My tuppenceworth speech by Mike Swadling
“the first post-lockdown election, and I don’t actually remember anyone talking about the lockdown at all, despite it being perhaps the most significant thing since the war that’s happened in this country”
In August 2020, among one of many versions of lockdown, I wrote about the need for a political party to run on a ticket of liberty. My article started by saying the line, ‘Growing up in the 80s it was common to hear “I can say what I like, it’s a free country”’. But that’s really not felt true for some years now, has it?
Now, we’ve had an election, the first post-lockdown election, and I don’t actually remember anyone talking about the lockdown at all, despite it being perhaps the most significant thing since the war that’s happened in this country. I no longer think a freedom-focused party is the best way forward. People are used to voting for smaller parties, which was a really interesting point of note out of the election, but Reform has stepped up as the overwhelming front-runner among liberty-minded people.
You may not think of Reform as a libertarian party, but it is the standout party in that space. I don’t think there’s room for anyone else. The election has seen a rise in the enemies of freedom, the Green Party and independent candidates, who stand for the absolute antithesis of freedom. Of course, overall, it was a big win for Labour, and they now have a huge majority in government.
What’s the landscape we’re now facing? Well, there’s no money. We had the King’s speech today, and from what I could see they didn’t really plan to spend a lot of money in it. So, they’re going to focus on that other socialist passion – Control.
“There’s going to be a need for a freedom-focused campaign, because the socialist in power will want to control us, especially because they can’t spend any more of our money”
I wrote this before the King’s speech, and for those of you that have looked through what’s happening, it’s clear that Labour are focus on control. There’s going to be a need for a freedom-focused campaign, because the socialist in power will want to control us, especially because they can’t spend any more of our money, as there ain’t none. To build a campaign you need a bit of a gap in the market, you need an opportunity. You need people to think about the fact that freedoms important to them, and you need something that motivates them.
If there was a voter’s equivalent to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it might start with economics and some basic safety. Blair got this right, there was no gap in the market to push back against some of Blair’s reforms, because frankly we were rich and safe under Blair’s government most of the time. He didn’t allow that gap in the market to exist. Sir Keir will allow that gap, we are not rich, and we are not safe. Indeed he’s already doing some things to ensure we will be less rich and less safe.
So that creates an incentive, a push, a drive, for people to say, what’s going wrong here, what can we do? Let’s look at what he is and isn’t doing:
- he’s doing nothing on housing, which is for a certain generation at least, the single biggest impact in terms of wealth and concern for people,
- he’s making Britain a clean energy superpower – which is going to make us poorer,
- and of course he’s taking back our streets by releasing prisoners.
If you look at some of their plans for liberty, in their manifesto, they want to close the gender pay gap, that sounds fine in and of itself, but of course that means telling you how to run your business.
They’ve got a promise to introduce mandatory disability and ethnicity pay gap reporting, again telling you how to run your business, taking away your options and opportunity. They want to shift the negative attitudes around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Interesting timing as you may have seen that Microsoft are closing their in-house DEI department today.
Shifting negative attitudes, if you’ve made a manifesto commitment to that, I’m not sure that you’re talking about changing people’s attitude by doing something different. I think you might be talking about them forcing a change in people’s attitudes, again another massive impact on people’s freedom. They’re banning conversion therapy, the therapy is I think a rather ridiculous thing, but again it’s a freedom, it’s a choice, it’s people’s religious expression, it’s people’s right to air their personal views, that’s being taken away. We also know this Labour party was massively sympathetic to lockdowns and taking pretty much all our freedoms away, and they are very sympathetic to ID cards. Again, this creates an opportunity to campaign for freedom.
“What do we need to do? I think we need a minimum viable product for freedom”
What do we need to do? I think we need a minimum viable product for freedom, a minimum set of things that most of us can agree on and work towards. I would propose it to be:
- free speech,
- the rule of law,
- democracy,
- evolution of power from the centre,
- and value for money from what the government does spend money on.
For the last one, no matter what you think the government should spend on or not, I’d hope we’d all agree we ought to get value for money from it.
On line’s important and useful, but it can’t be replaced by real world activity. If you want to grow a movement, sending people down the rabbit hole of clicking on the same links all of the time and getting the same things presented back is not the way to go. You need to get out to the real world and reach out to new people.
We need street stalls, leafleting at stations, leafleting at schools. I wrote back in 2000, 5,000 leaflets, colour double-sided, A5, decent weight of paper, it’s £100. This is not cheap, but it’s not generally unaffordable. Even cheaper is a press release which is free. All you need to do is write to your local democracy reporter. If it’s good enough for the pizza firm, it’s good enough for us.
Focus on local issues if you can, partner with national groups, but frankly do something. If we can’t partner with a national group, we will just do it ourselves. We will get our own things out, we will start putting something in people’s hands to say, do you want to be told what you can and can’t say? Do you want to be told what you can and can’t do? Two years ago, I’m not sure people would have listened to us, but that can change with the new government.
Transcribed by https://turboscribe.ai/