Back in 2012, as the Lib Dems were really starting to suffer for their role in the Coalition government, some commentators  and some Conservatives started to speculate that growing unpopularity could force the smaller party out of government.

Others, perhaps more familiar with the Lib Dems, saw more resilience in the party. One of the more colourful bits of analysis noted this extreme resilience, comparing the party’s ability to survive political damage to the apocryphal cockroaches that will supposedly survive even a nuclear winter.

Most people would be mildly unhappy at being called cockroaches, but the Lib Dems wore it as a badge of pride — literally.  The party press office had yellow cockroach badges run up for that year’s party conference. The joke stuck, and at the 2013 party conference, Tim Farron, then the party president, cheerily called his party “cockroaches and nutters” from the podium.  Party members loved it.

Fast forward to 2020, and winter has well and truly arrived for the Lib Dems. This weekend, they will meet, virtually, at an online party conference that will attract little attention — and not just because of the huge events taking place elsewhere in British national life right now.

The story of the Lib Dems in 2020 can be told in two numbers. The first is 2 – that’s the percentage of voters in Wales who backed the Lib Dems in a recent poll.  Dismal, but hardly inconsistent with the party’s general standing. The Politico Poll of Polls currently puts the Lib Dems on 6%, far behind the Tories on 41% and Keir Starmer’s Labour on 39%.

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How patriotic Labour could crush Boris

By Tim Bale

A year ago, that same tracker put the Lib Dems on 20%, snapping at Labour’s heels on 24%, and even Jo Swinson’s general election failure in 2019 saw the Lib Dems take 11.5% of the vote last December.

The other number that explains the state of the party today  is 998. That’s the number of words in the official party definition of transphobia that the Federal Board of the Liberal Democrats (more about party structure in a minute) recently adopted as the party’s official position on what constitutes discrimination against trans people, and people who suport them. (“Transphobia, whether through words or action, may be targeted at people who are, or who are perceived to be, trans or trans allies…”)

Really, the various Lib Dem sub-groups and working parties who laboured over this epic could have saved themselves a lot of time, because those 998 words can be expressed in just three: everything is transphobic. Still, the words do merit some attention here, because that statement says rather a lot about the Lib Dems today. How on earth does a party that can count JS Mill among its forebears end up seeking the outlaw the use of the phrase “biological man”?

To be clear, I am not suggesting that the Lib Dems are tanking in the polls because they are staunch supporters of trans rights, or that the British public is deserting them as a result. I’m suggesting that the Lib Dems are tanking because they’ve become fixated on things that are of no urgent interest to the majority of that public. British voters, by and large, are neither pro- nor- anti-trans: they’re just more interested in stuff like the pandemic, the NHS and the fate of the economy.

People aren’t even that interested in Brexit: the most recent Ipsos Issues Tracker showed barely a third of voters mentioned it as a top priority. Whatever the outcome of the Brexit process, voters have mostly moved on, and Keir Starmer has proved it. The Remain-voting leader of Remain-backing party has recently been urging Boris Johnson to get on with Brexit — with barely a murmur of protest from his party.

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How the Lib Dems could seize power

By James Kirkup

Brexit, of course, was the adrenaline shot that restarted the Lib Dems’ failing heart in the years after coalition. Under Vince Cable and then Swinson, the party took increasingly stark positions against the policy chosen by more than 17 million voters in 2016. That drew in a new wave of members, the sort of people who spend time on #FBPE Twitter inveighing against extremist elements in British politics and not seeing the irony.

The new Lib Dems were delighted when Swinson promised to “cancel Brexit”, but the old cockroaches weren’t so sure. British history might have been rather different if Swinson had listened to Lib Dems like Norman Lamb, then the MP for North Norfolk, who warned that the “cancel Brexit” stance would help to polarise politics and “open the door” to Boris Johnson to win big.

But the Lib Dems didn’t listen, and actually rushed to open that door: it should not be forgotten that the 2019 election only happened because Swinson believed it was in her party’s best interest to allow Johnson to go the country.

Today, Brexit is not done but, endorsed in a referendum and a general election, it is a settled fact of British politics. That has left the Lib Dems, once again, searching for a purpose. That brings us back to transphobia, and the identity politics that seem to be all the party has to offer.

Log on to the Lib Dem website today the first thing you’ll see is a crowd of earnest young people holding rainbow flags and #LoveisLove placards. It’s the site of a Pride rally, not a political party.

Again, to be clear, this isn’t an argument that the Lib Dems should take a different position on gay rights, trans rights or any other part of that rainbow-flag agenda. For a party targeting younger, degree-educated urban voters, there’s a certain sense in that positioning, especially when Starmer is so carefully trying to avoid Tory attempts to draw him into a culture war where he can be painted as the head of a “woke liberal” party.

Nor is that different position really an option for Ed Davey, the Lib Dems’ sober new leader and a cockroach who first worked for the party in the early 1990s. One of the things that makes the Lib Dems different is their insistence on internal democracy and rules. The party machinery is a network of committees and boards, all with real internal power. If a small group can control an official “Specified Associated Organisation” such as LGBT+ Lib Dems, they can and do help set party policy and priorities.  Weaning the Lib Dems off identity politics probably isn’t an option for Davey.

A better approach would be to put the rainbow flags in perspective: make them part of the Lib Dem offer — but not all of it. Once, not too long ago, the Lib Dems were the most effective think-tank in British politics, an outfit relentlessly churning out policy ideas that were perfectly sensible but just a little too far ahead of their time for bigger parties to embrace.

