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‘Revolutionary liberalism’? The philosophy and politics of ownership in the post-war Liberal party

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British Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

Liberal party thinking on ownership questions in the post-war period (defined here as 1945–1989) attempted to find an alternative to both socialism and existing capitalism. Arguing that Labour and the Conservatives were both committed, in different ways, to the concentration of wealth and power, Liberals defined themselves in terms of a radically dispersive philosophy of ownership. This led the party to explore substantial reforms to the content of capitalist property rights and ways of changing their distribution. Although party policy was typically more conservative than some of the party's internal thinking on these issues, an examination of Liberal party thinking in this area adds to our understanding of the specific philosophical character of post-war Liberalism in Britain; of the diverse ways in which capitalism was the focus of critique in post-war British politics; and of the potential alternatives to ‘neo-liberalism’ in our own day.

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Notes

  1. My focus is on the ideology of the Liberal party. The influence of liberalism as an ideology was not confined to the Liberal party in this period, and my claims in this paper should be understood to refer only to the broader ideological tradition insofar as it manifested itself in the Liberal party. The one qualification to this is that I give some attention to the thinking of the Social Democratic party in the 1980s because of the political alliance and shared intellectual milieu between it and the Liberal party and their joint role in the formation of the Liberal Democrats.

  2. Dodds was chair of the committee and almost certainly the author of this passage.

  3. See also Grimond's favourable reference to the Israeli Kibbutzim movement (in Grimond, 1959, p. 60), where he writes: ‘I do not myself hold the view that private property is inextricably bound up with Liberalism…. I can imagine Liberalism flourishing in a Kibbutz – in fact, the State of Israel has a great deal to teach Liberals’.

  4. This theme is strongly emphasised in the post-war pamphlet, ‘Facts about Ownership for All’. One cartoon shows a male manual worker declaring, with a smile: ‘I'm PROUD of my job: I'm a partner’. Another shows a female manual worker, sleeves rolled up, saying ‘I'm a partner, too’. Throughout the period, party literature refers to ‘co-partnership’ in industry. The report of the party's Industrial Partnership Committee in 1968 was called, predictably enough, Partners at Work. In the mid-1980s, the party leader, David Steel, co-edited a book called Partners in One Nation (Steel and Holme, 1985).

  5. The objection is particularly weak if one accepts the justice-based argument for profit-sharing. If workers are entitled to a share of pure profit, compulsory profit-sharing constitutes a just enforcement of property rights, and not, as the critics assumed, an imposition on property rights.

  6. See especially the memorandum, ‘Liberal Party & Co-Partnership’, by five members of the Liberal party's Economic Advisory Committee, dated April 1954, Liberal Party Archives, 16/55 98, London School of Economics. The authors were Graham Hutton, F.W. Paish, Alan Peacock, G.J. Ponsonby and George Schwartz. As will be explained below, the memo, which was produced at the invitation of the party's governing council, the Liberal Party Committee, helped to prompt a radical, albeit temporary, shift in party policy away from compulsion. At least three of the authors of this memo – Hutton, Peacock and Schwartz – went on to become important figures in the New Right in Britain. This might help explain their opposition to compulsion. I am grateful to Ben Jackson for this point.

  7. This marked a reaction against a tendency of some pioneers of profit-sharing in nineteenth century Britain to use it as an anti-union measure, and an attempt to gain union confidence as a result of this experience (see Fay, 1913, pp. 1–36).

  8. The sale of municipal council houses became party policy in 1948. However, the policy was not included in the report of the 1959 ‘Ownership for All’ committee, chaired by Nancy Seear, endorsed at the party assembly that year. Liberals in local government, notably Liverpool, did return to the policy of selling council houses in the 1970s, and some explicitly linked the policy back to the ownership for all philosophy of the immediate post-war period; see Lindsay (1978).

  9. For example, the 1948 party assembly endorsed a policy which would tax people both on the size of a received inheritance and inheritance already received. The 1959 party assembly, following the recommendations of the party's third ‘Ownership for All’ committee, returned to the prior policy of taxing according to the size of the inheritance alone.

  10. Clouston continues to campaign for this policy which is the policy of the Liberal party, the party of those Liberals who did not wish to join the Liberal Democrats after the merger with the SDP. See www.universal-inheritance.org.

  11. This is reflected, for example, in the party's opposition to Labour's plans in the late 1950s for a national pension programme based on public investment in industry. See Liberal News (1958b).

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Michael Freeden, Victoria Honeyman, Ben Jackson, Marc Stears and other participants in a Political Studies Association Labour Movements seminar at University College, Oxford, in June 2008, and two anonymous referees, for comments on earlier versions of this paper; and to the librarians at Nuffield College, Oxford and the LSE Archives for their help.

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  1. Department of Politics and International Relations, and Jesus College, Oxford, OX1 3DW, UK

    Stuart White

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White, S. ‘Revolutionary liberalism’? The philosophy and politics of ownership in the post-war Liberal party. Br Polit 4, 164–187 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2008.35

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