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ANALYSIS
WHERE HAVE ALL THE LIBERALS GONE?
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED
DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
Producer: Hugh Levenison
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
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Broadcast Date: 25.11.04

Repeat Date: 28.11.04
Tape Number:
Duration:

Taking part in order of appearance:

Tony Wright
Labour MP and editor of Political Quarterly
Ziauddin Sardar
Author
George Lakoff
Professor of cognitive science and linguistics at
the University of California, Berkeley
Roger Smith
Director-General of the human rights organisation,
Justice
Ann Widdecombe MP
Former Shadow Home Secretary
Michael Freeden

Oxford Politics Professor

Baroness Williams of Crosby
Liberal Democrat in the House of Lords

Fernandez-Armesto
Liberalism is yesterdays consensus.
In the 1960s, as JK Galbraith said, there was no other creed. In
the late twentieth century, liberal shibboleths welfare, tolerance,
human rights became almost unquestionable. Today, however,
liberalism is under threat: accused in the name of security,
responsibility, social cohesion, and traditional values; blamed for
weakness, beleaguered by woes.
Labour MP and editor of Political Quarterly, Tony Wright
Wright
The fact that we have people in the
world ... who HATE liberals, the fact that the most important
country in the world is in the grip of a deep illiberalism, the fact
that it is the grip of fundamentalism, that is what is illiberal, so if
Im worried about liberalism, what Im worried about is a liberal
tradition of rational discourse and rational enquiry as applied to
politics. I think thats in more danger now than I can ever
remember it.
Sardar
Muslim fundamentalists do not like
the kind of liberalism that is coming from the West but now of
course we see from the American election that Christian
fundamentalism is also very, very strong and is not just resisting
liberalism but actually demonising it .... So I think the future of
liberalism is grim in the short-run.
Fernandez-Armesto
Ziauddin Sardar, author of American
Dream, Global Nightmare. But the threat isnt only from
fundamentalists. Liberalism has plenty of other enemies: in
mainstream politics and in power. So where did liberalism go?
Where did it go wrong?
Some might say its bound to be wishy-washed away by its own
hesitancies. Liberals even flip-flop about what liberalism is: an
ideology, or a point of view; a way of using the state, or a way of
resisting it. When liberalism started in the nineteenth century it
targeted tyranny: then, as governments became more
democratic, liberals embraced the state to free people
oppressed by poverty and inequality, and give them rights.
In todays politics responsibilities displace rights. In a world
threatened by violence and dissolution, electorates demand a

state that is more restrictive, less permissive; less tolerant, more

tough. In America, liberalisms already a term of abuse. George
Lakoff, professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the
University of California, Berkeley, explains.
Lakoff
Back in 1964 when Barry Goldwater
lost as a conservative, no one wanted to be a conservative.
Conservative was a dirty word. It meant a sort of mean greedy
small-minded sort of violent person. And liberal meant someone
who was in favour of freedom and equality and opportunity, you
know, the best of America. And that slowly got changed. What
the right wing did was to brand liberal. That is to frame it in their
language. And the way you do that is you add adjective. You
have the tax and spend liberals. The limousine liberals. The
latte liberals. And you want liberals to sound irresponsible,
licentious, effete and so on. The liberals did nothing to defend
themselves. They did nothing whatever. The conservatives are
way ahead in the war of ideas.
Fernandez- Armesto
American liberalisms not
dead. But its demonised, marginalised, tongue-tied, and
helpless. American liberals dare not speak their name.
America is different. Britain is more secular. Broad-minded
values are imbedded. Economic liberalism is unassailable: Mrs
Thatcher saw to that. But what about social liberalism welfare
liberalism, the liberalism of rights and of individual
independence? Roger Smith is Director-General of the human
rights organisation, Justice. Does he fear for the future of that
sort of liberalism?
Smith
I do. I think its partly under
attack and you can see that in relation to policies which are
emanating from the Home Office and in relation to crime.
Fernandez-Armesto
Is that a conscious attack? Is
that inspired by illiberalism among policy makers?
Smith
I think much of this
governments approach has been to present itself as, not as
illiberal but as strong. Tough on crime. Tough on asylum
seekers. And its wanted to do that because its seen itself as
responding to a public mood but its also wanted to sort of do
good by stealth. So that this is the govt that has more people in
prison than ever before. But it has consistently tried to advance
the notion of community sentences. So its more complex, their
position is more complex than just being illiberal. But theyre
drawn to a particular political strategy which is to hold up an
illiberal and tough position. And to project themselves in that
way. And actually its feeding a cycle of fear of illiberalism in a
very unsatisfactory way
Fernandez-Armesto
The government seems
to be v good at liberal baiting. Do you sense that?
Smith
I sense it and I
experience it. That a governementt minister will make an
announcement, and David Blunkett is very good at it, but others
too, in the hope that, in the expectation that, liberals for want of a
better word will come out of the woodwork and say its
outrageous, and they will then present themselves to the
electorate as having taken a really tough step.

