I’ve had many conversations about the lack of a liberal grassroots movement, the necessary prerequiste for a future liberal Government. Here’s where I admit I was wrong. 

I was wrong… well, not wrong to say we need it. I was wrong to think it didn’t exist already.

There is a liberal grassroots movement, and joyfully it’s the, “Free Trade, Free Minds” sort of liberalism. It’s occuring independently and organically, without any help from the Lib Dems, which fills me with gushing buckets of hope: As long as the concept of liberty exists in people’s minds, so liberalism will just ‘happen’ – and it is.

Can the Lib Dems capitalise on it? Will they even be willing to acknowledge it? I somehow doubt it.

For me the spontaneous eruption of new political parties like the Social Liberalist Party and LPUK point not to a small minority but a critical mass of opinion desperately needing an outlet. Look at the distribution of political opinion online and you can see libertarians dominating – and this is because the hunger to debate and demand a sort of liberalism that was thought to have died out forever. I think it’s safe to say that this creed is not going to die and the days of political parties telling the public what “socialism” is or what “liberalism” is are over – people can work these things out for themselves and our party is institutionally unable to adapt or react quickly enough. 

But just as our democracy as a whole tends to focus on the increasingly small number of people who still vote, causing a fatal feedback loop of pandering to a less and less diverse body of public opinion, so the Lib Dems highly democratic structure has the same flaw – policy is dictated by the membership, which creates another fatal feedback loop of our policies only ever appealing to people within the Lib Dem Party and alienating everyone else. 

To get a policy through conference, it needs to be approved by social democratic members and the liberal members. So we can cut tax, but only for the poor. We can be economically liberal, but not if it involves deregulation, lowing the tax burden or removing barriers to entry. We support Liberty, unless it’s the liberty to do ‘bad things’ like smoking, drinking or driving. We can support Free Speech, but not the kind of Free Speech we don’t approve of.

I read this today:

Those who have come to us from the LibDems tell of horrific infighting, with the SDP controlled leadership squeezing the Liberal element out of the party, marginalising them at branch level and suggesting that there is no room in the modern LibDem party for them. The LibDems have lost their Liberal roots and become the Social Democratic party, set to continue where Brown leaves off. More of the same.

Now I can argue that we have MPs within our party that fall into the “Free Trade, Free Minds” school of liberalism, and clearly we’ve got a few bloggers on this side, too. But internally the party does feel dominated by lefties – I’ve been on the end of “why don’t you f**k off to the Tories then?” rants myself – which vote for policies that reinforce the perception of us as a Social Democratic rival to Labour, which causes people like me to leave, which means they win the votes easier.. and the result is a smaller and smaller political party representing a narrower and narrow range of opinion.

I’m not advocating entryism. Entryism sucks… but I am advocating leadership and empowering the leadership of the party to make decisions and set policy, so that the party can embrace a genuine grassroots liberal movement that, at the moment, would rather gouge their own eyes out than vote for what is supposed to be liberalism’s main representatives in Britain. 

This is our “Clause 4″, this is what needs to happen if the Lib Dems are ever going to be anything more than “Lib Dems: The Party for Lib Dems.