Covid is not over

 First published on LibDemVoice.

The UK’s response to Covid has been, and still is, characterised by delay and indifference. This is largely but not wholly because Boris Johnson was Prime Minister when it struck. Johnson made being irresponsible fun, and we all paid the price for it, as the Covid inquiry is now slowly and painstakingly beginning to make clear. The British electorate was shallow enough to fall for it, and resistant enough to taking responsibility seriously to make it very risky for a political party to advocate it. But sometimes it is right for political parties to say unpopular things.

A liberal response to Covid would start from the basic principle: we should be free to do everything we want, provided we do not infringe other people’s freedom. Conrad Russell noted that that proviso is far more of a limitation than most people realise.

During the crisis we did all the things we were asked to do (unlike Johnson et al). Once it was over, most of us embraced our “freedom”, and stopped counting the cost to other people. More than a million clinically extremely vulnerable people remain effectively trapped in their own homes because they cannot count on the rest of us to keep them safe. The population at large (including, unfortunately, a lot of medical practitioners) embraces the fictions that it’s over (while the aptly named FU.1 variant is spreading globally 50% faster than previous variants) and that it’s just like flu. But currently 200+ people die every week with Covid on the death certificate (this is known to be significant underreporting). Flu doesn’t kill people in the summer. Flu doesn’t cause the long term sequelae that Covid does. People don’t get Long Flu, whereas currently in the UK alone two million are suffering from Long Covid (ONS figures).

80% of Japanese people still mask in public. The instant reaction will be they’re different, they’re more conformist, we believe in freedom. But it doesn’t have to be about ideology or culture. It can and should be about common sense. I am free to not wear a mask; but my not wearing a mask increases the risk of you getting Covid. And that is a much worse fate than the tiny inconvenience of a mask. Back to the key principle that we are free to do whatever we want provided it does not impact on other people’s freedom. This principle says that we must take responsibility for the effect we have on other people. Going about unmasked and not taking other sensible and barely inconvenient precautions puts other people at risk. To be liberal, we should take account of that and act responsibly.

It is time for the Liberal Democrats to say, “Hey, this is our core principle. It’s time to be sensible about this. People are suffering dire long term consequences, or even dying, because we refuse to take responsibility for the effect we have on others.  People are suffering dire long term consequences, or even dying, because we won’t press the government to do sensible things like allocating meaningful budgets for air filtration in schools and public buildings. ‘Living with’ Covid actually means dying with it.”

It seems to me that this would be the liberal way, despite the public’s impatience with it.

Why I am a Liberal Democrat

The LibDems recently ran an essay competition on the theme "What  it means to be a Liberal Democrat today". Results of the competition are not out yet, and I have no idea when they will be. Here is my effort, for what it is worth.

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I am a Liberal Democrat because I have a sense of justice. Justice means everybody getting a fair chance without the playing field being tilted against them throughout their lives. Justice does not mean everyone being treated the same all the time. Equality before the law is a sine qua non, but equality before the law requires different treatment, e.g. those who cannot afford representation should get legal aid. Those who can should not. My sense of justice is Biblical as much as it is political, though I accept it will not be for everybody. The Old Testament justice of Amos “Let justice roll on like a river and righteousness like an ever flowing stream”. Justice is so much more than equality before the law: it demands that we treat everybody as we would wish to be treated ourselves. Thus the two most important fibres in my being, the political and the religious, are intertwined.

Liberal democracy involves a lifetime of effort levelling the playing field. We come into a world with a tilted playing field. We make the effort to level it. But the effort does not end once the field is level because in our world the most influential currency is money, and money is magnetic. Wherever it is, it attracts more. If we leave the playing field alone, it will gradually tilt again as those with money use their power to accumulate more. So we need to work constantly to keep the playing field level. It is not just about fairness, it is also about effectiveness. Wealth used for the benefit of all benefits the wealthy too (some of the wealthy realise this). Wealth redistributed to those who have no work keeps them fit and alert and best able to contribute when work does come their way. Wealth redistributed towards those who will never be able to work means we care for those less fortunate than ourselves. Hence my implacable opposition to the poisonous policies and practices of the current Department for Work and Pensions.

The second most influential currency is information, which is crucial for the exercise of power. Information is light which we shine into the murk of both states and corporations to find out how they are affecting us. Without information we are not free, so being a Liberal Democrat means a concern for the freedom of information everywhere and in every form. People must be free to communicate with each other everywhere and about anything, provided it does not harm other people. But people in power hide information as obsessively as they hide money. So liberalism involves a permanent struggle to uncover information and set it free.

I don’t aim for a small state. I aim for an effective state. Size and effectiveness are not necessarily correlated. I want a state that is strong when I need it to be and otherwise leaves me alone. At the same time I want a society that encourages other people to be all that they can be, but to leave me alone if I am not affecting them. Regulation is a necessity; without it markets and social relations would not be peaceably ordered. Too much regulation is problematic, but so is too little – as we discovered in 2008. I want a smart state, one that is strong enough to counter balance prevailing global forces, and at the same time nimble enough to deal with rapidly changing circumstances. The Home Office’s leaden footed response to legal highs is a perfect example of how not to respond to change.

