by Newswire

As the Liberal Democrats prepare for their first party conference since entering coalition, The Liberal magazine has published a savage attack on Libdem ministers, arguing the government’s wide-ranging and ambitious public sector reforms will erode the liberal architecture of the welfare state.

The Liberal offers an in-depth analysis of the party’s rapidly changing identity.

Contributing editor Simon Kovar charts the rise of the ‘Orange Bookers’ and argues that the leadership has left behind not just the party’s membership and voting base but its political and philosophical traditions – a radical departure that has given birth to ‘The Neo-Liberal Democrats’.

The infrastructure planned by Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge is under sustained attack from a philosophy that masquerades as liberalism, says the magazine’s editorial, employing the language of ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’, but which is, in fact, neo-liberalism, the political economy of the New Right.

The magazine’s editor Benjamin Ramm said of the major structural reforms planned for the NHS:

The proposals outlined in the White Paper amount to handing £80 billion of taxpayers’ money to private providers, some of whom are responsible for the most inequitable and poorly run systems with the worst outcomes in the developed world. Will the party that conceived of the NHS be responsible for this lethal prescription?

More broadly, in relation to the role and size of the state, Ramm says:

A state that aids the weak and vulnerable, or that assists the citizen with the provision of good quality local services, is not a demonic Leviathan to be stripped and slashed. The contempt that characterises the coalition’s rhetoric is alien to the liberal tradition.

Simon Kovar, a teacher and Contributing Editor of The Liberal also writes:

After twenty years of failed marketisation, it is difficult to believe that anyone could support an even greater role for the market with even less local democracy. If schools are forced to go it alone – competing with their neighbours for pupils and scarce funds – the poorest children will suffer most. The Academies programme is socially divisive, likely to depress overall standards, and an inefficient use of resources in an age of austerity.

The Liberal is an independent publication dedicated to the revival of liberalism.

It has no affiliation with the Liberal Democrats, although previous contributors include Nick Clegg, Vince Cable, Chris Huhne, Simon Hughes, Menzies Campbell, Shirley Williams and Paddy Ashdown.

From a press release