In these toxic times, Scotland needs the liberalism that defined Charles Kennedy
THESE are dreadful days for Liberalism, for that old and vital strain in our political thought – one born of past furies and tempered in the Enlightenment; prizing every individual as of equal and ethical value; of global outlook and demanding firm legal and moral limits on political power.
In 1914 there was a Liberal government in office. A decade later the party was reduced to a rump of some dozens, from which – despite sallies and revivals, slumps and sorties – it has never really recovered. A month ago, after their first part in Britain’s governance since the Second World War, the Liberal Democrats were reduced from 57 to just eight seats in the House of Commons.
The Liberal Democrats have just two Members of the European Parliament, five MSPs and dozens of local councillors where, not so long ago, there were thousands. And their sole Scottish MP, Alistair Carmichael, was two weekends back comprehensively unmasked as a liar, a fool, an ocean-going balloon.
Even the most universally liked of their Scottish Parliamentarians, Charles Kennedy, could not retain his Westminster seat. He took this with characteristic Highland grace – and very Liberal perspective.
‘I am fond of political history,’ he declared serenely, ‘and tonight, if nothing else, we can all consider and reflect in years to come, and perhaps tell our grandchildren, that we were there on the night of the long sgian dubhs...’ A month later he was found dead. Kennedy in fact began his political career, as a 15-year old schoolboy in Lochaber, by joining the Labour Party. But he did not long care for it and, alarmed by its increasing collapse into the deep Left by 1981, unhesitatingly joined the breakaway Social Democratic Party.
Labour, he later explained, had seemed ‘less about releasing individual potential and more about levelling down’. And it was on the joint SDP/ Liberal Alliance ticket that the 23-year old in 1983 became, so unexpectedly, an MP. After its second failed date with the voters in 1987, though, Kennedy – still not 30 – was central to junking the Alliance and forming the new Liberal Democrats.
And, though he would in time lead the party for fewer than seven years, rather disorganised and in time sadly compromised by alcohol, Kennedy in many ways exemplified the best of Liberalism – and in 2005 took it to its best election results since 1923.
The philosophy, properly defined, is unique to our islands and those English- speaking realms begotten of them; born out of the terrible turmoil of the 17th century as we learned, post-Reformation, to reconcile competing, fiercely-held religious convictions with stable government, the rule of law and peace in the public square.
It is centred on the Parliamentary tradition, limited monarchy and central executive power, a free market in lands and goods and labour but – essentially – the belief that we should all try to engage with each other, and work for the common good, despite the most passionate differences in our beliefs.
In fact, the roots of Liberalism are as much in the Reformation as in the Enlightenment and, given its history, it is no accident that the last Liberal redoubts have been in the gently mocked ‘Celtic fringe,’ where the posh parish church of the laird holds little sway.
The ‘Highland Liberal’ tradition embodied by Kennedy not only weathered the ‘Crofters War’ of the 1880s but absorbed with ease the MPs of the Crofters Party, the first electorally successful socialist movement in Britain.
Only Orkney and Shetland, though – save for one brief term after the Second World War – has been Liberal continuously, and
SUBSEQUENT revival l aunched the l ong career of Russell Johnston (for Inverness), though it would be the mid-1980s before Kennedy and others consolidated the Highlands for the party of Gladstone and Asquith. The Western Isles was lost – irrevocably, as it proved – from 1935.
Alasdair MacKenzie, who sat for Ross and Cromarty between 1964 and 1970, was in the best of the tradition: a Free Churchman, socially conservative (a robust believer in the death penalty) and an agrarian radical.
The very young David Steel caught MacKenzie at t he Dingwall hustings in 1964, when candidates were hard-pressed on national security; then the elderly crofter stood up and, in halting Gaelic lilt, announced, ‘The Lib-e-ral Party will defend Bri-tain, the Common-wealth, and the free world...’
He sat down to thunderous applause; years later, humiliated by his own party conference at Eastbourne, in 1986, over nuclear weapons, Steel would ruefully recall that succinct response.
There is, besides such legitimate concern, profound regard for the individual, wariness of what we might call ‘the mob,’ deep distrust of the State – insofar as it tries to interfere with our freedoms or our privacy or indeed the free market, at home or abroad – and fierce belief in toleration.
That word is chosen precisely; and it is important. ‘Tolerance,’ so lightly bandied about in our day, is generally defined as sublime and even gigglesome indifference to the beliefs or conduct of others.
‘Toleration’ is far less fashionable, more important and a good deal harder – living respectfully alongside other people, sustaining community and government with them, even when you think their religion false, their beliefs bonkers or their lifestyles reprehensible. It is the wisdom to grasp that we have a keen stake in everybody’s freedom because upon it hinges our own.
And in most recent years there has emerged a new, nutty brand of ‘tolerance’ in Britain, whereby those genuinely convinced of their own liberalism – and the elites they control or comprise – assume the right to tell everyone what to think; to identify those who think the wrong way; and at every turn and in every sphere to silence them from expressing that opinion.
We have seen that in recent years – and still more strikingly, in recent months, in Ireland – over the issue of same-sex marriage. On a more trivial level, the social media are increasingly stalked by people hunting for a ‘gaffe,’ demanding – again – the humiliation, and hopefully the comprehensive ruin, of someone who has said anything they deplore.