Yet Davey has taken the leadership of a party that has little to say about the bread-and-butter issues of politics and government that still motivate the typical voter. The party did develop some sound policies last year — insulating low-income homes; a £10,000 training allowance for all adults — but these were inevitably drowned out by noise about Brexit.

The irony of Lib Dem irrelevance on policy today is so sharp you could shave with it.

If it were to be revealed that Dominic Cummings was a card-carrying Lib Dem who used to sit on the Federal Policy Committee in the early 2000s, no one familiar with the party in those days would be remotely surprised. Industrial Strategy, regional policy, unpicking pension tax perks for high-earners and obscure local government reform: these are all things Lib Dems spent years talking about, to no avail. Anyone looking for the policies that flesh out the Johnson-Cummings promise of “leveling up” could do worse than look at the unread policy papers that Cable and others used to churn out.

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Jo Swinson's feminist credentials are a joke

By Sarah Ditum

Likewise on the green economy.  It has been reported recently that the PM has become fascinated with the role that hydrogen could play in a new low-carbon economy.

If only he’d attended a few Lib Dem conferences in the cockroach days, when Lib Dems enjoyed nothing more than a day dreaming about the carbon-free economy of 2030. When I chaired a fringe meeting on energy policy at last year’s Lib Dem conference, everyone enjoyed it when a very detailed row broke out between audience members about the precise size of hydrogen molecules; Davey, a panelist, cheerily joined in. This is a party that takes the detail of policy seriously.

What happens to the Lib Dems next will depend in part on who is left in the party. The FBPE crowd were largely not “proper” Lib Dem cockroaches; many of them were happy to have a membership card and a direct debit, but not for them pounding the pavements delivering Focus leaflets or going to conference for Glee Club. There are still some very serious Lib Dems in local government, however, and I suspect many of the old cockroaches are still there, even if some younger types with blue hair and pronouns now make more noise.

Will that be a solid enough foundation on which Davey can start to rebuild? And if so, what will he construct?  What is the role for the Liberal Democrats in a political system that is starting to look at least partially post-liberal? A fair bit depends on what Starmer does, but all the signs are that he’s listening to his very clever policy chief Claire Ainsley and trying to reconnect Labour with the values of the voters it lost to Johnson last year: Rule Britannia, VE Day and even Get Brexit Done.

Some Lib Dems may think that leaves a gap in the market for a truly progressive party: more rainbow flags and BLM slogans, and rejecting voters who believe the “wrong” things. In other words, offering sort of politics that Americans call “liberal left”.

As an outsider who runs a centrist think-tank, I’d suggest the Lib Dem aim should be something else: to make the case for a rather older idea of liberalism, one where personal freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand and people are trusted to make their own choices within a clear set of rules.

The two big parties are quietly agreeing a broad consensus that the size and power of the state should grow: assuming Johnson leads his party into the next election, don’t be surprised to see him battling Starmer over who can promise to do the most, spend the most, in the Red Wall and elsewhere. After all, money is cheap and the huge challenge of the pandemic demands a new paradigm, right?

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The Tories are facing a new revolt on the Right

By Matt Hancock

Economically, we have already entered the new world: the Conservative Party is waging political war on allies and institutions in order to obtain the power to use state spending to support companies favoured by ministers and their super-bright advisers. Likewise the rules and instructions rolled out in response to Covid-19, some of which constitute a remarkable extension of state power in daily life.

Who speaks for the dissenters, for those who’d like some more checks and balances on the people in charge? Who will make the case for rules on the role of the state in markets and in people’s lives? I am no liberterian but the absence of a clear liberal voice in British politics unnerves me sometimes. And as someone who still thinks Mill’s On Liberty is probably the most important book I’ve ever read, it saddens me to see “liberal” attached to causes and ideas that are keener to smother dissenting opinions than protect them.

Is there yet a role for a liberal Lib Dem party? Do the Lib Dems want to be that party? Here, Davey might want to pay attention to the detail of some recent YouGov polling on those Covid interventions, which asked people if they would follow ministerial encouragement to shop their fellow citizens to the police for meeting in groups of more than six.

No fewer than 43% of Conservative voters would report strangers to the police, and 29% would make a similar call about neighbours; 15% of Tories would even call the cops on family members. Lib Dems, meanwhile, were the voter-group least likely to snitch: only 26% would call the police on strangers, 21% about neighbours, and 7% on family.

https://twitter.com/cagyarrow/status/1306920845911224321?s=20

Britain may be heading down the road of post-liberal politics and a bigger state, but liberalism is neither dead nor doomed to irrelevance. Lib Dem cockroaches need to decide if they want to keep scuttling on.

When politics changes as significantly as it is now changing, new terms can help to encapsulate what is going on. For years I have wondered whether we could popularise a term for the opposite of deja-vu.  That is, for something that you see which you just know you are going to see again.  How about ‘pre-ja-vu’?  Almost a decade ago when I saw a certain type of street politics emerge I wondered if something like ‘pre-ja-vu’ might enter the political lexicon.  But even as I watched a man like Jeremy Corbyn, forever on a soapbox at demonstrations, I never thought that I would ever see quite as much of him as we now see of him as Leader of Her Majesty’s opposition. The idea of pre-ja-vu could apply to almost any realm of life. It is at least as possible to see an outfit, a colour, or the return of some form of facial hair and think ‘Yes, I fear I am going to be seeing a lot of more of this in the years ahead.’

