Tag Archives: Coalition

Exclusive Paddy Ashdown Interview ‘I Am Devoted To The Liberal Democrats’

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Here is part three of our exclusive Paddy Ashdown interview. Take a look at part one and two.

That’s a good answer. In your diaries you are clear about how close you were to Labour before and after the ’97 election, and that PR was the price of coalition. Given that the Lib Dems eventually went into coalition with the Tories, with just a promise of a referendum on AV, how do you think events would have unfolded if you’d accepted a similar deal in ’97?”

I don’t know. I mean I can’t take you through the what would have happened parts of history. I suspect the circumstances would have been very different if we also had the referendum on a sensible system rather than a lesser sensible one. I don’t think you would have had the leading party in the country at the time deliberately doing what they could at the time to destroy the motion and the national newspapers at the time supporting them. That is the ‘what would have happened’ bits of history and we could all spend hours deciding how the world would be different  if Britain hadn’t won the battle of Waterloo; It’s very interesting but it doesn’t bear much relevance.

Paddy_Ashdown_3You also said in your diaries that you were worried that the party would start with Gladstone and end with Ashdown, what do you think was your greatest achievement as the Liberal Democrat Leader?

I have never ever believed that I am a good judge of my own achievements, I leave that to others to decide on what your achievements are. I was very proud to lead the Liberal Democrats for eleven years, I loved it, I am devoted to them. I was also very proud to be the International High Representative in Bosnia for the British Government.  No doubt I made mistakes in both of those jobs, probably quite a lot of them. When you have the privilege of doing jobs like that you can use it to your advantage and I quickly realised what I was good at and what I was bad at.

What do you think will happen with the Liberal Democrats in 2015?

I actually think all the polls now are wrong. I have to rely, as I always have done, on the good judgement of the british electorate, I think we have a good story to tell, we have been in government, everyone said we couldn’t do it. I think we have been more united than the Tories, tougher than the Tories, and played a really serious role in bringing our country through a crisis. If I know the British electorate at all well, when the moment comes, I think we’ll reap the dividends of that. I also think that the British electorate probably, having had the benefit of the coalition may not be very happy returning to absolute power in anybody’s hands. Also, having a coalition of some sort forces people to work together instead of spending all their time scratching each other’s eyes out. Maybe that is a much better system than what we had in the past. Those two things will help us I think.
Who Is Your Favourite Politician?

I think as someone said to me; ‘Who is my hero?’ and I said William Wilberforce who is as unlike me as you could possibly get, apart from Gladstone of course, who is the greatest Prime Minister this country has ever had both internationally and domestically, he was a man who said, “We did not march across the law of anti-slavery, we did not march towards a monument in the distance, we gathered friends like flowers along the way.” and I think he was an extraordinary politician.

Do you think we should have intervened in Syria?

No, I don’t. I’m against intervening in Syria while the opposition is so fractured and defused. Anyways, they’re being funded by extremist elements and encouraging extremist elements so, no, I thought that would lead us towards an engagement in what I think is a widening religious war. I did however think we should intervene in defense of one of the principles pillars of international law; a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has stood since 1926 and strained even Hitler and Stalin, and I thought that unless we were prepared to show strength to Assad, not by intervention because we wouldn’t have done, but there was a price to pay that was painful for breaking this principle of international law, then it would only have encouraged the wider spread of chemical weapons. So, no, I don’t think we should have intervened in Syria but I do think we should defend International Law and indeed one of the most important pillars of the international law that preserves some semblance of civilised behaviour in the prosecution of wars.

You testified against Slobodan Milosevic. Was that scary?

No, it wasn’t scary. It was more scary being bombarded by his troops. I mean, I testified about being in the middle of the Albanian villages when they were being bombarded by the main battle units of his army, that was much more scary.

I can understand that. You have done a lot of different things in your life. What is your favourite?

I think there is nothing I’ve done that will match my sense of pride of being a member of parliament for my own community of Yeovil. There is no thing you could ever do that matched being the representative in Westminster of the community you live in and love. So if somebody said you can have one line to put on your gravestone it would be ‘Member of Parliament for Yeovil’.

What was it like being an intelligence officer?

I was a perfectly ordinary diplomat

What is the best advice you have ever received?

Never stop learning.

Thank you Paddy.

 What do you think?

