Social democracy has many definitions. In our view, it combines:
• a determination to pursue policies that will work;
• a commitment to fight for the vulnerable; and
• a belief that for democracy to thrive, policies must work for everyone, including the affluent.
Through this book, we seek to strengthen the voice of a political philosophy that has done more to transform the world for the better than any other in the last 100 years. In modern Britain, the National Health Service (NHS), state investment programmes and social insurance are the result of this social democratic heritage.
One of the greatest qualities of the SDP was an atmosphere of creative policy exploration, which created solutions that were not just radical, but also workable. The greatest successes of social democracy have often owed as much to building a consensus about values and policies. The technological and social change of recent decades has put huge strain on this consensus in important areas of policy, as Ian Kearns describes in Chapter Three.
Voters are rightly sceptical when social democrats propose large-scale change through an active state as they fear these changes are not based on fairness and rigorous thinking. However, when a consensus has been achieved, social democratic reforms have not just been delivered, but been accepted by all parties. This has meant that even when social democrats have lost power, the influence of their values has continued, for example, in the way all parties now support the free provision of healthcare through the NHS.
Many of the policies outlined in the following chapters would, if implemented, make huge differences to people’s lives, for example, Chris Huhne’s proposals for long-term policies that would increase the provision of decent housing and make it more affordable. However, as social democrats and liberals, we need to do more than propose policies; we need to win public support.
This is a considerable challenge for all ambitious policies. For example, many in the centre-left have argued for a universal basic income. The Social Democrat Group has a range of opinions on this issue, as do the contributors to this book. The policy seeks to resolve, or at least mitigate, many of our social ills, including job insecurity, rapid technological change and poverty. However, there is a significant challenge to convince voters that the significant rise in taxes is justified, and that it will deliver what is promised.
This is true for many other policies, including the free trade policies which Sarah Olney describes in Chapter Six, and the foreign and defense policies which Julie Smith describes in Chapter Seven.
A new social contract
All mature states have some kind of social contract to create a stable consensus, where individuals give power to the state, for example, to levy taxes, in exchange for certain benefits. In some countries, this is defined in a written constitution; in others, like the UK, it is more implicit – but it still exists.
A substantial increase in taxes to create a more just society would change the existing implicit social contract in the UK. If we are to win public support, we need to consider what that contract would look like. The cost in increased taxes will be self-evident. To win voters over, we need to convince them that the gains are worthwhile, whether in improved pooling of risk or an improved social fabric.
The social contract also implies obligations that citizens have to wider society. For example, that if they make appointments with their doctor, they attend them. Many voters believe that the implicit contract involved in their funding the welfare state is not being kept by others. To increase funding for the welfare state, we will need to reassure these voters.
Responding to voters’ concerns
The unexpected Conservative majority in December 2019 was a painful defeat for both Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The pain of this defeat has been compounded by the fact that many of those on lower incomes, whose lives we seek to improve, switched to the Conservatives. This is a serious political failure and we need to consider why it happened. To have a chance of implementing the excellent solutions outlined in the following chapters requires us to resolve this dilemma.
The following chapters are written by experienced politicians, rather than academics, who are painfully aware of the need to reach out beyond those who think like us. On his election as Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey rightly emphasised the importance of listening, and not just to those who agree with us. Those of us who are activists on the centre-left should do the same.
Reaching out must be about more than policies. It may involve changing the way we express ourselves. Probably the most painful electoral defeat in the last ten years was the election of Donald Trump. On 9 September 2016, Hilary Clinton said: ‘you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables…. They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.’1 It was a catastrophic gaffe that was used repeatedly by the Trump campaign. Not only did it energise Trump’s base, but some who were still undecided thought her insult might be directed at them. She quickly apologised, but the damage was done, perhaps because those words were perceived to reflect the underlying attitude of many liberal members of the Democrats. Social democrats and liberals in the UK should consider whether we have made similar mistakes.
Engaging with these voters will sometimes require us to make compromises.