My nomination for UnHerd’s “new words for new challenges” series is not pre-ja-vu but a word that relates to the presumption in politics and ethics that people change their minds based on evidence. While this is often the case it may be more true – to our great irritation – that minds don’t change at all. As Harvard’s Cass Sunstein, among others, has shown, it is frequently the case that when a person in provable error meets the correction to their error they do not throw up their hands and say ‘Goodness me, what an idiot I have been’. Instead, they double down on that error. Jonathan Swift’s immortal phrase that “you cannot reason someone out of a view they were not reasoned into” should have prepared us for this reality.

Across so many political discussions – especially those with a strong ethics dimension – people’s minds are not only closed to new ideas, but utterly closed. This is deeper than the level at which people merely say ‘I could never support a Tory’ or ‘My family have always been Republicans/ Democrats’ (as though hereditary voting trends are something to be proud of). On a range of deeply-felt issues it is not possible to reason somebody out of a position because mere tribalism is not the key obstacle. For anyone to concede the validity of contrary arguments on many moral questions would be to do a hurt far beneath the levels at which politics can ordinarily reach.

We saw a glimpse of this with the resonant case of former UK Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, which our own Tim also referred to yesterday. It was demanded of Farron that he make a moral judgement about homosexual sex which he felt wholly unable to make and he was pilloried for doing so. But the flip-side of that is also worth imagining. For instance it would be unlikely that Farron would be able to reason with a gay person with a full sex life that they should share his views on the matter. Not impossible but certainly hard. Such an appeal would not be to a political stance, or even to a moral stance but to something of the essence – the echt – of the person.

Another example would be a discussion on the morality of abortion. For many people the issue is a matter of heated moral debate.  In America it also remains a matter of heated debate. Obviously there are people within that debate (who do not always contribute to it) who cannot be moved in their position. Not because they are not clever enough or supple enough to do so, but because the matter goes to the very core of their being. Obviously there are some in the ‘pro-life’ movement who feel this, and feel that their stance on abortion is central to their faith and politics. But the most strongly-held position of all is likely to held by a woman who has herself ended a pregnancy (or a man who has recommended a woman do so) and who is almost never going to concede to even  very powerful counter-arguments. The shutters are fixed around such positions, and are most unlikely ever to be able to be lifted.

A final example. In his masterpiece ‘My Past and Thoughts’, Alexander Herzen recalls meeting a general and his wife who lived in Novgorod in the 1840s. Herzen recalls that their house had “a painful feeling.” That “there were tears in the air, and it was obvious that death had passed through it.”  The general’s hair is greyer and his face more wrinkled than a fifty year old’s hair ought to be.  In a cupboard are a collection of unused toys.  The general and his wife had had three children.  Two years before Herzen had met them their talented nine-year-old son had died.  A few months later one of the girls died of scarlatina.  The mother rushed to the country with her surviving child hoping to save her with a change of air, but came back a few days later “with a little coffin in the carriage.”

“Their life”, wrote Herzen, “had lost its meaning: it was ended, and continued without object, without need.” Husband and wife clung to each other in grief but were now bound more by their common tragedy than by love.  The mother clung to religious mysticism.  Herzen describes her as being “deceived by the flattery that religion pays the human heart.”  But he is at pains to add that “for her mysticism was no light thing, no mere dream; it was having her children again, and she was defending them when she defended her religion.”[1.  Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, Constance Garnett (trans.), Humphrey Higgens (rev.), Chatto & Windus, 1968, Vol. II, p.404]

If Herzen had entered that house in Novgorod and argued the most eloquent, perfect argument against the existence of God he could not have won it – and perhaps should not have done so. Any intellectual argument would have met someone the foundation of whose being relied on him being wrong. Such an argument, therefore, would not really be an argument but an exchange between someone arguing on one plane and someone arguing on another one altogether.

I suspect that much of what now passes for the most vehement political and ethical discussion at least trespasses near this terrain.  Deep calls to shallow and shallow fails to spot the deep.  Yet all the time we behave as though various political and ethical exchanges are equal.

***

At this concluding point you will have noticed that I’ve identified a phenomenon but haven’t found a term for it with the resonance of pre-ja-vu, hegemonia or, dareIsay, “unherd”. We do need a term for it and I am open to your suggestions. Please use the “have your say” link at the top of this article to send in ideas.

When Antonin Scalia died in early 2016 Barack Obama had the opportunity to replace one of the most conservative members of the nine person US Supreme Court with a liberal. If his nomination of Merrick Garland hadn’t been controversially thwarted by the Republican leader of the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, America’s Supreme Court would have become solidly liberal by a five-to-four votes at minimum and probably by six-to-three. And so here’s my question: did it even cross Barack Obama’s mind that he might have some kind of responsibility to ensure that his country’s ultimate enforcer and interpreter of the founders’ Constitution and of all the laws passed since should ideally command broad support across the US population? I doubt it. Uppermost in his mind would have been the pro-abortion, pro-gun control etc concerns of his own party’s base and their hunger for an anti-Scalia to replace Scalia.

I’m not (for once) making an anti-Obama or anti-Democrat point here. If the position had been reversed and a Republican President had had the opportunity to install a conservative judge likely to overturn Roe Vs Wade or to enhance the Second Amendment rights championed most vociferously by the National Rifle Association, he or she would almost certainly have done so. Anything less than the nomination of a full-throated ‘one-of-us’ would have meant a serious challenge for the party’s re-nomination in the case of a first-term president. And we had proof of the desire for a winner-takes-all politics last week when Donald Trump expressed a desire to scrap the rights of the Senate minority to filibuster the federal budget. Although he didn’t actually win a plurality of votes cast in his contest with Hillary Clinton he clearly wants to take all powers of scrutiny from the representatives of those with different views to his.

