Speaking last week at an Ipsos MORI/King’s College London debate on political leadership, Ashdown said: “Politics used to be about a clash of principle and great ideas, and it’s become instead the politics of mere managerialism.”
This works “very nicely if you’re on a rising curve of prosperity”, he argued, but “don’t imagine that’s going to work in a period of declining prosperity. Because then the ideas have got to come back”. The absence of substantive debate, he said, leaves a vacuum, and “unless we reoccupy that space with the politics of belief and principle, there’s a real danger that what happens next is something rather ugly.”