Tag Archives: Paddy Ashdown

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.

 

Exclusive Paddy Ashdown Interview: On His Books

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Paddy Ashdown has been a Royal Marine, the leader of the Liberal Democrats for eleven years, High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is a life peer in the House of Lords. On top of that he has written 8 books, with the 8th coming out on the 5th of June. I can’t wait as I have loved all of his other books. I interviewed him about his books and politics. Here is part one.

Did you get the idea for A Brilliant Little Operation: The Cockleshell Heroes and the Most Courageous Raid of World War 2 while you were a member of the Royal Marines elite Special Boot Squadron?

No, my publisher approached me and said ‘it’s the 70th anniversary how about writing the book’. Which is my seventh book. I am just about to produce my 8th so it was a natural subject really.

What is your 8th book about?

The 8th book is about the largest resistance battle with the Germans in the Second World War. It is called A Terrible Victory, about the Vercors plateau on June 1944 and it was the biggest resistance German battle in Western Europe. [Learn more about the book here. It is about the chronicle of the French Resistance during World War Two]

That sounds fascinating. You have written quite a lot of books. Do you have a favourite?

I think the one I am working on now is always my favourite. I love writing books and whatever you’re working on consumes your mind so it is always the one you are most thinking about.

You’re books are very good. They are always very factual and have lots of history in them. How do you go about writing them. What is your writing schedule?

Writing The Brilliant Little Operation, and the one I am going to produce, Harper Collins will publish it on the 5th of June, takes me about three years of research. I mean, I start writing before then and overall I don’t like writing unless I have all of the research it is possible to get. Normally the whole process will take my three and a half to four years. Of which three years is spent on research. Going to the wonderful archive museum in Britain, the National Archives in Britain. In the case of both of my most recent books, to the Château de Vincennes in Paris, In France there are three key archives you have to go to. And also the Bauhaus-Archiv in Germany.

I spend a lot of time in archives. In writing my present book I have read sixty other books on the subject, all of them in French. In writing a Brilliant Little Operation I have read four books before and a lot of research. So research is very important.

You can really tell that when you read your books.

Thank you, that’s kind. That’s very generous.

Tomorrow: The Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives, Nick Clegg, Labour and the NHS: Exclusive interview.

 

Words For The Wounded Writing Prize Closes On 11 March

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W4WLogoAlt3 Words for the Wounded writing prize closes on 11 March. two grannies Why on earth do three grannies (two shown above) throw themselves out of a plane, strapped to a fit young man, hoping their parachutes open? Well, OK, the fit young man is a bit of a clue. But seriously, why? pic2 janairborne The reasons lie in the past and the present. In the past, both my grandfathers survived the first world war, so just as there were thankful villages who had lost no men, so too there were thankful families. But life isn’t that simple, is it? Gentle Percy, my mother’s father survived but took his own life in 1923. War has long, relentless tentacles which reach out and destroy families, just as surely as bullets do. pic3 poppies Then, about four years ago I met a young  man and his wife. They were both under twenty five. She was pushing him in his wheelchair; his portable ventilator lay on his chest. He’d been shot through the neck in Helmand and is tetraplegic, (paralysed from the neck down). They were both smiling and cheerful but their hopes and dreams were very different now, and everyday life was a mountain in itself.   I decided that, as writers, my two granny friends and I could help not just the wounded, but also aspiring writers. We founded Words for the Wounded and were enormously lucky in our patrons, amongst whom are Julian Fellowes, Louis de Berniers, Katie Fforde, Paddy Ashdown and many others. Julian Fellowes   We decided also that we would earn our donations, not just appeal to the generosity of others; hence the skydive, and hence the Mud Challenge Obstacle Course in August, and hence the LitFest to be held at High Wycombe on 18th April  2015 with Katie Fforde and two Midsomer Murders writers amongst others.   katie-fforde Our main thread, however, is our writing prizes. We have the short category for poetry/fiction/memoir – up to 400 words, with prize money of £400. Entry fee £4.50   This year we are launching The Independent Author Book Award for fiction or memoir, with a 1st prize of a Palamedes PR professional press release. pic 6 palamedes.jpg And a biography and review in Frost Magazine.  Entry fee £12.50 pic7Frost The WforW grannies absorb ALL the costs themselves, so every penny raised goes to the wounded. Our troops put their lives on the line for us, some are killed, many, many,  more sustain life-changing injuries. To help them is the aim of Words for the Wounded. They deserve the best.

