conservative

 Well, I've been fretting for a few days about the bits I missed out of my talk at the Oxford "Speak Easy" last week.  Those who were there early enough heard me begin with a few lines from my notes, before I went rambling off elsewhere and lost my place, so whilst I mentioned that I'd like people to disassociate for the purposes of the discussion the (big-m) "Mutualism", the successor to the Individuality Anarchist movement, and the (small-m) "mutualism" that describes the use of a particular co-operative business form.  For whilst there are similarities, especially in their theoretical basis, there are also differences, especially in the way the Co-operative Movement in the UK operates.

But I think it is important to compare and contrast them, and I intended to do this on Wednesday night, but didn't get to that.  At the moment, politicians from all the main parties are talking about embracing mutualism, using co-operative businesses to deliver certain public services and so on.  And what worries me is that people will get the wrong idea about both co-operative businesses and about "Mutualism" and if these attempts to use co-ops in public policy do not work out as well as they are now being touted will be disillusioned with the idea of mutualism, and Mutualism, itself.

There has also been much discussion of this around the blogs and media recently, so I thought I would add my tuppence worth.

So some thoughts...

First the Co-operative Movement is innately anti-statist.  This may not appear to be the case in the UK where the Co-operative has established a political party, called, unsurprisingly, the Co-operative Party, and which many years ago now hitched itself to the party of the big state, the Labour Party.  But in its early years and, as some would say its hey-day, in which co-operative business forms were founded from the ground up, by ordinary people wanting to meet all sorts of their needs, for food, for insurance, for health care, housing and so on they worked in spite of the state which most often seemed to grant privilege to those who would rip them off.

Indeed, the first of the seven Co-operative Principles, based on those set down originally by the Rochdale Pioneers and now guarded and promoted by the International Co-operative Alliance reinforced that a co-operative is based on voluntary, open membership, for all people who are able to make use of the benefits the society is created to deliver.  It is inherently voluntarist - anarchist - the complete opposite of which is the sort of compulsory collectivist state socialism engages in.  Even when that state is apparently "democratic", it is still not voluntary in the same sense.  If you really don't like a democratic decision of your fellow co-op members, you can, ultimately part company; go and get whatever services or goods they deliver from somewhere else, or start another co-op.  Try doing that if you don't like the "democratic" decision that leads to one party running the country however they like.

So in this sense, the co-operative business form is a very useful one for those of us who see co-operatives and social enterprises not as a way of delivering government policies, but as a way to develop truly voluntarist means of doing what the state often does by coercive collectivism.  But it is only one business form of many, and to a large extent Mutualist-anarchists are agnostic about what business form should be used in any particular instance, just so long as it is not coercive.  

That said, there are some areas in which the co-operative form seems to me to give particular benefits; where for example a good or service is too big or difficult to procure individually, or where the different interests in an organisation, the workers, consumers, financiers and so on want to align their interests in the ongoing management of the organisation because of the nature of the sort of transaction they are involved in.  And schools might very well be a good example of this.  It's not something you want to change your supplier of every day.  You can buy your newspaper or groceries from a different person every time, but you will want some stability for your children's education.  So you may want to agree to participate in setting policy and direction in your chosen school alongside teachers and managers.  

Second, a co-operative business or a social enterprise is not a "not-for-profit".  I know that people have qualms about things they perceive as public services being delivered by organisations that aim to make a "profit", but it is simple fact that you cannot run a business without aiming to make a "profit" - to aim for "break even" is to fail.  What matters is what you do with that profit, perhaps.  And sure, in a shareholder owned limited company, the whole purpose of the business is to make financial gain for its investors.  But the same could be true of a co-operative.  There is nothing that prevents a co-operative business distributing its surplus to its owners.  In the case of the ubiquitous Co-operative Group retail businesses this usually involves sending us members discounts off our future purchases, but there's no reason why it should not be a cash dividend if that is what the co-operative membership decided.

But there are lots of other things that could be done with "profits" - there could be a policy to help finance other co-operatives start up, or local community activities or charities, or to reinvest everything into the profit generating organisation itself.  The really key thing about a co-operative is that it is owned by the members who join it because they benefit from the goods or services it delivers, as opposed to it merely being a financial investment where shareholders may have little interest or intention, or even ability, to use what their limited company produces.

And so, finally, to the various noises being made by political parties about "embracing mutualism", "encouraging co-operatives" and so on.  Of course, as someone who does not believe the state has legitimate roles in delivering what they call public services in any case, I also do not believe it has the right to control who delivers them, or to whom to devolve responsibility for some of them to.  The most state-collectivist activists would not accept a co-operative as a compromise in any case.  They would say that it is wrong in principle to incorporate what is currently delivered by a unique sort of an organisation - public custodians elected by everyone - because it creates an organisational form that is itself vulnerable to take-over.  Even if you establish your public service delivery co-operative as, to start with, a business whose rules say they must reinvest surpluses and so on, they will point to the demulualisation of our former mutual financial services sector as an example of where member/owners can be tempted out by big money and big business.

But more importantly, as in my first point above, co-operatives are about voluntarism and grass roots action by people who want to work together to secure some kind of a benefit more difficult or less satisfying to achieve on their own.  They are not, and should not, be agents of state policy, of top down devolution of something in which the state will then, inevitably, want to retain a significant amount of control.  

It has been incessant growth of state action in the spheres in which very many people were already making their own voluntary arrangements that has extinguished much of the thriving co-operative and mutual self-organised culture that previously flourished.  When Lloyd-George promoted unemployment insurance for example, he quoted in his budget that 90% of the people likely to benefit from the proposed state system were already covered through friendly societies and so on - so his state action was to replace all of this voluntary co-operation in order to fund a statist way of ensuring the other 10% had cover.

Whenever I was asked, such as in those "go round the table and introduce yourselves" moments, as a director or chair of Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum, or as a director of Social Enterprise South East, I would make the point that I was not a promoter of social enterprise for delivering on government commitments, but as promoting self-organised social market alternatives to government action.  And I hope other would be co-operators and social entrepreneurs will sup with a long spoon when the man from the government comes along offering them the chance to "run their own public services".

I noticed in the "Golden Dozen" today a post by Paul Walter last week concerning the Tories making a lot of noise about how they would bolster the right to "self defence" when you or your property are under threat. Whilst difficult cases like that of Munir Hussain make bad law, such things are far from the mind of politicians in election time and "my right to defend myself" clearly makes a good election slogan amongst a certain section of the population who feel that the rights of criminals have been taken too far, as witness a couple of elections ago a similar outcry about the fate of Mr Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who killed a fleeing burglar with his shotgun, and was subsequently convicted of manslaughter.

Conservative concern might be laudable, if it weren't for the very inconvenient fact that they, just like Labour, have been compliantly complicit in the long term policy of steadily disarming law-abiding citizens and rendering them less and less able to defend themselves and their property, whilst at the same time ensuring that when you need them, in such circumstances, the police are like as not going to be as far away on the other side of the county as they could possibly be.

Yet for all the bravura about banning one weapon after another in recent decades from all our political masters of whatever hue, prohibition in this as in so many other areas of prohibition has made the problems worse.  Gun crime is higher than it was in 1996 when the public outcry for "something must be done" led to the banning of nearly all effective handguns.  We all know the stories of the rise of knife crime on our streets.  The fact is that with a disarmed citizenry, and a seemingly ever more remote possibility of a timely police response, it is now the criminal that is routinely armed and the victim that is routinely helpless.

By way of an aside and example, a few weeks ago we had some intruders on site trying to steal bikes.  One of our students caught them in the act and rescued three bikes which he took into his flat while he called out the warden.  Although they were just kids really, these would be thieves were no ordinary cut-it-and-run types though; while the warden was on the phone to the police, using 999 as instructed when the perpetrator is still on the premises, these kids were running round and round the block, banging on the windows of the flat into which the bikes had been taken, threatening the occupants and so on.  But no, the police switchboard was more interested in the colour of the bikes, and no, there would not be a 999 response, and lo! half an hour later, having managed to get our own private mobile security on site first who managed to shoo them away, along pops two PCSOs, yes, you guessed it, on bikes, to take down more details.  And all on a Sunday evening, when you would have thought that the doughnut shops were all closed and the pubs and clubs relatively quiet!

But anyway, back to the gripe.  You see it does not matter whether you call it "reasonable force" or whether you try to make some vacuous and vain change in the wording of the law to "not grossly disproportionate force" (whatever that may mean); it is the political classes of all parties in this country who have left the victims of crime defenceless and unaided.  They can make all the hullabaloo they like; they have brought us to this.  Political point scoring will not wash here.

And this is where anarchists, and the idea of "private law" we espouse, is head and shoulders above any of this silly legislative willy waving which will just result in more courtroom consternation and a bigger statute book for government to finance from our pockets.  "Justice" in a private law society is simple.  It is based on the "non-aggression principle" and the respect of society for property and contract.  You see, "non-aggression" does not entail pacifism.  If someone attacks or threatens you or your property you may defend yourself and your property.  But the "non-aggression" principle applies to you as defender as well.  If you go beyond the force needed to to make you and your property safe from immediate threat then you yourself are stepping over into the role of aggressor and the now victim, who was attacking you and yours, has every right to legal redress against you.

