The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800-2000 9780198714897, 0198714890

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

M ODE R N B R I T I SH P OL I T IC A L H I STORY, 1800 – 2 0 0 0

The Oxford Handbook of

MODERN BRITISH POLITICAL HISTORY, 1800–2000 Edited by

DAVID BROWN, ROBERT CROWCROFT, and

GORDON PENTLAND

1

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2018 The moral rights of the authors‌have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959071 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​871489–​7 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr0 4yy Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgements

Any endeavour of this sort rests on the willingness of colleagues to craft a wide-​ranging and ambitious essay in an era of increasing workloads and pressures. We would first and foremost like to acknowledge the skill, professionalism, and patience of the contributors to this book. An edited volume with more than 30 authors almost necessarily involves a near-​geological timescale for publication and some of them have waited for a considerable time to see their essays in print. We hope we have done them justice. The idea for this volume was germinated in the Lord John Russell pub near the British Library and the book itself was commissioned in the summer of 2013. Across the following years we have had the pleasure to work with a number of dedicated and professional editors. We would like to acknowledge the support of (in chronological order) Christopher Wheeler, Robert Faber, and Cathryn Steele and all of their colleagues at Oxford University Press. Assembling a team of authors for the Handbook was itself a revealing insight into the place of political history within the modern academy. We were conscious at the outset that a volume comprising contributions only from those who had already reached the conventional heights of the academic profession might make a claim to be authoritative, but would lack diversity in personnel and approaches. We therefore initially invited a mixture of men and women and senior, early, and mid-​career scholars working within different contexts (both inside and outside universities). We own that we were slightly disappointed as editors that our approaches did not yield a more diverse group of contributors, however pleased we were with the faultless credentials of those who did take the bait. The final roster of contributors is, at least, broadly representative of those currently researching and teaching modern British political history. A final note on one would-​be contributor. We approached Michael Roberts of Macquarie University early in the process to write a chapter on pressure groups and lobbies. He replied indicating his enthusiasm for the project, but also informing us that he had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and advising us to consider implementing ‘an unsentimental contributor risk management system’! Given his expertise, we wanted to commission Michael and he worked on his chapter, sending us notes and a sketch on 1 July 2015, beyond which point he physically could not continue. Sadly, he passed away a week later on 8 July. We had hoped to publish a version of his chapter, but it was not in a sufficiently advanced state for this to be possible and we had no desire to put his name to anything which was below the exemplary standards of his published scholarship. We would, nonetheless, like to acknowledge his truly humbling example of commitment and professionalism and dedicate this volume to his memory.

Contents

List of Figures and Tables  List of Contributors 

xi xiii

1. Introduction  David Brown, Robert Crowcroft, and Gordon Pentland

1

PA RT I   C ON C E P T S A N D H I S TOR IO G R A P H I E S 2. Political Ideas and Languages  David Craig

13

3. High Politics  Steven Fielding

32

4. Popular Politics Malcolm Chase

48

PA RT I I   I N ST I T U T ION S , S T RU C T U R E S , A N D  M AC H I N E RY 5. The State  Philip Harling

67

6. Parliament  Philip Salmon

83

7. Prime Minister and Cabinet  Andrew Blick

103

8. The Civil Service  Hugh Pemberton

121

9. Trade Unions  Richard Whiting

137

viii   Contents

10. The Press  David Brown

154

11. Devolution  James Mitchell

173

12. Local Government  Ben Weinstein

189

13. The Monarchy  Andrzej Olechnowicz

205

14. Religion and the Churches  S.J.D. Green

223

PA RT I I I   PA RT I E S , D O C T R I N E S , A N D L E A DE R S 15. Political Parties  Angus Hawkins

247

16. Ideology in Action  Jeremy Nuttall

266

17. Whigs and Liberals  Ian Packer

288

18. Tories and Conservatives  John Charmley

306

19. The Labour Party  Lawrence Black

325

20. ‘Third’ and Fringe Parties  Kevin Morgan

343

21. The Role of the Politician in the Democratic Regime  Robert Crowcroft

361

PA RT I V   E L E C T ION S A N D P OP U L A R P OL I T IC S 22. Parliamentary Reform  Gordon Pentland

383

Contents   ix

23. Elections  Luke Blaxill

400

24. Women and Politics  Jennifer Davey

417

25. Political Communication  Laura Beers

434

26. Petitioning and Demonstrating  Henry Miller

452

PA RT V   C HA L L E N G E S 27. Democracy  James Thompson

471

28. The Economy  Jim Tomlinson

490

29. Imperial Policy  Simon C. Smith

508

30. War and the State  Simon Ball

525

31. Britain and Europe  Geoffrey Hicks

544

32. Welfare and the State  Pat Thane

563

EPILOGUE 33. In Defence of Contemporary History  Anthony Seldon and Mark Davies

583

Index 

601

List of Figures and Tables Figures 6.1 Number of public and private/​local acts passed each year, 1801–​1999 

89

6.2 Proportion (%) of acts that were public or private/​local each year, 1801–​1999

90

6.3 Number of standing orders regulating public and private business, 1801–​1990 

91

8.1 Number of civil servants (FTE), 1902–​2015 

127

Tables  6.1 Main procedural reforms (public business) associated with ‘growth of ministerial control’ 

86

28.1 State and ‘para-​state’ employment in the UK, 1978–​2008 

504

30.1 Levi’s estimate of expenditure on the armed forces as a percentage of state expenditure in the mid-​nineteenth century 

530

30.2 Avebury’s estimate of expenditure on the armed forces as a percentage of state expenditure at the turn of the century 

530

30.3 Public expenditure projection at 1969 prices 

535

30.4 Defence, health, and social security expenditure in the Thatcher era 

542

30.5 Defence, health, and social security expenditure in the Major era 

542

List of Contributors

Simon Ball is Professor of International History and Politics at the University of Leeds. Laura Beers is Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Birmingham. Lawrence Black is Professor of Modern History at the University of York. Luke Blaxill is Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in History at Anglia Ruskin University. Andrew Blick is Lecturer in Politics and Contemporary History at King’s College, London. David Brown is Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton. John Charmley is Pro-Vice-​Chancellor (Academic Strategy) at St Mary’s University. Malcolm Chase is Professor of Social History at the University of Leeds. David Craig is Associate Professor of Modern British History at Durham University. Robert Crowcroft is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Edinburgh. Jennifer Davey is Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of East Anglia. Mark Davies is an independent researcher. Steven Fielding is Professor of Political History at the University of Nottingham. S.J.D. Green is Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds and Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford. Philip Harling is Gaines Professor of the Humanities at the University of Kentucky. Angus Hawkins is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Keble College at the University of Oxford. Geoffrey Hicks is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of East Anglia. Henry Miller is Senior Research Fellow in History at Durham University. James Mitchell is Professor of Public Policy at the University of Edinburgh.

xiv   List of Contributors Kevin Morgan is Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Manchester. Jeremy Nuttall is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Kingston University. Andrzej Olechnowicz is Assistant Professor of Modern British History at Durham University. Ian Packer is Reader in Modern British History at the University of Lincoln. Hugh Pemberton is Reader in Contemporary British History at the University of Bristol. Gordon Pentland is Reader in History at the University of Edinburgh. Philip Salmon is Editor of the 1832–​1945 House of Commons Section at the History of Parliament. Anthony Seldon is Vice Chancellor of the University of Buckingham. Simon C. Smith is Professor of International History at the University of Hull. Pat Thane is Research Professor in Contemporary British History at King’s College, London. James Thompson is Reader in Modern British History at the University of Bristol. Jim Tomlinson is Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow. Ben Weinstein is Teaching Fellow in Modern British History at the University of Edinburgh. Richard Whiting is Emeritus Professor of Modern British History at the University of Leeds.

chapter 1

Introdu c t i on David Brown, Robert Crowcroft, and Gordon Pentland

Modern British political history (and, indeed, the discipline of political history as a whole) seems, to us at least, to be in a curious state. The field is wider and its contents more diverse than ever before. At the same time it lacks the coherence and, frequently, the self-​confidence that other scholarly enterprises seem to possess (and which political history itself once enjoyed in abundance). This paradox seemed to us to offer a compelling rationale for a volume in the Oxford Handbook series. When Geoffrey Elton published his Political History: Principles and Practice in 1970, it constituted a belated effort to codify, and justify, the primacy of a set of historical concerns which was already perceived as being under challenge within universities. As an addendum to his much better known Practice of History (1969), substantially the same enemies stalked its pages: ‘the abstract vocabulary of the logician or the proliferating jargon of the sociologist’.1 While it is possible to debate the reality and extent of a ‘crisis’ of political history, the sort of narrative laid out by Elton in 1970—​of a well-​established craft, with its own rules of procedure, under assault from interlopers from and fellow travellers of other disciplines—​has never really gone away.2 Elton’s own defences became even more shrill into the 1980s, when some discussions within political history reflected even more glaringly wider debates about the form and function of the humanities as a whole.3 The answers to that hackneyed question as to whether there is and has been a crisis in political history can be caricatured as revolving around two poles. At one, practitioners bemoan the dethroning of ‘serious’ political history in favour of more modish approaches and, in more recent times, a seemingly endless and disorienting series 1 

G.R. Elton, Political History: Principles and Practice (London, 1970), p. 57. For an elegant unpicking of Elton’s focus on ‘craft’ and ‘technique’ see Q. Skinner, ‘Sir Geoffrey Elton and the Practice of History’, TRHS, 7 (1997), 301–​16. 3  See G.R. Elton, Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study (Cambridge, 1991). 2 

2    David Brown, Robert Crowcroft, and Gordon Pentland of ‘turns’. Political history has lost any sense of common endeavour, let  alone pre-​ eminence, and drowned in the interdisciplinary soup of contemporary academia. At the other pole, the prognosis is more cheerful. There is no crisis and, in fact, political history carries all before it. The dramatic expansion of prevailing definitions of ‘power’ has entailed a similar expansion of definitions of ‘politics’ and therefore of political history. Nowhere has this tendency been more marked than in the proliferation in recent decades of discussions of the ‘political culture’ rather than the ‘politics’ of modern Britain. All history is political history. In practice, of course, historians tend to be less imperialistic in how they place themselves, more open-​minded in acknowledging the creative impact of other disciplines, and more comfortable with the porous nature of disciplinary boundaries. Most would, we suspect, find Peter Clarke’s formulation unobjectionable: ‘I don’t want to claim that what I pass off as political history is what all political historians ought to be doing. But I am reasonably confident that my own range of interests must be defined as political history, if only because none of the other conventional labels would fit.’4 Looking at the tables of contents of ‘general’ history journals is not an infallible guide to the state of any discipline, but does offer a useful illustration. While political history of various descriptions (with constitutional and diplomatic history pre-​eminent) dominates the first hundred years of the English Historical Review (1886–​1986), for example, modern British politics is scarcely a marginal concern thereafter. At the same time, as judged by source material and subject matter, ‘political’ history can be found in an ever wider range of journals, whatever their disciplinary slant. Our impression then is that interest in, engagement with, and research into Britain’s ‘political’ past has never been in a more vibrant state of health. That is said with the obvious caveat that its relative primacy has vanished.5 The idea that political history represents the only kind of serious history is clearly unsustainable. No one, however—​not even Elton—​has attempted to sustain it. Assessments that fret about the increasingly disparate nature of political history may be closer to the mark, but are perhaps guilty of imagining a golden age that never existed. Political history as practised from the second half of the twentieth century has always been ‘a fractured field of intellectual inquiry’.6 There have certainly been crises within and challenges to especially dominant ways of understanding and narrating Britain’s political past—​as a heroic story of the unfolding of Britain’s constitution, as an epic tale of class formation, struggle, and dissolution, or as a substantially closed and self-​referential system—​but these reflect the health of an area of inquiry whose suppositions, practices, and assumptions have been constantly questioned.

4  T.P. Wiseman, G.R. Elton, C. Russell, R. Hutton, R. Foster, J. Turner, K.O. Morgan, and P. Clarke, ‘What Is Political History?’, History Today, 35:1 (1985), 17. 5  A similar line was taken in S. Pedersen, ‘What Is Political History Now?’, in D. Cannadine, ed., What Is History Now? (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 36–​56. 6  J. Lawrence, ‘Political History’, in S. Berger, H. Feldner, and K. Passmore, eds., Writing History: Theory and Practice (London, 2003), p. 183.

Introduction   3 That political history has felt or appeared more fractured than other areas of historical inquiry may be ascribed to a number of things. First is the unusually wide interpretation of which its central concerns are susceptible. For example, whatever else they might find objectionable, many historians would endorse one of Elton’s opening statements: ‘Power constitutes the essential theme of political history.’7 At the exact point that definitions of that slippery central category were required, of course, very real disagreements would begin and very divergent paths might be taken. Second, any sense of insecurity might be laid at the feet of the idiosyncratic trajectory of political history within universities, one peculiarly marked in Britain but also apparent within many other ‘national’ historiographies. Dethroned as the pre-​eminent concern of an entire discipline, it was not armed with the weaponry of insurgent sub-​ disciplines: dedicated journals and monograph series, annual conferences, professional associations, and all the attendant sense of identity and coherence (however fuzzy the boundaries of the subject or however hotly contested the methodologies) that these necessarily confer. On the whole, historians of modern British politics have had to look for professional homes elsewhere, and the outlooks of historians who find them in, for example, the Political Studies Association and the Social History Society are likely to be very different indeed. Third, British political history has always had one eye on the contemporary politics of the real world. Many prominent historians have been vocal in their political views, whether of left, right, or centre. Arguably, it is usually not very difficult (and is an enjoyable academic parlour game) to infer the politics of the less voluble ones from their published work. An intermittent sense of ‘crisis’ in British political history thus maps broadly onto tectonic shifts within British political life itself. The current volume, therefore, makes no grand claims either to chart (still less to resolve) a singular ‘crisis’ within modern British political history or to build an impermeable sub-​disciplinary wall around it. It does, nevertheless, mark one opportunity to bring some of these questions into focus. It embodies more than thirty chapters, all of which fit the bill as ‘modern British political history’ in terms of their subject matter, but which demonstrate just how promiscuously historians of past politics in Britain have borrowed both from other disciplines and from other historical methodologies. Before considering the shape and content of the volume, it might be useful to establish its rationale in terms of demand, supply, and timeliness. The political history of modern Britain is still widely taught, both within schools and at all levels within universities. Such efforts have an enormously rich and rapidly proliferating body of specialist scholarship, summary accounts, and collections of sources on which to proceed. Conversations with colleagues at conferences and strained efforts to produce our own reading (or, increasingly, ‘resource’) lists highlighted the absence of any volume which attempted either to survey the current state of the field, or even to locate the field itself. There are numerous useful essays by historians and volumes produced by

7 Elton, Political History, p. 4.

4    David Brown, Robert Crowcroft, and Gordon Pentland colleagues within Politics departments (many of which can be found in the footnotes of individual essays), but nothing that came close to the Oxford Handbooks in terms of usability and accessibility for teaching and research. The volume’s timeliness has, if anything, been augmented in the period between its conception and completion. It was discussed and then commissioned a few years after the financial crisis of 2007–​8 and the series of scandals that rocked Britain’s political establishment; as authors were approached and worked on their contributions, referendums on Scottish independence and membership of the European Union came and went; and we have witnessed a volatile and unpredictable series of elections both for Westminster and for other representative institutions in the UK. Across all of these developments, there has been a pervasive tendency among politicians and their publics to mobilize historical parallels (whether well informed or not) and an effort to understand the present and future in terms of the past. In asking contributors to provide snapshots of how historians have approached, and might consider in the future, key aspects of modern Britain’s political past, this volume provides one means of grounding and informing those debates.

I In developing the Handbook, we quite deliberately avoided being prescriptive in terms of how contributors should tackle their essays. Certainly, we hoped that the volume would synthesize and reflect on the state of political history, but we were also keen to encourage contributors to press at the limits of existing knowledge to set the agenda for future research. Imposing a uniformity of approach seemed likely to prove obstructive of that latter objective, so we gave authors a mandate to proceed as they themselves thought best. Rather than establishing a set structure and approach, the volume seemed likely to be more intellectually fruitful and provocative if contributors were empowered to strike out on their own. We believe this diversity is a considerable asset. Not only has it avoided a tiresome rigidity across a book containing more than 30 essays, but it also meant that contributors have exceeded our expectations to produce stimulating essays and have frequently grasped the opportunity to be argumentative and bold. Taken together, the essays more than match the aims of producing fresh perspectives, rethinking prevailing conceptual frameworks and periodizations, and helping to highlight research agendas for the coming years. Some of the pieces in the volume are broadly chronological explorations of their subjects. Others adopt a ‘core sample’ approach. Quite a few essays take the form of sustained historiographical discussions. Several are more akin to ‘think-​pieces’. The Handbook is also unquestionably a collection of its times, not only in being at the cutting edge of current scholarship, but also in that many of the essays are written with an eye on developments in the real world of twenty-​first-​century politics. Pertinent topics

Introduction   5 are plentiful. The fortunes of society and the economy; the nature and trajectories of political parties; the machinery of state; issues of political communication; the strategic dilemmas confronting governors; and even the survival, as a political entity, of the United Kingdom itself are all here. As readers will see, that tangible connection between political history as a theme for research and writing and the tensions and challenges of contemporary political life—​always a feature of the best work in the discipline—​retains its vitality. That is a good thing. Some of the topics covered in the Handbook were manifestly so important that their inclusion was a matter of necessity. Others were the subject of considerable discussion. Unfortunately, even a volume as large as this one cannot hope to encompass every possible topic or approach. This necessarily entailed regrettable omissions, though we hope that the number of gaps is relatively small and forgivable. The constraints of the volume necessitated similarly regrettable omissions of personnel. We were simply unable to invite quite a few eminent scholars and exciting younger historians to participate in what we hope will be an important text. This was very difficult. The fact that we were spoilt for choice in approaching contributors for most (if not all) chapters is, however, further testimony to the rude health of the volume’s subject. The volume is structured in five parts. The first part, ‘Concepts and Historiographies’, examines a number of the dominant preoccupations and conceptual problems that have shaped the discipline. These have generated major bodies of literature which demanded sustained scrutiny and reflection. The second, ‘Institutions, Structures, and Machinery’, revisits some of the major components of the British political system, both those within and those outside the apparatus of the state. That perhaps represents a more ‘traditional’ way of approaching political history. The subjects covered, the approaches adopted, and the suggestions for future research in fact highlight the gains to be made by viewing familiar topics through new lenses. The third part, ‘Parties, Doctrines, and Leaders’, represents another well-​established set of historical concerns. In approaching what would appear to the layman or laywoman as the very essence of political history, these chapters mine seams which have produced rich bodies of scholarly literature, but themselves offer fresh takes and identify new problems. The fourth part of the Handbook, ‘Elections and Popular Politics’, considers the multiplicity of interactions between politicians and their publics. Such concerns have long captivated political historians, and indeed work in this vein has arguably dominated the field in recent decades, frequently collected under the awkward and problematic umbrella term ‘new political history’. It is timely to take stock of these developments and a number of the chapters in this section showcase promising new avenues for research. The fifth part, ‘Challenges’, explores a number of broad policy areas that, after 1800, have posed (and in all cases continue to pose) consistent problems for the British state and for politicians. Finally, an epilogue to the volume reflects on the important work of writing ‘contemporary’ political history. It goes without saying that this structure is not the only one that might have been adopted in shaping the Handbook. Others might well have been equally fruitful. Nonetheless, it is the one that we thought would offer the best chance of achieving the

6    David Brown, Robert Crowcroft, and Gordon Pentland initial goals for the volume and would, we hoped, give contributors a relatively free hand to proceed as they judged best.

II As Geoffrey Elton acknowledged, the ‘reaction against political history, though often ill-​ informed and sometimes silly, has its virtues’, and not the least of these was ‘the stimulus given to political history to improve itself ’.8 If social history was once the history of people with the politics left out, then political historians have responded by showing that the history of people is necessarily political; they just needed to unearth that history more effectively. While some ‘traditional’ political history was indeed written in a social and intellectual vacuum, this does not mean that a more universal or wide-​ranging approach should be uncritically all-​consuming. When John Turner judged that political history is ‘almost anything you can think of, and probably much that you can’t’, he counselled colleagues to ‘write it at your peril’.9 Write it we should, and with some confidence. As the contributions to this volume attest, political history is in rude health. It has navigated various ‘turns’ and, while the route is not linear and while political history continues to spread over a diverse terrain, it is asking new and important questions about the political past. We have moved a long way from A.J.P. Taylor’s dismissive attitude to the History of Parliament project, for example, which he damned with the judgement that all we needed to do was to consult Hansard for an account of parliamentary history, since that history could be found in ‘what members heard and said, in what they felt, not in what they were’.10 Yet what those members were is much more than an exercise in collective biography, and while it is useful to know what motivated a politician, we can ask more penetrating questions than Namier did. Politicians and political actors were not and are not autonomous beings, but simultaneously both the products and shapers of their political environment. It was the conventional preoccupation of the political historian to deal almost exclusively with the people who exercised power, however, that led many critical friends to warn of the subject’s increasing irrelevance unless it recognized that it ‘depends for its vitality on a close involvement with its intellectual neighbours’.11 As was recognized some time ago, by borrowing from ‘the very social sciences which had pushed it into the background’, political history would ‘return to force’, as a complement to other analytical frameworks (rather than as a competitor).12 Many ‘newer’ forms of historical 8 

Elton in Wiseman et al., ‘What Is Political History?’, 11. Turner in Wiseman et al., ‘What Is Political History?’, 16. 10  A.J.P. Taylor, The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792–​1939 (London, 1957), p. 40. 11  J. Tosh, The Pursuit of History (4th edn., Harlow, 2006), p. 124. 12  E. Hobsbawm, On History (London, 1997), p. 190 (quoting J. Le Goff, ‘Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?’, in Felix Gilbert and Stephen R. Graubard, eds., Historical Studies Today (New York, 1972), p. 340). 9 

Introduction   7 enquiry might well continue to be accommodated within ‘conventional’ political history, or rather be taken as prompts to broaden its purview. To take but one example, as one recent definition suggests, environmental history’s concerns with understanding attempts to manage or control the environment are, at base, ‘a struggle among interests about power’—​as good a definition of politics as six words can achieve.13 This volume has adopted a national perspective as one means of organizing the work of political historians. The choice was to present this history as ‘British’, a term which is, of course, both convenient and problematic. Broadly speaking, our intention was to invite contributors to take the fluctuating ‘union-​state’ assembled in 1801 as the principal unit for analysis. A critical mass of shared institutions and personnel, issues and challenges, and political culture and practices for much of the period under review justified adopting the term. We did so, however, without any intention of suggesting any rigid or prolonged homogeneity between the political histories of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.14 Still less did we wish to ascribe any sense of impermeability to the political life of ‘these islands’. Indeed, we hope the ways in which authors have dealt with these issues also invites a critical engagement with the meaning of a national (British) political history, and its relationships with other frameworks: local, ‘four nations’, international, or global. One should bear in mind Susan Pedersen’s observation that British history, particularly when it focuses on political institutions, has tended to measure and analyse its subjects against their own pasts, rather than adopting a comparative perspective stretching across different political cultures and contexts.15 This may have led to self-​referential accounts that inevitably play up and refurbish notions of exceptionalism. At the same time, a distinctive British political history still needs to be written alongside wider, globalized accounts to draw attention to that very distinctiveness. As has been noted already, this volume has not attempted to provide anything approximating to a comprehensive analysis of British political history over two centuries. Nor has it attempted to provide an (immediately dated) snapshot of ‘current scholarship’. It does have elements of survey and assessment, but it also looks forward, anticipating, or proposing new directions in the field. The political historian continues to be drawn to the written record, and sometimes uses that as a justification for focusing on the limited interests and activities of the (educated) elite,16 but just as the so-​called linguistic turn drew attention more closely to the language of those sources, non-​textual forms—​visual, material, and indeed sonic—​ are increasingly analysed by historians who want to capture the dynamics of political 13 

D. Hughes, What Is Environmental History? (London, 2006), p. 24. Different ‘national’ treatments of politics across the same period can be found in other books in this series, especially T.M. Devine and J. Wormald, eds., Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford, 2012); A. Jackson, ed., Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (Oxford, 2014). 15  Pedersen, ‘What is Political History Now?’, p. 47. 16  See, for example, John Vincent, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to History (rev. ed., London, 2001). Vincent’s argument that the history of pre-​or illiterate societies is ‘unsound’ is dismissed by Richard Evans in his In Defence of History (London, 1997), p. 164. 14 

8    David Brown, Robert Crowcroft, and Gordon Pentland culture in the widest sense.17 The desire to embrace the rich opportunities of these different sources, breaching, and perhaps also bridging, the gaps between high and low or official and unofficial history, has in recent years stimulated a number of innovative studies of space, place, environment, and mindsets as historians have looked to delineate political cultures and assess anew qualities of leadership and engagement.18 There is always scope to take this work further, but as chapters in this volume suggest, this should not be at the expense of an attention to the institutional frameworks and political structures which shaped that culture. But as those institutions are themselves challenged by shifts in society—​not least the increasing demands for greater devolution and more political accountability, alongside forces of globalization—​then the nation-state itself as a framework for analysis becomes itself a subject of investigation. There is simply no point trying to write a (Whiggish) narrative of a ‘rise of democracy’ in modern Britain, which a couple of generations ago might have lent itself as a workable substructure for a volume on modern British political history. That linear, one-​ dimensional story of politics simply fails to capture the nuance, intricacy, and messiness of political developments over a couple of hundred years. Greater attention to the multiple meanings of political thoughts and actions inevitably leads to more diverse interpretations of the political past. A genuine question raised by a project such as this one is: in what ways should British political history be defined and studied? (We take it as a given that it should). Writing across two centuries of political history in which the idea of who counted, and what constituted legitimacy—​to say nothing of the shifting boundaries (geographical and political)—​poses considerable challenges. It also underlines the value of efforts such as this one to canvas bird’s-​eye views, however partial. Common prescriptions emerge from a number of chapters, whose authors urge historians to consider and test the exceptionalism of case studies against the validity of wider norms, to interrogate the similarities and differences between perceptions and realities, and to eschew neat simplifications in favour of embracing the tensions and inconsistencies in Britain’s political past. It is important both to embrace but also to interrogate the label of political history. As our contributors make abundantly clear, it has meaning, but should not act as a

17  See, for example M. Nixon, G. Pentland, and M. Roberts, ‘The Material Culture of Scottish Reform Politics, c.1820–​c.1884’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 32 (2012), 28–​49; K. Bowan and P. Pickering, Sounds of Liberty: Music, Radicalism and Reform in the Anglophone World, 1790–​1914 (Manchester, 2017). 18  To cite a small, but influential, sample, J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–​1867 (Cambridge, 1993); J. Vernon, ed., Re-​Reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1996); J. Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009); P. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999); M. Bentley, Lord Salisbury’s World: Conservative Environments in Late-​Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2001). For a critical assessment of some of these works, see M. Bentley, ‘Victorian Politics and the Linguistic Turn’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), 883–​902.

Introduction   9 constraint. The boundaries of political history are fluid ones, but it takes work to exploit that fluidity. Jon Lawrence has rightly noted that: While high political histories often exaggerate this isolation from external [or popular] pressures, pretending that the world of elite politics is all but hermetically sealed from demotic influences, histories of popular politics too often make the opposite mistake—​assuming that state power is of no matter, and that the discursive and legislative strategies of ‘elite’ politicians played little part in shaping plebeian political traditions. To end with an old cliché, they are the twin dragons we must slay if political history is to overcome its schizophrenic mind-​set—​if it is to transcend the unhelpful dichotomies of ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ or ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ in favour of a systematic exploration of the interconnectedness of politics.19

Political history is thus both precise and ‘scientific’ (or quantifiable) but also woolly, amorphous, and subjective. It is the task of the modern political historian to embrace these differences; build on the diverse questions, methods, and preoccupations evident in this volume; and continue to ask new questions.

19 

Lawrence, ‘Political History’, p. 199.

Pa rt  I

C ON C E P T S A N D H I S TOR IO G R A P H I E S

chapter 2

P olitical Ide as a nd L anguag e s David Craig

‘My objection to liberalism’, said Disraeli in 1848, ‘is this:  that it is the introduction into the practical business of life of the highest kind—​namely, politics—​of philosophical ideas instead of political principles’.1 The future Prime Minister was making a point about Palmerston’s foreign policy, but in doing so he encapsulated a central problem in modern political history. On the one hand, politics was routinely defined as a practical matter that was ill served when ‘theorists’ and ‘visionaries’—​in this case, liberals—​ were in power, but on the other, those who ruled were still expected to have ‘principles’.2 What, it may be asked, were ‘principles’ if they were not a form of ‘ideas’, albeit in some sense ‘unphilosophical’? Just as politicians have circled nervously around these issues, so too have historians over the course of the twentieth century. It is not simply that intellectual fashions have changed over this period—​it is that the way the field of ‘politics’ has developed has shaped how historians have thought about ‘ideas’. First, we might notice the steady separation between the disciplines and departments of ‘History’ and ‘Politics’—​often, but not exclusively, called ‘Political Science’—​which has created barriers to cross-​fertilization and interdisciplinary dialogue. As a consequence, second is the fact that the field of ‘history of political thought’ largely drifted towards ‘Politics’. There, it generated its own scholarly concerns which, although animated and important in their own right, have created problems when transplanted back into the field of ‘political history’. Third, the way that ‘political history’ itself has defined ‘politics’ has further shaped the role accorded to ‘ideas’. When defined as the pragmatic concerns of a narrow elite, the ‘ideas’ typically discussed by historians of political thought have often seemed rarefied and irrelevant to ‘politics’. The aim of this chapter is to sketch these trends, and

1 

Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5 June 1848, cols. 396–7. D. Craig, ‘Statesmanship’, in D. Craig and J. Thompson, eds., Languages of Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 44–67. 2 

14   David Craig to indicate some of the ways in which it is possible to insist that politics is saturated with ‘ideas’ without abandoning a belief in its murky realism.

I The ‘history of political thought’, as Stefan Collini has persuasively shown, is an ‘ineliminably hybrid activity’.3 Since it has generated influential methodological debates, but also problematic intellectual practices, it is useful to consider its peculiar origins, and its subsequent disciplinary locations. As a field, it started to coalesce towards the end of the nineteenth century—​the chief figures in Britain were Pollock, Carlyle, and Figgis. Collini sees four distinct impulses feeding into its early identity, although varying in different national contexts: the tradition of moral philosophy; theories of the state, especially as generated by engagement in jurisprudential theory and constitutional practice; a style of constitutional and political history that examined the ideas and attitudes of participants in significant moments in the past, for example during the Civil War in the 1640s; and finally, the history of earlier attempts to study politics. In effect, then, the ‘history of political thought’ was formed at the intersection of philosophy, law, history, and politics. Each of these concerns tended to generate their own particular core texts, and so to the standard classics of moral philosophy were added legal treatises and then works of writers thought to have had a major impact on the politics of their day—​Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Marx, for instance. This ‘hybridity’ also proved troubling for its disciplinary location: it tilted towards philosophy in Oxford, and towards history in Cambridge, but in most universities over the twentieth century it found an uneasy home in Politics departments. There it attached itself to the study of ‘political theory’, which itself had to fight for recognition as the empirical and behavioural revolution took hold across the discipline. So, if ‘political theory’ could be justified normatively, then ‘history of political thought’ had ultimately to serve the same master—​and in Politics departments the same people tended to teach both. This has meant that for much of the century the ‘history of political thought’ has had an ambiguous relationship to the discipline of history. It might seem as if the historicist revolution in the subject resolved that ambiguity, but this is not the case. Certainly, the pioneers of the ‘Cambridge School’—​J.G.A. Pocock, John Dunn, and Quentin Skinner—​all found the historical approach congenial, because they had been trained as historians, and exposed to ‘political thought’ in that disciplinary context. Dunn’s argument was directed partly against a form of economic determinism which turned major thinkers into bearers of class interest (Plato as voice of aristocratic anti-​democrats; Locke as the doyen of bourgeois individualists), but mainly against philosophers whose ‘histories’ were transparently anachronistic—​asking 3  S. Collini, ‘Postscript. Disciplines, Canons and Publics: The History of “the History of Political Thought” in Comparative Perspective’, in D. Castiglione and I. Hampsher-​Monk, eds., The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge, 2001), p. 295.

Political Ideas and Languages    15 questions that their subjects could not possibly have intended to answer, finding levels of coherence that were unlikely to exist, and assuming that ‘great’ thinkers always spoke to the concerns of the present.4 In a series of articles, Skinner developed a rigorous methodology which drew on speech-​act theory to argue that the recovery of the intentions of agents (not just what they said, but what they were doing in saying it) would produce a genuinely historical account of political thought which would also reveal how a diverse range of thinkers succeeded in altering the terms of political life.5 As Samuel Moyn has recently argued, these polemics were aimed at political philosophers, and much of the enormous literature thrown up by these debates was about how to study ‘texts’ and whether the historical method denuded them of all contemporary relevance. Much of this passed mainstream historians by, because it had long seemed eminently sensible to avoid anachronism and to read texts in context.6 It is also debatable how fully historical the ‘history of political thought’ has become when many of its practitioners remain attached to Politics departments. We can see this in the enduring appeal to ‘canonical’ thinkers. Even though the canon of ‘political thought’ is the contingent product of different disciplines and concerns—​and so has produced a ‘collection of texts written at very different levels of abstraction from or immersion in’ political history and hence ‘can hardly be regarded as constituting a “tradition”, still less, as it has sometimes been grandly celebrated, “the tradition”’—​it yet remains central to much scholarship in the subject.7 But the problems with treating such a range of writers and thinkers as part of a canon are important—​this treatment encourages links and connections to be found between members that have no real historical basis, and it irons out the very real differences of genre and levels of abstraction in them. Moreover, despite all the pleas about context, the tendency to ignore seemingly less important figures and to treat the wider intellectual environment cursorily remain apparent. Indeed, as Collini observes, even those most associated with contextualism have recognized that professional aspirations are best fulfilled by working on thinkers—​ Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill—​who are likely to be of concern to the widest range of fellow practitioners.8 This has meant, in practice, that the ‘canon’—​with some jiggling at the margins—​continues to hold the field, when there ought to be more historical awareness of the formation of that ‘canon’ in the first place.9 So in the case of Britain, there are a number of figures from the past couple of centuries who tend to make the cut, but whose presence is largely indicative of the intellectual preoccupations of 4 

J. Dunn, ‘The Identity of the History of Ideas’, in J. Dunn, Political Obligation in Its Historical Context (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 13–28. 5  J. Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge, 1988); Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics, I: Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002). 6  S. Moyn, ‘History and Political Theory: A Difficult Reunion’, Theory and Event, 19 (2016), , 18 April 2016. 7  Collini, ‘Postscript’, p. 296. 8  Ibid., p. 298. 9  See S. Stuurman, ‘The Canon of the History of Political Thought: its Critique and a Proposed Alternative’, History and Theory, 39 (2000), 147–66.

16   David Craig the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Whiggism, utilitarianism, and idealism have ensured that Burke, Bentham, Mill, and Green have always been prominent.10 In addition, the obsession with liberalism has kept up the stock of the latter three, and ensured other ‘lesser’ figures, such as Spencer at one end and Hobson and Hobhouse at the other, have attracted attention. The story for twentieth-​century figures is altogether more muddled: there is no obvious figure who can be ushered into the international pantheon, but a range of nevertheless important writers that includes, perhaps, Laski on the left, Berlin in the centre, and Oakeshott on the right, are recognized objects of study. Pocock’s work, by contrast, has been explicitly committed to opening up the canon, and as a result has been of more interest to historians than to philosophers. In his various historical and methodological writings since the 1950s he has made the case for studying ‘languages’. Any stable society, he argued, possessed concepts which it used to discuss its political arrangements—​these tended to be ordered together with their own grammar, syntax, and associations, and so operated rather like a natural language. The task of the historian of political thought was to identify and reconstruct these languages by immersing themselves in the terms, concepts, and texts of the period being studied. There was some similarity to Kuhn’s ‘paradigms’, and at times Pocock used that word in preference to ‘languages’: a language operated ‘so as to structure thought and speech in certain ways and to preclude their being structured in others’, meaning that ‘the individuals of my story are paradigms rather than people’.11 The focus on languages has therefore acted as a corrective to the concern with canonical thinkers—​they encourage attention to a much wider range of texts, including even relatively ephemeral productions, and they can also appreciate the less conscious and even unintentional aspects of a written or spoken performance.12 Indeed, it is these latter points which have appealed to some cultural historians, and have enabled them to draw out affinities between Pocock’s ‘languages’ and Foucault’s ‘discourses’. These influences—​coupled with the central impact of cultural anthropology—​have, since the 1970s, helped to inspire growing interest in ‘political culture’, which was originally associated with historians of revolutionary France but has become influential in modern British history since the 1990s. Although some leading proponents have been critical of the ‘history of ideas’ in outlining their methodologies, it is worth recalling that the title of Foucault’s chair at the Collège de France was ‘The History of Systems of Thought’.13 Similar criticisms have been applied to Pocock as to Foucault—​that an excessive focus on the structural properties of ‘languages’ risks making the agent who expresses them no more than a cipher. Skinner was 10  An early example is E. Barker, Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day (London, 1915). 11  J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The Concept of a Language and the Metier d’Historien: Some Considerations on Practice’ and ‘Working on Ideas in Time’, in Pocock, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 89, 29. 12  The same can be said of Michael Freeden’s work on ideologies in the late modern period: Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford, 1998). 13  See J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 4.

Political Ideas and Languages    17 alert to this problem, and argued that an exclusive focus on languages was insufficient. It was important to see what a speaker or writer was doing in making use of a language, otherwise the historian might miss cases where conventions were deliberately being manipulated—​for instance, the conscious use of irony—​or even fail to locate the agent in the correct tradition.14 So, while looking at languages helpfully moved away from ‘canonical’ authors, there was a danger that it might move away from authors altogether. Even if historians can overcome the disciplinary ‘hybridity’ of the ‘history of political thought’ and write genuinely historical histories, there is still the question of what they are histories of. The chief concern seems to be thoughts and arguments and languages about politics: what historical actors have said politics was, is, or ought to be about, or the assumptions and prescriptions embedded in widely shared languages. Strictly speaking, it is possible for ‘political thought’ to contribute nothing to politics, and even for its authors to have little interest in doing so. It may be the case that some thinkers hoped to transform not just intellectual but also political life: Bentham is assumed to have done both, while Rawls has perhaps only succeeded in doing the former. Moreover, this may not even be the task of the ‘historian of political thought’. Pocock is clear on this point: ‘it is for the historian of action to investigate how ideas, beliefs and arguments help us to understand the actions of men in particular situations; for the historian of thought to study the activity of thinking, of conceptualizing, of abstracting ideas from particular situations and traditions.’15 In this sense Pocock writes about languages of politics, but not in politics. The same point can sometimes be applied to work on political culture: it succeeds in illuminating a wide range of attitudes and arguments that underpin practices, but it becomes hazy when it tries to show how this culture affected political action. It may be objected that these distinctions are artificial, and that the discourse of politics should be seen as a constituent element of the political realm. This is an important point, and Skinner has been particularly prominent in developing it—​although he still tends to be understood as an intellectual historian, a central part of his argument was about how ideologies were used as forms of legitimation in political struggle.

II If we turn now to the field of ‘political history’ proper, we can see how the role of ‘ideas’ has been approached rather differently as the subject developed. Throughout the nineteenth century, politics was assumed to be core to the subject of history, whether in the amateur narratives and popular biographies which the public enjoyed or in the increasingly professional stress on properly documented accounts. For J.R. Seeley, ‘politics and 14  Q. Skinner, ‘Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action’, in Tully, ed., Meaning and Context, pp. 106–7. See also M. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge, 1999). 15  J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry’, in Political Thought and History, p. 13.

18   David Craig history are only different aspects of the same study’, while E.A. Freeman made famous the claim that ‘History is past politics, and politics present history’.16 No one could accuse the Whig historians of the nineteenth century of not taking ideas seriously—​ their error, rather, was treating them too naively. The classic Whig history was of the onwards and upwards march of liberty. In Linda Colley’s words, ‘it was both present-​ minded and intensely nationalistic, concerned to celebrate Victorian constitutionalism by stressing those episodes of England’s past in which freedom seemed to triumph over oppression and injustice’.17 The ideas that mattered were those that had prevailed in the present, and the past was mined for anticipations of thinking about liberty and representation, democracy, and citizenship, creating an almost seamless continuity from Teutons to Gladstonians. That said, as Michael Bentley and John Burrow have recently shown, Whig history could be more sophisticated, and was not simply displaced by professionalization.18 Stubbs opposed romantic narratives and heroic deeds, and made great play of his use of original documents, but he still ultimately thought he was contributing to a story about freedom. Others went further: Seeley disliked accounts which stressed the doctrinal continuity between seventeenth-​and nineteenth-​century parliamentarians, and Tout was critical of the way constitutional history privileged the theory rather than the practice of administration.19 Yet they too admired national institutions and retained an interest in how political liberty and national character had developed. Hence, the success of inter-​war histories by G.M. Trevelyan and Ernest Barker shows that Whig history was not quite as obsolete as is sometimes suggested.20 Nor, on the other hand, did the arch anti-​Whig Namier emerge onto a bare stage. In the two decades before The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III was published in 1929, various eighteenth-​century historians had already raised doubts about how significant Cabinet really was, and how much coherence parties really had.21 Still, Namier’s forthright commitment to modernism and realism meant he tried to root out sentimental nonsense—​‘flapdoodle’—​wherever he found it. He succeeded in reshaping the way historians thought about the 1760s: the King did not have a plan to overthrow constitutional government, parties were not cohesive entities organized around clear political programmes, and the nature of ‘corruption’ had been radically misunderstood. He did this by reorienting interest away from traditional narrative and towards an intensely detailed focus on political ‘structure’ which revealed the dominance of local interests and personal relations in the behaviour of MPs. Although the ‘Namier Revolution’ did not carry everything before it, in its heyday between the 1930s and 1960s 16  J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (London, 1883), p. 166; E.A. Freeman, Lectures to American Audiences (Philadelphia, 1882), pp. 207–8. 17  L. Colley, Namier (London, 1989), pp. 46–7. 18  M. Bentley, Modernising England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2005); J. Burrow, A History of Histories (London, 2007). 19 Colley, Namier, pp. 48–9. 20  D. Cannadine, G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London, 1992); J. Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics: The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker (Cambridge, 1994). 21  See Bentley, Modernising England’s Past, ch. 6.

Political Ideas and Languages    19 it reached beyond the confines of the eighteenth century, and had a lasting influence on the way political historians related to their subject. There are two significant points which Namier made and linked, but which can readily be uncoupled. The first was that the personal papers of politicians represented the best insight into their minds and motives. His empirical haul was an unarguable achievement, and in ferreting out material mouldering in country houses, and in mining the copious Newcastle Papers, he helped to create a strong professional identity for political historians grounded on ‘proper’ sources rather than the sanitized ‘lives and letters’ relied upon by earlier generations. This type of material became the basis for Namier’s other claim, which was that ‘ideas’ were of very small consequence in explaining political behaviour—​they were not the ‘offspring of pure reason’, and so what really mattered was the ‘underlying emotions, the music, to which ideas are a mere libretto’.22 He was already personally attracted to such a view, and found some sympathy with the economic determinism associated with Marx—​which grounded political behaviour in an agent’s social and economic circumstances—​and certainly with the psychology of the unconscious pioneered by Freud. He was keenly interested in the emotions and actions of individuals, and his writings accordingly teem with character studies of some sophistication—​ his discussions of George III and Newcastle, in particular, have been singled out. In this sense, Namier’s reduction of the role of ideas was designed to make space not so much for the self-​interested intriguer of repute, but instead for complex, difficult, and rounded persons. Nevertheless, the downplaying of ‘ideas’ in politics was a frequent leitmotif of his work, and it found wider support in a period when ‘ideology’ was often seen as alien and dangerous: he wrote, as Colley puts it, ‘non-​epic history fit for Baldwin’s England’.23 If Namier claimed empirical confirmation in his source base—​personal papers—​others have rightly criticized his exclusive focus on such ‘unlikely repositories for inspiring declarations of shared principles’.24 From the 1960s onward, it seemed increasingly hard to take ‘the mind out of history’25—​the emergence of various movements across the globe patently attached to ‘ideologies’ made such a view seem ridiculous. Nevertheless, whether it was outright rejection or subtle modification, Namier’s shadow—​not always recognized, and often misunderstood—​loomed surprisingly large over the historiography of the later twentieth century. Some important lines of criticism had already been signalled by Butterfield. Though agreeing about the deficiencies of Whig history, he outlined his broader objections to Namier in George III and the Historians. ‘Human beings are the carriers of ideas’, he insisted, ‘as well as the repositories of vested interests’, and so there was a ‘framework’ of ideas which shaped the actions of George III and his politicians. Namierites, indeed, seemed oddly uninterested in ‘the very things that governments 22 

Cited in Colley, Namier, p. 26.

23 Ibid., p. 50. 24 

J. Burrow, A History of Histories (London, 2007), p. 472. To paraphrase A.J.P. Taylor’s infamous review of ‘The Namier View of History’, Times Literary Supplement, 28 Aug. 1953, xxiii. 25 

20   David Craig and parliament exist to do’—​the work of ministers, the nature of policy, the origins of decisions, the content of controversies, the attitudes of the public, and the debates of parliament. In their desire to avoid being ‘hoaxed’ by the Whig tendency to take ideology at face value, they had gone too far in the other direction. In draining the intellectual content out of politics, they not only misunderstood the commitments of participants, but also failed to appreciate ‘what men imagine the situation to be’—​ perceptions about the beliefs and motivations of others, whether true or false, were an integral ingredient of political behaviour.26 This latter point was later developed with some sophistication by Skinner, who tried to bridge the divide between those who argued ideas really motivated behaviour and those who thought interest was the key.27 His point was that ideas still mattered even if the politician espousing them didn’t really believe a word of them. So the puzzle of Bolingbroke—​a Tory seemingly committed to radical Whig ideology—​could be explained by saying that he deployed this language as a means of undermining the credibility of Walpole, whom his interest motivated him to topple. But, by using this form of legitimation, Bolingbroke publicly committed himself to a position which would affect what he could do and say in the future if he didn’t want to be accused of hypocrisy. In other words, Skinner showed that even if political motivation was often a grubby matter of power-​seeking, ideas could not be whisked off as mere epiphenomena, because they were often deployed with purpose in the cut and thrust of public political argument. One of the more controversial ‘schools’ of political history in the 1960s and 1970s was widely and inaccurately seen as an attempt to apply Namierism to nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century political history.28 While Maurice Cowling and the ‘Peterhouse School’ shared Namier’s stress on the importance of using private papers, they were also increasingly interested in assessing the role that ideas played in the ebb and flow of political life. Cowling’s ‘high-politics’ trilogy, while seemingly about the intrigues and manoeuvrings of a wide range of ‘players’, also recognized that beliefs and policies were often affected by the tactical constraints and opportunities of a given political situation. Certainly, Cowling appreciated the importance of political language and rhetoric, and stressed its fundamentally instrumental role.29 What these historians (particularly the second generation) wanted to stress was the difficulty of making claims about the influence of political ideologies and languages on events—​in this sense they opposed both the naïve views of older Whig history, and also some of the easy assumptions made 26 

H. Butterfield, George III and the Historians (London, 1957), pp. 211, 208, 219. Skinner, ‘Some Problems’, pp. 107–18; Q. Skinner, ‘The Principles and Practice of Opposition: The Case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole’, in N. McKendrick, ed., Historical Perspectives: Essays in Honour of J. H. Plumb (London, 1974), pp. 93–128. 28  D. Craig, ‘“High Politics” and the “New Political History”’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 453–76; P. Williamson, ‘Maurice Cowling and Modern British Political History’, in R. Crowcroft, S.J.D. Green, and R.C. Whiting, eds., The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British Democracy: Maurice Cowling and Conservatism (London, 2010), pp. 108–52; R. Crowcroft, ‘Maurice Cowling and the Writing of British Political History’, Contemporary British History, 22 (2008), 279–86. 29  See, for example, M. Cowling, The Impact of Labour 1920–1924 (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 1–12. 27 

Political Ideas and Languages    21 about the influence of political thought on action. It was in fact hard to show how far and in what ways a movement of thought actually directly intervened in politics, but that did not mean the task was impossible—​it required both a careful analysis of the ideas of a substantial range of politicians and intellectuals and a precise account of exactly how they were mediated in the febrile politics of any given moment.30 This might make it possible to assess, for instance, how far classical liberal economics shaped Conservative policy in the 1820s and 1840s, or whether idealism and organicism influenced Liberal social policy in the 1900s. Unfortunately, some of the insights of this ‘school’ were lost in the heightened partisan invective of the 1970s and 1980s, and also because of its separate claims about the primacy of ‘high politics’. There was no a priori reason why these arguments about ideas and their role in political behaviour could not be applied to popular politics more broadly. Since the 1970s, renewed and careful attention to the intellectual component of politics has helped transform historical understanding. In the case of Namier’s own century—​the eighteenth—​the change has been dramatic, fuelled in part by the attentions of intellectual historians. Pocock’s work exposed a powerful strain of ‘civic humanism’ which ran through the political argument of the century, and which—​following Bernard Bailyn—​could be seen in the ‘ideological’ origins of the American Revolution.31 The history of the Scottish Enlightenment has also become a major theme, and from the 1980s the link between theological and political debate has also been stressed. Although these works are primarily written by historians of ideas, they have fed back into a reorientation of political history. A significant change of direction was signalled by John Brewer—​the title of his first book indicates a direct challenge to Namierism. In Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III, Brewer opened up the 1760s in two ways.32 First, he took seriously the insistence of Butterfield and Skinner that the language of politics mattered, and accordingly paid close attention to the enormous range of pamphlets and polemics that the period threw up, and which Namier had so disdained. In doing so he showed that ideas really did matter, and that it was possible to investigate the ‘ideology’ of Pitt as well as the arguments of Burke. Second, Brewer also wanted to affirm the importance of popular politics and to show the origins of the reform movement. Here, too, ideology was significant, and he showed how ‘country party’ language was deployed by radicals against the ‘corruption’ of the government, and against parliament more broadly. Brewer went further, and drew on recent anthropological writing to investigate the symbolic meanings of the rituals employed by the Wilkite crowd. This would prove increasingly important to subsequent writing

30 

See especially M. Bentley, ‘Party, Doctrine and Thought’, in M. Bentley and J. Stevenson, eds., High and Low Politics in Modern Britain: Ten Studies (Oxford, 1983), pp. 123–53, and also J.P. Parry, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867–1875 (Cambridge, 1986). 31  J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1975); B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967). 32  J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976).

22   David Craig on political culture, which sometimes found more inspiration in cultural anthropology than intellectual history.33 If we turn to the nineteenth century, while the direct impact of Namier was less keenly felt, there was nevertheless a desire to play down the intellectual aspects of politics. It had been a virtual article of faith in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Benthamite utilitarianism and Ricardian economics were responsible for the liberal transformation of the state between the 1820s and 1860s. By the middle of the twentieth century a reaction had set in. Some political historians—​such as Norman Gash—​ stressed the unideological pragmatism of leading politicians such as Peel, while others launched more direct assaults on the utilitarian paradigm.34 In 1958 Oliver MacDonagh argued that the ‘revolution in government’ between the 1830s and 1860s was not caused by Benthamism, which he claimed had no real influence over either public opinion or civil servants, but instead arose as a result of unintended consequences: a social evil was exposed; an outcry ensued; a measure was introduced, and later refined and extended, and thereby created precedents for further reforms. It required no presiding intellectual agenda.35 As references to Namier and Oakeshott suggest, this argument owed at least something to the anti-​ideological mood of the 1950s, and one critic even described it as a ‘tory interpretation of history’. Another critic was simply puzzled: ‘Why should anyone seek to eliminate Benthamism as a factor of importance in nineteenth-​century history?’36 And yet, a generation later, most historians would endorse just such an elimination. However, it was not the case that these older ideologies were toppled to make way for a sort of nineteenth-​century Namierism. Boyd Hilton’s work is instructive. In Corn, Cash and Commerce he successfully showed that Ricardianism played virtually no role in the economic reforms of the 1820s, and argued that the measures were largely pragmatic. But, in the conclusion to that book, and much more fully in later work, he suggested historians had been looking in the wrong place—​the real ideological drive of economic and social policy was not secular but evangelical utilitarianism. This offered a rather different ‘liberalism’ to that of earlier textbooks fixated on the Bentham–​Mill tradition, and instead made the case for a gloomier and retributive worldview found in Malthus and Chalmers. Hilton was interested not only in recovering a neglected strand of thought, but also in showing how it affected fundamental policies on the currency and banking, the Poor Laws, and the Corn Laws. The political actions of Peel and Gladstone, it was argued, had to be understood by reference to their intellectual habits

33 

See, for example, W.H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980). 34  N. Gash, Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 (London, 1972). 35  O. MacDonagh, ‘The Nineteenth Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal’, Historical Journal, 1 (1958), 52–67. 36  J. Hart, ‘Nineteenth Century Social Reform: A Tory Interpretation of History’, Past and Present, 31 (1965), 39–61; H. Parris, ‘The Nineteenth Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal Reappraised’, Historical Journal, 3 (1960), 33.

Political Ideas and Languages    23 and sympathies.37 Other historians restored intellectual purpose to Whig-​Liberals as well. Peter Mandler argued that a revival of Foxite paternalism in the 1830s and 1840s—​ rather than Benthamism—​could help explain the seemingly puzzling intrusion of the state in a period otherwise committed to laissez-​faire.38 Alternatively, Jonathan Parry argued that constitutional and religious reform was the real key to Whig-​Liberals and their core commitment was to ensuring that diverse opinions and interests could be represented locally and nationally, and that as a result policy decisions were the result of deliberation and consensus. In arguing this, Parry was particularly alert to the difficulties of tracking how intellectual traditions shaped political decisions, but he did not deny their influence.39 Since the 1970s, considerable attention has been devoted to the ‘new liberalism’ of the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Here, it is sometimes suggested, is a clear case of an intellectual movement not only shaping a new language of social reform among politicians but also constituting a factor in the electoral resurgence of liberalism after 1906. Among intellectual historians, T.H. Green had always attracted some interest, but a range of other thinkers—​in particular L.T. Hobhouse and J.A. Hobson—​have benefited from attention in recent years. The primary interest has been the way these writers enabled a shift away from classical liberalism, with its seeming commitment to negative liberty, and towards a more enhanced role for the state, which at the very least ought to ensure a minimum standard of living for its citizens. This vein of scholarship is rich and vibrant, and has focused on questions such as the relative influences of idealism, organicism, and evolution on ‘new liberal’ thought and the extent to which this school of thought marked a clear departure from earlier forms of liberalism.40 In terms of its political impact, a case can be made. In 1893 the Rainbow Circle was formed to develop a programme of progressivism, and its members included not just intellectuals such as Hobson and Hobhouse, but also politicians such as Haldane, Trevelyan, and Samuel. In addition, it has been frequently noted that Asquith was tutored by Green as a young scholar at Balliol. There is broader evidence of interest in and activism about these new ideas, and this made itself felt at the municipal level and in particular regions. But, some have argued, the case can be pressed too far. The Liberals struggled after 1895 to find an agenda on which they could all agree, and it was opposition to tariff reform which galvanized them and led to the election victory in 1906—​social reform was only a 37   B. Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1977); idem., ‘Peel: A Reappraisal’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979), 585–614; idem., The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988). 38  P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–52 (Oxford, 1990). 39  J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 1993). 40  M. Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978); P.F. Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978); S. Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1979). For a recent survey see J. Thompson, ‘Modern Liberty Redefined’, in G. Claeys and G. Stedman Jones, eds., The Cambridge History of Nineteenth Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 720–47.

24   David Craig comparatively minor issue at that election. Reforms did come after 1906—​old age pensions, unemployment and health insurance, and progressive taxation—​but the positive drive largely came from Lloyd George and Churchill, while the rest of the Cabinet tended to view progressivism with some suspicion.41 That said, if we think in terms of a looser party ‘doctrine’ rather than political ‘theory’, then we can better see the purchase new liberalism had. As defined by Bentley, doctrine is a ‘network of assumptions and associations’ which form a party’s identity: it is ‘what is left of “ideas” and “theories” when parties have assimilated the bits they can cope with and turned them into a slogan, a boxful of phrases, two paragraphs for the current “speakers guide”.’42 After 1906 it seemed that such slogans and attitudes commanded more respect than they had previously, and provided an ‘atmosphere’ out of which policies might be developed, even if the direct influence of particular theorists was relatively attenuated. This tension between formal ideology and informal doctrine could be exploited by critics. After the First World War, progressives and socialists increasingly found themselves charged with holding dangerous and alien ideologies which constituted an assault on the propertied and constitutional order. Such claims were invariably fanciful—​and radically misconstrued the aims of mainstream Labour politicians—​but they carried electoral bite from the 1920s.43 In pioneering these arguments, the Conservatives became beneficiaries of a conjuring trick: in casting their opponents as ideologues, they could take up the mantle of pragmatism, and argue that conservatism was not an ideology but instead the embodiment of the nation, the transmitter of tradition. This has had a lasting effect on historiography: until the 1980s it was typically argued that ‘conservative philosophy’ was a contradiction in terms, and that the history of the party was guided more by common sense than by committed ideas. Thatcherism, however, precipitated an interest in conservative ideology. E.H.H. Green showed how an intellectual commitment at the turn of the twentieth century—​protectionism—​was held intensely despite the lack of evidence of its electoral appeal. In a subsequent study, he explored how collectivist strands among the party elite helped shape the move towards ‘consensus’ in the post-​war period, and how the ‘new right’ had deep roots among the party faithful who were never really sold on accommodations with socialism. Rather than being marginal, the ‘battle of ideas’ clearly mattered to those who founded the Conservative Research Department in 1929 and the Conservative Political Centre in 1945.44 Baldwin, meanwhile, pioneered a ‘doctrine’ which enabled the normalization of inter-​war conservatism by linking it to patriotism and localism, with a dash, perhaps, of pastoralism and nostalgia.45 In other words, the anti-​ideological veneer of conservatism

41 

M. Bentley, The Climax of Liberal Politics: British Liberalism in Theory and Practice 1868–1918 (London, 1987), pp. 110, 144–45. 42  Ibid., pp. 96–7, and Bentley, ‘Party, Doctrine and Thought’ more generally. 43  R. McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–1951 (Oxford, 2010). 44  E.H.H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the Conservative Party, 1880–1914 (London, 1995); Green, Ideologies of Conservatism (Oxford, 2002). 45  P. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999).

Political Ideas and Languages    25 was very consciously achieved, and even found nourishment in the philosophical writings of Oakeshott. Arguably, it also spilled over into the practice of political historians working in the first half of the century. Hopefully, these brief examples demonstrate the false dichotomy of thinking in terms either of ideology or pragmatism. In practice, policy formation and decision-​making will be affected by the personal and electoral ambitions of significant participants, but it would be an exaggeration to stress only the ‘love of the game’ in politics. Similarly, the ideas of intellectuals, theorists, and especially ‘experts’ will obviously be crucial factors in shaping the priorities of departments and drafting the specifics of legislation. This may work in much subtler and quieter ways than announced influences—​one only has to think of Tony Blair’s ‘third way’ or David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ to recognize that the ideological allegiances which politicians proclaim may not bear much relation to the actual intellectual legwork behind specific policies. Namier’s mistake was to have a ‘purist’ view of ideas—​if they were makeshift or flawed he tended to dismiss them, rather than realizing that, whether good or bad, ideas are the lifeblood of politics.46 If, as Butterfield stressed, governments exist to do things, they need to have ideas about what things to do, about how to achieve them, and why. ‘Politics’, as Green argues, ‘is about argument, and arguments are about ideas’. 47 The chains of connection between the place where such ideas originate and that where they are executed may be very long—​both spatially and temporally—​but they are nevertheless real, and one of the tasks of the historian is to identify them. This does not mean a politician believes what she or he says—​ ministers often defend policies they oppose, or support them on grounds other than those stated, or, just as likely, are quite indifferent either way. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, the utterances that make up parliamentary debates, media interviews, and election speeches, as well as the private memos, personal calls, and moments of indiscretion, all form part of the language of politics.

III Up to this point, this chapter has been considering the role that ideas played in shaping the commitments and pronouncements of political actors in the major organizations of national life. This tends to define ‘politics’ in a traditional sense as the centralized institutions of the nation-​state: government, parliament, and bureaucracy, an arena increasingly referred to as ‘high politics’ in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, some historians have argued that this should be the primary focus of enquiry, since the elites of these institutions held disproportionate power which meant they were largely insulated from popular pressure. The contrast between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ politics (or

46 Colley, Namier, p. 65.

47 Green, Ideologies of Conservatism, p. 14.

26   David Craig ‘low politics’ in one account)48 was an important area of contention between the 1970s and 1990s, and remains relatively well entrenched in the sympathies of political histor­ ians. Nevertheless, over this period, understanding of popular politics has increased enormously. A major area of attention has been the practice of electoral politics, which has moved away from narrow studies of voter choice to embrace the wider political culture of which it was a part.49 There has also been serious attention to protest and pressure groups—​anti-​slavery, free trade, and suffrage movements have perhaps been the most extensively explored, and recent work has increasingly insisted on how they can illuminate political sentiments and attachments beyond the elite.50 Even if the direct influence of these groups and movements over ‘high’ politics requires documenting, there seems little doubt of their indirect influence through shaping discussion and nudging priorities—​certainly, politicians increasingly tailored their messages to appeal to such constituencies.51 There is, however, a nagging sense that the conceptualization of a distinction between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ politics is inadequate. Even if we allow for Lawrence Goldman’s argument that we should also think of a ‘middle’ layer of politics—​the groups, organizations, and lobbies that are the lifeblood of civil society and which mediate between the ordinary citizen and the elite politician—​there remains the sense that ‘politics’ conceived in such blocs lacks fluidity and flexibility.52 While there is an attraction to the idea that institutions are resistant to popular pressure, this is true not just of ‘high politics’, but of institutions in general—​trade unions and even protest groups necessarily have some organizational structure which constrains their openness. The problem with the high-​middle-​low metaphor is not so much that it is hierarchical as that it implies homogeneity. Even within ‘high politics’ there will be all manner of criss-​crossing networks of affiliation and antagonism between and within institutions—​only an extremely exclusive and cohesive elite would be completely impervious to outside influence, and this was not true even of the relatively aristocratic world of nineteenth-​century ‘high’ politics. It may be more helpful to abandon the tripartite model of politics in favour of something both more complex and more malleable. Since the 1970s, activists and theorists have argued that the concept of politics needs to be opened up. The philosopher James Tully has argued that for the past two centuries,

48

  See Bentley and Stevenson, High and Low Politics. J. Lawrence and M. Taylor, eds., Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain Since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997). 50  See, for example, F. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2008) and H. McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c. 1918–1945 (Manchester, 2011). 51  J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 1998); L. Beers, Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 52  L. Goldman, Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association 1857–1886 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 7–11; J. Lawrence, ‘Political History’, in S. Berger, H. Feldner, and K. Passmore, eds., Writing History: Theory and Practice (London, 2010), pp. 213–31. 49 

Political Ideas and Languages    27 political studies has been about ‘the basic languages, structures, and public institutions of the self-​contained, representative, democratic, constitutional nation-​states and federations of free and equal citizens, political parties and social movements in an international system of states’.53 This has also largely been true of the field of ‘political history’. There have, however, been numerous challenges to this approach coming from, inter alia, social democrats, feminists, environmentalists, multiculturalists, cosmopolitans, and postmodernists. Tully—​drawing on Foucault—​argues that the agenda is now moving back to early modern conceptions of ‘governance’, which were not just about the narrow practice of the democratic nation-​state, but about the overlapping ways in which individuals and groups govern themselves and each other, and the way that both governance and freedom are always related to one another.54 This does not mean ignoring the considerable power that traditional institutions retain. The philosopher Roberto Unger conveys this well when he distinguishes between two concepts of politics: ‘Politics means conflict over the mastery and use of governmental power. But it also means struggle over the resources and arrangements that set the basic terms of our practical and passionate relations. Preeminent among these arrangements is the formative institutional and imaginative context of social life. Politics in the former sense represents a special case of politics in the latter sense: governmental power is often the single most important tool for the stabilization or remaking of a formative context.’55 In the fullest sense, then, politics—​which includes the power of government in its traditional sense—​is the struggle over ‘the reproduction and reinvention of society in every aspect of social life’.56 Thinking in these terms has important consequences for the historian. It means recognizing that the ideological and institutional fabric of modern life is not fixed, but the result of the contingencies of history—​it could have developed differently in the past, and it might be altered in the future. This approach enables us to see a further way in which ‘ideas and languages’ matter in political history. It is not just modern political ideologies which rest on the deep-​rooted attitudes, assumptions, and arguments that have evolved over time, but the political institutions too. This is one of the reasons why so much history of political thought concerns the early modern period, because it was here that the conceptual underpinnings of modern institutions and practices were formulated. Skinner’s Foundations of Modern Political Thought is very deliberately titled—​it explores the origins of the modern state and of forms of representation and resistance.57 The point is not just how ideas and arguments developed, but that they came to be entrenched and naturalized, even operating as ‘limits’ to what ordinary citizens think is possible. Tully rightly draws parallels between this and Foucault’s histories of the

53 

J. Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, I: Democracy and Civic Freedom (Cambridge, 2008), p. 19. Ibid., pp. 21–5, 154–9. 55  R. Unger, Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 145–6. 56  R. Unger, False Necessity: Anti-​Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (Cambridge, 1987), p. 44. 57  Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols, Cambridge, 1978). 54 

28   David Craig present—​and sees behind both Nietzsche’s genealogical method, showing ‘that what we take to be necessary and foundational politically is the unplanned product of contingent controversies and struggles’.58 To understand modern ideologies, the political historian may need to have a good grasp of their earlier ancestry and how they have affected thought and argument more recently. But the point can be pressed further—​as Alsadair Macintyre argued long ago, it is a ‘truism’ that ‘institutions and practices are always . . . constituted by what certain people think and feel about them’.59 This means that institutions can be understood in terms of the ideologies that instantiate them—​ just like ideologies they have complex histories, and just like ideologies they are capable of change. In practice, however, they often seem more ‘sticky’ than this, and are frequently felt by citizens to be a natural part of the political landscape. They are part of what Unger calls ‘frozen politics’—​the routines and rituals of social life which could be resisted, reformed, and even revolutionized, but which are presumed to be beyond the scope of political change. The historical point, however, is that institutions are the products of contingent evolution just as ideologies are, and there is no reason in either case to naturalize them. Yet, whereas ideological morphology has been a major area of interest in recent years, what might be called institutional morphology has tended to attract less interest. The institutional landscape of Britain has evolved over time—​something understood by Whig historians, with their stress on the unwritten constitution and customary law, even if they did relapse into teleology and so fail to explain why it endured or changed. Indeed, there has been variation in the extent to which institutional reform has been explicitly embraced over the past couple of hundred years.60 In the nineteenth century, although ‘the constitution’ was a shibboleth, in practice its many elements were the subject of contestation and struggle—​the electoral system was constantly being rethought at the level of ideology and often also at the level of practice: there was, for example, growing interest in forms of proportional representation by the time of the First World War. In addition, there were numerous reforms of local government and of the central state, the Church and the Lords were subjects of keen discussion, and the issue of imperial devolution ultimately proved explosive. This was a period of comparative vigour in questioning political institutions, but the same cannot be said of economic institutions. Here a lack of experimentation was encouraged by the belief that economics was a science whose operations should not be tainted by the ‘unnatural’ intrusion of politics. This story was reversed in the twentieth century—​there was recognition among many thinkers that economic forms were historical creations, and some interest in experimenting 58 

J. Tully, ‘The Pen is a Mighty Sword: Quentin Skinner’s Analysis of Politics’, in Tully, ed., Meaning and Context, p. 19. See also Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge, 1995); R. Geuss, ‘Nietzsche and Genealogy’, European Journal of Philosophy, 2 (1994), 274–92. 59  A. Macintyre, Against the Self-​Images of the Age (London, 1971), p. 263. 60  See J.P. Parry, ‘The Decline of Institutional Reform in Nineteenth-​Century Britain’, in D. Feldman and J. Lawrence, eds., Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 164–86.

Political Ideas and Languages    29 with different concepts of property and ways of managing the economy. If this was rarely as bold in practice as some progressives and many socialists hoped, there was still little doubt that economic institutions could be reformed.61 But, oddly, the earlier stress on political experimentation was lost. After the First World War, constitutional reform virtually dried up, with Labour assuming that achievement of universal suffrage was sufficient, and its leaders somewhat awestruck by the traditional trappings of the state. The Conservatives, meanwhile, had much less interest in constitutional reform, and, as we have seen, were able from the 1920s successfully to present any tampering with the supposedly traditional fabric of national life as dangerously ideological, thereby virtually naturalizing institutions. For Ross McKibbin, this lack of interest in serious institutional reform was a disaster which stymied any chance of establishing social democracy.62 Ironically, from the 1970s, the turn to neo-liberalism ensured that economic institutions were increasingly put beyond the scope of political control and restored to their supposedly ‘natural’ domain, while there was only a faltering return to constitutional reform, and then largely outside England. Many of the core institutions of the state had in fact changed, but the outer shell of the constitution was unreformed: the centralized system of politics with its entrenched parties endured, but arguably at the cost of a more energetic democracy, and with the growing estrangement of the populace.

IV It is apparent, then, that ‘languages’ play a crucial role in political history: they undergird our ideologies and institutions, and thereby shape the fabric of political life by the forms of power and corresponding freedoms and goods—​or lack of them—​that they inscribe. They affect what politicians and citizens say and do, but they are not determining. Since the replication of everyday routine politics requires a constant re-​enactment of rules, roles, and practices, there is always scope for revision and resistance. Indeed, no institution or ideology can survive without a measure of adaptability, and even those which at first sight appear most resistant to change will, on closer inspection, prove to have been adept at evolution—​the modern monarchy being a case in point. Two further points may be stressed. First, the scope of ‘politics’ is literally as large as can be, and thinking in terms of distinct and isolated realms—​‘high politics’ versus ‘popular politics’, the ‘political’ versus the ‘social’—​misses the interconnections between and across ideologies and institutions, such that minor changes in one area may have major consequences elsewhere, just like vibrations in a web or ripples in a pool. Second, political historians should oppose the Whiggish tendency to see resistance and reform as the sole preserve of ‘progressives’: conservatives should not be taken at face value, and the 61  B. Jackson, Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought, 1900–64 (Manchester, 2007). 62 McKibbin, Parties and People, pp. 159–64, 175–6, 199–202.

30   David Craig revision of ideologies and institutions can take place on the right as well as the left. Since the 1980s both the radical and populist right in Britain have dramatically redefined the scope of political life. It might also be added that the right has generally been better at appreciating the instrumental nature of political language, whether in exploiting the slogan of ‘freedom’ against the welfare state in the 1980s or the aspiration to ‘democracy’ against the European Union in the 2010s. Having said all this, there are perhaps two risks to focusing on ‘languages’ in politics. The first is the danger of intellectualism. Namier may well have been wrong to attach little importance to ideas in politics, but he did appreciate that character and personality counted for much. In reacting against Namier, political historians must be careful not to overstate the role of ideas. Often employed as rationalizations and legitimations, the expression of ideas needs still to be matched—​where possible—​to the underlying motivations for speech and action. But even here we may need to be cautious in presuming coherence and rationality to the self. In contrast to the belief–​desire model of agency preferred by many philosophers, Bernard Williams instead proposes that we should see the agent ‘awash with many images, many excitements, merging fears and fantasies that dissolve into one another’.63 Geoffrey Hawthorn draws much the same lesson from a study of Thucydides—​that while politicians may have purposes and plans, ‘they are subject to the limits of mind and body, the fallibilities of character and agency, the force of habit, the unforeseen and unforeseeable, and other people’.64 The recent turn to the history of emotions might assist political historians in reconstructing not just the culture of politics, but its irredeemably human qualities—​the hopes and frustrations, the friendships and hatreds that run through it and make it what it is. The second concern with ‘languages’ is that they need to take account of asymmetries of power. While it is true that ideologies and institutions are the contingent products of historical processes, and so can theoretically be remoulded in the future, in practice they are extremely varied in their levels of malleability. The danger with some current work on ‘political culture’ is that while it can sensitively reconstruct the enormous variety of beliefs and practices of hitherto unheard actors, it does not necessarily explain why some preferences get enacted and others get marginalized. It must be recognized, as Dunn once put it—​and with apologies for his gendered language—​that ‘Not only do men make their own history; but some men make far more than their fair share of the history of others’.65 The history of political languages must contribute to broader political history by seeking to understand the realities of power and the effects of political structures. In doing this it may well turn out that an uplifting celebration of the potentially diverse and open-​ended nature of history may need to be pulled sharply down to earth by the constraining realism of Weber’s ‘iron cage’.66 63 

B. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton, NJ, 2002), p. 195. G. Hawthorn, Thucydides on Politics: Back to the Present (Cambridge, 2014), p. 238. 65  J. Dunn, ‘Practising History and Social Science on “Realist” Assumptions’, in Dunn, Political Obligation, p. 94. 66  See the work of John Dunn, e.g. The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics (London, 2000). A commentary relevant to the concerns of this chapter is D. Craig, ‘Political Ideas and Real Politics’, in N. Turnbull, ed., Interpreting Governance, High Politics and Public Policy: Essays Commemorating Interpreting British Governance (New York, 2016), pp. 97–114. 64 

Political Ideas and Languages    31

Further Reading J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976). D. Craig, ‘“High Politics” and the “New Political History”’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 453–​76. D. Craig and J. Thompson, eds., Languages of Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2013). J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–​1914 (Cambridge, 1998). J.G.A. Pocock, Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge, 2009). J. Vernon, Politics and the People:  A Study in English Political Culture, c.  1815–​ 1867 (Cambridge, 1993).

chapter 3

High P ol i t i c s Steven Fielding

How Britain elects its governments has undergone considerable change since the first Reform Act of 1832. The number of those able to vote has expanded from a few thousand to include virtually every adult. Political parties have been transformed in terms of organization, doctrine, and personnel. Elections are now fought on very different issues and conducted through social media and television rather than small face-​to-​face meetings. At the same time, the size and shape of government has undergone a huge transformation: it now touches the lives of everyone. Yet, there have also been significant continuities, which mean that Britain is a democracy only in a certain sense. In particular, while the monarch’s formal power has almost disappeared, and notwithstanding recent referenda, the electorate is not sovereign: Britain remains a parliamentary democracy. It was the people who adapted to the Westminster system more than the other way around. The century-​long expansion of the franchise helped facilitate this outcome: if the process began in 1832, 1950 was the first general election decided purely on the basis of one-​person-​one-​vote. Moreover, in 2015 the same first-​past-​ the-post system was employed to return MPs to the House of Commons as had been used in the eighteenth century. And if most hereditary peers were expunged in 1999, members of the House of Lords, whose influence over legislation can be decisive, remain unelected. Despite some momentous changes, therefore, Britain has always had a political system in which the accurate representation of the electorate’s voice was ultimately subordinated to the creation of effective government.1 Britain never had anything more than what Kevin Jefferys described as an ‘anaemic’ political culture, one in which direct and active popular participation was discouraged and remained low.2 Even when the Labour and Conservative parties were at their zenith during the 1950s, their members

1  This brutal truth is rarely expressed as directly, but see C.S. Emden, The People and the Constitution (Oxford, 1933), pp. 138–​40, at 306–​7. 2  K. Jefferys, Politics and the People: A History of British Democracy since 1918 (London, 2007).

High Politics   33 accounted for less than 10 per cent of adults.3 Most of these members simply paid their subscriptions, if that; some joined merely to access cheap beer or other leisure facilities. But the few who sought to influence policy-​making were invariably frustrated, the parties having structures that helped insulate their Westminster leaders from such impudence. This was, moreover, a situation leading academic experts considered right and proper.4 As a consequence, and perhaps more than for any other of its West European counterparts, Britain’s democracy was characterized by ‘the rule of the politician’ rather than of the people themselves.5

I It is therefore explicable that it was once taken for granted that the most significant subject of British political history should be the country’s national leadership: those who held a prominent position in Parliament or Whitehall or who helped, hindered, or otherwise influenced such figures. Political historians consequently, and almost unthinkingly, kept within narrow, institutional bounds, writing histories that largely ignored the majority outside this magic circle. There was however a strong normative element to the resulting historiography: its authors described not only how it was, but also how it should be. This was what is now referred to as ‘high-political’ history, or sometimes ‘traditional’ or ‘elite’ history—​but once it was simply regarded as ‘history’. Such history was taught at universities whose few students mostly consisted of future governors of the empire hoping the past would impart lessons in statecraft. For those educated within this climate, focusing on the elite and seeing history as the story of their struggles for dominance appeared completely natural: that was ‘politics’. Writing in 1970, the Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton accordingly argued: The history of public affairs  . . .  [is] the history of ‘great men’, of the leading few. Whether it concerns itself with kings and popes, or with political parties and politbureaus, it chronicles the specialized existence of special people; and the charge that it confines itself to a very limited part of the human experience must therefore be admitted to be essentially true.6

That Elton, a deeply conservative historian, felt obliged to defend the ‘great men’ approach was a sign it was under attack. In 1957 the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm described parliamentary and governmental politics as ‘the superstructure of the 3  This is an estimate, as the parties did not consider membership a sufficiently important issue about which to keep accurate records: Library of the House of Commons, ‘Membership of UK Political Parties’ (June 2012). 4  As argued in R. McKenzie, British Political Parties (London, 1955). 5  J.A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York, 1950), p. 285. 6  G.R. Elton, Political History: Principles and Practice (London, 1970), p. 61.

34   Steven Fielding subject’, for the actual ‘basis’ of political history lay in ‘the movements of public opinion and party loyalties and similar phenomena’.7 Partly thanks to his work and that of social historians, most notably Edward Thompson, during the 1960s and 1970s this view gained greater ground. And as social history supplanted political history within the historical discipline, adherents of the former argued with greater confidence for the importance of popular pressure—​and in particular that of the labour movement—​on forcing political change. If political history was ever seriously defined as a few ‘great men’ climbing the ‘greasy pole’, at the top of which was a seat at the Cabinet table, by the end of the 1970s that idea was held up to ridicule. In 1979 Tony Judt summarized the new conventional wisdom about ‘traditional political history’. This, he claimed, was confined to: describing in detail the behaviour of ruling classes and the transformations which took place within them. Divorced from social history, this remains, as ever, a form of historical writing adapted to the preservation of the status quo; it concerns itself with activities peculiar to the ruling group, activities of an apparently rational and self-​justifying nature.8

Since then, criticisms of the limitations of the high-​political approach have only proliferated. Some of this was conceptual in nature. Not only were high-​political historians accused of focusing on an elite much less influential than they imagined, but feminists and postmodernists upbraided them for holding to a restricted and mistakenly unitary notion of what constituted ‘the political’. Such censure often had its origin, like Judt’s critique, in politics itself. The post-​war expansion of higher education saw a transformation in the kinds of students studying the past and in those employed to teach them. As a result, historians started to identify with the governed, not the governors, and saw high-​political history as promoting a reactionary notion of who should—​and should not—​exercise power. So far as such progressive historians were concerned, the purpose of writing about the past was no longer to supply lessons to an elite so it might better rule, but rather to celebrate those moments when the people challenged authority so as to encourage contemporaries to emulate them. A new set of normative assumptions about how power should be exercised, and by whom, now prevailed. Whatever the cause, by the start of the twenty-​first century, high-​political history had lost whatever intellectual respectability it had once possessed. By the 1990s an interest in parliamentary leadership was something for which ambitious historians felt obliged to apologize.9 Not only was it considered methodologically obsolete, but it was also thought ethically dubious. In what looked very much like a final judgement, in 2002 Alex Windscheffel claimed it was innocent of ‘languages, ideas and cultures’; consisted

7 

E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘Twentieth-​Century British Politics’, Past and Present, 11 (1957), 100–​8, at 107–​8. T. Judt, ‘A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians’, History Workshop Journal, 7 (1979), 66–​94, at 87. 9  See for example, M. Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–​1860 (Oxford, 1995), p. 12. 8 

High Politics   35 only of narrative; viewed parties as strictly institutional organizations; and thought ‘politics’ reducible to ‘conversations held within the hermetic corridors of Westminster’.10 Certainly, few serious historians now adhere to that which Elton would have recognized as the ‘great man’ approach, although biographies remain one of the most popular means through which the public continue to understand political history. Instead, many political historians currently follow what James Vernon described as the ‘cultural history of politics’. As Vernon defined it, this is the very mirror image of the high politics written by those he called ‘Tory historians’, who believed power resided only in ‘orthodox political institutions and their representative systems’.11 Adherents of the cultural history of politics, moreover, identify with ‘the poor, the disenfranchised, and others dispossessed’, that is, those excluded from formal political power. They consequently disavow ‘traditional sources of political history’, such as ‘organisations, personnel or policies of the national institutions of politics’, and instead embrace ‘ballads, banners, cartoons, handbills, statues . . . and the rich vein of ceremonial and iconographic forms’. In return, remaining exponents of high politics, notably Michael Bentley, have dismissed such an interest in language, representation, identity, and discourse as irrelevant to their analysis.12

II This Manichean approach to political history has obscured the extent to which high and cultural approaches can be reconciled so as to develop a more holistic approach to the study of power, one that rescues a concern for leadership from the degraded position into which it has now fallen. As Susan Pedersen suggested, at least some high and cultural political historians share some of the same concerns, notably a belief in the creative and autonomous role of politics.13 The high-​political historians to whom Pedersen referred were members of the ‘Peterhouse School’, especially its principal figure Maurice Cowling, who between 1967 and 1975 produced five monographs covering the period 1867–​1940.14 Indeed, of Cowling, who wrote the three most important of these, it has 10  A. Windscheffel, ‘Men or Measures? Conservative Politics, 1815–​1951’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), 937–​51, at 938. 11   J. Vernon, Politics and the People. A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–​1867 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 2–​3, 6–​7, 336. 12  M. Bentley, ‘Victorian Politics and the Linguistic Turn’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), 883–​902, at 894. 13  S. Pedersen, ‘What is Political History Now?’, in D. Cannadine, ed., What Is History Now? (New York, 2002), pp. 40–​4. 14  M. Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution. The Passing of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1967) and The Impact of Labour, 1920–​24 (Cambridge, 1971); A. Jones, The Politics of Reform 1884 (Cambridge, 1972); A.B. Cooke and J. Vincent, The Governing Passion. Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain, 1885–​86 (Brighton, 1974); and M. Cowling, The Impact of Hitler. British Politics and British Policy 1933–​1940 (Cambridge, 1975). For background on the ‘School’, see M. Cowling, ‘The Peterhouse School’, New York Review of Books, 10 Apr. 1986.

36   Steven Fielding been said that his ‘most noted and notorious contribution to political history was precisely “high politics”’.15 Yet, if many see Cowling’s work as exemplifying the ‘greasy pole’ view, his approach—​if not that of all the other members of Peterhouse—​was much more sophisticated. Indeed, while differing on how to explain it, and having very different normative assumptions about its merits, Cowling shared with later cultural historians the same basic aim: to explain how the Westminster elite retained its pre-​eminent role within Britain’s changing political system.16 Attacked at the time and later ridiculed when not gratuitously ignored, Cowling’s work contains clues as to how high and cultural political historians can speak to each other. Such a synthesis could enable all historians to establish a more measured appreciation of the role of political leadership within Britain’s past. For even such a materialist critic of high politics’ explanatory limitations as Hobsbawm conceded of Britain’s ruling class during the first half of the twentieth century: ‘All in all, theirs has been a success story.’ Their achievement in limiting the impact of popular political pressure was, he admitted, at least partly due to the skills of leaders such as Bonar Law, David Lloyd George, and Stanley Baldwin.17 Similarly, Jon Parry, whose work has explored in some depth the character of the nineteenth-​century political elite, argued that an exclusive focus on leadership can be no substitute for analysis that draws together all the ‘members of the political nation in one picture’, so as ‘to arrive at a better idea of the nature and effectiveness of the channels—​organizational and ideological—​which linked them’.18 Indeed, even Geoffrey Elton criticized the kind of ‘pure political history’ that just focused on organizations or leaders and so was ‘self-​contained and remote from the realities of the historical experience’.19 It is one thing to suggest that political leadership needs to be integrated into broader accounts of the past. But it is quite another to identify what precisely was its place—​ that is, how much agency it enjoyed—​in shaping the development of Britain’s partial democracy, and so the level of importance historians should grant to the high-​politics approach. For, if all historians are bad at just one thing, it is explaining the dynamics of change. The main weaknesses of high politics is that its adherents often simply assumed that their subjects enjoyed a pre-eminent role in shaping events; a significant drawback of cultural politics is that those who reconstruct the wider context of formal politics usually fail to establish its impact. A chapter such as this can therefore go only so far in suggesting how this tricky but critical question might best be answered.

15 

P. Williamson, ‘Maurice Cowling and Modern British Political History’, in R. Crowcroft, S.J.D. Green, and R. Whiting, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British Democracy: Maurice Cowling and Conservatism (London, 2010), p. 131. 16  See for example, C. Hall, K. McClelland, and J. Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000). 17  Hobsbawm, ‘British Politics’, p. 101. 18  J.P. Parry, ‘High and Low Politics in Modern Britain’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), 753–​70, at 757. 19 Elton, Political History, p. 6.

High Politics   37

III During the 1960s and 1970s, ‘Peterhouse’ appeared similar to a rearguard action against the inevitable advance of a social history that stressed the supreme importance of class to politics. Some social historians were so confident that their ‘history from below’ held the key to historical explanation that they found it hard to take Peterhouse seriously. In his review of Cowling’s The Impact of Labour, James Hinton even snarkily confessed to needing ‘a conscientious suspension of disbelief to read the book at all’.20 This high-​handed attitude ‘Peterhouse’ returned with enthusiasm: Andrew Jones disparagingly rejected social historians’ concern for ‘the inarticulate in their unknown graves’.21 Underpinning such juvenile posturing was political antagonism and normative belief. ‘Peterhouse’ was strongly associated with the Conservative party: A.B. Cooke even became a leading party official and peer while Cowling stood for election under its colours, and held fast to a religiously informed Toryism that inclined him towards a nascent Thatcherism. ‘Peterhouse’ admired the leadership it studied.22 Most social historians, like Hinton, in contrast identified with the radical wing of the Labour party or organizations much further to the left, such as the Communist party. Many wanted to overturn the status quo, at the heart of which was the Westminster system, through extra-​parliamentary action. Described by Jose Harris as the ‘demon king of British political history’, Cowling’s combative personality, if nothing else, meant he was disinclined to seek a consensus with critics.23 There were also basic philosophical reasons why Cowling’s work then appeared irreconcilable with more radical currents. A devotee of inter-war and post-​war conservative historians—​particularly Herbert Butterfield—​who admired a British ‘tradition’ in which change apparently only occurred in harmony with precedent, Cowling was similarly critical of progressives who believed in change based on abstract principles.24 Thinking liberalism’s essentialist understanding of reason meant it could not comprehend the necessary complexity of political action, he set out his perspective in The Nature and Limits of Political Science (1963), which leant heavily on the work of the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott.25 It argued that while Westminster leaders were an important element in the political process, ‘over very large areas [they were], 20  J. Hinton, ‘The Beginning of Modern British Politics’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 24 (1972), 64. 21 Jones, Politics of Reform, p. 236. 22  P. Ghosh, ‘Towards the Verdict of History: Mr Cowling’s Doctrine’, in M. Bentley, ed., Public and Private Doctrine. Essays in British History presented to Maurice Cowling (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 174–​5. 23  J. Harris, ‘High Table’ [book reviews], History Today, 45 (Feb. 1995), 61. 24  C.T. McIntire, Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven, CT, 2004), pp. 122–​3; M. Taylor, ‘The Beginnings of Modern British Social History?’, History Workshop Journal, 43 (1997), 155–​76, at 159–​60. 25  References in this paragraph come from M. Cowling, The Nature and Limits of Political Science (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 119, 178–​9, 181, 184, 198, 206–​7, 211.

38   Steven Fielding in the grip of, dependent on, and in one sense determined by, conditions over which they have no means of exercising conscious control’. Therefore, to achieve their ends, politicians worked within the ‘political structure’, a result of ‘the arbitrary exercise of power and an arbitrary conjunction of circumstances’ and which had ‘accumulate[d]‌ around itself a covering of conventional habits, reasonable laws, acceptable customs and well-​understood liberties which are then taken to have a validity of their own’. This was, in effect, Cowling’s version of ‘tradition’: one in which Westminster—​rightly, in his view—​was the main stage. It was to validate his normative view of political change that Cowling turned to the past. He aspired to apply a ‘total’ or ‘organic’ approach, terms he took from Butterfield, who had bemoaned the extent to which political history had been ‘wrenched out of an immense sociological totality’, resulting in a partial and ‘insulated constitutional history’.26 By reintegrating politics back into this totality, Cowling claimed, historians would then see ‘what happens to intentions, ideals, doctrines and advice once they have taken their chance in a vast and unpredictable world’. It would thereby throw light on the complexity of political action.27 Cowling believed that the proper function of the elite—​which, according to him, comprised party leaders, prominent civil servants, newspaper barons, and their editors—​was to ensure politics maintained its essentially pre-​democratic character, one in accordance with the traditional ‘structure’. Significantly, Cowling’s conception of the elite firmly rejected the individualism favoured by other high-​political historians. He considered biographies—​the form employed by most exponents up to that point—​to be of little value given how they abstracted their subjects from the Westminster system, the heart of the political structure, in which they were largely constituted.28 Politicians and their parties had to be seen ‘in relation to all the rest’, while ‘the politics of continuous tension’ was vital to any understanding of decision-​making. Only this, Cowling claimed, explained why, for example, MPs embraced extensive franchise reform in the Second Reform Act of 1867. Had they been able to free their ‘actions, and their votes, from all considerations of party interest, duty, situation and advantage’, most parliamentarians would have settled for something much less radical.29 More generally, Cowling claimed, individual members of the elite ‘cannot usefully be said themselves to have wanted, desired, or believed anything except what was wanted by all other participants in the system’. For by the time anyone had become part of the elite they had ‘adopted a way of thinking and acting whose function [was] the playing of a role which their positions as repositories of the hopes and ambitions of their followers, force[d]‌them to respect’. This meant that even the most apparently powerful of statesmen ‘reflected as much as they created the climate in which they worked’.30 26 

M. Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, I (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 221, 231.

27 Cowling, Political Science, pp. 45, 52, 123. 28 Cowling, Impact of Labour, p. 5. 29 Cowling, Reform Bill, p. 6. 30 

Ibid., pp. 311–​12.

High Politics   39 Unlike his Peterhouse colleagues, Cowling did not therefore consider the elite fully in command of events or regard their actions as solely determined by personal ambition. If they were guilty of advancing a ‘greasy pole’ view, he was not.31 Cowling however chose not to draw attention to the differences of emphasis he had with those closest to him. Instead he enthusiastically denigrated social historians who, he asserted, believed in a ‘simple, one-​way relationship’ between economic and political change—​for political decisions were, he stated, not ‘derivative offshoots of pre-​existing social conditions’ and working-​class demands. Even if only because they were advanced through the established political structure, such demands were ‘transformed in order to be made tolerable to ruling opinion’.32 On that basis, Cowling came to blows with Royden Harrison over responsibility for the 1867 Reform Act, firmly rebutting Harrison’s proposition that the Act was the product of proletarian pressure. Instead, he claimed Disraeli supported dramatically extending the franchise because that suited his immediate parliamentary purposes. It was, Cowling argued, Disraeli’s ‘position in the political system’—​not popular force—​which meant he favoured reform.33 The extra-​parliamentary pressure undoubtedly evident in 1867 was in any case a rare feature of Britain’s modern political history. It did not detract from Cowling’s belief that, for the most part, the elite was able to persuade the newly enfranchised into accepting their subordination within the Westminster system. In accounting for this success, Cowling did not however rely on social influences such as ‘deference’, which was how some explained the incorporation of the working class.34 Instead, he saw it as primarily due to the deployment of the politicians’ arts, principally rhetoric, maintaining that it was the ‘language they used, the images they formed, the myths they left’ that enabled leaders to shape what the people thought. ‘High politics was’, he stated, ‘primarily a matter of rhetoric and manoeuvre’, with the former used to ‘provide new landmarks for the electorate’ and the latter to ensure ‘the right people provided them’.35 For Cowling, ‘public opinion’ stood in a dependent relationship to the elite and existed to be moulded into a shape of the latter’s choosing. Politicians, even with the arrival of a fully democratic franchise, remained ‘constructive’ and tried ‘not merely to say what electors wanted to hear but to make electors want them to say what they wanted to say in the first place’.36 For Cowling, the elite’s ability to manipulate the people into enjoying a ‘vicarious satisfaction at the leadership of the politicians who operated the system’, rather than demanding a direct say for themselves, was the basis for Westminster’s supremacy.37 He nonetheless conceded that this rhetoric had its social limits, describing Labour after its 1931 general election rout as possessing an irreducible core of ‘die-​hard 31 

Cooke and Vincent, Governing Passion, pp. 20–​1, 22; Jones, Politics of Reform, pp. 11–​12.

32 Cowling, Reform Bill, pp. 1, 3, 315–​16, 339. 33 

Ibid., p. 339. For example, R. McKenzie and A. Silver, Angels in Marble: Working Class Conservatives in Urban England (Chicago, 1968). 35 Cowling, Impact of Labour, pp. 4–​5. 36 Ibid., p. 5. 37  Ibid., pp. 6–​7. 34 

40   Steven Fielding support’ within the working class—​one which guaranteed it the kind of ‘social indestructability’ the Liberals, most notably, had lacked.38

IV Despite announcing his intention to produce a general survey of the years 1850–​1940 and write monographs on the inter-war and post-​war periods, Cowling abandoned mainstream political history during the mid-​1970s.39 Had he pursued these projects, Cowling’s version of high politics might have been harder to ignore or less easy to disparage: it might also have become more consistent. In that regard Cowling was unfortunate in his followers, a small and eclectic group, as few of them saw any purpose in doing more than preserving his memory, as opposed to creatively engaging with those cultural currents that subsequently engulfed political history.40 Yet, Cowling’s work contained within it the potential for helping the development of a measured appreciation of the role of leadership consistent with important aspects of the cultural history of politics. It would however be wrong to claim that Cowling’s approach, now four decades old, does not require some judicious revision. Even those few historians who sympathize with it concede Cowling’s work was uneven and incomplete. Robert Crowcroft considered that his lack of regard for political parties meant Cowling’s understanding of the organizational context in which the elite operated was ‘simplistic’.41 Parry also suggested that the Cowlingite emphasis on the importance of immediate calculation meant it had little to say about the long-​term development of policy.42 There are, undoubtedly, other areas that need recalibration to take account of advances in the historiography. So far as this chapter is concerned, the most significant aspect of Cowling’s approach to high politics is his understanding of the relationship between the elite and society. Despite his reputation, Cowling was interested in the world outside Westminster, making forceful claims for the elite’s ability to constitute popular political subjectivities. That he did not spend much time substantiating them does not mean Cowling thought the relationship inconsequential. As he wrote in The Impact of Labour: ‘[a]‌study of the impact of politicians on British public opinion would be an important extension of this book’, while an understanding of the Labour and Conservative parties ‘as aspects of total social history’ would be similarly ‘desirable’. Cowling nonetheless considered analysis of

38 Cowling, Impact of Hitler, p. 22. 39 Ibid., ix. 40 

For an uncompromising extension of Cowling’s high politics to the 1940s Labour party, see R. Crowcroft, Attlee’s War: World War II and the Making of a Labour Leader (London, 2011). 41  R. Crowcroft, ‘Maurice Cowling and the Writing of British Political History’, Contemporary British History, 22 (2008), 279–​86, at 284–​5. 42  Parry, ‘High and Low’, 755.

High Politics   41 the character of the elite to be an ‘essential preliminary’ to properly assessing that impact and analysing those parties.43 Most historians who responded to The Impact of Labour when it was published in 1971 believed, like the social historian Peter Stead, that had Cowling extended his frame of analysis to include the extra-​parliamentary domain, he would have been disappointed to discover that class ‘experience’ had immunized workers against elite rhetoric.44 The political historian Kenneth Morgan was similarly confident that high politics became ‘out of date’ after the 1918 Reform Act gave all working-​class men and most women the vote. After that point, he claimed, Labour and the Conservatives ‘flourished on the partisanship and sectarianism of a [class] divided society’, to which it was their function to give voice.45 Few are now so certain. In a 1983 essay on Chartism, Gareth Stedman Jones, whose work had hitherto emphasized the importance of class to politics, altered tack to argue that social changes ‘are not bearers of essential political meaning in themselves. They are only endowed with particular political meanings so far as they are effectively articulated through specific forms of political discourse and practice’.46 Building on this insight, Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor later argued that political interests and identities are not ‘predetermined and self-​evident, only requiring recognition and expression by the parties’. They were, instead, just ‘signposts for political behaviour in so far as language allows them to be described and articulated’.47 That workers’ social experience ineluctably led them towards a consciousness of class that could be translated into clear-​cut political loyalties is a belief now possessed by few historians. In particular, most current students of the Labour party doubt its leaders merely tapped into fully formed class identities; some even argue the party tried to impose its own vision on workers, albeit with varying degrees of success.48

V It was historians from outside the high-​politics tradition—​renegade social historians influenced by postmodernism, such as Stedman Jones in the first instance—​who conducted such innovative work. Few Cowlingites explored in any detail relations between 43 Cowling, Impact of Labour, p. 4. 44 

P. Stead, ‘1922 and All That’, Historical Journal, 17 (1974), 201–​8, at 207–​8. K.O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity. The Lloyd George Coalition Government 1918–​1922 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 351–​3, 355–​6, 373; see also Morgan’s letter in the Guardian, 8 Sept. 2005. 46  G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge, 1983), p. 242. 47  J. Lawrence and M. Taylor, ‘Introduction’, in J. Lawrence and M. Taylor, eds., Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997), p. 18. 48  See for example, L. Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain 1951–​64 (Basingstoke, 2003); S. Fielding, P. Thompson, and N. Tiratsoo, ‘England Arise!’ The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester, 1995); and J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 1998). 45 

42   Steven Fielding parliamentary leaders and those they aspired to lead. In 1983 Michael Bentley did however analyse the extent to which party ‘doctrine’ structured elite thinking, rather than the other way round.49 This was a development of his earlier account of how the ‘Liberal cosmology’ prevented its leading adherents from adequately responding to the dramatic changes initiated by the First World War.50 These were modest but significant extensions of the high-​politics frame of reference. It was, however, not until Philip Williamson’s 1999 study of Stanley Baldwin that the first sustained Cowlingite—​indeed, given its originality, it might be better described as neo-​Cowlingite—​analysis of the relationship between elite and people was attempted.51 Measured through electoral support and popular regard, Baldwin was by far the most successful member of the inter-​war elite. Williamson’s explanation of this achievement led him to elaborate on Cowling’s assertions about leadership rhetoric. Williamson argued that Baldwin accomplished his pre-​eminence largely through public speech. But Williamson did not claim Baldwin crudely imposed his words on a passive public, instead contending that he relied on an ability to appear to reflect—​while actually constructing—​attitudes. Perhaps even more significant than his dialectical view of public speech, Williamson expanded the concept of rhetoric to include the Conservative leader’s presentation of his public persona, involving such apparently minor matters as employing his pipe at suitable moments to project a reassuring, statesmanlike image. This persona, Williamson argued, was a product of Baldwin’s conscious intention as well as of wider cultural forces, including the press, radio, and the cinema, over which he had little control. Williamson’s attempt to specify the dynamics of elite rhetoric, and to expand understandings of how leaders promulgated their message, did not occur in a historiographical vacuum. It nonetheless represented a significant moment in the development of high politics, marking a crucial bridge between it and cultural politics. For, if Cowling had gestured towards its importance, it was not until the later 1980s that modern British political historians started taking rhetoric seriously.52 By the 1990s elite rhetoric had, moreover, become a subject in which cultural historians, most conspicuously Bill Schwarz, had a particular interest, seeing it, as had Cowling, as an important means through which leaders shaped popular opinion.53 If much of this work focused on words, some did as Williamson and took a more generous view, to embrace film or the

49  M. Bentley, ‘Party, Doctrine, and Thought’, in M. Bentley and J. Stevenson, eds., High and Low Politics in Modern Britain: Ten Studies (Oxford, 1983), pp. 123–​53. 50  M. Bentley, The Liberal Mind 1914–​1929 (Cambridge, 1977). 51  P. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 12–​16, 79–​87, 338. 52  The first significant evidence of this interest being H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Rhetoric and Politics in Britain, 1860–​1950’, in P.J. Waller, ed., Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain (Brighton, 1987), pp. 34–​58. See also Joseph S. Meisel, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (New York, 2001). 53  B. Schwarz, ‘Politics and Rhetoric in the Age of Mass Culture’, History Workshop Journal, 46 (1998), 129–​59.

High Politics   43 very person of the politician themselves.54 Schwarz included ‘the whole paraphernalia of invented rituals and to the myriad ways in which a national political culture came to be organised’.55 Highlighting Lord Curzon’s role in this process, Schwarz’s emphasis on the rhetoric of ritual brought into view work on elite-​invented ceremonials which, in Britain’s case, proliferated at the same time as the franchise expanded, and one of whose purposes was to popularize adherence to patriotism, hierarchy, and continuity.56 As Williamson also recognized, the monarchy and the rituals to which it gave rise were useful and popular means for the promulgation of establishment values.57 These developments brought the concerns of high and cultural politics closer together. But they did not address the efficacy of elite rhetoric, however it was conceived. Nor did they clarify the extent to which the predominance of Westminster leaders, something so important to the high-​political view, came from their own efforts, as Cowling intimated, or if this was rather the consequence of a fortuitous conjuncture. For Cowling focused on a very particular period—​the 1860s to the 1930s—​one in which, he claimed, leading politicians’ public role was an amalgam of ‘corporate monarch, witch-​doctor and bard’, in which they acted as ‘entertainers  . . .  crusaders or philosophers  . . .  the unacknowledged poets of the time’.58 This was however a period in which, according to John Vincent—​writing of the 1860s—​the central place of politics in national life was unique, comparable as it was with what drama, sport, and liturgy became in later times.59 Peter Clarke suggests this regard continued into the Edwardian period, with contemporaries looking upon even the most obscure MPs as celebrities.60 Yet how likely was it that such a position owed anything much to the agency of leaders? Were they instead merely beneficiaries of cultural processes in which aspiration and deference combined to invest political activity with special significance and endowed its participants with considerable prestige?61 During this period, the elite benefited from how their words and persons were presented to the nation. As H.C.G. Matthew emphasizes, by the 1880s, press agencies and telegraph services could rapidly transmit leading politicians’ words to newspaper

54 

J. Ramsden, ‘Baldwin and Film’, in N. Pronay and D.W. Spring, eds., Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918–​45 (London, 1982), pp. 126–​43; M. Francis, ‘The Labour Party: Modernisation and the Politics of Restraint’, in B. Conekin, F. Mort, and C. Waters, eds., Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–​1964 (London, 1999), pp. 152–​70. 55   Schwarz, ‘Rhetoric’, 150–​1. 56  D. Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”, c. 1820–​1977’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 101–​64. 57  P. Williamson, ‘The Monarchy and Public Values, 1900–​1953’, in A. Olechnowicz, ed., The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present (Cambridge 2007), pp. 223–​57. 58 Cowling, Impact of Labour, pp. 8–​9, 10. 59  J. Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party (New York, 1966), p. xv. 60  P.F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971). 61  As argued in T.R. Tholfsen, ‘The Origins of the Birmingham Caucus’, Historical Journal, 11 (1959), 161–​84, and J. Cornford, ‘The Transformation of Conservatism in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Studies, 7 (1963), 35–​66.

44   Steven Fielding readers. Matthew Roberts further emphasizes the importance of the late Victorian local and regional press in shaping political identities, but he also notes that that this was a brief moment when ‘profit and politics’ were in harmony. As Matthew argues, the contraction of the provincial press, which began before 1914, and the reluctance of popular national titles to directly report speeches was a significant factor in the demise of at least a particular form of rhetoric.62 The parties had earlier shown an impressive facility to adapt to changes in popular forms of communication, notably turning the advertising industry’s poster to good effect in the late Victorian period.63 And, according to Jon Lawrence, the inter-​war period was still one in which they exerted significant influence over the shape of popular politics.64 According to Schwarz, however, by the 1930s, party leaders believed Britain’s ‘Americanized’ popular culture—​one in which politics was increasingly mediated by a press, cinema, and radio unwilling to report their words at length, if at all—​meant they were losing contact with the people.65 If most now recognize that the elite’s aptitude to beguile the public with their rhetoric was increasingly circumscribed as the twentieth century progressed, few political historians have spent time closely analysing the nature of that ability. Cowling was hardly alone in appearing to assume that a message sent from Westminster was one the people uncritically consumed.66 However, as a variety of historians now appreciate, studies of rhetoric—​or any kind of discourse—​which assess how it was conceived and presented to the exclusion of its reception are incomplete. For the nature of its dispatch—​be it in person; from the platform; on the printed page or cinema screen; through radio, television, or Facebook—​influences the impact of any message, while the character and location of the inevitably disaggregated audience also structures how the message is understood.67 It is, however, extremely difficult for students of the past to establish with much precision the extent to which politicians turned audiences’ heads. Williamson attempted to provide some kind of answer by suggesting that the content of Baldwin’s speeches itself implied their effectiveness. That the Conservative leader reiterated the same themes, and over a prolonged period—​Williamson surmised—​meant they must have met with a popular response. For had they not, he presumed, Baldwin would not have repeated

62  Matthew, ‘Rhetoric’, pp. 39, 54–​6; M. Roberts, ‘Constructing a Tory World-​View: Popular Politics and the Conservative Press in Late-​Victorian Leeds’, Historical Research, 79 (2006), 115–​43, at 142. 63   J. Thompson, ‘“Pictorial Lies”?—​Posters and Politics in Britain c. 1880–​1914’, Past and Present, 197 (2007), 177–​210. 64  J. Lawrence, ‘The Transformation of British Public Politics after the First World War’, Past and Present, 190 (2006), 185–​216, at 204–​6. 65  Schwarz, ‘Rhetoric’. 66  For example, I. McLean claimed Margaret Thatcher to have been a brilliant rhetorician but declined to show how: see his Rational Choice and British Politics (Oxford, 2001), p. 205. 67  D. Tanner, ‘Constructing the Constructers: Institutional Cultures, Associational Life and Their Impact on Inter-​War Politics’, paper presented to the 31st annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 26–​28 March 2004; G. Stedman Jones, ‘The Determinist Fix: Some Obstacles to the Further Development of the Linguistic Approach to History in the 1990s’, History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996), 19–​35, at 30–​1.

High Politics   45 them, given that the basic purpose of all public speech is to persuade.68 While holding some danger of becoming a tautology, this is nonetheless a plausible methodology, and one that might be employed to further explore the effectiveness of rhetoric.69 But to help them better establish the effect of elite rhetoric, or merely to better contextualize it, high-​political historians might be advised to also employ sources associated with cultural history. For example, in dramatizing Britain’s political history on the big screen during the 1930s, filmmakers consistently told stories of selfless statesmen advancing the national interest, presenting their elite protagonists as wise, paternalistic, and humane. At the same time they diminished belief in the political agency of ordinary people by presenting them as a fickle, often violent mob. These popular depictions suggest the largely working-​class cinema-​going public looked on such representations of leadership in positive terms.70 These benign dramatic depictions of the political class were, however, transformed during the decades that followed 1945.71

VI It is understandable why so many today consider antediluvian an approach to political history that focuses on its representative institutions and leading figures. Since the 1970s, power has apparently drained from Westminster thanks to the European Union, devolution, and global capitalism. Leaders of parties that aspire to hold national office have become increasingly unpopular and periodically denounced for ‘sleaze’. Political parties are empty shells, whose members account for just 1 per cent of the electorate.72 So diminished was their influence and so powerful had the media in comparison become, Jon Lawrence concluded in 2009, that the future of British democracy lay in the hands of broadcasters, not politicians.73 Historians are creatures of the context in which they write, so it is no wonder they now find it more satisfying, intellectually and personally, to focus on identities crafted within the private sphere—​an arena which postmodernism and neo-​liberalism stipulate is the most significant site for the generation and exercise of ‘power’.

68 Williamson, Baldwin, pp. 12–​18. 69 

Students of film genre similarly suggest that when a series of movies rework the same storylines it is because such narratives evoke a positive response among audiences: T. Schatz, Hollywood Genres (New York, 1981) and S. Neale, Genre and Hollywood (2000). 70  S. Fielding, ‘British Politics and Cinema’s Historical Dramas, 1929–​38’, Historical Journal, 56 (2013), 487–​511. 71  S. Fielding, ‘A Mirror for England? Cinematic Representations of Politicians and Party Politics, ca. 1944–​64’, Journal of British Studies, 47 (2008), 107–​28. 72  Library of the House of Commons, ‘Membership of UK Political Parties’ (August 2015). 73  J. Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009), p. 254.

46   Steven Fielding If this is an explicable perspective, there is still much wrong with it. Prime ministers can still go to war despite millions of citizens taking to the streets to demonstrate their opposition. Governments remain responsible for spending more than one-​third of Britain’s gross domestic product and, through legislation, shape everyday behaviour. The general election campaign is still one of those moments that help define who the British are, and who they are not. The death of representative politics—​the rule of the politician—​and so the unimportance of leadership within the widely derided ‘Westminster bubble’ has been greatly exaggerated. For no other reason than that, political leadership continues to be a relevant historical subject. But that does not mean high-​ political historians should not reconsider their approach. For, just like those men and sometimes women who are their subjects, high-​ political historians need to take account of new ways of thinking. This chapter devoted so much attention to Maurice Cowling because his work suggests high-​political history contains within it seeds that can be developed to allow it to engage with newer forms of historical explanation without losing its unique emphasis. High politics, at least under the neo-​Cowlingite flag outlined here, can save itself from its current irrelevance by casting a new eye on its own traditions and practitioners. As suggested, Philip Williamson’s work indicates a way forward. Williamson showed the willingness to explore—​in a way Cowling did not—​the nature and efficacy of the elite’s relationship with the people. He recognized that leadership was manifested in more than words expressed in Westminster and Whitehall, that it depended on varying cultural forms to express itself, and that this entailed that its meaning and impact could only partly be determined by leaders themselves. Williamson consciously developed some of Cowling’s insights, but was also sensitive to some of the interests of cultural political history. There is every reason for this process to go further and for students of leadership to start tackling more inconvenient topics. Cowling focused only on those moments in which the elite succeeded in imposing themselves on events—​taking command of franchise reform in 1867, accommodating the emergent Labour party within the Westminster system. Even Williamson studied one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century. But what of later extensions of the franchise, when the elite felt change had been forced upon them? What of those leaders who failed to evoke a positive popular response? In the late 1930s, Mass Observation claimed its research showed Britons did not ‘feel sufficiently strongly that they are able to speak through Parliament’, that many had resigned themselves to being voiceless and regarded politics as ‘just another of the forces which exploit them and of which they know little or nothing’.74 Since then such attitudes have become more extensive. Indeed, the current ‘anti-​politics’ temper is one reason why Cowling’s concerns now seem so antiquarian to so many historians. A high-​political history that continues to dodge explanation of the origins of this contemporary phenomenon will remain—​ and deserve to remain—​irrelevant.

74 

Mass-​Observation, Britain (1939), pp. 9, 12–​13.

High Politics   47

Further Reading S. Pedersen, ‘What is Political History Now?’, in D. Cannadine, ed., What Is History Now? (New York, 2002), pp. 36–​56. B. Schwarz, ‘Politics and Rhetoric in the Age of Mass Culture’, History Workshop Journal, 46 (1998), 129–​59. P. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin:  Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999). P. Williamson, ‘Maurice Cowling and Modern British Political History’, in R. Crowcroft, S.J.D. Green, and R. Whiting, eds., Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British Democracy: Maurice Cowling and Conservatism (2010), pp. 105–​52.

chapter 4

P opul ar P ol i t i c s Malcolm Chase

Though part of what might be termed historians’ ‘mental furniture’, popular politics is an elastic term that evades close definition. For medieval and early modern historians it generally denotes ‘ordinary’, non-​elite subjects as audiences for, or interlocutors with, elite political actions. Modern historians often prefer it to the term ‘working-​class politics’, signalling authorial discomfort with the connotations of class and/​or a recognition that, outwith the establishment realm, political ideas were often trans-​class. And for the nineteenth century, popular politics has typically served as a synonym for radicalism, an umbrella term for a succession of movements which, from the 1770s, emphasized the sovereignty of a people largely excluded from formal exercise of political power. No usage is entirely satisfactory, especially given incremental extensions to the franchise in 1832, 1867, 1884, 1918, and 1928. The ‘modernization’ of British political life from the nineteenth century is typically held to include the triumph of party and the taming of the ‘popular’. Yet petitioning, collective assembly, and the occupation of public space remained integral to the politics of those who regarded themselves as excluded from power. From the Tichborne campaign (bracketing, and some might argue overshadowing, the 1867 and 1884 Reform Acts), British politics has also been punctuated by causes unbound by party-​political fetters. Examples include the nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century campaigns for women’s suffrage; the far right in the inter-​war period; the development of ‘green’, feminist, and gay politics after the Second World War; and, at the end of our period, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP, founded in 1993). All asserted that they were popular, in the sense of being rooted in the views of—​and giving voice to—​those outside organized politics. The discussion that follows suggests some defining principles and characteristics of popular political activity; it then takes a broadly chronological form, identifying in the first half of the nineteenth century a diminishing resort to violence and the growing importance of memory and commemoration (notably in Scotland and Wales, less so in England). The most momentous of all modern British political mobilizations, Chartism, was a hinge on which much turned and, no less critically, failed to turn. This is seen in the rise of popular liberalism and in the more ‘masculine’ reform organization of the

Popular Politics   49 1860s, the decade that also saw the emergence of a concerted movement for female suffrage. Throughout our period a sense of political and economic exclusion was a consistently animating force in popular politics, but there often ran alongside it a burgeoning imperial nationalism that softened the boundaries of class. The tensions of the 1930s, played out at the polar ends of popular politics by fascism and the unemployed workers’ movement, gave way from 1945 to the maturing of universal suffrage within the context of an organized two-​party system, suggesting that popular politics had at last been tamed. The revival of ‘third party’ alternatives from the 1970s, however, revealed that this was not so, and the forms taken by popular politics at the turn of the millennium are suggestive of a widespread rejection of organized politics and even a regression to the grumbling endemic in pre-​industrial societies.

I The defining principle of popular politics has seldom been one of simple contestation. Many causes have loudly asserted their loyalty to what they conceive as a deeper and more enduring entity than the political establishment, be it nation, monarch, religion, heritage, ‘the rights of man’, or, most recently, intergenerational justice. In addition, the roots of many political pressure and interest groups have been popular, in that they largely found their supporters beyond the social strata that supplied the political establishment. As the journalist Douglas Jerrold observed of an 1879 meeting of London’s Patriotic Club (an offshoot of the Land and Labour League, formed by followers of the Chartist Bronterre O’Brien): ‘Every tone, every aspect, every sentiment impressed upon you the fact that this was no gathering of tribunes, but a homely meeting of ordinary British artisans’, expressing the ‘prosaic discontent of the toiler who finds times hard and the hearts of the rulers harder’.1 For a twentieth-​century example of the same phenomenon one might point to the ‘John Hampden New Freedom Party’, named after the seventeenth-​century parliamentarian and founded on a perception that English sovereignty was undemocratically subordinated to the Westminster Parliament. It was re-​ titled the English National Party (ENP) in 1974, in imitation of Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party, and two years later it could claim 5,000 members. However, it is now only remembered—​if at all—​for by-​election campaigners dressed in Beefeater costumes and as the last political refuge of a disgraced ex-​Labour minister, John Stonehouse.2 The ENP has a place in the rich history of Britain’s fringe political parties, but few serious scholars would locate it other than beyond the pale of serious politics. Yet in their 1  Weekly Dispatch, 6 July 1879, cited in A. Whitehead, ‘Dan Chatterton and his “Atheistic Communistic Scorcher”’, History Workshop Journal, 25 (1988), 87. 2  D. Boothroyd, Politico’s Guide to the History of British Political Parties (London, 2001), pp. 87–​8; ‘A New Haven for Stonehouse’, The Guardian, 15 Apr. 1976, 26.

50   Malcolm Chase different ways, the Patriotic Club in the 1870s and the ENP a century later alert us to one of the great but unfathomable truths of popular politics: it exists at its most basic and pervasive level in the realm of grumbling, a universal human activity but one that largely evades the attention of serious historians. Fringe political groups typically articulate otherwise submerged currents of opinion within the politics of the everyday, articulations that often resurface, later and less eccentrically, in more organized and purposeful forms. Thus the Patriotic Club prefigured late ​Victorian socialism, especially the Social Democratic Federation, and the ENP prefigured many of the preoccupations of UKIP (despite the UK of its title, essentially an English organization). Mirroring the typology (suggested by the anthropologist James Scott) of the background noise of political discontent that characterizes agrarian societies, we can conceptualize a spectrum of behaviours:  grumbling, swearing, slander and character assassination, dissimulation, and false compliance. All are constitutive of popular politics but each falls short of organization in the form either of collective resistance, a protest movement, or a political party.3 Subsequent activities such as appeals, petitions, demonstrations, and the occupation of public space may constitute stages towards either a protest movement or formal political organization. The use of violence—​mirroring other ‘everyday’ strategies of resistance in pre-​industrial societies, such as threatening letters and acts of sabotage—​largely receded after the 1840s, until their adoption in the decade before the First World War by the Women’s Social and Political Union (founded in 1903). During the first half of the nineteenth century, however, the repertoire of British popular politics was both broader and not infrequently more combative. In the 1790s, elements of popular support for revolutionary France evolved—​in the face of British government repression—​into an underground movement that was fully prepared to countenance revolution. Members of the so-​called United Britons and United Englishmen (named in imitation of the more sophisticated and numerous United Irishmen) included many that previously had belonged to constitutional agitations such as the London Corresponding Society. The subsequently much celebrated ‘Scottish Martyrs’ (six men transported to New South Wales and a seventh hanged and beheaded for treason in October 1794) had similarly belonged to the Society of Friends of the People or the Dundee Friends of Liberty.4 In the early nineteenth century this same Jacobin conspiratorial tradition surfaced in the so-​called Despard Conspiracy (1802) and, in 1820, in a Scottish rising and the Cato Street Conspiracy to assassinate the Cabinet. The commemoration of certain forceful mobilizations against the establishment has been an explicit phenomenon at subsequent periods of popular political tension. Thus the 1840s saw the erection of several Scottish memorials to the 1820 insurgency. The latter was also a point of reference during the reform crisis of 1830–​2 and for the 3 

J.C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT, 1985), pp. 29, 284. 4  R.A.E. Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience, 1795–​1803 (Gloucester, 1983); E.V. Macleod, ‘Scottish Martyrs (act. 1792–​1798)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, online edn, January 2008.

Popular Politics   51 Independent Labour Party in 1920, as it has also been for Scottish nationalists since the 1960s.5 Unemployed workers’ protest marches in South Wales in the 1930s deliberately imitated aspects of the 1839 Chartist rising in the region, and the rising’s centenary was celebrated by the South Wales Miners’ Federation with a pageant that effectively presented Welsh labour politics as a response to, and evocation of, Chartism.6 The 1930s hunger marches were in turn explicitly evoked in the ‘People’s March for Jobs’ organized by the trade union movement in 1981 (with a second in 1983) against the economic policies of the Thatcher government.7 In general, however, recurrent celebration of specifically English episodes of violent resistance has been muted. The Luddites, textiles workers resisting mechanization (1811–​ 16), have become a focus of celebration in West Yorkshire, but direct political involvement is absent, while the serious insurgency of 1820 in the county is forgotten. Annual commemoration of the Levellers at Burford, Oxfordshire (where three parliamentarian soldiers belonging to the Leveller movement were shot on Cromwell’s orders in 1649) is a minor marker in the labour movement’s calendar. Rather more substantial is the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival’ organized each July by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to commemorate six Dorset farmworkers sentenced to transportation in 1834 after they had formed a trade union branch. Safely non-​violent in their methods (though not as politically naïve as often painted), their commemoration dates from the centenary of their exile, when it was organized by the TUC to refocus the labour movement after the humiliations of the 1926 General Strike and the second Labour government (1929–​31). The vocabulary of martyrdom emerged around the same time.8 While the treatment of the Tolpuddle labourers was execrable, there is a sense in which its commemoration was—​and to some extent remains—​contrived, rather than a subject of genuinely popular remembrance. This underlines the volatility and shifting ideologies of popular politics, especially in England, where nationalist (in the sense of specifically English) sentiment has always been chimerical.

II Mainstream political commemoration of Chartism beyond Wales has been even more attenuated than that of the Levellers, largely due to the 1839 South Wales Rising and the involvement of significant numbers of Chartists in conspiracies in 1839–​40 and 1848. 5 

G. Pentland, “‘Betrayed by Infamous Spies”? The Commemoration of Scotland’s ‘Radical War’ of 1820’, Past and Present, 201 (2008), 141–​73. 6  S. Ward, Unemployment and the State in Britain: The Means Test and Protest in 1930s South Wales and North-​East England (Manchester, 2013); South Wales Miners’ Federation/​Labour Research Department, Pageant of South Wales: May Day 1939 (Cardiff, 1939). 7  The Times, 2 June 1981, 2 and 23 Apr. 1983, 2. 8  C. Griffiths, ‘Remembering Tolpuddle: Rural History and Commemoration in the Inter-​War Labour Movement’, History Workshop Journal, 44 (1997), 144–​69.

52   Malcolm Chase The Chartist movement (1838–​58), however, represented a high point of popular politics. More than three million people signed its national petition in 1842. This figure was never contested and, representing as it did around a third of Britain’s adult population, suggests that it is reasonable to claim that Chartism was the high point of British popular political mobilization. Chartism was not, however, unprecedented. The famous Six Points of the People’s Charter (universal male suffrage and the secret ballot; salaried MPs and the abolition of the property qualification to become an MP; equal-​sized constituencies and annual parliaments) had first surfaced in British radical demands at the time of the American Revolution. These ideas were especially current after the Napoleonic Wars, which saw a surge in political demonstrations that reached a tragic apogee on 16 August 1819 when cavalry charged a mass rally of reformers on Manchester’s St Peter’s Fields, killing 18 and injuring more than 700. Instantly and mordantly dubbed ‘Peterloo’, the incident assumed a black and enduring significance. Its commemoration has remained a matter of continuing controversy in Manchester city politics into the twenty-​first century. However, for subsequent reformers, Peterloo was also a central element of a lived experience of government repression, referenced by middle-​class and working-​class reformers alike. Veterans of Peterloo were respected figures within Chartism; survivors were lauded in demonstrations preceding the Second Reform Act of 1867; and a few even assembled for a photograph taken at the time of the Third Reform Act in 1884.9 Peterloo profoundly influenced Chartism. The latter’s most lauded leader, Feargus O’Connor, consciously modelled himself on Henry Hunt, the charismatic orator who was about to speak at Peterloo when the cavalry charged and who was subsequently imprisoned for offences connected to the incident. On the cusp between an oral and a print-​based political culture, Chartism cohered around Northern Star, a paper designed as much to be read aloud and publicly as silently and in private. The movement was resolutely opposed to political compromise, a mood the memory of Peterloo did much to harden. Chartism was fuelled, too, by the increasing preparedness of women to mobilize in support of political causes. The immediate precursor of this was the movement against the Whig government’s Poor Law reforms of 1834, but its true antecedent was in female mobilization around the time of Peterloo and unprecedented levels of women’s involvement in the popular campaign to support Queen Caroline, the wife of George IV who sought to divorce her in 1820. English and Scottish radicals had turned to the Queen in the final months of 1820, finding in her an impeccably patriotic focus for criticizing the monarch and the ministry that governed in his name. The Caroline affair was short-​lived (she died the following August) but her cause shaped the tone of popular political activity for the next quarter of a century. It did so not only in terms of the form that popular politics frequently took—​ petitioning, a lively print culture, and carefully choreographed mass

9 

R. Poole, Return to Peterloo (Manchester Region History Review, vol. 23, Manchester, 2014).

Popular Politics   53 demonstrations—​but also in the inclusion of both genders and the widespread perception of Parliament as dominated by the aristocracy and acting only in the interests of the propertied social groups that were directly represented at Westminster. As far as popular politics was concerned, the 1832 Reform Act had changed nothing. Cross-​class mobilization against the Tories (in government continuously from 1807 to November 1830) and in favour of the Whigs (the self-​styled ‘friends of the people’), who supported electoral reform, was much in evidence during the reform crisis of 1830–​2. However, the important London-​based National Union of the Working Classes (NUWC) declined to make common cause with middle-​class radicals since there was no shared commitment to immediate universal male enfranchisement. The NUWC included many who proceeded to play prominent roles in Chartism. The popularity acquired by the Whigs, both through their support for Queen Caroline and for reform, dissolved rapidly during their ministries of 1832–​41. Not only was the 1832 Act declared immutable, but the Whigs were also responsible for a slew of measures—​notably Poor Law and police reform, and politically oppressive policies in Ireland and Canada—​that earned them lasting popular enmity. There existed then a fundamental suspicion that Parliament was not to be trusted to deliver meaningful reform, either of Parliament or of society generally. The People’s Charter was conceived as a means to wider socio-​economic ends. Although Chartists disagreed on the precise detail of these, it is worth noting that their 1842 petition included demands to reverse Poor Law reform and the union with Ireland, and for the disestablishment of the Church; cuts in the costs of the monarchy, civil list, army, and police; reductions in the hours of labour and complaints against ‘a host of other evils too numerous to mention, all arising from class legislation’.10 From this followed the logic of demanding annual parliaments, the only one of the Six Points of the People’s Charter not subsequently made law. Annual parliaments were as integral to the Chartists’ demands as universal male suffrage. The inclusion of annual parliaments explains Chartists’ confidence that the adoption of the Charter would remedy much more than just the yawning democratic deficit left in the wake of the 1832 Reform Act. MPs would be the delegated representatives of their constituents, subject to account annually for their actions, and thus Parliament would become an assembly that could be trusted to govern in accordance with the popular will. Chartists particularly acted on the conviction that a mass electorate would increasingly be an educated one, not necessarily schooled in a formal sense (though we should not underestimate the extent to which Chartism was also an educational movement) but able to refine its political judgement through access to a free press and the increasing prominence of the public platform in daily political life. An abiding image of nineteenth-​century political debate is one dominated by a handful of extraordinary public orators such as Hunt, O’Connor, Gladstone, and Disraeli. Public debate, however, was a routine strand in the culture of even small communities, carefully

10 

Quoted in M. Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, 2013), p. 203.

54   Malcolm Chase regulated according to generally accepted rules of procedure—​rules that in turn were imitated in the proceedings of a wide variety of voluntary endeavours, for example by mutual instruction societies in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth by both the Women’s Institute and the labour movement (and encapsulated for the latter in the once all-​pervasive ABC of Chairmanship, published in 1939 by the TUC’s General Secretary, Walter Citrine). The ideal of direct democracy that underpinned the Chartist demand for annual parliaments was no less incompatible with the five-​year maximum span for parliaments established in 1911 than the earlier Septennial Act. At issue was not only a fundamentally contrasting concept of democratic procedure, but also the extent to which electors could trust those they sent to Westminster. This was a perspective that many political reformers beyond the Chartist movement shared. The activities of the Anti-​Corn Law League, for example, were predicated on the perception that the aristocracy had retained control of Parliament in 1832 and needed to be persuaded to relinquish it. The National Complete Suffrage Union of 1842, independent of the League but with a membership drawn largely from it, was no less attached to annual parliaments than were the Chartists whom the Union warily (and ultimately unsuccessfully) courted.11 During the later 1840s, however, the appeal of annual parliaments outside the Chartist movement rapidly diminished. It was not only the National Complete Suffrage Union with whom Chartists declined to co-​operate, but also middle-​class reformers advocating triennial parliaments. Among them was the Radical MP Joseph Hume. As architect of the 1824 repeal of the Combination Acts (which had deemed trade unions illegal), Hume commanded widespread respect among working-​class reformers. However, the Scotsman tried on several occasions to develop common ground between Chartism and middle-​class reformers with a four-​point ‘Little Charter’ (a vote for all household heads, triennial parliaments, the ballot, and equal-​sized constituencies). It was not just the compromise on annual parliaments that was anathema to Chartists, but also the judgement that working men were unsuitable to be MPs, implied by Hume’s refusal to agitate for paid MPs and the abolition of the property qualification. Although the ‘Little Charter’ gained some ground after the rejection of Chartism’s third and final mass petition in 1848, it fared hardly better in the Commons than the Six Points had done. Its importance lay in its signalling that some middle-​class reformers now favoured widening the franchise, albeit not to full universal male suffrage. It also indicated that those with an informed understanding of the mechanics of the electoral system knew annual parliaments to be impractical. Although complaints about Parliament remained a recurrent feature of British popular politics, anti-​parliamentarians by ideological conviction were henceforward confined to a few niche political grouplets, for example elements within the Socialist League (1884–​1902)—​one thinks of News from Nowhere (1890), in which William Morris projected a British utopia where the 11 Chase, Chartism, pp. 198–​201, 208–​9, 227–​9.

Popular Politics   55 Houses of Parliament were preserved out of antiquarian curiosity and for the storage of manure.12 Although Chartism refused to compromise on the issue of annual parliaments, from its inception there was an awareness that to demand the vote for women would fatally corrode its credibility. The preface to The People’s Charter could find ‘no just argument’ against the principle of female suffrage, but candidly rejected it on the pragmatic grounds it would repel support.13 It is important, however, that we do not shrink our understanding of what the Chartists meant by democracy to the Six Points. There was a broad, though not universal, assumption that female suffrage would eventually follow if male suffrage was secured. Women who were ratepayers in their own right were already beginning to vote in local elections. The extent to which this occurred varied according to local interpretation and economic circumstance, but the participation of even pauper women in voting for parish overseers is documented in the case of Lichfield.14 Furthermore, Chartism was in essence a mobilization of working-​class communities. We should not therefore be surprised by female participation in the Chartist movement. Women signed Chartism’s national petitions in large numbers. Where separately recorded for individual communities, women’s signatures in 1839 ranged from around 13 to 20 per cent. In 1848, by contrast, the House of Commons Committee on Petitions (with no incentive to underestimate the figure, since it saw women’s signatures as discrediting Chartism) calculated the proportion to be only 8 per cent. The contrast between Chartism’s 1839 and 1848 national petitions tells the story of a gradual transition from a movement that had mobilized whole communities to one increasingly espousing the male-​breadwinner ideal and the politics of respectability, consequently closing off opportunities for women’s participation. This trajectory antici­pated features of the mid-​Victorian popular movement for parliamentary reform, which set its face against not only the theoretical possibility of female enfranchisement but also direct participation by women in political agitation itself. For example, like Chartism before it, elaborate banners were prominent in processions organized by the Reform League (1865–​9). However, the 1860s reform movement surpassed Chartism in the generation of a rich performative culture. This bore witness to workers’ sense of property in their skill, their education, and their importance as wealth creators, but also to the increasingly gendered character of popular politics. Complex models (sometimes even of working steam engines) were paraded, and the performance of acts of labour likewise appeared on floats bearing fully equipped workshops in reform processions.15 Significantly, these spectacles emanated from metals, construction, and engineering trades, where apprenticeship endured as the route to entry and no

12 

W. Morris, News from Nowhere and Other Writings, ed. C. Wilmer (London, 1998), p. 69. The People’s Charter (London, 1838), p. 9. 14  S. Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Abingdon, 2013), pp. 100–​2. 15  M. Chase, ‘The Popular Movement for Parliamentary Reform in Provincial Britain during the 1860s’, Parliamentary History, 35 (2017), 14–30. 13 

56   Malcolm Chase women were employed (in contrast to textiles, tailoring, and shoemaking, for example). Women were peripheral to this reform movement, a contributory factor to the emergence of the sustained and focused movement for female suffrage from 1866.16 So too were the unskilled. Although the Reform League was formally committed to universal male suffrage, the 1867 Reform Act was carefully hedged to deny so-​called unskilled men, or rural workers of any kind, the franchise. The Act was also passed without protest.

III How was it that the popular movement, so resolute about obtaining universal male suffrage—​and to some extent prepared to contemplate female voting too—​could within the space of 20 years have accepted a franchise confined to better-​paid male household heads, and this only in borough constituencies? The answer largely lies in a rapprochement between labour and middle-​class liberalism, particularly at a local level, that was already emerging in the later years of Chartism. Popular identities shaped around ‘nation’ and ‘the people’, rather than ‘class’, offset the political tensions of sharp social difference.17 Since the 1980s, historical interpretation of the Victorian period has been notably reluctant to conceptualize politics purely along class lines. Too often the history of Chartism had been written as if growth of class consciousness was all that was needed to explain it. However, ‘attention to the language of Chartism’, Stedman Jones has argued, suggests that its rise and decline were primarily related ‘not to movements in the economy . . . or an immature class consciousness, but to the changing character and policies of the state’.18 Though this argument relied heavily on textual evidence taken only from the earliest phase of the movement, it was a significant force for the development of a more nuanced interpretation not only of Chartism but of British popular politics generally. Subsequent studies of both Chartism and popular politics more broadly have recognized the force of antipathy to the politics of the establishment, an antipathy that cannot be neatly explained as an expression of class consciousness. Victorian Britain’s various local government bodies (including vestries, highway boards, Poor Law unions, and in Scotland, ‘police burghs’) were typically elected on franchises more generous than the parliamentary one, and working men frequently 16 

On gender and the 1860s reform movement, see C. Hall, K. McClelland, and J. Rendall, Defining the Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 71–​178, and J. Vernon, ed., Re-​Reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 230–​53. 17  Patrick Joyce forcefully argued that they eclipsed class altogether: Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840–​1914 (Cambridge, 1991). 18  G. Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-​Class History (Cambridge, 1983), p. 178.

Popular Politics   57 participated as electors, candidates, and elected representatives in these bodies, necessarily adopting a less combative stance to middle-​class political activists. Furthermore, self-​ help movements, including the freehold land and building societies movements that took off from the late 1840s, provided platforms for practical cross-​class co-oper­ation and thus helped underpin the emergence of popular liberalism. During the 1850s, freehold land societies especially were a forum in which radical artisans and former Anti-​Corn Law League activists cohered in agitating against what the land movement’s paper decried as ‘the monopoly of political power and the monopoly of the land . . . the two parent evils in this country, from which a multitude of lesser ones grow’.19 ‘Liberty, retrenchment and reform’, the bywords of Gladstonian Liberalism, signalled a determination to moralize (in the sense of make more moral) the conduct of the state. This was an objective that attracted widespread support among working people. The radicalism of the early part of Victoria’s reign, it has been argued, found authentic and continuous expression in popular liberalism.20 The organized trades played a far more strategic role in the popular movement for reform in the 1860s than they had in Chartism. The Second Reform Act, as much as the first, constituted a decisive break in defining the political nation and can be seen as shifting the terms of popular politics, by hardening the frontiers that separated the sexes, and the skilled from the unskilled. For many working men of the post-​Chartist generation, accommodation within liberalism seemed to signal an end to exclusion. Moving a memorial to the Queen to dissolve Parliament and force an election on the question of reform in 1866, the former leader of Middlesbrough Chartism, James Maw, declared that ‘he hated the Tories as much as the devil but he hated the old Whigs as bad as the devil and hell put together’.21 Significantly, though, Maw was speaking as a committeeman of the Middlesbrough Liberal Association, a body that doubled as the local executive of the Reform League. A place in the liberal sun satisfied many who had formerly been combative advocates of parliamentary reform. In addition, there was limited appetite to widen the franchise further to include either women or ‘unskilled’ males. Although the 1884–​5 Reform and Redistribution Acts considerably increased the electorate, they did so by extending to the country as a whole the heavily qualified franchise that in 1867 had been restricted to borough constituencies alone. This still left as many as 40 per cent of adult men at any one time without the vote.22 The 1884–​5 reforms, and still more those of 1867, therefore left a popular constituency unrepresented by the main political parties. However, the Conservatives’ Primrose League (founded 1883), with a membership of around two million by the Great War, 19 

Freeholder, 1 June 1850, quoted in M. Chase, ‘Out of Radicalism: The Mid-​Victorian Freehold Land Movement’, English Historical Review, 106 (1991), 339. 20  E. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–​1880 (Cambridge, 1992); E. Biagini and A. Reid, eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organized Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–​1914 (Cambridge, 1991). 21  Middlesbrough Weekly News, 29 June 1866, cited in J. Bellamy and J. Saville, eds., Dictionary of Labour Biography: Vol. 10 (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 140. 22  D. Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900–​1918 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 102.

58   Malcolm Chase did much to align popular support (especially female) with the party. Its activities were essentially social and directed at nurturing deference rather than encouraging active political involvement.23 Nonetheless, the League towered numerically above all other popular political formations. The socialist movement that emerged from the 1880s, for example, hardly qualified as a mass movement. Estimates of the early membership of the Social Democratic Federation suggest an organization with rarely more than 3,000 members and often much fewer. The Socialist League and the Fabian Society each enrolled less than a thousand. The Independent Labour Party, established in 1893, enjoyed greater support. Its reach, however, was geographically concentrated in Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Scotland, with isolated outposts such as Leicester.24 Nor was the socialist movement the greatest mobilizer of counter-​establishment opinion after Chartism. That accolade belongs to the ebullient campaign in support of the Tichborne Claimant. In 1865 a butcher from Wagga Wagga, Australia, appeared and claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir to a sizeable landed fortune who had disappeared in 1854 and was presumed to have died. Two of the longest trials in British legal history ensued, the first (May 1871–​June 1872) a civil action by the Claimant against the family and the second a criminal trial against him for perjury (April 1873–​February 1874). The Claimant lost both and in March 1874 was gaoled for 14 years. Yet his misfortunes did nothing to dent the popular appeal of a cause that melded the carnivalesque of street culture with the same indignation at the apparent veniality of establishment politics that had animated Chartism. The campaign saw the Claimant’s chief supporter elected an MP and gave rise to the significantly titled Magna Charta Association. It also sustained a mass-​circulation weekly newspaper, The Englishman (1874–​86), as well as the shorter-​lived Tichborne Gazette and Tichborne News and Anti-​Oppression Journal: A Weekly Newspaper Advocating Fair Play for Every Man. That title alone is eloquent testimony to the movement’s aims, to which securing the Tichborne inheritance for an Australian butcher was almost incidental.25 ‘The culture of consolation’ that Stedman Jones has argued to be ‘de facto recognition of the existing social order as the inevitable framework of action’ was more complex than it appears.26 No subsequent movement in British politics came close to matching the Tichborne campaign. That this was so underlines that relationships between political parties and popular opinion were shifting from the 1880s. However, the massive increase in printed political material after 1884, as parties responded to the enlarged electorate, did not signal that popular politics was in any way being ‘tamed’. Rather, the leap in pictorial material especially was indicative of professional politicians struggling to enlist popular

23 

M. Pugh, The Tories and the People 1880–​1935 (Oxford, 1985). J. Allen and M. Chase, ‘Britain: 1750–​1900’, in J. Allen, A. Campbell, and J. McIlroy, eds., Histories of Labour: National and International Perspectives (Pontypool, 2010), p. 81; D. Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–​1906 (Manchester, 1983). 25  R. McWilliam, The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (London, 2007). 26  Stedman Jones, ‘Working-​Class Culture and Working-​Class Politics’, p. 237. 24 

Popular Politics   59 opinion rather than succeeding in creating a more passive or privatized political culture.27 Tichborne-​style sloganizing was central to the print propaganda and ‘picture politics’ of the Edwardian period. Free traders and rival tariff reformers deployed posters, lantern slides, and the new media of postcards and film to engage with the popular politics of everyday grumbling and slander. ‘TARIFF “REFORM” MEANS TRUSTS FOR THE RICH [AND] CRUSTS FOR THE POOR’, declaimed a National Liberal Club poster of 1905. ‘THE WIFE’S APPEAL. DON’T LET THE FOREIGNER TAKE MY MAN’S JOB!’, in lurid red letters, was the solitary message of a Conservative poster from about the same time.28 The battle was won for free trade and this did much to bolster support for the Liberal party during the constitutional crisis of 1910–​11, when entrenched hostility in the Lords to Liberal fiscal measures required two general elections in one year, plus the prospect of the King creating sufficient new peers, to negate the opposition. Suspicion of tariff reform rhetoric also gives the lie to the idea that the popular politics of the period was in thrall to jingoism. In the longer term, however, tariff protection and the imperial interest to which it was integrally linked increasingly prevailed. ‘Empire Day’, an innovation from 1904 that sought to inculcate pride among schoolchildren in the empire, was one influential cultural indicator of an imperial nationalism that served to smooth the boundaries of class.29 The diminution of aggressive imperialism after the First World War by no means reflected diminishing popular attachment to empire. ‘A Britain without an Empire seemed almost a contradiction in terms.’30 Popular imperialism between the wars cohered around consumption as much as, or more than, political ambition. Trade with the empire was promoted as privileging both sides of the economic partnership and materially enhancing the British quality of life. This facilitated the further development of a relatively muted, but no less popular, politics of patriotism. To a considerable extent this weakened the ‘them and us’ binary that had shaped so much of the popular politics of the pre-​1914 era, but it also proved fertile ground for the development of a politics of national fervour, of which the British Union of Fascists (BUF) was the most disturbing manifestation.

IV Though the extent of socialism in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain was considerable, female suffrage increasingly dominated the popular political arena after the 1897

27 

J. Thompson, ‘“Pictorial lies”? Posters and Politics in Britain, c. 1880–​1914’, Past and Present, 197 (2007), 177–​210. 28  F. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2008), pp. 88–​133. 29  J. English, ‘Empire Day in Britain, 1904–​1958’, Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 247–​76. 30  J. Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–​1960 (Manchester, 1984), p. 10.

60   Malcolm Chase formation of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). In their critical engagement with parliamentary politics, which women were excluded from participating in, female suffragists utilized the customary tactics of earlier popular politics to advance their cause: marches and demonstrations, petitioning, publishing and publicity, and engagement with existing political parties to secure MPs sympathetic to their case. To varying degrees, the movement also encouraged civil disobedience. This was the avowed policy of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which seceded from the NUWSS in 1903. Considerable debate has surrounded how far the WSPU’s ‘Deeds Not Words’ policy advanced the cause of female suffrage. Even the extent to which such tactics enjoyed large-​scale support among women suffragists remains a matter of debate. Arson and sabotage especially provided a convenient excuse for male parliamentarians to decline active pursuit of franchise extension. Subsequent British popular political movements shunned such tactics, the only significant exceptions being two fringe nationalist groups, both established after the 1979 Scottish and Welsh devolution referenda: the Scottish National Liberation Army and Meibion Glyndŵr (‘Sons of Glyndower’, the Welsh prince who led an anti-​English revolt, 1400–​9). The decline of extreme violence as a political tactic did not indicate, however, that the traditional ‘them and us’ binary was declining. That perception was most obvious in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), the organizing force behind the most militant and widely supported popular demonstrations of the inter-​war years. There was a significant difference, however, between how the NUWM conceptualized its opponent and what had gone before. In the years leading up to the Great War, Lloyd George had explicitly aligned the Liberal party with popular anti-​aristocratic sentiment, pledging it to unprecedented interference in the rights of landowners. Had there been a general election in 1915 it would have been fought over the land issue.31 Seismic shifts in the ownership of land in the post-​war period, combined with agricultural depression and the demise of the Liberals as a party of government, left the land issue high and dry. Nationalization of the land remained a Labour manifesto pledge up to and including the 1945 general election, but there was little appetite—​and still less opportunity—​to implement it. The target for the politics of exclusion had at last decisively shifted from the aristocracy to the capitalist system and the perceived function of the state in capitalism’s maintenance and protection. The close involvement of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the NUWM accentuated this polarization but is far from a sufficient explanation for it. The pre-​war socialist movement (which included groups that had merged to form the CPGB) had been similarly anti-​capitalist in intent, and the Labour party, despite its commitment to gradualism, sought to target structural inequalities in economy and society. The Labour party, however, was concerned not to be seen to condone the CPGB. It was also apprehensive of the reputational damage militancy by

31 

I. Packer, Lloyd George, Liberalism and the Land: The Land Issue and Party Politics in England, 1906–​14 (Woodbridge, 2001).

Popular Politics   61 the unemployed might do to Labour’s image. Thus officially the party was lukewarm towards the first national hunger march of 1922–​3, opposed to those in 1929, 1930 (inevitably, a march against Labour government policy), 1932, and 1934, and then lukewarm once more both towards the 1936 march and the Jarrow Crusade of the same year (despite the latter’s disavowal of the NUWM). Local studies, however, have shown that the constituent elements of the Labour party (and likewise the trade union movement) were considerably more supportive, both of hunger marches and the NUWM generally, than national policy pronouncements suggest.32 This asymmetry within the labour movement, with its largest political party enjoying an expanding base of support despite the often deep misgivings expressed by those supporters, helps to explain the relatively limited inroads made by fascism into the popular political arena between the wars. Furthermore, the close association of Conservatism with the imperial project (for example, defending the enduring celebration of Empire Day against opposition from the left) served to contain British nationalism within the political mainstream. The membership of the BUF was volatile and turned over rapidly: even its core subscribers included a significant proportion judged to be inactive (more than 80 per cent, according to a senior BUF figure who was the official biographer of its leader, Oswald Mosley). Thus while the BUF belongs undeniably to the spectrum of popular politics, it was popular in terms of the social class of its supporters (‘largely petit bourgeois with working-​class and bourgeois peripheral elements’) rather than numerically: Mosley’s biographer thought 100,000 in all had passed through the BUF by 1938.33 For all the vicissitudes of the Labour party between the wars, and the reputation of the 1930s as a ‘low dishonest decade’ (to quote W.H. Auden) seared by political fanaticism, there are good grounds for arguing that organized parties were gradually taming popular politics. It is pertinent to bear in mind here that the CPGB barely corroded electoral support for Labour. Measured in terms of general election performance, Communism’s greatest successes coincided with those of Labour in 1924, 1945, and 1950. Only in the peculiar circumstances of 1931 did its support increase as Labour’s diminished. However, a sense of political and economic exclusion, so frequently an animating force in popular politics as this discussion has shown, asserted itself again in 1945. General elections under universal suffrage had taken place on only three previous occasions. A popular belief that universal suffrage had yet to deliver significant structural shifts in either political influence or well-​being helped bring Labour to power in 1945. On the day that the results were announced, the instinctive explanation that Churchill gave his doctor for his defeat was that ‘They [the electorate] have had a very hard time’. It was a perceptive summary of the popular mood which, linked to ‘the visible success of planning and “fair shares” during the war’, does much to explain the popular basis of 32  D. Watson, No Justice Without a Struggle: The National Unemployed Workers’ Movement in the North East of England, 1920–​40 (London, 2014); Ward, Unemployment and the State in Britain. 33  A.K. Chesterton, cited in D.S. Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur: Mosley, Fascism and British Society, 1931–​81 (Manchester, 1987), pp. 72 and 74.

62   Malcolm Chase Labour’s victory.34 The next two general elections (1950 and 1951) saw the party’s share of the vote increase further, to 48.8 per cent in 1951. Overall turnout in the same elections was similarly impressive, at 84 and 82 per cent respectively. The Conservative share of the total vote in 1951 was only slightly smaller than Labour’s. Because Labour lost voters in marginal seats while accumulating more in its safer ones (losing the election in consequence), the 1951 contest has often been held up as exemplifying the idiosyncrasies of the UK electoral system: but that is not an issue here. Rather, the extent to which the populace endorsed the policies of the two major parties suggests that at last the maturing of universal suffrage within the context of an organized two-​ party system had tamed popular politics. It was the years immediately after the Second World War, rather than the First, that witnessed ‘the transformation of public politics’.35 Contemporary comment on the subdued character of campaigning in the 1950 and 1951 elections would seem to reinforce this interpretation.36

V Part of the reason for the post-​war hegemony of the Labour and Conservative parties was the collapse of support for any alternative. The revival of ‘third party’ alternatives from the 1970s eroded that hegemony, though the sheer variety on offer rather disguised this process—​for example, the rival Liberal and Social Democratic parties that operated before 1988, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, UKIP, the Green party (and its earlier forms as first the People party and then the Ecology party), and successive embodiments of the far right. All these might claim, with varying justification, to have articulated the popular voice. However, the most significant feature of British political behaviour over the same period was the downward drift in electoral turnouts, reaching a nadir of 59.4 per cent in 2001. Elections in the new millennium saw a recovery to 66 per cent in 2015, but this figure is still strikingly smaller than voter turnout in 1950–​1. Furthermore, the membership of political parties saw an even sharper decline, to rates that were among the lowest in Europe. The collective membership of the Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat parties equalled just 1 per cent of the electorate in 2013, compared to 3.8 per cent in 1983. The percentage of political party membership was conceivably even greater in the post-​war decades, but earlier membership figures defy precise analysis.37

34 

C.M. Wilson [Lord Moran], Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–​65 (London, 1966), p. 286; D. Butler, British General Elections Since 1945 (2nd edn., Oxford, 1995), p. 9. 35  J. Lawrence, ‘The Transformation of Public Politics after the First World War’, Past and Present, 190 (2006), 185–​216. 36  C. Cook and J. Stevenson, A History of British Elections since 1689 (Abingdon, 2014), pp. 162, 164. 37  R. Kean, Membership of UK Political Parties, House of Commons Library Briefing Paper SN05125 (London, 2015), pp. 3–​4, 6–​8. Note, however (pp. 10–​11), evidence that membership of UKIP and the Scottish National Party increased over the decade to 2015.

Popular Politics   63 It is tempting to label the situation at the turn of the millennium a consequence of political apathy. Apathy, however, is often a concept that is ‘used as a means of displacement of blame away from the structure towards individuals or “masses”’.38 The closing years of the twentieth century were not characterized by complete popular disengagement from politics. First, we should note the growing interest in intergenerational justice and the environment, most obvious in the popularity of Friends of the Earth (founded 1969), which claimed 226,000 UK members by 1996.39 By 2013 it was claimed that one in ten UK adults were members or supporters of a conservation or environmental organization.40 Second, and echoing the popular politics of an earlier era, has been an increasing perception that the political system is largely self-​serving, amounting almost to a form of exclusion.41 This may prove to be short-​lived: however, taken together with the proliferation of ‘fringe’ political parties since the 1970s and with the polemical rhetoric deployed across so much of contemporary social media, it is suggestive of a reversion towards the low-​level ‘background noise’ of grumbling and discontent typical of simpler societies.

Further Reading M. Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, 2007). M. Cragoe and P. Readman, eds., The Land Question in Britain, 1750–​1950 (Basingstoke, 2010). G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-​Class History (Cambridge, 1983). J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–​1914 (Cambridge, 1998). J. Lawrence, ‘The Transformation of Public Politics after the First World War’, Past and Present, 190 (2006), 185–​216. R. McWilliam, Popular Politics in Nineteenth-​Century England (London, 1998). M. Pugh, The Tories and the People 1880–​1935 (Oxford, 1985).

38 

S. Yeo, ‘On the Uses of “Apathy”’, European Journal of Sociology, 15 (1974), 279–​311, at 290. BBC News, profile of Jonathan Porritt, published 13 April 2004, . 40  The Guardian, 27 Nov. 2013. Problematically, however, this research failed to take into account the extent to which individuals held multiple memberships: J. Cracknell, F. Miller, and H. Williams, Passionate Collaboration: Taking the Pulse of the UK Environmental Sector (2013), p. 8 n. 15, . 41  N. Allen, ‘Dishonourable Members? Exploring Patterns of Misconduct in the Contemporary House of Commons’, British Politics, 6 (2011), 210–​40; S.D. Graffin et al., ‘Falls from Grace and the Hazards of High Status: The 2009 British MP Expenses Scandal and its Impact on Parliamentary Elites’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 58 (2013), 313–​45. 39 

Pa rt  I I

I N ST I T U T ION S , ST RU C T U R E S , A N D M AC H I N E RY

chapter 5

The Stat e Philip Harling

An immense scholarship now speaks to the broad and deep impact of the British national state on social life over the past two centuries. Given the scope of the subject, the relevant literature is intimidatingly broad. One way to manage it is to explore a series of larger premises that most historians would now endorse. The first point is the centrality of war-​making to the Napoleonic-​era British state and the rapid dismantling of this ‘fiscal–​military’ state in the decades after Waterloo. The second point is the emergence of the minimal state of the mid-​Victorian decades. While a generation ago historians preoccupied themselves with tracing the ‘Victorian origins’ of the British welfare state, most now stress the Victorians’ political commitment to limiting the scope of central government. The Victorian state was relatively cheap and relatively neutral, inasmuch as its elite stewards succeeded in convincing most Britons that it was not a corrupt broker of special privileges. Still, its moral agenda did not prevent it from meting out harsh discipline to the (ostensibly) feckless. The third point is that the Victorian commitment to a minimal state did not prevent it from intervening in ways that mitigated the perceived ills of a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing society. There was no doctrinaire line between laissez-​faire and state intervention, and the imperial and social crises of the turn of the century notably enhanced the capacities of the state. The fourth point is that the two World Wars broadened the scope of the state’s responsibilities much farther still—​a point worth stressing given the current scholarly vogue for questioning the wartime ‘consensus’ in favor of a greater state role in welfare provision. In marked contrast to the Napoleonic state, the warfare state of the first half of the twentieth century invested heavily in butter as well as guns—​in welfare as well as weaponry—​and the broader fiscal and social capacities of the state were not dismantled after the wartime crises had passed. The fifth and final point is that, although critiquing the post-​war welfare state has long since become not only a political but also a scholarly preoccupation, it continues to exert a far broader and deeper impact on the lives of its citizens than did its Edwardian predecessor. Its structure and (to a lesser degree) its functions are certainly different now from what they were in the 1960s. A wholesale dismantling of the state’s social service capacities, however, is not in prospect.

68   Philip Harling After discussion of these scholarly trends, this chapter closes with a few suggestions for future research. The first is that we should make a more concerted effort to address a seemingly big conceptual gap in the recent literature on government and self-​ government in the Victorian era. On one hand, much recent political history draws attention to the limits of state action in the nineteenth century and to popular support for a distinctly limited state. On the other, an equally robust line of postmodern analysis chiefly inspired by the work of Michel Foucault suggests that the liberal state worked most effectively through ‘governmentality’—​through sanctioned modes of comportment that people adopted voluntarily, without state compulsion and largely mediated through agencies of civil society that owed little or nothing to the state.1 How might government and ‘governmentality’ be brought into more fruitful scholarly conversation with one another? The second point worth considering more closely is the shifting relationship between local and central government. Local discretion was a Victorian shibboleth and, arguably until at least the Second World War, the instruments of local government exerted a very palpable impact on the daily lives of Britons. The post-​war decades saw a steep decline in local autonomy and discretion, driven initially by the centralizing tendencies of the welfare state and latterly by the privatizing tendencies of the Thatcher and New Labour years. What difference did the decline of the local make to Britons’ experience of the state? A third and related point worth developing more fully is that of Britons’ shifting attitudes toward the state. We now know a great deal about the shape of the nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century states. We know a good deal less about the ‘feel’ of the state in the minds of its citizens. What, for instance, explains the seeming paradox that the mid-​ Victorians apparently identified a good deal more closely with their state than their late twentieth-​century counterparts did with theirs, even though the latter enjoyed seemingly far more capacious rights of citizenship?

I The defence of the realm was virtually the sole responsibility reserved for the central government in the eighteenth century. Chronic warfare on an ever vaster scale was a hallmark of the Georgian era. It led to the emergence of what John Brewer memorably christened a ‘fiscal–​military’ state that was more efficient than its European counterparts in extracting the revenue needed for perpetual war-​making.2 Some 83 per cent of all public money spent on goods and services between 1688 and 1815 can be classified as military in origin and purpose; on a per capita basis (and probably also as a 1  P. Mandler, ‘Introduction: State and Society in Victorian Britain’, in P. Mandler, ed., Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2006), pp. 11–​13. 2  J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–​1783 (London, 1989), p. xviii.

The State   69 share of national income), Britain’s military expenditure came in first in the European league table. The wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France saw the apogee of the fiscal–​military state. Per capita taxation increased by 86 per cent over the course of the French Wars (as against only 30 per cent in France itself) and Britain surpassed the Netherlands as the mostly heavily taxed European nation.3 After Waterloo, most Britons still believed that national defence was by far the most important duty of the central government, but that duty became far cheaper than it had been in the recent past. A dramatic round of post-​war retrenchment meant that public spending fell a full 25 per cent in real terms between 1815 and 1835. Relative peace in Europe over the course of the nineteenth century helped to contain central expenditure and nowhere more so than in Britain. While by 1880 French central spending had quadrupled over immediate post-​war levels (accounting for some 13 per cent of gross national product, or GNP), in Britain it had grown by only 50 per cent (accounting for only 8 per cent of GNP).4 The civil costs of central government rose over the nineteenth century as the state gradually took on more duties. Those duties remained modest compared to the traditional ones of military spending and debt service, which together still accounted for 65 per cent of central expenditure as late as 1880. Very few early Victorians would have welcomed a dramatic accession of new responsibilities to the central government in any case, because there remained widespread suspicion that a powerful central government was an instrument of corruption. Many Britons—​not only political radicals such as William Cobbett or Feargus O’Connor—​looked back on the fiscal–​military state of the Napoleonic era as ‘Old Corruption’: a maldistributive machine that diverted tax money from the pockets of the people to the pockets of the politically well-​connected through sinecures, reversions, unmerited pensions, unwarranted fees, and sweetheart military contracts. The state needed to be divested of its reputation for doing active harm before many Britons would be willing to entrust it with new responsibilities. Thus the dismantling of the fiscal–​military state in the post-​Waterloo decades was accompanied by reforms that made the central bureaucracy more recognizably modern and a good deal less ‘corrupt’ than its Georgian predecessor.5 By the mid-​1830s, sinecures and reversions were essentially a thing of the past, and what little pension money remained at the disposal of the Crown and its ministers was subject to parliamentary scrutiny. By mid-​ century, virtually every centrally appointed officer was subject to strict terms of service and payment. Pockets of nepotism remained, as it took several more decades before 3  P.K. O’Brien, ‘The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–​1815’, Economic History Review, 41 (1988), 613. 4  P. Harling and P. Mandler, ‘From Fiscal-​Military State to Laissez-​Faire State, 1760–​1850’, Journal of British Studies, 32 (1992), 56–​60; M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power: Vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation States, 1760-​1914 (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 11; P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, 1988), pp. 151–​2. 5  P. Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–​ 1846 (Oxford, 1996); M. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1779–​1914 (Cambridge, 2001), chs 1–​3.

70   Philip Harling uniform standards of competitive recruitment were implemented throughout the Civil Service. ‘Old Corruption’ remained the most prominent radical critique of the British state until at least the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the reality was that the high-​Victorian administrative system was much more conspicuously disinterested than its Georgian predecessor had been. Indeed, disinterestedness can be taken as the hallmark of the mid-​Victorian state more generally. As Jonathan Parry has pointed out, Parliament might well have been held in higher esteem by the mid-​Victorian generation than by any other one before or since.6 One of the main reasons for this was that the men who now sat in it were eager to demonstrate that the state was no longer in the business of privileging some social interests over others. Cultivating the neutrality of the state, and thus cultivating public trust in its motives, became an abiding preoccupation of Victorian governments, whatever their party complexion. Retrenchment left money to ‘fructify in the pockets of the people’, as Gladstone famously put it. Free trade and the gold standard built a sort of laissez-​faire shield around the Victorian economy, and thus in turn shielded the state and its stewards from charges of sectional interest brokerage. In consequence, as Colin Matthew pointed out and with the notable exception of Gilded Age America, ‘No industrial economy can have existed in which the state played a smaller role than that of the United Kingdom in the 1860s’.7 Taxation remained low and became at least modestly more equitable, as the balance shifted slightly away from indirect and toward direct tax receipts. What little social spending there was tended to be delegated to the local level, and much of that spending remained discretionary. While a generation ago most histor­ ians were convinced of the ‘Victorian origins of the British welfare state’,8 considerable stress is now placed on the fact that, by today’s standards, the mid-​Victorian state did not do much. This is exactly how most mid-​Victorians wanted it, because they tended to equate ‘big government’ with Old Corruption, and minimal government with disinterested virtue. Even the post-​1867 electorate showed little appetite for central interventionism; new voters, like their social ‘betters’, were inclined to keep the state as cheap and unobtrusive as they feasibly could. Despite this Victorian predilection for a minimal state, however, the principle of laissez-​faire was frequently honoured in the breach. This was chiefly because the massive challenges spawned by urbanization and industrialization would have led to serious upheaval had government steadfastly ignored them. That said, social reform was almost always politically contentious, and often halting. The inevitability of reform as a commonsensical response to increasingly ‘intolerable’ social evils was a scholarly commonplace a generation ago.9 The emphasis now, however, is very much on the fitful

6  J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 1993), pp. 8–​9. 7  H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–​1898 (Oxford, 1997), p. 171. 8  D. Roberts, Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State (New Haven, 1960). 9  O. MacDonagh, ‘The Nineteenth-​Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal’, Historical Journal, 1 (1958), 52–​67.

The State   71 and drawn-​out nature of reform. For example, only after two decades of agitation did Parliament enshrine in law the principle of the ten-​hour day for women and children, and it took another two decades for it to apply to most workplaces. It was only in the 1870s that Parliament gave trade union members the right to engage in free collective bargaining without fear of imprisonment for breach of contract. Even the most attenuated notion of a legislated minimum wage remained anathema to MPs until the first decade of the twentieth century. While Parliament passed a landmark Public Health Act in 1848, it was largely permissive, and ratepayer resistance meant that in many towns it took decades to establish local boards of health. In this and other respects, public investment failed to keep pace with urban population growth until the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The result was the rise of the ‘four Ds’ in Britain’s booming industrial cities: disruption, deprivation, disease, and death. At mid-​century, life expectancy in the slums of Liverpool and Manchester had fallen to levels not seen since the Black Death.10 The Victorian state was considerably more intrusive when it came to disciplining its most feckless subjects than it was in creating a more salubrious environment for them and everybody else. In this sense, most scholars take a considerably dimmer view of the Victorian state than they did a generation ago. Its disciplinary proclivities were much less frequently noticed then than they have been more recently. Thanks to the enormous influence of Michel Foucault in drawing scholars’ attention to the powers of nineteenth-​century governments in policing social conduct, it is now a truism that the Victorian state made robust efforts to regulate the behaviour of the down-​and-​out, most notably paupers, prisoners, and prostitutes. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 sought to make poor relief more repulsive and ‘less eligible’ to the able-​bodied by tying it to the performance of obnoxious tasks such as bone-​crushing and oakum-​picking within strictly regimented workhouses. The point was to humiliate the poor into ‘independence’. Admittedly, in some respects the stigma of the workhouse was mitigated in practice. A good many paupers continued to receive aid outside workhouse doors, for instance, and poor folk developed a utilitarian view of the workhouse, feeling little shame in resorting to it when the vagaries of the labour market left them little choice but to do so.11 Still, the workhouse system encouraged them to see the Victorian state as a moral disciplinarian who sought to shame them into self-​sufficiency. Similarly, the rise of borough and county police forces both reflected and hastened the decline of social permissiveness. By the final decades of the nineteenth century, vagrants, drunkards, and prostitutes were much more likely than hitherto to be arrested 10 

S. Szreter, ‘Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: On the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development’, Population and Development Review, 23 (1997), 693–​729; S. Szreter and G. Mooney, ‘Urbanization, Mortality, and the Standard of Living Debate: New Estimates of the Expectation of Life at Birth in Nineteenth-​Century British Cities’, Economic Historical Review, 51 (1998), 84–​112; S. Szreter and A. Hardy, ‘Urban Fertility and Mortality Patterns’, in M. Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain (3 vols, Cambridge, 2000), vol. III, pp. 629–​72. 11  L. Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–​1948 (Cambridge, 1998), ch. 5.

72   Philip Harling and sentenced to serve time in gaol. The Victorian carceral regime was an especially chilling monument to moral authoritarianism. ‘Separate confinement’ and the ‘silent system’ were taken to such extremes in Pentonville prison that within a few years of its opening in 1842 the authorities cut in half the standard 18-​month sentence to quell an epidemic of madness among its inmates. Nevertheless, conditions in Pentonville and the other centrally administered prisons remained deliberately grim for the next 50 years. Inmates were subjected to rigorous standards of hard labour, were obliged to subsist on meagre diets, were given few chances to earn remission of sentence, and were routinely flogged for misbehaviour.12 Outside prison walls, the Victorian state’s most infamous moral regulation effort targeted marginal women. The Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, passed in an effort to combat venereal disease in the armed forces, empowered plainclothes officers to arrest suspected prostitutes and to subject them to vaginal examination. Those found to be suffering from syphilis or gonorrhoea could be interned in certified ‘lock hospitals’ for up to nine months. Public agitation ultimately led to the repeal of the Acts in 1886, but their fitful enforcement over 20 years is a particularly glaring example of the Victorian state’s moral interventionism and of its commitment to a legal double standard that privileged men over women in a great many ways.13

II Despite this flexing of moral muscle, state intervention was the exception that proved the minimalist rule until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. By the late 1880s just about everyone had concluded that the era of the ‘nightwatchman state’ was over, and by 1914 the principle of state intervention was not only broadly accepted, but was also rapidly advancing in practice. Perhaps the most important explanation for this shift was the growing acknowledgement that chronic poverty was chiefly a matter of environmental rather than moral shortcomings, and that thus the state had a duty to help the poor to better help themselves by improving their physical conditions.14 The economist Alfred Marshall concluded that much unemployment could only be understood in structural terms, quite apart from the moral capacities of the unemployed. The fin-​ de-​siècle social surveys of Charles Booth and Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree drew attention to the troubling persistence of structural unemployment and underemployment and the poverty they perpetuated. Even the workhouse system began to register the decline of

12  M. Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–​1850 (New York, 1978), ch. 7; L. Radzinowicz and R. Hood, The History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750, vol. 5: The Emergence of Penal Policy (London, 1986), ch. 16. 13  J. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, 1980). 14  J. Harris, ‘The Transition to High Politics in English Social Policy’, in M. Bentley and J. Stevenson, eds., High and Low Politics in Modern Britain: Ten Studies (Oxford, 1983), pp. 58–​79.

The State   73 a moralistic notion of poverty, as more and more local authorities were granting assistance on more generous terms to mothers, the very young, the very old, and the disabled. The urgent mission to promote ‘national efficiency’ was arguably an even more important motive than altruism for the advance of state interventionism in the decades prior to the Great War. In an era of intensifying global economic competition and imperial rivalry, enhancing public welfare to advance public fitness became a national imperative alongside and allied to that of military preparedness. The costs of formal empire—​painfully brought home via the Boer War and the naval race with Germany—​ grew precipitously from the 1890s. By the early years of the twentieth century, the biggest political question was how to pay, simultaneously, for the mounting costs of defence and of social services that could no longer be entirely delegated to local government and private charities. The answer provided by the Liberal governments of 1906–​14 was progressive taxation, most notably in Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, which raised death duties on large estates, imposed a ‘super-​tax’ on high incomes, and placed a capital gains tax on rising land values. The extra revenue flowing into the Treasury helped to fund several landmark welfare initiatives. The most notable among them were the Pensions Act (1908) that provided half a million elderly poor people with a modicum of weekly support directly from the Treasury, and the National Insurance Act (1911). Part one of the Act provided 14 million Britons with basic medical care and short-​term family income support when breadwinners fell ill. Part two established compulsory unemployment insurance for workers in a handful of industries that were particularly vulnerable to seasonal and cyclical unemployment. Both parts of the Act were funded on a contributory basis, their payouts were limited, and their ambit was tightly circumscribed. It is true that they embodied an unprecedented acknowledgement that the central government had a legitimate role to play in providing non-​stigmatizing assistance. On the eve of the Great War, however, this was as yet a ‘social service’ state rather than a welfare state. The state gave a relatively small subset of its citizens means-​tested access to a limited variety of social services outside the framework of the Poor Law, but did not as yet guarantee a minimum standard of welfare to all its citizens as a matter of right.15

III Two World Wars in the space of 30 years greatly magnified the capacities of the British state. In stark contrast with the decades after Waterloo, those capacities were not dramatically scaled back in the post-​war years, and the ‘classic’ welfare state of the third quarter of the twentieth century would have been unthinkable without this dramatic augmentation of the state’s reach. The Great War swept away any remaining assumptions

15 

G. Finlayson, Citizen, State, and Social Welfare in Britain 1830–​1990 (Oxford, 1994), p. 198.

74   Philip Harling about the properly limited relationship between state and society, simply because the demands of total war required Britons to put up with a measure of state interference in their lives that they would have found completely unacceptable in any other context. Conscription killed off the age-​old commitment to a volunteer military. The Victorian barrier between state and economy was shattered. The central government assumed direct management over key sectors of the economy; imposed controls over the allocation of manpower so extensive as to merit the term ‘industrial conscription’; banned strikes; limited profits in war-​related industries; set extensive wage, price, and rent controls; requisitioned raw materials; and rationed foodstuffs. Wartime government intruded into daily life in hitherto unimaginable ways—​censoring press reportage and manufacturing propaganda, imposing stiff fines for failing to observe blackout rules, limiting pub opening hours, even tampering with the hours of the day itself (with the introduction of Daylight Savings Time in 1916). The fiscal requirements of total war rendered obsolete the Victorian shibboleth of ‘cheap government’. British war spending almost matched that of all the Central Powers combined. Much higher death duties, super-​taxes, and excess profits taxes hit the very wealthy especially hard, while the trebling of the number of income-​tax payers and the mounting burden of wartime excise taxes extended the fiscal burden far down the social scale. Central expenditure amounted to a mere 12 per cent of national income in 1913. By 1918 it came to 52 per cent. While it fell considerably thereafter, it stabilized at about 25 per cent—​double the pre-​war standard—​until it started to rise once again shortly before the Second World War.16 A growing proportion of this additional state spending was devoted to the extension of social services before rearmament finally commenced in the mid-​1930s. It is true that the inter-war era was marked by bourgeois hostility to working-​class politics and a ‘deflationary ideology’ predicated on retrenchment, balanced budgets, and anti-​collectivism.17 Despite the atmosphere of conflict and the prevailing rhetoric of austerity, however, the welfare responsibilities of the central government continued to grow. What accounted for this growth was the piecemeal but dramatic extension of benefits in an era of chronically and sometimes dramatically high unemployment. Carefully limited, grudgingly means-​tested, and indeed deliberately humiliating though the dole remained, by the 1930s the British worker was aided by the world’s most comprehensive system of centrally coordinated unemployment benefits.18 By the late 1930s, Britain likely boasted a more extensive array of social services provided by local and central government than any other country in the world. It took a second experience of total war to popularize the notion that it was the central government’s 16 

J. Cronin, The Politics of State Expansion: War, State and Society in Twentieth-​Century Britain (London, 1991), pp. 2–​3, 60–​72; A. Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London, 1965); J. Winter, The Great War and the British People (Basingstoke, 2003). 17  R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–​1951 (Oxford, 1998). 18  R. Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump: The Labour Government of 1929–​1931 (London, 1967), p. 282; H. Heclo, Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden: From Relief to Income Maintenance (New Haven, 1974), pp. 90–​112; A. Deacon and J. Bradshaw, Reserved for the Poor: The Means Test in British Social Policy (Oxford, 1983).

The State   75 responsibility to provide all of its citizens with a high level of social security as a matter of right. Interventionism grew to unparalleled dimensions in the fight against the Axis powers. This time round, the government adopted conscription even before the war broke out, and put in place an extensive rationing system only a few months into the fighting. Allocation of labour was strictly regulated through a series of ‘manpower’ budgets. Churchill’s wartime government vested itself with even more coercive powers over the workplace than Lloyd George’s wartime government had done (although Ernest Bevin, as head of the behemoth Ministry of Labour, tended to use those new powers judiciously). For the first time ever, the government employed Keynesian demand management in a largely successful effort to keep wartime inflation under control. It also taxed its citizens as never before; direct and indirect tax receipts trebled during the war. While on balance the wartime tax reforms were progressive, they hit everybody hard. Government spending came close to 75 per cent of GNP at the height of the war, as against a little more than 50 per cent at the height of the Great War. Once again, post-​war retrenchment did not even come close to doing away with the state’s magnified spending capacity. In 1955, a full decade after the war’s close, public expenditure still came to 37 per cent of GDP, as against 26 per cent in 1937.19 Much of this additional spending capacity was allocated to the post-​war welfare state. The recent scholarly trend has been to stress the limits rather than the novelty of the ‘classic’ British welfare state of 1945 to 1975. Historians are no longer apt to exaggerate the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ of shared sacrifice and social solidarity that ostensibly informed the Beveridge Report (1942) and the Attlee government’s construction of cradle-​to-​grave social security. While the post-​war state dramatically broadened the social safety net, its redistributive goals were modest at best. The impact of post-​war taxation was broadly neutral, and as the burden of taxes and insurance contributions rose over the years, it became increasingly manifest that working-​class people were being obliged to pay for their own social security benefits. While some categories of social spending disproportionately benefited the less affluent (for example, council housing allowances and rent rebates), others were neutral (for example, primary education), and still others disproportionately benefited the relatively well-​off (for example, higher education and the National Health Service, the full range of whose services were more fully made use of by middle-​class Britons).20 These caveats do nothing to diminish the unprecedented achievement of a truly comprehensive and universal scheme of social insurance for sickness, unemployment, and old age to which Britons were entitled by right, and regardless of their financial

19 

M. Harrison, ‘The Economics of World War II’, in M. Harrison, ed., The Economics of World War II: Six Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 21–​2; R. Middleton, ‘The Size and Scope of the Public Sector’, in S.J.D. Green and R.C. Whiting, eds., The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 89–​145. 20  H. Phelps Brown, Egalitarianism and the Generation of Inequality (Oxford, 1988); P. Johnson, ‘The Welfare State’, in R. Floud and D. McCloskey, eds., The Economic History of Britain since 1700 (3 vols, Cambridge, 1994), vol. iii, pp. 284–​317.

76   Philip Harling circumstances. Nor should we downplay the historical significance of the other tenets of post-war ‘consensus politics’, even though historians now question the strict accuracy of this phrase: that it was a proper responsibility of government to try to foster and direct economic growth; that full employment was a worthy and attainable public goal; that the central government ought to engage in regular consultation with trade unions and employers’ organizations in its efforts to coordinate and direct the economy; that nationalization of the ‘commanding heights’ of industry and management of about a fifth of the national economy were proper and desirable responsibilities of the state.21 These axioms had been unimaginable before 1914, and most would remain scarcely conceivable until after 1939. In this basic sense, it was the warfare state that spawned the welfare state.