For more information: www.wordsforthewounded.co.uk 

Richard Wright is On Tanget

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As the great Willie Nelson once told us “on the road again, just can’t wait to get on the road again”. That man spoke a lot of sense in that song but he also smoked a lot of cannabis apparently, so take anything he says with a slight pinch of salt. I know I do. Why am I quoting him? This makes no sense. Which would be fine if I was high but I don’t smoke weed. So anyway the confusion is back at Frost Magazine. For those of you who don’t know, cause let’s face it as Staind said; it has, in fact, been a while, I used to write a lot of nonsense on various things right here at Frost Magazine. And now due an underwhelming lack of public interest in those articles I am back to do some more. No need to thank me I know you didn’t ask me too. So let’s get down do it and do something America can’t do and raise the ceiling! That joke works better if it’s raise the roof but it’s not called the Debt Roof. If it was then the debt roof really is on fire. The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. Anywho….

Let me introduce this little idea of mine. It’s called “on tangent” and basically I like to wander aimlessly wherever my mind takes me at that moment. There is never a moment when I can truly stay on topic. For example writing this now I have had to avoid slipping into a few lines on the topic chocolate bar. You see I will never be on topic and don’t go looking for a topic because there’s isn’t one. However I can promise that I can stay on tangent. There is to the best of my knowledge no chocolate bar called tangent. There is one in Sweden called Plop but none called Tangent. Plop is actually quite a tasty bit of confectionary. You see my issue. So here I present the first ever on tangent – I’ll keep these brief there is only so long you can read them before they become intolerable.

I thought we could start with something deep. The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. Unless, of course, you’re a surgeon in which case that’s just not true at all. What I would like to talk with you about today is something that I believe is an important topic that deserves deep consideration. Why does Alexander Armstrong look quite so much like a Toby Jug? That’s not it but it just struck me, and I felt I should share.

Admittedly saying that was a tad pointless. Oh yes that’s right he shoots and he scores. Thank you thank you no need to applaud. I do quite like that quiz though it’s quite a good tea time watch. I wouldn’t mind going on pointless because I wouldn’t win and it would be pointless. I think we can all see the circularity in that. It would be the purest form of the quiz and I would have embraced the totality of the nature of naming the quiz pointless. Because my being on the show would be pointless and therefore that would surely make the lords of quiz naming happy. Although I have a feeling the name was initially rejected as the title for a Katie Price reality show. Or even just as the tagline to her life. I mean that would be a more honest title for one of those shows. Speaking of honest advertising here is a few potential company slogans if the companies involved decided to be a bit more honest about themselves:

1.We’re not ethical but you knew that – NewsCorp
2.We do terrible things but aren’t your trainers comfortable? – Nike
3.Evil vs tasty? Tasty wins – Nestle
4. Want to look like you care without trying too hard? Cadburys Dairy Milk
5. At this point we could probably sell you anything – Apple
6. Come on you don’t even watch Panorama – Primark
7.You don’t really understand it but everyone is else is doing it – Twitter

Speaking of advertising one of the adverts I saw for the new Alpha Romeo Mito made me angrily confused. Now car adverts is one of the places were rhetoric and the use of over the top language is common place and I can accept that for what it is. A ford focus won’t give you more focus. But this? Sorry Alpha this is lying! It runs on Adrenaline? It clearly won’t that’s so over the top stupid I can’t wrap my head around who said that was OK! It’s beyond my tiny mind and maybe that’s why I don’t understand it. But as the weeks role by here at Frost Magazine you’ll soon discover there are many things I don’t understand. And that’s ok. There is nothing wrong with saying I don’t understand. Nick Clegg says it every day when he looks in the mirror. And I can help Nick it’s called standing by your beliefs. Talk to Paddy Ashdown about it he might be able to help you out. You remember him right Nick?

So that’s all for this particular peculiar but always molecular edition of On tangent. I am aware that last sentence makes about as much sense as going to Lycos to do a search for Google but, you know, when you’re the type of person who does go to Lycos and type in Google you run with whatever you can think of. When I went to Lycos and typed in Google I just wanted it to link to a picture of a dog crying with the text “why do you mock me like this? It’s not right. You know where Google is. Why do you have to remind me things aren’t as good as we planned? I hate Google!” Thanks for reading until next time please occasionally use Lycos it will make its little tail wag.

PS – If Lycos had become the world powerhouse instead of Google would the popular phrase for doing an internet search have been “fetching”? It would have been better then “dogging it”