Liberty Alone

Tom Clougherty over at the ASI blog has a comment on Simon Jenkins’ s book ‘Thatcher and Sons’.

The key comment he makes was that there were two revolutions, the good and the bad (from a liberal view anyway).
The good is her liberalisation of the economy (I know Thatcher is public enemy number one for many LibDems, but she saved this country’s economy from the miasma of the 1970s and set the foundations for the economic well being we have today). This was something desperately needed.

The second revolution was the centralisation of power in Whitehall, which has been pursued with great vigour by Blair and now Brown. This is the illiberal revolution.

Jenkins rightly calls for a third revolution, a localism revolution. Tom Clougherty agrees, as do most LibDems. We should make it central to our party to promote localism, to create the conditions for experiments in government and services which the US States originally provided in the US.

I’ve just heard Matthew Taylor (Blair’s ex-advisor not the LibDem MP) on the radio talking about trying to include people in local government and politics.

He misses the point entirely, he keeps on talking about ‘persuading people to act wisely’. Why should government persuade people to act wisely? How on earth can government decide what that is?
This is the same old paternalistic authoritarianism hiding behind a mask of participation and localism.

Perhaps we can welcome the fact that they realise that there’s a disconnect between government and people and that government cannot do everything, but to assume that government knows what is best, it just needs to persuade people to ‘do the right thing’ is wholly wrong.
People must be left to make their own choices and to take responsibility for them. Government should protect that right, not seek to manipulate it.