IV A final point to make in this brief inventory of scholarly trends in the study of the British state is that we should not exaggerate the scaling-​back of the welfare state in the years since 1979. The rhetorical assault on the contemporary state’s capacities has been potent, but those capacities remain far broader than they were three or four generations ago. In some ways the reach of the state has indeed been shortened. The commitment to full employment died when the Thatcher government readily accepted high unemployment levels in exchange for lower inflation and a stronger pound during the recession of the early 1980s. It has not been resurrected. Corporatism is a thing of the past, and trade unions exert nothing like the influence over economic policy that they did in the third quarter of the twentieth century. A lengthy series of privatizations has taken the state out of the process of production, and the contracting-​out of hitherto public services continues apace. Public authorities’ role as builders and managers of dwellings has been greatly attenuated and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the sale of council housing stock in the 1980s amounted to a tenurial revolution. Tory and Labour governments alike have inserted market principles and a more consumerist ethos into a broad swathe of public sector institutions that had hitherto been insulated from them, most notably the Civil Service, the universities, and the National Health Service.22 Thus by the end of the twentieth century the state had withdrawn from large spheres of activity in which it had played a major role three quarters of the way through it, and in other spheres it was now operating under quite different managerial assumptions.

21  For a pioneering reassessment, see B. Pimlott, ‘The Myth of Consensus’, in L.M. Smith, ed., Echoes of Greatness (Basingstoke, 1988), pp. 129–​49. More generally, see H. Jones and M. Kandiah, eds., The Myth of Consensus: New Views on British History, 1945–​64 (Basingstoke, 1996). 22  D. Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy since the Industrial Revolution (4th edn., London, 2009), pp. 310–​13; H. Glennerster, British Social Policy, 1945 to the Present (3rd edn., Oxford, 2007), pp. 225–​51.

The State   77 In important respects, however, the state was scarcely less of a behemoth than it had been in the 1960s and 1970s. While much lip service was devoted to the ideal of cheaper government, public expenditure continued to account for more than 40 per cent of GDP—​although the tax structure that paid for it was now considerably more regressive, as income tax rates were cut (dramatically so in the upper brackets) while taxes on consumption rose.23 Social security spending remained buoyant in the last two decades of the twentieth century, even though a good deal of political energy went into reducing the value of benefits for many categories of recipient. This chiefly stemmed from burgeoning unemployment benefits, a consequence of higher rates of joblessness, and the growth of part-​time work.24 Still, critics of the welfare state could point to the fact that for the first time in a century, the percentage of public expenditure devoted to social security was no longer on the rise.25 If the welfare state was contained, however, it was by no means rolled back; nobody was proposing to dismantle it and, as politically contentious as welfare benefits could be, there were no serious proposals to return to the nineteenth century and scrap unemployment benefits altogether. Moreover, it has proved essentially impossible to cut broadly popular entitlements such as subsidized medical care and old-​age pensions. Merely containing those costs has proved an enormous challenge in the face of an aging population. Despite these continuities, it is important to stress that by the dawn of the twenty-​first century, the welfare state looked very different than it had done 50 years earlier. Across a broad swathe of its functions it was now considerably more market-​based, and the universalism at the core of the Beveridge idea was in retreat. The national ‘safety net’ remained, but it was largely made up of means-​tested selective benefits, and in this important respect was beginning to seem closer in spirit to the Poor Law of old.26 The final point to make about recent trends, however, is that it is worth trying to resist the temptation to exaggerate the transformation of the British state—​or of most other Western states, for that matter—​in the last few decades. The British state continues to dispose of a far higher percentage of GDP than it ever did before the Second World War. The proportion of taxes in British national income remains around 40 per cent, just as it did in 1980 (as against a mere 10 per cent on the eve of the First World War).27 In stark contrast to the nineteenth century, it continues to devote something like four times more of its revenues to health, education, and social security than it does to defence. Many of the characteristics of globalization have undoubtedly compromised the economic power of ‘mature’ states, such as the expansion of international credit markets, job-​ shedding in the manufacturing sector, dramatically growing wage differentials, more

23 

M. Daunton, Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Great Britain, 1914–​1979 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 338. 24  R. Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945 (3rd edn., Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 320–​9. 25  H. Glennerster, ‘Health and Social Policy’, in D. Kavanagh and A. Seldon, eds., The Major Effect (London, 1994), pp. 318–​21. 26 Fraser, Evolution of the British Welfare State, pp. 312–​23. 27  T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-​First Century (Cambridge, MA, 2014), pp. 474–​7 7.

78   Philip Harling ‘flexible’ labour practices, and capital flight to cheaper labour markets, much of it facilitated by multi-national corporations with immense power to extract concessions from national governments seeking to attract investment.28 Nevertheless, those states retain considerable economic heft because they spend so much money and because they will continue to regulate interstate commerce. Closer European integration has undoubtedly shifted a great deal of decision-​making authority from member states to the institutions of the European Union. A growing host of recent trends, however, militate against anything even remotely resembling a federal union, and indeed in 2016 a majority voted Britain out of the European Union in a national referendum. Within Britain itself, devolution has dispersed a good deal of decision-​making away from Westminster and Whitehall, but even the dissolution of the Union would not mean the decline of terri­ torial states themselves. Indeed, an independent Scottish state would likely be a good deal more interventionist than its English counterpart.

V Like much of the literature on which it draws, this rather breathless tour through two centuries of modern British state formation has focused on the changing functions of the central government—​on what the state does, and the ways in which what it does has (or has not) changed over time. Future lines of inquiry would do well to focus more attention on the no less important but more elusive and certainly far less explored territory of how the state feels to its subjects and citizens. As suggested above, one well-​established line of inquiry influenced by Foucault stresses the ways in which the institutions of the ostensibly minimal high-​Victorian state felt oppressive to groups who were the objects of its discipline—​paupers through the workhouse system, prostitutes through lock hospitals, and prisoners through its carceral regime.29 A rather newer and highly suggestive line of inquiry suggests that the Victorian state benefited even more from the Foucauldian notion of ‘governmentality’,30 that is, through modalities of discipline with which the formal institutions of the state had very little to do. If one central tenet of Victorian liberalism was freedom from overly intrusive government, another was the importance of self-​government. As Chris Otter has pointed out, these two tenets were mutually reinforcing. A society composed of people of good character who cultivated habits of cleanliness and sobriety scarcely needed a

28  See, e.g., C. Pierson, The Modern State (3rd edn., London, 2011); D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, 2005). 29  M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York, 1977). 30  M. Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, Ideology and Consciousness, 6 (1979), 5–​21; N. Rose and P. Miller, ‘Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, British Journal of Sociology, 43 (1992), 173–​205; M. Deane, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (2nd edn., Los Angeles, 2010).

The State   79 state to govern it.31 But in rapidly urbanizing Victorian Britain, the development of such habits required (among many other things) a well-​lit and sanitary environment. In this sense, the development of gasworks and electricity networks or, for that matter, an efficient postal service arguably promoted and reinforced orderliness less intrusively and more effectively than more conspicuous agents of authority, such as police forces. Yet these infrastructures that helped to define modern daily life would not have developed without the routine superintendence of central and local agencies of state. Over time, as Patrick Joyce has recently pointed out, an increasingly complicated, diverse, and sometimes scarcely even perceptible array of state instrumentalities have thus been naturalized into everyday life, to the extent that the customary distinction between state and society may no longer be very analytically helpful.32 Joyce’s own analysis of the growth of the Post Office in the nineteenth century and Otter’s richly suggestive investigation of light and vision in the Victorian city offer promising models for better appreciating this interpenetration of the state with the social in the heyday of ostensibly ‘minimal’ government. Another realm in which we still have much to learn about the changing ‘feel’ of the state to its subjects and citizens is in the dramatically shifting relationship between local and central government over the past two centuries. What difference has the decline of local autonomy and discretion made to Britons’ relationship with their government? Historians agreed 40 years ago that centralization was the key to overcoming the enormous social problems thrown up by what everybody still called the ‘Industrial Revolution’.33 There was then broad agreement with the Webbs’ classic account of local government as an irrational and penny-​pinching obstacle that the central government had to overcome in its effort to create a more livable environment for Victorians.34 The past quarter-​century has seen a turnaround. As it has become more fashionable to damn the welfare state for its putative centralizing excesses, so has it become more fashionable to acknowledge the primacy of the local in the provision of social services in a ‘mixed economy of welfare’ which central government played a very modest role in before the eve of the First World War.35

31  C. Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–​1910 (Chicago, 2008), pp. 10–​12. 32   In addition to Otter, see P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003); Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800 (Cambridge, 2013), esp. ch. 2. 33  D. Roberts, Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State; MacDonagh, ‘The Nineteenth-​Century Revolution in Government’, 52–​67; O. MacDonagh, A Pattern of Government Growth 1800–​1860 (London, 1961); G. Kitson Clark, ‘“Statesmen in Disguise”: Reflexions on the History of the Neutrality of the Civil Service’, Historical Journal, 2 (1959), 19–​39; G.M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (Oxford, 1953); J. Hart, ‘Nineteenth-​Century Social Reform: A Tory Interpretation of History’, Past and Present, 31 (1965), 39–​61. 34  S. and B. Webb, English Local Government (new edn, 11 vols, Hamden, CT, 1963). 35  See, for example, M. Daunton, ‘Introduction’, and P. Johnson, ‘Risk, Redistribution and Social Welfare in Britain from the Poor Law to Beveridge’, in M. Daunton, ed., Charity, Self-​Interest and

80   Philip Harling When Victorian government stepped in to provide welfare or urban amenities, it was almost always local authorities that did the intervening. This is why local ​government expenditure grew twice as fast as central expenditure between 1850 and 1890, and why the last quarter of the nineteenth century saw a whopping 75 per cent increase in local government spending, as cities used the income generated from higher rates and the municipalization of gas, electricity, water, and public transport to build and enhance a wide assortment of urban amenities, from street lights to public libraries.36 By the early years of the twentieth century, the local tax base could no longer sustain this dramatic uptick in spending, and the fiscal crisis of the local state was the main reason why the Exchequer reluctantly got into the business of spending on social services. Nevertheless, as late as 1939 local authorities still enjoyed a good deal of discretion over the 51 per cent of all social service spending that passed through their hands.37 Local authorities were divested of much of their discretionary power in the post-​war decades. Whitehall relied on them to deliver a broader array of public services than ever before, and by 1975 local government spending amounted to 18 per cent of GNP, roughly six times what it had been a century earlier. However, less than a fifth of local authority income now came from the rates—​not even half the sum that came from Exchequer grants. Localist sentiment and local autonomy were much weaker than they had been early in the century, and turnout at local elections fell to 40 per cent as voters increasingly associated local government with an aloof ‘corporate state’ centred in Whitehall.38 Local discretion fell even more sharply late in the century, as the Thatcher government curbed local authorities’ role in the provision of housing, imposed uniform curricula on the Local Education Authorities, capped the rates of free-​spending councils, and abolished the most recalcitrant ones, including the Greater London Council. While civil disobedience prompted the government to abandon its efforts to replace the property-​ based rates with a flat-​rate ‘community charge’, the new compromise council tax paid for merely a fifth of all local expenditure.39 The Treasury paid for most of the rest, giving it greater control over local spending than it had ever had in the past. Local discretion, so long considered an axiomatic British virtue, thus declined precipitously in the post-​war decades. The extent to which that decline might have contributed to citizens’

Welfare in the English Past (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 1–​22, 225–​48; P. Johnson, Saving and Spending: The Working-​Class Economy in Britain 1870–​1939 (Oxford, 1985); R.H. Trainor and R.J. Morris, eds., Urban Governance: Britain and Beyond since 1750 (Aldershot, 2000). 36 Daunton, Trusting Leviathan, p. 26; P.J. Waller, City, Town, and Nation: England, 1850–​1914 (Oxford,

1983), pp. 300–​13. 37  A. Peacock and J. Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom (Princeton, 1961), pp. 106–​8. 38  G.C. Baugh, ‘Government Grants in Aid of the Rates in England and Wales, 1889-​1990’, Historical Research, 65 (1992), 215–​37. 39  S. Jenkins, Accountable to None: The Tory Nationalization of Britain (London, 1996), esp. pp. 59–​61.

The State   81 growing sense of disconnection with their government is a question that deserves further exploration. A huge and related theme (already well known but deserving of more systematic investigation) is how and why the ‘state’ has come to be such a widely despised thing, a favoured rhetorical whipping-​boy across the political spectrum.40 While this phenomenon was especially obvious during the Thatcher years, it was well established 20 years earlier. Already by the late 1960s, the Labour intellectual Douglas Jay’s famous (and almost always misquoted and decontextualized) 1937 assertion that ‘the gentleman from Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves’41 seemed laughable to just about everyone. As economic stagnation and a sense of relative economic decline set in, the state was blamed for either over-​ steering the economy or not steering it enough. Tax and insurance contributions took two and a half times more of an average worker’s earnings by the end of the 1960s than they had at the beginning of that decade, but the government seemed unable to combat stagflation.42 The state’s corporatist compromises and perpetual bargaining with business, and particularly with the trade unions, led to widespread concern that interest brokerage was subordinating the public good to sectional interests. The Civil Service, long a particularly respected estate of the realm, was increasingly denigrated for being elitist, condescending, meddling, and out of touch. By the 1970s, it seemed that the state no longer enjoyed much affection or respect, even in return for the social security benefits it was providing more generously than ever before. With the possible exception of the NHS (still a focus of national attachment), citizens felt little pride of ownership in a heavily bureaucratized welfare state whose ideological premises went largely unexamined.43 Almost 50 years on, the state looks rather different in important respects. It seems to be no less despised, however, despite a long series of rhetorical attacks followed by innumerable ‘customer service’ reforms designed to enhance its efficiency and responsiveness and to reduce its intrusiveness. There are enormous and complicated factors to take into account in trying to better understand why this is so. One is the neo-​liberal triumphalism and distaste for étatisme that became more pronounced just about everywhere after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. A second is the attenuated sense of a public good that seems to be a prominent trend in contemporary life. A third is the widespread belief in the inauthenticity of politicians and conventional politics. A fourth is the reshaping of group identities and affiliations in a digital age that makes physical proximity less 40 

See, for example, M. Shovel, ‘A Bullying, Interfering Waster: How Politicians Gave the State a Bad Name’, Guardian, 16 Apr. 2015. See also M. Wiener, ‘The Unloved State: Twentieth-​Century Politics in the Writing of Nineteenth-​Century History’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), 283–​308. 41  D. Jay, The Socialist Case (London, 1937), p. 317. See also R. Toye, ‘“The Gentleman in Whitehall” Reconsidered: The Evolution of Douglas Jay’s Views on Economic Planning and Consumer Choice, 1937–​47’, Labour History Review, 67 (2002), 185–​202. 42  J. Hinton, Labour and Socialism: A History of the British Labour Movement 1867–​1974 (Amherst, MA, 1983), pp. 190–​1. 43  J. Harris, ‘Political Thought and the State’, in Green and Whiting, eds., The Boundaries of the State, pp. 15–​28.

82   Philip Harling relevant than it was in the past. A fifth is the threat to privacy posed by the surveillance powers of the state, greatly enhanced since the turn to the present century. A sixth factor, at least so far as the political left is concerned, is the accelerated pace of social inequality, particularly noticeable in the United States and Britain. This trend is partly attributable to state action, in the form of the more regressive tax regime imposed in the 1980s and still largely in place, but it can also be explained by factors that even a heady dose of state intervention might not be able to reverse, such as casualization at the lower end of the labour market and the very rapid acceleration of higher incomes, most particularly seen in the recent rise of a class of ‘super-​managers’ whose pay is a hundred times the national average.44 These and a host of other issues will need to be taken into account in order to better understand the execration of the state that is one of the salient political facts of our age.

Further Reading J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–​1783 (London, 1989). J. Cronin, The Politics of State Expansion: War, State and Society in Twentieth-​Century Britain (London, 1991). M. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1779–​1914 (Cambridge, 2001). G. Finlayson, Citizen, State, and Social Welfare in Britain 1830–​1990 (Oxford, 1994). D. Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy since the Industrial Revolution (4th edn., London, 2009). P. Harling and P. Mandler, ‘From Fiscal-​Military State to Laissez-​Faire State, 1760-​1850’, Journal of British Studies, 32 (1992), 44–​70. J. Harris, ‘Society and State in Twentieth-​Century Britain’, in F.M.L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain, vol. 3:  Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 63–​118. T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-​First Century (Cambridge, MA, 2014). N. Rose and P. Miller, ‘Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, British Journal of Sociology, 43 (1992), pp. 173–​205. P. Thane, ‘Government and Society in England and Wales, 1750–​1914’, in F.M.L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain, vol. 3: Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 1–​62.

44 Piketty, Capital, esp. pp. 302, 417.

chapter 6

Parliam e nt Philip Salmon

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the political culture, functions, and organization of Parliament were transformed. If asked what drove these changes, most historians would point to the ‘rise of democracy’ associated with the major electoral reforms of 1832, 1867, 1884, and 1918, and the emergence of mass politics oriented toward national political parties and the development of ‘representative’ government. In a climate of ever-​growing popular legitimacy, ministers and the Cabinet assumed greater political prominence and power, assisted by a dramatic tightening of party discipline among parliamentarians. This ministerial dominance over Parliament, underpinned by what was increasingly seen as a government’s electoral mandate, grew steadily throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, diminishing the role of the individual politician or ‘private’ MP and the opportunities for non-​government legislation, inquiries, and initiatives. From a situation in which it was common for private MPs to take the lead in introducing new laws, even in significant areas of social and public policy, they eventually became little more than lobby fodder—​a change neatly captured in Gilbert and Sullivan’s famous lampoon of 1882 about MPs being forced to ‘leave their brains outside’ and ‘vote just as their leaders tell ’em to’.1 One obvious outcome of this historical interpretation is that themes such as the growth of the party system, the emergence of ministerial control, and the role of public opinion and the press have loomed large in most accounts of parliamentary development.2 The background of parliamentarians and the various pressures influencing their political behaviour also feature prominently in many studies. These were not the I wish to thank Dr Kathryn Rix and Lord Rowlands CBE for their helpful comments. 1 

W.S. Gilbert, Iolanthe (London, 1882), act 2. This is implicit within a wide range of works, but see especially the essays on ‘Parliament and Democracy’ and the ‘“Democratization” of Procedure’, in G. Campion and L. Amery et al., Parliament: A Survey (London, 1952), pp. 9–​36, 141–​67; G. Cox, The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian England (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 45–​67; and G. Cox and J. Ingram III, ‘Suffrage Expansion and Legislative Behavior in Nineteenth-​Century Britain’, Social Science History, 16 (1992), 539–​60. 2 

84   Philip Salmon only factors shaping parliamentary history, however, and they are not the subject of the present survey. Political events sometimes forced Parliament to adapt and reform its working methods, but many of these topics are better suited to explaining the changing organization and practice of modern politics rather than the operation of Parliament. Separate accounts of these subjects can be found in other sections of this book. Offering a rather different approach, this chapter focuses on the changing functions and organization of Parliament in areas that have received less attention. The ‘rise of democracy’ was by no means the only imperative driving Parliament’s almost complete remodelling as an institution during this period. Broader cultural factors, in particular, also played their part, as a number of innovative studies examining the environment of Parliament from the perspectives of architectural space, historic identity, parliamentary debate, scientific inquiry, and the concept of time (to name but a few) have sought to indicate.3 Gaps still remain, however, particularly in terms of work on the House of Lords and the development of Parliament’s legislative and scrutiny functions. Drawing on some of these historical approaches, and proposing a few new ones, this chapter explores the changing power structures and operation of Parliament in two key areas: the business of law-​making and the relationship between its two houses.

I The law-​making and scrutiny activities of Parliament underwent a complete overhaul during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This can be charted in all sorts of ways, from simple counts of the ever-​increasing number of Acts of Parliament reaching the statute book to more sophisticated assessments of their length and content; passage and failure rates for various types of bill (including ministerial and private members’ bills); and the growing number of related inquiries, committees, and other forms of investigation, including commissions. The enhanced scrutiny functions of Parliament can also be examined from the perspective of the number of debates and votes, requests for information (returns), and questions to ministers, to name but a few.4 For the statistically inclined, the opportunities and permutations are virtually limitless. 3   R. Quinault, ‘Westminster and the Victorian Constitution’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2 (1992), 79–​104; D. Cannadine, ‘The Palace of Westminster as Palace of Varieties’, in C. Riding and J. Riding, eds., The Houses of Parliament: History, Art, Architecture (London, 2000), pp. 11–​29; J. Meisel, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (New York, 2001); R. Vieira, Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and the British World (Oxford, 2015). See also E. Gillin, ‘The Science of Parliament: Building the Palace of Westminster, 1834–​1860’ (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2015); S. Thevoz, ‘The Political Impact of London Clubs, 1832–​68’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2014); R. Vieira, ‘The Time of Politics and the Politics of Time: Exploring the Role of Temporality in British Constitutional Development during the Long Nineteenth Century’ (PhD thesis, McMaster University, 2011). 4  The development of non-​parliamentary commissions during the Victorian era had a huge impact on the broader culture of inquiry but remains a massively neglected topic. For a broad overview, see

Parliament   85 Charting how all these activities were transformed, however, does not necessarily explain why they were transformed. The prevailing view has always been that it was the ‘rise of democracy’ that drove the major law-​making, investigative, and procedural changes of the nineteenth century. Two key elements are assumed to have been at work here. First, as electorates expanded so did the need for party organization and coherent policies, which the party leaders would then seek to enact once in power. Law-​making, instead of being an eighteenth-​century free-​for-​all open to all parliamentarians, now became an increasingly essential and exclusive function of government. Since failure to implement party policies would have electoral repercussions, the ability of elected governments to pass their legislative programmes without unnecessary delays or interruptions became imperative. Accordingly in the Commons, where most major bills started their life, days dedicated to government business (order days) became the norm. These were soon followed by increasing restrictions on when individual MPs could speak, how often they might force a vote, and eventually curtailment of the amount of time permitted for scrutinizing the details of legislation. The main developments associated with this striking ‘growth of ministerial control’—​the focus of a number of seminal articles on the Victorian Commons—​can be seen in Table 6.1.5 A second factor driving these changes was the dramatic increase in the number of MPs who began to attend regularly and take part in debates.6 Again, this development is traditionally linked to the ‘rise of democracy’. Being seen to be effective as a representative became far more important, and one of the most efficient ways of maintaining a public profile was to make a Commons speech, which would then find its way into the reports of debates published in the national and local press. As one Tory MP explained in the immediate aftermath of the 1832 Reform Act, ‘members were anxious that their constituents should see that they took part in the discussion’ and even ‘delivered arguments that had been urged by former speakers, not regarding what had been previously stated, provided they had the opportunity of delivering their sentiments’.7 Half a century later they were repeating not only each other but also themselves. As one of ‘no party’ observed: The great majority of the house now consists of talking members, men who all have something to say on some subject or another and who consider that they are under H. Clokie and J. Robinson, Royal Commissions of Inquiry: The Significance of Investigations in British Politics (New York, 1969). For a new study of the precedent established by the 1831 Boundary Commission, see M. Spychal, ‘Constructing England’s Electoral Map: Parliamentary Boundaries and the 1832 Reform Act’ (University of London PhD thesis, 2017). There is also surprisingly little work on the nineteenth-​ century select committee inquiry system, which, contrary to the assumptions of many scholars, failed to ‘take off ’ in the Victorian era. Indeed, the legitimacy of this type of inquiry continued to be discredited by intermittent ‘packing’ scandals until the creation of departmental select committees in 1979. 5  See especially P. Fraser, ‘The Growth of Ministerial Control in the Nineteenth-​Century House of Commons’, English Historical Review, 75 (1960), 444–​63; V. Cromwell, ‘The Losing of the Initiative by the House of Commons, 1780–​1914’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 18 (1968), 1–​24. 6  For an overview, see P. Salmon, ‘The House of Commons, 1801–​1911’, in C. Jones, ed., A Short History of Parliament (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 257–​62. On debate, see Meisel, Public Speech. 7  Parliamentary Debates, Commons 20 Feb. 1833, col. 1013.

86   Philip Salmon Table 6.1 Main procedural reforms (public business) associated with ‘growth of ministerial control’ 1811

Order days: precedence given to public bills on Mondays and Fridays

1835

Wednesdays added as order days

1835

End of debates on petitions (confirmed by standing orders in 1843 and 1853)

1837

Ban on moving amendments to orders of the day

1848

Ban on moving amendments on going into committee (on certain bills)

1854

Number of stages at which bills could be debated dramatically cut and ban on questions at first and second reading

1856

Restrictions on amendments at third reading

1879

Restrictions on amendments on going into committee of supply (Mondays) extended to all days in 1882

1881

‘Closure’ (closing debate with support of 100 MPs), ‘urgency motions’ (enabling Speaker to suspend ordinary rules and expedite ‘urgent’ business), and severe restrictions on ‘dilatory motions’ (to adjourn or postpone). Confirmed by standing orders in 1882 and 1887

1882

First standing committees (miniature Houses) established. Revived by standing orders in 1888

1887

‘The Guillotine’: introduction of cut-​off points for debating separate parts of urgent or major bills

1896

‘The Railway Timetable’: fixed number of days for bills before closure (embodied in standing orders in 1902)

1902

Introduction of written answers to parliamentary questions

1907

Standing committees extended to all non-​financial bills. Separate Scottish standing committee

an obligation to their constituents, to their country, and to themselves, to say it, and resay it, and say it again, whenever they can.8

Aided by the growing facilities available for parliamentary reporting—​a separate press gallery was provided in the temporary Commons chamber above and behind the Speaker in 1835 and replaced with a larger gallery in Barry’s chamber of 1852—​ Commons speeches and the cult of the parliamentarian began to attract almost a mass following during the Victorian era.9 Debates became accessible to millions, first as 8 

E. Sullivan, Common Sense in Politics (London, 1883), pp. vi, 60. Recent work on the cult of the politician includes H. Miller, Politics Personified: Portraiture, Caricature and Visual Culture in Britain, c. 1830–​1880 (Manchester, 2015); M. McCormack, ed., Public Men: Masculinity and Politics in Modern Britain (Basingstoke, 2007). 9 

Parliament   87 verbatim reports in newspapers but later via the vastly under-studied medium of ‘parliamentary sketches’. From a pre-​1832 situation in which only about 100–​50 MPs (23 per cent) contributed regularly to debate, by 1876 some 385–​400 (60 per cent) had become ‘talking members’.10 MPs such as Henry Lowther, who sat for Westmorland from 1812 to 1867 without uttering a word, or Christopher Talbot, who allegedly only broke 60 years of silence in order to ask someone to open a window, still existed, of course, but they were increasingly unusual. The far more usual experience, as another long-​serving MP lamented in his memoirs, was for MPs to become ‘almost all seized with a rage for speaking’.11 Just how far were these developments really related to the ‘rise of democracy’? One problem with this traditional narrative is that the pace of procedural reform assisting government law-​making and regulating debate does not correlate particularly well with the chronology of franchise expansion. Key reforms such as the creation of government order days, for instance, were implemented decades before the 1832 Reform Act. The growing tendency for MPs to intervene in debate and present public petitions also clearly predated electoral reform, with a 20 per cent rise occurring between 1820 and 1828.12 Moreover, although there was no dedicated reporters’ gallery in the old Commons’ chamber, which was destroyed by fire in 1834, since 1803 an estimated 60–​70 reporters had been paying the doorkeepers three guineas per session for exclusive use of the rear benches in the ‘strangers’ gallery’, helping to fuel a steady rise in press coverage throughout the pre-​reform period.13 In terms of public interest in debates and other parliamentary activity, something akin to what has been termed an ‘information revolution’ was already underway well before the 1830s.14 Underscoring these chronological issues, it is also clear that the rules of procedure themselves only aided ‘ministerial control’ rather than guaranteeing it, leaving huge scope for independent activity and opportunities for parliamentary disruption by backbench MPs, as the notorious activities of the Irish nationalists in the 1880s amply demonstrate.15 In particular, the committee of supply, despite various attempts to regulate its separate rules, gradually became what has been termed a ‘paradise of the independent member’.16 10 Sullivan, Common Sense, p. 60; A. Todd, On Parliamentary Government in England (2 vols, London, 1869), vol. ii, p. 401. 11   R. Heron, Notes (Grantham, 1850), p. 203. 12  On petitioning, see C. Leys, ‘Petitioning in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Political Studies, 3 (1955), 45–​64; H. Miller, ‘Popular Petitioning and the Corn Laws, 1833–​46’, English Historical Review, 127 (2012), 882–​919. 13  Salmon, ‘Commons’, p. 259. On parliamentary reporting, see K. Rix, ‘“Whatever Passed in Parliament Ought to be Communicated to the Public”: Reporting the Proceedings of the Reformed Commons, 1833–​50’, Parliamentary History, 33 (2014), 453–​74, and A. Sparrow, Obscure Scribblers: A History of Parliamentary Journalism (London, 2003). 14  P. Jupp, The Governing of Britain: The Executive, Parliament and the People (London, 2006), p. 207. 15  On Irish tactics, see D. Thornley, ‘The Irish Home Rule Party and Parliamentary Obstruction, 1874–​ 87’, Irish Historical Studies, 12 (1960), 38–​57; C. O’Brien, Parnell and His Party 1880–​90 (Oxford, 1957). 16  Fraser, ‘Ministerial Control’, 461.

88   Philip Salmon For these sorts of reasons, in recent years historians have increasingly begun to acknowledge the need for alternative ways to explain the transformations in law-​making and parliamentary scrutiny that occurred during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, there has been a growing recognition of the role played by broader cultural factors and the necessity for a more interdisciplinary treatment of the entire subject. The appearance of Ryan Vieira’s innovative study of parliamentary time, linking procedural developments at Westminster with the emergence of new Victorian conceptions of time and efficiency, marks a major turning point in this respect.17 As well as offering the first sustained analysis of nineteenth-​century procedural change since Josef Redlich’s dated account of 1908, Vieira’s work provides a much needed cultural reassessment of the working practices, attitudes, and historical constraints affecting parliamentary behaviour and political ‘modernization’.18 The resistance of the Commons to procedural change, in particular, is made abundantly clear, as is the disjuncture between new notions of ‘efficiency’ within public discourse and parliamentarians’ concern to protect their scrutiny functions. It is a work that does much to bridge the gap between the ‘new political history’, of which it is clearly a part, and the more traditional parliamentary subjects that many ‘postmodern’ scholars have simply sidestepped. Above all, and in line with recent work in other areas questioning the broader teleological narrative of ‘the rise of democracy’, it presents an alternative and far more nuanced framework for conceptualizing some key components of nineteenth-​century British political development.

II Vieira’s thesis commands attention and will undoubtedly help to stimulate fresh work exploring the culture of institutional change in other representative bodies and periods. There was one other form of parliamentary activity, however, that also profoundly affected the political culture and practical workings of Parliament in this period, which has yet to receive any attention from modern scholars. This was the activity that actually occupied most MPs’ time throughout the Victorian era: private bill legislation. Private acts (meaning laws of a purely personal or local nature) have long been overshadowed by public acts (general legislation affecting the entire nation) in most analyses of British political development. The latest edition of How Parliament Works notes that the ‘vast majority’ of laws passed by Parliament ‘and by far the more important, are public’.19 Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, arguably

17 Vieira, Time and Politics. 18 

19 

J. Redlich, The Procedure of the House of Commons (3 vols, London, 1908). R. Rogers and R. Walters, How Parliament Works (London, 2015), p. 173.

Parliament   89 500

400

No. Acts

300

200

100

0 1800

1820

1840

1860

1880

Public Acts

1900 Year

1920

1940

1960

1980

2000

Private & Local Acts

Figure 6.1  Number of public and private/​local acts passed each year, 1801–​1999 (Figures calculated from PP 1857 (34), xiv, p. 359; Statutes of the United Kingdom (1801 et seq.); Chronological Table of the Statutes (1870 et seq.); www.legislation.gov.uk)

the opposite was true. Not only did private acts completely transform the physical environment and create Britain’s modern infrastructure—​legalizing the construction of railways, canals, tramways, docks, sewers, roads, bridges, museums, parks, and essential utilities such as water, gas, and electricity (to name but a few)—​but they also outnumbered public acts by a factor of more than two to one well into the twentieth century. Figure 6.1 shows the actual number of private and public acts passed each year since 1801. The ‘railway’ peaks of the mid-​1840s and mid-​1860s are clearly evident. What is most revealing, however, is the proportion of the total legislative output that these numbers represent. Figure 6.2 plots the percentage of each year’s laws that were respectively private or public over the same period. The linear trend for private acts is remarkably clear and indicates that the switch to the modern situation described in How Parliament Works occurred considerably later than has often been assumed, after the Second rather than the First World War and apparently in tandem with the onset of nationalization and the creation of the modern welfare state.20 Of course, private acts were never as glamorous as their public counterparts and rarely attracted the publicity associated with large-​scale debates on major issues of national policy. Many, after all, were little more than compulsory purchase bills, setting out a project’s terms of authority and compensation. It does not follow, however, that they were

20 

See, for example, M. Rush, The Role of the Member of Parliament since 1868: From Gentlemen to Players (Oxford, 2001), p. 53.

90   Philip Salmon 100

% Acts

75

50

25

0 1800

1820

1840

1860 Public Acts

1880

1900 Year

1920

Private & Local Acts

1940

1960

1980

2000

Linear Trend

Figure 6.2  Proportion (%) of acts that were public or private/​local each year, 1801–​1999

any less controversial or bitterly contested. Private bill proceedings rarely found their way into the national press, but they invariably secured plenty of coverage in the provincial papers, not least because of the legal duty to inform all those who might be locally affected by their provisions. Organized protests, deputations to Parliament, public meetings, and petitioning campaigns relating to private bills were often just as numerous and vibrant (sometimes far more so) as those held on issues of public policy, where the bulk of historical attention has been focused. Indeed, ‘nimbyism’ may have been just as significant in fuelling public awareness of Parliament and the need to improve its practical workings as any political factor. Above all, it is becoming increasingly clear from the biographies of MPs being completed for the History of Parliament’s 1832–​68 House of Commons project that what many Victorian backbenchers spent the bulk of their time doing was private bill committee work.21 The fact that ministers and elderly members were excused from this essential parliamentary activity only increased the burdens it placed on the rest of the Commons and Lords. And with so much often at stake for private individuals and local communities in terms of the ways that private acts could affect their private property and livelihoods, it was perhaps inevitable that it was this key area of law-​making and its associated methods of scrutiny, far more than general public acts, that was the first to attract widespread criticism and external pressure for reform. 21  P. Salmon and K. Rix, eds., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1832–​1868 (forthcoming). Draft articles are available at .

Parliament   91

No. of Standing Orders (Commons)

300

200

100

0 1810

1830

1850

1870

1890 1910 Year

Private Standing Orders

1930

1950

1970

1990

Public Standing Orders

Figure 6.3  Number of standing orders regulating public and private business, 1801–​1990 Sources: Williams, Private Bill Procedure, vol. ii; Rush, Role of the Member of Parliament, p. 59.

By as early as 1810, more than ten times as many written rules (standing orders) had been introduced to regulate private as opposed to public business in the Commons. Over the course of the next 60 years the pace of procedural change in private law-​making continued to far outstrip that relating to general acts. It was only from the 1870s onwards that the overhaul of public business began to catch up, culminating in the reforms of the 1880s and early 1900s establishing the procedural culture and framework that was to remain in place for most of the twentieth century. Figure 6.3 charts the number of changes implemented by standing orders for both types of law-​making. The initiative taken in private business reform is immediately apparent and correlates closely with the pressures created by mid-​Victorian railway development, which pushed the total number of private acts to an all-​time peak of 453 in 1846, almost four times that year’s output of public acts.

III What these figures cannot reveal, of course, is how far the first set of procedural reforms, streamlining private business, may have influenced the later changes made to the system of public and government bills. The ‘revolution’ in private bill procedure that occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century created a whole new structure and set of

92   Philip Salmon precedents for dealing with an unparalleled volume of legislative activity.22 But to what extent did this also have an impact on the direction and development of the subsequent ‘ministerial controls’ introduced to regulate public business? The connection between the development of Parliament’s private and public law-​ making functions, and the way the modernization of the one may have fed into the other, has yet to receive the detailed historical treatment it deserves. A broad correlation between the two, however, has long been recognized by the handful of scholars who have studied private business.23 Tellingly, the reports of the numerous select committee inquiries established during the nineteenth century on public business made frequent reference to the solutions that might be ‘found in the course adopted in the case of private bills’.24 Pressed for his views on how to improve the drafting of government bills in 1857, for instance, Thomas Erskine May, in one of his many appearances before such an inquiry, characteristically argued that ‘any change in regard to public bills’ ought to be ‘founded upon the experience of the House in regard to private bills’.25 Erskine May is, of course, best remembered today as the founding author of the encyclopaedic guide to parliamentary practice that still bears his name. As a Senior Clerk in the Commons for more than 30 years, however, he was also one of the leading advocates for reforming public business, an area in which he was clearly influenced by his previous experience as a private bill examiner.26 Underpinning the advice of experts like Erskine May, whose views were shared by the highly influential Speakers Charles Shaw Lefevre and Henry Brand, there was also the cultural impact of the burgeoning private bill agenda on Victorian parliamentary life.27 MPs working in the increasingly streamlined and regulated world of private business, where so much of their time was invariably spent each day, could hardly fail to notice the difference when they turned their attention to public legislation at night. Along with the broad influence this had on working methods and attitudes to law-​making and scrutiny, there were also some specific ‘knock-​on’ effects. In 1855, for instance, a number of restrictions were introduced on the type of amendments that could be made to private bills at their third reading. In 1856 the same tightening of the rules was adopted for public bills.28 Similar types of correlation can be identified with many other details of procedural reform. However, it is at the more general level of principle that the most striking parallels can be found, with a number of key innovations in modern parliamentary practice being formulated in private business before being rolled out more widely. 22 

O. Williams, The Historical Development of Private Bill Procedure and Standing Orders in the House of Commons (2 vols, London, 1948). 23  See, for example, Williams, Private Bill Procedure, vol. i, 2. 24  PP 1857 (99), ii, p. 900. 25  PP 1857 (99), ii, p. 832, question 487. 26  D. Rydz, The Parliamentary Agents (London, 1979), p. 105. 27  The increasing institutional significance of the Speakership and the role of various Speakers in overseeing procedural modernization lies outside the scope of this account, but there is fresh work on Brand, based on his private papers, in Vieira, Time and Politics, pp. 84–​123. 28 Williams, Private Bill Procedure, vol. i, 171.

Parliament   93 By far the most significant was the subdivision of parliamentary labour into unbiased committees, grouped and chosen by a process of selection designed to maximize parliamentary integrity and public confidence. One of the major complaints against all types of select committees in the early nineteenth century was that they were invariably too large and ‘packed’ by those with vested interests. Early railway bill committees, for example, were often chaired and attended by precisely those individuals who stood to gain the most economically, sometimes even by the railway directors themselves. Select committee inquiries on a whole range of public matters, meanwhile, were invariably instigated, monopolized, and ‘manipulated’ by the very campaigners most actively involved in advocating a particular cause or point of view.29 The outcomes of both types of ‘scrutiny’, as a result, were often a foregone conclusion. By the 1830s the whole parliamentary inquiry and select committee system had fallen into disrepute. Indeed for some radical critics it was this issue, far more than electoral reform, which really warranted national attention.30 Significantly, it was the unelected Lords that seized the initiative. In 1837, in a ‘radical change’, they began to refer all private bills to a small committee of completely ‘disinterested’ peers, chosen by a special committee of selection.31 Each bill committee was to sit on specific days for agreed times, and attendance was compulsory. In 1844, under mounting pressure at the Board of Trade, Gladstone applied the same system to the huge backlog of railway bills in the Commons, which was then extended to cover all private business in 1855.32 Adapting these principles of subdividing labour and impartial selection to the arena of public legislation proved less straightforward, because most public bills continued to be dealt with by committees of the whole house. Nevertheless, select committee inquiries on public matters slowly began to be reformed and by the end of the 1870s their membership was also being determined by the committee of selection, who took ‘the greatest care’ to obtain ‘a proper representation of all political parties’.33 It was the 1882 introduction of standing committees or ‘miniature Houses’, for which Erskine May had been pushing for almost 30 years, which marked the real turning point, however. Initially set up temporarily, to deal only with law and trade bills, they also adopted the same selection system to appoint members on a ‘proportionate’ basis. Placed on a permanent footing in 1888, they were then applied to all public business in 1907 (except finance measures or unless agreed otherwise). This new system of standing committees, which ‘enjoyed the advantage of having precedents to follow and a well trodden path to pursue’, as the Clerk of the Commons put it, was in essence the one that operated throughout the rest of the twentieth century.34 ‘Public bill committees’, as 29 

The classic account of this is S. Finer, ‘The Transmission of Benthamite Ideas 1820–​50’, in G. Sutherland, ed., Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth-​century Government (London, 1972), pp. 11–​32. 30  See, for example, ‘Committees of the House of Commons: Administration by Large Numbers’, London and Westminster Review, 5 (1837), 209–​25. 31 Rydz, Parliamentary Agents, p. 93. 32  F. Clifford, A History of Private Bill Legislation (2 vols, London, 1885), vol. ii, pp. 841, 843. 33 Redlich, Procedure of the House of Commons, vol. ii, 186, 214. 34 Redlich, Procedure of the House of Commons, vol. ii, 207; Rush, Role of the Member of Parliament, p. 61.

94   Philip Salmon standing committees were rebranded in 2006, remain the routine way of dealing with almost all non-​financial legislation in Parliament. A number of other guiding principles of modern parliamentary practice were also clearly initiated in the arena of private law-​making. The use of legal templates, or ‘model’ bills, and the creation of ‘enabling’ legislation was first formulated and fine-​tuned to deal with mid-​Victorian private business, but then had a major influence on the acceptance and development of delegated legislation, statutory instruments, and the other types of secondary laws increasingly used by government departments. The successful operation of a ‘devolved’ commission for dealing with private bills in Scotland provided an important template for the creation of a completely separate standing committee on Scottish public bills in 1907, composed exclusively of Scottish MPs.35 Many of the restraints on speaking, the moving of amendments, as well as the strict timetabling of a public bill’s progress through its various stages also had clear antecedents in the numerous technical devices implemented to streamline private bill procedure. Far more work needs to be done on the precise nature of these connections, as well as the broader influences on Parliament of the increasingly litigious methods used in private bill committees, where specialist lawyers worked alongside politicians.36 However, if there was ever a missing component in the history of modern parliamentary development, it surely has to be the central role played by Victorian private bill legislation. The ‘rise of democracy’ and the pressure of public business have long been viewed as the main catalysts of change, responsible for transforming Parliament’s law-​making processes into a recognizably modern form, but they do not tell the whole story. As more research is carried out on the culture and working dynamics of Parliament as an institution, the limitations of these older explanatory narratives centred on democratic progress are becoming ever more apparent.

IV One of the other obvious shortcomings of the ‘rise of democracy’ model in explaining parliamentary development is that one half of Parliament, the House of Lords, has always been unelected.37 Many traditional accounts of Parliament have, as a result, either tended to backdate the supremacy of the Commons, viewing the Lords as a subservient chamber long before it really became so, or—​more usually—​simply focused the bulk of their attention on the ‘popular’ Commons. Both approaches have skewed the relationship between the two houses, compartmentalizing them as institutions, separating their activities, and assuming a level of constitutional conflict and tension that in 35 Williams, Private Bill Procedure, vol. i, 199–​210; Redlich, Procedure of the House of Commons, vol. iii, 213. 36  The best account of private bill advocacy remains Rydz, Parliamentary Agents. 37  Excluding the representative peers.

Parliament   95 reality did not exist, at least not outside exceptional moments of crisis. Scholarly work on the nineteenth and early twentieth-​century Lords, perhaps because it sits so awkwardly within the prevailing model of democratically driven change, remains thin on the ground compared with the amount of research on the elected chamber.38 As one of the more recent studies noted, ‘for the last half-​century and more it has been largely ignored’.39 The significance of the Lords, however, should not be underestimated. More than half of the twenty prime ministers of the nineteenth century, including the two longest serving (Liverpool and Salisbury), formed their governments as members of the Lords, while two more (Russell and Disraeli) started out in the Commons but later served as premier in the upper house. For just over half the entire nineteenth century, the government was led by a prime minister sitting in the Lords. At the ministerial level the enduring presence of peers was even more striking, even in the twentieth century. Attlee’s first Cabinet of 1945 and Macmillan’s in 1957 contained five Lords, while Churchill’s of 1951 had seven. Perhaps most importantly, family ties and patronage networks ensured a close working relationship between members of both houses, with many MPs either succeeding or being promoted to peerages and many Lords continuing to exercise a considerable degree of influence over elections to the Commons well into the Victorian era. One often overlooked factor determining the level of conflict between the two houses during the nineteenth century was the Lords’ political composition. Despite years of Liberal peerage creations aimed at trying to rectify a long-​standing imbalance, by 1880 the number of Liberal Lords had only just passed the 200 mark, or roughly 40 per cent of the total, which was then decimated by the Liberal party’s split over Irish home rule. The Lords was therefore always an overwhelmingly Tory chamber. One effect of this was that many Whig and Liberal measures that passed the Commons were often defeated or altered beyond all recognition by the Lords, sometimes even against the express wishes of the Tory leaders. The fact that so many controversial reforms of the nineteenth century ended up being proposed by Tory or Conservative governments, however, meant that the number of conflicts between the two houses was far lower than it otherwise might have been. Hugely contentious issues such as Catholic Emancipation (1829), the Maynooth Grant (1845), the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), and of course the Second Reform Act (1867), all of which would surely have been defeated in the Lords if sent there by a Liberal ministry, were allowed to pass by a Tory-​dominated Lords, albeit with varying degrees of dissent.40

38 

Notable exceptions include: E.A. Smith, The House of Lords in British Politics and Society 1815–​1911 (London, 1992); A. Adonis, Making Aristocracy Work. The Peerage and the Political System in Britain, 1884–​1914 (Oxford, 1993); R. Davis, Leaders in the Lords 1765–​1902 (Edinburgh, 2003); and the excellent recent study by C. Ballinger, The House of Lords 1911–​2011: A Century of Non-​Reform (Oxford, 2012). 39 Davis, Leaders in the Lords, p. 2. 40 

A classic example of this was the greater party loyalty demonstrated by the Lords (compared with the Commons) over Corn Law repeal: R. Davis, ‘Wellington, Peel and the House of Lords in the 1840s’,

96   Philip Salmon It was this deep-​seated loyalty to the Tory leadership that helped limit the number of showdowns between the two houses for most of the nineteenth century, even on major constitutional issues. In 1867, despite many misgivings, the Lords loyally backed Disraeli’s ‘leap in the dark’ extending the franchise. In 1884 they initially rejected the Liberal ministry’s Third Reform Bill by 205 votes to 146, but, taking their cue from their new leader Lord Salisbury, then allowed it to pass after a deal was hatched between the two front benches over an accompanying redistribution bill. Steady resistance in the Lords to measures such as the abolition of church rates, the removal of religious tests in universities, and allowing Jews to enter Parliament put them at odds with the Commons on a regular basis throughout the 1850s and 1860s, but again it was at the behest of leaders, notably Disraeli, that they eventually gave way. In 1868 the Lords threw out Gladstone’s preliminary measures for disestablishing the Anglican Church in Ireland, passed in the Commons during the tail ​end of Disraeli’s minority government. Following that year’s general election, however, which gave the Liberals a substantial majority, the Tory Lords reluctantly consented to pass a compromise measure at the behest of their leader, Lord Cairns. By now the results of a general election, in so far as they appeared to endorse any particular policy, were beginning to be accepted by many influential Lords as amounting to a ‘mandate’ reflecting the wishes of the nation, which the upper house ought not to resist.41 The way Lord Salisbury, leader of the Tory Lords after 1881, cleverly adopted and adapted this concept, eventually to the point of almost turning it on its head, is widely regarded as having opened a new era in the relationship between the two houses, making clashes increasingly likely (when the Tories were not in power) and ultimately leading to the constitutional crisis of 1909–​11. Salisbury’s doctrine, which should not be confused with the rather different ‘Salisbury convention’ developed by his grandson to placate the Labour ministry of 1945–​51, was that the Commons’ ability to scrutinize legislation and act as an effective check on ministers was being steadily eroded by the government’s increasing hegemony over the lower house. If MPs were being forced to ‘vote just as their leaders tell ’em to’, who was there to caution, revise, and refer bills back for improvement? Only the Lords, independent of electoral pressures and party platforms, could be relied upon to carry out these essential parliamentary functions and protect the rights of minorities. Rather than diminishing the power of the upper house, changes in the representative and party system were actually making its political presence and intervention all the more necessary. With no little irony, given his own party’s control over the Lords and his personal role in creating the single-​member constituency system of 1885, Salisbury even began to suggest that, owing to the way the Commons had become ‘enslaved to the party caucus’ and the glaring representational deficiencies of the ‘first-​past-​the-​post’ voting system, the

in C. Jones, R. Davis, and P. Salmon, eds., Partisan Politics, Principle and Reform in Parliament and the Constituencies, 1689–​1880 (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 164–​82. 41 

See in particular the speech of Lord Cairns: Parliamentary Debates, Lords, 14 July 1869, cols. 1655–​8.

Parliament   97 Lords was on occasion better placed to represent the ‘will of the people’ than the lower house.42 It could, as another Tory peer put it, ‘be a more correct interpreter of public feeling than the House of Commons’, with its crude emphasis on bare majorities.43 This bold and ‘daring proposition’, enshrined in Salisbury’s public musings and speeches, was to receive an extraordinary endorsement as a result of the Irish home rule crisis of 1893.44 In the largest vote of the period, the Lords threw out Gladstone’s Irish home rule bill, which had been forced through the Commons using many of the new draconian procedures available to ministers. On this occasion, unlike Irish Church disestablishment in 1868, the Lords seemed to have captured the mood of the nation perfectly: at the next two general elections the Conservatives and their Unionist allies secured substantial majorities. Underpinning the Lords’ powerful claim to be able to stand up in this way for the broader ‘will of the people’, the upper house also began to be transformed in other areas, especially during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Echoing some of the changes taking place in the social composition of the Commons, its membership underwent a mini-​revolution, with ever increasing numbers of non-​landed elites from banking, business, industry, and the professions being awarded peerages by the leaders of both parties. James Williamson, a Liberal linoleum manufacturer who was created Baron Ashton, was a typical example of this new breed of peers, who accounted for more than 40 per cent of all the ennoblements made between 1897 and 1911. By the latter year the size of the house had grown to around 630, some 115 higher than 30 years previously.45 Its proceedings and debates, often likened to ‘addressing tombstones by torchlight’, also began to enjoy a renaissance, particularly in the wake of Irish obstruction in the Commons and the increasing restrictions on MPs’ speeches.46 The superiority of Lords’ debates on major issues was frequently commented on in the press. Its capacity for business, especially in the area of private legislation, is also worth stressing.

V By the end of the nineteenth century the Lords had emerged not as a subordinate chamber to the elected Commons, as one might have expected, but as more assertive, constitutionally reinvigorated, and politically active than it had been in the early 1800s. 42  The Times, 14 Apr. 1882, cited in A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: Habits of Heart and Mind (Oxford, 2015), p. 314. 43  T. Legh, Lord Lansdowne: A Biography (London, 1929), p. 360. 44  C. Comstock Weston, ‘Salisbury and the Lords, 1868–​1895’, Historical Journal, 25 (1982), 109. See also C. Comstock Weston, The House of Lords and Ideological Politics. Lord Salisbury’s Referendal Theory and the Conservative Party, 1846–​1922 (Philadelphia, 1995); P. Marsh, ‘Salisbury’s Definition of the Powers of the Lords’, in Davis, Leaders in the Lords, pp. 91–​9. 45  Excluding bishops. 46  E. Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale (2 vols, London, 1913), vol. i, p. 402.

98   Philip Salmon One area, of course, where it was not able to challenge the supremacy of the Commons was government finance—​specifically its income and expenditure plans. This had long been the exclusive preserve of the lower house. An enduring problem here, however, had always been what exactly this financial embargo covered. In 1860, in an important showdown between the chambers, the Lords had rejected the Liberal ministry’s propo­ sals to abolish the duties on paper. This formed part of the government’s broad move towards obtaining more revenue from income and property, but was also seen by many Lords as touching on wider national issues beyond a financial remit.47 Rather than confront the Lords head on, the ministry passed resolutions in the Commons reasserting its exclusive right to deal with all money matters, and in the following session controversially inserted the proposals into their budget, which, despite many objections, was duly passed. This increasing practice of ‘packing’ budgets with other measures lay at the heart of the constitutional crisis of 1909–​11. After three years of throwing out a series of Liberal reforms, including an unpopular licensing bill, and earning themselves their reputation as ‘Mr Balfour’s poodle’, the Lords went one step further and rejected the so-​called ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, which, as well as extending inheritance duties on landed estates, had tacked on previously rejected licensing and land valuation reforms. The Liberal ministry called an election, held in January 1910, but their resulting losses made them heavily dependent on the support of the Irish Nationalist MPs and Labour, both of whom shared the Liberal party’s growing commitment to a formal reduction of the Lords’ powers. After months of high political drama and abortive negotiations between the two houses, and yet another general election in December 1910 that solved nothing, the Parliament Act of 1911 was eventually passed under the threat of mass peerage creations by the King.48 Much has been made of the way the 1911 Parliament Act formally ended the Lords’ ability to interfere in money matters (as defined by the Speaker) and its replacement of the Lords’ complete veto over legislation with a delaying power of two years. In reality, however, this was precisely the way in which the Lords had operated for most of the nineteenth century, rarely intruding into budgetary matters and often postponing rather than preventing the passage of controversial measures (with the obvious exception of Irish home rule). Not only did the Parliament Act’s provisions only apply to bills that originated in the Commons—​leaving completely untouched the peers’ powers over bills introduced in the Lords and all secondary or delegated legislation—​but also the opportunity for bills to be delayed until after the next election in effect conferred a ‘referendum’ power on the upper house, legitimizing its claims to a separate constitutional relationship with the electorate.

47 

See Smith, House of Lords, p. 123. On the constitutional crisis, see C. Ballinger, ‘Hedging and Ditching: The Parliament Act 1911’, in P. Norton, ed., A Century of Constitutional Reform (Chichester, 2011), pp. 19–​32; K. Epstein, The British Constitutional Crisis, 1909–​1911 (New York, 1987). 48 

Parliament   99 Perhaps most significantly, the Parliament Act’s technical requirements—​ bills delayed by the Lords had to go back through the Commons in the same form three times before becoming law—​in practice made it far too cumbersome to be used on a regular basis. Tellingly, during the twentieth century it was implemented just six times. In 1914, Welsh Church disestablishment and Irish home rule were enacted under its provisions, only for their implementation to be suspended for the duration of the war (and in the latter case aborted owing to Irish independence). The 1949 Parliament Act, which further reduced the Lords’ delaying powers to one year, also reached the statute book without the Lords’ consent, as did the 1991 War Crimes Act, the 1999 European Elections Act, and the 2000 Sexual Offences Act. All other legislation that was passed during the twentieth century, however, continued to be debated, scrutinized, and, where necessary, amended by the Lords before becoming law, much as it had been during the Victorian era. The only difference was that after the primacy of the Commons had been asserted during the showdown of 1909–​11, the Lords became less disposed to be combative in its approach and more inclined to engage in subtle political manoeuvrings, especially behind the scenes. To this extent, the change implemented in the early twentieth century was as much a cultural as a constitutional one. One unintended consequence of this delicately reconfigured power relationship between the two houses was its impact on plans to reform the composition of the Lords. The opening lines of the 1911 Act had famously declared: ‘it is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a second chamber constituted on a popular instead of hereditary basis, but such substitution cannot be immediately brought into operation.’49 In the years ahead, however, the impracticality and drawbacks of almost every ‘popular’ form of second chamber became clear, as first the Bryce Commission (1917–​18) and then numerous committees and government bills of the twentieth century sought but failed to find an acceptable solution to this ‘unfinished’ component of Lords reform. At the heart of the problem lay the simple dilemma that any improvement in the composition of the Lords would be likely to embolden the upper house, making it more likely to use its substantial remaining powers and interfere with the will of the Commons. Another complication was that a wholly elected chamber based on the system for electing MPs would simply end up mirroring the balance of parties in the Commons, making it superfluous. One elected on an alternative principle, however, would in effect pitch two rival electoral systems against each other in terms of being able to represent the ‘popular will’. Given the democratic anomalies of first-​past-​the-​post elections this would inevitably put electoral reform back on the political agenda, with all its implications for the two-​party system and the ability for governments to be formed without resorting to coalitions. Only the Labour party’s proposal of ‘total abolition’ and making

49 

1 & 2 Geo. V, c. 13.

100   Philip Salmon Parliament a ‘single-​chamber legislating body’, a policy endorsed overwhelmingly at its 1977 conference, appeared to provide a straightforward, albeit brutal, solution. By then, however, the Lords was no longer an exclusively hereditary body and the constitutional context had shifted. The Life Peerages Act of 1958, passed by the Conservative ministry of Macmillan despite strong Labour opposition, had given the Lords a new lease of life, allowing non-​hereditary peerages to be conferred on partisans nominated by the leaders of the main parties—​which over time helped to dilute the Tory bias of the chamber—​and also on distinguished figures from all walks of public life.50 Significantly, the Act enabled women to become ennobled, and by 1997 more than a hundred had entered the upper house.51 Prime ministers, of course, had always had the option of nominating peers from a range of backgrounds. The way in which the entire honours system had been thrown into disrepute by Lloyd George’s venal creations of 1918–​22, however, had ensured that no subsequent ministry had dared make quite as many, despite the official cleaning up of the system by the 1925 Honours (Prevention and Abuses) Act. Crucially, removing the hereditary component of a peerage created just enough of a symbolic break with the old discredited system to make wholesale nominations viable again. By the end of Wilson’s Labour ministry just over a decade later, some 215 life peers had been created. By 1999 the total had reached 887 (excluding law lords), bringing the proportion of the house who sat as life peers to 37 (allowing for deaths). It was not just their growing number, however, but also the disproportionate impact of life peers on the ethos and working culture of the Lords that really marked a new beginning. Bolstered by their backgrounds as experienced politicians drawn from all parties and distinguished public figures, within just a few years they had easily surpassed the hereditary peers as the ‘most active’ members and begun to contribute to a very substantial increase in attendance and the volume of business undertaken on the floor of the house and in committee.52 By the late 1990s the average attendance during each day’s sitting, at 446, was over four times higher than it had been in the mid-​1950s, while the sittings themselves had become twice as long, at more than seven hours. Comparable increases in the frequency and size of votes, the length of debates, and the number of questions to ministers (starred and written) all testified to a steady resurgence of the Lords and its powers of scrutiny throughout the late twentieth century. It is in this sense that Blair’s reform of the Lords in 1999, which initially aimed to remove hereditary peers completely, in many ways merely accelerated existing historic trends, both in terms of the practical workings of the house and by again deferring the question of how to achieve a more ‘popular’ membership. As one commentator has recently noted, Blair’s changes, however unintentionally, resulted in ‘a much more active and assertive second chamber’.53 The backstairs compromise that was hatched 50 

For a useful analysis, see P. Dorey, ‘Change in Order to Conserve: Explaining the Decision to Introduce the 1958 Life Peerages Act’, Parliamentary History, 28 (2009), 246–​65. 51  House of Lords Library, LLN/​2008/​019; House of Commons Library, SN/​PC/​5867. 52  See J. Morgan, The House of Lords and the Labour Government 1964–​70 (Oxford, 1975). 53  P. Cowley, ‘Parliament’, in A. Seldon, ed., Blair’s Britain 1997–​2007 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 17.

Parliament   101 between the two main parties in 1999, allowing 92 ‘elected’ hereditary peers to remain in return for Conservative acquiescence, has been variously ridiculed as ‘hilarious’ and ‘nonsense’. It was widely condemned for having ‘brought a hugely questionable form of democracy into the second chamber’, by enabling peers disqualified from sitting to nevertheless nominate members and their replacements at ‘by-​elections’.54 What was perhaps most revealing about this arrangement, however, was the way it almost resuscitated the system introduced to elect Scottish representative peers in 1707, which was later extended and used to elect Irish representative peers between 1800 and 1919.55 The practice of peers electing peers was a standard feature of the nineteenth-​century Lords. Until the issue of how to elect a more ‘popular’ second chamber is finally resolved, the reintroduction of this historic practice will continue to offer yet another reminder of the enduring legacy of Victorian constitutional culture in modern parliamentary practice.

VI The relationship between the Commons and the Lords lies at the heart of the UK’s bicameral parliamentary system, but explaining its development in terms of the prevailing ‘rise of democracy’ model is clearly unsatisfactory. It does not account for the enduring significance of the ‘unelected’ upper house or the reluctance of successive governments to apply the democratic principle to the second chamber. Moreover, by focusing so disproportionately on the ‘elected’ chamber, political historians have not only overlooked the residual importance of the Lords but also downplayed its role as an instigator of reform—​ for example, in initiating the modernization of procedure (private bill) in the nineteenth century or by being the first to televise debates in the twentieth century. Recent analysis of the post-​1999 Lords, if anything, only confirms its growing effectiveness as a legislative revising chamber and increasing willingness to act as a check on the government, despite the restrictions created by the automatic programming or ‘timetabling’ of bills.56 Viewed from the perspective of the Victorian era, it is not so much the degree of change that is most striking, but rather the remarkable similarity of the relationship between the two houses after a century of constitutional development. Parliament continues to be a curiously neglected component of modern political history. Compared with the amount of scholarly literature on political languages, ideology, ‘popular’ movements, and electoral organization, work on the structures and operation of the institution at the centre of the nation’s political system remains in short supply.

54  A. Kelso, ‘Stages and Muddles: the House of Lords Act 1999’, in Norton, ed., Constitutional Reform, p. 111. 55  For further details, see J. Sainty, A Parliamentary Miscellany: Papers on the History of the House of Lords (Chichester, 2015), pp. 47, 71. 56  Cowley, ‘Parliament’, pp. 22, 30–​3; M. Russell and M. Sciara, ‘The Policy Impact of Defeats in the House of Lords’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 10 (2008), 571–​89.

102   Philip Salmon One upshot of this is that, at a time when researchers working in other areas of political history have almost begun a process of revising the revisionists, the historiography of Parliament has yet to experience even its first comprehensive overhaul. Important advances have recently been made, most noticeably in Vieira’s welcome study of procedure. A younger generation of scholars are also pursuing innovative PhD projects. However, a huge amount of work still needs to be done before this topic can in any sense be said to have ‘caught up’ with the field as a whole. This chapter’s examination of the development of modern law-​making practices and the relationship between the two Houses of Parliament has sought to highlight just some of the enduring influences and legacies of the Victorian constitution in the operation of Britain’s modern parliamentary system. The process of revising the old traditional ‘rise of democracy’ model, however, still has a long way to go.

Further Reading C. Ballinger, The House of Lords 1911–​2011: A Century of Non-​Reform (Oxford, 2012). G. Campion, L. Amery et al., Parliament: A Survey (London, 1952). A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture (Oxford, 2015). C. Jones, ed., A Short History of Parliament (Woodbridge, 2009). R. Rogers and R. Walters, How Parliament Works (London, 2015). R. Vieira, Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and the British World (Oxford, 2015).

chapter 7

Prim e Minist e r a nd Cabin et Andrew Blick

The subjects of this chapter existed in some form throughout the period covered by this handbook. They were at the centre of many of the key events that occurred, and often figure prominently in accounts of them. At the outset, William Pitt ‘the Younger’ appears as a pivotal figure in the struggle against Napoleon and in developments such as the Union between Great Britain and Ireland into a single United Kingdom.1 Robert Peel is associated with various important policies in the 1840s, in particular the abolition of the Corn Laws and the move to free trade.2 Lord Salisbury emerges almost as an imperial chancellor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,3 Winston Churchill as war leader from 1940,4 Margaret Thatcher as at the centre of an ideological shift in Britain from 1979,5 and so on. Similarly, the Cabinet frequently figures as a forum both for decision-​making and the manifestation of political tensions.6 The Cabinet conclusion, for instance, is an important document for many historians covering the period from December 1916 onwards.7 It is a crucial record of the decision arrived at by the supreme committee of British government, and—​in theory—​the reasoning for it. Disputes within the Cabinet—​for instance over home rule in 1886, tariff reform in the early twentieth century,8 and retrenchment in public expenditure9—​are another staple of political history. 1 

J. Ehrman, The Younger Pitt (3 vols, London, 1969–96). N. Gash, The Life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 (London, 2011). 3  E.D. Steele, Lord Salisbury: A Political Biography (Oxford, 2001). 4  M. Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (London, 2000). 5  R. Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s (London, 2010). 6  P. Hennessy, Cabinet (Oxford, 1986). 7  For Cabinet conclusions, see The National Archives (TNA) CAB 23, 65, and 128. For an account of Cabinet records from the earliest years to 1945, see S. Shipley Wilson, The Cabinet Office to 1945 (London, 1975). 8  I. Cawood and C. Upton, eds., Joseph Chamberlain: International Statesman, National Leader, Local Icon (Basingstoke, 2016). 9  See, e.g., R.G. Bassett, The 1931 Political Crisis (Dartmouth, 1986); R. Roberts, When Britain Went Bust: the 1976 IMF Crisis (London, 2016). 2 

104   Andrew Blick Despite the general prominence of prime minister and Cabinet, there is a gap in the literature. Such coverage as there is of the history of these entities as institutions in their own right is erratic or incomplete. Taking into account this absence, this chapter performs the following tasks. First, it considers why there might be a less-​than-​full body of secondary work in this field. Second, it discusses the literature that does exist, and its strengths and weaknesses. Third, it proposes the tasks that a fuller assessment of the history of the prime minister and Cabinet would need to accomplish. They would include: a definition of the entities being considered; an identification of the relevant primary sources; and—​most substantially—​an estimation of change and continuity in the subjects and their surrounding environment. Finally, the chapter considers the role of modernity from the perspective of its subject matter. This overview of possible lines of development in historical study will show that an understanding of the prime minister and of Cabinet is crucial to an understanding of political and constitutional history, as well as the ways in which different material forces, ideas, people, and institutions interacted. It will also demonstrate that the supposed divisions between different kinds of history are less relevant than has sometimes been assumed, and often actively unhelpful.

I The office of prime minister and the Cabinet both came into being in informal, incremental ways. Neither was created at a set point. The very idea that they should exist was controversial. Famously, the office of prime minister is often traced in its beginnings to Sir Robert Walpole and his ascendancy within the governments of 1721–​42.10 The degree of dominance within Court and Parliament that he achieved during this period, especially from 1730 onwards, is traditionally regarded as marking the beginning of the office of prime minister. Yet there were precursors to Walpole. Moreover, he was never formally labelled ‘Prime Minister’. This term was deployed against him by his opponents (as it had been against predecessors). The notion of there being a ‘Prime Minister’ rather than a series of departmental ministers, each equal beneath the monarch, was considered distasteful—​and an unwanted adaptation of French political practice.11 Consequently, Walpole denied being prime minister, even if in practice he was. Gradually, though in a faltering fashion, the existence of a chief minister acting as the most senior adviser to the monarch and the leading figure in Parliament became a more established and accepted feature of the British constitution. By the opening of the period considered in this handbook, Pitt the Younger was nearing the end of his first term in the post. As with Walpole, the length of the predominance attained by Pitt

10  11 

A.J.P. Taylor, British Prime Ministers and Other Essays (London, 1999), pp. 6–​14. B. Kemp, Sir Robert Walpole (London, 1976), pp. 3–​5.

Prime Minister and Cabinet    105 the Younger helped to define the role of prime minister. But it was far from formally established.12 The development of Cabinet followed a similar pattern. During the 1660s, a gathering that came to be known as the Cabinet began to emerge. It was a means by which leading politicians could bypass the larger, less wieldy Privy Council. As with the office of prime minister in its early phase, the term ‘Cabinet’ and the idea that it might be a means of circumventing proper forms of governance were controversial. The need for high-​level efficiency was, however, a powerful imperative. The Cabinet as we know it actually grew out of a smaller subgroup that appeared within the full Cabinet, that—​ like the Privy Council before it—​came to be seen as an unsatisfactory instrument by senior ministers.13 During the nineteenth century the Cabinet became firmly established in constitutional doctrine as the most senior entity within government. But, again like the office of prime minister, it had a casual existence. While it did discuss circulated papers, its meetings were not regularly and formally minuted by officials until December 1916, when David Lloyd George became Prime Minister. Upon arriving at No. 10, Lloyd George created a small War Cabinet—​another supplanting, if temporary, of a larger decision-​taking body by a smaller—​and attached to it a Secretariat. In this body lay the origins of the Cabinet Office. The Cabinet never acquired a statutory basis. It remains grounded in convention. The decisions it takes are politically, not legally, binding. It is secretaries of state to whom Parliament generally provides statutory powers and votes money, and parliamentary accountability tends to focus on these individuals and the activities for which they are responsible more than on the Cabinet as a group.14 Therefore, while it is difficult to establish with certainty the reasons for it, the lack of a more fully formed historical school of prime minister and Cabinet may well derive to a significant extent from the casual way in which these institutions came into being and subsequently developed. Their roles tend to be assumed rather than unpicked. As Viscount Melbourne, himself a former prime minister, put it to Queen Victoria in a letter from 1841, after she inquired on behalf of Prince Albert about the nature of the premiership: the work of conducting the executive government, has rested so much on practice, on usage, on understanding, that there is no publication to which reference can be made for the explanation and description of it. It is to be sought in debates, protests, in letters in memoirs, and wherever it can be picked up.15

12 

A. Blick and G. Jones, Premiership: The Development, Nature and Power of the Office of the British Prime Minister (Exeter, 2010), pp. 111–​12. 13  J. Mackintosh, The British Cabinet (London, 1968), pp. 36, 42. 14  For a contemporary account of these lasting features of the UK constitutional system, see Cabinet Office, The Cabinet Manual: A Guide to the Rules, Conventions and Laws on the Operation of Government (London, 2011). 15  Reproduced in Blick and Jones, Premiership, pp. 3–​4.

106   Andrew Blick There has been some important work on the early period of the office of prime minister, focusing on the eighteenth century.16 There has also been research concentrating on the period since 1945, most notably The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders since 1945 by Peter Hennessy,17 and a history of prime ministerial aides by Anthony Seldon and Dennis Kavanagh, The Powers Behind the Prime Minister.18 Studies filling any of the intervening period are harder to locate, as are histories of the entire office that attempt to place anything approaching equal weight on the different periods. Writing in the 1950s and 1960s, Byrum E. Carter19 and F.W.G. Benemy20 attempted overviews. Lord (Robert) Blake published three lectures he gave in 1974 on the subject of the British prime minister, the second of which was entitled ‘The History’.21 In more recent times, an article by Paul Langford was an important entry in the field of comprehensive prime ministerial history.22 My work with George Jones, covering both the office of prime minister and specifically the teams that support premiers,23 also seeks some kind of even historical distribution. Kevin Theakston has produced a large volume of work dealing with different aspects of the premiership over different time periods.24 An official or authorized history of the office of prime minister, in a single or in multiple volumes, has yet to be commissioned. For Cabinet, there are some general overviews,25 but certainly not a large body of work addressing in detail issues around its development. Histories dealing with aspects of the Cabinet Office are being published to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of this institution. But though the Cabinet Office has a close relationship with the Cabinet, the two are not synonymous. Political scientists sometimes produce historical accounts of the prime minister and Cabinet, though their objectives and methods may differ from those of historians. Contributors in this category include Michael Foley 16 

See, e.g., L. Namier, Crossroads of Power: Essays on Eighteenth Century England (London, 1962); R. Pares, King George II and the Politicians: The Ford Lectures 1951–​2 (London, 1962). 17  P. Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945 (London, 2000). 18  A. Seldon and D. Kavanagh, eds., The Powers Behind The Prime Minister (London, 2000). An earlier, similarly titled work covering a similar theme was C. Petrie, The Powers Behind the Prime Ministers (London, 1958). 19  B.E. Carter, The Office of Prime Minister (London, 1956). 20  F.W.G Benemy, The Elected Monarch (London, 1965). 21  R. Blake, The Office of Prime Minister, Thank-Offering to Britain Fund Lectures (Oxford, 1975). 22  P. Langford, ‘Prime Ministers and Parliaments: The Long View: Walpole to Blair’, The Annual History of Parliament Lecture, 2005, Parliamentary History, 25 (2006), 382–​94. 23   A. Blick and G. Jones, At Power’s Elbow: Aides to the Prime Minister from Robert Walpole to David Cameron (London, 2013). 24  K. Theakston, After Number 10: Former Prime Ministers in British Politics (London, 2010). For an article including a discussion of some of the problems with the existing literature on the office of Prime Minister, see idem., ‘Political Skills and Context in Prime Ministerial Leadership in Britain’, Politics and Policy, 30 (2002), 283–​323. 25 Mackintosh, The British Cabinet; Hennessy, Cabinet; A. Seldon, ‘The Cabinet System’, in V. Bogdanor, ed., The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2004); G.W. Jones, ‘Development of the Cabinet’, in W. Thornhill, ed., The Modernisation of British Government (London, 1975); G.W. Jones, ‘Cabinet Government Since Bagehot’, in R. Blackburn, ed., Constitutional Studies: Contemporary Issues and Controversies (London, 1992); and I. Jennings, Cabinet Government, (3rd edn., Cambridge, 1969).

Prime Minister and Cabinet    107 with his thesis of a British presidency26 and Richard Rose with his account of the changing nature of the premiership.27 There is, however, no shortage of material about individual prime ministers. Numerous biographies, often the work of writers working outside academic institutions, of varied approaches and quality, have been produced and continue to appear. There is no especial problem with this tendency in itself. But it does have unintended consequences for the study of the premiership as an institution rather than a role performed by a particular person at a given time. The office of prime minister is a collection of functions and powers. It has always been exercised by a group of people—​that is, the premier at the centre, supported by various staff. Walpole had a large team of aides of various kinds, and the pattern of relying on support from others was followed in various ways by every one of his successors. But the unavoidable tendency of biography is a focus on the individual who is the prime minister, at the expense of the office. While particular aides can receive attention, it is primarily as part of the story of the politician they served, rather than as participants with that politician in the operation of an institution. Furthermore, the premiership can seem in biography as a given—​something towards which the subject perhaps aspires, goes on to capture, and then makes their mark on in some way, before moving on elsewhere. It is usually the summit of a career, its defining moment, and is often a focus for overall judgements of a politician’s success. But though the premiership often emerges as important, the trajectory of a biography is different to that which one might expect from a study of the office of prime minister. In the latter, unlike the former, it is the way that the individual career integrated into and impacted upon that of the whole that is of primary importance, not the part that the office played in a given life story. Unquestionably, in biographies, we can glean insights regarding the development of the premiership. However, providing such illumination is not their core purpose. The same points can be made about the relationship between biography and the history of Cabinet. There are clearly even more studies of politicians who at some point held a place in the Cabinet than there are of prime ministers alone. In these studies, the general tendency is to acknowledge Cabinet as an event that their subjects attend and in which they express themselves and interact with other participants. Important occurrences may be described as taking place. Yet biography is less likely to convey a sense of what Cabinet was, how it came to be so, how rules and conventions shaped its operation, what impact it had upon its members, and what difference they made to it. A sub-​genre of the prime ministerial biography is that of the collection of profiles of a series of premiers.28 These books are useful as works of reference, and would certainly be of assistance to a fuller study of the history of the office of prime minister. Yet they do 26 

M. Foley, The British Presidency: Tony Blair and the Politics of Public Leadership (Manchester, 2000). R. Rose, The Prime Minister in a Shrinking World (Cambridge, 2001). 28  For example, D. Leonard, A History of British Prime Ministers: Walpole to Cameron (London, 2014); B. Williams, Britain’s Prime Ministers (Stroud, 2010); V. Bogdanor, From New Jerusalem to New Labour: British Prime Ministers from Attlee to Blair (Basingstoke, 2010). 27 

108   Andrew Blick not in themselves amount to such a work. The reader of these types of volumes is presented with a procession of personal stories that are fascinating in their diversity but do not amount to a coherent account of an institution. Switches from one incumbent to the next can create an impression of an office that is characterized by frenetic surface-​level change, but is lacking in deeper-​lying patterns of alteration. This form of analysis is not best suited to the appreciation of more fundamental continuities and transformations. One merit of chronological collected biographies of prime ministers is that they provide complete coverage of the periods they cover. Yet the overall impact of biography on understandings of the premiership is distorting in a further sense. Some politicians are the subject of a greater number of biographies than others. Aside from the Churchill industry, a particularly popular prime minister lately, for instance, has been Clement Attlee (Labour 1945–​51).29 Consequently, important periods in the history of the premiership may receive less attention simply because the prime minister of the given time may be less attractive to biographers. In any case, full use has yet to be made of existing biographies from the perspective of the study of the premiership. As Theakston notes, while ‘[t]‌here are innumerable political biographies and historical studies of British prime ministers . . . these are neglected as a basis for comparison, generalization and theory testing or evaluation’.30 Selection bias problems arise in another sense beyond that of biographical study. Assessments of particular subject areas may—​like profiles of individual people—​deal with the workings of the office of prime minister and the Cabinet. Once again, while they may offer useful perspectives on these institutions, they arise tangentially in the context of something else. Furthermore, they seem to have the effect of meaning that certain episodes receive a surfeit of attention—​for instance the Suez crisis of 1956.31 Others by implication are neglected, yet it may be that a fuller understanding of the institutions of prime minister and Cabinet requires their investigation. A further body of work addressing not only the office of prime minister but also the Cabinet from an historic perspective is that which seeks to deploy such consideration in an assessment of present trends.32 One important school within this branch of the literature has sought to depict the premiership as having grown more powerful over time, coming in some accounts to resemble a presidency, at the expense of Cabinet. It tends to refer to an earlier era in which supposedly more collegiate forms of government prevailed, but which political trends served to undermine, concentrating authority on the office of prime minister. Variants on this thesis have a long lineage, stretching back towards the beginnings of the institutions of the premiership and the Cabinet. John,

29 

For a selection of only the more recent works, see J. Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (London, 2016); M. Jago, Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister (London, 2014); N. Thomas-​ Symonds, Attlee: A Life in Politics (London, 2012). 30  Theakston, ‘Political Skills and Context in Prime Ministerial Leadership in Britain’, 283. 31  For example, J. Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis: Reluctant Gamble (Basingstoke, 2003). 32  Blick and Jones, Premiership, chs 1 and 2.

Prime Minister and Cabinet    109 Lord Hervey—​an ally of the prototypical prime minister, Walpole—​later complained that Walpole ‘did everything alone . . . whilst those ciphers of the Cabinet signed everything he dictated . . . without the least share of honour or power’.33 In a speech attacking Walpole in the House of Commons in 1741, Samuel Sandys is reported as claiming that ‘[a]‌ccording to our constitution we can have no sole and prime minister’. Rather, he went on, there ought to be a group of ministers with their ‘own proper department’. They should not ‘meddle in the affairs belonging to the department of another’. Yet, Sandys asserted, it was ‘publicly known, that this minister [Walpole], having obtained a sole influence over all our public counsels, has not only assumed the sole direction of all public affairs, but has got every officer of state removed that would not follow his direction, even in the affairs belonging to his own proper department’. Sandys regarded this conduct as ‘a most heinous offence against our constitution’.34 In other words, a historical change, Sandys felt, was afoot, undermining previous standards. Such complaints continued to surface at later stages. In 1806, the new Prime Minister, Lord Grenville, described the previous holder of the post, Pitt the Younger, as having operated ‘a Cabinet of cyphers and a government of one man alone’, an approach that Grenville regarded as ‘a wretched system’. Similar complaints were made about the Duke of Wellington during the 1830s, with the word ‘Dictator’ used. An overt (pseudo-​)historical component can be detected in some subsequent contributions to this school. In 1904, Sidney Low wrote in his work The Governance of England that for ‘the greater part of the past half century . . . The office of Premier has become more than ever like that of an elective President.’ Low took the view that ‘[m]‌uch of the authority of the Cabinet has insensibly passed over to that of the Premier’. The political scientist Harold Laski complained in 1920 that Lloyd George was ‘virtually the President of a State’. Previously a prime minister was ‘the chairman of a board who knows his power depends upon the careful weighing of his colleagues’ judgements’. Now, Laski asserted, Lloyd George was ‘his own Foreign Secretary’ and ‘the deciding factor in Labor [sic] policy’. Other Cabinet members were, in Laski’s view, ‘not colleagues who can weigh decisions, but subordinates who can accept them’. In 1951, Laski intervened again in the debate about prime minister and Cabinet. He wrote that ‘if we compare 1850 with 1950, or even 1900 and 1950, the centralisation of power in the Prime Minister’s hands has proceeded at a swift pace’. For Mackintosh, writing in the 1960s, ‘British government in the latter half of the nineteenth century can be described simply as Cabinet government’ but ‘such a description would be misleading today. Now the country is governed by the Prime Minister’. In 1963 Richard Crossman concluded that ‘[t]‌he postwar epoch has seen the final transformation of cabinet government into prime ministerial government’, though he believed that even in the nineteenth century premiers possessed ‘near presidential powers’.35

33 

Reproduced in ibid., p. 56. Reproduced in ibid., p. 56. 35  Reproduced in ibid., pp. 56–​64. 34 

110   Andrew Blick One historical problem with such theories is that one account of the supposed rise of the premiership at the expense of Cabinet tends to have been written in a period that a later, similar claim depicts as a golden age for Cabinet. When did this usurpation of Cabinet by the premiership occur—​during the nineteenth century (or perhaps earlier still), during the first half of the twentieth century, or during the post-​Second World War period? Another school has used historical narrative to claim development in the opposite direction. It asserts that the premiership is becoming overwhelmed by forces it cannot control. An important entry of this type came from Lord Rosebery, who had been Prime Minister from 1894 to 1895, in an 1899 essay on an earlier former premier, Robert Peel. Rosebery argued that in popular perception the prime minister was ‘a dictator, the duration of whose power finds its only limit in the House of Commons’. However, the truth, Rosebery held, was ‘very different’.36 In the 1840s, Peel was able to maintain ‘a strict supervision over every department’. He ‘was master of the business of each and all of them’. But Rosebery concluded that by the late nineteenth century it would be more than doubtful, indeed, if it be possible in this generation, when the burdens of empire and of office have so incalculably grown, for any Prime Minister to discharge the duties of his high post with the same thoroughness or in the same spirit as Peel. To do so would demand more time and strength than any man has at his command.37

Rosebery believed that ‘in these days of instant, continuous and unrelenting pressure, the very tradition of such a minister has almost departed; indeed, it would be impossible to be so paternal and ubiquitous’.38 The approach Rosebery epitomized suffers from a similar problem to the previous one: that of being repeated over time, creating confusion about when exactly this transition could have taken place. Writing in 2007, Michael Barber, formerly head of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit under Tony Blair, argued that there had been an increase in strains upon the premiership, serving to compromise its authority. As Barber expressed it, the ‘ever-​increasing demands of the job suggest the task is becoming more difficult to do’. Barber saw this process as having ‘accelerated since the 1960s’. In his account, earlier eras had not presented such great challenges to the office of prime minister. This outlook is difficult to reconcile with that of Rosebery and the surge of pressure on the premiership that he identified as having occurred during the nineteenth century.39 Whatever their difficulties, both schools—​those of prime ministerial expansion at the cost of Cabinet and of relative diminution of the premiership—​can present a view of modernity overwhelming older practices and values. Their claims include that an increased volume of governmental work, mass political parties, and the rise 36 

Lord Rosebery, Sir Robert Peel (London, 1899), p. 33.

37 Ibid., p. 27.

38 Ibid., p. 29. 39 

Cited in Blick and Jones, Premiership, pp. 73–​8.

Prime Minister and Cabinet    111 of a permanent Civil Service all had consequences for the roles of prime minister and Cabinet. But they are perhaps best understood not so much as histories in themselves, but as manifestations of a tendency for contemporary observers across many periods in time to depict the premiership and Cabinet in a certain light. Nonetheless, they have been exceptionally influential on wider understandings of the premiership and Cabinet, and debates about the nature and interrelationship of the two institutions. Reform campaigners, for instance, have based their programmes on particular historical interpretations of prime minister and Cabinet, and their ideas can be taken up by those holding office.40 The lack of a fuller literature on the institutions of prime minister and Cabinet, therefore, is a problem not only from the perspective of the historical discipline, but also from the point of view of the wider political environment.

II So what are the requirements that a fuller assessment of the history of prime minister and Cabinet would need to fulfil, were it properly to fill the current gaps? First, it would need to work towards a definition of the subject matter. I have already suggested some of the difficulties in this area. Neither institution has ever had a full official definition; therefore the nature of both must be discerned to a substantial extent from practice as it has occurred over time.41 At any given point, their precise form has an element of indeterminacy. Indeed, it is not possible to establish with precision when the office of prime minister or the Cabinet came into being. This realization has consequences for the periodization of the subject matter. By 1800, much of importance had already taken place; therefore, the school must begin earlier. Even to commence with the assumption by Walpole (for the second time) of the post of First Lord of the Treasury in 1721 could be too late. Clearly, it is always possible to peer further into prehistory. It is nevertheless reasonable to propose the following selection of starting points. One could be the Revolution of 1688–​9 and the settlement associated with it.42 It might be held that this chain of events prompted the appearance of a new constitutional framework within which Parliament—​and especially the House of Commons—​would be a more firmly entrenched fixture than it was previously. Within this context, monarchs came to rely on a single senior adviser who could take their business through Parliament for them. Those who occupied this post then came increasingly to gather around them a group of ministers with parliamentary support who were bound together by a policy programme that they agreed between them. This latter development allowed a wresting of power from the monarchy by this unified group of politicians—​though it was a protracted process. 40 

For example, The Power Inquiry, Power to the People: The Report of Power (York, 2006). For the current position, see A. Blick, The Codes of the Constitution (Oxford, 2016), chs 5 and 6. 42  S. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven and London, 2011). 41 

112   Andrew Blick Another plausible point of beginning for a school of studies of the prime minister and Cabinet—​one that can be inferred from the work of Paul Langford—​is the Act of Settlement (1701). This Act is better known today as the basis for the Hanoverian succession and as a source of judicial independence, providing judges with security of tenure, subject to removal only by a resolution of both Houses. But the Act contained other stipulations, subsequently removed and largely forgotten. Some of them represent attempts to impose a particular version of the English (as it then was) constitution that would, if they had lasted, have prevented the appearance of both the office of prime minister and the Cabinet as they came to be understood. The 1701 Act sought to prohibit the taking of decisions outside the Privy Council and require that its members recommend particular courses of action as individuals, not a group. This rule, if it remained in force, would have precluded the development of Cabinet and of its convention of collective responsibility. The original version of the Act of Settlement also prohibited the monarch from making ministerial appointments from the House of Commons. Many early prime ministers, including Walpole, were based in the Commons; and eventually, by the 1960s, it came to be accepted that this was the proper chamber from which to exercise the role. The 1701 Act in original form would not have allowed such a development. To take 1701 as a point of commencement for the history of these subjects could set up an interesting dynamic, since it would involve demonstrating why a path other than the one it suggested was taken. A final possibility would be to look to 1706–​7 and the negotiation and ratification of the Union between England (including Wales) and Scotland. In this sense the history of the premiership could run concurrently with that of the Union (though the fullest extent of the United Kingdom came about following the incorporation between Great Britain and Ireland, under the 1800 Act of Union).43 A historical school of prime minister and Cabinet would therefore require proper attention to the full temporal span if it were clearly to define its subject matter. It would also benefit from an appreciation of the interconnected nature of the two institutions. Prime minister and Cabinet have been mutually dependent upon one another for their viability. Especially from the mid-​nineteenth century, a central role for the individual who held the post of prime minister has been to act as chair of the Cabinet. The Cabinet has been useful to prime ministers, since it was a means of connecting them to their range of parliamentary support, of devising and implementing policy that could be politically and practically effective, and of presenting a united front to the monarch, Parliament, and the outside world. From the point of view of Cabinet, the prime minister has been needed to provide coherence from the chair, seeking to ensure that clear decisions were reached and held to. Cabinet also enabled all senior members of the government, including the prime minister, to take part in major decision-​taking in a confidential environment. Historians of prime minister and Cabinet would benefit from recognizing this important overlap of interests. To regard the two institutions—​as they sometimes are—​as somehow in conflict with one another, with a gain for one equating

43 

A. Blick, Beyond Magna Carta: A Constitution for the United Kingdom (Oxford, 2015), chs 4 and 5.

Prime Minister and Cabinet    113 with a loss for the other, is to constrain unnecessarily our understanding of the true nature of their historic relationship. Nonetheless, it is vital to consider prime minister and Cabinet as distinct entities. An identification of both must be broad and flexible. There is no UK ‘written constitution’ to define either. The statutory basis for the premiership is relatively recent and slight; for the Cabinet it is non-​existent. What do we mean, then, by the premiership? Throughout nearly the entire period 1800–​2000, the prime minister has been the holder of the post of First Lord of the Treasury. In this sense, the office of prime minister has generally comprised First Lords of the Treasury and the staff supporting them. This description does not, however, reveal much about the actual functions of the office of prime minister. It has performed a wide variety of tasks that the title First Lord of the Treasury does not convey. Prime ministers have had their Cabinet role; have at times taken a lead in foreign policy; have been responsible for the Civil Service and for the intelligence and security agencies. They have been chief adviser to the monarch on the deployment of many aspects of the royal prerogative, including ecclesiastical and ministerial appointments, and war-​making and diplomacy. A fuller literature exploring the history of the premiership would need to take into account these many roles; their development and deployment; and the teams, comprising prime ministers and their aides, responsible for exercising them. We can view Cabinet from a number of perspectives. George Jones and myself have previously suggested a series of overlapping definitions. Each of them could inform the historical school contemplated here. Cabinet began as an event, a convening of senior ministers. It became established by the nineteenth century as the supreme committee of government. Cabinet was a means of attaining objectives such as carefully formulated policy that was attentive to political and practical requirements. It also came to be connected with a principle—​namely collective responsibility. According to the convention of collective responsibility, Cabinet ministers have an opportunity to take part in private discussions about policy, putting forward their own views. As a corollary they are required publicly to unite around the decisions reached. The term ‘collective’ implies that the prime minister, though at the centre of Cabinet as its chair, is one of a number of equals, not the absolute head. Another quality of Cabinet, which developed particularly with the emergence of the Cabinet Office during the twentieth century, was that of an institution, which developed a sophisticated set of procedures around its activities.44 Having identified the subject of this historical research, where might the relevant primary sources be found? For both prime minister and Cabinet, the materials are diffuse. In 2016, working with two of my master’s-​degree students, Ryan McCullough and Callum Scowen, I engaged in an initiative in this area as part of a history project undertaken by the Prime Minister’s Office at No. 10 Downing Street. We constructed a ‘virtual archive’, identifying relevant sources for each individual prime minister from Walpole onwards. This task demonstrated the importance of personal papers, located

44 

Blick and Jones, Premiership, pp. 87–​8.

114   Andrew Blick across many parts of the UK, both of the prime ministers themselves and of those with whom they interacted. These sources have been used extensively by historians, but not with a specific view to better understanding the premiership. During the twentieth century, files from the National Archives—​especially the PREM class, the earliest record in which dates from 1907—​become increasingly significant, though they never fully supplant personal papers. The phasing in of a 20-​year rule will mean that we will soon have access to all papers up to the end of the twentieth century, with the exception of those held back for special reasons. Oral interviews will also be invaluable. Historians such as Seldon and Hennessy have already proved the worth of such testimony. The Blick–​Jones archive, now deposited at the library of Queen Mary University of London, comprises notes of interviews that George Jones began systematically conducting in the early 1970s with former and serving prime ministerial aides, with the blessing of the then Principal Private Secretary at No. 10, Robert (now Lord) Armstrong. We drew on them extensively for our book At Power’s Elbow. They include accounts of conversations with staff whose tenures stretch back so far as to encompass a private secretary to Herbert Asquith, Giles Pinsent, who served from 1913–​14; and the archival material provides significant insights into the teams of figures of the magnitude of Churchill and Lloyd George. The principles regarding appropriate sources apply as much to the study of Cabinet. CAB files, dating to the mid-​nineteenth century, begin sooner than PREM and are larger in volume. The development of the Cabinet Office from late 1916 was important both to the history of Cabinet and to the generation of papers documenting that history.45 An under-​exploited source that should be drawn upon heavily is that of texts such as Questions of Procedure for Ministers and the Precedent Book. These documents were initially produced during the course of the twentieth century to set out ideal procedures and operating principles within government. Later, they began to appear in the public domain. Their value to the historian is twofold. Their role in shaping the working of the institutions of prime minister and Cabinet requires consideration. Moreover, their content is useful as a guide to how government operated, and includes sensitive material which, at the time of drafting, was never intended for the public domain.46 The foregoing discussion of the existing literature on prime minister and Cabinet noted that historical analysis has frequently been used to depict development in one direction, often towards an ever more dominant premiership, eclipsing Cabinet. The school proposed in this chapter would seek to recover the subject matter from deployment in this way. It would therefore make the discernment of both continuity and change a core task. In the case of the premiership, a key sustained feature has been that of providing leadership. The prime minister has always been required to represent the government in Parliament. If faced with concerted and lasting opposition in Westminster, especially in the Commons, premiers and their administrations were in jeopardy. Prime

45 Wilson, The Cabinet Office to 1945.

46 Blick, The Codes of the Constitution, esp. chs 1 and 2.

Prime Minister and Cabinet    115 ministers have always had an important role in patronage, placing people in ministerial posts and other offices. They have also always been a public focus for their governments. Accordingly, they have often taken a close interest in presentation and media management. Another constant for the premiership has been responsibility for the wider popularity of the government, and sustaining electoral success. An overall image of the premiership, when these consistent features are taken into account, is that of an entity engaged in the conduct of relations with a variety of different groups, managing and balancing a variety of forces in pursuit of specific aims. Given the scale of this task, it is not surprising that the premiership has always comprised a team, rather than simply the person holding the office of prime minister. The history of this institution, then, is partly the study of a network of people existing on social and professional levels. Within it various themes will be important. Both big-​‘P’ and small-​‘p’ politics intersect. Ideology, policy decisions, and powerful material forces are ongoing concerns. So too is the way in which the members of the team work together, or potentially enter into disputes with one another. Members of prime ministerial teams can be profiled from the perspective of their social background, education, gender, faith, age, and—​though this can be more a matter of speculation than certainty—​sexual orientation.47 The staff of the prime minister has also connected with other networks in the outside world. Indeed, doing so has been crucial to its method of operation. When we consider the prime ministerial human support structure in this way, the rigid barriers between ‘political’ and other forms of history begin to dissolve. Political history is distinct, but not hermetically sealed, from other approaches. A further form of constancy is connected to physical geography. Since it became the official residence of the First Lord of the Treasury in 1735, in the Walpole era, No. 10 Downing Street has had a close association with the premiership.48 Not all premiers have lived there, or even based themselves there, but many have. Historians of the office of prime minister should afford this location considerable attention. It has been both a home and a workplace, often at the same time. It has influenced and constrained the way in which the premiership operates. While the basic location has remained largely static, it has at times been renovated. Moreover, the surrounding area has changed, and the use made of buildings within it altered. An important connection has been with the complex of buildings now known as 70 Whitehall. They are now occupied by the Cabinet Office, but they contain within them the structure that was once the headquarters of the Treasury. Change in the premiership has come in different varieties. One form involves developments in the outside world or in the nature of the relationship between it and the office of prime minister. Institutions such as the Established Church and the monarchy became less important, while other entities, including political parties, gained in significance. A major concern of prime ministers throughout the nineteenth century and for

47 

48 

W. Kuhn, The Politics of Pleasure: A Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli (London, 2007). A. Seldon, 10 Downing Street: The Illustrated History (London, 1999).

116   Andrew Blick some of the twentieth century was the condition of the British empire; something which ceased to be a viable enterprise during the post-​1945 era. During this latter period, the UK became a participant in European integration. The functions performed by prime ministers and their staff often changed in response to these outside developments. Another important contextual setting that has been prone to alteration has been the constitutional environment. Some key developments have had implications for the premiership. The territorial extent of the state over which prime ministers presided was capable of change. In 1801, the Union between Great Britain and Ireland came into effect; from the 1920s, most of Ireland ceased to be part of the UK. Further constitutional alterations include successive expansions in the franchise from 1832 and changes to the way in which Parliament operates, such as those embodied in the Parliament Act (1911). Some shifts could have consequences for the authority of the prime minister. During the closing decades of the twentieth century, the courts became more assertive with regard to subjecting executive actions to judicial review. The emergence of a permanent Civil Service was a slow process that gradually gained in impetus, in particular from the mid-​nineteenth century. In the inter-​war period of the twentieth century, the Civil Service became the predominant source of staff support for premiers. It provided continuity and knowledge of how the Whitehall system worked, but its employees were to some extent restricted by their need to retain political impartiality, and arguably suffered from a lack of specialist skill and experience. In fact, the pre-​eminence attained by career officials at No. 10 was, placed in full historical perspective, relatively brief. During the Second World War, a significant body of prime ministerial staff came from beyond the Civil Service. From 1964, Harold Wilson instigated the use of special advisers, individuals appointed as temporary civil servants on a basis of his personal patronage; they became a regular and important feature of the system at No. 10, and were not part of the permanent Whitehall machine.49 There were also material changes in the office of prime minister itself. The most important came in the mid-​nineteenth century. Upon becoming Prime Minister for the second time, in 1841, Robert Peel made what retrospectively seems a crucial decision. Up to this point, prime ministers, as—​in nearly every case—​First Lords of the Treasury, were in direct day-​to-​day control of the Treasury. If they sat in the Commons they combined the First Lord role with that of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Peel, however, wanted to shed some of the detailed work that arose from the latter post, and delegated it to another member of his government. An exceptionally interventionist premier, Peel retained overall responsibility for the Treasury policy portfolio. But the separation of the First Lord and Chancellor roles became lasting. Subsequently, prime ministers lost responsibility for financial policy, which became the province of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, an increasingly important figure within government. As Jones and myself have argued, a crucial transition had taken place.50 The premiership had passed from a 49  A. Blick, People Who Live in the Dark: The History of the Special Adviser in British Politics (London, 2004). 50  Blick and Jones, Premiership, pp. 106–​15.

Prime Minister and Cabinet    117 first phase, in which it had a departmental role derived from the Treasury, to a second stage, in which it no longer necessarily had specific departmental functions. In this second period, overall coordination of government became a more prominent part of the work of the office of prime minister, deriving in particular from the role of the premier in chairing Cabinet.

III While the transition traceable to the mid-​nineteenth century entailing withdrawal from direct responsibility for the Treasury was the most important of all, there have been other alterations that merit attention. Some of them have involved specific functions attached to the premiership. During the Second World War, the role of Leader of the House of Commons was separated from that of prime minister. In 1968, the prime minister formally became Minister for the Civil Service, though premiers had long possessed special responsibilities in this area, and they delegated the actual ministerial role, once acquired, to a subordinate government member. A subject that has received some attention but could reward further study is that of the reconfiguration of the prime ministerial staff. From some perspectives, it may seem that there has been vast transformation. The number of aides working for prime ministers has expanded, from only one secretary paid out of public funds in the first decade of the nineteenth century, to a team of approaching 200 by the end of the twentieth century. By this time a series of sub-​divisions had appeared within the prime ministerial team, including the Private Office at the core, the Press Office, the Policy Unit, the Honours and Appointments branch, and the Strategic Communications Unit. While these developments are significant, there are other senses in which we can detect continuity. Prime ministers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not have the formal and specialized support structures of their successors. But they were able to draw on the support of a range of individuals who, though not formally attached to the office of prime minister, were nonetheless available to provide it with support when needed. The early premiers, as we have seen, were in direct control of the Treasury and the relatively large team of staff employed within it. Other unpaid assistants and friends of various prime ministers were also on hand. William Gladstone, for instance, leant at times on the historian and Catholic reformer, Lord Acton. Tasks the premier entrusted to Acton included, in 1869–​70, despatching him to the First Vatican Council at Rome to organize the opposition to the adoption of the Declaration of Papal Infallibility. A further qualification is required with respect to the idea of change in prime ministerial staff structures. Rather than viewing the history of the premiership as involving an accretion of new functions, it is more accurate to discern a process whereby activities already being performed became more distinct and formalized. For instance, a private secretary with specific responsibility for handling relations with journalists did not appear until the 1930s. By the 1960s a full Downing Street office was performing this task. Yet from

118   Andrew Blick the time of Walpole onwards, prime ministers had taken a close interest in cultivating the media, and often deployed individuals or teams to this end. It is important, therefore, to avoid exaggerating the extent of change in the organization of the prime ministerial team. Nonetheless, certain periods of innovation stand out. One is that of Lloyd George, running from 1916 to 1922. Significant changes he instigated included the establishment of a team of advisers known as the Prime Minister’s Secretariat or ‘Garden Suburb’. Another reformer of the structures of the premiership was Harold Wilson (1964–​70, 1974–​6). His modifications included the establishment of the Political Office and the Policy Unit. Finally, late on in the 1800–​2000 period, comes Tony Blair. By 2000, he had already introduced important initiatives. They included attaching new executive powers to his two most senior special advisers—​Alastair Campbell, his chief press secretary, and Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff—​and creating the Strategic Communications Unit, intended to co​ordinate official announcements across the whole of government. Even more substantial reorganizations would follow in the second Blair term (2001–​5), outside the timeframe under study.51 The development of Cabinet is more amorphous still. Certain qualities were attached to Cabinet throughout. It comprised the most senior members of government, with the prime minister in a central role. Members could be powerful in their own right, and might be individuals that a particular premier felt obliged to afford significance to, even if not regarding them as a close ally. Consequently it makes sense that the Cabinet should be an environment in which these senior colleagues in government could confidentially negotiate positions on key policies around which they might unite publicly. Given the consistency in some of its underlying characteristics, where might historians of Cabinet seek evidence of change? A crucial moment comes in December 1916. Just as Lloyd George carried out a restructuring of the prime ministerial staff, he also brought about major changes to the operation of Cabinet. First, he introduced a smaller War Cabinet charged with taking decisions that bound government as a whole. This change did not become permanent, but is an example of an innovation that could be imitated at later stages, most notably during the Second World War. Second, Lloyd George attached to the War Cabinet a Secretariat charged with recording its decisions and helping to ensure they were put into practice. Out of this Secretariat grew the Cabinet Office. This body brought about a formalization and institutionalization of Cabinet. Therefore, while some narratives depict Cabinet as having entered into decline at some indeterminate point, it is as easy to construct an account in which Cabinet became a more entrenched entity. Its practices, understandings, and principles became firmer, with a team of permanent officials in place to operate, uphold, and promote them. The service provided by the Cabinet Office extended to the network of sub-​committees that eased the pressure of work on the full Cabinet. Some historical accounts have pointed to these smaller entities as representing a challenge to the status of Cabinet. Another perspective would be to argue that

51 

Blick and Jones, At Power’s Elbow.

Prime Minister and Cabinet    119 they made it possible to reconcile collective decision-​taking with the constant demands of government. At times, observers have suggested that the Cabinet Office has or ought to become more clearly a prime ministerial department. It has always had a close relationship with the premiership. Nevertheless, it is an important historical fact that the UK has never adopted a full-​blown ‘Department of the Prime Minister’, and that the co​ ordinating entity at the centre of Whitehall remained focused largely on supporting the Cabinet as a whole. Perhaps a more serious threat came to Cabinet on occasions when its members, far from being dominated by the prime minister, could not agree a fixed position. Historians may wish to consider the significance of three suspensions of collective responsibility during the twentieth century: in 1932, over tariff reform; and in 1975 and 1977, over issues connected to European integration. The Lloyd George changes prompt another observation that is important to the overall task proposed in this chapter. A strong case could be made for the Lloyd George initiatives as a moment of modernity for both prime minister and Cabinet. In their earliest form at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, prime minister and Cabinet seemed a challenge to earlier principles, associated with practices the Act of Settlement had sought to prohibit. But during the First World War, circumstances served to call into question the extent to which these institutions, as constituted, could provide for contemporary needs. The Lloyd George innovations represented and were deliberately conceived of and presented as an assault on the amateurism of previous approaches (though Lloyd George himself was far from a systematic operator in his personal style). The extent of the emergency posed by the First World War created sufficient pressure to overcome vested interests. The changes that occurred were either retained by all successors to Lloyd George, or re-​adopted in some form later. In many ways, however, even after the Lloyd George recalibrations, both the office of prime minister and the institution of Cabinet retained earlier qualities. Prime ministers remained chief advisers on the deployment of an ancient legal source, the royal prerogative, a central basis for their power. Their role was a historical conglomeration and never acquired a firm statutory basis. Even more vague was the status of Cabinet, the amorphousness of which was matched only by the degree of importance to UK government that it sustained. This chapter has made a case for addressing an important gap in our historical knowledge, and suggested how those undertaking this assignment might go about it. A task overlooked by earlier political historians could become an important achievement of their successors. Not least, it could illuminate the complex relationship between the modern and the ancient that lies at the core of the UK constitution.

Further Reading R. Blake, The Office of Prime Minister, Thank-Offering to Britain Fund Lectures (London, 1975). A. Blick and G. Jones, Premiership: The Development, Nature and Power of the Office of the British Prime Minister (Exeter, 2010).

120   Andrew Blick A. Blick and G. Jones, At Power’s Elbow: Aides to the Prime Minister from Robert Walpole to David Cameron (London, 2013). P. Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders since 1945 (London, 2001). P. Langford, ‘Prime Ministers and Parliaments: The Long View: Walpole to Blair’, The Annual History of Parliament Lecture, 2005, Parliamentary History, 25 (2006), 382–​94. L. Namier, Crossroads of Power: Essays on Eighteenth Century England (London, 1962). A. Seldon and D. Kavanagh, The Powers behind the Prime Minister (London, 2000). K. Theakston, After Number 10: Former Prime Ministers in British Politics (London, 2010).

chapter 8

The Civil Se rv i c e Hugh Pemberton

In the wake of the 2016 EU referendum, the UK faces a major governmental challenge. Now the country is to leave the European Union, the UK’s economy must be reconfigured and its international relations renegotiated, and its administrative apparatus must reincorporate functions hitherto undertaken in Brussels. The Civil Service will be an essential actor in this process. Though politicians will decide on the nature of ‘Brexit’, it will be up to the Civil Service to advise them and to implement their policy decisions. But what exactly is the present form and function of the Civil Service, what values came to underpin it as it developed over the past two centuries, what is its relationship to democratic politics, how well has it responded to previous challenges, and why has it often been so criticized? The Civil Service is a core institution of the British state, being the administrative arm of government and permanent, in that its personnel remain in post when the ‘political’ government changes. It is divided into the Home Civil Service (the bulk of the total) and the Diplomatic Service, but has historically excluded Irish (later Northern Ireland) and Overseas (for which read Imperial) civil servants. Formally, it is composed of those who are employed by the Crown but does not include those working directly for the monarch herself or the armed services. Nor does it include those working for a range of public bodies, such as the National Health Service. In short, the Civil Service is a relatively small subset of all public employees and its function is the administration of UK government, including advice to ministers on policy. At the time of writing, only around 1 in 12 public sector workers are classed as civil servants, about 1.3 per cent of the UK workforce, compared with about 3 per cent at the zenith of Civil Service employment in the late 1970s. That is a much smaller figure than imagined by some critics of the Service, but it is also a larger institution than is implied by the oft-​used term ‘Whitehall’.1 1  R. Lowe, The Official History of the British Civil Service: Reforming the Civil Service, Vol I: The Fulton Years, 1966–​81 (London, 2011), p. 5. A deterioration in Rodney’s health meant that he was unable to be joint author of the present chapter as planned but, nonetheless, close readers will detect his intellectual influence.

122   Hugh Pemberton The history of the Civil Service is, not surprisingly, a complex one which mirrors that of the British state of which it is part. Moreover, its historiography remains bedevilled by myths that tend to overplay particular moments in the development of the Service and to overstate its early conversion to a unified and uniform institution with a particular ethos and set of values, not least appointment on merit, political impartiality, and democratic accountability. The literature also tends to understate historic tensions between effective and cost-​efficient government that must now be confronted once again as we navigate our way into a post-​Brexit governmental world.

I The foundation myth of the Civil Service is that it emerged in its modern form as a consequence of a 1854 report for the House of Commons, written by S.H. Northcote and C.E. Trevelyan, which condemned the institution as it was then as a refuge for the ‘unambitious, and the indolent or incapable’ and set out the need for a unified and permanent Civil Service underpinned by values of integrity, impartiality, objectivity, selection and promotion of staff on merit, and accountability through ministers to Parliament.2 That, however, is to overstate the importance of Northcote–​Trevelyan, which really represents a moment in the evolution of the modern Service rather than its foundation document. For a start, the critique it embodied was consonant with earlier attacks on ‘Old Corruption’—​well summed up by William Rubinstein as the ‘widespread use of pensions, sinecures and gratuitous emoluments granted to persons whom the British government . . . wished to bribe, reward or buy’.3 Those attacks gained power as a consequence of the war with revolutionary France and worries about the concomitant growth of the state (and taxation needed to pay for it).4 As a result, significant change began even before Northcote–​Trevelyan. In the early nineteenth century a series of reforms undertaken by the Tories, not least those of Pitt the Younger, served somewhat to reduce the importance of patronage in the appointment of government officials.5 As Jon Parry reminded us, Earl Grey’s Whig government then achieved significant changes to the 2

  Parliamentary Papers, Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service (1854), p. 4. The Northcote–Trevelyan Report is identified as a foundational document by the Civil Service Commission on its website (), 15 December 2015), and has been seen as such over the years by a succession of parliamentary reports and government white papers, including the Fulton Report of 1968 (Cmnd 3638, p. 9, with the entire Northcote–Trevelyan Report reprinted as an appendix); Continuity and Change (Cm 2627, 1994, p. 8); and The Governance of Britain (Cm 7170, 2007, p. 21). 3  W.D. Rubinstein, ‘The End of “Old Corruption” in Britain 1780–​1860’, Past and Present, 101 (1983), 55. 4  On the growth of the ‘great tax eater’ (by 1815 the state was responsible for 25 per cent of gross national product, compared with 8–​10 per cent in the eighteenth century), see M. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–​1914 (Cambridge, 2001), ch. 2. 5  E.J. Evans, William Pitt the Younger (London, 1999).

The Civil Service    123 broader political system, especially via the 1832 Reform Act.6 Rubinstein argued that a period of subsequent Whig reform finally brought ‘Old Corruption’ to an end. That, however, might be to overstate things. Gareth Stedman J​ones argued that it was not until Peel’s reforms of the early 1840s that the notion of central government as a corrupt instrument of aristocratic enrichment, and thus a necessarily inefficient institution, began to wane. Likewise, for Philip Harling, whereas Tory ministries had hitherto instituted a series of ‘practical improvements’, it was ‘Peel’s remarkably punctilious notion of the proper uses of office’ that marked a sea change in the ethos of government.7 Though the waning of ‘Old Corruption’ was protracted, there can be no doubt that Bourne had a point when he asserted that the age of reform between 1780 and 1850 saw a gradual transition from pre-​modern to modern government.8 Thus the idea that the Northcote–​Trevelyan report was ground-​breaking is overstated, though it is also true, as Rubinstein noted, that pre-​modern aspects of government persisted at the start of the 1850s. Perhaps more importantly, we should acknowledge that the continuing evolution of the modern Civil Service also owed a lot to changing expectations of government. From 1850, the growing demands on ministers to attend Parliament, as well as the gradually increasing complexity of government administration and burden of work on permanent secretaries, meant that work increasingly had to be delegated and bureaucratic procedures implemented to ensure it was carried out properly.9 It was this need for a more developed and efficient bureaucracy that caused Gladstone to commission Northcote, his former private secretary, and Trevelyan (then Permanent Secretary at the Treasury) to conduct their examination of the Civil Service. It is not surprising, given Gladstone was its progenitor, that the Northcote–​Trevelyan Report’s fundamental goals were the promotion of both economy and efficiency in government. Northcote and Trevelyan’s report did not mince its words about the Civil Service’s poor quality and the need for a radical overhaul. There should be greater unification of its departments; the ‘incompetent, or incurably indolent’ should be sacked and replaced by a ‘carefully selected body’ of staff recruited via a competitive examination (overseen by an independent board), and their subsequent promotion should be determined by ‘the industry and ability with which they discharge[d]‌their duties’.10 This certainly marked a significant moment in establishing the principles of appointment and promotion on

6  Parry has played a crucial role in re-​establishing the centrality of Whig liberalism in the process of governmental reform. See, for example, J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 1993). 7  Rubinstein, ‘Old Corruption’, p. 73; G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-​1982 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 174–​8; P. Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform in Britain, 1779–​1846 (Oxford, 1996), ch. 7. For an excellent dissection of ‘reform’ in terms of both ideas and policy between 1780 and 1850, see A. Burns and J. Innes, eds., Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–​1850 (Cambridge, 2003). 8  J.M. Bourne, Patronage and Society in Nineteenth-​Century England (London, 1986), p. 163. 9 Lowe, Official History, p. 31. 10  Northcote–​Trevelyan Report, pp. 8–​9.

124   Hugh Pemberton merit and the need for a more uniform Civil Service, but we should not exaggerate the report’s importance. It was only twenty pages long and it left many issues unaddressed. The role of civil servants in relation to their ministers and to Parliament is but one obvious and very important omission, though one should also note that the report avoided the issue of how best to regulate civil servants’ implementation of policies that were inherently political, and thus how to ensure that officials did not become, in Kitson Clark’s words, ‘statesmen in disguise’.11 Moreover, as Lowe has reminded us, implementation of Northcote–​Trevelyan’s proposals was slow, with little progress until 1870. It was also incomplete. There was, for example, no Act of Parliament to implement its proposals, as it had recommended; instead the reforms that flowed from it were implemented via successive ‘undebated Orders in Council, Treasury minutes and a series of public enquiries held not so much to honour the Northcote-​Trevelyan ideal but in response to current political pressures’.12 It would be better, therefore, to see Northcote–​Trevelyan as part of a process that had begun decades before, and which would continue for some time, in which the Civil Service was remodelled and repurposed, but with a constant eye on economy. Not until 1870 was a national open competition for entry established, but even then, only a third of recruits in the years to 1910 entered via that route. Progress was also slow when it came to the creation of a unified and uniform Service. Other than in finance (where the Treasury increasingly exercised central control in its pursuit of economy), individual departments retained considerable power over their ‘establishment’ in terms of grades, pay, and conditions of service.13 That created discontent among civil servants that was the subject of investigation by the 1876 Playfair Commission. After this the Service was divided horizontally, with a small higher division for the better educated, able to fulfil policy-​making and executive roles, and a lower division of administrators and clerks who had received an ordinary commercial education. In that lower division, at least, the establishment of standard rates of pay and the principle of transfer between departments managed then to break down some of the barriers that had hitherto separated one from the other.14 At the same time politicians were responding to the desire for a wider democratic franchise, and to fears of its consequences. Central government was starting to expand into new areas, for example, ensuring acceptable standards of local government; centralizing responsibility for national standards of health and education via new institutions such as the 1875 Local Government Board and the 1899 Board of Education; and the Board of Trade’s growing regulation of the railways and water supply, and its increasing role in managing the labour market via its Labour Department, set up in 1893.15

11 

G. Kitson Clark, ‘Statesmen in Disguise’, Historical Journal, 2 (1959), 19–​39.

12 Lowe, Official History, p. 19.

13  H. Roseveare, The Treasury: The Evolution of a British Institution (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp. 183–​210. 14  E.J. Cohen, The Growth of the British Civil Service, 1780-​1939 (London, 1965), pp. 129–​36. 15  G.K. Fry, The Growth of Government (London, 1979), pp. 132–​50.

The Civil Service    125 Perhaps the most significant factor driving the Service’s growth in this period, however, was its growing role in social welfare flowing from legislation such as the Workmen’s Compensation Acts of 1897, 1900, and 1906, and in particular the many welfare reforms implemented by the Liberal government after 1906. The setting up of a national health insurance system from 1911, for example, was a complex operation which, while locally administered by Approved Societies, required central coordination and oversight.16 The Civil Service grew accordingly. It continued, not least via the expanding role of the Civil Service Commission, to become an institution based less on the principle of patronage and more on that of open and competitive recruitment.17 It also, following the recommendations of the 1914 MacDonnell Commission, began systematically to admit women as civil servants. We should not, however, overestimate either the size of the Civil Service or the extent of the Northcote–​Trevelyan ‘revolution’ that had reformed and expanded it by the eve of the First World War. As Geoffrey Fry noted, the Service had grown through a long process of evolution during the nineteenth century but by 1914 the role of the state, and thus of the machinery of British government, remained relatively modest.18 Regulatory functions had expanded, but on the whole the services and industrial activities being regulated remained privately run or, where that was not the case, were provided by local authorities or charitable and voluntary agencies. Likewise, central government was becoming more involved in social provision, but even here there remained a very considerable role for private initiative and voluntarism. Nonetheless, the number of civil servants—​which had been estimated at 16,000 by Northcote and Trevelyan in 1854—​ had reached around 50,000 by 1902, according to current Cabinet Office estimates, and 70,000 by 1914.19 By the standards of later decades, however, that was a low figure—​in large part because the Service continued to be managed in a way that was consonant with Gladstonian precepts of economic laissez-​faire and limited expenditure on government.

II The requirements of war were to change things dramatically. The inadequacy of administration came to a head in 1915 with a shortage of artillery shells—​a crisis that was decisively to transform the Civil Service. It led to a Coalition government under Asquith, the 16 Fry, Growth of Government, pp. 154–​6. For the best overview of the early development of Britain’s

welfare state, see D. Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State (4th edn., Basingstoke, 2009). 17  R.A. Chapman, The Civil Service Commission 1885–1991: A Bureau Biography (London, 2004), pp. 33–​40. 18 Fry, Growth of Government, pp. 151–​62. 19  Estimates of Civil Service employees are many and various, varying according to different definitions of what exactly it was to be a civil servant—​Cohen (Growth, p. 164), for example, has the total for 1902 as 107,782, and Lowe (Official History, p. 31) finds the number in 1901 to have been 116,000. Our figures are derived from a dataset for ‘full-​time equivalent’ civil servants provided by the Cabinet Office in January 2016.

126   Hugh Pemberton formation of the Ministry of Munitions under the leadership of Lloyd George, and, as a result, an unprecedented expansion in the responsibilities of central government as it came increasingly to intervene in the economy through a complex system of market controls. To oversee this much more complex administrative machine, a Cabinet Office Secretariat was created in December 1916 (which, for the first time, formally recorded Cabinet decisions and monitored their implementation). These administrative innovations of the First World War were to prove enduring, and were embedded by two post-​ war changes. In 1920 the Cabinet Office, encompassing the Cabinet Secretariat, was created under the direction of a Head of the Civil Service (HoCS), a new post filled by the newly appointed Permanent Secretary of the Treasury (Warren Fisher). Fisher was handed considerable power by Lloyd George (including powers over the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service). The new status and powers of the HoCS and of the Treasury, and the creation of the Cabinet Office, heralded the start of a shift towards greater unification of the Civil Service. This had been resisted by the Victorian Treasury, which feared it would cause a systematic and costly ‘levelling up’ in pay; however, a radically reorganized and strengthened Treasury in which a specific unit wielded new powers over the Civil Service ‘establishment’ faced the prospect with greater equanimity. Generally, there was a move towards greater centralization, with the advent in 1920 of a common grading system for all civil servants and, from 1919, the idea that ‘First Division’ civil servants should develop experience by moving between departments.20 This trend towards greater departmental uniformity and more central control by the Treasury’s Establishments Department (established in 1920 on the recommendation of the Haldane Committee as a means of securing both economy and efficiency of departmental operation) and, to a lesser extent, by the Cabinet Office continued in the inter-​war period under Fisher’s tenure as HoCS (he remained in post until 1939). Centralization occurred even as the end of the First World War saw a reduction in the number of civil servants. Significantly, however, this contraction (which bore particularly heavily on female civil servants, who faced much discrimination) did not take the Service back to pre-​war staffing levels.21 As can be seen in Figure 8.1, even after the 1921 ‘Geddes Axe’, its staff was larger post-​war than pre-​war. Nevertheless, with peace came the restoration of full Treasury control (its historic aversion to greater expenditure having been in abeyance due to the overriding demands of war). That reassertion of Treasury power should be seen also in the context of a decidedly lacklustre inter-​ war economy, to which the Treasury reacted by seeking to cut costs. There is general agreement that economy trumped efficiency in these years, and in 1945 the Treasury was to be roundly criticized for such ‘cheese-​paring’ by the Machinery of Government Committee, which also found fault with its apparent aversion to delegation and its lack of both managerial expertise and vision.22 Even so, much as the Treasury resisted the 20  M. Wright, Treasury Control of the Civil Service, 1854–​1874 (Oxford, 1969), pp. 359–​60; Lowe, Official History, pp. 27–​8, 45–​7; Cohen, Growth, pp. 150–​1, 177–​80. 21 Cohen, Growth, p. 190. 22 Lowe, Official History, p. 49.

The Civil Service    127 1.2 1.0

Million

0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 1900

1910

1920

1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2020

Figure 8.1  Number of civil servants (FTE), 1902–​2015

idea, Roger Middleton has demonstrated how the poor inter-​war economic conditions produced a gradual extension of state intervention in the economy, for example in the arena of regional policy as a means by which unemployment in very depressed areas might be ameliorated.23 In social policy, too, the scope of central government widened—​for example, via the extension of unemployment insurance between 1920 and 1930 and the institution of the first contributory state pension in 1925. Again, such innovations needed administration and, consequently, a higher number of civil servants. None of these changes was implemented as a consequence of the Haldane Report, a landmark report on the machinery of British government that appeared at the end of the war.24 Nonetheless, that report, with its vision of a more logically ordered, more unified, and more democratically accountable Civil Service founded on the ideal of public service, was to have far-​reaching consequences. Haldane recommended that departments be organized logically around the functions of government and that each be accountable to Parliament via a standing committee of MPs tasked with monitoring it. In terms of the organization of the Civil Service, Haldane recognized the need for Treasury control of departmental expenditure but also the need for more rational organization of departments themselves, with each provided with a central and coordinating staff tasked with ensuring ‘enquiry, research and reflection before policy is defined and put into operation’, coupled with a formalized system of interdepartmental coordination and machinery for obtaining external advice. As a result of Treasury ‘cheese-​paring’ in

23  R. Middleton, Towards the Managed Economy: Keynes, the Treasury and the Fiscal Policy Debate of the 1930s (London, 1985). 24  Ministry of Reconstruction, Report of the Machinery of Government Committee (Cmd 9230, 1918).

128   Hugh Pemberton the inter-​war years, implementation of many of Haldane’s recommendations was sometimes incomplete (for example, the use of specialist staff) and some failed to be implemented at all (for example, that the Treasury respond positively to spending proposals intended to raise either the quality or efficiency of administration).25 Nonetheless, by the mid-​1950s many had been implemented—​first by Fisher and then from 1945 by a new HoCS, Edward Bridges—​and they served fundamentally to reshape the Civil Service and to establish the principle of its democratic accountability to Parliament through the minister responsible for a given department. It was, however, the Second World War that was to prove both the Civil Service’s greatest historic challenge and its most transformative moment. Almost immediately, it was judged necessary to take an unprecedented degree of control over the economy and to widen the provision of social services (e.g. to victims of bombing). Consequently, both the role of the state and its administrative apparatus expanded rapidly, with an explosive growth in the size of the Civil Service (as can be seen in Figure 8.1). More than this, however, the Civil Service faced huge challenges in terms of forecasting, policy implementation, management, and monitoring that demanded significant organizational change and new expertise. The Central Statistical Office and Economic Section, for example, were created in 1941, and a range of ministries sprang into being or grew massively to manage new or much expanded functions. Expert advisers, such as the economists J.M. Keynes and James Meade, flooded into Whitehall; so too did women, who once again became predominant within the Civil Service workforce (as in 1918, when they had formed 56 per cent of the Service).26 ‘Total war’ demanded even more than an unprecedented degree of physical mobilization and the mental mobilization of British citizens around the idea that victory would see the creation of a much improved country. The mood of this ‘people’s war’ was caught by William Beveridge in 1942 (his report on social security, accepted by Labour and, with some reluctance, by their Conservative partners in the Coalition government, promised the post-war abolition of the five ‘giant evils’ of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease). Alongside this, however, was the wartime adoption of Keynesian techniques of macroeconomic management and the promise in 1944 that the post-​war government would manage the economy on ‘Keynesian’ lines in order to promote growth and full employment. The result was a much expanded post-​war role for the Civil Service. Moreover, the post-​war ‘peace’ was to be one of ‘cold war’ in which, as David Edgerton has shown, Britain maintained a ‘warfare state’ even as it developed a ‘welfare state’.27 As can be seen in Figure 8.1, the result was that, while peacetime again saw a contraction in the number of civil servants, its post-​war establishment settled at a very much higher level than in the inter-​war period. This was therefore a much larger and more complex Civil Service than it had been before the war. 25  Fry (Growth of Government, p. 170) claimed that ‘the cult of the generalist in the Civil Service reached the state of refinement with Sir Warren Fisher’s tenure’. 26 Lowe, Official History, p. 75. 27  D. Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–​1970 (Cambridge, 2005).

The Civil Service    129 How was this much enlarged peacetime Civil Service to be managed in a way that was effective, cost-​efficient, and democratically accountable? The answer was: much as it had been managed in the inter-​war period; consequently, this came to be seen as a lost opportunity for reform. As Peter Hennessy put it, ‘Postwar ministers and officials were attempting to run the modern state with the same bureaucratic instruments and administrative culture that had served Gladstone and Salisbury’.28 To an extent, we should not be surprised by the lack of change. Victory in 1945 served to legitimate the state that had achieved it, and by extension its institutions (political and administrative). Consequently, no pressing need for reform was identified and the procedures of the post-war Civil Service were refined rather than rethought—​though as a consequence of now having a single head, it was a much more unified institution than it had been before the First World War. As a consequence of this unity, of the validating effect of victory in 1945, and of its greater scope thereafter, this was an era of supreme self-​confidence for the Civil Service; a period in which, as Kevin Theakston has noted, it was effectively ‘a self-​governing institution’.29 This is not to say that there were no post-​war changes to the Civil Service under Edward Bridges, appointed HoCS in 1945. Key wartime innovations such as the Treasury’s Organisations and Methods division, Central Statistical Office, and Economic Section were retained (though the latter was relocated within a Treasury now much more dominant than it had been in wartime, when victory rather than economy was the overriding aim). An intricate system of official committees was developed to match an equally intricate system of Cabinet sub-​committees, with coordination across functional areas provided by an array of interdepartmental official committees coordinated by the Cabinet Office. Standards of record-​keeping were further improved. Civil servants were better trained, though generalists continued to be favoured on the grounds that highly intelligent and quick-​thinking staff were developed by being moved between departments in a process of ‘musical chairs’, thereby helping to break down barriers between departments (‘departmentalism’) to the good of the Service, their political masters, and, ultimately, the nation.30 Yet, just as the Second World War had worked to validate the Civil Service, late-​1950s concerns about the UK’s absolute geopolitical and relative economic decline served to bring its (and particularly the Treasury’s) effectiveness into question. Ultimately such concerns were to produce the Fulton Report of 1968.31 The opening paragraph of this damning report set the tone, with its assertion that the Civil Service was essentially a nineteenth-​century institution inadequate to meet the challenges of the second half of the twentieth century. The Service was seen to embody an anachronistic class system, being divided between executive, administrator, and clerical grades. Its managers,

28 

P. Hennessy, Whitehall (London, 1990), p. 728. K. Theakston, The Civil Service since 1945 (Oxford, 1995), p. 194. 30  R.A. Chapman, The Treasury in Public Policy Making (London, 1997). 31  Committee on the Civil Service. Vol. 1. Report of the Committee 1966-​68, (Cmnd, London, 1968). 29 

130   Hugh Pemberton selected as ‘all-​rounders’, were essentially amateurs—​ill-​trained amateurs, at that—​and were overly concerned with the more exciting provision of advice to ministers and insufficiently so with the mundane but essential implementation and day-​to-​day management of policy decision. Even the advice was found wanting, because it was the product of a Service that lacked specialists such as engineers and economists. The Civil Service as a whole was found to be both rigid and inward-​looking. The institution responsible for its management, the Treasury, was accused of lacking managerial expertise and talent and placing the management of the Service too far down its list of priorities. As with the Northcote–​Trevelyan Report, that of Lord Fulton came to be identified as a decisive moment in the development of the Civil Service and, as Peter Hennessy has noted, it continues to be something of a ‘sacred text’, not least in the Service itself (its findings were, for example, deployed in support of plans by the 2010–​15 Coalition government to ‘build capability’.32 Yet Rodney Lowe, its most recent historian, has questioned both Fulton’s analysis and the report’s importance. He argues persuasively that Fulton missed an essential truth: that the Civil Service had already recognized in the early 1960s that changes were demanded by the twin challenges of running a much more interventionist state and meeting the challenge of relative economic and absolute geopolitical decline.33 At the heart of the ‘establishment’ (much mocked at this time) they may have been, but the new generation of senior civil servants was more dynamic than was realized. The Treasury underwent both a major institutional overhaul between 1960 and 1962 and a clear-​out of the old guard; this reorganized and revitalized Treasury was to be an unacknowledged driver of the decade’s different political initiatives to use state intervention and investment to modernize the country and its economy, and to reorientate the country towards ‘Europe’.34 Innovations such as the Public Expenditure Survey Committee (PESC) were at the forefront of international public administration techniques, in this instance providing more rational expenditure forecasting and control of cash spending over a five-​year time horizon.35 We might also note the Wilson government’s innovatory use of special advisers to ministers from 1964 (resisted by senior civil servants who saw it, erroneously, as a break with ‘Northcote–​Trevelyan’ traditions, but which they did eventually come to see as improving the quality of advice).36 Thus, for all the reputation of the Fulton Report as the moment at which modernization of the Civil Service began, in fact ‘modernization’s moment’ had already arrived even before it began its somewhat haphazard and unscientific analysis.37 This is not to 32 Hennessy, Whitehall, p. 195; Cabinet Office, The Civil Service Reform Plan, CAB 049-​12 (June 2012). 33 Lowe, Official History, ch. 3. 34 

H. Pemberton, Policy Learning and British Governance in the 1960s (Basingstoke, 2004). R. Lowe, ‘The Core Executive, Modernization and the Creation of PESC, 1960–​64’, Public Administration 75 (1997), 601–​15. 36  J. Davis, Prime Ministers and Whitehall, 1960–​74 (London, 2007). 37  Even at the time Fulton had its detractors. Reporting on its publication, the Economist, for instance, noted the irony of its amateurism, complaining that it was the product of ‘a most nineteenth century British institutional mechanism, an ad hoc investigation by a number of uncommitted gentlemen meeting about once a week for three years’ (quoted by Lowe, Official History, p. 128). For a similar scholarly judgement, see R.A. Chapman, The Higher Civil Service in Britain (London, 1970), p. 143. 35 

The Civil Service    131 say that Fulton was without effect. The most notable changes flowing from it were the creation of a Civil Service Department (headed by the HoCS) to take over the running of the Civil Service establishment from the Treasury, and thus reduce its ‘cheese-​paring’ influence on the form of British public administration; the new Civil Service College (with the, ultimately disappointed, aim of creating a British equivalent of France’s revered École national d’administration);38 the ending of the former executive/​administrative/​clerical divisions; the creation of a new Senior Policy and Management Group covering the highest grades; and the institution of Programme Analysis and Review (PAR) as a development of PESC to focus less on cash and more on the outputs it purchased. Further reforms such as the Central Policy Review Staff (a sort of internal prime ministerial think tank) were logical outgrowths of that reform programme.

III Despite the reforms of the 1960s and early 1970s, however, the Civil Service faced a whirlwind of criticism in the latter decade. When the post-​war ‘consensus’ era (of active and expanding government, rapid economic growth, and increasing national affluence) came to an end with the onset of the twin evils of economic stagnation and rapid inflation after 1973, the government, and by extension the Civil Service, was easily identified as responsible; this was the more so since ‘stagflation’ at once cut tax revenues and resulted in the ballooning cost of output-​based government expenditure plans. The Civil Service found itself increasingly vilified and/​or mocked for its shortcomings (this was the era of the popular BBC sitcom ‘Yes Minister’, in which wily civil servants were portrayed as running rings round their hapless ministers). Politically, criticism came from both right and left, the shared analysis being that civil servants were self-​interested and obstructionist bureaucrats with an agenda at odds with party political programmes. The election of the Conservatives in 1979 meant, however, that it would be they who would take upon themselves the task of sorting out an institution that they thought had come to be in the business of merely managing the country’s ‘decline’, not reversing it.39 From 1979, the Civil Service found itself serving political masters suspicious of bureaucracy, intent on radically cutting back the Service and on making its management more effective in terms of both costs and outputs (an agenda that owed much to the ideas of William Niskanen, Milton Friedman, and the Institute of Economic Affairs).40 Mrs Thatcher’s governments, however, proved rather better at cutting staff and costs than at improving quality. In terms of the former, there were two great successes: the 1982 Financial Management Initiative (a large-​scale review of systems of managerial responsibility, financial accounting, and control) and the linked replacement of volume-​based 38 

D.L. Bird, The Civil Service College, 1970–​1995 (London, 1995).

40 

J. Burnham and R. Pyper, Britain’s Modernised Civil Service (Basingstoke, 2008), p. 234.

39 Theakston, Civil Service, pp. 120–​63.

132   Hugh Pemberton PAR with cash-​based expenditure planning via the Public Expenditure Survey; and the initiation of prime ministerial scrutinies of departmental cost efficiency by Sir Derek Rayner, a Marks and Spencer director installed by Thatcher as head of a new ‘Efficiency Unit’ in the Cabinet Office.41 Targets were set for reductions in the Civil Service workforce and, as can clearly be seen in Figure 8.1, the result was that the headcount fell almost continuously until the end of the century. However, other political objectives remained unclear, often shifted from year to year, and could be contradictory (just one example being the tension between, on the one hand, decentralizing to encourage local initiatives, and, on the other, centralized enforcement of national targets). It proved easier for ministers to dismantle existing institutions than to restructure, repurpose, or build new institutions within the Civil Service to improve administration. Thatcher’s abolition of the Civil Service Department was emblematic—​serving to return responsibility for the Service to a Treasury obsessed with the cost rather than the quality of public services.42 Under Robert Armstrong (HoCS from 1981 to 1987), senior civil servants who had come to maturity in the era of ‘consensus’ proved somewhat resistant to change, but the management of the Civil Service began, in subtle ways, to become more pliable as ministers took their cue from Mrs Thatcher and favoured ‘can-​do managers’. Lowe and Pemberton conclude that senior civil servants consequently became more reluctant to fulfil a crucial constitutional function: to speak truth to power. Increasingly, they concerned themselves with the management of policies whose formulation they played less part in, displaced by internal ‘political’ advisers and external think tanks. Not until the later years of Thatcher’s administration did constructive ideas for better, as opposed to cheaper and smaller, government begin to emerge. The first and most significant was the ‘Next Steps’ project (heralded by the ‘Ibbs Report’ in 1987), though the implementation of this and many other substantive Civil Service reforms came mainly under Thatcher’s successor, John Major, after 1990.43 ‘Next Steps’ was to place Britain at the forefront of the ‘new public management’ (NPM) revolution.44 It can be seen as the antithesis of the 1960s vision of centralized management. Borrowing techniques from the private sector, it inaugurated ‘arm’s-​length’ management from the centre of semi-​autonomous ‘agencies’ whose senior managers were allowed to decide on the most effective means by which ministerial objectives might be best achieved. As Lowe and Pemberton note, the speed of change was stunning; by 1997 more than three quarters

41  G.K. Fry, Policy and Management in the British Civil Service (Hemel Hempstead, 1995); C. Thain and M. Wright, The Treasury and Whitehall: The Planning and Control of Public Expenditure, 1976–​1993 (Oxford, 1995). 42 Lowe, Official History, chs 7–​8. 43  Efficiency Unit, Improving Management in Government: The Next Steps (1988); P. Greer, Transforming Central Government: The Next Steps Initiative (Buckingham, 1994); K. Jenkins, Politicians and Public Services: Implementing Change in a Clash of Cultures (Cheltenham, 2008); R. Lowe and H. Pemberton, The Official History of the British Civil Service: The Thatcher and Major Revolutions, 1982–​97, Vol. II (forthcoming). 44  For the initial codification of the NPM, see C. Hood, ‘A Public Management for All Seasons?’, Public Administration, 69 (1991), 3–​19.

The Civil Service    133 of all civil servants were working in agencies. Alongside this revolution was the increasing tendency in the 1990s for public services to be contracted out to the private sector, with civil servants transferred into private companies delivering public services under contract.45 As a consequence of these two initiatives, by 1997 the number of civil ser­ vants was down to 495,000 and the institution within which they worked had been transformed. Much as Sir Robin Butler (HoCS from 1987 to 1997) might deny it, this was now neither a unified nor a uniform Civil Service.46 This transformation, continued by New Labour after 1997, was accompanied by four other major changes. The first was the effective reinvention by Butler of the Civil Service Department, with the transfer to the Cabinet Office, by 1995, of all Civil Service management functions. The second was the 1991 Citizen’s Charter, an idea that reflected Major’s acceptance that there must necessarily be some services that had to be publicly provided, and that the quality of these could and should be improved. The third was the creation of the ‘Senior Civil Service’; this was a change, pushed by Butler, that might be said to recreate the distinction between administrative and executive classes that had been eliminated after Fulton. Finally, there was the laying of the foundation for a marked improvement in women’s ability to rise to senior management levels. There is widespread agreement that the Thatcher/​Major reform programme was revolutionary.47 By its end, the Senior Civil Service had effectively embraced the ‘managerialist’ ethos promoted by its political masters. The Service was better managed and civil servants better trained than hitherto, though struggling with the increasingly complex contracts demanded by contracting-​out. Nonetheless, the programme of change had its critics at the time, many of whom disparaged it for ‘hollowing out’ Civil Service capacity, not least its capacity to advise ministers.48 Other forces were also working to hollow out the Civil Service (most notably the progressive transfer of functions to the EU, accelerated after the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, and the devolution programme inaugurated by Labour after 1997), with the result that the Civil Service was increasingly dependent on others to attain its objectives—​a situation dubbed ‘governance’ in the academic literature, most notably by Rod Rhodes.49 Moreover, though much of the programme of reform from the late 1980s was the subject of cross-​party consensus in Parliament (contracting-out being the notable exception), its claimed successes have been questioned subsequently. It stands accused, for example, of ushering in the return of patronage, eroding the principle of appointment on merit, and politicizing a Civil Service no longer characterized by a unified, permanent, and career-​based cadre of staff. It might also be argued that the role of senior civil servants had changed, in that the Service’s function as 45 

Competing for Quality (Cm 1730, November 1991). Lowe and Pemberton, Official History. Note that Burnham and Pyper, Modernised Civil Service (pp. 231–​3) reach a less robust conclusion, seeing it as differentiated but still unified. 47  K. Dowding, The Civil Service (London, 1995); R.A.W. Rhodes, ed., Transforming British Government (2 vols, London, 2000); Lowe and Pemberton, Official History. 48  The most devastating contemporary critique was C.D. Foster and F.J. Plowden, The State under Stress: Can the Hollow State Be Good Government? (Buckingham, 1996). 49  R.A.W. Rhodes, Understanding Governance (Buckingham, 1997). 46 

134   Hugh Pemberton constitutional ‘ballast’ working to temper political swings through advice to ministers that brought to bear a vision of the national interest to balance their party interest had disappeared (an extreme version of this view is that of David Richards, who characterized civil servants as having been rendered the ‘poodles’ of their ministerial masters).50 Against this background of rapid change, Lowe and Pemberton argue that senior civil servants failed to capitalize on Major’s more sympathetic attitude to public service and definitively set out (and thereby defend), via a Civil Service Act, the constitutional position of the Civil Service.51 Moreover, by 1997 senior civil servants were becoming concerned at the erosion of the Service’s policy advice capacity even as the incoming Labour government bemoaned its lack of capacity to deliver the effective implementation of policy. Most notably, a hole had opened up at the centre in the early 1980s, not least via the abolition of the CPRS and growing managerialism, which left the prime minister weakly advised even as Britain became an increasingly prime ministerial polity. Nonetheless, even as ‘New Labour’ governments after 1997 bemoaned the Civil Service’s lack of strategic capacity, they accepted the NPM agenda of the Major years and moved it forward.52 Blair attempted to remedy the weakness at the centre by expanding the No. 10 Policy Unit (a small cadre of advisers which had come into existence in the 1970s), but the desire for a Prime Minister’s Department was thwarted—​partly by political fears as to how such a proposal would be received, but also via the active obstructionism of the HoCS. Thus strategic capacity at the centre remained wanting. Four particular features stand out from the ‘New Labour’ years. First is the increased power of the Treasury within domestic policy. Linked to this, and second, was an increasing culture of ‘management by target’, a trend that had set in under Major as the Treasury began to pervert the original intention of the Citizen’s Charter, increasingly shifting its targets from quality to efficiency. Third, the move towards the use of political advisers and other political appointees, begun by Labour in 1964 and an increasing feature of the Thatcher era, accelerated markedly and for a similar reason—​a distinct ministerial distrust of civil servants, seen as lacking unquestioning commitment to their political bosses’ political reform project. Finally, there was a clear focus on improving ‘delivery’ via initiatives such as the No. 10 Delivery Unit and attempts to use information technology to improve both the quality and the efficiency of policy implementation.53 The number of civil servants rose under Labour, a reflection of its greater ambitions for government intervention, but the election of a Coalition government in 2010 saw a renewed emphasis on cost-​cutting (‘austerity’) within the Civil Service, a marked

50  D. Richards, The Civil Service under the Conservatives, 1979–​1997: Whitehall’s Political Poodles? (Brighton, 1997). 51  Lowe and Pemberton, Official History. 52  Burham and Pyper, Modernised Civil Service. On the international nature of the NPM, see C. Pollitt and G. Bouckaert, Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis (3rd edn., Oxford, 2011). 53  Lowe and Pemberton, Official History.

The Civil Service    135 emphasis on contracting-​out, and renewed reductions in the central workforce.54 Little changed with the election of a Conservative government in 2015 on a manifesto which, notwithstanding its warm words about ‘Britain’s impartial, professional and highly capable Civil Service [that] is admired around the world and one of our nation’s strengths’, promised that the mission ‘to cut down on government waste’ and contract out public service provision to the private sector was far from complete. In short, it is hard to agree with Stephen Osborne that the new public management has morphed into a ‘new public governance’ characterized both by a plural state with multiple institutional actors and a pluralist state where multiple processes inform policy-​making.55 Rather, the NPM agenda, which had shaped policy on the Civil Service for nearly three decades, continued to shape the operation of the Civil Service. It was ironic, therefore, that an influential study published in 2015 by Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon concluded that NPM, of which Britain had taken pride in being at the international leading edge, had served at once to produce a striking real increase in the costs of, and a deterioration in the quality of, British government.56

IV The Civil Service may lie at the core of the British state but it remains under-​studied across much of our period, particularly in terms of departments other than the Treasury and Cabinet Office and in terms of comparative context. Over the past two centuries the institution has been subject to almost continual change. In the process, a fully developed modern government bureaucracy was created that was able to advise ministers, to carry out their decisions across the full range of modern government, and to be accountable to Parliament via those ministers. The key drivers of its institutional development were the expansionary forces of mass democracy and (particularly) of war, and the countervailing force that was the desire for economy. In that process of change, reports such those by Northcote–​ Trevelyan (1854), Haldane (1918), and Fulton (1968) have often been identified as key turning points. Yet Northcote–​Trevelyan and Fulton were much less significant than is generally assumed (not least in Civil Service mythology), and Haldane’s recommendations took decades to be implemented. On the whole, apart from in times of war, change was evolutionary than revolutionary. As a result, the emergence of a unified and permanent Civil Service underpinned by values of integrity, impartiality, objectivity, selection and promotion

54 

M. Burton, The Politics of Public Sector Reform (Basingstoke, 2013); P. Riddell, ‘The Coalition and the Executive’ in A. Seldon and M. Finn, eds., The Coalition Effect, 2010–​2015 (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 113–​35. 55  S.P. Osborne, The New Public Governance: Emerging Perspectives on the Theory and Practice of Public Governance (London, 2010). 56  C. Hood and R. Dixon, A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less? (Oxford, 2015).

136   Hugh Pemberton of staff on merit, and accountability to Parliament through ministers was a gradual process. However, the 1987 Ibbs Report—​and the Next Steps (‘new public management’) revolution that it unleashed—​fully deserves its status as a defining moment in the Service’s historical development. It took the Thatcherite quest for economy and reconfigured it in a way that did not just shrink the Civil Service, but repurposed it as the mere implementer and administrator of executive decisions made by ministers. The result was a smaller Service in which senior civil servants came to see themselves more as managers (often of contracts for services provided by firms in the private sector) than as full participants in the making of policy as well as its implementation. The form of the Service also changed. By the time the revolution had run its course, it could no longer be described as either unified or uniform. Questions were being raised about whether its historic values had been compromised in terms of impartiality (with accusations that the promotion of civil servants was being determined by their acceptability to ministers) and accountability (with civil servants rather than ministers being increasingly accountable directly to parliamentary select committees). For scholars, the new public management revolution matters in two important ways. First, we still know remarkably little about the detail of that revolution on the ground and there is also a clear need for more critical appraisals of its putative achievements (though in both cases this will not be easy, for the pursuit of ‘cost ​efficiency’ in that era meant standards of record-​keeping declined precipitately). Second, and of pressing interest to political scientists, is the question of whether the impact of the NPM and the emphasis on economy of operation has left the Civil Service poorly placed to meet the challenge posed by ‘Brexit’. As a former head of the Civil Service, Gus O’Donnell, recently observed, Brexit represents a challenge for the institution on a scale that it has not seen since the Second World War. In its attenuated ‘new public management state’, will the Civil Service have the expertise and resources both to advise ministers on how best to navigate exceptionally difficult policy waters and, at a time of continuing ‘austerity’, to reconfigure and expand itself in order to deliver effectively in a very different world?

Further Reading R.A. Chapman, The Higher Civil Service in Britain (London, 1970). E.J. Cohen, The Growth of the British Civil Service, 1780–​1939 (London, 1965). G.K. Fry, Policy and Management in the British Civil Service (Hemel Hempstead, 1995). P. Hennessy, Whitehall (London, 1990). R. Lowe, The Official History of the British Civil Service: Reforming the Civil Service, Vol. I: The Fulton Years, 1966–​81 (London, 2011). R.A.W. Rhodes, Understanding Governance (Buckingham, 1997). K. Theakston, The Civil Service since 1945 (Oxford, 1995).

chapter 9

Trade U ni ons Richard Whiting

The relationship between the trade unions and political parties has been one of the most important institutional connections in modern British politics. Trade unions have had a powerful impact on both the economy and the political system. Their actions have at times provoked intense reactions from the general public; perhaps not surprisingly, both the Conservative and Labour parties have won and lost office through their attempts to reform them. Trade unions have drawn upon a long history of organization at work. Their defining activity is the representation of people’s occupational interests and vocational identities. If their focus has often been on pay and conditions, this should not obscure their deeper significance. Trade unions embody collective power—​‘the organized power of ordinary men and women directed at those nominally set above them’—​and, as a result, ‘the value of a union to its members lies less in its economic achievements than in its capacity to protect their dignity’.1 Their specific function has brought into their organizations members with markedly different political beliefs and those whose attachment to their union has ranged from the purely instrumental to the devotedly committed. While these factors underline the trade unions’ independence, they have inevitably been deeply affected by the political environment in which they have operated. Trade unions have been at the centre of two historical contexts. For much of the modern period, certainly since the middle of the nineteenth century, they were secure in a trajectory that recognized the claims of the working class in the economic and political systems and which pointed to their increasing influence and power. The development of the welfare state and governments’ encouragement of the trade unions fulfilled this

1  The first quotation is from W.E.J. McCarthy, ed., Trade Unions. Selected Readings (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 11; the second is from A. Flanders, Management and Unions. The Theory and Reform of Industrial Relations (London, 1975), p. 239. For an incisive and wide-​ranging analysis which stresses the importance of occupational identities as the essence of trade unions, see P. Ackers, ‘Trade Unions as Professional Associations’, in S. Johnstone and P. Ackers, eds., Finding a Voice at Work? New Perspectives on Employment Relations (Oxford, 2015), pp. 95–126.

138   Richard Whiting promise and trade unions became established institutions in British social democracy. This was succeeded by a strikingly different policy environment within which the trade unions suffered significant displacement of their political and economic status.2 From the 1980s public policy was guided by liberal market theory, in which the claims of social groups were downgraded in order that the responses to changes in the economy could be as flexible as possible. The emphasis shifted from production to consumption as the engine of growth. Having been at the centre of political and economic life for the majority of the twentieth century, in the 1980s and 1990s trade unions became more marginal through a marked decline in their memberships and a change in the nature of public thought that regarded collective labour organization as an impediment to the workings of the market. However, although the trade unions are now much diminished, the question of how people’s interests at work are to be represented is still as relevant as ever. Anxiety about globalization, anger about inequality, and the growth of cheap and vulnerable labour have all become part of the critique of liberal market economics, but what kind of collective organization can best respond to these is now unclear. The particular characteristics of the British experience can best be understood through two connected threads in the narrative: those of the law and the Conservative party.3 The law has defined the relationship between trade unions and society and government; the Conservatives have been the dominant force shaping British politics in the modern period. The Conservatives have been deeply attached to the common law, with its emphasis on the liberties of the individual, which contrasts with the priority given to the collective interest by trade unions. The arguments against trade unions have been long-​standing. Did they improve workers’ pay, and even if they did, was this at the expense of the economy as a whole? Rather than being essential for democracy, did not the trade unions distort it through 2  For a useful treatment of the place of trade unions within corporatist politics and the thinking which supported this role, see P. Ackers, ‘Collective Bargaining as Industrial Democracy: Hugh Clegg and the Political Foundations of Industrial Relations Pluralism’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 45 (2007), 77–​101, and B. Jackson, ‘Corporatism and Its Discontents: Pluralism, Anti-​Pluralism and Anglo-​ American Industrial Relations, c.1930–​1980’, in M. Bevir, ed., Modern Pluralism. Anglo-​American Debates since 1880 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 105–​28. For the analysis of trade unions by critics of social democracy, see B. Jackson, ‘Neo-​Liberalism and the Trade Unions, c. 1930-​1979’, in C.V.J. Griffiths, J.J. Nott, and W. Whyte, eds., Classes, Cultures and Politics. Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin (Oxford, 2011), pp. 263–​81. See also P. Smith, ‘Order in British Industrial Relations: From Donovan to Neoliberalism’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 31/​32 (2011), 115–​54; A. Offer, ‘British Manual Workers: From Producers to Consumers, c.1950–​2000’, Contemporary British History, 22 (2008), 537–​7 1. 3  For valuable analyses of the relationship between the Conservative party and the trade unions, see P. Dorey, The Conservative Party and the Trade Unions (London, 1995) and British Conservatism and Trade Unionism, 1945-​1964 (Farnham, 2009), and A. Taylor, ‘The Party and the Trade Unions’, in A. Seldon and S. Ball, eds., Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 499–​543. The trade unions have a firm place in the vast literature on the Labour party. A classic work is by Lewis Minkin, The Contentious Alliance. Trade Unions and the Labour Party (Edinburgh, 1992). For an analysis which brings out the value of the relationship between the Labour Party and trade unions in the twentieth century, see the essay by A. Reid, ‘Labour and the Trade Unions’, in D. Tanner, P. Thane, and N. Tiratsoo, eds., Labour’s First Century (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 221–​47.

Trade Unions   139 the use of collective power against parliamentary democracy? And was the dignity of labour better served through the independence of the worker rather than through his or her subordination to the dictates of a majoritarian democracy? Trade unions have therefore been authentic and controversial institutions in a pluralist political and social system. An important element of this authenticity was the fact that they were far from benign organizations. That is, they chafed at the interests and conventions of the wider society in a number of ways. These all derived from trade unions’ basic aim to influence the working environment, as far as they could, to protect and enhance their members’ interests. This element of control varied across different occupations, but was reflected in the continuing public preoccupation with restrictive practices. The craft tradition embodied a particular obdurate defence of rights over work—​that certain jobs could only be done by those who had served an apprenticeship and belonged to the relevant association, and any seepage of that knowledge to those outside that channel was to be firmly resisted, whatever the practical urgency for doing so or the national imperative that might have required it. Such restrictions on production, and the other forms they may have taken—​operated by certain unions but also at least tolerated or accepted by political interests—​undoubtedly had an impact on the economic welfare of the community. Strikes always had their victims, and possibly all the more so as the service sector, and the human relationships that sustained it, became increasingly prevalent in the economy. The pressure that unions needed to exert had to be coercive and, especially on smaller firms, sometimes proved to be irresistible and destructive. The same was true of the discipline required to keep the membership loyal to a union’s policies, particularly during strikes. The closed shop, the ultimate embodiment of collective action, had the capacity on occasion to be especially damaging to individuals, who could find their access to employment blocked. All these ways in which trade unions asserted their collective will ran counter to the national tradition of the common law which, in the early nineteenth century, had seen strike action as being in restraint of trade and arising from conspiracies by workmen against their employers and fellow workers to break individuals’ contracts of employment. The trade unions achieved some protection from the law not by the enjoyment of positive rights to take industrial action, but by the establishment between 1871 and 1906 of immunities from operation of the criminal and civil law that would otherwise have crippled them. Conservatives always felt that this apparent exemption from the law gave trade unions an unfair status. The law has generally been accorded a central place in conservative thinking as the essential instrument for the authority of the state and the freedom of the individual. Devising a legal framework for trade unions to replace what Conservatives saw as an unsatisfactory system of immunities was a daunting challenge. There were also issues in conservative thought to be grappled with. Conservatives have attached a good deal of importance to the community, that network of organizations that lies between the state and the individual. This has distinguished their outlook from the liberalism with which they have had some affinity. Trade unions have been a part of the community, but the Conservatives’ acceptance of this has been conditional upon trade unions behaving moderately and (in their eyes) responsibly. But while the

140   Richard Whiting Conservatives might have been troubled by the legal position of the trade unions for much of the twentieth century, and considered that trade unions sometimes acted like ‘rogue’ organizations in the community, they were wary of the unions’ power and sensitive to the loyalties they engendered.

I The chronology of political engagement with trade unions in modern Britain can be summarized as one with two points of intense activity separated by a period of relative stability and agreement. The first ‘moment’ covered the years from 1871 to 1906, when a distinctive framework was established for trade unions and industrial relations, and the second took in the later 1960s through to the mid-​1980s, which saw the interrogation and substantial modification of what had been achieved in that earlier period. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw vital statutory acceptance of the role of trade unions. Before this, their activities had fallen foul of common law support for economic individualism through the laws of conspiracy and the opposition to any act which could be construed as being in restraint of trade.4 This included interference in the arrangements made between employers and their individual workmen. The Trade Union Act of 1871 provided protection for union funds even though their actions were thought to be in restraint of trade. The 1875 Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act recognized that any act in connection with a trade dispute would not be liable for conspiracy if the act would have been legal when carried out by one person. This was a crucial acceptance of the legitimacy of group action, and substantially lifted the burden of conspiracy which had weighed on trade unions.5 However, this legislation provided protection from the criminal law but not against civil actions against trade unions for the damage their strike actions caused. The right to picket had also been challenged in the courts. The Trade Disputes Act of 1906 permitted the exercise of industrial power by the trade unions to be free from liability for the economic costs of any strike action they undertook. The critical component was protection for those who induced another person to break their contract of employment.6 In particular, the definition of labour disputes included those between workmen, so providing the means for establishing the closed shop, that is, conditions where employment was dependent on trade union membership. This legislation also established the right to picket. By 1906 the position of the trade unions in Britain was established. Organization had spread to the less skilled in ordinary occupations, and a national presence had developed. 4 

H. Phelps Brown, The Origins of Trade Union Power (Oxford, 1983), pp. 28–​40. W.R. Cornish and G. de N. Clark, Law and Society in England, 1750–​1850 (London, 1989), pp. 320–​1. 6  R. Kidner, ‘Lessons in Trade Union Law Reform: The Origins and Passage of the Trade Disputes Act, 1906’, Legal Studies, 2 (1982), 50; W.E.J. McCarthy, ‘Principles and Possibilities in British Trade Union Law’, in McCarthy, ed., Trade Unions, pp. 350–​2. 5 

Trade Unions   141 The Trades Union Congress, formed in 1868, had established trade unions as an independent interest group in politics. The political orientation of the trade unions away from liberalism towards the Labour party was under way, if not complete. The recognition that trade unions contributed to industrial stability went hand in hand with claims that they impeded economic efficiency. The blanket immunity from civil actions accorded to trade unions when they were engaged in industrial disputes was criticized by contemporaries but supported on the grounds of simplicity.7 Had the immunities been more precisely specified, for this or that aspect of industrial action, then subsequent modification would have been easier. As it was, the 1906 Act erected a wall which any government intervention had to surmount. The Conservatives’ difficulties in devising fair and unfair industrial practices in their 1971 Act precisely to move away from a general immunity showed the value of the 1906 Act for the trade unions. The industrial relations framework which followed the 1906 Act and which lasted until the 1970s has been described as one of ‘collective laissez-​faire’; that is, a system in which the process and the outcomes of bargaining between trade unions and employers were largely untouched by constraints of civil law. British industrial relations were characterized in this way by the leading labour lawyer of mid-​twentieth-​century Britain, Otto Kahn-​Freund.8 The essence of his portrayal of industrial relations as they operated until the later 1960s has remained remarkably intact.9 Trade unions received state support for collective bargaining in those areas where organization was weak and in the nationalized industries, and they benefited from arbitration in labour disputes during wartime governments. However, it was a legal framework which allowed free play to the organic relationships between the employers and the trade unions. Kahn-​Freund’s seminal essay on collective laissez-​faire was at one with the collection of essays edited by Morris Ginsberg, Law and Opinion in England in the 20th Century. This was a commentary from a mid-​twentieth-​century perspective on the anxieties about the development of collectivism that had animated Dicey in his Law and Opinion in 19th Century England. The theme of that collection was that the development of collectivism was responding to social need, and was not such a threat to liberty as Dicey had envisaged. Indeed, Ginsberg himself argued that the rights of the individual had been won by, and depended for their protection on, collective power, including that of the state.10 The same element of reassurance was present in Kahn-​Freund’s essay ‘Labour Law’. There were two elements to Kahn-​Freund’s beguiling vision of the British system. One was the idea that the development of voluntary relationships which worked without close state or legal supervision was a sign of maturity on the part of its key actors, and

7 

Phelps Brown, Origins of Trade Union Power, pp. 41–​55. His argument was set out in his essay ‘Labour Law’, in M. Ginsberg, ed., Law and Opinion in England in the 20th Century (London, 1959), pp. 215–​63. At this time, Kahn-​Freund was Professor of Law at London University. 9  S. Deakin and F. Wilkinson, The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialization, Employment, and Legal Evolution (Oxford, 2005), pp. 200–​1. 10  Ginsberg, ‘The Growth of Social Responsibility’, in Ginsberg, Law and Opinion, p. 24. 8 

142   Richard Whiting demonstrated that collective forces could operate with autonomy from the state. The commitment to this system was, paradoxically, a sign of what Kahn-​Freund saw as the remarkable respect of the British people, including the working class, for the law: ‘Is it not perhaps partly the fact that people take the law so seriously which makes them anxious to keep it at arm’s length and to shrink from calling for its intervention?’11 If collectivism was less threatening because the law and the state were held at bay, the second element worked in the same direction, and that was the continuing respect for individual freedom within a system operated by large social forces. Kahn-​Freund found it striking that even when local authorities had the power to insist on membership of a particular trade union as a condition of employment, the unions themselves objected to this interference with the freedom of the individual.12 Before the 1960s there was not a great deal of evidence that the political parties wanted to reform trade unions and industrial relations. Trade unions certainly had their critics, but the latter had not achieved momentum for reform. Moderate conservatism had been perhaps the greatest contributor to political stability in Britain during the inter-​war period. A key element of this was Baldwin’s refusal to follow a stridently anti-​union or pro-​empire policy in connection with the General Strike and the government of India. This kind of conservatism was founded upon a significant share of the working-​class vote and the allegiance of middle-​class voters who were enjoying rather more secure conditions than had hitherto been the case. Both of these factors tempered hostility to the trade unions.13 After their election defeat in 1945, the Conservatives were determined to follow a more active policy of seeking the support not only of the working class but also of trade union members. The view that the party had to win working-​ class votes, and that this was to be done not by challenging but by accepting the unions, was an important assumption of Conservative strategy in the 1950s. The national policy embodied in Churchill’s instruction to Walter Monckton to ‘get on with the unions’ certainly aroused the criticism of Conservatives, but without any serious challenge to either the electoral or policy imperative there was no significant move to reform before 1964. If the Conservatives sometimes felt they had to tolerate the unions through clenched teeth, Labour’s position was fundamentally different: trade unions were deeply engrained in Labour’s history and its identity, but the relationship was a complex one. The trade unions provided a great deal of practical support for the Labour party through political contributions from their members, sponsorship of MPs, and the reinforcement of Labour’s electoral position. Trade union members were more likely to vote for the Labour party than other members of the working class, and once Labour had established its foothold as the second major party, it had a certain resilience even when it lost elections. Trade unions’ practical focus on their members’ material interests also chimed with Labour’s priorities on welfare and employment. Trade union leaders often achieved political prominence. The Attlee government’s success in developing the welfare state, 11 

Kahn-​Freund, ‘Labour Law’ p. 227. Ibid., p. 231. 13  See R. McKibbin, Parties and People. England 1914–​1951 (Oxford, 2010), ch. 6. 12 

Trade Unions   143 alongside the revival in the fortunes of the trade unions on the industrial side, suggested that the ‘labour movement’ was a functioning reality in the promising conditions of post-​1945 Britain.14 Where the two diverged was with regard to socialism. Because of the trade unions’ independent associational character, they could never be fitted into a socialist system that demanded subordination to the state.15 Nor were they ultimately able to reconcile participation in national wages policy with their own independence. Trade unions, and the industrial relations system, therefore enjoyed a certain independence from the political sphere. For Kahn-​Freund, writing in 1959, this was the problem that had been created by the very success of the system. An industrial relations system that was remarkably autonomous from legal and political intervention was also one where the claims of the nation were not readily heard. What the national interest might have been at any one time was hotly contested, and often amounted to competing voices rather than a unified understanding, although certain priorities did achieve a common currency. Reform of the trade unions was to become one such imperative, which emerged in the 1960s and came to fruition under the Thatcher government. While trade union members often showed great loyalty to their organizations, they were also citizens, and were aware when their own actions were at times in conflict with those of the wider population. The case for trade union reform meant arguing that the state had to take a bigger role in industrial relations and the affairs of the trade unions beyond the limited one it took up in collective laissez-​faire. Both Conservative and Labour complied, as part of a common commitment to the modernization of Britain. For Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, ‘modernization’ meant developing a more efficient and productive economy, to meet the challenge of faster growth rates in the other advanced economies of the world. Trade unions and their members seemed to place major obstacles in the path towards industrial efficiency, both through the persistence of a craft mentality—​with its sometimes ferocious, and deeply traditional, control over who did what work—​and through the prevalence in the later 1960s of unofficial, if short, strikes that were unpredictable and disruptive. In both cases, often small groups of workers had major obstructive effects on production and the employment of their fellow workers. The observance of rules and procedures—​the necessary constituent of the kind of informal system that operated in many factories—​was notably erratic. Both Labour and the Conservatives turned to the law to provide some sanctions against those who resorted to strikes too readily, as part of a greater role for the state in the affairs of trade unions. This was also explicable in the circumstances of the later 1960s, when one of the main social trends observed was a decline in respect for authority. There seemed to be a gulf between the behaviour of particular groups of workers and the interests of the rest of the population in steady economic growth and prosperity. In such a law-​abiding country as Britain, why not use that law to bring some order and predictability to industrial relations? 14 

Reid, ‘Labour and the Trade Unions’, p. 231. J.A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York, 1976 edn), p. 379; B.C. Roberts, ‘Trade Unions and Party Politics’, The Cambridge Journal, 6 (1953), 397–​8. 15 

144   Richard Whiting A further question was: how far would the reform of the trade unions give them a more secure institutional base within the economy and society? Both efforts at reform—​Labour’s proposals set out in a white paper entitled In Place of Strife in 1969, and the Conservatives’ Industrial Relations Act of 1971—​were failures. Both represented serious attempts to support trade unions and to give weaker ones a recognized role in collective bargaining. Both wanted to bring some sort of control and regulation over strikes. Labour’s plans unravelled when its parliamentary party swung against reform, encouraged by Cabinet minister James Callaghan, in alliance with a trade union movement hostile to what it saw as interference in its affairs, such as the requirement for strike ballots when an industry of particular national importance was threatened with disruption. As far as In Place of Strife was concerned, this was a fateful moment for the unions. It was an opportunity, through a balanced programme of reform, to give the trade unions a more secure place in the social democratic Britain that Labour wanted and to take the sting out of the intense criticism that trade unions generated. But the trade union leadership of Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers’ Union and Hugh Scanlon of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, who were at the forefront of the opposition, did not need the support of the state to ensure that employers treated them as serious bargaining partners, unlike some of the weaker trade unions. The Conservatives’ Act embodied much of what was in the Labour proposals, but tried to go further in both its proposals for a more finely delineated set of immunities for industrial action to replace the broad immunity of the 1906 Act and the establishment of a National Industrial Relations Court to build up case law specifically for employment disputes. Immunity from prosecution for breach of contract could only be enjoyed by trade unions that registered with the government, which gave greater oversight of trade union rules and procedures. Trade union leaders had regarded the campaign against Labour’s proposals as a warm-​up for the likely struggle they faced against the Conservatives’ legislation. The vehemence of the trade unions’ opposition to the 1971 Act took the government by surprise, and when it became embroiled in disputes with the miners and apparently intractable problems of income policy, the complicated and unwieldy piece of legislation became inoperable. The failure of the Conservatives’ 1971 Act was a humiliation for the party. It has been described, however, as a ‘training ground for the Conservative party legislators’.16 The party certainly drew a tactical lesson from the traumatic defeat. That is, the party showed no diminution in its desire to reform the trade unions, but was aware that a major piece of institutional reform was politically unsustainable. The project had to proceed with caution and circumspection. However, the Industrial Relations Act did have significance for the future. Under Geoffrey Howe’s direction, it had asserted that the right not to be a member of a trade union was as important as the right to belong 16  S. Wood, ‘From Voluntarism to Partnership: A Third Way Overview of the Public Policy Debate on British Industrial Relations’, in H. Collins, P. Davies, and R. Rideout, eds., Legal Regulation of the Employment Relation (London, 2000), p. 121.

Trade Unions   145 to one. The conventional thinking among industrial relations academics was that the right of association was the more important because, as a matter of public policy, trade unionism needed to be encouraged, and that the right to refuse to join a trade union was not therefore simply the other side of the coin of the right to associate. The right not to be a member of a union set out in the 1971 Act was therefore a first stage in the focus on the individual employee which was to inform much of the legislation of the Thatcher period. The consequences of the Conservatives’ failure with the 1971 Industrial Relations Act were far-​reaching. One legacy concerned the role and status of the law. The Act exposed the limits of the law and the power of the state in industrial relations. The principal architect of the 1971 Act, Geoffrey Howe, had argued in his proposal for legally binding collective agreements that the British people, including the working class, had an ingrained respect for the law, much as Kahn-​Freund had done in his essay on collective laissez-​faire. However, shop stewards showed themselves all too willing to become martyrs for their cause as they faced summonses before the courts for breaching the law, and the intensity of opposition to the Act had taken the government by surprise. An Act intended to remedy a fateful piece of legislation of 1906 had instead brought the law, and the state, into disrepute. The Conservatives’ efforts in the Thatcher period were all about the need to restore the authority of the state and the credibility of the law, and therefore led back to the 1971 Act. The failure of the Conservatives’ Act placed the onus on Labour to devise a framework of labour law to take its place. While in opposition in the period 1970–​4, the Labour party leadership and the trade unions came together out of mutual necessity and closed the rift that had developed over In Place of Strife. The trade unions wanted the repeal of the 1971 Act and the leadership of the party had to see off the threat from the left to commit a future Labour government to a highly interventionist industrial policy.17 This co-​operation was formalized in the Social Contract announced during the general election campaign of February 1974. The idea was that in return for control over prices and improvement in social benefits, the unions would exercise some restraint over pay without the need for a specific incomes policy. A positive interpretation of the Contract cast it as an attempt to make explicit the kind of bargaining with interest groups that governments had to engage in if democracy in an advanced industrial economy was to have a comprehensive and practical meaning. Certainly, some Conservatives were envious of Labour being able to crystallize their relationship with the trade unions in such language. However, the Labour governments that followed came to regard it as hopelessly asymmetrical in terms of the specific intervention required of government without, in return, reform of industrial relations or trade unions. In addition to the Social Contract, the Labour governments passed legislation giving trade unions and workers fuller protection when engaging in industrial disputes than was the case under the Conservatives’ 1971 Act; offering support for trade union officials in the workplace; providing approval 17 

P. Bell, The Labour Party in Opposition 1970–​74 (London, 1974) provides a perceptive treatment of this period.

146   Richard Whiting of the closed shop; and setting out procedures whereby trade unions could press their claims for recognition in particular enterprises.18 Two events in the 1970s suggested that, even with the political advantages the unions had, their position was still less secure than it might have been. One such was the Grunwick dispute of 1976–​8. George Ward, the owner of a small photographic processing factory in London, refused to recognize the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff in his firm, even though some of his staff were members. The dispute seemed to capture many of the tensions and cross-​currents affecting industrial relations at the time. Ward’s stand on his legal rights defeated the efforts of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service to establish the case for union recognition, while the alternative approach of bringing to bear large numbers of sympathetic pickets also ended in failure, and the disorder that attended them merely served to discredit the union. As the Court of Inquiry’s report into the dispute noted, public opinion became convinced ‘that the country was watching an industrial dispute develop into unacceptable social strife’.19 The traditional predisposition in favour of trade unions had been effectively challenged, with the support of the Conservatives. While employees had a right to become trade union members, the events at Grunwick showed that there was no firm obligation on employers to bargain with trade unions. Trade unions seemed to have too little rather than too much power.20 The second significant outcome from the mid-​1970s was the failure of any scheme for industrial democracy, despite the favourable report by Lord Bullock in 1977.21 While at the end of the First World War, schemes for workers’ control seemed to be a plausible aspiration to connect with the strong shop stewards’ organizations of the time, these ideas had less impact in the inter-​war period. The revival of shop steward organization in the conditions of full employment after 1945 saw renewed interest in workers’ control on the left, but also a wider interest in industrial democracy as a means of bringing some order to industrial relations. The rash of unofficial strikes in the 1960s had attracted a number of explanations. Such volatile and irresponsible behaviour suggested that work experience in the modern factory was demeaning and unfulfilling for a generation of workers who were better educated than their predecessors, and less willing than them to accept authority. Some kind of representation for employees in the running of their enterprises offered a solution for the disaffection that was distracting managements from their key aim of making profits. Industrial democracy, or at least participation, was not only the traditional demand from the left for the extension of political democracy, but was supported by a much broader constituency as a route to more responsible 18 

The Trade Union and Labour Relations Act of 1974, the Employment Protection Act of 1975, and the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Amendment) Act of 1976. See P.L. Davies and M. Freedland, Labour Legislation and Public Policy: A Contemporary History (Oxford, 1993), ch. 8. 19  Report of the Court of Inquiry under the Rt Hon Lord Justice Scarman OBE into a dispute between Grunwick Processing Laboratories Ltd. and members of the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staffs, (Cmnd 6922, August 1977), para. 38. 20  For a contemporary account of the strike, see J. Rogaly, Grunwick (Harmondsworth, 1977). 21  Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy: Chairman Lord Bullock (London, 1977).

Trade Unions   147 workforces. The main problem with the Bullock proposals was that they seemed to focus entirely on trade union representation of employees and accepted an adversarial model of industrial relations.22 But industrial democracy had few supporters among the key interests involved. Many trade unionists opposed it, even though it was cast in their favour, because they were happier with an adversarial rather than participatory form of democracy; industrialists were wary of sharing executive authority; and Callaghan, Labour’s Prime Minister, feared that the necessary legislation would be Labour’s equivalent of the bitter conflict that the Conservatives had faced over their 1971 Industrial Relations Act. However, it would have given the trade unions formal standing in the economy that their failure over Grunwick showed they lacked. The Conservatives had been liberated in their approach to the trade unions by monetarism. This placed the containment of inflation—​the key objective for the Conservatives’ policy-​making in the 1970s—​within the domain of the government’s control of the money supply, rather than within relations between the trade unions and government, as had been encouraged by a focus on wage demand as the main factor at work. Good relations with the trade unions therefore became less important than they had been in the past.23 However, it was the character of the trade unions as social and political organizations, and their impact on individual liberty, that was the key theme—​and a particularly effective one—​in Thatcher’s political rhetoric. This in turn required the assertion of the power of the state over trade unions which had become, in Conservative eyes, ‘rogue’ associations working against the interests of the community. This was delivered through two key events: the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978–​9, and the Miners’ Strike of 1984–​5. The ‘Winter of Discontent’, and especially the strikes by the public sector unions, was critical for the Conservatives’ victory at the 1979 general election. As a leading party official has put it, ‘If there had been no Winter of Discontent in 1978–​9 there would have been no shift of opinion in favour of the Tories’.24 The strikes provided ample examples of what was portrayed as trade unionists’ brutal indifference to the feelings and interests of members of the public. This illustrated just how much the role of the trade unions had become wrapped up in the sense of social crisis that gripped public discussion in the 1970s. Discussion about trade unions during debates over In Place of Strife at the end of the 1960s and the Industrial Relations Act of 1971 had been firmly within the domain of industrial relations, that is, a matter internal to firms and their employees. As the 1970s wore on, what mattered was the public impact of trade unions as they confronted authority through picketing and spread industrial action beyond the

22 

For a contemporary critique, see B.C. Roberts, ‘Participation by Agreement’, Lloyds Bank Review, (July 1977), 12–​23. 23  J. Enoch Powell, ‘The Conservative Party’, in D. Kavanagh and A. Seldon, eds., The Thatcher Effect (Oxford, 1989), p. 83. 24  R. Harris, Not for Turning. The Life of Margaret Thatcher (London, 2013), p. 138. Robin Harris was a member of the Conservative Research Department from 1978 and subsequently a speech writer and adviser to Thatcher.

