Author: Paddy Ashdown

Democracy – The House magazine 29 Sep 2012

Democracy House Magazine

It is now fifteen years or so since I first, as Leader of the Lib Dems, started to warn that there was a crisis coming in our democracy. The mismatch between the way people live their modern lives and the old unchanged way by which we are governed grows wider and wider. In our personal lives we have choice and control; the internet offers us a freedom individuals have never had before; to range the world for information; to choose our friends without the constraints of geography or convention; to communicate our views not just from place to place but person to person, irrespective of their rank importance or position. The market tells us, from supermarket, to bank, to service industry, that we are king; that consumer choice is the rule which runs the world. But democratic politics remains distant, deaf, arrogant, unresponsive and resistant to choice beyond a choice of three once every four or five years. The result is that, we suddenly  – frighteningly – find that increasingly it is not Governments in charge, but the faceless, unpredictable, irresistible surges of face-book opinion; that our establishments of democratic power are universally distrusted and, in many cases, hated. Nor is this just a phenomenon of the Arab street – it is found on ours too, as the Student riots of last year and the London riots of this should remind us. “Turning and turning on the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer” as W.B.Yeats put it.

 

There are those who, admitting the need for change, propose “put our house in order” by providing a Downing Street facility for electronic petitions or providing more transparency in our system of Members expenses.

 

Necessary, but not sufficient. The gap between Government and governed; between politics and people is now too deep for small measures.

 

For the last two, maybe three decades our political challenges have been the challenges of contentment. The issue has been how to distribute the ever larger fruits of ever expanding economic well-being. The politics of conviction took second place behind the value-free politics of managerialism. How we distributed the goodies was more important than what we believed in. But now, as the game becomes not how to distribute. not the fruits of growth, but the pain of retrenchment values and belief are about to come centre stage again. And, given the vacuum the conventional Parties have left in this space, the danger is that the first ideas which begin to take root here will be the ugly ones. You can see it happening already. If we will not return to a democracy built around the clash of great ideas, then others, outside St Paul’s and elsewhere,  are going to do it for us

 

Democracies depend on an effective connection between Government and governed – and ours has been shattered. Unless we can radically reshape the space in which we conduct our democratic politics, then I fear there is worse to come.

 

There has to be a radical re-settlement of power within our constitution. The old settlement of Bagehot and Dicey will no longer do. The key will be to emulate the spirit of our age by placing power closer to people; by creating – or maybe recreating – effective intermediary institutions between the citizen and the State and having the courage to invest them with real power. Westminster should do far less – maybe then it would do things better. We are a national Parliament; let us then concentrate on those things that are genuinely national in nature; defence; foreign policy; macro-economics; the instruments of justice; a framework of national rights and entitlements which must be available to every citizen. But how those entitlements are delivered, especially in those services which touch on the welfare of the citizen, such as health, education and welfare ought increasingly to be decided by the citizen at a point much closer to where they live than a distant and un-listening Government hundreds away in London.

 

Many say democracy is our most treasured institution. They are probably right. But in so many advanced Western countries, Britain included, democracy has grown old, tired, decrepit, widely disregarded and, in the eyes of many even increasingly corrupted. The choice is between real reform or continuing decay.

 

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Defence review – The Times 21 Oct 2010

 The Times

Article by Paddy Ashdown

 

Last week’s “Strategic Defence and Security Review”, or SDSR is not what wise heads would have brought forward if they had been starting with a blank sheet of paper.

 

But the Coalition had to start, not from scratch, but from what they found they found when they arrived in office.

 

A war to fight in Afghanistan – which has to come first. Another to fight on the deficit, which, if we lose it, will threaten our economy, our national cohesion and our capacity to defend ourselves all at the same time. Some criticise the SDSR because they say the Treasury had too big a hand in it. But every Defence Review is a tussle between what we ought to have and what we can pay for. It has to be so. You cannot defend a country with flights of fancy.

 

And above all an inheritance left behind by the last Government which combines incompetence and irresponsibility in equal measure. Labour allowed a defence budget of some £36 Billion to run at an annual deficit of £10 billion for years without lifting a finger to put this right; they failed utterly to check huge cost overruns, like the £800 million overspend on Nimrod MRA4 ; they presided over a Ministry of Defence which, under the last three Secretaries of State, has become increasingly dysfunctional (the old problem of Ministers without experience of conflict finding it difficult to say no to Service Chiefs with lots of scrambled egg on their hats); they ordered two aircraft carriers which the nation didn’t need and couldn’t afford – more it seems for political – even constituency – reasons, than those of national interest. And then they left behind a poison pill that made them more expensive to cancel than to build. The national interest (and the Coalition’s too I suspect) would be served by an immediate investigation into this fiasco by the National Audit Office

 

But the Coalition’s limited room for manoeuvre was an argument for giving the Review more strategic oversight, not less. The National Security Council (NSC) strategy paper which was genuinely new and commendably wide in scope. But then it all degenerated back, as so often in the past, into an unseemly and uncontrolled squabble between the Service Chiefs about who could hang on to their most iconic bits of kit. The NSC should have done much more to get control of the MOD when it became obvious that things were going awry. It should not have been necessary for one of the key players, General Sir David Richards, to have to do a side deal outside the Review with the Prime Minister in order to stave off Army cuts that would have terribly undermined the struggle in Afghanistan. Things finally came off the rails when the MOD’s proposals had to be taken over by the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister to sort out the mess.

