There is more to a Liberal Democrat than a chameleon in a hat!
Simon Beard responds to recent Disraeli Room posts painting the Liberal Democrats as shape-shifting anoraks
There has been some criticism of the Liberal Democrats on this blog in recent days, and the Editor has kindly offered to let me post a response from the perspective of a committed Lib Dem.
Reading many comments about the Lib Dems since the election, it seems to me that public opinion about us could be summed up in the phrase ‘chameleons in silly hats', and this is a view I think needs challenging.
Let's start with the hat. It is immediately apparent to anybody looking at UK politics where the Lib Dems stand on certain issues, and we hold positions on them that make us very distinctive, as if we were all wearing bright yellow hats. Electoral Reform is one of these, and in particular a commitment to replacing our current voting system, with a strong preference for the Single Transferable Vote system. Another is civil liberties, defined quite broadly so as to capture everything from the right to protest in parliament square to drugs policy reform. Historically free trade has formed the third horn of the hat, but this is less relevant now that it is the default policy of almost everybody, nevertheless it is still represented by our strong support for the EU and for the rights of migrants, both economic and political. It is quite a natty hat, and many non Lib Dems are tempted to try it on, especially when trying out a new set of policies, and whilst some snigger at its boldness the hat is generally respected. Hats are cool.
However, no matter how important these particular issues are to Lib Dems they are rarely those that the general public care about most. Instead they are far more interested in the wealth of services provided by the state, how they are run and how they will be paid for. In these areas the Lib Dems are far less distinctive. Moreover we have a tendency to appear to change our stance depending on who we are talking to. When the Lib Dems were seen mostly against a backdrop of disaffected Labour voters our commitment to free higher education, progressive taxation and social housing gave us a deep red tinge. Now that we are in coalition with the Conservatives our belief that public money should follow individuals, that markets can be used to drive reform and that the poorest should pay less income tax turn us a deep blue, and make it look, as Adam argued recently, as if we ‘simply dissolve into Thatcherism when mixed into a Coalition'. Hence the perception that, despite our bright yellow hats, the Lib Dems are political chameleons.
Naturally this is not how we see ourselves. The first thing to realise is that Lib Dems have always stood for free higher education, progressive taxation, including tax cuts for the poorest, social housing, individualised public services and free markets, and that we still do. None of these things is actually inconsistent with the rest. However political realities mean that we cannot get all that we would like, firstly because we must form a coalition to get into government (after all, who really wants to elect somebody wearing a silly hat!) and secondly because there simply isn't the money to do everything we want.
However, much more importantly, the Lib Dems are not just a random mixture of red and blue, but represent a cross-cutting ideology that takes what it sees as the best of both worlds and that shares both the values of the right and the left. We want higher education to be free because this helps ensure that it is available to everybody who wants it. However, if this can be achieved by other means, we also feel that there is something perverse in poor-non graduates paying for the education of rich graduates and whilst we want public services to be well funded we also believe that money is better allocated when it follows individuals rather than being distributed by a faceless and unresponsive bureaucracy. Whilst we see increasing the social housing stock as a key means of reducing homelessness and social depravation we are also motivated to do it because there are clear signs that without government intervention the market is bound to overheat. Our commitment to progressive taxation is sincere, and we are still opposed to VAT on principle, however the taxation of low income individuals is probably a greater evil as it makes work less profitable, discourages saving and so re-enforces the poverty gap.
For me the best illustration of this cross cutting ideology is our approach to income tax. In 1997 the Lib Dems argued for an extra penny to be raised on income tax, in 2001 this had changed to a new higher rate of 50%, in 2005 we wanted to redistribute the tax burden and at the time of the 2010 election we were arguing for a tax cut for the poorest. The public narrative has been that these moves represented a gradual shift to the right amongst Lib Dems, however from my perspective it felt much more like the Lib Dems stayed rock steady and New Labour raised more and more money through regressive stealth taxes until the tax burden became too high, were once it was clearly too low.
In truth it is the same material from which our bright yellow hats are made that the entire Liberal Democrat party, or at least the vast majority of it, is woven. However, because this fabric is neither red nor blue, people only ever see it as a mix of both. There is a consistent core of liberalism that explains all of our policies, and the disagreements we have about them. Naturally when we are in coalition it is those policies that are most amenable to a right wing audience that get implemented, on the other hand when Labour and the Lib Dems were considering a coalition prior to the 1997 election it was the red policies that came to the fore, and stayed there throughout the ensuing period of Labour government, but the party has never changed its colour. It isn't red, it isn't blue, and it isn't purple - it's yellow through and through.