D J Taylor: Has the liberal dream turned to ashes?

Perhaps some things are beyond the bounds of tolerance – such as actors smoking on screen (and the 'Daily Express')

The great American historian Studs Terkel turned up on Radio 4 the other night in a programme that addressed the slipperiness of language and the habit of certain words of taking on meanings ominously different from those envisaged for them by their creators.

Terkel, recorded shortly before his death in 2008, was particularly exercised by what had happened to "conservative" ("who wouldn't want to conserve the blue sky or proper sanitation?") and "liberal", which, as he pointed out, has an original dictionary definition of "being tolerant of the opinions of others".

A glance at the very large number of people who routinely describe themselves as "liberals" instantly confirms the Terkel diagnosis. Are, for example, those tribunes of sweet reason and rationality, Professors Richard Dawkins and A C Grayling, "liberals"? No, because their public pronouncements quite often seem to be based on a fundamental intolerance of other people's views. If it comes to that, am I a liberal? No, because, try as I may, I can never quite rid myself of the kind of ancestral, lower-middle-class prejudice that enjoins one to prefer Protestants to Catholics, Israelis to Palestinians and long prison sentences over community service, however strong the evidence that all three of them may very probably be a bad thing.

Inevitably, the Terkel case grows all the more convincing when one takes a look at the massed ranks of the modern Liberal Democrats, nervously assembled for their annual conference. Here, in no particular order, were free-marketeers who seemed to be touting a kind of ethical Thatcherism, eager-eyed collectivists and helpers of lame dogs over styles, the old somnolent pullover-wearers one remembered from the days of Jeremy Thorpe, not to mention the libertarian hardcore-porn-for-our-teenagers brigade, who always seem to forget that if there is one thing liberty doesn't mean it is unfettered licence.

They are all thoroughly good-natured people and one wishes them well. On the other hand, the spectacle of the Lib Dems en masse always stirs elegiac memories of an earlier version of English Liberalism, founded on such desirable abstracts as conscience, live-and-let-live and humanitarian principles, and receiving public expression in the asking of awkward questions. Back in the 1950s, when the Liberal Party's fortunes had sunk very low, the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer produced a book of character sketches called Modern Types. In one of them, gloriously illustrated by Ronald Searle, an innocuous-looking middle-aged man stands on a soap box. His only audience is a dog. "In parliamentary elections Mr So-and-so frequently stands in the Liberal interest", runs the caption. "He almost always loses his deposit. Fortunately, he can afford to do this." At the time this was a fair comment. On the other hand, it is possible to regard Mr So-and-so as a more reliable keeper of the Liberal flame than, say, Danny Alexander.

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Funniest public intervention of the week came courtesy of the UK Centre for Tobacco Control Studies, which urged that films depicting scenes of cigarette smoking should automatically be given an 18 certificate by the British Board of Film Censors. It is not that there is anything funny in the idea of teenagers being "lured into smoking", merely that, should this suggestion be taken up by the BBFC, then the bien pensant view of censorship would collapse into fragments at a stroke.

The standard liberal line on censorship generally has two aspects. On the one hand, there is the freedom of speech argument: what right have you or I, or the smut-detectors in Soho Square, to stop people watching what they want to watch? Tacked on to this is the assumption that such acts of watching exclude any element of imitation. Thus a manufacturer of violent videogames will move heaven and earth to suppress any hint that playing Grand Theft Auto might encourage its participants to go out and steal cars. Here, alternatively, are a group of activists who believe that there is a direct, causative link between what a viewer sees on a screen and his or behaviour beyond it. The logical extension of this argument is that any film which shows a person taking out a gun ought to be given an 18 certificate. Somehow you doubt that this is going to happen.

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The great tide of Dickensiana, to celebrate the bicentenary of the author's birth in February 2012, has already begun to appear in the shops. While much of the attention will be focused on Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life, my own favourite is Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist. Among other things, Douglas-Fairhurst offers a list of words and phrases that he believes Dickens contributed to the English language. These include "butter-fingers", "dustbin", "set-piece", "sharp practice" and, extraordinarily, "boredom". I have my doubts about "butter-fingers", which was apparently shouted by onlookers after the public execution of the Cato Street conspirators in 1820 when the executioner held up and then dropped the last of the four severed heads, but the Shorter Oxford does date "boredom" to 1852.

All this inspired the vainglorious thought: had I ever contributed a neologism to the word-hoard? All I could think of was "new solipsists", a phrase fashioned to describe the somewhat self-regarding breed of youngish journalists of the mid-1990s whose columns came crammed with accounts of the excellent Thai meal they had enjoyed the previous evening and their significant other's way of using a toothpick. But does anyone remember them here in 2011? Thirty seconds with Google was enough to confirm that an American blogger marked down the Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann as a "new solipsist" or "newso" only the other day. Lexicographers take note.

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For anyone bent on amusement without having to pay for it, there is always the cover of the Daily Express. Although invariably sensationalist, these are not, as media-watchers sometimes allege, always rabidly right wing, and for every lament about the hundreds of thousands of Gypsies about to come over here and grow fat on our benefits, or the iniquities of the EU, there is generally an awful warning about the state of the weather.

Last Wednesday's headline was a corker – a stark prediction that the mother of all freeze-ups was in store, with forecasters suggesting that snow would fall as early as October. This, it should be pointed out, was the newspaper that, some time at the end of April, assured us temperatures would be in the eighties for the next three months. Well, if a single snowflake falls within the borders of East Anglia by Bonfire Night I am going to donate £100 to Norwich night shelter. The downside of this climatic scare-mongering, of course, is that it calls all the Express's other direful prophecies into question. If the snow doesn't arrive, then there must be a fair chance that the hundreds of thousands of sponging Gypsies won't either.