 

So what of the proposals themselves?

 

Overall – and after Downing Street’s intervention – they seem to have made a pretty fair job of an awful inheritance.

 

But there are exceptions.

 

Because we have decided to keep both of Gordon Brown’s “white elephant” aircraft carriers, the Navy can’t have the escort vessels they need much more (not least to protect capital ships like aircraft carriers!). Was it really impossible to do deal with the ship builders to cancel at least one carrier, for more escort orders?

 

As it is, now, the devil, as ever, will lie in the detail.

 

Being lumbered with the two carriers is not without its risks. It’s a safe bet their costs will grow – possibly by enough to put at risk a defence budget which will remain precarious for at least the next four years. The upgrade of the first carrier with arrestor gear (the so-called “cats’n’traps”) will cost a lot of money (a billion or so, apparently), and relies on an a US electro-magnetic catapult which is as yet unproven in a maritime environment. We don’t yet know how we will crew or support these ships – or even whether they will be able to be properly serviced while alongside Portsmouth dockyard.

 

Its difficult, too not to conclude that, in cancelling the Navy’s Harriers and keeping the RAF’s Tornados, we got rid of the wrong fleet of aircraft. The reason for this, we are assured, is nothing at all to do with the fact that our retiring CDS is an RAF Air Marshal and everything to do with the war in Afghanistan; the Tornado (they provide only around 8% ISAF’s ground support assets) are more capable in the ground attack role than the Harriers which we used to have there. That may be so. But, if the question is whether to have marginally less capable ground support aircraft, or no carrier borne aircraft at all for the next decade, then the answer would seem to be pretty self-evident. The Government should re-visit this decision before the ink on the SDSR gets too dry and the mindsets in the MOD, too fixed.

 

But the main truth which leaps out of the whole SDSR process, is that we have an MOD which is no longer fit for purpose. One outcome of this Review should be that the MOD itself needs reviewing. And it can’t be done – it shouldn’t be done – just by insiders. No private business which found itself in this kind of mess would dream of trying to put itself right without outside help. Some of the Department’s miseries are not of their making. The MOD’s was not designed to fight wars; its role was to prepare for them. Directing a war is the job of politicians, not civil servants. But the refusal of the last Government – and especially the last Prime Minister – to take responsibility for this, meant that this task was dumped on the MOD. And this at a time when victory depends, not just on the armed services but on using all the levers available to the great Departments of state in a coordinated fashion. Mr Cameron promised to form a proper War Cabinet for Afghanistan. There seems to be a view in Downing Street that the NSC does this. It doesn’t. We need something much more like a command structure, than a committee. We need the MOD to focus on its original role as a strategic headquarters, in which the Chiefs of Staff Committee is dominant. And we need all this soon; not just for the Afghan war but for our war-torn Ministry of Defence as well.

 

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Defence – The Times 21 Jan 2012

We politicians stand accused by The Times of failing to grasp the nettle on defence, of tacitly agreeing to avoid the issue in the run up to the General Election. The issues are so complex that there is a temptation to sweep them under the carpet. But national security should be at the heart of any government’s strategy, and judgments on the fitness of politicians to govern should include a judgment of how well they will protect the people. So let’s start the debate now.

There is a political consensus on the need for a defence review. What I think we need is something much broader. The complexity of the threat demands it.

Defence used to be about how high to build the walls around us to protect from the enemy outside. Now public security can be threatened by anything from viruses in our computer networks to swine flu. It is not enough to be resilient as a nation; we must use the levers of civic society to make resilient communities too. So what we need is a comprehensive national security review.

The broader we draw the boundaries of security, however, the more we need to discuss what it is that we are seeking to protect or to champion. We are moving from a position of “defending the realm” to one of “protecting the people”. This will bring us to an uncomfortable but necessary debate about our place in the world.

We are currently trying to maintain the myth that we can have full-spectrum armed forces ready to operate anywhere in the world. But do we want and expect to remain a world power, with all the military hardware that implies? Or is it the case that we can only operate in close co-operation with Allies?

A common characteristic among modern organisations is to work out not just what they can do by themselves, but how they can join up with others to do better — I call it Ashdown’s Third Law. Our first step should be to work closely on defence with the only other European country with serious industrial capability — the French.

Once we have analysed the challenges across the spectrum we can make better decisions about where to invest (or where to spare the Treasury axe). We need to identify the right mix of diplomacy, intelligence, aid, economic assistance, security capacity building, and force to lead us through these turbulent times. We will not do that by looking in isolation at each department’s area of responsibility.

But within all that reviewing of options and building of strategy, one essential element remains constant: we must have the ability to deliver. And in the Ministry of Defence we have a department that is not fit for purpose. We have a department whose performance against its Public Service Agreement targets has been steadily declining since 2005.

This is a greater issue than procurement or buying the right kit. It is about having a department that is able to direct the resources at hand — both money and, crucially, lives — effectively. It is about having a department that is able to overcome its own institutional insularity and link up with partners and nations.