It doesn't need reams of legislation.  Just the "natural law" right to be able to resist aggression against you and yours.  And you may be armed in the process.  It's not up to the State to say who can and cannot hold a firearm or a sword stick or wave a knife at a threatening intruder under such a system.  But, since everyone would, in a market anarchist system, almost certainly need to be insured against claims made by others, your insurance company is the one who will authorise whether you are the sort of person they will insure with or without a weapon that might, in the hands of the responsible user, effectively deter an intruder for little cost or harm but in irresponsible hands cause them to bear the liability for you pumping the paper-boy full of lead and claiming he was an intruder!

As Aleksandr says, "Compare the meerkat; simples!"

In the run up to 1997, I remember that one somewhat better, the Iron Lady was gone, love her or hate her, and the Tory government had become mired in "sleaze" and policy-wise had run out of steam, full of the second division of ministers that had emerged under Thatcher. Tony Blair and his New Labour project was another "Big Idea" whose time had come. Labour without the socialism. Economically responsible. With a plan.

And so we've had Thatcherism and Blairism over that past thirty years. But I think we will not get Brownism or Cameronism. Now, even moreso than in 1979, and certainly moreso than in 1997, we need a "Big Idea". Not merely a change of management. And, for all the coverage, I cannot see any "Big Idea" coming out of Old Queen Street. To prove their management credentials, they present, at their big show case conference before likely victory, a managerial mock-budget. Talk of freezing public sector pay, of everyone working for an extra year before retirement; these are not going to solve the terminal systemic problems in the anglo-saxon pensions system or the bloated state, unable to sap any more out of a shattered and second class productive economy.

And today's "Big Idea" ought to be not looking at how the State can be tweaked here and there or managed differently, but to look at the very nature of the State itself. As I quoted Albert Jay Nock in me previous post, here he is again, also from "Our Enemy The State":

The condition of public affairs in all countries, notably in our own, has done more than bring under review the mere current practice of politics, the character and quality of representative politicians, and the relative merits of this-or- that form or mode of government. It has served to suggest attention to the one institution whereof all these forms or modes are but the several, and, from the theoretical point of view, indifferent, manifestations. It suggests that finality does not lie with consideration of species, but of genus; it does not lie with consideration of the characteristic marks that differentiate the republican State, monocratic State, constitutional, collectivist, totalitarian, itlerian, Bolshevist, what you will. It lies with consideration of the State itself.

[...]

It appears to me that with the depletion of social power going on at the rate it is, the State-citizen should look very closely into the essential nature of the institution that is bringing it about. He should ask himself whether he has a theory of the State, and if so, whether he can assure himself that history supports it. He will not find this a matter that can be settled off-hand; it needs a good deal of investigation, and a stiff exercise of reflective thought. He should ask, in the first place, how the State originated, and why; it must have come about somehow, and for some purpose. This seems an extremely easy question to answer, but he will not find it so. Then he should ask what it is that history exhibits continuously as the State’s primary function. Then, whether he finds that “the State” and “government” are strictly synonymous terms; he uses them as such, but are they? Are there any invariable characteristic marks that differentiate the institution of government from the institution of the State? Then finally he should decide whether, by the testimony of history, the State is to be regarded as, in essence, a social or an anti-social institution?

Nock, of course, concludes as I too conclude; that the State is an anti-social institution - the enemy of social power that it unremittingly destroys. And so the "Big Idea" for today is, in fact a "socialist" revolution. A complete reversal of the centuries' old process of State power usurping Social power and never giving it back. Not the "socialism" corrupted by the coercive statist tendencies of the twentieth century "left", or of the "social democratic" tendency. But the confidence that social power can achieve what the do-gooders believe their states can do only much better.

It is an irony that in our own party what we think of and term "social liberalism" reflects a belief that the state should help liberalism flourish by its supposedly judicious interventions. For true "social liberalism" ought to be the belief, expressed by Nock, or Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon or Gustav de Molinari that through genuine liberalism social power does not need the coercive state.

As David Boaz puts it in his "Libertarianism: A Primer":

The right term for the advocates of civil society and free markets is arguably socialist. Thomas Paine distinguished between society and government, and the libertarian writer Albert Jay Nock summed up all the things that people do voluntarily--for love or charity or profit--as "social power," which is always being threatened by the encroachment of State power. So we might say that those who advocate social power are socialists, while those who support State power are statists.