Fernandez-Armesto
The beginnings
of what happened to American liberalism are discernible in
Britain.
What Labour politicians call namby-pamby liberalism or sixties
liberalism is already getting the kind of treatment derogation
by adjectives that did for liberalism in America. Thats bound
to aggrieve a human rights lawyer like Roger Smith, but youd
expect a different response from the right. No voice in
mainstream politics in Britain is stronger for conservative values
and traditional morals than Ann Widdecombe, MP for Maidstone
and Weald and former Shadow Home Secretary. Yet for her, in
key respects, Britain today isnt liberal enough.
Widdecombe
If you look at the huge degree of
regulation, intervention - anti-smacking, parents being told how
to bring up their kids then that is not the mark of a liberal
regime. Very early in this governments term of office Jiang
Zemin
came over and the Tibetans were demonstrating and
they had their banners Free Tibet, etcetera, and the police
moved in and took them down. I have never seen that before in
a British demonstration.
Fernadez-Armesto
And the law and order agenda
is that also illiberal because I mean in a way theyve pinched
that from you, havent they?
Widdecombe
I dont think the law and
order agenda is illiberal as such. I myself am often frustrated by
the sort of liberalism which is often characterised as Hampstead
liberalism in which the view is virtually one of first of all social
anarchy and, secondly, one which says, for example,
punishment is never appropriate; you can always tackle these
things through looking at causes. But I think there is a world of
difference between that and the attitude which we now have
from this government, which is that it has an answer to
everything and that its appropriate for it to intervene - and that to
me is what is illiberal.
Fernandez-Armesto
So you are a liberal?
You think you shouldnt intervene unless theres serious
detriment?
Widdecombe
I do not think it appropriate
for the state to get involved in peoples choices unless there is a
very serious impact on other people. But if it is simply a lifestyle
choice, thats the individuals business.
Fernandez-Armesto
Theres a turn-up. A
Tory blaming Labour for not being liberal. In Britain, evidently,
the repudiation of liberalism hasnt gone nearly as far as in
America. But is Ann Widdecombe right to put so much onus on
the government? Politicians, surely, dont make the zeitgeist
they just reflect it. Tony Wright was one of the architects of New
Labour, and remains a champion of liberalism in the party. He
draws attention to a paradox of our culture.
Wright
People in much of their
lives, certainly in their personal lives, have never had more
freedom than theyve got now. And yet I think people sense there
has never been an emaciation of community life, of civic life, on

modern times, on the scale that we are seeing now. I think weve
been through a period of agonising about all this and I think now
people have said well, lets see what we can do then. And lets
see if we can insert the state into some of this. Lets try to make
benefits dependent upon work. lets try to make contracts
between parents and schools about how they educate their
children, Lets put parenting orders in. Lets have curfews for kids
who are on the streets. its the state getting into territory which it
did not have to get into a couple of generations ago. And then
when the state does it people say ah!! Affront to liberalism!! Well
absolutely affront to liberalism. But I mean again, my
constituents think we have to do this. They want the stuff.
Because they want something to be done.
Freeden There is a
strong populist trend within contemporary politics and the need
to pander to what is seen to be crucial public opinion.
Fernandez-Armesto
Oxford Politics
Professor Michael Freeden, historian of liberalism
Freeden
Liberalism has
never been a populist doctrine.I dont think it will ever be actually
a populist doctrine, because it doesnt use the means of
transmission that other ideologies do. It isnt good on raising
emotion, which is a very fast way of mobilising support. The
Conservatives can use nationality and patriotism, the Socialists
could use social solidarity and class and revolution. These were
stirring words. Liberalism has got a a rather more arid
vocabulary, a rather more cerebral vocabulary.
Fernandez-Armesto
Youre really saying that
liberalism is an inherently elite ideology and so its, the danger to
liberalism has arisen from the death of elitism.
Freeden
That is a valid
point. That is certainly one of the problems. Liberalism and
democracy met by accident, shall we say, in the 19th century and
have been holding hands in a rather fragile marriage ever since,
and there are aspects of democracy that are illiberal and there
are totalitarian aspects of democracy, in which majoritarianism
drowns other voices and in which populism and pandering to the
lowest common denominator creates a rather frightening
composite.
Fernandez-Armesto
Its the classic dilemma
of liberals in democracies. Voters value security more than
liberty. They demand tough sentencing, officious anti-social
behaviour orders, welfare-vigilantism,and capricious bans on
activities they happen to dislike.
For liberalism, democracy isnt the solution, its the problem. On
the other hand, you might expect most people to clamour for
tolerance, welfare, rights, in their own interests. Is the
electorate really so easily suckered by tough talk? Roger Smith.
Smith
What I see is a
society which is very split on these matters. You have a govt
which is taking a line on hunting, has taken a line on the Iraq
war, is taking a line on crime and actually what I see among the
people is actually a very different, a very much more uncertain, a
very much more mixed understanding of those issues.