At the moment the MoD is sclerotic and resistant to change — the very faults identified by Kipling after the Boer War. It is hamstrung by an inter-service rivalry which is out-of-date and now manifests itself publicly in arguments about cuts.

While the American Army under General Petraeus has developed a culture of listening and learning to troops, whatever their rank or experience, the culture in the MoD is that you don’t take lessons from junior officers. The ministry needs to become a learning institution if it is to become effective.

The adaptation to counter-insurgency operations seems to have been much slower in the UK than the US, despite our much vaunted experience from Northern Ireland of which we were so proud in southern Iraq in the summer and autumn of 2003.

A national security review would provide the leadership of the MoD with a clearer set of activities and missions. The ministry must then adapt itself to deliver those in as effective and transparent a way as possible.

Take procurement reform. The department should be congratulated on commissioning Bernard Gray to investigate the weaknesses within the current system. The recommendations and observations about behaviour and incentives within the MoD’s procurement section reveal a department that, even though it knew what was wrong, could not bring itself to remedy the problems. And the report looked at only one side of the equipment buying process, deliberately not investigating the role of the defence industry, either the UK’s, or that of our European and other allies.

These are institutional challenges that the MoD must overcome, irrespective almost of the nature of the security tasks it is given. And they will require wholesale changes of the structure and governance of the department.

I have not mentioned Afghanistan. Clearly, the Taleban must be defeated and the people of Afghanistan allowed to govern themselves in a free, representative, and inclusive way. The focus of all agencies of government must be on success in that endeavour.

Future conflicts may not be exactly the same in terms of the enemy, the terrain and the weapons employed. But those adversaries who threaten the UK will look to our successes and failures in Afghanistan and Iraq and use these to plot their own strategic review. We must be faster at learning to be better than our enemies.

Defence and the MoD The Times Feb 2011

MOD

The Times

 

Britain’s Ministry of Defence is no longer fit for purpose.
This is not primarily the fault of the present Government. It is chiefly the fault of the last one, which, for year after year, failed to address the department’s deep and growing dysfunctionalities. As the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee reports today, this led to a position where the MoD was running a recurring annual deficit of £10 billion a year, on a budget of £36 billion, without Ministers lifting a finger to put it right.
But here’s the rub. The present parlous state of our nation’s defence may not be down to this Government. But it is down to them to put right this monstrous mess. And they are not making enough progress.
The dust is now settling on the Strategic Defence and Security Review, published last October. And what it reveals is that the deeply painful cuts already announced are not going to be enough to balance the books. There will have to be more — there maybe even have to be, what is in effect, a second Review (though they will call it something else).
Of the £36 billion of cuts the MoD agreed to make over the next four years , it seems to have found less than half. If this is true, then the scale of the black hole which remains means that even if the MoD cuts everything, except what is needed to fight the war in Afghanistan (which the Prime Minster has ring fenced as forbidden territory for cuts), it would still not be enough to bring the department back within budget. Watch this space: we are about to see either a Treasury bail-out or more defence cuts down to a level which could even include our precious amphibious capability.
Today’s PAC report cites delays and alterations to project specifications as the key cause of previous cost over-runs. That is bad enough, but worse still, we are still making the same mistakes. The recent decision to fit ‘cats and traps’ to the new aircraft carriers in order to take cheaper planes has, the committee reports, been made on the basis of an “inadequate understanding of costs”.
The Strategic Defence and Security Review almost ended in disaster. This is not because it was done too quickly, as Labour claim. Any government having to slash welfare, housing, council spending, schools and hospitals in order to reduce the deficit, could not allow defence to wait until later. No Government (and certainly no Labour one ) could have got away with that.
No. The problem with the SDSR was not speed, but lack of political direction. That’s why it ended up, not in a sensible re-arrangement of our defence resources to better meet the national need, but in an unseemly squabble between the service chiefs to hang on to their favourite pieces of capital equipment. One result was that Sir David Richards, then head of the Army and now Chief of Defence Staff had to bypass the whole process (and his Secretary of State) to appeal to the Prime Minister, in order to avert catastrophe in the Army.
The decisions made in the SDSR, with some notable exceptions, like the decision to scrap the Harriers, were broadly right — but only thanks to the last-minute intervention of the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister.
The review should have marked the beginning of a new era. Instead, the MoD is still haemorrhaging money at a colossal rate. Some of the blame for this lies in the MoD’s initial misjudgement that, when the chips were down in the bargaining over cuts, the Prime Minister would back them and not the Chancellor. He didn’t and was never likely to. By the time this realisation dawned, it was too late in the process for rational decisions and hasty, ill-thought out ones had to be made instead to meet the deadline.
The Secretary of State found himself in charge of a department facing tremendously difficult financial choices. And I accept that these will take time to resolve. But not only do these problems remain — the MoD has also made some new blunders.
There were the civil servant emails sent to sack long serving soldiers who should have been told in person (preferably by their Commanding Officers) that they would have to leave. There was the leaking to the press of the termination of the careers of young pilots still under training.
These are bureaucratic mistakes which can be made even in the best run organisations. But they can also be symptoms of a much deeper malaise — and, in this case, they are.
The underlying problem is that because the last government was reluctant to set up a war cabinet to give political direction to the Afghan campaign. the MoD was left to do it instead and its civil servants subsequently strayed well beyond their proper remit. The MoD’s job should be to service the services, not to run them.
Yet today, it is civil servants, not generals, who move around individual units, right down to platoon level, in Afghanistan. Indeed, it is now often the case that those in command sometimes do not even know their units have been moved (or their men sacked) until after it has happened.
With the creation of the National Security Council we are beginning at last to create the architecture for a genuine, joined-up approach to the nation’s security. (Though not yet I fear the strategic thinking or, perhaps, the political will to drive it.) Our armed services themselves are more than capable of playing their part in this. But our Ministry Defence, which has been encouraged to think of itself as a war fighting organisation, rather than one which prepares for war. This needs to be put right soon.
And that can only be done if the politicians who direct this broken instrument focus energetically and exclusively on mending it.
In these turbulent times it is hard to tell where the next security challenge will come from . But I fear that if Britain were to face such a challenge in the next two or three years, our current inadequacies at the heart of defence would be cruelly exposed. That would be very dangerous for our country — and could prove disastrous for a Conservative-led government.

