The world – or my perception of it – has become a lot less liberal since I grew up watching The West Wing in one of the most Remain-voting constituencies in the UK.
I’ve also become less sure of liberalism in the past decade. I now think it too liable to being abused. “In his world there is no problem of evil,” John Gray wrote of Ed Miliband in 2021, identifying what I think may be liberalism’s enduring problem: an almost noble naivety towards the existence of bad actors. Liberalism requires guardrails – literal and figurative borders – yet seems too often to lack them in its modern form.
A lot of people I’ve spoken to recently seem to have begun to question liberal pieties they once took for granted. When you talk to someone like Maurice Glasman, that seems just and true. Maurice is amusing in person, and it’s easy to agree with someone when you’re laughing. (I’ll post our conversation in full on Twitter this weekend; follow here. Here’s the text.) But maybe Maurice is wrong. I wanted to get the other view, and understand how an arch liberal has perceived the last decade.
So, last Friday, I went back and forth in the studio with Ian Dunt – the trenchant Brexit critic, and author of a fine book on our system of government. (He’s here.)
Ian was dressed for lunch at Middle Temple rather than an evening with me, but it fit the space. Watch if you are, or ever have been, a liberal. I wanted to know how Ian maintained a liberal faith in the face of public hostility, an overwhelmed asylum system, the Boriswave, Musk’s takeover of X, Trump’s reelection, the illiberal way trans rights were pursued, and the incoherent whipsaws of Starmer’s government.
You can watch the video on Twitter or YouTube, where these timestamps are linked:
00:14 - Reversing the two-child benefit cap
04:38 - His despair over Starmer’s government
10:28 - The irrelevance of demographic change
15:53 - How Twitter became a “Nazi” site
20:14 - The economic consequences of immigration
24:52 - Britain’s borders are under control
34:38 - The triumph of multicultural Britain
45:10 - How he got Starmer so wrong
46:34 - Isaiah Berlin, human nature and trans rights
02:00 - Economic stagnation as the root of populism
Clips
On being failed by Starmer:
His answers on asylum:
What he once saw in Keir:
Transcript
Harry 0:14
Let’s start with some quick reaction to the budget. Why is it good that labour have reversed the two child benefit cap?
Ian 0:24
Well, morally, for a start, we don’t punish children for the sins of the father. Not that it’s a particular sin, you know, having a child, but it just comes from an almost biblically wrong moral dimension to start messing around that way, and also by changing it, we brought, I think it was just over 400,000 children out of child poverty. I mean, it’s like numbers. Like, what’s the point of politics unless you’re doing that? I gather that the public are sort of against this sort of thing, and therefore, I think the public should probably just look in a mirror and try to work out what the fuck has happened to their lives.
Harry
We’re going to do quite a bit of that today. You’re going to be asking the public to change quite a lot of their views. Isn’t that the problem with liberalism now, in a way, to set that scene, that you are a liberal, the arch liberal, in a world that no longer feels like it is.
Ian 1:09
I wish I could take that place, but I suspect there’s many other competitors towards it. I don’t think the world has ever really been that liberal. You read John Stuart Mill and almost the first thing he says after he introduces the harm principle is everyone thinks they agree with this: they can’t stop someone doing something unless it’s harming someone else. But actually, in day to day life, people will never agree with this. There was a Lib Dem proposal recently to ban – I mean, this is almost comically inane – but nevertheless, it was to ban the playing of music on the tube or on a train. I find that quite annoying, too. [But] I don’t think you have the right to just implement a law on this stuff, because I don’t think it violates the harm principle.
Harry 2:01
Isn’t it causing harm to the other people in the carriage?
Ian 2:05
I don’t think that is harm. This is the thing people always try to do with the harm principle. They try to put the line very, very low. Usually, you know, you’ll get that from the left, being like “words are violence”, and I’m affected in that way. If you put the line that low, no credible assessment of what John Stuart Mill and Harry Taylor were trying to say would suggest that the line should be that low. But more importantly, what I mean is most people don’t agree with that. The overwhelming majority of the time, they think, oh, live and let live to each their own blah, blah, blah. But when it comes down to it, and something irritates them, they very quickly want to ban it. So I think liberalism has never really been popular, and it isn’t.
Let me know if you find the transcript useful. It takes a beat to put together.
