A CHALLENGE TO LIBERALS
Sm,—The fundamental reason for the failure of the Liberal Party to play an effective part in the affairs of the nation is only too clearly demonstrated from your own columns (The Spectator, August 29th). On the one nand, Lord Beveridge pontifically bestows his qualified blessing on the Govern- ment (asking only that, like Eric, it should introduce its socialistic sche-nes "little by little "), and, on the other, your correspondent Mx. Ian Simpson demands to know why Liberal leaders should "not make common cause with the Conservative leaders." In these two opposing widely prevalent attitudes is the root cause of the pitiful ineffectualness of the Liberal Party today. 'And it is high time that those who call themselves Liberals began to realise this fact and all its implications. For to suppose that any large section of the electorate will support a cause whose own professed adherents cannot trouble themselves to fight for it, or even to make it intelligible, is assuredly to invite and deserve political extinction.
The Liberal Party will, in fact, remain ineffectual just so long as it fails to proclaim and defend, abroad as at home, the gospel of freedom. This, and nothing less, is the true challenge of the times to all Liberals. Who but they should be foremost to attack the growing threats to free- dom at home ; who but they should take the lead in exposing the danger to liberty inherent in over-centralised administration, with its ever-growing hordes of unproductive officials ; who but they should be first to spurn and resist the glorification of the State ; and, finally, who but they should be quickest to denounce the progressive destruction of freedom abroad, with all its manifest threazs to the future peace of the world? Yet this is precisely what the Liberal Party and its Press have hitherto most conspicuously failed to do. Its voice has been silent and its pen still. And by its failure, by its confusion of mind (looking at one moment to the Right and the next to the Left) it has proved itself at this critical juncture unworthy to defend the great cause of human freedom—now, once again, in dire jeopardy—and condemned itself to political impotence. —I am, Sir, yours faithfully, W. CAREY WILSON
Woodford Rise, Woodford, nr. Kettering.
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