Anglo – French Defence deal 19 Dec 2010

The ratification of the UK-France Defence Treaty is potentially a real ground breaker in the way we look at our national defence and secure our place in a fast changing world. But only if there is a much clearer view of what all this means and genuine political will to drive it through.

The Suez crisis cruelly revealed the weakness of the old European colonial powers once we were left naked and exposed without US backing. Britain responded to this humiliation by snuggling closer to the US. France moved the other way, standing apart and trying to build a European alternative based more on incipient rivalry to the US rather than engagement with them.

 

Both of these responses were perfectly rational in the days when the world was mono-polar and dominated by a single super power. But the rise of China, India, Brazil and others is creating a very differently shaped globe. The US may well – probably will – remain, for the next decade or more, the world’s most powerful power. But she will now hold that power in a very different context – a multi polar world, not a mono-poplar one.

 

Washington is now looking just as much west across the Pacific as east across the Atlantic. Europe cannot any longer rely on ties of history language and culture to underpin our relationship with Washington. We are judged by this US Administration – and will be judged by all future ones – less by bonds of sentimentality and more by what Europe can deliver to the causes driven by our shared interests. And if Afghanistan is anything to go by, that’s currently not much.

 

One reason for this is that we Europeans haven’t got our act together – though Washington now enthusiastically wants that to happen, where previously they opposed it.

 

Another is our severe financial difficulties.

 

Here France and Britain face exactly the same problem. And these are not just financial. They also touch on our view of ourselves, which now has to be tempered by a proper if painful assessment of what we really need for security in the new world in which we now find ourselves.

 

So working together makes economic sense, strategic sense and geo-political sense at the same time.

 

To our west, the US will remain our principle non-European ally. But we can no longer rely on her as defender of last resort and friend in all circumstance in the way we have in the past. To our east we have a highly assertive Russian President, prepared to resurrect the Brezhnev doctrine and use force when he thinks he can get away with it – as we saw in Georgia. And beyond that, a rising China, a increasingly self-confident India and fast growing economic powers in South America.

 

If we Europeans does not realise that the right response to the new global situation we find our selves in, is to deepen the integration of our defence and foreign affairs (and yes economic affairs, too) then we are bloody fools and the next decades will be much more uncomfortable that they need be.

 

Which is why the new Franco-British military axis is so important.

 

There are however three key problems which need to be overcome, if this is important new direction is not to meander away into the wilderness and get lost, like Mr Blair’s St Malo initiative before it.

 

The first is political will. If this to be more than gimmick, then it needs to be invested with real political will – from the very top – and from both sides. I hear there is already some slackening of interest in both Paris and London.

 

The second is a realisation – so far, I believe almost totally absent on both sides – that this will not be done from top down, but from the bottom up. You cannot bring two armed forces relying on both sides Generals and defence experts sitting in a room together. That’s one of the reasons why St Malo failed. And it is one of the reasons why the current Franco-German military relationship appears to be making little progress, too, despite regular meetings, served by a huge secretariat and a whole Franco German Brigade to show for it. Generals will not drive the kind of integration we want. Only a real push towards integrating our defence industries will. That’s where the huge savings are to be made. That’s where the move towards common procurement can be pursued. That’s where we can put together a genuine European defence industry which would compete better with and make us less reliant on, the defence giants on the other side of the Atlantic.

 

This won’t be easy of course. Attempts to do it have not been hugely successful in the past. But times are different now. We have less money to waste and greater need to act together. Given the political will (and we will need a lot of it in both Paris and London) this is where real progress – with real effect – could be made.

 

The third impediment to making a success of this new direction is the wide disparity of views between London and Paris on what this is all about.

 

Paris, with an already existing military relationship with Germany, sees this as a key building block to assembling, albeit organically rather than through Brussels, a hard core of European military co-operation which others will then join. They see this as the first step in creating a genuine, rather than mythical, European defence entity.

 

But London (or rather some in the London Government) regard that with horror. They do not see this as the first step to wider European defence co-operation but as a single and not be repeated step with a single ally which can go thus far, but no further.

 

This is the principle rock on which all this could founder. And that would be tragedy.