148   Richard Whiting industries directly involved. The authority of the state came increasingly into question. The widespread sense of unease about the deterioration of Britain shifted the question into one closer to law and order than the often technical and seemingly intractable area of industrial relations that had been the focus of the trade union issue in the 1960s and early 1970s. Thatcher conveyed a conviction about the seriousness of Britain’s condition as well as a promise of strong leadership that would enable the Conservatives to remedy it. She expressed a vigorous commitment to the individual and the rule of law which seemed at first sight strikingly at variance with the collective interests within social democracy, but which was undoubtedly effective in public debate. Opinion polls certainly suggested strong public support for action on what had become the key issues in trade union behaviour, with clear majorities from trade union activists, trade union members, and non-​trade union members for action on picketing and against sympathy strikes.25 The second of the pivotal moments of this period, the Miners’ Strike of 1984–​5, was a critical and extreme event. It was critical because the government had to win. The National Union of Miners (NUM) under Scargill’s leadership intended the strike to be a challenge to the Thatcher government. The economic demand involved—​that employment in the industry be maintained without reference to the price and supply of coal—​was in itself unacceptable, but it was Scargill’s belief that a strike had to be part of a working-​class struggle to gain control over society that made its defeat vital from the government’s point of view, especially since the miners had the power to make the threat credible. It was an extreme event because of the way the NUM attempted to launch a national strike not by a national ballot of its members but through the aggressive picketing of those areas, most prominently the Nottinghamshire coalfield, that wanted to stay at work.26 The clashes between the police and flying pickets became the most frequently televised images of the strike, but there were equally intense battles arising from the intimidation of working miners and their families in the mining villages. The strike had gone far beyond an industrial dispute. An indication of the knife edge along which the National Coal Board conducted the strike was its reluctance to use recently passed legislation restricting picketing for fear of uniting the labour movement behind the miners.27 But if the defeat of that labour movement was a key outcome of the strike, its fragility was also revealed in the course of the dispute, and was one of the reasons for the government’s victory. Key trade union leaders were unwilling to use their power to support one group over the rest of society. Had the supply of electricity been cut off in support of the miners, as Scargill had wanted, the outcome might well have been different. But John

25 

Results of opinion poll in The Times, 21 Jan. 1980, as reported by Lord Thorneycroft, Conservative Party chairman, to the Cabinet 30 January 1980, in Margaret Thatcher Archive, THCR 2/​6/​2/​174 Pt. 2, f. 93. 26  D. Howell, ‘Defiant Dominoes: Working Miners and the 1984–​5 Strike’, in B. Jackson and R. Saunders, eds., Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 148–​64. 27  R. Benedictus, ‘The Use of the Law of Tort in the Miners’ Dispute’, Industrial Law Journal, 14 (1985), 176–​90; I. MacGregor with R. Tyler, The Enemy Within: The Story of the Miners’ Strike 1984-​5 (London, 1986), p. 217.

Trade Unions   149 Lyons had refused to bring out his members in the electricity supply industry because ‘for our enormous power to be used in this way would be to threaten democracy itself ’.28 Even though the trade union legislation of the Thatcher governments was not used in the Miners’ Strike, the scale of what was achieved in the 1980s cannot be denied. Conservative legislation acted both to curb the scope of strike action and to enhance the rights of trade union members. Limitations were placed on strikes beyond the enterprise in which they originated, and on the immunities that had hitherto protected trade unions from being sued for damages. Action was taken against secondary picketing and secret ballots had to be held before industrial action could take place. Members could vote for trade union officers, eventually by postal ballots; curbs were placed on the closed shop, and then it was eventually abolished. Trade union members were protected from disciplinary action by their unions if they disobeyed a call to strike which was legal. This amounted to an extensive recasting of the legal position of trade unions from the one which they had constructed with the Labour government in the 1970s, and contrasted with what had been attempted by the Conservatives’ Industrial Relations Act of 1971.29 In place of the failed attempt to make collective agreements legally binding, trade unions now faced civil law restrictions on strike action, as well as more substantial legal support for their members who wished to challenge both the leadership of their unions and strike action they might be urged to take. Whereas the efforts at reform in the later 1960s and early 1970s had been addressed as much to managements as to trade unions, the legislation of the 1980s cast the problem entirely in terms of the need to restrain the activities of trade unions. The position of trade unions as the 1980s wore on certainly suggested a major turning point in their fortunes. Membership declined significantly and as a consequence many employees, especially in the private sector, no longer saw their pay and conditions established through collective bargaining. Before 1979, close to 90 per cent of employees were covered by collective agreements; by 1999, 59 per cent of employees were neither in a union nor had their pay and conditions determined by collective agreements.30 Inevitably, with the passage of time there was a growing proportion of workers—​48 per cent over the period 1983–​2001—​who had never been members of a union.31 Economic factors clearly played a part in all this. The savage economic conditions of the early 1980s were hardly favourable to union membership, whatever the strength of the grievances that they engendered. The spread of smaller firms and self-​employment did not help recruitment of members. But legislation set a framework within which unions had to operate, and it indicated too that public opinion had turned against some of their

28 TUC, Report, 1984, p. 405. Lyons was General Secretary of the Electrical Power Engineers’

Association. 29  Details of the provisions of the Acts of Parliament passed between 1980 and 1992 are summarized in A. Taylor, ‘The Party and the Trade Unions’, p. 534. 30  S. Wood, ‘From Voluntarism to Partnership’, p. 125. 31  Research reported in A. Bogg, ‘The Death of Statutory Trade Union Recognition in the UK’, Journal of Industrial Relations, 54 (2012), 416.

150   Richard Whiting patterns of behaviour. The majority of union leaders vigorously opposed laws that provided public funds for ballots on strike action and for union elections, but found that many of their members supported the new laws. Eric Hammond, the electricians’ leader, argued: The Government has been skilful in appearing to stand for the rights of the individual member and to be arguing for him to have a say in his union on such matters as industrial disputes . . . The Movement has been slow to champion the rights of the individual in his union.32

With their power curtailed, unions’ case for support was less compelling than it had been in the 1970s, when their membership had reached its peak. The deterioration in the unions’ position must not be too sharply drawn. Over time, there was a process of adjustment as unions accepted the public support for legislation restricting secondary action and providing for membership ballots over industrial action. And alongside the public dramas of strikes, some unions engaged in novel forms of dispute resolution and made the case for collaboration with employers in the interests of efficiency and productivity.33 Was there, in short, an alternative to the ‘class struggle’ version of trade unionism that had been pressed to its most extreme point in the Miners’ Strike, and been defeated? Was Thatcher’s conservatism accommodating towards trade unions if they eschewed confrontation and supported innovation? For both of these propositions to be true, there had to be opportunities for union recruitment in growing industries and recognition of the legitimate role of unions in representing the vocational interest of their members. Experiences in the 1980s were far from encouraging on either count. An official from the electricians’ union reported that more than half of ‘high tech’ companies were not unionized, ‘and the reason, unpalatable though it may be, is because workers in those industries have a very low opinion of our movement’.34 The ban on trade unions and trade union membership at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) suggested that the government was hostile to any form of trade unionism. Geoffrey Howe, at that time Foreign Secretary and responsible for the implementation of the policy, revealed his own reservations in his memoirs: ‘should I have been required, for example, to abandon my life long membership of the Bar Council if I was working at GCHQ? Why should a craft unionists’ loyalty to his representative body by any less regarded than that of a professional man?’35 Leaders of the unions catering for skilled and managerial workers were outraged at the suggestion that membership of a union might conflict with their patriotic duty. This put paid to

32 TUC, Annual Report, 1985, p. 439. 33 

R. Lewis, ‘Strike-​Free Deals and Pendulum Arbitration’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 28 (1990), 32-​56. 34  R. Sanderson of the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunication and Plumbing Trade Union, TUC Report, 1984, p. 443. 35  G. Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (London, 1994), p. 347.

Trade Unions   151 any kind of rapprochement between the unions and government based on an acceptance of the Conservatives’ legislation.36 It also provides a commentary on Thatcher’s attitude towards the trade unions. Her challenge and defeat of a confrontational style of trade unionism was one of the defining achievements of her premiership. However, her approach was not modulated in order to be more accepting of occupational and professional organization of a less politicized character. As Howe perceptively remarked in connection with the GCHQ question, ‘she could not find room in her thinking for acceptance of the parallel legitimacy of someone else’s loyalty’.37 Some familiar features of trade union organization continued after the Thatcher period. Trade unions retained a significant presence in the public sector, and in areas where their members had powerful leverage, such as rail transport. While trade union leaders no longer had ready access to government, they still had national profiles and significance. In the 1980s, union members also voted to maintain contributions to their unions’ political funds. But overall, the status of trade unions as the natural representatives of people’s interests at work has suffered a dramatic decline in recent decades. Long recognized as conservative and defensive organizations, by the early twenty-​first century they appeared in the eyes of the Labour party leadership to be out of date and disconnected from the public.38 The status of the trade unions has been determined both by the conditions of working life within which they have operated and by the political and constitutional context in which they have been located. To examine the first of these: to what extent has the significance of work in people’s lives changed? The growth of the service sector and the decline of manual work, especially in the traditional form associated with steel, coal-​mining, or even the relatively newer industry of car manufacture, suggest a different milieu, less obviously supportive of trade union organization. The impact of globalization has been uneven, but where it has taken effect it has weakened the usual sense of common experience in a particular enterprise as the labour market becomes (for some) transnational, and outsourcing and agency employment complicate the picture of whom particular employees think they are working for.39 Moreover, the structure of industrial relations has also meant that the decline in union membership has especial significance for the weakening of employees’ bargaining position. In countries where national bargaining agreements determine wages and conditions, and apply also to non-​union members, trade unions can still have a significant impact on employees’ lives even with low memberships. In Britain, the role of national negotiations had been much weakened even by the 1970s with the growth of plant bargaining, so low membership figures were also equated with weak or non-​existent collective bargaining. 36 

J. Lloyd, Understanding the Miners’ Strike (London, 1985), p. 11.

37 Howe, Conflict of Loyalty, p. 347.

38  At the time of a dispute with the fire brigades, Alastair Campbell recorded in his diary a comment from Gordon Brown that the unions ‘were totally behind the curve’ and that the trade union movement ‘does not understand what is happening to it out in the country’. A. Campbell, The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq (London, 2013), p. 438 (entry for 30 Jan. 2003). 39  H. Arthurs, ‘Labour Law after Labour’, in G. Davidov and B. Langille, eds., The Idea of Labour Law (Oxford, 2011), p. 22.

152   Richard Whiting

II However, even if much has changed about the place of work in people’s lives it still has a powerful salience in modern Britain. Work is seen as morally important in welfare policy, so that getting ‘marginal’ groups into employment is regarded as highly desirable. In an increasingly diverse society, work has been a positive force for integration. There are also important aspects of work that reinforce the traditional need for a countervailing force to that of the employer. The bifurcation between those in secure employment with paid holidays, pensions, and established patterns of work and those on uncertain flexible contracts is well established. The prevalence of ‘cheap labour’, with low economic status, in advanced economies also suggests that the need for collective representation has not diminished. An increasingly important part of trade unions’ activity has been in the area of the representation of individual grievances and problems and the upholding of members’ legal rights. This has arisen in part from the growth of individual employment law since the 1960s, but also because of the way in which people have brought a diverse range of identities to their employment beyond the more traditional one of class. What are the sources of recovery for trade unions in the post-​Thatcher period, when some of the certainties of the neo-​liberal outlook are under scrutiny yet the trade unions as organizations are in survival rather than expansion mode? For trade unions that need to restore their role, the policies and attitudes of government are vital for their development. For employees to have a voice requires them to have political and not merely industrial representation.40 Legal enactments covering pay and conditions have become an important part of the regulation of the labour market, but they require political support and defence. However, even if the case for employees to have a countervailing power at work is as strong as ever, the strength of the trade unions in the political system that was evident for much of the twentieth century has weakened, and the sources of recovery are hard to detect. The institutional setting for trade unions is currently in flux. The European Union, once seen as at least potentially useful as a means of reviving social rights against the trend of flexible labour regimes, has now very probably been removed as an institutional support through the result of the referendum of June 2016. The post-​Thatcher Conservatives have shown no sign of moderating their stance on trade unions. While there is widespread concern about inequality and harsh treatment of vulnerable workers, which should be one of the forces sustaining an interest in workplace representation, this has coincided with the decline and displacement of the labour movement. The unions still remain prominent in Labour party affairs, but at the time of writing (2016) the party itself is in an unstable position. It is undergoing a crisis in its ability to represent the core interests that have historically aligned themselves with the

40  For a discussion of this in relation particularly to union funds for political activity, see K.D. Ewing, ‘The Importance of Trade Union Political Voice: Labour Law Meets Constitutional Law’, in A. Bogg and T. Novitz (eds.), Voices at Work (Oxford, 2014), pp. 277–​99.

Trade Unions   153 Labour party. It is still a home for progressivism of a middle-​class and urban kind, but those who have suffered from the market system have been inclined to see the Labour party as complicit in their neglect. Many trade unionists continue to vote Conservative. The pressure on the two-​party system seems to be harming the Labour party more than the Conservatives. With the collapse of the party in Scotland, and the growth of intense and alternative electoral formations around nationalism and the environment, the space for Labour is shrinking. Some form of progressive alliance might be a solution, but it is a distant prospect. These conditions may well give further momentum to what has been a long-​standing point of view among some trade unionists—​that they should be politically active and engaged but less dependent on the Labour party. This would at least recognize what have been two contrasting themes in the history of the trade unions. One has been that of continuity, around the support for some kind of collective organization at work, which stretches back to before the period of industrialization; the other has been the variable framework within which trade unions have pursued their political ambitions, and which at the present time appears to be losing some of the stability that the Labour party has long provided.

Further Reading M. Chase, Early Trade Unions: Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour (Brookfield, VT, 2000). M. Curthoys, Governments, Labour and the Law in Mid-​Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2004). C. Howell, Trade Unions and the State: The Construction of Industrial Relations in Britain, 1890–​ 2000 (Princeton, NJ, 2005). A. Reid, United We Stand: A History of Britain’s Trade Unions (Harmondsworth, 2004). R. Taylor, The Trade Union Question in Modern British Politics: Government and Unions since 1945 (Oxford, 1993).

chapter 10

The Pre s s David Brown

In the autumn of 1856, the Radical Liberal MP Richard Cobden wrote to the editor of the Morning Star, a paper with which he was intimately connected,1 advising on how best to appeal to the paper’s working-​class audience. He feared that a preaching ‘essay style’ would simply alienate them. An article in a recent issue illustrated the point: it presented, he said, an exordium preparing one for an argument & the reader is warned to compose himself for a course of instructive reasoning. Now this is precisely what the readers of a penny paper don’t want—​or rather they must not be told that they want it, or they skip away to something else.

Instead, suggested Cobden, articles needed to grab readers’ attention immediately: It is in newspaper writing as it was with our [Anti-​Corn Law] League agitation. I used always to lay it down as a rule that the audiences at our meetings must be taught without their knowing it, & that a sense of amusement & excitement must predominate over the labor [sic] of learning, or the same parties would not come to a second meeting; & as I knew we should want them year after year to listen work & pay I was obliged in all my popular harangues to throw in a spice of amusing ingredients which I used to call ‘eating fire, pulling ribbons out of my mouth or standing on my head’ for their amusement like the clown at the fair. I remember how I was often ashamed at reading the reports of my lighter passages in the papers next day, but there was no alternative. If I had confined myself to a process of reasoning in which

My thanks to Professor Mary Orr for a valuable discussion about this chapter at an early stage in my thinking about it, and to my fellow editors for their thoughts and suggestions. 1  Cobden had been a key figure in the establishment of the Morning Star, which was launched in March 1856, and, although he refused to become editor, did act as a close adviser and contributor to the paper. See D. Brown, ‘Cobden and the Press’, in A. Howe and S. Morgan, eds., Rethinking Nineteenth Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 80–​95.

The Press   155 instruction was the obvious end in view the audience would not have followed me through & would certainly never have come to hear me a second time. Here is a confession & a lecture for you.2

Cobden’s ‘lecture’ is not simply a confession of personal ‘shame’, but encapsulates, and points to, many of the problems of positioning ‘the press’ in political life. While he adhered to the idealized notion—​often taken to be axiomatic—​of an enlightening role for the press that would educate the nation, he also recognized that his message had to appeal to his readers: if Cobden hoped to lure readers into instruction without their knowing it, he was also admitting that the press could only work if it supplied what the people buying those papers wanted. Readers could not be expected to digest only what the papers wanted to tell them; they expected the newspaper to respond to, and reflect, their own interests and demands. This in turn points to deeper questions that the (political) historian of the press must address in order to make some sense of the burgeoning, perhaps even central, role of print media in an evolving political culture in modern Britain—​questions about who spoke, and to whom, through the press, and of course why and to what effect. Rather than seeing newspapers as little more than a source of political information, therefore, it is important to reflect on the role the press played as an integral part of modern political culture. While newspapers remain a vital resource for the political historian investigating what happened, perhaps why, and how it was presented, the press should also be studied in and of itself as a vital part of the political process and culture within which it operated. The press was more than a chronicle of events, and nor was it simply a tool of the political class; the ‘Fourth Estate’ played a vital role in defining politics, yet its function and significance were and are ambiguous. This chapter is concerned primarily therefore with thinking about the different ways in which the press shaped and moulded politics, eschewing neat categorization into narratives of ‘progress’, or ‘improvement’, in favour of a more nuanced—​if equivocal—​assessment. A conventional account of the press in political life would present a Whiggish narrative of progress, and perhaps even of British superiority. The emergence of a free press in the late eighteenth century was one of the foundation stones of the edifice of Victorian democracy and subsequent, ongoing, ‘improvement’. Across early modern Europe, newspapers had emerged as short briefing notes for the interested cognoscenti—​ dense, allusive, dry, and also expensive—​focused on details relevant to policy-​making or commerce, but with little to engage the attention, had they been able to afford it, of the masses. Even as the commercial possibilities of a news service emerged with the expansion of printing, this often led to partisanship and partiality as vested interests sought to control anything that might create an opinion.3 Yet, in Britain at least, the later 2  R. Cobden to H. Richard, ‘Wednesday’ [c. 22 Oct. 1856], Cobden Papers, British Library [hereafter BL], Add. Ms. 43658, ff. 168–​9. 3  For a nice overview of these developments, see A. Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself (New Haven and London, 2014).

156   David Brown eighteenth century saw this situation change and the newspaper industry mature. John Wilkes’ North Briton and his celebrated victory for free speech had marked an important turning point in the battle for public opinion in the early 1760s. And legislative changes relaxing regulations which allowed open reporting of parliamentary business from 1772 gave a growing readership more to feed on. The rapid expansion thereafter, in particular of radical (non-​governmental) papers, helped create an informed and invigorated public opinion and, by extension, an arena in which policy decisions were increasingly tested, debated, and indeed forged—​effectively, in the words of one recent account, ‘institutionalizing’ the public sphere for subsequent decades.4 Thus, by the early nineteenth century public opinion had found a voice and a vehicle through papers whose very titles—​‘Sun’, ‘Star’, ‘Comet’, ‘Lantern’, ‘Champion’, ‘Moderator’, ‘Vindicator’, ‘Leader’, ‘Pilot’, ‘Monitor’, ‘Warden’, ‘Sentinel’—​pointed to their self-​proclaimed progressive intent and value.5 The establishment of a dynamic, unfettered press, then, was a fulfilment of the prescriptions offered by Enlightenment philosophers for political progress. The Edinburgh political economist Dugald Stewart, for example, had argued in the 1790s that in every government, the stability and the influence of established authority must depend on the coincidence between its measures and the tide of public opinion; and that, in modern Europe, in consequence of the invention of printing, and the liberty of the press, public opinion has acquired an ascendant in human affairs, which it never possessed in those states of antiquity from which most of our political examples are drawn.6

By this means, the press had ‘emancipated human reason from the tyranny of ancient prejudices’.7 In advance of—​perhaps in preference to—​democracy, a free press was therefore held up as a necessary and effective means of holding politicians to account. And so we have here the foundation for a history of the press in which newspapers became a guarantee of freedom and their expansion underwrote any notion of political progress (meaning greater accountability and openness). Inspired by a sense of their own importance, Victorian newspapermen would present this role in grandiose terms: James Grant, a former editor of the Morning Advertiser, for example, felt confident enough to assert in the early 1870s that the ‘Press has before it one of the most glorious Missions in

4 

K.W. Schweizer, ‘Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in the Later Hanoverian Era’, Parliamentary History, 25 (2006), 32–​48. 5  A. Jones, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-​Century England (Aldershot, 1996), p. 33; H. Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–​1855 (Harlow, 2000), p. 19. Of course the extent to which all such papers really were progressive is open to debate. 6  D. Stewart, ‘Elements in the Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. I (1792)’, in Sir W. Hamilton, The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart (11 vols, Edinburgh, 1854–​60), vol. ii, pp. 228–​9. 7 Stewart, Elements, vol. ii, pp. 223, 229, 244–​5.

The Press   157 which human agencies ever were employed. Its Mission is to Enlighten, to Civilize, and to Morally Transform the World’.8 Indeed, it was the perceived superior character of the mid-​Victorian British press, compared to its European neighbours—​notably in France—​that helped convince many of the more general sense of a British political ascendancy over continental rivals.9 But there is a fly in the ointment, in that practice rarely mirrors theory and this leaves open many crucial questions. If the press should be seen as a ‘Fourth Estate’, rather than defining its role this arguably only makes understanding it more problematic. Was the press a democratic force, or an instrument for political intrigue? Richard Cobden may have eulogized ‘the influence of public opinion, as exercised through the Press’ as the ‘distinguishing feature in modern civilization’,10 but another Victorian reformer, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, felt equally strongly that the voices that should find an echo in the press were those of politicians, not the people: ‘If the papers will not report what he [the politician] says, mention what he does, or exhibit the success of what he had done, his “occupation is gone”’.11 Thus did Anthony Trollope’s hack journalist, Quintus Slide, seek to ingratiate himself with Phineas Finn, MP, offering the services of his newspaper as the only effective way for an MP to speak to the country.12 Yet if Slide’s People’s Banner was to be a politician’s ‘organ’, Trollope himself seemed more equivocal about the position of the press in political life. Over in Barchester the picture seemed slightly different: Tom Towers, editor of the Jupiter (read John Thaddeus Delane of The Times), carried all before him. It is true he wore no ermine, bore no outward marks of a world’s respect; but with what a load of inward importance was he charged! It is true that his name appeared in no large capitals; on no wall was chalked ‘Tom Towers for ever’—​‘Freedom of the Press and Tom Towers’; but what member of Parliament had half his power?

With a swipe of the pen ‘he could smite the loudest of them’ and, indeed, it ‘was probable that Tom Towers considered himself the most powerful man in Europe; and so he walked on from day to day, studiously striving to look a man, but knowing within his breast that he was a god’.13 Towers hardly sounds like a democrat, and when the nature 8 

J. Grant, The Newspaper Press—​Its Origins—​Progress—​& Present Position (2 vols, London, 1871), vol. i, pp. i, vi. 9  To take but one example, as The Economist put it in 1852, unlike French, German, and other continental journals, which suffered under the demands of corruption and intriguing for honours among the journalistic classes, the British press ‘is the natural growth of the national progress: it belongs to all the people, is a part of their daily lives, and is indispensable to civilisation’. 10  Quoted in A. Briggs and P. Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge, 2002), p. 196. Briggs and Burke date this quotation as ‘1834’, which may be a little early. 11  Diary of the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, 15 Aug. 1855, Broadlands Papers, University of Southampton, SHA/​PD/​7. I am grateful to the University of Southampton Library for permission to quote from the Broadlands Papers. 12  A. Trollope, Phineas Finn: The Irish Member (Oxford, 1869, 1999 edn), pp. i, 241–​2. 13  A. Trollope, The Warden (Oxford, 1855, 1980 edn), pp. 189–​90.

158   David Brown of control of the news is extended, in the twentieth century, to include not just powerful editors but press barons and magnates as well, the notion of the Fourth Estate as an engine of public opinion, or a site of open political exchange, is yet further brought into question. A focus on the individuals in the story—​the politicians, the editors, and the journalists, as well as the proprietors—​must consider questions of control, of what is now known as ‘spin’, and, ultimately, of democratic accountability. But one must also consider the stuff with which these figures worked. Controlling an agenda inevitably also means defining what constitutes ‘news’. ‘Opinions’, comments, or editorials might just as easily be presented as news as was a political ‘fact’, such as legislation to extend the franchise, or the signing of a treaty; and so shaping what went in and what was left out was just as important as how and by whom it was presented. Indeed, it might even be said that the interpretative element is what transformed newspapers into their modern form, from indigestible chronicles into something that actually made sense of what was happening, and therefore created ‘the news’.14 We might call it agenda-​setting, or censorship, or spin, or political control, and ask at what point it becomes something more like propaganda; but under whatever label we consider it, what constitutes ‘political news’ is just as important a question as what impact that ‘news’ might be said to have had. To ask questions such as ‘what is the role of the press’, ‘what is the press for, and for whom’, or ‘does the press shape or reflect opinion’ (let alone deciding whose opinion) presupposes that we might be able to offer some neat answers. But, of course, there are multiple answers, varying across time, space, class, and gender (and probably many other things as well), that suggest that while political historians, press historians, or political historians of the press might be able to frame their subject within certain parameters and terms of reference, these will almost always be fluid and, to varying degrees, unsatisfactory or incomplete. If there was one thing about which Victorians could agree with regard to the press (and it is not necessarily certain that they could agree even on this), it was perhaps that one of the chief characteristics of the British press was its superiority over that to be found elsewhere. Shaftesbury, for example, might have complained in 1875 that the press ‘has no seriousness; no fixity of view, or greatness of design’, that everything about it was ‘for sale and for ambition’, and it was ‘cynical, indifferent, and never solemn’. Yet, for all these flaws, it was ‘vastly superior to the Continental & American Press’.15 In this sense, a history of the press might be part of a history of the fashioning of a national identity, and in terms of modern British history, one thing that might provide a medium for identifying strands of ‘Britishness’.

14 Pettegree, The Invention of News, pp. 8–​11.

15  Diary of Shaftesbury, 11 Jan. 1876, Broadlands Papers, SHA/​PD/​10. Shaftesbury continued by saying that the British press ‘has reached, in fact, its zenith; & it will, henceforward, decline’, but this does not detract from the sense that it was preferable to that elsewhere.

The Press   159

I If the press was to exercise its role as a guardian of liberties, its freedom and independence were clearly essential. It provided a link between government and the people by which feelings could be expressed and decisions explained, but more than this, as W.R. Greg put it in 1855: In fact, newspapers are just as truly representatives of the people as legal senators, only they attain their rank by a different mode of choice: in the latter case, they are elected beforehand by the people; in the former they nominate themselves, but can retain their seat and exercise their functions only if their nominations be confirmed. If a member of the fourth estate differs with his constituents and incurs their displeasure, he must abdicate or recant as surely as a member of the Lower House, and far more promptly. He is not even allowed to wait till a dissolution.16

Here we see the beginnings of the argument that the press was actually starting to supersede Westminster as the nation’s Parliament (although, as concerns about the predominating influence of The Times by the 1870s illustrated, this was not always regarded as a positive thing17). But if the press did serve politicians more directly, said Greg, it was only so that ‘ministers can instruct and inoculate the nation’.18 Yet newspaper influence was not for sale—​journalists would, he said, be ‘impossible’ to buy.19 It has been argued elsewhere that the significant income received from the growth in revenue from advertising underpinned the independence of the press moving into the nineteenth century.20 Politicians were a source of intelligence and were thus useful to journalists, Greg continued, but while ‘conversation with English ministers and foreign ambassadors is among the most valuable sources of wisdom and knowledge open to the journalist’, and while those conversations could lead to a politician coming to exercise influence over a journalist, this was only a reflection of the wider fact that those who live ‘at the great centre of affairs’ will ‘all take the colour of the tree they feed on’. The wonder, for Greg, was that in spite of this, newspaper writers retained so much independence and ‘individuality of thought’.21 The Fourth Estate, therefore, was just that, and not simply an appendage of the Third.22 Close connections between press 16 

[W.R. Greg], ‘The Newspaper Press’, Edinburgh Review, (Oct. 1855), 481. A. Marr, My Trade (London, 2004), p. 19. 18  [Greg], ‘Newspaper Press’, 482. 19  [Greg], ‘Newspaper Press’, 485. 20  I. Asquith, ‘Advertising and the Press in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: James Perry and the Morning Chronicle 1790–​1821’, Historical Journal, 18 (1975), 703–​24. Asquith concludes that ‘it may not be an exaggeration to claim that it was the growth of advertising revenue that was the most important single factor in enabling the press to emerge as the fourth estate of the realm’ (721). See also Schweizer, ‘Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in the Later Hanoverian Era’, 32–​48 (esp. 33–​6). 21  [Greg], ‘Newspaper Press’, 486. 22  [Greg], ‘Newspaper Press’, 487. 17 

160   David Brown and politicians, argued W.T. Stead in the 1880s, only served to lend newspaper accounts more weight, since they were thus demonstrably informed by first-​hand knowledge of events and views from an editor who was the ‘natural confidant and ready helper of all those who are endeavouring to serve the country’.23 Thus was widely articulated a standard trope of press history that would long be perpetuated: that it served the country and government only so long as it remained separate from what Frederick Greenwood described as ‘the political machine’.24 Yet Greenwood’s own record as a newspaper editor revealed some of the problems with this: he described himself as a ‘sceptical tory’ and ‘independent conservative’, and when the new owner of the Pall Mall Gazette, which Greenwood edited, declared in 1880 that it was to become a Liberal journal, Greenwood left the paper to edit the newly established and Conservative St James’s Gazette. In 1885 Greenwood even offered the Gazette to Lord Randolph Churchill as ‘your own organ at your own disposal’, and though Churchill declined, it does nothing to remove the sense that Greenwood’s insistence on the importance of press independence was somewhat disingenuous.25 After all, while at the Gazette, Greenwood had suggested that his editorial position gave him a power equal to at least half a dozen seats in Parliament.26 Reflecting this ambiguity, Thomas Escott, until recently a leader writer for the Standard, suggested in an article published in 1875 that while independence was important to press influence, the ‘English press’ had become little more than ‘the creature of the English Parliament’; likewise Frederic Harrison, a regular contributor to the Fortnightly Review, described journalism as ‘the appendage of the Commons’.27 While this dependent relationship was not necessarily detrimental to the sense of newspapers’ importance—​Escott, for example, maintained that The Times remained both independent and influential in spite of its relationship with politicians (its large size protected it from overt manipulation, he said)—​and could as others had suggested indicate a well-​informed rather than a well-​ controlled press, it does open up questions about what we would today call spin. As soon as the power of the press was revealed, politicians had sought to control it. Daniel Defoe, who had launched the Weekly Review of the Affairs of France in 1704, was regularly paid retainers by leading politicians; Robert Walpole had bought newspapers outright.28 It was Lord Bute’s attempt to shape opinion through a government paper that had first provoked Wilkes. And thereafter no serious politician could afford to ignore the press: even the Duke of Wellington, while ‘despising the press on the one hand’, could not avoid spending ‘hours poring over it on the other’.29 23 

W.T. Stead, ‘The Future of Journalism’, Contemporary Review, (Nov. 1886), 669. See, for example, F. Greenwood, ‘The Press and Government’, Nineteenth Century, (July 1890), 118. 25  A.J.A. Morris, ‘Greenwood, Frederick (1830–​1909)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, 2010. 26  S. Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain: vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century (London, 1981), p. 14. 27  T.H.S. Escott, ‘Politics and the Press’, Fraser’s Magazine, (July 1875), 41. 28 Pettegree, The Invention of News, p. 11. 29  P. Jupp, British Politics on the Eve of Reform: The Duke of Wellington’s Administration, 1828–​30 (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 348. 24 

The Press   161 These problems are reflected in the ways press historians have conceptualized the subject. James Curran, for example, has outlined several ‘rival narratives of media history’, competing to explain the relationship between the evolution of mass communications and the making of modern society, and the majority of these narratives conform to an ‘affirmative’ narrative model. Thus, for example, within this progressive structure, a ‘liberal narrative’ of newspaper growth in which the development of a free and independent press ‘empowered the people’ and a ‘populist narrative’ underpinned by a sense that an increasingly affordable and therefore commercially sensitive media became ‘more responsive to popular demand’ and, by extension, liberated from the narrow cultural tastes and prejudices of the Victorian intelligentsia, both argue for the rise of the newspaper press, from the eighteenth century onward, as an integral part of the emergent democratic project. There remains, however, scope for such Whiggish narratives to be questioned, and what is presented in Curran’s taxonomy as the ‘radical narrative’ argues that, in fact, ‘the development of the media introduced more dark than light’ as political elites continued to exercise considerable control and influence.30 Influenced by this radical narrative, this chapter particularly seeks to raise questions about the role of the press and how its role should be understood. If the relationship between politicians and journalists was ambiguous, it did at least suggest that the ways in which journalists wrote was important as a measure of their independence and integrity, and the strength of their claims to represent the people as well as politicians. According to William Greg, good liberal that he was, the ‘high tone and character of journalism’ were due in no small part to the ‘exemption from all the petty vanities of authorship which the custom of anonymous writing involves’. Unlike France, therefore, journalists in Britain were apparently motivated by a sense of ‘usefulness’: British journalists will therefore generally be men of earnest convictions, preferring power to reputation, more anxious to propagate what they deem sound opinions than to earn celebrity by the ostensible advocacy of them, devoted rather to the furtherance of public objects than to the service of their own ambitions, and content to be influential at the price of being obscure.31

Greg’s idealized view was increasingly challenged as the century wore on. Richard Cobden, not one to ignore an abuse when he saw it, saw plenty of evidence in mid-​century

30  J. Curran, Media and Power (London, 2002), pp. 3–​54 (on the ‘liberal narrative’, see esp. pp. 4–8; on the ‘populist’, pp. 12–​23, and on the ‘radical’, pp. 33–​6). Curran articulates six principal narratives, each with definable ‘key moments’ and each of which, with the exception of the ‘radical’, is defined by a progressive impact—​‘Liberal’ (key moment: the lapse of print licensing in 1695; outcome: ‘popular empowerment’); ‘Feminist’ (suffragette triumph 1918; ‘weakening of patriarchy’); ‘Populist’ (1940s and 1950s; ‘consumer pleasure’); ‘Libertarian’ (1960s; ‘greater freedom and tolerance’); ‘Anthropological’ (early eighteenth century; ‘greater social inclusion’); and, finally, ‘Radical’ (second half of the nineteenth century; ‘elite control’). 31  [Greg], ‘Newspaper Press’, 487.

162   David Brown journalism of corruption stemming from unduly close relations between politicians and members of the press. He singled out Palmerston for particular criticism, as the Foreign Secretary apparently used Secret Service funds to bribe journalists and appointed newspaper friends to comfortable diplomatic posts, but he identified other ministerial culprits too. The Times in particular Cobden thought to be well favoured, and he claimed to be able to ‘recite many examples’.32 Openness was the only remedy, which meant, Cobden insisted, an end to anonymous writing in the press.33 In 1867, an article in the Contemporary Review suggested that so long as articles remained unsigned, it ‘will be felt to be an intolerable anomaly that while our public affairs are conducted by men who come into the light of day, public opinion upon them should be formed and guided by men who remain in the dark’ (this one in the Review, by the way, was signed—​by J. Boyd Kinnear). Editors writing anonymously, suggested Kinnear, acquired a sort of divine eminence, and their words, partisan and often unsubstantiated, carried a dangerous weight which in irresponsible hands could provoke domestic and international conflict.34 This of course makes grand and important claims for the ability of the press to guide opinion, but as W.T. Stead argued later, this guiding role would be diminished if writers continued to hide behind a newspaper’s authorial ‘We’: power, he insisted, ‘should be associated with responsibility’.35 Indeed, as Frederick Greenwood pointed out, the eminence of the period’s most important journals frequently rested on the personality of their editors above all else; people such as Thomas Barnes and John Thaddeus Delane of The Times, Thomas Perry of the Morning Chronicle, or Alexander Russel of the Scotsman.36 This would accord with the interpretation of people such as Jean Chalaby who have argued for the emergence of a more professional and independent ‘journalistic field’ after the mid-​1850s, but at the same time points to a significant degree of power concentrated in the hands of a small class of influential writers, which should raise important questions about the ways in which the press shaped opinion. Focusing on newspaper writers should also encourage us to ask for whom they were writing. Many of the new and more numerous ‘professional journalists’ emerging after the repeal of the taxes on knowledge at mid-​century were now writing for the greatly expanded penny press market. But in terms of political influence it is striking how few contemporary commentators regarded these publications as a serious part of the narrative of politics, at least in terms of the ability of the press to influence parliamentary life. W.T. Stead dismissed the cheap papers in 1886 as offering little more than an unthinking 32 

Cobden to T. Hodgskin, 14 Oct. 1857, Cobden Papers, BL, Add. Ms. 43669, ff. 180-​1; Cobden to H. Richard, 21 Mar. 1857, 13 Apr. 1857, Cobden Papers, BL, Add. Ms. 43658, ff. 287–​8, 303–​6. 33  Mr Cobden and ‘The Times’. Correspondence between Mr Cobden, M.P., and Mr Delane, Editor of ‘The Times’; with a Supplementary Correspondence between Mr Cobden, and the Editor of the ‘Daily Telegraph’ (Manchester, 1864). See also Cobden-​Delane Controversy. Opinions of the Liberal Press on the Correspondence between Mr Cobden M.P., and Mr Delane, Editor of ‘The Times’ (Manchester, 1864). 34  J.B. Kinnear, ‘Anonymous Journalism’, Contemporary Review, (July 1867), 324–​39 (quotation from 339). 35  Stead, ‘Future’, 663. 36  F. Greenwood, ‘The Newspaper Press’, The Nineteenth Century, (May 1890), 837–​8.

The Press   163 regurgitation of party lines; that is, they lacked any real independent voice at a time when the public had already ‘commenced to emancipate itself from this despotism of imposition’ by political wire-​pullers. For example, said Stead, while heavyweight politicians such as Lord Salisbury and Lord Carnarvon would write for journals such as the Quarterly Review, they would never contribute to the penny press;37 this was an indication of the fact that only certain opinions mattered, and thus exaggerated claims by the press to speak for the (whole) nation need to be more carefully considered. Others have observed that, beyond the middle and upper classes, the appetite for political news may have been limited. Foreign affairs were always popular, to be sure, but as Aled Jones has shown, beyond that, working-​class interest in wider political stories was more limited.38 Cobden—​who hoped specifically to invigorate working-​class opinion through the press, as we have seen—​recognized that, even when dealing with a topic of great interest to the wider public, it was all too easy to lose the readers’ attention. And if the tone could be off-​putting to readers, so, apparently, could the sheer volume of journals and articles: by the 1890s, according to an article in the Nineteenth Century, the growing number of papers clamouring for attention had simply generated what it called ‘a babel more tiresome than impressive, so far as the general reader is concerned’.39 But whether the public was interested or not, the papers read by politicians were arguably not all catering for, or representing, a wide spectrum of opinion. In Whitby in late 1871, Gladstone suggested that the metropolitan press subjected the proceedings of Parliament to more severe scrutiny than did the provincial press. And this, he explained, was significant because ‘the opinions of the clubs, rather than the opinions of this great nation, are reflected in a considerable portion of the metropolitan press’.40 It was an acknowledgement of the fact that despite the apparent rise of an independent and professional newspaper industry, its ability to speak for the nation was limited, essentially, to representing the views of a vociferous middle class to which a London-​ centric political culture paid excessive attention. The opinion of the nation, captured to varying degrees in the newspapers published outside London, apparently had little tangible impact on politicians who, regardless of whatever changes were being witnessed in political culture and the growth of platform and extra-​parliamentary politics, remained largely insulated within a metropolitan bubble. Not that this should be taken to suggest there was not an important role for the press in the development of radical and working-​class politics. The cheap, often illegal, papers of the early nineteenth century that sought to energize and direct working-​class opinion were clearly very important in giving radical politics the means to flourish. As Malcolm 37 

Stead, ‘Future’, 46, 48. See Jones, Powers of the Press, p. 198: ‘Numbers and categories of subjects debated at the Hope and Anchor Inn, Birmingham, January 1858 to December 1862’. The approximate figures (derived from Jones’ histogram) are: The arts: 9; British politics: 31; Economic policy: 12; Foreign affairs: 61; Local politics: 12; Military: 5; Moral issues: 14; The press: 3; Religion: 21; Science: 4; Social policy: 47; Other: 4. 39  Greenwood, ‘Newspaper Press’, 836. 40  See ‘The Modern Newspaper’, British Quarterly Review, (1872), 348–​80, here 370; The Times, 4 Sept. 1871. 38 

164   David Brown Chase has demonstrated, for example, the establishment of the Northern Star (and a wealth of other, smaller titles) from the late 1830s onwards gave Chartism a coherent voice—​a voice, moreover, that ‘imbued readers with a sense of belonging to a common crusade’. The use of the press thus meant that the Chartist message was more easily communicated than was possible by speaking tours and local campaigning alone, and this helped to transform Chartism into a genuinely national movement with a clarity of purpose and a reach that it would not otherwise have had. Indeed, it is not insignificant that Chase has judged that, in ‘retrospect, Chartism may be described as situated on the cusp of the transition from a largely oral to a mainly print-​based popular culture’, and it was the ability of key Chartist figures such as Feargus O’Connor (who was intimately connected with the Northern Star) to ‘thrive in both worlds’ that made them ‘impossible to ignore’.41 But while the radical and unstamped press undoubtedly played a fundamental role in the widening and deepening of political life in the early nineteenth century, it is uncertain whether they were anything more than ‘a cause of concern to Government, magistrates, and educationalists, seeking to manipulate to eradicate the radical underworld’,42 in the wider field of political journalism and newspapers. This only highlights the extent to which it remains difficult to draw out a coherent narrative of the political press: while papers such as the Northern Star served a vital function in the ultimate enrichment of political culture, political action (more specifically ‘high-political’ action) and the exercise of power were largely influenced by, or conducted through, a relatively narrowly defined press circle. Whether an expanded press had brought political, even democratic, benefits is further complicated if one turns to the nature of this enlarged newspaper world. Of course, technology meant that more newspapers could be produced, more cheaply and for more people, and conventionally this was woven into narratives of political progress. But, there is a ‘but’. While the reduction in duties on papers after the mid-1850s is generally seen to have made newspapers cheaper and more accessible, it also brought changes in the structure and character of the newspapers themselves which must be acknowledged. Cheaper newspapers increasingly adopted a ‘principle of combination’ in order to reduce costs and make gains from economies of scale, most obviously in terms of foreign news and the growing reliance on sources such as Reuters.43 While news relayed by telegraph was more rapid and immediate—​seen nowhere more obviously in its early forms than in reports from the Crimea in the 1850s, for example—​it has been suggested that this led in part to a reduction in the variety of actual opinions expressed in the newspapers. An article in the British Quarterly Review in 1872 drew

41 

M. Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, 2007), esp. pp. 16–​17, 44–​5, 77–​8 (quotations from pp. 17 and 45). 42  P. Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study in Working-​Class Radicalism of the 1830s (Oxford, 1970), p. x. 43  For a contemporary comment on the nature and significance of the growth of Reuters, see [A. Wynter], ‘Who is Mr Reuter?’, Once a Week, 4 (23 Feb. 1861), 243–​6, in A. King and J. Plunkett, Victorian Print Media: A Reader (Oxford, 2005), pp. 146–​9. On Reuters more widely, see D. Read, The Power of News: The History of Reuters (Oxford, 1992).

The Press   165 attention to this ‘sameness’ of reports and how it ‘diminish[ed] the editorial sense of responsibility’. And this, according to that journal, had contributed to a wider malaise in terms of newspaper writing, not just in terms of foreign news: leading articles were on the whole still well written, it judged, but reporting itself was much curtailed. Only a small number of papers, apparently, now bothered to report on politics in any detail (this was an unwelcome comparison with what it took to be the superior levels of parliamentary reporting in France), and where parliamentary politics were reported it was very much at the whim of the reporting journalist whose rush to catch a train, or other banal practical considerations, might lead to ‘important matters being slurred over’ or even ‘lost sight of altogether’. And we could also add to this question of accuracy and fullness of reporting some more practical considerations: quick the electric telegraph might have been, but the reports could often be distorted or mangled in a physical sense, undermining their legibility, their coherence, and, ultimately, their usefulness.44 By 1890 it was possible for a contributor to the journal The Nineteenth Century to ‘ask whether it is true that while the scope of newspaper influence has widened so prodigiously it has become less powerful’, answering its own question by observing that the ‘influence of newspaper writing in political affairs has not increased proportionately with its scope, or anything like it’. Indeed, this article argued, the press enjoyed more influence during Palmerston’s lifetime than it did in the 1890s. In the 1840s, ’50s and ’60s, the argument went, ‘the machinery of Government was more limited, more compact, more capable of being influenced immediately by any single powerful agency than in these days of diffused and confused authority’. Politics and political questions were simpler too, apparently: ‘the faddist’ did not exist and so public affairs were less complex and varied, which meant a journalist could more easily master his subject: by the late nineteenth century he was, apparently, ‘lost if he has to run into a dozen “side issues” after as many several packs of readers’.45 The analysis is evidently partial but if journalism was no longer able to keep pace with diversified, enlarged, and more complicated politics, its role as a meaningful Fourth Estate is certainly compromised. But, by the same token, while this article was concerned about a newspaper’s ability to provide an accurate picture of politics to its readers and to encapsulate its readers’ opinions on the questions of the day, the apparent simplicity of Palmerston’s day—​if it existed—​might have worked the other way too, and we might suggest that a simpler political structure and a more limited newspaper audience made it that much easier for a politician to coerce and control the press and, by extension, public opinion. It is significant, then, that as late as the mid-​1880s, W.T. Stead still saw the potential of a modern newspaper that could be ‘a great secular or civic church and democratic university’ and would represent a ‘vast new stride in the direction of intelligent and self-​conscious government’ as a hope for the future rather than a feature of the present, let alone the past. It is a reminder that we should not overstate or oversimplify the role of the press.

44  45 

‘The Modern Newspaper’, British Quarterly Review, (1872), 357–​62. Greenwood, ‘Newspaper Press’, 836.

166   David Brown

II In large part, the problem is best understood in terms of perceptions of the role of the newspaper as much as, or perhaps more than, its actual purpose and impact. Much writing on (political) newspapers has simply built on Victorian foundations of the idealized, improving mission of the press. Key, not to say seminal, studies of the nineteenth-​century press perpetuated the idea that this was essentially the story of the relationships between politicians and political parties on the one hand and journalists and newspapers on the other, and that the Victorian period witnessed the ‘rise’ of the political press to complement a maturing and enlarging political world (swiftly followed by its twentieth-​century ‘fall’).46 While these studies remain extremely valuable guides to the development of the press, more recent work has sought to move the debate forward and to structure a history of the press within new conceptual frameworks. As Mark Hampton has suggested, the cultivation of a ‘vision’ of the press as an improver and educator of society has in many ways defined the parameters of debates about the role of the press in the years that followed.47 And so the difficulties faced by newspapers in realising the didactic role bequeathed to them by Victorian ideals inevitably created a growing sense of crisis as the era of ‘new journalism’ (c. 1880–​1914) dawned, in which a more commercially minded media overcame notions of public improvement. The problem for early twentieth-​ century newspapers was that the readership that needed to be educated seemed not to be sufficiently rational to benefit from the opportunities provided by the press. Thus some new conception of the press’ role was required: the press might no longer have to prepare the people for political advance, as Victorian idealists had hoped, but instead, in a ‘representative model’, newspapers might be seen as actually ‘constituting the readers’ exercise in self-​government’.48 It seemed increasingly that an educative role for the press was simply implausible as politics encompassed ‘the masses’ and newspapers became increasingly concerned with turning a profit. Victorian anxieties about levels of popular interest in political news gave way to the realization that ‘the people’ just did not seem to be very bothered at all. Jonathan Rose, for example, has painted a picture of the parochial and local preoccupations of

46  See, for example, A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press, c.1780–​1850 (London, 1949), L. Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford, 1985), and S. Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain. Volume 1: The Nineteenth Century and Volume 2: The Twentieth Century (London, 1981, 1984). For a couple of recent examples focusing specifically on the relationship between prime ministers and the media, see P. Brighton, Original Spin: Downing Street and the Press in Victorian Britain (London, 2016) on the nineteenth century and C. Seymour-​Ure, Prime Ministers and the Media: Issues of Power and Control (Oxford, 2003) on the twentieth. 47  M. Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–​1950 (Champaign, IL, 2004). 48  Ibid., p. 106.

The Press   167 the working classes and their limited interest in the ‘wider world’ in which newspapers carrying national or international news enjoyed very little currency within traditional working-​class communities.49 This is of course not to say that there was no interest in ‘news’, and the growth of the mass-​market newspapers of the early twentieth century—​notably titles such as the Daily Mail, Daily Express, and the Daily Mirror, with their punchy, illustrated accounts focusing on patriotism and popular interest stories—​ showed that there was still a market, but arguably for something different. Even the titles might tell a story—​newspapers were now seemingly reflecting events, or posting information, more than enlightening and improving their readers. Something had clearly changed since the Chartists sought to energize the workers through the press. But given the short shrift accorded to the non-​metropolitan press by the political classes as Britain moved into the twentieth century,50 this only served further to confirm the historian’s gaze on London newspapers and a narrative of patronage, proprietorship, and the management of news.51 In the era of so-​called ‘new journalism’ at the turn of the century, and the rise of the press barons in the early twentieth, the narrative history of the political press took a sharp turn, with important questions about who, what, and why reframed for new, enlarged audiences. The problem for contemporaries and commentators was that they were still trying to conceptualize and define the political press using a Victorian vocabulary of improvement and progress in which, despite growing commercial pressures, it remained, as W.T. Stead put it in 1886, ‘at once the eye and ear of the tongue of the people . . . the noble speech if not the voice of the democracy’.52 Stead’s article, titled ‘Government by Journalism’, only served to underline the extent to which the nineteenth-​century ideal had finally, apparently, become a reality. But if the newspaper was now somehow part of the political machine, rather than its independent, external critic and counterweight, what did that actually mean in practice?53 What was certain was that the press had become, or was becoming, more commercialized. Lord Thompson, at various times proprietor of the Scotsman, The Times, and the Sunday Times, was perhaps only half-​joking when he suggested that editorial comment had become ‘the stuff between the ads’.54 But there was a serious point here: as nineteenth-​century concerns about limiting the political nation gave way to an age of mass democracy, so too did Victorian snobbery about the press give way to Edwardian populism, in which papers such as the Daily Mail tried to offer office boys something less 49 

J. Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London, 2001), pp. 343–​4. 50 Koss, Rise and Fall . . . Volume 2, pp. 2–​3. 51  Thus, for example, the interest of N.J. Crowson, ed., Fleet Street, Press Barons and Politics: The Journals of Collin Brooks, 1932–​1940 (Cambridge, 1998). 52  From W.T. Stead, ‘Government by Journalism’, Contemporary Review, 49 (1886), quoted in G. Boyce, ‘The Fourth Estate: The Reappraisal of a Concept’, in G. Boyce, J. Curran, and P. Wingate, eds., Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (London, 1978), p. 25. 53  See Boyce, ‘The Fourth Estate’, pp. 28–​9. 54 Koss, Rise and Fall . . . Volume 1, p. 6; Marr, My Trade, p. 111.

168   David Brown stuffy than the grand titles of the past.55 But if the new mass-​circulation newspapers had to offer something for everyone, there was always the risk that they would offer nothing to anyone. While proprietors recognized a popular appetite to be informed, this did not necessarily translate into a desire to be politically engaged: Northcliffe would warn his editors that there should be ‘fewer and shorter articles on politics’ because ‘heavy politics’ would ‘prevent you getting circulation’.56 The pendulum had swung, arguably, from persuasion and propaganda to, simply, profit. This had important implications for the nature of political news and its reporting. While the rise of the press baron had apparently initially threatened the impartiality of the press, and much attention was devoted to the extent to which Northcliffe, Beaverbrook, and the like would steer their papers to follow their own personal politics—​a concern voiced again, and with more urgency, in the later twentieth century in the case of Rupert Murdoch and others—​in fact this shift actually went to the heart of questions about the press and democracy. Kennedy Jones, editor of the Daily Mail under Northcliffe’s ownership, observed to one of his predecessors: ‘You left journalism a profession and we have made it a branch of commerce.’57 A recognition of the importance of stable revenue to a newspaper is nothing new in work on the press. As Ivon Asquith pointed out some time ago, even for the newspapers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for all the talk of improvement, there was a fundamental truth that newspapers were, or could be, a very lucrative business; this rested on a healthy circulation and, not unrelated to this, substantial advertising revenues, and this could mean a trade-​off between political coverage and advertising space.58 Yet whether a more commercially minded press was a positive or a negative development in terms of political representation remains an open question. Conventional accounts have presented the history of the political press as gradually sliding down the slippery slope from nineteenth-​century high-​mindedness and political improvement to the twentieth-​ century debasement of political news and a decline in the influence of the press. The editor became less important than the office manager and if the press did still enjoy influence, it was exercised by proprietors and those with the means to buy it, rather than politicians and readers.59 More than this, political news itself was, apparently, passé and commentary was redundant: newspapers had to be punchy and popular if they were to sell, and this meant sharper headlines, shorter paragraphs, a focus on the sensational and extraordinary—​and, down the line, bingo and prizes in lieu of serious political content, a process of ‘dumbing-​down’ in most accounts.60 And yet, for those historians keen still to see the press as a force for democratic progress, this market-​based structure was actually a positive development: newspapers were responding directly to the tastes and interests of their readers—​how else could they persuade them to buy the things?—​and 55 

See K. Williams, Read All About It! A History of the British Newspaper (London, 2010), p. 130.

56 Williams, Read All About It!, pp. 142–​3. 57 

Quoted in Williams, Read All About It!, p. 126. Asquith, ‘Advertising and the Press’, esp. 703, 709, 711, 719. 59  See, for example, Boyce, ‘The Fourth Estate’, pp. 36–​7. 60  See, for example, Williams, Read All About It!, pp. 142-​3; Boyce, ‘The Fourth Estate’, p. 37. 58 

The Press   169 so, in a sense, were the ultimate democratic barometers of public opinion. If political news was not relevant, perhaps it was because politics seemed less relevant. But the press was still there to show political historians the broader currents in popular feeling, if not opinions, and to bring pressure to bear on politics, even if that was by cultivating campaigns and stirring up emotional responses and patriotism. For historians of the press, this has posed difficult questions about who the press was/​ is for, and what its role was/​is. Increasingly newspaper history, for the later twentieth century, has been subsumed within, or alternatively written in contrast to, wider media history. The newer media forms of radio and television, and more recently still the internet, have substantially changed the way political news has been reported, consumed, and understood, and this has threatened to make the traditional newspaper redundant. Certainly the promise of an enlarged and diversified press offered by the moves out of Fleet Street in the 1980s failed to deliver the new era some had forecast, as a plethora of new titles such as Eddie Shah’s short-​lived Today seemed to show that the opportunities for new papers were limited. Some practising journalists seem increasingly to see their ‘trade’ as having become something of an insider’s occupation, in which reporters and editors communicate more with each other than with wider communities.61 The business of communicating with the population, in parallel, has become the concern of the broadcast media (which frequently summarizes the press anyway) and historiographically familiar questions have been reframed to accommodate technological change focusing now, for example, on the extent to which it is the priorities of the radio and television media that will determine the nature of political coverage, making those broadcasters the ‘masters’ of our democracy.62 It would require a separate chapter to examine fully the dynamics and implications of the rise of these new media, and as a point of continuity through 200 years of British politics it is important to maintain a focus here on the print media represented by the press, but the growth of broadcast media reporting in the second half of the twentieth century in particular has been further fuel on the funeral pyre of the traditional political press: a soundbite culture and the immediacy offered by ‘live’ reporting relegated the printed press to the role of little more than a vehicle for political ‘conversation’ as it lost its place as a repository of truth, or even as narrator of events.63 And so the historiography of the twentieth century political press has been one of decline, even depoliticization. Indeed, many studies of the press in the twentieth century read more and more as business history, charting the circulation wars between titles and the collapse of the weaker or less far-​sighted in a Darwinian story of some sort of nightmare on Fleet Street.64 Stephen Koss argued for a mid-​century apotheosis for the political press in which it finally achieved its full independence of political 61 Marr, My Trade (passim, but see, for example, p. 146 for some illustrations). 62 

J. Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009), p. 254 (in this case Lawrence is referring specifically to election coverage, but the point, arguably, pertains more widely). 63  Ibid., p. 100. 64  As an example, see Williams, Read All About It!

170   David Brown parties and governmental control.65 But this is not altogether convincing if that is to suggest there was a long-​term legacy. Andrew Marr sensed a couple of ‘moments’ when public intellectuals briefly held sway through the press and drove public and political debate, first in the 1940s and ’50s and then again in the 1970s and ’80s, but both were fleeting and soon gone.66 More systematically, someone like James Curran would argue that Koss’ idealized vision could not be sustained and, in fact, throughout subtly changing chronological periods, the Victorian-​vision-​finally-​realized actually just faded away. Curran has offered a three-​stage chronology for the later twentieth-​century press: the growth of press autonomy from 1945 to 1974; the ‘rise of coalition journalism’ between 1974 and 1992; followed by ‘pragmatism and journalism’ until 2009. While perceiving a high degree of continuing party loyalty on the part of the press in the 1940s through to the 1970s, Curran has described this as a period in which there was a ‘closer political correspondence between press and public than there had been earlier (or was to be later)’. The emergence of a number of right-​of-​centre proprietors thereafter, however, coincided with a shift to the right in British politics more generally in the 1970s, which Curran, rejecting the idea of a ‘fawning’ relationship, suggests saw a significant portion of the (national) press going ‘into coalition with the government’ (Curran’s emphasis). As British political fault-​lines shifted again as Thatcher’s legacy unravelled and New Labour took centre stage, ideology gave way to commercial interests and the ‘political crusade of the 1980s had changed to pragmatic accommodation’.67 This does not really speak of an independent press fulfilling a clear or consistent role in the history of democratic progress. Where does this leave the political historian? The dominant, and convenient, narrative of progress and improvement of a gradually liberated press that successively educated the people and then represented them as part of an independent Fourth Estate has considerable appeal to the Whig historian wanting to chart the ‘rise of democracy’ in Britain over the last couple of centuries. But this nineteenth-​century ideal, which must in many ways still form the basis of any study of the press, is problematic. Even at the height of Victorian notions of ‘improvement’, it is clear that the model was flawed: politicians exercised influence, and editors and journalists were susceptible to manipulation, and so just what the press was free from anyway remained unclear. Whether the press barons of the twentieth century, or the advertisers who filled the space between the news (or vice versa), corrupted this democratic aspiration likewise remains unclear: giving the people what they (are thought to) want seems democratic and might have made the press a more accurate guide to the mood and preferences of ‘the people’, but at the same

65 Koss, Rise and Fall . . . Volume 2. For a discussion of Koss’ interpretation, see J. Curran, ‘Press

History’, in J. Curran and J. Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain (7th edn., London, 2010), pp. 66–​99. 66 Marr, My Trade, p, 41. 67  Curran, ‘Press History’, pp. 67–​75.

The Press   171 time it simply introduced further elements of top-​down control or influence that threatened to make the press a means of shaping opinion more than reflecting it. What makes the study of the political press interesting, therefore, is also what makes it problematic. There is no satisfactory model for understanding the press; indeed, the press cannot be studied in the singular. Some newspapers did try to improve; some sought to manipulate; some to include, some to exclude. But it is in trying to understand those processes that studies of the press remain vital to political history. Historiographically there has been a preoccupation with questions about the press and democracy, but looking forward it is perhaps necessary to unpick that in new ways. It has frequently been assumed, for example, that Fleet Street and the press were male preserves just as much as Parliament and government were.68 Yet newspapers did not simply cater for female readers through the creation of ‘lifestyle’ pages, and there would be scope to work more with what James Curran has labelled the ‘feminist challenge’ to the dominant narratives of press history—​not just in terms of charting numbers of readers (as a counterpoint to Northcliffe’s maxim that ‘women can’t write and don’t want to read’), nor indeed of the number of female journalists.69 Kathryn Gleadle has pointed, briefly, to the number of women who owned or edited papers in the nineteenth century.70 But the analysis might go further to examine how this affected the definition, production, and consumption of political news over time. Much work on the press has drawn attention to technological change as a way of explaining either the growth of the press (cheaper means of mass production) or its decline (as it was superseded by more ‘sophisticated’ media), but there is perhaps scope to consider how the changing nature and fortunes of the press affected the way politics was discussed and understood. In very simple terms, the transition from dense articles and verbatim reporting of parliamentary debates to succinct articles and pithy headlines, and more recently the expansion of the letters pages into something more unregulated but certainly more diverse in the online ‘comments’ posted by readers of articles, have surely had a fundamental impact on levels of political engagement, understanding of ‘news’, and the language used to discuss it. But above all, the political role of the press needs to be recognized as more nuanced and difficult (and interesting) than a simple narrative of rise and fall, or improvement and corruption. In 1852 an editorial in The Times declared that it was not the place of the press to interfere in the duties of politicians, and thus ‘our vocation is, in one respect, inferior to theirs, for we are unable to wield the power or represent the collective dignity of the country; but in another point of view it is superior, for, unlike them, we are able to speak the whole truth without fear or favour’.71 What that signifies in terms of the role of the press was open-​ended, and, arguably, so it remains. 68 Williams, Read All About It!, pp. 128–​32. 69 

J. Curran, Media and Democracy (London, 2011), pp. 127–​30. K. Gleadle, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender, and Political Culture in Britain, 1815–​1867 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 129–​30. 71  The Times, 7 Feb. 1852. 70 

172   David Brown

Further Reading G. Boyce, J. Curran, and P. Wingate, eds., Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (London, 1978). J. Curran, Media and Power (London, 2002). J. Curran and J. Seaton, Power without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain (7th edn., London, 2010). M. Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–​1950 (Champaign, IL, 2004). A. Jones, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-​Century England (Aldershot, 1996). S. Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain. Volume 1: The Nineteenth Century and Volume 2: The Twentieth Century (London, 1981, 1984). A. Marr, My Trade (London, 2004). K. Williams, Read All About It! A History of the British Newspaper (London, 2010).

chapter 11

Devolu ti on James Mitchell

T.P. O’Connor, the Irish Nationalist MP, quipped that devolution was ‘Latin for home rule’.1 The term does indeed derive from Latin but means ‘to roll down’. It was rarely used in Parliament until the 1970s. Whether home rule, federalism, and devolution have the same or similar meanings has been a cause of controversy. At the heart of these debates is the relationship between devolved institutions and Parliament at Westminster. The key themes identified by Vernon Bogdanor run throughout the vast volume of writing—​by historians, political scientists, journalists, and politicians—​on the subject. Devolution involves: dispersal of power from a superior to an inferior political authority. More precisely, it consists of three elements: the transfer to a subordinate elected body on a geographical basis, of functions at present exercised by Parliament. These functions may be either legislative, the power to make laws, or executive, the power to make decisions within an already established legal framework.2

Devolution’s origins, according to Bogdanor, lie in Edmund Burke’s proposal in 1774 to give the American colonies some autonomy while still keeping them subordinate to Westminster. The emphasis on devolved institutions as subordinate bodies is significant. Devolution, according to this understanding, is created by Westminster and exists on Westminster’s sufferance. As Bogdanor noted, devolution needs to be understood ‘through political rather than constitutional spectacles’, as ‘power retained at Westminster might be very difficult to exercise’.3 Burke is not the only leading constitutional thinker who has been repeatedly invoked in debates on devolution in the absence of a formal entrenched written constitution. A.V. Dicey recurs in much work, especially

1 

D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (London, 1982), p. 279. V. Bogdanor, Devolution (Oxford, 1979), p. 2. 3  Ibid., p. 217. 2 

174   James Mitchell by historians writing about the ‘Irish question’, but also by scholars writing about devolution in the 1970s. Nonetheless, remarkably few works have focused specifically on the roles of public intellectuals in informing debates on devolution. Garret Fitzgerald, in reviewing Alvin Jackson’s study of Irish home rule, noted that between 1888 and 1998, ‘generations of historically conscious British and Irish politicians and civil servants repeatedly referred back to, drew upon or sought to develop variants of earlier Irish home rule schemes’.4 There has been far less evidence of lesson-​drawing across the components of the state. Devolution has mainly been discussed in national silos. This chapter aims to take devolution out of these national silos. Past experience of devolution, especially debates on the Irish question and half a century’s experience of devolved government in Northern Ireland up to 1972, has tended to be viewed in isolation from debates on devolution in other parts of the UK. Ireland and Northern Ireland in particular have generally been portrayed as places apart, but different experiences of devolution across the component parts of the UK have been seen as sui generis and so systematic comparisons have been resisted. This chapter attempts to draw out comparisons and make sense of devolution as a UK-​wide phenomenon. It will explore how the centre’s different responses to asymmetrical pressures for change resulted in an asymmetrical structure of government, or, rather, built upon existing asymmetries. This requires an understanding of how the UK territorial state developed and how differences were accommodated. Perceptions have been important in the devolution story. Understandings of the past informed twentieth-​ century politicians—​both those making demands on the centre for change and politicians at the centre responding to these demands. The chapter considers the UK’s components, identifying common themes, while explaining the logic of continuing though changing asymmetries. There are rich literatures on devolution in each component of the UK, with greater cross-​referencing across disciplines than there has been in scholarly work seeking to draw linkages and lessons across territories. Devolution has taken a variety of forms at different times in different parts of the UK. A key aim of this chapter is to describe these varieties and explain why no common form of devolution emerged. Devolution may be a form of constitutional development but it has always been linked to wider socio-​demographic and economic developments as much as to the sense of collective identities. Some interpretations emphasize the role of national identity in the demands for devolution in Scotland and Wales, while others lay more emphasis on differences in political preferences that stimulated demands for self-​government. No understanding of the politics of devolution is complete without an appreciation of the roles of identity, the party systems, political and public policy preferences, and how these changed over time. The chapter explores the dynamics of devolution: why its forms varied over time and place.

4 

G. Fitzgerald, ‘Parnell’s People’, Guardian, 26 July 2013.

Devolution   175

I Myths are important. In his study of the rise of popular sovereignty in England and America, Edmund Morgan maintained that the foundation of government requires ‘make-​believe’.5 Such myths are necessary because ‘we cannot live without them, we often take pains to prevent their collapse by moving the facts to fit the fiction, by making our world conform more closely to what we want it to be. We sometimes call it, quite appropriately, reform or reformation, when the fiction takes command and reshapes reality’.6 The myth of an ancient UK nation in which sovereignty has successively been passed from God to the monarch to Parliament has been central to debates on devolution. At root is the idea of an ancient nation. The myth of parliamentary sovereignty developed in relationship to the founding myth and was imbued with Bodin’s and later Hobbes’ indivisibility doctrine that constitutional power cannot be divided. The existence of this powerful myth inhibited the reimagining of the UK as a devolved polity, far less a federal state. Parliament at Westminster assumed a jealous role in the government of the country. Walker Connor, one of the leading scholars of nationalism, argued that nation-​ building involved nation-​destroying.7 States come into being through amalgamation of pre-​union polities—​whether through conquest, treaty, marriage, or other means—​ and each state requires its concomitant nation. Competing sources of loyalty need to be destroyed or accommodated. As Norman Davies remarked, our ‘mental maps’ are ‘deformed’ in our tendency to focus on the ‘past of countries that still exist’, with the danger of ‘reading history backwards’.8 There was nothing natural about regions, nations, or states. Those building blocks that created each of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland have largely joined Norman Davies’ vanished kingdoms. The United Kingdom was little different from other European states, though there was no systematic or consistent plan to deal with these antecedent sources of loyalty. A mix of nation-​destroying, in Connor’s sense, and accommodation occurred. Notably, there was an interplay between the territorial and religious antecedent loyalties that operated in the components of the United Kingdom. These old loyalties would need to be transmitted from one generation to the next or face the prospect of joining Davies’ vanished kingdoms. There was no design to the UK as presently constituted, and the existence of sub-​state loyalties owes much to the willingness to accommodate these distinct communities. Until recently, the strength of state nationalism lay in its unquestioned acceptance. Bookshelves heaved with works on sub-​state nationalisms—​Irish, Scottish, and Welsh—​signalling their aspirational character rather than strength. It is a 5 

E.S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York, 1988), p. 13. 6 Ibid., p. 14. 7  W. Connor, ‘Nation-​Building or Nation-​Destroying?’, World Politics, 24 (1972), 319–​55. 8  N. Davies, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-​Forgotten Europe (London, 2012), p. 4.

176   James Mitchell sign of the changing times that our electronic shelves are filling with works on English, British, and UK identity and nationalisms as these have come under threat or have been problematized. Old loyalties and sub-​state communities persisted and were accommodated and celebrated. Wales was absorbed administratively but Welsh distinctiveness persisted. In Wales, as would happen in Ireland, tensions between assimilationist and particularist tendencies were played out in the nineteenth century in religion and politics. The collective memories or myths of these developments have been important in the development of devolution. Union with Scotland involved agreeing to the continued existence of key eighteenth-​century institutions. Some of these institutions, however, lost much of their relevance over the course of Union as other institutions, notably the state itself, reached into people’s lives. The state itself accommodated Scottish distinctiveness. The nightwatchman state gradually gave way to an interventionist welfare state with a distinct Scottish dimension that was no less significant in the lives of the public than the Kirk had been previously. Central government was built on a system of Scottish Boards that came in time to be the Scottish Office. Parliamentary procedures were created, including its committee system, to parallel these administrative arrangements. Thus was born a form of devolution—​administrative devolution—​that did not threaten any interference with parliamentary sovereignty. In Peel’s words, Ireland was ‘separated by nature from that to which she is united by law’, and consequently Union was far less assimilationist than that with England, Wales, or Scotland. The 1800 Act of Union claimed to create a state that would ‘for ever after, be united into one Kingdom’.9 It was another quarter of a century before free trade was enacted and a common currency agreed. The Irish question was more than a constitutional question. In 1844, Disraeli summed it up: A dense population, in extreme distress, inhabit an island where there is an Established Church, which is not their Church, and a territorial aristocracy the richest of whom live in foreign capitals. Thus you have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church; and in addition the weakest executive in the world. That is the Irish Question.10

All states require the consent of the people being governed; otherwise the government must impose its will. The conditions described by Disraeli made winning Irish consent difficult. The ideology of state nationalism only became evident when challenged by Irish nationalism. Unionism was the name adopted, and remains the familiar term for state or official nationalism. Until then, Unionism was a largely uncontested fact of the state. Unionism was the nationalism that need not speak its name, such was its unchallenged strength.

9 

10 

A. O’Day and J. Stevenson, Irish Historical Documents Since 1800 (Dublin, 1992), p. 6. Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 16 Feb. 1844, col. 1016.

Devolution   177

II Scottish and Welsh devolution debates from the 1960s were rehearsed in debates on Irish home rule at the end of the nineteenth century.11 The implications of home rule for one part of the state were well appreciated long before demands for Scottish and Welsh devolution became serious concerns. Calls for federalism or home-​rule-​all-​round would be made, though no serious effort then or since has been made to draw up a workable blueprint. Federalism became and remains the rhetorical response to the asymmetries inherent in the UK state of unions. What came to be called the ‘West Lothian Question’ was well known to students of Irish history. As Brigid Hadfield commented, ‘only those with short memories have called this the West Lothian Question’.12 In his first home rule bill, Gladstone proposed the establishment of an Assembly, not a Parliament, in Dublin, and that Irish peers and MPs should be excluded from Westminster. Westminster would retain responsibility for peace, war, treaties and foreign affairs, trade, tariffs, and coinage and would continue to tax Ireland: that is, Irish taxation without representation. The Liberals split and the bill was defeated, leading to an election and the return of the Conservatives. Gladstone returned as Prime Minister in 1892 and proposed his second home rule bill. This bill proposed a reduction in the number of Irish MPs in the Commons but raised the prospect that Irish MPs would be able to vote on matters affecting the rest of the state, while no MPs would be able to vote on matters devolved to Dublin. The alternative was to allow Irish MPs to vote only on matters that were reserved for Westminster, the ‘in-​and-​out’ proposal. There were two principal objections: distinguishing between reserved and devolved matters would be difficult, and it would make parliamentary government difficult, if not impossible, if the government of the day only had a majority for reserved but not devolved matters, or vice versa. The same issues would be confronted less than a century later and provoked the same opposition. In introducing his 1886 Irish home rule bill in Parliament, Gladstone cited Dicey’s Law of the Constitution. The Liberal Prime Minister stated that the work ‘brings out in a more distinct and emphatic manner the peculiarity of the British Constitution in one point, to which, perhaps, we seldom have occasion to refer—​namely, the absolute supremacy of Parliament’.13 This provoked Dicey, who criticized Gladstone’s use of his work to justify home rule. Devolved government was fundamentally incompatible with parliamentary sovereignty from a Diceyian perspective. Home rule challenged the idea of unlimited and indivisible parliamentary sovereignty and provoked a reaction that would be expressed 70 years later by Tam Dalyell in opposition to Scottish devolution.14

11 

D.G. Boyce, ‘Dicey, Kilbrandon and Devolution’, Political Quarterly, 46 (1975), 280–​92. B. Hadfield, The Constitution of Northern Ireland (Belfast, 1989), p. 89. 13  Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 8 Apr. 1886, col. 1048. 14  T. Dalyell, Devolution: The End of Britain (London, 1977). 12 

178   James Mitchell Irish home rule was stymied by a mixture of strong opposition within a concentrated part of Ireland, attitudes at the centre, and worries about the implications for the state as a whole. It has often been noted that legislative devolution was first introduced in that part of the UK that had most insistently opposed home rule. The Northern Ireland Parliament was originally part of a package designed to accommodate differences within differences. Home rule would be granted to Ireland in the form of a Parliament in Dublin, but a separate Parliament would be established in Belfast to accommodate opposition to Irish home rule there. A new polity was created to address hostility to home rule that was particularly concentrated in, though by no means exclusive to, the north.15 The Civil Service’s ‘swift and highly efficient’ establishment of the new administration16 was not matched by statesmanlike qualities of the political class that would govern Northern Ireland. Devolved and decentralized government across time and place has been established to permit, even encourage, diversity and public policy experimentation. Stormont, however, turned on its head US Justice Brandeis’ famous description of American states as laboratories in which ‘novel social and economic experiments’ would be tested ‘without risk to the rest of the country’. Terence O’Neill, Stormont Premier between 1963 and 1969, described how the ‘main task of the separate government in Northern Ireland has not been to emphasize differences but to encourage conformity of standards’.17 In its first incarnation, devolution Stormont-​style resembled administrative devolution more than conventional understandings of decentralized government. Stormont posed no threat to Parliament at Westminster as a large majority of its membership throughout its existence had no desire to challenge Westminster, nor saw Stormont as a laboratory for experimentation. The legitimacy of this new polity would be questioned by Irish nationalists who viewed the territorial integrity of Ireland much as opponents viewed the integrity of the UK. The key difference, and a theme that would recur decades later, was in how home rule was conceived. Was it a stepping stone to independence or a means of protecting the state’s integrity? Was it devolution in any meaningful sense or merely a means of extracting resources from the centre for the benefit of particular interests in Northern Ireland? The history of Stormont has attracted considerable scholarly (and other) interest, though John Whyte remarked that discrimination was ‘almost the only area of Northern Ireland society and politics which had been at all extensively explored’.18 For some, Stormont created an ‘Orange state’,19 though others sought more nuance and Whyte concluded that the ‘picture is not black, not white, but grey’.20 Sir Wilfrid Spender, head

15 

A.T.Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: The Roots of Conflict in Ulster (London, 1989). B.A. Follis, A State under Siege: The Establishment of Northern Ireland, 1920–​1925 (Oxford, 1995), p. 6. 17  T. O’Neill, Ulster at the Crossroads (London, 1969), pp. 77–​8. 18  J. Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland (Oxford, 1991), p. 165. 19  M. Farrell, Northern Ireland: The Orange State (London, 1976). 20 Whyte, Interpreting Northern Ireland, p. 168. 16 

Devolution   179 of the separate Northern Ireland Civil Service, described Stormont as a ‘factory of grievances’ providing a title for one of the most important works on the subject.21 Stormont was a creature of statute and theoretically no different from local government. In 1923, the Commons Speaker ruled that no question could be asked on ‘transferred matters’ in the House of Commons and Herbert Morrison, then Lord President of the Council, later denied that Stormont was ‘subordinate’. Westminster was reluctant to interfere in Stormont affairs but finally suspended Stormont in 1972. Stormont had long since lost legitimacy, if it ever had any, in the eyes of the Catholic community, and had become an embarrassment that could no longer be ignored by London. This coincided with—​indeed, was partially caused by—​‘the Troubles’ and serious financial difficulties as Stormont headed towards massive deficit. If Northern Ireland was to have the same levels of welfare as the rest of the UK, then it needed considerable subsidy. Supporters of Welsh and Scottish home rule were reluctant to learn from a place that was identified with intercommunal conflict. Yet there were important lessons to be drawn. Stormont was empowered to make laws and policies for ‘peace, order and good government’, an imperial phrase applied in the old Commonwealth. Its funding was to be based on two key sources: transferred taxes, including death duties and motor-​ vehicle licences, and reserved taxes, that would be collected by London and paid to Stormont after subtracting Northern Ireland’s imperial contribution. That was the theory but the practice was very different. Public spending costs outstripped expectations, especially for law and order. The imperial contribution became what was left after determining expenditure. While operating formally within the law, the practice of intergovernmental financial relations proved remarkably flexible and fluid, and lacked anything approaching fixed or clear governing principles.

III Stormont was replaced by what came to be known as ‘direct rule’. The UK prime minister appointed a Cabinet minister who took charge of matters previously devolved to Stormont. What was called direct rule in Northern Ireland had long been referred to as administrative devolution in Scotland. The Scottish Office came into being in 1885, in response to criticisms that Scotland was neglected in Parliament and across Whitehall. Its antecedents were boards, appointed by patronage, providing Scottish central administration for the Poor Law and public health, education, prisons, fisheries, lunacy and mental deficiency, and agriculture. These boards operated alongside the new Scottish Office during its first 40 years. The key feature of the Scottish Office was the appointment of a government minister with responsibility for ensuring Scottish interests were

21 

P. Buckland, The Factory of Grievances: Devolved Government in Northern Ireland, 1921–​39 (Dublin, 1979).

180   James Mitchell articulated at the heart of government. The Secretaryship for Scotland, upgraded to Secretary of State in 1926, was for a long time an office in search of a role. Prime Minister Salisbury invited the Duke of Richmond and Gordon to accept the office, noting that the work would not be heavy but ‘measured by the expectations of the people of Scotland it is approaching to Archangelic’ and that the ‘whole object of the move is to redress the wounded dignities of the Scotch people—​or a section of them—​who think that enough is not made of Scotland’.22 One Secretary of State for Scotland would borrow Salisbury’s comment for the title of an article reflecting on his tenure almost a century later.23 While the Scottish Office was established to redress wounded dignities, it needed to have administrative functions. Law and order were soon added to responsibility for the central administration of local authorities and education. The Scottish Office’s functions grew over time, largely with the widening reach of the state. Agriculture, housing, and health were added in just over three decades, while existing educational responsibilities also grew. By the 1930s, the piecemeal growth in responsibilities led to pressure for an overhaul of Scottish central administration. Internal Scottish Office discussion of possible reforms in the early 1930s referred to ‘administrative devolution’. The term administrative devolution had been used in the terms of reference to the Speaker’s Conference on devolution that met after the First World War, but was only fully articulated in these inter-​war discussions in Scotland.24 The reforms involved an internal reorganization of central administration but presented as a form of self-​government or Scottish control of Scottish affairs. Debate on how Scotland should be governed was coloured by inter-​ war home rule agitation, though it was far from the top of the political agenda. Scottish Office functions continued to grow, though this was neither inevitable nor irreversible. Separate National Insurance Commissions had been established for the components of the state in 1911. The Scottish Commission came under the Scottish Board of Health when it was set up in 1919, which in turn came under the Scottish Secretary, but the Scottish Commission was subsumed within the UK Ministry of National Insurance in 1945. It was a rare example of reverse devolution. A Royal Commission on Scottish Affairs, chaired by Lord Balfour, was set up in 1952 in response to further home rule agitation. The Commission maintained that background discontent had been ‘aggravated by needless English thoughtlessness and undue Scottish susceptibilities’, but there were deeper and more tangible causes.25 The functions of government had grown over time, with implications for the machinery of government. The Commission maintained that central ‘government encroachment on private activities’ had resulted in a form of centralization in London of decisions previously made in Scotland.26 The Commission called for greater sensitivity, echoing 22 

H.J. Hanham, ‘The Creation of the Scottish Office, 1881–​87’, Judical Review, 10 (1965), 229. W. Ross, ‘Approaching to Arch-​Angelic?’, in H.M. Drucker and M.G. Clarke, eds., Scottish Government Yearbook. 1978 (Edinburgh, 1978), pp. 1–​20. 24  A. Evans, ‘An Interlude of Agreement? A Reassessment of the Conference on Devolution’s “Consensus” on Powers’, Contemporary British History, 29 (2015), 424. 25  Report of the Royal Commission on Scottish Affairs, (Cmnd 9212, London, 1954), p. 12. 26 Ibid. 23 

Devolution   181 Salisbury’s observation without his cynicism. Administrative devolution was given a further push forward with more matters—​roads, piers, ferries, animal health, and justices of the peace—​transferred to the Scottish Office. The process continued with a Scottish Development Department set up in 1962 and a Scottish Economic Planning Board in 1964, and economists were appointed to the Scottish Office. Throughout its history, the Scottish Office referred both to the ministerial team appointed by the UK prime minister and the civil servants who were largely based in Scotland. A myth grew up that the civil servants had mainly been based in the Scottish headquarters in Dover House on Whitehall and that they were moved north in 1939. In fact, the bulk of administrators had always been based in Scotland and while there was a transfer of some Dover House staff to Edinburgh in the early 1930s, what happened in 1939 was the consolidation of most, though not all, existing staff in Edinburgh under one roof. St Andrew’s House, opened that year, proved too small for the burgeoning staff but would be the Edinburgh base until 1975, when New St Andrew’s House was opened. By the early 1960s, devolution had taken two different forms in the UK. In Northern Ireland, ministers were appointed by a prime minister who led the party with an overall majority. The symbolism was striking, with the Parliament modelled on Westminster right down to the colour of the green benches in the architecturally adversarial Commons chambers. The Scottish Office was more inclined to policy experimentation than Stormont, though always within strict limits. Each was more inclined to make the case for more resources than to pursue policies that ran against the Westminster and Whitehall grain. This was a model of self-​imposed limited devolution acting more as a pressure group within the system of UK government than as a form of decentralization. The Scottish Office was viewed with envy in Wales. Wales had been incorporated into Britain in a more assimilationist union than either Scotland or Ireland, while a Welsh cultural base persisted post-​union. Within a few years of the establishment of the Scottish Office, proposals were made for a Welsh Office, but the emphasis in Welsh campaigns was the protection of the language and culture, along with Church disestablishment. Welsh sensibilities had to be taken into account in the emerging interventionist welfare state. The form and extent this took varied, with education leading the way. Three relevant factors have been identified in this process: acceptance that Wales was distinct, national sentiment, and the general process of administrative change occurring across the state. The bodies that emerged, however, were not seen by everyone as leading to a Welsh Office. The most vehement opponent was Nye Bevan, founder of the National Health Service, who argued that a Welsh Secretary would be ‘nothing but a Welsh messenger boy’. A Welsh Office was set up when Labour came to power in 1964. It was modelled on the Scottish Office but had fewer responsibilities, though these grew over time. Ted Rowlands, who served as a Welsh Office Minister (1969–​70 and 1974–​5), reflected on the ‘process by which devolution of governmental responsibility within Britain has staggered forward little by little’.27 Deacon suggests that the Welsh Office had to ‘cope 27  E. Rowlands, ‘The Politics of Regional Administration: The Establishment of the Welsh Office’, Public Administration, 50 (1972), 334.

182   James Mitchell with predatory Whitehall departments, anxious not to lose any of their powers’ in its early years.28 Administrative devolution allowed for variation within a broadly agreed programme of government and ensured that the interests of its components would be articulated at the centre. It was formal acknowledgment that the UK was, in fact, a state of unions and not a unitary state. Administrative devolution was essentially, however, a nineteenth-​century idea that created problems in a more democratic twentieth century. If Scotland and Wales were distinct then why should Scottish and Welsh voters not determine Scottish and Welsh policies and priorities? This would not be a major problem when the governing party at Westminster was also the largest party in Scotland and Wales. It would become a problem under three interconnected conditions: when the UK governing party at Westminster was unpopular in Scotland and Wales; when that party was in office over a long period of time; and if that party pursued a policy agenda that was perceived to be driven by an ideology that undermined much of the post-​war consensus.

IV There had been demands for a Scottish Parliament throughout the twentieth century, and while there was evidence of broad support, it was rarely a priority for more than a minority of voters. Home rule agitation generated excitement in the late 1940s but the demand was more an irritant than a serious challenge. The issue never disappeared. The first significant stirrings of demand came in the 1960s. The classic UK government response was to establish a Royal Commission. The Royal Commission on the Constitution was set up under Lord Crowther, former editor of the Economist. There was little sympathy for devolution within Harold Wilson’s Labour government, though Richard Crossman, Leader of the Commons, supported devolution as part of a British-​ wide reform of the machinery of government. Crowther was no supporter of devolution and, when Heath came to power in 1970, intimated to the new Prime Minister that there would be ‘no ill feelings’ if Heath decided to bring the Commission’s deliberations to an end. Heath had been more sensitive to demands for action coming from Scotland and Wales—​fearing that the rise of nationalist parties was the ‘biggest single factor in politics today’, as he told Crossman in a private conversation recorded in the latter’s diary—​and had committed his party to establishing a form of home rule in a speech to the Scottish Conservative conference in 1968.29 When expectations of a nationalist breakthrough failed to materialize in 1970, the orthodox view was that the SNP threat had passed, but

28  R. Deacon, The Governance of Wales: The Welsh Office and the Policy Process, 1964–​99 (Cardiff, 2002), p. 39. 29  R. Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (3 vols, London, 1975–​7), vol. ii, pp. 550–​1.

Devolution   183 Heath decided to allow the Commission to continue to deliberate. Lord Kilbrandon succeeded Crowther as chair of the Commission after Crowther’s death in February 1972. Kilbrandon had been a reformist Scots lawyer and had previously chaired an enquiry that led to the introduction of children’s panels, and would end up a supporter of the Scottish Patriots, a nationalist group. The Commission reported in 1973, when SNP support was once more rising. Its reports, including research and recommendations, provide important sources of information. Independence and federalism were rejected. Majority and minority reports offered different forms of devolution. The majority proposed different forms of devolution for Scotland and Wales. Scotland should have a unicameral Parliament elected using single transferable vote for a fixed four-​year term with responsibility for the environment, education, health, social services, home affairs, legal matters, and agriculture, fisheries, and food, but Scottish Office responsibilities for electricity supply, aspects of agriculture, fisheries, and food would not be transferred. A separate Scottish Civil Service should be created. An Exchequer Board was needed to counteract the dominance of the Treasury in financial matters. There was less support among Commission members for the ‘more advanced’ form proposed for Scotland by the majority. The authors of the minority report proposed what they called executive devolution, defined as leaving law-​making powers with Westminster but permitting the Assemblies to work within this framework, including responsibility for the execution of policies. The minority proposed that there should be seven elected assemblies—​for Scotland, Wales, and five English regions. Kilbrandon left much unaddressed and the lack of agreement meant that its value lay in stimulating further debate rather than offering a clear blueprint. The electoral success of the SNP and Plaid Cymru in the two elections in 1974 ensured that Kilbrandon would not join the Royal Commissions that ‘take minutes and waste years’, in Harold Wilson’s phrase. Wilson had promised a referendum on continued membership of the European Communities and this took priority over devolution and created a precedent for a referendum to be held on major constitutional reforms. Once the EC referendum was out of the way in June 1975, the government turned its attention to devolution while also having to deal with stagflation, energy crises, and industrial relations unrest. Initially, the government proposed a bill to establish Welsh and Scottish devolution, but it fell when opponents voted against a timetable motion needed to avoid filibustering. The government went back to the drawing board and next proposed separate bills for Scotland and Wales, reflecting the different schemes of devolution proposed. The parliamentary progress of the bills was far from straightforward and involved compromises to keep opponents on the government benches onside. The original bill’s progress was undermined by wrecking amendments. The concession of a referendum ensured that the campaign began in Parliament. Devolution legislation in 1998 had been preceded by referendums in Scotland and Wales which gave public endorsement to the principle of devolution and thus undermined any opposition at Westminster. The 1970s proposals involved modest forms of devolution with a wide range of UK central government controls, which were criticized by leading supporters

184   James Mitchell of devolution.30 The legislation defined what would be devolved according to existing statute rather than by defining what would be retained at Westminster, meaning that the legislation would be in need of continuous revision. This would be another lesson learned when the issue was again debated two decades later. Devolution was decisively rejected in Wales in 1979 and a narrow majority in favour was secured in Scotland, insufficient to overcome another concession to opponents of devolution. A backbench amendment had been successfully moved in the Commons, seen as the most significant backbench defeat of a governing party, that required the government to move an order in Parliament to repeal the devolution legislation if less than 40 per cent of the eligible electorate voted in favour of devolution. The Labour government was caught between moving the repeal or playing for time in the hope that it could avoid a vote before the general election that was due by the autumn. A vote on repeal would have exposed deep divisions in the Labour party and would have led to the defeat of devolution. Prime Minister Callaghan’s priority, expressed privately to colleagues, was to avoid anything that would split his party. SNP MPs believed that the best prospect for devolution lay in forcing a vote on repeal, and supported a motion of no confidence when Callaghan refused to move the repeal order. The government fell and an election was held that brought the Conservatives to power under Mrs Thatcher. Devolution was put into cold storage. The issue gradually returned as support for the governing Conservatives declined in Scotland and Wales. An elision in the public imagination developed, with opposition to the Conservatives sliding into support for a Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. The broad support for devolution that had long been recorded in polls and surveys deepened as more voters came to see it as a means of protecting Scotland and Wales from an ideology and government with which they were out of sympathy. Labour’s divisions, which had undermined devolution in the 1970s, diminished as the party came to endorse devolution. The 1987 election proved a turning point when the Conservatives lost half of their Scottish seats. A cross-​party Constitutional Convention in Scotland deliberated and sketched out a new scheme of devolution. There had been hopes that this would force the Conservative government to deliver devolution, but it would take the return of a Labour government, after the 1997 Labour landslide election victory, to ensure its delivery. Scottish and Welsh referendums were held a week apart, four months after the election, allowing the Welsh referendum to follow the anticipated easy victory for devolution in Scotland. In order to meet the criticism that Scottish devolution would result in higher taxes, separate questions were asked: whether a Parliament should be established and whether it ought to have tax-​varying powers. Wales was limited to whether a Welsh Assembly should be established. Scotland emphatically endorsed tax-​varying devolution and Wales voted in favour of an Assembly by the narrowest of margins, though there was no 40 per cent rule; Westminster proceeded to legislate for devolution, treating the two referendums almost as if they were second-​reading stages of legislation. Separate legislation offering

30 

J.P. Mackintosh, ‘The Power of the Secretary of State’, New Edinburgh Review, 31 (1976), 9–​16.

Devolution   185 different forms of devolution was passed, with the first elections to the new devolved bodies set up in Edinburgh and Cardiff taking place in 1999. Ron Davies, Secretary of State for Wales, described devolution as a ‘process not an event’, signalling a different expectation from his colleagues in Scotland, who referred to devolution as the ‘settled will of the Scottish people’—​quoting a speech made by John Smith at Labour’s Scottish conference in 1994. A pattern appeared to have emerged in the early years of devolution whereby the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales did better in devolved elections than in elections to the Commons. This pattern changed. Plaid Cymru’s advance in the first elections in 1999 was reversed in subsequent elections. In Scotland, the SNP fell back in the second elections but advanced to become the largest party in 2007 and then gain an overall majority in 2011. The Additional Members System (AMS), a mixed electoral system, was adopted in Scotland and Wales. This ensured a greater degree of proportionality and was thought likely to lead to either minority or coalition government. The degree of proportionality differed in Scotland and Wales given the different ratios of constituency to list seats, the list seats providing the proportional element. In an unguarded moment in 1997, Jack McConnell, then Labour’s senior Scottish official and later First Minister, admitted that the system had been devised to prevent the SNP getting into power. Electoral systems, of course, only translate votes into seats, and ultimately it is the electorate that determines the outcome of elections. Though Welsh devolution was a pale imitation of Scottish devolution, Wales had travelled furthest in the shortest period of time. In effect, Wales had voted for executive devolution or ‘quasi-​devolution’ in 1999 and Scotland for legislative devolution, but the swing in public opinion over 18 years was greater in Wales. In July 2002, the Welsh First Minister established a Commission under Ivor Richard, previously Labour Leader of the House of Lords, on the powers and electoral arrangements of the National Assembly. The Richard Commission reported in March 2004, recommending that the Assembly should have legislative powers and changing the electoral system to single transferable vote. Though its boldest recommendations were rejected by the Labour government, over time the Assembly gained legislative powers. Back in the 1970s, it had been suggested that the old Encyclopaedia Britannica entry ‘For Wales see England’ should be amended to ‘For Wales see Scotland’, but this seemed even more apposite three decades later. In 2011, the Secretary of State for Wales set up a Commission to review the powers, including fiscal powers, of the Assembly under Paul Silk, former Clerk in the Commons. The Silk Commission issued two reports. The first focused on fiscal powers, making a series of recommendations, including giving the Assembly power to raise around a quarter of its budget. The second proposed increasing the number of Assembly Members from 60 to at least 80, increasing its powers, and defining its powers in the same way as in Scotland by identifying matters that would be retained at Westminster, with all else being devolved. In their 2015 election manifesto, the Conservatives made a commitment to legislate for more powers. By 2018, the Welsh Assembly is to have some tax powers, with limited income tax powers two years later; debate on other powers has remained fluid.

186   James Mitchell Scottish devolution proved just as unsettled. Additional matters were devolved in the early years to tidy up arrangements, including railways between 2001 and 2004. The opposition parties in Holyrood came together, with the support of the UK government, to establish a Commission under Sir Kenneth Calman following the election of an SNP minority government in 2007 after the SNP launched a ‘national conversation’ on Scotland’s constitutional future. This led to the transfer of further powers under a new Scotland Act 2012. These powers included borrowing powers and a range of taxes that were to come on stream from 2015. The return of the SNP with an overall majority in Holyrood in 2011 led to a referendum on independence. The UK government resisted the Scottish government’s efforts to include a third option—​more powers—​ on the ballot paper and were keen to settle devolution once and for all. Opponents of independence either refused to consider any more powers until after the referendum or insisted until the last week of the independence referendum campaign that there would be no more powers. When polls narrowed and there seemed to be a prospect of Scots voting for independence, however, the three main UK party leaders promised more powers would be delivered within a strict timetable. After the result was known, Prime Minister David Cameron announced the establishment of a Commission under Lord Smith to include representatives of the five main parties in Holyrood—​SNP, Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrats, and Greens. It produced a report just over two months after the referendum proposing further devolution. Legislative devolution has proved similar to administrative devolution in the manner in which its powers have gradually increased. Welsh and Scottish devolution were established and developed broadly in parallel, but devolution in Northern Ireland was established and evolved differently. After suspending Stormont in 1972, Westminster politicians tried, with varying degrees of effort, to re-​establish devolution based on a different model. This culminated in the Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement signed in 1998. Devolution was only one strand, and the least controversial, of the Agreement. Another strand addressed north–​south relations (relations with the Irish Republic) and a third addressed east–​west relations (relations with the rest of the UK), while there were also highly controversial provisions including arms decommissioning, security, policing and justice, and prisoner release. Compromise and creative ambiguity encouraged both sides to sign up to the Agreement but meant that many matters remained unresolved when the Agreement was put to a referendum in which a majority of Catholics and Protestants voted in favour. A simultaneous referendum was held in the Irish Republic removing constitutional claims to Northern Ireland. The new Northern Ireland Parliament was elected in June 1998 using single transferable vote and involved complex mechanisms to create an Executive. The legislation required that the Executive should include each of the main parties, with the First Minister and Deputy First Minister treated as one in an effort to create consensus. Outstanding issues meant that devolved government was subject to frequent suspensions and proved weak in developing a policy-​making capacity. The nature of the Agreement has been the subject of much debate, with some viewing it as an example of consociationalism. This idea, as outlined by Arend Lijphart, has four key elements: cross-​community executive power

Devolution   187 sharing; proportionality rules applied across government and public sectors; community self-​government and equality of cultural life; and veto rights for minorities.31 This characterization has been disputed by others. While it may have contributed to peace, the elements of the Agreement have been criticized for entrenching and polarizing communal differences and creating a suboptimal policy-​making process.

V Devolution is a term with various prefixes used to refer to a range of different institutional arrangements. Administrative, executive, and legislative devolution have one common characteristic. They each have been responses to the diverse legacies of different unions that created the United Kingdom. Common to all is the evolving relationship between government in London and the component nations making up the United Kingdom. Leaving aside the differences between these types of devolution, each has operated differently at different times. The fundamental issue is one of relationships. Key to this is an understanding of the UK as an asymmetrical state in which the key relationships have been between each component and the centre, with little concern for the state as a whole. These relationships have changed over time in each of the component parts of the state and the pressure for change has come from evolving socio-​demographic and economic forces viewed through the prisms of subjective national identities. For this reason, the UK might best be characterized as a state of evolving unions. Institutions may frame politics but people make choices as to how the institutions operate. When he had been Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill maintained that the ‘main task’ of devolution had ‘not been to emphasize differences but to encourage conformity of standards’.32 An American scholar referred, 30 years later, to devolution as a ‘divergence machine’, having created a ‘remarkable amount of difference in ten years of devolution’.33 In 2015, Peter Robinson, Democratic Unionist First Minister of Northern Ireland, highlighted this difference when he noted that there were ‘two devolved institutions, which recognize that they are devolved institutions, and one devolved institution that believes that it is a sovereign state and has the standing of the (UK) Government’.34 Centripetal and centrifugal forces compete within devolution to ensure that the system will continue to evolve. Much research on devolution tends to focus on its operation in each component of the state, with less comparative work carried out, and even less on relations between the devolved institutions and the UK’s core executive. There is scope for comparative 31 

A. Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies (New Haven, CT, 1977).

32 O’Neill, Ulster at the Crossroads, pp. 77–​8. 33 

S. Greer, ‘Devolution and Health Policy in the UK’, Eurohealth, 14 (2008), 23. Constitution Committee of the House of Lords, Intergovernmental Relations in the United Kingdom, 11th report, 2015, para. 104. 34 

188   James Mitchell work on the different understandings of devolution—​not only its institutional forms but also how it has operated. Institutionally, Stormont devolution pre-​1972 might look similar to Scottish devolution post-​1999 but it operated more like Scottish administrative devolution, coloured by sectarianism, before 1999. Jim Bulpitt noted the importance of the centre in understanding territory and power in the UK and there is scope for much more research on how both Westminster and Whitehall have dealt with demands from beyond the centre.35 Masses of unexplored archival material await scholars who wish to explore this key part of the devolution story. A key theme in the history of devolution has been the combination of a willingness by the centre to treat the UK’s component parts as distinct while failing to consider the implications and unintended consequences of resulting asymmetries. The 1919 Speaker’s Conference on Devolution had primarily been established to address the Irish question, and did so in the wider context of parliamentary congestion and possible devolution all round.36 This was an interesting but failed effort to consider devolution in the round. It failed due to an inability to agree between two competing schemes. The Royal Commission on the Constitution, chaired by Lord Kilbrandon, which reported in 1973 also offered an overview of issues but was largely ignored in its effort to offer a UK-​wide response to demands for devolution. Each episode offered alternative means of addressing key challenges but neither succeeded. UK governments have been reluctant to consider devolution in the round but have preferred to see its components as exceptions. Most scholarly work has followed this approach. As noted, devolution in the UK has generally been viewed in national silos by scholars and politicians alike. This national exceptionalism has encouraged pragmatic adaptation and limited our ability to appreciate its implications. That has been both the strength of the UK’s devolved system of government but also its greatest weakness.

Further reading V. Bogdanor, Devolution (Oxford, 1979, 2001). J. Bulpitt, Territory and Power in the United Kingdom (Manchester, 1983). R. Deacon, Devolved Great Britain:  The New Governance of England, Scotland and Wales (Edinburgh, 2012). A. Jackson, The Two Unions: Ireland, Scotland, and the Survival of the United Kingdom, 1707–​ 2007 (Oxford, 2013). I. McLean and A. McMillan, State of the Union: Unionism and the Alternatives in the United Kingdom since 1707 (Oxford, 2005). J. Mitchell, Devolution in the UK (Manchester, 2010).

35 

J. Bulpitt, Territory and Power in the United Kingdom (Manchester, 1983), p. 57. Evans, ‘An Interlude of Agreement? A Reassessment of the Conference on Devolution’s “Consensus” on Powers’, 421–​40. 36 

chapter 12

L o cal Governme nt Ben Weinstein

The Victorians valued ‘local self-​government’ above nearly all other political virtues. W.E. Gladstone believed local self-​government to lie at ‘the root of all our liberties and all our aptitudes’, and to comprise ‘the guarantee of our political stability’; William Rathbone described it as ‘the only permanent basis of national self-​government’; the second report of the Royal Sanitary Commission claimed that local self-​government was no less than ‘the essence of our national vigour’; and the Westminster Review characterized it as ‘the distinguishing feature of our political organization’.1 Discourses on the Anglo-​Saxon development of, and capacity for, ‘local self-​government’ remained central to constructions of national identity throughout the nineteenth century. From eminent historians such as Palgrave, Kemble, Stubbs, and Freeman to political publicists such as Baines and Toulmin Smith, local self-​government was cast as the essence of the Saxon patrimony and consequently a crucial marker of English character.2 Given this emphasis on ancestral inheritance, members of the Victorian political class were as likely to find the ultimate guarantor of English liberty in the folk mote as in the Witenagemot. Indeed, when contrasting the ‘liberty’ enjoyed by British subjects to the ‘servility’ endured by French citizens, many Victorians focused on the autonomy and vigour of local institutions rather than on the progressiveness of national ones.3 ‘Centralization’ was widely, although not universally, considered an alien species of political organization which

1 PP, Royal Commission to Inquire into the Operation of Sanitary Laws in England and Wales . . . Second Report, Volume I (1871), p. 16; W.E. Gladstone, Programme of the Liberal Party (London, 1885), p. 2; W. Rathbone, Local Government and Taxation in England and Wales (London, 1883), pp. 4–​5; Westminster Review, 3 (1853), 497. 2  J.W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1983); T. Hunt, Building Jersusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (London, 2004). 3  H.S. King, Local Freedom and Centralization: A Lecture (Hull, 1888), p. 5; R.B.D. Morier, ‘Local Government Considered in Its Historical Development in Germany and England, with Special Reference to Recent Legislation on the Subject in Prussia’, in J.W. Probyn, ed., Cobden Club Essays: Local Government and Taxation (London, 1875), pp. 360–​1. See also J.P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–​1886 (Cambridge, 2006).

190   Ben Weinstein must be resisted at all costs. Some went so far as to characterize political centralization as racially uncongenial to the English.4 It is often assumed, given this valorization of localism, that the Victorian state was a ‘minimal state’. The study of the local state complicates matters.5 Whereas the Victorian central state was obsessed with retrenchment, even parsimonious local government became increasingly interventionist, and its interventions took place on increasingly larger canvasses as the period under consideration unfolded. Indeed, Philip Harling has argued that ‘if it is in any sense accurate to talk about a late ​Victorian “revolution in government”, this was emphatically a revolution carried out through local means, and chiefly for local reasons’.6 As the functions and scope of local government were enhanced and expanded, they were also rationalized and systematized. This chapter attempts to make sense of this arc of development, and the subsequent erosion of local government autonomy from the 1930s, while paying special attention to the value, both political and moral, that contemporaries ascribed to local government.

I Especially before the 1890s, local government within Great Britain took a bewildering variety of forms, and historians of the subject have often noted the dangers of drawing general conclusions from such a chaos of particularity.7 In Goschen’s memorable indictment, mid-​Victorian local government was ‘a chaos as regards authorities, a chaos as regards rates, and a worse chaos than all as regards areas’.8 Victorian local government might very well have been an apparatus, but this apparatus did not comprise a unitary or even coherent system. Its component parts were sometimes non-​complementary and often entirely disconnected from one another. In 1871, when Goschen made his indictment of administrative chaos, there were no fewer than 27,069 separate rating authorities operating in England, and 18 different types of rate. Moreover, rates were assessed and collected according to different principles in different parts of Great Britain. In England, liability for rates fell on the occupier of property. In Scotland, however, most rate demands were shared by occupiers and owners, although some were paid by owners 4  B. Weinstein, ‘Local Self-​Government Is True Socialism: Joshua Toulmin Smith, the State, and Character Formation’, English Historical Review, 123 (2008), 1193–​228. 5  For a thorough analysis of the role played by local government and quasi-​state institutions in the construction of the Victorian state, see M. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of English Taxation, 1799–​1914 (Cambridge, 2007), esp. chs 2, 3, and 11. 6  P. Harling, ‘The Centrality of Locality: The Local State, Local Democracy, and Local Consciousness in Late-​Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 9 (2004), 217–​18. 7  See, for instance, John Davis’s well-​drawn articulation of this danger in ‘Central Government and the Towns’, in M. Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: vol. 3, 1840–​1950 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 262–​3. 8  J. Redlich and F.W. Hirst, The History of Local Government in England (London, 1958), p. 213.

Local Government   191 alone. Many English borough dwellers were simultaneously subject to four separate rating agencies: the corporate borough itself, a parish, a union, and a county.9 They might very well also be subject to the rating demands of one or more improvement commissions. These local authorities multiplied further in rural parishes, where residents might additionally be subject to the rate demands of a variety of specialist ad hoc boards and committees tasked with overseeing and providing a range of services stretching from burials to highway maintenance. Importantly, most of these rating bodies did not relate to one another in any kind of clear hierarchical relationship. Moreover, the membership of each of these organs of local government was composed differently: municipal councillors were elected; justices of the peace were appointed; Poor Law guardians were both elected (on principles which differed from those of the municipal councils) and appointed; some improvement commissioners were elected and others were appointed. Little wonder then that, in Chadwick’s 1879 assessment, ‘an ordinary ratepayer finds it almost impossible to understand how he is governed’.10 Given this tangle of overlapping jurisdictions, for much of the period under consideration here nothing like a flow chart of local government is possible. It is however also true that, especially from the early 1870s, local government was progressively rationalized and systematized. Indeed, it is possible to discern three relatively discrete phases of local government development up to 1948. A first phase, stretching from 1834 to the early 1870s, was characterized by a proliferation of new forms and agencies of local government and the entrenchment of the kind of institutional confusion just outlined. Élie Halévy once pithily observed that the period following 1834 saw ‘not order arising out of chaos, but only a new patchwork taking the shape of the old one’.11 A second phase of development, in which the functions of local government were both rationalized and substantially enhanced, emerged following the 1871 creation of the Local Government Board and persisted up through 1929, when poor relief was made an obligation of the County Councils. Importantly, the development of a more uniform and coherent system of local government between the 1870s and the 1920s applied both within and across British national units.12 Finally, from 1929 to 1948, local government reached an apogee of coherence and power, but also became vulnerable to transfer to the central state of services previously performed by local authorities. From 1871, rationalization was accomplished through the absorption of ad hoc boards first into municipal corporations and then into county councils, to create what 9  The Webbs estimated that at least 35 municipal corporations were subject to the rating demands of county magistrates in 1835. See S. and B. Webb, English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act: The Manor and the Borough (3 vols, London, 1924), vol. i, pp. 281–​5. 10  E. Chadwick, On County Government (London, 1879), p. 25. 11  É. Halévy, ‘Before 1835’, in H.J. Laski, W.I. Jennings, and W.A. Robson, eds., A Century of Municipal Progress (London, 1935), p. 35. 12  The gradual institutional harmonization of Anglo-​Scottish local government is a curiously overlooked feature of this period. For the only piece of comparative research on the topic, see J.P.D. Dunbabin, ‘British Local Government Reform: The Nineteenth Century and After’, English Historical Review, 92 (1977), 777–​805.

192   Ben Weinstein V.D. Lipman has called ‘compendious authorities’. Such rationalization was encouraged by the abolition of ancient forms of local administration, especially in rural areas, and, from 1894, by the creation of a tiered hierarchy of local government jurisdictions.13 Indeed, the process of late Victorian and twentieth-​century local government reform has often been characterized as, above all else, an exercise in the elimination of administrative anomalies and the coordination of local government areas and functions.14 However, the drive to a more coherent system of local government rectified more than administrative inefficiency. Rationalization also had a political dimension. One of the most striking features of what Halévy called the ‘new patchwork’ after 1834 was the very wide variety of franchise qualifications and membership criteria which applied to discrete organs of local government—​a point made emphatically by H.H. Fowler in 1894, when, as president of the Local Government Board, he observed: ‘not only are we exposed to this multiplicity of authority and this confusion of rating power, but the qualification, tenure, and mode of election of members of these Authorities differ in different cases’. Fowler pointed out, in exasperation, that the qualifications required for an individual to serve as a town councillor or a burial board member differed substantially from those which entitled one to serve as a guardian, which, in turn, differed from the rating criteria required of waywardens, lighting inspectors, and overseers. Local franchises and scaled voting entitlements were similarly varied, ranging from council franchises which entitled each ratepayer to a number of votes equal to the number of ward vacancies to be filled, to local board franchises by which property owners rated at £250 might possess 12 votes, but where occupiers of modestly rated properties might possess only one.15 Many of these distinctive franchises and membership criteria were swept aside between 1894 and 1918. Plural and proxy voting for Poor Law guardians, for instance, was abolished in 1894; distinct qualifications for school board membership disappeared in 1902, when primary education became the charge of county and county borough councils; residence qualifications were simplified and made uniform in 1918. The establishment of county councils in 1888 and 1889 was perhaps most significant in promoting local government franchise harmonization, not least because identical local franchise reform was implemented in Scotland and England.16 The county councils were of course modelled on the handful of dynamic and increasingly powerful municipal councils which had begun, during the 1870s, to implement enticing visions of ‘municipal socialism’.17 Indeed, the great trend of the final quarter of the nineteenth century was the application of the municipal standard to an ever wider field of local government. 13 

V.D. Lipman, Local Government Areas, 1834–​1945 (Oxford, 1949), p. 220. For the classic articulation of this analysis, see B. Keith-​Lucas, English Local Government in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1977). 15  Parliamentary Debates, Commons, H.H. Fowler, 21 Mar. 1893, cols. 681–​3. 16  For a contemporary analysis of the impact of this reform in Scotland, see M. Atkinson, ‘The Organization of Local Government in Scotland’, Political Science Quarterly, 18 (1903), 73–​8. 17  Perhaps, as Philip Waller has claimed, ‘municipal capitalism’ is a more appropriate term. See P. Waller, Town, City and Nation: England, 1850–​1914 (Oxford, 1983), p. 300. 14 

Local Government   193 This process, known as ‘municipalization’, simultaneously rationalized and democratized rural administration, breaking the local political authority of the landed elite at the moment of their greatest economic vulnerability.18 Henceforth counties would be governed in precisely the same way, and on precisely the same terms, as the great cities. Moreover, ratepayer democracy would prevail in both areas, and would operate in the same way everywhere. Although the municipalization of rural administration was implemented in 1888, the drive to standardization had begun at the very outset of the period under consideration in this chapter. In the immediate aftermath of the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act, Joseph Hume had pushed hard for the creation of elected county boards, which would mirror the reformed borough councils. Arguments for franchise harmonization were central to Hume’s proposals.19 Although unsuccessful at democratizing county government, Hume had the support of many prominent Whigs, including Lord John Russell. There followed a further five private bills aimed at municipalizing county government between 1836 and 1869, and two government measures proposed the same during the 1870s. J.S. Mill had given succour to the reformers in 1861 by famously describing quarter sessions as the most aristocratic, and least accountable, form of government operating in England.20 However, the eventual success of county government reform was due in large part to the vigorous advocacy, from the early 1880s, of Dilke and Chamberlain, who worked ceaselessly to convince Salisbury of the need to replace the courts of quarter session with representative bodies.21 Indeed, county government reform comprised a central plank of the radical programme of 1885, which claimed that the great work of the parliament to be elected after the organic change of constituencies in 1885, will be the crowning of the edifice of local government in some parts of the United Kingdom, and the foundation, as well as the completion, of its structure in others. Then, and not till then, shall we be able to say that the rights of citizenship exist.22

Whereas the process of municipalization streamlined and liberalized the organization of local government, one must be careful not to overstate the system’s democratic credentials, at least before 1918. The percentage of the population entitled to vote in municipal elections remained remarkably small throughout the nineteenth century and well 18 

J.S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (London, 1861), p. 278. Parliamentary Debates, Commons, Joseph Hume, 20 May 1836, col. 1117; ibid., 21 June 1836, col. 680. The architect of the 1835 reform, Joseph Parkes, believed that the reform of county administration would follow quickly. ‘The County Magisterial and Fiscal self-​elect’, he prophesied in 1836, would be ‘early mowed down by the scythe of reform.’ See G.B.A.M. Finlayson, ‘The Politics of Municipal Reform, 1835’, English Historical Review, 81 (1966), 690–​1. 20 Mill, Considerations, p. 278. 21  T. Crosby, Joseph Chamberlain: A Most Radical Imperialist (London, 2011), pp. 81–​2. On Chamberlain’s role, see also J.P.D. Dunbabin, ‘The Politics of the Establishment of County Councils’, Historical Journal, 6 (1963), 226–​52. 22  J. Chamberlain, The Radical Programme (London, 1885), p. 234. 19 

194   Ben Weinstein into the twentieth. In fact, in many cities the municipal electorate was smaller (and often significantly smaller) than the parliamentary electorate. This was especially true before 1869, when legislation reduced the residence qualification for municipal voters from two and a half years to one. In mid-​Victorian Liverpool, for instance, whereas 22 per cent of all adult males enjoyed the parliamentary franchise, only 10 per cent were entitled to the municipal vote. A similar dynamic prevailed in Manchester.23 Birmingham, where only 3 per cent of residents enjoyed the municipal vote in 1861, provides an extreme example of just how restrictive the pre-​1869 municipal franchise could be. Smaller towns such as Maidstone and Ipswich, where roughly 10 per cent of inhabitants enjoyed the municipal franchise in 1861, are perhaps more representative of national dynamics.24 In the wake of the 1869 reform, Birmingham’s municipal electorate increased sixfold, but this still meant that only one in five of its residents enjoyed the municipal franchise—​a proportion which remained unaltered until 1918, when it doubled. In the wake of the 1918 parliamentary and local government reforms, Birmingham’s parliamentary voters still outnumbered its council voters by a ratio of five to four. Moreover, this proportion was replicated in almost every other British city.25 It is also worth considering whether those registered for the local franchise actually used it. Evidence on this is much harder to come by. However, where local studies have been undertaken, they suggest that municipal contests were relatively infrequent—​ occasioned by periodic bouts of economy after a phase of extravagance—​and that turnout at most contests was modest. Taking Victorian Bradford as a case study, one finds for instance that only 52 per cent of council seats were contested between 1847 and 1860, and that the average turnout for the seats which were contested between 1847 and 1854 was 60 per cent.26 This dynamic prevailed until the early twentieth century, when local government increasingly came to be infiltrated by national parties, and when the rise of the Labour party in particular politicized local governance in new ways. Local elections in the borough of Guildford illustrate this shift. Whereas only 37 per cent of all

23 

F. Vigier, Change and Apathy: Liverpool and Manchester in the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1970), p. 210. 24  B. Keith-​Lucas, The English Local Government Franchise (Oxford, 1952), pp. 237–​42. Figures are similar for Leeds and Sheffield. See E.P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons: Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-​ Century Urban Government (Montreal, 1973), p. 12. 25 PP, Parliamentary and Local Government Electors (United Kingdom). Return to an address to the honourable House of Commons, dated 16 October 1918, for ‘return showing, for each Parliamentary constituency in the United Kingdom, the numbers of parliamentary and local government electors on the first register compiled under the Representation of the People Act, 1918’, p. 5. For Bristol, the proportions were 49 per cent (parliamentary) and 40 per cent (council); for Liverpool, 46 per cent (parliamentary) and 35 per cent (council); for Manchester, 47 per cent (parliamentary) and 38 per cent (council); for Newcastle upon Tyne, 49 per cent (parliamentary) and 37 per cent (council); for Leeds, 51 per cent (parliamentary) and 40 per cent (council); for Sheffield, 52 per cent (parliamentary) and 39 per cent (council); and for Edinburgh, 47 per cent (parliamentary) and 41 per cent (council). 26  A. Elliot, ‘Municipal Government in Bradford in the Mid-​Nineteenth Century’, in D. Fraser, ed., Municipal Reform and the Industrial City (New York, 1982), pp. 137–​9.

Local Government   195 Guildford ward seats were contested between 1898 and 1914, 66 per cent were contested in the immediate wake of the 1918 reform. By the 1960s, almost all seats were contested.27

II Participation in local government was restricted in a variety of ways. Recipients of poor relief (and in some cases even recipients of other forms of charitable assistance), for instance, were excluded from various local franchises as well as from council membership before 1918 and then again after 1929, by which time they were no longer prohibited from participating in parliamentary elections. Moreover, paupers (and even the male head of a family of which a single member had been given relief) were also excluded from serving on district councils, parish councils, and boards of guardians. As Lord Salisbury observed in 1894 in the debate over the parish councils bill, to do otherwise would be to set the cat to guard the cream. Evidently, great emphasis was placed on keeping out the wrong sort of people. Yet local government was not exclusively the preserve of ‘fit and proper persons’. Throughout the period considered in this chapter, local government was conceptualized as an important tool of ‘political education’. Many Victorians professed a faith in the instrumentality of local government in developing the mental and moral capacities of its participants, and some even went so far as to argue that participation in institutions of local government was the best, and perhaps the only, means of nurturing the development of the kind of expansive, non-​sectarian, and ‘public-​spirited’ outlook among the general population that was necessary to the proper functioning of a liberal polity. According to these advocates of ‘political education’, participation in the business of local government would necessarily impart the character-​building virtues of responsibility, self-​restraint, self-​mastery, and civic consciousness to both individuals and communities which had hitherto been excluded from political life. Parish vestries, municipal councils, and other local boards were consequently often valorized as ‘schools of civic virtue’, ‘engines for the training of the people’, and ‘training schools for imperial government’. As this suggests, local government was valued for more than its role in effecting sound finance and administrative efficiency. Its advocates understood local government reform to be a vital tool for effecting the kind of fundamental psychological transformation which was deemed necessary for the safe development of a liberal political culture.

27  R. Ottewill, ‘The Changing Character of Municipal Elections, 1835–​1974’, Local Historian, 34 (2004), 159–​78. For the declining role of ‘independent’ councillors, and the politicizing impact of Labour involvement in local government, see W. Grant, Independent Local Politics in England and Wales (Farnborough, 1977); K. Young, ‘Party Politics in Local Government: An Historical Perspective’, in D. Widdicombe, ed., Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Conduct of Local Authority Business (London, 1986).

196   Ben Weinstein The character-​shaping functions of local self-​government were central to Joshua Toulmin Smith’s early and mid-​Victorian advocacy for municipal reform, which he claimed would ‘supply immediate and perfect means, and the only means, of thoroughly developing the powers and faculties of every man’.28 By the early 1860s, Toulmin Smith’s view had become a liberal commonplace. J.S. Mill, for example, was absolutely convinced of the utility of local government in imparting to its participants the values necessary for the safe and effective operation of a liberal polity by providing both ‘political education’ and ‘mental discipline’. W.E. Gladstone expressed a similar view, noting his opinion that if there be one portion of our institutions more precious in my view than another, it is that portion in which the people are locally organized for the purposes of acquiring the habits and instincts of political action, and applying their own free consciences and free understandings to dealing with the affairs of the community.29

Indeed, this view of local government’s instrumentality in promoting political education had become so widespread by 1886 that one critic, writing in the Saturday Review, identified it as a ‘consecrated fiction’.30 The diffusion and increasingly widespread endorsement, from the 1860s onwards, of this ‘consecrated fiction’ was a consequence of dramatic changes in municipal leadership. In the first place, as Barry Doyle, John Garrard, and others have demonstrated, the social profile of municipal corporation membership across England was dramatically altered between the early 1850s and mid-​1880s. Much of the scholarship has emphasized urban elites’ increasing reluctance, from the 1870s onwards, to take part in local government. As municipal corporations shifted their focus from the management of corporate property to the development of public health infrastructure, smaller ratepayers, representing shopkeepers and other petty commercialists anxious about the rate increases which such development would necessarily entail, increasingly replaced men of high social standing and wealth on municipal councils.31 This alteration of council membership was partially enabled by the Small Tenements Rating Act of 1850 and the Municipal Franchise Act of 1858, both of which expanded the municipal electorate by promoting the enfranchisement of compound tenants.32 According to the report of the 1859 select committee tasked with evaluating the working of these Acts, ‘wherever the Act of 1850 has been carried into full operation, the lowest class of the population have acquired a 28 

J.T. Smith, Local Self-​Government and Centralization (London, 1851), p. 44. Leeds Mercury, 30 Oct. 1871. 30  Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, 61 (19 June 1886), p. 837. 31  E.P. Hennock, ‘Finance and Politics in Urban Local Government, 1835–​1900’, Historical Journal, 6 (1963), 212–​25. B. Doyle, ‘The Changing Functions of Urban Government: Councillors, Officials, and Pressure Groups’, in Martin Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain: Volume III, 1840–​1950 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 298–​99; J.A. Garrard, ‘Urban Elites, 1850–​1914: The Rule and Decline of an Urban Squirearchy?’, Albion, 27 (1995), 583–​621. 32  Keith-​Lucas, English Local Government Franchise, pp. 68–​9, 71. 29 

Local Government   197 predominant influence over municipal elections . . . the character and dignity of the corporation is said to be lowered by the intrusion of unworthy members.’33 The transformation of municipal representation in mid-​Victorian Leeds illustrates the impact of these changes. In 1836, Leeds town council was dominated by the city’s social and economic elite. Of the council’s 64 members, 53 were drawn from Leeds’ gentry, professional, merchant, and manufacturing classes. By 1851 the social profile of the council had changed dramatically: the ‘shopocracy’ had captured the majority of seats, and the previously dominant elites accounted for just half of the total membership. The decline in the fortunes of the professional class—​incidentally, the class regarded by contemporaries as most cognizant of the ‘public good’ and least likely to advocate narrow sectional interests—​was particularly striking. In 1838, 14 professionals sat as Leeds councillors; in 1851 there were only three; and by 1874, professionals had been completely excluded from the council.34 Although professionals fared slightly better in other councils, the general trend toward a ‘lower social standard’ of councillor was everywhere the same, and attracted much criticism from contemporary observers of municipal affairs. In Hennock’s words, ‘the replacement of substantial and respectable men by people “lower in the scale” was, to put it bluntly, regarded as a deplorable lapse’.35 Measures were, of course, taken to counteract this supposed deterioration in the character of municipal membership. Although the 1869 Municipal Corporations Act, for instance, is primarily remembered for extending the municipal franchise, it also sought to elevate the social profile of municipal councils by entitling suburban property holders resident outside the municipal boundary to stand for election. This all suggests that, from the 1860s onwards, the involvement of ‘fit and proper persons’ in local governance could no longer be taken for granted. Increasingly, ‘fitness’ needed to be inculcated among sitting councillors. This necessitated a reconceptualization of the functions of local government and encouraged the view that political education should be one of these functions.

III Whereas the rhetoric of ‘political education’ demonstrates the moral value sometimes assigned to local government, the late Victorian ‘gendering’ of local government offers further insights into how contemporaries conceptualized local government’s proper

33 PP, Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Operation of the Small Tenements

Rating Act 1850, VII (1859), Appendix, col. 99. 34  D. Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England: The Structure of Politics in Victorian Cities (Leicester, 1976), pp. 129–​33. 35 Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons, pp. 312–​14. Such concerns lingered into the early twentieth century. See J.M. Lee, Social Leaders and Public Persons: A Study of County Government in Cheshire since 1888 (Oxford, 1963).

198   Ben Weinstein scope and functions. Women participated in local government in a variety of capacities throughout the period under consideration. In addition to filling important parochial offices such as overseer, clerk, and sextoness, from 1869 onwards unmarried women were entitled to be municipal electors, then, slightly later, school board members, and finally, from 1907, councillors.36 Of course, women might also be Poor Law guardians.37 Many campaigners for female parliamentary enfranchisement promoted involvement in local government as a stepping stone to entry into national politics. Lydia Becker, for one, noted that just as some classes of men had proved their fitness for parliamentary politics by first participating in local government, so women would demonstrate their own political capacities on local boards and councils.38 Honor Morton argued in the same vein that women ‘have got to use their municipal vote so as to gain the parliamentary vote’.39 Yet many supporters of female involvement in local government eschewed such instrumentalist views, arguing instead that women were inherently suited to the tasks of local administration and inherently unsuited to the work of national and imperial politics. Indeed, it is significant that many ‘ladies elect’ came to local government through charitable and philanthropic work, and one finds from the 1880s a widespread perception that local government comprised a kind of ‘compulsory philanthropy’ underpinned by supposedly ‘womanly virtues’ such as caring and nurturing.40 At the same time, local government was often characterized as family management writ large—​with paupers cast as wayward children in need of a mother’s firm but loving discipline. Indeed, the notion that the tasks of local government were uniquely suited to female aptitudes became a late Victorian and Edwardian commonplace. As one member of the Women’s Co-​Operative Guild asked her fellow members: would they like their homes and children to be managed by men, even if they were the best of men? Would they like men only to choose their clothes and their food, their education and their nurses, to inspect their sickrooms and their nurseries, to cross question them when they have fallen? . . . you may think this is mixing the trivial with the important, but these are all duties undertaken by our Poor Law Guardians.41

36   For the parochial dimension, see S. Richardson, ‘Petticoat Politicians: Women and the Politics of the Parish in England’, Historian, 119 (2013), 12–​15. For the municipal dimension, see P. Hollis, The Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865–​1914 (Oxford, 1987). 37  See S. King, ‘“We might be trusted”: Female Poor Law Guardians and the Development of the New Poor Law’, International Review of Social History, 49 (2004), 27–​46. 38  L. Becker, The Rights and Duties of Women in Local Government (London, 1879). 39  H. Morton, Questions for Women (London, 1899), p. 68. 40  J. Lewis, Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England (Aldershot, 1991); M. Martin, ‘Single Women and Philanthropy: A Case Study of Women’s Associational Life in Bristol, 1880–​1914’, Women’s History Review, 17 (2008), 395–​417. 41  G. Abbot, How, as Guild Women, Shall We Most Fully Use Our Powers under the New Local Government Act? (London, 1894), p. 3.

Local Government   199 Such characterizations were especially appealing to anti-​suffragists, who often drew sharp distinctions between the domesticity of local government and the worldliness of national politics. Mary Ward, who, alongside Elizabeth Burgwin, established the Local Government Advancement Committee precisely to involve women more heavily in local government, was very fond of invoking this distinction: As voters for school boards, boards of guardians, and other important public bodies, women have now opportunities for public usefulness which must promote the growth of character . . . the care of the sick and insane; the treatment of the poor; the education of children: in all these matters, and others besides, they have made good their claim to larger and more extended powers. We rejoice in it. But when it comes to questions of foreign or colonial policy, or of grave constitutional changes, then we maintain that the necessary and normal experience of women . . . does not and can never provide them with such materials for sound judgment as are open to men.42

As Ward’s words suggest, the supposedly homey, parochial concerns of local government were relentlessly contrasted to the Darwinian struggles of national politics. Whereas local government was thought to be tasked with constructing and maintaining harmony and co-​operation within local communities, parliamentary politics were said to be focused on the aggressive pursuit of national advantage and competition on a global scale. National security and the regulation of trade were matters equally alien to the Victorian wife and the Victorian alderman. Gender ideology thus informed a ‘separate spheres’ conceptualization of the proper relationship between local and imperial government. However, this conceptualization overstated the extent to which local and imperial government operated independently of (complementary to) one another. In practice these two spheres of government intermingled in all kinds of ways, and did so to ever greater degrees from the 1880s onward. This tangled relationship is demonstrated best by the ways in which local government was funded and the growing central state oversight which evolving funding arrangements encouraged.

IV Although the 1880s are sometimes presented as a watershed in central–​local relations, central government subvention of local government expenditure began decades before Goshen introduced his Local Taxation Account in 1889. From the mid-​ 1830s, central government contributed, through the so-​ called ‘percentage

42  M. Humphrey Ward, ‘An Appeal against Female suffrage’, Nineteenth Century, (June 1889), 781–​8. It should be noted that not all anti-​suffragists were convinced of the inherent difference between local and imperial politics. See B. Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain (London, 1978), pp. 134–​6.

200   Ben Weinstein grants’, to the local funding of policing, lunatic asylums, prisons and road maintenance. These grants grew rapidly in value from the mid-​1870s, when landlords began to complain loudly about the burdens of the county rates.43 From 1889, the ‘assigned revenues’ system aimed at replacing (and reining in) these ad hoc grants, but by the 1910s it had only managed to supplement them. Moreover, the scale of grants-​in-​ aid grew very rapidly as the responsibilities of local authorities increased. The 1902 Education Act and the 1919 Housing Act, for instance, introduced new Exchequer grants which significantly raised the proportion of central funding in local government expenditure. The ratio of funding from rates to funding from grants-​in-​aid for local government was transformed by these developments. In 1880, local authorities raised ten times as much revenue from rates as from central government grants. By 1931, this figure stood at nearly 1:1. Although local authority borrowing grew rapidly over the same period, the percentage of total local authority receipts derived from central government grants was similarly transformed, growing from 5 per cent in 1880 to 23 per cent in 1931.44 The decision to de-​rate both farmland and industrial property during the mid-​1920s and early 1930s (which deprived local authorities of roughly 15 per cent of the rating revenue) made local government even more dependent on central subvention. Although the early twentieth-​century drive for national efficiency encouraged a more interventionist attitude from the central state—​especially in matters relating to public health—​financial assistance only truly began to translate into substantial central interference during the inter-​war years. The creation of the Local Government Board (LGB) in 1871 represented a first attempt at rationalizing and streamlining the relationship between central and local government. However, the LGB was emphatically not an agent of central domination over local government. As John Davis has observed, ‘even its more meaningful powers . . . were reactive rather than directive.’45 Moreover, although the Local Government Board was charged with vetting local authority loan applications, in practice it rarely interfered with, and almost never denied, council plans.46 Indeed, the sevenfold growth of town council indebtedness during the final quarter of the nineteenth century can be largely attributed to the LGB’s encouragement of, and general reluctance to veto, substantial municipal infrastructural projects. From the 1870s, as the costs of local government began to outstrip the rateable value of property, councils managed to finance a good proportion of their expanding activities through municipal trading. In 1905, for instance, trading profits financed no less than 12 per cent of council

43  G.C. Baugh, ‘Government Grants in Aid of the Rates in England and Wales, 1889-​1990’, Historical Research, 65 (1992), 227. 44  B.R. Mitchell, ed., Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962), pp. 414–​15. Hennock gives somewhat inflated ratios in ‘Finance and Politics’, 224–​25. 45  Davis, ‘Central Government and the Towns’, p. 269. 46  C. Bellamy, Administering Central–​Local Relations, 1871–​1919: The Local Government Board in Its Fiscal and Cultural Context (Manchester, 1988), p. 79.

Local Government   201 expenditure.47 By the 1920s, however, as electric tramways and gas began to face much stiffer competition from alternative forms of transport and power, municipal trading became far less effective and sustainable.48 The decline of municipal trading, coupled with Churchill’s programme of de-​rating and anxieties over the municipal impact of the international economic crisis, conspired to hasten the decline of local government autonomy and authority. At the same time, the 1929 Local Government Act was interpreted by many as evidence of increasing central interference in local government. W.A. Robson, for one, identified three principal agents of central domination. First, he claimed, was the rapidly growing scale of grants-​in-​aid—​which had more than doubled in value between 1920 and 1930—​and the disappearance, from 1929, of the ‘percentage grant’ principle. Second, district auditors’ enhanced authority over councils from 1927 onwards left local authorities with less discretion over spending. Finally, the more stringent central supervision of local borrowing advanced by the 1929 Act, argued Robson, would simply make local authorities ever more reliant on central funding. The cumulative effect of these developments, Robson argued, betoken[ed] a subordination of local autonomy to the dictates of the central power which, if pursued, will be the virtual end of local government. The complete abdication by the local authorities of the right to think and act for themselves ; their transformation into mere receptacles for Government policy ; their immediate acceptance of all the ill-​considered panic measures, involving a complete reversal of existing tendencies and the abrogation of carefully-​prepared schemes, put forward by the Government under the pretext of the so-​called crisis; their servile acquiescence without a protest in the unlimited encroachment on the rights of local authorities introduced by the National Economy Act, 1931; their willingness to destroy and to see destroyed the fruits of municipal progress in terms of education, housing, and the other social services without demanding so much as an enquiry into the necessity for so doing—​all this, I suggest, reveals a new and degraded spirit in local government which has not previously appeared in this country.49

Although Nick Hayes has demonstrated that local authorities managed to retain much autonomy in the face of this central state onslaught, and that this local fight-​back was enabled by the continuing participation of the urban middle class in municipal leadership, it is nonetheless clear that local government independence and authority was significantly compromised during the inter-​war years.50 47  M. Daunton, ‘Payment and Participation: Welfare and State Formation in Britain, 1900–​1951’, Past and Present, 150 (1996), 197–​8. 48  M. Falkus, ‘The Development of Municipal Trading in the Nineteenth Century’, Business History, 19 (1977), 158. 49  W.A. Robson, ‘The Central Domination of Local Government’, Political Quarterly, 4 (1933), 85–​104. 50  N. Hayes, ‘Civic Perceptions: Housing and Local Decision-​Making in English Cities in the 1920s’, Urban History, 27 (2000), 211–​33; N. Hayes, ‘Counting Civil Society: Deconstructing Elite Participation in the English Provincial City, 1900–​1950’, Urban History, 40 (2013), 287–​314. For an excellent argument about the continuing role of local government as a site of ‘political education’ during the inter-​war

202   Ben Weinstein

V The great wars of the twentieth century severely challenged the salience of British local government. The nationalization of culture forged in the crucible of national suffering, the development of an unprecedentedly strong central state with its own plans for social welfare provision, and the further development of grant-​funding schemes which placed local government funding at the mercy of central government largesse conspired fatally to undermine local government autonomy, authority, and relevance. The post-​war abolition of the Poor Law and the simultaneous birth of the National Health Service took from local councils many of their newly won responsibilities. These reforms were followed by steady erosion in the agency of local authorities throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. This erosion was enabled by a cross-​party commitment to ‘modernization’ which emphasized the efficiencies to be gained by centralizing funding decisions. Within this emerging consensus, local government was increasingly conceptualized as either inept or unable to provide the economies of scale necessary for efficient service provision. As Richard Crossman put it in his Diaries: ‘the time was right for a total and radical reform of local government because the people in local government, the officials as well as the councillors, were aware of the own inanity and inadequacy.’51 Successive Conservative governments, increasingly open to Keith Joseph’s suggestions for local government reform, sought to make room for private provision. Labour governments, meanwhile, characterized the rating system as inherently regressive. These views encouraged ministers to invent novel ways of chipping away at local government financial autonomy, such as Crossman’s 1965 ‘rebate’ for low-​income ratepayers. As local authorities became less and less able to raise revenues through the rates, other sources of revenue also began to dry up. In 1973 the Heath government completed a process begun in 1947/​8, when gas and electricity had been nationalized, by creating regional water authorities—​thereby depriving councils of their last remaining source of municipal utility trading revenue. The introduction in 1980 of right-​to-​buy schemes for council tenants, and the creation of ‘grant maintained’ schools in 1988, made an even more profound impact on the role and responsibilities of councils. This precipitous decline in the scope and role of local government is reflected in the dramatic decline of local government spending as a share of overall government spending during the course of the twentieth century. Whereas local government spending comprised more than half of all government spending in 1905, by 1990 it accounted for slightly less than one quarter. This diminution remained steady and gradual until the early 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher’s first government began to present local government revenues as subject to Treasury control, and began to restrict central government years, see T. Hulme, ‘Putting the City back into Citizenship: Civics Education and Local Government in Britain, 1918–​1945’, Twentieth Century British History, 26 (2015), 26–​51. 51 

R. Crossman, Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (3 vols, London, 1975–​7), vol. I, p. 439.

Local Government   203 grants on the basis that local government was both ‘inefficient’ and susceptible to ‘corruption’.52 The Rates Act (1984), for example, empowered central government to ‘cap’ local authority rate levels, and by so doing restricted the ability of local authorities to respond to central government grant cutbacks. Indeed, as its share of government spending has fallen, local government has become progressively more dependent on central government funding and increasingly vulnerable to cuts to this funding. Since the late 1990s, nearly 85 per cent of local government expenditure has been financed by central state grants. Yet, central funding of English local government fell by more than a third between 2010 and 2015, and is set to diminish even further in the coming years, leaving many local authorities struggling to meet their statutory commitments.53 Moreover, since 2013 local authorities have been required by law to hold referendums on any rate increase of over 2 per cent. These challenges have been compounded by problems of council indebtedness. As local government became ever more subject to the authority and various political agendas of the central state during the second half of the twentieth century, so it also came to be perceived as both less capable and less relevant to people’s everyday lives. Indeed, since the mid-​1960s there has been a very significant erosion of public support for institutions and personnel of local government. Whereas the Maud Report (1964) found that 95 per cent of the public thought their county council, district council, or borough council ‘ran things fairly well’, only 80 per cent were similarly satisfied twenty years later. Today, the figure is a mere 68 per cent. This trend is matched by a corresponding decline in voter turnout at local elections, which fell by nearly 15 per cent between the 1950s and the late 1990s.54 The period between 1965 and 1975 was crucial to the development of the public’s increasingly apathetic, and even alienated, attitude to local government, and this public alienation in turn enabled central government to undermine local autonomy during the following decade. Public loss of faith in local government hinged on three simultaneous developments: the sensational uncovering of corrupt practices; the growth of left-​wing militancy in some councils; and the growing militancy of local authority trade unions. The first of these sins, centred on the exposure of T. Dan Smith’s corrupt manipulation of Newcastle City Council, was sensational enough to prompt to the creation of a 1974 Royal Commission tasked with investigating standards of conduct in public life. Although the resulting Salmon Report found minimal evidence of local authority corruption, it nonetheless recommended the establishment of a series of measures and procedures aimed at preventing future misconduct.55 Clearly, by the mid-​ 1970s, local government was no longer thought to be a wellspring of ‘national vigour’, or 52 

M. Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher: The Downing Street Years (London, 1993), pp. 39, 123; D. Walker, Municipal Empire: The Town Hall and their Beneficiaries (London, 1983); Alex Henney, Inside Local Government (London, 1984). 53  National Audit Office, The Impact of Funding Reductions on Local Authorities (November 2014). See also Local Government Association, The LGA Autumn Statement Submission (2013). 54  J.A. Chandler, ‘Local Governance: Britain’s Civic Failure’, . 55 PP, Report of the Royal Commission on Standards of Conduct in Public Life (1976).

204   Ben Weinstein at all instrumental in character formation or ‘political education’. Despite the best efforts of the Local Government Association, local government is today perceived by many to be a ‘poorly defended’ sector. Moreover, as its historic roles are increasingly handed over to private service providers, public perceptions of the rightful scope of local government are narrowing. However, the current ‘crisis’ has been accompanied by calls for a re-​evaluation of the role and purpose of the local state and of its relationship to central government, and there have been moves—​including devolving authority over business rates and even health services—​to empower units of local government. The long process of local government reform continues; and it remains deeply political.

Further reading J.A. Chandler, Explaining Local Government:  Local Government in Britain since 1800 (Manchester, 2007). M. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–​1914 (Cambridge, 2007). E.P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons:  Ideal and Reality in Nineteenth-​ Century Urban Government (London, 1973). P. Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865–​1914 (Oxford, 1987). B. Keith-​Lucas, The English Local Government Franchise: A Short History (Oxford, 1952).

chapter 13

The Mona rc h y Andrzej Olechnowicz

Academic study of the monarchy has largely existed on the margins of modern British political history. David Craig’s discipline-​summarizing and agenda-​defining article on political history made no mention of the institution, for example.1 Various reasons for this are considered in this chapter, but the most fundamental and iterated is that political history is about the study of power (in some way),2 and the modern monarchy is an institution which reigns but does not rule. Even now, for all the exhortatory pronunciamentos about the converging of ‘high politics’ and the more expansive ‘new political history’, more often than not publications are characterized at the coalface by the thin gruel of limited horizons and restricted archival preoccupations in understanding the political system. Latterly we are told that ‘everything’ should be of interest to the political historian, but it decidedly is not. The contemporary academic study of the British monarchy by historians can be traced to two influential publications of the 1980s: Professor Sir David Cannadine’s 1983 study of the monarchy and the ‘invention of tradition’,3 and Tom Nairn’s 1988 study of how the Crown has shaped the strange national identity of ‘Ukania’—​his term for the Anglo-​British state.4 Both, however, are principally works of social history, with the objective of understanding persistent royal popularity and its connection to national identity (though Nairn is much else besides).5 It is no accident that both were produced 1 

D. Craig, ‘“High Politics” and the “New Political History”’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 453–​75. For example, the several definitions offered in T.P. Wiseman, G.R. Elton, C. Russell, R. Hutton, R. Foster, J. Turner, K.O. Morgan, and P. Clarke, ‘What is Political History?’, History Today, 35:1 (1985), 10–18. 3  D. Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”, c.1820–​1977’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 101–​64. 4  T. Nairn, The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy (London, 1988). 5  Historians have, of course, noted that there have been fluctuations in royal popularity (e.g., P. Ziegler, Crown and People (1978), passim) and attempted to account for these fluctuations (e.g., A. Olechnowicz, ‘“A jealous hatred”: Royal Popularity and Social Inequality’, in A. Olechnowicz, ed., The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 280–​314); however, as a general proposition, persistent royal popularity holds true. 2 

206   Andrzej Olechnowicz under Thatcherism. Cannadine accorded particular importance to developments in the media from the 1880s, and observed a shift from a provincial, rational Liberal press to ‘London-​based, increasingly Conservative, strident, vulgar, and working-​class in their appeal’ national dailies in which the monarchy was ‘virtually sacrosanct’.6 For Nairn, ‘popular Royalism is visibly not passive and mindless’, is the peculiar form that nationalism takes in Great Britain, and is essential to the ‘Ukanian’ state in two respects: first, it is the only way of maintaining ‘the informal authority of an elite inside the more formal and bureaucratic constraints of a quasi-​industrial society’; second, it is the only way of holding ‘populism permanently at bay. Egalitarianism in the democratic sense was partly absorbed and partly (the more important part) broken’.7 Moreover, both look to the category of ‘the irrational’ in order to account for royal success, as have current explanations seeking to account for the success of Thatcherism.8 Eric Hobsbawm, co-​editor of The Invention of Tradition, wrote that with mass politics in the later nineteenth century, ‘rulers and middle-​class observers rediscovered the importance of “irrational” elements in the maintenance of the social fabric and the social order’.9 The success of elaborate political rituals which looked to ‘both old and tried evokers of emotion such as crown and military glory and . . . new ones such as empire and colonial conquest’ reflected ‘a mixture of planting from above and growth—​or at any rate readiness for planting—​from below’.10 Not only did Nairn employ the notion of ‘enchantment’, but he also considered its old Scottish version, ‘glamour’—​‘the spell cast upon humans by fairies, or witches’, and therefore denoting ‘persons and symbols ordinary in appearance but quite super-​ordinary in significance’—​and argued that through George IV’s visit to Scotland in 1822, ‘Glamour had won a new lease of life, in both language and the State. It had become part of modernity’.11 Although political historians are concerned with, say, the popular effects of party rhetoric, they do not typically look to ‘the irrational’ to understand those effects. By contrast, most academic historians of the monarchy and certainly nearly all popular writers on the topic do (at some level). Thus, Vernon Bogdanor, drawing on Bagehot, argued that in addition to political parties and the like, voters need ‘the reassurance of a visible presence’ in their political world.12 Ross McKibbin too, while in general assuming ‘working-​class intellectuality’,13 characterized the inter-​war monarchy as ‘partly magical’

6

  D. Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual’, p. 122.

7 Nairn, The Enchanted Glass, pp. 53, 10, 185. 8 

E.g., S. Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, Marxism Today, (Jan. 1979), 14–​20. Hall explicitly argued that ‘authoritarian populism’ had a ‘rational and material core’ (p. 20), but the concept was often misunderstood by others as not having such a core. 9  E. Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-​Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–​1914’, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition, p. 268. 10  E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–​1914 (London, 1989), p. 105. 11 Nairn, The Enchanted Glass, pp. 27, 214. 12  V. Bogdanor, The Monarchy and the Constitution (Oxford, 1995), p. 303. 13  P. Ghosh, ‘The Guv’nor: The Place of Ross McKibbin in the Writing of British History’, in C.V.J. Griffiths, J.J. Nott, and W. Whyte, eds., Classes, Cultures, and Politics (Oxford, 2001), p. 19.

The Monarchy   207 and ‘quasi-​magical’, thereby in accordance with ‘people’s mentality’ which accepted ‘belief in semi-​religions’.14 Neither of these instances is defensible. Bogdanor simply asserts (as did Bagehot) what needs to be proved. McKibbin cites evidence, but it can be reinterpreted to tell a rather different story, of a kind more familiar to political historians.15 Moreover, one need only think of Nairn’s withering attack on newspapers’ monitoring of the ‘mystic significance of a small bald patch’ as Prince Charles’s hair thinned in the 1970s to recall how common this sort of nonsense is in the press.16 This penchant for the irrational reflects the neglect of what by any measure should be regarded as a foundational text for academics: the social psychologist Michael Billig’s Talking of the Royal Family (1992). Billig recorded 63 unprompted discussions, mostly lasting one to two hours, among members of ‘ordinary’ families in the East Midlands in order to ‘reconstruct patterns of common-​sense thinking’ about royalty.17 These discursive patterns ‘revealed barely a trace of religious sentiment when discussing monarchy’, and: Over and again, respondents uttered the common-​place that royals were ordinary human beings. The common-​place can be used to justify royal lapses, to claim similarity with royals and to bring royalty down to earth, should they start believing in their special destiny too ardently. A supermarket cashier commented that ‘basically they’re just ordinary people like everybody else’ (interview 55).18

Consequently, royals were evaluated in down-​to-earth, instrumental terms. Like the rest of us, they had a clearly defined job to do: The Queen and her family might be praised for doing an excellent job, but the praise would turn to criticism, should the job not be done. This much was made clear, again and again. The royal job was to set standards, or to give the image of setting standards. As such, said one father, it was ‘part of the job’ that ‘they have to behave themselves’ (interview 3). It was like a contract of employment.19

Billig’s work is unique in terms of its originality and persuasiveness. Of course, it cannot demonstrate that this ‘disenchanted’, instrumental orientation towards the monarchy is of recent or older origin, but, alongside the ‘knowingness’ that has long characterized 14  R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–​1951 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 3, 14, 15, 522. McKibbin, like many people, was perhaps over-​impressed by the quasi-​religious view of Diana in the days after she died: R. McKibbin, ‘Mass-​Observation in the Mall’, in M. Merck, ed., After Diana: Irreverent Elegies (London, 1998), p. 19. 15  A. Olechnowicz, ‘Britain’s “Quasi-​Magical” Monarchy in the Mid-​Twentieth Century?’, in Griffiths, Nott, and Whyte, eds., Classes, Cultures, and Politics, pp. 70–​81. 16 Nairn, The Enchanted Glass, pp. 25–​6. Prince William too must contend with columnists declaring that his baldness no longer makes him ‘the Prince of our dreams’ (e.g. Daily Mail Online, 16 Jan. 2016). 17  M. Billig, Talking of the Royal Family (1992), pp. 16–​18. 18  Ibid., pp. 61, 69. 19  Ibid., p. 111.

208   Andrzej Olechnowicz lower-​class life,20 it suggests the likelihood that for some time most ordinary people have seen the monarchy as nothing special—​an institution like any other. This chapter therefore starts from the premise that royal history is not yet properly a part of political history, but ought to be. It will first examine who has written about monarchy and how they have done so, suggesting that this work has been distinctive and defective in several respects. It will next evaluate how much of the research agenda outlined by Cannadine in his inaugural lecture as Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History, University of London, in 2004 has been addressed. The chapter will then identify the area which political (alongside social) historians might most urgently examine. The absence of study of monarchists and ‘monarchism’ is a remarkable omission in the light of much recent interest in republicans and ‘republicanism’. The chapter will conclude by presenting preliminary research which indicates how the inclusion of monarchists and monarchism might alter thinking about both the monarchy and its subjects.

I The official royal biography enables the monarchy to write its own history. The official biographies of George V by Harold Nicolson in 1952 (KCVO21 in 1953), George VI by Sir John Wheeler-​Bennett in 1958 (KCVO in 1959, and historical adviser to the Royal Archives), Queen Mary by James Pope-​Hennessy in 1959 (CVO in 1960), King Edward VIII by Philip Ziegler in 1990, and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother by William Shawcross in 2009 (CVO in 2011) follow the principle of selection outlined to Nicolson by Sir Alan Lascelles, George VI’s private secretary: the book is ‘not meant to be an ordinary biography . . . You will be writing a book on the subject of a myth and will have to be mythological’ . . . He said that I should not be expected to say one word that was not true . . . All that I should be expected to do was to omit things and incidents which were discreditable.22

All also endorse that most fundamental tenet of royal ideology—​that the British monarchy is, in the words of Sir Ernest Barker in 1945, ‘far—​very far—​from being a merely conservative institution’. Instead, it is ‘a changing and moving monarchy—​changing and moving with the times, and actively helping the times to change and move . . . That is

20  P. Bailey, ‘Conspiracies of Meaning: Music-​Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture’, Past and Present, 144 (1994), 138–​70. 21  Knight Commander (KCVO) and Commander (CVO) of the Royal Victorian Order, established by Queen Victoria in 1896 to recognize personal service to the monarch. The honour remains in the gift of the Sovereign. 22  H. Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, 1930–​64, ed. S. Olson (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 334, 8 June 1948.

The Monarchy   209 the secret of its survival and that is the source of its strength’.23 Official biographies are difficult to contradict, partly because their imprimatur (and often their length) convey authority, partly because the access to the papers of a reign that is granted to official biographers is denied to others. One historian has described the Royal Archives as ‘a hermetic private body, imposing stringent controls on access and frustrating legitimate historical research. They constitute a royal pocket borough at the heart of our supposed democracy’.24 Direct access is only granted ‘to certain research academics’, and requests must be in writing and sent by letter. Since the monarchy is not a ‘public authority’, and its archives are not ‘public records’, it is exempt from Freedom of Information legislation.25 So far, campaigns to make national records available to the nation have been resisted or ignored by the monarchy and the government.26 The irony is that if royal papers became more easily available, the type of historian attracted to this subject would probably often be the kind who might safely have been chosen as an official biographer.27 For some commentators, at any rate, this points to a wider cultural fact about British scholars and, presumably, the British in general: there is always ‘a certain obsequiousness’ when it comes to the monarchy.28 Most writing about the monarchy takes the form of popular, or commercial, history. The claim of this type of biography is that it alone has uncovered what its royal subject is ‘really like’ because it has been granted privileged information or access.29 In the previous century this genre was, overwhelmingly, more reverential and toadying than the official lives, and this largely continues to be the case in the present century. Nonetheless, Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story in 1992 marked a watershed, and gave credibility to this genre: a revised edition of his book in 1997 finally confirmed what had long been suspected—​that ‘the story contained in its pages would never have appeared had it not been for the wholehearted co-​operation of Diana, Princess of Wales’.30 From now on, even what was strenuously denied or seemingly unbelievable might, after all, be true. 23 

E. Barker, Essays on Government (Oxford, 1945), pp. 1, 22. ‘Glaring Anomaly of the Royal Archives: Letter from Dr. Piers Brendon’, The Guardian, 22 June 2015. 25 , 24 February 2016. 26  For example, ‘The Guardian View on the Royal Archives: Open Them Up’, The Guardian, 20 July 2015. 27   For example, K. Rose, King George V (1983). 28  ‘Are British Academics Too Obsequious to Write Good Royal History?’, Times Higher Education, 19 June 1998 (comment by Robert Baldock, history editor at Yale University Press). 29  Two striking examples are C. Hutchins and D. Midgley’, Diana on the Edge: Inside the Mind of the Princess of Wales (London, 1996), which claimed to be ‘the first book to delve into the mind of the Princess of Wales, one of the most controversial women alive today . . . Drawing on high-​level sources close to the Princess of Wales—​some of whom have never spoken before—​and the expert views of a team of distinguished specialists, this book examines her growing instability and what lies behind it’; and N. Davie, William: The Rebel Prince. The True Story of Why He Never Wants to Be King (London, 2001). 30  A. Morton, Diana: Her True Story—​In Her Own Words. Completely Revised Edition (London, 1997), p. 7; ‘Field Day for the Windsor Pundits. Diana Has Created a Media Growth Industry’, The Guardian, 2 Mar. 1996. 24 

210   Andrzej Olechnowicz In any case, the mundanity of revelations by former royal servants increasingly emboldened to cash in on their status undermines any hope of continuing to accord royals ‘mythological’ stature.31 There is little here of value for the political historian, however. Popular writers and ex-​royal employees or insiders have neither the pecuniary incentive nor the knowledge nor, often, the competence to illuminate the political role of royalty. All more or less do no more than briefly assert in passing that monarchy is valuable because it embodies (somehow) national identity. In 2004, Cannadine offered a route map of how the subject might move ‘from biography to history’, and become ‘a history of society as reflected in the changing experience of the British royal family’. He first praised Walter Arnstein’s 2003 biography of Queen Victoria as ‘an outstanding and pioneering example’ of a ‘historically-​informed’ biography by a professional historian.32 A principal objective for Arnstein was to examine how Victoria’s self-​image as a daughter of a soldier and ‘warrior queen’ shaped her understanding of her political role, and what room existed in the political system to allow her to initiate political action.33 Cannadine might also have mentioned Ben Pimlott’s The Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth II (1996), which demonstrated how the ‘choice of occupation and acquired habits of mind’ of courtiers reinforced the Queen’s personality—​punctilious, conscientious, conservative, reassured by routine, and hating the unexpected—​to fashion a monarchy which is politically and culturally ‘deeply cautious’.34 Cannadine then advocated conceptualizing the monarchy as ‘a successfully self-​perpetuating elite institution’ and exploring this success in terms of its political, philanthropic, military, and ecclesiastical roles, which further entails understanding royal finance, education, and marriage, royal gender roles, media representations, and the relationship between the monarchy and social classes, the nation, and the empire.35 Much of this agenda has been met. William Kuhn’s Henry and Mary Ponsonby: Life at the Court of Queen Victoria (2002) had already demonstrated the value of Cannadine’s suggestion that the political history of the monarchy was best approached as ‘the history of successive private secretaries to successive sovereigns’ than as that of monarchs themselves.36 The publication of some courtiers’ diaries has proved valuable.37 Nonetheless, the political history of monarchy often remains too tied to constitutional history and the approach of constitutional lawyers. One of the most impressive articles by the professor 31 

For example, S.P. Barry, Royal Service: My Twelve Years As Valet to Prince Charles (1986); D. McGrady, Eating Royally: Recipes And Remembrances from a Palace Kitchen (Nashville, TN, 2007); ‘Ex-​Royal Head Housekeeper at Sandringham for a Decade Reveals her Secrets to Running a Household’, Daily Mail Online, 14 Dec. 2015. 32  D. Cannadine, ‘From Biography to History: Writing the Modern British Monarchy’, Historical Research, 77 (2004), 292, 303. 33  W.L. Arnstein, ‘The Warrior Queen: Reflections on Victoria and Her World’, Albion, 30 (1998), 1–​28; W.L. Arnstein, Queen Victoria (Basingstoke, 2003), esp. pp. 200–​1. 34  B. Pimlott, The Queen (London, 1996), pp. 244–​5. 35  D. Cannadine, ‘From Biography to History: Writing the Modern British Monarchy’, Historical Research, 77 (2004), 298–​311. 36 Ibid., 301. 37  For example, King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War. The Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles, ed. D. Hart-​Davis (London, 2006).

The Monarchy   211 of constitutional law Rodney Brazier (MVO 2013) examines how a British republic could be legally enacted. However, there is hardly any consideration of where, within the (party) political system, the pressure for an elected presidency might come from. The arguments for and against a monarchy are presented as abstract standpoints, virtually unembodied in any political actors.38 The problem comes when a political historian such as Vernon Bogdanor (CBE 1998) approaches royal history in broadly similar fashion.39 A sharp exchange between Bogdanor and Philip Williamson over King George V’s role in the formation of the National Government highlighted the shortcoming of the ‘constitutional’ approach. Bogdanor insisted that the king’s role had been much greater than generally thought, because he had been ‘not merely the facilitator of the National Government, but the instigator of it’, above all by refusing three times to accept Ramsay MacDonald’s resignation.40 Williamson retorted that ‘most historians would assume that the place to begin is with the Prime Minister and party leaders’ when considering governments, and charged Bogdanor’s ‘constitutional’ interpretation with producing ‘manifest distortions, by wrenching material out of complex political contexts’. Williamson’s masterly recreation of those multiple, changing contexts demonstrates that the King operated in the slipstream of the party politicians.41 The study of the monarchy is the study of (after Victoria) a reluctant, tentative, often unskilful second-​order political actor in a political system dominated by party political players. Indeed, Cannadine’s agenda was a missed opportunity to call explicitly for a liberation from the cult of Walter Bagehot, or rather a very skewed reading of his work, regarding the monarchy. We have already questioned Bagehot’s assertion that the (uneducated and ill-​informed) people needed the monarchy to satisfy their ‘emotional longing for splendour and serenity’, in Frank Prochaska’s redolent phrase.42 But we need to go much further and reclaim Bagehot from the misinterpretation of The English Constitution (1867) by academic and non-​academic monarchists. David Craig has pointed to the irony of George VI, Elizabeth II, and Prince Charles all being tutored in royal statecraft by being obliged to read a republican tome. What royal appropriators have failed to see, or chosen to hide, is that Bagehot actually argued that cabinet government could work perfectly ‘efficiently’ without a monarchy, and ought to do so when the people were sufficiently politically educated to realize this.43 The broader ‘political’ functions performed by the monarchy which Bagehot identified (making government intelligible, reinforcing the

38 

R. Brazier, ‘A British Republic’, Cambridge Law Journal, 61 (2002), 351–​85.

39 Bogdanor, The Monarchy and the Constitution, passim. 40 

V. Bogdanor, ‘1931 Revisited: The Constitutional Aspects’, Twentieth Century British History, 2 (1991), 10–​16, 25; Bogdanor, The Monarchy and the Constitution, pp. 104–​12. 41  P. Williamson, ‘1931 Revisited: The Political Realities’, Twentieth Century British History, 2 (1991), 328–​38. 42  F. Prochaska, Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy (New Haven and London, 1996), p. 101. 43  D. Craig, ‘Bagehot’s Republicanism’, in Olechnowicz, ed., The Monarchy and the British Nation, pp. 139, 162. Craig concedes that continuing reverence for the monarchy is an obstacle to the people realizing that it is politically quite unnecessary.

212   Andrzej Olechnowicz impact of religion, and being the head of society) no longer hold.44 Above all, Bagehot was clear that hereditary succession was more or less guaranteed to produce indulged, petulant, and self-​aggrandizing heirs and monarchs: ‘a constitutional prince is the man who is most tempted to pleasure, and the least forced to business.’45 Countless constitutional historians opining on the constitutional function of the monarchy, habitually starting with Bagehot’s celebrated ‘three rights’ of a constitutional monarch (‘the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn’46), overlook these other observations by Bagehot. Excellent work has, of course, been produced by historians documenting (without much help from the Royal Archives) how Queen Victoria and Edward VII actually behaved in relation to their prime ministers, and how they sought to shape policy.47 The fault has come when constitutional experts have danced on the head of a pin either to prove that all, or virtually all, of these royal interventions were ‘constitutional’ and ‘efficient’, or to establish precedents about the constitutionally proper way for monarchs to behave in the future. By no means has all work genuflected to Bagehot. Prochaska’s Royal Bounty (1995) has documented the royals’ charitable activities, and observed how these activities contained republican and socialist criticism by demonstrating that the royal family performed a necessary and socially valued job exceptionally well. The politics of being ‘Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England’, the impact of ‘civil religion’, and the significance of central orders for local church services have been explored by Norman Bonney, John Wolffe, and Philip Williamson.48 Phillip Hall’s Royal Fortune: Tax, Money and the Monarchy (1992) has probably gone as far in uncovering royal finances as the relentless stonewalling of courtiers allows,49 while Peter Gordon and Dennis Lawton’s Royal Education (1999) showed how misguided are those who identify royals as having superior talent. The political and cultural consequences of ‘the feminization of the monarchy’ have been most strikingly (and also controversially) conceptualized by Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich.50 44 

A. Tomkins, ‘The Republican Monarchy Revisited’, Constitutional Commentary, 19 (2002), 751. W. Bagehot, The English Constitution, ed. Miles Taylor (Oxford, 2001), p. 65. In other words, Prince Charles is the norm, not the exception. 46 Bagehot, The English Constitution, p. 60. 47  For example, F. Hardie, The Political Influence of the British Monarchy, 1868–​1952 (London, 1970); R.R. McLean, Royalty and Diplomacy in Europe, 1890–​1914 (Cambridge, 2001). See also A. Olechnowicz, ‘Historians and the Modern British Monarchy’, in Olechnowicz, ed., The Monarchy and the British Nation, pp. 12–​20. 48  For example, N. Bonney, ‘Some Constitutional Issues Concerning the Installation of the Monarch’, British Politics, 7 (2012), 163–​82; N. Bonney, Monarchy, Religion and the State (Manchester, 2013); J. Wolffe, God and Greater Britain (London, 1994); J. Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000); P. Williamson, ‘State Prayers, Fasts and Thanksgivings: Public Worship in Britain 1830–​1897’, Past and Present, 200 (2008), 121–​74; P. Williamson, ‘National Days of Prayer: The Churches, the State and Public Worship in Britain 1899–​1957’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), 323–​66. 49  See H. Brooke, Your Right to Know (2005), pp. 68–​7 1. 50  M. Homans, ‘“To the Queen’s Private Apartments”: Royal Family Portraiture and the Construction of Victoria’s Sovereign Obedience’, Victorian Studies, 37 (1993), 1–​45; A. Munich, Queen Victoria’s Secrets (New York, 1996); M. Homans, Royal Representations (Chicago, 1998). 45 

The Monarchy   213 The relationship between the monarchy and national identity is still perhaps incompletely presented. That royals (in some way) embody national identity is not in doubt.51 However, following Cannadine’s initial lead in 1983, most of the emphasis has been on the impact of grand royal ceremonial52 and, more recently, provincial royal visits, and their displays of ‘popular constitutionalism’.53 Although popular provincial visits have been explained as displays of ‘popular constitutionalism’,54 national ceremonies are by and large simplistically still presented in terms such as ‘everyone loves a parade . . . from the glitter of a golden coach to the glamour of carnival’.55 What is also still missing is an emphasis on the ubiquitous presence of royalty in everyday life—​the royal equivalent of Billig’s ‘banal nationalism’, the recognition that royal nationalism, ‘far from being an intermittent mood in established nations, is the endemic condition’.56 This will involve investigating royal memorabilia, for example, but above all media—​ print, audio-​visual, and now digital—​representations of royalty. Excellent work has been done here. Thus, Richard Williams thoroughly examined the nineteenth-​century press, but his principal concern was to understand controversy surrounding the political power of the monarchy.57 John Plunkett pursued the broader agenda of showing that ‘the growth of a material culture and a popular publishing industry were primarily responsible for Victoria’s almost limitless plasticity, her diffuse proliferation’.58 The death of Princess Diana in 1997 produced a literature examining the culpability of the press in blighting her life and in producing the extraordinary displays of public mourning after her death.59 However, none of this work is principally focused on exploring banal royal nationalism. Finally, any investigation of the contemporary monarchy must acknowledge how decisively newspaper reporting above all has moved from (near-​perpetual near-​) reverence to what might be termed ‘amnesic royalism’—​abrupt shifts from censure to commendation, from over-​familiarity to decorous respect of individual royals from day to day, sometimes from page to page. The internet allows instant recall, countless bricolages, and instant transmission of elevating or enervating royal stories.60

51 

M. Billig, Talking of the Royal Family (London, 1992), pp. 33, 38–​9. For example, W.M. Kuhn, ‘Ceremony and Politics: The British Monarchy, 1871–​1872’, Journal of British Studies, 26 (1987), 133–62; W.M. Kuhn, Democratic Royalism (New York, 1996); H. Örnebring, ‘Revisiting the Coronation: A Critical Perspective on the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953’, Nordicom Review, 25 (2004), 175–​95. 53  E.g., A. Tyrrell and Y. Ward, ‘“God Bless Her Little Majesty”: The Popularising of Monarchy in the 1840s’, National Identities, 2 (2000), 109–​25. 54  J. Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford, 2003). 55  The Guardian, 5 June 2002 (Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee). 56  M. Billig, Banal Nationalism (London, 1995), p. 6. 57  R. Williams, The Contentious Crown (Aldershot, 1997). 58 Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media, ch. 1. 59  For example, Merck, ed., After Diana; J. Richards, S. Wilson, and L. Woodhead, eds., Diana, the Making of a Media Saint (London, 1999); T. Walter, ed., The Mourning for Diana (Oxford, 1999). 60  For examples and elaboration, see A. Olechnowicz, ‘“For the Many May be Better than the Few”: Republicans and Anti-​Monarchism in Contemporary Britain’, in A. Pankratz and C.Ul. Viol, eds., Un(Making) the Monarchy (Heidelberg, 2017), pp. 201–26. 52 

214   Andrzej Olechnowicz However carefully the royals attempt to manage the media,61 the brand is very likely to become an unstable signifier.

II The most glaring scholarly—​and popular—​omission is the absence of ‘monarchists’ and ‘monarchism’ from the political history of the monarchy.62 Rectifying this should be the first task of the new political historian. There is no equivalent of Antony Taylor’s ‘Down with the Crown’: British Anti-​Monarchism and Debates about Royalty since 1790 (1999) for monarchism.63 At most, a very few historians have explored certain limited themes across brief periods.64 The default position seems to be that monarchism is simply a synonym for grand royal ceremonial.65 Prochaska alone has hinted at the potential role of ‘pure monarchists’ in circumstances where an unpopular move to abolish the monarchy were to be made: ‘Compared to republican clubs, the Constitutional Monarchy Association and the Monarchist League are long lived. And if history is any guide, pure monarchists are, if anything, more inflexible and belligerent than pure republicans, and they might not go quietly.’66 The consequence of failing to identify a distinct group of political actors as ‘monarchists’ is to let the royal assumption that virtually everyone is a monarchist, and that the political culture is unproblematically monarchical, stand unchallenged. This seems to be the position of Jon Parry for the nineteenth and Williamson for the twentieth century. Parry’s ‘Whig interpretation’ asserts that it is ‘the political context, much more than royal behaviour itself ’ which is critical, and that the monarchy’s public standing is primarily the result of the ‘general acquiescence in the political order, and patriotic identification with the nation-​state and its symbols’ by the people.67 Through upholding the

61  ‘Prince Charles’s Efforts to Control the Media Slammed by Republicans’, The Independent, 2 Dec. 2015. 62  The semi-​official Royal Encyclopedia, edited by R. Allison and S. Riddell (1991), has no entry on ‘monarchism’. The myriad studies of British political ideologies by political scientists and theorists consider ‘monarchism’ neither as an ideology in its own right nor as a major component of British conservatism, liberalism, or, in Tom Nairn’s memorable phrase, ‘Royal-​distributive Socialism’. 63  At most, there are scattered references and meagre insights in older texts, e.g., Sir C. Petrie, Monarchy (London, 1933). Petrie’s The Modern British Monarchy (London, 1961) merely regrets that ‘international monarchist solidarity’ was ‘in abeyance’. 64  E.g., F. Harcourt, ‘Gladstone, Monarchism and the “New” Imperialism, 1868–​74’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 14 (1985), 20–​51; P.A. Pickering, ‘“The Hearts of the Millions”: Chartism and Popular Monarchism in the 1840s’, History, 88 (2003), 227–​9. 65  A. Taylor and L. Trainor, ‘Monarchism and Anti-​Monarchism: Anglo-​Australian Comparisons c. 1870-​1901’, Social History, 24 (1999), 158–​9. 66  F. Prochaska, The Republic of Britain 1760–​2000 (London, 2000), p. 226. 67  J.P. Parry, ‘Whig Monarchy, Whig Nation: Crown, Politics and Representativeness 1800–​2000’, in Olechnowicz, ed., The Monarchy and the British Nation, pp. 65, 73.

The Monarchy   215 ‘identifying characteristics of the regime, not least its liberalism’ and its shared public values, and through tolerating irreverence as well as adulation, the monarchy has, since the 1870s, successfully ‘symbolised a representative, constitutional political culture’ almost wholly satisfactory to its people. Consequently, at the same time, the monarchy ‘has not been that important’, and, Parry supposes, ‘most people have not thought very much about it’.68 Williamson likewise argues that by the inter-​war period the chief function of the monarchy had become ‘to express and symbolize public values’. As a result, royal speeches and statements were products of the collective endeavour of courtiers, politicians, civil servants, church leaders, and others. Moreover, philanthropic, commercial, media, military, and political bodies identified with the monarchy because doing so could advance their interests, not because they were ‘deferential or dazzled’.69 This approach would probably regard a focus on ‘monarchism’ in isolation or outside the context of government and public life as contributing little to understanding the political and social role of the monarchy. But this perspective comes at a price—​an asymmetry in how republicanism and monarchism are regarded. The former is abnormal and requires a special history of its own, which more often than not confirms its alien character;70 the latter is normal, and straightforwardly what the British people believe. Whereas disheartened republicans often see themselves as ‘outside the political mainstream’ and ‘unrespectable’, even as ‘cranks’,71 ‘pure monarchists’ are heartened by believing that their views enjoy strength of numbers. This, however, is doubtful. Space allows only for consideration of the varieties of monarchism ‘from below’, arising autonomously among the population, without official sanction or encouragement from the royal establishment. Three broad forms can be observed: the ‘eccentric’ monarchists, the ‘real royalists’, and the monarchist organizations. At one end are the eccentric and bizarre individuals who gain temporary prominence through the press, and whom the press not only tolerate but even present as devoted, dutiful, admirable, and (half-​jokingly) exemplary monarchists. The eccentric monarchists are most evident in the press during major royal celebrations.72 A few have achieved national prominence: for example, Lieutenant Commander Bill Boaks (1904–​86) found fame as a tenacious parliamentary candidate, first standing in 1951 for the Association of Democratic 68  J. Parry, ‘Family History’, in T. Bentley and J. Wilsdon, eds., Monarchies: What Are Kings and Queens For? (London, 2002), pp. 67–​8. 69   P. Williamson, ‘The Monarchy and Public Values 1910–​53’, in Olechnowicz, ed., The Monarchy and the British Nation, pp. 226–​8, 231, 232–​55; and for the five public values exemplified by the monarchy, p. 230. 70  E.g., Prochaska, The Republic of Britain 1760–​2000. 71  A. Taylor, ‘Down with the Crown’: British Anti-​Monarchism and Debates about Royalty since 1790 (London, 1999), pp. 14, 99, 101; also ch. 3. 72  The most prominent eccentric during the Diamond Jubilee of 2012 was probably the ‘patriotic’ Mrs. Atkinson, Deputy Lord Lieutenant of the County of Durham, who turned her café into ‘a shrine to the Queen’, with a cardboard cut-​out of the monarch and 5,000 pieces of royal memorabilia on display, and insisted that all customers should stand for the National Anthem, played at 3pm every day: ‘Spat over Majes-​Tea’s Anthem’, The Sun, 22 May 2012; ‘Given a Right Royal Marching Order’, Daily Mirror, 21 May 2012; Daily Mail, 21 May 2012; Daily Telegraph, 21 May 2012.

216   Andrzej Olechnowicz Monarchists Representing All Women, and after 1970 for Public Safety Democratic Monarchist White Residents.73 Eccentrics often express their monarchism in a moment or through a single act. By contrast, monarchism is a way of life for the ‘real royalists’, described by the anthropologist Anne Rowbottom as ‘people who regularly travel the United Kingdom, to stand for hours, in all weathers, to greet members of the Royal Family during royal visits’. It is impossible to estimate the total number of such royalists since not all join groups, and those who do form informal groups which rely on letters and telephone calls and keep no records. Rowbottom’s findings are based on her experience as a participant observer with one group of 60 royalists in Manchester in 1989 and 1990, and a series of interviews over the years 1988 to 1997. In the year and a half of participant observation, members of the group attended at least 30 royal visits, Trooping the Colour, the Garter Procession, Royal Ascot, and the State Opening of Parliament, and made three-​or four-​day trips to London, Windsor, Edinburgh, and Balmoral. In this group there were almost as many men as women; ages ranged from mid-​teens to late sixties; most of the women were married with older children, and most of the men single; most were Conservatives and Anglicans; and most were lower middle-​class with jobs which enabled them to follow the royals in such an intensive way. Their claim that ‘there is no such thing as a typical royalist, we are a very mixed bunch’ is therefore inaccurate in several respects.74 Real royalists fervently believe that monarchism is ‘about being British’, and ask: ‘If we lose the royal family what is there? We are just an island with some people on it, with nothing to say we are British.’ They insist that their pursuit is therefore completely different from celebrity-​watching since ‘celebrities don’t come from history, they are here today and gone tomorrow’. They value the ‘marvellous atmosphere’ of the royal crowd, in which class differences appear to be suspended and a ‘sense of good will and unity’ is generated. But the walkabout is the key feature of a royal visit for the royalists, as their most compelling motivation seems to be to meet and speak to a royal and to be recognized: ‘When I speak to a royal I feel happy, exhilarated. It is a very emotional experience and I am often on the verge of tears.’ Rowbottom doubts that this should be seen as deference, since the royalists ‘speak to and about the royal family as “ordinary” human beings with whom they can laugh and joke’, and admire the royals’ ‘personal qualities of warmth, charm and devotion to duty’. Rather, it is a reciprocal gift-​giving relationship. Royals receive gifts of photographs, of flowers—​symbols of luxury—​and of adulation. The royalists receive the ‘gifts’ of royal service, and the satisfaction of becoming ‘special people themselves’. The royalists’ extraordinariness is confirmed by the attention paid to them by the royal visitor (Prince Charles, for example, saying, ‘Ah, here’s a familiar face’, or Princess Diana remembering many of their first names), by other people in the 73  R. Ingham, ‘Boaks, William George’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, online edn, September 2004. 74  A. Rowbottom, ‘“The Real Royalists”: Folk Performance and Civil Religion at Royal Visits’, Folklore, 109 (1998), 77–​8.

The Monarchy   217 crowd, and by the media, which accepts their ‘expertise’ about the royals and consequently their ‘special status’. The very strength of the real royalists’ attachment to a dutiful monarchy meant that any royal’s failure to conform to these standards was troubling. Consequently, the royalists developed stratagems to interpret the rejection of a gift, for example, as a kindly, thoughtful act, or a brusqueness of manner (in the case of Princess Anne) as untypical or an admirable refusal to dissimulate or compensated by philanthropic work. Press stories of the disregarding of royal ideals (Princess Anne’s divorce) became opportunities to express sympathy for the Queen, both as a mother and as a monarch whose behaviour had been peerless. Thus transgressions ‘provided the royalists with a symbolic inversion against which the ideal of the monarchy could be constructed and maintained’.75 Rowbottom’s royalists were used to being abused as ‘cranks, crackpots, or fanatics’. They dismissed such estimations by arguing that they were no different from myriads of others, such as ‘football fans who travel the country to support their team, or fishermen who sit at the side of a river all day’. Moreover, they believed that they were only the most activist end of a more passive mass of monarchists: ‘Plenty of people feel like we do, but they wouldn’t do what we do. We are not the curious passersby who only turn out when the royals come to visit their area.’76 They are probably right to believe that they are ‘important’ for the monarchy, and the royals are sensible to indulge them. Most of the time the royals undertake ‘routine’ royal engagements and visits (3,820 engagements in 1997, of which around 1,000 were visits). Though even the most routine or fleeting visits will have been meticulously planned, they may sometimes struggle to attract a sufficiently sizeable and enthusiastic crowd to look impressive in the local press and on regional television, especially if a walkabout is involved. Unsurprisingly, royalists are often given advice by a Lord Lieutenant’s office on when to congregate and where to stand.77 The ‘real royalists’ are primarily seen, and sometimes heard; monarchist associations seem to be little seen or heard, but they do exist. Like most insignificant republican pressure groups, many monarchist pressure groups appear to be the hobby horses of one or a very few individuals, and to be subject to the sort of dissipation to which dedicated, self-​important cliques with more generals than troops are prone. Three might briefly be surveyed. The British Monarchist League, for example, was founded in April 2010 in order to counter ‘the many unjustified attacks that the Crown is subjected to on a daily basis’ from an ‘ever more aggressive and active republican agenda’, and to ‘rediscover what it is to have pride in being uniquely British’ since ‘our monarch is the one who exemplifies who we are as a people, what we believe in, and what we feel’. Many of the other totems of 75  A. Rowbottom, ‘Royal Symbolism and Social Integration’ (PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 1994), pp. 240–​2, 346, chs 8–​9; A. Rowbottom, ‘Following the Queen: The Place of the Royal Family in the Context of Royal Visits and Civil Religion’, Sociological Research Online, 7:2 (2002)’, para. 5.1–​5.8; Rowbottom, ‘The Real Royalists’, 80–​5. 76  Rowbottom, ‘The Real Royalists’, 86, 81. 77  Ibid., 79, 80.

218   Andrzej Olechnowicz right-​wing nationalism are also cited by the BML: a global model of good government; an imperial nation, which has been ‘known to never have the sun set on our empire’; a nation which ‘stood alone in our darkest days’; a nation ‘identified with Big Ben, red phone boxes, and black taxis’; the land of Shakespeare and tradition; and a nation threatened by ‘the rising power of the European Union’.78 In 2012 the British Monarchist Society was created to defend ‘the very ideals and theology of British identity’ against ‘the moving anarchist’s tide of a republican minority’. It asserts two cardinal claims: first, that ‘under political parties we will never be one people’, whereas a ‘non-​political Head of State’ is ‘bound to always act in the interest of their people, regardless of the political party in power’; second, that ‘it is almost impossible to imagine Britain without its Crown’, since it is the monarch who ‘exemplifies who we are as a people, what we believe in, and what we feel’. These claims are to be advanced through education, the media, political lobbying, and developing ties with Commonwealth monarchist organizations. Although the chairman of the BMS believes that there is a ‘higher power to be, one that is above the pettiness of politics’, he nonetheless contributes to the Conservative Blog.79 The Royalist Party is much more obviously a part of the Eurosceptic right wing of the Conservative party, and came into being in October 2010 out of the Conservative Royalist Party, offering ‘a disillusioned public, betrayed by false promises’ a ‘patriotic approach to politics’ as a real alternative to ‘the old beleaguered parties’. It asserts that MPs ‘have betrayed this country’ whereas ‘our Monarch has been the ever strong backbone for our British society and national identity’, and has ‘the nation and its people at heart’. Consequently, two far-​reaching changes are required. First, the monarch’s ‘constitutional rights’ should be enforced, and because the monarch has ‘no political allegiance’, she should not be ‘restricted from acting against the injustices in politics, for example the MPs’ expenses scandal’ (although the appropriate action is not specified). Second, ‘a proper Constitutional Monarchy’ requires ‘a representative of the Crown to sit in cabinet meetings’, who would be ‘personally chosen’ by the monarch to ‘act as a correspondent between the day to day workings of government, and the Monarch’. This would ensure that politics could ‘stay under the watchful eye of the Head of State who could hence forth prevent any potential political crises’ (although how exactly this could be done is not specified). For the Royalist Party the danger comes not from ‘the very few republicans’ but from a variety of foreigners, as well as from social disorder and religious and moral decline. Hence there should be ‘an immediate national referendum with a yes or no vote’ on membership of the European Union; illegal immigrants should be arrested, detained, and deported; and lax procedures should be changed to ensure there are ‘more suitable people gaining citizenship’. Unlike the BML and BMS, the Royalist Party’s agenda is to be advanced by candidates standing in local and national elections (though to date no candidate appears to have stood). Membership figures for these

78 ; . 79 .

The Monarchy   219 organizations are not made public. However, the results of surveys among members of the Royalist Party indicate the kind of people it attracts: 87 per cent believed the government was not doing enough to stand up for British values, and 79 per cent supported capital punishment.80 The three organizations considered so far were very recently founded, and are of uncertain durability.81 Pre-​eminent among organizations which have lasted several generations is the Royal Society of St George, which was founded in 1894 to promote the English way of life,82 and which currently designates itself ‘the premier patriotic society of England’ and ‘still the standard bearer of traditional English values, both at home and abroad’. In 2001 the Society’s website included Enoch Powell’s definition of ‘English’ as denoting ‘a particular people or not to be mealy mouthed, a particular race’ and his paean to monarchy in his ‘stirring speech’ to a Society dinner in 1961: Symbol, yet source of power; person of flesh and blood, yet incarnation of an idea; the kingship would have seemed to them, as it seems to us, to express the qualities that are peculiarly England’s:  the unity of England, effortless and unconstrained, which accepts the unlimited supremacy of Crown in Parliament so naturally as not to be aware of it; the homogeneity of England, so profound and embracing that the counties and the regions make it a hobby to discover their differences and assert their peculiarities; the continuity of England, which has brought this unity and this homogeneity about by the slow alchemy of centuries.

The monarchy is clearly at the heart of Englishness for its members, with ‘Respect for the Monarchy, Duty to our Sovereign and Country’ placed first among its stated aims; their fantasy is of themselves as G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Secret People’ who ‘have not spoken yet’. Its first royal patron was Queen Victoria; Edward VII gave permission for it to use the prefix ‘Royal’; and it has been patronized by every succeeding monarch. In 1963 the Queen granted the society a Royal Charter. Its presidents and vice-​presidents have been a roll call of aristocrats, military commanders. and leading Conservative politicians. Nonetheless the Society describes itself as unsectarian and independent of party politics, and in December 2011 the chairman reminded members to ‘remember that we are not a political society’ when lobbying politicians. Its bibliography is largely drawn from the right, including Baldwin, Dean Inge, Kipling, Nicolson, and volumes from the Right Book Club. The Society attaches particular importance to sending flowers to the Queen on her birthday and ensuring that St George’s Day is ‘properly celebrated’ in 80 . 81 

There are, in addition, monarchist university dining clubs such as the Strafford Club at St Andrews, which has 200 members and a number of prominent alumni: ; . 82  On its origins, the views expressed in its journal The English Race, and disagreements over Empire Day, see G. Davies, ‘Threat to “Englishness”: The Royal Society of St. George during the Edwardian era’ (MA dissertation, Durham University, 2001), chs 1 and 2.

220   Andrzej Olechnowicz England and the Commonwealth, which involves holding a Service of Thanksgiving in Westminster Abbey on the nearest Saturday and campaigning for the day to be made a public holiday. It also marks the Battles of Trafalgar, Waterloo, and Britain with an annual luncheon or dinner. Its staple role, however, is educating the younger generations of ‘English and kindred people’ about the nation’s history and customs. Its website gives no indication of its membership or effectiveness: the most that can be gleaned is that it has 55 branches, spread throughout the country except for the north-east and parts of the Midlands, and that its sales of regalia are ‘continually falling’. The Society’s letter to Prime Minister David Cameron in November 2011 asking whether he would honour his pre-​election pledge for England to have its own minister claimed that the group had ‘many thousands of members’, and that its journal and website ‘should exceed fifty thousand viewers this year’.83 The Constitutional Monarchy Association has also existed for some time, having been founded in the late 1990s. It describes itself as ‘non-​political and very broadly based’, with thousands of subscribers; however, its patrons are largely aristocrats, holders of royal honours, and Conservative MPs. It states that it has ‘no formal links’ to Buckingham Palace, and aims to educate ‘the man-​and-​woman-​in-​the street supporters and defenders of our monarchy’, who, ‘beyond the emotional feelings, important as these are . . . if pressed can only come up with a few probably not very well-​expressed reasons’ in support of the monarchy. The Association therefore lists 12 benefits, principally that constitutional monarchy provides ‘an impartial symbolic Head of State above politics, commercial and factional interests’ and ‘a focus for national unity’. Its main adversary is the media, which needs to be constantly monitored in order to challenge the people in the media ‘just waiting for opportunities to cause trouble for members of the Royal Family’ and avoid ‘the massive advantages of monarchy’ being ‘easily swept away by any tide of scurrilous media attention to less positive aspects of the monarchy’. Moreover, the Association fears that young people are indifferent or opposed to the monarchy because they do not spend sufficient time learning about it in schools, but ‘receive the constant bombardment of the disparaging and undermining aspects of media coverage’. Subscription fees and donations are therefore spent on youth awareness, and on education packs for citizenship ceremonies, schools, and universities.84 Many of these groups derive encouragement from seeing themselves as part of an international monarchist movement, which includes Australians for Constitutional Monarchy (founded in 1992), the Australian Monarchist Alliance, the Australian Monarchist League (founded in 1993), the International Monarchist League in Australia (founded in 2006), the Australian Orange Order, the Monarchist League of New Zealand (founded in 1995), and the Monarchist League of Canada (founded in 1970). Moreover, many claim an international membership themselves: for example, the Royal 83 .

84 ; .

The Monarchy   221 Society of St George claims its national tally of 55 branches rises to 130 when overseas branches are included. The Constitutional Monarchy Association is an offshoot of the International Monarchist League (originally founded in 1943), out of whose offices in London it operates. Even allowing for this international dimension, these monarchist organizations amount to very little. The monarchy has a number of prominent propagandists in its service, and a huge number of others at its service in political parties, churches, voluntary organizations, the universities, the arts, and the media. It therefore hardly needs these monarchists, some of whom it would certainly regard as embarrassing nuisances.85 Indeed, one might agree with R.W. Johnson’s stronger contention that mainstream royalists ‘do not make a cause out of royalism and would be embarrassed by anyone who did’ because ‘even the greatest devotees of the Family Windsor are aware that a theoretical discussion of monarchism will be bound to lead many to discover that they are republicans at heart’.86 It is therefore evident that ‘pure monarchists’ are no more representative of the British people than republicans; nor is the concoction of right-​wing nationalism, xenophobia, and fantasy that constitutes their ‘monarchism’ widely shared.87 So much is clear from opinion polls: since 1953, support for a British republic has hardly ever fallen below 10 per cent, and it peaked at 38 per cent in 2003. For most people, monarchy is ‘ordinary’ and rational, and their support for it is conditional, as Billig’s pivotal book demonstrated. He pointed to the ever-​present ‘potential for anger’ with the royals if they did not do their clearly delineated and obviously useful job properly.88 The political history of the modern monarchy ought to start from this perspective. But it ought to do something else too: liberate itself from Bagehot, or rather a monarchist misinterpretation of Bagehot that says the monarchy is essential to the government of the United Kingdom. It is not.

Further Reading V. Bogdanor, The Monarchy and the Constitution (Oxford, 1995). D. Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition”, c.1820–​1977’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 101–​64. D. Cannadine, ‘From Biography to History: Writing the Modern British Monarchy’, Historical Research, 77 (2004), 298–​311. T. Nairn, The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy (London, 1988). 85 

Nairn speculated in the foreword to the 2011 edition of The Enchanted Glass (p. xiv) that even the Royal Society of St George could prove an irritant if the monarchy ever emerged as the symbol of ‘federal’ identity in the United Kingdom. 86  R.W. Johnson, ‘Review of The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy by Tom Nairn’, London Review of Books, 7 July 1988. 87  This chapter was written before the outcome of the Brexit referendum. 88 Billig, Talking of the Royal Family, pp. 111–​13.

222   Andrzej Olechnowicz A. Olechnowicz, ed., The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present (Cambridge, 2007). F. Prochaska, The Republic of Britain 1760–​2000 (London, 2000). A. Taylor, ‘Down with the Crown’: British Anti-​Monarchism and Debates about Royalty since 1790 (London, 1999).

chapter 14

Religion a nd t h e Churc h e s S.J.D. Green

In November 2015, the National Theatre launched a revival of Harley Granville Barker’s long neglected play Waste. Its unrelentingly bleak vision of the emptiness of political ambition, coupled with much subtle insight into those unpalatable compromises habitually demanded of public life—​even the latent hypocrisies lurking behind polite convention—​recreated a world all too familiar to observers of twenty-​first-​century Britain.1 This was no mean achievement. The first public performance of Granville Barker’s political drama dated back to the year, almost indeed to the week, of Edward VIII’s abdication in December 1936.2 The original script was older still, penned in 1906. But the author had been so bold as to place a lethal abortion, itself the product of an adulterous affair, at the heart of his unsavoury plot. This ensured the Lord Chamberlain’s displeasure for a generation thereafter. Superficial details were altered in the modern version to ensure its continuing relevance. Sordid realities were pointedly kept in place. The effect remains shocking.3 Yet perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the play lay in its central theme. This made it vital for the Edwardians, and it still sustains our interest today. Waste relates the rise and fall of an apparently idealistic politician, Henry Trebell, determined to pass a bill through Parliament effecting the disestablishment of the Church of England. Trebell’s purpose is neither to kill religion in general nor Anglicanism in particular. Indeed, his seeming good will in this respect secures him the support of a leading churchman, Lord Charles Cantalupe. Rather, his aim is to redeploy the resources and personnel of what

1  H. Granville Barker, Waste (London, 2015). A. Treneman, ‘Sex, Death and Hypocrisy: The Politics of All Times’, The Times, 11 Nov. 2015, 21. 2  Granville Barker, Waste, p. vii. Refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain in 1907, Waste was first staged privately in November 1907. Revised by the author in 1926, its first public performance was at the Westminster Theatre, in December 1936. 3  This was the author’s experience, 30 December 2015.

224   S.J.D. Green had even by then become a historic, state-​sponsored anomaly to the novel and noble end of enlightening the young in a ‘faith that modern man might reasonably believe’: he proposes to secularize the revenues of the Church in order to facilitate the provision of a universal, humanistic, public education system. Trebell’s bill commands cross-​party, even interdenominational, support (also—​for it remains a controversial bill—​cross-​ party, interdenominational, opposition). More to the point, it secures the government’s backing. It is thwarted only by the fleeting fatal attraction of the principal protagonist for another man’s wife, aggravated by the inevitable scandal that would have flowed (and, surely, would still flow today) from her wretched unwillingness to bear his child. The bill is abandoned. Deprived of what had become the principal motivating force in his life, Trebell commits suicide. The play ends in desolation. All is ‘waste’.4 In specifically selecting a measure of church disestablishment to drive his disturbing story, Granville chose well. It is difficult to imagine any other significant and divisive political issue that has survived the test of time so well. We are still debating the presence of Anglican bishops in the House of Lords. The play was—​eventually—​set at the time of the Prayer Book controversy. Contemporaries would surely have made the connection. It was first written in the very year when the ‘nonconformist conscience’ so spectacularly triumphed and the end of the Welsh Church appeared nigh. More broadly, it was conceived against the background of continual religious controversies, above all relating to Ireland and the Catholic question, in nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century Britain. The author was no doubt writing for the ages. But he understood very well how his own epoch might best address them. Granville Barker’s Waste illuminates not just those apparently perennial aspects of the human condition, as all great tragic dramas must, but also a profoundly historical aspect of British public life that political plays of this type so often attempt but rarely achieve. Those timeless questions which posit personal ambition against the greater good cannot concern us here. But the religious question in modern British politics will exercise us mightily. In truth, it has done so at least as far back as the Reformation. Not even Britain’s passing connection with the European Union has rendered Henry VIII’s Act in Restraint of Appeals redundant in this respect.5 It continued to exact a profound influence on the United Kingdom’s political life even during the years of religious peace forged—​ in Great Britain, anyway—​through the failure of the Jacobite project.6 That peace, and the problems which it entailed, were both grounded in the peculiar position of the Established National Church (actually two Established National Churches) in what was then a multi-​denominational Christian and is now a multi-​religious society. Its sway always extended far beyond the abstract issues of legal privilege, for it fuelled the political dimensions of religious competition more generally in this country. What is striking, at least in retrospect, is how for the past two centuries the British state has 4 

Granville Barker, Waste, p. 112. A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (2nd edn., London, 1989), pp. 137–​45. 6  See J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1660–​1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 1, pts III and IV. 5 

Religion and the Churches    225 continually striven to diminish a supposedly corrigible complaint in the body politic, and how generally it has failed to do so. What is quite extraordinary about our present situation is how a solution that for so long seemed so obvious to so many—​the equalization of faiths through the secularization of the state—​now finds least favour among the principal religious minority in the land, Britain’s Muslim community.7 The politics of the churches have certainly changed over the past two centuries, but they have not gone away. Ironically, secular Britain has turned out to be a place of seemingly intractable religious dispute.

I The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was founded with no coherent religious end in mind. It was the product of realpolitik, in which questions about the next world played little part. Wolfe Tone’s Rebellion in 1798, and the continuing threat of Napoleonic invasion thereafter, drove Pitt’s government towards a defensive union in 1801.8 This reluctant manoeuvre was initially welcomed by Ireland’s oppressed Roman Catholic population (who made up the majority). They had good reasons for their optimism. Ireland after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ had assumed all the characteristics of a ‘confessional state’. Only those then in communion with its Established Protestant Church enjoyed full political, and even civil, rights. Many made the necessary compromise to do so. Burke’s father was only the most famous of these. But most did not, and suffered accordingly. For them, Union briefly held out the prospect of relief, or even emancipation, in this respect. When it failed to fulfil that promise, they turned in increasing numbers against both the (new) British connection itself and the (old) ecclesiastical arrangements that alien rule had foisted upon them.9 Early nineteenth-​century Irish resistance to injustice was personified by Daniel O’Connell. Down to 1847, O’Connell sought to reverse the Union through constitutional revision, and to liberate the people by means of religious concession. His methods were invariably direct and often crude, but they were usually peaceful. To further them, he formed the Catholic Association in 1823.10 This was in many ways the first mass political movement in modern British political history. Indeed, its influence in the early development of mainland Chartism is well documented.11 O’Connell’s Association mobilized Catholic voters (enfranchised since 1793) and encouraged them to vote against their Protestant landlords in pursuit of Catholic (and Irish) goals. Famous by-​election

7 

See S. Bruce, Religion in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1995), pp. 79–​83, 87–​93. B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People: England, 1783–​1846 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 74–​82. 9  R. Bourke, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton, NJ, 2015), pp. 27ff; R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1660–​1972 (London, 1988), pp. 297ff. 10  O. MacDonagh, The Hereditary Bondsman: Daniel O’Connell, 1775–​1829 (London, 1988), esp. ch. 10. 11  M. Chase, The Chartists: Perspectives and Legacies (London, 2015), esp. ch. 3. 8 

226   S.J.D. Green victories in 1827 and 1828 led directly to the Catholic Relief Act of 1829. This permitted all British Roman Catholic subjects access to all but five reserved offices of state. Most important of all, it enabled British, but especially Irish, Roman Catholics to sit in the Imperial Parliament. However, they rarely made up less than one-​eighth of its number throughout the nineteenth century. It seldom accommodated their often contrary aspirations.12 Put another way:  far from solving Britain’s historic ‘Catholic problem’, the political enfranchisement of a large, intractable, and potentially disloyal population within his Majesty’s realm only exacerbated the difficulty it was designed to solve. This was because it profoundly altered what had once been the essentially abstract, if just occasionally acute, question of political allegiance into an all-​too-​concrete and increasingly recalcitrant matter of competing national identities. Defending his decision, Wellington famously declared that he would sooner have the Irish within the ‘pale of the constitution’ as ‘Catholics rather than democrats’. He may temporarily have averted civil war by this action. The problem was ‘he let them’ in as Irish Catholics, and Britain’s Victorian constitution was never able successfully to reconcile itself—​or them—​to that fact.13 It was not that it did not try to do so. No small part of the political history of nineteenth-​century Britain might plausibly be written in terms of the continual efforts of British politicians to reconcile Irish public opinion to the benefits of a multi-​ethnic and a multi-​denominational British national union.14 That said, it would also have to be composed with a view to explaining their equally frequent failures in that regard. Not all British Protestants ever reconciled themselves—​even in theory—​to the compromises implied. Indeed, the Protestant proselytization of Ireland proceeded apace after 1829.15 But it failed, almost as categorically as the contemporary evangelization of India.16 Probably four-​fifths of Ireland’s population professed allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland at the turn of the nineteenth century. Fully four-​fifths did the same one hundred years later. The difference was that by this latter date they really had become Roman Catholics, ‘vitally’ and not just ‘nominally’ of the faith. In fairness, the British government was usually more subtle than unofficial evangelists in pursuing its Anglicizing ends. From the time of the Irish Church Temporalities Act of 1833 onwards, it promoted non-​denominational education throughout Ireland. This project enjoyed considerable success in turning Her Majesty’s westernmost province into an English-​ speaking realm. Perhaps half of Irishmen spoke some kind of Gaelic in 1800. Little more than 10 per cent did so a century later. But it achieved no greater success in converting

12 

See K.T. Hoppen, The Mid-​Victorian Generation: 1846–​1886 (Oxford, 1998), ch. 17, pt. 3. R. Muir, Wellington: Waterloo and the Fortunes of Peace, 1814–​1852 (New Haven, CT, 2015), ch. 18; Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People, pp. 384ff. 14  See, inter alia, R.B. McDowell, Public Opinion and Government Policy in Ireland, 1801–​1846 (London, 1974), chs 5–​9, and R.B. McDowell, The Irish Administration, 1801–​1914 (London, 1964). 15  S.J. Brown, The National Churches of England, Ireland and Scotland, 1801–​1846 (Oxford, 2001), esp. ch. 2; J. Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829–​1860 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 33ff. 16  See S.J. Brown, Providence and Empire, 1815–​1914 (Harlow, 2008), pp. 35–​9, 174, 196–​7, 242–​3. 13 

Religion and the Churches    227 them to Britain’s preferred, Protestant faith, to the degree that the leitmotif of Irish resistance to Anglicization became its Roman Catholicism. This remains true.17 Realistic British politicians quickly appreciated this, so much so that the more far-​ sighted tried to turn Ireland’s Catholicism into an instrument of its integration. In this way, they strove to bridge the gap between Irish Roman Catholic faith and British national allegiance. That was the principal motive for Peel’s controversial attempt to publicly endow the theological seminary of Maynooth, just outside Dublin, in 1845. He hoped thereby to create a domestically sympathetic priesthood. He may have partially succeeded. He was willing to risk the unity of his own party to pursue that end; in the event, he sacrificed it.18 Gladstone’s conversion to Irish disestablishment 20 years later represented the endgame of this sort of thinking.19 By then, British officialdom had been left with little option in the matter anyway. Cardinal Cullen’s leadership of the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland after 1850 furnished Britain’s westernmost kingdom with possibly the most ultramontane Church in nineteenth-​century Europe. But, far from being similarly reactionary in its politics, Ireland’s Catholic priesthood uniquely took upon itself the task of articulating a nation’s progressive ideals. As a result, an otherwise conservative Catholic Church paradoxically became the most important vehicle of the social and political ‘modernization’ of Victorian Ireland.20 To be sure, it had few indigenous rivals. Those spontaneous forms of economic and social transformation—​demographic expansion, industrialization, and urbanization—​ that galvanized nineteenth-​century Great Britain remained conspicuously absent across the Irish Sea, at least outside the north-​eastern corner of Ulster. As Ireland became ever more ‘backward’, so it evolved into an ever more peculiar part of the United Kingdom in other aspects of its political development too. Those secular professions—​civil servants, scientists, and scholars—​that increasingly challenged the intellectual authority of the mainland churches proved thinner on the ground further west. Almost by default, Ireland became a ‘priestly society’. Moreover, as Irish politics became increasingly antagonistic to the Unionist cause, so priests came to dominate that form of cultural expression too.21 It was never less than in the best interests of the Catholic priesthood to render its flock conventionally faithful, but they set about this task to considerable effect from mid-​century onwards. And they achieved nothing less than the transformation of Irish indigenous religion. Traditional Irish folk belief passed into recognizable Christian witness. More Catholic churches were built in Ireland between 1850 and 1914 than at any time before or since. More people subsequently went to them, too. In many parts of the 17  E.R. Norman, The Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion, 1859–​1873 (London, 1965), chs 1 and 3; E.R. Norman, A History of Modern Ireland (London, 1971), ch. 11. 18 Brown, The National Churches, pp. 378–​83; N. Gash, Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 (London, 1972), ch. 14, esp. pp. 478ff. 19  R. Shannon, Gladstone: Heroic Minister, 1865–​1898 (London, 1999), pp. 64–​70. 20 Brown, Providence and Empire, pp. 182ff; also L. Kennedy, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Belfast, 1996), ch. 4. 21 Foster, Modern Ireland, pp. 298–​317, 384–​7, 394–​8, 417–​19; J. Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848–​1918 (Dublin, 1973), ch. 2.

228   S.J.D. Green country, regular—​that is, habitual—​Sunday worshippers perhaps doubled as a proportion of the population.22 As a result, the Irish became not merely an attendant but also a devout population. The Church slowly weaned the people away from so-​called magical superstition and towards the more orthodox vehicles of supernatural intercession to which it offered divine sanction. The realm of holy men and village seers, also of the evil eye and the malevolent curse, passed into a regime of learned fathers and strict mothers, of the catechisms, creeds, and rosaries, and of the holy Eucharist and the last rites.23 This was a gradual process. It was also a negotiated settlement. The priesthood came to dominate common Irish life—​especially rural, agricultural, Irish life—​only by working with the grain of ordinary sentiment. That meant making implicit concessions to folk religion, particularly in matters of the spirit. It also entailed a pragmatic attitude towards politics. The Church habitually condemned revolutionary violence, certainly from the time of the formation of the Irish Republic Brotherhood onwards. But it generally allied itself to constitutional separatism. Moreover, when Parnell eventually succeeded in bringing the two together in his great campaign for ‘Irish freedom’ after 1880, it stood squarely behind what it took to be the political instincts of the nation. Thus in opposing ‘home rule and Rome rule’, Ulster Unionist Protestant sentiment may have revealed some of its more unsavoury prejudices, but it implicitly acknowledged the force of popular sentiment that united the two causes.24 The effect was that Irish politics bifurcated along ever more increasingly religious as well as nationalist grounds. That was especially true after the failed home rule crusades of 1886 and 1893. Many missed this inexorable dynamic at the time. The extent to which it was or was not aggravated by denominational discrimination in the allocation of public offices continues to be disputed.25 But the divisive denouement of 1916 to 1923 merely forced into the open what had long since been a latent dichotomy. This fracture was only very partially assuaged by the partition treaty. That problem was also addressed by ethnic–​religious cleansing on each side of the border during the years of civil war and strife. In many ways, this process continues still.26

22  D.A. Kerr, ‘Under the Union Flag: The Catholic Church in Ireland, 1800–​1870’, in Lord Blake, ed., Ireland After the Union (Oxford, 1989), pp. 23–​45, summarizes a vast literature. See S.J. Connolly, Religion and Society in Nineteenth-​Century Ireland (Dundalk, 1985), passim, for more detail. 23 Lee, Modernisation, pp. 48–​9; Connolly, Religion and Society, passim. 24  D. Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 5; D. Hempton and M. Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740–​1890 (London, 1992), ch. 9. See also O.P. Rafferty, The Church, the State and the Fenian Threat, 1861–​75 (Houndmills, 1999), chs 2, 4, and 5. 25  For an overview, see R.B. McDowell, ‘Administration and the Public Services, 1870–​1921’, in W.E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland, vol. VI, Ireland under the Union, II, 1870–​1921 (Oxford, 1996), ch. 20. 26  P. Hart, The IRA and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–​1923 (Oxford, 1998), ch. 12; more broadly, see C. Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford, 1983), ch. 8.

Religion and the Churches    229

II England’s ‘Irish problem’ wrought one further, curious, consequence during the nineteenth century. It made Great Britain altogether more of an integrated nation by 1900 than it had been a century earlier. The dynamic variable in that process was religion. Strictly speaking, Great Britain had ceased to be a country in 1801. Still, what Mr Gladstone called ‘England’ became an altogether more coherent political entity during his lifetime than it ever had been before—​or, arguably, has ever been since. No small part of the cause lay in the Irish problem itself. For while ‘Ireland’ increasingly defined itself against Britain—​as a Gaelic, Catholic, and republican nation—​so ‘Britain’ ever more came to think of itself as an English-​speaking, Protestant, and loyalist country.27 This held true even for most of the mainland’s early twentieth-​century socialists. Moreover, the single most important factor in that oppositional self-​definition was the integrative impact of Victorian British Protestantism. It was not that there were no disintegrative indigenous factors working in the opposite direction. Ethnic nationalism was far from unknown in nineteenth-​century Scotland. The Welsh clung to the language of their fathers with greater determination than their western neighbours. The 1689 Settlement had lumbered the (then) United Kingdom of Great Britain with two quite distinct Established Churches—​one Episcopalian in England, another Presbyterian in Scotland.28 These were continuously and often vigorously opposed by non-​established rivals on both sides of the border. Moreover, nineteenth-​century religious change rendered the Anglican Church a minority faith in Victorian Wales. But all these Britons were Protestants, not Catholics, and they knew it. Indeed, it was in many ways the periphery rather than the centre that drew the greatest comfort from that fact. Protestant values were, if anything, more aggressively practised in Scotland and Wales rather than England. That fact induced no sense of cultural inferiority in the geographical margins of the nation. To the contrary, it usually made them feel more authentically British than their southern (or eastern) counterparts.29 The significance of a common faith, even as partially confounded by organizational division, was still more true of the English themselves. That was not least because the ‘Evangelical Revival’ had confined itself to no particular denomination or sect.30 More than any other single stimulus, this drove the proliferation of denominations that characterized late eighteenth and early nineteenth-​century England. Down to the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century, churchmen might reasonably have hoped that they had outlived the ‘dissenting challenge’ of an earlier epoch. Those illusions were shattered 27 Hoppen, The Mid-​Victorian Generation, ch. 14. 28 Brown, The National Churches, ch. 1.

29  I owe this insight to C. Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain (New Brunswick, NJ, 2004), see esp. ch. 1. 30  F.W.B. Bullock, Evangelical Conversion in Great Britain, 1696–​1845 (St. Leonards on Sea, 1959), see esp. pp. 10–​189; more generally, see Brown, Providence and Empire, pp. 22–​4, 31–​2.

230   S.J.D. Green with the emergence of the Wesleyan Church. Methodism’s subsequent division paradoxically only made things worse for the Anglican establishment, for the ‘Wesleyan Revolution’ stimulated Baptists, Congregational, and even Presbyterian revivals too. Prominent, active ‘nonconformity’ became a permanent aspect of indigenous life. The repeal of the Test and Corporation Act in 1828 implicitly recognized that fact;31 the 1851 Religious Census made it public knowledge. The division of the major churches ceased around mid-​century. The proliferation of sects did not. Booth’s famous surveys of Religious Influences in later Victorian London identified more than a hundred different religious organizations. Official statisticians pointed to the existence of perhaps twice that number across the country.32 Few ecclesiastical partisans celebrated this kind of religious diversity, but indifferent observers were not necessarily displeased. Adam Smith famously extolled the virtues of a ‘multiplicity of sects’ as the best guarantor of worshipful toleration,33 and Alexis de Tocqueville pointed to the advantages not simply of diversity but also of equality—​for which, read the abolition of religious establishments—​in his influential survey of Democracy in America.34 Those arguments may have influenced some of those Englishmen who formed the Liberation Society, dedicated to abolishing religious privilege in England, in 1844.35 Naturally, there were other reasons for and against the establishment of the Church of England. A young Mr Gladstone famously argued the case in favour. His early tormentor, T.B. Macaulay, delivered a no less remarkable contemporary riposte.36 More importantly, the great question of the Church and the constitution divided the principal political parties of the age. One might go further: it effectively defined them. It was not the only thing that separated the proponents of reform from those who took themselves to be the honest conservers of the constitution after 1832. But nothing was more important.37 It was not that the Whigs—​later Liberals—​were against the Establishment, or that the Conservatives were opposed to all reform. Indeed, both happily subscribed to the improving and preserving purposes of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners after 1835. But Whig-​Liberals increasingly committed themselves to nurturing a ‘Common Christianity’ (i.e. common Protestant Christianity) that allowed for the possibility of institutional concession to those outside the Church. For some, such as Lord John 31 Clark, English Society, chs 4–​6, esp. at pp. 527ff; Brown, The National Churches, pp. 138–​40.

32   C. Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, Third Series: Religious Influences, vol. 7; Summary (London, 1902), passim. (Author’s calculations.) 33  A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford, 1976), vol. 2, pp. 292–​3. 34  A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. H.C. Mansfield and D. Winthrop (Chicago, IL, 2000), pp. 275ff. 35 Brown, Providence and Empire, pp. 122–​23. 36  T.B. Macaulay, ‘Gladstone on Church and State’, in Lord Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review, (3 vols, London, 1843), vol. ii, pp. 430–503; a review of W.E. Gladstone, The State in Its Relations with the Church (London, 1839). 37  R. Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform, 1830–​1841 (Oxford, 1987), ‘Introduction’.

Religion and the Churches    231 Russell, this was a matter of conviction. For others, such as Melbourne, it was more a question of advantage. For both, it furnished reasons to be favourably disposed towards a significant alteration in the relationship between the Established Church and its Protestant rivals. Put another way, it gave them sufficient justification to address long-​ standing nonconformist grievances. Early advances in this respect included the civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths after 1836.38 Peel’s Conservative party never set itself against the address of ‘legitimate grievances’ within the body politic. This was what the Tamworth Manifesto made clear. That said, Peel’s Conservative party became the principal political vehicle for the defence both of the ‘landed interest’ and of ‘ecclesiastical privilege’ in early Victorian England. Indeed, it decisively won the 1841 general election specifically by espousing the cause of each. That was why it subsequently split so bitterly over its leader’s apparent betrayal, first with the Maynooth Grant of 1845, and then over the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.39 More characteristically, it was why Conservatives supported the Church against the government during the tithe controversy of the 1830s and sustained the regime of church rates—​local taxes paid by all property owners to maintain the fibre of Church holdings—​right up to 1868.40 In that way, religion became the very stuff of party conflict in Victorian England. This was true as late as the 1906 general election. And it gave nineteenth-​century politics their peculiarly moralistic flavour. But such conflict did not exhaust the possibilities of religious dispute in nineteenth-​century England. These were altogether more various in origin and provoked more disparate political coalitions in turn. The Church generally looked to the Conservative party for favourable treatment. It often regarded the Liberal party with some suspicion. But the Liberal party was never an enemy of the Church, nor did the Church ordinarily view it in that way. What the establishment came to fear was what became known as ‘political nonconformity’. This involved an altogether broader coalition of anti-​Anglican forces and also entailed their acting together politically. Its specific goal was the pursuit of religious equality, that is, the removal of those disadvantages imposed upon nonconformists by the state. Its more disparate aims pointed to something little short of the eclipse of the state church as the principal organ of the nation’s religious life.41 ‘Political nonconformity’ began with the anti-​slavery crusade of the 1820s and 1830s. That is unsurprising. This was the great moral issue of the age: Parliament received more petitions against slavery than in favour of reform between 1830 and 1832.42 The success of that campaign emboldened the movement, for it demonstrated just what a well-​ organized minority might achieve and how to achieve it under England’s parliamentary

38 Brown, The National Churches, p. 208; N. Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics, 1832–​1852 (Oxford, 1965), chs iii and iv. 39  R. Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830–​1867 (London, 1978), ch. 10. 40  G.I.T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1832 to 1868 (Oxford, 1977), ch. x. 41 Brown, Providence and Empire, ch. 2. 42  J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT, 1993), p. 61.

232   S.J.D. Green oligarchy. Moreover, the religious census of 1851 suggested that nonconformists might not be a religious minority at all, because it revealed that if ‘only’ about half of the population attended any recognizable place of worship one Sunday in the spring of that year, around half of these chose to do so at places of worship other than those acknowledged as in allegiance with the state church.43 The evidence of 1851 may have pointed to a justification of disestablishment. But it suggested no method to achieve this. The Liberation Society furnished an organizational vehicle with which to pursue that aim. However, it commanded few votes in Parliament. That said, ‘political nonconformity’ was nothing if not a flexible instrument of opposition. Direct assault was as often matched by indirect subversion. This had been true, at least to some degree, of the anti-​slavery campaign, and was emphatically the case with the temperance movement. There was nothing inherently anti-​Anglican about alcoholic abstinence. Indeed, the Church founded its own Temperance Society in 1862. But all the early running was made either by radicals or nonconformists, sometimes separately, often in conjunction.44 As a result, the temperance question became the principal ‘pressure issue’ in early Victorian politics. It even acquired its own overarching ‘pressure group’, the United Kingdom Alliance, specifically designed to further agreed ends by coordinating disparate efforts. These were invariably voluntary labours, pursued by self-​consciously improving organizations, up to the mid-​century at least. But from the 1860s, the Alliance began to support anti-​drink legislation in Parliament. This change of tactics represented a subtle shift in moral progressives’ attitudes to the proper role of state intervention in the amelioration of common life. It also reflected a no less significant alteration in their long-​held conviction that the social benefits that properly accrued from such reasonable reforms had long been impeded by the implacable forces of religious conservatism and secular privilege, as unjustly over-​represented in the legislative arm of the state.45 According to that way of thinking, it was an illegitimately ‘privileged parliament’ that had defeated Lawson’s temperance bill of 1864. This pointed to the need for parliamentary reform. Palmerston then blocked the way, but Palmerston died in 1865. The impact of the 1867 Reform Act, particularly as coupled with the election of Gladstone’s first Liberal government the following year, emboldened the parliamentary reformers once more. Success was not immediate. Lawson’s second bill, in 1869, failed too. But the Prime Minister, increasingly aware of the strength of nonconformist feeling on this issue, finally introduced a government-​sponsored bill in 1872.46 The Licensing Act of that year restricted the opening hours of public houses for the first time and allowed for a ‘local option’ with stricter provisions, including Sunday closing, should local magistrates agree. (In the event, this occurred only in Wales.) The measure also made illegal

43 

H. McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850–​1914 (Houndmills, 1996), ch. 1, esp. pp. 11–​27. B. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question, 1815–​1872 (London, 1971), ch. 4. 45 Ibid., ch. 9. 46  M.R. Watts, The Dissenters, vol. iii: The Crisis and Conscience of Nonconformity (Oxford, 2015), pp. 249–​51. 44 

Religion and the Churches    233 the adulteration of beer with water or other substances. This pleased most nonconformists but by no means all of the people. There were anti-​temperance riots in Stalybridge and Ashton in Lancashire—​no doubt organized by landlords and publicans, but enthusiastically supported by ordinary drinkers.47 Gladstone later insisted that he lost the 1874 General Election as a result of his (possibly misplaced) temperance commitments. He was driven from office, so he claimed, in a ‘torrent of gin and beer’. This seems unlikely. It is certainly an insufficient explanation for the unexpected Conservative victory that year. No less significant was the degree to which his government alienated erstwhile nonconformist allegiance through the provisions of the 1870 Education Act. This was doubly ironic, for the Grand Old Man was scarcely more committed to the public provision of elementary education than he was convinced by legislative control of the drinks trade. That his discomfiture in this respect was scarcely uncommon among the contemporary political classes would probably have afforded him little comfort, but it may have helped to explain his situation. Whenever the combination of religion and politics came to confound nineteenth-​ century statesmen—​whether Liberal or Conservative—​in the smooth execution of their vocations, education was the issue that did the greatest damage.48 This unfortunate juxtaposition of good intentions and unfortunate effects should scarcely surprise us. Few, if any, Victorians considered education to be anything other than a profoundly religious affair. That revelation was the principal source of knowledge, and Christian witness the primary purpose of juvenile education, was so deeply ingrained a common assumption that few even bothered to challenge it. So contemporary disagreements about the true message of religion passed seamlessly into political disputes about the proper content of education. Doctrinal disputation did not always have the effect of making indigenous education more religious. Sometimes it had exactly the opposite effect. Nothing, paradoxically, better explains the progressive secularization of the ancient universities after 1854, equally the growth of non-​denominational higher education in England from 1828, and throughout the British Isles from 1836. 49 That ‘secular compromise’—​the idea that precisely because nineteenth-​century British society was so denominationally divided, public instruction must necessarily assume a religiously neutral form—​even found exponents among advocates of extended elementary provision after 1869.50 Religion made the question of public education politically contentious. From the very moment, in 1833, that grants of public money were made to day schools run by both ‘Established’ and ‘Voluntary’ religious groups, organized nonconformity resented the resulting ‘Anglican bias’ in fiscal provision that left the Church’s ‘National Schools’ so

47 

Ibid., pp. 250–​1.

48 Shannon, Gladstone: Heroic Minister, chs 3 and 4.

49  O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, vol. 1 (London, 1966), pt. 4, esp. pp. 89–​95; Brown, Providence and Empire, pp. 96–​100, 191–​2. 50  Notably the young Joseph Chamberlain; see P.T. Marsh, Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics (New Haven, CT, 1994), pp. 34ff.

234   S.J.D. Green much better endowed than the non-​denominational ‘British and Foreign Society’ versions. Paradoxically, the transformation of the Sunday schools after mid-​century only made matters worse. What had begun as cross-​denominational vehicles of popular education in 1780 became, by the 1880s, the single most important instrument of nonconformist recruitment.51 It was fear for the future of dissenting Sunday schools as much as opposition to the extension of Anglican educational advantage that led nonconformists to so vigorously oppose Graham’s Education Bill of 1843. And it was these two concerns, taken together, that inspired the ‘voluntary’ solution to the education question, espoused by Edward Baines during the 1850s and 1860s.52 Those fears, as well as that opposition, survived the passage of Forster’s 1870 Bill. Indeed, the seemingly obvious advantage this Act gave to Anglicans in the rural areas, where the majority of children continued to be educated in Church National Schools, only heightened tensions further. This was the background to the ‘School Board’ wars of later Victorian England. The Act provided for the creation of maintained schools in districts that lacked alternative provision. It also required that religion be taught and denominational teaching be prohibited in these places. In many of the larger towns a sensible compromise was reached whereby the scriptures were explained in a way ‘suitable to the capacities of the children’ but inoffensive to the sensibilities of their parents.53 In many smaller districts, especially rural areas, this proved impossible. The result in some places was that the Bible was read out ‘without comment’.54 In a few, it was simply not read at all. These schools became secular by default. Their number actually increased in the wake of the 1902 Act and the attempt to bring all publicly funded schools under local authority control.55 By 1944, maintained schools that had ceased to teach the gospels constituted a considerable minority of the total. The net effect of this shortcoming may have been marginal, at least for so long as Sunday schools continued to thrive. But they too went into decline during the 1930s. Thus the spectre of a generation unversed in—​let alone receptive to—​the scriptures came to haunt government ministers during the Second World War.56 Meanwhile, ‘political nonconformity’ evolved into something still more challenging. The term ‘nonconformist conscience’ was first coined during the debate over Parnell’s divorce case.57 It pointed to a development altogether more significant than 51  S.J.D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–​1920 (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 5; K.D.M. Snell and P.S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 9. 52  E. Baines, An Alarm to the Nation on the Unjust, Unconstitutional and Dangerous Measure of State Education proposed by the Government (London, 1847), pp. 3–​9. 53  E. Baines, Paper on Education, Read at the Social Science Congress Held in Leeds, 7 Oct. 1871 (Leeds, 1871), p. 9. 54  Anon., ‘Education Board Decision’, Driffield Times, 11 Nov. 1871. I owe this example to Dr Priscilla Truss. 55 Watts, The Dissenters, ch. 10, esp. pp. 350–​58. 56  Lord Butler, The Art of the Possible (London, 1971), pp. 93ff; K. Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: The Christian Church, 1900–​2000 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 303ff. 57  J. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (3 vols, London, 1902), vol. iii, pp. 431–​2; Gladstone to Morley, 19 Nov. 1890: ‘It is yet to be seen what our nonconformist friends will say.’ They did not have to

Religion and the Churches    235 the sententiousness that surrounded one peculiarly consequential lapse in accepted moral standards. The concept gained common currency for a generation after 1890, both among nonconformists themselves as a means of illustrating their recently discovered political muscle, and among sceptical onlookers as a way of deprecating the narrow outlook of self-​righteous sectarians in later Victorian and Edwardian politics. David Bebbington has identified three salient features of the ‘nonconformist conscience’: first, the insistence that there neither was nor should be any strict boundary between religion and politics; second, the conviction that public figures should both be and behave like persons of ‘high moral character’; and third, a belief that government should promote the moral welfare of the people. To say so much is only to underline how little there was that was really ‘new’ in the ‘nonconformist conscience’ at all. It may even establish just how little there was that was exclusively nonconformist in its underlying assumptions. Just think how readily the later Mr Gladstone might have fit much of that description.58 The ‘nonconformist conscience’ is easily discerned behind the extra-​parliamentary campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act. This measure was originally meant to control the incidence of venereal disease in garrison towns, but it was interpreted by many of those with less pragmatic sensibilities as an exercise in state-​sponsored prostitution. It played its part in the moral convulsion that surrounded indigenous reactions to the so-​called ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ of 1876 and after. (Think of Gladstone again.59) And it contributed much to principled domestic criticism of the Boer War. But, above all, it fuelled nonconformists’ rebellious reactions to the provisions of the 1902 Education Act.60 The Act was conceived as an exercise in progressive rationalization. It laid the foundation for maintained secondary schools, and it rationalized public provision through uniform local administration. But, as with the 1870 Act, problems arose out of its differential denominational impact. The Act proposed substantial public subsidy, in effect paying for staff and equipment at voluntary schools. By that time, the majority of these were either Anglican or Roman Catholic. It also entailed the abolition of direct political control of education through the School Boards. For many nonconformists, this pointed to the unaccountable provision of populist propaganda at public expense. This was what they meant by—​and why they so tirelessly opposed—​the spectre of ‘Rome on the rates’.61 That opposition quickly assumed the form of ‘passive resistance’. In practice, this meant many nonconformists’ refusal to pay their rates. That was illegal, and quickly provoked statutory consequences. Hundreds of men (and women) of conscience had

wait long to find out. More broadly, see S. Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics (London, 1975), pp. 27ff. 58  D.W. Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–​1914 (London, 1982), pp. 10–​13, 18–​22, 45–​53, 84–​102, 107–​17, 129–​37, 140, 156. 59  See R.T. Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation, 1876 (London, 1965): see esp. ch. 1, pt. 3, pp. 23–​36. 60 Brown, Providence and Empire, pp. 416–​18, 420–​3. 61 Watts, The Dissenters, ch. 10, passim.

236   S.J.D. Green goods seized in lieu of payments owed. Dozens of those who refused to suffer that indignity were subjected to the sterner punishment of prison. Protests of this kind continued down to the General Election of 1906. The education issue afforded that contest a keener edge than the tariff question ever provoked. It also led to 183 nonconformists being elected to Parliament—​a higher number than ever before or since.62 But it did not solve the education issue. Two Liberal bills, both aimed at redressing nonconformist grievances, foundered, the first in 1906 and the second in 1908. They were opposed by conservatives in the Church and government opponents in the Lords. However, they foundered as a result of Liberal nonconformist division over the matter. Eventually, in June 1914, Asquith abandoned any further attempt at educational reform. By then he had other things on his mind. Not least of these was war—​albeit civil war, beginning in Ireland, rather than world war, the wholly unexpected product of Sarajevo. As a result, the 1902 Act remained substantially in force for another 40 years.63

III The secularization of British politics proceeded apace during the second quarter of the twentieth century. This was the product of two simultaneous, but unrelated and unanticipated, developments. The first was the creation of an Irish ‘Free State’ in 26 of the 32 counties of the United Kingdom’s western isle after 1922. The second was the emergence of the Labour party as the principal vehicle of working-​class political representation on the mainland from 1923. The outcome, which no one foresaw and few even initially recognized, was a non-​sectarian form of democratic politics, one that increasingly differentiated both government and life in Great Britain from that on the island of Ireland—​ironically, on both sides of its border.64 What was presaged in the self-​ sacrificial Easter Rebellion of 1916 was only achieved in the military stalemate of 1918 to 1921.65 Moreover, what this wrought was only ever a partial solution to the ‘Irish problem’ of nineteenth-​century Britain. For many Irishmen it was only a very partial, even temporary, solution. For most Britons, it was a face-​saving compromise that promised peace for the foreseeable future. In truth, it delivered something like domestic tranquillity for a very long time. But it is scarcely possible to overstate the significance of Irish

62 

Ibid., pp. 361–​3. The Earl of Oxford and Asquith, Memories and Reflections (2 vols, London, 1928), vol. ii, ch. 1 suggests as much. This event is ignored in R. Jenkins, Asquith (rev. edn., London, 1978), ch. 17; also in S. Koss, Asquith (London, 1976), ch. 7. 64  See A.T.Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: Aspects of Ulster, 1609–​1969 (London, 1977), pt. 5, ch. 1. 65  C. Townshend, Easter 1916: The Irish Revolution (London, 2005), ch. 12; Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, pp. 135–​44, 198–​210. 63 

Religion and the Churches    237 independence—​thus defined—​in the decline of denominationally determined British political life.66 The question of Irish ‘home rule’ bitterly divided British political society from the 1880s onwards. By 1914, it had been reduced to the twin possibilities of forced imposition (by Britain on the whole of Ireland) or armed resistance (from Ireland’s northern quarter against majority opinion). Each outcome was construed more in terms of sovereign national will than of particular religious preference. But neither—​to put it mildly—​ lacked a religious dimension. Roman Catholicism had once informed Irish resistance to English cultural imperialism. After the turn of the twentieth century it came, increasingly, if not to define then to bound Ireland’s national revolution.67 As cultural protest merged into political resistance, the growing challenge was expressed increasingly in terms of an Irish, Catholic, nationalist presence in the imperial House of Commons. Upwards of 80 Irish nationalist MPs placed themselves in continual opposition to the purposes of Parliament. After 1906, they were sometimes supported by Irish Catholic Labour members from England. More remarkably, Catholic nationalists and English radicals alike were sometimes able to tap the sympathy of dozens of Scottish, Welsh, and even English nonconformists in support of otherwise sectarian causes. In this way, the territorial challenge that Irish nationalism posed to British rule entailed not merely a constitutional dimension but a profoundly religious one too.68 That was by no means limited to Ireland itself. By 1920, there was a Catholic community of perhaps 2.5 million on the mainland. Most of these were of Irish origin.69 That the majority of these men and women had a certain sympathy for the (Irish) nationalist cause, however residual or reticent, was inevitable. Indeed, a polite ambivalence in this respect was the absolute minimum required by their native kinsfolk. This, in turn, rendered them suspect in the eyes of many of their British but Protestant compatriots. These sensitivities of national loyalty were rendered raw in an apparent unwillingness to fight for Britain’s worldwide cause after 1914. With that, such sentiments became malignant. Individual Roman Catholics proved their patriotism by fighting in the trenches, but the Irish nation demonstrated its disloyalty by declining conscription in 1916.70 When reticence turned to rebellion in a treasonous rising against the Crown that Easter, anti-​Irish anti-​Catholicism enjoyed (and the country endured) one of its last great violent flings on the mainland.71

66 

A. Howard, ‘The Churches’, in J. Raymond, ed., The Baldwin Age (London, 1960), pp. 143–​59, esp. at pp. 145–​6; for Northern Ireland, see T. Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland, 1920–​1996 (Houndmills, 1997), ch. 1, esp. pp. 40ff. 67 Foster, Modern Ireland, ch. 18. 68  H.J. Hanham, The Nineteenth-​Century Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 1968), ch. 8, esp. pp. 450ff; K. Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, pp. 87–​91 and 98–​101. 69  A. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–​2000 (London, 2001), pp. 134–​41. 70  A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914–​1945 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 103–​4. 71 Townshend, Easter 1916, chs 6–​8; D.G. Boyce, Englishmen and Irish Troubles: British Public Opinion and the Making of Irish Policy, 1918–​1922 (London, 1972), pp. 32–​3.

238   S.J.D. Green The ‘Free State’ treaty had a paradoxical effect in the British Isles, at least up to 1949. It instantly reduced southern Ireland to a state of civil war, which lasted for a year, simultaneously effecting a partisan division in that country—​but over the question of sovereignty rather than religion—​that endured for another generation. However, it restored the mainland to temporal and spiritual peace. Moreover, it did so with similarly immediate and (if anything) still more lasting consequences. This was not least because the ‘quasi-​republic’ to the west remained so unsatisfactorily self-​conceived for so long that it never became the champion of radical Celtic nationalism more generally that British imperialists had feared and their republican opponents—​whether at home or abroad—​ long expected.72 In neutralizing the external threat, pragmatic British politicians also eliminated its internal representation. Until 1918, there had been up to 80 Catholic members of Parliament. After that date, there were rarely more than ten. The House of Commons once again became, and for a long time remained, a more ‘Protestant’ body than it had been at any time since 1829, perhaps even 1801.73 It was not the case, it must be emphasized, that the ‘Catholic factor’ was instantly removed from British society. But it was geographically concentrated, and in that way politically limited. Perhaps 900,000 lived within the diocese of Liverpool, nearly half a million in and around London, 300,000 in Westminster alone, and most of the rest in Glasgow, the West Riding, and Tyneside. ‘Ghettoization’ on this scale made for specific problems and particular tensions. It also ensured that the problem was barely noticed elsewhere. Scarcely less important was the political attitude assumed by the mainland Roman Catholic Church on behalf of its ‘newly British’ flock. As Professor Hastings has put it: ‘The Church expected loyalty on the Schools question, i.e., its demand for segregate, Catholic, denominational, schools . . . otherwise, it scarcely tampered with politics.’74 In many ways, that job was by then being done for it by the Labour party. It was not that Labour was a Catholic party, but it was not an anti-​Catholic party either. Indeed, it was not an irreligious, nor even an anti-​clerical party at all. This made it unique in post-​ war Western Europe. In part, this was because British socialists, from Keir Hardie down to Tony Benn, believed that their interpretation of that secular creed was not merely compatible with, but constituted the best modern expression of, historic Christianity.75 So much was this so that it quickly became little more than a commonplace that Labour owed more, in its political theology, to Methodism than to Marxism. What elevated that glib remark above the level of mere cliché was that it owed more to Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism as well.76

72 Foster, Modern Ireland, chs 21–​2; E. O’Halpin, ‘Politics and the State, 1922–​1932’, in J.R. Hill, ed., Ireland, 1921–​1984 (Oxford, 2003), ch. 4. 73 Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 181; Clark, English Society, 1660–​1832, chs 5 and 6. 74 Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 143. 75  Perhaps best argued in C.R. Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective (London, 1937), pp. 26–​9. 76  H. Wilson, The Relevance of British Socialism (London, 1964), p. 1.

Religion and the Churches    239 What translated this vague sentiment into the significant imperatives of political psephology was the social geography of twentieth-​century British political radicalization. The British working classes shifted their political allegiance from Liberal to Labour earliest and most uniformly in the major urban industrial areas of the country: in Strathclyde; in the South Wales valleys; in West Yorkshire, East Lancashire, Tyneside, and (in a slightly different way) the East End of London. These regions contained large nonconformist populations, but they were also home to sizeable Roman Catholic minorities. In London, the Church of England was popular among the people too. No political party seeking to expand its electoral base as rapidly as Labour after 1918 could have afforded to be anything other than denominationally eclectic to that end.77 Certainly the Labour party emerged out of, far more than in opposition to, popular religious association. No caricature of later Victorian plebeian culture could be more false than the oft-​asserted assumption that the British working classes were hostile to religious organizations in the nineteenth century.78 They may have been neglected down to c.1850, but they were courted by all denominations thereafter. And they responded. They did not always respond in the way that religious organizations hoped they might—​adult males rarely became regular communicants—​but women and especially children in Sunday schools patronized the multiplicity of quasi-​religious associations made available to them keenly.79 It was from these kinds of connections that radical organizations, and labour leaders, often emerged. The Independent Labour Party in Halifax, West Yorkshire was born in Northgate End Victorian Chapel Mutual Improvement Society,80 and James Ramsay MacDonald learned to speak in public at the Lossiemouth MIS.81 Thus as Labour became significant—​one MP in 1906, 39 in 1914, 191 in 1923—​so a popular religious sensibility took its place in British electoral politics too. Indeed, for many contemporary socialists—​Ramsay MacDonald was an excellent example—​the one was often taken to be a reflection of the other. Hence MacDonald’s ‘Plea for Puritanism’, conceived in the hope that often amongst the elect might be persuaded to turn their ‘admirable . . . private characters’ to the still more deserving ‘social cause[s]‌’ embodied in the constitution of the British Labour party.82 77 

D. Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–​1906 (Manchester, 1983), pt. II; J.J. Smyth, Labour in Glasgow, 1896–​1936: Socialism, Suffrage, Sectarianism (East Lothian, 2000), ch. 4; P. Catterall, ‘Modernity and Politics: The Free Churches and the Labour Party between the Wars’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 667–​85; D. Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900–​1918 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 141, 157, 172–​3, 228, 261, 318, 380, 414. 78 Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. 189ff offers an institutional analysis; J. Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870–​1930 (Oxford, 1982), ch. 4, and S.C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c.1880–​1939 (Oxford, 1999), ch. 1, suggest something broader. 79 Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, pp. 205–​10; Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain, pp. 43–​50. 80  S.J.D. Green, ‘Religion and the Rise of the Common Man: Mutual Improvement Societies, Religious Associations and Popular Education in Three Industrial Towns in the West Riding, c.1850–​1900’, in D. Fraser, ed., Cities, Class and Communication: Essays in Honour of Asa Briggs (Brighton, 1990), pp. 25–​43. 81  D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London, 1977), p. 13. 82  J. Ramsay MacDonald, ‘A Plea for Puritanism’, Socialist Review, 5:48, Feb. 1912, 27–​33.

240   S.J.D. Green MacDonald’s political problem was that during the years after 1918, many sincere British puritans came to a different conclusion about the proper fulfilment of their social duties. They became Conservatives. Thus Stanley Baldwin appealed to their loyalties too.83 For some, it was a matter of class. Others were ideologically opposed to collectivism. A few may have remained residual anti-​Catholics. Whatever, the Labour and Conservative parties cleaned up the erstwhile Liberal vote between them after 1924, pretty well everywhere outside the geographical peripheries. In so doing, less obviously but no less significantly, they also divided the religious vote—​especially mainland British Protestant voters—​between them.84 The religious significance of this unexplained and, in many ways, unanticipated political revolution cannot be overstated. For half a century after 1924, British politics was dominated by two class-​based but denominationally broad political parties. Between them, and in their own best interests, they took ‘religion’ out of mainstream, mainland British politics.85 They did so pragmatically, but unintentionally. Certainly, neither Labour nor the Conservatives actively worked to secularize British society, whether in the hope of partisan advantage or even in pursuit of a more generally satisfactory order of things. To the contrary, each sought to uphold the Christian basis of their otherwise divergent political faiths. That remained true up to the days of James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher. The irony was that, in so doing, they surreptitiously obscured the religious differences that might have separated them, just as they implicitly accepted the secularizing forces that increasingly surrounded them.86 The first victim of that subtle conspiracy was the ‘nonconformist conscience’ itself. This curious cultural phenomenon was not so much destroyed as eclipsed after 1924. That was because it had been too closely tied to the Welsh Liberal party to survive Labour’s triumph in the principality.87 Left-​wing nonconformity continued, from Arthur Henderson through to Harold Wilson. But it never maintained quite the same moral edge. Broader social change did for the fundamental tenets of ‘puritan England’ after 1918. One by one, its erstwhile moral lodestars, from temperance through sabbatarianism to a very particular understanding of sexual chastity, fell victim to self-​ consciously enlightened legislative alteration.88 Further restrictions of the drink trade, a genuinely live issue during the First World War, passed out of ‘the realm of controversial party politics’ during the 1920s. The austere English Sunday was served its notice by the

83  S. Baldwin, ‘Religion and National Life’, in Baldwin, The Torch of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses (London, 1935), pp. 77–​87. 84 Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, pp. 180ff. 85  R.T. McKenzie, British Political Parties: The Distribution of Power within the Conservative and Labour Parties (2nd edn., London, 1967): ‘Christianity’, ‘Church’, ‘Methodism’, ‘nonconformity’, even ‘religion’, do not appear in the index. 86  See A.W. Turner, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (London, 2013), pp. 315–​18. 87  K.O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 1866–​1922 (3rd edn., Cardiff, 1980), esp. ch. 6; K.O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation, Wales, 1880–​1980 (Cardiff, 1981), pp. 230ff. 88  S.J.D. Green, The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c.1920–​1960 (Cambridge, 2011), ch. 4.

Religion and the Churches    241 Cinema Act of 1932.89 There were 577 divorces in England and Wales in 1913, and 60,000 in 1947.90 No wonder Archbishop Temple began to despair of the ‘ordinary habits’ of his fellow citizens as early as 1943.91

IV Not that Temple believed the problem to be insoluble. He advocated what became the 1944 Education Act as a way of re-​Christianizing the people. He supported a ‘welfare state’ as a means of harnessing the resources of social administration to the end of moral regeneration.92 But he was the last significant ecclesiastical authority in England to believe seriously that the forces of political representation and organized faith could be brought together in Great Britain to the recognizable effect of restoring the Christian vitality of contemporary society. Some claimed to have noticed a ‘religious revival’ in Britain during the 1950s. Most observed only various failed attempts to kindle such anachronistic feelings.93 Part of the problem was that, by 1960, most of the mainstream Protestant churches in England and Wales had begun that process of precipitous decline in organizational strength—​in terms of both membership and attendance—​that has characterized their institutional life ever since.94 That said, these sorts of troubles scarcely ‘began with the Beatles’.95 The high point of recognizable religious affiliation south of the Scottish border, seems to have been around 1905. For at least some of the nonconformist churches, outside Wales, it may have been earlier still. Formal membership of the churches ‘flat-​lined’ from then until around 1950. But there was a discernible diminution in the popularity of Sunday schools from no later than 1930.96 The long-​term effects of this development have proved catastrophic for the Christian churches in this country, even the Roman Catholic Church. Their short-​term implications were more problematic. Curiously, up to 1945 at least, its initial impact was to strengthen the authoritative role of the Church of England throughout the land.97 This 89 

Ibid., pp. 166ff. J. Ramsden, ed., George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book (Gettington, 2002), p. 63; Green, The Passing of Protestant England, p. 141; see also Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain, chs 1 and 2. 91   Anon., ‘Primate’s Call to Men: Honesty and Sex Morality; Alarming Collapse’, The Times, 12 July 1943. 92  W. Temple, Christianity and Social Order (London, 1942), see esp. chs 2, 5, and 7. 93 Green, The Passing of Protestant England, ch. 7, offers a critical account. 94  B.R. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society: A Sociological Comment (London, 1966), ch. 1; G. Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford, 1994), ch. 4. 95  I owe this observation to Callum Brown. See also H. McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2007), pp. 79, 87, 126–​8, 133–​6, 258. 96 Green, The Passing of Protestant England, p. 71. 97  S.J.D. Green, ‘Survival and Autonomy: On the Strange Fortunes and Peculiar Legacy of Ecclesiastical Establishment in the Modern British State, c.1920 to the Present Day’, in S.J.D. Green and R.C. Whiting, eds., The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1996), esp. pp. 305–​16. 90 

242   S.J.D. Green was because its decline, at least after this fashion, was or seemed to be slower than that of its principal dissenting rivals. Losing less by way of general popularity, it gained much in terms of political authority. Indeed, the Church became once again the moral compass it had been prior to 1851. Put another way, it resumed the role of leader of the nation’s religious life.98 Or rather, it did so to some extent, and for a certain period. Archbishop Davidson’s public plea for compromise during the General Strike of 1926 came self-​consciously ‘from the churches’ taken as a whole, and undoubtedly struck a certain chord at the time.99 But it also failed. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was quickly followed by a Conservative parliament’s spirited rejection of not one but two versions of a Revised Prayer Book.100 Bishop Henson famously interpreted this unexpected provocation as sufficient to justify a measure of Church-​sponsored disestablishment.101 Davidson’s politically subtle successor, the deeply underrated Lang, chose the smoother path of benign inactivity. It is often forgotten that, in so doing, he effectively secured for the Church a text sufficiently altered to ensure its own undivided continuity.102 Temple, by contrast, believed that he had discovered the theological basis of social democracy. His analysis of Citizen and Churchman argued at once for a defence of the old, Established Church and the new, ameliorist state, the one craftily contrived and the other brilliantly depicted as if two sides of the same coin.103 But such eloquence described a mirage. Temple only proved that to the degree that public opinion became politically progressive, ecclesiastical interpretation of that sentiment could afford to be theologically avant-​garde as well. Moreover, for all the apparent acclaim and ostensible social significance gained through that translation of the secular into the sacred, such influence as it achieved was bought at a hefty price.104 This was first paid by Temple’s successor. Archbishop Fisher was no fool. Though scarcely a socialist, he enjoyed warm relations with Attlee, whom he judged (rightly) to be more of a Christian than Churchill. Though temperamentally a Tory, he proved fully capable of condemning Eden’s enormities over Suez.105 His problem was that his illustrious predecessor had bequeathed a moral environment in which the Church could do little more than wax ethereal about what the public wanted. When it tried to do the opposite, whether to oppose further liberalization of the marriage laws or to denounce 98 

For a discussion, see M. Grimley, Citizenship, Community and the Church of England: Liberal Anglican Theories of the State between the Wars (Oxford, 2004), ‘Introduction: Church and Nation after 1918’. 99  ‘Appeal from the Churches, dated 7th May 1926’, reproduced in G.K.A. Bell, Randall Davidson (2 vols, Oxford, 1935), vol. ii, p. 1308; for a caustic commentary, see E.R. Norman, Church and Society in England, 1770–​1970: A Historical Study (Oxford, 1976), pp. 338–​9. 100  G.I.T. Machin, ‘Parliament, The Church of England and the Prayer Book’, in J.P. Parry and S. Taylor, eds., Parliament and the Church (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 131–​47. 101  H. Henson, Disestablishment (London, 1929), pp. 1–​84. 102  R. Beaken, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis (London, 2012), esp. ch. 6. 103  W. Temple, Citizen and Churchman (London, 1941), see esp. ch. 4. 104 Green, The Passing of Protestant England, pp. 54ff. 105 Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, p. 308.

Religion and the Churches    243 the introduction of premium bonds, it found that prelatical words cut little ethical ice. Fisher learned that lesson the hard way. He was subsequently silent on most contentious social matters as successive Conservative governments progressively extended Britain’s permissive society.106 It was in this political context that Roy Jenkins set about his mission to ‘civilize’ Britain’s outdated puritan inheritance. He was well aware that some parts of his plan offended significant Christian constituencies at the time. This was most obviously true of the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude towards the relaxation of the abortion laws. He equally understood that other aspects of those alterations were actively supported by many Christian bodies—​the abolition of the death penalty, for instance. What was crucial was that neither the Home Secretary nor his acquiescent Prime Minister ever overtly cited ecclesiastical authority for their actions. It was not that they had any intention of antagonizing that authority either. It was simply that they knew that the churches were less than vital either in the active promotion of, or popular acquiescence to, general moral transformation.107 That lesson was taken in no less significantly by British liberalism’s contemporary opponents. They were not necessarily opposed to all aspects of indigenous liberalization. Some, indeed, stood on the progressive side of this process even at the time. But when Conservatism turned against the ‘welfare state’ after 1979, it did so in the confidence that it could proceed with the same freedom of political manoeuvre that had characterized its opponents’ moral radicalism a decade earlier. ‘Thatcherism’ was championed by the most self-​consciously Christian of Her Majesty’s first ministers since the war.108 But even the slightest squeak of opposition from England’s Established Church angrily provoked its eponymous representative from Finchley to declare her greater institutional debt to the more agreeable ethical injunctions of the Chief Rabbi. What was still more remarkable was her confident presumption that many from less obviously cosmopolitan parts of the country would be happy to similarly do so.109 In that way too, Mrs Thatcher unwittingly exposed the secular ‘centre’ of British society. Its moral compass turned to no particular Christian source. Only the ‘periphery’ of late twentieth-​century British society remained religious, and by then its faith was as much Catholic as Protestant, or indeed as much Muslim as Christian.110 The ‘Churches’ had ceased seriously to influence mainstream politics, in no small part because the ‘churches’ had all but ceased to matter. Moreover, insofar as religious influence did

106  P. Catterall, ed., The Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years, 1950–​7 (London, 2003), p. 554, 26 Apr. 1956, for a scathing account. More generally, see G.I.T. Machin, Churches and Social Issues in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford, 1998), pp. 147ff. 107  For a sympathetic account, see J. Campbell, Roy Jenkins: A Well-​Rounded Life (London, 2014), ch. 12. 108  E. Filby, God and Mrs. Thatcher: The Battle for Britain’s Soul (London, 2015), see esp. chs 1 and 2. 109  Ibid., esp. pp. 253–​5. 110  Ibid., pp. 255ff; see also E. Shils, ‘Center and Periphery’, in E. Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago, 1975), pp. 3–​16.

244   S.J.D. Green survive, it did so through religious institutions that had ceased to be churches. No wonder the Prince of Wales allegedly announced himself keener to describe his future duties more in terms of a more broadly conceived commitment to ‘faith’ than in relation to a specifically inspired dogma. What his mother made of this we do not know.111 We can be certain only that such a quixotic gesture, if ever officially sanctioned, would have solved—​and would now solve—​none of Britain’s pressing religious problems. The moment for a significant act of disestablishment has surely passed. These days, it is opposed most vehemently by those beyond the Church itself, notably among Britain’s Muslim community. In that way, the ‘religious question’ tends similarly to be posed in terms of those privileges that might or might not be extended beyond indigenous, Christian society—​the possible incorporation of ‘sharia’ into common laws, for instance—​rather than in relation to any determined assault on ‘privilege’ itself. Denominational struggle is all but over, even in Ireland. Ecclesiastical authority is at an end, across the whole kingdom. British politics continues to be haunted by ‘religion’ all the same.112

Further Reading S.J. Brown, Providence and Empire, 1815–​1914 (Harlow, 2008). S.J.D. Green, The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c.1920–​1960 (Cambridge, 2011). A. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920–​2000 (London, 2001). D. Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge, 1996). K. Robbins, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: The Christian Church, 1900–​2000 (Oxford, 2008).

111 

A. Pierce, ‘Prince Charles to Be Known as Defender of Faith’, Daily Telegraph, 13 Nov. 2008, 1. See S.J.D. Green, ‘The Revenge of the Periphery? Conservative Religion, Multiculturalism and the Irony of the Liberal State in Modern Britain’, in R. McInerny, ed., Modernity and Religion (South Bend, IN, 1994), pp. 89–​114; also Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain, ch. 5. 112 

Pa rt  I I I

PA RT I E S , DOCTRINES, AND L E A DE R S

chapter 15

P olitical Pa rt i e s Angus Hawkins

Parties became increasingly central to British politics after 1800, though the nature and function of political parties underwent significant change. Historians have sought to understand them from a variety of methodological viewpoints. Moreover, parties have functioned differently within the broader constitutional conventions of the British political system. The changing nature of political parties since 1800, the different ways in which historians have analysed them, and what approaches might be adopted in the future are the subjects of this chapter. The word ‘party’ entered English usage in the fourteenth century, denoting the division of a whole, a part, or a portion. Initially describing a confederacy or a plot, by the late seventeenth century it denoted a formally constituted political group. It also had close associations with the term ‘faction’. From the sixteenth century, ‘faction’ referred to a dissenting group, especially in politics or religion, with the negative connotation of self-​interested intrigue.1 It was the Whig Edmund Burke, in the 1770s, who declared ‘party’ in Parliament to be respectable and necessary to free government, while condemning ‘faction’ as a dishonourable struggle for place and emolument. He saw ‘party’ as an honourable association within Westminster. His evocation of ‘virtual representation’ left MPs free to exercise their judgement on the nation’s interest in Parliament unfettered by electoral demands suggesting a ‘party’ commitment arising from voters’ preferences. Burke’s legitimation of ‘party’ in Parliament implied a changing understanding of society, shaped by the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment—​what might be described as the sanction of pluralism. Following David Hume, writers such Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart, and John Millar saw increasing social differentiation in the advance of society, greater economic complexity, and the emergence of diverse social ‘interests’. The 1  For writers such as Lord Bolingbroke (1678–​1751) and Hume (1711–​73), the terms ‘party’ and ‘faction’ were usually synonymous and both were undesirable. For Bolingbroke ‘party’ was a political evil and ‘faction’ a fatal distraction from the national interest. Similarly, Hume condemned ‘faction’ for fostering fierce animosities within the nation, subverting government, and rendering laws impotent.

248   Angus Hawkins progress from a feudal to a more sophisticated commercial society entailed greater complexity supported by refinement, politeness, and tolerance. Burke’s assertion that ‘party’ was an honourable association in Parliament reflected the plurality of ‘interests’ existing in a ‘modern’ society.2 Yet Burke’s endorsement of ‘party’ from the 1770s remained a minority view during his lifetime and, until the 1820s, remained the particular view of those Whigs condemned to prolonged opposition in Westminster. The majority of MPs held to a traditional presumption of support for the government, as the king’s chosen ministers, based upon patriotic duty. Governments were broad-​based administrations serving the monarch, the Church, and the nation. This embodied the principles of ‘mixed government’. The Whigs refuted accusations of disloyalty in 1826 by adopting the appellation ‘his Majesty’s opposition’. Only in the late 1820s did ‘party’ come to be adopted more generally as a necessary and desirable aspect of Westminster politics. Opposition to Catholic Emancipation in 1829 prompted the Ultra-​Tory Duke of Newcastle to observe that ‘no minister can govern in this country without party’.3 In 1832 the Tory Sir John Walsh affirmed, in his pamphlet On the Present Balance of Parties in the State, that the debate over whether party was desirable or not was a dead issue. The king’s prerogative and patronage were gradually curtailed and the Crown’s ability to control the Commons was reduced. As a result, from the 1830s, government authority became dependent upon the support of MPs. In the constituencies before 1832, electoral activity was often animated and vigorous. Election committees oversaw the process of ‘canvassing’ voters, usually headed by local solicitors acting as part-​time election agents. But local dynamics were the context for partisan exertions, within traditional hierarchical and paternal structures. Local elites expended money and care in maintaining support for parliamentary candidates.4 Voters were not commonly subject to coercive clientage.5 A candidate’s personal acceptability to voters and the provision of various forms of paternal service were the usual requirement for electoral success. The convention of ‘canvassing’ was intended to ensure that due regard was paid not only to the standing of local landowners, but also to the status of the voter. Moreover, elections and voting were communal activities. Election rituals, such as the hustings, engaged voters as well as the unfranchised. Votes were declared orally in public and recorded in pollbooks. Prior to 1832, about two-​thirds of constituencies in England and Wales experienced electoral competition.

2 

During the 1790s and 1800s young future prominent Whigs such as Lord John Russell, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Brougham, and others, such as Lord Melbourne and Lord Palmerston, travelled north to study at the feet of Stewart and Millar. 3  R. Gaunt, ed., Unrepentant Tory: Political Selections from the Diaries of the Fourth Duke of Newcastle-​ under-​Lyme, 1827–​1838 (Woodbridge, 2006), p. 44. 4  F. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734–​ 1832 (Oxford, 1989). 5  Out of 202 borough constituencies in all, 50 English boroughs were patently venal in the 1820s.

Political Parties   249 Did partisan activity at elections express ‘party’ allegiances? Issues at elections mattered. From the 1780s, there were some tentative indications that electoral partisanship might assume a more rigid party form. Local Whig or Tory clubs organized partisan support at election time. But such clubs were informal associations, the product of local sentiment and control. It was the impact of the clauses in the 1832 Reform Acts requiring the registration of entitled male voters—​women being formally excluded from the vote—​that quickly brought clearer party alignments to bear in parliamentary elections.6 Local party agents assiduously sought to register their supporters on the electoral list and challenged the eligibility of those known to support their opponents.

I From the 1830s ‘mixed government’ gave way to the notion of ‘parliamentary government’, with sovereignty vested in the autonomous authority of Westminster. Party became integral to politics. The Whig Sir George Cornewall Lewis observed in 1851 that party was ‘the only means of government in our political system’.7 For Earl Grey in 1858, ‘parliamentary government’ was ‘government by party’.8 Walter Bagehot (1826–​77) wrote of parties being essential to the House of Commons; they were ‘bone of its bone, breath of its breath’. The foremost purpose of parties in Parliament was to identify and support or oppose the government. Bagehot described this as their ‘elective’ function.9 This safeguarded parliamentary sovereignty from the royal prerogative and, until the 1880s and 1890s, ensured that holding ministerial office was not directly determined by electoral endorsement. MPs were representatives, not delegates, exercising the power to make and unmake governments. This required party in Parliament to be cohesive, or else the Crown would rule, but also mutable, or else electoral judgement would decide directly who held office.10 After 1867, Westminster’s autonomous sovereignty in deciding who governed was eroded by ideas of ‘popular sovereignty’, parties becoming the direct expression of

6   P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832–​1841 (Woodbridge, 2002). 7  Cornewall Lewis to Sir James Graham, 27 January 1851, Graham MSS, Bundle 108. 8  Lord Grey, Parliamentary Government Considered with Reference to Reform (London, 1858), p. 43. See A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’ (Oxford, 2015). 9  The Commons, in Bagehot’s words, ‘lives in a state of perpetual potential choice: at any moment it can choose a ruler and dismiss a ruler’. W. Bagehot, The English Constitution, ed. P. Smith (Cambridge, 2001), p. 101. 10  As Sir Thomas Erskine May eulogized in 1861: ‘We acknowledge with gratitude, that we owe to party most of our rights and liberties . . . We observe that, while the undue influence of the crown has been restrained, democracy has also been held in check.’ Sir T. Erskine May, The Constitutional History of England (2 vols, London, 1861), vol. ii, p. 214.

250   Angus Hawkins a broader political will. This shift had a profound impact on the nature of party in Westminster. With a significantly broadened male electorate, extended formal party organization outside Parliament, and the growing perception that a main purpose of Westminster was to enact legislation, parliamentary parties became more rigidly aligned. They were more tightly disciplined by the Whips.11 Under their direction, MPs voted in more divisions. The participation of MPs in debates increased. At the same time, party in the constituencies and Westminster was brought into closer association. Changes of government became increasingly aligned with general elections. From the 1880s, national parties with extensive extra-​parliamentary organization, mass membership, and increasingly centralized bureaucracies producing tighter discipline among MPs resulted in more rigid party alignments becoming central to the functioning of British politics. When the Conservatives split over Corn Law repeal in 1846, Sir Robert Peel (1788–​1850), adhering to a pre-​1832 conception of executive authority, declined to form a distinct Peelite party in either Parliament or the constituencies. When the Liberals split over Irish home rule in 1886, the schism was immediately translated into distinct party organizations. Lord Hartington and his anti-​home rule Liberal supporters formed a Liberal Unionist party. Joseph Chamberlain immediately formed the National Radical Union, opposed to Irish home rule. During the twentieth century, politicians and political commentators affirmed that the British system of government was essentially one of party politics.12 Parties embodied the opinion of the country, the alignment of political sentiment, and the means for deciding who should govern the nation. So parties came to be seen as serving a number of complementary purposes: • To recruit persons for public office and identify leaders heading the contest for power. • To formulate and espouse an ideology, as a sustained cluster of ideas by which to control public policy. • To mobilize and organize the electorate. • To represent opinion within the polity. • To bring together or distinguish between diverse ‘interests’ within the polity. • To legitimize or criticize the political system. Historians have analysed political parties in all of these contexts.

11 

H. Berrington, ‘Partisanship and Dissidence in the Nineteenth Century House of Commons’, Parliamentary Affairs, 21 (1968), 338–​74. 12  For A.L. Lowell (1856–​1943) in 1908, ‘The English government is builded as a city that is at unity in itself, and party is an integral part of the fabric. Party works, therefore, inside, instead of outside, the regular political institutions. In fact, so far as Parliament is concerned, the machinery of party and of government are not merely in accord; they are one and the same thing.’ A.L. Lowell, The Government of England (2 vols, London, 1908), vol. i, p. 458.

Political Parties   251

II A long tradition of historical writing provides chronological descriptions of the varying fortunes of individual parties. The rise and fall of individual leaders, the gaining of power and electoral support, the legislative achievements of governments, and periods of opposition are placed in an unfolding narrative. During the nineteenth century this drew on the unprecedented number of memoirs, diaries, collections of speeches, and biographies published by and about politicians. The burgeoning cult of prominent figures, such as Richard Cobden, Sir Robert Peel, John Bright, Lord Palmerston, Benjamin Disraeli, and William Gladstone, from the 1840s to the 1870s fed a strengthening popular engagement with the political world. From the 1830s, the multi-​volume ‘tombstone’ biography of statesmen assumed its classic form. From this literature emerged histories of individual parties, often written by party adherents.13 The Conservatives have outstripped the Liberal and Labour parties in memorializing their past. In the process, Peel, Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, Sir Winston Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher have become iconic Conservative figures. The longest-​established party in British politics, the Conservatives’ periods in office have provided the high points of party narratives—​in particular 1841–​6, 1866–​8, 1874–​80, 1886–​92, 1895–​1902, and the 56 years in which they were in office, either as a single party or in coalition, during the twentieth century.14 Between 1859 and 1922 Liberals held office, either as a single party or in coalition, for 36 years, with their Whig and ‘reform’ predecessors governing for 28 years between 1832 and 1859. From the 1920s the Liberals lost their position as the major party of opposition to the Conservatives.15 Similarly, periods of office provide the high point of Labour party narratives, especially 1945–​51 and 1997–​2010.16 13  T.E. Kebbel, A History of Toryism (London, 1886) proved an early example of the genre, the author being a Conservative journalist. 14  The volumes in the Longman History of the Conservative party comprise R. Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830–​1867 (London, 1978); R.T. Shannon, The Age of Disraeli, 1868–​1881: The Rise of Tory Democracy (London, 1992); R.T. Shannon, The Age of Salisbury, 1881–​1902: Unionism and Empire (London, 1996); J. Ramsden, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin: 1902–​1940 (London, 1979); J. Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden, 1940–​1957 (London, 1995). Other accounts include R. Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Major (London, 1997); J. Ramsden, An Appetite for Power: A History of the Conservative Party Since 1830 (London, 1998); R. Harris, The Conservatives: A History (London, 2011); A. Seldon and S. Ball, eds., Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 (London, 1994). 15  Historical surveys of the Liberal party include A. Sykes, The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism, 1776–​1988 (London, 1997); C. Cook, A Short History of the Liberal Party (7th edn., Basingstoke, 2010); D. Dutton, A History of the Liberal Party Since 1900 (2nd edn., Basingstoke, 2013); R. Ingham and D. Brack, Peace, Reform and Liberalism: A History of Liberal Politics in Britain, 1679–​2011 (London, 2011). The historically most sophisticated analysis is J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 1993). 16  Historical surveys for the Labour party include A. Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party (4th edn., Basingstoke, 2015); H. Pelling, A Short History of the Labour Party (11th edn., Basingstoke, 1996); M. Pugh, Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (London, 2010).

252   Angus Hawkins While the securing of office has been an aspect of most historical studies of parties, the competition for power was a particular focus of what became known as the ‘highpolitics’ school associated with Maurice Cowling.17 ‘High politics’ explored the interaction between party leaders, parliamentary backbenchers, and those influential in shaping perceptions of political reality as part of the Westminster community with its own preoccupations and perspectives. This was an activity in which prominent individuals sought effectiveness in the context of competing attempts to determine public debate. This explained why, for example, in 1867 a Conservative government passed a more far-​reaching parliamentary Reform Act than was privately desired or anticipated by the great majority of MPs. Only in the setting of others’ actions could the purposes of party leaders be understood fully. This approach was misleadingly criticized for reducing politics solely to cynical ambition; for propounding a form of ‘venal Namierism’; for stripping politicians of belief or principle; and for arguing that a small self-​preoccupied elite engaged in the only politics that mattered. Such criticisms were misplaced. Cowling recognized that politicians could act on principle, but argued that posing an inherent contradiction between sincerity and ambition was naïve. A focus on the dynamics of the political elite, moreover, did not, as Cowling acknowledged, deny the legitimacy of other levels of political activity in the press, among electors, or by popular agitators. What was necessary was not to assume a direct casual relation, from the bottom up, between differing levels of political activity. Rather, the relations between levels of political activity were shifting and mediated. The preoccupations of parliamentary politicians were constructed, rather than passively received, in an understanding of ‘public opinion’, electoral wishes, and national need. In this process the importance of rhetoric was crucial. ‘We govern men with words’, Disraeli had written.18 An emphasis on the archives led historians of ‘high politics’ to examine closely the private papers, letters, and diaries of parliamentary politicians, as well as their public statements. And the impact of the contingent on intentions was also recognized as an unavoidable aspect of political endeavour. These insights influenced historical understanding of how political parties functioned. The purposes of any single party could not be divorced from the actions of other parties with which they were contending for the control of policy and debate. Party leaders were necessarily engaged in the perceived purposes of rival party elites, rather than being driven simply by grass-​roots wishes. What came to be called ‘the linguistic turn’ in historical studies from the 1980s onwards resonated with the ‘high-political’ concern with political rhetoric, albeit from different assumptions. The autonomy of politics, rather than being the product of social and material determinants, placed a focus on the language politicians employed.

17  See M. Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution (Cambridge, 1967); M. Cowling, The Impact of Labour (Cambridge, 1971); M. Cowling, The Impact of Hitler (Cambridge, 1976). Other notable ‘high-politics’ studies associated with what became called the Peterhouse (Cowling’s Cambridge college) school of history include A. Cooke and J. Vincent, The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain 1885–​6 (Brighton, 1974); A. Jones, The Politics of Reform, 1884 (Cambridge, 1972). 18  B. Disraeli, Contarini Fleming (new edn, London, 1881), p. 101.

Political Parties   253 In Languages of Class: Studies in Working Class History (1983), Gareth Stedman Jones argued for the critical role of rhetoric in shaping political perceptions and aspirations. This sparked an important historiographical debate.19 The language used by political parties to marshal and mobilize support has proved a fertile area of study—​an aspect of party history which has not been exhausted. Studies of parties as the embodiment of ideology have focused on the premises and principles of ideas informing their view of public policy, the positing of an intellectual inheritance giving coherence to a sustained cluster of ideas steering political action.20 Conservatives have often proposed that their beliefs are not a rigid ideology, but a philosophy of imperfection in which the agency of politics is limited. The distinction between the private and the public is crucial, they assert, and change is not synonymous with improvement. Hierarchy and mutual obligations between the ranks of society are inherent in a stable organic social order. This is the necessary pre-​condition for meaningful legal liberties. In turn, this reinforces the importance of historic institutions such as Parliament and the Anglican Church. Studies of Liberalism trace the emergence of a political agenda predating the formal establishment of the parliamentary Liberal party in 1859.21 Here the securing of ‘natural’ individual liberty in the removal of monopolies of political power, religious practice, and economic policy—​as argued by John Locke—​and the ‘natural’ functioning of open and free markets unrestricted by protective tariffs—​as argued by Adam Smith—​ provide the foundations for a Liberal agenda of greater civil and religious liberty. For Liberals this was the hallmark of ordered progress and the safeguard of a dynamic pluralistic society. Evolving definitions of liberty were central to different strands of Liberal thought. Such ideas informed the legislative reforms of Whig governments during the 1830s and 1840s. But it was not until 1859 that the great majority of non-​Conservative MPs adopted the common party label ‘Liberal’, denoting their commitment to free trade and political and religious liberty. Socialism, as it came to be embodied in the British Labour party, drew on a varied range of influences present in the 1880s and 1890s.22 Currents of radical thinking, republicanism, secularism, land reform agitation, and an ethical socialism based on the dignity of labour shaped humanist ‘utopian’ definitions of socialism. Inspiration was drawn from nonconformity, Christian socialism, the writings of John Ruskin, radical

19  See, for example, J. Lawrence and M. Taylor, ‘The Poverty of Protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language—​A Reply’, Social History, 18 (1993), 1–​15. 20  For Conservatism, see N. O’Sullivan, Conservatism (London, 1976); R. Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (London, 1980); F. O’Gorman, British Conservatism: Conservative Thought from Burke to Thatcher (London, 1986); R. Eccleshall, English Conservatism Since the Restoration: An Introduction and Anthology (London, 1990). 21  For examples, see R. Eccleshall, British Liberalism: Liberal Thought from the 1640s to 1980s (London, 1986); A. Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, 2012). 22  The political term ‘socialism’ entered English usage in the 1830s, denoting a system of social organization based on state or collective ownership and the regulation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange for the common benefit of all members of society.

254   Angus Hawkins contempt for corruption and wealthy oligarchies, and an evangelical zeal for social justice. The writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, not translated into English until the 1880s, proved only partial, in some regards peripheral, influences on a socialism concerned with a moral appeal to justice and fairness. Freedom, humanity, and fraternal Christianity featured more prominently than calls for violent proletarian revolution. While such studies suggest underlying intellectual genealogies, the relation between philosophical thought, doctrine, and political action remains complex. Theory is refracted through the prism of political contingency, as a distant echo more often than as a direct consequence.23 Ideological genealogies suggest the character of enshrined ideas redefined by successive generations. But their inherent instability strips them of consistent essentialist meaning. The relation between language, concepts, historical context, and party doctrine has generated an extensive scholarship, much of it centred on the work of Quentin Skinner.24 This has emphasized the role of language in defining social experience and mobilizing political affiliation. The adoption of new ideological terms by some politicians, in usually imprecise ways, provided them with a public language with which to engage party support. But the practical requirements of office and policy complicate the easy translation of ideas into political action. The correspondence of politicians rarely reveals a preoccupation with philosophical debate. Moreover, conflict is implicit in the agonistic vocabulary of politics, often suggesting clarity where vagueness of thought may prevail, or portraying a sharp divergence of opinion where unanimity might exist.

III The role of parties in mobilizing the electorate has been a long-​standing interest for historians. For Norman Gash, the 1832 Reform Acts brought modification, but not a transformation, to the electoral system.25 More recent work, however, has revealed significant change brought about by the 1832 legislation.26 Here the focus is less on the widening of the franchise—​the usual interest of historians—​and more on the numerous non-​franchise clauses, for example involving the registration of voters, that comprised

23  A sophisticated and historically sensitive analysis of ideology is M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford, 1996). Ideologies, Freeden suggests, are, at any one time, made up of ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ concepts. But these concepts shift over time and their relations change. This constant adjustment is the result of not only the competition to command public debate between ideologies, but evolving competition within ideologies. 24  See, for example, Q. Skinner, ‘Language and Social Change’, in J. Tully, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 119–​32; Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics: Volume 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002). 25  See N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel: A Study in the Technique of Parliamentary Representation, 1830–​1850 (London, 1952). 26 Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work.

Political Parties   255 a significant part of the English 1832 Reform Act.27 The intention of the legislation was to ensure a more stable and consistent electorate. One unforeseen consequence, following the unexpected general election of January 1835, was to increase the power of local party activists. Large numbers of eligible, but formerly unregistered, voters were put on the electoral register, with increased contentious claims being brought forward by party activists in the registration courts. Accompanied by the compiling of voting lists for local government elections, as required by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, politics in the parishes and constituencies became increasingly party-​oriented. The legislative link between the franchise and local taxation—​as with the poor rate, for example—​gave further momentum to this development. The dynamics of electoral politics remained a function of local ‘influence’ and organization. But more permanent Conservative, Reform, Liberal, or radical associations were established in the constituencies during the 1830s, with the primary objective of ensuring their eligible supporters were entered on the electoral register. Another factor complicated the development of party partisanship in the constituencies. Between 1832 and 1867, approximately 96 per cent of English electors possessed multiple votes.28 The number of English constituencies electing multiple MPs was slightly reduced in 1867, but it was not until 1885 that the great majority of constituencies became single-​member seats, with each voter having just one vote. How electors distributed their multiple votes was a central feature of English elections between 1832 and 1885. A fluctuating majority of electors ‘plumped’ or gave ‘straight’ votes, giving their support to a single party. But a significant number engaged in ‘split’ voting (giving their votes to candidates of different parties) or ‘non-​partisan plumping’ (not using all their votes and declining to support another candidate of the same party). The level of ‘split’ voting and ‘non-​partisan plumping’ was generally higher in borough constituencies than in the counties. So a complex electoral dynamic operated in the constituencies, framing the increased party orientation of voters. After 1867, national party organization began to encroach on local control of electoral politics.29 Following the 1867 Reform Acts extending the vote from one in five adult males to one in three adult males, the need to organize a ‘mass’ electorate prompted greater centralized party organization in the country.30 In 1867 the National Union of

27   The legal necessity for voters to be entered on an annual electoral list and the cost, time, and expertise required quickly led to the politicization of the registration process, strengthening the influence of local party agents. Each voter had to pay a shilling to be entered on the electoral register. This was an annual payment in the boroughs and a one-​off payment in the counties. 28  In constituencies electing two MPs each voter possessed two votes; in constituencies electing three MPs each voter had three votes; and in the City of London, which elected four MPs, each voter had four votes. See P. Salmon, ‘“Plumping Contests”: The Impact of By-​Elections on English Voting Behaviour, 1790–​1868’, in T.G. Otte and P. Readman, eds., By-​Elections in British Politics, 1832–​1914 (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 23–​50. 29  The ‘classic’ study of this process is H.J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Disraeli and Gladstone (London, 1959). 30  The UK electorate of 1,364,000 voters in 1866 became 2,477,713 voters in 1868.

256   Angus Hawkins Conservative and Constitutional Associations (NUCCA) was established. In 1870 the Conservative Central Office was set up, providing advice about voter registration, finding suitable parliamentary candidates, and providing party literature to distribute at local meetings. After Disraeli’s death in 1881, the Primrose League was formed in 1883, named after what was said to be his favourite flower. The Primrose League organized calendars of social events, fêtes, dances, and evening social entertainments, with women as full and active members. By 1890 it had one million members. In 1860 the Liberal Registration Association was formed as a national organization. It became the Liberal Central Association in 1877. The same year the Radical Liberal Joseph Chamberlain formed the National Liberal Federation (NLF), seeking to strengthen constituency organization in support of an ‘advanced’ Liberal agenda. The power base of the NLF remained centred in Birmingham, however, and more moderate Liberals were wary of the NLF dictating a radical agenda to MPs and controlling Liberal voters. Detractors referred to ‘wire-​pullers’ and ‘the caucus’ as the sinister means by which the NLF manipulated voters. The Liberal schism over Irish home rule in 1886 immediately produced rival party organizations, the Gladstonian Liberal Association being challenged by Hartington’s Liberal Unionist Association and Chamberlain’s National Radical Union. Three pieces of legislation passed by the Liberal government of 1880–​5 prompted further party organization of an increasingly numerous male electorate. In 1883 a Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act restricted the amount of money parliamentary candidates could spend in an election and enhanced the supervision of campaign expenditure. The 1884 Franchise Reform Act significantly increased the electorate by extending to the counties the household and lodger suffrage that had existed in the boroughs since 1867. The total United Kingdom electorate of 3.152 million in 1883 became 5.7 million in 1886. Then the 1885 Redistribution Act redistributed 177 Commons seats, giving greater representation to London and large or new manufacturing areas. Equally importantly, the Act made nearly all English constituencies single-​member districts. The elimination of multi-​member constituencies, with electors now possessing just one vote, had a profound impact on the dynamics of electoral politics. These changes proved a powerful stimulus to greater party organization in the constituencies. In 1885 the Conservative Central Office produced the first Constitutional Yearbook, a ready guide supplying party speakers and pamphleteers with approved statistics and information. In 1887 the first Liberal Yearbook appeared, providing authorized material for local Liberal activists. The professional party agent became a familiar figure and the use of part-​time local solicitors fell away. In 1891 the National Society of Conservative Agents (NSCA) was founded and the Society of Certified and Associated Liberal Agents (SCALA) subsequently established, giving professional status to full-​ time party agents.31 By the 1890s the established political parties were employing centralized bureaucracies and enlisting a popular membership in support of their policies, in response to the requirements of a mass electorate. Yet parliamentary politicians’

31 

K. Rix, Parties, Agents and Electoral Culture in England, 1880–​1910 (Woodbridge, 2016).

Political Parties   257 emphasis on certain issues, such as Irish home rule and imperialism, was often less marked in constituency contests, where local concerns continued to play an important part in party contention. In Parliament itself party alignment became more tightly disciplined, in contrast to the cohesive, yet mutable, Commons parties that had existed prior to 1867. In 1836, government whips directed 49 per cent of Commons divisions. By 1885 they directed 85 per cent of Commons divisions. More rigid party alignment enhanced the authority of the Commons front benches. Ministers and party leaders acquired greater command of legislative debate. The Speaker of the Commons’ power to control debate was increased, and the necessity of party discipline in delivering the legislative agenda of each party acquired greater emphasis. As a result, the primary purposes of Parliament itself were redefined. Prior to 1867, the first responsibility of the Commons was to make or unmake governments, as an autonomous deliberative assembly, dictated to neither by the royal prerogative nor by the electorate. By the 1870s, Parliament’s legislative function was being perceived as equal to its elective function. A  government that could not effectively pass legislation was no government at all. Delivering the measures promised in election addresses became a primary responsibility of parties in Westminster. This, in turn, began to suggest a shift in the understanding of constitutional sovereignty. Executive authority, it implied, relied on electoral endorsement, rather than simply party support in the Commons.32 Changes of government became increasingly aligned with general elections, with the electorate determining which party should govern the nation. The political worlds of Westminster and the constituencies were drawn into closer union. In 1902 the first full-​scale analysis of the British party system, written by Moisei Ostrogorski (1854–​1919), a Russian Jew settled in Paris and writing in French, was translated into English as Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, in two volumes. With the extension of the male franchise in 1867 and 1884 and the arrival of mass politics, managed by political parties, Ostrogorski’s study carried a clear warning. It described how political parties now manipulated the electorate. Organized parties in turn imposed discipline upon Parliament, resulting in Cabinet dominance of legislation. Ostrogorski warned that party organization had subverted the notion of ‘popular sovereignty’ as vested in a mass electorate. Party zealots, he argued, ‘enfeebled the will of men in politics’, destroyed the independence of voters, and ‘almost obliterated their dignity as human beings’. Ostrogorski’s targets were the ‘wire-​pullers’ and ‘caucus’ politics of the NLF. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchic Tendencies of Modern Democracy, by the German sociologist Robert Michels (1876–​1936), was translated into English in 1915. Michels asserted that mass politics, as disciplined by political parties, naturally led to oligarchy. Party elites presented themselves in democratic guise, but the substance of 32  Lowell noted in 1908 that the electoral platform had brought ministers face to face with the people and increased the importance of both. ‘Not only is the electorate the ultimate arbiter in political matters, but the platform has in some degree supplanted the House [of Commons] as the forum where public questions are discussed’. Lowell, Government of England, vol. I, p. 447.

258   Angus Hawkins democracy was permeated with elitism. This Michels called ‘the iron law of oligarchy’. Although alarm at the rise of ‘caucus’ politics among British politicians subsided during the 1890s, such academic arguments resonated with the views of the Conservative leader Lord Salisbury (1830–​1903) during the 1880s and 1890s. With the Commons in thrall to party dictate, Salisbury argued, the House of Lords had a duty to act on behalf of genuine national opinion. In 1901 the Daily News accused Salisbury of being ‘the first to introduce into English politics that essentially Jacobinical phrase’ the ‘electoral mandate’.33 The origins of the Labour party reinforced the changing relations between parliamentary parties and the electorate. The Labour party (named the Labour Representation Committee from 1900 to 1906)  emerged from extra-​parliamentary movements, the trade unions, and Socialist societies, and subsequently sought a party presence in Westminster; a reversal of the process seen in the Conservative and Liberal parties. From 1900 to 1918 the Labour party was a federation of various bodies under a National Executive Committee (NEC). Then, in 1918, the Labour party (with 42 MPs prior to the general election that year) adopted a constitution at its annual conference stating that its primary object was to organize a national party in the country and Westminster, including in its policies a commitment to the common ownership of the means of production (Clause IV). As an extra-​parliamentary movement in origin, the Labour party thereby established itself as a national party with a parliamentary presence in theory directly accountable to its popular membership. As a result, the professional organization of the Labour party after 1918 answered to the annual party conference through the NEC. The 1918 Representation of the People Act dramatically extended the vote, launching parties into a far more democratic electoral environment. It enfranchised all men over the age of 21 and women over 30 if they were either local government electors in their own right or the wives of those who were; constituency boundaries were revised; and electoral registration became the responsibility of neutral officials. A  United Kingdom electorate of 7.7 million in 1910 became an electorate of 21.4 million in 1918. But it is important to note that Britain arrived at manhood suffrage later than any other European country claiming to have a representative system of government, with the exception of the Kingdom of Hungary. The impact of the 1918 Act on party alignments is a matter of much debate among historians. The heavily masculine tone of Edwardian political discourse, it has been proposed, was to some degree feminized after 1918, either in particular appeals to women voters or in a broader recasting of platform rhetoric. The massive increase in the size of the electorate and the unprecedented demands this placed on party organization, it has been argued, were decisive factors in the rise of Labour as the main opposition party to the Conservatives and the accompanying decline of the Liberal party.34 Against this argument it has been observed that the number of Labour MPs after 1918 did not 33 Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, p. 315.

34  See H.C.G. Matthew, R.I. McKibbin, and J.A. Kay, ‘The Franchise Factor in the Rise of the Labour Party’, English Historical Review, 91 (1976), 723–​52; C. Cook, The Age of Alignment: Electoral Politics in Britain 1922–​1929 (London, 1975).

Political Parties   259 immediately increase dramatically and that the increase in working-​class votes brought about by the Act was lower than previously thought.35 Another dimension to the franchise factor in the rise of Labour, it has been suggested, was a generational gravitation towards Labour among young non-​Conservative voters during the 1920s and 1930s who had not been socialized in pre-​1914 Liberal politics.36 Yet the emergent Labour party struggled during the 1920s and 1930s with internal divisions over whether they represented all the working class, or ‘useful citizens’, or primarily the trade unions and their membership. It also retained a commitment to the shibboleths of free trade and free collective bargaining, when alternative economic arguments pointed towards the benefits of protection. The failure to articulate a coherent strategy attracting broader electoral support facilitated Conservative dominance during the inter-​war years.37 During the 1920s and 1930s the Conservatives proved most adept at managing the democratic electorate created after 1918. This reflected the resourcefulness of their Conservative predecessors in organizing a broadened electorate in the 1830s, 1870s, and 1880s. Redistribution, creating greater equality of population between constituencies, assisted their efforts. They deliberately appealed to newly enfranchised women voters, creating a ‘gender gap’ in electoral loyalties which survived until the 1970s. The split in the Liberal party from the early 1920s assisted the Conservatives. But the Conservatives also undertook assiduous party organization in the country. The Conservative Central Office, particularly under the party chairman J.C. Davidson from 1926 to 1930, was reformed. A truly nationwide party structure was established, which covered virtually every constituency. The new media of radio, film, and newsreel were exploited as propaganda tools. A Junior Imperial League was rapidly expanded and a Young Britons organization established, with half a million members aged under 14, to counter socialist Sunday schools. As a result the Conservatives enjoyed electoral dominance during the inter-​war years, with a rhetoric of anti-​socialism combined with a social broadening of the party’s elite. The achievement was complemented by the projected image of Stanley Baldwin, as Conservative leader from 1923 to 1937, as a stolid, phlegmatic, anti-​intellectual and good-​natured personification of the English character promoting measured progress, social improvement, and national cohesion. Conservatism was presented, in crucial senses, as non-​political.

IV The notion of ‘representation’ by the early nineteenth century had developed various meanings since its fourteenth-​century sense of ‘making present’. MPs were understood to 35 

D. Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900–​1918 (Cambridge, 1990). M. Childs, ‘Labour Grows Up: The Electoral System, Political Generations and British Politics, 1890–​1929’, Twentieth Century British Politics, 6 (1995), 123–​44. 37  See R. McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–​1951 (Oxford, 2010). 36 

260   Angus Hawkins represent communities and ‘interests’, though there were competing connotations to this term. For most MPs, prior to the 1880s, election to the Commons required them to exercise their own judgement as to the nation’s interests as defined through parliamentary debate. This could encompass generally speaking for or on behalf of those who elected them. MPs were not, however, instructed delegates; nor were they merely advocates of their constituency’s narrow interests. Radical MPs, however, often proposed a notion of ‘representation’ which required them continually to make present the views of those who elected them. They regarded themselves as mandated by their constituents and directly accountable for their voting in the Commons to those who had elected them. With the enlargement of the male electorate in 1867 and 1884, the notion that MPs directly represented the views of their constituents gained strength. This complemented the belief that ‘electoral sovereignty’, as channelled through national and centrally organized parties, was supplanting an autonomous parliamentary sovereignty, which had been dominant between 1832 and 1867. Definitions of settled considered ‘public opinion’, whose proponents were usually characterized as male, middle-​class, and urban prior to 1918, gave form to the views upon which ‘popular sovereignty’ stood. The press, the platform, and petitions gave expression to ‘public opinion’. Both the Liberal and Conservative parties increasingly looked to the press and the platform, as well as party organization, to form a rational and deliberate endorsement of their policies. Through the press, the platform, and party organization, ‘electoral sovereignty’ provided the base upon which parties were able to speak for and govern the nation. This formed the foundation of the party system in the twentieth century. In the general election of 1951, 97 per cent of those who voted—​the turnout being 82 per cent—​cast votes for either the Labour or Conservative parties. The two national parties dominated electoral politics and projected a simple bipartisan alignment of political opinion.38 At the same time, political science became established in Britain as an academic discipline. The Political Studies Association was founded in 1950 and the journal Political Studies launched in 1953. Political scientists proposed that two-​party politics was the ‘natural’ form of British politics.39 The paradigm of a two-​party system, with governments commanding a Commons majority, was constructed as the historic model of British politics. This paradigm was pervasive from the 1950s to the 1970s. But from the 1980s it came under challenge as the bipartisan alignment of party politics was complicated by the emergence in Westminster of minority third parties. In 1988, the Liberal Democrat party was formed with the merger of the Liberal party and those Social Democrats who had earlier left the Labour party. In the general election of 2010, no single party secured a Commons majority, and thus a Conservative–​Liberal Democrat government coalition 38 

In 1951 the Conservatives received 48 and Labour 49 per cent of the votes cast. In Scotland, the Conservatives secured 48.6 per cent of the vote. 39  In the 1950s the French sociologist Maurice Duverger proposed that a ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system with single-member constituencies tended to produce a two-​party system. Political scientists elevated this observation to a ‘law’. But it is worth noting that, while single-​member constituencies were established in England in 1885, a clear two-​party alignment of national politics was not apparent until after 1945.

Political Parties   261 was formed. In the general election of 2015 the Scottish National Party secured a near monopoly of Scottish representation, largely at the cost of Labour defeats, and a simple two-​party model of British politics appeared further divorced from electoral realities. During the same period, popular membership of the Conservative and Labour parties sharply declined.40 Increasing numbers of the electorate expressed views and concerns not readily aligned with the policies of the two major British parties. Structural changes in employment, such as the decline in the number of the manual working class since the 1950s, de-industrialization, the blurring of formerly clearer class distinctions, and ideological shifts from the 1980s also played a part in the erosion of those rigid tribal allegiances that had sustained bipartisan loyalty to either the Conservative or Labour parties immediately following 1945. At the local and regional levels, multi-​party politics became familiar. In the light of these political developments, challenges to the salience of the two-​party model as the ‘natural’ form of British politics raise questions about its historical value. Arguably, periods of simple bipartisan party alignment since 1800 have been the exception, rather than the rule. During the 1830s a revived Conservative party engaged with Whigs, Reformers, English radicals, and Daniel O’Connell’s Irish radicals. Electoral politics in the constituencies saw ‘progressive’ parties, under the separate banners of Whigs, Reformers, Liberals, or radicals, competing for votes. During the 1850s and 1860s, Liberal governments were dismissed from office more often by hostile Commons votes initiated by their own side of the House than by the Conservative opposition. From 1859 to 1874 a clearer bipartisan alignment of party politics emerged, personified in the titanic clash between Disraeli and Gladstone. In 1874, however, an Irish home rule party established itself in the Commons, and in 1886 the Liberal party was split over home rule for Ireland. By the 1890s there were five parties in the Commons: Conservatives, Liberal Unionists, Liberals, Irish Nationalists (split into two sections after 1890), and an emergent Labour party. During the 60-​year period from 1885 to 1945, for only ten years was a single party in office commanding a Commons majority. For the other 50 years of that period, governments were either minority ministries reliant on the support of another party or coalitions. While the period from 1945 to the 1970s saw a simpler bipartisan alignment of national politics, since the 1980s it has again taken on an increasingly multi-​party form. A two-​party system as the ‘natural’ character of British politics now looks a far less secure orthodoxy.

V Parties can be a means of either legitimizing or criticizing the political system. Popular mass movements—​notably Chartism during the late 1830s and 1840s, as well as the Irish 40 

Conservative party membership fell from 2.9 million to 177,000 and Labour party membership from 876,000 to 190,000 between 1951 and 2011.

262   Angus Hawkins Catholic Association and Repeal Union from the 1820s and the Anti-​Corn Law League from the late 1830s—​drew millions of supporters behind demands for far-​reaching political change. Chartism, campaigning for universal male suffrage, the abolition of property qualifications for MPs, annual parliaments, constituencies of equal size in terms of population, the payment of MPs, and voting by ballot, proved the most powerful popular critique of the political system since the eighteenth century. Asserting the dignity of the working man, citing historic legal liberties, and inspired by the Christian morality proclaimed in the New Testament and expressed in the language of John Milton and John Bunyan, Chartist mass meetings and petitions challenged the policies of Conservatives, Whigs, and Liberals. Yet Chartism failed to achieve a numerous parliamentary presence. The Irish Repeal Movement and the Anti-​Corn Law League, in contrast, successfully established representation in the Commons, with the former becoming a thorn in the side of both Conservative and Whig ministries and the latter seeing the Corn Laws repealed in 1846. The absence of mass violent revolution in Britain in 1848, contrasting with the barricades and bloodshed in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, Krakow, Prague, Budapest, Milan, and Rome, revealed that the parameters of political debate between the main political parties in Britain were narrower than those prevalent in continental Europe. Significantly, the word ‘consensus’ entered English usage during the mid-​nineteenth century. In continental Europe, political debate stretched across the competing polarities of conservatism, liberalism, militarism, socialism, republicanism, and strong reactionary sentiment. In Britain, during the mid-​nineteenth century, debate between the major political parties embraced a narrower spectrum of opinion. From the 1820s, radicals adopted a strategy of ‘popular constitutionalism’, looking to Parliament to secure institutional reform. Conservatives, Whigs, and Liberals all accepted the fundamental reality of ‘progress’. This in turn required the adaption of historical arrangements to the changing demands of a dynamic society. Obstructing change would incite revolution; precipitous change would threaten instability and anarchy. Conservatives and Liberals differed, often fiercely, over the precise changes required by ‘progress’. But they did not deny the necessity of judicious reform. From the late nineteenth century, socialism in Britain also exhibited characteristics distinguishing it from socialism on continental Europe. Values and language inherited from earlier radical movements and Chartism shaped an ethical socialism emphasizing the dignity of labour, the cry for social justice, and moral contempt for corrupt wealthy oligarchies. Aspects of ‘scientific socialism’ associated with the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, such as the theory of surplus labour and violent proletarian revolution, were marginalized. Inspiration was drawn from nonconformity, Christian socialism, and middle-​class Fabian positivist and collectivist arguments for wresting capital from class monopoly through evolutionary statist means. That public ownership was a central and sufficient tenet of British socialism revealed both the strengths and limitations of the movement during the Labour government of 1945–​51. The nationalization of major industries and services and the establishment of the welfare state were not accompanied by constitutional reform, any strategic direction of the economy, the

Political Parties   263 replacement of industrial management by new personnel, or class legislation, for example abolishing public schools. The welfare system established after 1945 was itself largely based on Edwardian principles of insurance. So it was possible for the term ‘the Establishment’ to become common usage in the 1950s, describing the survival of powerful traditional elites, largely privately educated, commanding the heights of influence and control in Whitehall, Westminster, the City, the law courts, and the Anglican Church. Historical elite paternalism had seemingly smothered proletarian revolution. From the 1950s to the 1970s, both Labour and Conservative governments worked within the context of the ‘mixed economy’ created by nationalization. Only after 1979 was the post-​war consensus stridently challenged by Thatcher’s Conservative government, with policies pushing forward privatization and curbing trade union influence. This proved to be political revolution from the right, not the left. Compared to continental Europe, therefore, the absence of violent revolution in Britain after 1800 can be partly explained by the consensus between the major political parties that governed the country. The continuing influence of Christian values into the twentieth century, in both institutional and non-​institutional forms, and moral conceptions of identity were significant. Only gradually was religion displaced by class as a major factor in political allegiances. The continuing importance of community and hierarchical relations, and the constant recourse to the past by all parties as a legitimization of their contemporary purposes, were significant. A polity seemingly capable of accommodating gradualist reform embraced, to varying degrees, the aspirations of the major British political parties. Morality, progress, and constitutionalism shaped their agendas. It reinforced an alleged genius in the English national character for putting new wine into old bottles without bursting them—​though the recurring bête noir of Ireland challenged such comforting beliefs. Irish nationalist parties discomforted successive British governments, split the Liberal party in 1886, and between 1918 and 1922 led to the separation of the Irish Free State from the United Kingdom.

VI In the 1990s, the term ‘new political history’ was introduced to historical debate. It asserted the relative autonomy of politics, the dynamic role of language in giving politics meaning, and the error of reducing political behaviour to social determinants.41 Speech, symbols, rituals, and the use of public space were expressive of values and narratives shaping the purposes of political action. Former narrower definitions of the ‘political’ were extended to include the visual and material aspects of party activity. In part, this

41 

These themes were present in G. Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–​1982 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 90–​178.

264   Angus Hawkins was a reaction against the structural determinism of earlier social and economic history. Engaging with postmodernist theory, James Vernon, for example, ‘subverted’ the familiar narrative of wider enfranchisement bringing greater political participation by emphasizing the closing down of popular agency by formal party organization,42 a distant echo of Ostrogorski and Michels. Class, as an indicator of political loyalties, also became subject, in the writing of Patrick Joyce, to postmodern cultural analysis.43 The influence of social science, as in the approach of ‘electoral sociology’, was effectively challenged.44 The notion of ‘civil society’ and the role of elites in governing the state has been re-​examined.45 Interest in overarching concepts, such as ‘national character’, ‘democracy’, ‘patriotism’ and ‘public opinion’, has become prominent.46 The examination of gender and consumerism has also become important in an enlarged sense of political agency. Gender is a significant part of the agenda for future research.47 The role of masculinity in Labour history, for example, is a theme awaiting fuller discussion. The possibilities of computerized analysis of political language, speeches, and manifestos, text ​mining a multi-​million-​word corpus drawn from newspapers, gives unprecedented opportunities to examine the similarities and differences between parliamentary rhetoric, local activism, and platform appeals, both between parties and within parties, as well as how issues shifted over time.48 The exploration of regional and national differences within parties across the United Kingdom, such as Scottish Conservatism and grass-​roots Liberal activism during the inter-​war period, merits further attention. How were relations between the four nations within the United Kingdom, giving form both to unification and division, mediated through political parties? The issue of how regional and national differences played out in Westminster, not just within the regions, awaits its historian. The impact of parliamentary petitions throughout the period is an understudied area. Political Catholicism in Britain after 1829 deserves further attention. At the same time, broader comparative analysis of British political parties in the context of

42 

J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–​1867 (Cambridge, 1993). P. Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840–​1914 (Cambridge, 1991); P. Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-​Century England (Cambridge, 1994). 44  J. Lawrence and M. Taylor, eds., Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997). 45  J. Harris, ed., Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions (Oxford, 2003). 46  See, for example, P. Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven and London, 2006); J. Innes and M. Philp, eds., Re-​Imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750–​1850 (Oxford, 2013); J.P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–​1886 (Cambridge, 2006); J. Thompson, British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion’, 1867–​1914 (Cambridge, 2013). 47  See J. Burke, Working Class Cultures in Britain, 1890–​1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London, 1994); K. Gleadle, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender and Political Culture in Britain, 1815–​1867 (Oxford, 2009); B. Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (Cambridge, 2012). 48  See L. Blaxill, ‘Quantifying the Language of British Politics’, Historical Research, 86 (2013), 313–​41. 43 

Political Parties   265 Europe and non-​European representative political systems offers potential insights as a corrective to more insular views. From our contemporary standpoint, with historically low party membership numbers and various manifestations of voter disenchantment with the major parties, parties’ success during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in securing large sections of popular support becomes increasingly striking. This brings to the fore the question of how parties engaged their audiences. How did they effectively give identity and purpose to their adherents? How did parties shape the character of their supporters’ experience? Against which sections of society were the appeals of different parties defined, and how were those excluded (on the basis of religion, ethnicity, or gender) understood to be positioned in society? Notions of community, the past, and morality are important in defining the particular character of British public life.49 Challenges to traditional narratives of increasing secularization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggest powerful moral aspects to the ways in which parties secured the loyalty of their adherents.50 Such questions invite us to re-​examine the role of parties in the relation between politics, the state, and social change, as well as the development of transnational networks. What were the changing relations, as refracted through political parties, between self-​generating free associations within a diverse civil society and the realm of the state? With contemporary political parties finding it increasingly difficult to engage the electorate, the historical success of earlier parties in doing so highlights the need for continuing study.

Further Reading R. Harris, The Conservatives—​A History (London, 2011). A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’ (Oxford, 2015). J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 1993). R. Shannon, The Age of Salisbury, 1881–​1902: Unionism and Empire (London, 1996). R. Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830–​1867 (London, 1978). A. Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party (3rd edn., London, 2008).

49 

For a study of British political culture, from the 1790s to the early twentieth century, examining the enduring values of the past, morality, and community in shaping public life, see Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture. 50  E.g., I. Katznelson and G. Stedman Jones, eds., Religion and the Political Imagination (Cambridge, 2010).

chapter 16

Ideol o gy i n Ac t i on Jeremy Nuttall

The role of ideas in writing on modern British political history has, in many ways, never been stronger. This is certainly the case if one accepts the broad threefold definition of ideas adopted in this chapter, which enables consideration of the increasing cross-​overs between histories of political ideas and those of political culture, and also of the distinctive contribution of history as offering insight into the meeting between ideas and ideals with practical realities and constraints. Most obviously, first, the history of political ideas clearly includes works built around the most systematic statements of thought, the great texts by leading ‘thinkers’. But, as Stefan Collini has illuminatingly observed, there are serious dangers in the recurring approach which ‘reduces “ideas” to “theories”’.1 This is because ‘a theory is a highly specific and relatively uncommon intellectual construction in any culture’, which involves ‘an extremely high level of abstraction’.2 Second, therefore, as Collini urges, our definition of intellectual life and ideas in modern British history needs to give space as well to ‘insights, perceptions, arguments, beliefs’.3 As Ewen Green has persuasively suggested, ‘if one sets aside the formal, “canonical” notion of the forms of expression of political thought’ and incorporates, for instance, speeches, policy-​ making discussions, and correspondence, one arrives at a definition of ideas that is more representative of the diverse ways in which serious political thinking was undertaken, and which positions the status of ideas within politics as, in Green’s words, ‘rich, varied, and extensive’.4 Thinking of the twentieth century alone, a definition of ideas that is confined to works produced by ‘intellectuals’ might well be considered to exclude Stanley Baldwin, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, and Tony Blair, yet as well as their thoughts clearly having considerable historical impact, all four were highly intelligent and penetrative observers of politics, and their observations are of intellectual importance.

1 

S. Collini, Absent Minds. Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006), p. 6.

2 Ibid., p. 6. 3 Ibid., p. 6. 4 

E.H.H. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism (Oxford, 2004), p. 14.

Ideology in Action   267 Beyond even this, third, the following chapter embraces within its orbit works on political culture which have been at the forefront of the most innovative research in the past generation, and which have dealt conceptually with themes of affluence, consumerism, and modernity, and with the relationship between political ideas and political action, in ways which more purely intellectual histories often do not, and which contain within their pages a considerable amount of political thought, even though the form of that thought includes briefer reflections, political strategies, and even attitudes as much as more elaborately constructed theories. Therefore, just as even the more theoretical expressions of political ideas were, as Ben Jackson has observed, in part shaped by insightful considerations of political practicality and strategy, so, in reverse, should we acknowledge the light shed on political ideas by the seemingly more practical historical spheres of political culture, values, and attitudes.5 Under this inclusive definitional umbrella, this chapter explores what its author sees as three of the most important, and closely related, recent historiographical themes relating to the articulation but also the impact of British political ideas since 1800: political realities, modernity, and moralities. The chapter analyses the close connections and interplay between these three initially seemingly uncomfortable bedfellows, and argues that collectively they have produced a contemporary historiography that, in crossing boundaries in its consideration of cultural, social, and intellectual history—ideas and action; popular and elite attitudes; high ideals, but also sometimes painful realities—is now richer in its understanding of all of these. We now have a body of scholarship more sensitive to practical political and historical constraints, more alive to the complex meanings and political challenges of ‘modernity’, and yet also displaying a revived or new interest in examining the highest political ideals and values. This last has included a concern to give more space to considering mind-​sets, character, and psychology as political influencers, alongside the more familiar emphasis on economics and social structures. The chapter also contends, however, that there is some way to go to integrate all three of these themes fully into the mainstream of writing on British political history. The discussion spans the period since 1800 but places its most in-​depth emphasis on the late nineteenth century onwards, since which time many of the dilemmas raised by the interplay of realities, modernity, and moralities in politics have reached their fullest flowering.

I ‘Labour’s inability to make socialists on the scale anticipated in 1945 demonstrated the extent to which the effect of the Second World War had been misinterpreted.’6 Here lies 5  B. Jackson, Equality and The British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought, 1900–​1964 (Manchester, 2007), p. 224. 6  S. Fielding, P. Thompson, and N. Tiratsoo, eds., ‘England Arise!’ The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester, 1995), p. 213. See also S. Fielding, ‘What Did “The People” Want?

268   Jeremy Nuttall the classic statement of the ‘constraints school’, at its point of inception in the mid-​1990s. Even at the apparent high point of the people’s political radicalization in the 1940s, agued Steven Fielding, Peter Thompson, and Nick Tiratsoo—​amid the collectivizing impetus of the ‘people’s war’, Labour’s landslide election victory of 1945, and the ensuing Attlee government’s creation of the welfare state—​the British public was in fact far less either communal-​minded or left-​wing than many socialists at the time wished and historians since have assumed. Drawing on the work of earlier revisionists questioning the extent to which 1939–​45 really witnessed a ‘people’s war’, the authors reminded us that developments such as the evacuation of working-​class children to middle-​class homes aroused antagonism as much as cross-​class reconciliation.7 More novel was the contention that Labour’s majority in 1945 exaggerated the extent of its lead over the Conservatives and concealed the fragility of its support among the more prosperous classes, who turned once again to the Conservatives just six years later. Most fundamentally, the party’s stated desire to achieve an underlying ethical transformation—​to forge a new citizenry, more public-​spirited and engaged in more ‘wholesome’ leisure pursuits—​foundered on people’s appetite instead for privacy, individualism, and ‘escapist’ entertainments. Given all this, the authors challenged the customary historiographical focus on the failings of politicians and governments at the top, contending that if blame was to be apportioned for the missed opportunities of the 1940s, the Labour leadership ‘should not be alone in the dock’, and might even ‘find itself in the role of the prosecuting counsel’.8 The strong implication was that the people as a whole might legitimately be the ones under (moral) prosecution. It now seemed clear that democracy and a greater political voice for the citizenry—​as cemented in 1918, and of which much had been hoped by progressives and reformers for a century before that—​had not automatically unleashed an enlightened, thoughtful, or reform-​ minded outlook, or an egalitarian spirit in the body politic. ‘England Arise!’ by no means secured immediate or comprehensive approval. But it has operated as a powerful slow-​ burner, and the ‘constraints school’ has found echoes and parallels in earlier and later periods. Investigating the local politics of Wolverhampton in the later nineteenth century, Jon Lawrence shows the appeal of a popular Conservatism built around promising to protect men’s leisure pursuits from the moral strictures of Liberal nonconformists.9 Switching from the local to the national level, Lawrence charts the corresponding anxiety of late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century reformers, both liberal and socialist, that the emerging mass democracy, from which they had hoped for so much, was

The Meaning of the 1945 General Election’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), 623–​39. Also note S. Macintyre, ‘British Labour, Marxism and Working Class Apathy in the Nineteen Twenties’, Historical Journal, 20 (1977), 484. 7 

See, for instance, H.L. Smith, ed., War and Social Change. British Society in the Second World War (Manchester, 1986); S. Brooke, Labour’s War (Oxford, 1992). 8  Fielding et al., ‘England Arise!’, p. 218. 9  J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–​1914 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 7.

Ideology in Action   269 struggling to fulfil its potential because citizens themselves were insufficiently rational, educated, or radical. Here, he notes, was the basis of the reformer’s essential tension: ‘the wish both to speak for the people and to change them’.10 This tension also helps account for the mixed feelings about the idea of democracy on the part of the Victorian Liberals who dominated British government for much of the middle period of the nineteenth century. As Jonathan Parry has explained, though supportive of the 1832 Reform Act and its extensions of the vote to the middle classes, because it made Parliament more representative of different interest groups, many Whigs or Liberals also exhibited a strong fear that full democracy would empower demotic language and unprincipled and sectional standpoints. Consequently, ‘Parliamentary Liberal leaders were not enthusiasts for democracy’.11 Echoing this sense of the limits to the enthusiasm for democratic radicalism, Edward Royle, reflecting on the question of why there was no revolution in Britain between 1789 and 1850, notes that the country was relatively immune from the political turbulence that shook and, indeed, brought down regimes and governments elsewhere in Europe. While in many ways Royle’s emphasis is on warning us not to underestimate levels of social conflict in this period, he acknowledges a clear distinction of outlook between a ‘minority of revolutionaries’ and ‘the people’ as a whole, or even those within reforming ranks, the majority of whom wished to ‘act peacefully’.12 Returning to the twentieth century—​and most notably that other apparent heyday of progressive ideological dominance, the 1960s—​in exploring popular political participation in this decade, Lawrence Black has examined how politics was ‘more parochial and less dramatic’ than often thought, and reminded us that it was ‘not automatically progressive’.13 The mass support for the campaign of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, led by the morally and culturally conservative Mary Whitehouse, to clean up the supposedly irreligious and excessively sexually avant-​garde BBC was one firm example of this.14 Taking the theme of popular political participation and attitudes backwards into the inter-​war years, Lawrence has shown that the tone of politics in this first era of almost fully fledged democracy, after the franchise extensions of 1918, was ‘low-​key and homely’, with the quiet, domesticated style of Stanley Baldwin and Clement Attlee finding popular favour—​to both the disappointment of those hoping for a more activist, assertive, or radical mood, and the relief of those fearing the boisterous approach of some Victorian political crowds would be intensified in the newly democratized twentieth century.15 10 

Ibid., pp. 7, 8, 263. J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 1996), pp. 12–​13. 12  E. Royle, Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, 1789–​1848 (Manchester, 2000), pp. 139, 144–​6. 13  L. Black, Redefining British Politics: Culture, Consumerism and Participation, 1954–​70 (Basingstoke, 2010), p. 210. 14  Ibid., p. 107. 15  J. Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009), p. 96. 11 

270   Jeremy Nuttall The focus, then, of the constraints school—​and others—​was, variously, on the moderation, passivity, individualism, peaceable nature, or conservatism of the electorate and citizenry. Not all of these, of course, were quite the same things—​a crucial point to which we shall shortly return. But they all complicated or questioned notions that the role of the public in implementing or acquiescing in political and social reform or radicalism was or could be a straightforwardly supportive one. This work has immensely enriched our understanding both of the history of political culture and of the way in which political ideas and visions were received by the populace. Not surprisingly, it has also continued to meet with resistance. In contrast to Lawrence’s picture of a quiet, domesticated inter-​war politics, Selina Todd has recently described ‘a vocal and angry working class’ in the 1920s and 1930s, and challenged ‘the myth that the British are essentially a moderate people’.16 Criticism emanates also from the particular sensitivity of the application of the constraints school to the 1940s, which continues to be seen in relatively positive, even sometimes heroic, historical terms. Sceptics insist that the constraints school has gone too far both in downplaying popular appetites for social change and in reducing the historical blame attached to political leaders. As Ross McKibbin has recently reasserted: ‘radicalization was genuine; people were not apolitical or cynical.’17 Real differences of interpretation exist here. However, this author has suggested that there is scope in future research for exploring some illuminating middle ground between these positions. It is not contradictory to suggest both that there was a significant popular political appetite for social reform in the 1940s, that the decade did redefine and reset the political ‘consensus’, and that there were limits to the intensity and permanence of this. An appetite for reform was perhaps more prevalent than that for radicalism, though there were also strains of the latter (most manifestly in the bold creation of a nationally organized free health service in 1948); support for a welfare state exceeded that for industrial nationalization; and individualism and collectivism co-​ existed. Indeed, arguably these are ‘ands’ that could be applied to the mixed popular and governmental British political mood of much of the post-​1800 period as a whole. Parry suggests that the electoral success of the Liberals between the 1850s and 1880s testified to the striking diversity of opinion and groups they managed to incorporate within their governing coalition. These included aristocrats, industrial magnates, artisans and labour activists, High Church Anglicans, nonconformists, and independent thinkers. This meant housing a full range of viewpoints along the conservative–​radical spectrum, which certainly produced tensions and ideological contradictions, but it was also a political and intellectual alliance which held up remarkably well, and meant ‘general contentment with Liberal government’.18 Research on leading mid-​twentieth-​century Labour figures’ perceptions about ‘the people’ they hoped to mobilize for socialism or social democracy also points to a complex mixture of both optimism and disappointment as to the public’s ideological, moral, 16 

S. Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of The Working Class, 1910–​2010 (London, 2014), p. 58. R. McKibbin, Parties and People: England, 1914–​1951 (Oxford, 2010), p. 138. 18 Parry, Liberal Government, p. 7. 17 

Ideology in Action   271 and intellectual qualities, and, consequently, contrasting and alternating views as to whether the newly improved society might come about almost overnight, or take many decades to evolve.19 Importantly, the mix of appetites for conservatism and change often co-​existed even within the mind of a single political individual, with Harold Wilson’s prime ministerial longevity in the 1960s and 1970s being partly attributable to his ability to appear both a reassuring and a modernizing force at a time of considerable social upheaval and national psychological adjustment to post-​imperial realities. Pipe-​ smoking, of plain tastes, empirical and pragmatic rather than theoretical of outlook, yet young, iconoclastic, and presentationally adept, Wilson seemed to epitomize both stability and dynamism.20 A new model, then—​acknowledging the mix of political constraints and opportunities, conservatism, reform, and radicalism—​would open up space for increasingly nuanced and well-​balanced accounts of modern British politics, as well as fairer historiographical assessments of the ‘performance’ of both governments and governed. It might also foster the drawing of greater distinctions between some of the characteristics of popular political sentiments and ideas that recent historians have unearthed. As suggested previously, while characteristics of moderation, passivity, individualism, a peaceable nature, or conservatism have all, correctly, been identified as components in the public’s political outlook, this cluster of attributes contains much diversity and, indeed, conflict within it. For instance, recent studies by Hilton and Lawrence of political or civic participation have emphasized the complexity of people’s levels of engagement, Lawrence observing that people’s deliberative ‘“peaceable-​ness”’ was not the same as passivity’.21 He pinpoints 1945, for example, as a surprisingly quiet election. Yet he notes that this quietness was a serious and reflective one, firmly focused on the forthcoming objective of constructing a welfare state, to be furthered by both politicians and people alike.22 A quiet outlook did not preclude a determination to achieve major social change. Neither was a moderate or centrist public the same as a conservative one. The underrated importance of ‘middle ground’ opinions in the history of British politics since 1800 is increasingly evident, but much work needs to be done to uncover more precisely what this complex middle actually entailed.23 This growing historiographical sense of the electorate often being somewhere between social democracy and conservatism—​one might add, somewhere between liberalism

19  J. Nuttall, ‘Pluralism, the People and Time in Labour Party History, 1931–​1964’, Historical Journal, 56 (2013), 729–​56. 20  Ibid., 729–​56. 21 Lawrence, Electing, p. 128. See also M. Hilton, ‘Politics Is Ordinary: Non-​Governmental Organizations and Political Participation in Contemporary Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 22 (2011), 232, 268. 22  J. Lawrence, ‘The Transformation of British Public Politics after the First World War’, Past and Present, 190 (2006), 215–​16. 23  For a highly perceptive start to this, which deserves much greater attention, see B. Harrison, ‘The Centrist Theme in Modern British Politics’, in his Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1982), p. 353.

272   Jeremy Nuttall and illiberal populism—​also has crucial implications for periodization. If research on the 1940s now points less to a monolithically collectivist or social democratic spirit and more to a mixture of left, right, and centrist instincts, it might be thought that the as yet much less studied (by academic historians at least) 1980s, with its characterization in terms of Conservatism and individualism, might also have been a more multi-​layered and varied decade, in terms of public opinion. Certainly, it has long been noted that, even towards the end of Thatcher’s premiership, opinion polls—​while showing support for her broad economic agenda—​suggested people were much more wary of her social policy approach towards the welfare state and the National Health Service. It is also too often forgotten that Thatcher was constrained by arriving in office following a 15-​year period in which Labour had largely been in the ascendancy, both politically and intellectually. It is in this context that we can see the increasing emphasis, notably in the work of Richard Vinen, on Thatcher’s pragmatic side: she ‘avoided fights that could not be won’.24 Public opinion sustained her up to the mid-​1980s in shifting the post-​ 1964 centre-​left governing philosophy to the centre-​right or centre, but would not permit the further movement rightwards that she later sought, believing (wrongly) that her more ideological side could now operate in a less constrained way. Brooke has reflected recently on the complex mixture of political and cultural allegiances in the 1980s. If Thatcherism was the guiding philosophy of central government, other more liberal, social democratic, or avant-​garde approaches had considerable influence at a local level, most obviously in London, as well as in the broader social and cultural spheres. Brooke justifiably recommends that much more could be done to investigate the ways in which the 1980s witnessed a society based on ‘contradiction’; it was ‘partly neoliberal, partly social democratic, partly individualist, partly collectivist’.25

II One of the chief ‘realities’ or constraints that faced both the main British political parties in seeking to implement their ideas, especially those which looked to past or traditional values or notions, was that society since 1800 (and, of course, earlier) was constantly changing or ‘modernizing’ in ways that forced politicians to adapt to approaches that were perceived to be in tune with those present and future social trends. The increase in population; growth in transport links and communications; the heightened sense of national and other collective social identities; the rise and later decline of the industrialized working classes; the increasing size and political influence of the affluent middle classes; the increase in international and, later, globalized trade, the growth of consumerism, suburbia, and technological and visual media; and the overall quickening and

24  25 

R. Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain (London, 2009), p. 290. S. Brooke, ‘Living in “New Times”: Historicizing 1980s Britain’, History Compass, 12 (2014), 20–​32.

Ideology in Action   273 heightening of the pace, public expectations, and scrutiny of politics and governmental life all appeared to fit inside this broad umbrella of ‘modernization’. Many aspects of ‘modernization’ were beginning to be apparent in the early decades of the nineteenth century, gathered heightened pace in the late Victorian and then inter-​war years, and came more fully to the fore in the 1950s and 1960s, and, since the 1990s, modernization has been seen by many leading politicians as the principal guiding concept to which they must accommodate themselves. As with the perceived need for political parties to adapt to ‘realities’, however, the political and intellectual consequences of ‘modernity’ have not been one-​sided or straightforward. While ‘modernity’ has often forced all parties to jettison some of their ‘outdated’ beliefs and approaches, the pace of modernity has not always been as rapid as is supposed, and tradition, precedent, and hierarchy (of the left as well as the right) have retained a considerable hold. Moreover, each of the parties has, at certain strategically important moments, shown considerable skill at grafting an accommodation to ‘modernity’ onto its more conventional values and assumptions, creating a workable fusion of old and new. Finally, ‘modernity’ has pointed in diverse ideological directions. It has been both an aid and a hindrance to right, left, and centre. If, in recent times, much intellectual attention has focused on how progressives have had to make concessions to the ‘modernity’ of an increasingly globalized market economics, there is a tendency to overlook the ways in which modernity has also worked in progressives’ favour, and how far Conservatives have also had to make concessions to it in order to survive. As Michael Bentley has noted, in some ways the period between 1860 and 1900 seemed one in which the position of conservative landed aristocracies was increasingly fragile, and in which Conservative prime ministers such as Lord Salisbury represented a ‘rearguard of privilege’, gloomily hoping only to slow the pace of inevitable change to a tempo of ‘inch by inch’.26 At this time, many Conservatives had assumed that, as the party standing for Crown, Established Church, and aristocracy, the emerging democratic modernity would be to its disadvantage. Yet, coterminous with this philosophical pessimism, nineteenth-​century Conservatives were already beginning to adapt their party to modernity from the twin motives of social compassion and self-​preservation that have continued to guide the party ever since. This was evident from Robert Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, through Benjamin Disraeli’s embrace of franchise extension to the urban working classes in the 1860s and then social reform in the 1870s, to even the otherwise often diehard Salisbury’s willingness to ‘modernize’ his party through a villa Toryism to appeal to the middle classes in the 1890s. That is not to deny the extent to which Conservatives such as Salisbury’s empathy with the working classes remained, as Bentley puts it, ‘fragile’.27 By the 1920s, this still often pessimistic outlook and state minimalism had become a more mixed, even upbeat mood. Baldwin exhibited that interesting recurring 26  M. Bentley, Lord Salisbury’s World: Conservative Environments in Late-​Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2001), p. 1. 27 Ibid., p. 92.

274   Jeremy Nuttall Conservative double feeling about the mass of the citizenry: on the one hand, fear of the radical ideologies that the uneducated populace might be drawn to; on the other, confidence in the innate righteousness of the British (or English) people, and a belief in their simple virtues and common sense, juxtaposed with the wild visions of theorists and intellectuals. Philip Williamson has explored how ‘Baldwin’s chief contribution to his own party was to ease its modernisation’ in this new democratic era.28 This was effected by, among other things, adopting policies, including social reform, that would be appealing to a significant number of both working-​class and female voters; offering a ‘moderate’ image to members of the middle classes searching for a new political home as the Liberal party declined; and embracing the emerging technological media of cinema and radio in Conservative campaigns. Through their enduring ability over the course of the century to relate to a relatively wide range of British society, and by developing Disraeli’s mantra of ‘trust the people’, the Conservative party, as Ball and Holliday have shown, ‘made the advent of democracy an opportunity rather than a peril’.29 They also suggest that they were aided in this, when in government, by the relatively modest expectations, and thus constraining pressures, that the mass of Conservative supporters placed upon their party compared to Labour, because the Conservatives looked much less to ideals of a future society.30 However, equally, in exploring this Conservative political success in forming the government—​or a dominant part of it—​for a large proportion of the twentieth century, we should not overlook the extent of the concessions that the party had to make to ‘modernity’, as clearly evident under Baldwin. This reminds us that the consequences of modernity, and of the rising political importance of the mass of the people, frequently remained as alarming and challenging to the political centre-​right as to the centre-​left. ‘Modernization’, for much of the century, incorporated such left-​leaning trends as rapidly expanding state welfare and an increasingly organized working-​class and trade union movement, to which one might append, crucially, the ‘psychological modernization’ of people’s increasing expectations of prosperity, social mobility, and access to educational opportunity. When one adds to this the increasingly liberal legal framework in areas of personal choice, morality, and sexuality, and the decreasingly deferential (albeit perhaps slowly so) and more open and communicative society, quite a number of these ‘progressive’ modernizing trends—​though not all—​have grown in force, or at least stabilized even under the supposedly uniform rightward drift of the political ‘consensus’ since 1979. In his work on the ‘Conservative Century’, Anthony Seldon perceptively argues that while this description is apt in terms of the party’s governmental dominance, it is less uniformly true of its setting of politics’ overall intellectual agenda. Conservative

28  P. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999), p. 350. 29  S. Ball and I. Holliday, ‘Mass Conservatism: An Introduction’, in S. Ball and I. Holliday, eds., Mass Conservatism. The Conservatives and the Public since the 1880s (London, 2002), pp. 2, 12. 30  Ibid., p. 13. On these themes, see also M. Francis and I. Zweiniger-​Bargielowska, eds., The Conservatives and British Society 1880–​1990 (Cardiff, 1996).

Ideology in Action   275 governments in the 1920s and 1950s (one might add the 2010s, and even, as touched on earlier, in some ways the 1980s) were to an important degree accepting new settlements, built around expanded state welfare, that had been established by other parties—​the Liberals from 1906, and Labour from 1945.31 Clearly, the third major recasting of the British political centre of gravity—​that by Thatcher from 1979—​was in some respects more Conservative-​initiated, and even in the earlier periods, of course, Conservatism had been adding its own ideas to—​as well as acting as a brake on—​aspects of the new welfare settlements it had inherited from others. Nevertheless, the extent to which right-​wing, and even mainstream, Conservatives felt out of tune with—​and even despairing about—​many of the mix of liberalizing, independence-​asserting, and secularizing trends in modern Britain is still significantly underplayed in modern, and especially contemporary, British political history. The fact that the Conservative party had by 2017 gone seven general elections without winning a really substantial majority is one reflection of this, which both seems remarkable in the context of its twentieth-​century electoral success and is, strikingly, far less commented upon than the present electoral difficulties of the Labour party. Central to these contemporary limits to the breadth of the party’s appeal has also been its recurringly uncertain, and still unresolved, attitude to the values and institutions of community, society, and the welfare state, which, despite the strength of societal attachment to competition and the market, have remained a stubbornly persistent and electorally powerful countervailing allegiance for many people. Here the ‘compound fracture’ that Bentley identified, in Salisbury’s time, in the party’s dual commitment to rugged individualism and organic community endures.32 In a sense, the historical observer might thus be struck both by the Conservative party’s skilful adaptability to modernity and by its recurring, and perhaps increasing, tendency to be out of touch with or even baffled by it.33 So too, in many ways, with the Labour party; though here, in contrast, the extent of the party’s historical willingness to ‘modernize’, albeit often rather grudging and half-​ hearted, has been somewhat under-​recognized. Laura Beers, for example, demonstrates how the early Labour party and wider labour movement, even in their early years, were willing to engage with, and seek to turn to their advantage, modern methods of media and communication. This was evident in Ramsay MacDonald’s use of colourful visual images in party posters in the pre-​First World War years, the railway workers’ effective use of cinema footage in gaining public sympathy for their 1919 strike, and above all the party’s more systematically enthusiastic pursuit of media coverage from the early 1930s onwards. Effective use of the media was also part of Labour’s broader success in capturing the public mood at the 1945 election. This embrace of the modern in media terms 31 

A. Seldon, ‘Conservative Century’, in A. Seldon and S. Ball, eds., Conservative Century. The Conservative Party since 1900 (Oxford, 1994), p. 17. 32 Bentley, Salisbury’s World, p. 65. 33  On this, see, for instance, M. Jarvis, Conservative Governments, Morality and Social Change in Affluent Britain, 1957–​1964 (Manchester, 2005), pp. 166–​7.

276   Jeremy Nuttall was allied with a broader intellectual commitment to ‘modernity’, in the sense of, on the whole, seeking to be a national, moderate, cross-​class, and even (though less completely) cross-​gender party, and not merely a sectional interest group of the workers.34 This is not to dispute that Labour has frequently struggled to come to intellectual terms with many of the changes relating to modernity and affluence, and that this has damaged it electorally. Lawrence Black’s work on the left’s response to ‘affluence’, as it first seriously emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, is perhaps the most important historical contribution to the political engagement with modernity. Here, the tendency of both Hugh Gaitskell and Aneurin Bevan, though on opposite wings of Labour, to dismiss new domestic goods as ‘gadgets’ was emblematic of a broader reluctance among socialists to treat the profound social and cultural changes of this era entirely seriously.35 Affluence was often taken to pose a threat to socialism, whether through its supposed glossy superficiality and capitalistic associations or simply its newness and unfamiliarity. This was a missed opportunity, Black suggests, because in fact affluence—​whether represented through home ownership or rock’n’roll—​was not the innate property of any one political ideology or tradition. Its implications were politically contingent, not socially determined. In the end, ‘the left contrived to alienate itself from affluence by describing it so unfavourably’.36 As in earlier and later periods, we see that the Conservative party was also by no means fully at ease with affluence, fearing its erosion of traditional and religious virtues. But, ultimately, ‘the Conservatives were more at ease with the people as they were, not as they wished they were’.37 Again, however, there is a danger (as Black alludes) in exaggerating the innateness or the extent of the historical clash between lofty progressive ambitions and ‘reality’ or ‘modernity’, a danger to which the often progressive-​sympathizing historian frequently succumbs, disproportionately inclined to try to shine light on Labour and Liberal failings more than successes (especially the more recent ones), even if helpfully designed to clear the way for rectifying them in the future. This risks neglecting the significant periods during which the Labour party did manage to fuse its traditional commitment to social justice with a concern for the ‘modernities’ of promoting affluence and individual aspiration. This was certainly evident under the leadership of Harold Wilson in 1964, and again under Tony Blair in 1997, when it seemed that an attachment to reducing social inequalities and encouraging social mobility, appealing to the comfortable and the disadvantaged, could be pursued in harness, not conflict. It also neglects the successes of the New Liberalism of the early twentieth century, a significant modernization of Victorian Liberalism in its greater embrace of state welfare and ideas of positive freedom, as well as the more sustained period of Whig and Liberal electoral success in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, leading Parry to describe Liberalism as ‘the 34 

L. Beers, Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party (Cambridge, MA, 2010). L. Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951–​64 (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 27–​8. 36  Ibid., p. 191. 37  Ibid., p. 193. 35 

Ideology in Action   277 dominant political force of Victorian Britain’.38 Like the Labour successes of the twentieth century, this was testimony to the breadth of the party’s appeal, both social and ideological, and its ability to balance an appreciation of society’s dual attachment to tradition and modernity. As Parry notes, the party claimed ‘that only they understood how to govern a nation experiencing rapid and unsettling growth and traditionally intolerant of strong central government rule’.39 Some historians have been more sceptical about the extent to which ‘modernity’ and affluence have fully taken hold, at least in a beneficial sense, and especially in relation to the social and political structures of class power. For McKibbin, ‘those who had authority in 1918 still had it, more or less, in 1951’.40 It was certainly striking how most of the main institutional pillars of traditional Britain remained in place, despite the reforming spirit of the 1940s—​from the monarchy and House of Lords, to the Established Church and public schools. Discussing the 1960s, Stuart Middleton has recently drawn attention to the ways in which both the extent of the existence of and the correct political response to the ‘“so-​called” affluent society’ were contested by some in the Labour party, notably on the left. Here, John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood’s The Affluent Worker (1968 and 1969) studies, based on research in Luton, were influential in disputing that the new or better-​off working class had now become either more middle class, or inclined to break its allegiance with the Labour party.41 Todd’s also recent panoramic view of class across the twentieth century acknowledges the statement of much revisionist writing that that the activism and agency of the working class was as marked as its passivity or status as exploited group. They were ‘not helpless victims . . . [T]‌hey had minds . . . of their own’.42 But ultimately, for Todd, the continuity of class relations in the twentieth century was more marked than the change, with the essential story one of ‘exploitation [by a] tiny elite’.43 Such work usefully reminds us of the longevity of tradition and inequality, that the benefits of ‘modernity’ were by no means comprehensive, and that notions of the inevitability of ‘modernity’, and the need to adapt to it, were sometimes devices to legitimize particular political and social models that were, in fact, far from inevitable. However, if some of the research on affluence and modernity at times underplays their limits and limitations, the minimizing of social improvement in some of the accounts emphasizing class continuities is also problematic. The equation, in such works, of ‘the people’ with ‘the working class’ does, by any definition, leave rather a lot of people out, and even within the working classes the story of the angry and exploited, while highlighted with laudable vibrancy, is not the only story that matters. Similarly, while the survival

38 Parry, Liberal Government, p. 1. 39 Ibid., p. 1. 40 

R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures (Oxford, 1998), p. v. S. Middleton, ‘“Affluence” and the Left in Britain, c. 1958–​1974’, The English Historical Review, 129 (2014), 138 and 130–​1. 42 Todd, People, p. 9. 43 Ibid., p. 1. 41 

278   Jeremy Nuttall of the monarchy, House of Lords, Church of England, and public schools was indeed testimony, on one level, to the enduring power of class inequalities—​and more than this, arguably, to the mass appeal of some of that deference and inequality—​they were undoubtedly also reflective of an important degree of modernization and democratization in those institutions. All this reminds us that themes of affluence and modernity remain often only tentatively examined in a considerable body of work on political history or thought. For instance, Mark Clapson’s research on suburbia as a long-​term mobilizer of social mobility across class and ethnic divides could usefully be integrated more fully into political history narratives.44 One of the problems, here, is that the period in which ‘modernity’ and affluence, and the diverse and competing interpretations of them, arguably became most politically central—​that since 1979—​is one which has received the least systematic attention from academic historians. No doubt this reflects both the traditional nervousness about whether study of the recent past can be undertaken with a sufficient sense of balanced perspective or enough available official documents, and the particular sensitivities in approaching and contextualizing Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair with the proper impartiality and nuance. Black’s work on the 1950s, 1960s, and, latterly, 1970s, is indicative of a historiography finally willing to engage beyond the pivotal focal point of so much historians’ attention—​the 1940s—​but 1979 remains in important ways a psychological barrier within university walls.45 It may be that in the case of our understanding of ‘political modernity’, historians must become advocates of the view that, to reverse their usual maxim, a better understanding of the (almost) present is becoming essential for us to better understand political modernity in the more distant past. This is not by any means to say that by giving due weight in political history to affluence, modernity, and social class change, we should overlook the persistence of poverty, tradition, and class continuity. Class, post-​Blair, has undoubtedly undergone somewhat of a revival, among historians of modern Britain and politicians alike. David Cameron’s Conservatives spoke openly of the problem of inequality and of the needs of ‘working people’, and Labour, under Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn, have given primacy to reversing what they see as New Labour’s neglect of economic inequalities. Both the academic and the political revival of class, in their various forms, seem to offer both the risk of a lapse into some of the cruder binary, exclusively conflictual models of class relationships of the past, and the opportunity for more nuanced portrayals, which accommodate both the erosion and resilience of class, its malleability and definitional complexity, alongside its, at times, biting rigidity. Undoubtedly, class allegiances, however ‘constructed’ and malleable, played a major part in modern British party politics. Yet, as Cannadine reflects, British political leaders were usually keen to define their parties in broad and national, not sectional or class, terms.46 The history of modern politics, 44  M. Clapson, ‘The Suburban Aspiration in England since 1919’, Contemporary British History, 14 (2000), 151–​74. 45  L. Black, H. Pemberton, and P. Thane, eds., Reassessing 1970s Britain (Manchester, 2013). 46  D. Cannadine, Class in Britain (London, 2000), p. 150.

Ideology in Action   279 and political ideas, therefore now has both the challenge and the opportunity of incorporating together the heightened historiographical focus on modernity, affluence, and class, and this will require an approach in which historians, as Cannadine recommends, ‘move forward, not backward, to class’.47

III Both the themes of realities and modernity reflect the contemporary historiographical interest in seeking to explore modern British political history more empirically, with fewer illusions about the innate radicalism or unambiguous moral virtue of the citizenry; consequently more balanced expectations about what leading politicians in history might reasonably be expected to have achieved; and a sense of the pressures, challenges, and constraints which social change and ‘modernization’ imposed upon political parties. In a sense, pragmatism, scepticism, and exposing the delusions of political dreams have been hallmarks of the historiographical age. Whether one views this as a product of a post-​Cold War, post-​Thatcherite, less ideological age; of a broader ‘postmodernist’ knowingness, scepticism, or cynicism; or simply of a more careful and precise historical scholarship (and it seems to be all three), the emphasis has been on fostering a stronger awareness of the obstacles to the historical achievement of high ideals. The apparent paradox, however, is that this focus on obstacles to ideals has coincided with a historiographical focus on, and interest in, those high ideals themselves that is sharper than was previously the case. A greater understanding of the complexity and challenges involved in any political project that required some moral alteration or elevation in the calibre of the citizenry has seemed to heighten, not dampen, historians’ interest in such projects, the stark presentation of the educative difficulty creating renewed appetite for exploring attempts to resolve it. Superficially, the probing of constraints and modernity has seemed to portray a history of politicians as prisoners of social and political constraints to which they could only succumb or adapt. In reality, however, much of the work on constraints and affluence has had a strong interest in politicians’ ideas of moral, educational, and cultural improvement, and other historians have also investigated these themes independently. In sum, the past generation, and especially the past ten years, has seen a growing body of work exploring, or at least significantly touching on, ethical, psychological, and educative agendas in political history. Two broad strands exist to this work, the first focused more on social, collective, and ideological values or moralities and the second more centrally concerned with individual character or psychologies. Crucial to the manifestation of this first strand of interest in social values or ideology in relation to the Labour party has been the concept of equality. This concern with

47 Ibid., p. 23.

280   Jeremy Nuttall egalitarianism has spawned a particular emphasis on the centre-​left social democratic tradition of figures such as R.H. Tawney and Tony Crosland, through to Roy Hattersley. Particular attention has been devoted to their articulation of a moral case for greater equality of outcome, on the grounds that political agendas promoting only equality of opportunity or social mobility both underestimate the barriers against ‘real’ equality of opportunity and further an ethically unattractive endpoint of a society built around individual competitiveness.48 This moral egalitarianism has frequently been characterized in contrast to a more left-​wing socialist outlook deemed excessively mechanistic, statist, or economistic; to the moral individualism of Thatcher; and to New Labour’s supposed ‘third way’ pragmatism. In terms of periodization, much of this writing has emphasized (and lamented) a perceived decline in the political popularity and governmental application of egalitarianism since 1979, or earlier. Ellison charted egalitar­ ianism’s ‘retreating visions’, Hickson highlighted what he saw as the contrasts between Crosland’s egalitarian radicalism and New Labour’s more watered-​down commitment to equality, and Jackson viewed egalitarian ideas as being ‘on the back foot’ as early as the 1964–​70 Wilson government.49 In that sense, a largely conflictual relationship between egalitarianism and political ‘modernity’ in contemporary British history is indicated, in which the post-​1979 or even post-​1964 period witnesses a decline in commitment to equality; given this, political modernity has been seen to go hand in hand with a form of moral decline in political vision. There are reasons to question this declinist narrative, to which the chapter will shortly return more fully. Indeed, the research on egalitarianism just described is itself testimony to the survival of interest in the idea of equality, even in this supposedly inhospitable modern political era. Jackson rightly refers to the ‘sheer historical durability’ of social democratic egalitarianism.50 Moreover, this durability partly stemmed from this tradition’s willingness to adapt and accommodate, while still adhering to its broad ideals. In particular, Jackson emphasizes that mainstream egalitarians in the century’s first six decades believed in income differentials to provide incentives; attached importance to individual responsibility, especially the obligation to work; and were not pure idealists, but were also focused on ‘considerations of political strategy’.51 It might then be suggested, to take the matter beyond Jackson’s own conclusions, that the responsiveness of these ‘Old Labour’ and New Liberal egalitarians to social change, political realities, and indeed ‘modernity’ was greater than sometimes believed, and that there are more historical and ideological continuities with New Labour in these respects than is acknowledged by some of the historiography on equality.

48 Jackson, Equality, p. 219.

49  K. Hickson, ‘Reply to Stephen Meredith. Mr Crosland’s Nightmare? New Labour and Equality in Historical Perspective’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9 (2007), 165–​8; N. Ellison, Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics: Retreating Visions (London, 1994); Jackson, Equality, p. 224. 50 Jackson, Equality, p. 219. 51  Ibid., pp. 220, 224.

Ideology in Action   281 The revival of interest in the collective political morality of egalitarianism has been increasingly accompanied by an exploration of individual morality, character, and psychology, and how these shaped, constrained, and were in turn shaped by political agendas and ideas. Initially, much of this focused on the Victorian period, during which ‘moral’ agendas relating to religion, personal probity, character, and self-​improvement were more overtly propounded and preached than in the more secular and collectivist twentieth century, with its supposedly alternative preoccupations with class, economic interest, and the state. In his seminal work on nineteenth-​century ‘public moralists’, Collini argued that the ideal of character ‘enjoyed a prominence in the political thought of the Victorian period that it had apparently not known before and that it has, arguably, not experienced since’.52 Reflecting on late Victorian notions of progress, Collini argued that while economic and technological growth were the most tangible and demonstrable manifestations of this progress, they were not considered the most important. Rather, the ‘assumptions of intellectual and moral advance . . . provided the fundamental motif of the pattern’.53 Critical here was the link drawn between individual character and wider notions of collective and societal advance. The promotion of virtues—​often middle class-​ associated—​such as sobriety, frugality, industry, and duty reflected, as Bellamy observes, ‘the belief that individual moral improvement would lead to social progress’.54 Noting the importance of character to late Victorian social thought, as well as its continuing centrality in the Edwardian era, Jose Harris has suggested that the subject still deserves much more scrutiny than it has received.55 For one thing, the changing relationship between morality and politics posed difficult and, as it turned out, often insurmountable challenges for the twentieth-​century Liberal party, as the particular moral concerns of Victorian Liberalism, such as freedom of religion, freedom from state coercion, and the promotion of individual moral rectitude, receded in favour of a focus on economic and social welfare questions. For Michael Freeden, Liberalism’s high-​minded promise to rise above sectional interest was undermined by the twentieth century’s preoccupation with power, struggle, and class.56 Yet, complicating this, Harris’s highlighting of the importance of character in Edwardian times invites the reflection that the political concern with character and individual morality in politics may have outlived the nineteenth century. Especially in the past decade, there has been a growing interest in considering the role of character, psychologies, and ethics in politics in a historical context well into the twentieth and indeed twenty-​first centuries. Work, for instance, on the role of mindsets and 52 

S. Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–​1930 (Oxford, 1991), p. 94. 53  S. Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L.T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England 1880–​1914 (Cambridge, 1979), p. 160. 54  R. Bellamy, ‘T.H. Green and the Morality of Victorian Liberalism’, in R. Bellamy, ed., Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-​Century Political Thought and Practice (London, 1990), p. 132. 55  J. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–​1914 (London, 1994), p. 248. 56  M. Freeden, Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought 1914–​1939 (Oxford, 1986), p. 10.

282   Jeremy Nuttall psychologies in Labour party history contends that the role of people’s characters, values, education, and reasoning should be integrated much more fully into party political histories, which have still been largely dominated by a focus on economics, high-political ‘events’, or the social structures of (often class) power.57 For leading Labour thinkers and politicians enduringly sought not only to improve the material well-being of their citizens but also to raise minds and morals, by various means, including by having an over-​arching ethical vision, through educational and cultural policies, and simply by social democrats themselves setting a good personal example which might be followed. It was argued here that this twentieth-​century Labour politics was more infused with these aims of improving minds and morals than the sharp contrast between a ‘moral’ Victorian politics and a more materialist, class-​based twentieth-​century one suggests. It is equally contended, however, that Labour politicians still placed more faith than could be fully repaid in the degree to which merely changing economic policy, institutions, or social power structures alone could advance the country in a more progressive direction—​though these things certainly played an important part. An egalitarian or co-​operative society also required citizens with a thoughtful, egalitarian outlook and mindset, and, from this perspective, the presence or absence of such virtues as kindness, parental love, and independence of mind were as important determinants of the success of social democracy (or other political projects) as setting the right taxation policy. Linking this to the approach of the constraints school, too, the ‘character’ of the people at any given historical point limited what a party or government might achieve, as well as providing the psychological momentum for it.58 Also important were the psychologies and mindsets of individual politicians and political thinkers themselves. Political differences in history emanated partly from differences over policy and ideology. But they were also driven by different psychological and intellectual outlooks. One of the key arguments, for instance, of the Jenkinsite revisionists of the 1970s, some of whom eventually left Labour to form the SDP in 1981, was that the whole Labour mindset was too restricted by its traditional labourist ethos, and its vested interest in defending the trade unions. What was needed instead, given the challenging economic and social problems of the decade, was a willingness to think independently, to challenge outdated dogmas—​ultimately, to be brave enough to change one’s own mind.59 Richard Toye has also recently taken up this theme in relation to the Liberal thinker John Maynard Keynes, notably as he wrestled with his own highly multi-​layered political position and considered the strengths and weaknesses of each of the now three main parties in the 1920s. What attracted him to Liberalism over socialism, ultimately, was his belief that it offered greater freedom to think over matters independently and rationally, not tied down by commitment to class war or statist policies. 57 

J. Nuttall, Psychological Socialism: The Labour Party and Qualities of Mind and Character, 1931 to the Present (Manchester, 2006), pp. 4–​7. See also M. Francis, ‘Economics and Ethics: The Nature of Labour’s Socialism, 1945–​1951’, Twentieth Century British History, 6 (1995), 220–​43. 58 Nuttall, Psychological Socialism, pp. 6–​7, 141–​4. 59  Ibid., pp. 3, 99.

Ideology in Action   283 Liberalism was thus for him, as Toye concludes, ‘a questioning outlook or psychological technique rather than a set of political and economic theories of unchanging validity’.60 Work has also been undertaken on Conservative approaches to the morality of both individual citizens and civil society. Williamson has shown the importance attached by Baldwin to his educative and exemplary function as a national political leader. This assumed particular significance in the inter-​war years, with both the arrival of the new, more democratic and, as Baldwin saw it, as yet politically untutored society—​and an associated rise in trade union power at the workplace—​and fears over how Britain might fall victim to the allure of the far right or left, such as had happened on the continent. It was deemed important, then, that the positive character qualities of the citizenry were nurtured, by articulating a Conservative vision that was not just an economic one but also promoted values of responsibility and service.61 Mark Jarvis has identified a later duality in the Conservative party, Macmillan’s adaptability to the more commercial, liberal, and secular morality of the late 1950s (as evidenced in debates over commercial television or betting) yielding it electoral advantage over the more hesitant Labour party, yet also co-existing with the party’s unease with these values, Macmillan himself believing that the country’s morals had been declining for four decades.62 Matthew Grimley has explored the similar two-​sidedness of Thatcher’s desire to remoralize the nation in the 1980s, in particular through reference to Christian, and sometimes Jewish, religious values. She did try to do this, and her hazy theology often resonated with a public whose own ‘half-​remembered’ religion was somewhat faded but still mattered.63 But Thatcher was also aware, much more so than Mary Whitehouse, of the difficulties of effecting a mass religious conversion in a secularizing society, and also of the bluntness of legislation as a tool for changing minds in this way. Notably, the supposedly ‘permissive’ legal changes of the 1960s were not, in the main, reversed by her.64 More broadly, Green emphasizes the importance of searching for an understanding of Conservative ideas not only in their approach towards the role of the state, but also in their attempts to further Edmund Burke’s ‘little platoons’ of civil society. This, he notes, helps us better to contextualize Thatcher’s assertion in 1987 that there is ‘no such thing’ as society. Given her belief in the importance of charity, voluntary associations, and the general concept of good neighbourliness, she did not in fact believe that there should be no sense of social obligation but rather, like David Cameron more recently, that ‘society’ needed to be distinguished from the ‘state’. However, Green also points to major tensions between Thatcherism’s individualistic market economic strategy and this more

60 

R. Toye, ‘Keynes, Liberalism and “The Emancipation of The Mind”’, The English Historical Review, 130 (2015), 1183, 1191. 61 Williamson, Stanley Baldwin, pp. 203–​14. 62 Jarvis, Conservative Governments, pp. 166–​7. 63  M. Grimley, ‘Thatcherism, Morality and Religion’, in B. Jackson and R. Saunders, eds., Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge, 2012), p. 90. 64  Ibid., pp. 88–​9.

284   Jeremy Nuttall organicist belief in social association, which has also been one of the central underlying dilemmas facing Cameron’s vision of a ‘Big Society’.65 Despite all these strides towards investing narratives of political history with a moral and psychological dimension, the subject is still very much in its infancy. This is especially true of the Conservative party, where much of the work on such themes consists of an occasional chapter, or is confined to a specific, relatively short time period. Moreover, the work still has some way to go to permeate fully into more mainstream narratives of the parties’ fortunes. Much research still focuses primarily on the supposed ‘meta-​narratives’ of economic policy and performance, high-political machinations, and election results. Perhaps, in part, this simply reflects the reality of what did actually preoccupy most of the public and politicians most of the time, that is to say, the state of the economy and the pay packet, more than the state of the nation’s ethics and education levels. Yet, if this prioritization is so, the prioritization is itself one worthy of extended analysis. Moreover, these ethical and educational concerns were still undoubtedly an important part of the political agenda, and especially of the underlying, long-​term, intellectual part of that agenda. Indeed, it may be the case that such concerns have become more and not less central to politics in recent decades. This invites us to return to the issue of periodization and to consider some of the broader recent research on issues of character and psychology in modern British history, which has incorporated significant political elements, and which raises important questions about how far agendas to do with ethics and character became more or less central at different points in time. Peter Mandler’s exploration of the English national character, for instance, points us in two equally interesting, yet different directions. On the one hand, he emphasizes that, far from being an exclusively conservative or nationalistic interest, liberals and radicals, too, have long had a strong interest in seeking to define what qualities of character did or should make up a sense of Englishness.66 This points to the Victorian elite moral concern with character in fact surviving well into the twentieth-​century democratic age and being something with which progressive politicians grappled—​they were never just interested in the ‘new’ politics of class and economic structure. On the other hand, Mandler also contends that discussion of the national character faded from the late 1950s, having enjoyed one final heyday as a result of Britain’s involvement in the Second World War. Both of the elements that made up the compound—​nation and character—​were hit by a mixture of reduced national confidence after Suez, growing individualism, and the increasing ease with which it was possible to blame elites and institutions for national failings, rather than the character of the people as a whole. The ensuing decades were thus characterized by a ‘loss of character’ as a central theme.67 Mathew Thomson’s work on Psychological Subjects, which illuminatingly broadens our understanding of the interactions between 65 Green, Ideologies, pp. 289–​90.

66  P. Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven and London, 2006), p. 1. 67  Ibid., p. 196.

Ideology in Action   285 the history of psychology and that of twentieth-​century British history as a whole, offers a similar periodization.68 Thus, taking together this work on Victorian morality, national character and psychology, social democratic ethical egalitarianism, and New Liberalism, there is something of a consensus on an element of ethical decline, perhaps setting in at the turn of the twentieth century but certainly embedded from around the 1960s, whether in interest in (national) character, psychological idealism, or equality. Though very different, all seemed to point to some kind of moral retreat, especially over the past 50 or so years. Though broader than politics, this raises a significant question for the very writing of recent political history that this chapter has argued is one of the most urgent historiographical priorities. In essence: will this be an exercise in charting an essentially second-​rate era in British history, marked by a decline both from the egalitarian idealism of the first half of the twentieth century, and the more overtly ‘moral’ politics of the Victorian era. This chapter concludes on an optimistic note by suggesting that this seems unlikely. Some of the reasons for this have already been touched upon. Political eras cannot be so easily categorized in homogeneous terms. Importantly, the assertion of a decline in the belief in and application of egalitarianism still rests quite heavily on a particular, usually predominantly material, definition of equality, and on a focus on some social groups more than others. If one’s focus is on the job security and identity of that often masculine, unionized world built around the Victorian heavy industries, or on those marginalized by homelessness, family breakdown, or cuts in particular areas of public expenditure, then evidence for a declinist analysis of the past 40 years is clearly present. However, one would have to set that against rapidly expanding educational opportunities, including in access to university; rising incomes for most; increased home ownership; a more liberal outlook on gender, sexuality, and race; free museum entry; and, arguably, greater emphasis on parental affection for and attention to children, many of which, as suggested, are important ‘non-​material’ contributors to a ‘progressive’ and egalitarian politics or society.69 The idea that the current or most recent era is the one of most alarming decline has been, as Tomlinson reminds us, a historically recurring belief, and one which may reveal as much about the observer as the period under observation.70 The persuasiveness of narratives of moral decline is also somewhat undermined by the diversity of the dating. If 1979 marks a downward spiral for some social democrats, many others see little to celebrate after the high point of the 1940s.71 The Conservative Macmillan, however, 68 

M. Thomson, Psychological Subjects. Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-​Century Britain (Oxford, 2006), p. 291. 69 Nuttall, Psychological Socialism, pp. 141–​4. 70  J. Tomlinson, ‘Thrice Denied: “Declinism” as a Recurrent Theme in British History in the Long Twentieth Century’, Twentieth Century British History, 20 (2009), 227, 249. 71  See, for instance, E. Hobsbawm, ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’, Marxism Today, (Sept. 1978), 284–​5; and D. Howell, British Social Democracy: A Study in Development and Decay (London, 1976), p. 10.

286   Jeremy Nuttall as noted, appears to have viewed the First World War as a turning point for the worse, while Thatcher’s reverence for the still earlier ‘Victorian values’ is well known. As to the supposed decline in the political salience of character, one should not confuse a (partial) erosion of moralizing with an erosion of morality, or a decline in overt or systematic treatises on national character with a decline in people’s, or politicians’, underlying belief that character still matters. As Mandler observes, part of the reining-​in of the language of national character in fact reflected both a laudable suppression of labelling we now realize to be stereotyping and some movement towards a preference for articulating universal human values rather than exclusively national ones.72 Again, Lawrence’s observation that a quieter politics was not necessarily a less morally serious one may have important application to the contemporary political age. If there is a single approach bringing together the various strands of recent historiography considered in this chapter it might be described as a tentative pluralism, which, perhaps reflecting its valuing of diversity and complexity, has stopped rather short of emerging as a ‘school’.73 The emphasis has been on balance, on extending our sense of the variety and range of factors involved in historical causation, and it has been strongly non-​reductionist. A greater attention to the political roles of ethics, psychology, education, and character should reduce the primacy attached to economics, power, structure, institutions, and high-political manoeuvre, but one should not replace the other: rather, they should be seen in conjunction and as interacting. An enhanced understanding of political constraints may, at times, help us to judge politicians less harshly—​though of course not uncritically, and not elevating pragmatism into a virtue that overrides all else. A heightened interest in political ‘modernity’, and, one hopes, a growing willingness to move forward to study of the post-​1979 era, should not blind us to the contested nature of what ‘modernity’ meant or means. A more complex and multi-​layered political periodization is also needed to reflect the growing pluralism of spheres and measures through which we might assess the achievement of ‘progress’. In essence, one might hope for the future to witness the broadening of political history charted in this chapter carried still further, for that very breadth and desire to complicate also seems to have fostered, not inhibited, an interest in the moral depth and high ideals of politics—​a combination of breadth and depth which ought surely to excite even the most sceptical and world-​weary observer of modern British history.

Further Reading L. Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951–​64 (Basingstoke, 2003). S. Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006).

72 Mandler, English, pp. 239–​42.

73  On this emerging, though somewhat hesitant pluralism, see Nuttall, ‘Pluralism’, 729–​56. See also L. Beers, ‘Labour’s Britain, Fight For It Now!’, Historical Journal, 52 (2009), 695 on the desirability of a ‘pluralistic model’.

Ideology in Action   287 E. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism (Oxford, 2004). B. Jackson and R. Saunders, eds., Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge, 2012). J. Nuttall, Psychological Socialism. The Labour Party and Qualities of Mind and Character, 1931 to the Present (Manchester, 2006). R. Toye, ‘Keynes, Liberalism and “the Emancipation of the Mind”’, The English Historical Review, 130:546 (2015), 1162–​91.

chapter 17

Whigs and L i be ra l s Ian Packer

The historiography of the British Liberal party has been dominated by one question:  why did it decline from the governing party in 1914 into insignificance by the 1930s? This is the only example in British politics of one of the two main parties losing its leading role, so it is not surprising that it has generated an enormous literature and has coloured virtually every aspect of how the Liberal party, and the Whig grouping which was one of its main precursors, have been viewed. In general, long-​term explanations of the party’s fall, based on changes in British society, have gradually lost their hold and the party’s decline is now usually considered an unforeseeable political event, precipitated by the party’s divisions in the First World War. But more recent trends in the historiography of the Liberal party also tend to discuss much more than just the question of the party’s fall, and are firmly situated in the turn towards political culture and language in studies of British politics. This essay examines these developments and suggests some future directions for the study of the British Liberal party.

I Recent writing on the Whigs and Liberals in the nineteenth century has been a self-​ conscious reaction to what has been dubbed the ‘three-​stage model’ of British economic, social, and political development, which underlay many influential analyses of the 1960s and 1970s.1 In this scheme the period 1790–​1850 was viewed as one of exceptional turbulence, marked by the Industrial Revolution, the initial ‘making’ of both middle-​class and working-​class consciousness, and endemic class conflict. The role of the aristocratic 1  J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1974); R. Harrison, Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics 1861–​1881 (London, 1965); E. Hobsbawm, ‘The Making of the Working Class 1870–​1914’, in Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour (London, 1984), pp. 194–​213; M. Roberts, Political Movements in Urban England, 1832–​1914 (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 4–​5.

