The Political Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 1, January±March 2007

Ideology and Policy

Social Democracy or Social Liberalism? Ideological Sources of Liberal Democrat Policy
RICHARD S . GRAYSON

Introduction
When the Liberal Democrats grew in signi®cance in the late 1990s, one sign of that was the attraction of the nearsupport of a national newspaper, The Independent. However, that support, perhaps because of the paper's name and ethos, has not been uncritical, and a particular bugbear for its leader writers and commentators has been that some of the party's policies exhibit tendencies of social democracy. In September 2000, commenting on the party's pre-election programme, the paper conceded that it `convinces when it follows the party's more radical instincts' and that it was `a skilful piece of political positioning'. However, the paper was very critical of the party's economic policy, saying that there was `little that is authentically liberal and radical', and that it had `the fusty whi€ of ``tax and spend'' social democracy about it'. It added:
When Charles Kennedy says he wants to see a Britain where `as the country does better, the poor do best', he speaks the pure language of Croslandism . . .

Such accusations were repeated in September 2002 following Kennedy's speech to party conference, when The Independent described the party's public services policy as based on `the mantras of oldfashioned social democracy'. Two years
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on, John Rentoul talked about `Kennedy's soggy social democracy'.1 Perhaps this should surprise nobody. After all, the party was formed from two parties, one liberal, the other social democratic. Leading ®gures in the party, including both the previous party leader and the current leader in the House of Lords, were members of the SDP and before that (if only brie¯y in Kennedy's case) the Labour Party. Yet that is not re¯ected in the way the party labels itself or thinks about its beliefs. The party is regularly referred to as