 

I am struck by the fact that the Conservatives in the Coalition have been more pragmatic than dogmatic about Europe and greatly welcome this.

 

I hope they will now be able to find the space to be pragmatic on this issue too. Our defence co-operation with France has huge dividends to deliver. But only if it can be underpinned by an equivalent integration of our two defence industries, backed by with the will behind it to make it happen and an understanding that, if it works, then it something to build on and not just an end in itself.

 

Then we would doing something which our best ally Washington wants very much, which would help both our security and our tax payers and which makes solid good sense in the new world in which we Europeans now find ourselves.

 

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Should Lib Dems go for a Coalition? Daily Telegraph 12 May 2010

Should Lib Dems go for a Coalition? Daily Telegraph

12 May 2010

By Paddy Ashdown

For many of us in the Liberal Democrats, this is a rather unexpected moment. And a somewhat nerve-racking one, too.

 

For decades, our party worked towards a realignment of the Left; an alliance with Labour that would reshape politics and bring in a new and more modern form of government. Now we find ourselves in coalition not with the centre-Left, but with the centre-Right. What happened? And can it work?

 

Well certainly, there are many who are sceptical. In my old constituency office in Yeovil, the calls coming in have been half in favour, half against. Those who oppose the deal, some of whom voted Lib Dem to keep the Conservatives out of office, will look at the situation and think that it is a disaster. Perhaps they will even consider their membership of the party. It will be especially galling for those Liberal Democrat candidates and campaigners who came second to a Tory last Thursday (and, of course, vice versa).

 

I’ll admit that I was sceptical, too. A deal with the Labour Party would have been easier, more comfortable and far more consistent with our strategy of realignment – and it was this which I worked for over the past few days. But some of the old Neanderthals in Labour wrecked that opportunity, and have now turned their party back towards tribalism.

We Lib Dems could then have abandoned Nick Clegg’s promise to work with others in the national interest, moved back to our comfort zone, sat tight and done nothing. That would have been the simpler thing to do. But it would have been the wrong one.

 

The Tories, under David Cameron, seemed to understand the demand from the electorate for a new kind of politics better than many in Old Labour, and responded to it with speed, understanding and a good deal of statesmanship. Those of us who learnt our politics in opposition to the Tory party of the Thatcher era found this surprising, and in some cases even quite hard to deal with.

 

But our negotiators, and those from the Tory party, showed that these were different times, by producing a remarkable coalition document which contained commitments to political modernisation, voting reform, fair taxes, such as the £10,000 threshold for income tax, a clean environment and civil liberties, all of which any Lib Dem can be proud.

Of course, there are things in here which are much more difficult for us, such as Europe and nuclear power. But you can’t build the new politics of partnership without making compromises. There is, too, a huge task ahead, and there will be many bumpy moments. Whether this coalition will work depends not on its shiny newness on the morning after it was made, but on how dog-eared it will look after four years of tough, hard, wearing decisions at a time of national crisis.

 

Will the deal hold? Well, there will undoubtedly be some outriders who want to see it brought down. But their numbers may be fewer than we thought. It is significant that the meeting of the Lib Dems’ ruling Federal Executive and our MPs and Lords was virtually unanimous. And if our leader was able to get a majority there, he will probably get the same welcome at our consultative conference in Birmingham 
this weekend. He certainly deserves it.

Meanwhile, Labour is about to begin a knock-down, drag-out, blood-on-the-floor battle for the heart and soul of the party. Just as the Tories did in 1997, it will probably go back, lick its wounds, and arrive at the wrong conclusion, by moving away from the centre ground.

 

Sadly, for the moment at least, the great project of the realignment of the Left is over. Surprisingly, the changes Britain need appear to be coming from the opposite direction – a direction which I never expected, but Disraeli probably would have.

 

So a little euphoria is justified; because something many thought impossible has been done. Something that creates an opportunity to provide not only the stable government that the nation needs, but real change and the possibility for a new kind of politics.

 

None of this, however, should hide the fact that there will be difficult times ahead. There will be divisions. And harsh words. And real tensions. And lots and lots of tough choices.

 

But bankable goodwill has been created in these past few days; a remarkable coalition document has been produced, of which both sides can feel proud; and real statesmanship and vision have been shown by two young leaders. These ingredients give us about the best start we could have for the hard journey ahead.

 

I refuse to use the tired old clichés about “new dawns”. But I have to confess that I find myself still blinking with surprise at where we have got to, and how it has come about. And perhaps a little more hopeful than is rational about what is now possible, if we can continue as we have started.

The Coalition Guardian 8 May 2011

The Coalition Guardian 8 May 2011

Nick Clegg said after last week’s painful and deep reverses, that we Lib Dems must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down and get back to work at the business we set our hand to – working through the coalition, to clear up the mess that Labour left behind.

 

And he is right of course. And we will. We have heard the message many of our erstwhile voters have sent. We need to do more to persuade them that compromise is not betrayal. And we accept, as democrats should, the overwhelming verdict of the ballot box on the question of AV. You cannot be a Liberal Democrat and a bad loser (or at least if you are, you’ve joined the wrong Party!)

