SHHHHH, THE LIB-DEMS CAN'T ACKNOWLEDGE THEY'RE A PARTY OF THE RIGHT:

Where does the Coalition stand on the new ideological map? (Stuart White, 9 June 2010, Open Democracy: Our Kingdom)

In the original article, I identified four currents of thought:

(1) Left communitarianism: ‘We need a social vision that acknowledges and celebrates our interdependence. This will emphasise solidarity and mutuality against the atomistic individualism of the right. We need to tackle economic equality and restate the case for ambitious collective action, while also recalling that social democracy begins, not with the state, but in the everyday cooperation of civil society. The market must be kept firmly in its place, which is not in the public sector.’

(2) Left republicanism: ‘The task of progressive politics is radically to disperse power and opportunity and to build a participatory and deliberative form of democratic politics. This requires restructuring the state so that individuals participate more directly in decision-making. It requires the cultivation of a grass-roots social-movement politics. It also requires a new politics of ownership, one that seeks both to widen individual asset ownership and to democratise the control of capital.’

(3) Centre republicanism: ‘The task of progressive politics is radically to disperse power and opportunity. This requires restructuring the state in a much more decentralised direction; individual empowerment in public services; a wider distribution of assets; and a stronger policy of protecting - indeed, expanding - civil liberties and lifestyle freedom. The left should get over its fixation on high taxation of labour income and put more emphasis on taxing unearned wealth and environmental bads.’

(4) Right communitarianism: ‘The urgent task is to fill the moral vacuum created by a combination of neo-liberalism in the economy and lifestyle liberalism in society. This requires that we rebuild a strongly moralistic civil society to meet social needs that neither the free market nor the conventional welfare state can meet. To this end, we must build a new political and economic localism. We must ‘recapitalise the poor’ in order to empower them to crawl out from under the welfare state, and the welfare state itself must be cut back.’

The Coalition

The Coalition government can be seen, I think, as drawing on – without in any way being reducible to - right communitarian and centre republican currents.