POLITICS
Mr Ashdown and friends are suffering from a surfeit of small ideas
NOEL MALCOLM
You notice the distinctive qualities of the ancient Liberal civilisation the moment you enter the building. For a start, it takes only a moment to enter the building. The almost indescribably slow and intrusive security system used by the Tories here last year (I think I described it as like a visit to Lenin's tomb organised by El Al) has been swept aside. If that is what people's power means, give me more of it.
And the people are different, too. At the Labour and Tory conferences, the clientele can be roughly divided into three categor- ies. There are distant grandees at the top, a swirling mass of party hacks, back- scratchers and coterie-cultivators in the middle, and a large number of bemused non-careerist delegates at the bottom, who feel no more responsible for what is going on in front of them than they would if they were attending a garden party at Bucking- ham Palace. Maybe these divisions have their faint equivalents at the Liberal con- ference; but the grandees here are not very grand, and any truly ambitious careerist would, by definition, have chosen a diffe- rent party for his career. Most importantly, the ordinary delegates give the impression of thinking that it is their conference and that they are in charge. Sometimes, it is true, a disaffected delegate leaps to his feet and starts hurling complaints at the ros- trum. But usually, when this happens, the chairman immediately addresses the pro- tester by his Christian name. Even their fiercest disputes are tempered by a kind of domesticity which is almost unknown in the two main political parties.
The reasons for such a difference in atmosphere are not hard to find. This is a small party; and it is a party dominated by local councillors — people who are used to exercising real power, yet on a small scale. Such people exist, of course, in the two big parties; but there they are overawed by the holders or seekers of national, ministerial power.
And although power at the national level is what the Liberal Democrats, as a party, are meant to be striving to acquire, they feel an innate resentment towards any politician who actually thinks in terms of national power-politics. That is what riled them about Dr Owen, even before his refusal to merge; they may have dres§ed up their resentment this way and that, calling him a socialist or a crypto-Thatcherite, but what they really could not forgive was his evident, disdainful lack of interest in their peculiar, Shangri-la variety of politics. At the last elections, the Liberals have presented the country with a mass of small ideas, solutions to problems guaranteed to appeal to that small section of the electo- rate which thinks of politics as an exercise in bit-by-bit problem-solving. Sometimes the ideas are good ones, the sort of things that would emerge from a reasonably fertile think-tank. In their last manifesto, for example, there was an idea about helping labour mobility by granting tax relief to people who let rooms in their houses to lodgers. In the next manifesto, there will be an idea about controlling pollution from factories by issuing 'trade- able emissions licences': quota-permits which companies can sell off to other companies as they reduce the emission of pollutants from their own factories. The strong 'green' lobby in the party is especial- ly productive of such ideas; if a Liberal Democrat government ever managed to introduce all the clever schemes they have invented (energy-efficiency audits for all houses, with remission of stamp duty on the sale of the most efficient ones; 'coun- tryside management agreements' for all farms, drawn up with local planning au- thorities, establishing individual levels of subsidy for the preservation of wildlife habitats, etc., etc.), one half of the popula- tion would be permanently occupied in monitoring the other half, issuing its per- mits, checking its pollutants, counting the number of voles per acre, and so on.
If you try telling Liberal Democrats that they have too many small ideas and lack the one or two big ideas that win national elections, they will usually start talking about Europe. What idea could be bigger than that? And yet the Liberal love-affair with Europe is just a further illustration of the problem. Unused to the exercise of power at the national elections, they are happy to shuffle off the responsibilities of national governments onto some more distant (from their point of view, even more distant) bodies. The experience of a county councillor in this country involves spending large sums of money which are mainly handed down from a higher level; it involves applying policies, or fulfilling legal obligations, which are mainly determined at a higher level too. So the secret appeal of a federal Europe to the ordinary Liberal Democrat delegates at this conference is that it would turn national government into something more like a county council. Brussels and Strasbourg, they feel, must be their natural allies against Whitehall and Westminster: note, incidentally, how this feeling rests on the assumption that the Liberal Democrats will never actually form a government of their own.
So the Liberal Democrats' problem is a simple one: their small ideas are too specialised and too many, while their big idea is too big. The gap in the middle remains. What they still lack is a clear position on the handful of large-scale issues which are the real fighting-ground of an election — above all, on economic policy.
The main change here is a shift towards the free market: Thatcherism, it seems, has arrived even in Shangri-la. There have been motions in favour of wider share ownership, statements in favour of 'enter- prise and competition', and even an attack on national pay-settlements in the public sector — a piece of pure Thatcherism, dressed up (completely spuriously) as Liberal 'regionalism'. But all these mea- sures are counterbalanced by more and more pledges of public spending, on hous- ing, training, nursery education, adult education, energy conservation projects, 'technology transfer centres', and lashings and lashings of regional administration. In his address to the party rally on Monday night, Mr Ashdown denounced both Labour and the Conservatives for repre- senting nothing more than 'ameliorated Thatcherism'. His own party's policies now represent a mixture of ameliorated Major-
ism and ameliorated Kin nockism. It may ameliorate the Liberal Democrats, but it will not win them the breakthrough they are looking for at the next general election.
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