A few weeks ago, the Liberal Conspiracy website launched, with a bold claim of representing the 'liberal left'. This provoked a less-than-enthusiastic response from those who felt that 'liberal' was not the right word. I meant to write this post while the question was a bit more topical, but now is as good a time as any: just what is the liberal left?

Any analysis of this problem tends to suffer from semantic confusion: there's little agreement over what 'left' really means in a political context, or even what 'liberal' means. So, if this question is to be answered meaningfully, we'll have to define the terms.

Liberalism is a broad concern with human liberty. It is a belief that individual decision-making is important and that, insofar as it is possible, people should be free to control their own lives. Liberals tend to believe that the only good reason for coercing a person - preventing them from taking a course of action - is to protect the rights of others. Liberalism rejects the notion that we need to be commanded from above by wiser, cleverer, richer, more powerful, more articulate or more organised groups; instead, liberalism favours free association and voluntary arrangements wherever possible.

'Left' is a broad political term which has changed in meaning over the period of its use. I think it's fair to characterise 'left-wing' as 'concerned about improving the conditions of those who are suffering most from the present arrangement of society'. Yes, that's a long-winded way of saying it, but it's better to be long-winded than to leave anything open to interpretation. So, a left-wing perspective on economic issues might involve concern about poverty, or the status of mistreated workers, or the effects of imbalances of power on those with the least power to control their own lives. Left-wingers are primarily concerned with promoting the interests of the weak.

So, what does 'liberal left' mean? They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I'll try to illustrate by use of a diagram:

Put simply, 'liberal left' is that area in which 'liberal' and 'left' overlap. (I apologise if this is a bit obvious; As I said earlier, there's so much confusion about this issue that it pays to be clear).

So, there are some policies and beliefs which are both liberal and left-wing, some which are liberal but not especially left-wing and some which are left-wing but not liberal. For example, a left-winger could advocate state control of the major national industries on the basis that this would (in theory) enable them to be run in the interests of all. A liberal would reject this idea on the basis that it would create monopolies, thus denying people choice and control, or that it would simply create a new concentration of power in the hands of politicians and lobbyists. Alternatively, a liberal might suggest drastic tax cuts in order to give people more control over how their money is spent, whilst a left-winger might reject this because it would, in the extreme, lead to greater inequalities; the poorest might not be able to afford healthcare if it was not tax-funded.

So, to call oneself 'liberal left' or 'left liberal' requires that you be willing to rule out ideas which fall outside of either liberalism or left-wing sympathies. It means that you can't support paternalist policies which take control away from people even if your intention is to help them, and it means that you can't advocate greater liberty if it only means greater liberty for the few. Jock Coats has an insightful post today about how liberal economic ideas must benefit everyone if they are to be popular; to me, this illustrates the issue perfectly. It is possible to achieve left-wing aims - a better deal for the poor and the powerless - without resorting to illiberalism and paternalism. The challenge for the liberal left is to demonstrate that there is a complete programme for government within the sphere of liberal left ideas.

So, this might be 'left-wing' politics, but not as we know it. The insistence on liberty as a guiding principle should win the support of those who want to see a more equitable society without wanting to surrender control over their own lives, and the insistence on a care for the interests of the weak - already an idea most liberals will instinctively subscribe to - will ensure that liberty is not just the freedom of the strong to exploit the weak.

Forging this kind of movement will not be easy. It's tempting to subscribe to the 'bloggertarian' viewpoint, and damn all government action as unjustified meddling. It's also tempting to propose that this particular government intervention is justified, even if it results in a loss of liberty. Both views are in tension with each other, and have to be balanced. Many of the discussions on Liberal Conspiracy so far have demonstrated that tension. But I don't think that liberalism and leftism are irreconcilable; now, more than ever, with both New Labour and the Conservatives occupying the centre-right, a progressive centre-left has a great opportunity. We need to promote liberty as a virtue and not a weakness, and explain how liberty can bring society together, not drive it apart.

Via Devil's Kitchen, I am reminded of this animation. I've seen it before, but it's worth watching every now and again just as a timely reminder of some of the fundamental principles of liberty. It's often too easy to forget some of these things, given how used we are to liberty in this country and how arcane political debates can become.

