Write for us!Political language
Lost in Translation: The Art of the Misquote
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Few things are more confidently delivered, or more frequently wrong, than a famous quotation. We misquote for all sorts of reasons – faulty memory, wishful thinking, political convenience, or simple repetition of someone else’s error. But the misquote is rarely innocent. More often than not, the distortion tells us something interesting about the distorter. “Elementary, my dear Watson” Sherlock Holmes never said it. Not once across all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. Holmes does say “elementary” in some stories, and obviously in the stories he does address Watson, but never together in that form. The phrase was cemented through stage…
Thoughts From the Woods
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I live near a beautiful park. When the weather permits, I put on my shoes and run up along a path through the trees, and turn left onto the track that winds through the recently planted Foresters’ Memorial Wood. It’s a lovely spot. The Foresters were people from Commonwealth countries who answered the call during the Second World War to cross an ocean and help Britain and the Allies in the struggle against the Nazis. Everyone did what they could We needed them. With so many able-bodied men sent away to fight there was a requirement for labour in the forests…
Liberal Democrats Need to Stop Their Obsession With ‘Trans Rights’
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I’m a middle-aged man and I have a confession. I’d really like to be younger. And I feel young too. I’m very active. I exercise regularly – at levels that very few older people do. I’m in the small minority of middle-aged men in the UK who isn’t overweight. Go me! Now suppose I decided on those grounds that I will henceforth self-identify as a teenager, and on that basis I demanded access to youth clubs, a place on LibDem quotas reserved for young people, and so on? And suppose I also demanded that everyone should be obliged to treat…
Thought‑Terminating Clichés Are the New Normal
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Over the past week I have spent some time on Blue Sky. Partly because this is where a lot of Lib Dem MPs are now posting and I wanted to read their reactions to the EHRC guidance (in summary they have been largely silent except for the Women and Equalities spokesperson who condemned it as a huge step back for human rights – which I disagree with). However, I ended up in several conversations with trans activists on the app who are making the same kind of arguments that failed on Twitter (X) three years ago. One of the key…
The Silence They Cannot Buy: Iran, Antisemitism and the Weaponisation of Fear
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Something has gone badly wrong with British political discourse, and the elections on Thursday will be the first formal reckoning with it. Three threads run through the disorder, and they share a single pattern: a political and media establishment using manufactured crises, convenient attributions, and the deliberate conflation of dissent with hatred to avoid accountability for its own failures. The threads are distinct. The logic connecting them is not. The boy who cried wolf (the wolf being Iran) When a seventeen-year-old lad is found with a petrol can after ambulances have been torched, and when a man with evident and…
The French Revolution and Human Rights – Early Steps Toward Modern Liberalism
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The impression most people have of the French Revolution is a one of sensible moderates who were overcome by the radical extremists of Robespierre who then drowned the Revolution in blood. Jonathan Israel doesn’t dispute that part of the story but places on center stage a group of democratic republicans who briefly gained control of the Revolution and came close to establishing the first true modern democracy – before Robespierre staged the coup that led to them being sent to the guillotine. The Roots of the Revolution in the Radical Enlightenment Johnathan Israel has made the Enlightenment his main specialisation.…
Returning Fallibilism to the Forefront of Liberalism – The Importance of Maintaining Clear Philosophical Foundations
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Across Western democracies, political debate is becoming more polarised and more fragile at the same time. Many voters feel that ideas cannot be discussed openly, while political parties increasingly struggle to explain what they actually stand for beyond individual policies. When parties lose the ability to articulate their philosophical foundations, politics becomes reactive rather than principled. It’s all very nice and easy to ask voters to vote tactically against people they dislike. That will always be part of politics. Getting voters to vote for your policies, even if for different reasons, can work too. Or parties can make pragmatic compromises.…
Has the Party Become Too Libertarian for Its Own Good?
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Our membership and, in particular, our activists, are overwhelmingly middle-class men. Quite what the ratio is between men and women is unclear because the Party no longer collects data on the sex of members, but apparently the ratio in the Lib Dems is worse even than in the Reform Party. Is this impacting on our policies and Party culture? Are we steadily approving policies, at our regular state Party and federal Conferences, that might well suit a lot of men, but are a disaster for women and girls? Sex work is a questionable freedom Take our policy on prostitution, for…
Moving the Overton Window – and the Implications for Women
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Barbara Lindsay was an inspirational Liberal Party and Liberal Democrat activist who sadly died in 2024. This is her last article. Recent conversations on language have reminded me of the ‘Overton Window’ characteristics of the shifts in the language used by GC (gender critical – believers in biological reality) people. (For anyone not familiar with this, the concept was devised by American policy analyst Joseph Overton.) The width of the window encompasses the breadth of acceptable opinion within a group, or society at large. As its activist members promote an aim and seek to push the majority towards its adoption,…
