Liberalism true and tale There can be no doubt, if
only from the gut-reaction of many who are neither dockers aor blimps, that the Powell 'happening' has Coincided with a general—and justified— revolt against the prevailing ethos of the nation's opinion formers. But it is not liberal values against which the public is rebelling. bat the leftist values that have automatically been masquerading as liberalism, whereas, in fact, they have no connection with it what- tically declared that 'The past week was a dreadful one for Britain's reputation in English-speaking nations of Africa. . . . It has utterly nullified any gain the Wilson Cabinet may have hoped to score in terms of world opinion by the new Race Relations Bill. . . . The tarnishing of Britain's image was well summed up in a two-page think- piece headlined "Britain has sold her ideals" in Kenya's national Sunday newspaper, the Nation,' For the genuine liberal, by contrast, domestic legislation is to be judged against liberal principles, and the effect on 'world opinion' or our 'image' in Africa is supremely irrelevant. Least of all is the liberal concerned with the opinion of a country whose treat- ment of its own (long-settled) racial minority is notorious.
. If the revolt against leftist anti-patriotism is one element in the present wave of popu- lar feeling, another—as Lord Goodman sug- gested in his important article The decay of liberty' in the SPECTATOR last month—is the increasing sense of social claustrophobia caused by the steady erosion of individual liberties by Oovernment action. But once again this is a reaction not against liberalism, which is ever on the retreat as individual liberties are one by one taken away by the state, but against the leftist belief that only the state is capable of behaving rationally or in an enlightened fashion—an attitude which is able to pass itself off as liberalism largely because many of those who hold it are apparently also in favour of permitting incest between consenting homosexuals publicly performed on the stage. leftists, who preach revolution (however bloodless) and Leach-like 'hold the past in contempt.' If all men's views deserve respect, this applies to those of generations now dead as much as to those of the living. And as for science and technology, it is significant that the German sociologist Dr Ralf Dah- rendorf has suggested that the important political divide today is not between capital and labour, but between the liberal values and those of the technocracy—between free- dom and authoritarian efficiency.
What is being rejected today—and thoroughly healthy it is, too—is a com- bination of the science-and-socialism peddled by Mr Wilson in 1964 and the national self- abasement of the leftist intellectual. But it is not liberalism, properly understood, that is in disfavour: indeed, in a sense, it is a movement, inchoate though it may be, in favour of greater liberalism. What has happened, however, is that the impedimenta of leftism have been allowed to give liberalism a bad name, thanks to a confusion between the genuine liberal values of indi- vidual freedom (in business and the social services as much as in theatrical perform- ances) and tolerance, with the etatisme and anti-patriotism of the 'progressives' of the left.