State Power is created by conquest and confiscation. From what Paine described as the "French bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives" the state has exploited. It was no less exploitative from the seventeenth century Commonwealth's installation of mercantilist power - merely a different group was exploited. Nor, for all the talk that the universal franchise was the zenith of democratic achievement, has that exploitation ceased just because everyone now has a theoretical say - again, just another group, or groups, exploited from time to time. State power is the true "opium of the masses" with its ability to whisper softly, intoxicatingly to us that "the State will provide".

For those managerial politicians, those would be state exploiters, who cannot get away from their amateur management-speak, what we need is to "zero base" the state. For the state is no defier of the laws of the universe: for every state action there is an automatic and most likely undesirable reaction. It is state created privilege that enables some to exploit others' natural competitiveness in the market. And then the state says it needs to intervene and "redistribute" what would be more naturally distributed if that privilege had not been granted in the first place: more coercion, more exploitation, more state power. Every intervention of the state needs to be examined for the usually detrimental effects it has elsewhere and which it then claims as reason to usurp yet more social power to fix.

And we will find, invariably, that left well alone, without the depredations of the state in the first place, social power would have worked better. Social power, the power of all the associations we make one with another, even the ones we don't know about, such as my relationship with the forger of the brass ferrule in Leonard Read's "Pencil" whom I cannot know, is the only thing that can end this spiral of managerial, coercive, exploitative and ultimately futile statism. And its resurgence needs to start now, before George and Dave, and all that seek to come after them, manage to destroy it utterly. And with our now massively increased ability, through modern technology and communication, to organize for ourselves, for "people [to] have more to do with each other and governments less" there has never been a better time than now.

Socialism: it's not what you think!

There is ... an impression that if actual recessions [as in "state power receding" not economic recessions. Ed.] do not come about by themselves, they may be brought about by the expedient of voting one party out and another one in. This idea rests upon certain assumptions that experience has shown to be unsound; the first one being that the power of the ballot is what republican political theory makes it out to be, and that therefore the electorate has an effective choice in the matter. It is a matter of open and notorious fact that nothing like this is true. Our nominally republican system is actually built on an imperial model, with our professional politicians standing in the place of the praetorian guards; they meet from time to time, decide what can be “got away with,” and how, and who is to do it; and the electorate votes according to their prescriptions. Under these conditions it is easy to provide the appearance of any desired concession of State power, without the reality; our history shows innumerable instances of very easy dealing with problems in practical politics much more difficult than that. One may remark that in this connexion also the notoriously baseless assumption that party-designations connote principles, and that party-pledges imply performance. Moreover, underlying these assumptions and all others that faith in “political action” contemplates, is the assumption that the interests of the State and the interests of society are, at least theoretically, identical; whereas in theory they are directly opposed, and this opposition invariably declares itself in practice to the precise extent that circumstances permit. However, without pursuing these matters further at the moment, it is probably enough to observe here that in the nature of things the exercise of personal government, the control of a huge and growing bureaucracy, and the management of an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power, are as agreeable to one stripe of politician as they are to another. Presumably they interest a Republican or a Progressive as much as they do a Democrat, Communist, Farmer- Labourite, Socialist, or whatever a politician may, for electioneering purposes, see fit to call himself. This was demonstrated in the local campaigns of 1934 by the practical attitude of politicians who represented nominal opposition parties. It is now being further demonstrated by the derisible haste that the leaders of the official opposition are making towards what they call “reorganization” of their party. One may well be inattentive to their words; their actions, however, mean simply that the recent accretions of State power are here to stay, and that they are aware of it; and that, such being the case, they are preparing to dispose themselves most advantageously in a contest for their control and management. This is all that “reorganization” of the Republican party means, and all it is meant to mean; and this is in itself quite enough to show that any expectation of an essential change of regime through a change of party-administration is illusory. On the contrary, it is clear that whatever party-competition we shall see hereafter will be on the same terms as heretofore. It will be a competition for control and management, and it would naturally issue in still closer centralization, still further extension of the bureaucratic principle, and still larger concessions to subsidized voting-power. This course would be strictly historical, and is furthermore to be expected as lying in the nature of things, as it so obviously does.

...twas always thus.

Nice one on the BBC page at the moment with the caption under what ought to be a picture of the winning Tory candidate Chloe Smith saying that she will become the "youngest Labour MP":

What the Beeb could not do for Gaza, John Redwood does today as he boldly launches an appeal on behalf of struggling "public sector fat cats":

Today I would like you to spare a thought and a few billion for the public sector fat cats. They have been going through a miserable time lately.

Fred Goodwin has been pilloried for his noble action in creating the largest loss making bank in UK financial history and for delivering it safely into the public sector.

Chief Executives the length and breadth of local government and quango land have been subject to abusive intrusions in to the privacy of their rewards by the Taxpayers Alliance, the Redwood website and others.

They should be supported for increasing the costs of public services year after year, for keeping productivity down, and for tirelessly recruiting so many extra administrators, spin doctors, regulators and management consultants to help them. We need all the jobs we can get in a recession. One man’s productivity gain can be another man’s job loss.

Read the rest at The Sunday appeal. I thought it was quite funny anyway.

Over at ConservativeHome there's a post about George Osborne's predicament over the Labour proposal for a 45% tax rate on incomes over £150,000 per year. Now, as we know when we did our work on the Lib Dem 50% tax rate it seems likely that such a move will collect very little and annoy many people whom the country needs for investment. And of course I don't like taxes at all and would abolish all but land rents in my empire, but this particular piece of criticism by Fraser Nelson due in tomorrow's News of the World attracted my attention:

> Fraser Nelson in the News of the World (not yet online) THE 45p TAX HIKE MAY RAISE "NOTHING" "Right now, the richest 1 per cent pay 23 per cent of all income tax collected. They pay their fair share – and the fair share of 22 other people. When the tax rate rises too much, the rich just bugger off. We saw this in the seventies. But as Tory peer told me: “Those too young to remember the seventies are destined to repeat its mistakes”. Yesterday George Osborne now said Brown’s proposed 45p tax on the rich is “difficult to avoid”. Difficult if you have no imagination. Experts say this proposed 45p tax will raise NOTHING. Because the super-rich will emigrate, or work less. Just like in the 70s." [From George Osborne hit by quadruple whammy]

It is frequently argued that the wealthy pay enough, and as in this piece that they pay the equivalent of many other people put together - more than their fair share. However, it is just plain wrong.

The top 1% by wealth in this country also own nearly 25% of the financial wealth in the country. While the very poorest tax payers (the bottom two fifths of the population that is) own no financial wealth at all yet still pay tax. So, whether we approve of taxation at any level at all, let's please once and for all get rid of this idea that the wealthy pay more than their fair share because of simplistic tax take ÷ number of taxpayers calculations.

Of course, as a Georgist, I would also say that of the financial wealth the richest do own, much of it directly takes money from the poorest, both in interest and rent, and should probably be more heavily taxed to drive them to invest in productive assets rather than zero-sum assets.

It must sometimes be a bit annoying for David Davis, the former shadow Home Secretary who stood down and fought a byelection over the 42 day detention issue and other civil liberties, to have such a common name. For his fellow conservative homonym David Davies is now calling for a further curtailment of civil liberties:

Call for ban on military protests Angry protests greeted returning soldiers in Luton Conservative MP David Davies has called on abusive protests against serving military personnel to be outlawed. The Monmouth MP has tabled an amendment to a bill governing religious hatred that would extend protection to the Armed Forces. It would make it an offence to incite hatred against serving soldiers. [From BBC NEWS | Politics | Call for ban on military protests]

The trouble is Davies is also wrong. These are big boys and girls. They have stared death in the eyes and faced him down. What they really need to know is not that there is some simmering resentment that goes unvoiced, prohibited, but that the vast majority of us, from the reaction to the Luton protestors this week amongst the good people of Britain, are prepared to stick up for them and heap opprobrium on such protestors.

We go down a dangerous route in banning protest. Far better to get angry and shout them down each and every time and make it clear as a bell that they are in the minority. Our men and women on the front lines, whatever we think of the reasons for them being there, are not there to create or enforce the kind of society that will not brook criticism, we should not shield them from it when they return, but make them proud that the majority of us stick up for them freely and genuinely.

Earlier I spent a very pleasant, if slightly nerve-wracking, evening "chairing" the final "Meet the Author" session of my employer, Oxford Brookes University's, "Love and Justice Month". Our guest author, and an honorary graduate from the 2008 round of graduations, was Teresa Hayter, author of "Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls".

Teresa is a long time campaigner against immigration controls and the asylum machismo that tabloid editors and leading politicians promulgate and revel in. She was a founder member of the Campaign to Close Campsfield (with which Lib Dem MP Evan Harris is often involved) way back in 1993 when I barely knew the place existed. Campsfield is one of the several Immigration Reception/Detention/Removal (whatever the phrase is this year) centers with which our government pursues its racist, authoritarian, violent and at times lethal "war on the foreign poor".