Whigs and Liberals    289 Whigs was merely to usher the middle class into the pale of the constitution with the 1832 Reform Act and then to begin a long slide into irrelevance and oblivion, the nascent Liberal party being seen as fundamentally an expression of middle-​class identity.2 This meant the Liberals were necessarily engaged in prolonged conflict with working-​class organizations, especially Chartism. The period 1850–​80, in contrast, was characterized as one of rapprochement between the classes, based on economic prosperity and the emergence of an elite within the working class, the ‘labour aristocracy’, which identified with middle-​class Liberalism. This situation, though, was superseded in the period 1880–​1920, which saw the emergence of a fully formed class consciousness within the working class. This inevitably led most working-​class voters to abandon the ‘middle-​ class’ Liberals for the new Labour party, while the Conservatives corralled the frightened forces of property. After 1920, Labour and the Conservatives faced each other as the political representatives of the middle and working classes, reflecting the social reality of a mature capitalist system. Almost every aspect of this approach has now been challenged. First, historians have substantially rethought the Industrial Revolution.3 Rather than a single dramatic launch into industrialization, the emphasis is now on a steady period of growth in 1700–​1820, followed by a rather faster expansion in 1820–​70. There is no necessity to see the period 1790–​1850 as witnessing sweeping changes to the economy, class formation, or politics. Second, the idea that politics simply reflects social formations has now been discarded in favour of emphasizing the central importance of language and the ability of politicians and activists to shape political parties and their fates.4 Together, these trends have emphasized the continuities rather than the discontinuities of British politics since 1800.5 All of these general developments have had huge implications for how the Whigs and Liberals are viewed. One central theme that has emerged is the rehabilitation of the Whigs, who are no longer seen as an obsolete aristocratic clique, but rather as the first modern parliamentary grouping based on principles.6 Their social status certainly did not stop them successfully participating in the robust popular culture of open constituencies under the unreformed electoral system, cultivating the press, or taking a serious interest in new economic and social theories.7 If there is no longer any need to see them as simply paving the way for the developing middle class, their effectiveness as

2 

D. Southgate, The Passing of the Whigs, 1832–​1886 (London, 1962). N. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985). 4  J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–​1914 (Cambridge, 1998). 5  E. Biagini and A. Reid, ‘Currents of Radicalism, 1850–​1914’, in Biagini and Reid, eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular Politics, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–​1914 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 1–​19. 6  F. O’Gorman, The Emergence of the British Two-​Party System, 1760–​1832 (London, 1982). 7  J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 1993), pp. 74–​5; E.A. Wasson, ‘The Whigs and the Press, 1800–​50’, Parliamentary History, 25 (2006), 68–​ 87; I. Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 1830–​41: The Politics of Government (Stanford, CA, 1990), p. 105. 3 

290   Ian Packer participants in the burgeoning public sphere of Georgian Britain can be appreciated.8 The Whigs had to wait so long to achieve power in 1830 not because they were incompetent or outmoded, but because of the necessity for royal approval and the inherent advantage of incumbent ministers under the unreformed system.9 Once the Whigs achieved office, they remained the central component of most British governments up to 1886. The Whig governments of 1830–​4 and 1835–​41 have been subjected to intensive study and their members classified variously as ‘Young Whigs’, ‘Foxites’, and ‘Liberal Anglicans’.10 What all these studies have done, though they do not agree in detail, is take the ideas of the Whigs seriously, rather than viewing their policies merely as concessions wrung from a reluctant aristocracy by the ‘new’ middle class. This process does not just refer to the 1832 Reform Act, which most historians now see as an embodiment of the Whig ideal to provide disinterested but responsive rule for the country’s various propertied groups rather than the triumph of the ‘middle class’.11 It can even be argued that it was the Whigs who helped bring the concept of the ‘middle class’ into everyday use, partly by arguing in 1832 that they were enfranchising this group.12 Parry has gone furthest in outlining a coherent set of themes and ideas that underlay the Whig approach to politics from the 1830s to the 1880s—​including a commitment to govern in the interests of all the nations of the United Kingdom, responsiveness to popular grievances, a belief in the harmony of social groups and undogmatic Christianity (rather than narrow Anglicanism), and a specific version of patriotism which viewed Britain as leading Europe in the paths of liberty, constitutional government, and humanitarianism.13 Works such as Parry’s have raised the reputation of the leading Whigs, especially Lord John Russell and Palmerston, and filled out the picture of how the Whigs connected with British society.14 The idea of a rapprochement between Whigs and middle-​ class Liberals in the 1850s has not entirely disappeared, but it has been reconfigured. If in 1845 the Whigs accepted the need to repeal the Corn Laws and for a minimal, low-​tax central government, as opposed to their more interventionist policies of the 1830s, this was a shift that left the Whigs, especially under Palmerston, more firmly ensconced in national power than ever. Nor were these developments purely a response to external pressure.15 The formation of ‘middle-​class’ consciousness remains much debated, but

8 

P. Jupp, The Governing of Britain, 1688–​1848 (Abingdon, 2006), pp. 231–​63.   P. Jupp, British Politics on the Eve of Reform: The Duke of Wellington’s Administration, 1828–​30 (Basingstoke, 1998). 10  R. Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform, 1830–​1841 (Oxford, 1987); P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals 1830–​1852 (Oxford, 1990); Newbould, Whiggery and Reform. 11  L. Mitchell, ‘Foxite Politics and the Great Reform Bill’, English Historical Review, 108 (1993), 338–​64. 12  D. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–​ 1840 (Cambridge, 1995). 13 Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, p. 4; J.P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–​1886 (Cambridge, 2006). 14  E.D. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–​1865 (Cambridge, 1991). 15 Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, pp. 155–​217. 9

Whigs and Liberals    291 historians increasingly view this group as deeply divided by religion and politics as well as by occupation and wealth, with many of its constituent parts focused on exercising authority in the local arena rather than national affairs.16 This analysis dovetails with increasing doubts about the achievements of those MPs (often from a middle-​class background) who described themselves as Radicals and argued for more far-​reaching reforms in the constitution, taxation, and administration than the Whigs were prepared to undertake. For instance, business MPs often just did not agree about what they wanted to achieve (e.g. on issues like introducing limited liability for companies) any more than the middle class as a whole did.17 ‘Independent’ Radicalism among MPs died out by the end of the 1850s as the agenda of reducing government expenditure was achieved.18 Increasingly, historians have drawn attention to the ways in which, after 1832, all non-​Conservative MPs in Great Britain shared a common identity, even if the name ‘Liberal’ only gradually came into common use in 1847–​ 59.19 This did not mean that Liberal MPs constituted a party in the contemporary sense, but most self-​described Radicals were attached—​sometimes more loosely, sometimes more tightly—​to Whig governments and Salmon has demonstrated that the registration requirements of the 1832 Reform Act had an enormous impact in stimulating party organization at the local level.20 Parry places the foundation of the parliamentary Liberal party as early as 1834, though others continue to prefer the traditional moment of the meeting at Willis’s Tea Rooms in 1859 in which MPs agreed to bring down the minority Conservative administration.21 Whichever of these two parameters is preferred, there is now agreement that Radicalism and Whiggery were a spectrum of opinion rather than polar opposites based around class. Popular Radicalism’s relationship with the Whigs was much more problematic. Older traditions of interpretation saw popular Radicalism as essentially an expression of working-​class consciousness, culminating in Chartism.22 More recently, Stedman Jones’s work has led the way in emphasizing how popular Radicalism represented a plebeian tradition dating back to the eighteenth century rather than a new form of class consciousness, let alone class conflict.23 Seen in this light, the gap between

16  M. Savage, J. Barlow, P. Dickens, and T. Fielding, Property, Bureaucracy and Culture: Middle Class Formation in Contemporary Britain (London, 1992), pp. 36–​57; S. Gunn and R. Bell, The Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl (London, 2003), pp. 1–​20. 17  G. Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-​Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1993), pp. 187–​93. 18  M. Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–​1860 (Oxford, 1995). 19  J. Coohill, Ideas of the Liberal Party: Perceptions, Agendas and Liberal Politics in the House of Commons, 1832–​52 (Chichester, 2011). 20  P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832–​1841 (Woodbridge, 2002). 21 Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, p. 108; A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart & Mind’ (Oxford, 2015), pp. 103–​4. 22  E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963). 23  G. Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–​1982 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 90–​178.

292   Ian Packer Chartism and parliamentary Radicalism (and even Whiggism) was bridgeable in some circumstances. If some moments (e.g. the presentation of the Charters in 1842 and 1848) seemed to drive the movements apart, there were consistent efforts to bring them together over a programme of franchise and financial reform and, as Chase has pointed out, Chartism was not hostile to all parliamentary activity.24 In this interpretation it was logical that many ex-​Chartists should move into Liberalism in the 1850s and 1860s, as it seemed to offer hope of progress on extending the right to vote, restricting the role of the Church of England, free trade, and reduced indirect taxation. To historians such as Biagini, this was an entirely rational strategy on matters that affected working-​class activists and the most obvious way to promote the traditional concerns of plebeian Radicalism both before and during Chartism.25 It did not require any explanation through elaborate theorizations about the creation of new strata of the working class. Indeed, the concept of the mid-​Victorian labour aristocracy as the driver of working-​class Liberalism has taken some hammer blows recently and most historians doubt that such a group was a new development in this period, or that it held moderate political views based on its role in the economy.26 Biagini’s analysis, like that of Stedman Jones, centres on long-​term continuity in popular ideas and language, but Joyce has taken linguistic analysis further, denying any class element at all in the worldview of Radical working men, whom he suggests saw themselves as part of ‘the people’ or even ‘humanity’.27 This view has provoked a good deal of criticism, not only from those who have pointed out the coded nature of class references in the symbols and practices of popular Radicalism, but also from historians who have emphasized the continued tensions between Liberals and Radicals (often with a background in Chartism or trade unionism, however they defined their class position to themselves).28 Rival candidatures within the Liberal party were a regular feature of elections up to 1885 and arguably only declined with the radicalization of the whole party after 1886.

24  M. Turner, ‘Thomas Perronet Thompson, “Sensible Chartism” and the Chimera of Radical Unity’, Albion, 30 (2001), 51–​74; C. Skelly, Moral Force Chartism: Its Origins, Nature and Development, 1836–​1850 (Saarbrucken, 2013); M. Chase, ‘“Labour’s Candidates”: Chartist Challenges at the Parliamentary Polls, 1839–​60’, Labour History Review, 74 (2009), 64–​89. 25  E. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–​1880 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 8–​16. 26  R. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford, 1976); G. Crossick, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society: Kentish London, 1840–​1880 (London, 1978). 27  P. Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–​1914 (Cambridge, 1991). 28  J. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790–​1850 (Oxford, 1994); A. Taylor, ‘“The Glamour of Independence”: By-​Elections and Radicalism during the Liberal Meridian, 1869-​83’, in T. Otte and P. Readman, eds., By-​Elections in British Politics, 1832–​1914 (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 99–​120.

Whigs and Liberals    293

II Liberalism remained a broad and quarrelsome church, but there is now much agreement that in the 1850s and 1860s it was marked both by underlying ideological continuity and a drawing together of fissiparous elements.29 One new feature in this process was a more direct relationship between Liberal leaders and activists in the country. This was initiated by Palmerston in the 1850s, but was brought to new heights by Gladstone—​the dominant figure of Liberalism from the 1860s to the 1890s.30 His populist campaigns gave him a hitherto unthought-​of standing.31 To Vincent, Gladstone’s appeal was fundamentally irrational and a kind of substitute for practical policies, but to Biagini this merely symbolized his modernity as the kind of charismatic leader who was required to ignite the enthusiasm of voters—​albeit one who was careful to retain and embody the appeal to popular Radicalism that had made his followers Liberals in the first place.32 Gladstone’s leadership provided a triumphant culmination for mid-​ Victorian Liberalism and a symbol of Liberals’ ability to function successfully in a system with a mass electorate—​the Conservatives (with support from Radical Liberals) had extended the vote to all male householders in the boroughs in 1867 and the Liberals applied this system to county seats in 1884, ensuring more than three ​quarters of the electorate was working class.33 However, the 1880s have usually been interpreted as a decade of crisis and decline for the Liberal party. This is first because of the dominant event in Gladstone’s later career—​his decision to embrace Irish home rule in 1885 and the resultant split in the Liberal party in 1886, with a substantial group of opponents of this policy decamping to a separate Liberal Unionist party, in alliance with the Conservatives.34 Gladstone’s motivations for this dramatic volte-​face have been much debated, though explanations that emphasize his Machiavellian attempts to gain office through alliance with the Irish Nationalists, a misguided crusade to unite Liberals, or his determination to avoid any commitment to social reform have now been overshadowed by interpretations which emphasize that he came to his decision gradually after an intensive course

29  J. Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party, 1857–​1868 (2nd edn., Hassocks, 1976) and M. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–​1874 (Cambridge, 1993), in contrast to D.A. Hamer, Politics of Electoral Pressure: A Study in the History of Victorian Reform Agitations (Hassocks, 1977). 30  H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone (2 vols, Oxford, 1986–​96); R.T. Shannon, Gladstone (2 vols, London, 1982–​99). 31  A. Saab, Reluctant Icon: Gladstone, Bulgaria and the Working Classes, 1856–​1878 (Cambridge, MA, 1991); Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, pp. 369–​425. 32 Vincent, Formation of the British Liberal Party, pp. 211–​35; E. Biagini, Gladstone (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 57–​74. 33  R. Saunders, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics: the Making of the Second Reform Act (Aldershot, 2011); A. Jones, The Politics of Reform 1884 (Cambridge, 1972); D. Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900-​1918 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 99–​129. 34  I. Cawood, The Liberal Unionist Party: A History (London, 2012).

294   Ian Packer of reading and reflection.35 For Gladstone, home rule was an attempt finally to solve the ‘Irish Question’ by reconciling the Nationalist movement to Ireland’s continued membership of the United Kingdom. However, the question why this decision split the Liberal party has continued to be controversial. Older interpretations saw it merely as the occasion for the Whigs and other moderate, propertied Liberals to leave a party they feared had lurched to the left under Gladstone—​and indeed most of the party’s great landowners, as well as some of its leading intellectual spokesmen and some prominent businessmen did leave it in 1886.36 However, Ireland had never been an easy issue for Whigs and Radicals; while they had been no less committed to the Union than Conservatives, many had always been uneasy about naked assertions of British power and had sought to conciliate Irish Catholic opinion. Gladstone’s conversion to home rule could be seen as one possible development of these policies. However, a substantial minority of Liberals did not view the matter in this light and saw Ireland as a society that required the rule of law and liberal values to be imposed upon it and Irish Nationalism as a fundamentally illiberal movement.37 The split of 1886 can therefore be seen as an ideological division about Ireland within Liberalism, rather than a proxy for other arguments or class conflicts.38 This can in turn explain why some Radicals as well as moderates opposed home rule, and the difficulty in matching up the social backgrounds of Liberal MPs to their opinions on Ireland in 1886. Some historians, though, have continued to emphasize the ‘high-political’ context to the Liberal split—​particularly in explaining Gladstone’s refusal to conciliate the rebels, or the motives of key Liberal Unionists like Joseph Chamberlain.39 This division within Liberalism has continued to be linked to debates about the party’s decline. For historians such as Parry, the Liberal party after 1886 was fundamentally different from its predecessor and much weaker; the split deprived the Liberals of any claim to the Whig tradition of disinterested government that balanced the interests of all, and this development made it much less popular (it only once gained a majority after 1885—​in 1906).40 In terms of harming Liberalism’s popularity, this was just as important as the loss of support to the Liberal Unionists in areas such as Birmingham and Glasgow. From a rather different perspective, Lawrence has argued that the party’s remaining nonconformist supporters were able to push it into fundamentally unpopular positions, especially over the regulation of working-​class behaviour in terms of

35 

A.B. Cooke and J. Vincent, The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain, 1885–​86 (Brighton, 1974); D.A. Hamer, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery (Oxford, 1972), pp. 108–​23; J. Loughlin, Gladstone, Home Rule and the Ulster Question, 1882–​93 (Dublin, 1986), pp. 180–​96, 286–​90. 36  G. Goodman, ‘Liberal Unionism: The Revolt of the Whigs’, Victorian Studies, 3 (1959), 173–​89. 37 Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, pp. 292–​303. 38  T. Jenkins, Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party, 1874–​86 (Oxford, 1988); W.C. Lubenow, Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis: The British House of Commons in 1886 (Oxford, 1988). 39 Jenkins, Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party, pp. 230–​93. 40 Parry, Rise and Fall of Liberal Government, pp. 306–​11.

Whigs and Liberals    295 drinking, gambling, and sexual morality, and this helps to explain the party’s electoral difficulties.41 It has also been suggested, rather less convincingly, that if the Liberals had not lost Joseph Chamberlain in 1886 they could have taken up social reform and secured their popularity with working-​class voters.42 What all these arguments imply is that the Liberal party’s problems created a space for the Labour party to emerge on the left of British politics. But in many long-​standing interpretations of the Liberals’ decline, the party’s split in 1886 was only incidental. The 1880s marked a crucial moment in Liberalism’s decline, not because of events in Parliament, but because of developments in society and the economy that ensured Liberalism lost its appeal to the working class in favour of Labour, which could make an explicit appeal to workers’ growing class consciousness. The period from the 1880s to the 1920s witnessed a ‘remaking’ of the working class, based on increased conflict in the workplace; a more complete segregation of the classes, as working-​class suburbs grew outside city centres; and an increasingly homogenous working-​ class culture. This essentially sociological argument underlay much of the case for the unavoidable decline of Liberalism from the 1880s onwards, buttressed by histories of the Labour party that emphasized the party’s growing organization and electoral appeal in 1900–​14.43 This approach is now very much on the wane, under a twin assault on both its underpinnings and its empirical evidence. Historians are no longer willing to trace an unproblematic increase in working-​class identity to the years between the 1880s and 1914, any more than they are to ascribe it to the 1840s. Instead, there is much more emphasis on what divided members of the working class rather than what united them; even at the most basic economic level, divisions between ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ workers, or between workers in different regions, do not seem to have shrunk in any major and continued fashion in the period 1880–​1914.44 As increasing working-​class consciousness is no longer accepted as a given aspect of the period from the 1880s onwards, the Liberal party’s fortunes can now be judged in a much less gloomy fashion. The empirical evidence on the party’s electoral fortunes, for instance, does not suggest a picture of decline before 1914. After the doldrums of the 1880s and 1890s, the Liberals won an overall majority in 1906 and retained office in 1910 (twice) with the help of their Labour and Irish Nationalist allies, and the result of the election due in 1915 might well have been similar.45 On this basis, the Edwardian era could be viewed as witnessing a crisis of 41 

J. Lawrence, ‘Class and Gender in the Making of Urban Toryism, 1880–​1914’, English Historical Review, 108 (1993), 629–​52. 42  T.A. Jenkins, The Liberal Ascendancy, 1830–​1886 (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 217–​18. 43  Hobsbawm, ‘Making of the Working Class’; R. McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–​ 1924 (Oxford, 1974). 44  R. Harrison and J. Zeitlin, eds., Divisions of Labour. Skilled Workers and Technological Change in Nineteenth Century England (Brighton, 1985); E.H. Hunt, Regional Wage Variations in Britain, 1850–​1914 (Oxford, 1973). 45  I. Packer, ‘Contested Ground: Trends in British By-​Elections, 1911–​1914’, Contemporary British History, 25 (2011), 157–​73.

296   Ian Packer Conservatism rather than Liberalism, and detailed work on Labour’s organization and electoral performance suggests it was in no position to mount a major challenge to the Liberals.46 The reasons assigned for the Liberals’ success, though, have started to change. The pioneer in this field was Clarke.47 He accepted that voting had become more class-​based by 1914 but suggested the Liberals had benefited from this by capturing the working-​ class electorate through their advocacy of social reforms, particularly the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908. This position was supported by Freeden’s detailed analysis of the advocacy of social reform by the party’s ‘New Liberals’.48 However, if class-​based voting had not become the main feature of the electoral system by 1914, it is no longer necessary to think of social reform as the only reason for the Liberals’ success in this period. Increasingly, historians have come to realize that other issues that had once been dismissed as irrelevant in the period 1900–​14 were quite as important to voters in this period as social reform. This analysis has now extended across the whole spectrum of Edwardian politics. A number of historians have argued persuasively that Irish home rule continued to arouse strong popular passions around issues of democracy and national and religious identity.49 Free trade has been reconfigured as less a defence of laissez-​faire than an argument for cheap food for working-​class consumers.50 Historians of religion have increasingly postponed the secularization of British society far into the twentieth century, making the Edwardian obsession with the battle between the Church of England and nonconformity intelligible.51 Issues specific to Scotland and Wales, including the beginnings of arguments for self-​government, now seem distinctly modern.52 The cause of land reform has been rescued from oblivion as a key component of the Edwardian political scene, and an issue that both reflected the important role that aristocrats still played in politics and was capable of incorporating policies of rural reconstruction, housing reform, and minimum wages.53 Finally, no historian would now deny the

46 

E.H.H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880-​1914 (London, 1995), pp. 267–​306; Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party. 47  P. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971). 48   M. Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978). 49  E. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–​1906 (Cambridge, 2007); D. Jackson, Popular Opposition to Irish Home Rule in Edwardian Britain (Liverpool, 2009). 50  A. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–​1946 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 230–​73; F. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2008), pp. 33–​133. 51  C. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–​2000 (London, 2001). 52  I.G.C. Hutchison, A Political History of Scotland 1832–​1924: Parties, Elections and Issues (Edinburgh, 1986), pp. 234–​45; J.G. Jones, ‘E.T. John and Welsh Home Rule, 1910–​14’, Welsh History Review, 12 (1987), 453–​87. 53  I. Packer, Lloyd George, Liberalism and the Land: The Land Issue and Party Politics in England, 1906–​ 1914 (Woodbridge, 2001); P. Readman, Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880–​1914 (Woodbridge, 2008).

Whigs and Liberals    297 central importance of women’s suffrage and women’s role in society to Edwardian politics.54 This rehabilitation of issues other than social reform has made it possible to see Liberalism’s success before 1914 as based partly on its identification with a whole range of issues that reached back into the nineteenth century but which were still relevant to voters.

III This emphasis on continuity across the ‘long’ nineteenth century has reinforced the view that it was events during the First World War that provide the most profound disjuncture in the party’s history and the most convincing explanation of its downfall. Debates about why the war was so toxic for the Liberals have tended to mirror the themes that have dominated analysis of the party’s fortunes before 1914. Older analyses saw the war as merely speeding up trends in society and the economy that were already apparent from the 1880s onwards and that rapidly reinforced working-​class consciousness and thus the trend towards Labour voting. As with the pre-​1914 era, historians are no longer so sure these trends can be identified. If the war helped Labour challenge the Liberals, this can be seen as a political rather than a social process, by enabling Labour politicians to serve in the Cabinet and stimulating the expansion of trade unions and their political funds.55 But this allowed Labour to take advantage of the Liberals’ difficulties rather than ensuring it would displace them. However, in a final chronological flourish of the idea that Liberalism could not cope with modernity, some historians have been eager to argue that the Liberals were particularly poorly equipped to wage total war because of their squeamish attachment to civil liberties and hostility to increasing the State’s role in the economy.56 The party thus failed the final test of modernity—​it could not organize the ‘Great War’. This argument, though, has proved difficult to demonstrate, as the Liberals had proved willing to push the boundaries of the state forward in the area of social reform before 1914 and accepted everything from state control of the engineering industry to conscription in 1914–​16. The Liberals’ implosion was fundamentally a matter of high politics—​of Lloyd George’s coup, through which Asquith was replaced as Prime Minister in December 1916.57 Attempts to relate this event to divisions in the party

54 

M. Pugh, The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, 1866–​1914 (Oxford, 2000). 55 McKibbin, Evolution of the Labour Party; A. Reid, ‘The Impact of the First World War on British Workers’, in R. Wall and J. Winter, eds., The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–​ 1918 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 221–​33; Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, pp. 351–​83. 56  T. Wilson, The Downfall of the Liberal Party, 1914–​1935 (London, 1966), pp. 30–​5. 57  J. Turner, British Politics and the Great War: Coalition and Conflict 1915–​1918 (New Haven, CT, 1992), pp. 112–​51.

298   Ian Packer before 1914 have proved unconvincing.58 Primarily, the split in 1916 was as unforeseeable as Gladstone’s declaration for home rule in 1885. But unlike the crisis of 1885–​6 it was difficult to discern any ideological rift between Asquith and Lloyd George. The latter merely asserted he would be a more effective wartime prime minister than the former. Historians have been reluctant to accept that personal power struggles can determine grand political events, such as the decline of the Liberal party. But by uncoupling politics from the determinism of explanations that centre on class and economic developments, this at least becomes possible. However, the more recent emphasis on the continuity and resilience of long-​standing Liberal narratives in the nineteenth century is not much more hospitable to the idea that the party might be brought down by a squabble at the top. This view can be meshed more neatly with the high-political notion of the Liberals’ downfall if Lloyd George’s coup is placed in a wider context. The division of 1916 was not healed (formally) until 1923. This was just at the time when the voting system underwent its greatest change under the 1918 Reform Act, which enfranchised all men over 21 and women over 30, and it was crucial to recruit new voters.59 Moreover, this was a time when the Liberals faced challengers from both left and right, who had been invigorated by the war.60 But, just as importantly, the great Liberal issues of the pre-​war period were also undergoing dramatic transformations. Irish home rule disappeared once most of Ireland became independent in 1921. Free trade was increasingly undermined by world economic competition and changing ideas about how to protect consumers. Land reform became less pressing as great landowners disappeared in the wholesale disposal of country estates after the First World War.61 These narratives did not disintegrate overnight (free trade greatly helped the reunited Liberals at the 1923 general election), but they required the party’s attention and ingenuity to ensure they continued to work on their behalf. A party at war with itself was in no condition to act with this kind of dexterity. The Liberals’ difficulties with handling these long-​standing themes and narratives were intensified by their problematic position in the party system after the 1918 general election. Once they ceased to be the main governing party or the official opposition, they were forced to define themselves in terms of their relationship to the other two parties. After 1918, Labour’s role as the main opponent of the Conservatives polarized politics around attitudes to organized labour and welfare payments, particularly unemployment benefit. On these issues the Liberals found it difficult to say anything distinctive, as the positions ‘for’ and ‘against’ on, for example, unemployment benefits were fully 58 

E. David, ‘The Liberal Party Divided, 1916–​1918’, Historical Journal, 13 (1970), 509–​32, and M. Johnson, Militarism and the British Left, 1902–​1914 (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 156–​84, contradicting T. Wilson, Downfall, p. 37, and M. Freeden, Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought, 1914–​1939 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 20–​1. 59 Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, pp. 384–​417. 60  N. Keohane, The Party of Patriotism: The Conservative Party and the First World War (Farnham, 2010). 61  J.J. Smyth, Labour in Glasgow 1896–​1936: Socialism, Suffrage, Sectarianism (East Linton, 2000), pp. 125–​54; Trentmann, Free Trade Nation, pp. 189–​348; Packer, Lloyd George, Liberalism and the Land, pp. 178–​93.

Whigs and Liberals    299 occupied.62 Both Labour and Conservatives, on the other hand, were in a prime position to annex those parts of Liberalism which they saw as compatible with their rhetorical traditions. After 1916, much of pre-​war Liberalism and the remaining themes that had sustained it migrated to Baldwin’s Conservatives (financial rectitude, governing on behalf of the whole nation) or to MacDonald’s Labour (free trade and moderate social reform); the Liberal party that was left increasingly faced an identity crisis, if only because it was so much smaller and less successful than its pre-​war predecessor.63 Historians have tended to see this situation as leaving the Liberals with three choices. The first was to attempt to find a new way of appealing to the electorate. The most plausible attempts to do this were Lloyd George’s ingenious schemes in 1925–​9 for land reform and his proposals to ‘conquer unemployment’ through public works. There has been some debate about how convincing these ideas were, but unanimity that they failed to break into the Labour and Conservative parties’ rhetorical battle about welfare spending versus lower taxation.64 The second choice was to accept that the party had nothing left to say and that its ideas and narratives primarily existed in other parties. This was the route taken by half the Liberal MPs in 1931–​2, when they formed the new Liberal National grouping in permanent alliance with the Conservatives and agreed that even free trade would have to be compromised. As Dutton has emphasized, this further split represented a huge blow to the party’s viability.65 The third choice was simply to carry on and hope. Finding new policies, or reactivating old ones, that would increase the party’s appeal proved an insoluble difficulty, though. As recent studies of Liberal policy have emphasized, Liberals were reduced to simply mimicking appeals already fully embodied by other parties, as with their enthusiasm for the Beveridge Report in 1944–​5 or hostility to nationalization in 1947–​50, or associating themselves with ideas that seemed impossibly outdated (free trade) or which nobody cared about (co-​ownership).66 In this situation, it seemed entirely possible by the early 1950s that the party would disappear altogether.

IV That the Liberal party did not vanish, and instead experienced a series of limited revivals and contractions until it merged with the Social Democrats in 1988, has been explained 62  R. McKibbin, ‘Class and Conventional Wisdom: the Conservative Party and the “Public” in Inter-​ War Britain’, in McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880–​1950 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 259–​93. 63  P. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999); D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald: A Biography (2nd edn., London, 1997). 64  J. Campbell, Lloyd George: The Goat in the Wilderness, 1922–​1931 (London, 1977); R. McKibbin, ‘The Economic Policy of the Second Labour Government, 1929–​1931’, Past and Present, 68 (1975), 95–​123. 65  D. Dutton, Liberals in Schism: A History of the National Liberal Party (London, 2008). 66  P. Sloman, The Liberal Party and the Economy, 1929–​1964 (Oxford, 2015), pp. 149–​63, 173–​7, 195–​9.

300   Ian Packer in a number of ways. The context for all these explanations is provided by the related concepts of partisan dealignment and class dealignment.67 Political scientists noted, especially from the 1970s onwards, that the number of voters who identified strongly with either of the two main political parties was declining, both because the electorate was increasingly dissatisfied with their performance in office and because class was becoming less clearly identified with voting behaviour. This situation provided the opportunity for other parties to break into the political system, and that meant primarily the Liberals, who, until the 1970s, had no competitor as a third party with an existing structure, a presence in Parliament, and some name recognition. More detailed explanations of why the Liberals survived but could manage no more than periodic revivals have taken a number of paths. Some historians have emphasized the central importance of developments at the level of high politics, especially the role of a number of charismatic leaders, archetypically Jo Grimond, in making the Liberals appear electable.68 Arguably, the arrival of a politics in which personalities and media image were of key significance helped obscure the Liberals’ continued difficulties with finding distinctive and popular policies (by the 1960s they were most associated with membership of the European Economic Community and proportional representation—​neither of which mattered much to voters).69 A vague image of modernity and a willingness to embrace the use of television and advertising techniques made up for some of these deficiencies, but may also help to explain why Liberal revivals tended to be transient. Other approaches to this phenomenon have concentrated on aspects of the Liberals’ identity:  they have been described both as a centrist party, existing ideologically between the two other parties, and as a party of the periphery, strongest in the areas most distant from ‘modern’, class-​based politics. Both positions offered a viable basis for some public support, but were inherently unstable. The appeal of centrism was intermittent as it depended on perceptions of extremism in other parties,70 and Liberalism’s identification with peripheral areas could always be challenged, both because these identities were often weak in England and because other parties expressed these identities more directly where they were stronger—​particularly in the case of Nationalists in rural Scotland and Wales.71 However, recent analysis has suggested that both definitions of Liberalism post-​1945 require heavy qualification.

67  I. Crewe, B. Särlvik, and J. Alt, ‘Partisan Dealignment in Britain, 1964–​1974’, British Journal of Political Science, 7 (1977), 129–​90; M. Franklin, The Decline of Class Voting in Britain (Oxford, 1985). 68  A. King, ed., Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections (Oxford, 2002); M. McManus, Jo Grimond: Towards the Sound of Gunfire (Edinburgh, 2001). 69  M. Egan, Coming into Focus: the Transformation of the Liberal Party 1945–​64 (Saarbrucken, 2009), pp. 149–​52. 70  D. Dutton, A History of the Liberal Party (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 219–​24, on the 1974 general elections. 71  G. Tregidga, The Liberal Party in South-​West Britain since 1918: Political Decline, Dormancy and Rebirth (Exeter, 2000); L. Bennie, J. Brand, and J. Mitchell, How Scotland Votes: Scottish Parties and Elections (Manchester, 1997).

Whigs and Liberals    301 The Liberals were never just a party of the periphery even at their nadir in the early 1950s, when much of their remaining strength in local government and two of their six seats were in urban Lancashire and Yorkshire. When the party began to revive, most of its new votes, if not its seats, were won in suburban England, especially in the south-​ east and north-​west.72 These phenomena can best be explained by examining how the Liberals had to function in a mainly two-​party system. This was not as a ‘centrist’ party but either as an ally of or a competitor with the other parties. In the early to mid-​1950s the Liberals retained much of their residual presence by functioning as a very junior ally of the Conservatives. But at the same time, the Liberals remained the main opposition to the Conservatives in a few areas where Labour was weak, especially some of northern Scotland and the English south-​west—​they were both a Conservative and an anti-​ Conservative party at the same time. Once signs of revival were apparent in the early 1960s, the national party rejected its local anti-​Labour pacts. This left the Liberals dependent on their anti-​Conservative identity, which was most likely to deliver parliamentary seats in those peripheral areas where it had best survived the party’s near-​extinction. But it gained most of its new voters in suburban England, as the most obvious home both for disillusioned Conservative voters who could not identify with Labour and for Labour voters who hoped a Liberal might defeat a Conservative where a Labour candidate could not. Again, this did not necessarily represent a centrist appeal, but rather a purely tactical, and very unstable, coalition. The party’s identity was negative—​electors chose it for what it was not, in reference to the two main parties.73 This, too, helps to explain the periodic nature of the party’s revivals—​it had little in the way of a core vote. The pattern of waves of Liberal revival followed by decline that was established in the late 1950s continued until the party’s merger with the Social Democrats in 1988, but without resolving the fundamental question of just what the party stood for; whatever it was, though, it was only remotely related to its predecessor of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

V The turn against social factors, especially class, as the determinants of the Liberal party’s fate now holds the field, but this process does present some problems. Most importantly, by emphasizing continuity over discontinuity, it does not always make clear how and why Liberalism changed at all in this period. However, the Liberal party did undergo a number of transformations between 1800 and 2000—​most importantly in the 1830s, the mid-​1880s, and 1916–​24. All were associated with interactions between events in

72 Egan, Coming into Focus, pp. 164–​225. 73 

K. Young, ‘Orpington and the Liberal Revival’, in C. Cook and J. Ramsden, eds., By-​Elections in British Politics (London, 1973), pp. 198–​222, especially pp. 208–​9.

302   Ian Packer high politics and changes in the structure of the electoral system: in the 1830s the Tory government collapsed, producing a Whig regime, a massive change to the electoral system, and a huge boost to political organization and partisanship; in the 1880s the Liberal party lost an important segment of its support over the matter of Irish home rule, at the same time as the electoral system acquired a clear working-​class majority and politics became much more centred on elections as plebiscites on the government, political programmes, and national party organization; finally, in 1916–​24, the Liberals split and their status declined to that of third party, in conjunction with another massive expansion of the electorate and further changes to the nature of campaigning.74 In turn, these events produced decisive changes in the Liberal party—​producing its first incarnation in the 1830s, weakening it in the 1880s, and unexpectedly destroying it as a major force in 1916–​24. But each crisis also had an important impact in the realm of political culture and ideas. In the 1830s, by entering government, the Whigs had to define their attitude to a host of pressing political matters on which their views were not clear at all before 1830, as in the case of Poor Law reform. Their own legislation led them to enact reforms that had not been central to their identity in opposition, as with municipal reform, and their attempt to govern in a balanced and disinterested fashion produced interventions in society that had not been foreseen—​as with the Factory Act (1833)—​and the need to take up new positions on the Corn Laws, electoral reforms such as the secret ballot, and the removal of religious disabilities. Similarly, after 1885 the Liberal party’s official ideology became much more radical and programmatic, not just on home rule but on a whole range of issues, from land reform to temperance, once many moderates had defected. Finally, in 1916–​24 the party’s position at the centre of politics imploded and, as a third party, it found it increasingly difficult to retain ownership of key themes in its identity and to effectively manipulate those with which it was still identified in a new political environment.75 None of these developments suggest that there were not underlying continuities in Liberal mentalities across these periods. However, re-​emphasizing these disjunctures based on the interaction between high politics and political structures provides an explanatory mechanism for how Liberalism itself could change rapidly. This methodology also suggests areas where further research is urgently needed. While developments in the 1830s and 1880s have been examined at length, much less has been written about the Liberal party in 1916–​24, even though this was the crucial moment in the party’s decline. In particular, intensive study of how Liberalism reacted to and positioned itself with regard to other parties and ideologies would shed much needed light on its difficulties in recovering from the disasters of 1916–​18.

74 Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work; E.H.H. Green, ‘An Age of Transition: an Introductory Essay’, Parliamentary History, 16 (1997), 1–​17; J. Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009), pp. 96–​129. 75  A. Mitchell, The Whigs in Opposition 1815–​1830 (Oxford, 1967); M. Barker, Gladstone and Radicalism: The Reconstruction of Liberal Policy in Britain 1885–​94 (Hassocks, 1975); Dutton, History of the Liberal Party, pp. 68–​103.

Whigs and Liberals    303 This is not to suggest that the current emphasis on political culture and language is played out. There are a number of areas where this process is still in its infancy. For instance, the importance of concepts of masculinity has been strongly emphasized in relation to debates about the 1867 Reform Act, both in justifying who might be enfranchised—​working men who displayed ‘manly independence’—​and who was excluded.76 But the significance of these concepts in subsequent Liberal discourses (other than female suffrage) has received very little attention. Yet its implications were wide-​ranging in areas as diverse as Irish home rule, which could be presented as a recognition that the Irish had achieved ‘manly’ self-​control and deserved self-​government, and Edwardian social reform, which had to be carefully presented as not infringing on masculine independence—​especially at a time when women’s right to enter the male public sphere was supported by many Liberals. There are also a number of fields in which Liberal discourse has been much more fully explored, but only within limited chronological boundaries. This is most notable in the case of patriotism, which Parry has examined in detail, but only as far as 1886.77 Yet patriotism was a deeply contested feature of the Liberals’ identity in the years up to 1914. The Liberal Imperialist and Radical strands within the party espoused very different views of foreign policy, but how these were justified and related to both Liberalism and patriotism remains to be examined—​the most recent major studies of Liberal Imperialism and Radicalism date back to the early 1970s.78 The same might be said of Liberalism’s relationship with other systems of thought in society, especially religion. A great deal has been written about the importance of nonconformity to Liberal electoral support and the centrality of religious controversies to Liberal legislation and of personal religion to the motivations of key figures, especially Gladstone.79 But the study of theology and its interrelationship with Liberalism stops short in the 1860s and 1870s, although it is at least arguable that many developments in Liberal policy and discourse, from temperance to social reform, were deeply involved with developments in theology, especially in the nonconformist churches.80 The study of Liberalism’s political culture and discourse can also be pushed forward by new methodologies. Now that parliamentary debates and newspaper reports of politicians’ speeches are increasingly available in digital form, it is possible to undertake large-​scale text mining of this material. This process is only just beginning, but it will

76  C. Hall, K. McClelland, and J. Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race and Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000). 77 Parry, The Politics of Patriotism. 78  H.C.G. Matthew, The Liberal Imperialists: The Ideas and Politics of a Post-​Gladstonian Elite (Oxford, 1973); A.J.A. Morris, Radicalism against War 1906–​1914 (London, 1972). 79  T.A. McDonald, ‘Religion and Voting in an English Borough: Poole in 1859’, Southern History, 5 (1983), 221–​37; J.P. Parry, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party 1867–​1875 (Cambridge, 1989); R.T. Shannon, Gladstone: God and Politics (London, 2007). 80  B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–​1865 (Oxford, 1988); I. Packer, ‘Religion and the New Liberalism: The Rowntree Family, Quakerism and Social Reform’, Journal of British Studies, 42 (2003), 236–​57.

304   Ian Packer make possible quantitative as well as qualitative analyses of the content of political language. In turn, this will provide new ways of testing current ideas about the continuity of Liberal discourse across the long nineteenth century, and identifying how and when the content of Liberals’ political language changed. This will be particularly important for analysing key turning points, such as the crises of the 1880s and 1916–​24, and the Liberal message and image at general elections and over key pieces of legislation.81 In turn, this process will make it possible to recover the public language of Liberal MPs—​a key step in increasing knowledge of this group, about whose overall characteristics and views much still remains to be discovered. Historians have called insistently for high and low politics to be joined up; MPs represent the missing middle in this relationship, conveying local concerns to the party leadership and the leaders’ message to activists and localities.82 A wide-​ranging analysis of what they said in Parliament and their constituencies is one way to reach a much surer identification of how the concerns and language of high and low politics interconnected and developed. Finally, big data will not only allow more insight into the language used by MPs, but will also make available much more material for prosopographical studies of this group, and thus help recover the social context of Liberalism at this crucial intermediary level. Liberalism was not just a set of discourses, it was also a lived social reality for its exponents and existed at the level of familial and friendship networks, club and pressure group memberships, church affiliations, charitable endeavours, and business relationships. Liberals’ political language existed within this context and recovering the interrelationships and extra-​parliamentary identities of Liberal MPs will help understand how this language was connected to Liberals’ actions and activities. It is even beginning to be possible to discover something of the social context of Liberal constituency activists, by matching up local party records with census data and other local material.83 As digitization gathers pace, this body of work will grow and it will be possible to reach firmer conclusions about the social profile of the party membership and some of the key aspects of their identity, such as religious affiliation. Taken together, all these developments provide the opportunity to answer questions about both what Liberalism was understood to be and who found the creed attractive. There are, therefore, a number of ways in which the current emphasis on political culture and language in the study of Liberalism can be developed and pushed forward. Some of these will undoubtedly shed further light on the question of the Liberals’ decline, especially by examining the key period of 1916–​24. But they also offer the real possibility of finally putting that debate into the much wider context of an examination of the nature of the Liberal party and its actions. The party’s decline will always be a

81  L. Blaxill, ‘Quantifying the Language of British Politics, 1880–​1910’, Historical Research, 86 (2013), 313–​41. 82  S. Pedersen, ‘What is Political History Now?’, in D. Cannadine, ed., What is History Now? (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 36–​56; J. Lawrence, ‘Political History’, in S. Berger, H. Feldner, and K. Passmore, eds., Writing History: Theory and Practice (London, 2003), pp. 183–​202. 83  P. Lynch, The Liberal Party in Rural England 1885–​1910 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 61–​72.

Whigs and Liberals    305 central feature of its history; however, the Liberal party was the dominant political force in Britain for nearly a century and there is much more to say about it than that it ceased to be an effective political force after the First World War.

Further Reading E. Biagini, Liberalism, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–​1880 (Cambridge, 1992). P. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971). D. Dutton, A History of the Liberal Party in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke, 2004). T.A. Jenkins, The Liberal Ascendancy, 1830–​1886 (Basingstoke, 1994). J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT, 1993). J.P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–​1886 (Cambridge, 2006). J. Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party, 1857–​1868 (2nd edn., Hassocks, 1976).

chapter 18

Tories and C onse rvat i v e s John Charmley

In Hilary Term 1968, Robert Blake delivered his Ford lectures at Oxford, later published as The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill; they would remain in print for the next 30 years, finally ending up as The Conservative Party from Peel to Major.1 Blake’s narrative reflected the way in which historians had written about the party, and, consciously or not, subsequent histories engaged with it. It did what a good meta-​narrative should do: it provided an over-​arching explanation for a complex story. It did so in a way which quietly celebrated its subject, and it provided a set of easily identifiable heroes and villains. This made it compulsory reading for generations for undergraduates and their teachers, popular with its subject, and kept it in print. A product of its time, it distilled the collective wisdom of the history of the party into a message which was simultaneously timeless and timely. The party was in opposition, facing a canny Labour leader in Harold Wilson, who sought to align his party with the forces of modernization to make it something it had never been—​the natural party of government. Blake reminded his party that it was not the first time it had been in such a position—​and that it had a recipe for dealing with the situation. First, parties on the left with a reforming agenda always exhausted themselves and ended in fractious recriminations; wise Conservatives waited for that day, as Peel had, as Disraeli had, as Churchill had. Second, they made it clear that they were not opposed to timely, moderate reform, and planned for it—​as Peel, Disraeli, and Churchill had all done in their time. If readers drew the conclusion that Edward Heath was their heir, and that his reformist Conservatism was to be preferred to that advocated by Enoch Powell, they would have received Blake’s message loud and clear: liberal Conservatism was the ingredient which had enabled a party founded in the aftermath of the Reform Bill debacle to survive the stresses and strains of Britain’s transformation to a parliamentary democracy, and to occupy 10 Downing Street for most of the twentieth century. The unravelling of the

1 

R. Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill (London, 1970); The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher (London, 1985); The Conservative Party from Peel to Major (London, 1997).

Tories and Conservatives    307 post-​war consensus and the rise and triumph of Thatcherism in the next two decades challenged Blake’s version. It allowed historians to rediscover virtues in leaders such as Derby2 and Salisbury,3 who, for Blake, had been reactionaries leaving no heir. But its teleology has survived, and the message that ‘One Nation’ Toryism is the best way forward for the party seems as timely in the era of Mrs May as it was in the age of Heath. Blake provided a conservative answer to the ontological question of what the Conservative party was for—​it exists so that Conservatives can hold power and govern in the national interest. It is at its best when its appetite for power is unhampered by ideology. It is at its worst when it descends into ideological fractiousness. Whether it is the Great Reform Act, the Corn Laws, tariff reform, or Europe, the party only acts stupidly when under the impulse of some strong principle. Conservatives like to portray themselves as not being frightfully interested in politics. As the second Viscount Hailsham put it in his The Case for Conservatism (1946): ‘Conservatives do not believe that political struggle is the most important thing in life . . . The simplest among them prefer fox-​hunting—​the wisest religion’; up to a point, Lord Copper. Men who by choice spend much of their lives in the corridors of Westminster when they could be hunting or praying may represent their peers who do, but they are not the same as them. In choosing agriculture and the Church to illustrate the natural hinterlands of Conservatives, Hailsham evoked two of the tribal gods of his party; the third one, the defence of the realm, he took for granted, as by 1950 patriotism had long been appropriated by the party. These were the forces which had rallied to Pitt the Younger as their defender against the godless French revolutionaries and their Whiggish admirers. Sustained by his ‘sacred memory’ and an electoral system which could be manipulated to produce an anti-​reform majority in the Commons, the long Tory domination broke on the issue of the protection of the Anglican confessional state in 1829, and the Duke of Wellington’s decision to try to rally the troops on the issue of reform in 1830 failed, not least because some of his own side thought a more representative political system would have provided a better defence of the Protestant cause.4 The 1832 Reform Act identified the Whigs very firmly as the leaders of progressive opinion in British politics, and that could easily have led the Tories to being identified as solid reactionaries. Indeed, when the new Whig leader, Melbourne, fell out with King William IV and was dismissed, that very thing seemed to have happened when Wellington was sent for. But the old hero declined the honour and advised the King to send for Sir Robert Peel, who thus became party leader. His famous ‘Tamworth manifesto’ in the ensuing election did not win a majority for his

2 

A. Hawkins, Parliament, Party and the Art of Politics, 1855–​1959 (London, 1987); R. Stewart, The Politics of Protection: Lord Derby and the Protectionist Party 1841–​1852 (Cambridge, 1971); R. Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party 1830–​1867 (London, 1978). 3  Lord Blake and H. Cecil, eds., Salisbury: The Man and His Politics (London, 1987); R.T. Shannon, The Age of Salisbury 1881–​1902 (London, 1996). 4 Stewart, Foundation, pp. 2–​67; N. Gash, Mr Secretary Peel (London, 1961), chs 15–​17 remain unsurpassed.

308   John Charmley party, but it did scout the idea that it was opposed to all reform.5 Those in his own party who disagreed with him and who distrusted him because of his volte-​face on the issue of allowing Roman Catholics within the pale of the Constitution faced a dilemma, neatly captured by the Whig Macaulay when he called the youthful Gladstone ‘the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories who follow, reluctantly and mutinously, a leader whose experience and eloquence are indispensable to them, but whose cautious temper and moderate opinions they abhor’. Macaulay’s instinct that such an alliance could only end in disaster was well founded. Blake’s Peel, like that of Norman Gash,6 was a heroic and tragic figure. An executive man of government in the Pitt mould, he offered his shattered party a road back to office, but once there many of them thought their work was done. Facing economic and social problems of an unprecedented kind, as well as trouble in Ireland, Peel had neither the luxury of inaction nor the time to properly educate his party into the need for the action he took. Party loyalty and unity, strained by Peel’s decisions to drop protection for the economic interests which produced sugar in the West Indies and give the Catholic seminary at Maynooth state aid, collapsed when he decided to suspend the Corn Laws in 1846. The forces of blank reaction destroyed Peel—​and the party’s electoral chances for a generation. It was not until Disraeli began the process of educating his party with the Second Reform Act that electoral success returned. That Disraeli’s biographer7 should have gone with his subject’s version of events was not surprising, but Blake saw, somewhat uneasily, that the story was a construct designed to conceal Disraeli’s real role in events. In his biography of Lord George Bentinck, the leader of the agricultural interest in the Commons, which was published in 1852,8 Disraeli produced a version which portrayed his hero (and thus, by extension, himself) as a man of principle opposing an arrogant leader who betrayed his party. Casting himself in the role of the party loyalist, Disraeli was then able to gloss over his sudden conversion to advocating the acceptance of free trade as a matter of educating his party. That certainly fitted the narrative of reactionary Tories wrecking their party’s chance of victory and liberal Conservatism coming to the rescue, but it did less than justice to the case mounted by Peel’s opponents. Insofar as there was opportunism in it, it came mainly from Disraeli, who had no fixed principles on the issues concerned, but a keen tactical sense that they could be used to overthrow Peel; correct on the latter, he, and his admirers, never understood the case being made by Peel’s opponents. Starting with Robert Stewart in the 1970s,9 and culminating in Angus Hawkins’ magisterial two-​volume biography of the fourteenth earl of Derby,10 a generation of 5  R.A. Gaunt, ‘Sir Robert Peel’, in C. Clarke, T.S. James, T. Bale, and P. Diamond, eds., British Conservative Leaders (London, 2015), pp. 59–​74. 6 Gash, Mr Secretary Peel and Sir Robert Peel (London, 1972). 7  R. Blake, Disraeli (London, 1966). 8  B. Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography (London, 1852). 9 Stewart, Politics of Protection (1971) and Foundations (1978). 10  A. Hawkins: The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby, volume 1: Ascent (Oxford, 2007); The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby, volume 2: Achievement, 1851–​1869 (Oxford, 2008); and, more recently, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart & Mind’ (Oxford, 2015).

Tories and Conservatives    309 historians have cleaned the rich Disraelian varnish from the picture, restoring Derby to his proper place in the history of the party and doing justice to the causes for which he stood. The governing narrative here is profoundly opposed to Blake’s.11 It recognizes the seriousness with which Conservatives regarded the Church of England and its place in ensuring spiritual and social cohesion, and their hostility to the ‘Romanizing’ tendencies of the Oxford Movement and their suspicion of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Ireland; for these men, Peel’s failure to behave as they thought a Conservative leader should meant he forfeited their trust. On agricultural protection, there was, as Anna Gambles has laid out, a strong case to be made that it supported an essentially conservative way of life, one in which, in return for the protection their economic interests received, the landed gentry acted as stewards of the countryside and provided a livelihood for their tenants and those who depended on them.12 The free trade arguments were, essentially, as self-​interested as those of the Protectionists. Industrialists wanted lower food prices so they could pay their workers less, and the cash nexus was only one such men had with their workers. Landowners saw such relationships as essentially exploitative and liked neither the tone of the men who advocated them nor what they were doing to the landscape of old England. In providing a standard around which the Conservative interest could rally, Derby provided an essential bulwark which resisted the forces of change in British politics. He could not see how Conservatives could govern in an age of change—​they would simply be co-​opted into Peel’s position, which was, at best, making changes with which you disagreed in order to avoid something worse; better to remain in strong opposition thwarting as much change as you could, which was not a bad option when the conservatively inclined Palmerston led the Whig-​ Liberal Coalition.13 There were, to be sure, times when it was necessary to take office to keep the troops happy, but 1852, 1858–​9, and 1866 were all about keeping the government going when the fissiparous governing coalition fell apart. Or, at least, that is how 1866 began. In Blake’s narrative, the 1866–​8 government is the moment when Disraeli seized the opportunity to repudiate the ‘stupid party’ label and, by passing the Second Reform Act, once more claimed the Peelite mantle, before doing it in office in 1874–​80 while also grabbing Palmerston’s ‘patriotic’ foreign policy in the form of ‘Jingoism’. These themes of social reform at home, ‘Tory democracy’, and imperialism would underpin the success of the Conservative party for the next century, and in enunciating them Disraeli became at once the saviour of the party and an inspiration for future generations.14

11 G. Hicks, ed., Conservatism and British Foreign Policy, 1820–​1920: The Derbys and Their World (Farnham, 2011). 12  A. Gambles, Protection and Politics: Conservative Economic Discourse 1815–​1852 (Woodbridge, 1999). 13 Stewart, Foundations and Hawkins, Ascent both take this view. 14 Blake, Conservative Party (1970, 1985, 1997); Blake, Disraeli.

310   John Charmley This seductive narrative neatly organizes a series of things which happened to make it look as though they were meant to happen, and provides a thread through what others have seen as a series of more or less random events. Forensic examination of the Reform Bill crisis shows the extent of Disraeli’s opportunism—​he would accept any bill as long as it had his name on it, even one which granted household suffrage and caused resignations from the Cabinet; it was politics as the art of the possible in pursuit of power.15 Disraeli’s real genius was to invent a narrative which found some guiding principle where there had been only opportunism. The 1874–​80 reforms were largely the result of other men’s agendas, and his real contribution was to use the Great Eastern Crisis of 1876–​80 to drape his party in the Union flag.16 Much good that did him personally—​ it did not save the party from defeat in 1880, when Gladstone ended up Prime minister at the head of a reconstructed Liberal Coalition which looked set to continue the dominance it had enjoyed since 1846. At this juncture, the function of the Conservative party was essentially still Derbyite—​that is, a bulwark against Gladstone and his restless radicalism. It was only in retrospect, and with the advantage of hindsight and the need for a convincing narrative, that the long period of Conservative ascendancy from 1885 to 1905 came to have anything to do with Disraeli. The works of Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, and Michael Bentley all point in the direction of the long Tory dominance owing more to Salisburian opportunism in the face of Gladstonian recklessness than to an innate Conservative genius.17 Contemporary assumptions about the continuation of the Liberal ascendancy foundered where so many bright hopes in nineteenth-​century politics went to die—​Ireland. In eventually coming out in favour of home rule in 1885, Gladstone was acting on the assumption that the Conservatives would play the Derbyite line and perhaps even do what Peel had done in 1846 and sacrifice themselves for the sake of the national interest, which would enable him to unite his fracturing coalition and continue to lead the country. He made two major errors which falsified his assumption and left the road open for other solutions. Salisbury had Derbyite instincts when it came to resisting change, but no Peelite ones. He saw Gladstone’s reasoning about the national interest and dismissed it as nauseating hypocrisy.18 Salisbury had long argued the case for an alignment of conservative forces in British society against the pressure to introduce a democratic system of government in which numbers would rule; his own order would, in such a

15 Stewart, Foundations; M. Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution. The Passing

of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1967); F.B. Smith, The Making of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1966). 16  G. Hicks, J. Charmley, and B. Grosvenor, eds., Documents on Conservative Foreign Policy 1852 to 1878 (Cambridge, 2012). 17 Cowling, 1867; A.B. Cooke and J. Vincent, The Governing Passion. Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain 1885–​1886 (Brighton, 1974); M. Bentley, Lord Salisbury’s World: Conservative Environments in Late-​Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2001). See also A. Jones, The Politics of Reform 1884 (Cambridge, 1972) and R.T. Shannon, The Age of Salisbury 1881–​1902 (London, 1996). 18  Cooke and Vincent, The Governing Passion.

Tories and Conservatives    311 world, be despoiled by the likes of the Jack Cade of radicalism, the Birmingham demagogue Joseph Chamberlain.19 Untroubled by any supposed demands of consistency, Salisbury was happy to work with ‘Radical Joe’ when it turned out he was willing to split the Liberals over the question of home rule. It was one answer to the question of how to persuade an increasingly democratic electorate to vote Tory, and a better one, from Salisbury’s point of view, than the opportunist ‘Tory democracy’ slogans of his maverick Chancellor, Lord Randolph Churchill. In the short term, the identification of the Conservatives—​and their new Unionist allies—​with the patriotic interest played well in an age of popular imperialism and suburbanization.20 Support for the Conservatives was a sign of aspiration and even social success for the suburban bourgeoisie; those who were coming to have an economic and social stake in the prosperity of Britain in the age of high imperialism were not persuaded that voting for Gladstone and his Irish home rule allies was the way to preserve it.21 The Salisbury/​Unionist Coalition, as it became after their success in the 1895 election, provided a rallying point for Conservatives, with imperialism and patriotism as its positive aspect and a defence of the realm and the status quo as its equally powerful negative one. But the Unionist ascendancy was based on insecure foundations.22 Salisbury was content to do as little as possible on the domestic front. His main interest was in running foreign policy, and his Conservatism resembled Derby’s instincts rather than those of Peel, but the coalition with Chamberlain, Devonshire, and the Unionists in 1895 demanded its price. Salisbury used the rhetoric of that demagogic imperialism known as ‘Jingoism’ when necessary, but disliked it. Chamberlain believed in it and had a wider vision about how to preserve British power in an age of challenges to it from Germany, Russia, and America; this brought him into collision with Salisbury.23 Salisbury disbelieved in Chamberlain’s nostrum of an alliance with another power, and he was profoundly uneasy with his activism in South Africa. No doubt all these things were better than Radical Joe pressing for increased taxes at home to pay for pensions and health care, but they were a trial; when they led to the Boer War, they became something more than that. That Chamberlain fits so badly into Blake’s narrative is not surprising, and despite the work done on him we still get the best idea of where he fits from the Garvin and Amery multi-​volume biography, which tells us more about the history of the Conservative

19  P. Smith, ed., Lord Salisbury on Politics: A Selection from his Articles in the Quarterly Review 1860–​ 1883 (Cambridge, 1972). 20 Shannon, Age of Salisbury; J. Ramsden, An Appetite for Power: A History of the Conservative Party since 1830 (London, 1998); J. Charmley, A History of Conservative Politics since 1830 (London, 2008). 21  E.H.H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party 1880–​1914 (London, 1995); M. Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism 1886–​1914 (Edinburgh, 1996). 22 Green, Crisis; J. Ramsden, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin 1902–​1940 (London, 1978); R.A. Rempell, Unionists Divided (Newton Abbot, 1972). 23  J. Charmley, Splendid Isolation? Britain and the Balance of Power 1874–​1914 (London, 1999).

312   John Charmley party in the first half of the twentieth century than it does about its subject.24 For Garvin and Amery, as for two generations of Imperialists, Joe offered a vision where Salisbury and his heir, Balfour, offered caution and inaction. The young Winston Churchill, who was no admirer of Salisbury, was not alone in his generation in seeing the ‘old man’ as a dead weight.25 Salisbury’s Derbyite instincts told him that since most change was for the worse, it was in the Conservative interest that there should be as little of it as possible. But young men who saw the world was changing—​and for the worse, in terms of the challenges to Britain’s position—​saw Joe as the man of drive and vision who was both aware of the problems and searching for a solution. It was his solution that would divide his new party quite as effectively as home rule had divided his old one: Baldwin was right to say that a ‘dynamic force’ in politics was a dangerous thing. The Unionist ascendancy owed much to the divided nature of the Liberal opposition and its failure to find a cause around which to unite and fight back. Chamberlain’s proposed solution to the challenges facing Britain managed the remarkable feat of simultaneously providing such a cause while splitting Unionism. Divining that the future lay with large economic blocs—​America and the uniting of Germany were the two examples which came quickest to his mind—​Chamberlain wanted to turn that chance assemblage of territories known as the British empire into Britain’s version.26 An advocate of Imperial Federation—​he envisaged an Imperial Parliament at Westminster with representatives from across the empire sitting there—​ he saw what he called ‘tariff reform’ as the necessary first step. Monies collected from a tariff on other imports would, he argued, also allow the Unionists to provide old age pensions and other welfare benefits without any increase in domestic taxes—​the foreigner would pay. Chamberlain’s crusade captured the hearts and minds of a generation of young activists such as Leo Amery, George Lloyd, and Alfred Milner—​here was something a man could get behind.27 But, as much as it attracted some, it repelled many Unionists; the young Winston Churchill crossed the floor to defend free trade, and in so doing joined a newly united Liberal party. Not even the sophistically elegant efforts of Salisbury’s nephew and successor as leader, Arthur Balfour, could stop the government looking like the divided and quarrelling mess it had become by 1905, and it was duly punished at the general election. Opposition after 1906 proved to be a difficult experience, shading into something almost traumatic after the 1910 elections.28 As leader of the Opposition, Balfour was happy to use the Unionist majority in the Lords to veto Liberal legislation, and the narrowness of the margin of defeat in the two elections of 1910 suggested to the more radical

24 

J.A. Garvin, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain: Vols I–​III (3 vols, London, 1933–​5), and J. Amery, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain: Vols IV–​VI (3 vols, London, 1951–​69). These should be supplemented by P.T. Marsh, Joseph Chamberlain (New Haven and London, 1994). 25  J. Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory (London, 1992), pp. 21, 43, 77. 26 Ramsden, The Age of Balfour; Rempel, Unionists Divided. 27  J. Charmley, Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire (London, 1987). 28  G. Phillips, The Diehards: Aristocratic Society in Edwardian England (London, 1979).

Tories and Conservatives    313 Unionists that their policy was paying off and what they needed was a tougher leader, which they found in Andrew Bonar Law. So, far from being some sort of backwoodsman’s attempt to turn back the clock, the Unionist opposition to Asquith’s Parliament Act, which was designed to curb the powers of the Lords, was a calculated attempt by the most active forces in the party to prevent what they saw as a constitutional coup d’état. The election results had left the Liberal dependent on the support of the Irish home rulers, who enacted the inevitable price for that support; without the Lords’ veto powers, this sordid parliamentary deal (from the Unionist point of view) would destroy the Union. Bonar Law was both the most and least ideal leader the party could have had at that juncture.29 A fervent believer in the Union and in tariff reform, he nailed the party’s colours firmly to both. This suited the Liberals as both causes rallied the fissiparous elements of the party against them. Law’s ostentatious attempts to bluff Asquith with the threat that the Unionists would back paramilitary forces in Ireland opposing home rule were so convincing that, to this day, historians are unclear how far they were bluff; what is clear, however, is that they did not deter Asquith. The country was spared the possible spectacle of a Conservative and Unionist party backing the forces of armed opposition to His Majesty’s Government only by the advent of the Great War.30 The War not only saved the party from the mess it was getting itself into, but also helped create a situation from which it would reap much profit—​even if that was not clear by 1918. As the ‘patriotic party’, the Unionists were, unlike the Liberals, united in favour of prosecuting the war; lacking the Liberal shibboleth of a devotion to individual liberty, they could watch the Liberals splinter over the issue of conscription without going that way themselves. There are few general rules in British politics, but one of them is that whoever is in charge of the country at the start of a major war will suffer politically from the country’s failure to prosecute the early stages of one with any degree of military success. Asquith’s attempt to create a broader base for national government in early 1915 let Bonar Law and the Unionists back into office for the first time in a decade, and Asquith’s refusal to serve under Lloyd George in late 1916 led to the sort of Liberal split from which the Unionists could expect to profit. But the creation of a mass electorate by the 1918 Reform Act, and the fact that the Unionists had not managed to win an election without external support or a coalition since 1874, was not conducive to the possibility of this being the time to go it alone.31 The decision to stay with the radical Welshman who ‘won the war’, Lloyd George, paid off handsomely at the general election of 1918. Disraeli (who never managed, despite great effort, to get his party into one) said that the country did not love coalitions, but he might have been more accurate if he had said that political parties did not like them once the occasion which had brought

29  R. Blake, The Unknown Prime Minister: The Life and Times of Andrew Bonar Law (London, 1955) still holds the field. 30 Ramsden, Age of Balfour; Ramsden, An Appetite for Power. 31  J. Stubbs, ‘The Impact of the Great War on the Conservative Party’, in G. Peele and C. Cook, eds., The Politics of Reappraisal 1918–​1939 (London, 1975); K.O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition 1918–​1922 (Oxford, 1979).

314   John Charmley them into being had passed. Sharing the spoils of office with a variety of Liberals when the Unionists had 333 seats was always going to become a strain on the party, and as the Coalition got into trouble at home and abroad, found itself mired in allegations of corruption, and seemed unable to win seats at by-​elections, the strain grew. The crisis over Chanak in October 1922 which almost led Britain into a war with Turkey was the proximate cause of a vote of no confidence in the Coalition that was called at the Carlton Club. The Unionist leadership opted to ignore their followers, but Bonar Law, who had stood aside, agreed to come back and lead the party—​as it happened, to a clear victory in the general election which followed.32 That should have settled matters for the next five years. Had it done so, that would have allowed time for the former leaders and the party to bury the hatchet—​perhaps in the back of the nascent Labour party, which now looked set to become the official opposition. But that did not happen. Law turned out to be fatally ill and stood down in May 1923, far too soon to allow Chamberlain to be a candidate for the leadership. Lord Curzon expected the King to call for him, but the choice went to one of those who had spoken most strongly against the Coalition—​Stanley Baldwin. In such a manner did the most successful leader of the Conservative party before Margaret Thatcher come to power.33 The Second World War would cast a long shadow for historians of the Conservative party, and it was not until the 1980s and the pioneering work of Phillip Williamson that Baldwin received his due;34 he was easy to underestimate, and historians did, as so often, the easy thing. It is easy to see why. One of his first acts after becoming leader was to call an entirely unnecessary general election on the issue of tariff reform, which he proceeded to lose, letting Labour into office. His 1924–​9 government ended in electoral defeat, letting Labour in, and, having made his name by helping to destroy one coalition, he ended his career by creating another, which saw him out until he retired in 1937 and lasted until 1940. But in the Churchillian legend of the ‘wasted years’, Baldwin became the man who had not rearmed and who had failed to see and prevent the rise of Hitler. His very virtues now became vices—​so it is as well to be reminded of what they were.35 Like a later leader, David Cameron, Baldwin gained a reputation as a man whose natural home was the last ditch, coming to life only when his own inaction seemed to have placed him in a situation where crisis loomed. There was much in this—​but not everything. Baldwin shared with Cameron that quality for which Napoleon is said to have looked in his generals—​luck (at least until the very end). He was lucky that the Liberals failed to reunite, lucky that Asquith got the blame for putting Labour’s MacDonald into power in 1923, lucky not to be prime minister when Wall Street crashed, and lucky that MacDonald was happy to head up the National Government in 1931. But luck only goes 32 

A. Taylor, ‘Andrew Bonar Law’, in Clarke et al., eds., British Conservative Leaders, pp. 161–​7 1. P. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999). 34 Williamson, Baldwin; also P. Williamson, The Modernisation of Conservative Politics: The Diaries and Letters of William Bridgeman 1904–​1935 (London, 1988). 35 Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory. 33 

Tories and Conservatives    315 so far. Baldwin was a shrewd operator: shrewd in eschewing the right-​wing view that Labour was a socialist party; shrewd in spotting its essential reformism; shrewd enough to spot that the way to win over Churchill and Liberals more worried about socialism than tariffs was to offer the former high office; shrewd enough, too, to spot that as long as he could hold on to the centre ground, a Tory right led by Churchill on the reactionary cause of India would not break away from the party, and shrewd enough to make Neville Chamberlain his man of business and dauphin. A man with such instincts might be forgiven for not working too hard—​that was what Chamberlain, Churchill, and others were for. What Baldwin was supremely good at was projecting an image of himself as your average pipe-​smoking avuncular Englishman—​a trick Harold Wilson would borrow to good effect. That Baldwin was far from average, not terribly avuncular, and partly a Celt, mattered not a jot—​he was the first British politician to master the black art of projecting himself via the mass medium of the day. Where the excitable Churchill would accuse Labour of being a bunch of communists, and wanted to fight and win a class war during the General Strike of 1926, Baldwin took an altogether more emollient line which would set the tone for future Conservative leaders before Mrs Thatcher. He would have preferred to have avoided the Strike, and once the unions were defeated tried not to rub it in; he was personally polite to the Labour leaders, and did not, as his successor Chamberlain would, beat them up verbally in the Commons.36 He was also averse to the kind of imperial policy favoured by his own right wing, preferring to follow the advice of the man he appointed as Viceroy of India in 1925, Lord Irwin, the future Lord Halifax, who wanted to pursue a line of accommodating Indian and colonial opinion where possible. To Churchill and the Imperialists this looked like appeasing Gandhi and nationalism; to Baldwin and Irwin it was the best way of avoiding replicating the problems attending the end of British rule in southern Ireland. Baldwin’s moderation in all these things was a trial to his opponents in his own party, and between him losing the election in the summer of 1929 and the summer of 1931 they made several attempts to ease him from the leadership, increasingly helped by the press magnates Beaverbrook and Rothermere.37 It was precisely the qualities which made these men oppose him that fit him so well for the great crisis of 1931. Unable to either balance the books or carry through the cuts in expenditure needed to do so, MacDonald’s Labour government reached the end of the road. But when MacDonald tendered his resignation, the King asked if he would stay on to lead a National Government designed to keep Britain on the Gold Standard; it was a temporary expedient to solve a particular problem, but, having failed to solve the problem (Britain came off the Gold Standard), it turned into something approximating to a permanent fix to the political problems of the day.38 36 

Ibid., p. 232. S. Ball, Baldwin and the Conservative Party: The Crisis of 1929–​1931 (London, 1988). 38  D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London, 1977); R. Self, ed., The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters: Volume 3, The Heir Apparent, 1928–​1933 (Aldershot, 2002). 37 

316   John Charmley The National Government was sustained by a Conservative majority in the House, but, rather like the Coalition between 2010 and 2015, it provided a Liberal–​Conservative leader with the perfect excuse (and majority) to ignore his own right wing. The considerable Tory opposition to greater home rule for India, led by Churchill, utterly failed to make the sort of impact it might have done on a purely Tory government, as Baldwin let it be known that if the India Bill failed then he would have to go, and who could tell what an election would produce.39 By such tactics the Coalition frustrated those on the right, without driving them out of the party. The fate of Sir Oswald Mosley’s New Party and his British Union of Fascists offered no encouragement to anyone of the right to go it alone, and while it did not always please the more liberal Tories such as Harold Macmillan, Baldwin’s leadership managed to anchor the party firmly in the middle ground. For all the later criticism directed at the rearmament policy, the Chancellor, Chamberlain, knew how close to economic disaster the country had come, and was not of the opinion that further weakening the economy by spending too much on defence would help anyone. The real criticism that historians have fastened onto the government is not Churchill’s bogus one, but the charge that it could not make up its mind about where the money would be best spent—​but then, that is a criticism always easy to make in hindsight.40 The National Government won another convincing majority in 1935, and Baldwin took over from the increasingly senile MacDonald just in time to have to deal with the constitutional crisis raised by the desire of the new King, Edward VIII, to marry an American divorcee. Baldwin masterminded his abdication and the succession of George VI, and retired in a blaze of praise from the press and his peers. If there ever was a Conservative leader who fitted Lord Blake’s bill, it was Baldwin: a natural moderate, he encouraged liberal young Conservatives, kept the right wing at bay without losing them, and, with the help of Chamberlain and local Conservative Associations, came close to making the Conservatives the natural party of government. Ironically, it was Neville Chamberlain, a former Liberal Unionist, who would disrupt the Baldwinian consensus. In part, this was the result of his personality. Chamberlain was never a man to suffer fools gladly and, like many such, had a wide definition of what constituted a fool—​which included the Labour front bench, as well as those in his own party who opposed him.41 Chamberlain gave British defence and foreign policy the drive and direction it had lacked under Baldwin. Unfortunately for him, his assumption that there was something he could give Hitler which would satisfy the German dictator turned out to be false. In retrospect, that failure looked inevitable—​not least when Churchill wrote that retrospective. Chamberlain’s Cabinet forced his hand in September 1939, and, reluctantly, he declared war on Germany. His hopes that ‘Hitler had missed the bus’ when spring came without a German offensive proved as frail as his war leadership when Hitler launched 39 Charmley, Lord Lloyd, pp. 170–​88.

40 Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory, chs 29–​31: R. Self, ed., The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters: Volume 4, The Downing Street Years, 1934–​1940 (Aldershot, 2005). 41  In addition to Charmley and Self, D. Dutton, Neville Chamberlain (London, 2001).

Tories and Conservatives    317 his blitzkrieg in May. Even as this was happening, Chamberlain, in whom the Commons had lost confidence, was resigning, to be replaced by Churchill. Chamberlain fell because, popular as he remained with his own party, he was cordially hated by Labour, whose leaders refused to be part of a new government of national unity designed to prosecute the war more effectively. Churchill depended greatly on Chamberlain’s support, not least since the latter remained leader of the Conservative party which cordially distrusted him. Tory MPs cheered Chamberlain to the rafters and pointedly did not do the same for Churchill on the first day he appeared in the Commons as Prime Minister.42 Chamberlain kept control of the important Cabinet committees and ensured his party secured important posts; his successor as Conservative leader did neither of these things. Churchill was the obvious successor when Chamberlain fell fatally ill during October 1940. His relationship with his party was a poor one. He regarded many of them as ‘filthy Munichois’ for their support of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, which had culminated in the 1938 Munich agreement that partitioned Czechoslovakia, and he distrusted colleagues like Lord Halifax and R.A. (Rab) Butler who had been its architects. He had no friends in the senior ranks of the party—​even Anthony Eden, whose career he revived when he made him Foreign Secretary in 1941, was not a close friend—​and Eden’s views on the Conservative party were much the same as Churchill’s.43 Neither Churchill nor Eden (who was recognized as his most likely successor as Tory leader) paid any attention to party management.44 Insofar as either of them thought about the post-​war future, they seem to have assumed that it would look much like 1918—​with a coalition under a popular war leader winning the election handsomely. This view was shared, in a general way, by the Labour leader Clement Attlee and most of his front-​bench colleagues. It would certainly have suited the Conservatives to have continued the Coalition, but in October 1944 the Labour party conference voted against doing so. Those who had prophesied that Churchill would sweep the country were proven spectacularly wrong by the 1945 general election, which brought Labour to power with the first parliamentary majority in its history.45 The reasons for this are various and, as they amounted to the creation of a consensus which would dominate British politics until the late 1970s, are worth noting. The ethos in which the war had been fought, and one of its allies, were crucial here. The inter-​war Conservative party had emphasized individual liberty and the importance of a small state, and identified the USSR as a menace to this. But during the war the latter had become a valued ally, and Britain had become the most heavily mobilized state in Europe. Not unreasonably, the bomb-​scarred and battered British people wondered

42 Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory, chs 32–​4. 43 

Ibid., ch. 32; R. Blake, ‘How Churchill Became Prime Minister’, in R. Blake and W.R. Lewis, eds., Churchill (London, 1993). 44  D. Carlton, Anthony Eden: A Biography (London, 1981); D.R. Thorpe, Eden: The Life and Times of Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon, 1897–​1977 (London, 2003). 45  P. Addison, The Road to 1945 (London, 1977).

318   John Charmley whether the methods which had brought victory in war might not be deployed to finally create the homes fit for heroes they had been promised after the last war. The Conservative ‘One Nation’ vision remained what it had always been—​a society stratified by class in which, to be sure, it was possible for the hard-​working individual to prosper; however, the very make-​up of the parliamentary party showed that the Conservative ideal was still one in which class counted more than talent. Labour seemed to be promising a more egalitarian and fairer Britain in which those who had made so many sacrifices to win the war would receive their reward. Churchill’s Coalition had already pointed the way towards a better Britain with promises about a National Health Service, via the Beveridge Report, and free education for all via the Butler Education Act of 1944; of course, the Conservative candidates in 1945 stood on this platform, but when it came to deciding whether to trust them or Labour to deliver a more egalitarian Britain, the latter won the vote.46 The mythology of the 1945 defeat’s aftermath has gone through two distinct stages, both of which show up in the different editions of Blake’s history. The first, dominant in the first edition, is of a liberal Conservative takeover of the party under the direction of Rab Butler, in which it adapted to ‘Attlee’s consensus’ by accepting the welfare state, nationalization, and a more egalitarian Britain and modernized its local associations, refreshing the pool from which it took MPs by opening nomination up to those without private means. This view was challenged in the 1970s and one sees traces of that in the final editions of Blake’s book, although the author himself never accepted the Thatcherite version of events which portrayed the period as a sell-​out to socialism and appeasement of the unions which ended in failure and, of course, the Thatcher revolution.47 At the height of Thatcherism it was the fashion to denigrate Butler and Macmillan as the precursors of Heath; in post-​Brexit Britain, this fashion has faded. Few Conservatives hanker after novelty, and whenever a type of Conservatism is labelled as ‘new’, it usually indicates a need to repackage it to meet changing circumstances. That was certainly true of Butler. The fashion for treating the 1930s as the ‘devil’s decade’ and focusing on the economic dislocation of parts of the North has obscured the growing economic prosperity of southern England, and the continuity between the domestic policies of the Baldwin era and those of the post-​war party. Butler’s ideas did not spring unbidden from his own head; they were a pragmatic response to the Labour victory and a development of pre-​war ideas towards the end of winning the next election—​and they worked.48 There was nothing in the paternalistic conservatism of Baldwin which found it difficult to accept the welfare state or the need for higher public spending to secure high levels of employment, just as there was nothing in the patriotic socialism of the Labour party which made it difficult to accept the need for a nuclear deterrent and membership of NATO; that there were elements in both parties which decried these things as ‘selling out’ simply illustrates the wide spectrum of opinion 46 

R. Hermiston, All Behind You: Winston Churchill’s Great Coalition (London, 2016). A. Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (London, 1995). 48  A. Howard, RAB: The Life of RA Butler (London, 1987). 47 

Tories and Conservatives    319 both main parties contain. A commitment to full employment and the welfare state and a rhetoric to that effect, along with some MPs who looked like they meant it, put the Conservatives in a good place from which to benefit, as they had in 1874, from the inevitable exhaustion of a great reforming government of the Left. By 1950, after a decade in power for some of its leaders, Labour looked tired, and, having carried through its programme, lacked new ideas with which to enthuse an electorate suffering from post-​war austerity. It was easy for the Conservatives to call for a ‘bonfire of controls’, an end to the restrictions of rationing, and an easing of bureaucratic controls over the economy. They narrowly failed to eject Labour in 1950, but managed it a year later.49 However much it may have come to be criticized in the Thatcher era, the emphasis on maintaining social harmony and industrial peace ushered in a period of unparalleled prosperity for the mass of the British people, who saw record numbers of council houses being built and record levels of employment, helping to fuel a consumer boom which even contemporaries called ‘the age of affluence’. It was an era which seemed to call for nothing more than a steady hand on the domestic tiller and, after the drama of the Suez crisis, the dismantling of an empire Britain neither wanted nor could afford; it was easier for a Conservative government to do this than it would have been for a Labour one. It was a sign of the success of the Conservative policy that the party could campaign in 1959 on the slogan ‘Life’s better under the Conservatives. Don’t let Labour ruin it’, and win decisively.50 It was only when the post-​war economic system began to fail that some Conservatives who had supported it fully at the time discovered that it had been wrong. In government, Conservatism has tended to define itself as what Conservative governments do, and however necessary some Thatcherites found it to denounce what the Macmillan–​Heath governments had done, that was simply part of the ideological battle of the 1980s and should be noted as such. The difficulty for the Macmillan–​Heath line was that even before the party lost power in 1964, there were clear signs of economic malaise, and six years of Labour government under the wily Harold Wilson did not suggest that the usual Keynesian levers were working. It had been fears of economic decline which had pushed Macmillan and Heath towards the Common Market as a possible solution—​neither of them had any idea how much trouble they were storing up for their successors. Had the UK entered the Common Market in the early 1960s, the terms would have been better, and so would the economic climate, and it might well have delivered some of the things which its advocates wanted; the tragedy was that de Gaulle’s veto delayed that until 1972, by which time the rules were set and the first major economic downturn of the post-​war era was imminent. This was, nonetheless, the one positive success of the Heath government of 1970–​4. Except for Sir Edward Heath himself and a few loyalists, no one has seriously attempted to claim that his government was a success. But that is not the same as

49  50 

A. Seldon, Churchill’s Indian Summer (London, 1981). A. Horne, Harold Macmillan: Vol. II 1957–​1986 (London, 1989).

320   John Charmley accepting the Thatcherite version of it as an unmitigated failure. Heath was the last Conservative Prime Minister (before Mrs May) to believe in the idea of national economic planning, and his attempts to use the levers of the state to control prices and incomes and to secure the necessary co-operation of the trade unions were logical in the context of the post-​war settlement; however, their failure revealed the extent to which that settlement was falling apart. As it failed, so Heath failed—​which paved the way for what, at the time, seemed a dangerous if not doomed experiment: the first woman leader of a major political party, in the form of Mrs Margaret Thatcher. It became part of the Thatcherite historical method to contrast their heroine with Heath. However much that works in terms of emphasizing which of the two possessed the better leadership qualities, it is less useful than its proponents suppose in distinguishing types of Conservatism. Heath saw the state as being useful in delivering economic and social policy, and there is no evidence that, as long as that seemed a viable policy, Mrs Thatcher disagreed with it. She did, after all, serve in Conservative Cabinets and shadow Cabinets which subscribed to just that view. It was the evident failure of the accepted orthodoxy to deliver the results it had once delivered which sent the supremely pragmatic Mrs Thatcher off in search of other methods of governing. Historians have spent much time on the intellectual underpinnings of Thatcherism, not least because it is rare for a Conservative leader to have intellectual underpinnings, but as Charles Moore’s biography shows, Mrs Thatcher was a good deal more pragmatic, and less ideological, than her own version of events (or that of her admirers) was willing to admit. At the start of the 1979 general election, she declared: ‘The Old Testament prophets didn’t merely say: “Brothers, I want a consensus.” They said: “This is my faith and vision. This is what I passionately believe. If you believe it too, then come with me.”’51 To the surprise of the liberal intelligentsia, that was precisely what ‘they’ did; they went on to do so again in 1983 and 1987, and it was only an internal revolt which stopped her winning a fourth term in office. The initial expectation that a woman of her type would fail to appeal to the electorate (an expectation held within her own party as well as on the opposite side of the House) would give way across the next decade first to a feeling she was undefeatable, and finally to one that she was unbearable. At the heart of her success was that she was economically liberal and socially conservative. Her economic liberalism allowed her to abandon the old, failing native industries without worrying too much about the consequences, as she believed that the free market would take care of those. This allowed her to be, simultaneously, the Prime Minister who eventually presided over an economic recovery and the woman who destroyed whole communities in, for example, the mining areas of Yorkshire and South Wales. For those who had wondered whether the country was becoming ungovernable thanks to the actions of militant trade unions, she provided the definitive answer in facing down the National Union of Miners during the strike

51 

M. Thatcher, The Path to Power (London, 1995), p. 448.

Tories and Conservatives    321 of 1984–​5.52 That, along with her firm (and successful) determination to take back the Falklands in 1982, cemented both her reputation and her political position. For most of her time as Prime Minister, she even managed to keep the divisive issue of ‘Europe’ under control—​although it was, at least in part, her decision to defy conventional economic wisdom over the single European currency and further political integration which helped consolidate the opposition to her within her own party. Mrs Thatcher’s economic liberalism was an object of distrust to many traditional Conservatives; despite her mockery of them as ‘Wets’, they had a point, and it was one which eventually told against both her and her legacy and helped make the party, in the words of Theresa May, the ‘nasty party’. At the heart of conservatism lies a profound suspicion of human nature and of its capacity for goodness; shorn of that, it can become little more than a set of excuses for the status quo, where the rich and powerful dominate because they can. The economic liberalism favoured by Mrs Thatcher had, at its heart, a belief that individual wants could be provided by market forces. So when the aged Harold Macmillan, as Lord Stockton, spoke of Thatcher ‘selling the family silver’, he spoke in the authentic accents of an Anglican conservatism foreign to the nonconformist individualism of Mrs Thatcher, which saw success as a sign of individual effort and failure as a sign of the want of the same.53 As long as three conditions obtained, Thatcher continued to win. These were, in order of importance: as long as Labour continued to be a divided party led by men more interested in rhetoric and in-​fighting than in governing; as long as militant unions appeared to be a threat to parliamentary democracy; and as long as her own parliamentary party felt that she was, in her own phrase, a ‘winner’. By 1989 the second and third of these conditions no longer applied, and with the Cold War safely won and her position in the opinion polls falling because of the adverse public response to her reform of local government funding (the so-​called ‘poll tax’), she finally faced a real challenge from within her own party. There was an inevitability in the fact that, when the challenge came, it was over the European Union. As an economic liberal, Thatcher had agreed to the expansion of the Single Market, but as a social conservative she remained fiercely opposed to moves towards the ‘closer political union’ to which the European Union was committed. In November 1989, she had made it clear there would be no chance of Britain agreeing to further measures of integration such as joining the nascent European monetary exchange, which prompted her long-​time Chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, to resign and to launch a critique of her methods as leader in a speech to the House which was as surprising as it was effective. It triggered a challenge from her long-​time critic, the old Heathite Michael Heseltine, who had resigned from the Cabinet in 1986. Although he failed to muster enough votes to defeat her, she failed to garner enough to avoid another round of voting. Alan Clark’s diary described the spectacular series of interviews with ministers who owed their careers to her, at which nearly every one refused to give her 52  C. Moore, Margaret Thatcher, The Authorized Biography: Vol. II Everything She Wants (London, 2015), pp. 136–​82 for a gripping account. 53  E. Filby, God and Mrs Thatcher (London, 2015), pp. xii–​xxiii.

322   John Charmley unconditional support. She knew it was over and stood down, going with dignity after a performance in the Commons which had even her veteran critic, the Labour MP Dennis Skinner, wondering why her party was getting rid of her.54 That would be a much heard sentiment across the next two decades. What one commentator dubbed ‘the great matricide’55 would help determine the course of Conservative politics into the new century. Antipathy from Thatcher’s many admirers ensured that Heseltine’s challenge would not result in his wearing the crown, and he had to be content to act as number two to the hitherto obscure John Major, a man for whom the saying ‘risen without trace’ might have been coined. In the face of a poor Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, Major was able to win the 1992 election, but it turned out to be a pyrrhic victory. A narrow majority meant that the Eurosceptics (or ‘Bastards’, as Major called them in an unguarded moment when his microphone was left on after an interview) made his life a misery on any issue involving greater European union. It had once been said that loyalty was the secret weapon of the Conservative party; it was one they appeared to have misplaced under Major and his successors. The timing could not have been worse, as it coincided with Labour finally finding a leader pragmatic enough to adapt the economic liberalism of Thatcherism to run alongside a social liberalism more attuned to contemporary mores on what became known as lifestyle issues. For all the contemporary wisdom that the issue was ‘the economy, stupid’, the shambolic Major government was unable to rely on an economic recovery to save it from the consequences of its own failures, and against a resurgent Labour under Tony Blair, effectively peddling a more competent and socially liberal conservatism, the Tories went down to their worst ever defeat, with only 165 seats compared to Labour’s 418. Blair’s comment that ‘a new dawn has broken, has it not?’ marked the beginning of a long eclipse for the ‘nasty party’. One of the marks of a political hegemony is that it forces opposition parties to trim in the direction of the hegemon. It took Labour 16 years before it was successfully able to present itself as a less corrupt and more economically efficient manager of the British state than the Conservatives. Blair was able to present himself, convincingly, as the heir to Thatcher’s economic globalism, while providing a more modern take on social matters. It was a convincing mixture which survived two more general elections and the Iraq War. Just as Labour had struggled to come to terms with Thatcher, so it was with the Tories and Blair. It avoided the mistake Labour had made in 1980 of choosing an incompetent leader. William Hague was one of the best orators in the House, and soon proved himself equal to giving Blair a run for his money there. But the electorate had had enough of the Tories, and Hague struggled to get a hearing outside the House. The reduction of the party to its core inevitably played into the hands of the Eurosceptics, and Hague made a virtue out of necessity by playing up his support for sterling and opposing Britain’s entry into

54  55 

A. Clark, Diaries (London, 1993), pp. 357–​67. G. Wheatcroft, The Strange Death of Tory Britain (London, 2005).

Tories and Conservatives    323 the euro. This might have paid dividends politically if Labour had gone in that direction, but as it did not, there was no dividend. For all his talent, Hague made no impression on the Labour majority, gaining precisely one more seat at the 2001 general election. This time the party did make the same mistake Labour had made in 1980, with the membership electing one of their own, the Eurosceptic Iain Duncan Smith, rather than the alternative, the immensely experienced Ken Clarke, whose pro-​European views made him unacceptable to the party faithful. Fortunately for the Conservatives, Duncan Smith’s inadequacies, which included the inability to deal with Blair in the Commons or to present a coherent recovery plan to the party, led to the first sign that the Conservatives were recovering their old appetite for power. In October 2003, a motion of no confidence against the hapless leader saw 90 MPs voting against him, with only 75 thinking it a good idea to continue with failure. Declining the opportunity to offer the party membership a choice of leader given its failure last time, the party settled on the experienced Michael Howard, who led it to success in the 2004 European elections and managed to win 33 more seats at the 2005 general election. Howard had led the Tories out of the wilderness, but he was too right-​wing and too socially conservative to complete the adaptation to being heir to Blair—​who, with three general election victories under his belt, was beginning to face problems not dissimilar to those faced by Mrs Thatcher after her third victory in a row. The party’s determination to regain power was clear in the membership’s decision to vote for the untried David Cameron, a telegenic performer whose ease in communicating with the wider public invited obvious comparisons with Blair. He and his fellow “Cameroons’ set about a ‘modernizing’ project, and he styled himself as the ‘heir to Blair’.56 It had been Theresa May who, at the 2002 party conference, had helped set the tone for what would follow, when she told loyalists that the party had earned itself a reputation as the ‘nasty party’ and needed to set about losing it.57 In this aim, Cameron was aided by the departure of Blair in October 2007, succeeded by the dour figure of Gordon Brown, who provided Cameron with opportunities for point-​scoring which he had lacked under Blair. But just when it seemed as though Cameron might be able to catch the Labour party swimming and run off with Blair’s clothes, the great economic crash of 2008 threw everyone’s political calculations into the melting pot. The main theme of Blake’s history was that the Conservatives were, at heart, a pragmatic party rather than an ideological one, and he shared the distrust of his type of Tory for Mrs Thatcher’s type of liberal economics.58 Cameron marked a return to the sort of pragmatism admired by Blake, and if he was not able to secure a parliamentary majority in the 2010 general election, he was able to secure a majority of seats in the Commons and go into coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Where commentators had talked about ‘Thatcherism’ or even ‘Blairism’, no one would talk about ‘Cameronism’. Although it would be his successor, Theresa May, who said ‘I don’t have an “ism” other 56 

The Times, 5 Oct. 2005 (Andrew Pierce’s report of the party conference). The Guardian, 8 Oct. 2002 (Michael White’s report of the party conference). 58  Personal conversations between 1985 and 2000. 57 

324   John Charmley than Conservatism’,59 the same could have been said of Cameron himself. He continued the economic liberalism of Thatcher and Blair, but combined it with the sort of social liberalism favoured by the latter and rejected by the former. The effects of this in a time of austerity were more far-​reaching than anyone realized at the time. The calculation was the usual pragmatic one:  win voters from the centre-​left and those of the right would stay, as they had in the 1930s for the most part, because there was nowhere else for them to go. But with Labour committed to a diluted Blairism under Brown’s successor, Ed Miliband—​which failed to win the centre ground where his tanks were parked—​Cameron would win an unexpected victory in the 2015 general election, which would turn out to be a pyrrhic one that revealed the fault lines created by the attempt to modernize the party. As Blake realized, Conservatism is as much about social milieu and cultural inclination as it is about politics, and in reaching out to social liberals with policies such as gay marriage, Cameron’s ‘virtue signalling’ to the left gave a message to social conservatives which they received with displeasure: ‘The reactionary right saw it as an ultra-​cosmopolitan project symbolized by Mr Cameron’s support of gay marriage and short-​lived dalliance with environmentalism.’60 For some time, a populist tide had been rising—​‘an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism’.61 The feeling that the European Union and other non-​directly elected bodies were usurping the function of Parliament was cleverly channelled by a Eurosceptic movement which was also able to appeal to those traditional Labour voters who felt alienated by its leader’s social liberalism. The long liberal consensus seemed to be dying. Economic liberalism had deprived large sections of the working classes of their traditional stable employment, and social liberalism, not least immigration on a large scale, had changed their communities. Something of all of this fed into the ‘Brexit’ result which shocked the commentariat on 24 June 2016. The new Conservative leader, Theresa May, appealed to an older conservatism which rejected the loss of community which resulted from the cult of individual self-​gratification, and sought to speak to the need for a national sense of belonging. Some called it ‘Red Toryism’, but it was no more than a Conservative adaptation to changing circumstance by the evocation of eternal verities. Lord Blake would have recognized it well.

Further Reading S. Ball, Portrait of a Party: The Conservative Party in Britain 1918–​1945 (Oxford, 2013). R. Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Major (London, 1997). J. Charmley, A History of Conservative Politics since 1830 (London, 2008). C. Clarke, T.S. James, T. Bale, and P. Diamond, eds., British Conservative Leaders (London, 2015). J. Ramsden, An Appetite for Power: A History of the Conservative Party since 1830 (London, 1998). 59 

The Guardian, 23 Nov. 2014 (Article by Vanessa Thorpe). The Guardian, 30 Dec. 2016 (Editorial). 61  J. O’Sullivan, ‘Populism vs Post-​Democracy’, The Spectator, 31 Dec. 2016. 60 

chapter 19

The L ab ou r Pa rt y Lawrence Black

Summer 2016 will haunt Labour lore. The party’s crisis was a toxic mixture of structural causes and self-​inflicted wounds: the ‘Brexit’ victory in the EU referendum (and, in the run-​up to it, the murder of ‘Remain’-​supporting Labour MP Jo Cox), electoral collapse in Scotland, fallout from the Chilcot Iraq War Report, an internal anti-​semitism inquiry, and, above all, stasis of a leader supported by local members but opposed by the parliamentary party. This chapter gleans some insights from the disconnections between debates and uses of history within Labour, and the broader state of labour history and trajectory of academic political history. It is not pessimistic, but notes that less work identifies as ‘labour history’, even as debate about history within Labour has been vibrant, stimulated by ‘Blue Labour’ and Corbyn’s surprise 2015 election as leader.

I Judging by the weighty publications that marked Labour’s centenary in 2000, the party seemed in rude historical health.1 It was not at the crux of methodological dispute as it had been a generation before, when Eric Hobsbawm and Gareth Stedman Jones had pitted materialist and linguistic approaches against each other by applying them to Labour’s post-​1970s crisis.2 But historians’ interest—​notably in Labour’s First Century, which dealt with then novel topics such as gender, memory, and constitutional reform—​suggested it remained a vibrant site of debate. New Labour generated floods Thanks to Kit Kowol, Steven Fielding, and Emily Robinson for feedback and to David Ellis, Jon Lawrence, Ben Jackson, and Florence Sutcliffe-​Braithwaite for suggesting and supplying reading. 1  D. Tanner, P. Thane, and N. Tiratsoo, eds., Labour’s First Century (Cambridge, 2000); Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für die Geschichte der sozialen Bewegungen, vol. 27, ed. S. Berger (2002). 2  E. Hobsbawm, The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London, 1981); G. Stedman Jones, ‘Why is the Labour Party in a Mess?’, in G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1892 (Cambridge, 1983).

326   Lawrence Black of scholarship on how it governed, its language, its political economy, its foreign and cultural policy, its ideology,3 and how new it was.4 And it stimulated work, inflected by a New Labour paradigm, on earlier periods—​on charismatic, controversial leaders, or periods when the party had seemed out of touch with a New Britain.5 But in the past decade, such confidence has evaporated. Rumours of labour history’s extinction circulated.6 This was related to disappointment with New Labour, opposition to the Iraq War from 2003 onwards, the all-​too-​familiar drift into economic crisis from 2008, and loss of office in 2010. Fair to say, Blair, Brown, and Ed Miliband attracted friendly (i.e. left) fire—​from the outset, a regrouped Marxism Today derided New Labour’s language and fanciful embrace of the market.7 Internally, Roy Hattersley deplored how merit had substituted for equality or redistribution; would even revisionist Tony Crosland have found New Labour congenial?8 (Ralph) Miliband-​esque jeremiads in which Labour’s electorate bayed for a more red-​blooded party, less beholden to Parliament, were common.9 Historian Ross McKibbin was among the most trenchant critics of New Labour in the pages of the London Review of Books. Such criticism was something labour historians would recognize from the party’s past. Labour history often saw itself as an expression of the party’s mission, or failure to fulfil said mission. Labour had long possessed a sense of being ‘in tune’ with history.10 This was as true of New Labour as of more traditional mindsets—​history was a resource. Segueing academic, specialist histories and activist/​political uses of history makes for a volatile, convoluted chemistry, but one that is vital to understand the state of ‘history’ in and on the party. As Labour’s political mission took it elsewhere and labour history struggled for vitality, their divergence after 2000 seemed a more qualitative rupture. In its origins and classical form, labour history was not a singular school. It combined an interest in Labour and trade unions and engaged with social histories of the working class—​classically in the work of Labour ‘movement’ writers such as G.D.H. Cole. Its politics were a broad 3 

S. Ludlam and M. Smith, eds., Governing as New Labour (Basingstoke, 2004); C. Hay, The Political Economy of New Labour (Manchester, 1999); R. Little and M. Wickham-​Jones, eds., New Labour’s Foreign Policy (Manchester, 2000); S. Bayley, Labour Camp (London, 1998); M. Bevir, ‘New Labour: A Study in Ideology’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2 (2000), 277–​301; A. Giddens, The Third Way and Its Critics (Cambridge, 2000). 4  S. Fielding, The Labour Party: Continuity and Change in the Making of ‘New’ Labour (Basingstoke, 2003); J. Cronin, New Labour’s Pasts (London, 2004). 5  D. Howell, MacDonald’s Party (Oxford, 2002); L. Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951–​64: Old Labour, New Britain? (Basingstoke, 2003). 6  J. McIlroy, ‘Waving or Drowning? British Labour History in Troubled Waters’, Labor History, 53 (2012), 91–​119. 7  Marxism Today, Nov./​Dec. 1998. 8  R. Hattersley, ‘It’s No Longer My Party’, Observer, 24 June 2001; D. Leonard, ed., Crosland and New Labour (Basingstoke, 1998). 9  R. Seymour, ‘Bye Bye Labour’, London Review of Books, 23 Apr. 2015; D. Coates, ‘Labour after New Labour’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 15 (2013), 38–​52. 10  C. Griffiths, ‘History and the Labour Party’, in C.J.V. Griffiths, J.J. Nott, and W. Whyte, eds., Classes, Cultures and Politics (Oxford, 2011), pp. 282–​302.

The Labour Party   327 church, including Henry Pelling’s institutional focus and Ralph Miliband’s holding of Labour to a socialist standard. The lines between political activist discussion and historical writing were regularly blurred, as history was wielded to extol or attack contemporary Labour actions. The field shared a national focus and a conventional approach and source-​base, even if its subject was less established. Social history in the 1970s did bring to labour history an interest in the margins beyond the official movement. But labour historians are a dying breed. Fewer historians working on Labour politics, the working class, or collateral areas describe themselves as labour historians; most have been redeployed, or identify with other historiographical trends. It was not that Labour lacked historians among its ranks. Kenneth O. Morgan in the Lords; MPs Chris Bryant, Hywel Francis, and Gregg Mclymont; even Prime Minister Gordon Brown had labour history credentials. Nor, as the Blue Labour initiative showed, was there a lack of creative interest in the party’s past, albeit perhaps not in ways that involved or animated labour historians. The wider left offered little respite. De-industrialization continued to transform the working class, with trade union membership slowly falling. For historians who based politics on such social forces, there was little strange in the death, or dearth, of labour history. The Co-​Op announced its biggest financial loss in 2013, lost control of the Co-​ Op Bank to US hedge funds, and saw its chairman, Methodist minister and Labour councillor Paul Flowers, resign amid drug and sex scandals. The Socialist Workers’ Party, having survived the end of the Cold War and George Galloway, faced rape allegations from 2010. Its response—​a defence of Leninism and dismissal of feminism, bourgeois legality, and the internet—​made Tariq Ali’s depiction of the far left in Redemption look less satirical than had previously been the case. As capitalism fractured, taking Labour down with it, the left (excepting UK Uncut and Occupy) clung to Ken Loach’s 2013 film The Spirit of ’45.11 Labour history has lost several founding grandees and intellectual keystones: Hobsbawm; (Baron) Asa Briggs (Vice President of the Society for the Study of Labour History until 2016); and, of a younger generation, Duncan Tanner. In its wider orbit, points of reference such as Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall have also passed.12 Its key archives and institutions—​the wonderfully refurbished People’s History Museum, Women’s Library, and Ruskin College—​have encountered funding woes. The Society for the Study of Labour History’s journal, Labour History Review, descended into an internecine battle debating the recently deceased (1920–​ 91) Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), whose research boomed as UK and international archives opened after the Cold War. This produced some brilliant studies, but the fact that newly available resources were so readily seized upon might also be read as evidence of the conceptual stasis and limited ambitions of labour

11 

T. Ali, Redemption (London, 1991). J. McIlroy, ‘Asa Briggs and the Emergence of Labour History in Post-​War Britain’, in M. Taylor, ed., The Age of Asa (Basingstoke, 2015), pp. 108–​42; A. Edwards and C. Williams, eds., The Art of the Possible: Essays in Memory of Duncan Tanner (Manchester, 2015). 12 

328   Lawrence Black history.13 Attention was lavished on the CPGB and the issue (the extent of Soviet control) was reheated from past politics into a present-​day historiographical controversy. The debates colonized the journal, although new editors have rescued it from self-​destruction.14 Labour history’s difficulties are not unique to Britain—​Labnet, European labour historians’ listserv since 1997, cited diminished traffic as a reason for its 2015 closure.15 This was a crisis long in gestation. In 1994, McKibbin—​revisiting Hobsbawm’s ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’—​asked: ‘is it still possible to write Labour History?’ With its certainties and categories challenged by postmodernism, feminism, anthropology, and Marxism’s collapse, McKibbin answered equivocally, if affirmatively. Labour history needed to engage these critiques and modify its institutional industrial relations focus. But because it posed fundamental questions about power, it remained vital.16 The signs of faltering faith were apparent, however. In 1982, History Workshop had added ‘and feminist’ to ‘a journal of socialist historians’; in 1995 it dropped the subtitle altogether. In 2002, the Welsh journal Llafur morphed from Labour to People’s history.17 In 2010, Richard Price turned in a virtual obituary in reviewing the field on the Society’s fiftieth anniversary. Price found that ‘much of what I read was familiar . . . conventional and staid’. ‘If a Rip van Winkle labour historian had gone to sleep in 1980 and woken up in the labour history world of 30 years later’, Price felt, ‘it would not take long for him to get up to speed on the historiography, he would not have to learn a new vocabulary’. Compared to ‘the glory days of the 1960s and 1980s’, Price encountered ‘little, too of the conceptual experiment and debate’. Nonetheless, Price commended a ‘transnational direction for the field’. Historians should recognize how it had incubated categories—​gender, race—​that were now undercutting it, and ‘give thanks to labour history for helping pare the postmodernist crusade against social history down to size’ in the 1990s (a battle in which Price was vocal). Nonetheless, ‘the move away from materialism as a basic framework of historical analysis’ undermined ‘labour history as it had previously been practiced’ and ‘progressive politics as it had previously been known.’ ‘As class went into demise in the political world’ and ‘‘new’ Labour . . . worked to cut its ties to its earlier history’, traditional labour history’s prospects were diminished. This did not mean labour history was history, but rather ‘that it was no longer a magnet for innovative scholarship’.18 13   G. Cohen, A. Flinn, and K. Morgan, Communists and British Society, 1920–​91 (London, 2007); G. Andrews, The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle (London, 2015). In Labour History Review, 60 (1995), 123, Fielding predicted the opening of the archives would mean a flood of histories, drowning out the CPGB’s marginal status. 14  A. Campbell and J. McIlroy, ‘The Last Word on Communism’, Labour History Review, 70 (2005), 97–​101. 15 , 4 Sept. 2015) email, A. Blok, D. Mayer, 22 Apr. 2015. 16  R. McKibbin, ‘Is It Still Possible to Write Labour History?’, in T. Irving, ed., Challenges to Labour History (Sydney, 1994), pp. 34–​41. 17  History Workshop, 13 (1982); History Workshop Journal, 39 (1995), iii–​iv, 241–​2; History Workshop Journal, 40 (1995), 271–​2. 18  R. Price, ‘Histories of Labour and Labour History’, Labour History Review, 75 (2010), 265–​8.

The Labour Party   329 Price rather exaggerated (or encountered the CPGB wars). A global turn in Labour history had already been noted.19 Competitor intersectional categories have meant that Class Struggles, but as labour history’s principal category, it remains central to debate.20 It never receded as much as its many defenders protest, and has profited from a post-​ postmodern return to stressing the social context of politics, non-​discursive forces, and material culture.21 The complaint that labour historians were ‘too easily satisfied by material explanations’ was not new; nor did it mean that a cultural approach could not bring much to studies of union dynamics and shopfloor practices, as Saunders’s forensic study of car workers does.22 But few would dispute with Price that the political axis of history has shifted away and diversified from classical labour history.

II The politics of history and method are now more hotly debated in cultural and transnational histories of sex, gender, emotions, consumerism, or political culture. The trajectory of Labour’s First Century contributors Francis, Brooke, Fielding, and Lawrence discloses much. Francis’ work on gender and emotional history has moved away from politics. Labour and labour history await a full historical treatment of their masculinity. The politics of sexuality on the left have been subjected to Robinson’s and Brooke’s analyses—​and Laite reminds us that work on prostitution is as much labour history as the history of sexuality.23 Other prolific Labour historians have shifted to popular culture to understand politics—​Fielding through plays, novels, and TV; Worley with punk and fanzines.24 Part of the story here was twentieth-​century history catching up with ground-breaking work on nineteenth-​century popular politics. The emergence of political culture as an analytical topic and approach has left traditional party-​centred histories (Conservative no less than Labour) out of fashion. The frame has been more party competition and interaction—​as Thorpe’s study of Parties at 19 

M. Van Linden, ‘Labour History: The Old, the New and the Global’, African Studies, 66 (2007), 169–​80. 20  D. Dworkin, Class Struggles (London, 2006); S. Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–​2010 (London, 2014); M. Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940 (Oxford, 2010). 21  P. Joyce, The Social in Question (London, 2002); R. Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor (Berkeley, CA, 1995). 22  W.H. Sewell, ‘Towards a Post-​Materialist Rhetoric for Labor History’, in L. Berlanstein, ed., Rethinking Labor History (Chicago, 1993), p. 17; J. Saunders, ‘The British Motor Industry 1945–​77: How Workplace Cultures Shaped Labour Militancy’ (PhD thesis, University College London, 2015). 23  L. Robinson, Gay Men and the Left in Post-​War Britain (Manchester, 2007); S. Brooke, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left from the 1880s (Oxford, 2011); Julia Laite, ‘(Sexual) Labour Day’, Notches, . 24  M. Worley, ‘Punk, Politics and British (Fan)zines 1974–​84’, History Workshop Journal, 79 (2015), 76–​ 106; S. Fielding, A State of Play (London, 2014).

330   Lawrence Black War stressed.25 Studies of conservatism have flourished, focusing less on the party than on race, empire, culture, gender, ideology, and transnational and micro-​history perspectives. But the shift should not be overstated. Much political history remains traditional, institutional, party-​centric: Thorpe’s history of Labour entered its fourth edition in 2015 and there have been numerous studies of the 1960s Wilson governments (suggesting this period’s stock is rising).26 And even where exploring roads less travelled, such as the countryside or taxation, a party optic persists.27 Yet the direction of travel is clear. With party politics understood not just in its own terms but as part of a wider culture, Jon Lawrence has considered its conduct and technology in the interplay of media, voters, and politicians, and how politics was perceived by the public.28 With the import of party not taken for granted, how it has related to the activism of NGOs and social movements and interacted with civil society have been vital in this resituating of politics.29 Part of the appeal of social movements was to find the essence of politics or alternative paradigms for it in places other than establishments such as Labour. This accounts for some of the interest in the CPGB and ILP.30 Consumption has been another historiographically rich area since 2000.31 A resurgence in Co-​Op studies chimed with a hope it was The Hidden Alternative to the economic crisis—​mutual, voluntary models were in vogue.32 The Co-​Op’s 2009 Blowin’ in the Wind TV ads represented the first time Bob Dylan had licensed his music for a British ad. The Co-​Op has been variously used by historians to draw international comparisons, to explore working-​class life and business—​and also politically, notably in Gurney’s work, as newer forms of consumer social movement activism challenged it.33

25 

A. Thorpe, Parties at War: Political Organisation in Second World War Britain (Oxford, 2009). A. Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party (Basingstoke, 2015); G. O’Hara and H. Parr, eds., Harold Wilson and the Labour Governments of 1964–​70 (London, 2006); P. Dorey, ed., The Wilson Governments, 1964–​70 (London, 2006); and the 2003 series on the 1964–​70 Labour governments by J. Young, J. Tomlinson, and S. Fielding. 27  C. Griffiths, Labour and the Countryside (Oxford, 2007); R. Whiting, The Labour Party and Taxation (Cambridge, 2006). 28  J. Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009). 29  M. Hilton, J. McKay, N. Crowson, and J.F. Mouhot, The Politics of Expertise: How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain (Oxford, 2013); L. Black, Redefining British Politics: Culture, Consumerism, Participation, 1954–​70 (Basingstoke, 2010); H. McCarthy, ‘Whose Democracy? Histories of British Political Culture between the Wars’, Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 221–​38. 30  G. Cohen, The Failure of a Dream (London, 2007); P. Corthorn, In the Shadow of the Dictators (London, 2008). 31  N. Thompson, Social Opulence and Private Restraint: The Consumer in British Socialist Thought since 1800 (Oxford, 2015). 32  A. Webster, L. Shaw, J.K. Walton, A. Brown, and D. Stewart, eds., The Hidden Alternative: Co-​ operative Values Past, Present and Future (Manchester, 2011). 33  K. Friberg, A Comparative Study of Consumer Co-​Operative Organisation in Britain and Sweden, 1860–​1970 (Vaxjo, 2005); N. Robertson, The Co-​Operative Movement and Communities in Britain, 1914–​ 60 (Farnham, 2010); P. Gurney, ‘The Battle of the Consumer in Post-​War Britain’, Journal of Modern History, 77 (2005), 956–​87. 26 

The Labour Party   331 Others focused on the consumption of politics, concurrent with the rise of ‘spin’ and delving into Labour’s reception. Many show there was in fact a longer history behind New Labour’s presumed novelty. Thompson charts Labour’s place in debates about nineteenth-​century public opinion, Wring documents its marketing since 1918, Beers considers its relationship and concern with 1920s and 1930s media, and Thomas considers the biases of popular newspapers since 1945. The continuity here was Labour’s abiding conception of the press’s power to frame debate, critically or favourably.34 Thus, for labour historians little was newsworthy about the media’s role in the 2015 election. The Murdoch and Rothermere press remained powerful. For McKibbin, ‘the press and television were responsible for deficit fetishism’ becoming viewed as an economic norm and not a political choice, and they portrayed Ed Miliband ‘more viciously than they did Kinnock in 1992’.35 Gaber argues the Daily Mail attack landed less of a blow when focused on ‘Red Ed’ (the ‘red’ label having lost its lustre post-​Cold War) than on ‘Odd Ed’, the out-​of-​touch embodiment of a metropolitan, professional political class. Gaber’s work on the 1980s urban left notes their modern ideas and campaigning and argues the perception of the ‘loony left’ fermented in the media was stronger among politicians than the public. Corbyn has exhibited social media savvy, but cocoon tendencies and a seeming determination to re-​enact the battles of the 1980s suggest a more constrained modernity.36 The imperial and transnational have been other notable influences. Eley’s epic connects the left to other European progressive movements, and comparative work such as Hilson’s and Favretto’s has offered a way out of parochial Britishness.37 Work on ethnicity, empire, and the labour diaspora has ranged from Zionism to representations of Attlee’s imperialism, London as a hub of 1930s anti-​imperial radical networks and Hyslop’s study of J.T. Bain, the Scottish syndicalist, racist, and founder of socialism in South Africa.38 The hybrid of gender and transnational politics accounts for the recent popularity of Ellen Wilkinson, bringing analytical rigour to the biographical 34 

J. Thompson, British Political Culture and the Idea of Public Opinion, 1867–​1914 (Cambridge, 2013); D. Wring, The Political Marketing of the Labour Party since 1918 (Basingstoke, 2004); L. Beers, Your Britain! Media and the Making of the Labour Party (Cambridge, MA, 2010); J. Thomas, Popular Newspapers, the Labour Party and British Politics (London, 2005). 35  R. McKibbin, ‘Labour Dies Again’, London Review of Books, 4 June 2015. 36  I. Gaber, ‘The “Othering” of “Red Ed”’, Political Quarterly, 85 (2014), 471–​9; J. Curran, I. Gaber, and J. Petley, Culture Wars (Edinburgh, 2005). 37  G. Eley, Forging Democracy: The Left in Europe 1850–​2000 (Oxford, 2002); M. Hilson, ‘Swedish Approaches to the Rise of Labour: A British Perspective’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 26 (2001), 103–​ 21; I. Favretto, The Long Search for a Third Way: The British Labour Party and the Italian Left since 1945 (Basingstoke, 2003). 38  D. Feldman, ‘Zionism and the British Labour Party’, in E.B. Katz, L. Moses Leff, and M.S. Mandel, eds., Colonialism and the Jews (Bloomington, IN, 2017), pp. 193–​214; C.L. Riley, ‘The Confounded Socialists and the Commonwealth Co-​operative Society: Cartoons and British Imperialism during the Attlee Government’, in R. Scully and A. Varnava, eds., Comic Empires: the Imperialism of Cartoons, Caricature and Satirical Art (Manchester, forthcoming); S. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, NJ, 2009); J. Hyslop, The Notorious Syndicalist (Johannesburg, 2004).

332   Lawrence Black genre.39 If views from beyond Labour—​from periphery, not just metropole—​have stimulated, so have those ‘from below’ and local studies approaches: McHugh’s of Labour’s ‘rise’ in Manchester; Mates’ of the Spanish Civil War’s importance in north-​east England; Payling’s of 1980s Sheffield; Carter’s of Labour’s administration in Southwark up to 1995, assessing its difficulties in negotiating ethnicity.40 In recent overarching interpretations of modern British history—​Offer, Edgerton, Savage, Todd—​politics is a recipient, not agent, of analysis.41 Part of Labour his­tory’s malaise is a broader impasse of political history. At the paradigm-​exploring 2015 Rethinking Modern British Studies conference in Birmingham, politics as a direct topic was scarce, except on a panel entitled ‘Whatever Happened to Political History?’ The problem is not just an increasing consciousness of the strong cultural strain of anti-​politics, although explaining Why We Hate Politics (Hay’s title) has not been political historians’ natural inclination.42 Rather it is that the methodological engagement with the cultural and linguistic turns and Foucaldian ideas of the variegated nature of power in the ‘new political history’ of the 1990s and 2000s has stalled.43 Its interest in the discursive, symbolic inventiveness of politics has been pared back by the reassertion of the social dimension and limits to political action, and critiqued for its anthropological descriptiveness and neglect of the hierarchies of power or state agency. Its interest in the wider reception and perception of politics—​its performance—​persists. The ‘new political history’ is no longer new, certainly for those interested in producing more than a transcript of official documents and their terminologies. It is not, then, that novel work on modern British political history is absent, but rather that, by comparison with, say, Germany or the United States, or with earlier periods, it seems methodologically quiescent, unconfident. Readman’s 2009 account betrays no little range of output, but a field that is methodologically placid—​stale, even.44 Do other scholars look to it for methodological cues in the way they did in the 1990s? The political zeitgeist has left political history.

39 

M. Perry, ‘Red Ellen’ Wilkinson (Manchester, 2014); P. Bartley, Ellen Wilkinson (London, 2014); L. Beers, Red Ellen: The Life of Ellen Wilkinson—​Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist (Cambridge, MA, 2016). And germane to Blue Labour, see L. Goldman, The Life of R.H. Tawney (London, 2013). 40  D. McHugh, Labour in the City: The Development of Labour in Manchester, 1918–​31 (Manchester, 2006); L. Mates, The Spanish Civil War and the British Left (London, 2007); D. Payling, ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire: Grassroots Activism and Left-​Wing Solidarity in 1980s Sheffield’, Twentieth Century British History, 25 (2014), 602–​27; H. Carter, ‘Building the Divided City: Race, Class and Social Housing in Southwark, 1945–​95’, London Journal, 33 (2008), 155–​85. 41  A. Offer, The Challenge of Affluence (Oxford, 2006); D. Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–​70 (Cambridge, 2006); Savage, Identities; Todd, The People. F. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation (Oxford, 2008) is an exception. 42  See ; C. Hay, Why We Hate Politics (Cambridge, 2007). 43  D. Craig, ‘High Politics and the “New Political History”’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 453–​75. 44  ‘The Contours of the Political’, German History, 33 (2015), 255–​73; M. Jacobs, W. Novak, J. Zelizer, eds., The Democratic Experiment (Princeton, NJ, 2005); P. Readman, ‘The state of twentieth-​century British political history’, Journal of Policy History, 21 (2009), 219–​38.

The Labour Party   333 The history of ideas and political science—​from which, despite its intentions, newer historical approaches remained semi-​detached—​has contributed much. Notable here are Bevir’s reassessment of Labour’s origins in the late nineteenth-​century mix of ideas, hopes, and push for state action and Jackson, Nuttall, and Butler’s rethinking of Labour revisionism.45 Bale’s study of Miliband’s leadership notes the usual leftward swing, but a rare achievement of unity after an election defeat.46 Miliband’s minority support among the parliamentary and wider party, meant unity was relinquished in the 2015 leadership contest. That contest released suppressed frustrations with New Labour, and disclosed differences between members and MPs that became vicious and paralyzing under Corbyn. A second leadership election in 2016 was a measure of the deadlock between Corbyn’s leadership, MPs, the National Executive, and members. Wickham-​Jones and Pemberton shed light on newer party members and structures. Equally prescient seems Toye’s version of Tony Benn’s case that New Labour was an elite construction, ‘the smallest party in history’.47 But more self-​consciously demanding approaches have been rarer, albeit evident in Crowcroft’s study of Labour parliamentarians that applies a Peterhouse ‘high-politics’ approach (at odds with labour instincts)48 and in Robinson’s assessment of party identities as part of wider British culture. Robinson segues the changing practice of political history with how parties since the 1980s have grappled with their traditions, at one with British culture’s penchant for heritage and the relativism of postmodernism. History as a discrete force, to which parties had a distinct approach, instead became a battleground of current concerns. Marquand likewise argues political culture has become presentist. Integral to the construction of ‘Old Labour’ was a certain version of history, one that New Labour wished not to forget but to distance itself from. In the process, it erased much. Much the same, Fielding argues, happens in Loach’s Spirit of ’45.49 Yet there is evidence of continuity in the place history occupies in Labour’s imagination, in its remaking in the Blue Labour project after 2010. Whether Blue Labour demonstrates the ongoing value Labour places on the past or has made present-​centred selections from it, what it certainly shows is the detachment between specialist historians and Labour’s own uses of its past. The evacuation of orthodox labour history 45  M. Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton, NJ, 2011); J. Nuttall, Psychological Socialism: The Labour Party and Qualities of Mind and Character (Manchester, 2006); B. Jackson, Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Thought, 1900–​64 (Manchester, 2011); L. Butler, ‘Michael Young, the Institute of Community Studies and the Politics of Kinship’, Twentieth Century British History, 26 (2015), 203–​24. 46  T. Bale, Five Year Mission: Labour under Ed Miliband (Oxford, 2015). 47  M. Wickham-​Jones and H. Pemberton, ‘Labour’s Lost Grassroots’, British Politics, 8 (2013), 181–​206; R. Toye, ‘“The Smallest Party in History”: New Labour in Historical Perspective’, Labour History Review, 69 (2004), 371–​91. 48  R. Crowcroft, ‘The High Politics of Labour Party Factionalism, 1950–​55’, Historical Research, 81 (2008), 679–​709. 49  E. Robinson, History, Heritage and Tradition in Contemporary British Politics (Manchester, 2012); D. Marquand, Mammon’s Kingdom (London, 2014); S. Fielding, ‘The Cultural Memory of 1945’ (unpublished paper, 2015).

334   Lawrence Black signalled both its historiographical exhaustion and that Labour’s political project was heading in a different direction. And Blue Labour—​in that it was preoccupied with Labour’s past, but not with Labour history—​exemplified this. Debates were conducted at the forefront of Labour politics, but in terms unfamiliar to Labour history—​although, as Jobson notes, if it was more pronounced in Blue Labour, nostalgia was not a novel cultural proclivity for Labour to be exhibiting.50 Corbyn’s emergence as a UK variant on Syriza in Greece, Bernie Sanders in the United States, or Podemos in Spain also speaks to the resilience of a more recognizably ‘labour history’ version of the past among grassroots supporters—​whether latent in Labour activists, energized by a new generation, or revived from outside the party by Momentum. Not that the left has a monopoly on the past. Blue Labour released a degree of nostalgia for what New Labour might have been, and Corbyn’s election has animated narratives of battling Militant Tendency in the 1980s. Former leader Neil Kinnock invoked the party’s parliamentary purpose since 1906 in a speech emboldening Corbyn’s truculent MPs.51 Tensions between winning elections, beliefs, and extra-​parliamentary forces are age-​old. The point here is how mobilizing the past is risky if history has different pasts, but that this remains a highly valued tool in Labour debate—​although Labour’s fixation with its past(s) is not much shared by the electorate.

III Blue Labour was one of several post-​New Labour initiatives—​like Progress’s The Purple Book and One Nation—​in the wake of the 2010 election and the economic crisis. It eschewed New Labour’s reverence for markets and shared its scepticism about ‘old Labour’ and unwillingness to revert to the state. The New–​Old binary was a relic. Blue signalled a nostalgic sense of loss and a conservative tinge, to court controversy. The liberal-​sceptic, faith-​based alternatives to state and market proposed by its key thinker, Lord (from 2011) Maurice Glasman, coincided with Phillip Blond’s Red Tory (an influence on ‘Big Society’ rhetoric).52 By 2011 the group had disbanded, the ‘blue’ tag rendered toxic by Glasman’s comments on engaging the far right and his statement in May 2011’s Progress that Labour said too little about immigration and ought ‘to put the people

50 

R. Jobson, ‘Blue Labour and Nostalgia’, Renewal, 22 (2014), 102–​17; R. Jobson, ‘A New Hope for an Old Britain? Nostalgia and the British Labour Party’s Alternative Economic Strategy, 1970–​83’, Journal of Policy History, 27 (2015), 670–​94. 51  S. White and M. O’Neill, ‘The New Labour that Wasn’t’, in G. Lodge and G. Gottfried, eds., Democracy in Britain: Essays in Honour of James Cornford (London, 2014), pp. 31–​40; D. Hayter, Fightback! Labour’s Traditional Right in the 1970s and 1980s (Manchester, 2005); Neil Kinnock, Speech to Parliamentary Labour Party, 4 July 2016, 52  R. Davis, Tangled up in Blue (London, 2011); P. Blond, Red Tory (London, 2010).

The Labour Party   335 of this country first.’53 But it retained influence over the Jon Cruddas-​led policy review, One Nation (another provocative title, borrowing from Disraeli), which Cruddas inked with leading Blue Labourite Jonathan Rutherford. The review exhibited numerous Blue Labour tropes: the influence of Glasman and Karl Polanyi; patriotism; conserving working-​class community and family against the market disruptions to which New Labour had become habituated; and, like The Purple Book, pre-​distribution, decentralization, and mutualism.54 Whether Blue Labour was a fleeting efflorescence or a persistent influence under different titles is of less matter here than the ways in which it understood and used history as ammunition or a premise for policy-​making.55 This sounds like an internal Labour dialogue or an attempt at rescuing history from New Labour, recovering an identity forsaken for slick PR. In practice it was partisan—​combating Red Toryism’s view of community and liberal coalition involvement. As the historiographical propensity was away from Westminster, so Blue Labour was positively inclined towards social movements and active democracy. While Blue Labour’s interests were those of Labour history—​ class, capitalism, culture, community—​its theory and approach were quite different. The Blue Labour manifesto, a series of papers entitled The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox (2011), was assembled by Glasman, Rutherford, Marc Stears (Miliband’s speech writer), and Stuart White (like Stears, an Oxford professor), with an Ed Miliband preface. The first seminar was at University College Oxford in October 2010. The Introduction was dogmatically concerned that ‘Labour had no shared interpretation of its history’. But for the most part, the manifesto was open-​minded, toying with strands in Labour’s past to show how live a range of historical questions—​about radical traditions, means and ends, Cole and Tawney’s rehabilitation, Crosland’s demotion—​were to Labour. Stears addressed ‘issues that mattered enormously to our party’s founding generations’ and flagged keywords such as ‘fellowship’ and ‘relational’ to convey how Labour ought to practice its values. Other tropes included defending working-​class self-​help and mutual traditions, a ‘new economy’ post-​2008, sustainability, a humane approach (supporting the ‘living wage’ campaign), and decentralizing state power. Labour had become, Rutherford estimated, too ‘disconnected from the ordinary everyday lives of the people’, and was ‘at risk of losing England’. An English radical tradition—​Cruddas lauded Robert Blatchford and E.P. Thompson, White ‘the spirit of Tom Paine’—​was invoked. Values of family, home, and nation gave this a conservative air. The group embraced this paradox, describing its project as ‘radical conservatism’ and stating that preserving what seems lost or threatened was as important as change in mobilizing support and resisting commodification. Joining the long struggle

53 Bale, Five Year Mission, pp. 52–​5; J. Rutherford, ‘Blue Labour is Over but the Debate Has Just Begun’, New Statesman, 29 July 2011. 54  J. Cruddas and J. Rutherford, One Nation (London, 2014), pp. 11–​14, 30–​4; Bale, Five Year Mission, p. 56. 55  N. Stevenson, ‘The Socialist Blues? Citizenship, Class and Civil Society’, Sociological Review, 62 (2014), 189–​205; A. Pabst and I. Geary, eds., Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics (London, 2015).

336   Lawrence Black against dispossession and the alienating impact of markets, ‘radical conservatism shares this sense of loss, a degradation of human labour under the conditions of a profit-​ maximising capitalism’.56 For Glasman, Labour had become too liberal-​dominated, focused on change delivered by state-​level experts rather than being true to its pluralist past, grounded in the authentic reciprocal relationships of working-​class community. He stressed how Labour was neither secular nor divided by religion, unlike much European social democracy. Re-establishing a community base was not just nostalgia, but meant London citizens, churches, and US-​style community organizing for the ‘common good’ (Arnie Graf, a Chicago organizer, worked for Labour until 2013). Glasman held the Attlee governments and Crosland responsible for Labour’s turn from the varieties presented by Cole, Laski, and the Co-​Ops to a centralized state that could redistribute and enable the good life. Jose Harris has argued that Crosland’s target in The Future of Socialism (1956) was Laski’s case that personal liberty and democracy were incompatible with capitalism. It wasn’t just that Crosland seemed to have reached a truce with capitalism, as New Labour’s take on free markets in the 1990s was about enabling participation in globalization rather than protection from it. It was as much liberalism’s penchant for general moral principles (here Blue Labour was redolent of Conservative critiques of the liberal elite). ‘Labour values are not abstract universal values such as “freedom” or “equality”’, Glasman asserts. Crosland’s focus on ends, not means—​like New Labour’s embrace of globalization—​left it talking in abstract terms that might ‘apply in any country . . . rather than developing the specific language from within the political traditions of our own country’.57 Polanyi, the Hungarian political economist and 1930s Workers’ Educational Association lecturer, is Glasman’s lodestar. His critique of market practices resonated anew after state socialism was discredited and as neo-​liberalism faltered.58 In The Great Transformation (1944), Polanyi argued that markets were historically contingent, enforced by the state rather than a natural order, and while wealth might be redistributed, the fundamental challenge was limiting the commodification of labour and everyday life. To this end, autonomous civic, voluntary, religious and democratic life was a vital means and thus in a reciprocal relationship with capital, however much market utopians willed it otherwise. This was about individuals, but not market individualism or the abstract individual rights of secular liberalism. Like Polanyi (and Stears), Glasman saw Cole’s guild socialism as evidence of the value of work.59 Glasman’s Unnecessary Suffering identifies labour as cultural and political activity (referencing Biernacki) and plots the trade-​offs between market and society in Britain, 56 

M. Glasman, J. Rutherford, M. Stears, and S. White, eds., The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox (London, 2011), pp. 10, 88, 91, 124, 125, 127, 132, 140. 57  M. Glasman, ‘Labour as a Radical Tradition’, in Glasman et al., eds., The Labour Tradition, p. 24; J. Harris, ‘Labour’s Political and Social Thought’, in D. Tanner, P. Thane, and N. Tiratsoo, eds., Labour’s First Century (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 34, 39. 58  C. Hann and K. Hart, Economic Anthropology (Cambridge, 2011). 59  A. Finlayson, ‘Making Sense of Maurice Glasman’, Renewal, 19 (2011), 18–​24.

The Labour Party   337 from land enclosures and poor relief through to the Second World War and the New Left and Right.60 Glasman’s leitmotiv is the desire to preserve human labour and relationships as virtues—​with values, not just value-​as-​commodity—​and he draws on Aristotle and Catholic social theology besides the usual left suspects.61 He praises West Germany’s social market economy—​worker representatives, subsidiarity, vocational training, strong local government and banking—​over more abstract economic philosophies. Balancing stabilizing market forces requires such non-​contractual relationships, public goods, social knowledge creators (schools, libraries), legal and democratic institutions, in order to preserve and renew. For Glasman the paradox is that ‘socialism is a precondition of a viable capitalism’, or, as he puts it in The Labour Tradition, ‘a condition of a sustainable capitalism’.62 Stears’ work relates to labour history interests. His first book explores debates between US progressive nationalists (Lippman, Weyl) to extend state power and UK socialist pluralists (Tawney, G.D.H. Cole, Laski) to challenge it. More than their differences over the state or how they map onto present-​day communitarian or associational theory (such as Paul Hirst’s work), it was the shared values and aims (industrial democracy, tackling poverty) of this trans-​Atlantic debate that impressed Stears. In their robust openness and negotiation of adverse circumstances, he saw a counter to utopian-​ idealist and narrow-​pessimist theories. Equally, wary of re​imagining a ‘progressive alliance’, it differentiated Laski and Cole from New Liberalism.63 Demanding Democracy is absorbed by how twentieth-​century American radicals debated a ‘new kind of politics’, conscious that its behaviours might not be ideal for a future society. If explosive, creative action was legitimate, this was not a recipe for ‘anything goes’. New Left students, labour unions, civil rights campaigners, and progressives weighed up strategy’s longer-​ term impacts on citizen’s virtues (a Blue Labour keyword). For Stears, vital for ‘a democratic theory of political action in non-​ideal circumstances is an account of the political virtues needed to shape the right response to those circumstances . . . that has the prospect of improving the democratic order, of bringing the ideal closer.’ He wanted to move beyond realist (accepting of how things are) and deliberative (idealistic about how they ought to be) democrats. It is not hard to see, in the book’s concern with how radicals sought to both ‘preserve the best aspects of the prevailing order and . . . construct a better, fairer, more inclusive alternative’, connections to Blue Labour.64 As an intervention in political philosophy, Stears’ work does not always or directly translate into contemporary politics. It is not easy to recognize the street struggles of Demanding Democracy in Labour. But Stears’ contemporary agendas were evident in 60 

M. Glasman, Unnecessary Suffering: Managing Market Utopia (London, 1996), pp. 5–​13, 115–​19. M. Glasman, ‘Politics, Employment Policies and the Younger Generation’, in N. Sagovsky and P. McGrail, eds., Together for the Common Good (London, 2015), pp. 171–​82. 62 Glasman, Unnecessary Suffering, pp. 138–​42; Glasman, ‘Labour as a Radical Tradition’, pp. 30–​1, 34. 63  M. Stears, Progressives, Pluralists and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the US and Britain, 1909–​26 (Oxford, 2006). 64  M. Stears, Demanding Democracy: American Radicals in Search of a New Politics (Princeton, NJ, 2010), pp. 18, 215–​22. 61 

338   Lawrence Black extolling rangy debate and his Institute for Public Policy Research outputs on transcending the market-​state dichotomy65—​and in his interest (like Glasman) in London Citizens, a coalition of local educational, ethnic, religious, trade union groups that built relationships with community organizers. Stears suggested historians would recognize the focus on place, organization, and relationships in Tawney, Raymond Williams, and Raphael Samuel and urged Labour to ‘remember its own tradition’.66 This develops the idea that Crosland’s revisionism in the 1950s took a raft of thinkers out of Labour’s repertoire, along with more obvious targets such as austere Fabianism. In practice it elevated the Fabian faith in expert applied knowledge to the fore in social democracy. One Nation briefly mentions Michael Young (a lacunae in Blue Labour’s reading of Labour’s past, presumably because of his setting up of the Tawney Society in the SDP in 1982) as an advocate of community-​level engagement and social movement activism. Other research on the ‘Pavement Politics’ of housing, roads, or playgrounds does suggest Labour was part of the problem, if also that the resources of community politics were not as diminished as Blue Labour contends.67 One Nation argues that after 1951 Labour ‘did not choose the path of social renewal and active democracy’; instead, ‘its politics were championed by the small New Left’.68 Rutherford, who has written widely for Soundings on emotion and masculinity, attempts to merge Blue Labour and the first New Left (more indigenous, less influenced by Western Marxist theory). 69 Both saw English common culture as radical and conservative in its political importance. Among the New Left’s ‘key figures’ Rutherford has Richard Hoggart, who was not an editor of New Left Review or its forerunners and contributed to it only a four-​page transcript of a debate with Raymond Williams. Rutherford omits, notably, Ralph Miliband, who was involved editorially and contributed substantially, often on Labour’s shortcomings. One need not read far into The Uses of Literacy to find Hoggart warning of romanticization—​‘the danger of over-​stressing the admirable qualities of earlier working-​class culture’—​or of leftism, which ‘pities the . . . debased worker, whose faults he sees as . . . the result of the grinding system which controls him’ and ‘admires the remnants of the noble savage, and has a nostalgia . . . for such scraps of them as he thinks he can detect today’—​to which the New Left were and Blue Labour are prone.70 The second New Left, of Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, was, Rutherford regrets, defined by ‘the certainty of their own historical analysis’. This sits uneasily with some of the cant Rutherford himself wields about the ‘closing of a specific historical period’, 65  M. Stears, Everyday Democracy: Taking Centre-​Left Politics beyond State and Market (London, IPPR, 2011). 66  S. Baskerville and M. Stears, ‘London Citizens and the Labour Tradition’, Renewal, 18 (2010), 65–​70. 67  L. Black, ‘Crosland’s Consumer Politics’, in K. Brückweh, ed., The Voice of the Citizen Consumer (Oxford, 2011), pp. 117–​37; D. Ellis, ‘Pavement Politics: Community Action in Leeds, c. 1960–​90’ (PhD thesis, University of York, 2016). 68  Cruddas and Rutherford, One Nation, p. 13. 69  J. Rutherford, ‘The First New Left, Blue Labour and English Modernity’, Renewal, 21 (2013), 9–​14. 70  R. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth, 1957), pp. 15, 17.

The Labour Party   339 centred on shifts in political economy in 1979 and 2008. One could also object that this privileges political economy over culture (pace the New Left), when it is unclear that neo-liberalism perished in 2008. Its intellectual pretensions ‘detached the second new left from common English culture’. Except, of course, that Nairn was Scottish and wrote on Scottish nationalism—​a topic on which Blue Labour has been reticent.71 Rutherford regards this detachment as a cause of the New Right’s triumph over social democracy in the 1970s. Even New Labour suffered from the New Left’s elitism, leaving the ‘third way’ to accommodate itself to economic liberalism. Like the New Left, Blue Labour claims to have the right ideas.

IV The New Left analogy has been treated warily elsewhere. Radical patriotism would have found a welcome in E.P. Thompson’s vision of eighteenth and nineteenth-​century popular politics and his battle against the second New Left’s imported Marxist theory, Kenny reckons, but Thompson would have found that Blue Labour made ‘too great an accommodation with political forms of conservatism’ and was insufficiently part of a ‘transformative politics in the here-​and-​now’.72 Other critics have been legion; tribute, Blue Labour would have it, to its energizing of debate. It was such a mesh of eclectic traditions—​anarcho-​syndicalism, anyone?—​that critics had plenty of choice. Progress were sceptical of Blue Labour’s nostalgia and ability to resist globalization. To its credit, The Labour Tradition aired debate—​notably, Jackson questioning how contaminated Labour was by liberalism or egalitarianism and showing its Gladstonian inheritance. Liberalism’s persistent presence, much as Blue Labour might regret it, was discernible from the nineteenth century and constitutional reform to neo-​liberalism.73 Much debate has been conducted in the journal Renewal. Finlayson found ‘making sense’ of Glasman hard to square with Labour traditions. Glasman would relish such charges, and who prior to 2010 was discussing Polanyi in Labour circles? Even his practice of delivering speeches, then published online, marked Glasman apart. Finlayson reckoned the conservatism, paradoxically, of Labour party culture was likely to limit his impact: conservatism in the sense of issues of national identity, race, religion, and the emotive ways in which Glasman discussed them running against the grain of Labour’s inherited language and (electoral) instincts; or conservatism in the sense that Corbyn’s

71  Excepting B. Jackson, ‘The Political Thought of Scottish Nationalism’, Political Quarterly, 85 (2014), 50–​6; G. Hassan and E. Shaw, The Strange Death of Labour Scotland (Edinburgh, 2012). 72  M. Kenny, ‘Faith, Flag and the “First” New Left: E.P. Thompson and the Politics of ‘One Nation’, Renewal, 21 (2013), 15–​23. 73  B. Jackson, ‘Labour History and Glasman’s Labour Tradition’ in Glasman et al., eds., The Labour Tradition, pp. 38–​41.

340   Lawrence Black election was a return to something familiar, showing Labour less bound than moved by its past. Crosland was critiqued for rejecting the idea that capitalism was inherently unstable and exploitative, but Blue Labour regarded these as contingent features of speculative finance, rather than systemic.74 Blue Labour’s sociology was not lost on critics. In a pivotal phrase, Glasman conceived of Labour as a ‘marriage between a decent working-​class dad and an educated middle-​ class mum’, in which, from the 1940s onwards, the latter gained the upper hand. Such gendered language was noted in Helen Goodman’s critique of Blue Labour.75 Of The Labour Tradition’s 24 pieces, 21 are by men. Graf revealed his amazement at the party’s difficulty in finding a worker on the minimum wage to meet Miliband. McKibbin turned on fellow Oxford academics, concerned that ‘the difference between the life-​experience of those who ‘advise’ Miliband and those who vote UKIP seems now unbridgeable’. McKibbin stressed external forces—​Scottish nationalism, the EU—​as problematic for Labour, and also highlighted its insecure social base: ‘Glasman and the other proponents of Blue Labour . . . call for an ‘authentic’ working-​class party uninfected by bourgeois social liberalism (no pussy-​footing on the issue of race) . . . the class they wish to win back, the white working class, is in steady decline.’ Labour might crave a ‘Britain in which class and party loyalty trumped everything else’, but that was (always) very wishful thinking.76 Other historians have weighed in. Lawrence notes the tradition of utilizing history as a political resource: heroic biographies and belief in an inexorable forward march pepper Labour’s past. Blue Labour’s understanding of Labour as made by nineteenth-​century mutualism and losing its way in the 1940s as middle-​class liberal intellectuals and the central state came to dominate was, for Lawrence, another myth. Many turn-​of-​the-​ century working-​class mutual associations were Liberal, positive about state intervention, or not ‘political’. The idea that pre-​1945 Labour was embedded in local communities, unions, and Co-​Ops was only the case regionally. This gave the sense of a movement, but it was in deploying modern media, addressing suburban, patriotic, Anglican, and Tory workers nationwide in 1945, that Labour became ‘Blue’ rather than lost its way. Nor was it Labour’s post-​1945 penchant for statism that eroded self-​help traditions—​this would accord Labour extraordinary power over popular identities. Other social changes and attitudes—​consumerism, privacy, autonomy, apathy—​account for the fate of mutual institutions and cultures after 1945, and for popular resistance to state initiatives to engineer civic sociability. Besides its geographic limits before 1945, the prospects of mutualism developing a nationwide movement or constituency today are insufficient.77 74  Finlayson, ‘Making Sense’; E. Rooksby, ‘Blue Labour and the Limits of Social Democracy’, Renewal, 19 (2011), 104–​17. 75  Glasman, ‘Labour as a Radical Tradition’, p. 21; H. Goodman, ‘A Modern, Humanised State’ and also R. Davis, ‘Shades of Blue’, in J. Denham, ed., The Shape of Things to Come (London, 2012), pp. 75–​84, 85–​94. 76  A. Graf, ‘Labour’s failure . . . ’, LabourList.org, 4 Aug. 2015; R. McKibbin, ‘Brought to You by the Conservative Party’ and ‘Labour Vanishes’, London Review of Books, 11 Oct. and 20 Nov. 2014. 77  J. Lawrence, ‘Blue Labour, One Nation Labour, and the Lessons of History’, Renewal, 21 (2013), 6–​13; S. Fielding, P. Thompson, and N. Tiratsoo, England Arise: Labour and Popular Politics in the 1940s (Manchester, 1995).

The Labour Party   341 Lawrence is wary of the easy dichotomies Blue Labour sees in Labour’s past. Glasman’s sincere attempts to denigrate liberalism in shaping Labour are wishful (well, regretful) politics. Stears’ application of Cole and Laski to contemporary individualism and choice allows in the liberalism and anti-​mutual instincts to which Blue Labour professes aversion. Stears suggests his re-​examination of associational pluralism was because ‘historians continue to overlook or misunderstand the detailed policy positions’. No doubt, but political scientists are prone to discount inchoate popular understandings, even disinterest, in policy and politics. There is a whiff of idealism in the notion that people are listening for politics to present coherent ideas and policies. It is wishful in imagining such a close relationship between politics and people—​blasé about what Lawrence terms ‘the intractability of everyday life’, persistent ‘rugged individualism’ (Savage’s term), or what Jefferys terms Britain’s ‘anaemic’ political culture since 1918. For all the evidence of a politicization of cultural and civic life since the 1950s, Britain’s remains a political culture with good reasons to mistrust politic(ian)s.78 Equally, Lawrence concludes with a case—​derived historiographically from the linguistic turn—​for political language’s ability to shape popular attitudes. Its power is not infinite—​as discussed, it seems fanciful of Rutherford to insist Labour ‘become the creative meaning maker of the people’. But it could influence ‘common sense’ norms—​ contingent upon its language both resonating with and shifting understandings of popular experience. The point here is less the proximity of politics–​citizens relations than their ordering and respective agency, and viewing them as interactive, relational. For New and Blue Labour, popular attitudes were fixed and it was politics that had to adapt. New Labour’s achievements were couched in terms of existing interests and neo-​ liberal framing—​efficiency and aspiration rather than fairness or inclusivity. While electorally successful, this left it politically vulnerable. Lawrence charges New Labour more than Blue here, since it could exercise both rhetoric and public policy but ‘didn’t even try’.79 But Blue Labour remained beholden to public opinion on immigration. It approached individual well-​being through communal efforts, but proved reluctant to challenge economic norms after 2010.

V Language and narrative even figure in McKibbin’s critique of why Labour has been blamed for the 2008 crash. ‘Labour’s supposed overspending did not cause what happened’ but ‘the Conservatives have succeeded in making people believe their version of events’, to justify austerity, downsize welfare, and embed neo-​liberalism as not defunct 78  Lawrence, ‘Blue Labour’; Stears, Progressives, p. 19; K. Jefferys, Politics and the People (London, 2008), p. 281; Black, Redefining. 79  Lawrence, ‘Blue Labour’; J. Rutherford, ‘The Future Is Conservative’, in Glasman et al., eds., The Labour Tradition, p. 94.

342   Lawrence Black or guilty, but common sense. Liam Byrne’s missive on departing the Treasury in 2010, ‘there is no money left’, became New Labour’s epigraph. McKibbin accepts that, ‘given the now received view of its record’ forged by the Coalition, Blair and Brown’s successors were ‘always going to have trouble’. But ‘the stance it has adopted, fearful and dominated by the ideas of the city and debased neoliberal economics’, made Labour complicit. It ‘nervously acquiesced in deficit fetishism’, McKibbin adjudges. ‘Miliband and Balls should never have allowed the Tories’ claims to go unchallenged.’80 There are analogies here with Thatcherism’s realization of a crisis narrative of the 1970s, which served not just its electoral agenda but a broader economic ideology and hegemony. Blue Labour counter that polling showed that the message of austerity and deficit reduction had sunk deep into popular attitudes, but that in essence was the point. Corbyn vowed to question their hold, but could he coin an appropriate language, as the EU referendum shifted political paradigms and narratives? The paradox for Blue Labour is that Corbyn’s election demonstrates the hybrid, multiple, conservative, dogmatic, liberal-​idealist cultures, even the social movement inklings, that the group had highlighted in Labour’s past. Labour remains historically minded; moved, not bound, by its past; nostalgic, even. There are then prospects for a revival of traditional Labour history and its accustomed languages, if less of recapturing the historiographical energies and trends that labour history fostered and which have left the original behind. Amid the turmoil of 2016, historians might wonder if there can be found the spectre of the party emulating labour history’s eclipse.

Further Reading L. Beers, Your Britain! (Cambridge, MA, 2010). M. Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton, 2011). H. Drucker, Doctrine and Ethos in the Labour Party (London, 1979). S. Fielding, The Labour Party:  Continuity and Change in the Making of New Labour (Basingstoke, 2003). E. Robinson, History, Memory and Tradition in Contemporary British Politics (Manchester, 2012). D. Tanner, P. Thane, and N. Tiratsoo, eds., Labour’s First Century (Cambridge, 2000). A. Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party (Basingstoke, 2015).

80 

McKibbin, ‘Brought to You’; ‘Labour Dies Again’.

chapter 20

‘Third’ and Fri ng e Parti e s Kevin Morgan

In the 1950s, as millions gathered round their television sets on election night for the first time, a new device was unveiled to depict for them the way things were going. This was the famous swingometer, affably manipulated by Canadian pundit Bob McKenzie, and it represented the contest of Britain’s two great tribes of Labour and Conservatives as a simple oscillating movement between one election and another. Standing head to head in 1951, the two parties had between them secured 96 per cent of the national popular vote. By 1959, when the swingometer was deployed on a national and not just constituency level for the first time, all but seven MPs accepted one or other of the two major party whips. McKenzie was a distinguished academic as well as one of the first of the new breed of media psephologists. In his monument to duopoly, British Political Parties, he had consigned even the Liberals to a three-​page appendix, and every other party to the dustbin of lost causes and deposits.1 As results poured in on election night, the swingometer collated them as a single national ballot from which all subsidiary movements were excluded, and the only decision that mattered was that between the two prospective front benches. What else were elections for? And who was really interested in the handful of anomalies? As early as 1882, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Private Willis had sung in Iolanthe of how every newborn Briton was ‘either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative’. According to McKenzie, this was a product of the franchise extensions that began in 1832 and of an era of modern party organization to which all centrifugal pressures were subordinated. In what came to be referred to as the ‘Westminster model’, the role of party was simply to sustain these two competing teams of parliamentary leaders. Their branding and identity mattered less than the fact that there should be only two, as both condition and

1 

R.T. McKenzie, British Political Parties: The Distribution of Power within the Conservative and Labour Parties (London, 1955).

344   Kevin Morgan corollary of a system of modern cabinet government whose chief accountability lay in the parliamentary opposition that was also an alternative government. Ironically, as the last notes of Private Willis still hung in the air, a third instalment of franchise reform and the stirrings of independent labour were about to herald the one seismic shift of the modern party era and the consequent displacement of the Liberals as a party of government. The immediate result was a period of considerable fluidity, but one which the forming of a first majority Labour government in 1945 seemingly brought to a close. If anything, the dualism of the Westminster model seemed now to be still further underpinned by the single class-​based social cleavage which some social scientists identified as the key to Britain’s partisan allegiances. Everything else, as Peter Pulzer famously put it, was ‘embellishment and detail’.2 Class had spelt the Liberals’ political doom, and Labour’s rise in its stead, to such an extent that neither national, regional, ethnic, confessional, nor any other form of segmentation counted for anything in party terms. Combine the Westminster model with British class relations, and the result was what Giovanni Sartori described, in his famous comparative study in 1976, as a perfect two-​party system.3 He would not have described it this way by the end of the century. It had become obvious not only that the party system was a-​changing, but also that two-​party dominance had never embodied such deep-​seated ‘historical and moral forces’ as its proponents had once assumed.4 According to Arendt Lijphart in another classic text on party systems, Britain’s was a two-​party system by repute that had always—​even in 1951—​had its ‘third’ parties, which this model discounted.5 Beyond the ayes and noes and ins and outs, the importance of these other parties lies in all those things that the Westminster model excluded and that a simple class polarity obscured. As votes were increasingly cast in more variegated and unpredictable ways from the 1960s onwards, this began to be seen as a thwarted multi-​party system needing the first-​past-​the-​post electoral system (FPTP) both to deter voters from choosing alternatives and to discount their votes when they did. Progressively the swingometer now fell into relative disuse, and as FPTP stood revealed as the duopoly’s ‘artificial life-​support machine’, it was also clear in retrospect that national electoral outcomes had never fully captured the complexities of political action and allegiance.6 All the third parties had in common is that they were not first or second parties. Some were meteors, some were damply spluttering fireworks, and some were like a permanent sideshow to the main prize, or the noises off in a Jacobean drama. The maximization 2  Cited in D. Butler and D. Stokes, Political Change in Britain: Forces Shaping Electoral Choice (London, 1969), p. 74. 3  G. Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Colchester, 2005), pp. 164–​70. 4  S. Beer, Modern British Politics: A Study of Politics and Pressure Groups (London, 1969 edn), p. 432. 5  A. Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-​One Countries (New Haven and London, 1984), p. 68. 6  P. Lynch, ‘Party System Change in Britain: Multi-​Party Politics in a Multi-​Level Polity’, British Politics, 2 (2007), 323.

‘Third’ and Fringe Parties    345 of the two-​party vote tended to require of the dominant parties a pluralistic, broad-​ church character. Nevertheless, there were not only breakaway movements sporadically appearing to expose their internal tensions, but also parties articulating grievances and aspirations that the dominant parties shied away from precisely because they were divisive. Sometimes these smaller parties centred on maverick parliamentary personalities, and often they sought to use the leverage of parliamentary elections. At the same time, there were also parties which remind us there were other sources of political influence, authority, and legitimation, from the mobilization of grassroots activists to the moulding of agendas through the cultivation of opinion or the deployment of mass media. In the years of European crisis beginning with the First World War, there was also the reverberation within Britain of the Bolshevik and fascist movements, which, in their different ways, stood for alternatives to the prevailing parliamentary order. The Conservative leader Baldwin spoke for many in regarding them as alien forces of darkness, hate, and division. For the historian they nevertheless pose important questions as to the often insular and self-​contained character of national histories in which only the parliamentary parties are easily decipherable. These, therefore, were Britain’s ‘splinter’, ‘fringe’, ‘third’, or simply ‘other’ parties: the parties of minorities, peripheries, extremes, divided loyalties, the squeezed middle, the left behind, and the passing craze or megalomaniac. As they loom in and out of view over time, their diversity makes generalization more than usually hazardous, and their historiography is inevitably a fragmented one. It was not in fact until the 1970s that multi-​party politics began to attract attention in its own right, albeit mainly viewed within a contemporary rather than a historical context.7 In some cases, such as fascism and communism, these parties have their own dedicated historiography. In others, they feature mainly in the published lives of the personalities whose dominant imprint some of them so clearly bore, and in others still the third ​party aspect appears as part of a bigger story, as with the nationalist parties, or as part of a longer one, as with the Liberals. What follows is therefore rather more than the story of Britain’s also-​rans. It is also the story of has-​beens, might-​have-​beens, and those whose day was still to come, all of which are touched upon here only in their third party aspect. The first section considers some of the varieties of the minor party from the origins of the modern party system in the mid-​nineteenth century. The second section considers the wider effects which can sometimes be traced to even the also-​rans among them. The final section then focuses on issues raised by the extensive historical literatures devoted to Britain’s far-​ left and far-​right parties, most notably the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the British Union of Fascists (BUF).8 Both may be regarded as instances of relative party failure; both have occasioned much debate as to how far this demonstrated their alien and extrinsic political character, and how far conversely these were movements 7  See for example, H.M. Drucker, ed., Multi-​Party Britain (London, 1979); V. Bogdanor, Multi-​Party Politics and the Constitution (Cambridge, 1983). 8  Both parties went through changes of nomenclature but these are the most familiar variants and will be used irrespective of period here.

346   Kevin Morgan anchored in British political culture. If the CPGB exercised more of a definite influence in British political life than its fascist contemporaries, it will be seen that it did so not so much through challenging the system’s two-​party dynamic as by adapting to it and seizing upon those opportunities which the narrow terrain of mainstream party competition left open to it. To this extent it encapsulates the paradox of the minor party phenomenon; for, like the other parties considered here, it offers both the confirmation of a sort of two-​party electoral hegemony, and a reminder of its limitations in everything except elections.

I When, in early 1931, Oswald Mosley launched what he actually called the New Party, he was aged just 34 and the vaunted champion of the ‘modern mind’ against the pre-​ war ‘old gang’. He was also a frustrated former minister in the second Labour government (1929–​31), whom the dashing of any hope of a New Party breakthrough then sent lurching after the chimera of a home-​grown British fascism. In Mosley and his clutch of youthful supporters one therefore finds the three key elements which, alone or in combination, figured in every significant departure from Britain’s established party alignments. These were: the voicing of some ideal or constituency not yet adequately represented in national politics; a splintering away from one or other of the established parties; and the representation within Britain of some international movement or body of ideas. In Mosley’s case, one might well add the fourth possible element of personal amour propre or a taste for the messianic, for Mosley was a political rising star who, according to Michael Foot, could by common consent have led either the Labour party or the Conservative party.9 He was not alone in British history in giving rise to a political party that had no significant figurehead but himself. Already as the modern party system took shape, there were radicals at Westminster who were linked with a wider movement in the country. In 1841 and 1847, Chartist candidates won symbolic victories at the hustings, though only Thomas Duncombe and later Feargus O’Connor were able to carry the battle to parliament itself.10 As Chartism ebbed in the 1850s, there emerged the larger reform party which Miles Taylor describes as a party within the emerging Liberal party, again complemented by the movement outside parliament and drawing towards it the remnants of the Chartist leadership.11 In 1857 the co-​operator and secularist George Jacob Holyoake was by his own account the first true prospective labour candidate, at Tower Hamlets; however, he had so little resolution that he withdrew in favour of a tolerable Liberal.12 With the passing in 1867 9 M. Foot, Evening Standard, 22 Oct. 1968, cited in O. Mosley, My Life (new edn, London, 1970), p. 524.

10 

M. Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, 2007), pp. 178–​83, 279–​86. M. Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism 1847–​1860 (Oxford, 1995). 12  G.J. Holyoake, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life (3rd edn., London, 1906), ch. 65. 11 

‘Third’ and Fringe Parties    347 of the Second Reform Act, there was now established a wider Labour Representation League, and the first authentic Labour representatives, Alexander MacDonald and Thomas Burt, were returned in 1874 for the mining seats of Stafford and Morpeth. Both were nevertheless comfortably embedded within the radical wing of the Liberal party, and by the turn of the century, ‘Lib-​Lab’ MPs of working-​class sponsorship and Liberal political credentials were a fixture of the British coalfields. That was why Keir Hardie’s candidature in mid-​Lanark in 1888 entered into Labour folklore as the augury of the truly independent political force which some proponents also referred to as the New Party.13 Through, successively, the Scottish Labour Party (1888), the Independent Labour Party (ILP, 1893), and the Labour Representation Committee (1900), an electoral presence was mustered that was sufficient to draw the Liberals into the covert collaboration of the Gladstone–​MacDonald electoral pact (1903) and thus allow the establishment of a substantial parliamentary Labour party. Academic debate would later rage as to whether a modernized Liberal party might itself have met the challenge of the new mass electorate, and whether the tilting of the balance in Labour’s favour was a matter of political contingency or of the underlying logic of a class society. Whatever the different verdicts reached, what was apparently confirmed was that the logic of the two-​party system required either the closer coalescence of these rivals or else the vanquishing of one by the other. What was also clearly demonstrated was that the interim experience of hung parliaments, while temporarily strengthening the hand of a centre party, was finally calamitous to it in forcing it to reveal that hand. Both the 1924 and the 1931 elections saw precipitate falls in the Liberal popular vote in precisely such circumstances and strengthened Labour’s standing even in defeat. One may wonder whether Liberal Democrats had sufficiently digested this lesson when they negotiated the 2010 Coalition with a dominant Conservative party. As the guarantee of Labour’s continuing electoral advance, the Fabian socialist Sidney Webb invoked ‘the inevitability of gradualness’. Notoriously, the Fabians had foresworn any distinctive political stance except in respect of their primary concern with ‘practical Democracy and socialism’.14 If a Fabianized Labour party should now prevail within a reconstituted party duopoly, it would be similarly through the subordination of all diversionary considerations to this single dominant political axis. Mosley and his New Party might claim to speak for the coming generation. In reality, a generational cleavage had never provided the basis of a viable party organization in Britain, and theirs in any case was a fatally circumscribed movement of gilded youth.15 With the achievement of women’s suffrage in 1918 there had briefly surfaced a ‘Women’s Party’, envisaged by suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst as continuing the work of the Women’s Social and Political Union. This had a stridently anti-​Labour platform that found favour with supporters of the Lloyd George Coalition. Nevertheless, the 1918 election saw the defeat of 13 

A. Reid, ed., The New Party: Described by Some of Its Members (London, 1894). K. Morgan, Bolshevism and the British Left: Volume ii. The Webbs and Soviet Communism (London, 2006), ch. 6. 15  See M. Worley, Oswald Mosley and the New Party (Basingstoke, 2010). 14 

348   Kevin Morgan the party’s only candidate, Emmeline’s daughter Christabel, and the handful of independent women’s candidates were also unsuccessful.16 Women’s political activities thereafter were therefore focused either on the provision made for them within other political parties, at the expense in every case of their massive under-​representation in leading roles and public office, or on the many non-​party campaigns with which the continuity of a feminist campaigning tradition has been identified.17 More durable parties were founded on the basis of the national question. The ceding of the Irish Free State in 1922 removed the greatest of the spanners in the Westminster works, in the form of the Irish Nationalist Party. Even so, the contrivance of partition did bring with it a sort of party micro-​system in Northern Ireland. This chiefly took the form of Ulster Unionist MPs who, until the 1970s, accepted the Conservative whip at Westminster. In Wales and Scotland, meanwhile, Plaid Cymru was established in 1925 and the Scottish National Party (SNP) in 1934. Home rule had been close to the heart of Gladstonian Liberalism, and Plaid’s formation has been traced to the crisis of a Liberal political hegemony which had become fused with the nationalist cause.18 In Scotland, it was the shallowness of Labour’s commitment to self-​government that prompted the formation in 1928 of the National Party of Scotland, whose merger with the right-​leaning Scottish party, formed four years later, resulted in the SNP.19 Neither party threatened any immediate electoral breakthrough, and Plaid’s historian describes it as in this period ‘not really a political party at all but a cultural and educational movement’.20 It was in the late 1960s that both the Welsh and Scottish parties achieved the by-​ election victories that signalled their bursting in upon the Westminster model.21 The Liberals had already similarly confounded the operations of the swingometer, most notably in the spectacular Orpington by-​election upset of 1962. For some this signified class dealignment, for others the fraying of the post-​war settlement within which the contest between its two dominant parties had been played out. In spite of continuing marked fluctuations, an age of multi-​party politics was thus prefigured that has since come to appear as irreversibly grounded in a multi-​level polity and the employment within it of diverse electoral systems conducive to strikingly varied outcomes and patterns of support. As the century reached its end there thus existed a range of electorally credible parties representing what Dennis Kavanagh and David Butler, in their commentary on the 2005 election, described as ‘distinctive strands of opinion that the traditional parties are 16 

J. Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London, 2002), ch. 21. K. Cowman, Women in British Politics, c. 1689–​1979 (Basingstoke, 2010), chs 8–​9; P. Thane, ‘The Impact of Mass Democracy on British Political Culture, 1918–​1939’, in J. Gottlieb and R. Toye, eds., The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender, and Politics in Britain, 1918–​1945 (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 54–​69. 18  D. Hwyel Davies, The Welsh Nationalist Party 1925–​1945: A Call to Nationhood (Cardiff, 1983). 19  R.J. Finlay, Independent and Free: Scottish Politics and the Origins of the Scottish National Party, 1918–​1945 (Edinburgh, 1994). 20 Davies, Welsh Nationalist Party, p. viii. 21  J. Mitchell, ‘From Breakthrough to Mainstream: The Politics of Potential and Blackmail’, in G. Hassan, ed., The Modern SNP: From Protest to Power (Edinburgh, 2009), pp. 31–​2. 17 

‘Third’ and Fringe Parties    349 unable to represent’.22 The Liberals, lately the Liberal Democrats, had initially seemed to cater for a social and political ‘happy medium’ alienated by class conflict and disenfranchised by two-​party adversarialism.23 Subsequently the convergence of the Westminster parties on the centre ground, particularly as this was redefined in the light of Thatcherism, produced its own exclusions, as most strikingly manifested in what had once seemed impregnable Labour strongholds. The earliest beneficiary was the far-​right British National Party (BNP), which like its counterparts elsewhere picked up support from disaffected ‘losers from modernisation’.24 In contrast to the inter-​war years, it was the far left that seemed furthest from establishing an electoral foothold. Nevertheless, from the student protests of the 1960s to a plethora of issue-​based campaigns, the parties and groupuscules of the radical left had a definite presence away from the parliamentary arena. If these, moreover, could be regarded as a form of post-​materialist ‘middle-​class radicalism’, so too could the more electorally orientated campaigning of the Green party, which on its formation as PEOPLE in 1973 was arguably the earliest such environmentalist party in any European country. Breakaway parties seemed of their very nature to come and go. Where the claim on some distinct ‘strand of opinion’ allowed, if nothing else, for a degree of staying power, the pull of the two-​party system led as if inexorably to the absorption or extinction of virtually every one of Britain’s disenchanted splinter groups. In the case of the Liberal Unionists, whose leader Joseph Chamberlain was one of Mosley’s most obvious political forebears, a spate of inconclusive general elections (1885–​92) only served to hasten the process of rapid absorption into the main body of the Conservative party.25 There were also the Liberal Nationals, who, from their emergence in 1931, were closely aligned with and dependent on the Conservatives, and eventually fused with them at constituency level. Lloyd George, meanwhile, broke off from the Liberals with his tiny family party, and almost as quickly made his way back again.26 Labour’s first significant breakaway was the National Democratic Party, formerly the British Workers’ League, comprising pro-​war supporters of the Lloyd George Coalition and returning ten MPs in the 1918 Khaki election. All had received the Lloyd George coupon, and like the smattering of Coalition Labour MPs they proved a phenomenon of a single parliament.27 National Labour, formed to support defecting ministers in 1931, also depended on Conservative goodwill, and by the end of the decade its handful of MPs had either reverted to their old allegiance or formalized their new one. Even the 22 

See S. Ingle, The British Party System (4th edn., London, 2008), ch. 9. Butler and Stokes, Political Change, ch. 14. 24  R. Ford, ‘Who Might Vote for the BNP?’, in R. Eatwell and M.J. Goodwin, eds., The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain (London, 2010), pp. 145–​67. 25  J.D. Fair, ‘From Liberal to Conservative: The Flight of the Liberal Unionists after 1886’, Victorian Studies, 29 (1986), 291–​314. 26  D. Dutton, A History of the Liberal Party since 1900 (2nd edn., Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 111–​20, 148–​9. 27  Roy Douglas, ‘The National Democratic Party and the British Workers’ League’, Historical Journal, 15 (1972), 533–​52. G.H. Roberts did retain his Norwich seat in 1922, but lost it the following year having joined the Conservatives. 23 

350   Kevin Morgan ILP, on disaffiliating from Labour in 1932, lost the great bulk of its membership, though it retained its one real stronghold of Glasgow and returned four MPs there in 1935.28 Generally, Labour dissidents were either reconciled with their party, like the mercurial Stafford Cripps, or consigned to electoral oblivion, like the ‘Labour Independents’ expelled as communist sympathizers in 1949 or the two Militant MPs who suffered a similar fate in 1991. The sole possible exception was the Social Democratic Party, which broke away with fourteen MPs in 1981 and briefly threatened a lasting realignment of the centre-​left. That such a claim was sustainable was nevertheless possible only through its alliance with the resurgent Liberals, giving rise in 1988 to their merger into the Liberal Democrats. While Labour defectors split off in both directions, Conservative splintering movements usually involved some notion of a national or imperial interest insufficiently safeguarded against disparate forms of political, economic, or racial imperilment. This was certainly the rationale of the National party, established by the protectionist MP Henry Page Croft with a handful of parliamentary supporters in 1917.29 The Empire Free Trade Crusade of press magnate Lord Beaverbrook flashed across the protectionist firmament 14 years later, while in the last decade of the century hostility to the European Union gave rise to both the Referendum party and the UK Independence Party (UKIP). Even UKIP—​at the time of writing, Britain’s third party in terms of votes—​has had to depend on a Conservative defector for its sole parliamentary representation. Though Page Croft’s National party is said to have achieved the century’s best fourth-​party performance in the 1918 Khaki election, its two successful candidates similarly depended on a free run from the Tories and soon returned to the Conservative fold, as did the one successful Beaverbrook candidate in a 1930 by-​election. It was a measure of this predicament that Enoch Powell, who was UKIP’s clearest political precursor in his aversion to Europe and mass immigration, had to secure his parliamentary platform by relocating to Northern Ireland and accepting the mandate of the Ulster Unionists. The third or exogenous variety of ‘other’ party takes us even further beyond the reach of the Westminster model. Mosley maintained that neither liberalism, socialism, nor conservatism were peculiarly British phenomena, and that each also had the aspect of an international creed or ideology.30 The nationalist parties of the inter-​war years were certainly part of a pan-​European development, and the influence of the far-​right Action française upon Plaid Cymru has prompted impassioned discussion of Plaid’s alleged fascistic proclivities.31 The larger parties also had their fellow travellers of left or right—​far more 28  G. Cohen, The Failure of a Dream? The Independent Labour Party from Disaffiliation to World War II (London, 2009). 29  W.D. Rubinstein, ‘Henry Page Croft and the National Party 1917–​22’, Journal of Contemporary History, 9 (1974), 129–​48. 30  O. Mosley, The Greater Britain (2nd edn., London, 1934), p. 20. 31  See for example, R. Griffiths, ‘Another Form of Fascism: The Cultural Impact of the French “Radical Right” in Britain’, in J. Gottlieb and T.P. Linehan, eds., The Culture of Fascism. Visions of the Far Right in Britain (London, 2004), pp. 174–​80; R. Wyn Jones, The Fascist Party in Wales? Plaid Cymru, Welsh Nationalism and the Accusation of Fascism (Cardiff, 2014).

‘Third’ and Fringe Parties    351 so, in the Labour party’s case, than did the more disciplined social democratic parties of the continent. Where the communist and fascist parties nevertheless stand apart is in the derivation of their very names, insignia, and, in the BUF’s case, uniform from the external states and movements with which they identified. The latter also provided them with both material and moral support, and doubtless this is part of their fascination: for of all the smaller parties, these have attracted a level of historiographical interest that can hardly be accounted for by their electoral presence alone. On the other hand, if we first reflect upon the possible impact of these diverse smaller parties upon British politics and society, we shall see that this can by no means be reduced to the number of votes they received.

II In relation to the SNP, James Mitchell invokes Sartori’s idea of the capacity of oppositional parties to help shape the terms of political debate through what he calls their blackmail potential. They may, in other words, have no credible claim to a role in government, or ‘coalition potential’. They do, however, offer sufficient electoral competition to influence the outcome of elections, if only in some cases by the diversion of votes at other parties’ expense.32 In the earliest days of Labour’s electoral challenge, its capacity to damage Liberal electoral prospects was manifestly greater than that of actually winning seats. While the Liberals as the dominant party might therefore argue against splitting the non-​Unionist vote, this could equally be turned against it as a political bargaining counter. As early as 1892, L.T. Hobhouse was warning that the formation of a separate Labour party could only be avoided if the Liberals embraced a programme of broad national interests ‘of which . . . the greatest and most pressing is the improvement of the conditions of the working millions’. If social reformists of this type made the running once the Liberals returned to power in 1906, this was certainly not due to their numerical weight within the party, and it did on the other hand reflect something of the pressure of the rising Labour party.33 For the later Celtic nationalist parties, in the absence of any such electoral arrangement, the geographical concentration of support did facilitate a parliamentary breakthrough, and as early as the October 1974 general election some 14 SNP and Plaid MPs were returned. What ultimately proved a win–​win situation for the SNP was Labour’s meeting this challenge through the concession of such political reforms as gave its nationalist rivals the space beyond the dominant party system in which to flourish. Buttressed by its standing in the Scottish Parliament and the securing of a referendum on Scottish independence, in 2015 the SNP enjoyed the once unthinkable sequel of Labour’s extinction as a parliamentary force north of the 32  Mitchell, ‘From Breakthrough to Mainstream’, pp. 33–​41; Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, pp. 107–​10. 33  Hobhouse, cited in M. Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978), p. 126.

352   Kevin Morgan border. Perhaps there is a parallel with the early Labour party’s securing legalization by Asquith’s Liberal government of the trade union political funds which then assisted it in supplanting the Liberals after 1918.34 While other minor parties struggled to breach the threshold of electoral credibility, it is a paradox of the phenomenon that party failure may in certain circumstances be the measure of a party’s impact rather than its absence. One of the features of a finely balanced duopoly was that governments could change hands, or at least anticipate doing so, through relatively small-​scale movements of the swingometer. A party capable of influencing these movements could therefore expect to have its presence attended to, even at the expense of the distinctive political space it sought to occupy. Even in advance of modern polling methods, the so-​called nationalization of the party system meant that almost any electoral contest could be read as the key to national trends. This was especially so in circumstances in which the pull of the principal parties was weakened, as in by-​elections, by the absence of any immediate national consequences.35 By the final decades of the twentieth century, the volatility that had become such a feature of these campaigns was compounded by the introduction of new categories of election, notably for devolved institutions and the European Parliament, which did not follow the simple plurality principle of the Westminster model. The far-​right National Front (NF) never achieved a by-​election breakthrough, nor even managed to get a single local councillor elected. Nevertheless, by its merely signalling a reservoir of possible support—​as, notably, when it pushed the Liberals into fourth place in the Greater London Council elections in May 1977—​it fuelled concerns about a strong electoral performance in a period in which both main parties had been haemorrhaging votes. These were the circumstances in which, in 1978, Margaret Thatcher undertook to deal with the immigration issue that lay behind the NF challenge, using the very language of ‘swamping’ that had hitherto demarcated the NF from the political mainstream. To this extent, Thatcher’s notorious interview with World in Action represented a definite point scored by the NF. Nevertheless, whatever the connection between the boost it gave to the political salience of immigration, the election victory that Thatcher achieved the following year, and the passing in 1981 of the British Nationality Act, it did the NF itself no good at all. In the 1979 election, the NF flopped, and throughout the Thatcher years it found that the political space it had threatened to occupy was no longer available.36 As Roger Griffin observed, the spectre of fascism’s success could exercise a greater influence on mainstream political agendas than could 34  C. Wrigley, ‘Labour and the Trade Unions’, in K.D. Brown, ed., The First Labour Party 1906–​1914 (London, 1985), pp. 129–​51. 35  M. Roberts, ‘“A terrific outburst of political meteorology”: By-​Elections and the Unionist Electoral Ascendancy in Late-​Victorian England’, in T.G. Otte and P. Readman, eds., By-​Elections in British Politics 1832–​1914 (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 177–​200. 36  N. Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism: The British National Party and the Quest for Legitimacy (Basingstoke, 2005), chs 1–​2; M. Durham, ‘The Conservative Party, the British Extreme Right and the Problem of Political Space, 1967–​83’, in M. Cronin, ed., The Failure of British Fascism: The Far Right and the Fight for Political Recognition (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 81–​98.

‘Third’ and Fringe Parties    353 ‘actually existing fascism’ itself, and thus it was that purportedly liberal states were drawn into collusion with the forces of racism and ultra-​nationalism.37 The notion of political blackmail might suggest a victim more unwilling and less opportunistic than Thatcher actually was. On the other hand, the later challenge of the BNP was also accommodated by what was now New Labour with a so-​called triangulation strategy that in practice was closer to Thatcher’s approach than to the more combative stance which Labour itself had traditionally adopted.38 From another part of the political spectrum, the greening of Britain’s mainstream politics must have owed something to the Greens’ achievement of a one-​off 15 per cent of the national poll in European Parliament elections in 1989. Certainly, it was consistent with the paradox of Britain having one of Europe’s weakest environmentalist parties and one of its strongest environmental lobbies.39 In the case of the Referendum party and more especially UKIP, Euroscepticism combined with populist xenophobia certainly had its effect upon the larger parties. In the most contiguous party, which in this case was the Conservatives, the familiar notion of blackmail may nevertheless obscure the ways in which an external party threat could be deployed in internal party politics as a form of partisan bargaining counter. UKIP, in other words, was a form of argument for the Eurosceptic Tory in just the same way that the embryonic Labour party had been for the Liberal progressive Hobhouse. That may be worth bearing in mind as we turn to the seeming ineffectuality of the CPGB and the inter-​war fascist movement. According to the political scientist’s criteria of party relevance, both these movements comprehensively failed the test not only of coalition potential but of blackmail potential. At its electoral apogee in 1945 the CPGB had just two MPs, along with the communist-​aligned Labour expellee D.N. Pritt. The BUF, following the New Party fiasco, did not even contest a parliamentary seat; and whereas the CPGB did at least have its ‘little Moscows’, and in 1946 claimed 215 local councillors, Britain had no little Nurembergs and only one little-​publicized BUF councillor.40 Both the CPGB and the BUF have in consequence been regarded as prime examples of party failure. The former, according to its first academic historian, was a ‘revolutionary party in a non-​revolutionary situation’.41 The BUF similarly appeared as a sort of praetorian guard standing ready to rescue Britain from a crisis that never materialized. Here, on the one hand, was the evidence of Britain’s immunity to what was otherwise an ‘age of extremes’.42 At the same time, the extremes themselves appear as a somewhat esoteric affair, with the ‘bizarre fascination’ which A.J.P. Taylor conceded on 37 

R. Griffin, ‘British Fascism: The Ugly Duckling’, in Cronin, Failure, pp. 162–​65. N. Copsey, ‘Meeting the Challenge of Contemporary British Fascism? The Labour Party’s Response to the National Front and the British National Party’, in N. Copsey and D. Renton, eds., British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 182–​202. 39  C. Rootes, ‘Greens in a Cold Climate’, in D. Richardson and C. Rootes, eds., The Green Challenge: The Development of Green Parties in Europe (London, 1995), pp. 66–​90. 40  In Eye, Suffolk, in 1938. 41  H. Pelling, The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile (London, 1958), ch. 11. 42  A. Thorpe, ed., The Failure of Political Extremism in Inter-​War Britain (Exeter, 1989); J. Stevenson and C. Cook, The Slump: Society and Politics During the Depression (London, 1977). 38 

354   Kevin Morgan reviewing one early CPGB history, but without this being of any relevance for the wider course of events.43 Superficially at least, there are consequently a number of similarities in the two movements’ historiographies. Both are approached as movements of highly committed political activists, and both have drawn extensively on recent developments in social and cultural history. The highly localized phenomenon of the ‘little Moscow’ has attracted studies of the social or ethnic particularities that lay behind the CPGB’s relative success in certain parts of the British coalfields or London’s Jewish East End.44 The BUF has also given rise to a plethora of local and regional studies, and in both cases there is a strong interest in the prosopography of these parties, which in the communists’ case can draw upon a body of source materials unparalleled in the case of any other British party.45 Both the CPGB, and its predecessors, and the BUF have also given rise to sophisticated studies of women’s political activism and the gendering within these movements of political discourse and power relations.46 Particularly in the BUF’s case, it is a truism that never in the field of popular politics has so much been written by so many about so few. As Martin Pugh remarks, despite its abundance, this literature has nevertheless figured remarkably little in the wider study of British political history.47 Work on both these movements engages with a vigorous international scholarship, and both have the potential to bring a distinctive comparative perspective to the specificities of British political development. This can hardly be expected, however, if they are historiographically quarantined within a sort of extra-​territorial enclave. It is through exploring their interplay with Britain’s wider political culture that the superficial resemblance between the impact and reception of the two movements themselves is dispelled. More importantly, these are not just interesting footnotes to the larger political narrative of twentieth-​century Britain. At certain key moments, they are, crucially, part of the bigger story itself.