We see the desire for total victory in British politics, too.

Two recent examples stand out:

• There’s the case of the former leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats Tim Farron. It wasn’t enough for this evangelical Christian to accept UK laws on access to abortion and gay equality. Opponents and journalists attempted to make windows into his soul and demanded to know if his faith led nonetheless led him to disapprove of the termination of a pregnancy or of two people of the same sex getting married. Incidentally, a good number of left-leaning parties have elevated the abortion issue into litmus test status. Anyone who opposes abortion rights can’t be a candidate for Canada’s Liberals, for example. That pro-life/antiu-abortion person may be left-leaning, green and Justin-Trudeauesque in all other taxing, regulating etc respects but – even though the country’s abortion laws are under no threat whatsoever – they aren’t welcome in the governing not-s0-‘Liberal’ party (or in Canada’s even more ‘progressive’ NDP).
• After the Tories won Britain’s 2015 general election with 36.9% of the popular vote they proposed slashing (by 19%) the funding enjoyed by opposition parties to hold the government to account. Simultaneously, they proposed a substantially larger taxpayer-funded budget for their own political operations. A few wise Conservatives, who understood the importance of a properly-resourced opposition to functioning law-making, helped to veto the idea (perhaps also fearing that such hyper-partisanship would only invite Labour to take their revenge once they were back in charge).

This demand for total victory is not just evident in politics. A particularly ugly example of the zero tolerance of diverse views in higher education came at the turn of the year when academics at one of the world’s most prestigious universities turned on Professor Nigel Biggar after he had said that the British Empire had been “morally mixed” in its implications. The director of Oxford University’s McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life hadn’t in any way minimised the darker elements of what had been committed in the many parts of the world once coloured British imperial pink. He’d simply argued that a fair assessment couldn’t be one-sided. ‘Oh yes it must be’ was the effective shout back from 58 academics – followed by even uglier student voices who accused Professor Biggar of being a “bigot”.

The economic historian Niall Ferguson reflected on absolutism in his interview for UnHerd last year. While globalisation might be in the overall long-term interest of almost everyone on the planet (especially the poorest of the poor) it had produced many casualties amongst the less skilled in the developed world and the Davos crowd might have avoided much of the populist democratic insurgencies of recent times if more time had been given so that welfare and education provision could have kept pace with fast-moving trade and immigration revolutions. But that time wasn’t given. Politicians like Tony Blair gave speeches extolling globalisation and castigating anyone or any group who attempted to raise concerns at the impact of change on the beneficiaries of the old era.

There are many reasons for this hegemonic insistence on total victory and the thirst to not just win office or ascendancy but to flatten and marginalise opponents. There’s the rise of activist classes within political parties and of ‘narrowcast’ media platforms that thrive by playing to narrow ideological or social groups. There’s just rudeness, too. Reflecting on the increasingly sour nature of Britain’s public square, Chris Rumfitt recently noted how…

“Remainers are remoaners who are plotting to subvert the democratic will of the people. Leavers, meanwhile, are xenophobes wanting to turn their back on the world. Tories are “scum” who hate the poor. And Corbynites? They love terrorists while hating Britain.”

And don’t think it’s just tabloids that are guilty of this. Matthew Parris may be softly-spoken, use long words, write (brilliant) columns for The Times and present high-brow programmes for BBC Radio 4 but his characterisation of people with a different view to him can be as ugly as anything produced within much larger circulation titles. Deep down Brexiteers are just racists. Apparently. And the average Tory activist?  “Spittle-flecked, obsessively anti-European, immigrant-hating social and [a] cultural reactionary.” He was at it again last Saturday, painting EU referendum opponents in the least flattering possible light.

Can we turn the tide against this problem of hegemonia (or do I mean hegemania?).

Can we recognise that attempting to call any and all opponents racists, fascists and bigots – without good cause – is not just offensive but electorally incendiary? (Hopefully you might have read Paul Embery yesterday).

And can we be patriotic enough to yearn for minorities to feel that their country’s institutions (whether the US Supreme Court or the BBC or universities) are not closed to them?

And can we have the humility to know that victory and vindication are not 100% bedfellows. That political and other opponents who may have lost votes or circulations or professional prestige may still hold useful, insightful opinions and, occasionally, there might be some merit in listening to ‘the defeated’ a bit more carefully – and sometimes changing course as a result.

Let me end with one practical (and even a little sacrificial) implication of my deep worry at the balkanisation of politics being produced by hegemania. No vote in post-war British history has given me more delight or pride than that of the outcome of June 2016’s EU referendum. And I’m pretty convinced that a full implementation of the majority’s desire to leave the EU means we can’t be half-in and half-out. We should be leaving the single market and customs union if we’re to be fully free of the EU octopus – and especially its expansionary, judicially activist courts. But there wasn’t a 66-34 victory on 23rd June 2016 – the victory was 52-48. Nearly two years after the vote (partly because of Theresa May’s failure to deliver change on three key fronts (as I previously set out)) the poison in the national conversation shows no sign of dissipating. For the sake of the temper and popular authority of our national democracy I think it’s time to make a concession or two to the other side and that concession might be continued membership of the customs union. This doesn’t have to be forever. It could be reviewed within five or ten years – when the potential of trade pacts with the fast-growing parts of the non-EU world has (or has not) been established.