Of course, the view of liberty being promoted here is still open to some interpretation; by a particular reading, it could be taken to say that all taxation is theft. Undoubtedly there are times and places where taxation is theft, where it used to unfairly appropriate the property of some people for the benefit of others (or merely for wasteful ends that nobody benefits from). It's always important to remember just how dangerous the levers of government can be in the wrong hands, or merely when the exercise of power becomes so broad that it is no longer possible for individuals to resist or control it.

If you don't want to sit through the whole thing (and I don't really blame you, it doesn't exactly move along at a great pace, although this does give greater opportunities for thought about the message), there's a transcript at Devil's Kitchen (see the link at the start of this post).

This post is largely inspired by this one, and the resulting comments. I'd advise anyone reading this to read that too.

I'm an economic liberal. I think that some regulation is necessary, but that we have more regulation than we presently need, and that this tends to act in favour of the large corporations who can most easily absorb the costs of this regulation. I think that the government wastes enough money at present that it has the scope to their cut taxes or redistribute money in a far more straightforward and direct way. I believe in the ability of people to have their own values and decide, as much as possible, how best to spend money in pursuit of those values. I believe that diversity and competition are important both in their practical effect of raising standards and in their liberal principled effect of giving people choice and freedom.

I also believe that people should pay fairly for the costs of their actions and their unearned benefits. They should pay for the pollution that they cause, and they should pay for wealth that they have received purely through the acts of others. I believe that nobody should live in poverty and that educational opportunity should be freely available to all, at least to the level of a person's first degree or equivalent. I believe that universal health coverage should be state-funded, but I'm very suspicious of monopoly state provision, and that suspicion applies to most state activities. I generally approve of private ownership, but I'd like to see a lot more employee-ownership, cooperatives and mutual societies.

I believe in an engaged society where freedom provides the main protection from oppression. People who feel that large corporations are negatively affecting their communities need freedom to organise alternatives. Sometimes this means simply choosing not to deal with that company (which requires vibrant competition and diversity to provide an alternative), but it might also mean investing directly in local companies in order to support them. We need to eliminate any and all regulation that stands in the way of creative, entrepreneurial individuals who want to take on their more powerful rivals. Regulation, done incorrectly, will choke off the underdog long before it brings the powerful to heel. Regulation sets hurdles so high that only those who already have power and money can afford to jump over them. Our present regulatory environment is a mirror of our tax and benefit environment, which crushes the aspirations of the poor with eye-watering marginal tax rates and leaves the poorest paying more tax than the richest as a proportion of income. If you're on minimum wage and get an extra £50 per week in your pay packet, you'll lose more of that £50 in tax and benefit reductions than if you were a millionaire earning the same amount extra.

To sum up, I'd say that liberals are on the side of the least powerful, and we should want to set them free, not trap them in the machinery of the state.

This is what I believe the meaning of economic liberalism is. And yet, economic liberalism is something that is often derided as 'a bit right-wing', referred to disapprovingly as little more than warmed-up Thatcherism. Personally, I can't understand why. But I want someone to explain it to me, in the hope that perhaps we might realise that we, as liberals, all have a lot more in common than we think, and that divisions between 'economic' and 'social' liberals are mostly misunderstandings. So, who wants to take up the debate?

In this excellent post, James Graham implores the Lib Dem leadership candidates to get down to basic principles. In the post, he reinforces the view that there is, at heart, a fundamental difference between Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg's aims:

Huhne’s manifesto contains two core elements that he should push home as much as possible over the next few weeks. The first is the People’s Veto - a brilliant populist move which happens to also be a democratic one. The second is his defence of equality. The latter guarantees that the likes of Andy Mayer and Tristan Mills won’t vote for him, but it marks him out as a centre left politician and contrasts with Clegg’s emphasis on meritocracy. It is an issue of principle that he can stand or fall on. For me - and others - it makes Clegg’s exhortation of liberalism sound hollow.