 

So its back to business. But that does not mean business as usual. Things have changed because of what has happened in the last three weeks – not because of the AV result but because of the failure of our coalition partners to restrain their supporters in the way that it was fought.

 

Mr Cameron tells us that, though the No campaign was funded to a level exceeding 90% by Conservative money, he could not exercise restraint on its unbridled personal attacks on his principle coalition partner. To which Liberal democrats say – pull the other one. Did he even try? It doesn’t seem likely, since her resolutely refused every opportunity even to dissociate himself from a campaign which was as disgraceful, as it was damaging to the Coalition he leads.

 

We are told by Downing Street that the reason they had no influence over the No campaigns tactics was because they were led by the Labour Party. If that is so (and it is difficult to believe), then to provide Tory funds for a campaign which you then hand over to Labour to do damage to the your own Government, is, I agree, not betrayal; just “bloody stupidity”.

 

We are now told that Mr Cameron is a master strategist. But it is not strategy to exchange short term appeasement your right wing at the cost of long term good relations with your coalition partners. These tactics may have delivered some advantages for the Conservatives last Thursday. But they have consequences – and these are likely to be felt for some considerable time. Our relationship with the Conservative is not built on affection (and if it was, there would be a lot less of it now than there was six weeks ago). It is built on the business we must do together to put our country right. But even business relationships need trust and there is now much less of that around – in fact there is probably none at all, just at the moment.

 

That is not to say that a working level of trust cannot be rebuilt – but it will not be done quickly or easily.

 

The Liberal Democrats commitment to honouring the Coalition agreement to the letter, is bankable in all circumstances. But going beyond that will now require painstaking persuasion and the patient reconstruction of our relationship.

 

I have heard right wing voices trumpeting that, since Conservatives did so wonderfully well in last week’s elections and Liberal Democrats so disastrously badly (their language, not mine) we can now be ignored while they get on with the job of running Britain on Conservative principles. One even put forward the outstandingly generous proposition that, if we took their whip they might give us a free run at the next election. There is a short answer to that which comes in two words, the first of which has four letters and the second, three.

 

Conservatives would be very foolish indeed to misread the Lib Dem’s polite restraint about using our leverage in this coalition in the interests of collegiality, with an unwillingness to do so if we are forced to.

 

Mr Lansley’s proposals for reform of the NHS are not in the coalition agreement. Nick Clegg says he will now be spearheading our Lib Dem approach to ensure that these proposals when they are finally brought forward, contain, not just Conservative hopes of what the NHS might be, but also conform to Liberal Democrat principles about what the NHS must be. The signal is clear and I hope our Conservative can see it– Nick has now made this our key priority. And we will back this with votes in Parliament where we need to. Shirley Williams has said she will not vote for these proposals in the Lords in their present form. And, I, for one, will be right behind her.

 

Then there is the reform of the House of Lords itself. Even amongst other competing domestic priorities, this has extra importance now – for four reasons; it is a crucial part of the modernisation of our democracy; it was in both Party’s manifestos; it is a key part of the coalition agreement. And, given what has just happened, we Liberal Democrats will now want to be reassured that we have coalition partners who will stand up for what we agreed together, rather than backing down in the face of their right wingers.

 

The last few weeks have been bruising – and not just electorally for the Liberal Democrats. Trust has been damaged too. The result of the AV referendum we accept. The way our coalition partners fought it, we do not. This foolish long term damage for short term reasons can be repaired. We can make this work – we must. But it is not going to be nearly as easy to do so, as it was before all this was allowed to happen.

 

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Civil Liberties -Observer 31 Aug 2014

Observer

31 Aug 2014

 

It is always easy to persuade frightened people to part with their liberties. But it is always right for politicians who value liberty to resist attempts to increase arbitrary executive powers unless this is justified, not by magnifying fear, but by actual facts.

 

The Government on Friday announced that the imminent danger of Jihadist attack meant Britain’s threat level should be raised to “Severe”. Then, from the Prime Minister downwards, Tory Ministers took to every available air-wave to tell us how frightened we should be and why this required a range of new powers for them to exercise. For the record the threat level in Northern Ireland has been “Severe” for the past four past four years. As it was in all Britain for many years in the 1980s and 90s, when the IRA threat was at its greatest.

 

I say this, not to deny the threat from returning Jihadists – though as the former head of Counter Terrorism for MI6, Richard Barrett said yesterday, this should not be over-estimated. But rather to make the point that this is not a new threat. It is one we have faced before and one we know how to deal with – effectively, without panic and without a whole new range of executive powers which could endanger our liberties. Indeed, when it comes to facing threats, it was surely far more difficult to cope with IRA terrorists slipping across the Irish Sea than it is to stop Jihadists returning from Iraq?

 

Of course, in these circumstances, the police and the security services will lead the clamour for more powers. They are charged by us to maintain our safety. It is natural they should want the most powerful weapons to enable them to do so. That’s their job. But it is the job of politicians to act, not as cheerleaders for those demands, but as jealous protectors of our liberties who measure any demand for their reduction against necessity, supported by evidence. Mr Cameron seemed to support this view when he said recently there should be no knee-jerk reactions. Since when, ahead of Monday’s Parliamentary debate, senior Tory Minsters have indulged in a spasm of knee-jerking which would have made even St Vitus feel concerned. And Labour, frightened as always when it come to liberty and security, capitulates to the demand. It is difficult not to conclude that there is as much domestic politics at play here, as there is national security.