More generally – in combatting hegemonia – we need to work harder at understanding opponents.

Is it really sensible to vow never to be friends with parliamentarians from another party?

Are sometimes-annoying filibuster powers enjoyed by minorities really anachronistic or, actually, sensible brakes on what might be rushed thinking?

Should more comment pages be more like those of The (London) Times and less like echo chambers?

I’d love your thoughts. Please use the Have Your Say button at the top of this page to tell me what you think. It’s thoroughly depressing that the populist insurgencies of 2016 (and since – see Italy!) have largely produced deeper trenches rather than bridge-building. Hegemonia isn’t the only explanation for the deepening divisions (I’ll be exploring others in coming days) but it’s an important one.

“Look through history.  Where the gospel is preached, other freedoms follow. The abolition of slavery led by evangelical Christians, most notably Wilberforce, the laws to prevent industrial exploitation led by committed Christian Lord Shaftesbury…”

So claimed Tim Farron MP, the former Liberal Democrat leader, at the Theos Annual Lecture last week (28 November).[1.  Theos is a think-tank whose aim is to “stimulate the debate about the place of religion in society, challenging ideas through research, commentary and events.” ] Writing for UnHerd, Danny Kruger described it as one of the bravest speeches he’s heard from an MP.

Farron’s lecture was essentially a defence of Christianity within the liberal tradition, his argument being that not only has “good” sprung from the Faith, but also that to say there is no place for Christianity within liberalism – because Christianity requires belief in the transcendent rather than the relative – is itself inherently illiberal.

There are problems with this, of course – at what point, for example, are less than wholly liberal views to be denounced? – but Douglas Murray praises Farron for understanding the difference between what he calls convening liberalism (where all reasonable voices are at least respected) and a campaigning liberalism that, more rights-based, secular and left-leaning, allegedly wants to be very dominant top dog at the expense of other ideas.

Farron believes, no doubt correctly, that he was invited to speak because of his defenestration as party leader, though in fact he jumped before he was pushed. He jumped, he said, because the LibDems were no longer the second party of Opposition (the Scottish National Party having greatly more MPs) and he therefore struggled for media time, and that the focus on his Christian beliefs prevented him from making the important political points required of a leader of a political party.

Being suspicious of political leaders who take orders from God is not a new thing for the British, however – and especially the English. Even the saintly William Wilberforce, an (independent) MP from 1780 to 1825, who declared that “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners [moral values]”, was subject to the ridicule that befell members of the aristocracy and gentry who proclaimed their evangelical principles.

With just cause?

Yet England had a right to be suspicious of leaders who believed they were ordained by God (Cavaliers) or compelled by Him (Roundheads). Some 200,000 men, women and children out of a population of 3.75m had perished during the English Civil War (1642-51), a conflict with, at its heart, the question of Divine authority exacerbated by sectarianism. Little wonder that at the Restoration in 1660, Charles II was keen to see an inclusive Church of England and latitude towards Catholics and protestant dissenters. He distanced himself from the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, and consequently the rhetoric of Divine guidance was generally much diminished in public life.

Through most of the 18th Century, indeed, the Church of England languished as “the Tory Party at prayer”, the one not troubling the other’s conscience much in matters of faith, morals or social responsibility, while the Catholics on the whole lived quietly and apart, no longer persecuted but still regarded with suspicion. It was Wesleyan Methodism, with its emphasis on moral regeneration and good works, that troubled the waters. Originally a movement within Anglicanism, after John Wesley’s death in 1791 it split from the C of E to become yet another dissenting church, its adherents thereafter excluded from public office.[2.  The terms “dissenter” and “non-conformist” derive from the refusal to assent to the 1662 Act of Uniformity – submission to the rubrics of the Church of England. The various “Test Acts” passed initially at the Restoration and extended throughout the 18th Century were the instruments of exclusion from a wide range of public offices, including teaching at Oxford and Cambridge (at that time the only universities in England)] However, the split gave a boost to non-conformism, not least because many Methodists were men of standing.

Despite the Methodists’ defection, though, evangelical concern for the moral reform of society had entered the mainstream of public life, most notably and perhaps most importantly in the movement to abolish slavery.  Wilberforce himself remained in the C of E and became a prominent figure in the network of Anglican evangelicals called the “Clapham Sect.” The Claphamites were heartily disliked by many a churchgoing Tory (and Whig, for that matter), uncomfortable with evangelical fervour in worship and mistrustful of radical social reform (In 1831 virtually the entire bench of bishops opposed the parliamentary Reform Bill). Since the Civil War, political leaders had kept their piety under strict regulation. Indeed, it had become somehow un-English to do otherwise.

A Christmas Carol (and other stories)

Things began to change in Victoria’s reign with increasing urbanisation, a growing middle class (and middle class franchise), and a press which began taking an interest in the condition of the poor (Dickens was first a journalist). But social concern stemming from religion was boosted mid-Century by the “Oxford Movement”, which in trying to recall the Anglican Church to its Catholic roots emphasized the pre-Reformation doctrine of “Justification by Good Works” rather than simply by “Faith.” Anglo-Catholic clergy became prominent in the poorer city and industrial parishes, and the movement as a whole – not least because its clergy were often from influential families, the great schools and Oxford – began to “make converts” in public life. Most notable of these was Gladstone, four-times prime minister.[4.  December 1868 – February 1874; April 1880 – June 1885; February 1886 – July 1886; August 1892 – March 1894.]