Fernandez-Armesto
Isnt it fair to say that the
reason why people want the government to extend its controls is
because people have despaired of individuals getting it right for
themselves?
Smith
You have to
distinguish it seems to me as a matter of policy very very clearly
between behaviour which is not acceptable because its criminal
and behaviour which is not threatening in any way but which is
different from your own. So Im talking about a group of kids
sitting around in a bus stop. And ASBOs, antisocial behaviour
orders, which have so far been heralded as one of the great
victories against antisocial behaviour, you can see even as we
talk, the winds of change turning on that, because youre
beginning to get stories of absurd restrictions on people.
Camden took cases against people putting up flyposters. And
therell be a reaction, mark my words, a reaction against ASBOs
and the reason for it is that the philosophy behind it has not been
properly thought out.
Fernandez-Armesto
What, if anything, is that
philosophy? Its tempting to think the governments incapable of
coherence that it just spins around focus-group fashions and
electoral fancy. But there is a philosophical core to the way New
Labour treats freedoms, although its sometimes hard to spot
and hard to classify as liberal. Tony Wright.
Wright
I think one of the good things
about New Labour thinking was what it tried to say about rights
and responsibilities. We all know that that is a balancing act we
have to do all the time, in our own lives and in our public lives.
And if we forget that in our political traditions, we will go wrong. I
do think the labour party came to be seen as having gone wrong,
as only having got part of that equation right. So I think the
rebalancing that came through New Labour on that it both
reclaimed a very old tradition on the left which really was that
community tradition. The sort of things that are being said now
about only getting benefits in exchange for work would have
been absolutely standard stuff at the beginning of the 20th
century on the left. The idea that there was some sort of contract
involved in being a citizen. So it was only reclaiming territory that
we should never have abandoned.
Freeden
What we are looking at
is the resurrection of an earlier tradition, which is a harsher
tradition.
Fernandez-Armesto

Michael Freeden

Freeden
One good example which we can see when we look at New Labour - is the
reformulation of what a human right is. Within the liberal tradition
rights have always been unconditional and the reformulation of
rights as conditional is a novelty which has been imported over
the past ten years or so from the United States.
Fernandez-Armesto
Seeing them as conditional on the
fulfilment of responsibilities or duties?
Freeden
Precisely. The standard view
of a right is that if I have a right, you have a responsibility
towards me to protect that right and I have a responsibility

towards you to protect that same right. The reformulation of this

is now: if I have a right, it is because I have previously
discharged a responsibility. I have a responsibility. So rights are
purchased through good behaviour. And that is actually a
standard conservative argument and not a liberal one, but its
seeped into public discourse and liberal discourse and socialist
discourse.
Fernandez-Armesto
So are the reasons why this language
of responsibilities is displacing the language of rights? Does that
have special reasons of its own?
Freeden
Yes, well I think thats the rise
of the notion of community and the way the notion of community
has been handled by New Labour. Its community as control, its
community as a conventional, stabilising, regulating structure,
and I think New Labour has assimilated those ideas. When they
talk about responsibility, they are talking about complying with
acceptable social norms, behaving properly, but behaving
properly in a sense that the Home Office thinks one ought to
behave properly.
Fernandez-Armesto
Responsibility has a lot to answer for:
it crowds out rights. Liberalism has never minded deviants; it
has always targeted detriment. As long as you do no harm, says
liberalism, you should be allowed to do what you like. But the
frontier between health and harm is becoming as blurred as that
between rights and responsibilities. The way we understand
harm is changing. The more sources of harm we identify, and
the more causes of harm we fear, the more we want authority to
step in. Ann Widdecombe.
Widdecombe
I think there is a growth now of a
completely different motivation for intervention, which is
enormous, and that is something very straightforward: its the
compensation culture. Lets take an obvious example. There is
a council that has prohibited people from doing the backstroke in
its swimming baths. That is not because the council thinks that
there is anything wrong with doing backstroke or that theyre
going to lose an election if they let people do backstroke. Its
nothing to do with that at all. Its to do with the fact they are
terrified of being sued if somebody cracks their head on the end
of the bath when they complete their length. They have no
objection to the activity. They are very afraid of the
consequence. Take, for example, smoking in public places.
Nobodys going to tell me that that isnt driven by a fear of being
sued. It is driving a huge amount of intervention and a huge
amount of what you would call anti-liberalism
Fernandez-Armesto
Obsessions about rights can have
paradoxically illiberal consequences where rights conflict: the
smokers right to smoke, the non-smokers right to a smoke-free
environment; the rights of parents in split families, the right of
children to stable home-life; individuals right to safety and their
right to judge their own risks. Every time the state arbitrates, it
interferes. Rights AND responsibilities end up undermined.
It doesnt sound as if liberalisms equipped to cope with modern
life: struck by the swings of public interest and individual claims;
spun off the roundabout of populism. So is it doomed?
Smith

