The roots of Vince Cable’s political beliefs Placing Vince Cable on the left-right political spectrum never quite works because he combines both a passion for intervention to deal with market failures with a suspicion of the failings of big government. The roots of that combination are well illustrated in his excellent memoirs, Free Radical. They highlight how his work on development issues in Africa helped give him both those passions – seeing both the need for action and the consequences of government failure. Writing here exclusively for Lib Dem Newswire, Vince Cable sets out the roots of his political views in more detail. My earliest political views were a reaction to the extremes I encountered growing up. My father was an upwardly mobile, working class, Tory who sought to inculcate some good values (hard work, thrift, respect for the law) and some bad ones (racism, which split the family when I married an East African Asian, my late wife Olympia). He died after contracting pneumonia delivering leaflets for Mrs Thatcher in the snow. My mother secretly voted Liberal, defying his instructions to vote Tory. My best teenage friend was a card-carrying Communist like his father, a shop steward at York carriage works. His revolutionary zeal got him expelled from college, allegedly for arson. He tried to re-educate me in sound ideological principles but concluded that I was a ‘bourgeois liberal’ with Menshevik tendencies. When I went to university I sampled both the Liberals, becoming their President, and also a student branch of the social democratic wing of the Labour party. Sensing that they were saying the same thing but using different language, I tried to achieve a merger. Both sides were outraged and the merger collapsed ignominiously, 20 years ahead of its time. I joined Labour, beguiled by Harold Wilson’s white-hot technological revolution. As a young economist, educated by the disciples of Keynes, I was then exposed to real world economics as a Treasury official in Kenya. Experience of African development quickly taught me that textbook ideas of ‘planning’ – or Keynes for that matter – had little relevance. The state was usually a vehicle for predation and patronage. Wealth was created by farmers, especially by entrepreneurial African small-holders; by mainly Asian businessmen; and by professionally run multinationals. And then looted by politicians and civil servants I moved on to Latin America where the fashionable nationalistic ideology of ‘self-reliance’ merely entrenched vested interests and reinforced extreme and often appalling inequalities. Much of my development writing would now be described as ‘neo-liberal’ but I think is right in that context. The country which most influenced my thinking was India which I have visited many times over 50 years for family and professional reasons. I have seen India’s remarkable transformation, much of it based on the adage that ‘the economy grows at night, when the government goes to sleep’. I have always been torn between torn between my admiration for India’s democratic and dynamic ‘anarchy that works’ and my admiration for the technocratic revolution in modern China which has produced an economic, poverty reducing, miracle, albeit seriously illiberal. Between the travelling I got involved in British politics and became a Labour councillor, helping to run Glasgow. The establishment was pure Tammany Hall, so I moved to the Left where the idealistic and capable people were. I marched proudly down Sauchiehall Street alongside the charismatic Communist leader of the shipyard workers, Jimmy Reid and Tony Benn, and contributed to Gordon Brown’s Red Papers on Scotland. I led a somewhat schizophrenic existence teaching students Adam Smith’s economics in the morning and practising municipal socialism in the afternoon. I found a more comfortable place campaigning for Britain to join the EU alongside Labour figures like John Smith, for whom I later worked as a Special Adviser, and Liberals like David Steel. My Fabian, centre-left, eclectic, version of social democracy didn’t long survive a move to London where the Militant Tendency and assorted Trots, including today’s leadership, were in control of the Labour Party. In the civil war which followed, I joined the SDP, albeit after some heart-searching, unsuccessfully contesting my home town of York in the 1983, and then the dispiriting 1987, election. In the long period in the political wilderness before becoming MP in Twickenham I had two other formative political experiences. One was spending several years working on global environmental issues in the late 1980’s: helping to write the Brundtland Report on Sustainable Development and then one of the first intergovernmental reports on climate change. The other was when Shell recruited me into their long-term scenario planning team, later to be Chief Economist. I found the management culture admirably professional and honest, albeit conservative, and I like to think I helped to steer them towards a future in emerging economies and to a greater sense of social and environmental responsibility. For the rest, my record as a Lib Dem MP after 1997 is reasonably well known. As an economic spokesman, my approach initially reflected the social liberal consensus of the time. The financial crisis changed everything. My intellectually eclectic background in economics helped me to see ahead and better understand the nature of the crisis, to write coherently about it – in The Storm – and to advocate correct but controversial measures like nationalisation of the banks and the taxation of property wealth. The Coalition was a classic head-heart dilemma. My head told me that joining the Coalition was right and that we had no alternative but to address the massive budget deficit which was the legacy of a crisis of financial capitalism. My heart was definitely not with the Tories. But I found a useful role as an interventionist Business Secretary promoting industrial strategy and state-led banking, German-style innovation and training policies and applying a pragmatic, problem solving, approach to government. In a sequel to The Storm – After the Storm – I set out where I think we should be going as a country, now, in terms of economic policy. There is one more important strand in my approach to politics. I have long been interested in, and worried about, the politics of identity. Bringing up a multiracial family and fighting racism; experience of the tangled web of religious sectarianism and incipient nationalism in the west of Scotland; immersed for over 50 years in the movement to anchor Britain in Europe: these have been major, often dominant, concerns. I wrote the first of two pamphlets for Demos in the mid-1990’s on identity politics and have seen its growing influence, culminating in the Brexit vote. My first venture into fiction, the novel Open Arms – due out in a few weeks – involves the interplay of identity politics and personal relationships. And in the real world, I anticipate that the future of the UK and our party will be determined by whether national identity or a broader, more outward-looking, more European, view of the world dominate politics. You can read Vince Cable’s manifesto for the Lib Dem leadership election in full here.