The strange English of dead liberals

Today's Telegraph has a nice quote from Peter Oborne — the paper's contrarian-in-chief — on the ongoing failure to agree a workable meaning of the word 'liberal'...

Now we come to the second wing of the modern Liberal Democrats, who have their roots in the collectivism of the first decades of the 20th century rather than the individualism of the 19th. These members greatly admire the state, while tending to be hostile to individual liberty. Bafflingly, they also call themselves liberals. But like so many other confusions of language, this is almost entirely the fault of the United States. Just as the Americans use the term “gas” for what we call petrol, so they have mangled the meaning of the term “liberal”, using it to describe those who embrace the state as a means of enforcing what they regard as desirable social goals – usually ones associated with the imposition of social or economic conformity.

As I've written before, tethering yourself to the 'liberal' mast lets you fudge the issue of whether you're really a centre-right Economist-reading type or a centre-left social democrat. In America the word now clearly means the latter, in Australia presumably still the former, while in Britain many left-wing voters assumed the Lib Dems were merely a less authoritarian version of the Labour Party (so ignoring their capture by Orange Book soft-libertarians). 

In Europe, proportional electoral systems mean parties aren't forced into uneasy SDP/Liberal-style alliances to win parliamentary representation. Anyone who isn't an ossified conservative (whether of left or right) should want the same for Britain: for the sake of our language as well as our politics. Electoral reform would allow classical and contemporary liberals to part ways: leaving each to campaign on a clearer and more honest platform, and ensuring that one of Western civilisation's greatest intellectual traditions doesn't just come to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean.