search, I could find only one sandal-shod delegate in the
hall — and he was the
editor of the Conference Gazette, who was
presumably doing it as a provocation. Beards are less hard to spot; but they are attached to the faces of schoolmasterly middle-aged men in jackets and ties, not young beardie-weirdies in tee-shirts. This is the new, earnest, polite, non-heckling and altogether non-troublesome Liberal Democratic Party.
If you look hard enough, of course, you can find a few unravelled strands of the old woolly fringe. The conference bookstall is well stocked with studies of lesbian fiction or 'the politics of breast-feeding'. The Young Liberal Democrats still hand out leaflets demanding immediate unilateral disarmament and the abandonment of civil nuclear power within 20 years. They are also very keen on animal rights, believing that 'the catching of fish with hooks' should become a criminal offence. They demand the prohibition of any form of ritual slaughter which is not preceded by the use of an anaesthetic — implying, perhaps, that Liberal Democrat candidates should not take part in general elections without being made to listen to a speech by Mr Robert Maclennan first.
But radical dissent has been notable by its absence from the conference floor. The debate which was trailed in the press as opening up a great split in the party — the emergency debate on the Gulf — produced a surprising display of agreement. An implicitly pacifist amendment, which de- manded that no military action be taken without new, express instructions from the UN, was defeated in a show of hands by a majority which I estimated as nine to one.
What has happened to the old, fractious, unpredictable and slightly dotty Liberal Party, to turn it into such a paragon of maturity and self-restraint? One thing that has happened, of course, is merger with the Social Democrats. This is the first assembly I have attended where the wounds of 1987 really do seem to have healed, where introspection is at an end, and where the whiff of mutual mistrust is no longer part of the atmosphere of fringe meetings and conference debates. Up on the platform the grandees of the old SDP are on display: Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, John Cleese . . . . And mingling with the delegates is a leavening of men in striped shirts, silk ties and expensive suits, who look as if they might be accountants of the claret-buying variety — or even real, live, successful businessmen.
But to attribute the new seriousness of the party to the influence of its ex-SDP membership is a doubtful argument. The business-friendly members of the old SDP — the ones who, though they felt vaguely guilty about making money, did at least acknowledge the importance of market mechanisms and business efficiency — seem to have had little or no influence on the thinking of the new party. Tuesday's debate, entitled 'Investing for Prosperity' (which, as one delegate complained, was the sole debate on the economy — one hour out of four days), was on a motion which read like a watered-down version of Labour policy: it called for 'the establish- ment of regionally based small firms invest- ment companies to provide equity and loan finance with low interest rates' — in other words, government-run investment banks. One policy document proposes that em- ployers should be not just encouraged but obliged to offer their employees a share in the ownership of the company; and throughout the conference the debates and consultative sessions have been informed by an almost palpable hostility to capital- ism and big business.
But then, as that delegate rightly com- plained, the discussion of economic reality has had only a very small place in this conference. Most delegates have been preoccupied with far loftier themes: a new, federalist Europe, and a new British con- stitution which would include a Bill of Rights, proportional representation, an elected Senate, and every Other bit of well-meaning _ ationalism you can think of.
This is the real explanation, I think, for the mood of harmonious seriousness which now reigns in the Liberal Democratic Party. The sort of person who, 20 years ago, was marching to ban the bomb or digging up cricket pitches to ensure the downfall of apartheid, now sits at home poring over the latest blueprint for an ideal world. Maverick enthusiasms have been superseded by something far more grave and high-minded; woolly radicalism has given way to the Higher Priggery.
European federalism and British consti- tutional reform may not be inherently priggish ideas, but they certainly attract priggishness to them in the way that a saucer of jam attracts wasps. The hallmark of priggery here is a special tone of outraged and offended moral superiority. It is a tone which becomes a substitute for argument, by implying that reasons need not be given because only fools or knaves would demand them. Thus Mr Ashdown refers in every speech to the great impera- tive of European integration, but seldom offers any reasons for it — beyond the tautologous one that if we fail to rush ahead with the rest we shall be left behind'. (Though, oddly enough, the one reason he did give in his fringe speech on Monday was pure inverted Ridleyism: fear of a dominant Germany, which must there- fore be deprived of its power to act independently.) This is a cause for the sake of which no exaggeration is too gross to be pressed into service; thus Mrs Thatcher does not want accountability in Europe, 'she wants the whole of Europe to be accountable to her', and so on.
On the home front exaggeration is also de rigueur. One curiously persistent theme, used in speeches by Malcolm Bruce, Sir Cyril Smith and Mr Ashdown, is that our present political system is not just unfair but 'corrupt' as well. Any foreigner listening to this would conclude that West- minster was a den of mafiosi. As for the party's plans for constitutional reform, some of them may indeed be plausibly rational (proportional representation, for example, is a very reasonable method to choose, once you assume that the purpose of an election is the same as that of an opinion poll). But in the week's debates the reasons were assumed, not given, and the opponents not criticised but de- nounced. And as soon as a real, practical issue came up — such as the case of Salman Rushdie — it became clear that the magic Bill of Rights would do nothing to solve it.
It always used to be said that there was a gap between the grass-roots 'community politics' of the Liberals and their national political programme. The message of this conference is that that gap now yawns wider than ever before. Between the prac- tical nitty-gritty of local Liberal councillors and the lofty certainties of Mr Ashdown there lies a huge and almost empty space, through which the Labour and Conserva- tive parties will pass unhindered at the next election.
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