But Gladstone’s troubled public conscience also troubled others, who disliked his “preachiness.” Queen Victoria was irritated by the way he “addresses me as if I were a public meeting.” In 1838 he had nearly ruined his career by trying to force a religious mission on the Conservative Party. Disraeli made capital of Gladstone’s Anglo-Catholicism, suggesting that he was in fact a crypto-Papist – or, at least, a supporter of diabolical papist activities such as ritualism. The Third Marquess of Salisbury, a devout and thoughtful Anglo-Catholic (he helped found Pusey House in Oxford) who succeeded Gladstone as prime minister in 1885, was not slow to draw the conclusion that public piety could be misconstrued. His public utterances were duly guarded.

Twentieth-Century Foxes

Certainly David Lloyd George, Liberal chancellor of the exchequer 1908-15 (and then prime minister – and known occasionally as “the fox of London”), did not hide his non-conformism during his reforming budgets, but neither did he proclaim it. He had enemies enough without making more. When he did “preach” it was always in his native Wales, and, sensibly, in Welsh.

The First World War generated a certain “muscular Christianity”, and out of respect for the dead there emerged for a time a greater respect for the established church, which had somehow to represent the nation in its obsequies and memorializing, but between the wars the C of E, with a few notable exceptions, lapsed once more into comfortable Erastianism. Politicians seemed disinclined to bring God into the debate, although there were men of considerable personal piety. Lord Halifax, foreign secretary just before the Second World War, was dubbed by Churchill the “Holy Fox”.

Stanley Baldwin, three-times prime minister between 1923 and 1937, was personally devout – convinced, indeed, that he was an instrument of the Almighty, though as several writers have remarked, what the Almighty used him for was not so evident to others.

In July 1940, while still foreign secretary, Halifax gave a powerful radio address extolling the power of prayer:

“We may take heart from the certain knowledge that that great people [America] pray for our victory over this wicked man and his ways as fervently as any of his present victims. The foundations of their country, as of ours [emphasis added], have been Christian teaching and belief in God.”

Afterwards, Baldwin sent him a long and appreciative letter in which he wrote how for “prayer to be effective [it] must be in accordance with God’s will, and that by far the hardest thing to say from the heart and indeed the last lesson we learn (if we ever do) is to say and mean it, ‘Thy will be done.’'[5.  Fulness of Days, the Earl of Halifax (London, 1957)]

Post-war Reconstruction

After the war, politicians just “got on with it”, for there was undeniably much to do. Clement Attlee, Britain’s first post-war prime minister, was not a practising Christian, although one of brothers had been ordained, and one of his sisters was a missionary. When asked once whether he was an agnostic, he replied, with characteristic dry wit, “I don’t know.”

Harold Macmillan (prime minister 1957-63) was an Anglo-Catholic who might have crossed the Tiber had it not been for his mother, but he rarely invoked God in his speeches. They were on the whole well enough received without risking it. Margaret Thatcher (1979-90) was far less circumspect. Her strong religious background and faith was central her personality, thinking and politics, and she had no qualms about drawing on the Bible in her speeches (in more biblically literate days). Famously, outside No 10 on the day she became prime minister, she said:

“I would just like to remember some words of St. Francis of Assisi which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment: ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.’ ”

The words were not welcomed by all, however, because Thatcher herself wasn’t. It was probably one of the reasons why Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair’s director of strategy and communications, who was unable to separate the man from the message, told an interviewer in 2003 who asked Blair about his Christian faith, “We don’t do God.”

In fact, in telling Blair not to “do God”, Campbell probably did a great deal more to propagate the Faith than the answer the journalist would otherwise have received.

Yesterday on UnHerd, Elaina Plott looked at how the politics of the Bible Belt still appear to rule in Alabama. Some things just don’t seem to cross the Atlantic well, one of which is God in politics.

As many historians of ideas have shown, including in recent decades Isaiah Berlin and John Gray, liberalism has long existed in at least two major versions.  These not only divide liberals but rumble around beneath them, vying for pre-eminence at all times.

The first form of liberalism views liberalism as a mode of living together – a way of convening the many different political attitudes and movements which exist in any society and finding a way to get along harmoniously.  In that form of liberalism almost all of us who believe in the franchise and accept that our preferred political outcomes will sometimes be achieved and often be rejected are some type of basic political liberals.  But a second form of liberalism exists as well – and that is a form of liberalism which believes that liberalism is not a state of being but a political project in and of itself.  European liberals largely find themselves in the former camp.  American liberals more clearly in the second.

There is a long argument to be had within this – one going back to Hobbes. But the fissure between these two interpretations of liberalism does not only divide the US and Western Europe.  It now exists beneath many Western political parties.  Occasionally the fissure opens up and someone falls down through it.

Tim Farron is such a person. Before going any further I should say that I have never had any particular occasion to admire Mr Farron. I thought him unusually honest when he was once asked by an interviewer how he would like to be remembered and replied by saying that he would not be remembered. Perhaps I should also add that as somebody who argued the case for equal marriage before it became fashionable to do so, some people might expect me to be critical of Mr Farron for the content and cause of his political descent. But I can neither rejoice in it nor castigate him for it.  Indeed I thought his treatment by his fellow liberals earlier this year to be not only deeply illiberal but deeply wrong.  Furthermore, I think his speech to the Theos think-tank earlier this week to be a rather important moment of political clarity from a direction in which I would not previously have expected to look for it.