The gist of this argument is that Huhne places a greater emphasis on creating a society where there is more 'equality', whereas Clegg is implicitly opposed to this view, based on his championing of 'meritocracy'. What you take this to mean will largely depend upon your own assumptions. Some of you will read 'equality' as 'punitive taxation, levelling down, stifling of aspiration', whereas others will read it as 'protection of the poor, restraint of runaway greed and power, challenge to entrenched privilege'. Some of you will read 'meritocracy' as 'devil take the hindmost' and others will read it as 'opportunity to succeed according to one's talents and efforts'. Personally, I doubt that Chris Huhne favours a socialist society where success is to be looked upon with distrust and envy, and I also doubt that Nick Clegg wants to lock the poor into poverty on the basis that they deserve to be poor, but in leadership campaign situations even minor differences of opinion can appear to be inflated to these proportions.

Charlotte Gore takes Huhne to task over his focus on equality:

Is it ‘Left or Right’? It’s Left, there’s no doubt in my mind - certainly it’s way to the left of the mainstream these days. He has committed himself to Equality itself, essentially the nearest a Lib Dem will ever come to declaring himself on the ’socialist’ wing of the party.

Is it ‘liberal’? He uses the word but for me this is continuation of the ‘liberalism’ that has defined the Liberal Democrats certainly as long as I can remember. It is the same mish-mash of liberalism and socialism that has everyone scratching their heads and asking us to make up our minds about what we believe in.

I think that Charlotte is right, and that 'equality' is too vague an aim. As liberals, there are certainly some kinds of equality that we stand for unequivocally: equal treatment by the law, equal votes, equal rights, equal access to public services and with our commitments to education and fair taxation, we stand for equality of opportunity too. In my view, to go beyond this is to go further than we need to.

The problem is that I'm not sure that Huhne is really proposing this. Nobody is proposing absolute equality, a situation in which everyone is guaranteed equal wealth, equal income etc. It's politically, practically, morally, intellectually and in almost every other sense absurd. In fact, I think it's possible that Huhne is using 'equality' as shorthand, to demonstrate an awareness of the fact that some problematic inequalities exist in society today. 'Equality' is his catch-all term which covers such issues as equal votes (votes are not equal in a FPTP system), equality of opportunity (something which needs to be improved) and material inequality between the richest and poorest.

For me, Huhne's problem in communication here is that he is using technical language which conveys moral meanings to some people. When he says 'equality', it triggers reactions in his audience. Some reactions are favourable, others are not - as I outlined at the start of this post. But 'equality' (or, more accurately, inequality) can also be an objective fact. We can measure the inequality between rich and poor based on their incomes or their assets. And if we observe that this inequality is increasing, we might infer that something needs to be done about this (or that something which is presently being done needs to be stopped or done differently). In saying that he wants to 'promote equality', Huhne might be saying nothing more than that it is necessary to tackle a range of inequalities (I mentioned unequal votes already), and is certainly not implying anything much stronger than that. If he's merely saying that, by failing the poorest, we have allowed some people to slip too far behind, then I can agree with him. If he's suggesting that we should merely redistribute from the wealthy to the poor, without addressing the causes of the increase in inequality, then I can't support him.

Let's look at what he actually said on the issue of inequality of pay, in his manifesto:

It is not enough to speak of equality of opportunity, aspiration and level playing fields. If 'meritocracy' means that individuals will receive the rewards their abilities and work deserve, it produces a very unattractive society in which complacently successful people constantly look down on their less able fellow citizens, whom they firmly believe to deserve less. We need more than that. In R.H.Tawney's phrase, we need both an equal start and an open road. It is right that people should have the opportunity to climb up the ladder, which is why, for example, we should continue to support the idea of that education should be free up to and including first degree level. We should celebrate success and energy. But no one should ever lose their entitlement to self-respect or to sufficient income, wealth and health to function as a citizen simply because they have fallen off that ladder.

