We don't know, and may not know until much closer to the next election, whether the ambitious gamble of luring the dependent off benefits and into work will have paid off for the poor as well as for the Exchequer. Conversely since some of the most popular and sympathetic figures in the Liberal Democrats grew out of the social democratic traditions of the pre-Thatcher Labour party, it isn't surprising that they are nervous about whether New Labour is any more, and in any sense, a redistributive party. When Shirley Williams heartily congratulated the Blair government for its constitutional advances on the Today programme yesterday but admitted to being not yet sure about its social policies, she was being not only true to herself but to the facts. It isn't, for example, all that surprising that activists worry about social authoritarianism in the Labour Party - especially when it is most apparent among some of Labour's most modernising tendency. When it concentrates too much on the "constructive" it risks submerging its own distinctiveness - and with it the separate attention - especially media attention - on which its electoral strength, and therefore its bargaining power, may eventually depend. In confronting this dilemma, Ashdown has to contend with a range of emotions - varying from wariness to extreme hostility - about Labour in his own party Some of these emotions are easy to understand. But this doesn't make the party's chronic dilemma any easier to resolve. It's pointed up by every hallowed demand on the Liberal agenda that Blair effortlessly grants.
The Lib Dems' official stance towards the Government is that of "constructive opposition". When it concentrates on the "opposition" it risks drying up the flow of favours, the most outstanding of which, a new electoral system for the Commons, is still no more than in the pipeline. And it is closer than at any time since the 1920s to securing electoral reform for the House of Commons, thanks to a Commission chaired by its own elder statesman Lord Jenkins, a figure whom Blair appointed out of deep regard and whom he cannot fail to take seriously when he reports in October. A Blair government has granted it the favour high handedly denied it by a Jim Callaghan 20 years ago: a new proportional system for electing the European Parliament in 1999 which will widen its base.
IF ALAN Price, on hand to entertain the guests last night at the Liberal Democrats' tenth anniversary party, didn't sing "Oh, Lucky Man", he should have done. The fact is that Paddy Ashdown had a lot to celebrate at the National Liberal Club bash. A party which Ashdown took over in 1988, when its poll rating was within the margin of error of zero, now stands at 15 per cent, with more MPs than it has had at any time since Lloyd George. Its leading figures sit regularly round the Cabinet table under the chairmanship of Tony Blair. It has seen the Blair government introduce a series of constitutional reforms dear to its own heart. It is entitled to expect that it will share power in the first Scottish government for three centuries.