 

I have no objection to what Nick Clegg has called specific, proportionate responses to strengthen our hand in tackling this threat. But these must be evidence based, careful of our liberties and sensitive to the need to keep moderate Islam on our side. For the wider threat of global Jihadism, will only be beaten if we can engage and work with the overwhelming majority of Islam who want to see their religion recaptured from the forces of darkness and medievalism that now threatens them. They, not western bombs and rockets are our most powerful allies.

 

Here it is not Mr Cameron’s proposals that I fear, it is his rhetoric. He recently told us that this fight was about defending “Western values”. I cannot think of any phrase, short of those used by George Bush during the Iraq war, which more damages our ability to win this battle. For it at once confirms the Jihadists’ Manichean view that this is indeed a struggle between the West and them, while at the same time alienating those very Islamic moderates, whose help we need most in defeating ISIS and its cohorts. The truth is that this increasingly brutal and dangerous battle will NOT be won for our “Western values” but for the universal values which underpin and unite all the world’s great religions and philosophies – including, perhaps especially at this moment, Islam.

The point here, which the Government is studiously missing is that the best defence for Britain lies, not action on the domestic front, but on the international one. The biggest danger we face, is not returning Jihadists, but a widening religious war which threatens, not just to engulf the Middle East and change its borders, but to spread across the entire global Islamic community with potential consequences for peace on a much wider scale.

 

I happen to believe that what is happening in the Middle East at the moment is a convulsion which will, in due course play itself out, as moderate Muslims recapture their religion for its true values. But in the process there could be terrible suffering, the obliteration of borders, a widening regional war. And with Russia supporting Assad and Tehran, even the possibility of the great powers being sucked in on opposing sides. With so many piles of tinder lying around in the littoral which stretches from the Ukraine to the Maghreb, this is not the time for sensible Governments to allow lesser domestic threats to distract them from far, far greater international ones.

 

What we should be seeing from the Government, rather than just domestic measures to protect ourselves, is a co-ordinated international strategy to defeat those who threaten us, along with the rest of the civilised world. This should match judicious military action (eg in protecting the Kurds as a northern bulwark against ISIS) with a broader diplomatic effort to first isolate and then defeat the jihadists. I suspect that in this struggle, diplomacy will play a larger part than military action. This should include the closer engagement of Turkey, a rapprochement with the new reformist government in Tehran, support for moderate Arab states like Jordan, strong international pressure on Saudi Arabia and Qatr to stop funding the extremists. And finally some action at last to extinguish the burning coal at the heart of the Middle Eastern conflagration, the illegal Israeli settlements on the West bank which strangle at birth the only peace Israel and the Palestinians can have; one based on a two state solution.

 

It is action on this front, far more than on the domestic one, which will keep our country safe.

 

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Christmas 2007 Sunday Mirror

 

Unlike my admirable successor as leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, I do believe in God. But not much in churches. I heard too much hate from them in my Northern Ireland youth.

 

But Christmas is the exception and begins for me at midnight on Christmas eve in our village church known locally as the “the jewel of Somerset”. I love its honey stone light and its slender pillars and its perfect proportions and its cleanly latticed roof, just high enough to give the impression of something separated, almost celestial above us. And I love the company of my neighbours and friends lustily celebrating the magic, and gently steaming from the moisture of the night, like cattle in the manger.

 

“Peace on earth goodwill towards all men” we enthusiastically sing – even though there is little enough of it around at the moment. Perhaps we forget that this is not so much a carol as a commandment – and by the way it is the supreme commandment of all the great Abrahamic religions who have, for a thousand years and more slaughtered each other in the name of a common God – and are at it still. I once heard that great Arab, King Hussein speaking at the funeral of that great man of Israel, Yitzak Rabin, begin his speech, a single Muslim amongst ten thousand Jews, with the words “Our father, Abraham…”.

 

Our problems lie, not with Muslims – but with fanatics and they are not to be found just in the religions to our East. You can (or could until the recent miracle of Irish reconciliation) find them aplenty in the pulpits of Northern Ireland and in the little clapperboard churches of middle America, too. My old Dad used to say (quoting, he claimed, the Koran – though I have never found it) “There is one God, but many ways to him”. And it is true – we Christians have far, far more in common with Islam and Judaism, than separates us from them.

 

Here is another version of the nativity story. “When Mary withdrew from her family to an Easterly place, thus did she seclude herself from them, where upon we sent to her Our Spirit….that I may give you a pure son…Peace be the day I was born and the day I die and the day I am resurrected”. Recognise it ? well our Muslim readers will, for it is the story of the birth of Jesus as told in the Holy Koran, where you will also find all the great stories of the Old Testament, only one chapter dedicated to a woman – Mary the mother of Jesus and in which we are instructed that Jesus was the Messiah, was crucified and rose again. Not many Christians know that. Just as not many of my neighbours on Christmas eve would have recognised that the wonderful light lines of our quintessentially English church nave and the gothic arches which line it, were originally inspired by the Muslim architecture which the crusaders found in the great Mosques of the East and brought back home with them in the middle ages.

