Paddy Ashdown talks on Afghanistan

Paddy Ashdown, former Liberal Democrat leader, visited Lytchett Matravers last week (11 March) and spoke to a 150-strong audience in the packed village hall.

Paddy, together with local Lib Dem MP Annette Brooke, met with the local press beforehand and spoke about a number of issues including Britain’s role in Afghanistan, drawing on his personal experience as a former Royal Marine, diplomat and UN representative in the Afghanistan.

In his speech, Paddy spoke about the four great challenges facing Britain as the country in the future. He identified these are the economic crisis; Britain’s broken political system; the international power shift from the West to the East and climate change.

He expressed serious doubts about the ability of either Labour or the Conservatives to provide solutions to these unprecedented challenges and pointed instead to the Liberal Democrats as having the right approach.

He said, “Vince Cable, for example, was the only politician to warn of the coming recession, and he had campaigned against climate change as leader of the Lib Dems in the 1990s.” 

Afterwards Annette Brooke MP chaired a session in which Paddy answered questions from the audience. This covered topics as wide-ranging as Afghanistan and the threat of Islamist extremism in Pakistan, the devolution of power in Northern Ireland, and the possible democratisation of China.