The real meaning of the Orange Book

It is a worrying fact, for those of us who would prefer to stay the age we are, that The Orange Book is now ten years old.  Centre Forum is organising an essay competition to celebrate - and the opportunity has been grasped by some academics to draw some rather strange conclusions.

One of these is Peter Sloman, who has written an interesting piece on the LSE politics blog (thank you, Simon).  It is interesting enough to be half right - but falls a bit flat with this wholly unsupported assumption:

"That the party has moved rightward in the decade since The Orange Book can hardly be doubted – the very existence of the coalition is testimony to that..."

On the contrary, I think it can be doubted.  In fact, I doubt it very much.  The assumption here is that the coalition with the Conservatives was somehow a policy choice by the Lib Dems, when most sources confirm it was a matter of electoral arithmetic.  

I can see the argument that the coalition might have driven a rightward shift - though I dispute that too - but not that it is evidence of a shift that existed before.

The peculiar thing is that The Orange Book has gone into political mythology along these lines, and it is hard to extract it again.  Still, I just extracted my copy from my bookshelf, reminded myself that the subtitle was 'Reclaiming Liberalism', and took a second look.

It is obvious opening it again, blowing the dust off, that the Liberalism that is being 'reclaimed' is not just economic liberalism, but social and political liberalism too.  It is clear from a quick read that what the book was reacting to, apart from the Blair government, was to a particularly bland period of Lib Dem policy-making.

The essays in the book, by people on the left as well as the right of the party, seem now to have been tentatively testing out new Liberal positions.  Some of them (abolishing the DTI, national health insurance) are obviously rightward, some of them (Mark Oaten on an education revolution in prison) are clearly not.

But this isn't quite the end of the conversation.  There is no doubt that the economic liberalism muscles were particularly exercised in the book, and this was the framing that David Laws gave the opening essay too.

Yet, even here, things look different to the myth.  It is more about Liberalism gargling a little with economics, their traditional blind spot, taking a few ideas out for an experimental walk, waking their economic bones up after years of lazy inactivity.

Ten years on, Laws' essay looks like the beginning of the re-interpretation of economic liberalism that we still so badly need - neoliberalism is, in comparison, a kind of protectionism for the biggest and most powerful.

So, no, I don't think that Peter Sloman's characterisation ("progressive yet anti-statist") is anything new.  It was there in Chris Huhne's 2002 commission on public services (the emphasis on mutualism).  It was certainly there in Jo Grimond's revived Liberalism.

But there is still something nagging away at me about this, and it makes me keep going back to the Sloman article.  I think it is this: I don't believe the coalition is evidence of a rightward shift in the Lib Dems - though they have had to swallow their opposition to a number of  compromises that will potentially haunt them.

But I was staggered that the coalition was agreed so easily, and surprised at my own excitement at the prospect of going into government with Cameron rather than Brown.

For me, I was so angry at the time with the Blair-Brown government for what seemed to me to be the destruction, at great expense, of the effectiveness of our public services.  The iron targets, processes, standards and inspection, and the great hollowing out of our institutions that resulted.

In fact, the coalition failed to articulate this issue clearly.  But for me it was a clincher.  For me, at least, it wasn't a rightward shift, it was the urgent importance of rolling back New Labour.

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