Towards the end of the discussion session after Teresa's inspiring talk one person asked what the practical political and social implications would be of a completely open borders policy. And it struck me; just what is a state without borders? After all, one view of the state is that it is the territorial monopoly of arbitration. And if you don't demarcate that territory somehow, beat the bounds, spray like a wandering dog-fox the limits of that monopoly, in what way are you a state at all?

Now, the free movement of people is one thing (and I agree, absolutely, with it), but it seems to me that it is just a visible and, to an extent, preventable - in the sense that you can turn people around; treat them like shit and send them home to God knows what - symptom of the new global world we live in.

As I have written many times before, the communication networks that now span the globe make our less visible borders much more porous. Whether it is forming alliances with like minded people in other countries (for good or ill), moving capital around the globe to take advantage of favourable tax regimes, trading with ever smaller units of production, gradually sidelining the mighty intermediary trans-national corporations in favour of dealing with individuals and smaller and medium sized enterprises in other countries.

And you know, it may sound obvious, but we need to remember, recognize for the first time for some, that the genie of globalization (whilst the definition of what that means might be in dispute) is well and truly out of the bottle. We no longer live in a world in which China is "over there somewhere" - a blob on a map that was never pink but about which we knew little - or in which someone in a shanty town in Mumbai cannot see live images of the once "mother country" and aspire to some different life. Or in which we can be oblivious to goings on in the "dark continent" between Dr Livingstone's occasional letters home. In which football competitions are between small towns and cities in one country or the players all from the local community.

Yet, for all our former national adventurous spirit, colonizing an empire on which the sun never set, here we sit, cowering on our rock off the edge of Europe besieged by the idea that everyone wants to come here and destroy our way of life or that our tax revenues are steadily going down the drain in some tax haven somewhere. Migration is a two way thing. For all that people do want to come here, we should be matching that with still pioneering people going out into the wider world. But our world seems to want to enforce some kind of permanence through its nation states - you belong to one or another, very occasionally a couple at the same time, which crystalizes both the desires and fears of migration.

Rather than people choosing to come here for a job for a few years and then heading off somewhere else, or even just "back home", our immigration controls make people choose between staying permanently or going permanently (unless, that is, you happen to come from a most favoured rich country). If we are truly in a globalized world we should be feeling a lot freer than, say, we were thirty years ago when my parents as ex-pats dragged me around various African countries, to do just that: a job here, a job there, a holiday somewhere else, some time back home; all the time maximizing the return from each of our skills.

And if we don't pick up that challenge, if we choose to turn our backs and pretend that old world of bi-monthly dispatches from the colonies is still how it is "out there", like a child hiding our eyes and believing that because we can't see others they can't see us, the alternative is very grim indeed; a war of all against all. And, like that child, it is a scary world out there - we don't know quite what would happen if we open up here, open up there.

I happened to be reading Hayek's postscript to the "Constitution of Liberty" too the other day in which he explains "Why I am not a conservative" and I probably for the first time realized the essential difference between liberal and conservative. Liberty demands a leap into the unknown. Authority, conservative or socialist, on the other hand demands a plan. Without that plan they cannot feel in control; without being damn sure, or as sure as they can be, about the outcome, they dare not proceed; true "progress" is stopped in its tracks. And it seems innate in our collective psyche - how many times have I been explaining what I think is a bright new idea to find the first question on everyone's lips is "where have they done this before" - and that's just amongst my "liberal" friends!

At an individual level, there is a vast industry in "life coaching"; trying to teach us to push our boundaries, leave our comfort zone, to trust that we can overcome whatever obstacles may fall into our path when we branch off into new experiences and journeys. We are told that's what makes us grow, to succeed; that without pain there is no gain, or that discomfort is what makes us stronger through dealing with it. But at the level of the state, of government, we do not heed that same advice.

Some, usually on what they call the "left", bleat on that libertarian policies would mean a "return" to a vicious, beggar everyone else "Victorian laissez-faire" world (which I keep reminding them in vain was precisely the system which prompted the early anarchists and libertarians to work against the state entrenched systemic inequity and monopolies they saw skewed the outcome of that laissez-faire) in which there would be no support for the poor and hapless. They need to learn to trust in humanity. We have been "schooled" for over a century now into a more or less consensus that we do need to help support some others who cannot help themselves. The authoritarian will say only the "state" can ensure that mutual assistance can be assured fairly. That if we take that state away, there would be no hospitals, no schools, or that they would be only exclusive, unavailable to many or even most of the population. But in doing so, that state is necessarily coercive, illiberal, and suffocating.

We need to free people up to care, not to subcontract caring to some state entity that at best has only a partial mandate. And we will choose, at times, not to care - or at least to prioritize caring for ourselves over others when we barely have enough for ourselves. We can only guess that, on balance, there will always be enough people choosing to care such that those who are less fortunate through no fault of their own are not left defenseless or destitute. It's not a plan and it's inherently difficult to manage, predict or measure but it is what liberty is about.