III In an essay published in 1984, Ross McKibbin posed the question of why there was no Marxism in Britain. McKibbin was the author of a standard work on the early Labour

43 

Taylor in The Observer, 27 Mar. 1966. S. Macintyre, Little Moscows: Communism and Working-​Class Militancy in Inter-​War Britain (London, 1980); H. Srebrnik, London Jews and British Communism 1935–​1945 (London, 1995). 45  K. Morgan, G. Cohen, and A. Flinn, Communists in British Society 1920–​1991 (London, 2007). For the BUF, the best local study, which also incorporates a prosopographical dimension, is T. Linehan, East London for Mosley: The British Union of Fascists in East London and South-​West Essex 1933–​40 (London, 1996). 46  K. Hunt, Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question 1884–​1911 (Cambridge, 1996); J. Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement (London, 2003). 47  M. Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ Fascists and Fascism Between the Wars (London, 2005), pp. 1–​2. 44 

‘Third’ and Fringe Parties    355 party that was firmly rooted in the age of the swingometer and expressed its debt to Peter Pulzer, among others. Labour in this account was thus the product of intense class loyalties and of a class-​riven society; ideology was embellishment and detail, and socialism itself partly a sop to the professional bourgeoisie.48 The ‘Marxism’ essay took these questions further back to ask why, prior to 1914, Britain’s highly developed class consciousness had not given rise to a mass Marxist party like the German Social Democratic Party (SPD).49 As an excursion into comparative history, the essay was somewhat bereft of comparative data and some of the factors cited—​notably the structure of the workforce and the availability of a socialist political leadership—​could equally have been made of other European countries and large parts of Germany.50 What did however appear as the crucial distinction in the British case was the strength of a pre-​existing working-​ class associational culture. This may also be identified with the trade unions that long predated any British socialist movement and were central to McKibbin’s understanding of British labourism. In theory, there was no reason why the same logic should not be extended to the post-​ 1914 period.51 Accounts of British fascism have not made much of factors such as the structure of the workforce. Nevertheless, even in this context, the strength of organized labour has been seen as a crucial factor restricting the popular support available for Mosley’s brand of fascism. By the same token, the structurally induced contraction of this labour movement presence is plausibly regarded as at least part of the explanation for the much greater electoral advances made by far-​right movements in the post-​ Thatcher period.52 In relation to McKibbin’s immediate concern with Marxism, one is superficially confronted with the same basic anomaly in respect of the absence in Britain of the sort of mass communist party that was established at different times in countries such as Germany, France, and Italy. Nevertheless, the posing of the same question diachronically raises very different issues, for Britain by the 1920s lacked not only the mass rejectionist party assumed to have prevailed elsewhere before 1914, but also the sort of tightly managed, mass reformist party of a resolutely anti-​Bolshevik type that the SPD had since become. Even Lenin had seen that there was something distinctive about the British case. If Britain’s diffuse and pluralistic associational culture precluded the development of a mass Marxist party, it also counteracted pressures for the ostracism of the same radical elements as long as these appeared to respect the movement’s common conventions. 48 

R. McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–​1924 (Oxford, 1983 edn), pp. 91–​105, 236–​47. R. McKibbin, ‘Why Was There No Marxism in Britain?’, reprinted in R. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880–​1950 (Oxford, 1991 edn), pp. 1–​41. 50  See J. Callaghan, ‘Ross McKibbin: Class Cultures, the Trade Unions and the Labour Party’, in J. Callaghan, S. Fielding, and S. Ludlam, eds., Interpreting the Labour Party: Approaches to Labour Politics and History (Manchester, 2003), pp. 116–​33. 51  See for example, A. Thorpe, ‘“The Only Effective Bulwark against Reaction and Revolution”: Labour and the Frustration of the Extreme Left’, in Thorpe, Failure, p. 24. 52  T.P. Linehan, ‘Whatever Happened to the Labour Movement? Proletarians and the Far Right in Contemporary Britain’, in Copsey and Renton, British Fascism, pp. 160–​81. 49 

356   Kevin Morgan British trade unions had never been divided on political or confessional lines. They were consequently disinclined to introduce political tests when the establishment of a national Labour party coincided with the wider schism in European social democracy that followed the Russian Revolution. It was not until the late 1920s that communists were finally excluded from the Labour party, and even then they mostly retained their rights within the unions that loomed so large within it. The Labour party itself had always accepted the affiliation of the communists’ predecessors. Curiously, it is nevertheless the ultra-​reformist Fabian Society, formed as one of Britain’s earliest socialist bodies in 1884, that may be regarded as one of the CPGB’s most important antecedents. The Fabians had not at first even supported the idea of a new party breaking into the bifurcated world of Private Willis. Instead, they became synonymous with the idea of permeation: not just of Britain’s political elites, but through the influencing of a wider public and the democratic movements of worker and consumer to which founding Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb devoted a series of pioneering studies. This was one of the strands that fed into the early CPGB, through the radicalization of a younger generation of Fabians and the transformation of the Fabian Research Department into the communist-​aligned Labour Research Department. The Webbs themselves would never become persuaded of the need for a British communist party. Nevertheless, as they embraced the cause of Soviet communism in their final years, they did certainly recognize a sense of fellow feeling with the communists’ first real mass enrolment of the anti-​fascist 1930s. If the communists sought power by means of ‘permeation, fractions and nuclei’, the sometime Labour leader George Lansbury had advised, it was the Webbs who could teach them how to do it.53 Here then was neither blackmail nor coalition, nor merely a form of burrowing, but a politics of partisan campaigning that was not primarily about sustaining a group of parliamentary leaders. From the ‘New Unionism’ appearing in the formative years of British socialism to the great industrial conflicts of the 1960s–​70s, successive movements of the radical left were intimately connected with the militant union activism of at least a section of British labour. In the communists’ case, the historian Nina Fishman once suggested that they ‘vacated the political arena voluntarily’ to concentrate on these union-​based activities.54 Though this was clearly overstated, the communists did certainly achieve their greatest effectiveness through forms of militant permeationism, sometimes of a covert character, though far more often not. As well as work within the unions, one might think of communist initiatives such as the Left Book Club of the 1930s, or the hunger marches organized by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, or the international solidarity campaigns to which communists and other left groups made such prominent contributions.55 Until the CPGB finally dissolved itself in 1991, 53 

On these themes, see K. Morgan, Bolshevism and the British Left: I. Labour Legends and Russian Gold (London, 2006). 54  N. Fishman, The British Communist Party and the Trade Unions 1933–​45 (Aldershot, 1995), p. 341. 55  For which, see S. Howe, Anti-​Colonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire 1918–​ 1964 (Oxford, 1993).

‘Third’ and Fringe Parties    357 there was always an underlying tension between the conception of a leading or ‘vanguard’ party and that of a movement of political activists. It is noteworthy, however, that when the New Left emerged from the crisis of Stalinism in 1956, it was the latter tradition which it sought to maintain, and, the Trotskyists excepted, there was no attempt to form a rival or successor party. If there was a sequel in party terms, it was in the ‘Labour new left’ which in the early Thatcher years was identified with left-​wing standard-​bearer Tony Benn, and which linked up with movements beyond the Labour party exactly as had the unity campaigns of the 1930s.56 Though subsequently Tony Blair’s New Labour introduced a managed party environment verging on control-​freakery, commentators of all persuasions were amazed, following the 2015 election, to see Labour’s age-​old radical tradition resurrected from the ashes. There are obvious parallels again with the historiography on inter-​war fascism. Pugh in particular evokes a ‘flourishing traffic’ in ideas and personnel between fascists and inter-​war Conservatism, and the permeation not of the unions but of the military.57 Though fascism in Britain lacked the continuous party lineage which for Marxists began in the 1880s, its historians have clearly demonstrated that its ideological roots go back to a British as well as a European far-​right tradition.58 This in itself, however, does not tell us very much about the changing relations between these ideas and the society within which they found expression. The notion of a disembodied ‘generic fascism’, positing the primacy of ‘culture’ over ‘politics’ and of ideology over movement, has in this respect encouraged a descriptive and surprisingly traditional reproduction of period texts irrespective of how these were socially constructed and by whom.59 Notwithstanding the ‘primacy of culture consensus’ in fascist studies, fascism in its British variant had little real cultural presence to give primacy to. The BUF’s internal culture has been admirably reconstructed. Discussion of a wider activity has nevertheless fallen back on a reactive stream of far-​right commentary, mostly on the part of a very few individuals, with no significant cultural productions, no discussion of audience, and nothing at all—​unless one includes palingenetic renditions of Elgar and Schubert—​bearing out the claim of a radical fascist modernity.60 Comparison of the two fringe movements is not therefore an exercise in historical parallelism, but demonstrates their very different relations with both state and society in the years of Britain’s emerging post-​war settlement. In respect of the state, it was the communists who, from the outset, were a principal target for Britain’s systems of 56 

See L. Panitch and C. Leys, The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour (2nd edn., London, 2001). 57 Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’, pp. 4–​5. 58  A. Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain: Social Imperialism to the BNP (Basingstoke, 2005). 59  See R. Griffin, ‘The Primacy of Culture: The Current Growth (Or Manufacture) of Consensus within Fascist Studies’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37 (2002), 21–​43. 60  See the essays in Gottlieb and Linehan, Culture of Fascism, notably Linehan, ‘Reactionary Spectatorship: British Fascists and Cinema in Inter-​War Britain’, pp. 27–​44, and R. Griffin, ‘“This Fortress Built against Infection”: The BUF Vision of Britain’s Theatrical and Musical Renaissance’, pp. 45–​65; also Linehan, British Fascism 1918–​39: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester, 2000), ch. 11.

358   Kevin Morgan surveillance, whereas fascists in the 1920s enjoyed an element of positive collusion with them.61 Nevertheless, when, during the Nazi–​Soviet pact (1939–​41), the two movements became entangled in the official mind as never before, it was the fascists who were summarily proscribed and had several hundred members interned. The communists avoided such a fate, not least because of the reaction it might have provoked in the factories and among a wider public.62 Within a liberal political culture, relations with state and society were to this extent interdependent with each other. Communists took on many public roles, and research confirms the verdict of one early study that the CPGB was never a ‘closed society with distinctive mores isolated from the rest of society’ and that its members readily fraternized and found acceptance with their fellows.63 Discussion of the communists’ cultural presence can easily descend into lists of luminaries passing through the party’s ranks. From the Unity Theatre and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop to the jazz and folk revivals, the Artists’ International Association, and the scientists who influenced the ‘white heat’ of the Wilson years, communists and those closest to them did undoubtedly have a presence that was not restricted to the margins of British society.64 By the 1970s, former communists included a Poet Laureate, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Master of Balliol, and General Secretary of Britain’s largest trade union. It is remarkable, by contrast, how few of the longer trajectories of BUF members are so far known to us, whether as a result of the movement’s pariah status or because the estimates of a BUF membership greatly exceeding the CPGB’s need revising downwards.65 The CPGB achieved its peak membership in 1942. These, by common assent, were years of a ‘probably unprecedented’ politicization of the British people, and at a time, as McKibbin has pointed out, when the Labour party was unwilling to enter the sphere of civil society.66 It is therefore reasonable to ponder the role of party in this politicization, and what these parties might have been. McKibbin has latterly admitted the communists as part of the wartime ‘radical mix’ on the basis of their respectable showing in the 1945 election. Nevertheless, the two-​party paradigm remains intact, and the phase of radicalization is tellingly characterized as one of ‘the party system thrown off course’.67 Elsewhere, Steven Fielding has invoked the same ‘movement away from party’, and while he rightly discusses the 5,000 members of Richard Acland’s radical

61 

See R.C. Thurlow, ‘The Historiography and Source Materials in the Study of Internal Security in Modern Britain (1885–​1956)’, History Compass, 6 (2007), 147–​7 1. 62  K. Morgan, Against Fascism and War: Ruptures and Continuities in British Communist Politics 1935–​ 41 (Manchester, 1989), pp. 236–​42. 63  N. Wood, Communism and British Intellectuals (London, 1959), p. 24. 64  For diverse examples, see A. Croft, ed., A Weapon in the Struggle. The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain (London, 1998). 65  For a judicious assessment of these estimates, see Linehan, British Fascism, ch. 6. 66  R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures. England 1918–​1951 (new edn, Oxford, 2000), pp. 531–​34. 67  R. McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–​1951 (Oxford, 2010), ch. 4.

‘Third’ and Fringe Parties    359 Common Wealth party, the CPGB’s 40,000 wartime recruits are simply discounted.68 Paul Addison commented long ago that the main source of radicalizing propaganda was ‘not the official Labour apparatus, but the leftish intelligentsia’, and this included an activist intelligentsia in the factories and localities which in this period were strongly identified with the communists.69 Whether as a symptom or as a galvanizing contributory factor, there is therefore no retracing Addison’s ‘road to 1945’ except in the company of this political presence to Labour’s left. The moment did not last, and, having campaigned for Labour’s victory in 1945, the communists were then virtually wiped out as an electoral force during the Cold War. The party system resumed its course, and by the time that McKenzie wheeled out his swingometer it would appear as if it could have had no other. It does not seem that way now. It was in the watershed elections of the twentieth century—​those of 1906, 1945, and 1979—​that movements or threatened movements away from established parties helped shape the terms on which these elections were fought and won. When Private Willis warbled and McKenzie first measured the two-​ party swing, these by contrast were moments of relative equilibrium and a certain inward-​looking complacency. It is doubtless true that every generation recasts history in the light of its own preoccupations. With Scotland voting on the break-​up of the Union, and Britain as a whole on its Brexit from a wider union, it is therefore natural that at the time of writing Britain’s minor parties should seem to raise important issues regarding the broader field of British political history. These parties are too diverse to allow of any general conclusion regarding minor party politics. Whether as splintering movements or as parties arising independently of those duopolizing national office, effectiveness did nevertheless depend in every case on there being some grievance, aspiration, or identity that the Westminster model did not accommodate. Damp squibs excepted, the mere fact of these issues coalescing in some meaningful party form was a measure of how much there was that the model did exclude, albeit that this, as in a case like fascism, could be a mark of strength as well as complacency. The impact of these minor parties depended in some of the best-​known cases on the exercising of credible electoral threat. Nevertheless, politics has never only been a matter of elections, and from the Chartists to the two World Wars, some of the peaks of third ​party activity occurred in the absence of any real opportunity for elections at all. It is a cliché that precisely these were some of the pivotal moments in British political history. They remind us that neither the two-​party paradigm nor the swingometer could ever fully represent the complexities of British political culture, particularly in its moments of greatest flux.

68  S. Fielding, ‘The Second World War and Popular Radicalism: The Significance of the “Movement Away From Party”’, History, 80 (1995), 38–​58. 69  P. Addison, The Road to 1945 (new edn, London, 1975), pp. 142–​3.

360   Kevin Morgan

Further reading T. Linehan, British Fascism 1918–​39: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester, 2000). K. Morgan, Bolshevism and the British Left (3 vols, London, 2006–​13). A. Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain: Social Imperialism to the BNP (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). A. Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow, 1920–​43 (Manchester, 2000). M. Worley, Oswald Mosley and the New Party (Basingstoke, 2010).

chapter 21

The Role of t h e P olitician i n t h e Demo cratic Re g i me Robert Crowcroft

Scrutinizing the character of democratic politics has always risked rubbing people the wrong way. In 399 BC Socrates was put to death by the Athenian democracy for doing precisely that, targeted for his lack of confidence in the democratic regime and infuriating tendency to pose searching questions of it.1 Thankfully, scholars are no longer executed for asking difficult questions—​at least not in the West—​but probing what democratic politics entails still elicits an emotional reaction. In the seminar room, my undergraduates are often so defensive that their faculties desert them; sometimes even professional historians are visibly uneasy about where the conversation might lead. Yet such probing remains an important task, not least because those who run the democratic regime—​politicians—​are every bit as vexing as the system itself. In 1873, William Gladstone observed that ‘I always hold that politicians are the men whom, as a rule, it is most difficult to . . . understand completely, and for my own part I never have thus understood, or thought I understood, above one or two’.2 Considering the staggering psychological complexity of Gladstone himself, that is a striking admission. And the problem has not lessened in the intervening period. In dissecting politicians, there is what they do, what they say, and what they believe. There are always these three sides to political activity. In a contemporary climate of public cynicism about politicians, the combination of bafflement and fascination hinted at by Gladstone endures. It also makes

I am grateful to James Alexander and Simon Green for helpful discussions at an early stage. John Bew, David Fauchier, Geoffrey Fry, Francesca Morphakis, and Julius Ruiz read the chapter, offering suggestions, good humour, and encouragement. My fellow editors also gave penetrating advice. 1 Plato, Apology, in The Last Days of Socrates (London, 2003). 2 

J. Morley, The Life of W.E. Gladstone (3 vols, London, 1903), vol. ii, p. 464.

362   Robert Crowcroft it all the more urgent that political historians pose pertinent questions which connect the academy to society in meaningful ways. This is no time for navel-​gazing. At the beginning of the period under review in this Handbook—​the age of the French Revolution and William Pitt the Younger—​‘democracy’ elicited fear among sensible people. It raised the prospect of cowering in drawing rooms while a baying mob broke down the door and committed unspeakable acts against one’s female relatives. The finest minds, from Burke to de Tocqueville, wrestled with its implications. By 2000, democracy was not only established in Britain, but would-​be rulers had gradually perfected its mastery. Lord Palmerston was probably the first expert practitioner of the art and, in many respects, devised the blueprint that others would follow. For good or ill, Gladstone may be the most significant politician of the whole period. Tony Blair, in power from 1997 to 2007, was the epitome of the polished, smooth-​talking contemporary democratic leader. Democracy as it developed and was practised was about best distributing the benefits of human associational life, as well as stimulating the creation of further benefits in the future. And coming to terms with a democratic society is what unites a vast and disparate historiography on British political life since Pitt.3 Politics is an ambiguous creature. It defies easy characterization.4 In a sense, this entire Handbook explores the role of the politician, in a diverse set of themes and contexts. The authors of every chapter show politicians ‘doing’ politics. What I will do in this chapter, then, is select several features of the democratic regime that strike me as being particularly important. This selection is arbitrary, but in proposing a view of the democratic regime it is hoped the piece will yield a certain underlying unity.

I However, the first step is to comment on the oft-​remarked ‘crisis’ of political history. This is important because the writing of political history directly, and naturally, addresses how the political system and those who function within it are approached. There are promising indications that the ‘crisis’ is finally passing, and that scholars are once again becoming confident about their subject and willing to pose big questions. A recent book by Angus Hawkins and a collection of essays edited by Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders represent the most potent manifestations of a wider trend.5 This would be a welcome development that harkens back to the 1960s and 1970s, the golden age of scholarship about modern British politics. Moreover, it is consistent with a pattern visible across the 3 

For a flavour of the diverse meanings of ‘democracy’, see R. Saunders, ‘Democracy’, in D. Craig and J. Thompson, eds., Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 142–​67. 4  J. Alexander, ‘Notes Towards a Definition of Politics’, Philosophy, 89 (2014), 273–​300. 5  A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’ (Oxford, 2015); B. Jackson and R. Saunders, eds., Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge, 2012).

The Role of the Politician in the Democratic Regime    363 profession more broadly, for there are encouraging signs that, having passed through an unfortunate phase, the study of history is now emerging out of the other side.6 But there is a need to be clear about the nature of this ‘crisis’. We should begin with doctrine. The crisis of political history need not have occurred. It was not universal. It was sectional. In fact, it was principally a crisis suffered by the academic progressive left. Most academics are left-​wing. They identify themselves as ‘progressives’. What they choose to work on, their judgements, and, increasingly, their social media presence make their worldview perfectly apparent. At the risk of a crude paraphrasing of Herbert Butterfield, it is astonishing the extent to which the historian has been left-​wing, progressive, and Labour.7 In addition to doctrine, there is time. One fundamental reason for the ‘decline’ of political history over the past three decades was the shock that neo-​liberalism, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher delivered to the intelligentsia. In an environment already being impacted by the New Left, the events of the 1980s dissolved many of the left’s old certainties and assumptions. It proved a catastrophic experience. The effect was to provoke historians to move away from their self-​ confident projects of the 1960s and 1970s—​generally centred on class, the idealization of the workers, welfarism, and social democracy—​which had found a natural expression in political history. As A.B. Cooke and John Vincent diagnosed the genre in 1974, political history had to be ‘agreeable’, and that meant progressive.8 For example, Britain’s terrible experience of the two World Wars could be recast as accelerating social change, which was—​of course—​progressive. A  benign, or at least comforting, interpretation could thus be constructed. This is hardly a coincidence; it is a powerful expression of doctrine through the medium of historical writing. In short, the discipline seemed relatively hopeful. The social democratic mixed economy of the post-​war era possessed the right intellectual ambience for a clerisy with a strong view about the character of the good society. If Whig history in its purest form had been strangled long before, some of its underlying impulses—​to employ the past for ‘the ratification . . . of the present’ and ‘emphasise certain principles of progress’—​naturally remained strong.9 But, all good history being contemporary history, the shock of the 1980s meant that political history was now simply less emotionally agreeable than was desired; real-​world politics were not headed in the approved direction. The ‘crisis’ of political history was thus one manifestation of the wider crisis of a secular religion. What to do when the present became something that nobody would want to ratify? A lot of ‘progressive’ academics remained sensible and continued writing political history of a recognizable kind. But many increasingly focused their attention elsewhere and

6 

For example, D. Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream (New York, 2008); N. Malcolm, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-​Century Mediterranean World (London, 2015). 7  H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), p. 3. 8  A.B. Cooke and J. Vincent, The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain, 1885–​86 (Brighton, 1974), p. 162. 9 Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, p. v. For the ways in which the urge endures, see the approach of Michael Bentley at .

364   Robert Crowcroft developed fresh forms of political history. New fashions in other disciplines, specifically anthropology, cultural history, and literary criticism, were used as ratlines out of enemy-​ occupied territory. Emphasis was particularly placed on a series of so-​called intellectual ‘turns’, most notably the ‘cultural turn’ and the ‘linguistic turn’. In reality, however, these are better conceived of less as ‘turns’ than as projects. Those projects are deeply political. What happened was that the ‘turns’ saw a disillusioned intelligentsia develop a new interest in subverting entrenched identities, accepted narratives, and social norms of many kinds. This generally entailed using cultural history, reading Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and employing alternative methods in order to unpick the distinctiveness of various established categories. If political history had, for some, been a mission analogous to social work, a new outlet had to be found. A usable past was still very much the object of the quest, but scholars now ventured that social realities were in fact ‘invented’, ‘performed’, or even ‘imagined’. To this end the core traditions and institutions of human life—​the nation, the constitution, the law, Parliament, elections, and anything else rooted in the particular—​were all subjected to ‘deconstruction’ using the new intellectual armaments. And the dominant impulse in political history, which took hold from the 1980s, was to study the zone in which politicians persuaded the public to acquiesce to them, and the tools of communication and language employed to this end. Yet this impulse, and that literature, cannot be untangled from the sobering experience of a decade in which Reagan and Thatcher defied the way history was expected to develop. The problem was that the public did not behave as the intellectuals thought they ought to; the sky had fallen in as a result. The way in which the neo-​liberal politicians had pulled this off therefore needed to be understood, and became an area of urgent focus. Anthropological methods were helicoptered in to help, as were notions from postmodernism. Politicians’ methods of ‘communication’ were quickly identified as being at the core of what had happened; their powers, and apparatus, of persuasion were therefore key. But ‘truths’ that exist only in so far as they reflect the ‘discourses’ that sustain them, and activities studied in terms of how they maintain power structures, felt like a rehash. Frequently, it was false consciousness warmed up and presented as a fresh meal. If social and economic Marxism had failed to cut the mustard, perhaps cultural Marxism would be different. Nor was that all. Attitudes towards epistemology shifted to such a degree that the outcome was often to describe (and complicate) but not necessarily to explain—​hence the warning at the beginning of this chapter about navel-​gazing. And, to reiterate, these frameworks are equally as political as those of the sixties and seventies, for it can hardly be a coincidence that they conform to the contemporary left-​wing totems of the age—​immigration, gender, sexuality, race, the weakening of established identities in an age of ‘globalization’, and so on. Stripped of an ‘agreeable’ form of political history by the realities of the Reagan–​Thatcher era, political historians found comfort elsewhere. It is telling that right-​leaning political historians—​of which there are plenty—​do not have appear to suffered any ‘crisis’ at all. Just the opposite: over the past 30 years they have sailed serenely onwards much the same as before. But then, they did not really approach

The Role of the Politician in the Democratic Regime    365 history as a story of redemptive progress.10 Therefore, in accepting the reality of a ‘crisis’, we have to take care to locate it properly. A preponderance of political historians remain on the left, but there have always been sufficient right-​wingers to permit a meaningful core sample to be extracted. The latter have mostly continued to produce old-​fashioned political history with few signs of trauma or anguish. That is revealing. By no means all left-​wing scholars have been affected by the crisis, but enough have for patterns to be identifiable.11 The episode is puzzling to those untroubled by it, but as it afflicts much of the academy, it has had important effects. We cannot understand political history if we do not understand political historians. Authorial intent is key, which is not to say that historians write fiction so much as to point out that they do not write—​and cannot recover—​‘Truth’.12 The state of the discipline over the past 30  years has thus been a curious, and at times silly, one. This brings us to a concomitant aspect of the contemporary intellectual climate in which academic work is produced: the higher liberalism. Even though there is now a greater tendency for historians to treat what politicians say as functional, there remains the long-​established habit of assuming progressive ideas to be correct rather than doctrine. If narratives are different, the villains of the piece are generally the same as before. The friends and enemies of progress are clearly identified. The moral asymmetry in which virtue resides on the left is still ever present and deeply buried within the historiography.13 And for the most part, political history in the twenty-​first century still has to be ‘agreeable’. Voluntary action, anti-​racism movements, sexual liberation, the body, the environment, transnationalism, and the previously ignored role played by women in x are some examples of the fresh historiographical construction of agreeable (and strikingly contemporary) totems to broadmindedness. As Jeremy Black pointed out, these interests reflect an ideology and value system as much as they represent tools of analysis.14 Meanwhile, innocuous utterances from the past are interrogated for discriminatory meaning using the self-​same apparatus employed to police contemporary ‘speech crimes’. And scholars remain commendably likely to engage in public activism. In May 2016, for example, more than 300 historians—​many of them political historians—​signed a letter to The Guardian arguing the case for a ‘Remain’ vote in the European Union referendum.15 10  On which, see R. Niebuhr, Faith and History: A Comparison of Christian and Modern Views of History (London, 1949). 11  An example of this anguish can be found in R. McKibbin, ‘Making Things Happen’, London Review of Books, 12 (26 July 1990), 6–​7. 12  On the similarities between writing history and fiction, see N.F. Partner, ‘Making Up for Lost Time: Writing on the Writing of History’, Speculum, 61 (1986), 90–​117. 13  This is the most resilient single feature of academic political history. As Scruton noted, Eric Hobsbawm’s whitewashing of mass murder is ‘of the same order’ as David Irving’s, but never treated as such—​R. Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (London, 2015), p. 31. More benign, but no less striking, examples can be found virtually everywhere. 14  J. Black, ‘Why Historians Get It Wrong’, The New Criterion, 35 (Feb. 2017), 37–​9. 15  The Guardian, 25 May 2016.

366   Robert Crowcroft One would have thought that, of all people, historians might be sensitive to the force of what Leo Strauss contended—​that humans are loyal to the particular, and thus the universal, open society was unlikely to command the allegiance of its citizenry.16 A glance through the annual catalogue of an academic publisher or a few issues of a journal quickly reveals the ascendancy of a particular liberal worldview. The effect of this can be discerned in that right-​leaning political historians coming to right-​leaning conclusions in a journal article are far more likely to fall foul of editors—​and thus not be published, at least without substantial modification—​than is the case for their progressive peers coming to social democratic conclusions.17 The stigma attached to right-​wing perspectives in a profession in which liberal values are deeply embedded is now drawing sustained empirical scrutiny, and this is a welcome development.18 Thinking beyond the norms of liberal orthodoxy is a valuable exercise. Clinging to certain assumptions about, for example, the desirable nature of the post-​war settlement is all well and good—​but for those who do not cling to those assumptions, history can look quite different, even if the boundaries of professional acceptability make it trickier to disseminate through the usual channels. Perhaps more promising are the increasing signs of historians launching an assault on what they perceive as the hegemony of ‘the market’. James Vernon has discussed what such an agenda might look like.19 And in an admirable example of both new and old impulses, Mark Bevir explicitly wrote about late nineteenth-​century socialism in order to ‘find inspiration’ for a contemporary challenge to ‘market individualism’ and ‘neoliberalism’.20 Bevir sought ideas ‘that might inspire political action today’, and he criticized the tendency to narrow the focus rather than pose big questions. That is scholarship with a purpose, and expressed in a way of which an older generation of political historians would approve. This may constitute an important development that stimulates welcome improvements in the discipline after three decades of uncertainty. It leaves the current author with a degree of hope that the crisis of political history is passing. That this desire to get back to basics in political history is occurring in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis can, of course, be no coincidence; even the Israelites only wandered the desert for 40 years.

16  L. Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953), pp. 131–​2. See also A. Gat, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (Cambridge, 2012). 17  A rare recent exception is G.K. Fry, ‘“A Bottomless Pit of Political Surprise”? The Political “Mystery” of the Thatcher Era’, Twentieth Century British History, 21 (2010), 540–​57. 18  See J.A. Shields and J.M. Dunn Sr., Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University (New York, 2016), esp. pp. 74–​5; P.E. Tetlock and G. Mitchell, ‘Why So Few Conservatives and Should We Care?’, Society, 52 (2015), 28–​34. 19  See Vernon’s July 2015 lecture at . 20  M. Bevir, The Making of British Socialism (Princeton, 2011), pp. ix, 3–​10.

The Role of the Politician in the Democratic Regime    367

II Still, it may be that a different perspective on modern British political history—​one that draws upon conservative, libertarian, reactionary, and theological traditions instead—​ possesses at least as much contemporary resonance that can connect the academy to the public in ways with explanatory potential.21 That is because it seems to this author that the right, broadly defined, has gotten the problem of the democratic regime correct. This is particularly so in identifying the questions that need to be posed of it. A splash of Michael Oakeshott, Elie Kedourie, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Namier, W.H. Greenleaf, Leo Strauss, Maurice Cowling, and Kenneth Minogue would be beneficial here. The starting point of such a history might be clarity about the democratic and representative system. To put the matter simply, the key task of politicians between 1800 and 2000 was to come to terms with, and control, an increasingly democratic system. That system created particular imperatives and problems for those who operated it. Methods of management employed by politicians certainly changed, as did the national policy issues confronting elites. But while challenges took on new forms, there was still a striking degree of continuity in the conceptual toolkit that politicians brought to bear. Identifying the instruments to be employed was largely a matter of common sense; the character of the system made certain kinds of conduct essential. The process began in the first half of the nineteenth century and was largely complete by the end of the 1940s. At some times, its development was suddenly accelerated by men such as Palmerston and Gladstone. At others, efforts were made to slow it, by the likes of Lord Salisbury. For more than a century, politicians worked collectively (and competitively) to test the limits of that system. By the time the government of Clement Attlee fell in 1951, those boundaries were largely identified and the way in which politicians should behave had been tested, refined, and (essentially) perfected. The process of learning how to win power and discover the questions that voters wanted to be asked was a long one, but the result was a handbook of accumulated knowledge. Reflecting upon the character of the system within which they functioned thus helps us to discern the roles played by the politicians. The first and most important role was the art of procuring, or even purchasing, support. If one is a politician in democracy—​ whether the franchise is limited or universal—​one must be in the business of buying votes. We usually tend to prefer the phrase ‘winning’ votes because it sounds less pejorative, but that is to overlook why and how votes are ‘won’. Democratic politics involves making promises: to do something or deliver goods, services, or money in return for votes. This making of promises is the common systemic denominator of representative politics, regardless of party, situation, and period. A new narrative of the evolution of British democracy since 1800 might be founded on a hard-​headed reading 21 

For a related discussion, see S.J.D. Green, ‘The Anti-​Secular Tradition in British Historiography: From Herbert Butterfield to Maurice Cowling’, Fides et Historia, 44 (2012), 1–​20.

368   Robert Crowcroft of the character, and imperatives, of that regime. It is often said that the promises of politicians are not worth anything because they are so frequently broken. While this may or may not be true, the making of promises greases the wheels of the whole enterprise. There is a fictitious element to it, which requires a collective suspension of disbelief on the part of all concerned, but the system could not function without it. Thus, although pledges were often forgotten or dropped, they provided a spine for political action. At the time of elections, politicians multiplied their promises, stacking them on top of the other in an electoral arms race. If the other side wanted to compete, they need to be prepared to outbid their rivals. And the promises of politicians invariably came at a cost. Even where measures were implemented, political leaders and parties could always think of something else to do next, another advance that needed to be made, another reason why their continued exercise of authority was indispensable to the public good. Satisfaction was thus a figment of the imagination—​the city upon a hill, just visible on the horizon, never came any closer (and was never allowed to); there was no end state beyond which further change would not be needed. The moment of final victory never arrived. One remarkable feature of modern British politics was that ‘the future of the country’ was always in grave danger, and time was always short. Politics was, gradually but increasingly, presented as promising some form of social end-​state through the power of engineering and human knowledge. But, in practice, an encounter with eternity was not merely impossible but positively undesirable. Matters that could be turned into burning political issues were thus the only ammunition that counted. As more and more people gained the vote, so the character of government was altered. This was a product of rapid economic development in the nineteenth century, stimulating huge population growth (from 10.6 million in 1801 to 16.3 million three decades later), movements of labour, social tensions, and demands for political responsiveness. Economic downturns were not uncommon. Expectations of the state grew. While often seeking to discipline the electorate, politicians were, ultimately, willing to feed those expectations. By c.1945, and perhaps long before (one might attribute much of it to the unpredictable and erratic Gladstone22), a shift had occurred from—​as one observer had it—​‘parliamentary government’ to ‘popular government’.23 In 1879, Gladstone told a public meeting that ‘the people’ were ‘the masters’ now. While the Grand Old Man’s declaration was flattery—​the politicians still occupied the positions of power, and could often select the political issues of the moment themselves—​it captured something important.24 In order to occupy the stage of public life, politicians needed to be willing to flatter, cajole, and bribe the country. Waging intense electoral competition, leaders developed programmes consisting of specific legislative measures they promised to 22 

J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 1993), pp. 20, 306–​11. 23  M. Oakeshott, ‘The Masses in Representative Democracy’, in M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, ed. T. Fuller (Indianapolis, 1991), pp. 363–​83, at p. 379. 24  W.E. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches, 1879, ed. M.R.D. Foot (Leicester, 1971), p. 50.

The Role of the Politician in the Democratic Regime    369 pursue if in government. Disraeli’s ‘alchemy’ was ‘to transform the base metal of social welfare into the gold of party triumph’.25 It was refined by developments such as Joseph Chamberlain’s Unauthorized Programme. Moreover, governments now attained and relinquished office through the verdict of the electorate, as expressed at general elections. The formation of governments thus came to be understood in terms of receiving a mandate for office in return for pledges to legislate. This reached its high-​water mark in the triumph of Attlee’s Labour party. Party government driven by programmatic politics thus replaced parliamentary sovereignty as the linchpin of the system. Palmerston’s observation that ‘we cannot go on adding to the Statute Book ad infinitum’ was proven spectacularly wrong.26 The institutions of state became a legislative production line, churning out initiative after initiative to meet challenges (real or invented), to appease the public, and to relieve the voter of more of life’s potential worries. Politicians were tempted to promise a simplification of life. The chaos of experience needed to be reduced to a set of principles and slogans that could be packaged together, sold to the voters, and then reused over and over. The resultant doctrines had a coherence that, though illusory, was well suited to the task at hand; the open-​endedness and uncertainty of reality were too ambiguous. This was the world of the ‘policy auction’, as W.H. Greenleaf labelled it.27 Of course, the actual phrase ‘policy auction’ would never have been used in polite company. But Greenleaf ’s choice of words captures the flavour. Pious phrases and the language of ‘virtue’, ‘causes’, and ‘morality’ were the indispensable armour without which the system would have proven difficult to justify. A close correlation emerged between democratic politics and the promotion of ‘happiness’. Collectivism proved the ideal instrument for this, facilitating what Hayek termed ‘the relief from responsibility’.28 Government could thus become the ‘Universal Provider’29 offering, in effect, earthly salvation, and there was advantage for the politician (in the form of a role for all eternity) in seeing that this was so. Oakeshott described the effect: What in fact has happened . . . is that the prospective representative has drawn up his own mandate and then, by a familiar trick of ventriloquism, has put it into the mouth of his electors . . . Thus . . . was generated a new art of politics: the art, not of ‘ruling’ . . . nor even of maintaining the support of a majority of individuals in a parliamentary assembly, but of knowing what offer will collect most votes and making it in such a manner that it appears to come from ‘the people’.30

25 Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, p. 343. 26 

D. Southgate, ‘The Most English Minister’: The Policies and Politics of Palmerston (London, 1966), p. 528. 27  W.H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, Volume One: The Rise of Collectivism (London, 1983), p. 219. 28  F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London, 1944), p. 217. 29  G.K. Fry, The Politics of Crisis: An Interpretation of British Politics, 1931–​1945 (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 53. 30  Oakeshott, ‘The Masses in Representative Democracy’, p. 380.

370   Robert Crowcroft It was especially helpful if the politician could appear to the electors as ‘Robin Hood’31—​ even if at times their behaviour more closely resembled that of the Sheriff of Nottingham. From the 1960s onwards, public spending was almost always more than 40 per cent of gross domestic product. Politicians typically boasted of this largesse, and democracy saw them compete with pledges to spend more. To be sure, sometimes ‘retrenchment’ would be a powerful, alternative cry. Yet that became less frequent. This is an old problem for the democratic regime: Plato noted that in democracies, ‘orderly expenditure’ was portrayed as ‘meanness’.32 Greenleaf identified a ‘simple inter-​relationship between the growth of state intervention and extensions of the franchise’. ‘Politicians quickly realised that in order to win office and keep themselves there . . . they had to cadge votes’.33 This is the social contract as it evolved. One is reminded of Oakeshott’s formulation of the contrast between the state as a civil association and as an enterprise association; or, as he expressed it in another book, between the politics of scepticism and the politics of faith.34 But, to reiterate, to conceptualize it as a product of the relationship between ‘state’ and ‘citizen’ is to simplify matters in a troubling way. It neglects what has created and sustained the social contract. The boundaries of the British state defy easy characterization; retreat in some areas is as evident as expansion in others. We should not be looking to the state so much as to the politicians. Generations of rulers collaborated in an elaborate fiction: to actively encourage the public to look to government when faced with a problem. For when they looked to government, they were really looking to the politicians themselves. And where there were problems, there were votes. Thus, the pledges that politicians make are not simply an expression of doctrine, or even pragmatic policy intent. They are often also bribes. It is elevated bribery, to be sure, but it is bribery all the same. And politicians are able to engage in this behaviour because, ordinarily, the cost to themselves is, quite literally, nothing. To be sure, failure to deliver on pledges may lead to a loss of credibility. But, for the most part, broken promises can be explained away and new inducements offered to distract the attention of the public. Taxpayers bear the cost of state action, and Whitehall departments and the Civil Service can be left to try and put policies into effect. Other ministers, or ‘events’, can be blamed when things go awry. Anyway, often politicians are able to boast that they have ‘done’ x when what they really mean is that they passed a law through Parliament (if one commands a majority, hardly a difficult feat) as opposed to delivering a desirable outcome in the real world. The ‘doing’ part is where politicians, and governments, tend to fall short. The long-​term effects of this are tied to key elements in the story of British politics since 1800: a gradual expansion of the responsibilities of government, increases in spending to meet promises, and fierce debates about how to save taxpayers’ money. Much political debate in Britain, from the Chartists to Mrs Thatcher, centred on the 31 Fry, The Politics of Crisis, p. 26.

32 Plato, The Republic, trans. A.D. Lindsay (London, 1906), 560d. 33 Greenleaf, The Rise of Collectivism, p. 219. 34 

See M. Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford, 1991 edn) and The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (New Haven and London, 2009 edn).

The Role of the Politician in the Democratic Regime    371 question of where the state should go, and what it should do. The system thus hinges on making the public dependent on the politicians for x or y, thereby increasing the chances that they will become clients and vote for the same people again in the future. Of course, voters have tended to possess voracious appetites and are rarely satisfied; new pledges have to be made, politicians need to go further, and what was once novel or even unthinkable quickly becomes conventional. During the nineteenth century it was widely understood that this would be the result of creating a system which had entitlement at its core. As engagement in politics became a question of entitlement, the nexus of reciprocal obligations that had once been incumbent on those involved in the political process simply evaporated. Participation in politics involved no obligation. This fundamentally altered the character of the whole. For those who rule, this style of politics has worked well in democratic Britain. And the more people who possess the vote, the better it works. A high proportion of voters pay little to no direct taxation. A large section receives subventions, in some shape or form, from the state (which means the politicians), in excess of the taxation they pay. Bread-​and-​circus politics has thus been a viable and straightforward methodology, with the welfare state and the public sector there to provide the bread and a wide range of options to fulfil the role of the circus. The fact that—​as Seeley had it in 1896—​democratic Britain was a ‘Legislation-​State’ ensured that opportunities to command authority would never be in short supply.35 The same year, William Lecky bemoaned the fact that politicians were now compelled to continually pay tribute to ‘the matchless wisdom and nobility of the masses’ in order to do anything.36 From the 1830s onwards, promising to ‘do less’ was, gradually, a road to nowhere for any politician who hoped to succeed; the future lay with pledging to ‘do more’. The realization of this fact left Salisbury even more morose than usual. But as revolted as he was by ‘the hearty shake of the filthy hand . . . the loathsome, choking compliment that must be paid to the grimy wife and sluttish daughter . . . the wholesale deglutition of hypocritical pledges’ that came with seeking votes, even the Third Marquis was ultimately willing to bow to necessity.37 Reactionary worldviews did not often lead to reactionary policies. One important task that flowed from this was the need for politicians to be actors. Contemporary politics has refined theatrical gesture to a fine art, but it has always been that way. From leaders to backbench MPs seeking preferment to candidates seeking election, they all play a part. They have to; and doing it well can make a career. Palmerston cultivated the image of the great British patriot standing up to ghastly and illiberal foreigners. Playing for the highest conceivable stakes, Ian Paisley constructed a reputation as effectively as anyone in the past two centuries; this accumulated a social credit that he knew when to spend. William Waldegrave recalled witnessing Harold Wilson leave the private dining room at an event and come into public view, at which point he quickly 35 

J.R. Seeley, Introduction to Political Science (Cambridge, 1896), p. 146. W.E.H. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty (2 vols, London, 1896), vol. i, p. 30. 37  Cited in P. Smith, ed., Lord Salisbury on Politics: A Selection from His Articles in the Quarterly Review, 1860–​1883 (Cambridge, 1972), p. 42. 36 

372   Robert Crowcroft ‘stubbed out his Havana cigar and extracted from his pocket his trademark demotic pipe’.38 Affectation can actually become a selling point, a perverse form of authenticity: think of Boris Johnson. Moreover, it could be that one of the most fundamental roles of politicians in a democracy is to lie—​or, at any rate, to not tell the truth. Churchill established his own legend partly on the basis of untrue statements about his predecessors. Edward Heath distorted the character of the European project to Parliament and the electorate, ignoring the ambitions of the Treaty of Rome. Most governments promise far more than they deliver. And, as a matter of everyday routine, politicians feel a need to say things that do not really reflect their convictions. There is a strange relationship between democratic politics, conviction, and truth.

III Success in this public enterprise necessitated skill in the art of persuasion. Historians from Thucydides to Harry V. Jaffa recognized the importance of that facet of political behaviour,39 and it was central to almost all activity between 1800 and 2000. The masses were an ‘instrument’ to be played, and the system invited ‘the virtuoso’ to do exactly that.40 Lacking absolute power and operating in a system that was not only increasingly democratic but also adversarial, politicians had to persuade other people as a matter of routine. They needed to persuade voters to elect them; persuade party, Parliament, and public alike of policies and actions; and persuade other politicians to lend them their support. The essence of the democratic regime is assent. The line between persuasion and authority is a straight and direct one, as the cleverest politicians have understood. In seeking to persuade, British politicians possessed a crucial asset:  an inherited vocabulary of stock phrases and rhetorical styles, accumulated over generations. These words could be deployed at a moment’s notice and relied upon to resonate with listeners. For example, in the early twenty-​first century, the most common phrase was perhaps ‘it’s right’. Political leaders would routinely speak into a television news camera and inform the viewers that ‘it’s right’ that x should happen, or ‘it’s right’ that y be done. A comparable ubiquitous technique was to say that ‘we must do more’. It was utterly vacuous, but this language served to demonstrate moral worthiness and connectedness with public moods, without committing one to much of substance. Meanwhile, melodrama was an important component of politicians’ speech. There were dozens of other words and phrases that, when strung together in the right order, could help politicians to persuade. They might constitute a moral statement, play on the human capacity for wonder, or 38 

W. Waldegrave, A Different Kind of Weather (London, 2015), p. 142. I am grateful to Richard Whiting for recommending this fascinating book. 39  H.V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-​Douglas Debates (Chicago, 1959). 40  Oakeshott, ‘The Masses in Representative Democracy’, p. 373.

The Role of the Politician in the Democratic Regime    373 appeal to rather lower urges. Fairness, equality, hope, justice, rules, welfare, duty, plan, necessary, public, family, rights, poor, rich, worker, freedom, power, morality, nation, history, market, property, responsibility, past, future, community, socialism, liberalism, conservatism, democracy, national interest, patriotism  . . .  readers can doubtless add many others. Political insurgents—​from Randolph Churchill and Tory Democracy to the Socialist League to Enoch Powell—​used the same phrases as their more staid opponents. When scrutinized, these phrases were often empty. Yet they fulfilled an important purpose and had real creative power. Running a series of calculated moral crusades—​ over the Bulgarian atrocities, the Midlothian campaign, and Irish home rule—​that were intended to deliver him power by whipping up the public, Gladstone ‘maddened his audiences. He welded them into a unity, wild with passion, and ready to follow him even to the death’.41 One is reminded of the words of Thomas Carlyle: ‘The great man, with his free force direct out of God’s own hand, is the lightning’.42 Even when old political landmarks were obliterated, as occasionally occurred, these phrases would help politicians locate new ones. The meaning of the words was not fixed, conveyed different things to different people at different times, and thus, while not objectively amounting to much of anything at all, still played an absolutely central role in political life. Their ritualized recital enabled politicians to persuade; that in turn granted them authority, and through authority those men and women were able to occupy the public stage. The best politicians did not confine themselves to a narrow linguistic territory, but occupied large tracts of rhetorical ground: recall Stanley Baldwin. The arguments constructed through these idioms could never be fully demonstrated, nor refuted. That afforded them a remarkable resilience. At most, another argument would this time be found more convincing. Every rhetorical victory was fleeting, each defeat temporary. If politics is an ambiguous activity, then we should note that over the course of the two centuries under review in this Handbook, politicians thrived on that ambiguity. The words they uttered typically had at least two, rather different, meanings; those involved in politics needed to play multiple parts simultaneously, and anyway the very activity of politics was one of probability and conjecture, not certainty and proof. Of course, there were boundaries to what politicians could persuade others to do. They themselves were conditioned to think in terms of those boundaries. Their activities laid down layers of sediment that shaped the landscape as traversed by their successors. The mythologies constructed by one generation were inherited as Truth by the next; past politics not only provided signposts, but informed what politicians assumed to be possible. For the nascent Tory party, Pitt the Younger lived on long after death. Joseph Chamberlain would not have done what he did if not for the political legacy of Disraeli and Gladstone. The same is true of the Welsh Wizard, David Lloyd George. And nobody ever missed an opportunity to talk about Winston Churchill. Politicians liked to be seen as inheriting the mantle of an earlier giant; they eagerly charted their encounters

41 

42 

Cited in Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, p. 380. T. Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-​Worship, and the Heroic in History (London, 1841), p. 14.

374   Robert Crowcroft with destiny.43 Foreign enemies were to be ‘stood up to’ and compromise avoided. The Labour party was wedded to a socio-​economic outlook that, by the latter stages of the period covered here, was decades out of date and had little future to offer communities. Persuasion was thus the art of politics, but there were always tangible limits to the choices people would be willing to make. Why is politics this way? Because politics is a quest for self-​fulfilment, with public life as the stage, and for most that fulfilment means prestige and power.44 What politicians are seeking through this quest can be described in numerous ways. But it addresses something that sits at the core of human conduct. Hegel would term it recognition; Christian theologians would call it pride. As Francis Fukuyama wrote: Plato spoke of thymos, or ‘spiritedness’, Machiavelli of man’s desire for glory, Hobbes of his pride or vainglory, Rousseau of his amour-​propre, Alexander Hamilton of the love of fame and James Madison of ambition, and Nietzsche of man as ‘the beast with red cheeks’.45

Augustine labelled it libido dominandi—​a thirst for power and authority, and to shape the world according to one’s own outlook. The Greeks called it kléos—​meaning ‘renown’, or ‘glory’—​deriving the word from the ancient Proto-​Indo-​European *klewos, or ‘the fame that does not decay’.46 Politics is a struggle in which the human passion for honour and prestige comes into conflict with the identical passions of others. Few political memoirs reward close scrutiny. But in one of the more important memoirs of recent years, Waldegrave provided a rich and reflective account of the life of a politician: ‘I thought, “This [Parliament] is where I want to be. Here in this cockpit, this maelstrom, with my future hanging on the decisions of Quentin Davies and Rupert Allason, on whether David Trimble is offered the bribe he wants . . . than be ordinary, unknown”.’ Waldegrave wondered, ‘does a heroin addict feel like that?’ And, even after a career-​curtailing setback, he mused: Yet still the addiction. In a car, a ministerial car, going down Whitehall, I thought ‘How do these people, walking on the pavement, live? How can they find anything of interest, since they do not do what I do? Their lives must be shadowy, dull, have nothing compared to this insider life of ministries, secrets, parliaments . . . of being somebody.47

43 

T. Blair, A Journey (London, 2010); W.S. Churchill, The Second World War (6 vols, London, 1948–​1954). 44  R. Crowcroft, ‘“High Politics”, Political Practice and the Labour Party’, in R. Crowcroft, S.J.D. Green, and R. Whiting, eds., The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British Democracy: Maurice Cowling and Conservatism (London, 2010), pp. 153–​88. 45  F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992), p. 162. 46  R. Schmitt, Dichtung und Dichtersprache in Indogermanischer Zeit (Weisbaden, 1967), pp. 61–​102. 47 Waldegrave, A Different Kind of Weather, pp. xiii–​xiv.

The Role of the Politician in the Democratic Regime    375 Politics emerges as a narcotic force, one impossible to give up. In his first exposure to government, Waldegrave revels in realizing that ‘this is what I had always hoped politics would be like: high stakes, which might all be lost; the adrenalin of crisis; the future of the nation at stake, and me right there in the centre of it all’.48 Importantly, Waldegrave had a ‘head . . . full of heroes’ from a young age, and understood public life as a quest to engage with ‘heroes’—​even to be a ‘hero’ of some sort himself.49 It seems unlikely that he was alone in feeling the urge. There is more. For two centuries, British politicians spent their time grappling with the consequences of political rationalism. The belief that the world itself could be made to fit with pre-​agreed objectives exerted a profound influence over public life around the globe. People have always been prone to believe that they can succeed where others failed; as Oakeshott had it, ‘the project of finding a short cut to heaven is as old as the human race’.50 Immediate revelation could be attained through access to higher knowledge.51 The Victorian Liberal party was the most sustained and self-​confident rationalist enterprise of the period, long holding that the classes could be harmonized, the public educated in the rule of law (and the hierarchical status quo), and character itself reformed using the instrument of policy. No movement afterwards quite replicated the Liberals’ Baconian assurance in the capacity of human intelligence to rule the world around them, but the effort never ceased. Metaphors derived from biology and machinery were used to explain policy. The ecology of an increasingly democratic system mandated that everything had to be justified in terms of human reason; Hegel thought this nothing less than the ‘characteristic property of the modern age’.52 From measures of public improvement in the nineteenth century to the conviction that the central state could—​and should—​regulate the economy ‘efficiently’ in the twentieth, British politics was a dialogue with rationalism. It was perhaps inevitable that it would be this way, because of the tension between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ that resides at the heart of politics. As rationalism held sway, and in a democratic environment in which promising to do x or y constituted a politician’s claim to authority, leaders would naturally be tempted to try to shape the world according to their advantage and preferences. Of course, like Icarus, success in this hubristic endeavour eluded those who attempted it, not least because the world has proven too complex to control. Outcome never quite aligned with intention. ‘Is’ remained stubbornly resistant to ‘ought’. Politicians remained in, and could never hope to escape, a ‘mental fog’.53 Thus, the people and the politicians existed in a symbiotic relationship, with each relying on the other for the supply of their wants. Yet there was still more to it. Politicians 48 

Ibid., p. 114.

49 Ibid., p. 47.

50  M. Oakeshott, ‘The Tower of Babel’, in Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, pp. 465–​ 87, at p. 465. 51  D. Steinmetz-​Jenkins, ‘Michael Oakeshott’s Theological Genealogy of Political Modernity’, The European Legacy (2014), pp. 323–​34. 52  G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge, 1991), p. 22. 53  M. Oakeshott, Religion, Politics and the Moral Life, ed. T. Fuller (London, 1993), p. 93.

376   Robert Crowcroft also invested great energy in remaking the public. Until the late nineteenth century, the prevailing assumption was that all aspects of national life, including the electorate, were subordinated to parliamentary sovereignty—​that is, to the politicians themselves. The politicians assumed themselves to know more and to be wiser. Even as the supremacy of Parliament has withered, this still holds true today; it has had profound implications. The Thatcher government was animated by precisely that impulse. There is obviously a tension here. From the work of the Liberal party to inculcate the ‘right’ outlook into the masses to contemporary legislation on healthy food, speech, and even humour, the public have been ‘constantly being summoned to reform [themselves]’.54 This applied more and more as the period progressed. There was frequent alarm that the public held ‘unsound’ views on some issues, such as capital punishment.55 This ‘unsound’ democratic opinion was labelled ‘populist’ and ignored where possible—​even where there would have been votes to be gained in exploiting it. From nineteenth-​century efforts to ‘discipline’ the public to later concern that the masses were reactionary on mass immigration, politicians frequently sought to re-​educate. And from the 1970s the political classes were even willing to suspend the democratic sovereignty of the polity, granting increasing law-​making powers to unelected officials of a federalizing ‘Europe’ to which Parliament would be subordinate. This significantly complicates our view of politicians, pointing towards an oligarchical structure that requires periodic and symbolic—​though highly competitive—​sanction, yet thereafter changes its character, with its members concerned less about flattery and more with their own totems. As the Australian philosopher Kenneth Minogue argued, by the turn of the twenty-​first century, ‘democratic citizenship’ meant ‘receiving a stream of “improving” messages from authority’.56 What Palmerston said of the French could apply to politicians’ view of the electorate: that they were ‘children in regard to all serious affairs’.57 A great deal of the legislation passed by the state reflected this desire to better the moral condition of the citizen, with politicians reserving to themselves judgement regarding how citizens should think. That it rarely worked, and the people rarely thanked them for it—​voters responded to the aspirations of New Jerusalem by promptly returning the Conservatives to office and embracing the affluent society, while Thatcher did not so much inculcate ‘vigorous virtues’ as accelerate the trend towards individualism and instant gratification—​did not stop the politicians from trying.58 In Minogue’s words, ‘The inescapable conclusion is that the rulers of democratic states judge the populations of democratic states to be incompetent over a whole range of important matters’.59 It would be hard to deny that the actual history of British politics, as conducted since 1800, has seemed increasingly to bear this judgement out. 54 

K. Minogue, The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life (new edn, New York, 2012), pp. 2–​3. 55  C. Davies, The Strange Death of Moral Britain (London, 2004). 56 Minogue, The Servile Mind, p. 3. 57  Cited in Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture, p. 224. 58  S.R. Letwin, The Anatomy of Thatcherism (London, 1992). 59 Minogue, The Servile Mind, p. 36.

The Role of the Politician in the Democratic Regime    377

IV It may be an old-​fashioned thing to say, but ‘history’ really did ought to begin with political history—​and politicians. From their confrontation with the seemingly endless crises of the early nineteenth century to their curious suspension of Britain as a sovereign polity in the late twentieth century, the successes, failures, and oddities of politicians have shaped the fate of these islands. Other disciplines—​strategic, social, economic, intellectual, and (done properly) cultural history—​all have a crucial place, but they are nothing without traditional political history. As one scholar observed, there are simply ‘too many dead bodies on the stage’ to start anywhere else.60 Why do people live in the places they do, under the laws they do, and speak the language they do? Why do they live, and not other people? The answer is because of politics. After the killing of Socrates, Plato devoted his philosophy to constructing an extended critique of the democratic regime that had murdered his mentor. And the problems—​for there are many—​have not abated with the passing of the ages. In his 1929 masterpiece The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, Sir Lewis Namier famously observed that ‘men . . . no more dreamt of a seat in the House in order to benefit humanity than a child dreams of a birthday cake that others may eat it’.61 Where does this leave us? This chapter has attempted to think through the democratic form of authority, and ponder the perplexing anatomy of the democratic regime. There has always been the temptation for scholars to avoid a clear-​eyed encounter, and confrontation, with the character of the liberal democratic system. Yet exploring these issues is not a sign that one has suffered an unfortunate moral lapse, or is necessarily headed in the direction of Carl Schmitt.62 A number of scholars are engaging in penetrating analyses of modern political history on a range of fronts. For example, John Bew has produced a biography of Clement Attlee that is a powerful expression of doctrine through the medium of historical writing; it reconstructs for the reader a lost world of patriotic social democracy and serves as an unambiguous statement of an anti-​Corbyn worldview.63 Yet, overall, there is little literature that is truly acidic, while there is a great deal which is as cloying as the climate from which it emerges. As Cowling had it, ‘venom and polemic’ can ‘disclose the historical process’ as readily as any other approach.64

60 

J. Vincent, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to History (new edn, London, 1996) p. 36. L. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1957 edn), p. 2. 62  For example, C. Schmitt, Political Theology (Chicago, 2005 edn). But for indications of what one might achieve with insights derived from Schmitt, consult B. Simms, The Impact of Napoleon: Prussian High Politics, Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797–​1806 (Cambridge, 1997). 63  J. Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (London, 2016). 64  M. Cowling, Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England, Volume III: Accommodations (Cambridge, 2001), p. xxiii. 61 

378   Robert Crowcroft As discussed earlier, the ‘crisis’ of political history seems to have roots in the mind of the left-​wing university academic. As Vincent put it of the ‘payroll historian’: Living on a state salary . . . rather than by selling books is hardly likely to weaken one’s collectivist outlook. The payroll historian is likely to look with tender sympathies upon the general system which produces salaries for people like him to live on . . . In broad terms, historians rightly see their well-​being as connected with the big state, the high tax economy and the acceptance of definitions of progress linked to these. Historians . . . visibly approve the growth of the hand which has fed them.65

In an environment of unprecedented disillusionment with the democratic regime—​ where all politicians are held, fairly or otherwise, to be ‘liars’, and where there is scepticism about the legitimacy of the entire system—​an intelligentsia which fails to examine the systemic origins of this profound crisis in an accessible format arguably risks a derogation of its duty to the wider community. For the origins are systemic; they are rooted in the role played by politicians; and it does no good not to properly absorb those facts. That said, this is emphatically not to simply elevate twenty-​first-​century discontents and reduce historians to the status of well-​trained social commentators. Rather, it is merely to be fixated with a single, and very simple, question (that is, moreover, a profoundly historical—​even timeless—​question): What is the character of the democratic regime? That question is so important now because it speaks to the deepest concerns and anxieties of modern culture. But it is, to reiterate, a permanent problem, one intimately familiar to philosophers, that historians are well suited to help untangle through their empirical expertise. The highest of which political history is capable has hinged on making a linkage between the particular and the universal. Just as Thucydides conceptualized his work as being one for ‘all time’66—​in that it would both examine the Peloponnesian War and develop broader hypotheses about the conduct of political life—​the most memorable of modern historiography has aimed at, and achieved, something similar. In the past three decades comparable claims to broader explanatory significance have withered, which is a practice that should be dismissed as the intellectual dead end that it is. What we need instead is to scale up and ask the largest, most compelling questions possible. Publics across the Western world routinely assume that elites are incompetent, corrupt, and even criminal. The levers used by politicians to justify themselves no longer function as they once did. In the era of the internet and social media, cant and hypocrisy can be exposed in seconds. It will perhaps prove a forlorn hope that future historical research will be as cynical as the age in which we live. But at a moment where British politicians have arguably broken their system and collapsed their own legitimacy, never has the time been riper for the tensions inherent within the democratic regime to be teased 65 Vincent, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to History, p. 53.

66 Thucydides, The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, ed. J. Mynott (Cambridge, 2013 edn),

Book I, 1.22[4]‌, p. 16.

The Role of the Politician in the Democratic Regime    379 out. The electorate sees this perfectly well; hopefully younger scholars of all hues will be willing to fully integrate the implications of contemporary insights into democratic politics within future historical literature. For academics to be as cynical as the public would be no bad thing. It might even restore the discipline of political history to the position of pre-​eminence that it once held, and should never have so meekly surrendered.

Further Reading R. Crowcroft, Attlee’s War: World War II and the Making of a Labour Leader (London, 2011). M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, ed. T. Fuller (Indianapolis, 1991). P. Smith, ed., Lord Salisbury on Politics: A Selection from His Articles in the Quarterly Review, 1860–​1883 (Cambridge, 1972). W. Waldegrave, A Different Kind of Weather (London, 2015).

Pa rt  I V

E L E C T ION S A N D P OP U L A R P OL I T IC S

chapter 22

Parliam enta ry Re form Gordon Pentland

Parliamentary reform was, for a long time, a central concern of historians interested in British political development. It had formed part of the mental furniture of nineteenth-​century politicians, generated mass political movements immediately after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in Chartism, and in the movement for women’s suffrage, and engrossed and involved national audiences during the great set-​piece dramas surrounding the passage of a series of Reform Acts. This widespread interest and sense of significance was passed on to historians, whose work tracked the ‘genesis’ (the biblical overtones are interesting here) of reform and plotted Britain’s stately progression towards democracy from 1832 via a series of other reforms in 1867–​8, 1872, 1883–​5, 1918, 1928, and 1948. Most authors of volumes in the original Oxford History of England series were reluctant to offer a thematic anchor for their own periods: E.L. Woodward’s was emphatically The Age of Reform.1 The story became less heroic and the end point less clear than the beginning, but the centrality of parliamentary reform measures as launch pads to political modernity and staging posts on the ‘road to democracy’ underpinned a good deal of scholarly work before the 1960s and continues to structure popular accounts of Britain’s political past.2 Historians have dealt with three principal types of parliamentary reform:  electoral reform (with a focus on the mechanisms for and principles underpinning the return of members of parliament); constitutional reform (with a focus on the relations between and respective functions of the Crown, Lords, and Commons and their relationship to ‘the people’ at large); and procedural reform (with a focus on the internal organization of parliamentary institutions and the means by which ‘business’ has been identified and managed). While electoral reform has been the primum inter pares of these different concerns (and will be focused on in this chapter), historians have seldom been too concerned to draw clear lines between the three. Nor, perhaps, should they be, given that contemporaries seldom made hard and fast distinctions between different varieties of parliamentary 1 

E.L. Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815–​1870 (Oxford, 1938). It is, for example, central to the public account that Parliament gives of its own history: see ‘The Reform Acts and Representative Democracy’, . 2 

384   Gordon Pentland reform and efforts to amend any one of these areas inevitably had important implications for the other two. Indeed, reform of the electoral system, where it served to legitimize the lower house, necessarily impacted the ‘balance’ within Britain’s mixed constitution. The picture is complicated further by the fact that any attempt to reform Parliament sat within, drew from, and contributed to a kaleidoscopic range of other ‘reform’ projects.3 Such distinctions do, however, allow for a broad overview of shifting emphases within past discussions of and historical approaches to the issue of parliamentary reform. In terms of electoral and constitutional reform, the opening decades of the twentieth century apparently created a robust settlement. With the extension of the franchise to encompass most adults, a rationalization of the territorial dimensions of the electoral system, and an emphatic demonstration of the primacy of the House of Commons, Great Britain had become a democratic polity. With each episode of reform in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the legitimacy of government had been reinforced and institutions future-​proofed. As such, discussions of parliamentary reform in the twentieth century have focused far more on procedural issues. This shift came about partly because of a sense that the main tasks had been completed in terms of electoral and institutional reform; partly because parliamentary reform ceased to be an issue capable of mobilizing and interesting large numbers of people; and partly because the historical discipline itself drifted from what was conceived as a subject that invited a narrowly conceived vision of political change. Parliamentary reform has been of only marginal interest to historians of twentieth-​century Britain, who have left the task to political scientists and experts in constitutional law. This chapter evaluates the large volume of creative scholarship that has reinterpreted and recast understandings of the ‘heroic age’ of parliamentary reform before the early twentieth century. This work in itself highlights the value of parliamentary reform as a source of new questions and approaches for political history more generally. The chapter ends by discussing whether a long-​term analysis of parliamentary reform is desirable or possible and examining the potential for historical research into parliamentary reform after 1945.

I On the eve of the First World War, the future Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, J.R.M. Butler, published a weighty and dramatic account of the passing of the ‘Great’ Reform Act of 1832: In spite of recent changes in its letter, and a great and growing modification of its spirit, the Constitution as we know it wears, to all intents and purposes, the shape it assumed 3 

For pioneering work on the vocabularies used by contemporaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see D. Beales, ‘The Idea of Reform in British Politics’, in T.C.W. Blanning and P. Wende, eds., Reform in Great Britain and Germany, 1750–​1850 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 159–​74; J. Innes, ‘“Reform” in English Public Life: The Fortunes of a Word’, in A. Burns and J. Innes, eds., Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–​1850 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 71–​97.

Parliamentary Reform   385 in 1832. To parody a famous phrase, that year is now the limit of constitutional memory. The passing of the Great Reform Bill takes us suddenly into another air; we leave the remote world of the eighteenth century . . . The old aristocratic system begins to crumble, and the feet of the nation are set in the path that leads to democracy.4

In marking out the ‘limit’ of attitudes to and memories of Britain’s constitution, this first Act was presented by Butler as the foundational moment of modern British political life. Not least, from the perspective of 1914, it had set a number of precedents. It both ‘marked out the line of assault’ for future movements of reform and laid bare the underlying flexibility of the British constitution, which would henceforth embody the principle that ‘those who have power outside Parliament must have power inside it’.5 The following year saw the publication of Charles Seymour’s powerful account of this process, a relentless if complex and halting advance of democracy across the course of the nineteenth century.6 Both men worked within the context of a recently professionalized historical discipline and sought to provide scholarly accounts of a national myth history that had shaped political argument, action, and culture across the nineteenth century and was in the process of furnishing a history curriculum in schools.7 Parliamentary reform was presented as an adaptive process. Reform measures were the product of an alchemy involving far-​sighted and responsive statesmen, social and economic change, flexible institutions, and a particular ‘British genius’ for muddling through. The Reform Acts were thus central pillars of a broadly Whig history of the British constitution and its past. Their stuttering, contested enactment was the practical illustration of deep underlying currents within Victorian political life. They embodied that peculiar synthesis of enlightenment ideas around how societies could maintain progress and Burkeian notions of flexibility and the means of accommodating continuity and change. They were the self-​congratulatory acts of a political elite which had kept to a level-​headed avoidance of two extremes: the Scylla of a rigid and dogmatic attachment to an existing or historic constitution and the Charybdis of a repudiation of the past in favour of abstract or a priori notions of political rights.8 Such a formula found expression most colourfully in biography, with G.M. Trevelyan’s sustained celebration of Charles Grey as its high-​water mark: a statesman who, after a period of stagnation and all too rigid conservatism, initiated in our country a yet longer period of orderly democratic progress, and at the critical 4 

J.R.M. Butler, The Passing of the Great Reform Bill (London, 1914), p. vii. Ibid., p. 426. 6  C. Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales: The Development and Operation of the Parliamentary Franchise, 1832–​1885 (New Haven, CT, 1915). 7  D. Cannadine, J. Keating, and N. Sheldon, The Right Kind of History: Teaching the Past in Twentieth-​ Century England (Basingstoke, 2011). For an example of how reform was treated in a popular elementary school text, see E.H. Spalding and P. Wragge, Piers Plowman Histories Junior Book VII: The Nation and Its Government from 1485 to the Present (London, 1927), pp. 233–​47. 8  For a recent account of these preoccupations, see A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’ (Oxford, 2015). The best account of nineteenth-​century Whig history and the constitution is J.W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981). 5 

386   Gordon Pentland moment of the transition averted civil war and saved the State from entering on the vicious circle of revolution and reaction.9

Parliamentary reform underlay an intensely patriotic discourse during the nineteenth century, one that became increasingly emphasized whenever continental Europe seemed to abandon this virtuous via media and exploded into revolution and reaction, as it did at mid-​century. It was most powerfully annexed to Liberal politics, whose partisans could most plausibly claim Reform as part of a family heritage.10 It had claims, however, beyond any single political tribe. Trevelyan, for example, a scion of the Whig family in a very literal sense, developed far less partisan positions after the Great War.11 The patriotic celebration of a particular British genius for reform was above all a flexible set of claims, whose use was not restricted to any one partisan position, or to political elites alone. At several points in the nineteenth century it had formed a pan-​British rallying cry, albeit one which sat on top of numerous local variations and contests. As a narrative that shaped popular understandings of politics, its centrality is revealed in the surviving material culture as well as in a host of place names, monuments and memorials, and early local histories.12

II Much of the academic historical work of the twentieth century took aim at the patriotic certainties of Whig history and chipped away at the national myth of reform. Triumphalist accounts of the adaptive powers of parliamentary institutions were under pressure from several directions in the early decades of the century. Written in the summer of 1912—​in the immediate aftermath of the constitutional crisis around the House of Lords and in the midst of the militant phase of suffragette activism and a new bout of instability around Irish home rule—​Butler’s Passing of the Great Reform Bill can be read as an anguished plea for politicians and people to remember how to navigate such stormy waters with safety. The shifting emphasis towards social reform, the cataclysm of the Great War, and the challenges to parliamentary institutions of the inter-​war years all further challenged Whig accounts of the past. On the centenary of the Great Reform Act, the great Tudor historian, A.F. Pollard, lamented that what had been seen as ‘incomparably the greatest gift of the English people to the civilization of the world’ had become ‘a gift-​horse which some are busy looking in the mouth.’13 While recent work 9 

G.M. Trevelyan, Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (London, 1920), p. viii. See especially J.P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe (Cambridge, 2006); B. Porter, ‘“Bureau and Barrack”: Early Victorian Attitudes to the Continent’, Victorian Studies, 27 (1983–​4), 407–​33. 11  D. Cannadine, G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London, 1992), pp. 95–​140. 12  M. Nixon, G. Pentland, and M. Roberts, ‘The Material Culture of Scottish Reform Politics, c. 1820–​c. 1884’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 32 (2012), 28–​49. 13  A.F. Pollard, ‘Parliamentary History’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 Oct. 1932, 717. 10 

Parliamentary Reform   387 has made a compelling case not to overstate the speed or the completeness of Whig history’s retreat, the sense of optimism that underpinned it had been smashed.14 In the context of a professionalized historical discipline, the causes, consequences, and significance of parliamentary reform could be revisited. The Reform Acts were not, however, of interest to historians only because they allowed for the skewering of national myths. The events surrounding them, especially during the 1830s and the 1860s, were compelling as test-​beds for different approaches towards explaining political change. Parliamentary reform involved a number of areas in which political history has always and, presumably, will always have an interest: the mobilization of popular movements, the functioning of electoral systems, the manoeuvring of elite politicians, and the production of reams of printed material and reported speech articulating different understandings of British politics. Concentrated historical research around parliamentary reform has thus rendered it an extremely fruitful area, and one with implications for many other areas of research and for the practice of political history in general. One set of questions has necessarily revolved around causation and explaining the timing and nature of reform. There was, of course, a set of interpretations of the causes of reform based on the kind of history just outlined. In particular, a kind of social interpretation of parliamentary reform, bearing a family resemblance to the kinds of arguments Whig politicians made during the first reform crisis, provided a powerful and neat explanation that could be rolled out to cover subsequent reforms. Progress within commercial society threw up new social groups whose increased wealth, moral power, and respectability would render them fit for the exercise of the full franchise, and so the achievement of ‘the stage of political consciousness and social power’.15 One undistinguished late nineteenth-​century account served up this formula neatly: we endeavor to estimate at their true value the comparative benefits that have accrued from the acquisition of Magna Carta, the Revolution settlement of 1688, and the Reform Bills of 1832, 1867, and 1884—​those five great charters by which political power was successively conferred upon the barons, the land-​owners, the middle classes, the artisans in the towns, and finally the agricultural labourers in the counties.16

Approaches deriving from social history methodologies could attempt to put flesh on these bare bones. This could be done with the added sense of direction afforded by explicitly Marxist accounts of class formation and conflict, but in reality social history approaches embodied a much wider range of influences and concerns. Indeed, as Miles

14 

M. Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–​1970 (Cambridge, 2005). 15 Butler, Passing, p. 426. 16  J. Murdoch, A History of Constitutional Reform in Great Britain and Ireland; with a Full Account of the Three Great Measures of 1832, 1867, and 1884 (Glasgow, 1885), p. vi.

388   Gordon Pentland Taylor has argued, far from being best conceived as an insurgency against the narrow concerns of political history, the social history boom after the 1960s was shaped in important ways by the agenda and personnel of nineteenth-​century political history.17 The focus on class was part and parcel of enhanced interest in both urban history and in the local dimensions of social and political life. Reform movements, rather than the measures themselves, were revealed as complex negotiations of local class structures and their study necessarily entailed a change of perspective away from national elites. Asa Briggs’ wider interests in the dynamics of class in Victorian cities underpinned a careful local study of reform movements, which left ‘the Whig ministers in London . . . not as the masters of the situation, but merely as the temporary directors of it’.18 From explicitly Marxist perspectives, histories of the first two Reform Acts could be reimagined as important pivots within a longer-​term analysis of the development of working-​class consciousness and politics in England. In the work of E.P. Thompson and an influential collection of essays by Royden Harrison, for example, close attention to the reform agitations of 1831–​2 and 1866–​7 highlighted a similar range of themes. In both cases, the working classes were promoted from the colourful crowd scenes of reform to central roles in its enactment, as either the dupes of the middle class or as an articulate labour aristocracy; the ‘threat of revolution’ was recovered as a central dynamic in explaining the accommodations made by political elites; and reform, its grudging and prescriptive extension of political rights and its creation of discontents among those deliberately excluded, played formative roles as midwives to subsequent working-​class politics, both Chartist and socialist.19 Reform, from this perspective, was a key means of investigating how social and economic change became expressed in political terms or else was managed by political means. Across the same period, the presumptions and activities of elites, as well as the substantial claims made for the impact of reform, were also increasingly rethought, in ways that were not always at odds with these ‘social’ interpretations. It is tempting to tie this form of revisionism to a post-​war turn away from and distaste with ideologies and rationalist approaches to politics.20 Earlier work had punctured particular facets of the Whig account; for example, the schoolbook claim that between the first two Reform Acts ‘Britain was ruled chiefly by men of the middle-​class’ was an early casualty of empirical research.21 The focus here was very much on assessing and evaluating the consequences of reform and measuring the reality of its impact against the rhetoric of its architects and 17 

M. Taylor, ‘The Beginnings of Modern British Social History?’, History Workshop Journal, 43 (1997), 155–​76. 18  A. Briggs, ‘The Background of the Parliamentary Reform Movement in Three English Cities, 1830–​ 32’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 10 (1952), 293–​317. 19  E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), ch. 16; R. Harrison, Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics 1861–​1881 (London, 1965). 20  Taylor, ‘Beginnings’, pp. 159–​60; D. Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York, 1960). 21  Spalding and Wragge, Piers Plowman Histories, p. 243; S.F. Woolley, ‘Personnel of the Parliament of 1833’, English Historical Review, 54 (1938), 240–​62.

Parliamentary Reform   389 detractors. In the influential and pioneering work of Norman Gash, the emphasis on both the continuity of political life either side of 1832 and on the abilities of entrenched elites to maintain their hold on power through adapting to new realities was unpicked, and this interpretation ultimately fed into influential surveys of the period.22 In a similar register, H.J. Hanham focused on electoral politics and the development of parties between 1867 and 1884, a period, like Gash’s, which embodied a particular ‘juxtaposition of old and new’.23 Social science methodologies and enhanced abilities to digest, organize, and present the information preserved in election pollbooks allowed historians to extend such examinations and develop increasingly sophisticated accounts of the social composition of post-​reform electorates. In perhaps the most influential example of such work, the results of the Reform Act could be read back into its intentions, so that parliamentary reform could be presented not as a wise or even a muddled concession to popular opinion, but rather as a calculated ‘cure’ pressed by the agricultural aristocracy, which sought to preserve its power by erecting a cordon sanitaire around destabilizing urban electors.24 What was at stake in these debates was a particular understanding of progress and of political ‘modernization’. Had 1832 acted as a watershed moment, ushering in a world of partisan politics, national issues, and campaigns? If Gash was correct that ‘there was scarcely a feature of the old unreformed system that could not be found still in existence after 1832’, what was the precise nature of the mixture and how much of the change had been by design, how much the unintended consequences of reform?25 If an empirical historical assault threatened to take the ‘Great’ out of the Great Reform Act, one result was to render the Second Reform Act a more important focus for attention. It, rather than the measures of 1832, deserved the ‘Great’ label: ‘For while 1832 had no necessary aftermath in 1867, 1867 did have a necessary aftermath in 1884, 1918, 1928.’26 While 1832 was becoming a wholly inadequate starting point for the analysis of Britain’s political ‘modernization’, 1867 fitted the bill far more neatly. It had inaugurated both a mass electorate and a two-​ party politics aimed at taming it, had broken the cherished link between property and political rights, and so had ‘opened the way to the mass politics of another age’.27 This set of questions arising from the Reform Acts has driven a good deal of scholarship on nineteenth-​century politics. While the nature and scope of the franchise commanded considerable attention, different generations have identified different contexts within which to assess the impact of reform and have used different methods to do so. One

22 

N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel: A Study in the Technique of Parliamentary Representation, 1830–​ 50 (London, 1953); N. Gash, Aristocracy and People: Britain, 1815–​1865 (London, 1979). 23  H.J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Gladstone and Disraeli (London, 1959), p. ix. 24  D.C. Moore, ‘The Other Face of Reform’, Victorian Studies, 5 (1961), 7–​34; D.C. Moore, ‘Concession or Cure: The Sociological Premises of the First Reform Act’, Historical Journal, 9 (1966), 39–​59. 25 Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel, p. x. 26  G. Himmelfarb, ‘The Politics of Democracy: The English Reform Act of 1867’, Journal of British Studies, 6 (1966), 97. See also J.R. Vincent, Pollbooks: How Victorians Voted (Cambridge, 1967). 27  F.B. Smith, The Making of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1966), p. 243.

390   Gordon Pentland fertile area for answers to these questions, which provided a ready supply of doctoral studies and the opportunity to assess political continuities and changes over longer periods, was the turn to regional or constituency-​level studies.28 Increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques for measuring political partisanship and original ideas about how and where to measure the impact of reform have ensured the continuation of these debates. Studies focusing on electoral data, or on the spread of party organizations, or on the ‘small print’ of the 1832 Reform Act, or on the actual effects of the Corrupt Practices Prevention Act, have all continued to address the bracing challenges implied in the ‘continuity’ thesis pioneered by Gash.29 Complicating the picture further has been the development of historiographies of reform outside England. Examinations of the distinctive experiences of reform in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales and the empire have frequently been based around the same questions that underpinned investigation into reform in England.30 Within the contexts provided by ‘four nations’ history as well as developing approaches to imperial history, such accounts have at least the potential to disrupt or at least nuance overall accounts of reform.31 Indeed, Philip Salmon’s neat conceptualization of 1832 as neither a ‘concession’ nor a ‘cure’ but a ‘consultation’ might well be expanded: parliamentary reform was not only a consultation between parliamentary and popular politics and between centre and locality, but one between the different nations of the United Kingdom and its empire.32

III The centrality of the Reform Acts to accounts of and investigations into Britain’s political ‘modernization’ have made them a natural stomping ground for more self-​conscious 28 

For influential examples, see R.W. Davis, Political Change and Continuity c. 1760–​1885: A Buckinghamshire Study (Newton Abbot, 1972); T.J. Nossiter, Influence, Opinion and Political Idiom in Reformed England: Case Studies from the North-​East 1832–​1874 (Brighton, 1975). 29  J.A. Phillips and C. Wetherell, ‘The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Political Modernization of England’, American Historical Review, 100 (1995), 411–​36; M. Cragoe, ‘The Great Reform Act and the Modernization of British Politics: The Impact of Conservative Associations, 1835–​41’, Journal of British Studies, 47 (2008), 581–​603; P.J. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832–​1841 (Woodbridge, 2002); K. Rix, ‘“The Elimination of Corrupt Practices in British Elections”? Reassessing the Impact of the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act’, English Historical Review, 123 (2008), 65–​97. 30  For a representative example, see W. Ferguson, ‘The Reform Act (Scotland) of 1832: Intention and Effect’, Scottish Historical Review, 45 (1966), 105–​14. 31  K.T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 1832–​1885 (Oxford, 1984); M. Cragoe, Culture, Politics and National Identity in Wales, 1832–​1886 (Oxford, 2004); G. Pentland, Radicalism, Reform and National Identity in Scotland, 1820–​1833 (Woodbridge, 2008); J. Ridden, ‘Irish Reform between the 1798 Rebellion and the Great Famine’ and M. Taylor, ‘Empire and Parliamentary Reform: The 1832 Reform Act Revisited’, in Burns and Innes, eds., Rethinking the Age of Reform, pp. 271–​311. 32  P. Salmon, ‘The English Reform Legislation’, in D.R. Fisher, ed., History of Parliament: House of Commons, 1820–​1832 (7 vols, Cambridge, 2009), vol. i, p. 411.

Parliamentary Reform   391 forms of revisionism, as Moore’s work demonstrated. Parliamentary reform has thus either been the vehicle for or played a central role within accounts that have presented wide-​ranging challenges to the practice of political history as a whole. The Reform Acts of 1867–​8, in particular, highlighted a range of important disciplinary issues. Some of these had been identified at the time by Walter Bagehot, who, in investigating ‘the most silent of revolutions’, marvelled at the contrasts between the excitement, tumult, and confusion of the 1830s and the situation in 1867: ‘A change equal to that of 1832, and perhaps greater, has been substantially effected almost in silence.’33 As Bagehot knew full well, the dynamics of leadership and contest among elites in Parliament must form a large part of any explanation. The theme was most creatively developed in the work of Maurice Cowling. His influential study of the Second Reform Act was a bold essay in historical method as much as an exhaustively researched monograph.34 It was the centrality of parliamentary reform to broadly progressive accounts of the English past that made it an especially attractive target and the fitting subject for the opening volume of a loose trilogy substantially rethinking key moments of contingency and change within British politics.35 The contests around the Second Reform Act were used as a springboard to examine how politics actually worked and to draw appropriate boundaries around historical knowledge. This necessarily involved lining up and knocking down a range of other targets: self-​satisfied and complacent Liberal and Whig accounts of progress; the proliferating claims of social historians that politics were somehow ‘epiphenomenal’; or the confident claims of political ‘science’ to be able to describe with predictive force the mechanisms of political life. As other contributions to this volume attest, Cowling’s work has continued to be both influential and problematic. Recent years have witnessed something of a revival of interest in Cowling’s scholarship, premised not least on the apparent convergence in aims of two strange bedfellows: practitioners of ‘high politics’ and of ‘new political history’.36 Its influence in terms of historical assessments of parliamentary reform has certainly been marked. While a recent attempt to place 1867 on a wider canvas has been largely successful, the essentially ‘Cowlingite’ approach to the parliamentary reforms of 1884 has yet to be dislodged.37 Similarly, from the other end of the ‘age of reform’, a powerful book by J.C.D. Clark (hot on the heels of an exhaustive and recognizably ‘Cowlingite’ history of English high politics

33   W. Bagehot, ‘Why Has the “Settlement” of 1832 So Easily Melted Away?’, Economist, 1 June 1867, 609–​10. 34  M.J. Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution: The Passing of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1967). 35  The other two volumes were The Impact of Labour, 1920–​1924: The Beginnings of Modern British Politics (Cambridge, 1971); The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy, 1933–​1940 (Cambridge, 1975). 36  See particularly R. Crowcroft, S.J.D. Green, and R. Whiting, Philosophy, Politics and Religion in British Democracy: Maurice Cowling and Conservatism (London, 2010); D.M. Craig, ‘“High Politics” and the “New Political History”’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 453–​76. 37  R. Saunders, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848–​1867: The Making of the Second Reform Act (Farnham, 2011); A. Jones, The Politics of Reform, 1884 (Cambridge, 1972).

392   Gordon Pentland during the 1750s) explicitly rejected broadly progressive accounts of the eighteenth century and embraced the creative sense of contingencies manifested in Cowling’s work.38 Clark maintained the Great Reform Act as a crucial pivot, but in his account it was the accidental and contingent offshoot of existential debates around religion and Britain’s Protestant constitution and the death rattle of an ancien régime mentality based around monarchy, aristocracy, and the Church. The implications of this thesis continue to spark innovative approaches focusing on the religious context and consequences of reform.39 Clark’s revisionist approach to the long eighteenth century was partly aimed at toppling class from its central explanatory role, or even annihilating it. His focus was on both contextualizing political languages and practices and dethroning conventional assumptions about the house philosophers of progressive accounts of the English past. In tilting at overly caricatured versions of liberal and Marxist traditions, Clark drew deeply on contemporary politics: ‘as Attlee’s England and the worldview on which it was premised recedes from us, and especially after the change in mood of the late 1970s, it is easier to see the limiting effect of those assumptions and to begin to disengage ourselves from them.’40 Similar reflections underpinned revisionist approaches of an altogether different provenance, as historians working within popular politics, labour history, and electoral sociology reoriented their subjects against the backdrop of ‘The apparent about turn of the forward march of labour, the Right’s electoral successes on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1980s and 1990s, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall’.41 Again, the central problem was class and a much wider and fiercer debate around the vexed relationship between social being and social consciousness, experience, and language.42 In common with other historiographies, this revived scrutiny of language could not but have profound implications for the understanding of parliamentary reform and political history more generally. At its most self-​consciously revisionist, such approaches made themselves felt in a satisfying upending of established narratives. In James Vernon’s influential call for a cultural history of politics, for example, the Reform Acts were not milestones on the road to democracy, but successive episodes in which a participatory politics was

38  J.C.D. Clark, The Dynamics of Change: The Crisis of the 1750s and the English Party Systems (Cambridge, 1982); J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688–​1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 1985). A revised second edition with an amended title was published in 2000: English Society 1660–​1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 2000). 39  See, for example, R. Saunders, ‘God and the Great Reform Act: Preaching against Reform, 1831–​2’, Journal of British Studies, 53 (2014), 378–​99. 40 Clark, English Society 1688–​1832, p. 1. 41  J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–​1867 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 1. 42  G. Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 90–​178. For the wider debate, see S. Mayfield and D. Thorne, ‘Social History and its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language’, Social History, 17 (1992), 165–​88, and responses from J. Lawrence, M. Taylor, P. Joyce, and J. Vernon in the two subsequent volumes.

Parliamentary Reform   393 closed down and disciplined by the development of a politics pursued through formal parties and the individualizing medium of print.43 Dror Wahrman’s magisterial study of the emergence of an all-​conquering language of the ‘middle class’ argued that ‘it was not so much the rising “middle class” that was the crucial factor in bringing about the Reform Bill of 1832 . . . it was more the Reform Bill of 1832 that was the crucial factor in cementing the invention of the ever-​rising “middle class”’.44 In challenging and disrupting grand narratives of historical change, various histories of reform in Britain were low-​hanging fruit. By encouraging historians not to examine reform as a consequence or cause of structural change, but as a realm of competing discourses around the constitution and the ‘fitness’ of different groups to be included within or excluded from citizenship, radically different histories of reform have emerged. Among the most important insights to emerge from this scholarship has been the establishment of gender as a key theme within studies of parliamentary reform. Since Constance Rover’s pathbreaking study of the women’s movement was published in 1967 there has, of course, been an enormous volume of creative scholarship on women’s political experiences across the nineteenth century, which has moved well beyond the heroic and progressive teleology that formed an equivalent to histories of popular politics and radicalism more generally.45 Only comparatively recently, however, have efforts been made to reintegrate such work into more general accounts of political change in Britain and thus refute the uncharitable assertions of one of Rover’s reviewers that ‘the enfranchisement of women has not directly brought about momentous changes in British political life; its only verifiable result has been to augment the Conservative vote’.46 With a focus on the gendered languages and assumptions of politics and politicians, parliamentary reform has been an important theme in leading such efforts, and the engagement between gender history and political history clearly enriches both.47 One focus for future efforts may well be to approach similar levels of sophistication in rewriting other areas—​race, ethnicity, religion—​back into accounts of parliamentary reform. Indeed, one signal benefit from the efforts to open up cultural histories of politics has been the encouragement to bring together historiographies and areas of historical research that had hitherto been kept at arm’s length. Reading debates around parliamentary reform alongside contemporaneous discussions of medical, religious, moral, and cultural reform undoubtedly enriches and complicates our understanding of the 43

 Vernon, Politics and the People. D. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–​c. 1840 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 18. 45  C. Rover, Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain, 1866–​1914 (London, 1967). 46  J. Howarth, ‘Review of C. Rover, Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain, 1866-​1914’, Historical Journal, 12 (1969), 725–​6. 47  A. Clark, ‘Gender, Class, and the Nation: Franchise Reform in England, 1832–​1928’, in J. Vernon, ed., Re-​Reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 230–​53; C. Hall, ‘The Rule of Difference: Gender, Class and Empire in the Making of the 1832 Reform Act’, in I. Blom, K. Hagemann, and C. Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000), pp. 107–​35; J. Rendall, ‘The Citizenship of Women and the Reform Act of 1867’, in C. Hall, K. McClelland, and J. Rendall, Defining the Victorian 44 

394   Gordon Pentland content of explicitly political texts and of the contexts in which politics was practised. Recent work recovering the visual dimensions of parliamentary reform demonstrates the value of this disciplinary cross-​fertilization.48

IV It should be clear that parliamentary reform—​the movements for it, the ideas and arguments surrounding it, and the contests for and consequences of its achievement—​have generated a huge volume of creative and sophisticated scholarship. It is striking, however, that even more self-​consciously revisionist approaches, which have succeeded in radically challenging assumptions about the nature, content, and implications of parliamentary reform, have left the chronology of British political history essentially intact, with the Reform Acts as its most prominent waymarkers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What they are now waymarkers for is altogether less clear. With every facet of parliamentary reform examined and re-​examined, the theme has been left straddling a number of different methodological approaches. In that sense it has a fragmented character shared not only with political history as a whole, but with the humanities more generally. Is it possible or even desirable to provide any single account of reform? Arguably, if we wish to continue to think of political history as a distinctive area of scholarly activity (and, indeed, of politics as a distinctive sphere of human activity), the effort is required. Indeed, in two clear-​headed reviews of the field, leading scholars called for such an effort, premised on the attempt to explain change over time as well as on decoding and endlessly complicating particular moments.49 There is certainly considerable mileage left in considering the nineteenth-​century Reform Acts as ‘turning points’ in any overall assessment of political change in modern Britain. One such effort might take its cue from the cultural history of politics outlined here to provide an analysis of parliamentary reform measures, crises, and debates as hothouses from which new types of political subject and mechanisms for disciplining them emerged.50 Parliamentary reform remains promising ground for more dynamic accounts of change focusing on the interaction between politicians, people,

Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 119–​78; B. Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (Cambridge, 2012). 48 

J. Carlisle, Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2012); H. Miller, Politics Personified: Portraiture, Caricature and Visual Culture in Britain, c. 1830–​80 (Manchester, 2015). 49  J. Lawrence, ‘Political History’, in S. Berger, H. Feldner, and K. Passmore, Writing History: Theory and Practice (London, 2003), pp. 183–​202; S. Pedersen, ‘What Is Political History Now?’, in D. Cannadine, ed., What Is History Now? (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 36–​56. 50  Such an account is sketched in J. Vernon, Distant Strangers: How Britain became Modern (Berkeley, CA, 2014), pp. 77–​99.

Parliamentary Reform   395 and institutions. Reform in 1832, for example, has been interpreted most persuasively as a reassertion and renovation of the right of an elite to govern. With parliamentary authority re-​established following an intense period of discussion, debate, and action, MPs could embark on a period of considerable activism, while parliamentary reforms effected a crucial transition moment from mixed to parliamentary government and a fundamental reshaping of the workings of Parliament. Reform in 1867 is explicable within a similar framework, where the efforts of political elites to refurbish their legitimacy and authority brought reform, a shift from parliamentary to party government, another energetic bout of legislative activity, and consequences, both intended and unintended, for the day-​to-​day operations of Parliament.51 That in certain respects politics, especially under the influence of the Parliamentary and Municipal Elections Act (1872) and the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act (1883), became less participatory as they became more democratic, and that each episode of reform entailed reworkings of who stood ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ citizenship, nuances rather than destroys such an account. Such a perspective also helps to explain some of the distinctive features of Britain’s political ‘modernity’, in particular, the persistence of institutions, languages, and practices embodying paternalism and hierarchy.52 One compelling recent account has charted the process from the 1870s, by which reform acted to secure and underpin the legitimacy of British institutions and generated parties as a mechanism for managing a new mass electorate. Parliamentary reform was decoupled from the rough and tumble of popular politics partly because ‘social reform’ superseded it as an object of party and popular concern and partly because these forms of management had proved successful in demonstrating that Parliament was susceptible to popular action. Parliamentary reform measures cannot be understood outside the popular pressure and agitation that helped to bring them about, but each Reform Act had the paradoxical effect of augmenting governments’ legitimacy to act without reference to the wider political nation.53 Thinking along these lines, with well-​established political terms of art such as ‘authority’ and ‘legitimacy’ rather than the more problematic terminology ‘democratization’ and ‘modernization’, is one way to refocus accounts of parliamentary reform.54 Such approaches have the benefit of recombining otherwise atomized areas 51 

G.W. Cox, The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian England (Cambridge, 1984); A. Hawkins, ‘“Parliamentary Government” and Victorian Political Parties, c. 1830–​c. 1880’, English Historical Review, 104 (1989), 638–​69; P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830-​1852 (Oxford, 1990); J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 1993); Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture. 52  J. Lawrence, ‘Paternalism, Class, and the British Path to Modernity’, in S. Gunn and J. Vernon, eds., The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (Berkeley, CA, 2011), pp. 147–​64. 53  J.P. Parry, ‘The Decline of Institutional Reform in Nineteenth-​C entury Britain’, in D. Feldman and J. Lawrence, eds., Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 164–​86. 54  Though for a sensitive effort to write the history of parliamentary reform using ‘democratization’ as the key concept, see J. Garrard, Democratization in Britain: Elites, Civil Society and Reform since 1800 (Basingstoke, 2002).

396   Gordon Pentland of concern—​popular politics, elite manoeuvring and ‘thought worlds’, and institutional histories—​in novel and persuasive ways, which might provide sophisticated long-​term accounts of political change as well as nuanced descriptions of particular moments and crises. It is also an approach which could be effectively carried forward into the twentieth century, whose discussions around parliamentary reform have received very little attention from historians.55 Nor should that be a surprise, given the pervasive sense that with 1928 and full adult enfranchisement the job was done and the drama was over. As suggested earlier in the chapter, the electoral and constitutional dimensions of parliamentary reform had been largely removed from the arena of contentious politics and were issues henceforth to be dealt with along bipartisan lines through the emerging mechanism of the interparty conference.56 Parliamentary reform became a minority interest, one espoused fitfully by different parties or organizations: the Fabians, the Electoral Reform Society, committed individuals like Ivor Jennings, and sections of all political parties retained a sporadic, sometimes intense interest.57 The issue had one last gasp in the immediate aftermath of Equal Franchise Act of 1928, partly because of a minority Labour government’s need to secure Liberal support, but after 1931 the question retreated in the face of more pressing concerns, while modern party institutions continued to act as a prophylactic against systematic parliamentary reform.58 While there is an anaemic historical literature on parliamentary reform in the twentieth century, what there is suggests that parliamentary reform may yet provide a lens onto wider issues of political authority and legitimacy, even during that long period of apparent dormancy after the 1930s. Certainly the limited appetite within the Attlee government to make constitutional reforms an issue shows how far priorities had changed and how far the interparty conference model had taken any drama from parliamentary reform.59 Only one Penguin Special, by the redoubtable Jennings, had tackled the issue during the war and demonstrated the shift towards procedural issues and questions surrounding the authority of the executive.60 Nonetheless, that parliamentary reform featured as part of the effort to legitimize government in the aftermath of an existential

55  Interesting historical approaches are introduced in P. Catterall, W. Kaiser, and U. Walton-​Jordan, eds., Reforming the Constitution: Debates in Twentieth-​Century Britain (London, 2000). 56  J.D. Fair, British Interparty Conferences: A Study of the Procedure of Conciliation in British Politics, 1867–​1921 (Oxford, 1980). 57  J. Hart, Proportional Representation: Critics of the British Electoral System, 1820–​1945 (Oxford, 1992); V. Bogdanor, The People and the Party System: The Referendum and Electoral Reform in British Politics (Cambridge, 1981). 58  P. Catterall, ‘The British Electoral System, 1885–​1970’, Historical Research, 73 (2000), 156–​74; J.D. Fair, ‘The Second Labour Government and the Politics of Electoral Reform, 1921–​1931’, Albion, 13 (1981), 276–​301. 59  Electoral reform receives only one short mention in the landmark study, K.O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–​1951 (Oxford, 1984), p. 406, and is briefly reported as a ‘non-​issue’ in P. Dorey, The Labour Party and Constitutional Reform: A History of Constitutional Conservatism (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 21–​3. 60  I. Jennings, Parliament Must Be Reformed (London, 1941).

Parliamentary Reform   397 war in itself invites comparisons with earlier episodes. Recommendations based on the report of the Speaker’s Conference of 1944 were supplemented by Labour’s ultimately successful effort to abolish both university constituencies and the ‘business vote’.61 The measures generated considerable debate, which is revealing of elite attitudes and of the long shadow cast by the nineteenth-​century experience of parliamentary reform. For example, there were extensive debates around redistribution and redrawing of constituency boundaries, which illuminate the continuing tensions between territorial and equal representation and reveal the long-​term purchase of ideas around the representation of ‘communities’ or ‘interests’.62 So too were the constitutional dimensions of parliamentary reform highlighted by the Labour government’s efforts to go beyond the recommendations of the Speaker’s Conference.63 Far more acutely required are historical approaches to parliamentary reform after the 1960s. During that decade, a flurry of publications highlighted the growing alienation of people from Parliament and the arcane working practices of MPs. Bernard Crick, one of the founders of the Study of Parliament Group, could remark in his own intervention that parliamentary reform was ‘one of those things as Twain remarked of the weather, which everybody talks about, but nobody does anything about’.64 A key leitmotif of the Wilson governments, ‘modernization’, was at one and the same time structuring historical assessments of nineteenth-​century reforms and acting as a broad rallying cry for new efforts at parliamentary reform. A central figure in driving these discontents in the direction of a coherent programme was Richard Crossman, one of a number of key Labour politicians who have embodied their party’s uneasy relationship with parliamentary and constitutional reform.65 Sweeping procedural changes, commitments to devolution, and an abortive effort to reform the House of Lords set a clear agenda. This was revisited after 1997 by a subsequent Labour government, whose leitmotif was also ‘modernization’, but whose majority allowed it to act with greater freedom. One of the founder members of the Study of Parliament Group, along with Crick, wrote to the Times in 2002 to hail ‘the most systematic package of parliamentary reforms for 100 years’.66 61  J.S. Meisel, Knowledge and Power: The Parliamentary Representation of Universities in Britain and the Empire (London, 2011), pp. 43–​6. 62  For a recent treatment of the establishment of these important and long-​running debates, see M. Roberts, ‘Resisting “Arithmocracy”: Parliament, Community and the Third Reform Act’, Journal of British Studies, 50 (2011), 381–​409. 63  See, for example, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, Quintin Hogg’s speech, 17 Mar. 1948, col. 2167. 64  B. Crick, Reform of Parliament (London, 1964), p. ix. See also A. Hill and A. Whichelow, What’s Wrong with Parliament? (Harmondsworth, 1964). 65  V. Honeyman, Richard Crossman: A Reforming Radical of the Labour Party (London, 2007), pp. 95–​132; D. Shell, ‘Parliamentary Reform’, in P. Dorey, ed., The Labour Governments, 1964–​1970 (London, 2006), pp. 168–​92. On Labour and constitutional reform more generally, see M. Taylor, ‘Labour and the Constitution’, in D. Tanner, P. Thane, and N. Tiratsoo, eds., Labour’s First Century (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 151–​90; K.O. Morgan, ‘The Left and Constitutional Reform, Gladstone to Miliband’, Political Quarterly, 84 (2013), 71–​9. 66  Cited in P. Cowley, ‘Parliament’, in A. Seldon, ed., Blair’s Britain, 1997–​2007 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 21.

398   Gordon Pentland While we can certainly question how much ‘system’ has lain behind these reforms, it is plausible to argue that the period between the late 1960s and the early 2000s has witnessed ‘a constitutional upheaval unparalleled in modern British history’.67 Along with EU accession (and withdrawal) and devolution both parties have been involved in a range of measures that fall very comfortably under what Victorians regarded as parliamentary reform: dramatic procedural changes, the normalization of referendums, and the tortuous story of House of Lords reform. The process is ongoing, partly driven by the unintended consequences of previous reforms, partly by a sense of institutional crisis in public life, and partly by party efforts to address a pervasive sense of ‘political disengagement’ among the electorate.68 We lack proper accounts of the ‘genesis’ and the ‘passing’ of these reforms and we have only outlines of the individuals and groups involved, their ideas, and their political practices.69 To date, the work that does attempt to explain parliamentary reform since the 1960s has come largely from political scientists, journalists, and constitutional lawyers. Political historians may well have unique questions to ask and distinctive insights to offer, as well as peculiar obstacles to overcome in essaying histories of contemporary parliamentary reform. Nevertheless, the kind of interpretive frameworks deployed to understand reform in the nineteenth century might retain value in seeking to understand the reforms of the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. Contemporary politics can prompt historians usefully to historicize current debates, such as those around corruption.70 Similarly, post-​war reform measures and the debates around them, such as the lowering of the voting age, should be tempting invitations for historians to examine how languages of citizenship were deployed and contested around the concept of ‘youth’, as they have done successfully for the nineteenth century. The way in which reform can be tied to and explained by a perceived crisis of legitimacy in institutions or political elites and their subsequent efforts to renovate or ‘modernize’ the constitution may well provide a useful lens onto reform since the 1960s. A final area of similarity may lie in the resources historians have to explain in detail the emergence, passage, and impact of post-​war parliamentary reform. Canvassing the intentions of reformers, balancing parliamentary intrigue and extra-parliamentary pressures, accounting both for long-​term and contingent factors, and assessing both intended and unintended consequences will be as relevant in analysing the 1990s as it has been in explaining reform in the more distant past. It may be that no greater continuity can be discerned than that the experience of parliamentary reform in Britain has always been ‘narrow, selfish, short-​sighted and muddled’, but the effort might just allow future historians to tell a more coherent story of political change in modern Britain.71 67 

P. Norton, ‘The Constitution’, in Seldon, ed., Blair’s Britain, p. 115. D. Richards, M. Smith, and C. Hay, Institutional Crisis in 21st-​Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2012); R. Hazell, The Conservative Agenda for Constitutional Reform (London, 2010), p. 17. 69  See, for example, M. Evans, Charter 88: A Successful Challenge to the British Political Tradition? (Aldershot, 1995). 70  P. Seaward, ‘Sleaze, Old Corruption and Parliamentary Reform: An Historical Perspective on the Current Crisis’, Political Quarterly, 81 (2010), 39–​48. 71  N. Gash, ‘Parliament and Democracy in Britain: The Three Nineteenth-​Century Reform Acts’, in Gash, Pillars of Government and Other Essays on State and Society, c. 1770–​c. 1880 (London, 1986), p. 63. 68 

Parliamentary Reform   399

Further Reading D. Beales, ‘The Idea of Reform in British Politics’, in T.C.W. Blanning and P. Wende, eds., Reform in Great Britain and Germany, 1750–​1850 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 159–​74. A. Burns and J. Innes, eds., Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–​1850 (Oxford, 2003). P. Catterall, W. Kaiser, and U. Walton-​Jordan, eds., Reforming the Constitution:  Debates in Twentieth-​Century Britain (London, 2000). M.J. Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution. The Passing of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1967). C. Hall, K. McClelland, and J. Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000). A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’ (Oxford, 2015). J.P. Parry, ‘The Decline of Institutional Reform in Nineteenth-​Century Britain’, in D. Feldman and J. Lawrence, eds., Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 164–​86. J. Vernon, Politics and the People:  A Study in English Political Culture, c.  1815–​ 1867 (Cambridge, 1993).

chapter 23

Electi ons Luke Blaxill

The appeal of elections to modern British political historians is simple. They allow us to study the relationship between politicians and people through campaigns—​be they the ritual and theatre of the Georgian hustings, the ‘political oratorical pandemonium’ of the Victorian platform, or the modern media-​centric campaign trail of the later twentieth century—​and provide a quantification of the electorate’s opinion at their conclusion.1 Elections provide a rich and unusually focused range of sources: the voluminous press, election ephemera, and the writings of politicians, organizers, pundits, electors, and non-​ electors. There are also the records of party and non-​party electioneering organizations to consider, and a vast array of voting, pollbook, and survey data. General elections (of which there were 51 in the two centuries covered by this volume) can be studied singly, or in succession to form overarching analyses of political change over decades. Local elections and by-​elections provide important, if overlooked, windows outside these times.2 The historiography of British electoral politics since 1800 has focused on three distinct (if rather broad) periods, each lasting around 65 years. The first, referred to in this chapter as the ‘early period’, stretches from the age of Pitt and Fox at the turn of the nineteenth century to 1865, the year of the final election to be held before the Second Reform Act and the first to be fought clearly between Liberals and Conservatives rather than Whigs and Tories. Characterized (even after the landmark Great Reform Act of 1832) by tiny electorates, rampant corruption, and geographically idiosyncratic traditions and rituals, elections in these years inspired the carnivalesque and bawdy cartoons of Cruickshank and Gillray, and Dickens’ famous Eatanswill. The second period, which has spawned by far the greatest volume of historical work and is inelegantly christened the ‘transitional period’ in this chapter, stretches from Gladstone’s victory of 1868 to 1935, the year of the

1 

H. Jephson, ‘A By-​Election Contest’, Times, (June 1888), 683. For recent work on by-​elections, see P. Readman and T.G. Otte, eds., By-​Elections in British Politics, 1832–​1914 (Woodbridge, 2013). 2 

Elections   401 last election before the Second World War.3 This 67-​year period saw three Reform Acts and the incremental transformation of elections from elite affairs restricted by sex and property to universal suffrage and mass democracy. The late Victorian and Edwardian periods saw the rise of recognizably modern parties, electioneering organizations, and the ‘golden age’ of platform oratory, while the 1920s witnessed Labour’s replacement of the Liberals as the principal progressive and anti-​Conservative party. The third and final subset—​the ‘modern period’—​concerns the years after 1945, when elections entered the mass media age. Rich in voting and polling data, television archives, and oral testimonies, the historiography of electoral politics in this recent period has been dominated by its relationship—​sometimes symbiotic and sometimes divergent—​with political science. The study of elections across these three periods can be divided (albeit roughly) into two main methodological approaches. The first prominently features ‘psephological’ analyses of aggregate voting data and social cleavages, particularly class. It is mainly associated with the ‘electoral sociology’ of the 1960s and ’70s, but also with the ‘Nuffield studies’ of individual election campaigns, which began in 1947 and continue to this day. The second is the revisionist ‘linguistic’ approach of the 1980s and beyond, which emphasizes the careful reconstruction and exploration of electoral languages and discourses, often in a specific locality. While both approaches have undoubtedly yielded considerable benefits, their supporters have seldom seen eye to eye, and what was once a large field has broadly fractured into two camps: the empirical, quantitative tradition now associated with political science on one side, and the now dominant cultural and linguistic approaches on the other. This chapter discusses these two approaches, before offering thoughts on the future of the field. It argues that the advent of the ‘digital turn’ and the vast proliferation of electronic sources in its wake now make possible a third scholarly phase where the gap between electoral historians and political scientists may begin to close.

I ‘Electoral sociology’ was born in the early 1950s. British political scientists were inspired by American scholarship—​ for example, the works of Angus Campbell, Bernard Berelson, Paul Lazarfield, and William McPhee—​which used survey data to argue that election campaigns had little effect on voting behaviour.4 For David Butler and 3 

Although some might argue that the inter-​war period, covering the seven general elections between 1918 and 1935, should be placed in its own separate, smaller category. 4  For further commentary on electoral sociology and its origins, see J. Lawrence and M. Taylor, ‘Introduction: Electoral Sociology and the Historians’, in J. Lawrence and M. Taylor, eds., Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 2–​14. See also P. Clarke, ‘Electoral Sociology of Modern Britain’, History, 57 (1972), 31–​55; C. Stevens, ‘The Electoral Sociology of Modern Britain Reconsidered’, Contemporary British History, 13 (1999), 62–​94.

402   Luke Blaxill others, this busted the ‘nineteenth-​century rationalist myth’ that voters’ engagement with political issues and arguments mattered.5 In both Britain and America, these scholars accused parties—​both current and historical—​of failing to understand the ‘deeper’, but significantly more powerful, influences on voting behaviour, which they contended were primarily social: formed in the workplace and community, and reinforced by habits and association. The emphasis on ‘who you vote with, rather than who you vote for’ accorded the voter little agency, with his or her party allegiance being largely determined by geographical, associational, and professional coincidence.6 In practice, this thinking (applied, we must remember, to society in the 1950s) led to an emphasis on social class as the most universal and convenient tool of voter categorization and on elections as exercises in ‘democratic class struggle’, where these powerful social forces were channelled through political parties who had to adapt to them or face destruction (a fate that seemed to have befallen the Liberal party after 1918).7 Two decades later dissenting voices began to make themselves heard, and Bo Särlvik and Ivor Crewe, among others, argued that increasing social dealignment (apparent from the late 1960s) rendered the existing class model obsolete.8 However, political scientists did not respond by abandoning class, but rather by creating more finessed and less economically deterministic systems of social categorization (based on common voter archetypes).9 The academic world of the late 1950s was one of considerable disciplinary porosity, and electoral sociology was also experimentally applied to the study of historic elections. The pioneers—​principally J.P. Cornford, H.J. Hanham, D.C. Moore, T.J. Nossiter, Henry Pelling, John Vincent, and Peter Clarke—​argued that nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​ century elections could, like their post-​1945 successors, be understood broadly in class terms. In Moore’s, Nossiter’s, and Vincent’s accounts of the early period, this generally meant class in the pre-​industrial Weberian sense of status groups (or ‘operational collectives’) anchored in occupation, prestige, and religion. For the remaining authors, these operational collectives were gradually, albeit unevenly, superseded from the middle of the century by the awakening of modern class consciousness forged by industrial society and the relationship between capital and labour. In addition to their focus on class, the electoral sociologists also boldly employed modern psephological techniques, including two-​party swing, sociological modelling, and map-​based ‘ecological’ analysis. An implicit (albeit often unstated) assumption of these accounts was also that the rise of class and party had eroded local political identities, and that British elections, and voter 5 

D. Butler, The British General Election of 1951 (London, 1951), pp. 3–​4. See also P. Pulzer, Political Representation and Elections in Britain (London, 1967); R. Alford, Party and Society: The Anglo-​American Democracies (London, 1964). 6  T. Parsons, ‘Voting and the Equilibrium of the American Political System’, in E. Burdick and A. Brodbeck, eds., American Voting Behaviour (New York, 1959), p. ​96. 7  S. Lipset, Political Man: The Social Basis of Politics (London, 1960), p. 21. 8  B. Särlvik and I. Crewe, Decade of Dealignment: The Conservative Victory of 1979 and Electoral Trends in the 1970s (Cambridge, 1983); R. Rose and I. McAllister, Voters Begin to Choose: From Closed Class to Open Elections (London, 1986). 9  For discussion of the new voter archetypes, see Stevens, ‘Electoral Sociology’, 75–​6.

Elections   403 behaviour, were becoming increasingly ‘nationalized’ as early as the mid-​to late nineteenth century.10 The ambition of the electoral sociologists was immense. For the early period, Vincent is widely credited with having made the first attempt to interpret pollbooks and link them to probate records.11 He investigated the relationship between voters’ propensity to support parties and their occupation and wealth, and concluded that class—​based on status group rather than simple economic interests—​was the chief ground for political orientation even before industrialization. For his part, Moore also used pollbooks to argue that the Great Reform Act created a sharper dichotomy between borough and county, allowing the Tory aristocracy to survive by nurturing rural ‘deference communities’ uncontaminated by urban radicalism.12 Nossiter, meanwhile, categorized voters in the north-​east by occupational type, and gauged their electoral behaviour according to three ‘idioms’ (patronage, bribery, and individual opinion).13 He concluded that social group identification (such as a ‘shopocracy’ of petit bourgeois shopkeepers committed to Liberalism) was the most important determinant of voter behaviour, much as was also the case with contemporary class politics. For the transitional period, Cornford presented the ‘villa Tory’ argument that Salisburyian Conservative success was largely a passive reflection of an intransigent middle-​class vote, whose electoral significance had been inflated by the 1885 Redistribution of Seats Act.14 Hanham, meanwhile, explained the explosion of grassroots party organization after 1868 as a pragmatic party recognition of the imperative to socialize newly enfranchised working-​class voters into the existing political system.15 Pelling’s mammoth Social Geography charted the different ways in which social forces affected politics at regional and constituency level.16 Finally, Clarke argued that Liberals in Lancashire had successfully adapted to class politics by 1910 through an appeal to ‘new Liberalism’, thus refuting the popular ‘inevitable’ rise-​of-​ Labour thesis.17 Electoral sociology—​with its strong class motif—​was close to a consensus by the early 1970s. Even Cornford’s strikingly bold statement that, from 1868, ‘class was becoming the most important single factor in deciding political allegiance’ had few dissenters.18 10 

For further discussion, see L. Blaxill, ‘Electioneering, the Third Reform Act, and Political Change in the 1880s’, Parliamentary History, 30 (2011), 343–​73. 11  J.R. Vincent, Pollbooks: How Victorians Voted (Cambridge, 1967). 12   D.C. Moore, The Politics of Deference: A Study of the Mid-​Nineteenth Century English Political System (Hassocks, 1976). 13  T.J. Nossiter, Influence, Opinion and Political Idioms in Reformed England: Case Studies from the North-​East, 1832–​74 (Hassocks, 1975). 14  J.P. Cornford, ‘The Transformation of Conservatism in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Studies, 7 (1963), 35–​66. 15  H.J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Disraeli and Gladstone (Hassocks, 1959). 16  H. Pelling, Social Geography of British Elections, 1885–​1910 (London, 1967). 17  P. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism ( Cambridge, 1971). For the ‘inevitablist’ rise of Labour thesis, see for example H. Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party (London, 1954). 18  Cornford, ‘Transformation’, 37.

404   Luke Blaxill Clarke was perhaps most sceptical, but even he wrote of contemporary politics in 1972 that ‘explanations in terms of class have a virtually universal application’ and qualified Cornford only slightly, suggesting that important elements of class voting appeared in 1886 rather than 1868 and only fully supplanted religion in determining voter choice by 1910.19 Even J.P.D. Dunbabin (a mild critic of sociological methods) saw value in rolling modern psephological techniques back as far as 1868.20 Nossiter was more trenchant, complained in 1970 that even ‘ecological’ works to date had displayed insufficient statistical empiricism (he was still more acerbic about more ‘impressionistic’ Nuffield studies) and sarcastically praised Michael Kinnear’s The British Voter, writing that ‘it is ironic that the most interesting recent book in the field should be an atlas’.21 Local electoral studies that appeared at this time were timid and did little to challenge the dominant narratives of class and nationalization. Those covering twentieth-​century constituencies overwhelmingly saw religion, locality, and the personal appeal of candidates as representing residual (and retreating) survivals from the old political world.22 Nineteenth-​century local studies, meanwhile, were extremely mindful of their limitations, with Howarth’s modest framing of her excellent article of 1969 on Northamptonshire Liberalism in the 1880s and ’90s a case in point.23 She conceded that her work was less ambitious than Mr Cornford’s, both in its scope, for it does not attempt to produce general, national explanations of electoral behaviour . . . its conclusions do not rest on statistics . . . but literary evidence [which] cannot enable us to measure the voting preferences of different groups of electors. It can only serve as a basis for informed guesses.24

What eventually began to erode electoral sociology’s dominance was less a revisionist critique than a scholarly shift towards the intense biographical study of the political world of elite politicians at Westminster. This was the so-​called high-​political approach, which had made long strides by the mid-​1970s. Led initially by Maurice Cowling, high politics was a deliberate doctrinal attempt to redress what was damned as a high-​minded liberal fallacy that politicians had ever behaved according to the ‘wishes of the people’

19 

Clarke, ‘Electoral Sociology’, 33.   J.P.D. Dunbabin, ‘Parliamentary Elections in Great Britain 1868–​1900: A Psephological Note’, English Historical Review, 81 (1966), 83. 21  T.J. Nossiter, ‘Recent Work on English Elections, 1832–​1935’, Political Studies, 18 (1970), 526; M. Kinnear, The British Voter: An Atlas and Survey since 1885 (London, 1968). 22  A.H. Birch, Small-​Town Politics: A Study of Political Life in Glossop (Oxford, 1959); M. Stacey, Tradition and Change: A Study of Banbury (Oxford, 1960); F. Bealey, J. Blondel, and W.P. McCann, Constituency Politics: A Study of Newcastle-​under-​Lyme (London, 1965). 23  J. Howarth, ‘The Liberal Revival in Northamptonshire, 1880–​1895: A Case Study in Late Nineteenth Century Elections’, Historical Journal, 12 (1969), 78–​118. See also R.J. Olney, Lincolnshire Politics, 1832–​ 1885 (Oxford, 1973); R. Davis, Political Change and Continuity, 1760–​1885: A Buckinghamshire Study (Newton Abbot, 1972). 24  Howarth, ‘Liberal Revival’, 79. 20

Elections   405 or their personal or party ideology.25 Cowling and his supporters instead provocatively posited that a focus on power games and political manoeuvre among the elite could explain political change most fully. While this complex parallel historiographical debate will not be reprised here, it will suffice to say that the high-​political approach was, by its nature, largely unconcerned with electoral politics. Its published output—​even books explicitly focused on party fortunes over several decades—​maintained a close focus on the main power players, with elections (despite top politicians’ active preoccupation with them) relegated to a few mentions.26 Interestingly, as Lawrence has pointed out, the shift to high politics was not accompanied by an explicit critique of electoral sociology as a historical methodology.27 However, high politics’ popularity arguably served to begin the marginalization of elections into a specialist historiographical niche, which was further amplified by an increased scholarly interest in biographies of politicians, which also (again, despite their subjects’ preoccupation with them) invariably neglected elections.28 The declining popularity of electoral sociology by the mid-​1970s was exacerbated by its prior champions leaving the field: Hanham and Cornford produced no further major studies; Moore, Clarke, and Nossiter moved away from elections; Vincent migrated to high politics and Pelling to labour history. While works such as K.D. Wald’s Crosses on the Ballot served intermittently to raise the flag as late as 1983, the locus of the historical study of elections shifted to the ‘Nuffield studies’ associated with the psephologist David Butler.29 These began with R.B. McCallum and Alison Readman’s volume on the 1945 election, and each election since has received its own dedicated monograph describing the political background, the campaign, opinion polling and statistical analysis, and insights from the key politicians interviewed in retrospect.30 While the Nuffield volumes began as exercises in contemporary history, their approach—​perhaps influenced by Donald Stokes’ Michigan school of behaviouralism and the introduction of the British Election Survey from 1963—​rapidly moved the series towards the statistical empiricism of the political sciences. As a consequence, the books largely echoed the assumptions 25   M. Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution: The Passing of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1967). 26   See for example, R. Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill (London, 1970); E.J. Feuchtwanger, Disraeli, Democracy and the Tory Party (Oxford, 1968); D.A. Hamer, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery: A Study in Leadership and Policy (Oxford, 1972); M. Cowling, The Impact of Labour, 1920–​1924 (Cambridge, 1971); M. Cowling, The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy, 1933–​1940 (Cambridge, 1975). 27  J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 1998), p. ​41. 28   See, for example, R. Blake, Disraeli (London, 1966); N. Gash, Peel (London, 1976); and R. Jenkins, Gladstone (London, 1995). 29  K.D. Wald, Crosses on the Ballot: Patterns of British Voter Alignment since 1885 ( Princeton, 1983). 30  R.B. McCallum and A. Readman, The British General Election of 1945 (Oxford, 1947). The latest volume is P. Cowley and D. Kavanagh, The British General Election of 2015 (Basingstoke, 2015). The Political Communications series also provides more focused campaign-​by-​campaign commentaries from 1979 to present. See, for example, R. Worcester and M. Harrop, eds., Political Communications: The General Election Campaign of 1979 (London, 1982).

406   Luke Blaxill of electoral sociology regarding the primacy of social cleavages and the duty of parties to adapt to them. Importantly, the Nuffield methodology was not limited to the post-​ 1945 period and (much as with electoral sociology) also encouraged political historians to experiment by applying it retroactively. Sure enough, ‘Nuffield-​style’ historical studies appeared for more than a dozen elections since 1880, with Neal Blewett’s and Chris Cook’s works arguably the most impressive.31 Despite our clear debt to the Nuffield approach in inspiring what transpired to be a more enduring (if less ambitious) historiographical project than electoral sociology, the series’ reliance on the same underlying assumptions and the fact that the last ‘historical’ Nuffield study was released 25 years ago suggest that they too have now run their course outside contemporary political science. In addition, despite author Dennis Kavanagh’s recent caveat that contemporary Nuffield studies were ‘far from the final word on the subject’ and aimed to ‘achieve immortality only in other men’s footnotes’, it seems probable that their individual and collective authoritativeness, paired with the series’ increasing identification with the political sciences, had the unintended consequence of deterring historians from writing books on post-​war electoral politics.32 More fundamentally, the Nuffield approach, like electoral sociology, was eroded in popularity from the 1980s not just by the switch to high politics, but also by the birth of a new cultural and linguistic revisionism.33

II The majority of the new revisionism was inspired by the so-​called ‘linguistic turn’, which drew philosophical inspiration from theorists such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Johann Georg Harmann, and Wilhelm von Humboldt in the 1960s, and various poststructuralists in the 1970s. The turn demanded that historians see language as a crucial aspect of the political world, and one which was as important in explaining change as those 31 

N. Blewett, The Peers, the Parties, and the People: The General Elections of 1910 (London, 1972); C. Cook, The Age of Alignment: Electoral Politics in Britain, 1922–​1929 (London, 1975). See also T. Lloyd, The General Election of 1880 (Oxford, 1968); A.K. Russell, Liberal Landslide: The General Election of 1906 (Newton Abbot, 1973). 32  D. Kavanagh, ‘Producing Contemporary History’, Contemporary Record, 1 (1987), 55. It is difficult to find a single historical book concerning electoral politics after 1945 and scholarly articles are rare. Exceptions include S. Fielding, ‘Rethinking Labour’s 1964 Campaign’, Contemporary British History, 21 (2007), 309–​24; J. Thomas, ‘Labour, the Tabloids, and the 1992 General Election’, Contemporary British History, 12 (2008), 80–​104; J. Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009), chs ​5–​9. 33  Another parallel factor was undoubtedly historians’ general loss of faith in quantitative approaches and cliometrics after 1945. For contemporary commentary, see L. Stone, ‘History and the Social Sciences in the Twentieth Century’, in L. Stone, The Past and the Present (Boston, 1981), 3–​44, and Nancy Fitch, ‘Statistical Fantasies and Historical Facts: History in Crisis and Its Methodological Implications’, Historical Methods, 17 (1984), 239–​54.

Elections   407 traditionally emphasized, such as individuals, institutions, and events. One of the first historians influenced by the turn was Gareth Stedman Jones, who argued in 1983 that perceptions of class identity were formed primarily by language and that these perceptions contributed more to class consciousness than did the physical reality of material circumstances.34 This began a protracted debate among social and political historians on language and class in the nineteenth century. A small group of scholars—​most prominently James Vernon and Patrick Joyce—​took Stedman Jones’ poststructuralism still further and appeared to argue that class was entirely a linguistic tool in the hands of politicians, who used it to expound beguiling ‘visions’ that successfully tamed the mass electorate.35 They attracted sharp criticism from opponents such as Neville Kirk and Richard Price, who argued that E.P. Thompson’s existing definition already adequately encapsulated the crucial question of class perception.36 While it cannot be said that either side emerged victorious in this heated debate on class, it was, indirectly, enormously important for the study of elections. By their nature, campaigns represented a verbose and unusually well-​recorded dialogue between leaders and led, and thus supplied plentiful source material for the debate. While Vernon and Joyce’s radical linguistic revisionism made the early running, the field was ripe for a moderate reorientating scholarly intervention, and in 1997 it received one in the shape of Jon Lawrence’s Speaking for the People and Lawrence and Miles Taylor’s edited collection Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820.37 These books—​ which represented a more qualified adoption of the ‘linguistic turn’—​finally supplied an incisive critique of electoral sociology, arguing that the attempt to read back political science methods of the 1950s had in practice amounted to a crude retrofitting of a conception of class and nationalized top-​down aggregate analyses which might have been suitable for the immediate post-​war decades, but were inadequately suited to the peculiarities of nineteenth and early twentieth-​century elections. Lawrence in particular also criticized Joyce and Vernon for their excessively doctrinaire adoption of poststructuralism and their consequent exaggeration of the degree to which parties after 1867 successfully tamed the masses through language.38

34  G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–​1982 (Cambridge, 1983). 35   See especially J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–​1867 (Cambridge, 1993); P. Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840–​1914 (Cambridge, 1991). 36  N. Kirk, ‘Decline and Fall, Resilience and Regeneration: A Review Essay on Social Class’, International Labor and Working-​Class History, 57 (2000), 88–​102; R. Price, ‘Languages of Revisionism: Historians and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-​Century Britain’, Journal of Social History, 30 (1996), 229–​51. 37  While it predated Lawrence and Taylor, Duncan Tanner’s work was also influential in emphasizing the importance of language and locality. See D. Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900–​1918 (Cambridge, 1990). 38 Lawrence, Speaking for the People, pp. ​48–​61. For an acerbic attack on Vernon and Joyce, see M. Bentley, ‘Victorian Politics and the Linguistic Turn’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), 883–​902.

408   Luke Blaxill Having done much to problematize these two approaches, Lawrence used a study of popular politics in Wolverhampton to argue that historians had failed adequately to factor locality into their accounts of electoral politics.39 As political identities, values, and traditions—​not to mention results themselves—​could vary considerably from constituency to constituency, Lawrence argued that top-​down approaches were inherently limited, especially before 1918. Rather, he argued, a focus on the ‘politics of place’ would allow historians to tease out local idiosyncrasies and reveal hitherto overlooked nuances of political culture through close readings. This would, according to Lawrence, place scholars in the best position to understand how politicians defined and constructed (consciously or otherwise) political identities, be they of party, gender, patriotism, or class. This qualified adoption of linguistic approaches has been extremely influential, and poststructuralism more generally has, as Michael Bentley suggested, ‘begun to nibble at, sometimes bite on, the assumptions of working historians whose conscious activity may betray no shadow of interest in theoretical matters’.40 The last two decades have thus seen the field largely recast in this revisionist mould, and have witnessed an explosion of local studies of electoral language which (albeit to varying extents) are markedly influenced by the linguistic turn. For example, for the transitional period, Matthew Roberts, Alex Windscheffel, and Frans Coetzee used local studies of Leeds, London, and Croydon respectively to contest Cornford’s ‘villa Tory’ thesis and to advocate a more positive interpretation of popular Conservatism after 1885.41 Patricia Lynch, meanwhile, argues that Liberalism in North Essex, South Oxfordshire, and Holmfirth owed more to older radical traditions such as Luddism and Chartism than it did to class.42 For the early period, recent work has attempted to reconstruct electoral languages and discourses within a locale, such as Barker and Vincent’s work on Newcastle-​under-​Lyme before 1832 and Marc Baer’s fascinating recreation of neighbourhood and street politics in the Westminster constituency, which argues that the borough’s vibrant radical heritage was sanitized by the growth of parties between the First and Second Reform Acts.43 For the inter-​war period, David Thackeray examined a 39 Lawrence, Speaking for the People, pp. 73–​160. 40 

M. Bentley, ed., Companion to Historiography, (2nd edn., London, 2002), pp. 489–​90. M. Roberts, ‘“Villa Toryism” and Popular Conservatism in Leeds, 1885–​1902’, Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 217–​46; F. Coetzee, ‘Villa Toryism Reconsidered: Conservatism and Suburban Sensibilities in Late Victorian Croydon’, Parliamentary History, 16 (1997), 29–​47; A. Windscheffel, Popular Conservatism in Imperial London, 1868–​1906 (Woodbridge, 2007). 42  P. Lynch, The Liberal Party in Rural England 1885–​1910 (Oxford, 2003). I. Cawood’s study of the West Midlands, C. MacDonald’s of Paisley, and my own work on East Anglia also draw considerable inspiration from this new revisionism. See I. Cawood, The Liberal Unionist Party: A History (Chippenham, 2012); ‘The Unionist “Compact” in West Midland Politics 1891–​1895’, Midland History, 30 (2005), 92–​111; C. MacDonald, The Radical Thread: Political Change in Scotland. Paisley Politics, 1885–​1924 (East Linton, 2000); L. Blaxill, ‘Joseph Chamberlain and the Third Reform Act: A Reassessment of the “Unauthorized Programme” of 1885’, Journal of British Studies, 54 (2015), 88–​117; L. Blaxill, ‘The Language of British Electoral Politics, 1880–​1910’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 2012). 43  H. Barker and D. Vincent, eds., Language, Print and Electoral Politics, 1790–​1832: Newcastle-​under-​ Lyme Broadsides (Woodbridge, 2001); M. Baer, The Rise and Fall of Radical Westminster, 1780–​1890 (Basingstoke, 2012). 41 

Elections   409 host of localities to investigate how the Conservatives adapted their platform to come to terms with the democratic age, and Declan McHugh’s and Geraint Thomas’ respective studies of Labour in Manchester and the Tories in industrial and rural Wales shed further light on the dynamics of local party politics.44 While the shift to localized studies of electoral language has not been a total or even transition (there has been negligible impact on the post-​1945 period, for example),45 the change has been striking. Howarth’s almost apologetic presentation of her Northamptonshire study in 1969 was replaced 30 years later by claims such as Stevens’ that ‘politics prior to 1914 can only be understood through local studies’.46 While some recent scholarship, including my own, does not wholly conform to the core tenets of the ‘New Political History’ with its poststructuralist influence, it cannot be said that anything approaching a counter-​revisionism has yet been born. There remains, however, a suspicion that while much has been gained by recent revisionism, something has been lost too. That something is the bold ambition to provide models, theories, and theses that aim to explain political change across localities and decades. Lawrence himself issued something of a caution as early as 2003 when he wrote that ‘fascinating, almost anthropological, reconstruction[s]‌of . . .  political culture’ were in some cases becoming ‘defiantly indifferent to any broader claims of historical explanation’, and similar sentiments were echoed in 2009 by Paul Readman, who warned that ‘agency and causation have been eschewed in favour of the recovery and analysis of political cultures and discourses’.47 Such misgivings are reflective of a wider recent historiographical questioning of the rush towards linguistic approaches since the turn of the millennium.48 In the specific field of electoral politics, it can be said that the move towards close readings of specific localities and hitherto little-​known politicians represents something of a double-​edged sword. While tremendously rewarding for the reasons explored previously, they also risk treading dangerously close to antiquarianism to those outside the immediate field, whether political historians interested in ‘high 44 

D. McHugh, Labour in the City: The Development of the Labour Party in Manchester 1918–​31 (Manchester, 2007); G. Thomas, ‘The Conservative Party and Welsh Politics in the Inter-​War Years’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), 877–​913; D. Thackeray, Conservatism for the Democratic Age: Conservative Cultures and the Challenge of Mass Politics in Early Twentieth-​Century England (Manchester, 2013). 45  The closest match are political science books on national communication strategy. See, for example, D. Kavanagh, Election Campaigning: The New Marketing of Politics (Oxford, 1995); P. Norris et al., On Message: Communicating the Campaign (London, 1999); M. Rosenbaum, From Soapbox to Soundbite: Party Political Campaigning in Britain since 1945 (Basingstoke, 1997). 46  Stevens, ‘Electoral Sociology’, ​83. 47  J. Lawrence, ‘Political History’, in S. Berger, H. Feldner, and K. Passmore, eds., Writing History: Theory & Practice (London, 2003), p. 194; P. Readman, ‘Speeches’, in M. Dobson and B. Ziemann, eds., Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from 19th-​and 20th-​Century History (Abingdon, 2009), p. ​216. 48  See, for example, A. Jones, ‘Word and Deed: Why a Post-​Poststructural History Is Needed, and How It Might Look’, Historical Journal, 43 (2000), 517–​41; P. Mandler, ‘The Problem with Cultural History’, Cultural and Social History, 1 (2004), 94–​115. For further discussion, see L. Blaxill, ‘Quantifying the Language of British Politics, 1880–​1910’, Historical Research, 86 (2013), 315–​17.

410   Luke Blaxill politics’, biography, and ideology, or political scientists concerned with more empirical and quantitative approaches. Indeed, since the telling interventions of Lawrence and others, the subsequent increasingly formulaic reminders of the unfashionability and outdatedness of electoral sociology rather miss the point that scholars such as Cornford, Pelling, and Hanham originally saw the adoption of political science techniques as intellectual experiments with their own self-​evident limitations, rather than as declarations of a new scholarly dogma.49 In this regard, the new revisionist linguistic approaches are no different, for they also began as a scholarly experiment inspired by fashionable theories adapted from other academic fields (in this case, philosophy and literary studies).

III Having thus benefited from these two rather successful intellectual experiments, the field is perhaps now well placed to consider moving to a reintegrated third phase. For electoral politics to once again thrive as a field of scholarly study—​and influence others around it both in history and political science—​it must rediscover the explanatory ambition of electoral sociology while at the same time retaining the key lessons of recent revisionism. In large part, this will mean strategically re-​embracing the quantitative and empirical tradition of political science when and where it is useful. An obvious means of achieving this lies in taking full advantage of the plethora of digitized primary sources, such as local and national newspapers, political pamphlets and handbills, posters, manifestos, periodicals, pollbooks, and parliamentary debates. While extremely popular, the impact of digitizations thus far (especially newspapers and periodicals) has primarily been to improve accessibility and searchability for historians. A huge opportunity is being missed, namely, how we might use computers to analyse the newly liberated textual sources of millions (sometimes billions) of words which are beyond feasible scholarly endeavour to read in entirety. It is here that a variety of methodologies inspired by corpus linguists (often called ‘distant reading’ and ‘text mining’) have the potential—​through simple word counts, concordancing, and automated vocabulary comparisons—​to enable systematic, quantitative, and holistic analyses of huge texts. A national election speaking campaign, a century of party manifestos, or a region’s pollbooks can be electronically analysed in a few seconds, when this would have taken previous scholars months, if not years. The popularity among historians of tools such as Google Ngram provides strong prima facie corroboration of the potential of computerized textual analysis, and the general case for such ‘big data’ approaches in History has been provocatively made by the recent History Manifesto.50 49  See, for example, Cornford, ‘Transformation’, 39–​41; Pelling, Social Geography, pp. ​1–​2; Wald, Crosses on the Ballot, pp. 12–​15; Hanham, Elections, pp. 191–​92. 50  D. Armitage and J. Guldi, The History Manifesto (Cambridge, 2014), pp. ​88–​115. For reflections on some drawbacks of searchable digital archives, see J. Mussell, The Nineteenth-​Century Press in the Digital

Elections   411 The peculiarly large amount of text generated by elections—​assisted by its digital availability—​makes them particularly amenable to text mining. For example, a corpus of campaign speeches can be easily assembled from the British Newspaper Archive. It can be used to illustrate—​with the aid of simple software such as Antconc, Paper Machines, or Voyant Tools—​how often, and in what contexts, parties mentioned, for example, the leadership of Peel in the 1830s, Irish home rule in the 1880s and 1890s, women in the 1920s, or the National Health Service in the 1950s.51 This allows us to combine qualitative and quantitative analyses. We might begin by gaining a nuanced understanding of the presentation of political issues, ideologies, values, and traditions in a single locality by manually reading speeches, and then use a corpus to compare our findings with other constituencies, counties, or regions, or even across the nation. Comparisons of language patterns can also easily be made (providing the text is available) between different parties, election campaigns, and constituency types; between leadership and grassroots; and between different sources, such as speeches and pamphlets. Particular issues (such as Tariff Reform or Privatization) can be ontologized as groups of keywords, which can either be assembled through historical judgement or empirically derived via topic modelling or seed words. Alternatively, text-​mining software also allows a historian with two or more texts which he or she has not read but wishes to compare, to perform rapid automated analysis that highlights their key characteristics and flags similarities and differences. These can then be investigated through further text mining and by traditional methods.52 The results might simply give greater specificity to something we already suspected (for example, the discovery that the Conservatives talked about imperialism around twice as often as Liberals did in late Victorian and Edwardian elections), but might also surprise us (for example, the finding that Chamberlain’s Unauthorized Programme of 1885 featured more prominently in rural areas when he aimed it at boroughs).53 In a nutshell, the strategic use of text mining allows us to retain a focus on language and a close reading of election campaigns at a constituency level, but then to also situate our findings within the broader context of electoral discourse, thus enabling measurements of power, scope, and typicality.

Age (Basingstoke, 2012) and M. Roberts, ‘Labouring in the Digital Archive’, Labour History Review, 78 (2013), 113–​26. 51  See Blaxill, ‘Language of British Electoral Politics’; ‘Quantifying the Language of British Politics’. See also L. Bronner, ‘Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Europe’s Piecemeal Democratization’ (working PhD thesis title), which analyses British election ephemera with text mining. For quantitative discourse analysis on modern British election campaigns, see N. Fairclough, New Labour, New Language? (London, 2000); L. Ampofo et al., ‘Text Mining and Social Media: When Quantitative Meets Qualitative and Software Meets People’, in P. Halfpenny and R. Procter, eds., Innovations in Digital Research Methods (London, 2015), pp. ​161–​92. 52  For an excellent methodological outline, see S. Adolphs, Introducing Electronic Text Analysis (Trowbridge, 2006). For more advanced discussion on modelling historical concepts, see S. Graham, I. Milligan, and S. Weingart, The Historian’s Macroscope: Exploring Big Historical Data (London, 2015). 53  See Blaxill, ‘Joseph Chamberlain’.

412   Luke Blaxill The methodological complications with text mining—​for example, the difficulty in modelling complex issues via keywords, dealing with language change and unreliable sources (such as newspaper speech reports), and many of the classic problems of information retrieval (such as false recall)—​should naturally counsel due caution. In this regard, a sensible first step is to apply it to those historical problems that can simultaneously be investigated through traditional methods as part of the same study. One, for example, would be multi-​level analysis of the presentation of political issues on the constituency platform, in Parliament, and in the press, with the aim of comparing these three central streams of political discourse to investigate their interrelationship over time. A second more specific example might be gender in the twentieth century, where historians could investigate the frequency and common contexts of gendered terminology after 1918, to gain insights into how far parties responded to universal suffrage by targeting female voters. A third would be to investigate the question of ‘nationalization’ from 1868, comparing speeches of grassroots and frontbench politicians (and local and national election ephemera) to assess how and how far they converged over time, and also to shed light on the more fundamental question (perhaps still most interesting for the early nineteenth century) of how far national leaders actually mattered in constituency campaigning. For the potential benefits of text mining to be more fully realized, however, a number of challenges remain. The first is psychological: historians need not to be deterred by the false belief that such work can only be attempted by ‘specialists’. Software such as Paper Machines—​while still rough around the edges—​was created explicitly for historians, and there are numerous simple primers available for general humanities audiences.54 The second is practical: publishers of digital archives need to enable the download of textual content in machine-​readable form (something that Gale, for example, is beginning to do) and funders should sponsor the development of more text analysis tools which are specifically designed for humanities scholars unfamiliar with programming and advanced statistical argumentation. The third challenge is to develop a way of writing political history that captures the largely quantitative and empirical benefits of text mining (and other data-​driven approaches), yet also leaves room for traditional analysis. This means seeing text mining simply as another tool rather than necessarily as a paradigm shifter, and as one which might be used in small doses—​or in large ones—​ depending on the type of historical problem and the availability of sources.55 Outside text mining, a second promising future use of digital resources lies in a measured rehabilitation of psephology. It is perhaps a telling reflection of how far

54 

For example, Adolphs, Electronic Text Analysis. Another good example of an integrated methodological approach which balances close reading with quantitative discourse analysis is the ongoing work of N. Lloyd-​Jones on election addresses, meetings, and petitions in the 1880s and 90s. See N. Lloyd-​Jones, ‘Deconstructing Westminster: A Four Nations History of the Irish Home Rule crisis, c.1885–​1893’ (working PhD thesis title, King’s College London). Another example is the election address analysis of P. Readman, ‘The 1895 General Election and Political Change in Late Victorian Britain’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), 467–​93. 55 

Elections   413 quantitative analyses have fallen out of favour that the digital publication of F.W.S. Craig’s British Parliamentary Elections Results (in spreadsheet format for the years 1885 to 1945) a full decade ago seems to have gone almost entirely unnoticed.56 This release would have represented the stuff of dreams for Cornford and others, who had to work by manual inputs into primitive calculators. This spreadsheet collection makes all kinds of sophisticated statistical analysis possible, and allows the scholar to move easily beyond simple national computations by observing trends at the level of regions and constituency types.57 Future projects might use the collection to investigate statistically the relationship of key variables on party performance using constituency-​level data taken from atlases such as The British Voter, census and local authority records, and statistical data from existing books.58 These might include correlating the relationship between turnout and party performance and investigating the electoral behaviour of constituencies according to their demographics, such as workforce, class composition, and religious make-​up.59 More ambitious (because this data has not yet been mapped to constituencies) would be to correlate trade union membership to Labour vote, and to use local taxation returns to map Poor Law expenditure and rateable value per head to party performance. Finally, there is also the still more ambitious project of utilizing local election data to investigate comprehensively the relationship between local and parliamentary elections, which is perhaps most interesting in investigating the rise of Labour.60 To further empower this historical psephology, the existing Craig digital dataset could usefully be extended back to 1868, include Ireland, and be updated to include results after 1945 (which are already digitally available) in the same format. A third exciting application of digital approaches concerns pollbook analysis for the period up to 1872. Their use for genealogical research has led to the publication of large digital collections on ancestry sites. This fortunate boon allows historians to develop the pioneering computational longitudinal work of John Phillips and others by utilizing a much greater range of data, not just from pollbooks but also from other linked

56 W. Field, British Electoral Data, 1885–​1949, Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor],

(November 2007), SN: 5673, http://​dx.doi.org/​10.5255/​UKDA-​SN-​5673-​1. The original data is taken from F.W.S. Craig, British Parliamentary Election Results, 1885–​1918 (Aldershot, 1989) and British Parliamentary Election Results, 1918–​1949 (Chichester, 1983). This dataset has recently been used in L. Blaxill and T. Saleh, ‘The Electoral Dynamics of Conservatism, 1885–​1910: “Negative Unionism” Reconsidered’, Historical Journal, 59 (2016), 417–​45. 57  For a critique of purely national psephological analysis, see J. Lawrence and J. Elliott, ‘Parliamentary Election Results Reconsidered: An Analysis of Borough Elections, 1885–​1910’, Parliamentary History, 16 (1997), 18–​28. 58  For example, Pelling, Social Geography; Blewett, Peers. 59  For example, Kinnear’s The British Voter shows percentages of the population in each constituency who were nonconformists, employed in agriculture and mining, and could be classified as middle class. 60  Local election datasets remain patchy. The most promising sources are S. Davies and B. Morley, County Borough Elections in England and Wales, 1919–​1938: A Comparative Analysis (8 vols, Aldershot, 1999). There are also the first five volumes of the 20th Century Local Election Results series published by Plymouth University’s Elections Centre.

414   Luke Blaxill biographical data sources such as taxation, church, militia, and legal records.61 A number of research questions can now be more comprehensively investigated, including the shifting patterns of geographical support (particularly as a result of boundary changes), the changing role of urban voters and outvoters in the counties, and particularly electors’ use of plural votes in the same (or different) constituencies. The publication of ever-​expanding linked datasets of pollbooks in a common format would escape the traditional reliance on highly restricted samples (such as Phillips’ on a handful of selected boroughs) and enable historians to trace the voting behaviour of individuals over whole lifetimes in both national and local elections, potentially permitting analysis of all known voters over time. This longitudinal approach—​as explored by Phillip Salmon’s ongoing work on the mathematics of representation—​can help recreate the true breakdowns of polls in this period, including all the plumps, splits, and straights that made up the final tallies recorded in reference works such as Craig.62 This change alone provides a very different perspective on party election performance, turnout, and our understanding of partisanship, and thus has the potential to challenge our understanding of long-​debated questions in this field, such as the role of deference voting, social class, and the speed (and geographical variations) of political modernization following the Great Reform Act.63 While all three of my suggestions seemingly point to a measured reappropriation of what was once popularly called QUASSH (‘Quantitative Social Science History’) for the early and transitional periods, the opposite prescription seems more appropriate for the historiography of elections after 1945, which has yet to find its feet in a field dominated by political science. Scholars might usefully experiment here with the sharply focused studies of local constituency language which have proved so useful for earlier periods.64 Such approaches have largely been overlooked thus far owing to the perceived 61  J.A. Phillips, Electoral Behavior in Unreformed England: Plumpers, Splitters, and Straights (Princeton, 1982); J.A. Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs: English Electoral Behaviour, 1818–​ 1841 (Oxford, 1992). 62  Simply working with total vote tallies obscures how each candidate’s total was made up. For example, many electors either split their votes between parties or cast non-​partisan plumps (withholding their vote from the same party’s second candidate). Thus the final totals do not necessarily correlate with the level of support that can confidently be said to have been gained by a party. See P. Salmon, ‘The Mathematics of Victorian Representation’, The Victorian Commons (2014), . 63  For recent discussion, see P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties 1832–​1841 (Woodbridge, 2002). 64  There are just a handful of exceptions. They include, for example, M. Benney, A.P. Gray, and R.H. Pear, How People Vote: A Study of Electoral Behaviour in Greenwich (London, 1956); R.S. Milne and H.C. Mackenzie, Straight Fight: Voting Behaviour in the Constituency of Bristol North East at the General Election of 1951 (London, 1954). For more recent work, see C. Cook and J. Ramsden, eds., By-​elections in British Politics (Eastbourne, 1997), chs ​8–​13; J. Lawrence, ‘Public and Private Languages of “Class” in the Luton By-​Election of 1963’, in C. Williams and A. Edwards, eds., The Art of the Possible: Politics and Governance in Modern British History, 1885–​1997 (Oxford, 2015); T. Saleh, ‘The Decline of the Scottish Conservatives in North-​East Scotland, 1965–​79: A Regional Perspective’, Parliamentary History,  36 (2017), 218–42.

Elections   415 triumph of national televised campaigns, which focus on celebrity party leaders. Indeed, as early as the mid-​1960s, Lawrence found that it had become popular among parties to regard ‘every general election as basically the same . . . at the local level’ and that ‘activists could feel that their local efforts merely distracted voters from the “real” campaign on television’.65 This view is echoed by Martin Rosenbaum, who wrote in 1997 that ‘local campaigns have long been regarded as sideshows to the main event taking place on the national stage’, and by David Butler, who remarked in 1994 that ‘local campaigning makes little difference, only 1 or 2 per cent’.66 Despite this common view from parties and pundits, it is surely a mistake for historians to similarly ignore constituency campaigns in the post-​war period, not least because they clearly did matter in many localities.67 Examples include constituencies targeted by the SDP–​Liberal Alliance and later the Liberal Democrats’ overt appeal to ‘pavement politics’ and ‘community politics’ from the 1980s; Scottish seats challenged by the SNP during their surge in the 1970s; constituencies targeted by ‘challenger’ parties such as UKIP on account of their promising demographics; and of course numerous by-​elections. Such campaigns would make excellent choices for local studies, as would those of idiosyncratic candidates—​such as Tony Benn and his followers—​who deliberately embraced mass rallies and monster meetings even against central party advice, as would constituencies where local campaigning traditions simply refused to die out whether they were effective or not. Another interesting angle would be to investigate locally targeted appeals to archetypal voter groups which began to appear in the 1980s, such as attempts to woo ‘Worcester Woman’, Essex’s ‘Mondeo Man’, or the ‘Pebbledash People’ of undefined suburbia. And all this is to say nothing of the self-​evident utility of studying campaigns in marginal seats where even that one or two percentage point could make the difference.

IV The study of electoral history has been dominated by the relationship between historians and political scientists. While it is easy to juxtapose a period of co-operation after the Second World War with a great parting of ways in the 1980s, it is interesting to note that even in 1961, Daniel Bell made the familiar-​sounding complaint that the disciplines were ‘talking past each other’ because ‘many social scientists, trained largely in technique, scorn ideas—​and history—​as vague and imprecise, while the humanist mocks the jargon and often the minute conclusions of the social scientists’.68 This reminds us that anodyne calls for multidisciplinarity are invariably easier to make than to achieve. However, the digital turn has illuminated a number of exciting paths by which historians 65 Lawrence, Electing our Masters, pp. 170–​1.

66 Rosenbaum, Soapbox to Soundbite, pp. 224, 253. 67 

68 

This is well demonstrated in Lawrence, Electing our Masters, ch. 7. D. Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York, 1961), p. 15.

416   Luke Blaxill of elections might rediscover their former empirical ambition, while remaining mindful of what has been gained from the past two decades of revisionism. While potentially exciting and beneficial in themselves, these paths may also permit a reintegrated third historiographical phase where historians and political scientists studying the same sources again find it increasingly beneficial to collaborate.69 While an idealistic proposition, it may be observed that most of the previous major scholarly gains in the historical study of elections have arisen through methodological experimentation. With that in mind, it may be worth experimenting again.

Further Reading P.F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971). H.J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Disraeli and Gladstone (London, 1959). J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language, and Popular Politics in England, 1867–​1914 (Cambridge, 1998). R.B. McCallum and A. Readman, The British General Election of 1945 (Oxford, 1947). (This is the first of the ‘Nuffield’ series of election studies which have appeared for each general election to the present day. Other notable authors of later volumes include D. Butler, D. Kavanagh, and P. Cowley.) H. Pelling, Social Geography of British Elections, 1885–​1910 (London, 1967). J.A. Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs:  English Electoral Behaviour, 1818–​1841 (Oxford, 1992). J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–​1867 (Cambridge, 1993).

69  Despite being more than 20 years old, an interesting example of collaborative computational work between historians and political scientists is J.A. Phillips (ed.), Computing Parliamentary History: George III to Victoria (Norwich, 1994). A more recent example is the ‘Digging into Linked Parliamentary Data’ project, where a team of historians and political scientists are using text mining to study parliamentary debates. For published output, see L. Blaxill and K. Beelan, ‘A Feminized Language of Democracy? The Representation of Women at Westminster since 1945’, Twentieth Century British History, 27 (2016), 412–​49. The ‘Politics through Time’ project at Harvard is also bringing together political scientists and historians on a number of collaborative projects, including the history of electoral corruption, participation by the voteless, and the role of election addresses.

chapter 24

Wom en and P ol i t i c s Jennifer Davey

How might we tell the story of women and British politics between 1800 and 2000? For some, it is a story that starts with Mary Wollstonecraft and ends with Margaret Thatcher, and has at its core the battles for legal and constitutional equality and representation. Different stories have been told by looking at the local or the international, or focusing on the experiences of upper-​, middle-​, or working-​class women, or recovering the women who are all too often to be found on the margins of both politics and history. These stories often shift attention away from Westminster and offer other trajectories that are less Whiggish and less teleological in their design. Whichever story we choose to tell, there is (or at least there seems to be) a particular urgency for historians. There is a sense that these stories are still ‘live’—​ that the dreams and aspirations of women past have yet to be realized by women future. British politics, particularly Westminster politics, has often been very male, very middle-​class, and very white. Seeking to explain how and why the British polity, on a local, regional, national, or international stage, has been so resolutely male has been a major preoccupation for historians interested in the relationship between women and British politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Often, that relationship ​has been a fraught one that defies a simple narrative. It has been a relationship characterized as much by restriction as by opportunity, and reliant on a plethora of social and economic determinants. Telling the complex and competing stories of that relationship has been a key area of historical research in recent years, as historians have sought to uncover, recount, and examine women’s political activities between 1800 and 2000. This chapter is an attempt to trace the connections and tensions between the political history of women and the history of British politics. First, it examines the historiographical development of a political history of women, exploring the key debates and

I am grateful to Angus Hawkins, Anthony Howe, and the editors for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

418   Jennifer Davey focal points. Second, it considers how the political history of women was both a major beneficiary of the challenges faced by political history and itself a challenger to political history. Third, it attempts to trace chronologies of women’s politics, thinking about how we might conceptualize the narratives of change and continuity. Finally, it considers the possible future directions that research might take, thinking about areas that seem important and in need of further study.

I There was very little space for women in the first political histories of modern Britain. In the mid-​twentieth century, political history was often written with the preoccupations, interests, and actions of the political elite to the fore. It was the history of political leadership and political institutions, and the subject was nearly always male. The narrow focus of some political history did spark a debate about what political history should be and do. These debates, and the work that followed—​which was positioned against both the perceived elitism of political history and the social and economic determinism that influenced some of the social history written in the 1960s and 1970s—​saw focus shift away from Westminster and elite individuals.1 This ‘new political history’ sought to explore past political life by drawing attention to the importance of political languages, subjectivities, and cultures. Yet, more often than not, ‘the people’ were usually male, with little space afforded to female subjects.2 Of course, while political history has often seen women, as both author and subject, as curiously absent, there is a rich and varied historiography that can be traced back to the nineteenth century that has found space for the political experiences and actions of women in modern Britain. These accounts developed sometimes alongside and sometimes in correspondence with broader discussions in the fields of political, social, and most recently cultural history. The sheer volume and diversity of this work makes any attempt to delineate discrete subcategories necessarily imperfect. Nevertheless, six distinct if overlapping areas—​some shaped by their focus on a particular historical period, others not—​can be taken to have dominated historical enquiry. First, there is the work that has focused on the experiences of elite women. Given political history’s roots in the study of the aristocracy and the Court, perhaps it should come as little surprise that some of the first accounts of female political activity focused

1  See especially G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–​1982 (Cambridge, 1983); P. Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge, 1994); J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture (Cambridge, 1993). 2  An example of how to infuse political history with both gender and class can be found in A. Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, CA, 1995).

Women and Politics    419 on ‘women worthies’.3 The obvious focal point for much of this work has been the British monarchy, in particular the reigns of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II. In this context, Victoria and her reign received most of the historiographical attention. Biographical accounts of Victoria’s life have been popular since her death in 1901 and have largely been written by historians working outside the academy. Often, the appeal of Victoria’s personal life has overshadowed her political life, leaving little space for sustained or thorough examinations of her function, influence, or power. While academic studies on Queen Victoria seem a little sparse compared to studies of other British monarchs, there have been attempts to understand the political influence she exercised. Here, there have been two approaches. The first approach offers high-political accounts of Queen Victoria’s political function and influence at particular moments in her reign.4 In recent years, this work has either sought to examine Queen Victoria’s imperial role, or to incorporate her into accounts of British foreign policy.5 Yet there is no comprehensive account of Queen Victoria’s political role, either as a discrete study or as an integral feature in the high-political accounts of governance in Victorian Britain. The second approach has its traditions in cultural studies and cultural historiography, and offers an examination of the relationship between Queen Victoria and Victorian culture. This approach has enabled historians, art historians, and literary scholars to offer new and innovative ways of understanding Queen Victoria’s reign. In 1990, Dorothy Thompson drew attention to the interplay between contemporary gender ideals and popular reactions to Queen Victoria.6 This focus on gender and contemporary notions of femininity characterizes the cultural studies of Queen Victoria, from her role as a ‘welfare monarch’ to the representations of her role as a wife and mother.7 The other focus for historians interested in ‘women worthies’ has been the wives of prominent politicians or well-​known hostesses. For most of the twentieth century, this work was again undertaken by writers outside the academy and took the form of either biographical studies or edited collections of correspondence.8 Collectively, these works 3 

For a recent discussion of women worthies, see A. Chernock, ‘Gender and the Politics of Exceptionalism in the Writing of British Women’s History’, in P. Nadell and K. Haulman, Making Women’s Histories: Beyond National Perspectives (New York, 2013), pp. 115–​36. 4  See, for example, F.M. Hardie, The Political Influence of the British Monarchy, 1868–​1952 (London, 1935); W.E. Mosse, ‘The Crown and Foreign Policy: Queen Victoria and the Austro-​Prussian Conflict, March-​May, 1866’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 10 (1951), 205–​23; J.P. Mackintosh, ‘The Early Political Influence of Queen Victoria, 1837–​52’, Parliamentary Affairs, 12 (1958–​9), 174–​88. 5  This work includes W.L. Arnstein, ‘The Warrior Queen: Reflections on Victoria and Her World’, Albion, 30 (1998), 1–​28; D. Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 1846–​55 (Manchester, 2002); M. Taylor, ‘Queen Victoria and India, 1837–​61’, Victorian Studies, 46 (2004), 264–​74. 6  D. Thompson, Queen Victoria: Gender and Power (London, 1990). 7  F. Prochaska, Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy (New Haven, 1995); M. Homans and A. Munich, eds., Remaking Queen Victoria (Cambridge, 1997); M. Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–​1876 (Chicago, 1998); J. Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford, 2003); A. Chernock, ‘Queen Victoria and the “Bloody Mary of Madagascar”’, Victorian Studies, 55 (2013), 425–​50. 8  Indicative examples include J. Sykes, Mary Anne Disraeli: The Story of the Viscountess Beaconsfield (London, 1928); F. Bamford, ed., The Journal of Mrs. Arbuthnot, 1820–​32 (2 vols, London, 1950); T. Lever,

420   Jennifer Davey stressed the importance of feminine virtues and wifely duty. Over the past 20 years or so, academic historians have rediscovered the political history of these women. The scholarly emphasis here is on how, and to what extent, aristocratic women could exercise influence in a variety of political spaces, including the local estate, the ballrooms of London’s West End, and well-​trodden canvassing routes.9 Much of this work has been focused on the nineteenth century, with attention being drawn to the interactions between class, femininity, and political opportunity. In drawing attention to the use of informal spaces to conduct political business, this work is in keeping with a more general trend in the history of women’s politics to expand and alter narrow definitions of the ‘political’. This historiographical revision of definitions of the ‘political’ is also a key characteristic of the second area of research—​the political activity of Victorian middle-​class women. This work coalesces around the analytical framework of separate spheres, which ties middle-​class gender ideals firmly to the formation of Victorian political culture.10 In recent years, historians have moved on from simply highlighting female activity—​a worthwhile task, given the tendency to overgeneralize the impact of constitutional definitions of citizenship—​to thinking critically about the nature of middle-​ class female political activity. Significantly, this work has broadened the landscape of middle-​class political culture. Sarah Richardson has drawn attention to the particular importance the home, often cast as a private space, could have in determining political opportunity and activity.11 That the domestic, private sphere could be political is a theme also picked up by those who stress the political potency of the ideologies of maternalism and domesticity.12 While much of this work has tended to focus on urban women, Kathryn Gleadle has broadened discussions of middle-​class female political agency and activity to include rural women.13 Third, among the most fruitful areas of research has been the work on the women’s suffrage movement. As Laura Nym Mayhall has pointed out, there has been a split in

The Letters of Lady Palmerston; Selected and Edited from the Originals at Broadlands and elsewhere (London, 1957). 9 

See P. Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics, 1860–​1914 (London, 1986); K. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998); S. Richardson, ‘“Well-​Neighboured Houses”: The Political Networks of Elite Women, 1780–​1860’, in K. Gleadle and S. Richardson, eds., Women and British Politics, 1760–​1860: The Power of the Petticoat (London, 2000), pp. 56–​73; A. Vickery, ed., Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to Present (Stanford, 2001). 10  Much of this work was prompted by L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–​1850 (London, 1987). See also K. Gleadle, ‘Revisiting Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1750–​1850’, Women’s History Review, 16 (2007), 773–​82. 11  S. Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (Abingdon, 2013). 12  A. Twells, ‘Missionary Domesticity, Global Reform and “Woman’s Sphere” in Early Nineteenth-​ Century England’, Gender & History, 18 (2006), 266–​84; S. Morgan, ‘Between Public and Private: Gender, Domesticity, and Authority in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 1197–​210. 13  K. Gleadle, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender, and Political Cultural in Britain, 1815–​1867 (Oxford, 2009).

Women and Politics    421 the historiography that has seen work concentrate on either the constitutional suffragists or the militant suffragettes.14 Certainly, the campaigning work of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) has provided key focal points for historians, as have particular individuals closely associated with these movements.15 Equally, historians have stressed the networks that existed across the militant/​constitutional divide. The activities of the militant suffragettes have provoked the liveliest debate. In the 1980s and 1990s, feminist scholars such as June Purvis and Sandra Holton sought to re-​evaluate the activities of the WSPU.16 In particular, there was a desire to move away from ‘masculinist’ methodology and analysis, and to engage with the thoughts and ideologies of the suffragettes themselves.17 In recent years, the historiography of suffrage has developed in new and important directions. First, the methods, symbols, and performative aspects of the suffrage movement have received greater attention.18 Second, and significantly, the narrative of late Victorian and Edwardian suffrage has been put in dialogue with other political, moral, and intellectual currents that co-​existed with the movement. For example, Jane Rendall has demonstrated how definitions of citizenship were not only gendered, but were also informed by divisions that cut across class, regions, religions, and race.19 A close reading of citizenship is also offered in Ben Griffin’s recent study of the interplay between gender ideals, particularly political masculinities, and the debates

14 

L.E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860–​1930 (Oxford, 2003), p. 6. 15  The historiography on the suffrage movement is expansive, but see J. Liddington and J. Norris, One Hand Tied behind Us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London, 1978); S. Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain 1860–​1914 (Princeton, 1987); C. Eustace, J. Ryan, and L. Ugolini, eds., A Suffrage Reader: Charting Directions in British Suffrage History (London, 2000); M. Pugh, The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, 1866–​1914 (Oxford, 2000); J. Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London, 2002); K. Cowman, Women of the Right Spirit: Paid Organizers of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) (Manchester, 2007). 16  S. Stanley Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain 1900–​1918 (Cambridge, 1986); S. Stanley Holton, Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London, 1996); J. Purvis, ‘A “Pair of . . . Infernal Queens”? A Reassessment of the Dominant Representations of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, First Wave Feminists in Edwardian Britain’, Women’s History Review, 5 (1996), 259–​80. 17   For an overview of this debate, see S. Stanley Holton, ‘Challenging Masculinism: Personal History and Microhistory in Feminist Studies of the Women’s Suffrage Movement’, Women’s History Review, 20 (2011), 829–​41; J. Purvis, ‘Gendering the Historiography of the Suffragette Movement in Edwardian Britain: Some Reflections’, Women’s History Review, 22 (2013), 576–​90. 18  B. Green, Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage 1905–​1938 (Basingstoke, 1997); K.E. Kelly, ‘Seeing through Spectacles: The Woman Suffrage Movement and the London Newspapers, 1906–​13’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 11 (2004), 327–​53; M. Dicenzo with L. Delap and L. Ryan, Feminist Media History: Suffrage, Periodicals and the Public Sphere (Basingstoke, 2011). 19  J. Rendall, ‘The Citizenship of Women and the Reform Act of 1867’, in C. Hall, K. McClelland, and J. Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 119–​78.

422   Jennifer Davey about women’s rights.20 Lastly, any sense of British exceptionalism has been challenged by work which has placed the suffrage movement within an imperial, European, and global context.21 The fourth historiographical trend follows on, chronologically, from the history of suffrage. This area is a multi-​faceted one, but the work here considers, in a variety of different contexts, ‘the adjustments [women] had to make as citizens’ following 1918 and 1928.22 One focal point has been the experiences and activities of female MPs, particularly between 1918 and 1945. Studies here have tended to focus on collective experience and have drawn attention to the interplay between femininity and party politics, the contributions of female MPs to parliamentary debates, and, most recently, parliamentary committees and celebrity culture.23 A handful of female MPs have also received biographical attention.24 However, due to the comparatively small number of female MPs, historians had to look elsewhere to explore answers to Pat Thane’s question: ‘What difference did the vote make?’25 One response has been to explore the relationship between women and the major political parties. Much of this work has considered how political parties and political processes responded to the new female electorate. Here attention has been drawn to the relationship between women and political parties, the appeals made to female voters, and how, and to what extent, female enfranchisement altered (or was perceived to alter) the functioning of national politics.26 Two trends have emerged from this work. 20  B. Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (Cambridge, 2012). 21  C. Daley and M. Nolan, eds., Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (New York, 1994); A. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–​ 1915 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994); I.C. Fletcher, L.E. Nym Mayhall, and P. Levine, eds., Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation, and Race (London, 2000); L. Delap, The Feminist Avant-​ Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2007). 22  J.V. Gottlieb and R. Toye, eds., The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain 1918–​1945 (Basingstoke, 2013), p. 5. 23  E. Vallance, Women in the House: A Study of Women Members of Parliament (London, 1979); B. Harrison, ‘Women in a Men’s House: The Women MPs, 1919–​45’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), 623–​54; L. Beers, ‘A Model MP? Ellen Wilkinson, Gender, Politics and Celebrity Culture in Interwar Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 10 (2013), 231–​50; Gottlieb and Toye, eds., The Aftermath of Suffrage; L. Blaxill and K. Beelan, ‘A Feminized Language of Democracy? The Representation of Women at Westminster since 1945’, Twentieth Century British History, 27 (2016), 412–​49. 24  The paucity of biographical studies of female MPs is a notable feature of political historiography, but Nancy Astor and Margaret Thatcher have been the subject of the most sustained attention: see K. Musolf, From Plymouth to Parliament: A Rhetorical History of Nancy Astor’s 1919 Campaign (Basingstoke, 1999); T. Bale, ed., Margaret Thatcher (London, 2014). A handful of other female MPs have all received biographical attention: see, for example, P. Hollis, Jennie Lee: A Life (Oxford, 1997); S. Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (New Haven, 2004). 25  P. Thane, ‘What Difference Did the Vote Make? Women in Public and Private Life in Britain since 1918’, Historical Research, 76 (2003), 268–​85. 26  D. Jarvis, ‘Mrs Maggs and Betty: The Conservative Appeal to Women Voters in the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History, 5 (1994), 129–​52; A. Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-​ War Britain (Oxford, 2004); J. Lawrence, ‘The Transformation of Party Politics after the First World War’, Past and Present, 190 (2006), 185–​216; D. Thackeray, Conservatism for the Democratic Age: Conservative Cultures and the Challenge of Mass Politics in Early Twentieth Century England (Manchester, 2013).

Women and Politics    423 A considerable body of work has explored the relationship, broadly defined, between women and the Conservative party and/​or conservatism.27 This work has incorporated women into accounts of Conservative politics at a local and national level. In a characteristic common to most work on female political activity post-​enfranchisement, the inter-​war period holds particular appeal. There is also a growing body of work that not only considers female involvement in national politics post-​1918/​1928, but also examines the precise ways in which the political process was gendered.28 Others have sought to move attention away from political parties and Westminster and focus on female participation in non-​party associations.29 Here, as with the work which has examined female MPs, the inter-​war period has provided particularly fertile ground for research. Fifth, there is the work that has explored the history of feminism and/​or organized women’s movements. This work has sought to explore how women have understood and fought against their subordination in a variety of intellectual, social, cultural, and political contexts. There is a certain episodic nature to some of this work, which has drawn attention to particular individuals, particular works, or particular organizations, and seen work cluster around certain chronological moments. In particular, work has often focused on first, second, and third-​wave feminism.30 Yet, historians have also begun to map the ‘continuous history of [English] feminism’, drawing attention to traditions of feminist activity.31 One notable feature of the work on feminism in modern Britain is the focus on the international dimensions of feminist activity. Two trends emerge here: first, the work that pays close attention to the relationship between feminism and imperialism; second, the work that sets British feminism in its global contexts, emphasizing the transnational relationships and connections that permeated the movements.32 In sum, this work has pointed to the precise importance of national 27  J. Lovenduski, P. Norris, and C. Burness, ‘The Party and Women’, in A. Seldon and S. Ball, eds., Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 611–​35; D. Jarvis, ‘The Conservative Party and the Politics of Gender 1900–​1939’, in M. Francis and I. Zweiniger-​Bargielowska, eds., The Conservatives and British Society, 1880–​1990 (Cardiff, 1996), pp. 172–​93; G.E. Maguire, Conservative Women: A History of Women and the Conservative Party (Basingstoke, 1998). 28  J. Gottlieb, ‘Guilty Women’: Foreign Policy and Appeasement in Inter-​War Britain (Basingstoke, 2015). 29  H. McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c.1918–​45 (Manchester, 2011); C. Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1928–​64 (Manchester, 2013). 30   O. Banks, Faces of Feminism: A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (Oxford, 1981); P. Levine, Victorian Feminism 1850–​1900 (London, 1987); S. Kingsley Kent, ‘The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism’, Journal of British Studies, 27 (1988), 232–​53; B. Caine, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge, 2003); F. Montgomery, Women’s Rights: Struggles and Feminism in Britain c.1770–​1970 (Manchester, 2006); J. Rees, ‘A Look Back at Anger: The Women’s Liberation Movement in 1978’, Women’s History Review, 19 (2010), 337–​56; S. Browne, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Scotland (Manchester, 2014). 31  B. Caine, English Feminism 1780–​1990 (Oxford, 1997), p. 1. 32  R. Evans, The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia, 1840–​1920 (London, 1977); Burton, Burdens of History; C. Bolt, Sisterhood Questioned? Race, Class and Internationalism in the American and British Women’s Movements, c. 1880–​1970s (London, 2004); Delap, Feminist Avant-​Garde.

424   Jennifer Davey and international identities and contexts in shaping feminist activity. Yet the history of feminism, like feminism itself, often has a problem with definitions. As Lucy Delap has emphasized, there is a ‘tendency to overgeneralize the meaning of feminism’.33 In recent years, historians have sought to interrogate the precise ways in which feminism was defined, expressed, experienced, and interpreted at particular moments. This work often considers the extent to which feminist activity was contingent on other political and cultural determinants.34 Last, there is a rich tradition of historical enquiry that has sought to examine working-​ class female politics. This tradition, for the most part, has grown out of the turn towards social history in the 1960s, and has paid close attention to the interaction between social class and gender identities. Here, the work of feminist scholars, many of them associated with the activities of the History Workshop Journal, has been particularly influential. Take, for example, Sally Alexander’s 1984 article on working-​class women in the 1830s and 1840s, which delineated the tensions between contemporary conceptions of femininity, constructions of social class, and the development of a female politics.35 That working-​class women had a different kind of political landscape to that of their male counterparts (and women from different socio-​economic groups) has been a significant thread of historiographical enquiry. In particular, there is a significant body of work that has drawn attention to the importance of women in the radical political tradition.36 Often, this work has stressed the importance of the ‘local’ in determining the shape and scope of the relationship between working-​class women and radical political movements. Indeed, the significance of locality is a theme that extends beyond the work on female radicalism and permeates much of the work on working-​class female activity.37 The importance of space and place is also stressed by the work that has paid close attention to the relationship between work, the household economy, and female political activity.38 Research in this area has also focused on the involvement of women in the

33 Delap, Feminist Avant-​Garde, p. 321.

34  L. Schwartz, Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation in England, 1830–​ 1914 (Manchester, 2013); N. Thomlinson, Race, Ethncity and the Women’s Movement in England 1968–​1993 (Basingstoke, 2016). 35  S. Alexander, ‘Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and the 1840s: Some Reflections on the Writing of a Feminist History’, History Workshop Journal, 17 (1984), 125–​49. 36   D. Jones, ‘Women and Chartism’, History, 68 (1983) 1–​21; D. Thompson, ‘Women, Work and Politics in Nineteenth-​Century England: The Problem of Authority’, in J. Rendall, ed., Equal or Different: Women’s Politics 1800–​1914 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 57–​81; J. Bohstedt, ‘Gender, Household and Community Politics: Women in English Riots, 1790–​1810’, Past and Present, 120 (1988), 88–​122; Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches. 37  K. Stenberg, ‘Working-​Class Women in London Local Politics, 1894–​1914’, Twentieth Century British History, 9 (1998), 323–​49; K. Cowman, ‘Voices, Votes and Mock Turtle Soup: Liverpool’s Socialist Women, 1893–​1914’, North West Labour History, 29 (2004), 6–​11; K. Hunt, ‘The Politics of Food and Women’s Neighbourhood Activism in First World War Britain’, International Labor and Working-​Class History, 77 (2010), 8–​26. 38  K. Hunt, ‘Gendering the Politics of the Working Woman’s Home’, in E. Darling and L. Whitworth, eds., Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–​1950 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 106–​21;

Women and Politics    425 labour movement broadly defined, and on the relationship between industrial relations, political activity, and state legislation.39 Taken together, this research has affected our understanding of political life in modern Britain in a number of significant ways. It has served to broaden definitions of political culture. That political life was gendered has had important implications for how we understand political debate, ideology, space, and citizenship. It has stressed the importance of economic status in shaping political agency and activity. While there is scope to do more work on the variants within broad socio-​economic groupings, the research has highlighted how economic status shaped definitions of female citizenship, experiences of political structures, and opportunities for political activity. Work has also pointed to the importance of informal political activity outside formal political structures. From Victorian philanthropy to direct political action, there are traditions of female political activity that fall outside narratives of party politics. Lastly, the relationship between national identity and political citizenship has begun to be critically examined. As historians begin to shed light on the ways in which definitions of citizenship have intersected with ethnicity, religion, and femininity, the contours of ‘British’ citizenship are becoming more visible.40

II The historiographical developments sketched out in the previous section go some way to illustrate the depth and breadth of research which has sought to uncover and explore the political histories of women past. As a consequence, there are multiple narratives about political women—​as subjects and as participants—​in the historiography of modern Britain. Cumulatively, these narratives form a political history of women. The relationship between this field and political history is a complicated one. At its core, the historiography of women’s politics has a dual identity. The field has been a major beneficiary of the historiographical challenges faced by certain kinds of political history.

