POLITICS
Captain Paddy boldly goes where no party has gone before
NOEL MALCOLM
addy Ashdown's first words to the Human Rights Rally on the eve of his party's conference were conveyed to us via an interpreter. 'I am starting not with a joke but with a few words in Chinese.' The man sitting behind me murmured rather uncharitably: 'same thing'.
The best joke of a not very humorous evening was enjoyed by Mr Wang Ren Nan, the Chinese refugee dissident who was the rally's guest of honour. 'You and I have much in common', he told Mr Ashdown with a sly smile. 'We are both far removed from power.' At this point pro- active Paddy, whose platform manner em- ploys all the huge grins and violent head- noddings of a trainee mime artist, and who on this occasion had the advantage of getting the joke while we were still waiting for the translation, doubled up as if he had just been touched on the back of the neck by a cattle-prodder.
Do not forget that the Social and Liberal Democrats too have had their Tiananmen Square. The European election in June was an unmitigated disaster for them. Even in Euro-constituencies which contained the seats of their Westminster MPs, they came consistently fourth, behind the Conserva- tive, Labour and Green parties — with one solitary exception, Cornwall and Ply- mouth, where they came second. And where there was a Plaid Cymru or SNP candidate as well, the SLD came fifth. The whole campaign was catastrophically under-funded, thanks to some over- optimistic projections about the level of income from membership subscriptions.
That last factor suggests that the real problem is a long-term one: a deflation of public interest in the SLD which coincides almost to the day with the puncturing of the old Alliance. True, the Independent's opinion poll last week suggested that 36 per cent of voters agreed with the state- ment, 'I would seriously consider voting for the SLD if I thought it stood a chance of winning.' But polls which inhabit such realms of hypotheticality are, peculiarly difficult to interpret. What is one to make of the fact that only 78 per cent of people describing themselves as 'potential SLD voters' agreed with that statement? Would the other 22 per cent only contribute their vote if they thought the SLD stood no chance of winning? And what about the response to the proposition, 'It is hard to
know what the SLD stands for these days' — the puzzle here being not that 61 per cent of current SLD members agreed, but that ten per cent, bless them, answered that one with a 'don't know'?
In the circumstances, it would be quite understandable if this conference had col- lapsed in a tangle of internal recrimina- tions, or if the old divisions between Liberals and Social Democrats had opened wide again as each tried to blame the other lot for everything that had gone wrong since their shotgun marriage. Yet the recriminating has been almost faint- hearted by old Liberal Party standards (an emergency motion calling for resignations was dutifully withdrawn), and the potential abyss between ex-Social Democrats and ex-Liberals has obstinately refused to open.
It's true that something called 'The Liberal Movement', founded last year as 'a focal point for Liberals, whatever their party affiliation' (i.e. including some of the die-bards who refused to join the SLD), continues to flourish: its spokesperson told me that they plan to set up a think tank, which in the haste of the moment she described as the John Stuart Smith Insti- tute'. But one of the most extraordinary fringe events I have attended was a meet- ing to promote an equal and opposite movement called 'Social Democratic Voice'. When the main speaker failed to turn up, the audience held a spirited impromptu discussion instead, from which it emerged that most of them (and certainly a majority of the ex-SDPers among them) were against the creation of any more fissiparous groupings — what one Scottish lady tartly referred to as 'more bits and pieces'.
The easiest way to get a quick cheer at this conference has been to tell the audi- ence that they must look not to the past (and in some versions not even at the past), but only to the future. It is an attitude which has affected the way they talk about policy too. When I asked Malcolm Bruce, the party's environment spokesman, whether they thought that economic growth should be sacrificed for the good of the environment, he told me that that whole area of argument was old hat. Similarly, many speakers in the defence debate referred in a superior sort of way to 'the outdated multilateralist-unilateralist distinction'; and for Mr Ashdown much of the debate about nationalisation versus privatisation is old-fashioned and 'irrelevant'. This is a party, it seems, which is so far advanced in its policies that it has shot forward into hyper-space, where most of the stars we navigate by have disapp- eared. No doubt at such moments 61 per cent of Captain Kirk's crew in Star Trek would also agree with the statement that that 'it's hard to know where we stand'.
This party may be voyaging through strange seas of thought alone, so far as policies are concerned, but in the small matter of inter-party politics it has hardly stirred from its moorings. I am not thinking of more shenanigans with Dr Owen: the SLD are deeply committed to ignoring him now, and this is one commitment they can afford to honour. But what is striking is the lack of any clear policy towards the Green Party. Mr Ashdown's criticisms this week of the more extreme variety of ecoloony were courageous and well argued; but he must have known that they would earn him 'Paddy Hammers Greens' headlines and that this might be counter-productive. I can see no signs here of a clear strategy for recapturing those voters who floated off into the greenery at the Euro-election.
However, the most serious task noW facing the SLD is one they do not even seem to have glimpsed: that of revising their attitude to the Labour Party. No centre party in our system is ever, .really master of its own political fortunes: it inhabits a gap created by the positions which the big parties take for themselves. The recent re-modelling of the Labour Pprty — its conversion into what Mr Eric Heffer calls 'SDP Mark 2' — encroaches ominously on SLD ground, and threatens to capture many of those voters in the 'if I thought it had a chance of winning' section of the questionnaire. If Mr Ashdown got his strategic thinking straight, he would start planning a campaign to expose the elements of sham in Labour's policy (such as their hostility to the transfer of further sovereign powers to Europe, or their rejec- tion of a Bill of Rights) which should most offend SLD supporters.
After ten years of chanting about be- longing to the anti-Thatcher majority of the Left, they must find it difficult now, I suppose, to learn a new tune. Perhaps the size of the anti-Ashdown majority at the next general election will demonstrate the need. But by then it may be too late.
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