But the world is getting smaller all the time. If we do not free ourselves from that micro-managed planned outcome authority on our own, it may become inevitable anyway simply because the Cnut-like alternative is too horrible for even the statists to contemplate or when we peasants realize how horrible what they contemplate for us looks like. We may as well choose to trust in a positive vision of humanity rather than get more and more worked up about defending the status-quo until something gives, suddenly and explosively.

No wonder the Big Brother state is getting worried about all these pressures on it. Lots of powerful and wannabe powerful, or just self-important, people are threatened with being cut down to size; people who think they know better than the rest of us and want the opportunity to force their vision on the rest of us. Let us hope us serfs begin to get agitated!

There's been an awful lot of terminologically inexact harrumphing going on all week, in no small part I hope egged on by my contributions to the "debate" within the party. The "debate" that is, about neo-Thatcherite Tory entryist libertanarchist corporate shills who are either a. trying to capture the soul of the party for their wicked ends or b. seriously deluding themselves that it is possible to persuade the Lib Dems to be a truly liberal party.

What I have learned this week is that:

• My unknown father must have been a Tory, perhaps even one of those grandee types who gets to tup one of the milk-maids for his fourteenth birthday just to make sure he's not one of those left-footers that needs to be put away in a military school.
• I must have, unbeknownst to me, been a closet Con all my life until waking up one morning and thinking "hey, I know, the best place to promote my arch-conservative ideas would be in the liberal party, I think I'll join them and make my life difficult."
• Either that, or I have come under the evil influence of such closet Tories since I joined the party, possibly closet Tories with names like Smith, Ricardo, Paine, Spencer, Mill or Henry George, and "double agents" such as Fred "Why I am not a conservative, no wait, I really am...or maybe not" Hayek. Or ideas from such evil closet Tories speaking from beyond their graves.
• I shouldn't be in the party, because I believe in a world "in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity".
• I should be in the party, because, erm, I believe in a world "in which no-one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity".
• I want to have carnal relations with an octogenerian former Prime Minister and a dead former US President in tribute to the fact that they are the true leaders of my global conspiracy theorist ideology. Possibly some kind of spit-roast arrangement. Perhaps filmed by Ann Coulter.
• I am the willing, small dicked, narrow minded, socially inadequate gnarled goblin herald of the twin devils of inequality and wealth and their four horsemen; monopoly, capitalism, markets and MacDonalds.
• When I grow up, I'll find myself under a bed, or out of a tree, or off a trolley.

Still, this might seem to have little to do with the "five wars" and "four battles" of my title. I just wanted you to be able to read what I'm about to say knowing what some others think of me and my type.

Liberalism cannot win the five wars without fighting the four battles. In other words you cannot be a "social liberal" truly without fighting those battles the "classical liberals" first promoted.

The five wars, of course, are from the Revelations of St William, first Baron Bill of Beveridge. More precisely his "war on the five giant evils" that stalked the entire fabric of a society emerging from a devastating world war - Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. The cult of St William is observed by many in the party who use his Revelations to stake the claim that the "welfare state" in Britain was a "Liberal" invention that defines the essence of British Liberalism of the entire 20th century. So dominant is this cult at times that they may even claim that some time in that century, perhaps early on, say in 1911 or something, there was a "Year Zero" for British Liberals before which it is somehow no longer permissible to look for answers to modern problems.

The thing is, that many of the intractable problems that the Venerable Leonard and St William worked on appear to remain quite intractable. A hundred years later. When we realize this, we find this warning from the pre-year zero Liberal Anti-christ Herbert de Spencer prescient:

"To mitigate distress appearing needful for the production of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned upwards of one hundred acts in Parliament having this end in view, each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. Men are nevertheless still discontented with the Poor Laws, and we are seemingly as far as ever from their satisfactory settlement."

...how many thousands now more acts in Parliament do we need to have, tinkering with this, toying with that, before we listen to him? The real difference between what some have called "classical liberals"† and "social liberals" seems to me to be the sort of questions they were asking in their exploration of political economy.

The classical liberals seem to have been more interested in preventing causes; the social liberals in treating symptoms. The classical liberals on the systemic problems that contribute to inequity; the social liberals in how to mitigate that inequity after it's arisen. The classical liberals say that by changing the core system, by reducing government interference, government protection, corporate welfare, and specifically by focussing on what Individualist Anarchist Benjamin Tucker and Mutualist Clarence Swartz called the "four monopolies" - the monopolies of money, of land, of tariffs and of patents we can create a far fairer economy; social liberals that the system was not simply unfair but fundamentally somehow unalterable and that we had to deal with its consequences through increased government action.

