Core Beliefs Flashcards
(27 cards)
liberals committed to?
- Liberty
- Freedom
- Equality
- Tolerance
Examples of commitment to equality, freedom and tolerance. (6)
Support for gay rights - marriage
Prisoners rights - vote for some prisoners
Women’s rights - £28M to tackle women violence/representation
Ethnic minority rights - ended discrimination in stop and search.
Shown tolerance towards immigrants and asylum seekers - allow them work. Allow homosexuals to seek asylum.
Shown social policies towards health, welfare and education - pupil premium.
constitutional reform?
- Proportional representation
- Written Bill of Rights
- Reform of the House of Lords
- Decentralisation of government and devolution.
UN and EU
Internationalism
What core liberal belief do the Liberal Democrats still advance?
Commitment to individual liberty and tolerance.
What do the Liberal Democrats place stress on which classical liberalism didn’t?
State intervention to create social and economical equality.
Self regarding action
In August 2011 advance for an enquiry into the decriminalisation of drugs.
state management?
State management of the economy would maintain high levels of employment.
Liberal democrat view on crime?
Aim to reduce the cause of crime rather than relying on punishment.
How to reduce reoffending?
‘Working Prisons’ to ensure that prisoners get a 40 hour working week.
Increase the number of hours that prisoners spend in education.
Ensure drug addicts receive treatment rather than prosecution
devolution?
Scotland - urged them to say no to Scottish Independence.
Instead he wants to devolve power to Scotland.
Devolution is part of a core liberal belief. It reduces excessive power in the executive.
Example of commitment to liberty.
Scrapped the ID scheme.
Advanced the protection of freedoms act 2012 - repealed stop and search powers, DNA database.
Ended surveillance society - scrapped the contact point database, restored the right to parliament square.
Transparency
Ensure MPs expenses are independently checked.
Increase transparency in lobbying.
Classical liberalism has advanced to reduce the powers of the state.
civil liberties.
Liberalism is committed to ensuring the civil liberty of the electorate.
- Protected the principle of trial by jury even in complex fraud cases
- Made stalking a criminal offence
- Restricted the power of bailiffs to enter the home
- Stopped town halls snooping on people’s bins etc..
Mayhew
Jonathan Mayhew coined the term ‘‘no taxation without representation”
Human Nature
Rational beings
JSM best judge of their own interests.
Jeremy Bentham rational beings who acted in their own self interest by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain.
Successful society is based on meritocracy
TH green - people have a natural desire to enhance others welfare as well as their own.
Optimistic view of human nature.
Individualism
JSM ‘over his own body and mind the individual is sovereign’
Principle of being independent and self reliant.
Society is an aggregation of individuals rathe than a cohesive community.
The basic purpose of politics is to provide organisational structures which allow individuals to develop and prosper
Protecting the individual in social and economic spheres in a climate of tolerance and mutual respect
Championing rights across gender and social divides.
Libertarianism
Gives strict priority to liberty and - freedom over other values such as authority, tradition and equality. Associated with liberalism.
Seek to maximise individual freedom and minimise public authority.
Individual rights and laissez faire economics
Critical of welfare state and government intervention
Championed by new right
Roderick Long ‘political position that advocates a radical redistribution of wealth from the state to voluntary associations of free individuals’
Utilitarianism
Jeremy Bentham
A free market economy, inhabited by free individuals would guarantee the common good.
‘Greatest good for the greatest number of people’
2 conditions: governments had to accept that what the people asserted gave them satisfaction && the government should be limited to what the people as a whole preferred.
Accepted the freedom of individuals to determine their own self interests and insisted that the role of the government was to be limited.
Criticised for two reasons:
- Took a simplistic view of what motivated individuals, there were higher forms of pleasure such as education.
- Encouraged state intervention as long as it encouraged social utility(threatened individual freedom).
All liberals ?
Francis Fukuyama - worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free market capitalism and its lifestyle will signal the end to humanity’s sociocultural evolution and will become the final form of human government.
New right/Conservative
1970s and 1980s liberalism morphed into the new right.
- Laissez faire economics
- Firm belief in self help - championed by Samuel Smiles.
- Desire to achieve meritocracy
Progressive Liberalism: come to safe guard minority/individual rights. social inclusion firm belief in equalitypositive role for the state in health and education
Keynes and Beveridge influenced conservative thinking during the ‘era of consensus’
Race and Gender
State should protect the individual in spheres of both economic and social activity in a climate of tolerance and mutual respect.
Gays rights and marriage
Called for an end to ‘abhorrent prejudicial attacks’
£214K to shape action to prevent racist attacks.
Justice
Classical - Justice is the defence and respect of everyone’s right to what is theirs.
Anthony Flew “social justice isn’t any kind of justice” as it dismisses all possible grounds for differences in entitlement
Argued against it because it takes away someone else’s belongings.
Modern liberals support it - aim to achieve social justice. John Rawls advanced that some inequalities cannot be tolerated and the state are justified in intervening.
Classical liberals advocated that inequality was natural in a completely free society because all social outcomes were just.
Social contract
Jean Jacques Rousseau - individuals consent explicitly or implicitly to surrender some of their freedoms in order for the state to protect remaining freedoms.
Democracy was the best way of ensuring general welfare whilst maintaining individual freedom under the rule of law.
Thomas Hobbes - without a contract everyone would kill, murder and rape. A contract provides security for everyone in return for them subjecting themselves to the monarch.
