According to “Labour List” (1st January) Sir Keir Starmer has appointed a new chair of the Labour Party. She is the former MP Anna Turley, who writes that she is so proud of “everything we are doing to change the lives of working people across Britain.” (my italics)
Those words “working people” are the first reason why Labour is not liberal.
Liberals exist to represent the needs of all people: children, students, carers, home makers, disabled people, the retired , criminals (yes indeed, no one should be held in inhumane conditions,) academics, innovators, migrants and asylum seekers, SME entrepreneurs, - what the Prayer Book calls “all sorts and conditions of men (and, in updated editions, women.)”
Labour has its roots in the past when it can be argued that the “working class” needed special protection for which they deserved absolute priority. But the modern world has moved on from a world of ”the bosses v the workers.”
Certainly some workers do still need protection, not least those on exploitative zero-hours contracts and the young unable to find employment other than as unpaid “internships, but there are other and equally important sources of conflict: we citizens v the overweening power of the state; the state v overmighty conglomerates; misinformation v truth; might v the rule of law; fairness v the influence of the rich an powerful.
It is on many of these other sources of conflict that the Labour government is found wanting. Recent examples are:
Labour’s failure to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14, the “civilised” European norm:
The confiscation of migrants' phones;
Measures to reduce the right to protest;
The absurd prosecution of those who have peacefully displayed support for the aims of Palestine Action;
The failure to remove the restriction on voting and the powers of the Electoral Commission imposed by the Tories;
The proposal to impose compulsory digital ID on those seeking work, clearly the thin end of a wedge;
The ban on freely elected councillors permitting a four-fay week for their council workers:
The shameful cuts to Overseas Aid;
The failure to fund adequately and defend the BBC;
The failure so far to stand up for the rule of international law and condemn the US invasion of Venezuela.
The tendency to place destructive economic growth above the green measures necessary to preserve the habitability of the planet;
An obsession with social mobility, and hence a tiered society, rather than an aspiration for social and political equality.
For a genuinely liberal future we still need the Libel Democrats.
