Liberalism and its discontents

This week: the most annoying word in the political glossary, some notes on some market crashes, and which UK cities will be hurt most by Donald Trump?

If you, like me, are a perfectly well adjusted person who gets their kicks out of following election campaigns in countries you’ve never lived in, then the next couple of weeks will likely get a little confusing. On Monday 28 April¹, Canada will go to the polls for a federal election in which a governing party, broadly on the left of the country’s politics, is hoping to win a fourth term. Five days after that, on Saturday 5 May, Australia will go to the polls for a federal election at which an incumbent party broadly on the left of that country’s politics is hoping to win a second term. Both incumbents were expected to struggle, as incumbents generally have of late – but in both countries, the right wing opposition party’s support has weakened significantly, if not entirely collapsed, thanks to what one might term the “Trump effect”.

I don’t want to overstate the similarities here. I know relatively little of the politics of either Canada or Australia – I’ve never even visited the latter – and it’d be very easy to make a tit of myself. The two countries have different political cultures, use different electoral systems, and “incumbent” is anyway a word that can cover a multitude of scenarios: Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Alabanese has been Prime Minister since beating the incumbent Liberals at the 2022 election, while Canada’s Mark Carney is brand new but is heading a party that’s won three elections and been in office for a decade.

The reason things are really going to get confusing, though, is because of something that looks like a similarity but isn’t. I mentioned that the main right-wing party in Australian politics, the one coloured blue on the maps, is the Liberals. Canada has a Liberal party, too. But that’s the centrist/centre-left one that’s been in office for a decade.²

In other words, if you’re the sort of person who cares about election results then, whichever side of politics you are on, the Liberals will be the goodies in one of the elections being held over the next few weeks, and the baddies in another. Like I said: confusing.

The problem here isn’t either Canadian or Australian politics, but that word “liberal”, which, it’s long felt to me, is one of the most unhelpful words in politics. For at least two centuries, there’s been an established political doctrine called liberalism, which emerged from the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, and which (this from Britannica) “takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics”. That, though, is only one of the numerous things you’ll find being described as “liberal” in general usage and, though I’ve got no data to back this up, my guess is it isn’t the most common. Others you’ll frequently spot in the wild include:

• “Liberal” in the old school American sense, of meaning, basically, “not conservative”;

• “Liberal” as in “classical liberal”, used by conservatives who want us to imagine them as clever, which basically means “anti-state”;

• “Liberal” as a contraction of “neo-liberal”, implying a belief that the current economic settlement is in some way fine;

• “Liberal” with a silent “economic”, meaning “I’m all for free trade, gay rights and drug use, but don’t you dare touch my money”;

• “Liberal” with a silent “social”, which is why I was so surprised to see people on the left start using it as an insult;

• “Liberal” as the opposite of “authoritarian”, which come on, that one’s meant to be a good thing isn’t it?

• “Liberal” as a shorthand for “the Liberal Democrats”, who come with a whole bunch of other baggage I’m not going into here.

The use of “liberal” I encounter most, though, is the one used by online leftists to describe those (the Democrats, the Labour party, other people online) who profess to be on the left but aren’t left-wing enough. “Those that don’t share your urgency about changing the status quo” is a perfectly reasonable set of people to attempt to define and label, even if I’d say what is being described there is less an ideology than a method or a vibe. But given that the people I’ve seen included in this box have included the architects of New Labour³, George Osborne and Paul Mason – sometimes in the same conversation – I’d suggest it’s just possible that there are times when the word is being stretched beyond usefulness.

There are reasons for this. Sometimes when people say “liberal” they’re thinking about the economic axis of the political compass; sometimes, the social one. But the result is that different people, at different times, use it to mean the left, the right, the centre. Sometimes it means “us”, even when there are important ways in which the people using the word are clearly not liberal at all; at other times, even by people who are broadly in favour of core liberal principles like sexual freedom and tolerance, it’s used to mean “them”. The result is that, when people use the word “liberal”, it’s very difficult to work out what they’re referring to and what they think about it without also looking at wider context. That’s not a characteristic that is helpful in a word.

This has been bugging me for years – I wrote about it for the New Statesman all the way back in 2017 – and I’ve sometimes wondered if I’m just being touchy because it’s a word sometimes hurled at me personally, and I am…

a) confused, because I rather think freedom and tolerance are good, progressive values, so how exactly is this meant to be an insult, exactly, and

b) thin-skinned.

But then I remember that the liberals are the centre-left in one English-speaking country, and the right in another. Surely we can agree that this has ceased to be a functioning word?

So let’s hear no more about it.

Book Corner

A History of the World in 47 Borders is book of the month in both Waterstones and Foyles. I knew this was coming (honestly, I’ve been wanting to brag for weeks); but I didn’t realise quite how inescapable that would make the book – or in some cases, my face – in retail districts the length and breadth of the nation.

Here, for example, is a photograph I took on Saturday in Europe’s biggest bookshop, the giant Waterstones on Piccadilly:

Awww, look at the diddy little Hutton.

All of which has made me realise I might need to tone down the self-promo soon, or even I’m going to find me obnoxious.

This is a little awkward as I’m still meant to be reminding you of upcoming events you can buy tickets for, so instead I’m going to let the people interviewing me promote their books. Tomorrow night, for example, I am speaking to Rob Hutton of The Critic at Waterstones Piccadilly. (Tickets here.) Here’s Rob on his book The Illusionist: The True Story of the Man Who Fooled Hitler:

In 1941, the British army had a problem: every time it fought the Germans, it lost. Colonel Dudley Clarke – soldier, showman, and occasional crossdresser – had an idea to turn the tables.

His plan was to build a deception machine that would rely on rumour, stagecraft and spies. It was a vision so extraordinary that almost no-one understood what he had created, at the time or afterwards. It would involve tens of thousands of troops working to create the largest magic show in history, one that had the potential to change the course of the entire war. But would Clarke’s boldness destroy him first?

And here’s a video. Because why not.

Next Monday, I’ll be doing another event, this time chatting to the Anfield Wrap’s Neil Atkinson in Liverpool. (Tickets here.) So here’s Neil on his book...

It’s called Transformer and isn’t solely about football or Jürgen Klopp or solely about anything. It is partially about what it is to have the joy of work and do the work to elicit joy; it is partially about why nostalgia should always be rejected and why the work of today has to be for tomorrow to be better.

You should buy both of these books, not to mention tickets to those events. (Liverpool; London.) This weekend’s do in Guildford has, alas, been cancelled.

Okay I’m shutting up now.

Some notes on some crashes

The Great Crash (October 1929). A long bull market (rising values; as opposed to a bear market, falling ones) had seen loads of retail investors (the public) pouring money into stocks and shares in the belief they’d be able to sell them at a profit. Worse, many people – worried about being left behind – had borrowed money to do it.

That meant that, when the market showed the first tremors of a correction on 18 October, a load of people panicked and sold, causing prices to slide further. On Black Thursday (24 October), this worry turned to panic, a record number of shares were traded in New York, and the market dropped by 11%. It fell another 13% on the Monday, and 11% the day after that.

It took another three years for the market to hit bottom, having lost 90% of its value. By then they were calling it the Great Depression. Accidents will happen.

Black Monday (19 October 1987). After five years of the world’s global financial markets acting like a cross between a Jilly Cooper hero and Del Boy, it suddenly all went wrong: the Dow Jones index fell 22% in a single day. That’s still the worst ever single day in trading history, which is why everyone keeps going on about it.

There are other ways, though, in which this one… wasn’t actually that bad?