News from the New Party

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Immoderate liberalism

Here's Oliver Kamm defining his own political position:

It happens in doing interviews and debates that I get accused of being a neoconservative. I always answer that, while I don't regard that label as the insult the utterer intended, it isn't strictly applicable to me. I share the position of some neoconservatives (such as Paul Wolfowitz) and some who are not conservative at all (such as Christopher Hitchens) that the promotion of democracy ought to be the mainstay of western foreign policy; and I take a very different stance from what is commonly taken to be neoconservatism in economics and welfare, social issues, matters of personal liberty and the place of religion in public life.

I am not therefore a neoconservative. I am an immoderate liberal. "Blairite ultra" is a synonym.

We prefer the term "immoderate liberal" to "Blairite ultra". The past year of the woeful Brown regime has served to confirm that Tony Blair was a prime minister and world statesman of the first rank, and we are very much the poorer without him. However Blair and Blairism were hardly without their faults. Blairism has inflicted significant harm to the social infrastructure of our country, even if much of the damage was in fact wrought by the hand of Blair's Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Nevertheless, the foreign policy world view that Tony Blair espoused, and which has variously been labelled as neoconservative or liberal interventionist, is one that we proudly share with Tony Blair, Oliver Kamm, Paul Wolfowitz and Christopher Hitchens. It is, furthermore, not a conservative movement as such, but, in the broadest sense, a liberal and progressive one. The promotion of liberal democracy and human rights worldwide is unfashionable, especially on the left where various shades of totalitarian thought still maintain a strong psychological hold. Equally on the right a desire to protect national sovereignty too easily tips over into nationalism, isolationism and xenophobia, as if by shutting our eyes we could make the rest of the world go away.

In this day and age it takes courage to espouse real liberalism: perhaps only the most immoderate souls still do so.

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