First it is worth remembering what Farron fell for.  When repeatedly questioned in great and gruesome detail about his personal moral attitude towards homosexual sex he stumbled over the question of whether he saw it as innately ‘sinful’ or not.  On a subsequent occasion – and after considerable barracking – he said that he did not think that it was.  Too late. The scene had been set.  Tim Farron was anti-gay.  Elements of his party blamed this distraction for Liberal Democrats not making a greater break-through in June’s General Election and he subsequently stepped down from leading that badly monikered party, citing the interrogation of his religious beliefs as part of the explanation.  Now that he is unburdened of office he is able to unburden himself of his true opinions.  It is a shame he could not have remained in position and still done so.

Of course there were local reasons for the furore.  One was that political opponents of Mr Farron could not pass up the opportunity to claim that the head of the Liberal Democrat party was a homophobe.  It is true that his party have so enjoyed their moral preening when out of power in recent decades that other parties may be forgiven for finding the opportunity to beat the Liberal Democrats with one of their own favourite sticks to have been an opportunity too delicious to pass up.  And it is also true that in the run-up to the June election journalists clearly felt happy demanding moral answers from a non-conformist Christian for the same reasons they have no fear demanding moral answers from an observant Catholic like Jacob Rees-Mogg.  Since Christianity is still – vaguely – our own historic religious tradition, interviewers still know slightly better which questions to ask than they do with other religions.  And unlike deeply questioning somebody of any other religious tradition about the intricacies of their faith, when questioning a Christian in such a manner, accusations of bigotry are unlikely to be instantly hurled back at the questioner.

But back to the fissure in liberalism which was the real reason why Farron fell.  To anybody who cares about the difference it was always obvious that, by his actions, Farron demonstrated that he was almost the definition of a liberal. Even if he did believe that gay sex is morally wrong, he had done nothing in his political life to oppose the giving of equal rights to gay people.  Indeed if he did believe gay sex to be sinful and voted the way he did on a range of matters then he should be held aloft almost as the exemplar of the first type of liberalism. He refused to let his own moral attitudes about a private matter cause him to legislate over people who may not share his own moral outlooks. That is perfectly and exactly how one type of liberal should behave.

Unfortunately for Mr Farron – and perhaps for us all – this type of liberalism is on the wane in Western Europe as in America.  The liberalism that is growing is the liberalism which believes itself to be a campaigning political movement – a movement which must be forever on the march, rummaging into every cupboard, peering from the top of every ladder and pulling up every rug in search of anybody who does not share the latest iteration of the liberal manifesto.

Gay rights – and gay marriage in particular – provides an almost perfect example of this.  The British government currently presents support for gay marriage to be not only a liberal right, but a demonstration of liberal British rights (one reason why Farron is also correct in his criticisms of the ‘myth’ of current ‘British values’).  Thus to be opposed to gay marriage is now to be fundamentally misaligned with ‘British values’.  Those of us who argued for gay marriage may be expected to look at people like the former education secretary Nicky Morgan (who opposed gay marriage), watch their swift recantation of their former positions and be expected to be happy.  We may be expected to watch their turning of the thing they opposed until yesterday into a new dogma for tomorrow and be expected to celebrate.  But personally I cannot.  Give me a Farron over a Morgan any day.  For there is something not just sinister but suspicious about dogmas being created this swiftly and people being expected not just to tolerate but to celebrate (and then apostasise those who do not celebrate) something which until yesterday was not even on the agenda of most campaigning liberals.

It is inevitable that – among the U-turns that this type of liberalism now demands, whipped along as it is by social media and crowd-shaming – that many people will suffer whiplash and some become roadkill.  Those who fail to U-turn fast enough are not just treated harshly, but left for dead in the 100 miles per hour zig-zag race that this ‘liberal’ march has become.

Farron is absolutely right to say the newly predominant type of liberalism ‘isn’t very liberal any more.’  It was never going to be.  But perhaps those of us who believe in convening liberalism – rather than campaigning liberalism – should start to consider huddling together.  Strange bedfellows though we may inevitably find each other to be.

Further listening

Inflation is never coming down

By Tim Montgomerie

Douglas Murray on Communism’s forgotten victims

Further listening

Why don't we remember the victims of communism?

By Douglas Murray

Tim Farron’s annual Theos lecture was delivered too fast, rambled rather, and had too many football jokes and pop references for my taste. But it rewards a careful read. Mr Farron’s argument, inspired by the 90s indie band Pop Will Eat Itself, is that

‘Liberalism has eaten itself because it has eaten the very world view that gave birth to it, that made it possible.  It’s a bit like Michael J Fox in Back to the Future, erasing himself by accidentally preventing his parents getting together.’

Liberalism’s parents, says Mr Farron, are the doctrines of Christianity. The absolute value, and the total freedom, which God gives each person are the sources of the creed. And he neatly explains both how liberalism depends on Christianity, and how both lost their way – ate themselves – when they acquired political power:

“In the 4th century, in Rome, Christianity won, in that it became the establishment world view. Up to that point there had been three hundred years of persecution and exclusion for the followers of Jesus Christ…

But the church morphed from persecuted to dominant in a short time, and in doing so it lost sight of its own internal truth of reliance on Christ alone and self–sacrificing love.  The state with which that church merged began to oppress different minorities, to show the same intolerance and violence towards other groups that Christians had endured for so many years.