Exclusive: Paddy Ashdown On Clegg, The Tories, The Liberal Democrats & The NHS

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Part two of our Interview with Paddy Ashdown. Here he talks about politics. Part three will be up tomorrow. Let us know what you think. Part one, where he talks about writing and his books,  is here.

Do you mind if I ask you some political questions as well?

No, go on.

Would you prefer the Liberal Democrats to side with Labour at the next election?

That is a matter not for me or my preference but it is a matter for the British electorate voting in the ballot box.

Do you think Nick Clegg has been true to liberal values?

Absolutely. I think he is remarkable. I think he is…I am devoted to the man, I think he is one of the most brilliant politicians in Britain today. Hugely, publicly, under-rated. He’s got very, very good judgement. He’s got extraordinary courage and he is a liberal down to the marrow of his bones. So I think he’d undoubtedly make the best Prime Minister that you could have today.

He has a very hard job. Doesn’t he? 

It’s a thankless job. I did it for eleven years and let me tell you it is the most thankless job  because you represent the only philosophy: liberalism, that makes any sense.

He has it tough because generally people don’t seem to like the Tories

No they don’t like the Tories and I don’t like them either. I spent my life fighting them. If the public elects a coalition where the only coalition that can have a majority in the House of Commons inherently, mathematically, adds up to ourselves and the Tories do they really want people that don’t listen to them?, the public democratic view. And you better ask yourself what they like best. Do they really like the complete and utter corrupt mess this country was left in by Labour, which would have bankrupted young people for the next twenty years or do they like two parties that put aside their differences for the national interest and work together to get us out of the worst recession we have had since the 1930s and back on the path of growth. Which of these two would you prefer?

I agree with that, Labour left the country in a very big mess.

Absolutely. People have likes and dislikes in politics and what I’m interested in is doing what’s right for my country. That is what I have always been interested in and if the Liberal Democrats pay an electoral price for that, and I think they will by the way, if they did, if I was doing what I believed to be right for my country and helping it out of a crisis then I am proud of that and that’s what politics is for.

Do you think the Liberal Democrats made an error over tuition fees?

Yes, they made an error by promising it when it couldn’t be delivered. We’ve been in opposition for a hundred years, we haven’t been in government, so of course from time to time decisions which were driven to a certain extent by opportunism. I said at the time that we were making a promise that I didn’t think in the economic climate could be delivered. If we had been in government by ourselves I think we might have decided to sacrifice other things in order to deliver what we promised but we weren’t in government, we were in coalition. So, no, neither parties manifesto has been in operation. Both parties have had to make some compromises. I don’t call that anti-democratic. I call that the operation of democracy.

Do you think the NHS is being privatised?

What concerns me more than anything else isn’t who owns the NHS but how the public is served. How the citizen is served. For instance, even under the last government, under Mr Blair’s government, I had to have some health checks done and I went to a private organisation run under contract from the health service as an alternative means of delivering health services, that is; free at the point of delivery health services, and they did a wonderful job. Now I could have gone to a health service hospital, it’s all paid out of our taxes, it’s all paid by the national health service. One of those organisations was privately run, one was publicly run. It doesn’t matter who runs it. I don’t believe in private health but if there is a private provider providing to the health service under health service conditions and they can do it better for the costumer, then that is surely what you want. I mean I don’t believe the argument that says private/public is the necessary argument. I am strongly in favour of public services being offered free at the point of delivery and paid for on taxation, but who actually runs the organisation that delivers it is far less important to me than how well the citizen is served.

I agree with that. That is a question we get asked a lot but I got an MRI on my back and it was done through the NHS via a private company and they did an amazing job. Very professional, very quick.

Yes, that’s right. If you had a monopoly public service I don’t even think it would be a better public service. It needs competition. It makes people live up to the mark. I bet you there were more people abused and receiving bad service and ignorant service when the NHS was a public monopoly. I don’t believe in public monopoly. I believe in things being paid for either by taxation, free at the point of delivery but then who does that?, providing it is subject to inspection and national control is a matter of irrelevance.

 

The Budget: to progressive what Kim Jong-il is to moderate {Carl Packman}

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We’ve had the first budget by the new coalition government, called out by a small boy, nervously looking down at his sheet, behind him a Prime Minister with a face so red backbenchers thought it was daytime (it was daytime, but they didn’t know it was daytime by any other measure than David Cameron’s face, which actually isn’t a measure of time at all, allegedly) and two Liberal Democrats, whose party once called the rise in VAT (which was called today, starting in January 2011) the Tories’ ‘secret plot‘.

