contrast, the libertarians, with whom it is not unfair to class Reagan and Thatcher,
defend the right of each person to pursue his or her own idea of the good life and,
therefore,Wnd government intervention suYcient if it ensures all equal protection
against harm by any. Recognizing that beyond this negative right the individual
may well need positive assistance, if he is to pursue his better possibilities, social
liberalism oVers equality of opportunity, but with the crucial proviso that the oVer
of opportunity entails the duty of its responsible use.
Welfare policy, declared Blair at the party conference of 1997 in a vivid oxy-
moron, should be governed by ‘‘compassion with a hard edge.’’ He accordingly
warned the unemployed, especially the young, not to lapse into dependency on
welfare entitlements, but seriously and persistently to look for work. I was
reminded of how, as a youthful ghost-writer for the New Deal, I had learned,
when justifying aid to the unemployed, to add ‘‘through no fault of their own.’’
These were exactly the same words which had often been used by Lloyd-George in a
similar context. Precisely this rationale of encouraging self-reliance by empower-
ment rather than entitlement informed the workfare provisions of the welfare
reform act which President Clinton signed in 1996 and which served as a precedent
for the measure adopted by Tony Blair, similar even to the extent of using the term
‘‘new deal’’ for certain provisions. In a signiWcant way the social liberal shares the
libertarian belief in and hope for individual autonomy.
The individual freely makes his choice, but with social assistance and for a
further purpose, as Blair concluded in his 1997 conference address, to make Britain,
if no longer ‘‘the mightiest,’’ now and in the future, ‘‘the best place to lead a fulWlled
life.’’ Earnestly as he supported, on the one hand, devolution in the UK and, on the
other hand, a leading role in the European Union, to his way of thinking, the
British nation state was alive and well and on its way to becoming ‘‘a beacon for
good at home and abroad.’’ In what he had said and done I found enough such
emphasis to speak of Blair’s ‘‘New Nationalism.’’
The ground for this new hope was a new fact. While public policy was institu-
tionalizing greater individual freedom and greater individual responsibility, at the
same time and for the same reason the ancient class system was dissolving. This
‘‘collapse of deference,’’ as I with some exaggeration called it inBritain Against Itself
( 1982 ), had the positive eVect of facilitating the advance of social liberalism. The
ancient cultural premises of British politics had been hammered home on me by
my tutor in medieval history at Balliol, the renown Vivian Hunter Galbraith.
‘‘Beer,’’ he said to me, ‘‘you will never understand England until you understand
her middle ages.’’ And then as if in logical sequence, he continued, ‘‘In England the
upper classes do not hold the lower classes down, the lower classes hold the upper
classes up.’’ That penetrating observation of core values of Toryism and socialism
wasWnally losing its relevance.
712 samuel h. beer