POLITICS
Captain Ashdown leads his cosmic forces into the New Age
NOEL MALCOLM
It is hard to believe everything one reads in the newspapers, but I make a special effort with the Sunday Telegraph. An article there a few weeks ago, however, had me seriously wondering whether I was being hoaxed. It was a profile of a kind of person called the 'New Ager' — that is, someone who belongs to, or believes in, the 'New Age'. I have never met any such people, and even in the abstract I find it difficult to imagine that they exist. They are said to be devoted to what they think of as spiritual values, which include belief in radical Green ideas such as the 'Gala' theory (the idea that the whole Earth is a living, sentient being), cosmic forces, ley lines, alternative medicine and so on. And they are also said to be keen on enjoying all the advantages of late 20th-century civilisation, making lots of money and spending it not only on predictable things such as tubular furniture, but also on high-technology gadgets such as compu- ters.
There are cosmic-forces-freaks and there are computer-freaks, of course; but what is so improbable is that there should be people who are both at once. You would have thought that sooner or later these people must make a choice: do they believe the physicists and electrical en- gineers who can explain why their compu- ters work, or do they believe the other lot, who say that physics is bunk? Is it really humanly possible to agree with two such contradictory systems of belief at once?
Then I thought of Mr Paddy Ashdown, and realised that it was. He is the New Ager of British politics, and seems to be thriving on it. The central fact about him is his ability to believe two contradictory things at once; but he does also resemble the New Agers in the actual contents of his beliefs. He has said many times that `Green' issues are 'at the very centre of the new political philosophy'; but he has also never lost his obsession with technology. His pet idea is that the country desperately needs 'a national fibre-optic-based wide- band computer communication network with access terminals in every home'. This, he thinks, would not only revolutionise shopping. It would also 'set down the framework for all of us to have access to every piece of knowledge' — a dizzying prospect indeed, though I am not sure that even with one of these things in the house, we would be any closer to finding out what the Liberal Democrats' economic policies are.
Mr Ashdown was on fine form last week. In a series of interviews he explained that what really matters in any first-past-the- post system is not the number of seats won, but the proportion of the votes. At the same time he was celebrating as a great victory the results obtained by his party in the local elections, when their number of seats rose by 520, but their proportion of the vote fell by roughly four percentage points. And this was in an election where the system was weighted heavily in the Liberals' favour: in more than a third of the rural seats where the Liberals did so well, Labour did not even put up a candidate. Although Mr Ashdown's party can do spectacularly well in individual by-elections, its level of support has actual- ly fallen in every wider ballot (such as the European election) since 1987.
At the weekend, when he unveiled his grand strategy for the next general elec- tion, Mr Ashdown was at it again. 'I will be asking for a mandate from the British people', he told Jonathan Dimbleby, `to bring in a fair voting system — in every seat, in those we stand to win and those we do not'. Does this mean, asked Mr Dimb- leby, that if you then get 25 per cent of the vote, it will show that 75 per cent do not want your new voting system? Not at all, came the reply — 'people vote for all sorts of different reasons'. That is true, but it destroys Mr Ashdown's argument. If peo- ple vote tactically for Liberal candidates, for example, it will be because they have chosen to play the game of the present electoral system in a certain way. It will not be because they are taking part in Mr Ashdown's fantasy mandate-referendum. Paddy Ashdown has decided that not only he, but the entire electorate, should try to do two contradictory things at once. And why has he decided this? Because, whatev- er he may say about believing in 'the sovereignty of the people', he cannot be bothered to have a proper referendum after the general election.
Mr Ashdown is enjoying an exceptional- ly good press. I hesitate to say that it has now become Tory policy to say nice things about him, though it is certainly true that Tory managers understand the importance of keeping up the Liberal vote to stave off Labour in the general election. (`Oh no, they mustn't collapse', one Cabinet minis- ter told me: 'a nice solid 18 per cent would be about right'.) But at the moment there seem to be two basic reasons why Mr Ashdown is doing so well, and these reasons are somewhat — yes, you've gues- sed — contradictory. The first reason is that his party is not the Tory party: it is the protest-alternative for disaffected Tories in by-elections. And the second reason is that Mr Ashdown keeps supporting the Gov- ernment, on 'headline' issues such as Kuwait and the Kurds. This, together with a tendency to half-close his eyes and stare at the horizon, makes Mr Ashdown look statesmanlike. Of course, as an ex-officer in the Marines he gained a new air of authority during the Gulf war. Never mind that he spent years of his political career campaigning for the immediate removal of Cruise missiles, and for the abandonment of Trident, which he now wants to keep for bargaining purposes. It is no rare thing in a politician to adopt contradictory positions; one asks only that he should take them, as Mr Ashdown has taken his views on nuclear deterrence, one after the other, rather than both at once: Is there any policy on which Paddy Ashdown's views are clear, unequivocal and unchanging? His attitude to the EEC is at least distinctive. 'Let me be clear', he announced last year, 'What I am proposing is nothing less than a European govern- ment for a European Federal State.' He wants a European constitution along the lines of the American one, with a directly elected president appointing his own minis- ters, and a two-chamber legislature where the representatives of national government would have little more importance than Senators do in the United States. If that does not amount to a United States of Europe, I don't know what does. But here are Mr Ashdown's further thoughts on the matter: 'I hold no brief whatsoever for the creation of a European superstate. I want a comprehensive resettlement of the power of the nation state, with some power being passed up to Europe, but a lot more being passed down . .
I once tried to explain to Mr Ashdown the difference, as I understood it, between power and authority. He looked at me with bemused disbelief and finally said, 'But you sound like a political philosopher'. For a moment at least, I knew what it must feel like to be a physicist trying to explain electricity to a New Ager.
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