J. Howarth, ‘Classes and Cultures in England after 1951: The Case of Working-​Class Women’, in C.V.J. Griffiths, J.J. Nott, and W. Whyte, eds., Classes, Cultures and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin (Oxford, 2011), pp. 85–​101. 39 

E. Gordon, Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland (Oxford, 1991); P. Thane, ‘Women in the British Labour Party and the Construction of State Welfare, 1906–​1939’, in S. Koven and S. Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of the Welfare State (London, 1993); P. Graves, Labour Women: Women in British Working Class Politics 1918–​1939 (Cambridge, 1994); K. Hunt, Equivocal Feminists: The SDF and the Woman Question (Cambridge, 1996); K. Hunt and M. Worley, ‘Rethinking British Communist Party Women in the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History, 15 (2004), 1–​27. 40  A. Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop, 5 (1978), 9–​65; J. Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (Leicester, 2000); P. Levine, ed., Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2004); C. Hall and S.O. Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire (Cambridge, 2006).

426   Jennifer Davey It is also itself a challenger, which asks serious, and sometimes provocative, questions of both political history and the historiographical challenges that followed. As historians began to cast their eyes away from the subjects, institutions, and narratives that had exercised political history, new horizons opened up. Attention switched from top to bottom: the atypical, privileged statesman was replaced by the ordinary worker (often a man, rarely a woman). Yet the challenge made by social history to political history provided a space that could be prised open by those seeking stories of women past. While it was always going to be difficult to insert women into the narratives of high politics favoured in the mid-​twentieth century, as the focus shifted towards working-​ and middle-​class life, a new terrain of politics opened up. The social history of the 1960s and 1970s looked not to Westminster for its political narratives, but to the politics of the working class: to the struggles for manhood suffrage, plebeian movements, and industrial action. Here, the politics of radicalism, female suffrage, and left-​wing movements provided particularly fertile ground for those who wanted to recover female political actors.41 So, as paradoxical as it might seem, a sustained political history of women emerged almost simultaneously with the first major challenge to political history. There have followed other challenges to both political history and to the social history of the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, the influence of postmodernism on the historical discipline has had important implications for some of those conducting research into women’s politics. In stressing the importance of language and space, historians who adopted postmodern frameworks have opened up yet more ground for exploring female political activity.42 Linked to these developments has been the rise of gender history and the desire to understand relationships between men and women, as well as the contexts in which masculinity and femininity are formed and interpreted.43 In recent years, one of the foundation stones of political history—​the nation-​state—​has also been challenged by another turn, this time towards global history. In many ways, the history of political women was already attuned to the international dimensions of politics, but placing women within particular internationalisms has been a focal point for research.44 Often, then, the history of women’s politics has developed concurrently and in dialogue with the historiographical challenges political history faced in the closing decades 41 

B. Taylor, ‘“The men are as bad as their masters . . . ”: Socialism, Feminism, and Sexual Antagonism in the London Tailoring Trade in the early 1830s’, Feminist Studies, 5 (1979), 7–​40; Alexander, ‘Women, Class and Sexual Differences’. 42  K. Beebe, A. Davis, and K. Gleadle, eds., ‘Space, Place and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn’, Women’s History Review, 21 (2012), 523–​32. 43 Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain. 44  G. Sluga and C. James, eds., Women, Diplomacy and International Politics since 1500 (Abingdon, 2015); Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone; A. Summers, ‘British Women and Cultures of Internationalism, c. 1815–​1914’, in D. Feldman and J. Lawrence, eds., Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 187–​209; K. Hunt, ‘Transnationalism in Practice: The Effect of Dora Montefiore’s International Travel on Women’s Politics in Britain before World War I’, in P. Jonsson, S. Neunsinger, and J. Sangster, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Women’s Organizing in Europe and the Americas, 1880s–​1940s (Uppsala, 2007), pp. 73–​94.

Women and Politics    427 of the twentieth century. Significantly, the focus on female subjects and female experiences has offered a provocation to political history: what do we mean when we talk about the political? By moving women into view, certain definitions of the political are no longer seen as adequate. Given that many of their subjects were excluded from the political spaces favoured by political historians, historians interested in female political activity have been forced to look elsewhere. This has opened up an inclusive rather than exclusive political landscape. In varying ways, and to varying degrees, the history of women’s politics has sought to expand our understandings of past political activity and political spaces beyond the formal institutions of the state. This is not to suggest that the history of women’s politics ignores those formal institutions, but rather, it places them within a broader political landscape. In turn, this landscape destabilizes strict definitions of the ‘political’ and introduces plural understandings of what might be political at any one given time. Here, then, the history of women’s politics presents a challenge to political history. In rethinking the political, it forces a return to the very foundations of the discipline, interrogating established definitions. Perhaps the history of women’s politics was always going to present challenges to political history. In many ways, it has developed as a reaction to the implicit challenge made by those who excluded women from their explorations of Britain’s political past. Equally, and sometimes as a consequence, histories of women’s politics often sought to find their own spaces and places for their female subjects. Often, the history of women’s politics and political history have been parallel helices, developing in similar directions, sometimes connected by the conceptual questions asked and the events studied, but rarely combining. In particular, some aspects of political history—​particularly those concerned with the ‘state’—​have been impervious to attempts to try to incorporate female activity. This tension between political history and the history of women’s politics is perhaps most visible when one considers the long-​range narratives of Britain’s political past.

III Between 1800 and 2000, Britain’s political landscape changed dramatically. The decline in monarchial power, the rise of universal suffrage, the increased efficacy and scope of national government, the development of the welfare state, the growth of local government, regional devolution and dominance, and decline on the global stage all altered the conditions of British politics. These seismic shifts in Britain’s political fabric, while attractive for political historians, present a challenge—​how do we present coherent narratives about Britain’s political past? Perhaps the loudest story about British politics between 1800 and 2000 is the rise of liberal democracy—​a narrative of gradual modernization which frames and punctuates our understanding of Britain’s political past. Incorporating histories of women’s politics into this master narrative might appear straightforward. The fight for citizenship,

428   Jennifer Davey legal equality, and access to formal institutions and power could sit within a narrative focus on the rise of liberal democracy. Indeed, the trajectory of female suffrage forms a strong current within histories (and imagined memories) of Britain’s political progression. Yet incorporating aspects of the histories of women’s politics into this narrative is a problematic exercise: we know this story is too narrow and too Whiggish. For instance, we know that constitutional exclusion did not preclude political influence and that institutional power did not always follow formal rights. The political history of women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not, as Karen Hunt has stressed, ‘one of progressive inclusion’.45 For many women, political reality, experience, and influence was more complicated and more ambivalent than linear modernization narratives allow. To start with chronology, it would be foolish to suggest that either a history of women’s politics started in 1800 or that 1800 performed a useful turning point. As historians we should, as Judith M. Bennett has reminded us, be very careful about forgetting the past.46 To this end, it is worth remembering that women did not suddenly become political in the nineteenth century. There exists a growing historiography that has uncovered and explored the myriad of ways women were political in medieval and early modern Britain. Indeed, for historians interested in the opening decades of the 1800s, looking backward is often more fruitful that looking forward. Thinking in terms of the ‘age of reform’ (c. 1780-​1830) has often provided a useful timeframe for examining female political activity at the turn of the nineteenth century.47 This work, along with parallel developments in both political history and women’s/​gender history, suggests that the 1830s is an instructive decade for the relationship between women and the political sphere. For some, it has been the Great Reform Act of 1832, with its demarcation of the political citizen as propertied and male, that has performed a useful chronological divide.48Adopting franchise legislation as chronological bookends is a motif that runs through much of the history of women’s politics. To this end, 1867 and 1918/1928 have also provided turning points in the narrative.49 There is an ebb and flow to these chronological markers, patterns which often see female political experience and opportunity oscillate between restriction and freedom. Yet we do need to think carefully about the utility of using parliamentary legislation as markers, however faint, in the narrative of women’s politics. Franchise extensions, and the accompanying changes to political culture, did not matter in the same way for all women. Power and influence are never distributed equally. To this end, women were not just citizens and subjects as women, but as mothers and spinsters, landlords and tenants, girls and widows, agricultural labourers 45  K. Hunt, ‘Women as Citizens: Changing the Polity’, in D. Simonton, ed., The Routledge History of Women in Europe since 1700 (London, 2006), pp. 218–​56. 46  J.M. Bennett, ‘Forgetting the Past’, Gender and History, 20 (2008), 669–​7 7. 47  B. Taylor and S. Knott, eds., Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2004); Clark, Struggle for the Breeches. 48 Vernon, Politics and the People; P. Mandler, ‘From Almack’s to Willis’s: Aristocratic Women and Politics, 1815–​1867’, in Vickery, ed., Women, Privilege and Power, pp. 152–​67. 49  Hall, McClelland, and Rendall, eds., Defining the Victorian Nation; Gottlieb and Toye, eds., The Aftermath of Suffrage.

Women and Politics    429 and industrial workers, housewives and breadwinners. Political experience and political identities were contingent—​determined as much by national political culture as individual subjectivities. Thinking across chronological divides focuses attention on some of the continuities in female experience. While we should not forget the particular distinctiveness of, say, the mid-​Victorian generation or the inter-​war period, there are striking continuities, particularly in the strategies and methods adopted by political women, that run through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Elite women throughout the nineteenth century borrowed methods and activities from their Georgian and Regency grandmothers and mothers (and one wonders whether the wives of high-​profile politicians, particularly prime ministers and party leaders, continued this tradition well into the twentieth century). Working-​class women often found influence and power through and within their local communities and kinship networks. Philanthropic endeavours have continued to provide middle-​class women an outlet for their political concerns, from the bazaars of the Anti-​Corn Law League to the fetes of the Women’s Institute. When Bill Kenwright spoke at the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, he noted that the authorities had ‘taken on the wrong mums’: motherhood has offered both a motivation and a justification for female political activity throughout modern Britain.50 And, of course, hostility to female political activity has been a continual feature of political culture, from the Regency satirical press to the press coverage of ‘Blair’s babes’.51 These continuities draw into focus the traditions of female political activity. Highlighting the continuities in female political experience also allows us to consider how, and to what extent, women benefited from the processes of modernization that British political life witnessed between 1800 and 2000. Here the oscillations between restriction and freedom are particularly pronounced. Let us take 1832 as an example. To be sure, the Great Reform Act presented new discursive restrictions on how the political citizen was imagined, but, as Kathryn Gleadle has shown, the implications for women were complicated.52 While the abolition of electoral privileges that freemen’s daughters had previously held restricted certain paths of female political activity, some women held on to old methods across 1832, as can be seen, for example, in the use of petitions or aristocratic hostessing. Similarly, the work of Sarah Richardson, Kathryn Gleadle and Simon Morgan, among others, points to opportunities that the new political culture offered women. Similar observations could be made about 1867 or 1918. These chronological characteristics focus attention on the place of women in the developments of modern British politics. Often, the processes by which Britain became a modern political state—​industrialization, democratization, and imperialism—​held gendered definitions and implications (take, for example, the gentlemanly capitalist or the inter-​war citizen). These definitions and implications hint at the uneven way in which women experienced the processes and developments of modern British politics. 50 

The Telegraph, 15 Apr. 2013. The Mirror, 8 May 1997; The Observer, 1 June 1997. 52 Gleadle, Borderline Citizens, pp. 159–​91. 51 

430   Jennifer Davey Encounters with the political were often influenced by particular economic, social, and cultural determinants, with gender playing just one constituent part. Paying close attention to the nature of these encounters might run the risk of fractured narratives, but delineating the precise contours of female political experience reveals the gendered particularities of Britain’s political past.

IV So, where might historians go from here? To be sure, in recent years the field has been a vibrant one, but this should not lead to complacency. There is still much we do not know about women’s politics in modern Britain. Even when one turns towards topics that have received the most attention from historians, one is left with the feeling that there is still much to do. Compare, for instance, the literature on the Chartist movement with that on the suffrage movement: we know a great deal more about the former than the latter. We still do not know enough about the lives of ‘ordinary’ suffragettes and suffragists, or how suffrage activity fitted into wider patterns of political engagement. There are also clear chronological preferences, with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries proving particularly attractive to historians. While political scientists have begun to explore women and politics post-​1945, this period still awaits dedicated historical study.53 Equally, if one crude criticism of political history is that its subjects tend to be white (educated) males, a similar observation could be made about some of the history of women’s politics. Part of the agenda for the history of women’s politics should be the need to focus not just on the interaction between gender and politics, but also on the intersections between gender and other political determinants (for example, class, age, religion, ethnicity, disability). Equally, the women who are under-represented in formal politics are also under-represented in the history of women’s politics: where are the political histories of refugee, migrant, or unemployed women? Aside from these general observations, there are three areas of enquiry that need more research: first, the relationships between the local, the national, and the international; second, the extent to which there is a history of ‘British’ women’s politics; and third, a need to return to the fundamentals of political history by revisiting the concept of power. First, there are questions that pertain to scale and range. One notable feature of the history of women’s politics is the ease with which histories of the local, the national, and the international have co-​existed. Yet there is a patchy richness to this layered landscape. The local has provided an important focal point for much of the history of women’s politics, but certain geographical areas have attracted more attention than others. Broadly, we know much more about politics in cities and industrial areas than we do about rural or village politics. To this end, the tapestry of women’s (local) politics across Britain is

53 

S. Childs, Women and British Party Politics (London, 2008).

Women and Politics    431 incomplete. What were patterns of women’s politics like in, for instance, Cornwall or Norfolk? Thinking about different sorts of communities also throws up questions which address the intersections between class, gender, and politics. For instance, in areas of high female migratory work (such as the fishing industry on the east coast), how did these transitory lives experience politics? Considerations of the local forces reflections on how the national picture is constructed. Lynn Abrams has argued that the ‘dissonance between the local and particular women’s histories and general interpretations should be taken seriously’.54 It is a point echoed by Karen Hunt and June Hannam, who in their call for an ‘archaeology of women’s politics’ argue that ‘the national story of women’s politics will change when it is rebuilt out from the neighbourhood’.55 At the other end of the telescope has been the international. There can be little doubt that the international has offered historians interested in women’s politics new vistas, but, as with the local, there are significant absences. First, there is a chronological bunching to much of this work. We know a great deal more about the relationship between British women and particular internationalisms between around 1900 and 1945 than we do about what went before or after. While imperial historians have explored the ways in which British women were involved in the imperial project, and recent work has begun to uncover the ways in which foreign travel allowed middle-​class women to experience and respond to international politics, women are still largely absent from discussions of the interaction between foreign policy, public opinion, and nationalism in Victorian Britain. Similarly, women as subjects and participants in the politics of the post-​1945 global order are also absent. Second, to what extent are we able to talk about ‘British’ women’s politics? More often than not, research into ‘British’ women’s politics is actually research into English women’s politics, but how far are the experiences and activities of English women typical or particular? For instance, in what ways was the experience of, say, suffrage politics or labour politics, similar for women living in the Valleys and women living in the Pennines? Or, how did the experience of Westminster differ between a woman living in the Highlands and a woman living in Hampstead? In seeking to find answers to questions like these, one notes a discrepancy in the quantity of research. We know more about English women than Irish women, and we know more about Scottish women than we do Welsh women.56 There is, then, real scope for researchers to move beyond 54

  L. Abrams, ‘The Unseamed Picture’, Gender and History, 20 (2008), 629. K. Hunt and J. Hannam, ‘Towards an Archaeology of Interwar Women’s Politics’, in Gottlieb and Toye, eds., The Aftermath of Suffrage, p. 138. 56  For recent work on Scottish, Welsh, and Irish women and politics, see K. Baxter, ‘“Matriarchal” or “Patriarchal”? Dundee, Women and Municipal Party Politics in Scotland c.1918–​c.1939’, International Review of Scottish Studies, 35 (2010), 97–​122; C. Burness, ‘Count up to Twenty-​One: Scottish Women in Formal Politics, 1918–​1990’ and E. Breitenbach and F. Mackay, ‘Feminist Politics in Scotland from the 1970s to 2000s: Engaging with the Changing State’, in P. Thane and E. Breitenbach, eds., Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century: What Difference Did the Vote Make? (London, 2010), pp. 45–​62, 153–​70; A. Hughes, Gender and Political Identities in Scotland, 1919–​1939 (Edinburgh, 2010); U. Masson, ‘“Political Conditions in Wales are quite different . . . ”: Party Politics and Votes for Women in Wales, 1912–​15’, Women’s History Review, 9 (2000), 369–​88; S. Belzak, ‘Swinging in the 60s to 55 

432   Jennifer Davey geographical areas that previously occupied researchers and find new ground to furrow. It is not just an issue of visiting slightly different archives. Thinking about the particularities of regional experience could also open up important questions about national identities and national politics. For instance, while there is an extensive historiography of Irish women’s politics, particularly at the turn of the twentieth century, how to incorporate these narratives into wider political frameworks has often eluded historians. If we want to write and understand the history of British women’s politics we must seek to include stories of political citizenship, activity, and subjectivity that offer geographical breadth across the four nations. Questions of power have often been at the heart of the history of women’s politics. This work, along with the influence of social and cultural history, has done much to disrupt our understandings of where power might lie and how it could be exercised. Yet, in moving away from some of the mainstays of political history, the history of women’s politics has yet to interrogate established narratives about key institutions of power. In part, this is because institutional histories have fallen out of fashion. We have no comprehensive analysis of female interaction with the House of Commons or the House of Lords in Victorian Britain, nor do we know enough about the relationship between women and Civil Service departments (both as staff members and citizens).57 Equally, the relationship between women and perhaps the strongest institution of the state—​the military—​has received very little attention. When, how, and to what extent and effect women interacted with the institutions of state requires further study. It is a similar story for the monarchy. The lack of sustained academic work on the monarchy in modern Britain has been noted by several historians. Given that a female monarch reigned for 111 years between 1800 and 2000, it is peculiar that female monarchical power has not received more attention. There is real scope to develop studies on the machinations of royal power, including the function of the royal household, across the nineteenth and twentieth century. While this author is not convinced that ‘weddings and fashion’ constitute ‘areas of specific female interest’, there is a need, as Andrzej Olechnowicz has highlighted, to think carefully about manifestations of royal femininity (and masculinity), as well as to interrogate assumptions about royal popularity.58

the Liberals: Mary Murphy and Pontypridd Urban District Council’, Journal of Liberal History, 68 (2010), 26–​34; U. Masson, ‘For Women, for Wales and for Liberalism’: Women in Liberal Politics in Wales, 1880–​1914 (Cardiff, 2010); S. Pašeta, ‘Women and Civil Society: Feminist Responses to the Irish Constitution of 1937’, in J. Harris, ed., Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions (Oxford, 2003), pp. 213–​29; M. Luddy, ‘Working Women, Trade Unionism and Politics in Ireland, 1830–​1945’, in D. Ó Drisceoil and F. Lane, eds., Politics and the Irish Working Class, 1830–​1945 (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 44–​61; T. Keenan-​Thomson, Irish Women and Street Politics 1956–​1973: ‘This could be Contagious’ (Dublin, 2010); M. Valiulis, ‘The Politics of Gender in the Irish Free State, 1922–​1937’, Women’s History Review, 20 (2011), 569–​78; S. Pašeta, Irish Nationalist Women, 1900–​1918 (Cambridge, 2013). 57  Some information can be found in R. Lowe, Official History of the British Civil Service: Reforming the Civil Service, Vol. I (London, 2011), pp. 73–​7. 58  A. Olechnowicz, ed., The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present (Cambridge, 2007), p. 30.

Women and Politics    433 There is no single story of women and politics between 1800 and 2000. It is not one divided by 1918, with restriction on one side and freedom on the other. The experiences of women are messier than any crude narrative or simplistic schema will allow. We need confident histories that trace the complexity of these lives: histories that seek to explore the continuities and changes, and that take into account the intersections of status that shaped women’s political experience. We also need to ensure that the history of women’s politics does not become a supplement to the main story: the history of British politics, in all its guises, must seek to include women as matter of fact rather than matter of choice.59

Further Reading B. Caine, English Feminism 1780–​1990 (Oxford, 1997). S. Childs, Women and British Party Politics (London, 2008). C. Eustance, J. Ryan, and L. Ugolini, eds., A Suffrage Reader: Charting Directions in British Suffrage History (London, 2000). K. Gleadle, Borderline Citizens:  Women, Gender, and Political Culture in Britain, 1815–​1867 (Oxford, 2009). J.V. Gottlieb and R. Toye, eds., The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain 1918–​1945 (Basingstoke, 2013). P. Thane and E. Breitenbach, eds., Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century: What Difference Did the Vote Make? (London, 2010). A. Vickery, ed., Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to Present (Stanford, 2001).

59  I have borrowed this wording from Glenda Sluga’s contribution to the History Workshop Online roundtable on Mark Mazower’s Governing the World .

chapter 25

P ol itical C om mu ni c at i on Laura Beers

The term ‘political communication’ was rarely heard before the mid-​1950s. Even then, it was the Americans, not the British, who first adopted the phrase.1 While British politicians and party operatives had arguably been self-​consciously interested in the process of communicating with the democratic public for decades, if not centuries, they did not start talking about ‘political communication’ as a discrete concept until the 1960s. It took academics even longer to embrace the idea. British political scientists first began to study political communication in the late 1960s, and historians only really took an interest in the concept in the 1980s. What, then, finally prompted historians to embrace the study of political communication? The answer, in two words, was Margaret Thatcher. To an academic community dominated by the political left, the roots of Thatcher’s seeming facility in gulling the British public into a state of false consciousness through savvy packaging and Orwellian doublespeak was a historical question requiring explanation. Even those who viewed Thatcher with less hostility were struck by the unprecedented role that Saatchi and Saatchi played in ‘branding’ the Conservative party, and began to question the historical origins of the modern Conservative party’s interest in advertising and mediated communication. The prominence of political communication within the 1980s Conservative party thus inspired three related but largely discrete lines of enquiry:  a practical study of modern forms of political communication; an exploration of the pre​history of modern mediated political communication; and, finally, a more theoretical investigation of the contingent relationship between political language and political identity. These last two strands of historical research together inspired the emergence of the new political history school, with its emphasis on the centrality of language and culture to the development of modern politics, and its concomitant rejection of materialist identifications 1  Google Ngram Viewer: ‘[political communication]’, 1800–​2000 in English. .

Political Communication   435 of political identity. While the term ‘new political history’ embraced the exploration of both culture and language, in practice historians tended to focus either on a close analysis of political language or on an exploration of the mechanics and power structures of political culture—​either following Gareth Stedman Jones in taking political studies on a ‘linguistic turn’, or taking their inspiration from Patrick Joyce’s exploration of the plebeian pluralism of early nineteenth-​century political culture and the subsequent efforts of the Foucaultian state to tame plebeian rowdyism in the Victorian era.2 Alongside these two strands of new political history emerged a cohort of scholars working in history, political science, and media studies who were increasingly interested in the structures of twentieth-​century political communication. Growing out of the work of David Butler and the Nuffield school in analysing election campaigns, these men and women dissected the changes to political organization and modern media which enabled and encouraged new methods of political communication in the modern era. For much of the 1980s and 1990s these various lines of enquiry ran largely in parallel, with little consideration of how the media of communication informed the political message and its reception, and vice versa. Alongside others, including Jon Lawrence, James Thompson, and Philip Williamson, my own research was inspired by the desire to bridge the gap between the analysis of political discourse and the study of how such discourses were mediated.3 As I wrote in 2009, studying the relationship between publicity and propaganda and . . . electoral success . . . highlights the importance of considering, not only the content of political appeals, but also the way in which those appeals are presented to the public. Previous studies have broadened our understanding of democratic politics by shifting away from socially deterministic explanations of voting behaviour towards a more pluralistic model which takes into account the multiple ways in which interests can be articulated and mobilized. What is still needed, however, is a clearer understanding of how political parties successfully communicate those messages to the democratic public.4

2 

The respective key texts for the Manchester and Cambridge schools were: P. Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, c.1848–​1914 (Cambridge, 1993) and Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-​Century England (Cambridge, 1994), and G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–​1982 (Cambridge, 1983). The intellectual roots of the new political history have been traced most clearly in J. Lawrence and M. Taylor, ‘Introduction: Electoral Sociology and the Historians’, in their Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 1–26; L. Black, ‘What kind of people are you?: Labour, the People and the New Political History’, in J.T. Callaghan, S. Fielding, and S. Ludlow, eds., Interpreting the Labour Party (Manchester, 2003), pp. 23-​38; and, on the linguistic turn, G. Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), ch. 4. 3  J. Thompson, British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion’, 1867–​1914 (Cambridge, 2013); P. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999). 4  L. Beers, ‘Labour’s Britain, Fight for It Now!’, Historical Journal, 52 (2009), 667–​95, at 695.

436   Laura Beers Since writing those words, a new body of scholarship has emerged which has focused on the interplay between media and message and how they worked to influence public opinion and political culture. In so doing, these scholars have deepened our understanding of how these two amorphous bodies are shaped and constituted by looking beyond the world of politicians, party activists, media managers, and political journalists at the role of ostensibly non-​political forces in shaping political culture and opinions on politics. My own work on celebrity journalism and gender and Steven Fielding’s work on political fiction are examples of how popular culture can be brought into politics and politics into popular culture.5 There is, however, much more work to be done in this direction. As researchers move forward with the study of political communication in both the modern period and before the advent of mass media, they should be encouraged to consider the complex ways in which wider cultural forces have interacted with specific political cultures and technologies to inform the history of political communication and shape Britons’ attitudes towards party politics. The following discussion offers an overview of the emergence of the different strands of historical enquiry just outlined, paying particular attention to the history of political communication in the era of mass democracy and the mass media. It offers a focus on my own area of historical specialization, the relationship between the British left and the media. This relationship, I argue, was for decades largely and erroneously understood to have been unflinchingly hostile—​an understanding derived from long-​held Marxist assumptions about the role of the media in perpetuating false consciousness (assumptions reiterated by the cultural theorists of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s), and from the apparent inevitability of the hostile relationship between the left and the media in the 1970s and 1980s. It took the success of New Labour to shake the historical complacency about this supposed natural antagonism. Once Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair eroded the assumption that Labour could not compete with the Conservatives in the realm of political communication, a new generation of scholars (myself included) began to revisit previous assumptions about Labour’s past relationship to the mass media.

I Both the Manchester and Cambridge schools of new political history owe a huge debt to the cultural Marxism of the New Left, and to the reconceptualization of the relationship between culture and power by the theorists Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life pointed to the detrimental effects of ‘massification’, and the loss of indigenous, arguably more authentic working-​class cultures. The following year, Raymond Williams published Culture and Society, tying the emergence of modern culture to the advent of the Industrial

5 

See section III.

Political Communication   437 Revolution and linking the development of both to the emergence of a culturally hegemonic bourgeoisie. Not long after the emergence of the British New Left, continental theorists began to put forth a theory of power which emphasized the central role of culture, and the ways in which elites used their cultural dominance to contain and pacify dissent.6 Patrick Joyce’s historical work on working-​class cultures in nineteenth-​century Britain was an attempt to recapture a supposedly lost cultural world of pre-​industrial Britain and to argue that the ‘taming’ of the British working class was intimately tied to the destruction of a plebeian popular culture which had allowed a more robust space for political dissent. While many of Joyce’s students picked up on his Foucaultian analysis of change in Victorian Britain while eschewing his focus on culture and political communication, James Vernon’s 1993 Politics and the People explored the relationship between the emergence of modern party organization and the decline of a localized and pluralistic political culture in the mid-​nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, he argued, politicians’ speeches at the hustings were moments when ‘audiences were able to wield considerable political power . . . Music, heckles and any form of noise were used to upset the rhythm of unpopular speeches and to prevent them being heard’.7 Political communication thus went both ways—​from politician to citizen, and from the citizenry to the politicians who governed them. However, as politicians’ stump speeches became less frequent and more tightly orchestrated and policed, this reciprocal relationship was eroded. While William Gladstone’s Midlothian speeches in 1879 drew record crowds, they were predominantly conceived as media spectacles, to be reported on in the national press and debated after the fact in clubs, drawing rooms, and Parliament. Such scholarship illuminated how the mode of political communication in a society could be intimately tied up with both political culture and seemingly independent dynamics of power between political and economic elites and ‘the people’. Its focus was on the forms which cultural production took and what those forms revealed about power relationships within society. If Joyce and Vernon focused on form, Stedman Jones looked principally at content. Yet his method of linguistic analysis was equally informed by neo-​Marxian convictions about the relationship between culture and power. Traditional Marxism believed that people’s political identities were determined by their socio-​economic circumstances, and that those who failed to recognize where their political interests lay were suffering from false consciousness. Yet, faced with the appeal of Thatcherism to many in the British working class, Stedman Jones began to question the linear link between economic interest and political identity. Culture, and specifically language, he argued, mediated between the two, and culture was mutable. Thus, the same social circumstances—​such as an unequal society in which some prospered while others barely subsisted—​could be 6 

P. Bourdieu, La Reproduction. Éléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement (Paris, 1970); for Foucault’s early views on culture, see, inter alia, M. Foucault and L. Kritzman, eds., Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings (London and New York, 1988). 7  J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–​1867 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 123.

438   Laura Beers explained either through a rhetoric of class exploitation or through a rhetoric of hard work and individual endeavour versus laziness. In order to understand why one rhetoric gained purchase at the expense of another, historians needed to pay close attention to the detail of political languages and how they spoke (or failed to speak) to existing social and cultural realities. Both strands of the new political history underscored the importance of political communication to our understanding of political agency and the dynamics of political change. However, both were principally grounded in the study of the nineteenth century, and largely eschewed the question of how the medium of political communication interacted with the messages communicated to inform political consciousness. This was a question which preoccupied the social scientists who sought to analyse modern developments in political communication from the 1960s onwards.

II Political communication can be defined narrowly or broadly. In its broadest sense, it includes all interactions between politicians, political parties, and the voting public, and all discussion about politics in the public and private spheres. Coverage of party politics in the popular press, on television, or on the internet is political communication; so too are politicians’ stump speeches, conversations between mates in the pub about political news, political satire and stand-​up comedy, and ‘spin’ produced by governments and party headquarters. While practitioners of the Manchester school of new political history tended to define political communication broadly and students of the Cambridge school focused principally on printed texts, the social scientists inspired by the Nuffield studies explored the evolution of modern political ‘spin’, or the attempted manipulation of mediated political communication by political parties and by governments. These scholars tended, unsurprisingly, to focus on the modern era, in which media ‘impact’ could be quantified (however imprecisely) by tools such as public opinion polling and listener research.8 The social scientific narrative of the evolution of political communication is partly a story of the history of publicity, or the advertising and propagandizing of political messages, and partly a story of political marketing, or the attempt by political strategists and publicists to identify voters’ interests and craft a program and message designed to appeal to them. While both processes have played a growing role in modern British politics over the last century, there are significant distinctions between them which should not be overlooked. As Nicholas O’Shaughnessy wrote in The Phenomenon of Political Marketing, political marketing presupposes a ‘“consumer” orientation’ which borrow[s]‌techniques from business’. It is rooted in

8 

The records of the BBC’s Listener Research programme, launched in 1937, have recently been digitized by britishonlinearchives.co.uk, a division of Microform Academic Publishers.

Political Communication   439 ‘what people themselves say they want’, not simply what politicians believe they should want.9 Opinion-​sounding techniques such as polls and focus groups are used to determine voter preferences, political agendas are crafted in tune with those preferences, and then those agendas are publicized through the mass media. The role of the media in party politics has never been entirely absent from discussions of modern political studies. When R.B. McCallum and Alison Readman published The British General Election of 1945 (the first of the so-​called Nuffield studies published after each election, which have provided political historians with a ‘first draft’ of election history), they included a chapter on ‘The Daily Press’. The chapter contained a detailed summary of each paper’s reporting, dwelling equally on the small-​circulation ‘prestige’ papers such as the Manchester Guardian and The Times and the mass-​circulation broadsheet and tabloid papers. The differences between these two classes of papers in terms of their perceived mission and their intended audience were not addressed. Comparatively little was said about impact. The authors did note that the Daily Mirror’s ‘Vote for Him’ campaign ‘may well have won more votes for the Labour party than any other journalistic enterprise.’10 The pair ended their discussion of the press by asking whether the failure of the electorate to respond to [the Express’s] tactics was entirely due to the dispirited mood of the moment, or if it signified in the elector an interest in politics that is both more critical and more intense than heretofore, an interest, moreover, that transcends moods and will endure.11

An implicit contrast was here drawn with the supposed naïf elector of the inter-war period who could be gulled by press ‘stunts’, and the new, sceptical and informed elector who was determined to make up his or her own mind about political issues. If McCallum and Readman’s reading of the electorate discounted the importance of press reporting, it placed a high premium on the other principal medium of political communication: broadcasting. During the 1945 election, leading members of each of the two largest political parties delivered ten broadcasts to the electorate, with the Liberal party allotted four broadcasts and the Communists and Common Wealth each receiving one. The authors identified these broadcasts as ‘of peculiar importance’ in the election, and ‘a serious counter-​attraction to meetings in the constituencies’. ‘Mr. Churchill’s first broadcast, and Mr. Attlee’s reply the following night’, they argued, ‘were pivotal events in the history of the election. They exercised a profound influence on the subsequent development of the campaign, and perhaps on the final verdict of the electorate’.12 Their coverage of the broadcasts focused both on the message and the tone, and paid particular attention to Churchill’s attempts to frighten the electorate through the depiction of the party’s chairman, Harold Laski, as an autocratic ‘Gauleiter’ pulling the strings 9 

N. O’Shaughnessy, The Phenomenon of Political Marketing (Basingstoke, 1990), p. 23. R.B. McCallum and A. Readman, The British General Election of 1945 (London, 1947), p. 205. 11  Ibid., p. 213. 12  Ibid., pp. 139, 142. 10 

440   Laura Beers of the seemingly democratically accountable parliamentary Labour leadership. The discussion of the so-​called Gauleiter affair ended with an insightful analysis of Labour’s use of political communication to diffuse the impact of such accusations on their political fortunes: They had anticipated the stunt of 1945 by inoculating the people in advance against the poison which the Tory Central Office or Lord Beaverbrook [proprietor of the Daily Express] would in due course inject into their veins. Through all their propaganda, in the press, in speeches, and in election literature, there ran a constant note of warning to the electors to beware of tricks, frauds and stunts. This part of the Labour party’s campaign is perhaps the most brilliant piece of prophylactic political medicine ever achieved in political history. When the ‘Laski affair’ appeared the Labour party was ready for it.13

Here was one of the first academic acknowledgments of the value and payoff of a coordinated media strategy, and an appreciation that the Labour party was devoting energy and resources to an effective communications policy. In their 1969 volume Political Change in Britain, David Butler (who took over the Nuffield series from McCallum) and Donald Stokes noted the ‘wide variety of phenomena’ which have shaped electoral choice.14 They began their chapter on ‘the flow of political information’ by acknowledging that ‘developments in mass communications—​ the coming, first of the popular press, then of radio and now of television—​have transformed mass politics’.15 Unlike the more descriptive Nuffield studies, the chapter that followed dealt less with the content of the political reporting and more with the relationship between the consumption of political news and the strength of voters’ party allegiances. Charts and statistical data were used to demonstrate that those with the highest exposure to political media showed the strongest party loyalty, and those with the lowest exposure to political news were most likely to switch parties. This sociological approach showed a more sophisticated appreciation of the relationship between the electorate and the mass media—​an appreciation that informed the work of political communications strategists as well as scholars. What it did not address was the relationship between party political strategists and the mass media and the ways in which parties influenced their media coverage. In 1966, Lord Windelsham (David Hennessy) published Communication and Political Power. Windelsham held a law degree from Trinity College, Oxford, and had worked in television and with the Conservative think tank the Bow Group before taking up a seat in the House of Lords. He was clearly heavily influenced by recent American research on the media and post-​Second World War presidential politics, as well as Vance Packard’s

13 

Ibid., p. 149. D. Butler and D. Stokes, Political Change in Britain: Forces Shaping Electoral Choice (London, 1969), p. 3. 15  Ibid., p. 215. 14 

Political Communication   441 now classic work on subliminal advertising.16 (The word ‘persuade’ occurs several times in his opening discussion on the uses of the media.) Windlesham began by declaring that ‘It is now widely accepted that the most effective method of obtaining maximum electoral support on polling day is the maintenance of a continuing programme of communication over a period of many months before the election actually takes place.’17 While he dates this policy to the Tory party’s approach to campaigning in the run-​up to the 1959 general election, recent scholarship has identified a commitment to sustained mediated campaigning, dating back at least to the 1930s, if not before. Over the next several chapters, Windlesham traced the history of the professionalization of parties’ media policy, beginning with the Conservative party’s decision to hire the firm Colman, Prentiss and Varley to handle its print media from 1948—​a relationship that lasted until 1964. In March 1964, the party hired Jeremy Murray-​Brown, a former member of the BBC Panorama team, to work with Central Office’s radio and television division to produce party political broadcasts in the run-​up to the election—​a development which underscored the growing importance of television to political communication. Given Windlesham’s own background, his narrative not surprisingly focused on the history of the Conservative party. However, he did identify a shift in Labour party policy towards mediated communication in the early 1960s. Key to this transformation was the appointment of John Harris, a former journalist who had previously served as the party’s press liaison officer, as Director of Publicity in early 1962. On 20 May 1963, Labour ran a series of national advertisements in the daily press—​a counter-​blast to a series of Tory ads run the previous Sunday. The ad campaign proved that ‘The Labour party had overcome its traditional suspicion of political advertising’, Windlesham declared, ‘and from that date on there was a keenly competitive situation with each side pacing the other, studying rival advertisements and their costs, and speculating on resources’.18 Harris’s department was officially tasked only with publicizing, not with making policy, but, as with the Conservative communication department, the line between publicity and marketing soon began to blur. Harris worked with the opinion pollster Mark Abrams to identify and target voters in marginal constituencies, with the result that, by the time that Windlesham was writing, it seemed that ‘In both parties professional publicists have ceased to be concerned only with the mechanical reproduction of messages in the most effective way possible. They now have a say in the selection of the message itself and the identification of the audience at which it will be aimed’.19 Windlesham’s work was not immediately followed up. However, from the mid-​ 1970s, several political historians did begin to turn their attention from high politics

16  V. Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York, 1957). S. Kelley’s Professional Public Relations and Political Power (Baltimore, MD, 1956), and C.L. Smith, H.D. Lasswell, and R.D. Casey’s Propaganda, Communication and Public Opinion (Princeton, NJ, 1964), clearly influenced Windlesham’s own analysis. 17  D.J.G.H. Windlesham, Communication and Political Power (London, 1966), p. 27. 18 Ibid., p. 76. 19  Ibid., p. 248.

442   Laura Beers to political communication. In 1978, John Ramsden, then a young lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, published the third volume of Longman’s History of the Conservative Party, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin, 1902–​1940. The book expanded on his doctoral work on inter-​war party organization and paid exceptional attention to the developments in Conservative Central Office’s approach towards mediated political communication in the early years of mass democracy. Notably, Ramsden’s work highlighted the central role of J.C.C. Davidson, party chairman between November 1926 and May 1930, and Sir Joseph Ball, the former MI5 operative who joined central office as the Conservatives’ first director of publicity in 1927. In 1930, Davidson appointed Ball director of the newly formed Conservative Research Department. Ramsden details how the two men created a sophisticated system of propaganda and opinion research which lay the groundwork for the Conservatives’ post-​war publicity and marketing operation. Between 1981 and 1984, the American academic Stephen Koss published his magisterial two-​volume The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, which focused on the history of the press’s involvement in politics from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries from the vantage point of its proprietors and journalists. Yet, as proprietors developed close political identifications (Walter Layton, the long-time editor of The Economist and chairman of the News Chronicle and London evening Star, unsuccessfully ran for Parliament as a Liberal three times in the 1920s; Lord Beaverbrook served in Churchill’s Cabinet during the Second World War and his Daily Express was the most staunchly pro-​Churchill of the mass market dailies20) and politicians in turn became press proprietors (most famously in the case of the Lloyd George family’s control of the Daily Chronicle in the 1920s and the Labour party’s ownership of the Daily Herald through the first half of the twentieth century), Koss’s story inevitably became a tale of party political communication. To cite two randomly chosen examples, Koss quotes the News Chronicle proprietor Laurence Cadbury’s private anxiety that his journalists’ ‘ardent desires as crusaders may at times interfere with their professional capacity as journalists’—​the News Chronicle’s writers being more concerned with publicizing the case against Neville Chamberlain’s government than with objectively reporting the news. A few pages later, he quotes a letter from the journalist Frank Waters to his wife in which Waters sneers that the recently ennobled editor-​in-​chief of the Daily Telegraph Lord Camrose is ‘aiming at an earldom which he’ll get if the war goes on long enough, by kow-​towing to the Conservative Party . . . The Conservatives now have him well and truly gagged’.21 The wealth of detail in Koss’s study aided future scholars in mapping the byzantine formal and informal relationships between the political parties and the

20 

K. Lovell’s recent doctoral dissertation is illuminating on the extent of the Express’s fawning coverage of the leader of the wartime Coalition. See ‘Press, Politics and the “People’s War,” 1939–​ 45: British Political Culture and the British Press in the Second World War’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Aberystwyth University, 2016). 21  S. Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (London, 1990 [1981, 1984]), pp. 1034, 1047.

Political Communication   443 newspapermen who they came to rely on to either publicize or eviscerate their parties’ policies. The year after the publication of Koss’s second volume, Martin Pugh published The Tories and the People, 1880–​1935. While Pugh’s work focused less on mediated communication and more on the local institutions such as the Primrose League which inculcated Conservative values through sociability and an exploitation of the culture of deference, the book played an important role in highlighting the importance of the media through which political messages were communicated (in this case the garden party and the whist drive). While the subject matter differed, the book proved a model for scholars interested in the intersection between media and political messaging. During the same period, Timothy Hollins, a PhD student at Leeds University, produced the first academic study to survey how the two principal political parties approached two of the new mass media of the early twentieth century: broadcasting and film.22 Unlike contemporary commentators, Hollins did not argue that Labour was necessarily less innovative or effective in its use of new media technologies than the Conservatives (at least not when it came to broadcasting; Hollins does argue that Labour failed to take advantage of developments in film projection). Rather, he suggests that the Labour party was hypocritical in its approach to new media in the inter-​war period, claiming a moral high ground that eschewed the manipulation of voters by the media, while nonetheless pursuing such tactics in the 1920s and 1930s. Hollins’s work was particularly detailed on the Conservatives’ courtship of the newsreel companies and exploitation of traveling cinema vans to appeal to voters in the constituencies. It is a testament both to the quality of his work and to the dearth of research in this field in the years that followed that, although his thesis was never published, he has remained one of the dominant authorities on inter-war Conservatism and the media, even being called on by the BBC in 2009 to speak as an expert commentator for a programme tellingly titled ‘Learning to Love the Microphone’.23 At the same time as these scholars were shifting political history away from its traditional preoccupation with high politics towards a focus on organization and communication, political scientists were gaining an appreciation of the centrality of political marketing to modern party politics. As a consequence, in 1982, Robert Worcester and Martin Harrop published the first volume in what would become a regular series, entitled simply Political Communications:  The General Election Campaign of 1979. The volume included a brief introduction by the editors which highlighted the dearth of academic attention paid to date to political communication, which they defined as ‘the interactive dialogue between the elected and the elector, the politician and the demos’.24 The chapters that followed were short papers adapted from a conference held at the 22 

T. Hollins, ‘The Presentation of Politics: The Place of Party Publicity, Broadcasting and Film in British Politics, 1918–​1939’ (unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Leeds, 1981). 23  ‘Learning to Love the Microphone’, BBC Radio 4, 14 June 2009. 24  ‘Introduction’, in R. Worcester and M. Harrop, eds., Political Communications: The General Election Campaign of 1979 (London, 1982), p. vi.

444   Laura Beers University of Newcastle, and the invited participants included academic observers and journalists, politicians, and marketing consultants who had participated in the 1979 campaign. The book includes chapters by the advertising directors who worked with or for the respective parties: Tim Bell of Saatchi and Saatchi for the Conservatives, and Tim Delaney of Leagas Delaney Advertising for Labour. Both established narratives around the comparative approach of the Conservative and Labour parties towards political marketing. The Conservatives were professional. They hired a single marketing agency to handle both their print and broadcast media, and set up a smooth-​running system of coordination between the agency and central office. The Labour party, in contrast, had a ‘hypocritical’ attitude towards advertising agencies—​on the one hand recognizing the impact that marketing could have on voters and the necessity of taking advantage of industry insight, and on the other deploring marketing’s influence in politics. While the Conservatives had a proper account with Saatchi and Saatchi, Delaney and his team volunteered their time to the Labour party out of political conviction. While the Conservative party commissioned up-​to-​date opinion polling, Labour’s consultants ‘relied for research on the findings of a Gallup Poll about the most salient issues, taken in 1978. This indicates the limited access we had to the party’s private and more up-​to-​date research’.25 The Labour team was further hampered by a much more restricted budget than their rivals. Whereas the Conservative media budget was £1.9 million, Labour was working from a budget of £700,000. In brief, the Conservatives had their act together, while Labour’s media policy was a shambles. Political Communications and the General Election of 1983 included an effort to historicize the changing nature of political communication. David Butler, the long-​time editor of the Nuffield series, provided an introductory essay which argued: Although each post-​war election has in most respects resembled its immediate predecessor, there is one contest that stands out as a landmark—​1959. In that year the Conservatives put on a nationwide advertising campaign on a new scale. In that year Labour, thanks to Morgan Phillips, transformed the headquarters press conference from a routine administrative briefing into the centerpiece of the campaign day; Labour also experimented with private opinion polling. Above all, 1959 saw television come into its own, partly through more sophisticated party broadcasts.26

Butler’s contribution is noteworthy both for its focus on the centrality of media innovations in driving changes in party communication policy and for its emphasis on the role of opinion polling in driving changes to political communications. He went on to flag up the institutional history of polling within each of the two main parties, noting that ‘The Harris poll (originally ORC) has worked intimately with the Conservatives in every election since 1966. MORI has serviced Labour since 1970’.27 Both the importance of 25 

T. Delaney, ‘Labour’s Advertising Campaign’, in ibid., p. 28. D. Butler, ‘The Changing Nature of British Elections’, in I. Crewe and M. Harrop, eds., Political Communications: The General Election Campaign of 1983 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 3. 27 Ibid., p. 14. 26 

Political Communication   445 technological change and the impact of opinion polling would ultimately be taken up by historians interested in the history of political communication and marketing practices dating back to well before Butler’s signal year of 1959. As Butler turned his attention from the past to the present, his key observation about the 1983 election campaign was that ‘The Conservative organization was impressive [in 1983]. It ran smoothly, with negligible hiccups. The Labour organization was deplorable, as many of those involved testified in the aftermath’.28 If the first two volumes of Political Communication and the General Election reinforced a narrative of Conservative embrace of mediated political communication and marketing and Labour hostility to marketing and scepticism of publicity, the volume for 1987 represented a stark break with past precedent. Labour lost the 1987 election badly, winning only 229 seats to the Conservatives’ 376, although the party did succeed in sidelining the SDP–​Liberal Alliance, which won a meagre 22 seats. Yet despite its poor electoral performance, those who wrote the first draft of the election’s political communications history argued that the Labour party had in fact run a more sophisticated, and arguably more effective, campaign than their opponents. If Labour did not manage to defeat the Conservatives, it succeeded in its primary goal, which was to marginalize the SDP–​Liberal Alliance and re-establish its claim to be the left-​wing alternative to Conservatism. Special praise was given to ‘Kinnock—​the Movie’, the party election broadcast produced by Hugh Hudson, director of the 1981 hit film Chariots of Fire. The decision to employ Hudson had been taken by Peter Mandelson, who was appointed Labour’s director of communications in 1985. Mandelson was committed to using all available tools of market research, advertising, and behind-​the-​scenes persuasion to sell the Labour party to the public. Under his leadership, the long-​standing narrative of Conservative nous and Labour half-​heartedness and bureaucratic bumbling was turned on its head. Thenceforth, Labour was presented as the party of modern spin, and the post-​1997 volume of the political communications series was tellingly titled Political Communications: Why Labour Won the General Election of 1997.

III The seemingly central role of communications and marketing in Labour’s 1997 victory pushed a new generation of scholars to re-​evaluate the historical role of marketing and communications in modern party politics, integrating many of the conceptual developments pioneered by new political historians in their study of nineteenth-​ century political culture. The competing strands of the new political history helped historians reconceptualize both the reorganization and centralization of party politics in the face of mass democratization, and the central role of ideas and language

28 Ibid., p. 9.

446   Laura Beers in moulding political identities. However, what remained largely absent was an effort to connect these two strands of historical scholarship through a focus on the changing mechanisms by which political parties communicated their messages to the new democratic public in the century and a half following the Second Reform Act, and how their understanding of the democratic electorate influenced the construction of those messages. Here, historians interested in political communication were uniquely poised to build the bridge between histories of political organization and studies of political language. Not all of the scholars researching the history of political communications in the 1990s came from a historical background. I was trained as a historian, as was Mariel Grant, who worked on the development of government publicity departments in the inter-​war period, Lawrence Black, one of the first scholars to study the Labour party’s attitude towards television, and James Thomas, whose Popular Newspapers, the Labour Party and British Politics offers an insightful analysis of the Labour party’s approach to the mass-​circulation press from the 1945 general election through the Blair era.29 In contrast, Margaret Scammell, who examined the political marketing strategy of Thatcher’s administrations within a historical context, was trained as a political scientist, although she now works in a media studies and communications department. Dominic Wring wrote his dissertation as a student at the Management Studies Group at Cambridge, as at the time his supervisor in that department, Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, was one of the few people researching political marketing. Given the nature of the subject, the work of scholars interested in the history of political communication has necessarily been informed by scholarship from outside the historical discipline and found itself in conversation with literature in political science and communications studies. And while the emergence of New Labour was a significant spur to many working on the new history of political communication, Mariel Grant’s Propaganda and the Role of the State in Inter-​War Britain was based on her doctoral dissertation, submitted in 1988, before the ‘Mandelson effect’ had fully made itself felt within Labour politics.30 Rather, if Grant’s work was inspired by contemporary political developments, the key factor was the prominent role played by the Central Office of Information (COI) in publicizing the Thatcher government’s privatization program. Grant drew on literature on the changing role of the modern state, including Keith Middlemas’s influential Politics in Industrial Society, to make the case for the inter-​war roots of modern state publicity.31 Even before the creation of the Central Office of Information in 1946, the government had a strong hand in the production of what Grant terms peace​time propaganda, through Ministry 29 

J. Thomas, Popular Newspapers, the Labour Party and British Politics (London, 2005). M.L. Mariel Grant, ‘Perceptions of Propaganda in Inter-​War Britain: The Development of Government Publicity in the Domestic Sphere’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 1988). 31  K. Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society: The Experience of the British System since 1911 (London, 1979). 30 

Political Communication   447 of Health campaigns in favour of milk consumption or the extensive advertising campaign for the London Underground.32 Margaret Scammell’s doctoral thesis analysed the growing role of political marketing in the crafting and dissemination of both the Thatcherite Conservative party’s political brand and the Thatcher governments’ political message. While the bulk of the project focused on the 1980s, her opening chapter sought to debunk the conventional wisdom among politicians and political scientists that the roots of modern political communication trace back no further than developments in the late 1950s. Rather, she argues that any scholar of modern political communication must ‘begin with the interwar decades because political and technological changes took place then which revolutionized the craft of political persuasion’.33 While the centralization of party politics in the nineteenth century laid the groundwork for the development of modern political communications apparatus in the twentieth, she, like myself and others, argued that it was the media revolution of the early twentieth century—​particularly the development of broadcasting and, to a lesser extent, film, as well as the centralization of the print media into the hands of a small number of national media conglomerates—​which precipitated the development of sophisticated political communication machinery within both the government and the party headquarters. Scammell also acknowledged Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s early interest in political communication, noting that he was the first prime minister to employ a full-​time press officer, George Steward, and thereby problematizing the conventional narrative of Labour as hostile to modern methods of mediated political communication. While Scammell’s work has focused on the impact of marketing techniques and particularly the role of opinion research in driving both the shape and presentation of party platforms, my own research has considered the early history of opinion polling from the late 1930s through the early 1960s, and analysed contemporary debates over whether or not polling would lead to a dangerous shift from representative government to direct democracy.34 From an early stage, politicians and political strategists were conscious of the potential of opinion polling to drive politicians to follow instead of lead public opinion and to turn Britain into a ‘consumer democracy’.35 Few, initially, viewed such a future with optimism. Yet in order for such a transformation to occur, politicians and party managers had to be willing to shift away from traditional practices and to embrace opinion polling and market research. The same held true for the shift from the time-​honoured electioneering 32  M. Saler has looked at London Underground’s advertising campaign from an art historical perspective in The Avant-​Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (Oxford, 1999). 33  M. Scammell, ‘The Impact of Marketing and Public Relations on Modern British Politics: The Conservative Party and Government under Mrs. Thatcher’ (unpublished PhD thesis, London School of Economics, 1991), p. 38. 34  L. Beers, ‘Whose Opinion? Changing Attitudes towards Opinion Polling in British Politics, 1937–​ 1964’, Twentieth Century British History, 17 (2006), 177–​205. 35  M. Scammell, Consumer Democracy: The Marketing of Politics (Cambridge, 2014).

448   Laura Beers methods of the hustings and the door-​to-​door canvas to mediated methods of political communications. To an extent, all political parties did embrace the shift from the hustings to the breakfast table and the sitting room in the early twentieth century. In seeking to explain this transformation, which he has termed the ‘domestication’ of politics, Jon Lawrence has focused on the brutalization of the political public sphere in the Edwardian period, evidenced most clearly in the Fenian violence in Ireland and the post-war clashes between the Black and Tans and the IRA, as well as the violent propaganda rhetoric employed by both sides in the First World War. Additionally, Lawrence has pointed to the entrance of women into the electorate as an impetus for party operatives to ‘tame’ the traditional rowdiness of political campaigns, and to embrace mediated technologies which allowed political communication to take place without the rough and tumble of public assemblies. These socio-​cultural factors combined with the practical impetus to use media such as the mass press and broadcasting to bridge the growing distance between politicians and constituencies, which had swelled exponentially as a result of the multiple Reform Acts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.36 Yet while each party, in some measure, made the shift towards mediated communication in the early twentieth century, the Conservatives, and to a lesser extent the Liberals, were seemingly more enthusiastic in their embrace of the new mass media than the Labour party. Labour’s apparent antipathy towards the media during the 1926 General Strike, when the party and trade union leadership called out the printing operatives in an attempt to muzzle a press industry which they assumed would be hostile to their cause and boycotted the BBC, which they saw as a tool of the government, had been documented by the media historians Jean Seaton and James Curran in 1987.37 A few years later, Chris Waters’s study of the political culture of the late ​Victorian and Edwardian socialist movement portrayed early socialist activists as profoundly hostile to the commercial media and determined to foster an alternative media culture—​one which eschewed the profit-​driven focus on entertainment in favour of an emphasis on socialist education.38 Then, Lawrence Black’s research on the 1950s Labour party revealed a deep ambivalence about the growing role of opinion polling and of television in modern politics. While some self-​professed modernizers—​including Anthony Crosland and Michael Young in the Labour Research Department, or Mark Abrams, who carried out opinion polling for the party in the 1950s—​were open-​minded about changing methods of political communication and marketing, strong distrust and resistance within the party leadership and rank-​and-​file frequently stymied the efforts of those within

36  J. Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence and the Fear of Brutalisation in Post-​First World War Britain’, Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), 557–​89; J. Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009). 37  J. Seaton and B. Pimlott, ‘The Struggle for “Balance”’, in J. Seaton and B. Pimlott, eds., The Media in British Politics (Aldershot, 1987), pp. 133–​53. 38  C. Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–​1914 (Manchester, 1990).

Political Communication   449 the party who would adapt Labour’s communications strategy to the modern era.39 The work of these and other scholars created an implicit link which ran from the ILP of the late nineteenth century through to the Labour party of Michael Foot in 1983. While the Conservatives had a history of openness to new media, Labour had always, it was assumed, been hostile to mediated political communication, due to a natural socialist aversion to the commercialism and inauthenticity of the mass media. The emergence of New Labour, however, problematized this narrative and pushed scholars to reconsider assumptions about Labour’s implacable hostility to developments in mediated political communication. Dominic Wring’s work took as its starting point the victorious Labour campaign in the LCC elections of 1934 and, from there, surveyed Labour’s evolving attitude towards political marketing through to the Mandelson era. What he found was that the Labour party of the 1930s and 1940s had been comparatively open-​minded and proactive in consulting advertising agencies and making use of professional publicists to put its policies across to the public in the most effective manner. Coincidentally, the architect of both the 1934 and 1937 LCC campaigns and Labour’s 1945 general election campaign, which Wring cited as examples of successful experimentation with new methods of mediated communication, was none other than Mandelson’s grandfather, the London Labour leader Herbert Morrison. Wring termed Morrison a ‘persuasionalist’, and argued that the history of Labour’s approach to political marketing has been the history of struggles between persuasionalists and ‘educationalists’ who ‘believed in the power of ideas not soundbites’ and resented the incursion of marketing practices into politics.40 At different points, Wring argues, each has been in the ascendant. Martin Moore similarly honed in on Morrison as a key figure in introducing commercial advertising techniques into politics. While Wring focused on electioneering, Moore’s work looked at the post-​Second World War Labour government in office, and claimed that the Attlee administration’s use of the prime ministerial press office, the Central Office of Information, and the Economic Information Unit to control the way in which its policies were put across to the general public should be viewed as the ‘origin of modern spin’. While he acknowledges Grant’s work on pre-​war government publicity and Ian McLaine’s scholarship on the Second World War Ministry of Information,41 the activities of the post-​war Attlee government were so different in scale as to be different in kind. Again, Moore cited Morrison as a key force behind such developments. Under Morrison’s leadership, he argues, the Attlee government made the conscious ‘journey from idealism to pragmatism, from a vision of an informed electorate to a worldly

39  L. Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951–​1964 (Basingstoke, 2003), ch. 6, and L. Black, ‘Whose Finger on the Button? British Television and the Politics of Cultural vs. Remote Control’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 25 (2005), 547–​75. 40  D. Wring, The Politics of Marketing the Labour Party (Basingstoke, 2005), p. 79. 41  I. McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London, 1979).

450   Laura Beers acceptance of the manipulation of communication to engineer consent’.42 In this story, it is the Conservative party, not Labour, who were behind the times. The Conservatives, he argues, felt uncomfortable with the idea of Civil Service agencies acting as propagandists for political administrations. When Churchill returned to Downing Street, he did away with the office of prime ministerial press secretary, disbanded the COI, and generally scaled back the government’s publicity apparatus. It was only under Macmillan, Moore argues, that the Conservatives came to embrace the value of political spin. Shortly after Wring and Moore published their work on the post-​Second World War Labour party, I  took a closer look at the history of the inter-​war labour movement, applying to that period the same scepticism about the dominant narrative of Labour ineptitude with and hostility towards mediated communication which others had recently applied towards the post-​Second World War period.43 Drawing on both media and political archives, I exposed the existence of competing factions within the early Labour party—​those who saw the mass media as a potential ally in broadening Labour’s base and educating voters about the merits of socialism, and those who viewed the mass media exclusively as a tool of political manipulation. The General Strike of 1926, which Seaton and Pimlott had portrayed as emblematic of the fraught relationship between Labour and the media, was in fact, I argued, a turning point in Labour’s approach to political communication. After the strike’s failure, those who advocated a rapprochement with the popular press and the BBC and greater engagement with the potential of film media were in the ascendant. The late 1920s and 1930s saw a flowering of interest in how best to use the media to communicate the aims and ambitions of the industrial and political arms of the labour movement.44 Since writing Your Britain, I have gone on to look at the ways in which female politicians, and particularly the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson, navigated the popular press’s gendered interest in female MPs, often simultaneously pandering to the press’s interest in female politicians’ personal lives and exploiting that interest to achieve column space for discussion of their political agendas.45 This reorientation was part of a broader shift in historiographical focus towards the intersection between popular celebrity culture and politics. While my work focused on the self-​consciously political intent of politicians such as Wilkinson in participating in the culture of celebrity journalism, Lucy Robinson has explored the cultural context in which Tracey Ullman invited Neil Kinnock to participate in the 1984 music video for her Madness cover ‘My Guy’. Noting the political conservatism of much of her target audience, and the negative feedback which Ullman received from many fans as a consequence of Kinnock’s cameo, Robinson

42 

M. Moore, The Origins of Modern Spin: Democratic Government and the Media in Britain, 1945–​51 (Basingstoke, 2006), p. 1. 43  L. Beers, Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 44  L. Beers, ‘Education or Manipulation? Labour, Democracy, and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 48 (2009), 129–​52; idem., Your Britain. 45  L. Beers, ‘A “Model MP”? Ellen Wilkinson, Gender, Politics and Celebrity Culture in Interwar Britain,’ Cultural and Social History, 10, (2013), 231–​50.

Political Communication   451 eschews conventional narratives which have focused on the music video as a political publicity stunt, and goes on to explore the more complex meanings of political celebrity in the video age.46 Recently, Steven Fielding has taken the historical interest in political communication through popular culture even further. His monograph State of Play argues that fictional representations of politicians and political practice have done as much as, if not more than, real-​life events to inform the British electorate’s understanding of the political process. In such work, the emphasis has shifted from how politicians and party operatives have used the media to convey a certain message or set a news agenda, to how the media themselves have shaped political culture in ways often independent of politicians’ input and interests. This move away from the history of politicians’ and parties’ approach toward mediated political communication and marketing to the study of the broader diffusion of politics through popular culture perhaps reflects a perception that the history of party political communication has already been told. Whereas, in the 1960s and 1970s, politicians, advertisers, and political scientists frequently made claims about the novelty of parties engaging with the mass media, scholars have now firmly established that parties and governments have actively engaged with mediated political communication at least since the early twentieth century. The Saatchi brothers and Peter Mandelson drew scholarly attention to a phenomenon that had previously been largely (albeit not entirely) ignored by historians. Now that political parties’ sustained and evolving engagement with mediated communications is taken as read, the field of political communications history is expanding to explore the fascinating, complex relationship between politics and popular culture.

Further Reading L. Beers, Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party (Cambridge, MA, 2010). S. Fielding, A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It (London, 2014). G.  Stedman Jones, Languages of Class:  Studies in English Working Class History 1832–​1982 (Cambridge, 1983). P. Joyce, Visions of the People:  Industrial England and the Question of Class, c.1848–​1914 (Cambridge, 1993). J. Lawrence, Electing Our Masters:  The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009). M. Scammell, Consumer Democracy: The Marketing of Politics (Cambridge, 2014). D.J.G.H. Windlesham, Communication and Political Power (London, 1966).

46 

L. Robinson, ‘“Sometimes I Like to Stay in and Watch TV . . . ” Kinnock’s Labour Party and Media Culture’, Twentieth Century British History, 22 (2011), 354–​90.

chapter 26

Petitioni ng a nd Demonstrat i ng Henry Miller

Petitions and demonstrations are two of the major ways in which British subjects have participated in politics in the modern era. A survey of political participation in the mid-​ 1980s found that petitioning was, aside from voting, the only form of participation to engage a majority of the UK population.1 Yet studies of petitions and demonstrations remain rather few, and isolated from many of the central questions in modern British political history. The field, insofar as there is one, is small compared to the huge historiographies of electoral politics, Victorian liberalism, political parties, or popular radicalism, to give just a few examples. Petitioning has usually been studied as part of research into specific campaigns in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.2 The period after 1850 is virtually uncharted territory. This patchy and incomplete coverage compares poorly with the wealth of work on medieval and early modern petitioning, and the focus on petitioning by modern American and European scholars.3 It is particularly surprising given that the ‘long’ nineteenth century (1800–​1914) was the heyday of 1 

G. Parry, G. Moyser, and N. Day, Political Participation and Democracy in Britain (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 44, 46. 2  B. Agnes, ‘A Chartist Singularity? Mobilising to Promote Democratic Petitions in Britain and France, 1838–​1848’, Labour History Review, 78 (2013), 51–​66; J. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-​Slavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–​1807 (Manchester, 1995), pp. 96–​119; S. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (Basingstoke, 1986), pp. 59, 68–​85, 91–​4, 126–​31; H. Miller, ‘Popular Petitioning and the Corn Laws, 1833–​46’, English Historical Review, 127 (2012), 882–​919; P. Pickering, ‘“And Your Petitioners, &c”: Chartist Petitioning in Popular Politics, 1838–​48’, English Historical Review, 116 (2001), 368–​88; D. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford, CA, 1992). 3  From a large literature, see especially: W.M. Ormrod, G. Dodd, and A. Musson, eds., Medieval Petitioning: Grace and Grievance (Woodbridge, 2009); M. Knights, ‘Participation and Representation before Democracy: Petitions and Addresses in Pre-​Modern Britain’, in I. Shapiro, S. Stokes, E. Wood, and A. Kirshner, eds., Political Representation (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 35–​57; D. Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ, 2000); L.H. Voss, ed., ‘Petitions in Social History’, International Review of Social History, 46 (2001), supplement 9.

Petitioning and Demonstrating    453 popular petitioning in Britain. Indeed, it is likely that far more people petitioned than participated in election rituals every seven or so years, and that petitions provided the most regular connection between the people and Parliament. Furthermore, petitioning was a key part of the national political culture that developed in the nineteenth century. People petitioned from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as well as from the empire. Petitioning allowed the integration of local, regional, and national issues within the UK political system during a period when the representative system and franchise were not nationally uniform and were different in England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. This regular engagement with Parliament through petitioning goes a long way to explaining how a political system that rested on a narrow basis for much of the nineteenth century could nevertheless attain a degree of legitimacy and popular support. Part of the answer for this neglect is that petitioning has remained marginal to the central research questions of modern British political history. Colin Leys, writing during the apogee of the apparently stable post-​war two-​party Westminster model, argued that petitioning declined as the electorate expanded. The residual survival of petitioning into the mid-​twentieth century seemed to be a quaint hangover from an earlier, essentially pre-​modern age.4 Following this rise-​and-​fall narrative, Peter Fraser, writing in 1961, suggested that petitioning declined after procedural reforms in the 1830s and 1840s restricted parliamentarians’ ability to initiate debate through presenting petitions.5 This change effectively nullified the power of petitions to disrupt parliamentary business, according to Fraser. Other scholars have provided a more general account of the culture and uses of petitioning, but have usually ended their study around 1850.6 More recently, the emphasis on political languages should have attracted scholars to petitions, but much of the new political history’s focus has been on interpreting relations between different political traditions (such as liberalism and radicalism), or between parties and the people, particularly through focusing on election rhetoric.7 Petitions, as a non-​electoral, non-​party form of political representation and participation, have been largely ignored as a result. While petitioning has been curiously under-​studied, defining a field for demonstrating is more problematic. Arguably, such a field exists, but it is fragmented across several different subfields and research traditions. Part of the difficulty lies in defining what is a 4 

C. Leys, ‘Petitioning in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Political Studies, 3 (1955), 45–​64.   P. Fraser, ‘Public Petitioning and Parliament before 1832’, History, 43 (1961), 195–​211, at 209–​11. 6  P. Jupp, The Governing of Britain, 1688–​1848: The Executive, Parliament and the People (London, 2006), pp. 216–​17, 251–​3; S. Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in 19th Century Britain (London, 2013), pp. 109–​26; J. Innes, ‘People and Power in British Politics to 1850’, in J. Innes and M. Philp, eds., Re-​imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750–​1850 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 129–​48. 7  E. Biagini and A. Reid, eds., Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–​1914 (Cambridge, 1991); P. Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, c.1848–​1914 (Cambridge, 1991); E. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–​1880 (Cambridge, 1992); J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–​1867 (Cambridge, 1993); J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics, 1867–​1914 (Cambridge, 1998). 5

454   Henry Miller demonstration. Katrina Navickas has argued that the emergence of the ‘mass platform’ (mass public meetings) associated with radicalism after 1815 ‘was the origin of the modern demonstration’.8 The mass platform involved processions or marches culminating in a mass meeting for a political purpose. I will take this as my definition, as it seems to encapsulate neatly the qualities that mark demonstrations out from public meetings and civic processions, although they contain elements of each. Using this definition, studies of demonstrating are fragmented across many different areas of modern British history. First, social historians associated with ‘history from below’ in the 1960s focused on forms of eighteenth-​century crowd protest, particularly food riots, as a way to analyse social relations and popular attitudes during an era of social and political upheaval.9 Second, there are studies of particularly famous demonstrations, protests, or marches, the best known being the radical meeting in Manchester on 16 August 1819 that was dubbed ‘Peterloo’ after protesters were attacked by local yeomanry. As Robert Poole has shown, the procession and symbolism of Peterloo drew heavily on local popular cultural traditions.10 Other scholars have examined the riots against the proposed Sunday trading legislation in 1855.11 The impact of violence at their 1934 Olympia rally on the fortunes of the British Union of Fascists sparked a lively debate between Martin Pugh and Jon Lawrence.12 Third, there have been broader bodies of work on protests and demonstrations associated with particular campaigns or movements. Lisa Tickner’s ground-​breaking Spectacle of Women examined a number of carefully orchestrated demonstrations as part of a wider analysis of the visual culture of the women’s suffrage campaign.13 The unemployed protest marches of the inter-​war era, most notably the Jarrow March of 1936, have attracted much recent scholarly attention.14 The role of the mass platform

8 

K. Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–​1848 (Manchester, 2016), p. 52. J.E. Archer, Social Unrest and Popular Protest in England, 1780–​1840 (Cambridge, 2000); G. Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–​1848 (London, 1964); E. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé, Captain Swing (Harmondsworth, 1973); E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971), 76–​136; A. Randall, Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England (Oxford, 2006). 10  R. Poole, ‘The March to Peterloo: Politics and Festivity in Late Georgian England’, Past and Present, 192 (2006), 109–​53. 11  B. Harrison, ‘The Sunday Trading Riots of 1855’, Historical Journal, 8 (1965), 219–​45. 12   M. Pugh, ‘The British Union of Fascists and the Olympia Debate’, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), 529–​42; M. Pugh, ‘The National Government, the British Union of Fascists and the Olympia Debate’, Historical Research, 78 (2005), 253–​62; J. Lawrence, ‘Fascist Violence and the Politics of Public Order in Inter-​War Britain: The Olympia Debate Revisited’, Historical Research, 76 (2003), 238–​67, and ‘Why Olympia Mattered’, Historical Research, 78 (2005), 263–​72. 13  L. Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–​14 (Chicago, 1987). 14  M. Petrie, ‘Public Politics and Traditions of Popular Protest: Demonstrations of the Unemployed in Dundee and Edinburgh, c. 1921–​1939’, Contemporary British History, 27 (2013), 490–​513; M. Reiss, ‘Marching on the Capital: National Protest Marches of the British Unemployed in the 1920s and 1930s’, in M. Reiss, ed., The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2007), pp. 147–​68; M. Reiss and M. Perry, eds., Unemployment and Protest: New Perspectives on Two Centuries of Contention (Oxford, 2011); S. Ward, Unemployment and the State in Britain: The Means Test 9 

Petitioning and Demonstrating    455 in post-​1815 popular radicalism is well documented.15 There is also a strong body of work on crowds, demonstrations, and processions in Irish history, particularly as the issue of parades and marches continues to have contemporary relevance in the politics of Northern Ireland.16 Fourth, there is a rich body of work on the culture of the platform, public speaking, itinerant lecturing, and the development of the public meeting in the Victorian period. In part, this emphasis on oral communication has developed as a reaction and corrective to the emphasis on print and newspapers in older accounts of popular politics.17 Finally, urban historians have examined civic and public processions, parades, and rituals to examine the performance of different identities within urban space.18 At a more general level, historical sociologists such as Charles Tilly have emphasized that demonstrations play an important function for displaying worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment, all of which are crucial to the success of political and social movements.19 While the new political history has challenged and overturned older grand narratives based on social class or the rise of party, and emphasized the contingent, negotiated, and fragile relationship between popular politics and parties, the fact is that parties and elections still occupy centre stage and too often electoral culture has been treated as synonymous with political culture. While petitions and demonstrations have been studied in relation to specific campaigns, there has been an absence of systematic studies of them as forms of popular politics that existed outside elections and party politics.

and Protest in 1930s South Wales and North-​East England (Manchester, 2013), pp. 116–​58; M. Perry, The Jarrow Crusade: Protest and Legend (Sunderland, 2005). 15   J. Belchem, ‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-​Class Radicalism (Oxford, 1985); J. Belchem, ‘Henry Hunt and the Evolution of the Mass Platform’, English Historical Review, 93 (1978), 739–​73. 16  P. Jupp and E. Magennis, eds., Crowds in Ireland, c.1720–​1920 (Basingstoke, 2000); T.G. Fraser, ed., The Irish Parading Tradition: Following the Drum (Basingstoke, 2000); D.M. Jackson and D.M. MacRaild, ‘The Conserving Crowd: Mass Unionist Demonstrations in Liverpool and Tyneside, 1912–​13’, in D.G. Boyce and A. O’Day, eds., The Ulster Crisis: 1885–​1921 (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 229–​46. 17  J. Martin, ‘Popular Political Oratory and Itinerant Lecturing in Yorkshire and the North East in the Age of Chartism, 1837–​60’, (unpublished PhD thesis, University of York, 2010); J. Meisel, Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone (New York, 2001); M. Hewitt, ed., ‘Aspects of Platform Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Nineteenth Century Prose, 29 (2002), special issue; H. Southall, ‘Agitate! Agitate! Organize! Political Travellers and the Construction of a National Politics, 1839–​1880’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 21 (1996), 177–​93; P. Howell, ‘“Diffusing the Light of Liberty”: The Geography of Political Lecturing in the Chartist Movement’, Journal of Historical Geography, 21 (1995), 23–​38. 18  P. O’Leary, Claiming the Streets: Processions and Urban Culture in South Wales, c. 1830–​1880 (Cardiff, 2012); C. Wildman, ‘Religious Selfhoods and the City in Inter-​War Manchester’, Urban History, 38 (2011), 103–​23. 19  C. Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–​1834 (Harvard, MA, 1995), pp. 214–​15; C. Tilly, Contentious Performances (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 121–​2.

456   Henry Miller

I So far this chapter has largely offered a literature survey and a critique. The remainder of it will take a more constructive line by outlining an interpretation of the historical problem of petitioning and demonstrating, and suggesting an agenda for future research. The early twenty-​first century is an especially propitious moment for the study of petitions and demonstrations. Falling party memberships, declining electoral turnouts, and the fragmentation of the two-​party system suggest more and more that the 1945–​70 period was in fact the exception rather than a historical endpoint. The apparently stable ‘Westminster model’ of the mid-​twentieth century—​comprising mass party membership, high levels of voter alignment and loyalty, class-​aligned voting behaviour, a clear-​ cut two-​party system, high turnouts in general elections—​was a historical period that has passed, rather than the norm. Older accounts of nineteenth-​century politics written during this period were explicitly looking for the Victorian origins of the ‘modern’ British political system.20 The context of the early twenty-​first century lends a different perspective. The recent rise of e-​petitioning suggests that written appeals to political authority remain an important form of political expression, participation, and representation.21 This raises an interesting question, which problematizes much of the current scholarship about modern British political history: what if elections and party politics were not the most popular and important form of political activity, as has usually been assumed? Certainly in the nineteenth century there is strong evidence to suggest that petitioning and demonstrating were rife, and deserve greater scholarly attention and focus than has hitherto been the case. Petitioning and demonstrating were frequently connected and it would be unwise to treat them as entirely separate phenomena, certainly in the nineteenth century. Restrictions were imposed on public meetings and assembly by the Seditious Meetings Acts of 1795, 1817, and 1819, but the right to petition was not tampered with. Holding meetings to petition Parliament, or other authorities, thus provided a way to legitimate

20 

E.g., H.J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Disraeli and Gladstone (London, 1959). 21  C. Bochel, ‘Petitions: Different Dimensions of Voice and Influence in the Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly for Wales’, Social Policy & Administration, 46 (2012), 142–​60; C. Bochel, ‘Petitions Systems: Contributing to Representative Democracy?’, Parliamentary Affairs, 66 (2013), 798–​815; U. Riehm, K. Böhle, and R. Lindner, Electronic Petitioning and Modernization of Petitioning Systems in Europe (Berlin, 2013); R. Lindner and U. Riehm, ‘Electronic Petitions and Institutional Modernization: International Parliamentary E-​Petition Systems in Comparative Perspective’, eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government, 1 (2009), 1–​11; S. Wright, ‘Populism and Downing Street E-​Petitions: Connective Action, Hybridity and the Changing Nature of Organizing’, Political Communication, 32 (2015), 414–​33; S. Wright, ‘“Success” and Online Political Participation: The Case of Downing Street E-​Petitions’, Information, Communication & Society, 19 (2016), 843–​57; L. Miller, ‘E-​ Petitions at Westminster: The Way Forward for Democracy?’, Parliamentary Affairs, 62 (2009), 162–​77.

Petitioning and Demonstrating    457 such meetings and made it difficult for local magistrates to close them down.22 As Henry Jephson, the Victorian historian of the platform, noted in 1892, the public meeting developed from the ‘origin of public petitioning’.23 Charles Tilly has noted the development of the ‘petition-​demonstration’ in the 1830s: marches on Parliament for the ostensible purpose of presenting a petition.24 This tactic was later deployed by Chartists, women’s suffrage campaigners, and inter-​war unemployed protest marchers, to name but a few of the most famous examples. Writing of the mid-​nineteenth century, Janette Martin has noted that ‘most public meetings in this period were still ostensibly called to petition Parliament’.25 The right of petitioning therefore provided a secure constitutional basis on which to ground other liberties, particularly those of association and assembly, which remained contested and vulnerable to government curtailment, particularly during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Public, political, or popular petitioning, that is, petitioning on national issues and public policy rather than private or local legislation, emerged in the late eighteenth century. The 1779–​80 Yorkshire Association petitioning campaign for parliamentary reform, or the 1787 petitions for the abolition of the slave trade, can be seen as pioneering in promoting the idea of petitioning Parliament on public issues. As one late Victorian commentator noted, the 1787 anti-​slavery petitions were a ‘new departure’ and the House of Commons’ decision to receive the petitions ‘was equivalent to the recognition of a fresh constitutional right’.26 The scale of petitioning grew rapidly thereafter. Between 1785 and 1789, 880 public petitions were sent to the Commons. Between 1837 and 1841, more than 70,000 public petitions were sent to the Commons.27 Petitioning Parliament was central to many of the major campaigns of this period, including the Catholic Association’s campaign for Catholic Emancipation in the 1820s, the three monster Chartist petitions of 1839, 1842, and 1848, the anti-​slavery movement, and the Anti-​Corn Law League. The rise of public petitioning was linked to the development of new, or rather more sophisticated, forms of political association and organization. Tilly has presented the rise of the public meeting and petitioning in the 1758–​1834 period as part of the ‘parliamentarization’ of popular politics. That is to say, demands and claims were increasingly directed at national power structures, above all Parliament, rather than local agents of the state, such as magistrates.28 If one accepts Tilly’s arguments, it is possible therefore to present the chronology of ‘the rise of petitioning’ as part of a story of the modernization of British political life and the development of national popular politics, but with the key 22 

R. Handley, ‘Public Order, Petitioning and Freedom of Assembly’, Journal of Legal History, 7 (1986), 123–​55. 23  H.L. Jephson, The Platform: Its Rise and Progress (2 vols, London, 1892), vol. i, p. 11. 24 Tilly, Popular Contention, p. 279. 25  Martin, ‘Popular Political Oratory’, p. 115. 26 ‘Verax’, Manchester Guardian, 25 Apr. 1893, 9. 27  Parliamentary Papers [hereafter PP] 1852–​53 (166), Return of the Number of Petitions Presented Each of the Five Years Ending 1788–​9, 1804–​5, 1814–​15, 1832, 1837, 1842, 1847, and 1852, LXXXIII, p. 105. 28  C. Tilly, ‘Parliamentarization of Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–​1834’, Theory and Society, 26 (1997), 245–​73.

458   Henry Miller role played by social movement organizations rather than political parties or electoral reforms. Tilly’s interpretation may be too teleological, and is open to a number of criticisms. Clearly the emergence of public petitioning on a huge scale between 1780 and 1850 requires explanation, but we also need to know more about the later period. Preliminary research suggests that the level of petitioning remained high after 1850. For example, as late as 1912–​13 there were 10,221 petitions, containing almost 2.8 million signatures, sent to the Commons.29 Neither was petitioning unimportant in major campaigns after 1850. For example, the women’s suffrage campaign was inaugurated by a petition signed by 1,500 women in 1866.30 Petitioning remained a staple of later campaigns, such as the agitation for the prohibition of alcohol or the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1870s.31 Even after 1918, it would seem that petitioning continued to be of significance within particular campaigns through the presentation of set-​piece, singular petitions. The petition was one of the major tactics used by the National Viewers and Listeners’ Association led by Mary Whitehouse, for example.32 It may be that petitioning continued to be of value in the mid-​and later twentieth century as it provided a way to gain names and addresses and build mailing lists of supporters. There is also a danger in assuming that campaigning organizations generated petitions en masse, ignoring the importance of local variations and the interplay between the local and national. For example, associations such as those connected to the anti-​ slavery movement did circulate standardized drafts of model petitions for local supporters to use, but these were often adapted.33 Anti-​Corn Law petitions drew on the central arguments made by the League, but also reflected distinctive local political cultures, economic interests, and geographical differences.34 Finally, petitioning Parliament was part of a broader repertoire of popular political activity involving signatures and subscriptions. Radicals often argued that appeals should be directed towards the monarch, rather than an unrepresentative and undemocratic Parliament. The radical writer William Cobbett repeatedly advocated this tactic, as the 1688 Bill of Rights guaranteed the right of subjects to petition the monarch, but not Parliament. The right of petitioning was ‘amongst the birthrights of Englishmen’.35 The 1912 Ulster solemn league and covenant against the third home rule bill, signed by over 250,000 Ulstermen, is a late example of a major petition directed to the monarch.36 29 

PP 1912–​13 (0.188), Return of the Number of Public Petitions Presented, 1912–​13, LXVII, p. 96. B. Mason, Story of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London, 1912), p. 31. 31  A.E. Dingle, The Campaign for Prohibition in Victorian England: The United Kingdom Alliance, 1872–​1895 (London, 1980), pp. 30, 38, 113; Select Committee on Public Petitions [henceforth SCPP], Reports (1871), pp. 1126, 1130. 32  L. Black, Redefining British Politics: Culture, Consumerism and Participation, 1954–​70 (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 106, 112–​16, 118, 122. 33  Anti-​Slavery Reporter, 20 Oct. 1830, 451–​2. 34  Miller, ‘Popular Petitioning’, 882, 902–​15. 35  Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 5 Aug. 1826, 324. 36  G. Walker, ‘The Ulster Covenant and the Pulse of Protestant Ulster’, National Identities, 18 (2016), 313–​25. 30 

Petitioning and Demonstrating    459 Petitioning, then, developed on a large scale between the late eighteenth and mid-​nineteenth centuries and was integral to many of the best-known Victorian campaigns. Petitions to Parliament were just one element of a wider culture of subscriptional activity. The constitutional right to petition was well established and petitioners often reminded authorities that ‘the Right to Petition’ was ‘the fundamental right of Englishmen’.37 While such defences drew on the rhetoric of the rights of the freeborn Englishman, it is worth repeating that petitioning was used by all groups within the UK and was a national phenomenon. Significantly, petitions were rarely rejected by the House of Commons, perhaps because legislators were wary of being accused of restricting a popular, constitutional right. The Prittlewell petition in 1875, in favour of the Claimant to the Tichborne baronetcy (who became the focus of a popular radical campaign), was a rare example of a petition that the House refused to receive, in this case because of insulting language towards the Speaker.38 Whether or not MPs always agreed with the demands of petitioners, there seems to have been a general consensus that British subjects had a right to have their petitions presented. Petitions were thus an important form of representation in the pre-​democratic period before 1918, and one of the ways in which Parliament represented a broader public (consisting of all subjects) beyond the electorate. In short, not everyone had the right to vote, but all had the right to petition. This explains the heavy use of petitioning by important sections of non-​voters, such as working-​class radicals and Chartists in the early and mid-​nineteenth century, and women’s suffrage campaigners thereafter. As the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage argued in 1913, ‘the way of petition  . . .  is the only constitutional method’ available to the ‘unenfranchised class’ and was therefore of ‘immense importance’ to women.39 As Claire Midgley, Kathryn Gleadle, and Sarah Richardson have emphasized, petitioning was central to female political activity throughout the nineteenth century at a time when women were ‘borderline citizens’ in terms of political rights and their place in the body politic.40 Viewing petitioning (and indeed demonstrating) as alternative forms of popular participation and representation involves shifting away from purely instrumental perspectives. Whether petitions were successful or not is less interesting than why and how people petitioned, and the interaction between Parliament and petitioners. In many cases, petitioners had few expectations that authorities would concede their demands, and yet they continued to petition. This suggests that petitioning fulfilled a variety of other valuable purposes, including building collective identities, mobilizing public opinion, generating publicity, providing support for proposed legislation, and providing an outlet and a focus for political activity. It was a regular refrain of campaigners and

37 

Commons Journal, 73 (10 Mar. 1818), 156. Manchester Guardian, 16 Apr. 1875, 8. 39  Manchester Guardian, 15 July 1913, 25. 40  K. Gleadle, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender and Political Culture in Britain, 1815–​1867 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 42–​6; Richardson, Political Worlds of Women, pp. 109–​26; C. Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–​1870 (London, 1992), pp. 62–​7 1. 38 

460   Henry Miller petitioners that Parliament had ceased to listen to the people’s petitions and thus the ancient right to petition was now a futile exercise. Yet it was remarkable how often the same individuals then adopted an alternative form of petitioning. For example, in his memoirs, the Chartist William Lovett reprinted an 1842 ‘remonstrance’ to the Commons that stated: ‘as the ancient and constitutional custom of public petitioning has, by your acts, been rendered a mere mockery, we are thus induced to substitute a public remonstrance against you.’41 The difference between a petition and a remonstrance is difficult to grasp: both were written demands directed to authority, containing a list of signatures. Lovett abandoned petitioning (although he later reverted to it) and yet switched to what was essentially a kindred form. While petitioners had few illusions about the likely chances of success and often despaired of the point of petitioning the Commons, petitioning retained a remarkable hold over the political imagination. Ultimately, few were prepared permanently to abandon petitioning as a tactic, even if they preferred to call it something else. This section has highlighted some of the general features of the culture of petitioning in the long nineteenth century. It has sketched the emergence of popular petitioning, its connection to public meetings, the strong constitutional foundation of the right of petitioning, its use by major campaigns across the period, and the importance of petitioning as an end in itself, regardless of whether petitioning proved to be successful or not. Further research is necessary to identify the reasons behind the emergence of petitioning and demonstrating, and it may be better to view them as practices that wax and wane in cycles rather than adopting a linear narrative of decline. A broader perspective also involves shifting away from a focus on specific campaigns, important though they are, to considering the general culture and practice of petitioning and demonstrating, how this changed over time, and the role that non-​electoral and non-​party forms of political participation played within the British political system. Before outlining agendas for future research it is worth noting that original petitions to Parliament (unlike those to the US Congress) were rarely preserved. Yet the Commons Journals, Lords Journals, and, from 1833, the seldom used Reports of the Select Committee on Public Petitions provide rich resources that recorded where petitions came from, which groups signed them, the number of signatures, and which issues were the subject of petitions. The Appendices to the Select Committee on Public Petitions reprinted a selection of the texts of petitions every session. The Select Committee on Public Petitions Reports  and Appendices were published outside the main run of the Parliamentary Papers and are currently held by few repositories, and have been neglected as a result. The SCPP Reports and Appendices have remained rather inaccessible and have been used by few scholars,42 but are a rich and vast resource that would shed new light on popular attitudes to religious, political, economic, social, and 41 

W. Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett (2 vols, London, 1876), vol. i, p. 264. Miller, ‘Popular Petitioning’; Paz, Popular Anti-​Catholicism; J.G. Handley, ‘The Public’s Reaction to Public Health: Petitions Submitted to Parliament, 1847–​1848’, Social History of Medicine, 15 (2002), 393–​411. 42 

Petitioning and Demonstrating    461 imperial issues in the 1833–​1918 period. ProQuest’s digitization of these sources, available from late 2017 as Public Petitions to Parliament 1833–1918, and part of the UK Parliamentary Papers collection, will open them up to a new generation of scholars.  These sources, as well as parliamentary debates and other official publications, newspapers, pamphlets and periodicals, and archival material such as the letters and other correspondence of politicians and political organizations, provide plenty of material through which to address the following research questions.

II Petitioning and demonstrating, as I  have argued here, have been poorly served by modern British political historiography. Yet they have the potential to enrich and revise key central assumptions in this field, many of which continue to be dominated by a timeline of electoral reform, elections, and party politics. In recent years, scholars have argued that a degree of common ground exists between new studies of popular politics and high politics, with a shared focus on examining political languages and the ideas of political actors, whether parliamentarians or activists.43 An alternative way to connect parliamentary/​elite/​high politics with popular/​low politics, and, indeed, to blur the distinctions between the two areas, would be to focus on petitioning and demonstrating. Petitioning in particular, brought popular politics right to the very heart of the political system—​the Commons chamber—​in a way that no other form of political activity could match. Aside from work on procedural changes in the way Parliament handled petitions, we know remarkably little about the response of the political elite to the emergence of mass petitioning in the nineteenth century. Petitioning and demonstrating are subjects that cut across different disciplines and can be approached from a variety of perspectives, including political science, sociology, geography, literature, and law, as well as history. What follows here is a call for analyses of petitioning and demonstrating to be integrated with, and placed at the heart of, new research in the vibrant field of modern British political history, but also for that research to be grounded in a broader awareness of approaches and perspectives from other disciplines, as well as periods and geographical areas within history. In terms of method, new studies of petitioning and demonstrating can complement and extend recent work in modern British political history by deploying the innovative cultural analyses that are the hallmark of the best of the new political history, while also taking advantage of developments in digital humanities. In the following agenda for future research, I first outline essential areas and questions that scholars should address, and second suggest some of

43  D.M. Craig, ‘“High Politics” and the New Political History’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 453–​73; S. Pedersen, ‘What Is Political History Now?’, in D. Cannadine, ed., What is History Now? (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 40–​5.

462   Henry Miller the ways in which this might be done through deploying the methods associated with recent work and, more speculatively, the approaches associated with digital humanities. First, the starting point for future research should be that petitioning and demonstrating are changing mechanisms of popular politics, with distinct histories and contexts. This is another way of saying that studies of specific campaigns will only tell us so much while we lack a more general understanding of the shifting chronologies, histories, contexts, and uses of these two mechanisms. One key element here is identifying the shifting legal and constitutional context and position of petitioning and demonstrating. Mark Knights has documented the development of the right to petition in the long eighteenth century, and the legal context for public meetings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has recently been elucidated by Navickas.44 The emphasis on historical and legal precedents for popular liberties is an important theme in the tradition of ‘popular constitutionalism’ outlined by James Epstein.45 Yet a focus on the legal context also plays to the traditional strengths of British scholarship in what used to be called constitutional history, and gives this research an obvious relevance to recent debates about restrictions of the right of public meetings and other civil liberties in the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries. Another important aspect of sketching the general terrain is to provide, or attempt to provide, evidence of the scale of petitioning and demonstrating. Parliamentary Papers and other official publications can be used to reconstruct data for petitions to the House of Commons (and Lords), but collating data for petitions to other authorities will be more difficult and likely to depend on sampling surviving material. Gaining an indication of the shifting scale of demonstrating is likely to be much more difficult given the lack of official sources formally registering such activity and the problems in defining a demonstration. However, the Prodat project used random sampling of newspapers to identify and count forms of protest in West Germany in the 1950–​97 period, to identify patterns of protest, test theories of collective action, and relate these to other sources to understand the context and conditions for such protests.46 The accessibility of digital newspapers makes it more feasible than ever to count the number of demonstrations for selected historical periods. The comparison with pre-​digital research is sobering. Using what was then cutting-​edge technology, it took Charles Tilly and a team of researchers more than 20 years to count more than 8,000 ‘contentious gatherings’ in south-​east England for 20 selected years within the 1758–​1820 period and provide a national count for 1828–​34.47 Mapping the broad chronological contours and shifting scale of petitioning and demonstrating in modern Britain is necessary and would establish a foundation for further, more specific research. Second, in developing a general understanding of petitioning and demonstrating it must always be remembered that these are universal forms of political activity. Placing 44 

M. Knights, ‘The Lowest Degree of Freedom: The Right to Petition, 1640–​1800’, in R. Huzzey, ed., Pressure and Parliament: From Civil War to Civil Society (Oxford, forthcoming); Navickas, Protest, pp. 51–​99. 45  J. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790–​1850 (New York, 1994), pp. 3–​28. 46  D. Rucht, ‘On the Sociology of Protest Marches’, in Reiss, Street as Stage, pp. 49–​60, at 52, 57. 47 Tilly, Popular Contention, pp. 62–​87.

Petitioning and Demonstrating    463 the modern British experience within a wider comparative perspective, both in terms of time and place, will sharpen what was different or exceptional and what was not in British political development. In the case of petitioning, the most immediate comparisons would be the rich volume of work on eighteenth-​century petitioning and lobbying in Britain and the Atlantic empire by Joanna Innes, Julian Hoppit, and Mark Knights, among others. This work has sought to place petitioning within the wider context of interactions with Parliament and the state—​including its use by different groups, such as economic interest groups—​and move beyond a focus on the instrumental use of petitioning within particular campaigns.48 At a more conceptual level, engaging with social science work on collective action, contentious politics, and social movements may be fruitful, in terms of thinking of petitioning and demonstrating as part of a broader, shifting repertoire of popular political activity.49 While providing a general picture of the shifting chronology, contexts, and uses of petitioning and demonstrating is an essential starting point to enable further research, it is clearly not sufficient. There are a number of specific research questions revolving around Britain’s transition to democracy that deserve attention. What is the relationship between petitioning, demonstrating, and other non-​electoral forms of political participation, on the one hand, and democratization on the other? Work on the late nineteenth and early twentieth-​century movements for home rule, land reform, women’s suffrage, and free trade has emphasized the importance of the ideas of democracy and citizenship within these movements.50 At the same time, Britain’s evolution into a mass democracy by 1918 now seems a highly contingent process tinged with peculiarities, such as the survival of university seats until 1945 and Scottish burgh districts until 1983.51 Scholars now emphasize the redistribution clauses of the 1832 Reform Act rather than electoral expansion, and Robert Saunders has demonstrated that the Second Reform Act was intended by parliamentarians to put off the coming of democracy rather than install it.52 Classic 48  Innes, ‘People and Power’; J. Hoppit, ‘Petitions, Economic Legislation and Interest Groups in Britain, 1660–​1800’, in Huzzey, ed., Pressure and Parliament; Knights, ‘Participation and Representation before Democracy’; M. Knights, ‘The 1780 Protestant Petitions and the Culture of Petitioning’, in I. Haywood and J. Seed, eds., The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-​ Century Britain (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 46–​68. 49  For a recent overview, see G. Edwards, Social Movements and Protest (Cambridge, 2012). 50  P. Readman, Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity and the Politics of Land, 1880–​1914 (Woodbridge, 2008); E. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–​1906 (Cambridge, 2007); F. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2008); S.S. Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics, 1900–​1918 (Cambridge, 1986). 51  J. Meisel, Knowledge and Power: The Parliamentary Representation of Universities in Britain and the Empire (Oxford, 2011); M. Dyer, ‘Burgh Districts and the Representation of Scotland, 1707–​1983’, Parliamentary History, 15 (1996), 287–​307. 52  J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT, 1993), pp. 72–​3; P. Salmon, ‘The English Reform Legislation, 1831–​2’, in D.R. Fisher, ed., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1820–​1832 (7 vols, Cambridge, 2009), vol. i, pp. 372–​412; R. Saunders, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics: The Making of the Second Reform Act, 1848–​1867 (Farnham, 2011).

464   Henry Miller features of the modern British political system, such as single-​member constituencies or the secret ballot, were contested and far from inevitable.53 Studying petitioning and demonstrating can help to explain Britain’s own peculiar and highly contingent route to democracy by shifting the focus away from extensions of the franchise and electoral changes to thinking about how non-​electoral participation provided a training ground for democratic citizenship. Recent political science work on American women’s anti-​ slavery petitioning suggests that the practice of canvassing led to wider activism in reform causes and developed key skills such as advocacy, organization, and network building: in short, skills that underpin an active citizenry in a democratic society.54 The strong tradition of popular, active, constitutional activity in terms of petitioning and demonstrating arguably had an important legacy for Britain’s transition to democracy. Future scholars should examine the relationship between petitioning and demonstrating, on the one hand, and Britain’s transition to democracy on the other. In particular, what was the relationship between electoral expansion and these popular non-​electoral forms of political participation? After the extensions of the franchise in 1885 and 1918, who petitions? How are petitioning and demonstrating linked to conventional electoral and party politics? As the electorate expands after 1885, which groups use petitions, and are these the same people who are most active in electoral and party politics (for example, local activists)? Are the activists who organize petitions for local option or other forms of temperance legislation the same people who are the key workers in local Liberalism? What was the legacy of the nineteenth-​century culture of petitioning and public meetings? Does the vibrant political culture and civil society of inter-​war Britain55 owe something to the earlier traditions of popular political participation through non-​electoral means? To what extent do letters to MPs or inter-​war protest marches draw on the tradition of petitioning and demonstrating?56 Third, and shifting to the question of how these issues might be researched, modern British political historians are well placed to examine petitioning and demonstrating through using many of the culturally sensitive methods associated with the new political history. Petitions and demonstrations are key ways in which collective identities are articulated, expressed, and mobilized for political ends. Recent work on British political history, and social and cultural history more generally, has

53   M. Roberts, ‘Resisting “Arithmocracy”: Parliament, Community and the Third Reform Act’, Journal of British Studies, 50 (2011), 381–​409; M. and T. Crook, ‘Reforming Voting Practices in a Global Age: The Making and Remaking of the Modern Secret Ballot in Britain, France and the United States, 1600–​1950’, Past and Present, 212 (2011), 199–​237; M. and T. Crook, ‘The Advent of the Secret Ballot in Britain and France, 1789–​1914: From Public Assembly to Private Compartment’, History, 92 (2007), 449–​7 1. 54  D. Carpenter and C.D. Moore, ‘When Canvassers Became Activists: Antislavery Petitioning and the Political Mobilization of American Women’, American Political Science Review, 108 (2014), 79–​98. 55  H. McCarthy, ‘Parties, Voluntary Associations and Democratic Politics in Interwar Britain’, Historical Journal, 50 (2007), 891–​912; H. McCarthy, ‘Whose Democracy? Histories of British Political Culture between the Wars’, Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 221–​38. 56  P. Norton, Back from Westminster: British Members of Parliament and their Constituents (Lexington, KY, 1993), pp. 41, 43–​4; Reiss, ‘Marching on the Capital’.

Petitioning and Demonstrating    465 displayed a sophisticated sensitivity to class, race, and gender identities.57 Petitions and demonstrations would provide rich sources through which to examine these identities, as well as imperial identities, and how they were mobilized in the public arena. Other approaches that would be a good fit with the subject material would include examining the rituals and symbolic practices—​a method often employed by historians of popular radicalism such as James Epstein and Paul Pickering—​associated with petitions and demonstrations.58 While we know a lot about the rituals prevalent in electoral culture from the work of Frank O’Gorman, James Vernon, and Jon Lawrence,59 a broad study of rituals associated with petitioning and demonstration remains to be written. Such an approach would also chime with the recent ‘performative turn’ and the emphasis on theatricality in popular politics.60 Focusing on the materiality of petitions would also be interesting. Petitions were often painstakingly assembled material texts, the product of much labour and many hands and, in some case, many months’ work. Petitioners invested much in petitions as material documents, not least emotionally. Suffragist canvassers were advised to use pencils rather than pens for signatures in order to avoid ink smudging and blotting in the rain, and great efforts were made to ensure that petitions conformed to the exact format required by Parliament.61 Demonstrations and protests have frequently made use of material objects such as banners, mugs, pictures, and prints, and have spawned commemorative memorabilia. Material culture, of which political historians have become increasingly aware,62 offers further ways to integrate the study of petitioning and demonstrating with the new political history and political culture. Another approach familiar to political historians that could be applied to this subject would be focusing on specific petitioning or demonstrating communities, whether defined in geographic or social terms. Excellent examples of such approaches already exist in Joshua Civin’s work on petitioning communities in early nineteenth-​century Liverpool, or Katrina Navickas’s recent analysis of currents of radical activity within

57  C. Hall, K. McClelland, and J. Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race and Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000). 58 Epstein, Radical Expression; J. Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford, CA, 2003); P. Pickering, ‘Class without Words: Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement’, Past and Present, 112 (1986), 144–​62; P. Pickering and A. Tyrrell, The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-​Corn Law League (London, 2000), pp. 191–​216. 59  F. O’Gorman, ‘Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meaning of Elections in England, 1780–​1860’, Past and Present, 135 (1992), 79–​115; J. Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009); Vernon, Politics and the People, pp. 80–​104. 60  P. Yeandle, K. Newey, and J. Richards, eds., Politics, Performance and Popular Culture: Theatre and Society in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Manchester, 2016). 61  The Common Cause, 25 Nov. 1909, 436. 62  M. Nixon, G. Pentland, and M. Roberts, ‘The Material Culture of Scottish Reform Politics, c.1820–​ 84’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 32 (2012), 28–​49; S. Morgan, ‘Material Culture and the Politics of Personality in Early Victorian England’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17 (2012), 127–​46; K. Navickas, ‘“That Sash Will Hang You”: Political Clothing and Adornment in England, 1780–​1840’, Journal of British Studies, 49 (2010), 540–​65.

466   Henry Miller north Manchester.63 What tensions existed between petitioners and demonstrators, which sections of the community did they draw support from, and how did this shift over time? Petitions could be foci for unity but also division within communities, and often provoked contestation and controversy. For example, in 1816, the Noblemen, Clergymen, Gentlemen and Freeholders of Wiltshire petitioned the Commons to ‘disavow the principles’ of a reform petition sent from the county.64 Petitions on religious or ecclesiastical issues frequently reflected denominational divisions within communities. Petitioning always involved making claims to represent wider communities, whether geographical or social, to Parliament. More generally, an approach on geographical communities would build on the strong tradition of local and regional studies within modern British political history. Perhaps the greatest potential for further research lies in deploying the linguistic approaches that are the best-known element of the new political history. Much of this work has been distinguished by a close attention and sensitivity to political language and rhetoric, particularly that used by politicians and party activists in speeches and printed political communication. Yet for much of the period to 1914, petitioning was the most popular and accessible form of linguistic communication between citizens, or ‘the people’, and the state and politicians. The close textual analysis of petitions, where they survive, would repay analysis, particularly in relating them to the popular political languages and different political traditions (liberalism, conservatism, and radicalism) that have been much studied. Does the language of petitions reflect or differ from the political discourses on which historians have generally focused? For example, do petitions for parliamentary reform in the nineteenth century reflect a gradual blending of radical and liberal languages? Finally, the emergence of digital humanities—​the ever-​increasing amount of primary sources available digitally and the application of software and computer programmes to exploit such resources—​opens up a number of potential avenues in this field. The caveat is that modern British political historians will need to develop their own skills to exploit such methods; otherwise it may be left to geographers and political and social scientists to reap the benefits. First, corpus linguistic analysis of the texts of petitions would enable the analysis of the language of petitions on a scale beyond that achievable by any lone scholar using more conventional methods. Luke Blaxill’s pioneering work on electoral rhetoric points the way here in showing the possibilities.65 Second, the quantitative and spatial mapping of demonstrations and petitions using Geographical Information System (GIS) technology would be a powerful 63 

J. Civin, ‘Slaves, Sati and Sugar: Constructing Imperial Identity through Liverpool Petition Struggles’, in J. Hoppit, ed., Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660–​1850 (Manchester, 2003), pp. 187–​205; Navickas, Protest, pp. 106–​17. 64  Commons Journal, 71 (26 Apr. 1816), 310. 65  L. Blaxill, ‘Quantifying the Language of British Politics, 1880–​1910’, Historical Research, 86 (2013), 313–​41; ‘Joseph Chamberlain and the Third Reform Act: A Reassessment of the “Unauthorized Programme”’, Journal of British Studies, 54 (2015), 88–​117; L. Blaxhill and T. Saleh, ‘The Electoral Dynamics of Conservatism, 1885-1914: “Negative Unionism Reconsidered”’, Historical Journal, 59 (2016), 417–45.

Petitioning and Demonstrating    467 tool for future researchers. Through revealing spatial patterns and changes, historical GIS would offer fresh perspectives on the study of the popular support for political movements and parties. Such an approach does not undermine the need for qualitative historical research. As Ian Gregory and Paul Ell have noted, while revealing spatial patterns, historical GIS is ‘rarely capable of identifying the processes causing them’.66 Finally, the growing interest in social network analysis could also be applied to historical actors, revealing the invisible connections to different people and groups within social and political movements. Petitions (especially signatory lists where they survive) and demonstrations provide sources for social network analysis, which again can offer new insights and identify new questions that complement rather than supersede the methods political historians currently use.67 Katrina Navickas’s Protest and the Politics of Space and Place (2016) provides an excellent example of what future research might look like. Informed by the spatial turn and making judicious use of geographic mapping, Navickas re-​examines radical and Chartist protest, engaging with the huge historical scholarship and literature on social movements. A sensitivity to the importance of space and place with regard to radical movements, and the shifting legal and social context for popular protest, enables her to say something new and fresh about one of the most studied subjects in modern British political history. At the same time, the book is rigorously grounded in thorough archival research. Navickas builds on recent strengths of work on British political culture, while being open to new theoretical and conceptual approaches and new techniques. As this chapter has suggested, petitioning and demonstrating have been central to modern British political life and deserve to be integrated within general and specific studies. As subjects, they can enrich existing understandings of political participation, representation, and development, and are exciting areas for future research within the wider, vibrant field of modern British political history.

Further Reading C. Leys, ‘Petitioning in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Political Studies, 3 (1955), 45–​64. H. Miller, ‘Petition! Petition!! Petition!!! Petitioning and the Organization of Public Opinion in Britain, c. 1800–​ 1850’, in H. te Velde and M. Janse, eds., Organizing

66 

I.N. Gregory and P.S. Ell, Historical GIS: Technologies, Methodologies and Scholarship (Cambridge, 2007), p. 19. 67  C. Lipp and L. Krempel, ‘Petitions and the Social Context of Political Mobilization in the Revolution of 1848/​49: A Microhistorical Actor-​Centred Network Analysis’, International Review of Social History, 46 (2001), 151–​70; G. Edwards, ‘Infectious Innovations? The Diffusion of Tactical Innovation in Social Movement Networks: The Case of Suffragette Militancy’, Social Movement Studies, 13 (2014), 48–​69.

468   Henry Miller Democracy:  Reflections on the Rise of Political Organizations in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, 2017), pp. 43-​61. K. Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–​1848 (Manchester, 2016). M. Reiss, ed., The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2007). L. Tickner, Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–​14 (Chicago, 1987). S. Wright, ‘Populism and Downing Street E-​Petitions: Connective Action, Hybridity and the Changing Nature of Organizing’, Political Communication, 32 (2015), 414–​33.

Pa rt  V

C HA L L E N G E S

chapter 27

Demo cr ac y James Thompson

In twenty-​first-​century Britain the value of democracy has often been taken for granted. Those who reject democracy have not been deemed participants in legitimate debate. This has recently been made explicit: official guidance on the Counter-​Terrorism and Security Act of 2015 includes within its definition of extremism ‘vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values including democracy’. The complex, contested history of ‘democracy’ in Britain over the past two centuries, embracing decades of deep opposition and perceived foreignness, fits ill with its elevation as a basic British value. Britain’s contribution to the global history of democracy is now oft-​proclaimed and confidently celebrated, while the idea of ‘democracy’ is caught up in notions of Britishness. The insertion of democracy into enumerations of ‘fundamental British values’, alongside the likes of ‘the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs’, recalls Moyn’s emphasis on the novelty of similar litanies of human rights.1 Distinct values embedded in complex, frequently fraught histories are converted into aspects of a singular shared inheritance. The vision of the state embodied in the 2015 Act is individualist, reflecting its immediate ideological origins. However, the history of the relationship between democracy and national identity is longer, though also complex. In one sense, it is a story of how democracy was made safe for Britain. In the twentieth century, the institutions and practices of representative government that had secured considerable legitimacy in the nineteenth century came to be firmly identified with ‘democracy’, and their established links with national identity attached to a political system once considered inherently foreign. This process involved enormous increases in the electorate, but many of earlier democrats’ hopes for institutional reform were to be disappointed. For some, this helped explain the contrast between democracy’s theoretical dominance and the reality of reduced electoral turnout and enhanced voter cynicism in Britain at the end of the twentieth century.

1 

S. Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, 2010).

472   James Thompson The story of democracy in Britain cannot, however, be reduced to a single plot line. The consolidation of democracy as an ideal in Britain was not a single, straightforward process. For much of the nineteenth century, Britain was not regarded as a democracy, and British politicians disliked democracy. The spread of more positive appraisals of democracy, and of recognition of Britain as a democracy, did not eliminate misgivings. There were recurrent periods of significant anxiety about democracy, notably in the 1890s, 1930s, and 1970s. Democracy has long been cited as an essentially contested concept, and different groups and political traditions struggled over its meaning throughout our period.2 Most obviously, but perhaps also most fundamentally, the common association of democracy with equality could be understood in a political sense, but also in a social or economic one. The connection with equality was staunchly resisted by those who wished to privilege liberty, but it was difficult to deny convincingly that equality had something to do with democracy, and the boundaries between the political and the social were themselves both debated and shifting. While Britain’s size seemed to preclude direct democracy on the Athenian model, the vision of a self-​governing people raised fundamental questions about the nature of representation. Historians have tended to focus principally on undeniably important debates over who should have the vote, and of how those votes should be aggregated; but contemporaries were often as concerned about the extent and quality of participation, stressing the necessity of ‘discussion’, which A.D. Lindsay distinguished from consent, anticipating subsequent articulations of deliberative democracy.3 The 1990s explosion of writing about civil society and the public sphere recapitulated long-​standing disputes about the social conditions and cultural practices underpinning democracy, much as controversy over the economic basis of, and limits on, democracy recalled earlier and recurrent disagreements.4 The contestability of democracy as an ideal has run deep in these arguments: agreement, for instance, that a rich associational life made democracy more real did not preclude divergence over whether a given association was a sinister, narrow interest group or an expression of civic-​minded solidarity. The historiography of democracy has been shaped by the complex and contested historical trajectory of democracy in Britain. In the twentieth century, much historical writing adopted a threshold-​based approach, seeking to date the time at which Britain became a democracy and then to explain democracy’s arrival. These accounts often displayed both teleology and triumphalism, contributing to the very process they described in their emphasis on the Britishness of democracy in Britain. More recently, the milestones in the story of the ‘triumph of democracy’—​especially the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867—​have been revisited with a contrasting stress on the limits of the

2 

W.B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56 (1956), 167–​ 98; A. Macintyre, ‘The Essential Contestability of Some Social Concepts’, Ethics, 84 (1973), 1–​9. 3  A.D. Lindsay, The Essentials of Democracy (2nd edn., Oxford, 1935), p. 23. 4  For reflections on economics and democracy, see J. Dunn, ‘Conclusion’, in J. Dunn, ed., Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508BC to 1993 (Oxford, 1993).

Democracy   473 suffrage, and on the interdependence of exclusion and inclusion.5 Important work has downplayed the scale of enfranchisement in 1832, and demonstrated the inadequacy of the nineteenth-​century notion of 1832 as a massive injection of new middle-​class voters. The extensive historiography of the Reform Acts has been attentive to the significance of the distribution of seats; to the opportunity, as well as the right, to vote; and to the act of voting itself, particularly its secrecy—​all increasingly viewed through the perspective of a multi-​national state.6 This literature has delineated the rich range of arguments deployed in debates over the franchise, which could, in their assumptions, be very distant from later understandings of democracy. The emergence of the male political subject, and the subsequent advent of votes for women—​first at the local, then at the national level—​have been charted through the application of gender as a category of analysis.7 The resultant historiography is both diverse and illuminating, but shares with earlier approaches an emphasis on the vote as a marker of democracy. In tracking the changing meanings of and attitudes to ‘democracy’, the historiography of the vote raises important questions about the retrospective application of present-​day conceptions of democracy to earlier periods. Alongside assessments of when Britain became a democracy, historians—​and more so political scientists—​have been interested in how democratic Britain was and is.8 These approaches are also deeply rooted in the historical debate about democracy, especially arguments about equality, participation, and leaders’ accountability to voters and non-​voters. The advent of ‘social democracy’ as an ideal in the nineteenth century intensified scrutiny of the distribution of resources and appraisals of democracy as a matter of degree. ‘Spectrum’ approaches, especially in political science, have frequently been comparative, evaluating British democracy against other states, usually with a focus on the recent past. The comparative approach is, of course, itself of considerable vintage; evident in comparisons with Ancient Greece in the earlier nineteenth century, it came to be most commonly manifested in discussion of the United States and France. The 5 

F. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England 1734–​ 1832 (Oxford, 1989); M. Taylor, ‘Empire and Parliamentary Reform: The 1832 Reform Act Revisited’, in A. Burns and J. Innes, eds., Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–​1850 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 295–​311; J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London, 1993); C. Hall, K. McClelland, and J. Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender, and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000). 6   D. Beales, ‘The Electorate before and after 1832: The Right to Vote, and the Opportunity’, Parliamentary Affairs, 11 (1992), 139–​50; M. Crook and T. Crook, ‘Reforming Voting Practices in a Global Age: The Making and Remaking of the Modern Secret Ballot in Britain, France and the United States, c. 1600–​1950’, Past and Present, 212 (2011), 199–​237; M. Roberts, ‘Resisting “Arithmocracy”: Parliament, Community, and the Third Reform Act’, Journal of British Studies, 1 (2011), pp. 381–​409. 7  S.S. Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain, 1900–​1918 (Cambridge, 1986); S. Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–​1914 (Princeton, NJ, 1987); M. Pugh, The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, 1866–​1914 (Oxford, 2000); J. Gottlieb and R. Toye, eds., The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender, and Politics in Britain, 1918–​1945 (Basingstoke, 2013). 8  For example, S. Ringen, What Democracy Is For: On Freedom and Moral Government (Princeton, NJ, 2007).

474   James Thompson extensive discussion of the prospects of democracy and fate of parliaments in the 1930s embraced Europe and America, as the legacy of the First World War, the creation of novel international institutions, and global economic dislocation fostered an emphasis on comparisons and connections. What is perhaps most striking about work on comparative levels of democratization is how even more procedural, and pared-​back, conceptions of democracy lead in practice to consideration of the economic, social, and cultural underpinnings of political practices. If studies of democracy in Britain have underplayed the elusiveness of their subject, this has not led to a lack of prospective explanations for democratization. The relationship between capitalism and democracy has engendered a large literature, though one sharply divided over whether the two are symbiotic, opposed, or indeed unrelated.9 Historians have paid particular attention to the ideological origins of democracy, especially its relationship with liberalism. They have, however, disagreed sharply about whether Victorian liberalism fostered or retarded democratization in Britain.10 Explanations of the growth of social democracy have been myriad, though here too the character of British liberalism has figured prominently—​along with the impact of war, the growth of the labour movement, and the structure of taxation.11 Much of this literature mirrors the causal stories told more generally about democratization. Perhaps more distinctive has been the concern with the comparative stability of democracy in Britain. Here, once more, historians have often echoed contemporary accounts, not least the discussions of the 1930s in which, alongside trepidation about future prospects, can be found putative explanations of democracy’s resilience in Britain and the United States. For Lindsay, the common religious heritage of the seventeenth century was crucial, along with the vitality of associational life and an associated capacity for tolerance.12 Familiar motifs from nineteenth-​century debates were recycled, complete with quotations from Bagehot, noting the British genius for politics.13 The historiographical debate has been more nuanced, not least in its use of an imperial frame, recognizing the existence of more and drastically less democratic polities within the empire and interrogating

9 

F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992); G. Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–​2000 (Oxford, 2002); J. Dunn, Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy (London, 2005). 10 Parry, Rise and Fall; E.F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–​1880 (Cambridge, 1992); E.F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–​1906 (Cambridge, 2007); P. Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-​Century England (Cambridge, 1994); P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003). 11  M. Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978); P.F. Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978); J. Harris, ‘Political Thought and the Welfare State 1870–​1940: An Intellectual Framework for British Social Policy’, Past and Present, 135 (1992), 116–​41; M. Daunton, ‘Payment and Participation: Welfare and State Formation in Britain, 1900–​1951’, Past and Present, 150 (1996), 169–​216; N. Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (Basingstoke, 2002); M. Francis, Ideas and Policies under Labour, 1945–​51: Building a New Britain (Manchester, 1997). 12 Lindsay, Essentials of Democracy, pp. 5–​6. 13  R. Bassett, The Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy (London, 1935).

Democracy   475 their impact on the British state.14 Historians have, though, often addressed themes that loomed large in earlier debates, as in the valuable literature on Britain’s associational culture in the inter-​war period, or in discussions of media plurality or the lack of same.15 Historians of political thought have long been interested in democracy in Britain, but recent years have seen an intensification of their labours. The contested, elusive, and inconstant character of democracy talk has been central to these histories, especially for students of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.16 The foundational debates of the 1790s have been discussed at length, and the views of canonical thinkers on democracy, not least their responses to Tocqueville, repeatedly surveyed.17 Over the long run, the embrace of representation as integral rather than opposed to democracy has been much remarked, along with a distinctively British identification of democracy with parliamentary sovereignty. Indeed, while the history of opposition to plurality voting in Britain was long and often fervent, so was that of applauding the system’s tendency to deliver decisive election results as making democracy more functional and resilient. Struck by these strange developments, intellectual historians have devoted greater attention to the trajectory of ‘democracy’ in the nineteenth than in the twentieth century, focusing particularly on Chartism, the making of the Second Reform Act, attitudes towards America, and critiques of imperialism as anti-​democratic.18 Champions of greater democracy from within the early labour and women’s movements have attracted

14 

On empire and the inter-​war limits to democracy, see P. Satia, ‘Inter-​War Agnotology: Empire, Democracy and the Production of Ignorance’, in L. Beers and G. Thomas, eds., Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-​Building in Britain between the Wars (London, 2011), pp. 209–​27. 15  For contrasting readings of inter-​war associational culture, R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–​51 (Oxford, 1998) and H. McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism c.1918–​45 (Manchester, 2011). 16  J. Innes and M. Philp, eds., Re-​Imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750–​1850 (Oxford, 2013). 17  M. Philp, ‘Talking about Democracy: Britain in the 1790s’, in Innes and Philp, Re-​Imagining Democracy, pp. 101–​13; G. L. Green, ‘John Thelwall’s Radical Vision of Democracy’, in S. Poole, ed., John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon (London, 2009), pp. 71–​82; F. Prochaska, Eminent Victorians on American Democracy (Oxford, 2012); N. Urbanati, Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (Chicago, 2007); H.S. Jones, Victorian Political Thought (Basingstoke, 2000); E.F. Biagini, ‘Liberalism and Direct Democracy: John Stuart Mill and the Model of Ancient Athens’, in E.F. Biagini, ed., Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 21–​45. 18  P. Gurney, ‘The Democratic Idiom: Languages of Democracy in the Chartist Movement’, Journal of Modern History, 86 (2014), 566–​602; R. Saunders, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics: The Making of the Second Reform Act (Farnham, 2011); B. Kinser, The American Civil War in the Shaping of British Democracy (Farnham, 2011); R. Saunders, ‘Democracy’, in D. Craig and J. Thompson, eds., Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 142–​67; E. Dzelzainis and Ruth Livesey, eds., The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture (Farnham, 2013); D. Bell, ‘Democracy and Empire: J. A. Hobson, Leonard Hobhouse, and the Crisis of Liberalism’, in I. Hall and L. Hill, eds., British International Thinkers from Hobbes to Namier (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 181–​206; J. Thompson, ‘Democracy, Monism and the Common Good: Rethinking William Clarke’s Political Religion’, History of European Ideas, 38 (2012), 233–​47.

476   James Thompson attention, with a growing recognition of the spiritual significance of the democratic ideal among its radical proponents.19 The domestication of the idea of ‘democracy’ in twentieth-​century Britain has received less searching scrutiny, though there is a substantial literature dealing with advocates and, more recently, critics of ‘social democracy’.20 Arguments for industrial democracy, notably those of G.D.H. Cole, have been analysed, and some coverage given to the co-​operative movement’s attempts to institutionalize consumer democracy. Wartime propaganda, both domestic and overseas, for democracy has not been neglected, but its relationship to longer-​term developments remains unclear. Recent writing about ‘property-​owning democracy’ has revisited the twentieth-​century version of the recurring debate about the economic foundations of democratic stability and participation. While important work has been done in all these areas, we lack the more integrated accounts of the contested meanings of ‘democracy’ that scholars of the nineteenth century have supplied.21 This chapter seeks to bring out the interrelated quality of twentieth-​century discussions of democracy, drawing especially on debates in the 1930s and 1970s. Twentieth-​century disputes often invoked nineteenth-​century writers, particularly J.S. Mill, and need to be located in the longer history of the British conversation about democracy. As historians have increasingly acknowledged, the British way of thinking about democracy was both influenced by discussions elsewhere and informed by comparisons with, and imaginings of, other polities throughout our period. The rest of the chapter is in three parts. It starts with the history of debating democracy in Britain. It then turns to the British way of doing democracy. It argues that the former is essential to making sense of the latter. The second section aims to show how the British have done democracy, departing from a preoccupation with when, or how far, Britain became democratic and drawing upon an emerging cultural history of democratic practices. The final section offers thoughts on the prospects for the historiography of democracy in Britain, and upon what its development so far says about the state of modern British political history.

I The language of democracy was a site of struggle in modern Britain. The terms of that contest changed over time in far from straightforward ways, but the battle endured. At 19  L. Barrow and I. Bullock, Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement (Cambridge, 1996); M. Bevir, ‘Republicanism, Socialism and Democracy in Britain: The Origins of the Radical Left’, Journal of Social History, 34 (2000), 351–​68; M. Bevir, ‘British Socialism and American Romanticism’, English Historical Review, 110 (1995), 878–​901. 20  On the former, see the works listed in n. 11; on the latter, see especially B. Jackson and R. Saunders,  eds., Making Thatcher’s Britain (Cambridge, 2012); B. Jackson, ‘At the Origins of Neo-​Liberalism: The Free Economy and the Strong State, 1930–​1947’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 129–​51; R. Middleton, ‘Brittan on Britain: “The Economic Contradictions of Democracy” Redux’, Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 1141–​68. 21  For the nineteenth century, see, for instance, Saunders, ‘Democracy’, pp. 142–​67.

Democracy   477 the close of the twentieth century the rhetoric of democracy was more central to and prized in political culture than it had been for most of the nineteenth century, but its contours differed also. Its association with one part of the ‘mixed constitution’, or with a social group to be contrasted with ‘aristocracy’, vanished, while universal adult suffrage was now taken to be a pre-​requisite. The establishment of equal suffrage in 1928 is part of the background—​along with the Depression and the demise of parliaments abroad—​to the debates of the 1930s in which the economic basis and performance of democracy was more prominent than in earlier discussions. Arguably, the incorporation of ‘democracy’ into narratives about national identity and parliamentary government blunted its earlier radical edge, but diagnoses of British institutions as insufficiently democratic scarcely disappeared, as criticisms of prime ministerial power under Thatcher and Blair, post-​war critiques of party hierarchy, and analyses of male dominance in the House of Commons exemplify.22 If, at the close of the twentieth century, insulating aspects of economic policy-​making—​notably the Bank of England—​from democracy became conventional wisdom within the political class, this was but more evidence that the enduring struggle over the meaning of democracy had not ended. Arguments about suffrage are one much mined source for nineteenth-​century conceptions of democracy. However, it has been rightly noted that the language of democracy was far from dominant in these discussions. It was typically opponents of enfranchisement that raised the spectre of democracy, while proponents denied the charge. ‘Democracy’ was deployed in a variety of ways: as political system, as social group, as cultural trend. In its more narrowly political uses, it could refer to direct democracy, or to the size of the electorate. In the latter case, it could mean adult male suffrage, or much more rarely adult suffrage, but it was also frequently used to denote rule by the many or the poor.23 This range of usage remained evident in the debates over the Third Reform Act; it is striking how common the use of ‘democracy’ to refer to a social group (implicitly or explicitly contrasted with aristocracy) remained throughout the nineteenth century. There is here a sharp contrast with discussion in 1918 in which massive enfranchisement was regularly advocated upon democratic principles, and in which expressions of distaste for democracy were rare. The parliamentary argument about proportional representation, for instance, was conducted with reference to democratic goals, with fewer claims about the efficiency of strong government than in previous such debates. This reflected wartime rhetoric where traditional fears about the fighting capacity of democracy were addressed by contrasts between democracy and autocracy in which the equality of sacrifice ensured by the former supplied the basis for victory.24 Democratic rhetoric was, however, less prevalent than it would be in the

22  On prime ministers and democracy, see R. Quinault, British Prime Ministers and Democracy: From Disraeli to Blair (London, 2011). 23  For some context, see J. Thompson, ‘Modern Liberty Redefined’, in G. Stedman Jones and G. Claeys, eds., The Cambridge History of Nineteenth Century Political Thought (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 720–​47. 24  A. Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (Cambridge, 2008); D. Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda in First World War Britain: The National War Aims Committee and

478   James Thompson Second World War, while many Conservative constituency associations were unimpressed by the Representation of the People Act, which itself retained elements of older conceptions linking representation to taxation.25 Through the expansion of university franchises, the 1918 Act offset some of its reduction in the number of plural voters, and it is significant that it was the post-​war Labour government that established equality in the number of votes per person in 1948.26 The most celebrated case against democracy made in the Reform debates was that of Robert Lowe in the 1860s. His effort to frame the issue in terms of democracy was designed to put his opponents on the defensive. Lowe adopted a Comtean schema in decrying democracy as founded on ‘metaphysical’ doctrines of unclear meaning, contrasting these with the ‘experimental’ methods adopted by ‘the House of Commons on almost every subject except Reform’. Lowe was a meritocratic modernizer, which was one reason fellow Liberals felt the need to respond at length to him, and he sought to present democracy as a regressive regime, advocated on the basis of obsolete arguments in ‘which a term appropriate to the rights arising under civil society is transferred to moral considerations antecedent to it’. Like many others, Lowe appealed to Tocqueville, and—​ again like others—​he found in Tocqueville what he sought, namely the inevitability of democracy if the franchise was enlarged. He praised England as the home of ‘intermediate institutions’, but argued these would be extinguished by democracy. The traditional argument about the corruption of democracy was reiterated, but it was democracy’s anti-​Smithian political economy and redistributive tendencies that most exercised Lowe. Responding to Gladstone, he insisted: ‘whatever we learnt at Oxford, we learnt that Democracy was a form of government in which the poor, being many, governed the whole country, including the rich, who were few, and for the benefit of the poor’.27 As with Lowe’s case against, the case for enfranchisement on the grounds of democracy was about more than the composition of the electorate. This was apparent in Chartism, which did much, along with images of France and America, to shape a sense of the contemporary character of democratic politics. Continuing the radical reappropriation of the term ‘democrat’ from its Burkean ignominy, Chartists constructed a programme in which political reform was essential to the remaking of a corrupt, aristocratic

Civilian Morale (Liverpool, 2012); D. Runciman, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present (Princeton, NJ, 2013). 25  D. Thackeray, Conservatism for the Democratic Age: Conservative Cultures and the Challenge of Mass Politics in Early Twentieth Century England (Manchester, 2013), p. 102. 26  J. Meisel, Knowledge and Power: The Parliamentary Representation of Universities in Britain and the Empire (Oxford, 2011), p. 41. 27  R. Lowe, Speeches and Letters on Reform (2nd edn., London, 1867), pp. 4–​5, 13–​14, 35, 158, 105. On Lowe’s thinking more broadly, see J. Parry, ‘Lowe, Robert, Viscount Sherbrooke (1811–​1892)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2011, ; B. Hilton, ‘Utilitarian or Neo-​Foxite Whig? Robert Lowe as Chancellor of the Exchequer’, in E.H.H. Green and D. Tanner, eds., The Strange Survival of Liberal England: Political Leaders, Moral Values and the Reception of Economic Debate (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 37–​61.

Democracy   479 state, but was also part of a broader democratic tide of popular enlightenment.28 Politically, access to the vote was necessary but not sufficient: the abolition of property restrictions and the payment of MPs was essential to democratize the Commons, while annual parliaments, often seen as a hallmark of the pre-​Norman constitution, were needed to tether the executive to the will of the people. The Chartist insistence on free and equally weighted votes differed markedly from widely held conceptions of Parliament as representing interests and communities. The popularity of open voting, and the castigation of secret voting as ‘un-​English’, reveals the role of notions of national character in perceptions of the electoral system.29 As J.S. Mill’s rejection of the ballot illustrates, adherence to open voting was not the preserve of the right, nor was it incompatible with support for democratic principles.30 The legacy of Chartism was complex, as the chequered history of the demand for equal electoral districts testifies. Aspects of its vision, and of earlier democratic vistas, surfaced in later Labour politics, not least the importance attached to sending working men to the House of Commons in order to represent the labour interest. Edwardian election addresses from Labour candidates could proclaim the identity of democrat, most often contrasted with the power of the hereditary principle institutionalized in the House of Lords. Later Labour appeals to democratization could, though, also revive the demand for shorter parliaments, and return to the suffrage question.31 The attention given to the lodger franchise in the labour press was prompted by concerns that the post-​1884 franchise, while wide, still discriminated against younger working men. There was wide-​ranging debate across the left about democratizing Britain both within and without the Labour party. This embraced enthusiasm for the second ballot, and often linked self-​determination and democracy through support for home rule. It was centrally concerned with the role of political parties in an era of striking developments in party organization and widespread discussion of the character and prospects of the party system.32 While visions of a deeper democracy were rarely confined to political institutions, they generally looked to build upon the parliamentary system, often putting considerable store upon the underlying spirit with which the mechanism was worked. The rise of extra-​parliamentary party organization generated much discussion in late Victorian Britain. Both critics and champions of the ‘caucus’ could employ the discourse of democracy, though it was the language of ‘public opinion’ that was more often adopted 28 

Gurney, ‘The Democratic Idiom’; Saunders, ‘Democracy’. On national character, see P. Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven and London, 2006); J.P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–​1886 (Cambridge, 2006). 30  J. Thompson, British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion’ (Cambridge, 2013). 31  Election Addresses by J. Keir Hardie, John Williams, and J.T. Brownie in the People’s History Museum, Manchester, General Elections 1892–​1906, LP/​ELEC/​1906/​1. 32  On debates about party, see J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–​1914 (Cambridge, 1998); Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism; J. Owen, Labour and the Caucus: Working-​Class Radicalism and Organised Liberalism in England, 1868–​1888 (Liverpool, 2014); Thompson, British Political Culture. 29 

480   James Thompson on both sides. The term ‘caucus’ was itself an accusation of Americanization, and the principal charge was that of reducing representatives to delegates. Proponents presented the National Liberal Federation as an organ of the popular will rather than an instrument of sectionalism. As with attacks on programmatic politics in the 1890s, anti-​caucus rhetoric could diagnose the underlying malady as ‘One Man Rule’, in which the new party machinery amplified the voice of a demagogic leader. The nineteenth-​century heyday of caucus-​bashing was relatively brief, partly as the necessity of organization given a mass electorate was commonly acknowledged, but also it was widely thought that the growing power of ‘public opinion’ mitigated the dangers of sectionalism.33 Given the party realignments and splits, and the proliferation of extra-​party organizations from the 1890s into the early twentieth century, it was far from clear that control of party apparatus conferred great power. While the post-​1918 Labour party inevitably faced renewed accusations of tight-​knit sectionalism, it was the more disciplined two-​party politics of the post-​1945 period that popularized democratic critiques of party-​elite dominance.34 By the 1890s, invocation of democracy had become more common throughout British political culture. The South African War fostered debate about the relationship between empire and democracy. Progressives such as J.A. Hobson and William Clarke regarded bellicose imperialism as a source of reaction at home, echoing older radical critiques in a more democratic dialect. In his more pessimistic moods, Clarke argued empire had delivered Britain to ‘wealthy speculators and Anglo-​Indian colonels’, and feared that only in small nations without big empires, such as Denmark, could democracy and culture flourish.35 While advocates of the war, particularly Chamberlain, could adopt the language of democracy to defend British actions, it was opponents who elaborated the more systematic account of imperialism and democracy, incorporating the use of Chinese labour in South Africa and the Taff Vale decision in Britain into their critique. Empire’s threat to democracy, for critics such as Clarke, was multi-​ faceted, including both its inegalitarian economic impact and its corrosion of the democratic spirit.36 Social democrats such as L.T. Hobhouse employed a humanitarian idiom combining an established liberal regard for ‘intermediate organizations’ and local government with an insistence on effective liberty in which rights and duties were structured in relation to a substantive conception of the common good.37 Pre-​war strikes further fostered debate about distributive justice, plutocracy, and the democratization of economic life.38 More formal political considerations remained prominent, 33 Thompson, British Political Culture. 34 

S. Ball, Portrait of a Party: The Conservative Party in Britain, 1918–​45 (Oxford, 2013); P. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge, 1999); R. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880–​1950 (Oxford, 1990). 35  W. Clarke to H. Demarest Lloyd, 26 August 1897 and 21 November 1900, Illinois Mss E; Micro 460, Wisconsin Historical Society. 36  Thompson, ‘William Clarke’. 37  L.T. Hobhouse, Liberalism and Other Writings, ed. J. Meadowcraft (Cambridge, 1994), p. 112; L.T. Hobhouse, Social Evolution and Political Theory (New York, 1911), p. 198. 38  J. Thompson, ‘The Great Labour Unrest and Political Thought in Britain, 1911–​1914’, Labour History Review, 79 (2014), 37–​54.

Democracy   481 with campaigners casting votes for women as ‘a question of democracy’, while conflict between the Lords and the Commons intensified debate over the democratic, and other, credentials of the referendum.39 During and after the First World War, particularly in the 1930s, democracy became both more strongly identified with Britishness, and subject to fuller and more explicit discussion. The rise of authoritarianism and the economic travails of depression informed a rash of publications addressing democracy and dictatorship. These conveyed a palpable sense of democracy under fire, with A.D. Lindsay donnishly conceding the existence of ‘a certain disillusionment about democracy’.40 There could be, as in Leonard Woolf, a rewriting of the nineteenth-​century past that overstated support for democracy in Britain, and smoothed out the complexities of liberal attitudes in particular.41 The meaning of democracy was fundamentally contested, not least by G.D.H. Cole, who insisted in 1933 that ‘we have not democracy’ and that Russia was ‘in spite of the dictatorship . . . taken all round’ more democratic than Britain.42 Critics of Cole sought to insist on liberty rather than equality as its root, and to defend—​in Bassett’s case by drawing on Hans Kelsen—​democracy as a mode of political decision-​making. Bassett appealed to an ideal of individual self-​realization akin to that expressed by Viscount Halifax and Whiggishly acclaimed ‘our long and successful application of democratic methods’, but did grant that greater equality would strengthen democracy in Britain.43 Arguments about democracy in the 1930s reflected an expanded sense both of its demands and its possibilities. The achievement of equal suffrage in 1928 was widely understood as the completion of political democracy, and the labour movement especially advocated for a genuine social democracy. Vigorous civil society initiatives to bring foreign policy under democratic control were anchored in an analysis of the causes and the legacy of the First World War.44 Speaking to factory workers in York in 1934 as a professed ‘lover of democracy’, Viscount Halifax wondered nonetheless if democracy could conduct foreign policy consistently, govern an empire, and avoid short-​ termism.45 The sharpest sense of new challenges was evident in the economic sphere. In his Romanes lecture, Churchill asked if democracy was capable of solving the bewildering problems of the depression. In 1933 Harold Laski found Democracy in Crisis due to the inequality and acquisitiveness wrought by contemporary capitalism.46 Lindsay treated the economic threat to democracy as fundamentally a question of identity, grouping economic divisions with religious and racial differences as potential sources of 39 Holton, Feminism and Democracy, p. 100. 40 Lindsay, Essentials of Democracy, p. 7. 41 

L. Woolf, After the Deluge: A Study of Communal Psychology (London, 1931), pp. 131–​5. G.D.H. Cole, ‘Notes on Democracy and Dictatorship’, The Highway, (Nov. 1933), 3–​4. 43 Bassett, Essentials of Parliamentary Democracy, pp. 103–​4, ix; Viscount Halifax, Speeches on Foreign Policy (London, 1940), pp. 91–​2. 44  S. Pedersen, ‘Women’s Stake in Democracy: Eleanor Rathbone’s answer to Virginia Woolf ’, in W.R. Louis, ed., Still More Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (Austin, TX, 2003), pp. 127–​44. 45  Halifax, ‘The World and Democracy’, in Speeches on Foreign Policy, p. 10. 46  H. Laski, Democracy in Crisis (London, 1933), p. 264. 42 

482   James Thompson a ‘permanent social minority’ if stronger than an overarching sense of common culture. Nonetheless, he argued that democracy must be extended to the oligarchical fortresses of modern industry.47 Lindsay’s distillation of democratic essentials had definite nineteenth-​century antecedents, apparent in references to Green and Bosanquet, but was firmly directed at inter-​war concerns. He feared the concentration of the media in private hands while rejecting state control, citing the British Gazette during the General Strike as evidence. Intermediate and non-​political—​especially religious and educational—​associations occupied a prominent place in his account. In this—​and in making discussion rather than consent pre-eminent, though both were needed—​Lindsay reworked older arguments for an inter-​war audience. His portrayal of the flowering of ‘public opinion’ through platform oratory and the press embodied a late nineteenth-​century image of nationwide deliberation outside elections. However, in prioritizing discussion, Lindsay was responding to the evidence of continental Europe that the consent approach, ‘if it is left to itself . . . produces Caesarism’. Similarly, his insistence on ‘an official and encouraged opposition’ recalled an inherited faith that the alternation of parties was a source of practical wisdom, as well as a safeguard against majority tyranny. His appreciation, shared by Laski, of an impartial Civil Service ‘taken out of politics’ was a mainstay of nineteenth-​century discussions, as was the contrast with the spoils system in America, but the premium placed on expertise was heightened by the inter-war demands on policy-​makers. Lindsay distinguished between permanent and temporary majorities; discussion guided by common purposes in a society of associations was not to be confused with the mechanical majoritarianism of atomic individualism. Lindsay’s religious conception of democracy was framed against the Hobbesian economic man he detected in both Bentham and Marx. Democracy was ‘a reasoned faith’. In a Baldwinian mode, he argued that in a democracy ‘politics are a secondary matter’, since the state existed to protect a shared way of living more fundamentally expressed in associational life. Here lay the fundamental opposition between ‘totalitarian’ states and democracy.48 The post-​war settlement largely consolidated the developments of the 1930s, but with democracy both strengthened as an ideal and more firmly linked to national identity than ever before. Invocation of democracy was commonplace during the Second World War, and it was often identified with national identity and the parliamentary tradition. There was no end to contestation, as Conservative efforts to present the Labour party in 1945 as anti-​democratic testify. More rare, at least until the 1970s, was explicit criticism of democracy itself. The Cold War, and the global growth of anti-​colonialism, fostered the dominion of democracy as an ideal. The classical era of two-​party politics did lead to critiques of party centralization, while advocates of socialist humanism in the wake of 1956 were as struck by the inequality of power in the affluent West as by the failings of the Soviet bloc. The ideological temperature rose, however, in the 1970s. For some on

47 Lindsay, Essentials of Democracy, pp. 49, 4–​5. 48 Ibid.

Democracy   483 the left, disappointment with the Wilson governments led to campaigns to increase the power of Labour party members that spoke the language of democracy. The complex legacy of 1968 was perhaps most apparent in criticism of institutions, including parties and Parliament, for failing so conspicuously to mirror the composition of the broader population, particularly in terms of gender and race.49 The economic shocks of the 1970s disrupted widely held assumptions about the material underpinnings of social democracy, not least full employment. Greeted by some as evidence of a crisis of capitalist legitimacy, in the longer run it was democracy rather than capitalism whose scope was checked.50 The pessimistic literature of the 1970s on the economic consequences of democracy was largely a set of variations on established themes, as references to nineteenth-​ century writers hinted. Attacks on democracy as an engine of debt had a long history, and the putative link to inflation, while never convincingly articulated, essentially restated Lowe’s fears about redistribution. Likewise, talk of the ‘overload’ of demands upon government echoed long-​standing concerns about the strains of satisfying sectional demands, albeit in the particular context of stagflation.51 The significance of this episode was its role in fostering the view among political elites—​congruent with much traditional Treasury thinking—​that the economy and economic policy-​making should be insulated from democratic pressures, whether through privatization or by passing control of interest rates to an unelected central bank. Widespread, though never universal, acceptance of this approach owed much to the popular capitalism of the 1980s and 1990s in which consumer rights and sovereignty were much championed, reworking a long-​standing British emphasis on individual rights while replacing associational life with the market as the privileged locus of non-​political activity that democracy was to safeguard.52

II If the long history of the idea of democracy in Britain remains unfinished and unsettled, what then of the shorter history of its practice? This section examines how the British have done democracy. In the era of its ascendancy as an ideal, its practice bore out neither the hopes of its earlier champions nor the fears of its opponents. The struggles over and changes in its meaning challenge narratives of democratization as a process, but

49 

On the intellectual legacy of 1968, see J-​W. Muller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth Century Europe (New Haven and London, 2010). 50  J. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston, MA, 1975). 51  B. Barry, ‘Does Democracy Cause Inflation? Political Ideas of some Economists’, in L. Lindberg and C. Maier, eds., The Politics of Inflation and Economic Stagflation (Washington, DC, 1985), pp. 280-​317. 52  On the intermingling of ‘neo-​liberal’ and older ideas, see B. Jackson, ‘Currents of Neo-​ Liberalism: British Political Ideologies and the New Right’, English Historical Review, 131 (2016), 823–​50.

484   James Thompson the shifting terms of the debate both shaped and were shaped by the ways in which the British came to practice democracy as a self-​conscious politics. The historiography of the practice of democracy is in one sense very old, given the centrality of politics to the writing of British history. It is, in another sense, relatively recent, dating from the rise of political culture as a subject from the 1980s, and the related impact of intellectual history and the linguistic turn. This section is part of that newer historiography, but starts by drawing on the older tradition in mapping the institutional landscape of British democratic practice. It then turns to the culture of democracy in Britain. Viewed in comparative perspective, the story of the suffrage is, as the intellectual history of debating democracy suggests, one of piecemeal and often limited change. In the late nineteenth century, the British electorate was relatively narrow by European standards. While the enfranchisement of women came as part of a broader wave in the aftermath of the First World War, plural voting was unusually persistent. Local elections were more inclusive relative to comparators in the late nineteenth century. Following the dismantling of many Anglican privileges, civil liberties, including freedom of speech, were comparatively well established. The capacity of the elected assembly to hold the executive to account was relatively effective in European terms, while the principle that electoral defeat led to a change of government was also comparatively strong. The institutionalization of democratic practice in Britain was marked more by continuity than change. Much that was disliked by early nineteenth-​century democrats remained at the end of the twentieth century, including unequal electoral districts and the hereditary presence in the House of Lords. Contrary to supporters’ belief that some form of proportional representation was demanded by democracy, the incorporation of the idea of democracy into laudatory accounts of parliamentary government and the institutional basis of Britishness helped ensure that electoral reform remained a minority taste, revealingly parodied as inexplicable and foreign. The second half of the twentieth century saw the apotheosis of mass party membership, but neither the rise nor subsequent fall in party membership coincided with a serious shift in power away from party elites. Despite the flurry of revolts over Europe among Conservative MPs in the 1990s, and Labour MPs’ willingness (documented by Phil Cowley) to defy the Blair government, party managers’ capacity to deliver votes in the House of Commons was notably greater in the late twentieth century than in the nineteenth.53 While popular scepticism about the machinery of party never wholly disappeared, and laments about the weakening of the Commons as a forum for debate were a periodic feature of political journalism, dominant understandings of democracy offered much justification for centralized and cohesive parties. There was, of course, change as well as continuity in the institutional practice of democracy in twentieth-​century Britain. This was most apparent in the internal structures and external relations of the multi-​national state. Devolution in the 1990s departed from an established trend centralizing governing functions at Westminster, and brought

53 

P. Cowley, Revolts and Rebellions under Blair (London, 2002).

Democracy   485 deviations from simple plurality voting in the electoral methods for both the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. The incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law in 1998 enabled challenges to the decisions of public bodies on the grounds of infringements of basic liberties through the domestic legal system. Much debate about democracy, particularly in the United States, had addressed the question of judicial review.54 This had been seen as a necessary check on the potentially repressive power of democratic politics, but also as protecting the essential basis of democracy from executive curtailment. As Jan-​Werner Muller has noted, such devices were generally adopted much earlier in post-​war continental Europe than in Britain.55 This reflected the extent to which democracy had come, as Baldwin had sought, to be identified with the parliamentary government, and especially with a distinctive understanding of sovereignty.56 Strikingly, neither devolution nor the adoption of the European Convention into UK law occasioned a broader rethinking of the institutional premises of British democracy, at least within England. In 1938, in War Can be Averted, Eleanor Rathbone argued that collective security could be achieved through British leadership within the League of Nations. It was an urgent text, written quickly, with a sense of time running out. In surveying the peace movement, she found evidence of ‘the peculiar faculty of British democracy for throwing up voluntary organisations’.57 The significance of voluntary associations in conceptions of democracy had deep intellectual roots, but it also reflected democratic practice. Inter-​war associational life in particular has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. While some historians have seen inter-​war associations as bulwarks of conservatism, others have stressed their role as schools of active citizenship.58 This divergence in part reflects contrasting readings of the character of inter-​war Conservatism, though it perhaps also embodies differences over what constitutes politics. Nonetheless, the proliferation of associations was an enduring feature of British life. Associational life was central to the British way of doing democracy, not least as a means by which democracy itself was contested and imaginatively constructed. An emerging cultural history of such practices has much to tell us about how democracy was performed in Britain, and changing definitions of the political. The practice of voluntarism in twentieth-​century Britain frequently claimed to stand apart from politics and to embody moral principles. Such strategies had an obvious rhetorical purpose in building support and maximizing donations, while sidestepping potentially damaging controversy. Consonant with Lindsay’s emphasis on the ‘secondary’ status of politics, avowedly apolitical associations were often presented

54 

I. Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory (Princeton, NJ, 2003).

55 Muller, Contesting Democracy.

56 Williamson, Stanley Baldwin, p. 212. 57 

E. Rathbone, War Can Be Averted: The Achievability of Collective Security (London, 1938), p. 154.

58 McKibbin, Classes and Cultures; R. McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–​51 (Oxford, 2010);

H. McCarthy, ‘Whose Democracy? Histories of British Political Culture between the Wars’, Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 221–​38.

486   James Thompson as a characteristically British basis for enduring democracy. However, consciously or otherwise, these practices could serve both to devalue and to narrow the realm of the political. A more agonistic interpretation of democracy—​closer to Lindsay’s suggestion that crisis was a marker of democratic health—​would see such moralism as an evasion that promoted an impoverished sense of the political which hampered rather than advanced democracy.59 While democratic rhetoric in Britain encouraged association-​building as democratic practice, such claims were often subject to challenge. This was particularly apparent for trade unions. Baldwin’s constitutionalist vision of democracy deliberately marginalized trade unionism as sectional and, indeed, inappropriately political, drawing upon an older but enduring tradition of casting trade unions as hostile to the public.60 It was, however, in the last quarter of the century that the practice of trade unionism would be most insistently pictured as illegitimate and ultimately undemocratic sectionalism. It was not difficult to turn the common conception of democracy, with a particular reading of parliamentary institutions and national identity, against ‘militant’ industrial action. The example of trade unions supplies a sharp reminder of the persistence of conflicts over how to practice democracy. For many on the left—​and this view was more widespread earlier in the century—​trade unions were crucial to forging democracy as a political, social, and economic reality. The practices of the media were both defended and condemned in the name of democracy in modern Britain. Journalism was widely considered a potentially democratic practice, and many newspapers of disparate political stripes, and massively varying circulations, adopted democratic rhetoric. Newspaper readerships in Britain were amongst the highest in the world, with national (albeit London-​centric) newspapers more strongly represented over time, and relative to other polities. The rhetoric of political independence predominated, often linked, implicitly or explicitly, to a healthy democracy. The explicitly avowed links to political parties characteristic of the media systems, whether press or broadcast, of various continental European countries did not flourish. However, despite the reduction in political coverage over time, the British press never lacked partisanship. For the left, concentration of media ownership led to a preponderance of right-​wing views and news. The right largely responded by appealing to a formal conception of freedom of speech, while focusing on its own bugbear, namely the BBC. While the original creation of a public corporation in broadcasting was widely seen by politicians of varying hues as a useful counterweight to the excesses of the popular press, as BBC coverage of current affairs developed in the post-​war era so did accusations of political bias. The BBC retained, however, considerable popularity and authority. Neither a state broadcaster nor a commercial company, the model of the public corporation funded independently of government taxation aligned well with influential understandings of democracy.

59 Lindsay, Essentials of Democracy, pp. 1, 4.

60 Williamson, Stanley Baldwin, p. 206; Thompson, British Political Culture.

Democracy   487 The history of the political culture of democracy in Britain remains an emerging subject. There has been limited historical work dealing directly with what democracy meant to ordinary Britons, and how they imagined, contested, and enacted it. There are, though, useful bodies of writing that speak to these questions. Important work has tracked the tenacious appeal of the open meeting and the disruptive spirit of the hustings, while analysing the shifts in public politics in the wake of the First World War. While rightly resistant to a linear narrative of ‘modernization’ or ‘democratization’, this writing has traced the rise of more peaceable forms of political participation after 1918, and illuminated the changing relationship between politicians and voters in the twentieth century. The emergence of Labour as a national political force in the inter-​war period meant that the legions of new voters were, unlike the new voters of 1867 and 1884, confronted with candidates of a similar background to their own. It was only, it has been argued, in the era of televised politics from the late 1950s that the culture of direct interaction between voters and candidates through local campaigns was fundamentally displaced—​though this was far from inevitable, reflecting rather the dominance of a core voter strategy focusing on organization in the heyday of two-​party politics. Through such work, we learn much about changing attitudes towards the electorate among politicians and activists, but the views of electors themselves have proven more elusive.61 Writing about the media, and political literacy, has addressed the question of deliberative democracy in Britain, and the informational bases of voting decisions. In general, historians surveying the trajectory of the media—​particularly the print media—​in twentieth-​century Britain have taken a gloomy view.62 This was not generally nostalgia for the sheer volume of political coverage prior to 1914, but rather a bemoaning of the quality of information and discussion provided in the mass newspaper press, in particular. It was the comparative seriousness of earlier press coverage, notably in Edwardian Britain, that understandably struck observers, along with the relative superficiality of analysis compared to the newspaper press in a number of continental European countries.63 Historians have often seen the late twentieth-​century press as both mirror and maker of a shift in attitudes towards politics, particularly a decline in deference, but also a growth in cynicism. The strong citizenship culture of the early twentieth century was not replicated in the later part of the century. This is an under-​researched area. There is, though, reason to argue that the claims of citizenship have been relatively weak in Britain, particularly in the later twentieth century. The notion of sensitivity to ‘public opinion’ apparent in mid-​and late nineteenth-​century defences of parliamentary over presidential government has been incorporated into later conceptions of democracy. However, the decline of a more active culture of political participation has increased media power in shaping the democratic imaginary of ‘public opinion’. While Britain was 61  J. Lawrence, Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009). 62  B. Harrison, The Transformation of British Politics, 1860–​1995 (Oxford, 1996). 63  On Edwardian Britain, see J. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870–​1914 (Oxford, 1993).

488   James Thompson more equal in resource terms than many European polities from the 1940s to the 1970s, the close of the century saw Britain become one of Europe’s least equal societies. As we have seen, the relationship between equality and democracy has been deeply contested, but the distance between the composition of Parliament and that of the electorate as a whole was highly notable in late twentieth-​century Britain. The particular ways in which democracy came to be understood after 1945 help to make sense of these continuities and changes in Britain’s political culture.

III At the end of the twentieth century, democracy was unrivalled in the British political imagination, and had become grafted onto an extended tradition of celebrating Britain’s political precocity. Yet anxieties were not in short supply. On the political right, hostility to the European Union sported the banner of defending democracy, while on the left, media ownership and bias was felt to threaten an essential pluralism. Low turnout at the general election of 2001 provoked widespread concern about political apathy, though—​ another long-​standing feature of such debates—​this was more pronounced on the left, with its aspirations towards participative democracy, than on the right. Both the complacency and the disappointment here can only be understood in the longer-​term perspective that this chapter has sought to offer. Much that is distinctive about twentieth-​century conceptions of ‘democracy’ in Britain has its roots in earlier periods. The link often made between associational life and democracy in Britain owes a good deal to established tropes that identified voluntarism as an expression of national identity. Debates about ‘property-​owning democracy’ recapitulated aspects of previous discussions of ‘ratepayer democracy’, with its attendant marginalizing of those said to lack a stake in society. The relationship, however, between earlier and later visions of democracy was also fractured, reflecting fundamental changes in discursive and political context. The legacy of the First World War looms large both for its impact on debates about gender and citizenship and for its strengthening of the connection between national identity and democracy. It was, though, chiefly after 1945 that a Whiggish narrative about institutions and identity became powerfully fused with ideas about British democracy. Novel economic challenges, whether of sustained mass unemployment between the wars or of heightened inflationary pressures in the 1970s, reinvigorated and recast recurring debates about mass democracy, expertise, and economic management. The story of ‘democracy’ in nineteenth and twentieth-​century Britain is thus far from simple. It reveals the limitations of ‘modernization’ narratives, but also suggests some of the directions that political history, broadly conceived, needs to take. The spread of, and struggle over, democratic ideas in British society demands renewed scrutiny, in particular with regard to their relationship to constitutionalism and national identity. The culture of democracy, including the practices of everyday politics, requires further

Democracy   489 investigation. Perhaps most fundamentally, in order to make sense of the broader meaning of democracy’s contested history, we need to consider the shifting nature of the political itself. Due perhaps to a combination of the inherited prestige of political history within the historiography of Britain and the understandable determination of newer sub-​disciplines to open up topics other than politics, the changing construction of politics itself over time has been insufficiently scrutinized. In this respect, writing the history of ‘democracy’ in Britain requires political historians to re-​examine the boundaries and the nature of their craft.

Further Reading L. Barrow and I. Bullock, Democratic Ideas and the British Labour Movement (Cambridge, 1996). D. Craig and J. Thompson, eds., Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-​ Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2013). E. Dzelzainis and Ruth Livesey, eds., The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture (Farnham, 2013). J. Dunn, Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy (London, 2005). B. Harrison, The Transformation of British Politics, 1860–​1995 (Oxford, 1996). J. Innes and M. Philp, eds., Re-​Imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750–​1850 (Oxford, 2013). J.P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT, 1993). R. Quinault, British Prime Ministers and Democracy: From Disraeli to Blair (London, 2011). R. Saunders, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics: The Making of the Second Reform Act (Farnham, 2011).

chapter 28

The Ec onomy Jim Tomlinson

I In trying to understand the complex relationship between British politics and the economy over the two centuries in question, it is as well to start with one of the central analytic challenges, summarized by Adam Tooze: ‘the economy is not pre-​existing reality, an object which we simply observe and theorize about. Our understanding of the “economy” as a distinct entity, a distinct social “sphere” or social “system”, is the product of a dramatic process of imaginative abstraction and representational labour.’1 So, to understand how the political system dealt with ‘the economy’, it is crucial to have a sense of the shifts in the meaning and deployment of this term. Of course, much of that representational labour has been carried out by economists; however, this chapter is not concerned with developments in economics per se, but rather the way in which economic notions have shaped British politics over the past two centuries. Thus ‘the economy’ is not treated here as a brute fact to which politics has responded, but as something constructed in and through arguments which are themselves partly shaped by political processes and calculations. By 1800, that process of ‘imaginative abstraction and representational labour’ was on the verge, for the first time, of producing a recognizable field of enquiry distinct from moral philosophy.2 The most important figure in developing this new field was Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, had already attained canonical status by 1800. But Smith’s work had still formed part of a moral philosophy, whereas the new

1 

A. Tooze, ‘Imagining National Economies: National and International Economic Statistics, 1900–​1950’, in G. Cubitt, ed., Imagining the Nation (Manchester, 1998), pp. 213–​14. 2  R. Backhouse and K. Tribe, ‘Economic Ideas and the Emergence of Political Economy’, in R. Floud, J. Humphries, and P. Johnson, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Britain, vol. I: 1700–​1870 (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 423–​4.

The Economy   491 political economy was based on the notion of ‘an economy’ which, at least in principle, could be separated off from moral, theological, and even political argument. 3 Smith’s own politics were radical and egalitarian.4 But in the context of the repressive politics of wartime Britain, Smith was presented not as an advocate of radical change to achieve political liberty, but as the supporter of a much more restricted agenda of free trade. Smith certainly was an advocate of free trade, but he saw that as just part of a broader case for expanding the wealth of the nation, which would be achieved by a combination of the division of labour in manufacturing and the expansion of the market. The second of these would require the breaking down of impediments to trade, both internal and external. Smith’s political radicalism derived from the fact that he saw most such impediments as the product of successful pressure by private interests to use the state for their own ends; pressure that twentieth-​century economists would label ‘rent-​seeking’. Traditional histories of the ‘triumph of laissez-​faire’ in the post-​Waterloo decades could point with some force to the eventual arrival of free trade, though the transition was slow and the final act, the repeal of the Corn Laws, had to wait until the 1840s.5 But recent histories of British economic development in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have not shared these traditional histories’ view that only the coming of free trade allowed the flowering of British nineteenth-​century prosperity. On the contrary, they have emphasized the key positive, expansionary role of external trade in the ‘mercantile’ period, but seen this as grounded in an imperial and militaristic state that was successful in achieving national ends.6 This view of the state’s role fits with the characterization of Britain as possessing a ‘fiscal–​military’ state, which, in comparative international terms, was highly successful in extracting revenue from its citizens in order to fight the wars that were almost continuous in the six decades before Waterloo.7 While originating at the end of the seventeenth century, after 1750 this state was extracting up to 25 per cent of GDP in taxation in wartime, compared with around 10 per cent in peacetime.8 This scale of expenditure and taxation was tolerable in wartime, but once peace was declared, radical retrenchment was politically unavoidable. After the Napoleonic Wars, what later generations would 3 

G. Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (London, 2004). I. McLean, Adam Smith: Radical and Egalitarian (Edinburgh, 2006); E. Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2001); D. Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–​1834 (Cambridge, 1996). 5  A. Howe, ‘Restoring Free Trade: The British Experience, 1776–​1873’, in D. Winch and P. O’Brien, eds., The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–​1914 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 193–​214; A. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England 1846–​1946 (Oxford, 1997). 6  K. Morgan, ‘Mercantilism and the British Empire’, in Winch and O’Brien, eds., Political Economy, pp. 165–​213; J. Hoppitt, ‘Political Power and British Economic Life, 1650–​1870’, in Floud, Humphries, and Johnson, Cambridge Economic History, vol. I, pp. 344–​67. 7  J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–​1783 (London, 1989); P. O’Brien, ‘Fiscal Exceptionalism: Great Britain and Its European Rivals from Civil War to Triumph at Trafalgar and Waterloo’, in Winch and O’Brien, eds., Political Economy, pp. 245–​66. 8  J. Hoppitt, ‘Political Power’, p. 348. 4 

492   Jim Tomlinson call the ‘politics of austerity’ reigned, and as usual these politics were of a reactionary character. The perceived need to cut spending went along with attempts to make the tax burden even more regressive, and it was only after the reinstatement of the income tax in the 1840s that many of the regressive taxes on imports (including imports of corn) were removed. While a Whiggish history of progress to greater prosperity through the achievement of free trade is to be (heavily) qualified rather than dismissed, the story of the creation of a Smithian ‘system of liberty’ domestically is an even more complex and controversial tale.9 Insofar as such a system required reform of the state, part of the difficulty here is the different elements of the state that have to be considered. Above all, the distinction between the local and central state is vital, especially in the period before the 1870s, after which the trend towards increasing centralization of the British state became overwhelming and seemingly irreversible. The Napoleonic Wars, which saw the apogee of the centralized fiscal–​military state, also created a crisis for local government, above all for the Poor Law, because of the high prices and poverty that accompanied the war. This problem was addressed in a hugely important fashion by the Speenhamland decision of 1795, which gave assistance to the poor by subsidizing their wages out of the local rates. This decision was much attacked on distributional grounds, as aiding the labouring poor at the expense of the farmer. But more broadly, Speenhamland was at odds with the emerging political economy of free labour markets; it subverted a new moral economy in the name of much older notions of rights and responsibilities. 10 Speenhamland was eventually swept away by the reform of the Poor Law in the 1830s, which aimed to moralize the poor as well as to reduce the rates falling upon employers. It sought to regulate such support centrally on more restrictive principles, though it did so with only limited success. Nevertheless, we need to emphasize the importance of Speenhamland, and of its repudiation by the Act of 1834: ‘The New Poor Law was indeed a landmark in the creation of a market system’.11 But few would now accept that the triumph of the Poor Law reformers symbolized a complete ‘triumph of laissez-​faire.’ Alongside this reform came new interventions in the labour market, with a growing number of Factory Acts (the first in 1802), so that a ‘free market’ in labour was never fully accepted in early nineteenth-​century Britain. So we should be careful not to tell the story of the years following Waterloo as one simply of a triumph of this new political economy. Traditionally, the influence of political economy was seen as peaking in the first decades of the nineteenth century.12 But more recent work has argued that political

9  For an overview, see P. Mandler, ‘Introduction’, in P. Mandler, ed., Liberty and Authority in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2006), esp. pp. 6–​13. 10  K. Polanyi, Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation (London, 1944). 11  P. Mandler, ‘The New Poor Law Redivivus’, Past and Present, 117 (1987), 157. 12  F.W. Fetter, ‘The Influence of Economists on Legislation in the British Parliament from Ricardo to John Stuart Mill’, Journal of Political Economy, 83 (1975), 1051–​64.

The Economy   493 economy was not the only force shaping contemporary understandings of the economy among the political class. This period was also one of very powerful religious ideologies, most importantly Christian evangelicism, which also had a major, though contested, impact on understandings of appropriate economic policy.13 Smithian radicalism rested in large part on the denial of legitimacy to the contemporary state, portrayed as the creature of vested interests and corrupted politicians. For a new, more positive, view of the role of the state to emerge required the defeat of this ‘Old Corruption’. Recent work has argued that reforms of the state, especially from the 1830s onwards, did slowly undermine the plausibility of this characterization, culminating in 1848–​51 in a major watershed when the Old Corruption argument lost its potency, defeating Chartism but also changing the legitimacy of government action in the eyes of many. With the expansion of the franchise under the Second Reform Act of 1867, this process was largely complete.14 This growing legitimacy was coupled to ‘economical reform’ but also to tax reform, aimed at creating a sense of ‘fairness’ between classes in the distribution of the tax burden.15 As a result, in part, of this new legitimacy for the state, Cobdenite liberalism, with its high level of distrust of state action, was decreasingly effective. Its supersession was reinforced by extensions of the franchise and the emergence of new kinds of popular politics, eventually embracing new strands of working-​class and socialist elements. But a key legacy carried into this new political world was a commitment to free trade, which continued to underpin most radical politics up to the First World War. The role of the state can never be fully satisfactorily measured simply by levels of public spending (leaving aside complications arising from the central/​local divide). Many important actions by the state involve little in the way of expenditure (and, of course, may be ineffectual if the state lacks the machinery to make its edicts effective).16 State intervention shapes the behaviour of non-​state actors in ways which may be fundamental, for example by encouraging philanthropic activity, a hugely important feature of British society throughout these two centuries. All that said, it is undoubtedly a striking feature of British politics that over our period it has brought into being a state which has increased its spending as a share of GNP by around fourfold. Looking at the patterns of such spending does tell us something important. The mid-​nineteenth-​century state’s role, judged by level of expenditure, was undoubtedly at historically low levels, falling from a Napoleonic Wars peak of around 25 per cent to a low point of 8.3 per cent of GNP in 1870 and 1880.17 This pattern can be explained 13 

B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783–​1846 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 174–​94, 331–​5, 400–​9. 14  J.P. Parry, ‘The Decline of Institutional Reform in Nineteenth-​Century Britain’, in D. Feldman and J. Lawrence, eds., Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 164–​86. 15  M. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of British Taxation, 1799–​1914 (Cambridge, 2001). 16  G. Fry, The Growth of Government: The Development of Ideas about the Role of the State and the Machinery and Functions of Government in Britain since 1780 (London, 1979), p. II. 17  Figures in G. Peden, ‘Public Expenditure, 1832–​1914’, in Winch and O’Brien, eds., Political Economy, p. 354.

494   Jim Tomlinson by three factors. First, after Waterloo, spending on the military was radically reduced, especially on the army, and the costs of empire were cut by shifting much of the burden of policing its most populous country, India, onto the residents of the subcontinent. Second, while civil spending grew, it grew slowly until very late in the century. Much of the increased regulatory activity of the early Victorian state involved little expenditure. Third, GNP was growing at a historically fast rate in these years, so slow-​growing spending fell as a proportion of total output.18

II From the time of Dicey, historians have identified a late nineteenth-​century turning point in the role of the state, partly linked to a weakening of classical political economy and the rise of new doctrines. Dicey denounced the influence of ‘collectivism’, but insofar as this existed it owed little to economics. A changing attitude to the state can be found in the doctrines of John Stuart Mill, and much more explicitly in the welfare economics of Alfred Marshall. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, first published in 1848, was undoubtedly the most influential economics book of the second half of the nineteenth century, and went much further than its predecessors in developing notions of market failure.19 Marshall’s Principles of Economics of 1890 went much further in formalizing approaches to this issue. But towards the end of the century economic doctrine probably mattered less, partly because it became less of a discourse interwoven with the direct shaping of public understanding, and more of a subject taught to students. 20 Of greater significance than doctrinal changes were the political responses to increased economic competition and the ‘first great globalization’, with the increased insecurities this process brought about. Savage helpfully identifies three working-​class responses to economic insecurity: mutualist (co-​operatives and friendly societies), economistic (trade unions), and statist (government intervention). It is important to stress that the ‘statist’ response was only one, and many in the emerging working-​class and socialist movement were sceptical of this course.21 While recognizing the shift that had taken place in popular views of state legitimacy, the limits of this legitimacy in working-​class eyes should also be noted. Anti-​trade union decisions such as Taff Vale in 1901 suggest why these limits existed.22 18 

P. Harling, ‘The Powers of the Victorian State’, in Mandler, Liberty and Authority, pp. 28–​9. P. Johnson, ‘Market Disciplines’, in Mandler, Liberty and Authority, pp. 211–​15. 20  K. Tribe and R. Backhouse, ‘Economic Thought and Ideology in Britain, 1870–​2010’, in R. Floud, J. Humphries, and P. Johnson, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Britain, vol. II: 1870 to the Present (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 506–​28. 21  M. Savage, The Dynamics of Working-​Class Politics: The Labour Movement in Preston 1880–​1940 (Cambridge, 1987). 22  P. Thane, ‘The Working Class and State “Welfare” in Britain, 1880–​1914’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 877–​900. 19 

The Economy   495 Two political economies came into contention in response to this globalization: the established ‘liberal cosmopolitanism’ was challenged by a Chamberlainite ‘imperial national economy’, though both can be seen as alternative responses to pressure for more attention to relief of poverty and increased spending on social services. The liberal version claimed that higher taxes would accrue readily from an expanding free trade economy plus some increase in tax progressivity; tariff reformers saw import duties as a major new source of revenue.23 The late nineteenth-​century version of liberal political economy rested on the ‘three pillars of the anti-​collectivist temple’: alongside free trade were the gold standard and low and balanced budgets.24 Politically, these three shared a similar basis in maximizing the role of ‘automatic’ market forces over discretionary state action. In that sense they continued an adherence to classical economic doctrines. But it would be wrong to see these precepts as imposed from on high on a populace restless for change. While adherence to the gold standard was undoubtedly regarded as a ‘technical’ issue by its guardian, the Bank of England, it is notable that in some countries at this time, such as the United States, the monetary standard was a major political issue. But in Britain the long deflation of prices of the last quarter of the century, consequent on adherence to gold, was experienced by most Britons—​who were predominantly urban wage-​earners—​as a benefit, with lower food prices bringing substantial rises in real incomes. Support for free trade was much more positive and entrenched; it was far more than a rarefied economic doctrine. There was widespread popular support for its economic benefits, not least, of course, cheap food. But it was also supported as an anti-​militarist and pacific doctrine, celebrating international linkages and regarding them as desirable obstructions to nationalistic politics.25 The third pillar was more problematic. Here, undoubtedly, there was tension between the precepts of fiscal economy and popular politics in the context of an expanding electorate. The Liberal reforms after 1906 were notable for establishing new principles of spending in the fields of social policy, especially pensions, labour exchanges, and social insurance. The budget continued to be balanced by extending taxation, especially into landed wealth, but spending was on an upward trajectory. A crucial component of this expansion was the increased role of central government, with the Treasury not trusting local government to be economical if spending revenues from central taxation rather than local resources—​resources which were constrained by a fiscal crisis in local government. In this way, social policy became a matter of high politics.26

23 

E.H.H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the Conservative Party, 1880–​1914 (London, 1995). 24  R. Middleton, Government versus the Market: The Growth of the Public Sector, Economic Management and British Economic Performance, c.1890–​1979 (Cheltenham, 1996), p. 54. 25  F. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2008). 26  Peden, ‘Public Expenditure’, p. 361.

496   Jim Tomlinson The challenge to this political economy failed because of the entrenched popularity of free trade and its status as more than simply an economic doctrine. It also failed because the liberal economy proved both expansive (though subject to sharp cycles of activity) and capable of generating increased public revenues without fatally undermining the legitimacy of the tax system, though the Budget crisis of 1909/​10 did show the capacity of Conservative politics to mobilize a much wider constituency than just those directly affected by increased taxation. This was an important foretaste of twentieth-​century fiscal politics. The debate around the failed Chamberlainite political project had a lasting legacy in shaping the terms of economic debate. This was not so much because of the way economists were mobilized both for and against the old free trade verities, but more a result of the way in which a new notion of a national economy came into being. In many ways the free trade-​versus-​protection debate became a contest over economic statistics used to measure the performance of the national economy. Building on the early Victorian revolution in statistics, many types of economic data, from international capital flows to unemployment, were either invented or radically improved. Chamberlainite claims of economic failure and decline led to complex debates about how to assess the economy, and this assessment was grounded in the production of many more statistics, official and otherwise.27 The Edwardian protectionist debate was an important precursor to the decline debates of the second half of the twentieth century.28 It shared the breadth of political forces that could be mobilized by the claims made about the alleged severity of the country’s economic shortcomings. In many ways, despite its immediate failure to overthrow Liberal (and liberal) policies, it set the tone for much of the twentieth-​century debate (see section V).

III The three pillars of Edwardian political economy were undermined by the First World War. The gold standard was suspended for the duration. Free trade was likewise set aside, and with a less clear presumption that it would be fully restored post-​war. Public spending shot up, and was never to return to pre-​war levels. The politics of the 1920s saw a clash between an attempt to reconstruct the three pillars and the claims of a much expanded labour movement in a context of a weakened economy and heavily indebted state. The gold standard was restored in 1925 but this 27 

B. Supple, ‘Official Economic Inquiry and Britain’s Industrial Decline: The First Fifty Years’, in M. Furner and B. Supple, eds., The State and Economic Knowledge (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 330–​7. 28  D. Cannadine, ‘Apocalypse When? British Politicians and British “Decline” in the Twentieth Century’, in P. Clarke and C. Trebilcock, eds., Understanding Decline: Perceptions and Realities of British Economic Performance (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 261–​84.

