Ashdown bids to share power with Blair

PADDY ASHDOWN yesterday announced his party's readiness 'to make common cause with others' in terms which left no doubt that his goal was to share in a radical and pluralistic government led by Tony Blair.

Dedicating the Liberal Democrats to the replacement of the present 'one-party rule', Mr Ashdown used a skilfully coded speech at the end of his party's conference to open the long quest for an anti-Conservative partnership before the next election.

At the end of a week which had exposed serious tensions within the party over strategy towards the new Labour leadership, the party leader stopped well short of declaring the explicit preference for Labour over the Tories expressed by some of his most senior colleagues. But the carefully constructed message to the electorate and to the Labour leader was that a strong Liberal Democrat party was the best guarantee of a radical post-socialist alternative to the Tories.

Mr Ashdown projected the Liberal Democrats as the 'fulcrum of trust that can make this party the turning point of change'. Seeking to define a common agenda for those who 'claim to stand for progress and a modern Britain', he said the Liberal Democrats would make the difference between a government empty of ideas, devoid of reforming radicalism and imprisoned by vested interests, and one which was confident, reforming and prepared to work with people for their individual achievement and the common good.

His reluctance to be more explicit yesterday after his crucial decision last week to open up publicly the issue of 'equidistance' between the two big parties, reflected his anxiety not to aggravate party divisions after the most difficult conference he has faced since the party's poor showing in the European elections in 1989.

Although some colleagues have been pressing him to make it clear publicly that he will not co-operate with the Tories in any circumstances, Mr Ashdown knows he faces a substantial minority of party members, many of them in conflict with Labour at local council level, who bitterly oppose to any pre-election overtures to Labour. But his reference to the prospect of inter- party co-operation was in the context of a speech that lamented the 'disaster of this period of one-party rule' and followed the clearest private indications in Brighton that Mr Ashdown has now begun in earnest a long courtship with the Labour Party, directed at an informal accord before the next election.

With a sufficiently positive response Mr Ashdown could seek backing from his conference next autumn for a formal break with the stance of 'equidistance' between Labour and the Conservatives.

He took a calculated sideswipe at Labour's refusal to apply what he sees as its new- found pluralism to co-operation on local councils and made it clear that the only guarantee for pluralism was electoral reform.

In a brief but pointed reference to the volatility of a conference which this week debated the abolition of the monarchy and voted for the decriminalisation of cannabis, Mr Ashdown said the party had to think of the message it sent to voters as well as to its leaders.

(Photograph omitted)