Let's not be the radical party

First posted on LibDemVoice.

I find the word “radical” increasingly difficult nowadays. It has become a shibboleth. Whatever is being pitched has to be framed as radical. And everybody knows exactly what it means and says so with great authority. The trouble is that the next person will, with equally great authority, give it a different meaning.

And also, it doesn’t tell us anything about the liberalness of the policies being proposed. I think most people will agree that Iain Duncan Smith’s approach to welfare benefits was radical. But I don’t think any liberal wants a policy that vindictive. (Or that incompetent.)

When you look at the things we are in favour of, many of them are not radical at all.

Legalisation of cannabis, for instance. Cannabis is no more harmful than tobacco or alcohol. Its prohibition actually creates harmful forms of the substance, costs taxpayers a significant amount of money and badly affects a significant number of lives by creating criminal records that otherwise would not exist. Legalising it can be framed not as radical, but as common sense.

Try this:

We can:

- reduce harms to many ordinary people
- reduce pressure on the police and the entire justice system
- reduce burden to the NHS
- reduce days lost to illness for businesses
- increase tax revenue
by legalising and regulating cannabis in the same way as we treat alcohol and tobacco.

There is nothing radical there; it is just plain common sense.

Or, on a different topic, try this thought experiment:

- you are a country with small but very sophisticated armed forces
- your men and women are highly trained, well paid and dependable
- they and their families live in good quality accommodation
- if they are wounded in the service of their country, they get excellent medical and social care, and decent benefits
- you buy high tech equipment, both large scale and small scale, with an eye to effectiveness and value
- you invest in intelligence globally, regionally and locally, to enable your forces and equipment to be used most effectively and with least cost to bodies and lives
- you put effort into working on relationships with other countries which enable you to  collaborate to prevent conflict, but also to prosecute it effectively when necessary.

But one day you decide to spend more than three full years of your budget on a single weapon, one which is in practical terms useless for any conflict you can foresee, and will also, within five years, have lost its unique selling point of being invisible underwater. To afford this, you compromise every other budget: you take significant chunks of money away from recruiting, paying, accommodating and caring for your soldiers, you compromise on all the other equipment you buy, and you spend less on intelligence and on your diplomatic efforts. All for a weapon you will never use.

Doing something about Trident is not radical, it is just common sense.

We can do the same with most of our policies – climate change, housing, education, health and social care, transport.

Then we can save the word radical for policies that really are. Land Value Tax, maybe, because that really would shake up wealth and power in this country.