Description

This book is deliberately named after the famous Liberal Yellow Book of 1928. The reason for this is that we are seeking to articulate a Liberalism of the people, that speaks to modern Scotland, that offers a radical and practical inspiration for the future that will offer hope to young people, a personal future and place to those damaged by the aftermath of the banking crisis, and a mission to make our country a more equal and buoyant one, not fractured by social division, hopelessness and inequality. The Little Yellow Book is also intended to be something of a counterblast to the philosophy offered by the Orange Book of 2004. The Orange Book is well within the Liberal tradition and contains much of value to which Liberal Democrats can subscribe. But the belief that the private sector should be the driver of public services, that health services can be traded in a free market like widgets, that Government is a worse service-provider than monopoly private interests – these are not propositions we take to or regard as particularly Liberal. On the contrary, we believe that a society where MPs, the media, the banks and the big institutions have all successively been found wanting points to the crying need for a more rigorous sense of public and personal ethics, and for a strengthened concept of the public interest – ideas which have been central to Liberalism since the days of Gladstone.