Political Influences meme

Jock — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 01:03:12 +0000

I've belatedly noticed that I was tagged by Andy Hinton for my top five political influences. My excuse is that I was taking a couple of weeks off, as it turned out, to try to rewrite some of the code behind my blog, and that even now the auto-discovery off references to my blog isn't working on the live server. Mine probably won't be as unexpected as Andy's five, and unusually for me probably won't deserve the amount of explanation he gave to some of his, but here goes...

After some considerable thought (yes!) number one goes to:

Henry George, author of "Progress and Poverty", the seminal work on Land Value Tax and "Protection or Free Trade" a similarly influential book showing how free trade ought to be the vehicle that gives the best chance for the working man and woman to maximize what they can get out for their labour. They are the basis of much of the early twentieth century liberal economics that led to the People's Budget of Lloyd George in 1909. Figures as diverse as Mark Twain, Einstein, Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Churchill and Milton Friedman acknowledge his influence, so I figure why not me too!
Number two goes to Conrad Russell who, when I was in my Liberal infancy, showed in his "Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism" the multiple faces of liberalism that ought to be balanced to produce a coherent and successful liberal polity.
At three has to be a chap called Paul Oliver, a dear friend from school, with whom I am sadly no longer in contact - hmph! the youngsters of today with their mobile phones, email addresses and Facebook profiles to keep them in touch! - but with whom I would sit up to all hours of the morning "sorting out the world" at school and who probably got me thinking about more political and philosophical issues than I can now remember.
Fourth goes back in time some way - David Hume and in particular his "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth" gives me hope that if we ever get to sit down and design our political system and constitution again we do not need to start from the undemocratic elected dictatorship we have now.
And, probably not actually fifth if I had to think about it harder - probably higher - comes Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers of seventeenth century England, Christian "proto-communists" who fought for the right of everyone to have common access to the bounty of nature with which to sustain their lives by their own labour.

So there we are - quite a difficult choice really - there are so many I could have added:

Paddy Ashdown for example who provided a refreshing antidote to the 90s sleaze culture in the way he handled his affair and which probably convinced me as much as anything that the Lib Dems were basically the most decent folk in British politics;

or Joe Nutt, my English O level teacher who shocked me by giving me a 19/20 for an essay I wrote on inner city deprivation but at the same time noted that it was probably somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan in its apparent assumption that some people appeared born into and stuck in "vicious and semi-criminal" (to use Charles Booth's phrase) lives and communities that they had little hope, in Thatcher's Britain at least, of escaping;

or former Belgian central banker Bernard Lietaer who offers a vision, in "The Future of Money" of an economic redesign that could produce "sustainable abundance" to use his phrase in a superconnected world having to deal with globalization, environmental and demographic change;

or maybe even Robert Owen for planting the seeds of the worldwide Co-operative movement from his mill in central Scotland.

Oh - and I am flattered and gratified that Andy suggests my incessant nagging about Land Value Tax is not without merit or use. Every person convinced is another step towards acceptance and implementation of a sustainable fiscal system that could finally complete the vision of the great liberal reform agenda.

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Political Influences meme