This is a problematic paragraph for me. The attack on meritocracy seems to me to be ill-founded and ill-judged. I think that it is only right that people should receive rewards for their abilities and work and I don't see anything unattractive about that. His closing sentence is also confusing; I do believe that everyone has an entitlement to a role in society, but I don't believe that the state can adequately guarantee 'self-respect'. He makes no mention of personal responsibility here, and that seems to suggest that, in his view, anyone who is poor or who 'falls off the ladder' does so because they have been failed by the state or society. This is, unfortunately, not always the case. Self-respect comes from finding a useful purpose for one's own life, and that is not something that can be granted by the state.

On high rates of pay, Huhne is actually much more sensible:

Part of the problem of inequality comes from the sheer lack of shame of so many of those who award themselves extraordinarily high salaries. There is everything right with top rewards for risk, effort and hard work. But the ratcheting-up of pay for corporate bureaucrats is a different matter. Thirty years ago, the average chief executive officer of a FTSE-100 company earned ten times more than the average shopfloor worker in that organisation. Now the figure is more like 77 times. As each company tries to pay more than the average, on the grounds that they need above average managers, the pay difference has soared. More publicity for very high salaries is essential, and shareholders should be asked to vote formally on corporate remuneration.

Whilst this actually reads as a stinging attack on 'extraordinary' rates of pay, in practice he proposes nothing more than social pressure - 'publicity' and shareholder votes - as a means of correcting it. Personally, I'm fine with that because I don't really regard such high rates of pay as being the fundamental problem. Or, put another way, I don't believe that the poor are being impoverished by the success of others. If my concern lies with helping the poor, then I should focus more on how best to improve their situation rather than how best to reduce the success of others. Huhne appears to agree.

In summary, he says:

But we need to think more about inequalities. We should be asking, for example, whether it makes any sense for a person on the minimum wage to be paying income tax, or whether a very rich person who inherits an estate should be liable to the same inheritance tax as a person with nothing who inherits the same estate. In an era in which it is all too easy to move income and wealth around, we must also revive thinking about land values as a source of fair tax revenue. If the public sector invests in infrastructure such as tube or tram lines, should it not be able to recoup some of the cost from the increased land value that flows from the investment? We are committed to rebasing the business rate on land values, but we should consider too land value taxation as a replacement for other personal taxes.

There's really nothing there that I can disagree with. I'm left feeling somewhat confused. Most of the practical measures that Huhne talks about - cuts in income tax for the poorest, land value taxation, social rather than interventionist measures to tackle 'too high' pay, a redoubling of the commitment to education - these are all things which I can, as an 'economic liberal' support wholeheartedly. It's not Huhne's policies that I disagree with, it's his rhetoric.

In today's Independent, Andreas Whittam Smith explores the conclusions of Julian Baggini's new book, "Welcome to Everytown: A journey into the English Mind." Mr Baggini, a philosopher, went to live on the outskirts of Rotherham in order to understand the way Middle England thinks.

Whittam Smith notes that:

Mr Baggini's key insight is that England's culture remains predominantly working class. By paying too much attention to growing wealth, we have made the mistake of believing that everyone is gradually becoming middle class.

But in reality, writes Mr Baggini, the majority of those who deck out their houses with en suite bathrooms and drive bigger and better cars are also, in their values and beliefs, as resolutely working class as they ever were. The most popular television shows are either soaps about working class life or quizzes and entertainment that spring directly from the traditions of working men's clubs. And the greatest symbol of the centrality of working class culture to English life is football.

So far so what? Being Working Class does not of itself preclude someone from being liberal. But Baggini offers this insight into the limits of English toleration:

"the English are not classical liberals, but communitarians". A typical communitarian slogan is "No rights without responsibilities". In this way of thinking, rights are not absolute, as they are in the European and United Nations declarations of rights, but conditional. In English working-class culture, they depend upon the circumstances in which they are claimed. "Unless we recognise the fact that England is not liberal," writes Mr Baggini, "we will be going against the grain of popular thinking every time we try to implement policies that rest on the assumption that it is."

The same goes for fair play as in everyone plays by the same rules and no one cheats. But in practice, the English sense of fair play is considerably looser than this. After all, if we are paid in cash for some job, we probably won't declare it to the tax authorities.

No, on close examination our famous fair play is very similar to other country's. Playing fair does not mean playing by the rules, it means each person getting his or her due. And this, in turn, depends upon one's place in society. You might not cheat the neighbour next door, but you would rip off someone richer than you if you thought you could get away with it.

