Liberalism ascendant

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

John Vaught LaBeaume at Reason argues that the UK's LibDems are rediscovering their liberal roots:

While their economic policy might fail to satisfy a Chicago School economist, this election has seen the Liberal Democrats stake out the most explicitly liberal economic policy in a century. The party's website pledges to get the British government 'off the back of businesses' and assures voters that the LibDems 'want to cut the red tape that stops businesses from growing.' Press releases during the campaign have excoriated 'Labour's business record' as 'complex, interfering and over regulating' and have promised that 'Liberal Democrats will set business free.'

This is something I argued back in December:

The LibDems did emerge from the merger of the Liberal and the Social Democratic parties, but the liberal faction has clearly come to dominate, as evinced the LibDems membership in the ALDE (formerly ELDR) and the Liberal International.

That the LibDems have been portrayed as being to the "left" of Labour has more to do with Blair's New Labour than with the LibDems. Without falling into Nolan chart hermeneutics, it's safe to say that the position of liberalism and social democracy on the left-right scale is partly substantive, but also partly the result of historical contingency. Trade protectionism has a long conservative, not liberal, history; opposition to "bourgeois lifestyles" has been used by socialist governments to crack down on gays. So it doesn't surprise me to see liberalism reemerging as a progressive force in Albion.