25 years ago, Paddy Ashdown became leader of the party then known officially as the Social and Liberal Democrats. Here’s an excerpt from what he wrote for The Guardian on his first morning as leader:
Hope, said Francis Bacon, is a good breakfast, but a poor supper. On my first morning as the new leader of a new party, standing at seven per cent in the opinion polls, I know what he meant! But at the end of a bruising and often damaging period in the fortunes of the Social and Liberal Democrats , there is more than just hope to sustain us.
We have now completed, with the leadership and residential elections, all the difficult processes in the creation of our new party and can look forward to getting back to politics with more confidence than has been possible on any morning in the past year. … No doubt every one of us can think of compelling distractions to divert us. Our success will depend on ensuring that none do. There is too much ground to be made up, too many people who need us and too few opportunities left to waste more time talking to ourselves. …
All this will require a lot of new thinking and imagination. If we are serious about liberty, we cannot ignore the issue of choice which, albeit in its corrupted form, has proved to have such powerful appeal in Mrs Thatcher’s hands. Nor, in the face of changing social and demographic changes, can we turn our back on reform in the NHS. Nor can we dodge the issues which need to be tackled in recognising the role of women in the new politics. Nor ignore the opportunities which the new technologies offer to give either more power to the citizen, or more central control to government.
And finally we have to create the ‘feel’ of our new party. It will, I hope, be different from both the old Liberals and the old SDP, whilst a clear inheritor of both traditions. A party committed to the human values and concerned with the human condition, of course. But forward looking, capable of taking the tough decision, technocratic and concerned with efficiency and enterprise as well.
You can read Paddy’s 25 year-old article in full here.
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3 Comments
I do hope we don’t get any of those the party was on an astrix in the opinion polls, look how far we have come stories.
The birth of the party suffered from largely self inflicted wounds – Paddy did a fantastic job of rebuilding support – with a bit of luck – the Eastbourne by-election and a strong local Government base. The comparison with now is not a cheerful one, the wounds are still largely self inflicted (tuition fees, the rose garden, big society = community politics) but I imagine we would dread a by-election in all but a handful of seats and the local government base continues to be trashed. The Liberal Party almost disappeared in 1951 and again in 1970, the Lib Dems almost disappeared in 1998, wiping out the progress of 20 years is not something to keep repeating.
” The Liberal Party almost disappeared in 1951 and again in 1970, the Lib Dems almost disappeared in 1998″
I think these will be nothing to the backlash in 2015
From Paddy Ashdown’s original article:
“Mrs Thatcher’s appeal has been so dependent on materialism that I suspect she believes that if she offered an extra fiver a week in every pay packet in exchange for the abolition of Parliament, the voters would take the money and run.”
Paddy Ashdown used these words to disparage Margaret Thatcher, but since they were written there has been a well-funded campaign to steal the word “liberalism” and get it to mean just this sort of thinking. So successful has been this campaign, that one now often comes across people writing about the Liberal Democrats, mentioning the merger of the Liberal Party and the SDP, and suggesting that the problem with the party is that it is composed of “liberals” from the Liberal Party who hold to the sort of politics Paddy Ashdown was so disparaging here, and “social democrats” from the SDP who hold to the sort of politics that actually almost all Liberal Party members held to back then. These people are generally those too young to have any memories of what really happened back in the 1980s.
It is horrible to see this. Now I know what people living in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China must have felt like, when they were old enough to know the truth, but the next generation knew only the propaganda pushed by the ruling elite.