Reflect on that the next time you are out leafletting.

Recently I have engaged in some email communication, as a result of a residents' survey, with a verywell-informed and thoughtful member of the electorate. This person has shared with my constituency party some innovative ideas for improving our locality that we hope to give wider publicity, especially if we increase our representation after the elections in May. She also set all politicians a challenge:

Sadly, I feel that politics has become an ego-boosting game when it comes to governing the country and it seems that only if is good for their Party are policies put into place. Fire fighting is the name of the game …

I wonder if I asked any member of the political parties whether they could immediately answer the following question: How do you want the United Kingdom to look in 10-20 years time?

My view is if they have not got a Clear Long Term Vision and plans on how to put that vision into place (everyone in the party from the cleaners to the top should know it and start implementing it in their daily life), how can they get somewhere? They will be wandering with the wind, pushed by other countries (US, EU). I have not voted for the President of the US , nor for any other countries’ leaders (or Tony Blair) but we have to sit and swallow what they give us and see this potentially great country go down the pan.

The reason why I am happy to share my ideas is that as there is a lack of general leadership with a clear vision, actions can only be taken from the grass roots, i.e. in the local community. If we can get a clear long term vision for our locality and a strategy that goes with it, suitable for the 21st and 22nd Century, we can become a model town, a place where people want to come and look and ask how we have done it. An example to follow!

What example can we follow now?

This struck a chord with me; especially as a couple of days earlier I had read Cicero's piece Liberals and anti-Liberals. The resemblance between the main points of his article, and the challenge of this letter is uncanny:

British politics is changing.

Traditional party politics is in long term decline.

Politicians have promised too much and delivered too little. Partly, this is because it is simply not possible for the political process to deliver the kind of outcomes that politicians and their voters expect. Disillusion and apathy are the order of the day- and political pragmatism has declined into the pursuit of power above any other interest. Many politicians will say- "of course it must be power above all else, otherwise how could we actually make any difference at all". The problem, though, is that power is concentrated in the hands of so few and is so jealously guarded that by the time that anyone gets close to the top they have forgotten what they wanted to change in the first place.

This concentration of power - economic as well as political - has reduced the power of the individual to impotence. Huge administrative bureaucracies, in almost every field, have acquired enormous powers to control. As people have lost control over their own lives they have given up on responsibility.

I wasn't sure of my correspondent's political views (I suspect she is non-aligned, but I thought she would be interested to read the thoughts of one of the most robust Liberals I know. Her response to me was telling:

I have read it and like you thought, I strongly agree. The frustrating bit is, that if this is truly what the Liberal Party stands for, it has not come through very well to either me or my husband (and possibly to other people too).

If I had any left, this would have me tearing my hair out. Especially given the recent coverage of Gordon's "5 Tests".

If anyone with any influence is reading - forget Gordon. We should be setting out our own 5 Liberal Principles, and proclaiming them loudly from the bottom to the top of the party, till even our lazy media begins to take notice.

Update: my colleague Peter's report of Paddy's article in the Yorkshire Post will do for starters:

In a nutshell, liberals believe in individual freedom, accountable government, the dispersion of political power, social justice, the rule of law, the free exchange of opinions and goods, and the protection of the natural environment.

The way the BBC has reported our latest announcement on crime appears to be text-book stuff.

Firstly, we have the "man-bites-dog" headline - "Life must mean life". And when we get down to the main text beneath we see the liberal message below it - that we should only give out life sentences when we specifically want to "lock people up and throw away the key". The ultimate message is about honesty.

I am also impressed with the thinking on getting prisoners to work - it represents restitution to the victim and rehabilitation for the offender. And is about practical solutions not headline-grabbing empty rhetoric.

But, ultimately, we have to get our message heard outside of our core. And this is the sort of way we can do it. So - more of the same, please! Perhaps next time we might have something on the EU?