So the state needs to be smart, which entails that the people need to be smart. We need an active concerned and involved citizenry to keep the state tuned to our needs rather than to the needs of those in power. Liberalism also involves realism. I am realistic enough to know that we will never have an entirely active and involved citizenry. The forces of individualist consumerism are too strong for that. But we need a certain minimum, and everybody should at least have the chance, which means we need an education system in which people learn how to be smart. The system we have at the moment teaches one thing and one thing only – how to be measured. It is a tribute to the indomitability of the human spirit and to the professionalism and creativity of our teachers that most of our pupils leave the system with their character intact.

Ultimately, liberalism, like any political philosophy, is about character. Liberalism includes generosity of spirit. I do not envy those who are richer than me, provided they have earned it, which is by no means always the case. I do not scorn those who are poorer than me, because they did not bring it on themselves. They just live in the wrong part of the playing field, the one that I am constantly working to level up. Liberalism involves being always conscious of the rest of the world, not just the bits of the UK that go beyond my comfortable environment, but the entire world. Being internationalist means we won’t forget that our comfort depends on the discomfort of many others.


Liberalism is not an easy creed. It involves a tolerance for complication, an appetite for the convoluted practice of listening to every point of view and working to accommodate all of them. By and large political philosophies are based on either fear or hope. The politics of fear is easy. You point and shout. Liberalism is founded on the politics of hope, which is hard, hard work. We do not have the Daily Mail to expound our beliefs. We have Focuses. Which have to be delivered. So we pound the pavements. Activism gets you fitter. Not only have you got the message out, but you’ve taken your health into your own hands as well.

I am a cockroach

Tim Farron famously said a little while ago something along the lines of after the apocalpyse has happened, there will still be cockroaches and Liberal Democrats delivering leaflets. Well, the apocalypse happened on Thursday. A grim night. Lewes lost, in Norman Baker, the best MP it has ever had, or likely ever will. I doubt that his successor, for all her fine words, will measure up. (Irony: some circles in Lewes have just noticed that she is pro fracking: a bit late.)

We have been well and truly punished in the only poll that counts. We can now look back on some fine achievements, and some apologies that need to be made, and we can look forward to more pain for the many, and comfort for the few.

It looks to me as if the electorate has said, well, if we have to have Tory policies, we may as well have proper Tories making them. I know it's more complicated than that. But there are things which we have participated in, and enabled, and we no longer have to support - the ideological insistence on privatisation of everything possible, Iain Duncan Smith's heartless war on unemployed, sick and disabled people. Of course, now we're out of power, we have lost any ability we had to mitigate those efforts.

In my view, as many have already said, we became too economically liberal and were not socially liberal enough in government. Our achievements were mainly on the socially liberal side of the agenda - equal marriage, pupil premium, raising tax allowance for *everyone*, resistance to the snoopers' charter. But the main thrust of being in government was economic liberalism. I was struck by a piece from Mark Littlewood quoted in Liberal Vision. He says we may have the opportunity to redefine ourselves “as a genuinely classical liberal party, seeking to shift power in every area of life away from the state and towards individual men and women.”  The trouble is that nowadays that doesn't work. Globalisation and post industrial capitalism have taken us to the point where removing power from the state means that it accrues not to ordinary people but to corporations, and what we need is a form of liberalism that finds tools to empower citizens in the face of both the state and corporations. That tends away from the classical tools of economic liberalism, such as simple versions of free trade, which work to accumulate more power in the hands of unaccountable corporations. (Hence my opposition to TTIP; its headline is free trade, its effect is corporate dominance.)

I wrote my wishlist before the election. It still stands:
- a welfare policy that affords a decent minimum without harrassment to everybody who is not working because they cannot or because there is no work
- major increase in the capacity of the civil service to frame and monitor contracts given to the private sector (where increasing the power of the state works to the benefit of the individual citizen)
- FOI for all contracts issued by government. Corporate confidentiality should not be a figleaf. Transparency is all - when we can see what private companies are doing with our money, it is so much less easy for them to get away with it.
- properly funded units to chase tax avoiders
- MPs can have as many jobs as they want, but they cannot speak or vote on anything in which they have a financial interest. (It works for councillors, it can work for MPs.)

It is an incomplete list, but it's a start. It is by and large a socially liberal list. We still need to be economically liberal, but we need to get that right, so that it actually works on behalf of the citizens, not on behalf of the powers that be. I am no longer “for” minimal government. I am “for” the level of government that works for everybody, not just the few, that enables all of us to stand up best to the power of corporations, as well as the power of the state. I am "for" Conrad Russell's definition of liberalism: we stand up to bullies - everywhere.

That is my “air war”. As for the "ground war", I will be delivering leaflets, and preparing the ground for a battle about fracking. It will be a big one.

I am a cockroach.