Beveridge Group

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The Beveridge Group is a centre-left ginger group within the Liberal Democrat party in the UK. It was set up in 2001 by MPs Alistair Carmichael, Paul Holmes, John Barrett and John Pugh to promote debate within the party regarding public service provision.

The group was set up largely in response to a perceived rightwards drift in Liberal Democrat thinking, typified by the economic liberalism of Lib Dem Shadow Chancellor Vincent Cable and Shadow Home Secretary Mark Oaten.

In its first article, the group questioned the claim in the Liberal Democrat policy paper Setting Business Free that the party should "start with a bias in favour of market solutions”:

"Should the party of Beveridge and Keynes approach issues with a prejudice in favour of the free market system? Should we enter every policy debate with an underlying belief that private is always better than public? I certainly do not think so. That was the approach which led the Conservatives to undertake the disastrous privatisation of British Rail in the mid 1990s." (Alistair Carmichael, 2003)

With the election of Paul Holmes as parliamentary party chairman in 2005, the group's influence within the party appears to be growing. At the 2005 Liberal Democrat party conference, the party then voted against a plan by the leadership to privatise the post office, a policy which Beveridge Group members have attacked as an unnecessary example of market fundamentalism. The outcome of this vote, and of another on capping the European Union budget, appears to have weakened the positions of those who wish to reposition the Lib Dems as a party of the centre-right, and consequently strengthened the position of social liberals within the party (such as the Beveridge Group).