Liberalism faces the same fate today… My experience is that although liberalism has won, it is now behaving like the established church of the empire in 4th and 5th centuries.  It has gained ascendancy and lost itself in the process. It isn’t very liberal any more.”  

The most powerful part of the speech is Mr Farron’s simple assertion that, post Christianity, “we don’t really have shared values. There is no unifying set of British values. It’s a myth.” Secularism, he says, “is a totalising creed that reduces everyone down to either consumer or regulatory units.” It cannot unite us; it has no claim to bring us together. The enforcement of political correctness, the Orwellian denigration of alternative – namely traditional – views, represent not unity but disarray.

As this suggests, Mr Farron is a deeply conservative Christian. Yet he is clearly happier as a political outsider, just as he chooses a nonconformist (Baptist) church. He opposes establishment, whether of Anglicanism or atheism; there should be no required belief system for participation in civic life, no ‘tyranny of opinion’, in John Stuart Mill’s words.

Like Mill, Mr Farron seems to disregard the value of institutions and accustomed habits of thought to a properly free society. Edmund Burke, whom he misquotes to the effect that enforced religious conversation doesn’t work, also said that people cannot be expected to discern truth with their own naked reason. We need the wisdom of ages as well as individual conscience.

I am also perplexed how Mr Farron can sing the hymn of freedom while supporting big government and the European Union, as he does. But these are quibbles. He is – Mill’s highest accolade – an eccentric, in the Victorian sense: not ridiculous, but a dissenter and a pioneer, and a very brave man. This speech will not be enough to turn the tide of faith, which is already far out and retreating still. But I think last night might have been an important moment in the battle which is upon us. The tyranny of opinion has a slight, chirpy and formidable foe.

Or, in Barrett’s case, stymie her progress before she had even reached public office. Earlier this month, Senator Feinstein expressed concern in a hearing that federal appellate-court nominee Barrett may not be able to uphold Supreme Court precedent relating to Roe vs Wade because ‘the dogma lives loudly within you’.

Certainly, Farron directly attributed his resignation as leader of the UK’s Liberal Democrats to feeling as though he was ‘the subject of suspicion because of what I believe and who my faith is in’. Critics of his explanation have, however, suggested his failure to capture more of the 48% of voters who supported  ‘Remain’ in the EU referendum and therefore delivered a smaller increase in Lib Dem MPs at the 2017 General Election than some of his colleagues had hoped, were also a factor.

It was no secret that Farron was a Christian. While he longer wore an Ichthus (fish) symbol in his lapel – a sign of belief popular with evangelicals, in particular – as he did during his early years in parliament, he spoke passionately at various events about the ways his faith informed his values and politics. But when it came to answering questions about some of his personal beliefs, he struggled. Under sustained questioning, with the same questions being repeated by the same interviewer in a single encounter but also by multiple journalists, it became clear that backing his party’s liberal policy positions on abortion and gay rights was not enough. Interviewers wanted to know his private views, too. ‘Did he, in particular, think homosexuality was a sin?’ The question he was originally asked about his policy on certain issues quickly turned to his religious belief and became a freedom of conscience issue.

Fringe events at this week’s Lib Dem conference will reference the dilemma Farron expressed in his resignation – ‘we are kidding ourselves if we think we yet live in a tolerant, liberal society’. I’m speaking at one of them, which will consider whether there is room for faith in liberalism. Given the current level of Lib Dem representation in the House of Commons, perhaps it’s more salient to consider how voters respond to politicians’ views on these issues.

What do voters think?

To test public response to some of the underlying questions of freedom of expression, we asked 1,001 adults in Britain which of these statements came closest to their own view:

Despite including the word ‘sin’ – not often used in everyday language, with its punitive implications of condemnation – two thirds of the public supported the freedom of politicians to express their views. Even on an issue which has shifted as far in public acceptance as same-sex relationships and despite 59% of people from religions other than Christianity considering such relationships to be wrong[1.  59% of adults in Britain who identify with religions other than Christianity say they consider same-sex relationships to be always, mostly or sometimes wrong].

Thought police

We then went on to test a hypothesis which had emerged during the Farron saga: that if you believe something privately, you’re keeping a dirty secret, and only with full disclosure of all thoughts and feelings can you be considered transparent enough to hold office.

Again, we chose the same issue, to test public opinion, and asked the same respondents which of these statements came closest to their own view:

The reason – apart from Farron’s reluctance to answer the question – that this point is important is because Farron’s voting record demonstrates that he consistently voted for the rights and freedoms of people to do things which he personally did not believe were morally virtuous.

Voters appear to be OK with it. Perhaps it really is the voting records of politicians which are most important, after all.

Interesting takes…

Keep an eye on these commentators’ writing and social media content, as helpful context to some of these debates:

Michael Wear @MichaelRWear

Former faith adviser in the Obama White House, Wear comments knowledgeably and graciously on the tensions between US liberalism and some religious doctrines.

Stonewall @stonewalluk

Having made a huge contribution to workplace inclusion for LGBT people and been at the forefront of major social developments in the UK, Stonewall know more than most about some of these challenges. Director Ruth Hunt is always quick to point out the areas of connection between religion and LGBT equality, calling out commentators who suggest they are completely incompatible.

Theos @theosthinktank

The team at public theology thinktank Theos, and particularly directors Elizabeth Oldfield and Nick Spencer, think about this stuff all the time. Here is Nick’s analysis of Farron’s modus vivendi liberalism, for example