On holiday last week, I picked up a copy of Adrian Wooldridge’s book Centrists of the World Unite!: The Lost Genius of Liberalism. Published last month and reviewed in the March issue of The Critic, it argues that the excesses of liberalism have led to the rise of strongman populism. Wooldridge claims that the terrible trio of woke liberalism, neoliberalism and “managerial liberalism” (in public institutions, including the courts) have led society astray and that a spot of muscular liberalism of a largely conservative variety is required to save us from chaos.
It is an argument that I have some sympathy with. The author’s heart is in the right place and he is surely right that western democracies must control their borders and stamp out post-modern stupidities in their institutions if they are to counter populism. It is a shame that it took the election of Donald Trump and the rise of radical parties across Europe for “centrists” to acknowledge this.
It would also be nice if unaccountable, taxpayer-funded agencies and NGOs stopped being slush funds for complacent, self-serving, left-wing activists, but neither I nor Wooldridge quite know how to do this without abolishing them completely, an idea that Wooldridge considers to be beyond the pale (he barely has a good word to say about the EU, for instance, but still shudders at the thought of Britain leaving it).
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I must, however, take issue with the inclusion of “neoliberals” in his list of villains. This is a word that is nearly always used pejoratively and which Wooldridge at times confuses with “neoconservatives” who are a very different breed. Wooldridge’s definition of a liberal is, by his own admission, a broad one, encompassing not only Winston Churchill, John Maynard Keynes and John Locke but also George H. W. Bush, Edmund Burke and Rachel Reeves. For Wooldridge, liberalism is less about the love of freedom than about respect for institutions and democracy. The Labour MP Stephen Kinnock is therefore a liberal while Boris Johnson is not. This Humpty Dumpty-esque use of language (“when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean”) is compounded by the longstanding problem of Americans and Brits using the word liberal to describe completely different people.
To Wooldridge, free market economists and book-burning BLM grifters are both the same insofar as they are the bastard offspring of real liberals and have ruined it for sensible centrists by taking things too far. The comparison is unfair. Woke liberals, abetted by managerial liberals, have given us men in women’s sport, legalised racial discrimination, censorship, defund the police, de facto open borders and Nish Kumar. Economic liberals have given us Facebook and Uber. The early neoliberals used economic logic to explain why Bolshevism would fail. After 1945, they spent years in the wilderness warning that Keynesianism would also fail. They were right both times. Their teachings helped to control inflation for decades until governments unlearned the lessons during the pandemic. Their arguments against tariffs, protectionism, rent controls, nationalisation and over-regulation are timeless even if they need to be re-learnt every few generations. Economists will always face the trite accusation that they know the price of everything and the value of nothing, which is the essence of Wooldridge’s compliant, but an understanding of how humans respond to economic incentives has turned out to be rather useful over the years.
Wooldridge accuses Hayek and his fellow Austrian economists of “corrupting” liberalism by opposing the “New Liberal state activism” of the post-war years. The extent to which the reader accepts this argument will depend on how much he agrees with Wooldridge’s view that the post-war consensus was a continuation of liberalism and not, as I and many of the facts would suggest, a slightly diluted form of socialism in which nearly every major industry was nationalised, exchange controls and price controls were introduced, marginal income tax rates rose as high as 98 per cent and the Keynesian formula of borrow-and-spend was tested to destruction until the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, went to the IMF for a bail-out and told the 1976 Labour conference that “we used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists.”
Wooldridge skims over all this in a single paragraph when he briefly acknowledges that Britain was an economic basket case by the 1970s, although he still insists that the mixed economy of 1945-79 was a “golden age”. He admits that the neoliberals were a “necessary corrective” in the 1980s, but they are all but written out of the story until he needs someone to blame for our current troubles. Their role in fighting for freedom in the age of dictatorships is overlooked completely. It seems almost impossible to write about liberal intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century who understood that “fascism and communism were two sides of the same totalitarian coin” without mentioning F. A. Hayek and The Road to Serfdom and yet somehow Wooldridge manages it. Hayek’s friend Karl Popper gets a mention in this context but Hayek himself does not appear until the next section, titled “Enemies of Liberty”, in a chapter titled “The Corruption of Liberty”.
