The liberal spirit is being lost to an unswerving demand for uniformity

Where did the liberals go? I don’t mean the remnant of a party with the name in it. It is many years since the Liberal Democrats have been either liberals or democrats. But like other parties across the globe, the term “liberal” lingers like a memory of a nobler instinct. In some countries it is attached to a party of the Left, sometimes to one of the Right. In America this shape-shifter of a term long-ago became a synonym for “Leftie” and something not dissimilar has happened in Britain. Some years back the broadcaster Andrew Marr admitted the BBC has a “liberal” bias. He must have known that he meant something quite different: “Labour voting”, or “metropolitan”, or even “statist” would be more accurate. If the BBC was stuffed with true liberals, it wouldn’t be in the mess that it is.

The true liberal was a deeply recognisable type. The liberal mind – the liberal person – was discernible across party political boundaries. The tradition of David Hume and John Stuart Mill went deeper than day-today politics. It was informed by a belief in individual freedom and a scepticism of authority. It also produced an ideal: a certain type of inquiring, tolerant mind which had a faith in people as well as ideas. It had confidence in the notion that open debate was necessary to establish the truth, and that in a fair battle between ideas that were bad and ideas which were good, the bad ideas could not hope to win out. How dead that instinct and the type of mind that had confidence in it now seems.

Anyone doubting that should spend five minutes on any social media platform. Look at the glee with which users are willing to advocate toleration for me but not for thee. When one of their heroes is barred from a platform like Twitter they howl and scream. When one of their foes is barred they crow and cluck with glee. How eager they are to betray old hypocrisies on shiny new technologies. Meanwhile, the overlords of these platforms are either crusading Left-wingers with a tenuous understanding of liberal thought or hopeless inepts like Jack Dorsey of Twitter. His hand-wringing over the banning of Donald Trump from his platform epitomised the corruption of contemporary

liberalism: an open internet and a “global public conversation” are our best way of achieving greater common human understanding, he conceded, except if you stray from the orthodoxy.

Yet there is no greater example of the disappearance of true liberalism as in the area of our lives that has been most radically changed this past year: our enforced isolation in our homes. At any previous stage in British history such a move would have been almost unthinkable. Certainly, the almost wholesale obedience to it would have been unimaginable. As Lord Sumption has noted, in the past year the nation has undergone an invasion into our personal freedoms of a kind unprecedented throughout history.

You might be persuaded that this is necessary. But given the enormity of the cost of these economy-destroying and life-stifling efforts, a liberal mind would inquire whether they are proportionate. It would not slavishly follow established authority, and it would not just do what it is told. It would balance the justice of losing freedoms against the necessity of controlling a virus that can kill certain groups. It would question whether it is

right that our supposedly libertyloving Government does not trust the law-abiding majority to act in the interest of themselves and others, instead denouncing them as irresponsible and relying on heavyhanded police enforcement and fines.

That so few have asked these questions is indicative of how far our society has moved away from the philosophy of Mill and Hume. On both the Left and Right, many evidently prize security, or safety, or fairness above anything. That our national broadcasters have failed to ask these questions is a scandal that explodes the myth they are in any way “liberal”.

Worse, the so-called liberals are complicit in another pernicious trend surrounding this debate. For an extra layer of authoritarianism is being laced over the top of these already deeply arduous demands: the demand for complete uniformity of opinion on lockdown. Why do those who ardently defend the policies of the Government so fear the tiny number of figures who question the settled orthodoxy? Why do they heap abuse, and put every death at the door of the few people who question any aspect of what we are doing? The claim is that these are unusual times, and extraordinary times call for unusual measures. But we will always live in extraordinary times. What matters is the response you have to the times you find yourselves in and the principles you trust in to guide you.

So why has this age become so censorious? You could say it is because of the technology at our fingertips. Or because we have never seen anything like the pandemic. The truth is that it is these things plus one major shift. Not just the turning of the idea of truth into a relative concept, but the loss of that guiding, liberal spirit that believed there was a way to get to that truth.

And that open-minded, sceptical and brave disagreement was that way. Our age seems to think that belief was wrong. Another thing historians might chalk up to its list of errors.

‘Why do those who defend the Government’s policies so fear the tiny number who question the orthodoxy?’