Well I think to use a phrase

from another time, the struggle continues. And liberals arent

dead yet. LAUGHS. ....
Fernandez-Armesto
criminal justice.

Roger Smith cites the example of

Smith
But actually at the end of the
day we need to get results. We know one thing for certain which
is that prison doesnt do much to change people so ultimately
keeping bubbling up will not only be peoples wishy-washy liberal
desires for a new world but actually the reality that you cant just
chuck offenders into the can and throw away the key. Theyre
going to get out and youre gonna be well advised to, if you like,
take a more liberal view or actually youre going to have to deal
with them as people and seek to be able to put them back into a
society where they dont reoffend. But I think one of liberalisms
great virtues is it actually works.
Fernandez-Armesto
So however airy-fairy, namby-pamby
or wishy-washy you think liberalism is, some liberal strategies
are vindicated by results. But no political philosophy can work
unless it reads human nature correctly. Liberalism trusts people
to be fufilled in freedom. But that confidence in human goodness
is getting hard to sustain these days. We used to see
neighbours. Now we see nuisance. We used to see children.
Now we see yobs. Where we used to share understanding, now
we exchange fear. For liberals, the horrors of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, the determinism of modern science, the
fatalism of much religion are deep-reaching challenges. Shirley
Williams is a Liberal Democrat in the House of Lords. Does she
accept that to be a liberal you need faith in human nature?
Williams
There is a very deep question
here. I think that I believe in original sin. Yes, I think I do believe
in original sin. I think the human race is both aggressive and
social. I think were, as W.H. Auden said in that brilliant poem
about the Sabbath, that human beings are a very aggressive lot
and they kill for more than just land or territory. They kill for
pleasure sometimes. So one has to, I think, recognise that its
extremely optimistic to believe that given freedom, human beings
will be good.
Fernandez-Armesto
And isnt that precisely why
liberalism has an occluded future, why one can never see it
triumphing without very considerable modification from the kind
of law and order priorities which are increasingly prominent in
political discourse today?
Williams
No, I dont agree with you.
There are evil tendencies in human beings. There are also good
tendencies. But I think that to suggest that somehow the best
way to deal with the evil tendencies is simply to coerce them to
the ground, theres so much evidence that that isnt the case.
And if youre looking at people who are profoundly damaged by
their social background and most of the kids who are in gangs
come from desperately deprived emotionally deprived, not just
income-wise deprived social backgrounds its not surprising
that this is what happens. What Im arguing is that coercion on
the whole has got a very bad record. And thats equally true in
the international field where you know every time one coerces,
one tends to create more terrorists, criminals, whatever phrase
you like to use. So I dont accept that the liberal future is

occluded. What I do think is fair is that the liberal future is faced

with new challenges. And terrorisms a good example of a very
serious challenge to liberal attitudes and the question then
becomes how does one deal with it.
Fernandez-Armesto
dealing with it?

