The Orange Book: Clegg's Political Lemon?
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 February 2011
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Orange Book, published in 2004, is a collection of political essays by leading Liberal Democrats. Although the writers come from a range of viewpoints, the book has been seen as an attempt by party right wingers to reclaim the party's economic liberal origins in the nineteenth century and give it a new modern emphasis. But for some leading Liberal Democrats these ideas are now closer to tenets of Conservative thought. So will the Orange Bookers bind the coalition ever closer together or lead to fractures and even splits in Liberal Democrat ranks?
Edward Stourton talks to one of the leading Orange Book Liberal Democrats, David Laws MP, about the philosophy behind the book and why they were so keen to publish it. He discusses the consequences for the party of the gap which has now emerged between public perceptions of where the party stands on major issues and where its leadership's inclinations lie. And he discusses what the longer-term implications of the Orange Bookers' relationship with David Cameron's Conservatives will be.
Among those he talks to are Baroness Williams of Crosby; the former Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, The Rt. Hon. David Davis, MP; the historian and newly-elected Labour MP, Tristram Hunt; the expert on political leadership, Professor Peter Clarke; and the former Liberal Democrat policy director and Orange Book sceptic, Richard Grayson.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Hello and thank you for downloading this podcast of Analysis on BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:42.0 | For further information and our terms of use, please visit BBC.co.uk. This program in the series is on the Liberal Democrats Orange Book and is presented by Edward Sterton. |
| 0:57.2 | This is the story of a political push that made the politics of today possible. |
| 1:02.3 | It was brought off almost unnoticed by most of the electorate, |
| 1:05.0 | but without it our coalition government might never have happened. |
| 1:09.0 | And in this programme I'll argue that it's defined the landscape of Centaground politics for a generation. |
| 1:16.3 | It began with a book of essays, published in the summer of 2004, and jointly edited by the then |
| 1:22.2 | little-known Liberal Democrat MP for Joville, David Laws. |
| 1:25.6 | I think there were a number of us in the party who felt frustrated about two things. |
| 1:30.4 | Firstly, that some of the policy positions that were being taken by the party |
| 1:35.0 | were insufficiently liberal particularly in relation to the history that the party |
| 1:40.2 | had of economic liberalism and also to some extent personal liberalism. |
| 1:44.6 | We felt that the party had lost track a bit in the 1970s and the 1980s and in the 1990s of |
| 1:52.2 | some of its traditions. We wanted to reassert those strands of liberalism. |
| 1:57.0 | The Orange Book was first and foremost about ideas, an attempt to give the party a new intellectual vitality and a new direction. |
| 2:06.3 | But the other frustration David Laws was referring to was about practical politics. |
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