 

The truth is that, in our increasingly interdependent world, our peace rests on us building on similarities, not exaggerating differences. What to that great poet and preacher John Donne was a moral precept “send not to ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” is for us, a strategy for survival. The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore put it like this:

 

“We are all the more one, because we are many

For we have left an ample space for love in the gap where we were sundered

Our unlikeness shines with the radiance of a common creation

Like mountain peaks in the morning sun”

 

“Ah!” you may say “but that’s about morality. Which has nothing to do with the hard realities of the world and the tough choices of politics”.

 

Not so. My great Liberal predecessor, William Gladstone was elected Prime Minister in a General Election at a time of war – a British war in Afghanistan as it happens – with these words:

 

“…remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can ever be your own. Remember that He who has united you together as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love, that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilization, that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its wide scope.”

 

Indeed.

Eastleigh – The Guardian 1 March 2013

 

Guardian

1 March 2013

 

 

I am writing this article before we know the outcome of the epic Eastleigh by-election. And deliberately so. Because its message applies, win, lose or draw in this close-run contest.

 

A line in Kipling’s great poem “If” says: “Triumph or disaster, treat these two imposters just the same”. It’s a good motto for Lib Dems just at the moment. A good result in Eastleigh will make what we Lib Dems must do next, easier. A disappointing result will make it more difficult. But neither will change it.

 

A few home truths to begin with.

 

We have never fought such a crucial by-election (probably no party has) against such a difficult backdrop as the last week or so – or such a painful one.

 

The pain comes first from the fact that our pride in ourselves has been hit. As liberals we led in the cause of equality and respect for gender and sexual orientation long before it was fashionable and often against the ridicule of the very press that now attacks us. So, to have been found wanting (and perhaps worse) in this area is excruciating to say the least.

 

Of course this is not just a problem confined to the Lib Dems – we live in a society which, as a whole (and in some surprising places) is having to come to terms with these issues. A wise old friend from another party said to me the other day: “We are not having as much fun at your expense as you may imagine, Paddy. We are far too busy thinking  -‘there but for the grace of God…’”. Quite so.

 

But there is no comfort for us in that thought. The only comfort from this painful passage of events will come at the end of the forthcoming enquiries, when we must put in place a system which will be a model for others on how we should behave in future and what should happen when we fail. No lesser outcome one will do.

 

Second, this has been doubly painful because it has placed in question the actions of someone who many of us had only known as an outstanding and admired servant of our Party; while at the same time, it seems, placing others we also admire in a position of pain and humiliation for which, they say, they received neither answer nor adequate redress. All justice depends on due process and this is especially so when it is our own friends and our own colleagues who stand on either side of the line between accuser and accused. There is, I fear, more pain ahead on this front and a difficult healing period to follow. But what is very clear is that we will get to the truth and through the trials ahead better, the more we do so carefully, painstakingly and within the counsels of our Party, rather than on the pages of the tabloid press.

 

Final point.

 

Having spent the last week (yes, it really is only a week!) sheltering from the fiercest of shot and shell from our enemies, it is perhaps only natural for some to believe that, if only we had done things better, it might have all turned out somehow different. It wouldn’t.

 

No matter what defences we had put up, no matter how we had explained ourselves, no matter how perfectly modulated our every phrase and rational our every explanation, this was a story that was going to run and run. It is important for us to recognise that, whatever the pain that has resulted for us in this process, there has been some very good, entirely legitimate and highly effective journalism from Channel 4 and many other newspapers over this affair; even if, as many now recognise, certain elements of the right wing press have deliberately pushed it in pursuit of an undisguised political agenda in advance of the Eastleigh by-election and the enactment of the Leveson proposals. None of this is to say that there are no lessons for us to learn from what has happened. There are lots. It is just to say that, even if we had achieved presentational perfection in the face of the most ravenous media feeding frenzy I have ever experienced as a Lib Dem in forty years of politics, it would have made no more than the merest scrap of difference to the outcome.

 

For the right wing press, this was the perfect story; the perfect storm in which they held all the thunderbolts. It rolled up in a single attack, three targets which they have long loved to hate. The Lib Dems, the Coalition and finally (and for them most deliciously) the Leveson proposals. That’s why they have devoted so many column inches, so much invective and such lip-smacking relish to the task. That was only to be expected. Fortunately in Nick Clegg, who has led our Party to government after 70 years in the wilderness, we have a leader who has shown time and again that he has the resilience and strength to ignore all this and get on with the job.

 

There are some times in politics – and, with no newspaper to be our bugle they come more often to Liberal Democrats than most – when you just have to stand there while the press dump ten buckets of manure over your head and still emerge, united, fighting – and as, hopefully this morning’s news will show – winning as well.

 

But if that’s not what this morning’s news shows, then I have say this to those in our Party who may be tempted to join the so far refreshingly non-existent headless chicken tendency, by flapping around the studios of Westminster squawking panic.  Take your lead instead from our outstanding by-election candidate Mike Thornton and the steadiness, energy and commitment of our team of mostly young Lib Dem activists who, as I write this in the last hours before the polls close, are getting on with the job of fighting the by-election of their lives (and mine) down in Eastleigh.

 

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