What is the liberal way of

Williams
Its not like everybody else
the Conservative way of dealing with it, the Socialist way of
dealing with it we dont have the answers yet, we havent yet
worked out how we deal with this extraordinary phenomenon.
Fernandez-Armesto
Shirley Williamss case for
liberalism as treatment for evil is admirable. So is her candour
about not having all the answers. Maybe THATs why liberalism
is in retreat. It shies from quick-fix solutions to some of the most
widely perceived ills of our time: social breakdown, declining
civility, massive migrations. Liberalism lacks the decisiveness
electorates love. Faced with honest bafflement, people seem to
prefer affected certainty.
Nowadays, increasingly, when political movement want to
display resolve, they can invoke religion. Liberalism has always
had an uneasy relationship with religion. Bertrand Russell
actually defined liberalism as an attempt to free politics from
irrational dogma. Of course, there are rational religions. But the
fastest-growing kind of religion in the world today is
fundamentalism. And thats impenetrably irrational, viscerally
illiberal, isnt it? Ann Widdecombe.
Widdecombe
Religious fundamentalism that
is simply a movement which seeks to convert is not illiberal
because it has to stand or fall on its own merits, it has to
persuade people, it cannot compel, it has to persuade. So I do
not consider religious movements as illiberal unless they are
backed up by the state I mean unless they are the Taliban, for
example. Very often people say to me why are you always going
on about your religion? You know its a private matter. I say it
most certainly isnt. Christ said, dont put your light under a
bushel and my enemies have accused of many things, but
never yet of putting my light under a bushel.
Fernandez-Armesto
The problem for liberalism,
then, isnt that religion is anti-liberal, but that a lot of liberals are
anti-religious. Zia Sardar.
Sardar
I think liberalism has
failed mainly because it has been associated with, if you like,
rampant liberal secularism. I mean, for example, I am not just a
liberal Muslim. I actually come from a very strong tradition of
liberal Islam, which has over one thousand years of history and
the moment I say I am a Muslim, people immediately assume
that I must also be a closed-minded fundamentalist. Now that is
a problem.
Fernandez-Armesto
On the other hand, I can
understand people perhaps liberals themselves who think
that you cant be religious at all and liberal.
Sardar
I do not believe that to
be a liberal you also have to be a non-believer. I do not believe

that religion has to be necessarily irrational.So for example,

theres a great revival of Islamic liberalism in Indonesia Theyve
gone back to their liberal roots. Theyre looking for new ways to
be liberal within Islamic framework. That is the most profound
thing that people do not understand, that the real fertile ground
for liberalism is Islam.
Fernandez-Armesto
If Islam is such fertile territory
for the survival and revival of liberalism, why are there so many
fundamentalists and fanatics?
Sardar
Yes there are fanatics, yes
there are fundamentalists, but they are not the majority of the
people. Muslim fundamentalists are on the margins, but
American Christian fundamentalists are mainstream. I think this
is the great struggle of the future. The wars of the future are
going to be a positive and open way of looking at the world
versus a closed, narrow, religious or ethnicity based way of
looking at the world. I think that is the great battle and I suspect
that is the battle of the next decade.
Fernandez-Armesto
So its a liberal mistake to
make an enemy of religion. If Zia Sardar is right were not facing
the widely predicted clash of civilisations, but rather a conflict of
cultures in which rationalism and reasonable religion are ranged
on one side, and fanaticism and fundamentalism are allied on
the other.
We cant blame religion for the plight of liberalism any more
than we can blame the deficiencies of democracy, or the
language of responsibilites, or the compensation culture, or
America, or philosophical pessimism or original sin.- or even, as
Tony Wright reminds us the government.
Wright
Im not so worried about
the public policy positions which you might say are either liberal
or illiberal. I think we could have good arguments about whether
controlling fireworks, about doing something about smoking,
about some of the stuff were doing about antisocial behaviour
about whether this counts as attacks on liberty or whether it
counts as necessary assertions of community rights. I think you
can have all those kinds of arguments. I think where the worry
comes in is far more to do with the culture of politics itself and
the culture of public life itself where I think the threat to a liberal
way of doing politics is far more serious now than I can
remember. This inattention to complexity, inattention to respect
for other peoples positions, traditions of tolerance, which are at
the heart of the liberal position, I see those under attack. Not just
in the easy quarters, the easy terrorist quarters, I see them under
attack much closer to home. Now I think thats where the real
threat comes from.
Fernandez-Armesto
Were illiberal, in short,
because were dumb. We dodge complexity and crave simplicity.
Were too scared or impatient for slow-fuse solutions to societys
ills. We imagine deviancy where there is only difference. Faced
with activities we dislike, from fox-hunting to fly-posting, we
reach for the law. Faced with people we misunderstand, we bar
the frontiers and turn the locks.
Even if Tony Wrights correct about the cultures hostility to
liberalism, it may have more to do with short-term circumstances

than invincible ignorance. In America, liberalisms languishing

from a crisis of presentation: conservatives have shamed it by
successful caricature. In Britain, and, I suspect, in the West
generally, voters basic broad-mindedness probably survives
under present fears. But those who want to see liberalism revive
need to act to resuscitate it. The opportunitys there. After all,
liberalism may be all it enemies say
hesitant, elastic, even
permissive, too tender for a tough world. But in plural socieies,
where we need to be inclusive, those may turn out to be ideal
qualities for survival.