Loyalism is not a particularly popular creed in Great Britain. Indeed, along with the Welsh and the ginger-haired, it is probably one of the few things that you are still "allowed" to make jokes about. If the popular image of Ulster Unionism is of dour bowler-hatted bigots, the popular image of Ulster Loyalism is of shaven-headed, tattooed violent thugs.

To find that this much-maligned group had a witty, eloquent and thoughtful spokesman was a rare and surprising thing. David Ervine was that man, and at his passing politics in Northern Ireland is the poorer.

Ervine came from a tough East Belfast background. By the age of 19, a friend of his had been killed by the IRA and he joined the UVF. Two years later he was sent to prison. The foundations for a life of violence and incarceration, and possible early death, like so many of his contemporaries, appeared to have been laid.

Yet, his time in prison was the making of him. As the Guardian's obituary tells it:

Prison had a profound effect on Ervine, and he blossomed. Under the tutelage of the veteran loyalist Gusty Spence - serving life for a sectarian murder in 1966 - he picked up the pieces of the education he had abandoned at 14 after a confrontational relationship with teachers at Orangefield boys' secondary school. "David will be led, but he will not be driven," his mother had told them. Ervine quickly achieved his O-levels and commenced an arts and social sciences degree, which he completed after his release from the Maze prison in 1980 - although it was "Spence University" rather than the Open University which formed his views about the futility of politically motivated terrorism and nourished both his peace-making instincts and political ambitions.

Ervine remained dedicated to his Protestant working-class roots and constituents, and opposed a United Ireland, but made himself an articulate spokesman for non-violent political engagement (he was often accused of having "swallowed a dictionary" during his time in prison). As the Guardian put it:

he showed considerable courage by consistently condemning sectarian violence, drug dealing, racketeering, racism and other excesses of the paramilitary legacy....

Ervine's political pilgrimage still put him at risk of assassination - from extremists on both sides - and he was forced to move home several times. But the threats failed to curb his outspokenness. In a recent intervention in the Assembly he broke ranks with the unionist opposition to new regulations outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation: "Equality is equality is equality," he said. "If we refuse any human being the entitlement to equality, we deny ourselves proper equality. It is either for everyone or for no one."

The story of the Sectarian hard-man who found tolerance, understanding and his voice through the liberalising and civilising power of education seems like the stuff of fiction. But it happened, and is as good an advert as any you will find for what Liberalism is, or should be about - enabling people to live together and reach their full potential.

Our thoughts go to his wife and family.

As a child, having a December birthday was a bugbear as the temptation to amalagamate my birthday with Christmas was usually too great. This year, I had cause to be thankful, as I was given Niall Ferguson's Empire for my birthday and had the chance to read it up to and over Christmas.

The subtitle (and subtext) of the book is "How Britain made the Modern World". For, whilst Ferguson's engaging (if sketchy) narrative takes the reader on a whistlestop tour of British expansion and contraction, it is the questions that this hypothesis raises that are perhaps the lasting impression of the book for me.

Ferguson puts forward a variation on the "seeds of its own destruction" argument for the end of Empire, in that ultimately it was in standing up to the far more brutal nascent German and Japanese Empires that the British Empire bankrupted itself beyond repair.

Yet the real premise of the book is that it is the export of British ideas of governance that sets the British Empire apart, and allowed the development of a liberal/Liberal world. Perhaps the key quote for me in this respect is the following:

The economic historian David Landes recently drew up a list of measures which the 'ideal growth-and-development' government would adopt. Such a government, he suggests, would

1 secure rights of private property, the better to encourage saving and investment;
2 secure rights of personal liberty ... against both the abuses of tyranny and ... crime and corruption;
3 enforce rights of contract;
4 provide stable government ... governed by pucblicly known rules;
5 provide responsive government;
6 provide honest government ... [with] no rente to favour and position;
7 provide moderate, efficient, ungreedy government ... to hold taxes down [and] reduce the government's claim on the social surplus.

The striking thing about this list is how many of its points correspond to what British Indian and Colonial officials in the nineteenth and twentieth century believed they were doing. The sole, obvious exceptions are pointe 2 and 5. Yet the British argument for postponing (sometimes indefinitely) the transfer to democrac was that many of their colonies were not yet ready for it; indeed the classic and not wholly disingenuous twentieth-century line from the Colonial Office was that Britain's role was precisely to get them ready.

