There's been a bit of comment about the lack of Lib Dem comment about John Redwood's soon to be published report from the Tories' competitiveness commission (these commissions better hurry up and report if their ideas are going to be thoroughly discussed on Stand Up, Speak Up in time to get a manifesto written and costed for October!). So I thought I'd have a quick go.

I find John Redwood a bit of an enigma. No, enigma, I said, not enema. Nor Vulcan. For he is a libertarian (not, I don't think, the "neo-con" that Polly so caustically describes him). And it cannot be easy ploughing a libertarian furrow in an innately protectionist party. And I'm not sure that it's fair of John Hutton, for example, to say that this is all about a lurch to the right. The latter, in typical tribal partisanship, clearly forgets that the long term agenda of libertarians and anarchists alike, and once supported by the Labour Representation Committee and other Labour Party pre-socialists is the basic belief that freeing trade makes the worker better off. Makes more of the value of production feed through to labour than to capital.

And so, I find, as a fellow libertarian, after a fashion, Redwood's proposals are too timid. My gut instinct is that this sort of tinkering, far from the anti-monopoly true free trade ideas of Spooner, Tucker and George, swings the pendulum back towards employers rather than towards the level playing field that gives employees a fair chance. In that sense, it will sit well with the party of capital and big business. Some libertarian groups will hail it as a "step in the right direction". But it is not the revolutionary libertarianism of Redwood's background I don't think.

In the Lib Dems' manifesto for business in the 2001 election we were far braver - ditching the national minimum wage in favour of deals between trade and labour organizations on an industry and regional basis for example. Sunsetting five thousand, I think it was, pieces of legislation and regulation that bound up business even then. Creating a system where instead of being visited seemingly every week by a different government inspector covering a different aspect of its business an annual audit of all issues pertaining to the type of business would save huge amounts of time and effort and duplication in regulatory bodies. Disbanding the DTI (or whatever its constituent parts are now called).

And tonight on Newsnight Redwood looked a little uncomfortable (when doesn't he I suppose) defending his commission's work. It felt rather like those Lib Dem MPs in the run up to the last election trying not to say that prison/drug/sentencing reform was a fundamentally liberal idea and should be weighed as such by the electorate. Redwood could have gone out guns blazing defending libertarian ideals of a level playing field, anti-monopoly and truly free trade. But it will take a real Edward Scissorhands - more, one suspects, than the Tory party can stomach so long as their voters are the owners or aspiring owners of capital benefitting from protectionism - to cut all the red tape needed to create such an environment. But such is British politics that in the scramble for the middle high ground voter he did lots of side-stepping and back-sliding whenever the Paxman wannabe interviewer portrayed the proposals as reckless cuts for cuts' sake.

I still don't understand why any libertarian is a Tory. And it seems now that people at the Libertarian Alliance, where Redwood cut his libertarian teeth IIRC (or was it the Freedom Association?), now agree and are even thinking that now is the time for a true libertarian party in the UK.

Technorati Tags: Benjamin Tucker, Henry George, John Redwood, libertarianism, tories