Though, back then, the plot referred to Tory plans to raise VAT to 19.5%. Judging by the chants of ‘here here’ today by Nick Clegg and Douglas Alexander, either we are to take it that once VAT rises to 20% it stops being a plot, or the Liberal Democrats have their hands tied in this coalition government. All such speculation has been achieved on this subject, and it doesn’t look good for the yellows.

Julian Glover of the Guardian on the day of the budget argued that it was not: “as a Thatcherite one would have done, seek[ing] to divide the nation between winners and losers. It was a one-nation one, albeit produced in desperate circumstances.” Certainly all the talk of “progressive” (that vacuous blanket term for anything not fascistic or carried out by a person over the age of 50 – Ken Clarke beware) provided the cover with which to place over our eyes, while our ears heard insistence from the Treasury that “The top income decile [consult graph 1 here for further explanation] sees the largest absolute losses, while, on average, the bottom three income deciles experience the lowest losses”.

But if the way in which Ozzy Osborne has dealt his number blow is progressives then I might as well sign myself up to that Facebook group supporting Kim Jong-il right now.

VAT always hits the lowest paid in society the hardest, though mostly what George has forgotten is proportion and scale. If figure A earns £200 a week and the government decides to take £10 more of that away, while figure B earns £2000 a week, and the government also decides to take £10, figure A feels more of a pinch in spite of the fact that both have contributed the same.

Now this is not an accurate picture of what the government are doing at the moment, but certainly the illustration holds true, that though the top income decile will see the largest amount of money taken from them on their pay packets, this is because they are earning more. This does not represent an equal distribution of the “pinch” when you consider that those on the bottom end of the income decile, though not contributing as much (as they don’t earn as much as those on the top decile) feel more of a pinch by the raise in VAT, freeze on public sector pay and freeze on benefits.

It doesn’t follow that since figure A has less on his income statement than last year, that figure A is feeling the pinch more than figure B, in fact the opposite is true. This does not represent everyone taking an equal hit. Until this is rectified, the coalition government’s budget plans are to progressive what Girls Aloud were to dignity.

Is it Bromance; Carl on the Coalition {Politics}

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Since the first press release by Nick Clegg and David Cameron on Wednesday, it has dawned on the media that any coalition conflict in the near future is unlikely to come from these guys, and their so-called ‘love-in‘.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee; Ant and Dec; these are just some of the names to appear on the blogosphere or from the tweets of the twitterati to refer to our Prime Minister and the deputy. The BBC and ITN have taken to showing constant replays of David Cameron calling on Clegg to ‘come back‘ during one of their jokes in the back garden of number 10, and Henry McLeish, Labour’s former first minister in Scotland, even accidentally uttered the name “David Clegg”.

If you think Clegg will be Cameron’s nagging Aunty you can think again.

However that is not to say there will be no conflict within the coalition. On the same day as the press release Vince Cable was awaiting confirmation of the equal patch he will have with George Osborne as chair of the committee in charge of banks, only to find that those were not the plans at all.

Osborne’s sources were quick to brush the incident off by saying there had been some confusion on the matter, but it is clear for anyone to see why Ozzy Osborne wants his fingers on the banks, and not to share with his new pal Cable.

In spite of the fact that Osborne in the past has waxed lyrical about getting tough on the banks, and that the Libservatives have drawn up and agreed on a pledge to curb earth shattering bank bonuses, giving Cable the back seat is indicative that our new Chancellor finds dubious some of Cable’s tough plans for banks, namely the separation of high street and investment banking, and his no nonsense measures for banks’ lending requirements.

Sean O’ Grady of the Independent suspects that the honeymoon period inside the cabinet will be over by the 25th of June – the date of the emergency budget setting out a frame for public finances – when key differences in the party will come to the fore.

Cable has already agreed to back down on his plans for a mansion tax on properties worth over 2m, which would’ve saved money for those on the lower end of the tax scale, and Osborne compromised on raising inheritance tax exemption to 1m. Of those two compromises it is not difficult to see which measure could be for the purpose of softening the blow for the poorest in times of austerity, and which measure is in-built ideology.

If you want to identify where that coalition split will be, don’t look at Clegg and Cameron, who have to wear different coloured ties so we can tell them apart, it’s the economy, stupid.

by Carl Packman

You can read more of Carl’s thoughts and articles on his blog Raincoat Optimism.