His main beef with neoliberals is that they were, he says, responsible for deregulating the banks and allowing tech companies to get too big. Wooldridge has something of a bee in his bonnet about internet companies because they “peddle addiction and brain rot”. In a section titled “How Liberalism Can Save the World Again”, he calls for more regulation – or, to put it bluntly, more censorship – of social media. He also argues that what the world really needs is more nanny statism. Under the heading “The case for liberal paternalism”, he makes such a shallow and uninformed case for lifestyle regulation that one starts to doubt whether he has read On Liberty. In addition to making a number of factual errors, he puts forward a series of hoary old chestnuts that he seems to think are argument-winning zingers. So you think you like freedom, eh? What about the drunk driver that kills someone? (Drink driving is banned.) Why should thin people have to pay for the healthcare of fat people? (The obese take less out of the welfare state than the thin because they don’t live as long.) He cites Richard Thaler’s work on behavioural economics to justify “nudging” and “soft paternalism” and then lists a slew of anti-smoking policies that Thaler would consider to be unacceptable because they impose costs and cannot be opted out of.
He rejoices in people being banned from smoking not only inside but outside and then says that similar tactics need to be used against people who eat “fattening foods”. He celebrates governments that put “comprehensive taxes on unhealthy food” and cheers on Japanese companies that “measure the waistlines of employees to make sure that they are not getting too fat”. “We should go further”, he says. “Why not use the proceeds of food taxes to subsidize healthy foods?” (Because the government doesn’t control the price of food.)
The problem with this is not so much that the policies he proposes are ineffective, though they are (Britain’s sugar tax, which Wooldridge thinks is wonderful, did absolutely nothing to reduce obesity and nor did the warning labels put on “unhealthy” food in Chile.) The real problem is twofold. Firstly, whatever else they might be, policies that “demonise” (his word) consumers of tobacco, cast them out from private buildings, extort money from them through sin taxes and restrict where they can buy the product are not liberal; a word that, as the author helpfully reminds us, is derived from the Latin word libertas, meaning liberty. Wooldridge is right to say that John Stuart Mill was comfortable with more state intervention than some libertarians care to admit, but when it came to state-sponsored paternalism he was crystal clear. “To tax stimulants for the sole purpose of making them more difficult to be obtained,” he wrote, “is a measure differing only in degree from their entire prohibition; and would be justifiable only if that were justifiable. Every increase of cost is a prohibition, to those whose means do not come up to the augmented price; and to those who do, it is a penalty laid on them for gratifying a particular taste.” Laws restricting where alcohol can be sold, said Mill, are “suited only to a state of society in which the labouring classes are avowedly treated as children or savages.” If banning people from smoking outdoors and having the government define and prohibit “misinformation” is Wooldridge’s idea of liberalism, we can only be thankful that he never developed an interest in fascism.
Wooldridge is right about an awful lot, but he has bought into the left-wing myth that Britain is an unregulated, libertarian free-for-all
The second problem is that if Wooldridge wants a government that will take on populism by hassling smokers, meddling with the food supply and censoring the internet, he has already got it. Under Boris Johnson — the supposed populist “strongman” — the UK put into legislation the most stringent restrictions on “junk food” marketing and promotion in the world. His successor, Rishi Sunk, announced the total prohibition of tobacco, albeit over a timeframe that is almost surreal. Both policies were eagerly pursued by Keir Starmer when he became Prime Minister, as was the Online Safety Act. The House of Lords recently tried to ban social media for under-16s, Kemi Badenoch has already said that the Conservatives will enact such a ban, and it is only a matter of time before it becomes official Labour policy. Is it any wonder that populists talk about the Uniparty?
If this is the kind of thing you want, the mainstream parties have got you covered, but an endless pipeline of petty prohibitions has done nothing to stem the rise of populism so far and it seems unlikely to do so in the future. If anything, a bunch of chin-stroking do-gooders telling ordinary people to pay more for their food and watch what they say on Facebook will only add fuel to the anti-establishment fire.
Wooldridge is right about an awful lot, but he has bought into the left-wing myth that Britain is an unregulated, libertarian free-for-all that desperately needs a more interventionist state. There is more to liberalism than economic freedom, but economic freedom is the basis for prosperity and we need more of it, not less. Neoliberal economics is economics. Everything else is an attempt to make water run uphill. To anyone under the age of 50, the sheer number of Marxist economists knocking around in the twentieth century seems as bizarre as having to wait six months for British Telecom to install a landline, but that is how things were. The neoliberal counter-revolution was largely successful, but it petered out thirty years ago. Since then, successive governments have decided that economic growth is not their priority and have stifled the economy with regulation, taxes and debt in the name of egalitarianism, environmentalism, European integration, public health, “diversity” and a host of other political goals. Having shot themselves in the foot with terrible domestic policy choices, politicians complain about people being “left behind by globalisation” and get back to discussing the issues that really interest them, such as gender quotas, solar panels and banning greyhound racing. That may be centrism, but it sure ain’t liberalism.
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