A good time to help Ashdown and start on PR

His party, initially relieved that voting reform was firmly pledged in the Labour manifesto, is now seriously alarmed

Donald Macintyre
Thursday 22 May 1997 23:02 BST
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Paddy Ashdown has an arresting metaphor to describe the difference between his role as leader of the Liberal Democrats and that of the other party leaders. While his rivals are a pair of heavyweight wrestlers staggering on until the first man collapses, he is the small but perfectly formed ju-jitsu expert seeking deftly to turn the huge force of others to his own advantage.

It is attractive as a theory. But how to put it into practice now? The first of May was a triumph for Paddy Ashdown, but not an unalloyed one. If he had lost seats, he would probably no longer be leader. Exceeding his party's wildest expectations by winning 46 seats, he decisively buried that possibility. Yet while the number of seats has more than doubled since the 1992 election, the leverage they give him has, if anything, declined.

On Tuesday the Liberal Democrats voted for the Queen's Speech, helping in the process to deliver what must be the biggest single peace-time majority (270) in a contentious division since the 1931 National government. That was a sensible gesture, in keeping with Ashdown's policy of constructive opposition, on the one hand, and on Blair's magnanimity in granting him, in the new system of questions to the Prime Minister, a supplementary question on the other. He could easily have found a pretext for voting against it. But if he had, the vote would have demonstrated only the puniness of his party's impact on the remorseless arithmetic of the Blair parliament.

Ashdown's influence in the next five years, in other words, can never, in any foreseeable circumstances, be decisive. But that need not mean it will not exist at all. The psychological weight he carries is this: unlike his Tory counterpart, whoever that turns out to be, the criticisms most open to him to make are ones that cannot fail to appeal to at least some Labour backbenchers. If the Liberal Democrat leader chooses, possibly in the midst of one of those routine winter NHS crises, to attack the Government's insistence on keeping to existing public spending totals for the health service, the Prime Minister can certainly justly remind him that the election results do not suggest some new found willingness to be taxed on the part of the electorate. What is more, this is not a majority that is remotely going to collapse at the first whiff of gunfire; the Parliamentary Labour Party is too disciplined, too conscious of how far it owes its unprecedented size to its leader.

Every politician will tell you that the most effective attack is the one that extracts unspoken assent from your opponents' supporters. It cannot fail to strike a Labour chord if Ashdown attacks the Government on health or education spending and probably on electoral reform as well. More than half the new intake of Labour MPs are supporters of reform. And quite a few of those who are not may come to reflect that a PR list system offers them a better chance of staying in the Commons that defending a slender constituency majority won on the high tide of anti-Conservatism.

So the importance of the Liberal Democrats as potential opponents should not be exaggerated. But it should not be belittled either. And while the Lib Dems' 46 votes will not be pivotal, they are vastly bigger relative to the main opposition party than they were in the last parliament; quite impressive when you compare them with a 164-strong Tory party with no seats in Scotland or Wales and a mentality still so introverted that it has just elected a chairman devoted to ensuring the wider membership has no influence on the choice of leader. Finally even if Blair were not instinctively interested in leading a broad coalition of left and centre left, he could still need Ashdown during and after the next election; first to win seats Labour cannot, and second to underpin what can hardly, against even a partially recovered Tory party, be as big a majority as he has now.

Which is where the issue of proportional representation for the European Parliament comes in. Most of us do not lie awake at night worrying about how members of the European Parliament are elected. To the Liberal Democrats, however, the issue is a totem of almost mystical significance. For one thing PR for the European Parliament was what David Steel, to the withering and permanent disappointment of his party, failed to extract from the Callaghan government in return for propping it up in the late 1970s. And Ashdown's party, initially relieved that the reform was firmly pledged in the Labour manifesto, is now seriously alarmed. First it was not in the Queen's Speech. Then Lady Hollis, a minister in the Lords, says she "rather doubts" whether it will be introduced in time for the 1999 Euro- elections. It could, of course, be introduced in the 1998-9 session; but the Boundary Commission would need to be stopped fairly quickly from drawing up new Euro-constituencies under the first-past-the-post system.

PR for the Commons, of course, is the big prize, and the Lib Dems' only chance of growth beyond their current numbers depends on it. On the one hand Ashdown himself sees no reason why the promised referendum on electoral reform could not be held as early as next year. On the other there are doubts even among prominent supporters of PR in the Government's ranks whether the process of commission, referendum and legislation will really be completed in time for a new system, if there is one, to be in place by the next general election. Either way, to change the system for the European Parliament in time for 1999 would be an earnest of good intent; and, so the LibDems reason, a modest help in acclimatising the country to changing the system for the Commons.

It is difficult to see a good reason against it. First, it does not lead inexorably to Commons PR, about which Blair personally may still not have made up his mind. Second there is a reason of low politics for doing it, which is that it will make it a lot easier to explain away mid-term losses of MEPs if they have happened under a new electoral system. Third, it is Labour policy. Fourth, it might allow the Government to run its first tentative experiment in Tory splitting: if Howard, Lilley or Redwood wins the Tory leadership, are the pro-European Tories necessarily going to be happy fighting the European elections on their platform? Fifth it would provide an early and relatively risk-free demonstration that Blair is serious about pluralist politics. And finally, it would make Ashdown a happier man. Which might, in the long run, be well worth doing.

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