THE LIBERAL CREED
Sin,—Mr. Christopher Hollis really should be more careful. ICI his review of the.new Liberal symposium, The Unservile State (Spectator, August 2), he told us that half the present House of-Commons are Liberals already. On August 16 he writes that at Westminster the only chance of getting Liberal things done is to persuade members of other parties to support them.' Persuade? A mere fortnight ago, and half the Com- mons believed in Liberalism. Now they have to be talked into it. In a week or two Mr. Hollis will be admitting what everybody knows already, that under the present 'parliamentary system of government' it is about as useful to influence the private convic- tions of MPs who owe allegiance to the Tory or Socialist Whips as to jump off Westminster Bridge. As Taper put it last week, 'the number of back- benchers who have real influence on their own parties or the House of Commons can be counted on the fingers of one badly mutilated hand.' Mr. Hollis ought to know that better than anybody.
Mr. Philip Goodhart, whom I like to think of as one of the 300-odd MPs who may one day declare themselves as liberals when the Whips aren't watch- ing, seems to have made an honest mistake about The Unservile State. It isn't 'the latest edition of the Liberal Party's creed.' The Preface makes this quite clear, and it is a pity that Mr. Hollis's review did not. And he is off the rails entirely if he thinks that the authors of The Unservile State (or the Liberal Party, for that matter) are in some special sense advocating 'the forcible distribution by the State of a man's possessions,' though high taxation is already doing just that. In those realms of mist and legend, the central offices of the Conservative and Labour parties, it will come as a shock to realise that you could radically transform the distribution of private property in Britain in two or three years without touching a penny of anybody's capital. How? Thirty years ago, in Cambridge lecture-halls, Keynes used to play a game with his audiences. He would ask them
to write down their own estimates of how many years' national product it would take to replace the entire national stock of capital. People would write down 20, 30, 100. Keynes's answer was four. Mr. Colin Clark's answer, two years ago, was two (Listener, March 10, 1955). If you are really deter- mined, as Liberals are, to end a situation in which about 60 per cent. of the adults of this very rich country own practically nothing at all, then the job can certainly be done with no confiscation of existing capital. Among the methods proposed in The Un- servile State are tax-incentives for small savings, personal insurance and home ownership, and that 'free or subsidised acquisition of the equity of the business by its own workers' through an assured share in its profits which we are all coming to call co-
ownership.—Yours faithfully, GEORGE WATSON
Editor, The Unservile State
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