POLITICS
Mr Ashdown discovers a new principle: no member, one vote
NOEL MALCOLM
History never entirely repeats itself, but there are times when politicians seem grimly determined to make it do so: When Mr Paddy Ashdown wrote his conciliatory letter to Dr David Owen last Sunday, he slipped up on only one point: he forgot that it is considered usual, in these circumst- ances, to take it round late at night, in person, to the doctor's Limehouse address, and then burst into tears on being told that is has been rejected.
Unlike Mr Maclennan last year, of course, Mr Ashdown knew that his propos- al would meet with a frosty reception. His plan for combining with the SDP in select- ing candidates for by-elections was simply a revised version of the 'joint open selec- tion' procedure which had been used by the Liberals and the SDP in the past (78 candidates were chosen in this way for the 1987 general election), and which Dr Owen has always denounced as 'merger by the back door'. Dr Owen's objections are twofold: the SLD will have a numerical advantage, and potential candidates from the SDP will be put under pressure to compromise on policies in order to court the SLD vote.
Mr Ashdown says that he will not consider any other method of joint 'selec- tion because he is not prepared 'to com- promise the one member, one vote demo- cracy of my party'; but this argument is at best disingenuous, and at worst simply fatuous. What he is proposing to his own party (or rather, dictating, since he has not invited them to vote on whether or not they want this type of arrangement with the SDP) is that alongside their precious system of 'one member, one vote', there should also be a system of 'no member, one vote'. To talk of sticking to his own party's internal constitution in this context is an absurdity, as he would quickly come to realise if it were a matter of making such an arrangement with one of the two major parties.
. Why then has the SLD leader bothered to engage in this highly publicised partial volte-face, knowing that his offer will be rejected, and knowing also that (given his recent condemnations of electoral pacts of any kind) it can only add to his reputation as 'Paddy Backdown'? The answer he would like to give is that he is a reasonable man, and that the extraordinary revival of the SDP's fortunes at the Richmond • by- election has so changed the political land- scape that it would be foolish not to make some attempt to re-draw the route map. But the real nature of the struggle between Messrs Ashdown and Owen is rather diffe- rent. The competition is not about which of the two can be the more reasonable; .it is about which of them can make the position of the other appear the more unreason- able. Since Dr Owen had proposed an electoral pact before the Richmond by- election, he had banked an enormous moral advantage which he wA able to cash in as soon as the votes for the two centre parties were counted. Now at least Mr Ashdown has won a short-term advantage of his own. When Dr Owen rejects the Ashdown proposal he is forced to put aside his exultant, told-you-so expression and wear instead the one which has become more familiar during the last 18 months: an expression which is sullen, cold, contemp- tuous and withdrawn.
Dr Owen has good reason to exult after Richmond — 16,909 reasons, to be precise. He is back in the foreground of British politics in a way that no would have dared to predict until the final days of the campaign. And yet this particular piece of good fortune has come at a very awkward time for him. It has put the spotlight on the two centre parties and yoked them together again in everyone's mind; but Dr Owen has been spending the last couple of months signalling not to the other centre party but to Labour. It is an inconvenient distraction to have to turn back to the SLD.
Cynics will say, of course, that his message to Labour was that he was prepar- ing to abandon ship, and wanted to know whether they would be willing to take him back on board. But his overtures were consistent with the broad electoral strategy which he has expounded ever since the last general election. Again and again he has argued that no centre party can hope to dislodge Labour; the best it can hope to do is to assist Labour in getting rid of the Conservatives, and in the process, dictate its terms for some kind of coalition govern- ment. In exploring the possibility of a link7up with Labour, Dr Owen Was dis- tancing himself even further from the leadership of the SLD, who proclaim, absurdly, that their party will replace Labour altogether within ten years.
The plan which Dr Owen has put for- ward for a short-term coalition government devoted to constitutional reform (above all, to introducing proportional representa- tion) offers what is probably the only conceivable model of a coalition for which people would actually vote — a coalition which would deliberately leave all the ordinary business of day-to-day legislation on one side. (This in itself augurs badly for the brave new 'post-PR world in which coalition government would be the norm and not the exception.) But although a few courageous souls in the Labour Party have expressed an interest in PR — Jeff Rooker, John Cunningham and Robin Cook there is no chance of Labour playing Dr Owen's game until it has lost at least one more general election. And in the mean- while the rules of the ordinary general election game which all parties have to abide by are heavily biassed against any sort of coalition-mongering. The most important rule of all states that it is not enough to share, with a second party your opposition to a third party. It may look as if it is enough when that third party is in government and is pushing through a succession of unpopular mea- sures. But at a general election the 'second party will have to promise measures of its own, some of which you will dislike just as much. Hypnotic chanting about the 'anti- Thatcher majority' has made people forget that the anti-Kinnock majority was even larger at the last election. Research pub- lished just after the election in the Guar- dian showed that the most important reason why former Alliance voters failed to vote for the Alliance was they were afraid of letting Labour in'. And if they over- come this fear in time for the next election, many of them will do the obvious thing and vote Labour — not enough of them, perhaps, to create a Labour victory, but just enough to ensure that the history of the centre parties continues to repeat itself for many a long year to come.
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