True and classic Liberalism has always supported the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, the freedom of conscience.
‘Equality of concern and respect is cashed-out in terms of a set of basic rights, civil liberties and economic entitlements,’ writes one thoughtful academic. ‘These rights entail accompanying responsibilities...’
But there is no such thing,
CHARLES Kennedy himself internalised this, accepting his fall in 2006 with signal good grace and an extraordinary lack of bitterness, even as he became increasingly the butt for cruel, public jokes about booze and Highlanders.
There are two other instances of his Liberal outlook: both were courageous; and both alarmed senior colleagues – vexing them the more so as events proved Charles Kennedy right.
In 2000, the Conservatives waged an exceptionally unpleasant campaign against immigrants and, with some seeming degree of public support, tried to use this to their advantage in defending the supposedly safe seat of Romsey in a by-election that May.
Most rivals, these days, would try likewise to emote against Johnny Foreigner pouring into Britain. No, insisted Kennedy. The Conservatives were wrong, he declared – plain wrong; immigration had in fact enriched Britain, and would enrich it still.
He and the Liberal Democrats held fast to that position and won Romsey. In like manner, three years later, against the mass of opinion and even the opinion-polls, they opposed our unprovoked invasion of Iraq – and were again vindicated by events, and rewarded electorally.
As one London commentator, Gaby Hinsliff, observed the other day, Kennedy ‘believed fiercely in liberalism as something quite distinct from any other political creed; found ways to dramatise those differences which were right for his political time; and above all was unafraid to defy a public mood which is often shallower than the public will admit’.
In this regard he was most different from the leaders who bracketed him. Paddy Ashdown had hung tight by Tony Blair (in the hope of Cabinet office), winked at the worst New Labour excess, supported the bombing of Kosovo and indeed sent Blair private word, in 2003, that he agreed on Iraq.
Nick Clegg’s recent manifesto was jaw-dropping in its effrontery. It called for the restoration of educational entitlements Lib Dem votes had been instrumental in removing; ignored their complicity in slashing prisons funding even as ever more people had been slammed into them; would not be outdone in anti-immigrant scaremongering. It was no longer a pitch for Liberalism; but a plea to be retained in power.
Classic Liberalism – Kennedy’s Liberalism – was about the individual; his freedom, aspiration, and duties. Young Kennedy, recoili ng f rom hard- Left Labour, detested the politics of class. And he had even less truck for those of Nationalism.
On St Patrick’s Day 1943, the Prime Minister (and future President) of Ireland, gave the most extraordinary radio broadcast.
‘The ideal Ireland that we would have,’ intoned Eamon de Valera, ‘would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit.’
Today, it is self-evidently delusional; De Valera’s Ireland was then, and would for decades more remain, a blinkered, backwards-looking state of rank poverty, ludicrous censorship and hypocrisy and desperate, wholesale emigration, indifferent to the great moral questions of the wider world.
The antithesis of Liberalism and the worst of Nationalism: what can happen to even barest contact with reality once achieving a new, smaller, sundered state becomes your absolute and overriding political goal.
LIBERALISM matters because, while Tories oft toy with liberal ideals in opposition, they revert to authoritarianism in office. Labour is authoritarian even in opposition and the SNP now grows dangerously illiberal with no effective opposition whatever.
Having decried identity cards when a Labour government mooted them, the Scottish Government now tries to introduce them surreptitiously. It is so distrustful of parents that it wants to appoint a state guardian for every child; so contemptuous of ordinary working men that it has enacted laws making it a criminal offence to sing admittedly cretinous football songs.
So careless, too, in creating a national constabulary that, in short order, we had bobbies on our streets toting semi-automatic pistols and, come December 30 last year, Police Scotland could coolly announce, ‘Please be aware that we will continue to monitor comments on social media and any offensive comments will be investigated...’
So highly does the SNP rate the right of private judgement of its own Parliamentarians that it forced its budding MPs to declare ‘no Member shall within or outwith the Parliament publicly criticise a group decision, policy or another member of the group...’
The Nationalists do not, of course, seek a Scotland with (as de Valera apocryphally said) comely maidens dancing at the crossroads. What they seek – in a word Nicola Sturgeon uses so often she is in danger of wearing it out – is a ‘progressive’ Scotland; progressive policies; progressive values. A country, basically, doing things Tories do not like and every Leftleaning luvvie you know thinks absolutely wonderful.
And all this in a context of the most unnerving certitude; a view of the world dividing everyone, really, into good people and Unionists; one where Jim Murphy, filling up his car weeks after losing his East Renfrewshire seat, can be accosted by an entire stranger and told to ‘F*** off, you f****** Red Tory....’ – and people are so dehumanised they insist this is not just quite right; but actually funny.
That Scots are now woefully divided as to what country we belong to is bad enough; that our politics increasingly divide over just one emotional issue – the Union – reflects growing, debasing Ulsterisation.
Against the strident, the intolerant, the triumphalist and the fanatical, let us pray for the survival of Liberal instincts and the Liberal voice, if only in this – that, in the raucous realm we are fast becoming, there must be honourable place for cool, dispassionate reason, internationalist perspective and honest doubt.