Reading the above list, it strike me that (i) I would agree that it constitutes a blue-print for the sort of liberal society and governement I would like to see and (ii) how few places in the world there are where these conditions pertain. Much like the conditions for human betterment, which require basic physical needs to be satisfied before more esoteric concerns can be addressed, a liberal world requires a certain order.

Ferguson argues that it took the British to impose, and maintain, those conditions, in order for the world to become safe for Liberal Democracy. He uses this case to argue for a Pax Americana, indeed argues that de facto, if not de jure, an American Empire exists already (a theme he has developed in a later book).

Instinctively, as a Liberal I recoil from the imposition of anything; but at the same time, as I value Liberal Democracy should I not fight for, or authorise the fight for, those values to be allowed to others? This conundrum is encapsulated in another quote from Ferguson's book:

[The Americans have always had] a very different conception of Empire. To the Americans, reared on the myth of their own fight for freedom from British opression, formal rule over subject peoples was unpalatable. It also implied those foreign entanglements the Founding Fathers had warned against. Sooner or later, everyone must learn to be, like the Americans, self-governing and democratic - at gunpoint if necessary. In 1913 there had been a military coup in Mexico, to the grave displeasure of Woodrow Wilson, who resolved 'to teach the South American Republics to elect good men'. Walter Page, then Washington's man in London, reported a conversation with the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edwar Grey, who asked:

'Suppose you have to intervene, what then?'
'Make 'em vote and live by their decisions.'
'But suppose they will not so live?'
'We'll go in and make 'em vote again.'
'And keep this up 200 years?' asked he.
'Yes', said I. 'The United States will be here for two hundred years and it can continue to shoot men for that little space till they learn to vote and to rule themselves.'

Anything, in other words, but take over[my emphasis] Mexico - which would have been the British solution.

The US has tried the "British Solution" in Iraq - and Ferguson's argument is that it will not stay for the long term, so it tends more towards the Mexican situation. But it does raise this question.

Can it ever be possible to bring about a world system of Liberal Democracy without imposition? And if it can't be guaranteed without the willingness to impose it, should it be pursued in those terms?

In Wednesday's Guardian Simon Jenkins posited that "Ipswich proves how badly we need Tory libertarians". He does not recognise the current Conservative Party as being able to make the case for an increase in basic civil liberties:

What is the matter with the Conservative party? It once claimed a nodding acquaintance with the cause of liberty. Now it runs with the corporatist pack. If there is anything to be banned, regulated or computerised, it howls from the dispatch box for "something to be done". Be it prostitutes, drugs, prisons, NHS computers, data protection or civil rights, the Tories are desperate not to be seen as out of the action.

Just like Blair, Cameron seems content to have his agenda shaped at the behest of focus groups and the press. As Jenkins continues:

The Tories could tell us exactly what a modern Conservative means by a free society, and list the regulations and restrictions they intend to repeal in their bonfire of controls. They could seize the moment of the Ipswich headlines by declaring their determination to end counter-productive bans on consensual crime. Merely preaching an end to government interference in the private affairs of citizens is hypocritical if, when case after case comes along, Cameron funks mentioning it for fear of the press.

Indeed. Project Cameron is not about any sort of principle, as Cicero argued so persuasively earlier this week. It is solely about securing a return to power for the Conservatives, who have finally come to the realisation that the "Natural Party of Government" finds loss of power more painful than the triumph of the viewpoint of one their disparate sects (although, of course, if power was secured these internal tensions would surface immediately).

Yet what is the point of this power, if the Conservatives will not act?

If the Tories spend every day dancing attendance on the tabloids, they will get absolutely nowhere with wavering voters. If oppositions, especially those professing an aversion to an overwhelming state, cannot see how specifically to curb it, who will?

The answer is obvious - it has to be the Liberal Democrats. A clear and urgent expression of Liberty has to be our rallying cry in the run up to the general election. We owe it to the voters to offer them this choice; they will not get it from the Blue Labour parties.

It is distinctive, but it is also right.