Tag Archives: chris bowers

Bringing the party’s first leader back to life – in a modern-day cause

Six years after his premature death at age 77, Paddy Ashdown is making a comeback in the interests of the party’s immediate future.

Well, not really. But Paddy’s name does adorn a new publication from the Yorkists, a group of party activists keen for the Lib Dems to have a stronger public identity. What would Paddy do? is ostensibly a submission to the party’s policy review, the one chaired by Ed Davey and Eleanor Kelly that will report later this spring and propose motions to federal conference in September. But it’s really a discussion paper about where the Lib Dems need to go, given that the run-in to the 2029 general election is likely to take place on various shifting sands.

Despite its formulation, the title of the Yorkists’ submission is not an attempt to second-guess what Paddy Ashdown would do in the current circumstances, but to invoke the spirit of a political colossus who understood the person-in-the-street and was willing to take bold and counterintuitive stances. His stand-out policy was a penny on income tax to fund a boost to education, the tax rise deliberately ring-fenced to make it more palatable to voters (if indigestible to Treasury mandarins), but he also went against the Zeitgeist in 1989 when he called for all Hong Kong citizens with British nationality to be allowed to live here.

Consequently, what the Yorkists are feeding into the policy review addresses nine policy areas, combining immediate pragmatic proposals with thinking outside the box and challenging today’s Zeitgeist. Defence is a fast-moving topic, but the main call in What would Paddy do? is for cooperation among Europe’s states so money spent on defence goes further. It also urges efforts to tackle housing shortages to focus not simply on new building targets but on a package of measures that includes stipulating the right kind of dwellings to be built and accompanying land and taxation measures to stop starter homes becoming boltholes for the urban rich.