Freedom for whom? Flickr/Chris Beckett. Some rights reserved.As a recent report by the think tank Civil Exchange demonstrated, the Coalition has failed to deliver its promise to empower civil society. It has instead pursued policies which have extended the power and the reach of the state, resulting in liberal authoritarianism. Policies have not been overtly authoritarian, but have instead sought to engineer change via more subtle means, often using the private sector as an instrument of “soft power”. Although the term “soft power” is generally only used to refer to states’ exercise of power abroad, as a way of extending cultural and economic influence without the use of military intervention, the term may also be understood as the exercise of state power at home through more subtle means than those deployed by classically authoritarian governments. Used in this sense, “soft power” is more diffuse, exercised via the intermediary of a number of different state and non-state actors. It is less overtly coercive, and tends to be dressed in the language of liberalism and individual empowerment.
Under the Coalition the discourse of empowerment has been used to justify coercive, centrally-directed policies: the liberal discourse of localism has masked the continued directive power of the central state and the privileging of corporate over local power; liberal “compassionate” conservative social policies have masked the degree of state and corporate coercion of vulnerable populations; illiberal anti-terror and pre-crime measures have been disguised in the liberal discourse of security whereby the state’s primary role is seen as protecting the individual from external threats; the politics of austerity which hurts individual citizens has been justified by the liberal discourse of the free market; and new imperialistic measures extending both state and corporate power have been dressed in the liberal language of international aid and development.
The real coalition in power
The failure of such apparently “liberal” policies to empower individuals and local communities can largely be understood by the Coalition government’s extraordinarily narrow conception of the notion of freedom. It was conceived in essentially negative terms as freedom from the state to take responsibility for tackling local problems, finding employment, fighting crime and tackling the deficit. Many people who were regarded as lacking in responsibility were to be made free, often via coercion. Welfare claimants, for example, are subjected to extremely harsh financial penalties which now exceed the number of fines handed down by criminal courts.
