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EXTINCT PADDY
For most citizens of advanced industri- alised societies, natural selection has become irrelevant, a historical curiosity. They are insulated from Charles Darwin by state-funded healthcare and welfare. The weak, the wicked, the feckless are looked after by society, and encouraged to have children at the taxpayer's expense. One group, however, is still subject to the rule that only the fittest survive: politicians. The electorate has a nose for failure, an uncan- ny ability to detect irrelevancy. Parties and politicians whose time has passed are dropped unceremoniously without coun- selling or compensation. As Paddy Ash- down celebrates his tenth anniversary as leader of the Liberal Democrats this week, his party looks like the next candidate for culling.
A little over a year ago it all looked so promising. Tony Blair had been swept into Downing Street on a wave of hostility towards the Conservatives that also gave the Liberal Democrats 46 MPs; more than at any time since Lloyd George's 'Indian summer' in 1929. And Tony looked like a man Paddy could do business with. The new Prime Minister talked openly of his desire to create a coalition of the centre- loft, an alliance of Liberals and Labour to make the next 100 years 'a radical century'. He invited Paddy and four of his team on to a Cabinet committee to consider consti- tutional reform, and set up a commission under Lord Jenkins to prepare proposals for proportional representation, the Holy Grail of third party politics. Best of all, from Paddy's point of view, Tony seemed at heart a conservative; there would be plenty of political space for the Liberals out to Labour's left. Mr Ashdown must have thought that he had been chosen to lead his tribe back to the promised land of govern- ment after generations in exile.
A year later, and all these bright hopes have turned to dust. The price for involve- ment in the Blairite project was the impos- sibility of criticising it. Tory disarray gave Mr Ashdown an opportunity to establish the Liberal Democrats as the principal apposition; he could not take it. Instead, the Liberal position became increasingly indistinguishable from the government line. In part, this was Mr Blair's fault. His gov- ernment has shifted sharply to the left. The comprehensive spending review last week established New Labour as a socialist tax- and-spend party. This week's transport White Paper demonstrates that Mr Blair's team still has an old Labour hostility to the car, that potent symbol of independent cap- italism. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, has emerged as the driving force. He wants to create a socialist paradise in this sceptred isle. Mr Blair merely wants to be re-elected. Political power always passes to those with plans and the passion to force them through. And as Labour has shifted to the left, so Mr Ashdown's platform and pur- pose has been eroded.
Like the dinosaurs, however, it will take a
single cataclysmic event to push the Liberal Democrats from irrelevance to extinction. Unfortunately for those celebrating their leader's tenth anniversary, one such upheaval could be on the way. If Tony Blair accepts Lord Jenkins's proposals and backs the introduction of proportional represen- tation then Liberals may celebrate, but they would be foolish to do so. Labour and Lib- erals would almost certainly be pushed together to form a coalition government, further obliterating the distinction between the two parties. It would not be long before the electorate decided that, instead of vot- ing Liberal, they might as well be honest about the choice they were making and vote Labour. At the same time, the Tories would entrench their position as the princi- pal political alternative. Far from leading his party back to power, Mr Ashdown may be marching his troops into oblivion.
The Institute of Psychiatry has said that a happy family is more likely to be able to teach a baby to talk better and earlier than an unhappy one. Apparently environment dictates the quality and quantity of chil- dren's grammar and vocabulary.
As Tolstoy said, however, happy families are all the same but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The modern world greatly overrates happiness as a spur to achievement. Many literary giants, on the contrary, had miserable childhoods which caused them to compensate by doing greater and greater things.
Happy people tend to be lazy people. And just as most lovers are inclined to express their emotions in clichés, so joy makes few demands on the intellect. A con- sistently happy child is less likely to explore those outer plains of the imagination than one whose emotions are not rooted in blandness.
Children require stimulation as much as the easy pastures of contentment. There is a tendency to fear the consequences of push- ing young people too hard. But pushing people too hard is preferable to not pushing them at all. Man has achieved his greatest work through suffering, not placidity. A family that is occasionally unhappy will teach its child to talk in many languages.
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