It seems to me that just at the point our Liberal party forebears were coming to understand these systemic monopolies of the classical liberals and beginning to want to do something about them, there was also a collective feeling that "these can't help quickly enough" and that the argument that won out was the one that said "we can only deal with the effects". This perhaps especially after the Land Tax was derailed by the privileged interests in the House of Lords and in spite of two general elections returning a government mandate to implement it.

And it is true that the basic principles of the two positions are, apparently, irreconcilable. On the face of it the one insists that the solution to poverty and inequity is to reduce government; the other to increase it. The one says reducing government results in greater liberty; the other that increasing government results in greater liberty. How can both be right? Well, of course, they cannot. They cannot both be the "end game".

Now, surely, if we are at all liberal, we would all agree that other things being equal, we would prefer to have less government interference in our lives and property than more interference. Furthermore, I am sure we would agree (or we would not be liberal at all but just enamoured of power over others like other ideologies) that of two solutions on offer, one which increases the freedoms of all without harming the freedoms of any would be preferable to one where the improvement for one group can only be delivered by decreasing the liberty of another group. Indeed there's even a "second place" in between those positions, one that's less bad than interfering by force in someone's freedoms in order to make something more equitable for someone else; that it is be better if the "interference" were voluntarily accepted than state enforced. The state action is always the least good of these three, because however democratically we dress it up, government is still always interference by someone else and by force. Like an S&M party we can accept that force on us of course, and some may even enjoy it, but far better not to have to inflict it in the first place if at all possible.

Classical liberalism's advocates claim we can have the former solution if we fight the big battles, the four great monopolies. Social liberals would say that at the very least, we need to be prepared to use the latter solution, the interventionist solution; most, I fear, would go further and say that a priori there are some things that only state intervention can deliver at a certain cost, in a certain timeframe and most equitably. Here the two can co-exist, to an extent. Whilst classical liberals' policies tend towards a longer term large scale systemic change, perhaps taking a generation or more to feed through, in the mean time the ongoing problems of inequity continue and their adverse consequences need to be addressed in the shorter term. But if we don't make our "end game" a more classical liberal vision of a level playing field rather than giving the uphill facing team a lighter ball, we will be doomed to continue the state of welfare we appear to have become and not the safety net St William and the Venerable Leonard envisaged. And that state of welfare is likely to get more costly, and require more interventions into other peoples' freedoms to achieve as a. our expectations rise and b. as we take more of the market's production away to pay for earlier liabilities and failings.

Whenever we see a mismatch between demand and supply, which seems to be what people mean when they talk about "market failure" to deliver something generally regarded as important to everybody's welfare, we must first check to see whether that mismatch may be caused by something actively preventing the market addressing the demand - which is, after all, how enterprise functions, by attempting to meet a demand at the right price at which the buyer and seller will mutually agree to trade.

Perhaps affording a home is an unrealizable dream for some not because they have too little money to afford one in a truly free market, but because our system subsidizes landlords at our expense making land also more expensive for everyone else in a largely unfree market. You don't want to increase government interference and bureaucracy by adding to the subsidy, but reduce the cost by removing the subsidy. Smaller government, more level playing field, social justice. Perhaps people could afford private GPs if we didn't (deliberately) create an economic rent in GPs' remuneration in a publicly owned monopoly which in turn keeps the average cost of choosing private provision up.

We must, moreover, seek evidence to prove that a given interference would be better than non-interference and private provision. We cannot rest assured that Hobhouse a hundred years ago said it was a good thing to provide a universal education actually means via a monopolistic state provider and purchaser as opposed to a private mechanism. And if the answer is that we "cannot prove or disprove it" we should assume the thing to try first is private provision. And even if we don't have private providers capable of meeting the task in the market at the moment, we should seek to create private providers (most probably as mutual or social enterprises), perhaps through seed capital if the barriers to entry in a particular market are high (or by removing the barriers would be even better), rather than create a structure that requires constant input of tax money to continue delivering.

So, it is quite wrong to say that there's no room for classical liberals, in the broadest sense, in what has become a social liberal party. Social liberalism's aims simply cannot be met unless we address the concerns of the classical liberals and their libertarian friends. And both are needed to prod the other into proving that the interventionist case is the necessary one in the likely few cases that turns out to be true.

† - in which I include, probably, what people think of as "anarchists", "minarchists", "libertarians", "mutualists" and no doubt other -ists.