Cross-party cooperation: lessons from Paddy Ashdown’s tenure as Lib Dem leader
Should the Liberal Democrats seek to cooperate with Labour in some way and if so, how? That's a question being debated again in the Liberal Democrats in the aftermath of the 2019 election, so here is a re-run of an excellent account of a previous attempt, the one under Paddy Ashdown. It's Duncan Brack's chapter from The Alternative: towards a new progressive politics, kindly reproduced here with the permission of the author and editors. You can also read Tim Farron's chapter from the same book, about immigration, in an edition of Liberal Democrat Newswire. For more on this topic, see 6 ways to make cross-party political deals work, The Cook-Maclennan talks: lessons in cross-party cooperation and Lessons from history on Labour / Lib Dem cooperation: Kier Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald.
