It says something about modern politics when one is forced to defend liberalism against liberals. I blogged yesterday about how refreshing it was to hear a mainstream party leader make the case for old fashioned English liberalism. Well, it seems elements of Nick Clegg’s party are not quite on the same page. On the very same day, we find Liberal Democrat activist Kasch Wilder writing on Liberal Democrat Voice that “it is important, now more than ever, for Parliament to send a strong message that the diversity of our culture is the backbone of our society”. He makes this rather extraordinary claim during the course of an argument for the election of Labour MP Parmjit Dhanda as Speaker and it is evidence of some really rather muddled thinking. Issues around identity and the BNP are entirely separate from the much narrower issue of parliamentary reform. And yet somehow both he and Mr. Dhanda manage to conflate the two.
Reading Mr. Dhanda’s blog, it is clear that he simply hasn’t thought beyond New Labour’s failed identity politics and only really turns to the issue of accountability as an afterthought. In the main, he seems concerned with the absurd idea of uprooting Parliament and embarking on a tour of the regions. Alongside this, his proposals are for more of the failed identity politics that resulted in the election of two BNP MEPs. He bases his appeal around the conviction that “we need to change our personnel to reflect modern Britain”. So far, so much standard New Left fare, but we soon encounter something much more alarming. Later in the same paragraph we find the following:
“Parliament will not be representative of its racial, gender or class mix at any time in the next 100 years. The Speaker must actively encourage political parties to make changes, through law, to catalyse these changes over one or two terms, not 100 years.”Quite astonishing. This is a form of radical identity politics that polarises opinion not just in the House, but across the country. It will politicise the Office of Speaker to an unprecedented and wholly unacceptable degree. This alone should disqualify him. It is clear that he has absolutely no conception of the proper role and function of the Speaker of the House. Quite apart from the obvious constitutional impropriety of pursuing such a radical agenda from the Chair, what Messrs Dhanda and Wilder do not seem to understand is that it is precisely this commitment to diversity above almost every other social policy goal that is at the root of so much of the current crisis. Strong societies are those centred around a set of shared values. Societies that cannot achieve agreement on basic values slide into conflict and worse, and so it is not diversity - ethnic, confessional, or ideological – that is the backbone of our society, but rather its opposite; a stable and enduring consensus around basic values.
Those values are best expressed in the centuries old tradition of English liberty: a robust liberalism, a jealous regard for freedom, a healthy scepticism, and a deep and abiding suspicion of the state. So the most important message our Parliament could send out now is that the backbone of our society is liberty, not diversity. Through all the waves of immigration, the dominant culture has remained robustly liberal. Immigrants have contributed many great things, much energy and entrepreneurship, but the one thing they have not improved upon is our basic cultural settlement, the basic framework of rights and freedoms, the basic set of principles at the centre of our tradition of liberty. Not a single, solitary contribution has improved upon that basic framework. And as if to underline the point, sections of the new immigrant populations are now actively seeking to undermine it. And they are helped in that agenda by just this kind of wrongheaded, ill-considered argument. The basic point that Mr. Dhanda has still not grasped is that It is precisely while he was busy playing identity politics that his constituents turned their backs on him and voted for the BNP. I would invite both Mr. Dhanda and Mr. Wilder to reflect on that. The last thing we need is some ghastly new symbolism. This is not a cosmetic exercise. We need a champion of liberty; a Speaker determined to hold the executive to account; a Speaker committed to the basic values that underpin our constitutional settlement - not another poster boy for New Labour’s diversity agenda.