I recently discovered Tom Papworth's blog. I was browsing his recent posts and one in particular struck a chord:

In The error of labelling he tells of a friend who, having got a little bit interested in politics, had veered off to the "left"...

I have begun to realise that I made a tragic mistake this year. I took to criticising one of my friends for being too "left-wing".
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I took issue with some of his more radical views, notably what I perceived as anti-Americanism and anti-globalisaiton. Unfortunately, in looking for a short-hand to define his views, I fell to pigeon-holing him as a member of the loony-left. I think this has backfired. It certainly has not help dissuade him. Instead, it has given him a focus for his views. He has begun to identify himself with the very left-wing factions into whose orbit I was most worried that he would be drawn.
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I fear that as a result he is likely to begin to link himself with opinions and views that perhaps he might otherwise have approached with a more open mind.
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I hope I've learnt a lesson. By labelling him, I have driven him into the very camp I was criticising.

Funny really, my journey seems on the surface to have been quite the opposite. A few years ago, when I was a Lib Dem councillor in Oxford, people would, by and large, have characterized me as being the Trotskyite wing of the Lib Dems...:) It was a bit of a standing joke. I actually can't think why this could have been the case. Thinking back, I tended to be of the opinion that if only things were properly managed, public provision could be just as good, just as efficient and, importantly, make money for us as a community organization.

You know, the constant price rises of the bus fares we had to pay for free bus passes for pensioners were precisely because they were privatized and the quasi-monopoly locally allowed those organizations to fleece us with impunity, and the solution was to give them competition by having a top notch public sector managed competitor. That kind of stuff. (I now know this quasi-monopoly fleecing the public purse as "rent seeking" - just as execrable as protectionism and not at all part of "free trade").

But it has always sat slightly uneasily on me. Public School educated I realize that my school was a place of refuge for me, the first place I could call home in a near nomadic and latterly "broken" family. I could never support policies, for example, that might destroy that option of refuge for many people. And my family's background was definitely "protestant work ethic" style despite my innate laziness.

I would pride myself, though, in being to the "lower left" on the Political Compass test - south west of Ghandi and Tony Benn so to speak.

I don't know what changed me really. Probably Conrad Russell (pbuh!) and his "Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism". It was probably the first time I had seen a sort of a "time line" of Liberalism, and being able to link, in my mind, the ideas of the Levellers, Locke, Smith, Paine with those of the Rochdale Pioneers, Mill, Hobhouse and Lloyd-George. In particular, for the first time, having been conned into believing that Adam Smith was all about power to the richest by the likes of the Adam Smith Institute whom I closely associated in my mind with Thatcherism, realizing that these political-economists were much more complex than their later political acolytes wanted us to know about.

One quote, though not its source (except that it was a late 19th century Liberal woman), sticks in my mind - that "any attack on the trade unions is an attack on the free market" made me feel that there could be some kind of fusion between concern for the poor, and empowerment of individuals to reach their potential, and the freedom to pursue the accumulation of wealth. And the medium for this fusion, also first really introduced to me by Conrad, is the "level playing field".

I can agree with the basic principle that in theory both sides in any voluntary trade, because of the price mechanism, benefit equally. In practice, without that "level playing field", I don't believe that all trade is that voluntary (especially in the practice and still necessity for the vast majority of people of selling their labour to someone else). I'm still incredibly ill-informed about all this. Wealth of Nations is far too daunting a read, as is most of Marx (though I can understand his and Engels' diagnosis of some of the problems in the Manifesto), I've never read any Hobhouse, and have but dipped into Hayek, Keynes and Friedman.

So if there is any great Liberal commission, it is in my mind to try to ensure that "level playing field" exists. That monopoly and monopsony are attacked so that competition is fair. And that government interferes as little as possible in peoples' choices. There are two great monopolies (well, at least quasi-monopolies) that governments of either political hue have done little to address - the creation of credit and the enclosure of land and other natural resources that human labour and capital do not create. And doing something about either or both of them would significantly level the playing field at a shot.

The twentieth century has a lot to answer for in political-economy. There was surely a need at the beginning of the century to redress centuries of democratic deficit and powerlessness on the part of the majority. But now we need another revolution, based on the realization that we do not want to live in an increasingly authoritarian state, where public services are a byword for inefficiency precisely because they cannot possibly measure their own worth if they are protected from competition. This does not mean wholehearted endorsement of things like GATS - I believe that forcing someone to invite tenders from the other side of the world is as much protectionism for big multi-national corporations - if they want into my local market, let them come and court me, not force me to go to them and save them the effort. And of course if the service concerned was not publicly run and financed it would not be an obligation - it's only because state money in involved that GATS says it must be hawked around the globe to compensate for the "advantage" of state subsidy - if we ran a Friedman-esque cooperative PTA run voluntary school system it would not be demanded of it.

Friedman and Hayek railed just as much against corporate welfare as they did against social welfare - we should remember that. Just as much as we should remember that Robert Owen was no socialist about to give his factory or his wealth away to his workers as part of some great dream of worker ownership - he treated his workers better than anyone else in the business because, he realized, that they would work better for him if they were better fed, better educated, better rested and had a better chance at a family life.

The middle road is liberalism. The aim is economic freedom (on a personal level the ability of all to live without being forced to sell themselves, and is based solely on the accumulation of income producing assets to enable one to survive without working - assets that are not well distributed to be sure at present, and getting if anything possibly more polarized) and personal freedom to live as one chooses. How either of these are anathema to either "right" or "left" somewhat escapes me - except that tribally, they contain some core tenets of both sides and are therefore part of the "other".