The Economy   497 produced deflationary pressures and industrial conflict. Free trade was mainly restored, though it was clear that opinion among the business class and many Conservative electors had shifted against liberal cosmopolitan attitudes to the international economy. With the failure to implement a capital levy after the Armistice, the next decade saw a large part of public spending committed to debt service, in competition with the pressure for more social service spending. After the initial post-​war boom, the 1920s was a decade of deflation, and we may see this as a victory for creditors over debtors, as a victory for conservative politics. But this was accompanied by a clear upward trend in social service spending, especially by expansion in housing and social insurance. The British economy suffered from chronic unemployment in the 1920s, and the attempts to address this problem within a still largely liberal political economy failed. It took the exacerbation of this unemployment problem by the world slump after 1929 to stimulate both a major shift in economic policy and, largely separately, a major rethink of economic doctrine. The pivotal year in twentieth-​century economic policy was 1931. The simultaneous departure from gold and imposition of tariffs inaugurated a new era of economic management. The core of policy was to try and raise prices and profits in order to generate a recovery led by private investment.29 While retreating from the classical liberal norms about free trade and the gold standard, the National Government made no ideological concessions to advocates by using budgetary action to directly stimulate economic activity; this was a conservative version of ‘national political economy’. If, in principle, budgetary orthodoxy was to be maintained, fiscal outcomes proved as always to be hard to control by ideological formula, and substantial deficits were incurred as the automatic stabilizers came into play.30 Economic policy in the 1930s owed little if anything to the new departures in economic theory associated with Keynes and his General Theory of 1936. Like Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the General Theory was a tract for the times which also embodied a new approach to the relationship between government and the economy. Keynes was a Liberal who saw unemployment and economic insecurity as existential threats to liberal societies. His remedy was for governments to accept that, left to its own devices, a capitalist economy would generate chronic unemployment, and that state action to restore full working was both possible and desirable. On the precise nature of this action, Keynes was pragmatic. Monetary policy in some circumstances would do the trick, but fiscal policy might be needed if the economy was stuck in a depression where low interest rates were either unachievable or ineffective. Within the domain of fiscal policy, Keynes was again pragmatic about how precisely this should be conducted, but while he was not an advocate of permanent deficit financing, he did believe that such deficits were an appropriate, temporary, weapon in times of slump. 29  A. Booth, ‘Britain in the 1930s: A Managed Economy?’ Economic History Review, 40 (1987), 499–​522. 30  R. Middleton, ‘British Monetary and Fiscal Policies in the 1930s’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 26 (2010), 414–​41.

498   Jim Tomlinson Keynes’ doctrine was ideologically ambiguous. On the one hand, it was an attempt to defend a capitalist, free market economy to which a growing number of people on the left in inter-​war Britain were opposed in principle. On the other, acceptance of the necessity, in the given circumstances of inter-​war Britain, for government ‘pump-​ priming’ put him at odds with conservative forces, who regarded budgetary balance as not only morally right but also a crucial defence against a loss of financial confidence which would be fatal to the strategy of a private sector-​led recovery. Most accounts of modern Britain suggest a ‘Keynesian era’ running from the 1940s to the 1970s. The beginnings of this era are relatively straightforward, if paradoxical. Keynesian approaches to the economy, centrally involving notions of a circular flow of expenditure and assessment of aggregate demand and supply, were taken up by the wartime government in 1940/​41 as a means of attempting to reduce inflationary pressure by budgetary action—​hence the ‘first Keynesian budget’ of 1941. But in the longer run, even more important was the 1944 White Paper on Employment Policy. Committing the government to pursuing ‘high and stable’ employment, the shift from the politics of the 1930s was clear. In the White Paper, the perceived means to achieve this goal were ambiguous; Keynesian-​style ‘maintenance of total expenditure’ was to be conditional on labour mobility, wage restraint, and worker support for productivity enhancement. But the commitment to regarding unemployment as a key economic problem that could and should be addressed by government was clear.31 The ‘Keynesian era’ of the 1950s and 1960s saw governments hyperactive in using the instruments of macro-​management. The ‘stop–​go’ cycle symbolized governments’ attempts to balance the claims of full employment against the desire to limit inflation and maintain the value of the pound. Both monetary and fiscal instruments were commonly used in policy ‘packages’, though the latter had priority most of the time. In many ways, this policy regime was successful. Unemployment was kept extraordinarily low at around 2 per cent; inflation fluctuated, but with an average level of 4 per cent and with no upward trend. The current balance of payments (helped by devaluations in 1949 and 1967) showed a small positive balance, though the overall payments position was much affected by overseas military spending and foreign investment. Growth was high by historic standards. And, especially striking, the budget was usually close to balance, so maintaining full employment in this period did not require large fiscal injections.32 This last point has led some to doubt how important policy was to the full employment of this era, suggesting the perhaps more important role of high levels of private investment stimulated by rapid technical change, though perhaps also encouraged by the political commitment to avoiding a slump. However, efficacious or not, what seems clear in retrospect is that Keynesianism relied for its plausibility on big government, yet the process of government growth was a quite independent process, owing little to Keynesianism or indeed any other economics doctrine.

31 

32 

J. Tomlinson, Employment Policy: The Crucial Years, 1939–​55 (Oxford, 1987). R. Middleton, The British Economy since 1945 (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 86, 80.

The Economy   499 The end of the Keynesian era is normally associated with the 1970s and 1980s, when it was challenged by new economic doctrines and replaced by an emphasis on pursuing low inflation as the key to economic stability. Certainly the stagflation of the 1970s posed profound questions about the existing policy regime. This was clear in Healey’s landmark budget speech of 1975 when he said: I fully understand why I am being urged by so many friends both inside and outside the House to treat unemployment as the central problem and to stimulate a further growth in home consumption, public or private, so as to start getting the rate of unemployment down as fast as possible. I do not believe it would be wise to follow this advice today . . . I cannot afford to increase demand further today when 5p in every pound we spend at home has been provided by our creditors abroad and inflation is running at its current rate.33

Within a year, after this restrictive stance was given the IMF’s seal of approval in 1976, the Labour government moved back in a Keynesian direction; they were only ever ‘monetarists by necessity’. A much clearer, more consistent ideological attack on Keynesianism came with the Thatcher government after 1979. The key moment here was the 1981 budget, where, for the only time in post-​war Britain, the government sought vigorously to offset the automatic stabilizers during a recession, thus explicitly repudiating the efficacy of fiscal policy. This occasioned a set-​piece ideological debate about Keynesianism, and the policy in place was explicitly anti-​Keynesian. But was this the ‘end of the Keynesian era’? Conservatives claimed that the recovery after the 1981 budget vindicated their anti-​Keynesianism. Yet, despite claims that ‘the lady’s not for turning’, we know that monetary policy, which had been the main cause of the recession, was eased before the 1981 budget, despite this being in conflict with the government’s ‘Medium Term Financial Strategy’. So monetary policy had been used to try and limit unemployment, as any Keynesian would have suggested.34 More broadly, we may note that the 1981 repudiation of the automatic stabilizers was not repeated under the Conservative government in the early 1990s. The recession of those years saw the largest peacetime budget deficits to date, at 7.2 per cent of GDP in 1993/​4 (larger than the mid-​1970s peak of 6.7 per cent), as the government sought to contain the rise in unemployment. In this light, the repudiation of Keynesianism in the 1970s and 1980s looks much more contingent on particular economic and political circumstances, and rather less of an epochal change in the policy regime. Even more than the ‘rise and decline of Keynesianism’, the story of the rise of the welfare state from its New Liberal origins is perhaps the most popular narrative in the whole of twentieth-​century British history. But this story has crowded out recognition that, from the days of naval rearmament that accompanied the New Liberal reforms, Britain

33 

Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 15 Apr. 1975, col. 282. D. Needham and A. Hotson, eds., Expansionary Fiscal Contraction: The Thatcher Government’s 1981 Budget in Perspective (Cambridge, 2014). 34 

500   Jim Tomlinson also became a warfare state, with, by international standards, a large proportion of GDP devoted to armaments and the military, backed up by a commitment of huge resources to scientific research in weaponry and warfare. While some of these aspects of Britain’s warfare state eroded after the end of the Cold War, important legacies remained, with Britain at the end of the century still a major armaments exporter and a possessor of nuclear weapons.35 As David Edgerton stresses, this notion of Britain as a warfare state is at odds with many different interpretations of British history, but is well grounded in the comparative data of military spending, armaments production, and resources devoted to military research and development stretching back to the 1920s.36 It also has an important cultural dimension, given, for example, the British obsession with aircraft, and the mythologies which attached to the aeroplane as a symbol of modernity through much of the last century.37 Refusal to recognize the importance of this aspect of Britain’s modern political history is closely connected with ‘declinist’ interpretations of that history, a point returned to in the final section of this chapter.

IV Most accounts of Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century couple a ‘decline of Keynesianism’ narrative to one which proclaims (with favour or disfavour) a triumph of neo-​liberalism. Clearly, such a claim can be supported by reference to the self-​ proclaimed ideological attachments of governments since the 1970s—​most obviously the Conservatives after 1979, but also New Labour, which was careful in its ideological positioning not to reject much of the broad ‘pro-​market’ stance of the Conservatives. At the level of policy, neo-​liberalism achieved some unambiguous victories after 1979. The Thatcher government’s desire to ‘roll back the state’ led to a very large-​scale privatization programme, selling off both public corporations and council housing.38 The sale of the old nationalized industries helped raise revenue and thereby reduce the public sector borrowing requirement significantly, especially in the mid-​and late 1980s, though revenues only amounted to more than 3 per cent of public spending in one year, 1988/​9.39 More important in the long run was the attempt to use these sales to create a ‘popular capitalism’ by greatly extending personal share ownership, to both the general public and employees of specific privatized enterprises. To this end, discounts were given and major publicity campaigns mounted. The initial effects were substantial, with 35 

M. Phythian, The Politics of British Arms Sales since 1964 (Manchester, 2000). D. Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–​1970 (Cambridge, 2006). 37  D. Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (Basingstoke, 1991). 38  D. Parker, The Official History of Privatization, Vol. I: The Formative Years, 1970–​87 (Abingdon, 2009) and Vol. II: Popular Capitalism, 1987–​1997 (Abingdon, 2012). 39 Parker, Popular Capitalism, p. 505. 36 

The Economy   501 enterprises such as British Gas and British Telecom finding large markets for their discounted shares. By 1997 approximately 22 per cent of the adult population held shares directly, compared with around 7 per cent in 1979.40 But the average holding was tiny; for example, British Telecom had 1.4 million shareholders in 2006, but two thirds of these held less than 800 shares.41 The idea of a major transformation in the number of Britons holding substantial equity largely failed; for the great bulk of the population, escaping the ‘tyranny of earned income’ remained implausible.42 The trend towards a rising proportion of shares held by institutions, evident since the 1960s, had continued through the period of privatization; the proportion in the hands of private owners fell from 28 per cent in 1983 to 10 per cent by 2010.43 Probably even more important, certainly politically, was the sale of public (council) housing at discounts to sitting tenants. Under this policy, eventually 1.5 million units were sold off, reducing public housing to a largely residual role. This privatization progressed successfully because it combined at least three aims in one policy. Housing sales contributed substantially to the reduction in public borrowing, a key target of the 1980s. Such sales gave financial windfalls to purchasers, consolidating electoral support for the Conservatives. Also, ideologically, they fitted with notions of extending ‘property-​owning democracy’—​an important part of Conservative thinking, especially in regard to housing, since the late nineteenth century and Salisbury’s ‘villa conservatism’.44 These sales were concentrated among unskilled and semi-​skilled workers, whose voting behaviour does seem to have been influenced by the policy.45 But beyond housing, there has been little spreading of wealth. Overall, wealth (as well as income) inequalities have increased more rapidly in the ‘neo-​liberal period’ than previously.46 Perhaps the most unambiguous success for neo-​ liberalism was the weakening of trade unions. With the successful construction of an anti-​union account of the Winter of Discontent, a combination of cumulative legislative restrictions, defeats for key groups of workers (especially the National Union of Mineworkers in 1984/​5), de-​ industrialization, and ideological ‘de-​legitimization’ of union activity saw membership shrink radically. 47 40 

Ibid., p. 520. Ibid., p. 517. 42  J. Froud, S. Johal, J. Montgomerie, and K. Williams, ‘Escaping the Tyranny of Earned Income? The Failure of Finance as Social Innovation’, New Political Economy, 15 (2010), 147–​64. 43 Parker, Popular Capitalism, p. 520. 44  M. Daunton, A Property-​Owning Democracy? Housing in Britain (London, 1987); property-​owning democracy is not an inherently Conservative notion: see B. Jackson, ‘Property-​Owning Democracy: A Short History’, in M. O’Neill and T. Williamson, eds., Property-​Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond (Oxford, 2012), pp. 33–​52; B. Jackson, ‘Revisionism Reconsidered: “Property-​Owning Democracy” in Post-​War Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 16 (2005), 416–​40. 45  D. Butler and D. Kavanagh, The British General Election of 1983 (London, 1984). 46  J. Hills, Good Times, Bad Times (Bristol, 2014), pp. 24–​8. 47  J. Pencavel, ‘The Surprising Retreat of Union Britain’, in D. Card, R. Blundell, and R. Freeman, eds., Seeking a Premier Economy: The Effects of British Economic Reforms, 1980–​2000 (Chicago, 2004), pp. 181–​232. 41 

502   Jim Tomlinson Also carried through were a wide range of deregulatory measures. In the buying and selling of labour, ‘market forces’ were given much greater rein, with, for example, the abolition of most of the wage councils which set industry-​level minimum wages in a number of low-​paid sectors. 48 Very important also was the deregulation of the financial system, which underpinned a huge expansion of personal credit in the mid-​and late 1980s, greatly aiding the consumption-​led recovery from the recession at the beginning of the decade.49 On the other side of the account, most obviously, is the story of public borrowing and spending. As already noted in the discussion of Keynesianism, the story of the fiscal balance after 1981 does not suggest a repudiation of the fiscal activism proclaimed by neo-​ liberalism. On spending, the Thatcher government famously proclaimed that ‘Public expenditure is at the heart of Britain’s economic problems’. Yet the trend has been for the state to expand in absolute terms since the 1970s. In 2008/​9 prices, expenditure rose from £195 billion in 1970/​7 1 to £449 billion in 2000/​1. Relative to GDP, state spending (‘total managed expenditure’) has, as always, had a pronounced cyclical element. The peaks of 49.7 per cent in 1975/​6, 48.1 per cent in 1982/​3, and 43.7 per cent in 1992/​3 were all in recession years. In the boom years of 1972/​3 and 2000/​1, the figures were 41.9 and 36.8 respectively. 50 These figures suggest a reversal of the previous expansionary trend after the crisis of the 1970s, but falling far short of the kinds of reductions to which neo-​ liberals would have aspired. Colin Clark, for example, argued in a pamphlet published by the neo-​liberal Institute of Economic Affairs in 1964 that taxes above 25 per cent of GDP would cause runaway inflation.51 Most of the increase in public spending has come in health, education, and social security. The pattern since the early 1980s has been one of increased expenditure on the NHS, coupled with various attempts to introduce ‘market forces’ into the system without threatening the principle of a free service at the point of consumption. In education, the trend has also been towards increased expenditure, coupled to progressively removing the role of local government in the running of schools, and with an emphasis on ‘competition’ without affecting the principle of free access.52 These two areas are both ones in which the shape of policy has in large part been shaped by a combination of demography, which has determined levels of demand, and political calculation, where governments have had to recognize the high degree of popular support for free provision. In the case of social security, the pattern has had some parallel with that in health and school education. Expenditure overall has increased, in part because of the demographics of an aging population driving up spending on pensions 48 

For an example of the effects of this abolition, see C. Craig, R. Tarling, J. Rubery, and F. Wilkinson, Abolition and After: The Jute Wages Council (London, 1980). 49  R. Backhouse, ‘The Macroeconomics of Margaret Thatcher’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 24 (2002), 328–​9. 50  ONS data in Budget 2010, House of Commons Papers, HC 61 (2010). 51  C. Clark, Taxmanship: Principles and Proposals for the Reform of Taxation (London, 1964). 52  R. Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945 (3rd edn., Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 353–​64, 415–​27; P. Wilding, ‘The Welfare State and the Conservatives’, Political Studies, 45 (1997), 716–​26.

The Economy   503 and in part through higher demand for unemployment benefits, though the value of such benefits, unlike that of pensions, has been consistently eroded. But the most striking change in social security since the 1970s has been the rise of what a historian might call a ‘new Speenhamland’ system of wage subsidies. In the name of improving incentives to work among the unemployed, successive governments have used the tax and benefit systems to offset the impact of low wages on household incomes. This began with Family Income Supplement in 1971, but greatly expanded with Family Credit and Working Families Tax Credit in the 1980s and 1990s.53 Expenditure per claimant on such benefits increased from approximately £500 in 1970 to £4,300 in 2000.54 It is not only that these in-​work benefits have come to greatly exceed payments made to the unemployed, but more that the whole principle of post-​war welfare has shifted. The classic mid-​twentieth-​century Beveridge analysis of the sources of poverty suggested the problem fundamentally lay in ‘interruption to earnings’ (by unemployment, sickness, or old age) along with large numbers of children, the latter to be addressed by ‘Family Allowances’ (later, Child Benefit).55 While this analysis always misrepresented the actualities of the labour market, not least in its barely qualified notion of the ‘male-​ breadwinner household’, its fundamental idea that normally paid work would provide a route out of poverty has underpinned modern liberal understandings of how society works to the present day. ‘New Speenhamland’ undermines such understandings, and gives a role for the state which is difficult to see as ‘neo-​liberal’ in character. The ‘neo-​liberal era’ also saw a growth in tax-​funded public employment (leaving aside employment in the privatized, previously publicly owned industries, which were largely funded by commercial receipts). This growth has been obscured by the problematic way in which public sector employment is defined by the Office for National Statistics: ‘the difference between the public and private sector is determined by where control lies, rather than by ownership or whether or not the entity is publicly financed.’56 This definition means that not only are all employees in further and higher education treated as part of the private sector, along with all GPs, but so are the much more numerous workers in outsourced activities supplied to the NHS, local authorities, and other public bodies. But fortunately, we have the analysis of researchers at the Centre for Research on Socio-​Cultural Change (CRESC) in Manchester, who use a much more satisfactory definition whereby, if more than half of an entity’s activities are publicly funded, it is deemed part of the public sector.57 They estimate what they christen 53 

R. Blundell and H. Hoynes, ‘Has “In-​Work” Benefit Reform Helped the Labour Market?’, in Card et al., eds., Seeking a Premier Economy, pp. 411–​45. 54  Ibid., p. 426. 55  A. Cutler, K. Williams, and J. Williams, Keynes, Beveridge and Beyond (London, 1986). 56  ONS definition quoted in J. Cribb, R. Disney, and L. Sibieta, ‘The Public Sector Workforce: Past, Present and Future’, Institute for Fiscal Studies Briefing Note 145 (London, February 2014); J. Tomlinson, ‘From “Distribution of Industry” to “Local Keynesianism”: An Unacknowledged Policy Revolution?’, British Politics, 7 (2012), 204–​23. 57  J. Buchanan, J. Froud, S. Johal, A. Leaver, and K. Williams, Undisclosed and Unsustainable: Problems of the UK National Business Model (Manchester, 2009). These calculations are similar to those in Centre

504   Jim Tomlinson Table 28.1 State and ‘para-​state’ employment in the UK, 1978–​2008 1978

5.6 million

1987

6.2 million

1997

6.7 million

‘para-​state employment’ by adjusting the ONS category published in the Quarterly Public Sector Employee Survey. The adjustment is done by taking the industries in the Standard Industrial Classification and judging how far each of these is reliant on public funding. On this basis, they calculate that total state and para-​state employment together grew from 5.6 million in 1978 to 6.7 million by 1997, more than a million more than the official estimate (see Table 28.1).58 The majority of these jobs have been in education, health, and social care. The mechanisms of this expansion are complex, but a large part of the explanation is the high income elasticity of demand for health and education observed by Baumol.59 Fiscal pressures in combination with market-​fundamentalist ideology have meant that this expansion of public sector services has increasingly been achieved by cheapening labour in this sector through contracting-out. So, while there have been lots of well-​paid and relatively secure public sector jobs, these have been accompanied by burgeoning numbers of low-​paid and insecure posts in the ‘para-​state’ sector. This polarization was part of a broader economic change: de-industrialization. From a peak of 47.9 per cent of the British labour force in 1955, by 1998 industry employed only 26 per cent. The jobs lost were concentrated in coal-​mining, steel-​making, and manufacturing, and hit men particularly hard.60 As well as its economic consequences of high unemployment and the partial absorption of ex-​industrial workers into a polarized service labour market, de-​industrialization hit at the core of the organized working class of mid-​twentieth-​century Britain. This in turn undermined a key element of the two-​ party system. De-​industrialization is perhaps the least well examined of the major politically significant economic forces operative in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.

for Cities, Cities Outlook 2014 (London, 2014), which includes employment in universities as ‘public sector’. 58 

J. Froud, S. Johal, J. Law, A. Leaver, and K. Williams, Rebalancing the Economy (Or Buyer’s Remorse) (Manchester, 2011), p. 18. Compare the official data: A. Newell, ‘Structural Change’, in N. Crafts, I. Gazeley, and A. Newell, eds., Work and Pay in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford, 2007), pp. 45–​6. 59  W. Baumol, ‘Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth: The Anatomy of Urban Crisis’, American Economic Review, 57 (1967), 415–​26. 60  C. Feinstein, ‘Structural Change in the Developed Countries in the Twentieth Century’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 15 (1999), 39.

The Economy   505

V Martin Wiener argues that ‘the leading problem of modern British history is the explanation of economic decline’.61 This ‘leading’ status is a problem because it is a case where historians’ framing of a problem has been in large part a reflection of current political debates, perhaps registering a failure of historians to always establish a critical distance from their subject matter. The notion of ‘economic decline’ is, of course, politically highly charged, and it is especially important therefore for the term to be understood historically. While the contemporary notion of ‘economic growth’, and the idea that governments should explicitly pursue ‘growth’, is an invention of the 1950s, the belief that in some broad sense governments should seek to increase the prosperity of the nation can be traced back to at least the eighteenth century.62 This responsibility, implicit or explicit, opened government to accusations of failure if expansion was deemed unsatisfactory. The notion that the nation was declining relative to its rivals, and that this was manifest in economic failure, has been of great political importance in British political history, particularly on two occasions: first, with Joseph Chamberlain’s attack on free trade in the name of imperial protectionism at the beginning of the twentieth century; second, with Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives’ attacks on the ‘post-​war consensus’ in the 1970s and 1980s.63 Chamberlain’s declinism and his call for an ‘Imperial Zollverein’ largely associated him with the political right, though the proposed use of protective duties to support a big expansion of social provision harked back to his earlier radical politics. As a political project this failed, with a sweeping Liberal victory in the 1906 general election. But despite this failure, Chamberlain’s assault on ‘liberal cosmopolitanism’ had important long-​run consequences for thinking about the economy. As noted earlier in the chapter, it encouraged a great expansion of economic statistics, and this was far from just a technical matter; as Badiou notes, ‘the ideology of modern parliamentary societies, if they have one, is not humanism, law or the subject. It is number, the countable, countability’.64 And ‘countability’ has become central to understandings of the economy. As Tooze remarks, ‘Today, statistics define our knowledge of the economy’.65 So the notion of a national economy, quantified in diverse ways and in competition with other (quantifiable) economies, owes a great deal of its popularity in political argument to Chamberlain’s declinism and the debates it stimulated. A further huge expansion of 61 

M. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–​1980 (Cambridge, 1981), p. 3. D. Winch, ‘A Great Deal of Ruin in a Nation’, in Clarke and Trebilcock, eds., Understanding Decline, pp. 32–​48. 63  Cannadine, ‘Apocalypse When?’ 64  A. Badiou, Number and Numbers (Cambridge, 2008), p. 3. 65  A. Tooze, Statistics and the German State, 1900–​1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (Cambridge, 2001), p. 1. 62 

506   Jim Tomlinson economic statistics is also an important underpinning feature of the reinvention of declinism in the 1950s and 1960s, when there was an especially striking expansion of internationally comparative data by new bodies such as the IMF, UN, and OECD. This data production owed a great deal to the Cold War and the concern to measure economic development in the contest between two political systems. The declinism which drew heavily on this comparative data began mainly on the centreleft in the late 1950s, with criticism of the performance of the Conservative economic policy in the ‘thirteen wasted years’. But from its beginning, declinism appealed to very diverse political currents—​from Marxists to neo-​liberals—​and it was the latter who were to take it up and deploy it, with enormous political effect, in the 1970s.66 The core claim of the Thatcherite radicals of the 1970s was that the economic problems of that decade were the culminatory result of errors stretching back to at least the 1940s, which had put Britain on a path of decline which only a radical change of direction could correct. A feature of this version of declinism was its emphasis on the cultural causes of economic failure—​the perceived weakening of entrepreneurship and the spirit of enterprise, and the disappearance of ‘Victorian values’.67 Such notions of ‘cultural failure’ are central to Wiener’s work, but have had a much wider resonance in the writing of modern British history. The idea that the modern British state has been dominated by an effete, liberal, pacific, scientifically illiterate, anti-​entrepreneurial elite was a product of the very specific context of the centre-​left declinist literature of the 1950s and early ’60s, but its influence, when taken up by other political forces, has been pervasive.68 It fits, of course, with the narrative of twentieth-​century Britain as overwhelmingly a ‘welfare state’ rather than a ‘militant and technological nation’ (to use David Edgerton’s term). This history of British culture, it should be said, is deeply problematic.69 But it is an important feature of the historiography of modern Britain, above all because it ties together alluring narratives about the (decline of the) economy and the nature of politics and the state. Yet it itself is surely best seen as very much the product of a particular historical moment, and whose claims to provide a general understanding of modern Britain are, at best, very weak. An important task of the political history of the British

66 

J. Tomlinson, The Politics of Decline (London, 2001). Cannadine, ‘Apocalypse When?’, p. 278. 68  The titles and contents of two key works summarize a whole genre: H. Thomas, ed., The Establishment (London, 1959); A. Koestler, Suicide of a Nation? (London, 1963). Later, more conservative versions include C. Barnett, The Audit of War (London, 1986), C. Barnett, The Lost Victory (London, 1995). 69  As well as Edgerton’s work see F.M.L. Thompson, Gentrification and Enterprise Culture (Oxford, 2001); B. Collins and K. Robbins, eds., British Culture and Economic Decline (London, 1991); J. Harris, ‘Enterprise and Welfare States: A Comparative Perspective’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 40 (1990), 175–​95; M. Daunton, State and Market in Victorian Britain (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 12–​29, 148–​78. 67 

The Economy   507 economy is to locate all narratives of economic life very firmly in the ideological and political contexts in which they arose.

Further Reading P. Clarke and C. Trebilcock, eds., Understanding Decline: Perceptions and Realities of British Economic Performance (Cambridge, 1997). M. Daunton, State and Market in Victorian Britain (Woodbridge, 2008). D. Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–​1970 (Cambridge, 2006). R. Middleton, Government versus the Market:  The Growth of the Public Sector, Economic Management and British Economic Performance, c.1890–​1979 (Cheltenham, 1996). D. Winch and P. O’ Brien, eds., The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–​1914 (Oxford, 2002).

chapter 29

Im perial P ol i c y Simon C. Smith

For all the claims that the British were ‘absent-​minded imperialists’,1 they succeeded in constructing a truly impressive imperial edifice which, in the aftermath of the First World War, stretched in an unbroken swathe from Suez in Egypt to Singapore in south-​ east Asia. With the post-​war annexation of the former German colony of Tanganyika, Cecil Rhodes’ dream of a Cape-​to-​Cairo route in Africa controlled exclusively by the British was finally realized. A month after the Armistice, the Commander-​in-​Chief in India, Sir Charles Monro, enthused: ‘Now it is all over and the Empire stands on a pinnacle built by her tenacity and courage—​never did our reputation stand so high.’2 Indeed, while four great empires—​Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman, and Romanov—​disintegrated in the face of the global conflict, the British empire endured, and even expanded. By November 1918, it was at its fullest extent, with substantial new territories having been added in Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East.3 Yet by the early 1970s, most of the empire had parted company with Britain, leaving only problem territories such as Gibraltar, Hong Kong, and the Falkland Islands which were either subject to claims by other powers or specks on the map deemed too small and unviable ever to achieve full independence. British external policy against the background of the expansion of the British empire up to the end of the First World War, and its demise thereafter, will form the centrepiece of this chapter. Ronald Hyam has colourfully written that ‘When you think about it, there was no such thing as Greater Britain, still less a British empire—​India perhaps apart. There was only a ragbag of territorial bits and pieces, some remaindered remnants, some

1  In particular, see B. Porter, The Absent-​Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004); B. Porter, ‘Further Thoughts on Imperial Absent-​Mindedness’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36 (2008), 101–​17. 2  K. Jeffery, The British Army and the Crisis of Empire, 1918–​22 (Manchester, 1984), p. 1. 3  A.J. Stockwell, ‘The War and the British Empire’, in J. Turner, ed., Britain and the First World War (London, 1988), p. 41.

Imperial Policy   509 pre-​empted luxury items, some cheap samples’.4 In many respects, Hyam is right to highlight the diversity of empire and the lack of an imperial blueprint. This can perhaps best be seen with respect to the construction of the so-​called ‘informal empire’ in the nineteenth century. In 1833, the legal member of the Supreme Council of India, Thomas Babington Macaulay, remarked: The mere extent of empire is not necessarily an advantage . . . It would be, on the most selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India . . . were ruled by their own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were performing their salaams to English collectors and English magistrates.5

In the late 1840s, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, instructed Her Majesty’s Consul in Abyssinia to conclude a commercial treaty with its ruler, Ras Ali. Justifying his refusal to take possession of Abyssinia, Palmerston asserted: ‘I do not see any advantage in our getting land in these quarters. All we want is trade and land is not necessary for trade; we can carry on commerce on ground belonging to other people.’6 Indeed, the decline of protectionism, foreshadowed by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and the Navigation Acts three years later and the rise of free trade, appeared to negate the need for formal colonial possessions. Drawing on these ideas, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson produced their pioneering article, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, in the early 1950s. In their view, regarding only territory under Britain’s direct control as forming part of the empire is ‘rather like judging the size and character of icebergs solely from the parts above the water-​ line’.7 Seeking to support their interpretation, Gallagher and Robinson identified a huge ‘informal empire’ which, while not under formal British control or rule, was nevertheless under Britain’s imperial sway largely due to the strength of the metropolitan economy. In their analysis, the informal empire stemmed largely from the integration of new regions into Britain’s expanding economy.8 They concluded: ‘The usual summing up of the policy of the free trade empire as “trade not rule” should read “trade with informal control if possible; trade with rule when necessary”’.9 Unsurprisingly, Gallagher and Robinson’s ideas attracted critics both at the time of publication and subsequently. One of the most penetrating criticisms was presented by D.C.M. Platt, who questioned the extent to which the British government was prepared to intervene in support of its economic interests. ‘Fair and equal treatment’, insisted

4  R. Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–​1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (2nd edn., Basingstoke, 1993), p. 1. 5  Ibid., pp. 105–​6. 6  Ibid., p. 107. 7  J. Gallagher and R. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, 6 (1953), 1. 8 Ibid., 5. 9 Ibid., 13.

510   Simon C. Smith Platt, ‘not favoured treatment, was what British diplomacy aimed to achieve for British trade’.10 More recently, John Darwin has cast doubt on Gallagher and Robinson’s theory, arguing that ‘informal empire was more likely to reflect the force majeure of circumstance than the triumph of a principle’.11 He goes on to observe: ‘Informal imperialism was thus not a policy nor even a recognized formula for the assertion of influence. It represented a pragmatic acceptance of limited power.’12 The inadequacies of ‘informal empire’, and the breakdown of attempts to maintain British overseas interests through informal means, often led to a resort to more formal methods of imperial control. Gallagher and Robinson themselves concede—​and indeed it is a key feature of their interpretation of the late nineteenth-​century ‘scramble for Africa’—​that local crises on the imperial periphery served to draw the British into accepting greater responsibility for the governance of non-​European territories. ‘Scanning Europe for the causes’, contend Gallagher and Robinson, ‘the theorists of imperialism have been looking for the answers in the wrong places. The crucial changes that set all working took place in Africa itself ’.13 In particular, the authors lay emphasis on the 1881 outbreak of an army revolt led by Arabi Pasha against the ruler, or Khedive, of Egypt. With the breakdown of indigenous authority, Britain was forced to intervene to protect its vital strategic interests in Egypt, more particularly the Suez Canal, which had been completed in 1869 and provided much quicker passage to India and the East than the traditional Cape route, as well as carrying a significant proportion of British trade. The prevalence of local crises leading to a failure of informal empire can also be identified with respect to Burma. The Burmese kings’ refusal to deal with Britain on an exclusive basis and the breakdown of royal authority in Burma, especially following the accession of King Theebaw in 1878, served to undermine British commercial interests in the country and also negate British attempts to exert influence over the kingdom. Anthony Webster has also underlined that Westminster came under strong pressure from British commercial concerns, especially in the City of London, to annex Burma and thus secure their interests. Webster draws particular attention to the London Chamber of Commerce which he describes as the ‘mouthpiece of gentlemanly capitalists in the City’.14 Webster highlights the fact that the Chamber’s call for annexation more or less coincided with Secretary of State for India Randolph Churchill’s ultimatum to Theebaw of October 1885, which led directly to war and the termination of what remained of Burma’s independence.

10 

D.C.M. Platt, Finance, Trade, and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815–​1914 (Oxford, 1968), p. 316. J. Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion’, English Historical Review, 112 (1997), 620. 12 Ibid., 619. 13  R. Robinson and J. Gallagher, ‘The Partition of Africa’, in F.H. Hinsley, ed., The New Cambridge Modern History, Volume 11: Material Progress and World-​Wide Problems, 1870–​1898 (Cambridge, 1962), p. 594. 14  A. Webster, Gentleman Capitalists: British Imperialism in South East Asia, 1770–​1890 (London, 1998), p. 227. 11 

Imperial Policy   511 By referring to ‘gentlemanly capitalists’, Webster is drawing on the work of P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, who have argued that ‘Explanations of imperialism ought to begin with a close study of economic structure and change in Britain’.15 They point out that earlier ‘non-​industrial forms of capitalist enterprise, particularly those in finance and commercial services, have not received the historical recognition they deserve’.16 They are keen to stress that, in spite of the slow growth of manufacturing output after the mid-​ nineteenth century, the financial and service sectors in fact underwent marked expansion. In their interpretation, the link between Britain’s expanding financial interests and empire was provided by ‘gentlemanly capitalists’, land-​owners and financiers principally from the south of England who enjoyed the same social background and perceptions of national interest as the aristocratic governing class. By contrast, northern manufacturers were ‘largely outside the circle of gentlemanly culture and did not “speak the same language” as the aristo-​financial élite’.17 In the case of Burma, Webster argues that the termination of the Residency in 1879 had left the British authorities ‘entirely dependent on private commercial channels of intelligence in Mandalay’.18 This allowed commercial interests to fuel and manipulate British fears about growing French influence in order to create the conditions for annexation. Webster stresses that the ‘simplistic division between strategic and commercial considerations obscures this dependence of strategic calculation upon the commercial channels of information and influence, which shaped government policy’.19 In Webster’s analysis, Wallace Brothers, a leading finance house in the City, played a decisive role in persuading the British government to take action in Upper Burma. According to him, they used their contacts with the India Office, their control of sources of information on Burma, and their wide influence in commercial circles to secure annexation. Another important individual influencing government decisions was the financier Lord Rothschild, who was a personal friend of Randolph Churchill. Seeking to apply their interpretation to the European partition of Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, Cain and Hopkins insist that Britain’s involvement was governed by a determination to protect its economic interests. Consequently, the authors concentrate on those areas of the continent, such as Egypt and southern Africa, where Britain’s economic stake, especially its investments, was greatest. For example, examining Britain’s occupation of Egypt in 1882, Cain and Hopkins hold that ‘British policy was assertive not because policy-​makers were in the pockets of the bond-​holders, but because they recognized the need to defend Britain’s substantial economic interests’.20

15 

P.J. Cain and A.J. Hopkins, ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas. II: New Imperialism, 1850–​1945’, Economic History Review, 40 (1987), 17. 16  P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–​1914 (London, 1993), p. 19. 17  Cain and Hopkins, ‘New Imperialism’, 6. 18 Webster, Gentleman Capitalists, p. 226. 19 Ibid. 20  Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 369.

512   Simon C. Smith Britain’s unilateral occupation of Egypt had repercussions beyond Egypt itself. Paul Hayes has observed that ‘The quarrel over Egypt destroyed any possibility of an Anglo-​ French understanding for 20 years’.21 He proceeds to note that ‘Hostility between Britain and France over Egypt spilled into other areas, thus causing further strains. Rivalry gave an added impetus to imperial expansion and led to serious confrontation between the western powers in West Africa in early 1898 and at Fashoda in the autumn of the same year’.22 In addition to Anglo-​French rivalry, another driver of British external policy was the notion of British prestige and standing in the world. As Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain insisted with respect to Britain’s attempts to restrain Afrikaner nationalism and reassert its authority over South Africa during the Boer War (1899–​1902): ‘What is now at stake is the position of Great Britain . . . and with it the estimate formed of our power and influence in our Colonies and throughout the world.’23 Despite the controversies, and atrocities, of the Boer War, which included the use of embryonic concentration camps to suppress Afrikaner resistance, Britain sought reconciliation with its former opponents, and this included the granting of responsible government to a Union of South Africa in 1910. In many respects, British policy was rewarded by South Africa’s support for Britain during the First World War. Indeed, 11.12 per cent of the white male population of South Africa fought for Britain, serving in Egypt, East Africa, and France.24 Even high percentages from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand rallied to the imperial cause during the Great War. Nearly one and a half million Indian volunteers, moreover, passed through the ranks of the Indian Army between 1914 and 1918. In some respects, therefore, the First World War should be seen as an imperial war. Nevertheless, as A.J. Stockwell has noted: War sapped the empire, and cracks opened up on the surface. Military sacrifices and conscription of ‘native labour’, the accumulation of mountains of unexported agricultural surpluses in the tropics and the emergence of import substitution industries elsewhere, a growing awareness of British fallibility and the propagation of both Bolshevik ideology and American anti-​imperialism all encouraged centrifugal tendencies in the imperial conglomerate.25

In many ways the strains of war were responsible for the ‘imperial crisis’ of 1918–​22 which witnessed anti-​colonial movements, rebellions, and instability in territories as diverse as Ireland, Egypt, and India. John Gallagher goes so far as to characterize unrest

21 

P. Hayes, ‘British Foreign Policy, 1867–​1900: Continuity and Conflict’, in T.R. Gourvish and A. O’Day, eds., Later Victorian Britain, 1867–​1900 (Basingstoke, 1988), p. 159. 22 Ibid. 23  Ibid., p. 165. 24  Statistics for imperial involvement in the First World War are provided by C.E. Carrington, ‘The Empire at War, 1914–​1918’, in E.A. Benians, J. Butler, and C.E. Carrington, eds., The Cambridge History of the British Empire, Vol. 3: The Empire-​Commonwealth, 1870–​1919 (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 641–​2. 25  Stockwell, ‘The War and the Empire’, p. 46.

Imperial Policy   513 in these territories as ‘hammers [which] beat on the anvil of Empire’.26 He continues: ‘It is clear that the Empire of 1918, like the Empire of 1763, was over-​extended, and that the Empire which emerged from the First World War, like the Empire which resulted from the Partition of Africa, was too top heavy with insurance it was carrying for India.’27 In these circumstances, Britain had little option but to offer concessions. Nevertheless, as John Darwin points out, such concessions should not be seen as a ‘conscious preparation for the final act of dissolution’, but rather were designed to ‘knock out the props which, so it appeared, had supported the upsurge of anti-​British nationalism  in the aftermath of the war’.28 In 1919, the Montagu–​Chelmsford reforms introduced directly elected majorities in India’s provincial and central legislative councils. While the Viceroy and his executive remained dominant at the centre, a system known as diarchy was instituted in the provinces under which certain local subjects, such as agriculture, education, and public works, were transferred to Indian ministers responsible to provincial legislatures. Facing an escalating conflict in Ireland, Prime Minister Lloyd George agreed to a truce with Irish rebels in July 1921 and subsequently accepted the country’s partition and the creation of the new Irish Free State in the south. Shortly after the Irish settlement, the British made a unilateral declaration of Egyptian independence, although a number of important areas of government remained under British control, including the conduct of Egypt’s foreign and defence policy. In addition to offering concessions, British decision-​makers also sought to minimize opposition to colonial rule, and reduce the costs of colonial administration in the straitened financial circumstances following the Great War, by adopting a policy of ‘indirect rule’. Under this system, the collaboration of traditional indigenous elites was encouraged by recognizing their powers and integrating them into local administrative structures. The policy of ruling through local potentates was especially prominent in Africa, where it was given articulation by the former Governor-​General of Nigeria, Lord Lugard, in his 1922 publication The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. In other parts of the empire too, indirect rule was raised to the level of conscious policy—​ for example, in the Malay States, where the sovereignty and status of the local rulers, or Sultans, was in theory respected by the British colonial regime. In 1927, the High Commissioner for the Malay States, Sir Hugh Clifford,29 solemnly declared: These States were, when the British Government was invited by their Rulers and Chiefs to set their troubled houses in order, Muhammadan Monarchies; such they are to-​day, and such they must continue to be. No mandate has ever been extended to

26 

J. Gallagher, ‘Nationalisms and the Crisis of Empire, 1919–​1922’, Modern Asian Studies, 15 (1981), 365. Ibid., 366–​7. 28  J. Darwin, ‘Imperialism in Decline? Tendencies in British Imperial Policy between the Wars’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), 678. 29  Clifford had also served as Governor of Nigeria from 1919 to 1925. 27 

514   Simon C. Smith us by Rajas, Chiefs or people to vary the system of government which has existed in these territories from time immemorial.30

In addition to attempting to mitigate the problems of imperial overstretch through the adoption of indirect rule across many parts of the empire, British policy-​makers also sought to create structures of imperial defence which took cognizance of Britain’s reduced economic circumstances in the wake of four years of global warfare. The most conspicuous example of this is provided by the construction of the Singapore naval base in the inter-​war years. In the late nineteenth century, Britain maintained a two-​power naval standard. According to this, the Royal Navy was to be stronger than the most likely combination of two rival naval powers. Although by 1918 the menace of the German fleet had been neutralized, financial stringency dictated that Britain could no longer maintain a two-​ power standard. At the Washington Conference of 1921, capital fleets were limited to a ratio of 5:5:3 for Britain, the United States, and Japan. At the same time, the 1902 Anglo-​ Japanese alliance was allowed to lapse, largely in response to American pressure. With the formal reduction of the Royal Navy to a one-​power standard and the identification of Japan as Britain’s most likely naval rival, mobility became central to British naval strategy to defend its far-​flung empire. While remaining in Western waters, the British fleet required a base in the East from which to operate. As the base would have to await relief from the main fleet in Europe, Singapore was chosen since, of the potential sites, it had the advantage of being as far away from Japan as possible. From the outset, however, it was realized that the strategy could founder if, in the future, Britain faced a threat in home waters which would prevent the despatch of the fleet to the East. In 1921, the Admiralty warned: The worst situation with which the British empire could be faced, from a naval point of view, would occur if Japan seized the opportunity of aggressive action in the Pacific at a time when the situation at home was threatened from another quarter, and reinforcements capable of dealing with the whole of Japan’s main forces could not immediately be spared.31

The base, nevertheless, came to be seen as vital for the defensive integrity of the empire. In the opinion of James Neidpath, anxiety that the territories of the empire would start looking to the United States unless Britain could effectively defend them ‘underlay the policy of building and defending a naval base at Singapore throughout the twenties and thirties’.32 Although the decision to build the Singapore base was agreed in principle by

30 

J. de V. Allen, A.J. Stockwell, and L.R. Wright, eds., A Collection of Treaties and Other Documents Affecting the States of Malaysia, 1761–​1963 (2 vols, London, 1981), vol. ii, p. 81. 31  J. Neidpath, The Singapore Naval Base and the Defence of Britain’s Eastern Empire, 1919–​1941 (Oxford, 1981), p. 14. 32 Ibid., p. 49.

Imperial Policy   515 the Cabinet in June 1921, its progress towards completion was slow and intermittent. This can be accounted for in a number of ways. First, interservice rivalry between the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force over the optimum way to defend Singapore hindered the scheme. Another key reason for the delays in the naval base project was the state of the British economy. As a result of the First World War, the British national debt had increased spectacularly. By 1925, for instance, debt servicing as a share of total government expenditure had reached 41.6 per cent.33 In these circumstances, spending on military projects was vulnerable to cost-​ conscious governments. In 1924, the Singapore naval base scheme was even cancelled briefly by the minority Labour administration of Ramsay MacDonald. Following his return to office in 1929, MacDonald once more demonstrated scepticism towards the base, ordering a partial suspension of work on the project. Without the Singapore base, Britain could not adopt a strong line following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in northern China in 1931. Referring to the Washington Conference, however, Neidpath argues that ‘The power to stop Japan’s action had been surrendered in 1921, whatever the condition of Singapore’.34 To make matters worse, naval rivalry in European waters began to resurface from the early 1930s. The growth of the French and Italian navies meant that the pseudo-​two-​power standard—​taking Japan and the strongest European power into account but not the United States—​was no longer satisfied. Under the 1935 Anglo-​German naval agreement, moreover, Germany was permitted to build up to 35 per cent of Britain’s strength. As early as 1934, however, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, warned that a two-​front war against Germany and Japan was a financial impossibility. In consequence, he argued that ‘while we must (if only in good faith to the Dominions) proceed to complete Singapore . . . we must postpone the idea of sending out to it a fleet of capital ships capable of containing the Japanese fleet or meeting it in battle’.35 Despite the limitations on British resources, the concept of sending an adequate fleet to Singapore was reiterated at the 1937 Imperial Conference. This unrealistic commitment was made to preserve imperial unity. As the Minister for Coordination of Defence, Lord Chatfield, explained: ‘if we did not show willingness to look after our Dominions they might consider whether it would not be advantageous for them to look to America for assistance.’36 Military logic, however, demonstrated the unreality of the pledge. On 20 February 1939, the Chiefs of Staff estimated that on the outbreak of war in 1939, the combined British and French fleets would be numerically slightly inferior to their potential enemies. In March, nevertheless, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, assured his Australian counterpart, Joseph Lyons, that, ‘In the event

33  T.G. Otte, ‘“It’s what made Britain Great”: Reflections on British Foreign Policy from Malplaquet to Maastricht’, in T.G. Otte, ed., The Makers of British Foreign Policy: From Pitt to Thatcher (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 17–​18. 34 Neidpath, The Singapore Naval Base, p. 124. 35  Ibid., p. 131. 36  Ibid., p. 140.

516   Simon C. Smith of war with Germany and Italy, should Japan join in against us, it would still be His Majesty’s Government’s full intention to despatch a fleet to Singapore.’37 The size of the fleet, however, would be determined at that time. By this formula, Chamberlain secured the Pacific dominions’ consent to send their troops, aircraft, and warships to Europe and the Middle East. In the event, Britain could spare just two capital ships, the Prince of Wales and Repulse, both of which were sunk by Japanese bombers on 10 December 1941. A little over two months later, Singapore itself was to fall to the Japanese. In the post-​mortem which followed this disaster, Admiral Richmond declared:38 ‘It was the illusion that a Two-​ Hemisphere Empire can be defended by a One-​Hemisphere Navy that sealed the fate of Singapore.’39 This devastating critique has much explanatory power. By the 1930s, the supports which had underpinned the Singapore base strategy had, one by one, been knocked away. The growth of European navies in the 1930s; Britain’s failure to match Japan’s modernization of its capital fleet; and Britain’s acceptance, at the London Naval Conference of 1930, of a 10:10:7 ratio in cruisers destroyed the plausibility of the Singapore strategy. Faced by two hostile powers—​Germany and Japan—​at opposite ends of the globe, and with a third—​Italy—​straddling the communications between them, defence of the British empire became impossible with the resources at Britain’s disposal. In particular, the fall of France in June 1940 has been described by Darwin as a ‘catastrophic blow’. Justifying this judgement, Darwin asserts: The disaster that had loomed only briefly over the British world system in mid-​1918 now arrived in earnest . . . It was the brutal demolition of almost all the assumptions on which confidence in the future of British world power had come to depend: the shield afforded by the European balance of power; the sufficiency of British naval strength once adequately modernized; the latent force of global economic power once properly mobilized.40

Referring specifically to the difficulties faced by the British military in trying to defend Malaya and Singapore at the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, James Neidpath has written: ‘The enemy’s dominance of the seas around Malaya rendered the army’s tactical problem insoluble with the forces at its disposal.’41 Even Singapore’s symbolic role of representing imperial unity proved to be an illusion. On 27 December 1941, the Australian premier, John Curtin, put his name to a newspaper article which proclaimed: ‘Without any inhibitions of any kind, I  make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, 37 

I. Hamill, Strategic Illusion: The Singapore Strategy and the Defence of Australia and New Zealand, 1919–​1942 (Singapore, 1981), pp. 299–​300. 38  Admiral Richmond had been Commander-​in-​Chief of the East Indies station in the 1920s, later becoming Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at Cambridge. 39  W.D. McIntyre, The Rise and Fall of the Singapore Naval Base, 1919–​1942 (London, 1979), p. 214. 40  J. Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-​System, 1830–​1970 (Cambridge, 2009), p. 499. 41 Neidpath, The Singapore Naval Base, p. 215.

Imperial Policy   517 free from pangs as to our traditional links of kinship with the United Kingdom.’42 The Australian bitterness and sense of betrayal was all the more acute since Winston Churchill had promised in 1939 that ‘if the choice were presented of defending Australia against a serious attack, or sacrificing British interests in the Mediterranean, our duty to Australia would take precedence’.43 This pledge was repeated in August 1940 to both Australia and New Zealand. A.J. Stockwell has noted that ‘The Second World War dealt a mortal blow to the reputation of European imperialism, devastated the fabric of colonialism, and fired the cause of Asian nationalism’.44 Referring to the impact of the years 1939–​45 on the empire, Darwin has observed: The preconditions in which a British world-​ system had been continuously viable since the 1830s and 1840s had all but disappeared in the storms of war. The European balance, precariously restored after 1918, had been comprehensively wrecked  . . .  ‘Passive’ Asia had become an uncontrollable vortex of anti-​Western imperialism.45

‘Britain’s “survival”’, he concludes, ‘would resemble that of a patient on a life-​support machine: dependent indefinitely on American aid to fend off invasion; incapable of defending, supporting, financing or controlling the component parts of the pre-​war imperial system’.46 Britain’s decline was cruelly exposed at the Tehran conference of November 1943 when Stalin and Roosevelt negotiated over Churchill’s head. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, the British Colonial Office was forced to concede: ‘In effect, the United Kingdom has fought this war with complete disregard for financial consequences, and has poured into it the accumulated capital of generations of saving.’47 Just before the end of the conflict, economist J.M. Keynes had warned that Britain was facing a ‘financial Dunkirk’ on account of its depleted resources and swollen debts, coupled with its increased overseas commitments.48 ‘We cannot police half the world at our own expense when we have already gone into pawn to the other half ’, he added.49

42 Hamill, Strategic Illusion, p. 313. 43 

Ibid., p. 305. A.J. Stockwell, ‘Imperialism and Nationalism in South-​East Asia’, in J.M. Brown and W.R. Louis, eds., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), p. 479. 45 Darwin, The Empire Project, p. 513. 46  Ibid., p. 515. 47  ‘Financial Results of the War in the United Kingdom’, Colonial Office memorandum, 27 September 1945, CO 852/​555/​4, cited in R. Hyam, ed., The Labour Government and the End of Empire, Vol. II (London, 1992), p. 8. 48  L.J. Butler, Britain and Empire: Adjusting to a Post-​Imperial World (London, 2002), p. 60. 49 Ibid., p. 61. 44 

518   Simon C. Smith In the immediate aftermath of war, there was a rash of imperial exits. Indeed, in the years 1947–​8, Britain withdrew from India, Burma, Ceylon, and Palestine. As regards India, the erstwhile jewel in the imperial crown, Viceroy Lord Wavell commented at the end of 1946: the administration has declined, and the machine in the Centre is hardly working at all now, my ministers are too busy with politics. And while the British are still legally and morally responsible for what happens in India, we have lost nearly all power to control events; we are simply running on the momentum of our previous prestige.50

Shortly before Indian independence, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, pragmatically observed: If you are in a place where you are not wanted, and where you have not got the force, or perhaps the will, to squash those who don’t want you, the only thing to do is to come out . . . The Tories are making a good deal of a hoot about India, but I don’t believe that one person in a hundred thousand in this country cares tuppence about it, as long as British people are not being mauled about out there.51

In spite of the dramatic withdrawals from key parts of Britain’s Asian demesne, there was a reassertion of interests in the commodity-​producing territories of Africa and south-​ east Asia after 1945, since their exports to the United States earned valuable dollars for the sterling area. If Britain ‘pushed on and developed Africa’, confidently predicted the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, ‘we could have the United States dependent on us and eating out of our hands in five years’.52 The colonies were also central to Bevin’s vision of Britain as an independent ‘Third Force’ in the world. ‘We have the material resources in the Colonial Empire, if we develop them’, he argued, ‘and by giving a spiritual lead now we should be able to carry out our main task in a way which will show clearly that we are not subservient to the United States of America or the Soviet Union’.53 In pursuit of such policy objectives, an army of experts were sent to Africa from Britain in what has become known as the ‘second colonial occupation’.54 Successive British governments also proved willing to use massive force in countries as diverse as Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus to contain radical, anti-​British nationalism.55

50 

Entry in Lord Wavell’s journal, 31 December 1946, cited in P. Moon, ed., Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal (London, 1973), p. 402. 51  H. Dalton, High Tide and After: Memoirs, 1945–​1960 (London, 1962), p. 211. 52  R. Holland, The Pursuit of Greatness: Britain and the World Role, 1900–​1970 (London, 1991), p. 225. 53  J. D. Hargreaves, Decolonization in Africa (2nd edn., London, 1996), p. 113. 54 Butler, Britain and Empire, p. 84. 55  See A. Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya 1948–​1960 (London, 1975); C. Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London, 2005); D. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London, 2006); R.F. Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–​1959 (Oxford, 1998).

Imperial Policy   519 Even in the loyal island colony of Malta, which had been considered for integration in the UK itself, Britain suspended the constitution and imposed direct rule in 1958, in the face of mounting political instability there.56 The single episode that has generated the greatest debate about British decolonization, however, is undoubtedly the Suez crisis of 1956. Suez has traditionally been seen as hastening the end of empire. Britain’s attempts not only to reverse Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Anglo-​ French Suez Canal Company, but also to unseat him, unquestionably revealed British weakness—​diplomatic, economic, and military—​as well as leading to the resignation of British Prime Minister Anthony Eden. With only a little exaggeration, The Times described Eden as the ‘last Prime Minister to believe Britain was a great power and the first to confront a crisis which proved she was not’.57 Brian Lapping, moreover, memorably remarked that ‘The Suez operation wrote finis not only to the British Empire but to all the empires of Western Europe’.58 More recently, however, other writers have cast doubt on the impact of Suez on the end of empire and produced more subtle interpretations of the crisis and its legacy. Eden increasingly began to perceive that all of Britain’s problems and challenges in the Middle East could be traced to Nasser. This mindset was demonstrated by his reaction to King Hussein of Jordan’s dismissal, in March 1956, of the British Commander of the Arab Legion, Sir John Glubb. While Nasser unquestionably welcomed the news, he had little direct input into Hussein’s decision. Nonetheless, to Eden, the Egyptian leader was responsible. During a fractious telephone conversation with Anthony Nutting, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, Eden is alleged to have said: ‘I want Nasser murdered.’59 Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956 set Britain and Egypt on a collision course which would end in Britain’s, and Eden’s, humiliation by the end of the year. Eden’s resolution not merely to overturn the nationalization of the Canal Company, but also to topple Nasser, who had become Egyptian president in June 1956, is underlined by a meeting of the Cabinet’s Egypt Committee on 30 July during which it was agreed that Britain’s immediate aim should be ‘to bring about the down fall of the present Egyptian government’.60 Eden also informed the US President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, that ‘the removal of Nasser and the installation in Egypt of a regime less hostile to the West must . . . rank high among our objectives’.61 Despite American scepticism towards the use of force, Britain—​in conjunction with France, which suspected the Egyptian

56 

Minute from A. Lennox-​Boyd to H. Macmillan, 30 Apr. 1958, in S. C. Smith, ed., British Documents on the End of Empire: Malta (London, 2006), p. 208. 57  D. Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York, 2009), p. 478. 58  B. Lapping, End of Empire (London, 1985), p. 277. 59  Ibid., p. 262. 60  D. Carlton, Britain and the Suez Crisis (Oxford, 1988), pp. 36–​7. 61  K. Kyle, Suez (New York, 1991), p. 179.

520   Simon C. Smith president of providing support to rebels resisting French rule in Algeria—​made steps towards a military response to the Canal dispute. The British Foreign Office’s Legal Adviser provided the advice that ‘Whatever illegalities the Egyptians may have committed . . . these do not in any way . . . justify forcible action on our part’.62 The identification of a pretext was therefore necessary. During a meeting at the British Prime Minister’s country residence, Chequers, on 14 October, the Deputy Chief of the French Air Force, Maurice Challe, suggested that by secretly encouraging Israel to attack Egypt, Britain and France would be provided with a justification for sending their own forces to Egypt under the guise of separating the combatants and protecting the Canal. This scheme was given further refinement in the course of discussions between the representatives of the British, French, and Israeli governments at Sèvres, Paris, on 22 October. Two days later the Israelis, who had been keen to strike at Nasser since his successful conclusion in September 1955 of a deal to purchase Soviet arms via Czechoslovakia, consented to launch an attack on Egypt. Israeli forces began their operations against the Egyptian army on 29 October 1956. A day later, France and Britain issued a joint ultimatum calling on the two combatants to pull back their forces to ten miles either side of the Canal. Almost immediately, Eden’s duplicity began to be revealed, since at this time the Israelis were nowhere near the Canal. The Labour opposition’s refusal to give Eden’s government out-​and-​out backing was exacerbated by the hostile international reaction to the first wave of Anglo-​French attacks on the night of 31 October/​1 November. Despite the unfavourable climate of international and domestic opinion, Eden proceeded with the military operation, with British and French paratroops landing at the northern end of the Canal on 5 November. A day later, nevertheless, British forces were ordered to cease fire. On 23 November, Eden, whose health was in danger of collapsing, travelled to Jamaica. ‘The captain leaves the sinking ship which he has steered personally onto the rocks’, acerbically remarked Eden’s former Principal Private Secretary.63 Despite his impenitence about his conduct during the Suez crisis, Eden resigned as Prime Minister on 9 January 1957, ostensibly on grounds of ill health, to be replaced by his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan. The reasons underpinning Eden’s handing of the crisis range from the prime minister’s ill health to attempts to deter an Israeli attack on Britain’s regional ally Jordan by directing Israeli aggression towards Egypt instead. The most credible explanation is provided by his assessment of British interests in the Suez Canal. Britain’s economic stake in the Canal, even in 1956, was considerable. At that time, nearly 25 per cent of Britain’s imports traversed the Canal; one third of the total traffic passing through was British. By far the most important consideration, however, was the fact that a large percentage of Britain’s oil needs depended on transit through the Canal. Shortly after the nationalization of the Canal Company, Eden informed the Cabinet that ‘No arrangement 62  S.C. Smith, Ending Empire in the Middle East: Britain, the United States and Post-​War Decolonization, 1945–​1973 (London, 2012), p. 48. 63  E. Shuckburgh, Descent to Suez: Diaries, 1951–​1956 (London, 1986), p. 365.

Imperial Policy   521 for the future use of this great international waterway can be acceptable to the British Government which would leave it in the hands of a single power which could exploit it purely for purposes of national policy’.64 Eden even stated: ‘The Egyptian has his thumb on our windpipe.’65 The impact of Suez on the demission of empire is a controversial issue. Former Labour Defence Secretary Denis Healey depicted the crisis as a ‘turning point in postwar history’, in that ‘it signified the end of Britain’s imperial role outside Europe’.66 Moreover, the doyen of British imperial history, William Roger Louis, argues that ‘the debate about the Suez Canal and the invasion of Egypt became transformed into a full-​blown polemic yet searching discussion about colonialism. The British Empire was now not merely in the dock but reviled as a renegade’.67 Equally, Ronald Hyam holds that on the one hand, Suez had a ‘psychological impact on Macmillan’s colonial policy’, while on the other it represented a ‘moment of blinding revelation for many British people that the days of empire were numbered’.68 Despite the drama of the Suez crisis, however, it has been increasingly recognized that it sounded an uncertain note in British decolonization. Shortly after entering 10 Downing Street in January 1957, Harold Macmillan initiated a cost–​benefit analysis of Britain’s remaining colonial dependencies. Although this exercise appeared ‘refreshingly hard-​headed’, A.J. Stockwell has demonstrated that, rather than being brought about by the Suez crisis, it in fact ‘resurrected one element of a full-​scale policy review which Eden had initiated six months earlier but which had been interrupted by the Suez crisis’.69 Writing with A.N. Porter, Stockwell stresses that ‘Tighter Cabinet control did not necessarily point to preparations for rapid decolonization, or even the construction of a timetable for independence’.70 The Defence White Paper of 1957, which presaged a shift in resources from conventional to nuclear weapons and promised the end of national service, had been prefigured by earlier studies in 1954–​5 and should be viewed, according to Stockwell, as ‘one of a series of attempts by post-​war governments to live within their means’.71 Porter and Stockwell also note that the ‘cancelling of conscription did not necessarily predicate decolonization’.72 British commitments in the Middle East and south-​east Asia were endorsed by the 1957 White

64  M. Abd el-​Wahab Sayed-​Ahmed, Nasser and American Foreign Policy, 1952–​6 (London, 1989), p. 123. 65   P.L. Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945–​56 (Chapel Hill, 1991), p. 213. 66  D. Healey, The Time of My Life (London, 1990), p. 213. 67  W.R. Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization (London, 2006), p. 695. 68  R. Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–​1968 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 239. 69  A.J. Stockwell, ‘Suez 1956 and the Moral Disarmament of the British Empire’, in S.C. Smith, ed., Reassessing Suez 1956: New Perspectives on the Crisis and its Aftermath (Aldershot, 2008), p. 234. 70  A.N. Porter and A.J. Stockwell, British Imperial Policy and Decolonization, 1938–​1964: Volume 2: 1951–​1964 (Basingstoke, 1989), p. 30. 71  Stockwell, ‘Suez 1956’, p. 235. 72  Porter and Stockwell, British Imperial Policy and Decolonization, p. 32.

522   Simon C. Smith Paper and reiterated in the study of future policy initiated by Macmillan in 1959. British subservience to the United States in the aftermath of Suez has also been scrutinized. William Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson insist that ‘After Suez, the British concurred with the Americans at last in setting their sights on the post-​colonial era  . . .  According to Anglo-​American calculations, the strategic significance of pan-​ Arabism, of pan-​Africanism, and of the non-​aligned nations in the cold war motivated the final dismantling of formal empire’.73 They conclude: ‘After 1956 the British fell in with the American design for Western alliances with freer trade and free institutions. Such was the imperialism of decolonization.’74 Referring specifically to the Middle East, W. Scott Lucas maintains that ‘to restore the Anglo-​American “alliance”, Britain paid the price of permanent subservience to American policy’.75 Successive British governments, however, displayed a preparedness to pursue perceived national interests even in defiance of the United States. Although Macmillan conceded that ‘We had burnt our fingers over Suez and I had no intention of doing so for a second time’76 with respect to British intervention in Jordan to stabilize the monarchical regime there, he still sanctioned the despatch of British troops in July 1958 despite American scepticism. Three years later, he authorized the sending of forces to Kuwait in order to deter Iraqi adventurism in the oil-​rich emirate. For their part, American policy-​makers, especially in the context of the intensification of conflict in Vietnam, grew to value Britain’s continuing global role. It was not until 1968 that the Labour government of Harold Wilson declared its intention to withdraw from south-​east Asia and the Gulf, and even then this decision had more to do with domestic political and economic considerations than any identifiable legacy of Suez. Although Ghana had achieved independence in 1957, this had been a gradual process during the 1950s and had little or no connection with the Suez crisis. With regard to African decolonization more generally, L.J. Butler and Sarah Stockwell record that, in response to Macmillan’s cost–​benefit analysis launched in the aftermath of Suez, the Colonial Office ‘stressed the dangers of premature withdrawal from colonies as yet ill-​ prepared politically and militarily for independence, and the likely collateral damage this could deal to Britain’s international prestige’.77 Similar conclusions were drawn by an interdepartmental survey of overseas commitments produced in June 1958. If anything, events in East Africa had the most significant impact on the speeding up of decolonization in Africa. On 3 March 1959, 11 Mau Mau detainees at the Hola Camp in Kenya were beaten to death, while 20 Africans were shot dead in Nyasaland. Widespread

73 

W.R. Louis and R. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonization’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 22 (1994), 494. 74 Ibid., 495. 75  W. Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis (London, 1991), p. 324. 76  D. Little, ‘His Finest Hour: Eisenhower, Lebanon, and the 1958 Middle East Crisis’, Diplomatic History, 20 (1996), 48. 77  L.J. Butler and S. Stockwell, The Wind of Change: Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 5–​6.

Imperial Policy   523 shock at the killings, coupled with highly critical official reports, turned the spotlight on British colonial administration in Africa. At the October 1959 general election, Macmillan was returned to power. Convinced that Africa was the greatest problem facing his new government, Macmillan conceived an African tour which, he hoped, ‘might . . . just get something moving in what seems [to be a] log-​jam of ideas’.78 Macmillan’s six-​week African odyssey at the beginning of 1960 concluded with his celebrated speech before the South African Parliament on 3 February. Rounding on his taciturn audience, Macmillan declared: ‘The wind of change is blowing through this continent and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.’79 There followed a scrambling out of empire which witnessed the abandonment of most of Britain’s remaining Africa dependencies by 1964. Writing in that year, the Secretary of State for Colonies during the ‘wind of change’ era, Iain Macleod, commented: It has been said that after I  became Colonial Secretary there was a deliberate speeding-​up of the movement towards independence. I agree. There was. And in my view any other policy would have led to terrible bloodshed in Africa. This is the heart of the argument . . . Were the countries ready for Independence? Of course not . . . The march of men towards their freedom can be guided but not halted. Of course there were risks in moving quickly. But the risks of moving slowly were far greater.80

The British withdrawal from its fixed positions east of Suez in 1971, foreshadowed by Harold Wilson’s announcement three years earlier, did not necessarily presage a British withdrawal from world affairs. While Britain no longer enjoyed the status of a global power, it certainly retained global interests. As the Permanent Under-​Secretary at the FCO, Sir Paul Gore-​Booth, stressed in 1968: It was clear we could not simply retire into our shell once our troops left the regions in question. We had a general interest in the peace, stability and prosperity of the areas and we had also a substantial economic stake, in the form of investments and export markets, which were important for our future solvency and standard of living.81

In his interpretation of Britain’s international role after 1970, Michael J. Turner maintains that ‘Historians who focus on the reasons for Britain’s decline perhaps lose sight of an equally important phenomenon: how and why decline was minimized. Britain did decline, but despite the lack of resources and despite events that did not go its way, 78 Ibid., p. 7.

79 Ibid., p. 1.

80  I. Macleod, ‘Trouble in Africa’ (leading article in The Spectator, 31 Jan. 1964), cited in Porter and Stockwell, British Imperial Policy and Decolonization, pp. 570–​7 1. 81  OPDO (69) 4th meeting, Minutes of a Meeting of the Defence and Oversea Policy (Official) Committee, 10 June 1968, CAB 148/​83, TNA.

524   Simon C. Smith Britain remained one of the world’s great powers’.82 In a similar vein, Ashley Jackson observes that ‘Despite the apparent finality of the decision to withdraw from East of Suez . . . there was no firm handshake and swift departure—​more of a long lingering goodbye which is yet to end’.83 Referring to the continuing British role in the Gulf, especially in the area of security, Easa Al-​Gurg, who was the United Arab Emirates’ Ambassador to the United Kingdom in the 1990s, memorably concluded: ‘We had to recognise that although the British presence was officially no more, the British themselves were still very much with us.’84

Further Reading L.J. Butler and S. Stockwell, eds., The Wind of Change:  Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization (Basingstoke, 2013). P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism:  Innovation and Expansion, 1688–​ 1914 (London, 1993). J. Darwin, The Empire Project:  The Rise and Fall of the British World-​System, 1830–​1970 (Cambridge, 2009). J. Gallagher and R. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, 6 (1953), 1–​15. R. Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–​1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (2nd edn., Basingstoke, 1993). R. Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–​1968 (Cambridge, 2006). W.R. Louis, Ends of British Imperialism:  The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization (London, 2006). W.R. Louis and R. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonization’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 22 (1994), 462–​511.

82 

M.J. Turner, Britain’s International Role, 1970–​1991 (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 1–​2. A. Jackson, ‘Imperial Defence in the Post-​Imperial Era’, in G. Kennedy, ed., Imperial Defence: The Old World Order, 1856–​1956 (London and New York, 2008), p. 311. 84  R. Hollis, Britain and the Middle East in the 9/​11 Era (London, 2010), p. 165. 83 

chapter 30

War and th e  Stat e Simon Ball

Britain spent very little time at war between 1815 and 2000: the Crimean War (1854–​ 6), the First World War (1914–​18), and the Second World War (1939–​45) constituted the notable, and notably brief, occasions when the British state declared itself to be ‘at war’. When the British political class was forced to expend blood and treasure on a large scale, the activity was seen as perverse. In the words of Walter Bagehot, ‘it is very painful to me that they should shoot away my income tax’.1 The need to properly characterize the relationship of the British state to war over the long term is vital, not least because international relations theory has recently re-​embraced its fascination with the Anglo-​ Victorian international system.2 Since the 1960s, scholars of Victorian England have been worrying away at the thesis that something important changed in the political nation in the mid-​nineteenth century.3 As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1850s, Benjamin Disraeli was twice undone—​in 1852 and 1859—​by his attempts to strengthen military or naval power. In the 1860s, on the other hand, Lord Palmerston and W.E. Gladstone succeeded in forging the ‘security–​fiscal compromise’. In the words of the Peelite Tory Saturday Review, there was

The author would like to thank the British Academy for the ‘British Defence Policy, 1964–​1973’ research grant that kickstarted this chapter and a BAE Systems PLC workshop on defence procurement that allowed him to try out some of its ideas. 1 

Quoted in The Saturday Review (14 June 1862), 691. M. Daunton, ‘Britain and Globalisation since 1850: I. Creating a Global Order, 1850–​1914’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series, 16 (2006), 1–​38; B. Buzan and G. Lawson, ‘The Global Transformation: The Nineteenth Century and the Making of Modern International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, 57 (2013), 620–​34; H. Lacher and J. Germann, ‘Before Hegemony: Britain, Free Trade and the Nineteenth Century World Order Revisited’, International Studies Review, 14 (2012), 99–​124; M. Flandreau and J. Flores, ‘The Peaceful Conspiracy: Bond Markets and International Relations during the Pax Britannica’, International Organization, 66 (2012), 211–​41. 3  O. Anderson, ‘Early Experiences of Manpower Problems in an Industrial Society at War: Great Britain, 1854–​56’, Political Science Quarterly, 82 (1967), 526–​45; M. Hewitt, ‘Why the Notion of Victorian Britain Does Make Sense’, Victorian Studies, 47 (2006), 395–​438. 2 

526   Simon Ball no-​one, either within or without the House of Commons, who would be content to reduce the scale of our military and naval defences to the standard which was adopted only two years ago . . . [the compromise] already has given to England an influence abroad and a sense of security of home, which have an actual money value far exceeding the amount which will have to be expended.4

Martin Daunton has characterized this new compromise as the shift from the ‘fiscal–​ military state’ that had fought the wars of eighteenth century, up to and including the wars of 1793–​1815, to a ‘delegating market state’. The ‘Old Corruption’ that ran the ‘fiscal–​military state’ was warlike. In the words of Peter Mandler and Philip Harling, that state was a ‘war machine’. The Napoleonic-​era version of the first decades of the nineteenth century ‘differed from that of the previous hundred years only in degree, not in kind’.5 The Old Corruption fought regular wars—​Spanish Succession, Austrian Succession, Seven Years, French Revolutionary, Napoleonic—​mainly on tick.6 The new compromise sought to deter war, and to finance deterrence via income tax rather than too much credit.7 In fiscal terms the crucial turning point was probably the 1860 budget: Gladstone swept aside the 1853 legislative guarantee to abolish the income tax. In security terms the key change came earlier, with an alliance of sorts with the Napoleonic tyranny of France in 1852, sealed in blood and treasure by the one major British war in the nineteenth century, against Russia in 1854–​6. By shoring up national defence, Britain bought an insurance scheme against major wars in Europe. Contemporary commentators recognized what was happening. The Radical statistician Leone Levi calculated that although Britons would be heavily taxed in comparison to the inhabitants of other powers, the ‘average amount . . . set aside’ was ‘no other than a premium of insurance paid for the protection of lives and privileges in which every member of the community is alike interested’. It was ‘a comfort to know that, however dear the premium so paid, the object sought is fully attained, and that . . . for order and security, the United Kingdom stands far in advance of other countries’.8 With the national base secured, ‘soft power’ could rearrange the continental outer works of security at relatively low cost. As Jon Parry has pointed out, the ‘security–​fiscal compromise’ rested politically on a very clever framing of France. French populist tyranny was an affront to political virtue, but French insecurity ensured that it would spend plenteously on the continental balance of power so that Britain did not have to do so.9

4 

‘The Defences and the Estimates’, The Saturday Review (4 Feb. 1860), 139–​40. P. Harling and P. Mandler, ‘From “Fiscal-​Military” State to Laissez Faire State, 1760–​1850’, Journal of British Studies, 32 (1993), 44–​70. 6  ‘View of the Finances of the United Kingdom’, The New Annual Register, (Jan. 1815), 235–​44. 7  M. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–​1914 (Cambridge, 2003) and idem., State and Market in Victorian Britain: War, Welfare and Capitalism (Woodbridge, 2008). 8  L. Levi, ‘The Budget’, Fraser’s Magazine, (Mar. 1860), 434–​46. 9  J. Parry, ‘The Impact of Napoleon III on British Politics, 1851–​1880’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series, 14 (2001) 147–​75; G. Hicks, ‘An Overlooked Entente: Lord Malmesbury, 5 

War and the State    527 The fall of Napoleon III in 1871 made the ‘security–​fiscal compromise’ structurally much harder to maintain, but politically it now had three decades to bed itself in. The political smoke and mirrors of the compromise, with its populist militarism and visible fortifications, could obscure the fact that the 1870s was a low point in government expenditure on anything, let alone war.10 The architects of the ‘security–​fiscal compromise’ loathed the idea of war, but demonstrated a fondness for what the twenty-​first century Blairite political lexicon would later define, in contradistinction to war, as ‘armed conflict situations’.11 Across the spectrum of British thinking about war—​as it developed in the late nineteenth century and was codified between the World Wars—​very few British politicians subscribed to outright pacifism. Idealists and internationalists were among the most original thinkers about fresh expressions of organized violence.12 It has thus been possible to evoke British history over the past two centuries as little more than an unfolding martial pageant: one damn war after another.13 This well-​ established cultural tradition should not obscure the compromise forged in the 1860s. Neither should it obscure the end of that compromise in the early 1970s. In 1970 Britain entered a new ‘war world’ that bore little similarity to its predecessors. The ‘security–​ fiscal compromise’ was no longer much of a compromise, because the ‘security’ element had ceased to be a defining structural characteristic of the British state. The British political system undoubtedly lavished much treasure on war in the twentieth century.14 There was one towering peak in state expenditure, the Second World War: at this time, spending rose to more than 60 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). If expenditure can be taken as a proxy for political importance, then the Second World War dwarfs all other events in modern British political history. The First World War was important too, but by the 1970s the British state was spending the same proportion of national income, with proportionately very little focused on war or national security. ‘Armed conflict situations’ such as the Falklands and the First Gulf ‘Wars’ barely registered as blips on the graph of public expenditure.15 We must be clear that a profound change occurred in Britain’s ‘war world’ in the last third of the twentieth century. Too much emphasis on earlier periods can warp

Anglo-​French Relations and the Conservatives’ Recognition of the Second Empire, 1852’, History, 92 (2007), 187–​206. 10  L. Levi, ‘Our National Expenditure’, Fortnightly Review, 42 (Dec. 1887), 867–​78; A.M. Matin, ‘Scrutinizing the Battle of Dorking: The Royal United Service Institution and the Mid-​Victorian Invasion Controversy’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 39 (2011), 385–​407. 11  The Governance of Britain—​War Powers and Treaties: Limiting Executive Powers, (Cm 7239, 26 October 2007). 12  M. Ceadel, Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford, 1988). 13  J. MacKenzie, ed., Popular Imperialism and the Military, 1850–​1950 (Manchester, 1992). 14  M. Harrison, ‘Resource Mobilization for World War II: The USA, UK, USSR, and Germany, 1938–​ 1945’, The Economic History Review, 41 (1988), 171–​92. 15  T. Clark and A. Dilnot, Long-​Term Trends in British Taxation and Spending, Institute for Fiscal Studies Briefing Note (London, 2002), esp. Figure 1.1.

528   Simon Ball our understanding of contemporary reality; conversely, accepting the current reality as the norm can skew historical analysis. Until the mid-​twentieth century most politicians regarded ‘national security’ as the core activity of the political class, and thus of the state itself. In the late 1960s national security became a second-​tier issue.16 The language and practice of mid-​twentieth-​century warfare was instead transferred into the field of civilian British politics and administration, with profound effect: that transfer, as much as anything else, might be regarded as the primary legacy of the so-​called British ‘warfare state’. Impersonal forces were ‘Giant Evils’, there to be ‘defeated’ by the will and resources of the state. ‘Strategy’ was not about war; it was about everything else.17 This argument comes with a health warning. It subscribes to a form of ‘welfarism’, albeit a form ‘visible to itself ’, in the face of the literature of the ‘warfare state’. David Edgerton, the architect of the concept of the British ‘warfare state’, has argued that the middle decades of the twentieth century saw both a change in political culture and an objective transformation in the state’s power structure based around ‘warfarism’.18 Edgerton labelled the dominant trend in the history of twentieth-​century Britain ‘welfarist’, blinded by the political propaganda of 1945, a teleological narrative with its natural end in a National Health Service and universal benefits.19 The ‘welfarists’ were mere window dressing for ‘warfarists’ who silently took over British politics. Both the First and the Second World Wars concentrated ‘warfarist technocrats’ in the ‘war and supply departments’ as ministers, scientist–​civil servants, businessmen–​civil servants, and academics advisers. They did not disappear in 1945. The constant complaint that Britain did not spend enough on war—​either historically or in the present—​was generated by the desire to expand areas of control.20 In contrast, this chapter argues that the ‘welfarists’ rather than the ‘warfarists’ won the ‘war for war’, first in terms of political culture, and then in the British political power structure. It identifies two significant shifts: first, the incorporation of ‘welfarism’ into the dominant ‘fiscal–​security compromise’ and second, the success of ‘welfarism’ in overwhelming that ‘fiscal–​security compromise’ in the 1970s. Edgerton chose 1970 as the end-​point for his analysis of the warfare state: it was a good choice. Thereafter the ‘technocrats’ shifted their loyalties from war to welfare. The exact nature of the ‘British way in warfare’ has been much debated over recent decades.21 Few now would accept the historical veracity of Basil Liddell Hart’s original 1932 formulation, although he received some posthumous backing from

16 

The term ‘national security’ was Victorian. For example: ‘The Army and National Security’, Saturday Review (11 Mar. 1882), 284–​5. 17  H. Strachan, The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2013). 18  D. Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–​1970 (Cambridge, 2005), p. 5. 19 Ibid., p. 12. 20  Ibid., p. 266. 21  D. French, The British Way in Warfare, 1688–​2000 (London, 2014).

War and the State    529 academic historians of a British ‘fiscal–​military state’.22 The search for ‘a British way’ itself nevertheless predisposed practitioners to a belief in continuity. This continuity has been embedded in British military doctrine. The ‘character’ of war might change but its ‘nature’ was permanent; the British response had to be based on an ‘enduring philosophy and principles’. This ‘enduring philosophy’ could be encapsulated in an enduring British value system, articulated by late Victorian males—​Winston Churchill, Basil Liddell Hart, William Slim, and many others—​and annealed in the First World War.23 By shifting the analysis away from the atypical ‘great men’ ‘at war’ to the more typical ‘honest opportunists’ ‘not at war’, however, the radical discontinuity of the final third of the twentieth century becomes much clearer. The ‘rake’s progress’—​the long-​term persistence of incompetent and inefficient expenditure on the military—​should not be elided with the structural importance of that expenditure.24 ‘Welfarism’ was nurtured as a branch of the ‘security–​fiscal compromise’. Given the obloquy ‘militarists’ heaped on Neville Chamberlain after his death in 1940, it might seem surprising that his spirit should stalk the corridors of Whitehall for decades to come. Yet if the reputation of Chamberlain the Prime Minister was destroyed, the influence of Chamberlain the great Chancellor endured. Chamberlain stood for the ‘security–​ fiscal compromise’ as an enduring normative goal. Chamberlain’s fear of the baleful effect of a large defence budget appeared even more pertinent after 1945. Whereas the dominant ideology of national security in the post-​war period was that of anti-​appeasement, the dominant ideology of the political economy of war was that of Chamberlain’s ‘fourth arm’. Although the ‘fourth arm of defence’ was a peculiarly Chamberlainite term, it was a manifestation of an ideology that reached back well into the nineteenth century. The Victorian ‘security–​fiscal compromise’ dictated that Britain should spend a relatively low proportion of its national income on war, but that the most significant part of government expenditure would be military expenditure. Victorian Britain was in that sense very much a ‘warfare state’ (see Tables 30.1 and 30.2).25 On the other side, ‘statistical militarists’ argued that, in spite of immediate expenditure on ‘armed conflict situations’ culminating in the South African War of 1899–​1902, no one could ‘say that the burden of military and naval expenditure on the people of the United Kingdom was so very serious that they ought to seek to be relieved of it’.26 In 1890 Sir Charles Dilke, the number-​crunching rakehell of late Victorian politics, argued that 22 

B. Liddell Hart, The British Way in Warfare (London, 1932); J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-​1783 (London, 1989); L. Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994). 23  Army Doctrine Publication, Operations (November 2010). 24  P. Spencer, Chief of Defence Procurement in Ministry of Defence: Major Projects Report 2003, House of Commons Papers, HC 383 (2004). 25  Levi, ‘Our National Expenditure’. 26  C. Dilke, Paper on ‘The Defence Expenditure of the Empire’, 19 June 1900, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 63 (Sept. 1900), 410–​32, with commentary by the ‘prince of statisticians’, Sir Robert Giffen.

530   Simon Ball Table 30.1 Levi’s estimate of expenditure on the armed forces as a percentage of state expenditure in the mid-​nineteenth century1 Years

%

1841–​50

29.23

1861–​70

39.31

1881–​7

34.86

1 Figure derived from Levi, ‘Our National Expenditure’, esp. ‘Table: Progress of the National

Expenditure, 1840–​41 to 1886–​7’, 871.

Table 30.2 Avebury’s estimate of expenditure on the armed forces as a percentage of state expenditure at the turn of the century1 Years

%

1894–​5

37

1904–​5

46

1 Figure derived from Lord Avebury, ‘The Excessive National Expenditure’, The Nineteenth

Century, 58 (Nov. 1905), 706–​15, esp. ‘Table: Military and Naval Expenditure omitting the Years of the South African War’, 710.

the ‘fiscal–​security compromise’ was beginning to look curiously similar to the policy of the ‘Old Corruption’. In his apologia for the Crimean War, the last of the Whigs, Lord John Russell, had made no actual apology for British unpreparedness: he had declared himself against the ‘security–​fiscal compromise’, which he had called ‘the new system with regard to our naval and military estimates’. There had, Russell claimed, ‘been always a complaint in the first year of war that we have been very unprepared and have not made a sufficient provision for a period of war’. ‘Yet somehow or other’, he had continued, ‘after a time we have generally found ourselves strong enough to meet the enemy with the establishment we possessed’. Low taxes and low government expenditure had enabled Britons to grow rich. ‘We have seen in the last [Crimean] war what wealth was able to effect’, he argued. ‘When our enemy was exhausted, and our ally was so far weakened in its finances that its war spirit flagged, the Government of this country found that, owing to our wealth, we had more than sufficient to pay for the large expenditure of the war.’27 Poppycock, Dilke wrote: ‘war cannot be commenced with a fair chance of

27 

Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 3 Feb. 1857, cols. 185–​6.

War and the State    531 winning by a nation which waits until war to make her organisation perfect.’ Britain could and should spend a great deal more on preparations for war. 28 At the turn of the twentieth century the ‘statistical militarists’ won the argument, not least because of the twin pressures exerted on Britain by the Boer War and the growth of German naval power.29 Between 1903 and 1916, small-​state Liberals lost a series of arguments about naval expenditure and subsequently over-​debt-​financed expenditure for the First World War. As a result Britain fought this war in a manner that would have been recognizable to the ‘Old Corruption’.30 In the medium term, however, the injunction to ‘lighten the springs of industry’ remained firmly in the minds of those politicians socialized in late Victorian and Edwardian England. In 1937, the year in which he moved from No. 11 to No. 10 Downing Street, Neville Chamberlain commissioned a report on the proper relationship between defence expenditure and national security from Sir Thomas Inskip, the Minister for the Coordination of Defence. Inskip concluded, in line with Chamberlain’s wish, that a strong economy should ‘properly be regarded as a fourth arm of defence’.31 Military expenditure was wasted expenditure. It did nothing to add to the common weal. ‘We would delude ourselves if we looked on the expenditure facing us as capital in nature’, warned Sir Richard Hopkins, the second most senior Treasury official in the 1930s and its Permanent Secretary during the Second World War; ‘it is most of it ephemeral and all of it unproductive’.32 Even Chamberlain had to concede that, in the international conditions of the 1930s, some substantial increase in military expenditure was necessary. But he drew the line at its obvious corollary, a corresponding decrease in civil expenditure. The philosophy of the ‘fourth arm’ drew on the much longer tradition of the ‘security–​fiscal compromise’: the newer element concerned welfare. On the eve of the First World War these two lines of expenditure had consumed a roughly equivalent share of GDP: by the eve of the Second World War the proportion of national wealth devoted to social services was two and a half times that directed to defence.33 Chamberlain doubted whether civilian economy campaigns would achieve much, and he was certain that they would do nothing but political harm. The crisis of 1931 that had brought him to the Treasury had also convinced both Chamberlain and his officials ‘that a radical economy campaign with regard to social expenditure was unlikely to be worth the political upheaval’.34

28  C. Dilke, Paper on ‘Statistics of the Defence Expenditure of the Chief Military and Naval Powers’, 16 December 1890, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 54 (Mar. 1891), 1–​30. 29  A. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–​1905 (Princeton, 2010). 30  M. Horn, Britain, France and the Financing of the First World War (Kingston, 2003); M. Farr, Reginald McKenna: Financier amongst Statesmen, 1863–​1916 (London, 2008). 31  Quoted in G. Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, 1932–​1939 (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 64–​5. 32  Hopkins to Fisher and Chamberlain, 7 October 1935, quoted in Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, p. 74. 33  M. Daunton, Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1914–​1979 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 3. 34 Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, p. 90.

532   Simon Ball Chamberlain’s political rivals could not fault his logic, for it was theirs too. In November 1924, Chamberlain’s predecessor as Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, told the Cabinet that the Conservatives must ‘concentrate on a few great issues in the social sphere’. Frittering money away on war preparations would be madness.35 In the first part of his Chancellorship, Churchill managed to contain the defence budget. In 1928 he went even further. By persuading the government to formally adopt the so-​called ‘ten-​year rule’—​an assumption that Britain would not be involved in a major war for at least ten years hence from the current date—​he paved the way for cuts in military expenditure.36 The contention of Chamberlain’s post-​Slump Treasury that large-​scale expenditure on the military would have to wait ‘until the condition of the country has improved’ was merely a continuation of the view established under Churchill.37 The point at which Churchill and Chamberlain parted company was as to the correct response to imminent war. Churchill’s calculations in the 1920s were made in the context of a troubled but not yet apocalyptic international situation. Although the British empire faced a developing ‘cold war’ with Japan in the Far East, Churchill did not believe that there was the ‘slightest chance of war’ with Japan ‘in our lifetime’.38 Chamberlain had a not dissimilar view of the ‘cold war’ with Germany in the 1930s. ‘I do not believe that [war] is imminent,’ he told his confidantes; ‘by careful diplomacy I believe we can stave it off, perhaps indefinitely’.39 Churchill was right to think that the ‘cold war’ of the 1920s was quite different in kind from the ‘cold war’ of the 1930s. Yet his violent disagreement with Chamberlain was much more about the short-​term need for rearmament than any fundamental difference in philosophy. Sir John Simon, Chamberlain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, used the metaphor of a race to describe the dilemma they all faced. ‘We are’, he remarked in 1938, ‘in the position of a runner in a race who wants to reserve his spurt for the right time, but does not know where the finishing tape is. The danger is that we might knock our finances to pieces prematurely’.40 Just as the essential disagreement about appeasement shaped post-​Second World War security policy, so too did the essential agreement over the nature of the military budget. In the post-​war period, the threat of the ‘Cold War’ with the Soviet Union developing into an actual war was judged to lie somewhere between that posed by Japan in the 1920s—​‘not in our lifetime’—​and Germany in the 1930s—​‘not imminent’. This was 35 

Cabinet minutes, 26 November 1924, quoted in G. Peden, The Treasury and British Public Policy, 1906–​1959 (Oxford, 2000), p. 213. 36  K. Neilson, ‘The Defence Requirements Sub-​Committee, British Strategic Policy, Neville Chamberlain and the Path to Appeasement’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), 651–​85. 37  ‘Note by the Treasury on the Annual Review for 1932 by the Chiefs of Staff Sub-​Committee’, quoted in Neilson, ‘The Defence Requirements Sub-​Committee’. 38  Cabinet minutes, 26 November 1924, quoted in Peden, The Treasury and British Public Policy, p. 213. 39  Chamberlain to his sister, 14 November 1936, quoted in Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, p. 66. 40  Quoted in Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, p. 66.

War and the State    533 clearly reflected in monies allocated to military expenditure. There was a striking similarity between the level at which Chamberlain would have preferred to peg the defence budget—​around 6 per cent of GNP—​in 1937 and the proportion of GNP devoted to defence by the end of the 1950s.41 Anything beyond that figure could only be justified as a short-​term, crisis-​driven sprint. The Korean War—​Korea was ‘at war’, not Britain—​stimulated another such ‘sprint’. The fashion in which defence expenditure was conceptualized at the time of Korea was not dissimilar from the debates of the 1930s. Indeed, many of the key personnel involved—​including Churchill himself—​had a central role in both decades.42 The decision to switch resources once again to the ‘ephemeral and unproductive’ field of defence was conceived as one in which the pressing concerns of international security would be allowed to override good economic sense.43 The plans for increases in defence spending during the Korean War were dramatic, although actual expenditure was considerably lower.44 In accordance with the philosophy of the 1930s, Britain put in a seemingly impressive sprint in the 1950s.45 It thus became an idée fixe for politicians of all parties that Britain had ‘sacrificed’ the long-​term health of her economy in her pursuit of international stability. Such was the view sedulously put about by those with a political axe to grind. In April 1951, Aneurin Bevan resigned from Attlee’s Cabinet in protest at the introduction of a small element of charging for health care. As the government’s chief economic adviser, Robert Hall, noted at the time, however, ‘he put his resignation on much wider grounds, rather clever ones . . . the real substance was that the UK would not be able . . . to bear the burden of rearmament.’ As Hall correctly predicted, ‘people would only remember that he had prophesied less rearmament and hard times and he was right’.46 Military spending became a very convenient alibi for many more fundamental ills that underlay Britain’s poor post-​war economic performance. Endemic weaknesses in management, investment, productivity, or innovation were difficult subjects for governments intent on maintaining a high level of public and private consent’. Politically, it was much easier to speak the language of sacrifice than the language of incompetence. Such ideas crystallized in the mid-​1950s. Their most prominent and persuasive spokesman was Harold Macmillan, the only Minister of Defence in the post-​war period to rise to the premiership. Like Chamberlain before him, Macmillan used a dominant position on the domestic economy in order to pave his way to control over foreign policy. Defence spending was one of his chief weapons in a power struggle with his two 41 Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, Appendix III, Table A2; M. Dockrill, British Defence since 1945 (Oxford, 1988), Appendix IV. 42  J. Tomlinson, Public Policy and the Economy since 1900 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 219–​20; A. Booth, ‘Britain in the 1950s: A “Keynesian” Managed Economy’, History of Political Economy, 33 (2001), 283–​315. 43  A. Cairncross, Years of Recovery: British Economic Policy, 1945–​1951 (London, 1985), pp. 17–​46. 44  J. Park, ‘Wasted Opportunities? The 1950s Rearmament Programme and the Failure of British Economic Policy’, Journal of Contemporary History, 32 (1997), 357–​79. 45 Cairncross, Years of Recovery, Table 8.1 (p. 215). 46  A. Cairncross, ed., The Robert Hall Diaries, 1947–​1953 (London, 1989), 24 Apr. 1951.

534   Simon Ball rivals, R.A. Butler and Anthony Eden. ‘I really believe that our economy cannot stand defence expenditure on the present scale indefinitely’, he chided Butler. ‘We ought’, he declared, ‘to consider abandoning those parts of it which are really useless’.47 ‘In our hearts we all know . . . that it is defence expenditure that has broken our backs,’ he lectured Eden. ‘The only way I can see by which we could restore our economy’, he added, ‘is by really getting down to the defence problem’.48 When Macmillan became Prime Minister, the ensuing 1957 Defence White Paper explicitly stated that Britain’s influence in the world depended ‘first and foremost’ on her economy and her success as an exporter. Without this success, military power would wither away. In other words the economy was the ‘fourth’, and most important, arm of defence.49 It was possible to take an alternative view on the defence budget. Indeed, there was a counter-​current within the Macmillan administration itself. Macmillan’s first Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft, argued that it was civil rather than defence expenditure that was truly in need of control. His failure to convince either Macmillan or his Cabinet colleagues of this—​politically unwelcome—​view led to his resignation in February 1958.50 Despite his hard-​line rhetoric in the mid-​1950s, Macmillan’s solution was to increase overall public expenditure.51 To those who objected that this could be little more than a short-​term expedient, unsustainable in the long run, he retorted that ‘all through my life I have heard people talk about the long-​term problems. This is an excuse to avoid short-​term ones’.52 Macmillan’s political compromise did little to undermine ‘fourth arm’ thinking in the longer term. The dominant ideological position remained that taken in the 1957 Defence White Paper: defence rather than civil expenditure would be the first port of call for expenditure cuts.53 The Treasury calculated, however, that if the actual spending patterns of the Macmillan government were maintained then the share of GNP devoted to the defence budget would begin to rise once more, reaching the level of 9 per cent by the end of the 1960s.54 It fell to the Labour government that took over from the Conservatives in October 1964 to review defence expenditure. The political complexion of the Labour party made it easier politically for defence to be targeted for special consideration. ‘We cannot see’, wrote the Treasury and the Department of Economic Affairs, ‘a satisfactory

47 

H. Macmillan to R. A. Butler, 10 Aug. 1955, FO800/​668, TNA. H. Macmillan to A. Eden, 23 Mar. 1956, T172/​2135; Chancellor of the Exchequer to Ministers, 3 May 1956, T172/​2127, TNA. 49 Peden, The Treasury and British Public Policy, p. 445. 50  R. Lowe, ‘Resignation at the Treasury: The Social Services Committee and the Failure to Reform the Welfare State’, Journal of Social Policy, 18 (1989), 505–​26. 51  A. Cairncross, Diaries: The Radcliffe Committee and the Treasury, 1961–​1964 (London, 1999), 7 Apr. 1963. 52  Prime Minister to Chancellor of the Exchequer, 22 Jan. 1957, T172/​2152, TNA. 53 Peden, The Treasury and British Public Policy, pp. 509–​14. 54  MM (63) 3, Meeting between the MoD and the Chiefs of Staff, 5 Feb. 1963, DEFE32/​14, TNA. 48 

War and the State    535 Table 30.3 Public expenditure projection at 1969 prices1 1969–​70

1973–​4

Change

Defence

2271.8

2091.3

–​8%

Social security

3546.0

4047.0

+14%

1 Baldwin to Henley, 20 Oct. 1969, T225/​3533, TNA.

solution for the economic problems of this country unless an immediate halt is called to the increases in the defence budget’.55 Labour held almost annual defence reviews. Budgetary discussions involving the Ministry of Defence exuded an air of crisis. The rhetoric of the ‘fourth arm’ was particularly strong during the 1960s. As the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Roy Jenkins, put it in December 1967, ‘the keynote . . . must be the dependence of the country’s standing in the world upon the strength of the economy and not upon a world wide military presence’.56 1967–​8 saw the single most acute crisis of defence policy in the post-​war period. On the grounds of economy, the government was willing to endure the humiliation of admitting that it could not sustain the defence policy that it had trumpeted as definitive only months previously.57 Jenkins acknowledged that there was little economic rationale for cuts in defence expenditure. Rather, they had to be made in order to meet the ‘severe political difficulty’ in obtaining support from Labour MPs for cuts in civil expenditure. Although accepting Jenkins’s political argument, the Minister of Defence, Denis Healey, pointed out that cuts in defence expenditure were little more than a political blind, since the real problem was the failure to put a ‘firm grip on civil expenditure generally’. Healey observed that Jenkins was being disingenuous when he talked of the need to balance cuts in defence and civil expenditure, for there were no cuts in civil expenditure.58 Healey’s contention was amply borne out by a comparison of the government’s expenditure plans for defence and social security in the 1970s.59 On one level, debate about the political economy of military expenditure had evolved. The proportion of GDP devoted to social services had doubled in the 30 years since

55 

OPD (O) (64) 9 Revise, 11 November 1964, quoted in S. Straw and J. W. Young, ‘The Wilson Government and the Demise of TSR-​2, October 1964 to April 1965’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 20 (1997), 23–​4. 56  Quoted in J. Pickering, ‘Politics and “Black Tuesday”: Shifting Power in the Cabinet and the Decision to Withdraw from East of Suez, November 1967–​January 1968’, Twentieth Century British History, 13 (2002), 157. 57  OPD (67) 15th, 14 Apr. 1967, CAB148/​30, TNA. 58  Minutes of Meeting between the Foreign Secretary, the Chancellor, the SSD, and the Commonwealth Secretary, 20 Dec. 1967, T225/​3065, TNA. 59  COS (68) 35th, 20 June 1968, DEFE4/​229, TNA.

536   Simon Ball Chamberlain had been Chancellor of the Exchequer.60 A decade after the Tory Harold Macmillan had stated that it was defence expenditure that was ‘breaking our backs’, the socialist Denis Healey, who, like Macmillan, would rise from the Ministry of Defence to the Treasury, tentatively suggested that it was social expenditure that was the back-​ breaking burden. Defence had become a less prominent part of public expenditure. Healey’s civil servants calculated that between 1964 and 1971, defence, as an item of public expenditure, would fall from just under 15 per cent to 10 3/​4 per cent.61 Yet this evolution was in many ways illusory. As economic arguments for military cuts waned, political and social arguments rose to take their place. The critique of military spending was too deeply embedded to be shaken loose. Although the Conservative government of Edward Heath, which held power between 1970 and 1974, was generally more kindly disposed to the military than its predecessor, its fundamental ideas differed little from those of Labour.62 In the autumn of 1973 Heath created the Defence Studies Working Party:  its starting point was that high levels of defence spending had been responsible for the poor showing of the UK’s economy in the post-​war years.63 Part of the reason for the tenacity of belief in the ‘defence burden’ was the currency it enjoyed far beyond Whitehall. By the 1970s, the dominant concern in the discussion of Britain’s recent past was attempts to explain its decline.64 The role of imperial defence played a central role in the debates about decline in the 1970s and 1980s. Many commentators argued that there was a long-​run trade-​off between military spending and economic growth, with high levels of defence expenditure tending to undermine the national economy. High levels of military spending were funded by a combination of high taxation and government borrowing. The higher the level of national wealth directed towards military spending, the lower the amount that could be directed into investment in productive enterprises. Since investment was crucial to economic growth, high levels of military spending, although feasible in the short term, had undermined the economic health of the nation in the long term. One firm adherent of this view later popularized it to a global audience. In the 1970s, Paul Kennedy was a British naval historian—​his first book, evocatively entitled The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, was published in 1976. In the 1980s Kennedy transposed his analysis of the British experience into a grand theory concerning the rise and fall of empires. When he published The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 in 1987 it brought him unprecedented fame for a British academic historian. In Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Kennedy adopted a ‘crudely mercantilistic’ philosophy about the inelastic nature of national wealth. ‘If ’, he observed, ‘too large a proportion of the state’s resources is diverted from 60 Daunton, Just Taxes, p. 3. 61 

Briefing Notes on the Defence Budget, DEFE13/​878 (1970), TNA.

62 Tomlinson, Public Policy and the Economy since 1900, p. 285; K. Burk and A. Cairncross, ‘Goodbye,

Great Britain’: The 1976 IMF Crisis (New Haven and London, 1992), p. 15. 63  COS (73) 19th, 25 Sept. 1973, DEFE4/​279, TNA. 64  J. Tomlinson, ‘The Decline of the Empire and the Economic “Decline” of Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 14 (2003), 201–​21.

War and the State    537 wealth creation and allocated instead to military purposes, then that is likely to a weakening of national power over the longer term’. If a state—​in this case Britain up to 1945—​ ‘overextends itself strategically—​by, say, the conquest of extensive territories or the waging of costly wars—​it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all’. This created a dilemma for statesmen who must choose between short-​and long-​term national power. The dilemma became acute if the nation concerned—​Britain since 1945—​had ‘entered a period of relative economic decline’.65 The ‘declinists’ helped to create the atmosphere in which defence policy was considered. The key operative phrase to note was ‘relative economic decline’, for it linked into another important concept—​memorably articulated, once again by Macmillan, as the ‘two rifles’.66 British politicians looked with envy at the sustained and high levels of growth achieved by West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Although Germany had been allowed to rearm in the period between 1955 and 1962, German armed forces had a purely European role, ‘one rifle’, while Britain carried the ‘second rifle’ of global commitments.67 The smaller proportion of national wealth spent on defence was held to be a major contributory factor in German economic success.68 The returning Labour government’s 1975 defence review stated that cuts in military spending were necessary in order to ensure that the ‘defence burden’ was the same for Britain as it was for other European countries.69 The notion of the ‘defence burden’ remained firmly entrenched in political consciousness, although the ground was subtly changing away from an argument about absolute expenditure towards one stressing comparative defence expenditure. Such a tactical shift in argument was necessary since defence spending declined both in real terms and as a proportion of overall government expenditure during the 1970s. Placing defence near the heart of explanations for economic decline suited the intellectual climate of the 1970s rather than the objective reality.70 The equation of defence spending with economic decline rested on decidedly shaky foundations. The tendency towards unsupported theorizing was assisted by the fact that defence economics was a discipline in its relative infancy.71 Regression studies carried out between 1970 and 2000 failed to reach ‘definitive conclusions’. ‘Some of them,’ a review of the literature observed, ‘conclude that defence expenditure has a negative impact on the economy, while others conclude that the impact is positive. A third group of results affirm that there is no causality between defence expenditure and the

65 

P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, 1988), p. xvi. Speech before the Foreign Press Association in London, Manchester Guardian, 17 May 1956. 67  COS (56) 133rd meeting, 18 Dec. 1956, DEFE4/​93, TNA. 68  McDonnell to Baldwin, 5 Jan. 1968, T225/​3067, TNA. 69  K. Hartley, ‘The Defence Economy’, in R. Coopey and N. Woodward, eds., Britain in the 1970s: The Troubled Economy (London, 1996), p. 215. 70  Hartley, ‘The Defence Economy’, Table 9.2. 71  T. Sandler and K. Hartley, The Economics of Defense (Cambridge, 1995). 66 

538   Simon Ball indicators at the economy level’.72 If there was any consensus it tended towards the view that in the long run the impact of military spending on economic growth had been ‘moderate’, whether for good or ill. It was also ‘bi-​directional’: military spending had a moderate impact on growth, and growth had a moderate impact on military spending. As the economists admitted, perhaps sadly, their complex calculations resulted in a kind of banal common sense.73 The fact that military expenditure still so often found itself in an exposed position during political debates about post-​war public expenditure was notable. In part this was a consequence of monetary policy. A  significant proportion of military expenditure took place overseas, whereas social expenditure was mainly a domestic outlay.74 The ‘monetary problem’ was both specific and time-​bound, affecting the years 1931 to 1968. The roots of the problem lay in the transformation of the pre-​Second World War sterling bloc into the post-​Second World War sterling area.75 The British government’s commitment to ‘defend the pound’ ensured that between 1947 and 1967, ‘sterling crises were a repeated and tedious fact of life’. Such crises occurred in 1947, 1949, 1951, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1967.76 The conservation of Britain’s dollar reserves was a constant preoccupation for high-​level politics. Any money spent overseas in dollars was particularly resented. By 1964 Britain’s total yearly expenditure of dollars ran at the level of 500 million pounds a year. Total net overseas defence expenditure amounted to approximately 250 million pounds. It was a short leap to the conclusion that if Britain could dispense with that expenditure, the dollar problem might be solved on a permanent basis.77 The final crisis of defence and dollars occurred in 1966–​7. In July 1966 sterling came under intense pressure in the markets. The sterling crisis further poisoned the atmosphere in Harold Wilson’s already toxic Cabinet, but ministers could at least agree that there was not any overriding need to change their public expenditure policies, ‘which were on the right lines’.78 Instead, ‘a more fundamental approach to the solution of our economic problems’ comprised a 100-​million-​pound cut in overseas expenditure.79

72 

E. Morales-​Ramos, ‘Defence R&D Expenditure: The Crowding-​Out Hypothesis’, Defence and Peace Economics, 13 (2002), 365. 73  D. Lai, ‘The Great Power Dilemma: The Trade-​Off between Defense and Growth in Great Britain, 1830–​1980’, Defence and Peace Economics, 12 (2001), 145–​56. 74  H. Zimmermann, Money and Security: Troops, Monetary Policy, and West Germany’s Relations with the United States and Britain, 1950–​1971 (Cambridge, 2002). 75  R. Gardner, ‘Sterling-​Dollar Diplomacy in Current Perspective’, International Affairs, 62 (1985), 21–​33; C. Schenk, Britain and the Sterling Area: From Devaluation to Convertibility in the 1950s (London, 1994); G. Krozewski, Money and the End of Empire: British International Economic Policy and the Colonies, 1947–​58 (Basingstoke, 2001); C. Schenk, ‘The Empire Strikes Back: Hong Kong and the Decline of Sterling in the 1960s’, Economic History Review, 57 (2004), 551–​80. 76  S. Strange, ‘Sterling and British Policy: A Political View’, International Affairs, 47 (1971), 303–​15; Burk and Cairncross, Goodbye, Great Britain, p. 5; R. Middleton, ‘Struggling with the Impossible: Sterling, the Balance of Payments and British Economic Policy, 1949-​1972’, in W. Young and A. Arnon, eds., The Open Economy Macro Model: Past, Present and Future (Amsterdam, 2002), pp. 202–​31. 77  OPD (67) 10th, 7 Mar. 1967, CAB148/​30, TNA. 78  CC (66) 35th, 12 July 1966, CAB128/​41, TNA. 79  CC (66) 36th, 14 July 1966, CAB128/​41, TNA.

War and the State    539 The cut in overseas military expenditure did little to address the underlying weakness of sterling.80 This was fully exposed by a further sterling crisis that led to devaluation in November 1967.81 In the immediate wake of devaluation it once more proved ‘convenient to start with defence economies’.82 Savings in dollar expenditure were to be found from the defence budget, by abandoning Britain’s commitments in the Far East.83 With the policy of ‘cut and run’ firmly in place, it proved impossible to argue for a continued military presence in the Persian Gulf, and this too was abandoned.84 Defence proved extraordinarily vulnerable as a ‘quick fix’. The concentration on the defence/​sterling equation was very useful politically, for it diverted attention away from the need to make any real economic reforms. Denis Healey’s argument that the equation was essentially false was brushed aside.85 These were not arguments that the rest of the Cabinet wished to hear. They resisted making ‘concrete proposals for adequate economies in civil public expenditure’.86 The 1967 sterling crisis was the last monetary crisis that had a major impact on defence policy.87 During the course of the 1970s, core assumptions about the political economy of defence were challenged and modified. Defence had been an easy first port of call for Labour ministers in the 1960s, but not in the mid-​1970s. Once the specific issue of dollar expenditure overseas was removed from the equation, then debate was forced back on the issues of public expenditure and the productive economy. Due to the rapid increase in other government spending, the proportion of public expenditure allocated to defence fell rapidly. In any critique of the British economy that argued that total public expenditure was too high, defence, inevitably, would play a less prominent role.88 The most spectacular such critique was delivered by the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, in September 1976. ‘For too long, perhaps ever since the war’, Callaghan told a politically charged Labour party conference, ‘we postponed facing up to fundamental choices and fundamental changes in our society and our economy’.89 Although Callaghan’s own government lacked the political will to act on his analysis, its successor, a Conservative administration led by Margaret Thatcher, did. Its first public expenditure White Paper stated unequivocally that too much public spending lay at ‘the heart of Britain’s present economic difficulties’.90 80

  R. Roy, ‘The Battle for Bretton Woods: American, Britain and the International Financial Crisis of October 1967 to March 1968’, Cold War History, 2 (2002), 33–​60. 81   CC (67) 66th, 16 Nov. 1967, CAB128/​42, TNA. 82   CC (67) 67th, 21 Nov. 1967, CAB128/​42, TNA. 83   Pickering, ‘Politics and “Black Tuesday”’, 144–​70. 84   W.R. Louis, ‘The British Withdrawal from the Gulf, 1967–​7 1’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31 (2003), 83–​108. 85   C (67) 121, 4 July 1967, CAB129/​132, TNA. 86  CC (67) 67th, 21 Nov. 1967, CAB128/​42, TNA. 87  OPD (69) 9th, 10 June 1969, CAB148/​91, TNA. 88  C (67) 109, 24 June 1967, Note by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, commenting on C (67) 105, Memorandum by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 19 June 1967, CAB129/​131, TNA. 89  Quoted in Burk and Cairncross, Goodbye, Great Britain, pp. 55–​6. 90  C. Thain and M. Wright, The Treasury and Whitehall: The Planning and Control of Public Expenditure, 1976–​1993 (Oxford, 1995), p. 15.

540   Simon Ball The change in defence’s status, from mortal to venial sinner, that occurred during the late 1970s and early 1980s made it politically possible to accommodate the increases in defence spending that were judged necessary for reasons of Cold War politics. The 1979 Conservative election manifesto stated that ‘we will not hesitate to spend what is necessary on our armed forces even while we are cutting public expenditure on other things’. This change in status can be overstated, however. Although defence expenditure was no longer regarded as uniquely inefficient by the government, it was still considered to be an economically wasteful activity.91 ‘Like other politicians’, wrote John Nott, who became Minister of Defence in 1981, ‘I had my prejudices against Defence, which appeared to be lavish, extravagant and lacking in any reasonable financial control’.92 The issue of ‘financial’ control that came to the fore in the 1980s was far from new. It was ‘as old as governments ... from the days of Mr. Gladstone’.93 What had changed was the Treasury’s willingness to press its claims. In the inter-​war period the Treasury’s attempt to establish itself as the controlling department of government had gone some way towards success, only to be thwarted by Chamberlain’s political failure. Subsequently, the Ministry of Defence had tried very hard to avoid Treasury encroachment into the details of military policy.94 On the Treasury side, Sir Edward Bridges had encouraged Treasury officials to act as ‘candid friends’ to the war departments.95 The spirit of Bridges had atrophied by the 1980s. In 1983 the No. 10 Policy Unit briefed the Prime Minister that control of expenditure in Defence was ‘feebler’ than in any other department. In 1986 a ‘concordat’ between the Minister of Defence and the Chief Secretary allowed the Treasury civil servants the right to intervene in specific ‘allocations’, rather than merely confining themselves to the size of Defence’s block budget.96 In 1990 the Treasury claimed that its small team of defence expenditure specialists were better informed than those civil servants working in the Ministry of Defence.97 There were bruising encounters between the Defence and Treasury ministers.98 John Nott hastened his own political demise by calling the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Leon Brittan, ‘a Pakistani accountant’.99 Under Margaret Thatcher, despite Cold War rhetoric, Defence was a ‘relative loser’ in comparison with the rest of the public sector. Defence remained a ‘soft touch’.100

91

  G. Howe (Chancellor of the Exchequer) to Prime Minister, 11 May 1979, THCR 2/​6/​2/​48, CAC. J. Nott, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Recollections of an Errant Politician (London, 2002), p. 199. 93  A. Head to R.A. Butler, 10 Dec. 1953, T225/​350, TNA. 94  Note for the Record by I.P. Bancroft of a meeting with Cooper (AUS (Pol), MOD) and Cass (AUS (P&B), MOD), [early 1968], T225/​3146, TNA. Sir Ian Bancroft went on to be head of the Home Civil Service (1978–​1981) and Sir Frank Cooper became PUS, MOD (1976–​1982). 95  Draft letter drawn up by officials, R.A. Butler to A. Head, 17 Dec. 1953, T225/​350, TNA. 96  N. Lawson, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (London, 1992), p. 313. 97  Thain and Wright, The Treasury and Whitehall, p. 526. 98 Lawson, The View from No. 11, p. 283. 99 Nott, Here Today, Gone Tomorrow, p. 242. 100  F. Mount (Policy Unit) to Prime Minister, 1 July 1983, PREM19/​985, TNA. 92 

War and the State    541 The prospects for military expenditure in the 1990s were far less auspicious than they had been during the previous decade. Three converging factors made the position extraordinarily difficult. Even after Margaret Thatcher’s demise in November 1990, the Conservative government continued to proclaim an ideological commitment to the control of public expenditure. The Conservatives of the 1990s had risen to political prominence during the later years of Thatcherism. The Thatcherite goal of keeping expenditure flat in real terms, much less making significant cuts, had been reduced to the aspiration to ensure that public spending continued to decline as a percentage of GDP. Political calculation indicated that even this aspiration should be tempered. The government committed itself to increases in spending on health and social security.101 Prime Minister John Major came to see these social costs as ‘unavoidable’.102 The best politicians could do was to ‘police’ welfare expenditure.103 In order to relieve political tension, the Major government was on the lookout for a ‘spending battle the Treasury could win’.104 Defence was an obvious battleground. The collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 made a fundamental review of defence commitments unavoidable. The vehicle for this change was a defence review, entitled Options for Change and carried out by Tom King, which made no attempt to disguise the financial drivers of the project. The rhetoric of the ‘defence burden’ and the ‘two rifles’ were rolled together in a new concept—​‘the peace dividend’.105 Defence was an even bigger loser under John Major than under Margaret Thatcher (see Tables 30.4 and 30.5). The trends apparent under the Major government remained dominant under its Labour successors.106 Left-​wing commentators branded Tony Blair a ‘warmonger’ as a result of his propensity for entangling Britain in ‘armed conflict situations’.107 The political culture of such armed conflict situations rose to almost hysterical heights.108 Yet Britain’s political economy of war had already been transformed. Defence expenditure had been reduced to the level of national income advocated by Winston Churchill and

101  M. Hill, ‘Rolling Back the (Welfare) State: The Major Government and Social Security Reform’, in P. Dorey, ed., The Major Premiership: Politics and Policies under John Major, 1990–​1997 (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 165–​78. 102  J. Major, The Autobiography (London, 1999), pp. 664–​6. 103  Thain and Wright, The Treasury and Whitehall, pp. 424–​7; Norman Lamont, In Office (London, 1999), p. 300. 104  S. Hogg and J. Hill, Too Close to Call: Power and Politics—​John Major in No. 10 (London, 1995), pp. 118–​20. 105  A. Seldon, Major: A Political Life (London, 1997), pp. 404–​5. 106  C. McInnes, ‘Labour’s Strategic Defence Review’, International Affairs, 74 (1998), 823–​45; P. Cornish, ‘Blair’s Wars and Brown’s Budgets: From Strategic Defence Review to Strategic Decay in Less than a Decade’, International Affairs, 85 (2009), 247–​61; R. Page, Defence Expenditure: NATO 2% Target, House of Commons Library Briefing Paper CBP7343, 21 October 2015. 107  J. Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (London, 2004). 108  Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly C.M.G. (The Hutton Report) HC 247 (London, 2004); Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction: Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors (The Butler Report) HC 898 (London, 2004); The Report of the Iraq Inquiry (The Chilcot Report) HC 264 (6 July 2016) .

542   Simon Ball Table 30.4 Defence, health, and social security expenditure in the Thatcher era1 Defence

Year

Health

Expenditure Expenditure % Overall Expenditure % GDP Government % GDP

1982–​3

5.2

1990–​1

3.9

9.9

Change

–​1.3

–​1.1

1

11

Social Security

Expenditure % Overall Government

Expenditure % GDP

Expenditure % Overall Government

6.0

12.9

11.9

25.2

6.0

18.4

10.6

27

0

+5.5

–​1.3

+1.8

Figure derived from data in Cmd 3901, April 1998.

Table 30.5 Defence, health, and social security expenditure in the Major era1 Defence

Year

Health

Expenditure Expenditure % Overall Expenditure % GDP Government % GDP

Social Security

Expenditure % Overall Government

Expenditure % GDP

Expenditure % Overall Government

1991–​2

3.9

9.7

6.4

18.1

12.1

29.7

1997–​8

2.7

6.7

6.7

16.3

12.4

31.1

Change

–​1.2

+0.3

–​1.8

+0.3

+1.4

–​3

1 Figure derived from data in Cmd 3901, April 1998.

Neville Chamberlain in the 1920s and early 1930s. Indeed the first Defence Secretary of the Blair government, George Robertson, explicitly noted with approval that ‘our defence expenditure percentage of GNP is now at levels last seen in the 1930s’.109 Since defence expenditure now constituted such a low proportion of government expenditure—​one fifth of social security—​its management could no longer be regarded as an issue that lay at the heart of politics.110 This chapter has obeyed the injunction of All the President’s Men to ‘follow the money’. The picture of war in British politics that emerges is one of important transformations as much as it is one of continuity. The Wilson–​Heath transformation was every bit as profound as the Palmerston–​Gladstone transformation of a century before. The pieties of the standard national military narrative can obscure this transformation, and have been eschewed. Britain’s defence academies would be well advised to abandon the study

109  110 

Select Committee on Defence: Minutes of Evidence, Commons, 30 July, 1997, col. 138. The Economist, 23 Nov, 1996, 63.

War and the State    543 of history before 1970. This most certainly goes for the study of the First and Second World Wars, but applies equally to currently modish returns to the ‘small wars’ of the nineteenth century and the counter-​insurgencies of the 1940s and 1950s. The chapter has highlighted three key means of understanding the relationship between politics and war in Britain. First, generation mattered. The Victorians thought that war was central to the activity of the state. Victorians were in charge of British security policy until 1964. It had been unpalatable for the Victorians to make the transition from devoting a large proportion of state expenditure to national security to devoting an equally large proportion of national product to war. But this was not a difficult conceptual leap. The Georgians with direct experience of war had a great deal of sympathy with the position of their Victorian elders, those with less experience less so. Second, memes—​the ‘fourth arm’, ‘the defence burden’, ‘two rifles’, ‘the peace dividend’—​were more important than party. The Wilson government stumbled into a break with the past, but the Tories had already done the groundwork. Once that break had been made, subsequent Conservative governments sustained it. Party rhetoric of ‘national security’ was not a good guide to actual behaviour. Third, late Elizabethan politicians did (do) not take war seriously. They loved military symbolism. John Major, for instance, was a battlefield pilgrim. The late Elizabethans invested considerable energy in arguing over the morality of ‘armed conflict situations’. They were, however, dogs fighting over a rather moth-​eaten bone.

Further Reading D. Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–​1970 (Cambridge, 2005). D. Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (London, 2011). D. French, The British Way in Warfare, 1688–​2000 (London, 2014, originally 1990). G. Peden, Arms, Economics and British Strategy:  From Dreadnought to Hydrogen Bombs (Cambridge, 2007). H. Strachan, The Direction of War:  Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2013).

chapter 31

Britain and  E u rope Geoffrey Hicks

There is another shore, you know, upon the other side. The further off from England the nearer is to France—​ Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance. Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance? ‘The Lobster Quadrille’, Alice in Wonderland1

‘Bitte geht nicht!’ pleaded the headline writers in Germany’s Der Spiegel, just before Britain’s 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union. ‘Please don’t go!’.2 And yet, go it did. It was the latest in a series of spasms which have marked the past two centuries of Britain’s relationship with its European neighbours. That referendum result alone justifies deep analysis of Britain’s engagement with Europe, but it is worth setting out why that relationship is worthy of a chapter in this collection. Why examine it separately, when one might treat it as a subdivision of foreign policy? For British historians, Europe tends to fall somewhere between political history and international history. Its historiographical status is uncertain—​study of Britain’s place in it lacks a clear scholarly tradition. As far as the nineteenth century goes, the topic is often treated interchangeably with wider British foreign policy, given Europe’s geopolitical domination of the globe. In the historiography of the twentieth century, study of the subject is dominated by two wars and one institution. It moves through two phases: a voluminous account of—​in effect—​a 30-​year conflict is followed by a debate regarding European unity. And yet both of these approaches gloss over a separate level of British policy and political culture where Europe resides, between the domestic and the global, impinging on both. As the 2016 referendum demonstrated only too clearly, there is a particular regional dimension to British interaction with the world. It encompasses elements of British

1 

2 

L. Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (London, 1865). Der Spiegel, 11 June 2016.

Britain and Europe   545 identity, culture, party politics, and both domestic and foreign policy. It is far from being entirely or straightforwardly the preserve of British diplomacy. Over the past two centuries (as of course for a millennium before), Britain has functioned not just as a world power but as a player on a regional stage. It shares many characteristics with its neighbours: an acceptance of certain cultural norms and traditions; a common religion, however differently expressed; a history of colonialism and thus of not being colonized; a diplomatic and political discourse broadly compatible with that of its neighbours; a comparable economic system; and a similar experience of social, institutional, and electoral development. One could go on. Moreover, the continent in which the nation is situated has also profoundly affected the identity of Britain and its citizens, even if that identity has sometimes been defined in opposition to Europe. It has provoked fierce debate and impinged upon British domestic political culture. There is therefore much to be said for considering Britain in its specific regional context, at a nexus of domestic politics and foreign policy, rather than considering the European relationship as a sub-​ theme of either. The result of the referendum has reinforced the necessity for such a separate analysis. At one stroke it up ​ended Britain’s policies with regard to 27 of its neighbours, and much else besides. As a footnote to this momentous development, it will be interesting to see how ‘Brexit’ re​frames historiographical debates about Britain and Europe. It seems likely to exacerbate an existing trend towards examining ‘Euroscepticism’ instead of the previously convergent paths taken by Britain and its continental counterparts. It is also likely to prompt more assessments of, in particular, the Conservative party’s complicated engagement with European questions. It has highlighted the importance of domestic political debate in defining foreign policy, and strikingly so. In British political discourse, ‘Europe’ has often stood proxy for a range of problems and questions only tangentially related to foreign policy as we might conventionally understand it. It is clear that over recent decades domestic concerns reacted in a politically toxic manner with foreign and economic policies, slowly building up pressure and ultimately producing the political explosion that was set off in 2016. David Cameron’s unwise decision to placate the right wing of his own party on the subject of the European Union led first to the referendum and thence to the British people (or, rather, 51.9 per cent of them) sticking two fingers up at the country’s political establishment and at their neighbours. The centrality of domestic politics in foreign policy debate was thus underlined. It points to the importance of re-​categorizing our historiographical boundaries to reconsider this troubled relationship at the heart of British identity and government. It might even be said that a particular duty lies with British historians. It is principally to our discipline that it will fall to explore and explain the roots of such an apparently perverse decision as ‘Brexit’, reached contrary to the advice of almost all international observers and in the face of the considered will of most British politicians. The historical relationship with the Continent, however, encompasses much more than these recent events. This chapter will present a broad overview of the place of Europe and European questions in British political history. ‘Europe’ has, of course, very different meanings depending on context: the whole of continental Europe; the supranational institutions of the

546   Geoffrey Hicks European Union; the nineteenth-​century ‘great powers’ and their ‘concert’; a looming cultural ‘other’ somewhere beyond the Channel; and much more besides. Consequently, to attempt a comprehensive historiographical analysis of Britain’s relationship with Europe since 1800 would be to set oneself up for a fall; that task is worthy of a whole book. Rather, this chapter will attempt to establish a broad sense of the historiographical context, considering in turn the ‘new’ political history of recent decades, the histories of party politics, diplomacy and its culture, Europe as Britain’s comparator, British identity, post-​war attitudes to European unity, and structural tensions. Reflecting on this contextual framework prompts questions about the chronological parameters we use to assess the past two centuries of interaction with the Continent, not least about the historiographical role of the two World Wars, their origins, and their impact. It also raises the issue of the generational phases through which the British polity has passed in its complicated dance with its European neighbours. As the ‘Brexit’ decision graphically illustrated, if we are to understand the British relationship with Europe, we need to examine it as a distinct aspect of British political history, grounded at the same time in international history. The tradition of separate political and international histories has been increasingly challenged historiographically, and seems less and less justifiable; a gradual convergence of the domestic with the global has been an important feature of recent political and international history. William Mulligan and Brendan Simms have even suggested that the international has defined the political, that ‘the impact of foreign policy on domestic affairs has not been explored systematically, or systematically enough’, but that ‘the internal development of the British Isles was substantially driven by considerations of grand strategy’.3 While accepting the interconnectedness, the premise of this analysis is different: that the relationship between Britain and the European Continent is first and foremost a political matter, not a diplomatic one; that the diplomacy follows the politics. Historiographically, the political and international were not always intertwined. With the increasing specialization of historical sub-​disciplines in the twentieth century, the narrower diplomatic history of mid-​century metamorphosed into the kind of international history pioneered by D.C. Watt and developed its own distinct identity. In this process, historians of foreign policy naturally took cognizance of domestic constraints and influences. In the work of Watt, James Joll, and Paul Kennedy, for example, matters such as public opinion, the impact of the press, and economics were always central concerns.4 The principal focus of international history was not, however, the elucidation of political history, except insofar as it provided a context for foreign policy decisions. 3 

W. Mulligan and B. Simms, eds., The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660–​2000: How Strategic Concerns Shaped Modern Britain (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 3, 4. The editors include a useful summary of recent developments in international history with a bearing on British politics and vice versa, pp. 2–​3. 4  See, e.g., D.C. Watt, Personalities and Policies: Studies in the Formulation of British Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century (London, 1965); J. Joll, The Origins of the First World War (London, 1984); P. Kennedy, The Realities behind Diplomacy: Background Influences on British External Policy, 1865–​1980 (London, 1981).

Britain and Europe   547 The historiographical separation of the ‘international’ from the more conventionally ‘political’ history was reinforced from the 1960s onwards by the re​focusing of the latter away from elites, and pursuits such as diplomacy that seemed remote from the everyday experience of British citizens. For its part, political history did not, of course, ignore external concerns. Political biography dealt with European policy within the particular limits of political lives, and accounts of governments addressed specific policies, although the more traditional pursuits of constitutional and electoral history naturally tended to avoid external affairs. With the ‘new’ political history of recent decades, a different approach has gradually become apparent, as historians have attempted to encompass politics in its broadest sense, covering a wider range of political engagement, classes, social groups, influences, concerns, and debates. In the historiography of party politics, the relationship between Britain and Europe manifests itself first as a component in the broad ‘politics of foreign policy’, which has attracted attention in studies of the nineteenth century, and second in the histories of individual parties.5 One of the hallmarks of recent work on nineteenth-​century politics has been the much closer connection of domestic attitudes and policies with the positions taken by political parties on external relationships. For obvious geographical reasons, chief among these have been the relationships with the European powers. British attitudes towards Europe have been illuminated, from several angles, by considering them within a broader political canvas. Thus, David Brown’s work has sought to examine Viscount Palmerston’s career and politics in neither a specifically ‘domestic’ nor ‘foreign’ policy paradigm, but as a political phenomenon with a range of national and international manifestations.6 Meanwhile, Jonathan Parry has explicitly set out to assess ‘why European events had such an impact on nineteenth-​century British Liberal policy and politics’, and in so doing has explored the nature of Liberal English identity.7 For him, ‘setting British politics in a European context’ enables a better appreciation of ‘the international, but more particularly the insular, objectives of British Liberalism’ in the heyday of that creed, between 1830 and 1886.8 The European context of domestic politics has also been an important element in the work of historians such as E.D. Steele, Anthony Howe, Simon Morgan, and Eugenio Biagini.9 On the ‘Liberal’ side of British politics (at least, in the nineteenth century), the fusing of domestic and European questions is

5  For the politics of foreign policy, see, e.g., M. Swartz, The Politics of British Foreign Policy in the Era of Disraeli and Gladstone (Basingstoke, 1985); D. Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 1846–​ 55 (Manchester, 2002). 6  See, e.g., D. Brown, Palmerston: A Biography (New Haven and London, 2010). 7  J.P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–​1886 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 1. 8  Ibid., p. 399. 9  See, e.g., E.D. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–​1865 (Cambridge, 1991); A. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–​1946 (Oxford, 1997); A. Howe and S. Morgan, eds., The Letters of Richard Cobden (4 vols, Oxford, 2007–​15); E. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–​1880 (Cambridge, 1992).

548   Geoffrey Hicks perhaps more advanced. Such treatment has not however been confined to the Liberal party alone. Recent work on the Conservative and Labour parties has also considered the British relationship with Europe. Historians of Conservatism in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have proposed a rethinking of the party’s engagement with European questions. One might identify three principal conclusions:  first, that domestic and foreign policy needs to be closely linked; second, that we need to understand more than just the views of government ministers; and third, that there have been consistently two strands of policy towards Europe, competing for dominance in the Conservative party. The work of both Angus Hawkins and myself on nineteenth-​century Conservatism has proposed a symbiotic relationship between domestic and foreign policies, that neither entirely makes sense without the other, and that understanding Conservatism as a creed requires assessment of both. In his two-​volume biography of the fourteenth Earl of Derby, three times Prime Minister in the mid-​Victorian era, Hawkins has described the way in which the party under Derby ‘began to restore their claim to being a party capable of moderate responsible government’.10 Good diplomatic relations with the other European powers were an integral part of that process, and in his ministries Derby accordingly sought to maintain ‘careful neutrality’ in relations with Europe.11 The domestic and the ‘foreign’ were mutually reinforcing. My own work has drawn attention to the fact that Conservative conduct of diplomacy in the mid-​Victorian period mirrored domestic political imperatives, and that only by examining the two together can we make sense of both Conservatism in the period and its engagement with the Continent.12 Recent political history has accepted that considering a combination of ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics—​the ministerial level with the wider party, the ‘grassroots’ and its societal milieu—​enables a broader perspective on decision-​making, and helps illuminate the two broad approaches to Europe evident in Conservative circles. A wider conception of Conservatism has had its impact on our understanding of European relations. Historians such as E.H.H. Green and Nick Crowson have sought to gain a clearer sense of the party through assessment of its archives and consideration of local activism as well as ‘high-political’ actors; others such as Richard Toye have considered areas of political activity previously overlooked, such as rhetoric.13 Crowson, in setting out to examine

10   A. Hawkins, The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby (2 vols, Oxford, 2007–​8), vol. ii, p. 59. 11  Ibid., p. 228. 12  See, e.g., G. Hicks, Peace, War and Party Politics: The Conservatives and Europe, 1846–​59 (Manchester, 2007). 13  See, e.g., E.H.H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the Conservative Party, 1880–​1914 (London, 1995); E.H.H. Green, Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2002); N.J. Crowson, The Conservative Party and European Integration since 1945: At the Heart of Europe? (Abingdon, 2007); R. Toye, ‘Words of Change: The Rhetoric of Commonwealth, Common Market and Cold War, 1961–​3’, in L. Jin Butler and S. Stockwell, eds., The Wind of Change: Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 140–​58.

Britain and Europe   549 the evolution of Conservative attitudes towards Europe since 1945, has challenged the notion that there is anything novel about the ‘Euroscepticism’ that came to characterize Tory politics from the late twentieth century. The work of John Charmley, Angus Hawkins, Bendor Grosvenor, and myself has similarly noted the contrast between two persistent but different Conservative modes of thought regarding Europe.14 Though one needs to avoid casual caricatures, the division might loosely be described as between a more aggressive stance, represented for example by the leadership of Benjamin Disraeli or Margaret Thatcher, and a more conciliatory policy symbolized by, for example, Sir Robert Peel, Derby, or Edward Heath. However one defines such differences, recent research suggests that the ‘European’ positions adopted by political parties are rooted as much in domestic political circumstances as they are in continental developments to which British politicians have had to respond. This is also evident in research examining the Labour party. The Conservatives have attracted greater attention, unsurprisingly given their longer history and the fact that Labour has only once presided over a significant shift in Anglo-​European relations, when it initiated Britain’s second application to the EEC and the referendum subsequent to British entry (Tony Blair’s government might of course have presided over a referendum on the single currency, but retreated). The availability of primary material has also played its part in the historiography of Labour and Europe. For example, as Helen Parr has described, source limitations regarding Britain’s second EEC application—​as compared with the first, under Macmillan—​led to a slower growth of assessments.15 Nevertheless, a growing body of work has considered Labour’s gyrations on Europe.16 There has been a broad consensus on three issues. The first is that Labour moved to a position by the late 1980s where Europe had ‘exhausted itself ’ as a source of division within the party.17 This was despite a series of violently contradictory policies in the 1960s and 1970s. These positions were, second, as much the consequences of party political considerations and internal debate as international events. Andrew Thorpe has noted, for instance, that by the late 1980s, with ‘Thatcher’s continuing rhetorical opposition to greater integration leaving a gap in the political market, Labour became warmer

14  See, e.g., J. Charmley, Splendid Isolation? Britain and the Balance of Power, 1874–​1914 (London, 1999); Hawkins, The Forgotten Prime Minister; B. Grosvenor, ‘Britain’s “Most Isolationist Foreign Secretary”: The Fifteenth Earl and the Eastern Crisis 1876–​1878’, in G. Hicks, ed., Conservatism and British Foreign Policy: The Derbys and their World (Farnham, 2011), pp. 129–​67; Hicks, Peace, War and Party Politics. 15  H. Parr, Britain’s Policy towards the European Community: Harold Wilson and Britain’s World Role, 1964–​1967 (Abingdon, 2006), p. 4. 16  See, e.g., R. Broad, Labour’s European Dilemmas: From Bevin to Blair (Basingstoke, 2001); J.W. Young, The Labour Governments 1964–​70, Vol. II: International Policy (Manchester, 2003), pp. 142–​65; O. Daddow, ed., Harold Wilson and European Integration: Britain’s Second Application to Join the EEC (London, 2003); P. Bell, The Labour Party in Opposition, 1970–​74 (London, 2004); H. Parr and M. Pine, ‘Policy towards the European Economic Community’, in P. Dorey, ed., The Labour Governments, 1964–​1970 (London, 2006), pp. 108–​29; A. Mullen, The British Left’s ‘Great Debate’ on Europe (New York and London, 2007). 17 Broad, Labour’s European Dilemmas, p. 195.

550   Geoffrey Hicks towards Europe’.18 Third, narrowing opportunities, rather than any particular Euro-​ enthusiasm (Blair aside), moved the party towards a pro-​European position.19 Broader political fault-​lines over Europe are also illuminated by examining Labour. Roger Broad and Andrew Mullen have noted how the party’s shifting position in the late twentieth century had at its root a polarity on the wider left: a socialist antipathy to the pro-​market economics of the EU and its tendency to centralize power away from individual citizens, as against a social ​democratic desire to ameliorate the impact of globalization through European social and economic policy, and to participate in ‘internationalism in action’.20 One question raised by Mullen is whether historians have spent rather too much time on the Labour party, instead of the left more loosely defined—​ trade unions, smaller parties, etc.21 The SNP’s championing of Scotland’s divergence from the rest of mainland Britain over Europe would benefit from historians’ further consideration.22 Questions about the left prompt similar ones about the right, especially given the enhanced role of non-​Conservative actors such as UKIP. It remains to be seen whether Britain’s centrists will attract much attention. While the Liberal Democrats took a share of power between 2010 and 2015, there seems unlikely to be a resurgent historiography of the party’s European policy, given the minority role it has played compared with its nineteenth-​century antecedent. As Hugo Young noted, in the second half of the twentieth century the party ‘had long been a minority voice for closer union with Europe, but it was almost never heard’.23 In parallel to new work on domestic political cultures, a notable shift in the study of Anglo-​European relations in recent years has been the development of new studies of the culture of diplomacy. Where research in the second half of the twentieth century tended towards the administrative history of foreign relations, we can now perceive the impact of changes elsewhere in political history to produce a more rounded view of Britain’s formal relationship with Europe. This has a number of facets. Building on Zara Steiner’s earlier work, T.G. Otte’s assessment of the ‘Foreign Office Mind’ has considered in detail the outlook and behaviour of the men with everyday responsibility for British engagement with the European powers (and many others, of course).24 He has described how Britain saw itself as separate from continental affairs whilst desirous of ‘equilibrium’ between its European neighbours. Underscoring his work is an appreciation of the dual nature of Britain as a European power and a global power, that in the Foreign Office ‘there was a clear understanding of the nexus between the constellation 18 

A. Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party (4th edn., London, 2015), p. 231. See, e.g., Young, Labour Governments, p. 159. 20 Broad, Labour’s European Dilemmas, p. 196; Mullen, The British Left’s ‘Great Debate’, p. 2. 21 Mullen, The British Left’s ‘Great Debate’, p. 3. 22  See, e.g., A. Ichijo, Scottish Nationalism and the Idea of Europe: Concepts of Europe and the Nation (London, 2004). 23  H. Young, This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 472. 24  T.G. Otte, The Foreign Office Mind: The Making of British Foreign Policy, 1865–​1914 (Cambridge, 2011). For the earlier work, see, e.g., Z. Steiner, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 1898–​1914 (Cambridge, 1969). 19 

Britain and Europe   551 among the Powers in Europe and Britain’s ability to defend her overseas interests’.25 Any consideration of Britain and Europe must accept that British officialdom always saw the nation as an international power, with Europe occupying only a part of its collective attention. That, perhaps, helps explain Britain’s aloofness from a continent which is one of a set of geopolitical concerns, equal in significance. An assessment of the broader culture of diplomacy and the nature of its community, priorities, and mindset is slowly gathering pace. Markus Mösslang and Torsten Riotte have argued for a ‘culturalist approach’ to diplomacy, which recognizes that diplomacy is ‘not a one-​to-​one implementation of foreign policy’ but ‘has to be investigated within different contexts, especially in cases where mentality, perceptions, or even emotions came into play’.26 Similarly, John Fisher and Anthony Best set out to consider the mentalités of diplomatic culture in their edited collection examining its ‘fringes’.27 Although not specifically focused on Europe, the collection added more voices to a growing consensus that we need a more variegated picture of Britain’s engagement with the Continent. The editors explicitly wanted to look at ‘a broad range of actors other than the “usual suspects” of government ministers and ambassadors’, and also to move ‘beyond a mere analysis of day-​to-​day diplomacy to look at the influence of culture and society’.28 Jennifer Mori’s research examining the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has considered the long-​neglected social history of the diplomatic corps and, in that light, produced a new account of British diplomatic practice in Europe between 1750 and 1830.29 These new analyses of diplomatic culture have, among other approaches, reflected on the role of gender in British relations with Europe. Recent research in domestic politics has begun to examine the overlooked roles played by women, who often moved outside formal political structures and left fewer records behind.30 This work is now extending into foreign policy. Just as Jennifer Davey and Kim Reynolds have examined the roles played by politicians’ wives, Mori has considered the lives of diplomats’ wives as an integral part of a prosopographical study of 50 individuals.31 Her work has been mirrored by that of Helen McCarthy on diplomats’ wives in the twentieth century.32 In an analysis of Britain’s Paris Embassy in the early nineteenth century, Mori has suggested 25 Otte, Foreign Office Mind, p. 399.

26  M. Mösslang and T. Riotte, eds., The Diplomats’ World: A Cultural History of Diplomacy, 1815–​1914 (Oxford, 2008), p. 18. 27   J. Fisher and A. Best, eds., On the Fringes of Diplomacy: Influences on British Foreign Policy, 1800–​ 1945 (Farnham, 2011). 28 Ibid., p. 1. 29  J. Mori, The Culture of Diplomacy: Britain in Europe, c.1750–​1830 (Manchester, 2010). 30  See, e.g., K. Gleadle, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender and Political Culture in Britain, 1815–​1867 (Oxford, 2009); S. Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (New York, 2013). 31  See, e.g., J. Davey, ‘The Invisible Politician: Mary Derby and the Eastern Crisis’, in Fisher and Best, eds., On the Fringes of Diplomacy, pp. 17–​34; J. Davey, A Female Politician: Mary, Countess of Derby and the Politics of Victorian Britain (Oxford, forthcoming); K.D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998). 32  H. McCarthy, Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat (London, 2014).

552   Geoffrey Hicks that Anglo-​French relations after 1815 were materially affected by the role of diplomatic wives. They took advantage of ‘an increased frequency and intimacy of social contact’, thereby creating new opportunities to bring ‘willpower and patience’ to bear in the cause of British foreign policy, helping to ‘launch a more open, informal, and continuous dialogue between England and France’.33 The role played by gender in British diplomacy, and the extent to which attitudes and approaches were gendered, requires much further research; that work is likely to change our perception of the nature and dynamics of Britain’s relations with its European neighbours. Whatever our understanding of that relationship, it clearly has to encompass rather more than simply the policies adopted towards continental powers; Britain’s political sense of self requires Europe as, variously, comparator, competitor, and ally. The way in which Britain defined itself against and, in a comparative sense, beside Europe has also been a feature of recent assessments. Historians return regularly to Britain’s sense of its unique and un-​continental status. The work of Robert Saunders draws explicitly on the example of France in British debate about reform in the mid-​nineteenth century.34 The French revolutionary and democratic examples, in Saunders’s analysis, acted as a warning about the consequences of failure and helped define the exceptionalism of British political culture: ‘If the French experience made a reform of some kind more likely’, he suggests, ‘it increased the importance of distinguishing it from any taint of democratization, and of protecting the uniquely British qualities of the existing constitution’.35 Like Saunders, Hawkins also emphasizes the way in which British discussion of reform was couched in comparative terms. In his recent assessment of Victorian political culture he notes how British politics defined itself in contrast to continental politics. This was particularly evident in the wake of the 1848 revolutions, when the ‘suppression of continental liberalism . . . highlighted, in the minds of British subjects, the inclusive and libertarian character of Britain’s polity’.36 Unsurprisingly for an educated imperial people with excellent communications networks, the Victorians saw themselves in a global context, even if the Continent provided something to define against, rather than emulate. This process of comparison and definition is a persistent and constantly shifting one. What is clear is that Europe has consistently been an important element in British identity. Mori explored the British diplomatic community’s sense of self. In her view, the second half of the eighteenth century brought ‘new domestic expectations of public service and private identity’, and as a result, ‘[w]‌hat it meant to be British was more sharply defined  . . .  both for and against Europe’.37 She too considered the nature of English exceptionalism, placing it very much in a European context and rejecting the 33 

J. Mori, ‘How Women Make Diplomacy: The British Embassy in Paris, 1815–​1841’, Journal of Women’s History, 27 (2015), 152. 34  R. Saunders, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848–​1867: The Making of the Second Reform Act (Farnham, 2011). 35  Ibid., p. 142. 36  A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’ (Oxford, 2015), p. 217. 37 Mori, Culture of Diplomacy, p. 211.

Britain and Europe   553 notion that it ‘was about an increasing preoccupation with the empire’.38 Peter Mandler’s study of the English ‘national character’ across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also dwelt on the way in which definition with reference to Europe was an inescapable part of national identity.39 That included twentieth-​century forms of the exceptionalism identified by historians of the nineteenth century. In the post-​First World War period, for example, he posited a ‘returning sense of separateness from Europe’.40 In the years after 1945, however, there was ‘a sense that Britain had something to teach the rest of Europe’ and a ‘new sense that this could be achieved through some sort of tighter European community’.41 The European Economic Community, or ‘Common Market’, which Britain joined on 1 January 1973—​its membership confirmed by a referendum in June 1975—​became a part of British identity in the latter twentieth century, although never a straightforward or uncontroversial one. Britain’s engagement with the process of post-​war European unity has of course been the focus of a great deal of historiographical attention. Historians have tracked Britain’s relationship with a continent slowly but surely drawing together, redefined by Monnet–​ Schuman, the Treaty of Rome, and its various successors. How to assess that relationship is not straightforward. As the historiography has developed, the necessity of appreciating the multi-faceted nature of British political responses has become clearer. Assessments of the post-​war relationship with Europe began by dwelling on the slow progress of relations with continental Europe but have moved to a more nuanced view. In his wide-​ranging historiographical survey, Oliver Daddow has posited three schools of thought: orthodox, revisionist, and post-​revisionist.42 The first, from the 1950s to the 1980s, was in his view sustained by journalists, diplomats, and politicians, working on the assumption that Britain had ‘missed out’ on European unity in the post-​war years and that explanations were required as to what had gone wrong. One of its academic lights, Miriam Camps, ‘brought academic integrity’, but she also established the language and terminology of ‘missed chances’ and ‘missed opportunities’.43 The subsequent schools of thought felt obliged to respond to the orthodox criticisms of British European policy. As early as 1987, Anthony Seldon was sceptical about the narrative of ‘missed opportunities’.44 Revisionist international historians such as John Kent, John Young, and Anne Deighton rewrote the immediate post-​war history of Britain’s European policy in

38 Ibid. 39 

P. Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven and London, 2006). 40  Ibid., p. 143. 41  Ibid., pp. 214–​15. 42  O. Daddow, Britain and Europe since 1945: Historiographical Perspectives on Integration (Manchester, 2004). 43  Ibid., p. 194; see also M. Camps, Britain and the European Community, 1955–​63 (Princeton, NJ, 1964). 44  A. Seldon, ‘The Churchill Administration, 1951–​1955’, in P. Hennessy and A. Seldon, eds., Ruling Performance: British Governments from Attlee to Thatcher (Oxford, 1987), pp. 86–​7.

554   Geoffrey Hicks the light of the apparent inability of the orthodox school to explain it satisfactorily.45 They highlighted, in contrast, Britain’s often proactive and constructive policies. The picture has since become more complex still. In the ‘post-​revisionist’ school, one might place those recent scholars such as John Turner, Anthony Forster, Nick Crowson, and Benjamin Grob-​Fitzgibbon who have examined the history of Euroscepticism.46 Turner examined the ‘growing divisions’ in Tory ranks and how they produced the 1997 election defeat.47 Forster, who considered both Labour and Tory sceptics, defined the phenomenon not so much as a growing divide, but rather an ‘ebb and flow of opposition to Britain’s involvement in the European integration project’.48 Grob-​Fitzgibbon, a scholar in the US State Department, has located the root of Euroscepticism in Britain’s persistent ‘fear’ of its ‘imperial heritage slipping away’.49 Perhaps reflecting an American focus on British imperialism, this latter judgement seems rather to miss the point of a longer coolness towards Europe in British political history. Indeed, Crowson has been critical of the way in which much of the history of Euroscepticism has been focused on recent divisions and lacks a wider historical perspective. In his view, 1997 marked ‘a return to the “limited liability” tradition of Conservative thinking that held ascendancy during the inter-​war years’.50 Jeremy Black, in his search for a ‘deep history’ of the Conservative party, has considered the party’s relationship with Europe over the long term, but has defined it more in terms of shifting contexts than two opposing wings.51 If we were to simplify what is, of course, a complex historiography of the post-​1945 period, we might say that it has moved from being an explanation of missed opportunity, through a more balanced assessment of British policy objectives, to an appreciation of an ever shifting dynamic between those politicians more or less inclined to work with European counterparts. What the 2016 referendum suggests is that we need a much deeper, broader assessment of the phenomenon loosely described as ‘Euroscepticism’. If 17 million people in the UK could vote against membership of the European Union, it seems that either the views of the ‘Eurosceptics’ were shared much more widely than thought, or that they had immense power to persuade others—​or that we need to understand a much more complicated part of British identity.

45  See, e.g., J. Kent, ‘British Policy and the Origins of the Cold War’, in M. Leffler and D. Painter, eds., The Origins of the Cold War: An International History (London, 1994); J.W. Young, Britain and European Unity, 1945–​1992 (Basingstoke, 1993); A. Deighton, ed., Building Postwar Europe: National Decision-​ Makers and European Institutions, 1948–​63 (Basingstoke, 1995). 46  J. Turner, The Tories and Europe (Manchester, 2000); A. Forster, Euroscepticism in Contemporary British Politics (London, 2002); Crowson, The Conservative Party and European Integration; B. Grob-​ Fitzgibbon, Continental Drift: Britain and Europe from the End of Empire to the Rise of Euroscepticism (Cambridge, 2016). 47 Turner, Tories and Europe, p. 1. 48 Forster, Euroscepticism, p. 1. 49  Grob-​Fitzgibbon, Continental Drift, p. 470. 50 Crowson, Conservative Party and European Integration, p. 221. 51  J. Black, ‘The European Question, the National interest and Tory Histories’, in J. Black, ed., The Tory World: Deep History and the Tory Theme in British Foreign Policy, 1679–​2014 (Farnham, 2015), pp. 331–​70.

Britain and Europe   555 In order to do that, one contextual consideration might be the structural aspect of Britain’s engagement with the European Union. This, like other elements of Britain’s European role, would benefit from a wider chronological perspective. Peter Marsh has suggested that Britain’s establishment of, and subsequent attitudes towards, free trade treaties in the nineteenth century ‘sheds light on Britain’s ambivalence to the European Union today’.52 Like Anthony Howe, he has considered the political objectives of Cobdenism, noting the importance, just as today, of a ‘political agenda behind the nineteenth-​century [trade treaty] network’, which for example helped improve relations with France during the Second Empire.53 Yet he has pointed to the ‘striking feature’ characterizing Britain’s economic engagement with both nineteenth-​century and twentieth-​century Europe: ‘the difficulty that Britain has experienced in bringing its resources effectively to bear within the European structures of the day’.54 He notes Britain’s reluctance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to reduce national control over economic policy or recognize Continental (principally German) economic advantage, but such a thesis points to a wider structural dissonance in Britain’s political relationship with its continental counterparts. We might consider further the innate differences. They can, for example, be observed as much in the Congress System of the 1820s as within the EU. Thus, the growth of constitutionalism in Europe was a threat to the Holy Alliance because it challenged the fundamental structures of autocratic rule, but not to Britain, which had already developed constitutional outlets for discontent; the Schengen Area seems an opportunity if one moves constantly across land borders for work and recreation, but a threat if one does not. Industrialization and de-industrialization catalyzed changes in political systems and ideologies, but Britain has experienced both situations at different times from its neighbours, with a resulting lack of congruence: its nineteenth-​century free trade and its twenty-​first-​century service economy have both produced tensions. Meanwhile, Continental political systems based on consensus politics borne of proportional, federal systems such as Germany’s (which, in turn, feed into the processes of the European Commission) produce political cultures which British politicians and citizens at best fail to appreciate, and at worst simply do not understand. The differing nature of party also makes for dissimilarity between Britain and its counterparts. Black has noted for example that, post-​war, ‘Christian Democracy was more corporatist and more ostentatiously concerned with social welfare, and also looked to roots in a Catholic political activism that was very different to that of the Conservative Party’.55 On the left, where British and European parties have by contrast maintained a more robust solidarity, suspicions that EU institutions are innately pro-​capitalist has produced a different kind of

52 

P.T. Marsh, Bargaining on Europe: Britain and the First Common Market, 1860–​1892 (New Haven and London, 1999), p. 210. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55  J. Black, ‘The European Question’, p. 336.

556   Geoffrey Hicks structural mismatch. The multi-​layered collision of very different political cultures has generated tension and a mutual lack of understanding. In order to explore those difficulties further, and in the light of the historiographical developments previously discussed, we might begin to develop new frameworks for considering Britain’s relationship with Europe. The way in which we view Britain’s interaction with Europe is in part conditioned by standard chronological boundaries. Conventionally, we separate the Anglo-​European peacetime relationship into five broad phases after the French Revolutionary/​Napoleonic Wars: (i) 1815–​1865 or 1870; (ii) 1870–​1914; (iii) 1919–​ 1939; (iv) 1945–​1963 or 1973; (v) the late twentieth century onwards. The first of the five sections is bounded by the Treaty of Vienna and the unification of Germany, and is sometimes blended into the second period. The second, dating from either the death of Palmerston in 1865 or the outbreak of the Franco-​Prussian War in 1870, roughly corresponds with the period of the second German Empire, with its conclusion at the First World War. Third is the easily defined ‘age of appeasement’, nestling between the two World Wars. The fourth begins in 1945 but has a more ambiguous end date, although almost always relative to EEC/​ EU membership—​de Gaulle’s 1963 veto of the British application, 1973 membership of the EEC, or even 1992, as the European Community prepared to metamorphose into the EU. Thereafter, the final phase concerns the late twentieth century and beyond. The two World Wars tend to be corralled into their own distinct categories. There are, of course, variations on these precise dates (for example, 1898–​1914 is a demarcation that often provides the context for the origins of the First World War), but the shift is rarely substantial. These chronological boundaries are perfectly rational ones, marked by continental events of seismic significance in geopolitical terms. Only the second, when drawn at 1865, has a British domestic root, and only the fourth is defined, at its conclusion, by Britain’s own political relations with Europe (the outbreak of wars being primarily the consequence of events on the Continent, and certainly driven by Continental ‘actors’). It seems likely that this will also be the case for the fifth, given the dawning of ‘Brexit’ (what price 2016 as the cut-​off for accounts of British foreign policy produced over the next decades?). Britain’s part in three major continental wars in the past 250 years naturally changed its relations with its European neighbours in a variety of ways which it would be foolish for historians to ignore. Those wars have, of course, also impacted on British politics—​the traffic is always in two directions. Nevertheless, such parameters present challenges. To begin with, they tend to ignore other, smaller conflicts that had profound effects on British views of relations with Europe. Three examples demonstrate some of the difficulties attendant upon the present boundaries: the Crimean War, the second Boer War, and the Suez crisis. The Crimean War ushered in a period of withdrawal from European politics, yet it has never been a popular subject for political historians; there has been no major work on the British domestic impact of the war, nor for that matter on the complexities of pre-​Crimean politics since J.B. Conacher’s monograph on the Aberdeen Coalition.56 Nevertheless, there is consensus that British politicians in some sense withdrew from involvement in Continental politics after 1856, even if historians disagree as 56 

J.B. Conacher, The Aberdeen Coalition 1852–​55 (Cambridge, 1968).

Britain and Europe   557 to the precise nature of the causes. A boundary at 1865 or 1870 makes little sense in the light of such a shift. The second Boer War, though fought against a colonial foe far from Europe, only reinforced in many politicians’ minds the dangerous ‘isolation’ of Britain from its Continental neighbours. While clearly a far less significant conflict than the war that followed in 1914, its effect on internal perceptions of British power was profound. Half a century on, the Suez crisis, while perhaps as much symbolic in its effect as real, was one of a number of factors nudging Britain towards a more ‘Continental’ policy in the later twentieth century. It might perhaps be a more logical boundary than 1945, demonstrating publicly the loss of geopolitical power that British politicians had struggled with since the middle of the Second World War (and coincidentally occurring just months before the Treaty of Rome was signed). All of this is however defined by external factors. What of internal ones? Existing chronological divisions with regard to Europe seem even less explicable in the light of political history. As often as not, domestic politics have been the determinant of, rather than determined by, Britain’s relationship with Europe. If we are to take the five sets of boundaries outlined previously and map onto them the experience of domestic politics, there is little congruence aside from the World Wars. In the nineteenth century, there was no change in British government in either 1815, which fell in the middle of a long period of Tory government, or 1870, two years into Gladstone’s first administration. At first glance, the 1865 death of Palmerston, with his distinctive foreign policy, is a more explicable choice, but this is an illusory logic: his death made no immediate difference to British systems of government, the Opposition parties, or even the foreign policy of his own Liberal party. For historians of British domestic politics, critical divisions came with Reform processes in 1830–​2 and 1867–​8, both of which heralded changes in party politics and shifts in relationships with the European continent. In 1830 this occurred very sharply with the accession of a Whig ministry following years of Tory government, bringing Palmerston to power as Foreign Secretary and heralding a particular form of policy. After 1867 the shift was slower and more subtle, as Gladstone’s leadership turned away from Palmerstonian policy, after which Disraeli redefined Conservative party politics. The changes embraced by Disraeli and Gladstone had significant implications for future relations with Europe. While they were in part accidental effects of their predecessors’ deaths, they were clearly allied to electoral politics. They were certainly not caused by events on the Continent, even though they would materially affect Britain’s view of those events. In the twentieth century, too, the current parameters are worth reconsideration, even in those periods bookended by the World Wars. Those conflicts, historiographically, have a tendency to displace both domestic and diplomatic events that do not fit naturally into the boundaries thus created. At first glance, movements in domestic politics appear to have mirrored events on the Continent more straightforwardly than in the nineteenth century. Matters in Europe provided, for example, the catalyst for political change during and after the First World War and for the rise of Churchill in 1940. The division and post-​war decline of the Liberal party, the rise of Labour and the ascendancy of Baldwinite Conservatism sit neatly alongside upheaval on the Continent, as does the

558   Geoffrey Hicks later eclipse of the so-​called ‘appeasers’ after their policies were extinguished by Hitler’s war machine. Dramatic change on the Continent and domestic change in Britain had an obvious symbiotic relationship. And yet, on closer inspection, do the boundaries created by two World Wars entirely make sense? Developments in the historiography of international history might lead us to question the wisdom of continuing always to adhere to them. While 1914 seems an obvious point at which to draw accounts of foreign policy to a close, recent assessments of pre-​war diplomacy have warned of the danger of teleology—​focusing on the conclusion as explanation for all that went before, rather than seeing a period on its own terms. While in 1980 Kennedy could write a book entitled ‘The Rise of the Anglo-​German Antagonism’, more recent work has interpreted the period in rather different ways.57 Christopher Clark has pointed out that in the early twentieth century, ‘“Anglo-​German antagonism” was not . . . the primary determinant of British policy’.58 T.G. Otte has described how, in fact, British officialdom saw and understood ‘Germany’s weakening position in the years immediately before 1914’.59 To suggest that 1914 was of no significance would be ahistorical, but to allow the outbreak of war to define the focus of research into Anglo-​ European relations in the period presents its own difficulties. As work by Clark, Otte, and others suggests, there was more to British perceptions of Europe and relations with European powers in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras than a diplomatic chess game culminating in war with Germany.60 The conventional periodization of 1919–​39 presents a different problem, by leading us away from domestic political continuities that helped define Britain’s continental behaviour. The period between the wars has become known as the age of ‘appeasement’, defined by an apparently distinct foreign policy concerning relations with revisionist European powers. Yet Paul Schroeder and Paul Kennedy long ago suggested that the attitudes determining the policy known as ‘appeasement’ had been evident from a much earlier period.61 More recently, I have outlined the way in which we might further refine periodization in foreign policy, suggesting that treating the period 1919–​39 as if it is unique in British history obscures a particular strand of Conservatism which determined the conduct of European relationships at points during both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.62 The existing periodization, while apparently logical in its

57

  P. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-​German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London, 1980). C. Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London, 2012), p. 141. See also T.G. Otte, July Crisis: The World’s Descent into War, Summer 1914 (Cambridge, 2014). 59 Otte, Foreign Office Mind, p. 406. 60  See, e.g., K. Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy towards Russia, 1894–​1917 (Oxford, 1995). 61  P. Kennedy, ‘The Tradition of Appeasement in British Foreign Policy 1865–​1939’, British Journal of International Studies, 2 (1976), 195–​215; P.W. Schroeder, ‘Munich and the British Tradition’, Historical Journal, 19 (1976), 223–​43. 62  G. Hicks, ‘“Appeasement” or Consistent Conservatism? British Foreign Policy, Party Politics and the Guarantees of 1867 and 1939’, Historical Research, 84 (2011), 513–​34; G. Hicks, ‘Conservatism Obscured, 1935–​1939’, in Black, ed., The Tory World, pp. 293–​310. 58 

Britain and Europe   559 reflection of the impact of war, is thus problematic; if we are to illuminate Britain’s interaction with the Continent, the long view might be rather more useful than a straightforward search for the origins of the Second World War. The Allied victory in 1945 provides by contrast perhaps the most logical of our conventional historiographical boundaries, notwithstanding the cautionary comments above regarding the Suez crisis. It represents the termination and advent of European orders at the same time as dramatic political change in Britain. On the next boundary, there is no clear consensus, and in the light of the difficulties with such boundaries, perhaps we should also consider other tools for assessing British attitudes and policies. One useful tool is generational study. The role of generational factors in the British relationship with Europe is one that has been under-​examined. The study of generation in history goes back nearly a century, to Karl Mannheim, although of course the notion that similarly aged individuals might have collective experiences and/​or behaviour has a much longer pedigree. For historians of Continental nations, the experience of generation has been considered rather more than in Britain. Pat Thane has suggested that, as a concept, it has had ‘little resonance in the national politics of modern Britain’.63 It may be the case that generation has not been a political issue in itself, although we might conclude that this situation is changing, given recent debate about the privileges of the ‘baby-​boomers’, the financial challenges of ‘millennials’, and the role of older voters in the 2016 referendum.64 There seems no reason, however, why generations in politics should have any less relevance in Britain than elsewhere. As Stephen Lovell has suggested, generation ‘is a socially rooted identity that has political and economic implications  . . .  it is hardly more arbitrary, or less “real”, than class or nationality’.65 Most obviously, the experience of the three great global wars in the modern period sharply divided the experience of many Britons from those born before and after. As this analysis has already noted, beyond the Napoleonic and World Wars, other conflicts, such as those in the Crimea and South Africa, clearly had profound impacts on politicians and participants. The less obviously demarcated economic, intellectual, or social circumstances of, for example, inter-​war Britain or the prosperity of the mid-​Victorian era, or the fin-​de-​siècle nervousness of the pre-​First World War period, might also have had a significant effect. Existing work on both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggests useful paths of inquiry for the historian of Britain and Europe. In international history, recent historiography has highlighted the utility of generational study. Otte has noted the advantage of studying those generations ‘formed by common, formative social or political

63 

P. Thane, ‘Generations and Intergenerational Relationships, Public and Private, in Twentieth-​ Century Britain’, in S. Lovell, ed., Generations in Twentieth-​Century Europe (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 190. 64  See, e.g., D. Willetts, The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future—​And Why They Should Give It Back (London, 2010); F. Beckett, What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us? (London, 2010); E. Howker and S. Malik, Jilted Generation: How Britain Bankrupted Its Youth (London, 2010). 65  S. Lovell, ‘Introduction’, in Lovell, ed., Generations in Twentieth-​Century Europe, p. 13.

560   Geoffrey Hicks experiences’ and the ‘common intellectual reaction to those experiences’.66 Simon Ball has explored the role of political generations in the mid-​twentieth century. He posited the existence of at least three different generations as political actors: a ‘Great War Generation’, a ‘Post-​[Great] War Generation’, and a ‘Pre-​Second World War Generation’.67 Seen thus, the politicians of the late 1950s, grappling with the decline of empire at the same time as European questions, were not bound by straightforward chronological boundaries, but by more subtle ones to do with age and experience. Ball locates the shift from a ‘post-​war’ to a ‘pre-​war’ generation in the early 1930s, taking issue with Steiner, for whom the shift took place some years later.68 In political terms, Ball suggests, this generational change manifested itself as a difference between those who conceptualized British power equally in global/​imperial and European terms, and those who were focused on the European balance of power. Extrapolating this into mid-​century, one can identify patterns of political behaviour in relation to Europe which might make rather more sense than drawing a straightforward line at, say, 1939 or 1945. Meanwhile, in his analysis of pre-​1914 diplomacy, T.G. Otte has identified four political generations in the diplomatic service, each with common characteristics: the Palmerstonians, broadly anti-​Russian and pro-​French after the Crimean experience; the high Victorians, less enthusiastic about France and inclined to lean towards Germany; and the late Victorians and the Edwardians, both more suspicious of Germany.69 If we were to explore the British relationship with Europe through a generational lens, we might of course come up with any number of divisions, but we might identify a further two at the extremes of the chronological period:  the Napoleonic and Eurosceptic generations. The role of a Napoleonic generation would be well worth further examination. In examining the impact of Emperor Napoleon III in the mid-​ nineteenth century, for example, Parry has pointed to ‘a distinct latent psychological fear of French aggression and indeed invasion’ among British politicians of the mid-​ Victorian era, which was ‘the legacy of the intense wartime propaganda of the 1800s’.70 He notes that ‘British public life in the 1850s was dominated by men over whose youths the Bonapartist shadow had fallen’.71 One of those men, Lord Malmesbury, noted in his memoirs that, in his childhood, Napoleon’s name ‘was in everyone’s mind, and pronounced with execration’.72 For ‘Napoleonic’ politicians such as Lords Palmerston and

66

 Otte, Foreign Office Mind, p. 19. S. Ball, ‘The Wind of Change as Generational Drama’, in L.J. Butler and S. Stockwell, eds., Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 96–​115. For a different sort of generational study, see S. Ball, The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World They Made (London, 2004). 68  Ball, ‘Wind of Change’, p. 104; Z. Steiner, ‘Views of War: Britain before the “Great War” and After’, International Relations, 17 (2003), 7–​35. 69 Otte, Foreign Office Mind, pp. 405–​6. 70  J.P. Parry, ‘The Impact of Napoleon III on British Politics, 1851–​1880’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series, 11 (2001), 149. 71 Ibid. 72  Earl of Malmesbury, Memoirs of an Ex-​Minister (2 vols, London, 1884), vol. i, p. 3. 67 

Britain and Europe   561 Aberdeen (both born in 1784), who had reached maturity and official responsibility by the latter Napoleonic years (as Secretary at War and ambassador to Russia respectively), the wars of the early nineteenth century had profound implications. Aberdeen saw the battlefield at Leipzig in 1813 and was deeply affected by that experience. Meanwhile, Brown has suggested we need to re​think popular conceptions of a bellicose, anti-​ French Palmerston, the man who after all conducted ‘a foreign policy generally sympathetic to France’.73 It is not much of a leap to propose that such attitudes sprang in part from his experience in early career, helping to resource the conflict with France and witnessing its destructive power. Of course, the notion of one ‘Napoleonic’ generation may be too simplistic; here it might be useful to borrow from Ball’s twentieth-​century research and identify ‘Napoleonic’ and ‘post-​ Napoleonic’ (or ‘pre-​ Crimean’?) generations. Were politicians such as Palmerston and Aberdeen quite of the same generation as, say, the ‘post-​ Napoleonic’ Benjamin Disraeli (born 1804), Richard Cobden (also 1804), Malmesbury (born 1807), and William Gladstone (born 1809)? All these men had an impact on European relations on various occasions and in various ways, but only their early childhoods were spent in the Napoleonic era. Their adolescence, maturity, and careers would come later. Contrast that, in turn, with the ‘Crimean generation’—​not precisely analogous with the diplomats Otte calls the Palmerstonians, but not far removed. For Foreign Secretaries such as Lords Derby and Kimberley (both born in 1826), Derby’s wife Mary (born 1824), Lord Salisbury, and his colleague Carnarvon (born 1830 and 1831 respectively), early political life was heavily affected not by the shadow of the Napoleonic Wars, but by observing the waste and mistakes of the Crimean War. It would be too simplistic to suggest that these early experiences led to more circumspect engagement with European powers, but common experiences would be well worth exploring. At the other end of our period, naturally any generational study must come to grips with the complexities of the political generations dealing with Europe since the Second World War, but ‘Brexit’ has highlighted what we might call a ‘Eurosceptic’ generation. That is not a simple categorization of those who wanted to vote ‘Leave’ in 2016; it consists of a wide swathe of British society. It ranges from those actively hostile to the notion of European unity, through those suspicious of projects such as a common currency, to those whose primary concern is a more nebulous set of threats to the nation-​state—​ from the movement of terrorists to economic collapse. The early twenty-​first century might be said to have produced a generation whose engagement with European issues is defined by the paradigm of security. The turbulent years between 2001 and c.2008 were marked first by the attacks of 9/​11, then the Western powers’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by economic meltdown. These developments were compounded by the politico-​social crisis (however irrationally inflated) of two migrations: the free movement of European nationals, and the desperate flight of refugees from the Middle East

73 

D. Brown, ‘Palmerston and Anglo-​French Relations, 1846–​1865’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 17 (2006), 676.

562   Geoffrey Hicks into the EU. Different politicians draw different conclusions from that experience, but this is not the wartime generation of Heath or Roy Jenkins, nor yet those defined by their reaction to economic change in the 1970s and 1980s (for example Blair and John Major, both declared believers in working closely with Europe). For current leaders, the language of European debate is one of reluctant engagement in the face of global challenges, or of reaction against European institutions in the belief that those challenges are easier to face unrestrained by pooled sovereignty. Whether one is a ‘baby-​boomer’ like Theresa May, from ‘Generation X’ like David Cameron or Boris Johnson, from ‘Generation Y’, or even a ‘Millennial’ may be irrelevant when faced with the defining political experience of instability. Europe is inevitably a recurring concern, in a variety of forms, both for and in British politics. Yet Europe is more than a diplomatic expression or an institutional project; it has become a cultural and political signifier, the role of which has shifted over many decades. Whether British politicians and citizens like it—​and they often don’t—​Europe is intertwined with British identity. Naturally, historians’ responses to that have varied, but recent events have demonstrated, now more than ever, the importance of the academic ‘experts’ much derided during the 2016 referendum campaign. In the early twenty-​first century, for British politicians, Europe has signified crisis; for a significant proportion of the British population, Europe has been a threat; for historians, Europe is a question which needs distinct elucidation.

Further Reading R. Broad, Labour’s European Dilemmas: From Bevin to Blair (Basingstoke, 2001). N.J. Crowson, The Conservative Party and European Integration since 1945:  At the Heart of Europe? (Abingdon, 2007). P. Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven and London, 2006). J. Mori, The Culture of Diplomacy: Britain in Europe, c.1750–​1830 (Manchester, 2010). J.P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–​1886 (Cambridge, 2006). H. Young, This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair (Basingstoke, 1998).

chapter 32

Welfare and t h e  Stat e Pat Thane

The idea that ‘welfare’ could or should be a central function of the state, that Britain was indeed a ‘welfare state’, has been widespread only since the Second World War and has always been contentious. Even before then the British state had performed ‘welfare’ roles for many years, though its historiography also only took off seriously after that war. But what is meant by ‘state welfare’, and how has its history been represented?

I The term ‘welfare state’ was a translation of the German der Wohlfahrstaat, which was used mainly among liberal intellectuals in Germany following the introduction of the world’s first national insurance scheme by Bismarck in the 1880s. The implications behind the phrase and the background to the legislation suggest and explain some of the shifts and divisions among historians and social scientists in their interpretations of the welfare role of states since that time. As originally used, it did not imply approval of Bismarck’s measures, but rather the belief that his intention was less redistribution and reduction of poverty than ensuring key blue-​collar workers’ adherence to the newly formed German state, such workers being mainly male and not the most impoverished Germans at the time. Bismarck aimed to win them away from the growing allure of socialism, in the form of the Social Democratic Party, by demonstrating the beneficence of the liberal state. More recently, E.P. Hennock has demonstrated that Bismarck also wished to promote Germany’s growing industrial economy by improving the health and sense of security of key workers.1 No historian has seen state welfare, in any country, as a simple product of compassion prompting politicians to introduce redistributive

1 

E.P. Hennock, The Origin of the Welfare State in England and Germany, 1850–​1914: Social Policies Compared (Cambridge, 2007).

564   Pat Thane measures to promote equality and eliminate poverty,2 though some governments have come closer than others. Rather, it is interpreted as playing complex, variable political, social, and economic roles which academics have progressively, though still incompletely, unpicked. The term ‘welfare state’ has been used in diverse ways. In Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s it was more widely used as a term of abuse by conservative critics of the welfare reforms of the Weimar Republic. It appears to have been brought into English discourse in the early 1930s by Alfred Zimmern, first Professor of International Relations at Oxford, supporter of the Labour party, and passionate opponent of war, who used it in a favourable sense to differentiate modern liberal democracies from the ‘warfare state’ of Hobbesian political theory and the illiberal states forming in Europe in the 1930s, indicating a way forward for states like Britain to avoid these political extremes.3 This is a model which, arguably, British politicians of all parties broadly followed, for similar reasons. ‘Welfare state’ gained wider currency in Britain during the Second World War when it was used by the Archbishop of Canterbury (and close friend of William Beveridge), William Temple, to favourably describe the objective of the social policies he and other progressive reformers had advocated since before the war. The Labour government elected in 1945 took major, and not always fully understood, steps towards this goal, but the term did not enter popular usage before the general election of 1950, when it was revived, again as a term of abuse, by right-​wing Conservatives to describe Labour’s social reforms.4 Attlee’s Labour governments of 1945–​51 did not describe themselves as creating a ‘welfare state’ despite their subsequent strong association with the term. They adopted it defensively and promoted it as a popular term of approval, with some success, only when it was used to attack them. Labour’s 1945 election manifesto, Let Us Face the Future, promised improved social and economic conditions for the ‘millions of working and middle class people [who] went through the horrors of unemployment and insecurity before the war’, though, aware of unavoidable post-​war economic constraints, Labour’s promises were modest and they prioritized reconstruction of the economy and the creation of full employment over social policies. Labour had argued from its foundation that workers’ ‘welfare’ was more effectively maximized by work at decent rates of pay than by social benefits, which they believed should be reserved for those unable to work.5 After 1945, they implemented full employment—​for the first time in peacetime in modern history—​which probably did more to improve the national welfare than social reforms.6 Historians were slow to recognize this prioritization until an assault 2 

With predictable inaccuracy, this is how ‘welfare state’ is defined by Wikipedia (as accessed 1 January 2016). 3  J. Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (2nd edn., Oxford, 1997), p. 452, n. 1. 4  Ibid., p. 252 n. 2. 5  P. Thane, ‘Labour and Welfare’, in D. Tanner, P. Thane, and N. Tiratsoo, eds., Labour’s First Century (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 80–​118. 6  J. Tomlinson, ‘Labour and the Economy’, in Tanner, Thane, and Tiratsoo, Labour’s First Century, pp. 57–​60.

Welfare and the State    565 by Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War (1986)—​echoing polemic by the right-​wing, free market-​oriented Institute of Economic Affairs—​blamed Labour’s supposed wasteful post-​war prioritization of state welfare over economic reconstruction for the country’s subsequent economic decline. Barnett claimed that it made the mass of British people a ‘segregated, subliterate, unskilled, unhealthy and institutionalized proletariat hanging on the nipple of state maternalism’.7 His diatribe has been proved comprehensively inaccurate,8 and no respected historian has supported it, but bad history can be as influential as good—​perhaps sometimes even more so—​and state welfare is an area in which politicians seem especially prone to appeal to versions of the past which suit them. It may not be coincidence that Barnett’s book was published in the middle of Margaret Thatcher’s period of government, in which was dismantled as much post-​war state welfare as voters would allow. Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, Nigel Lawson, cited ‘Correlli’s book’ as a major source of authority for his fiscal and social policies as Chancellor.9 Public understandings of history are not shaped by historians alone.

II The term ‘welfare state’ has been widely associated also with William Beveridge, whose 1942 report to government, Social Insurance and Allied Services, has been credited with inspiring Labour’s post-​war measures, and indeed with formulating most of them—​ even the National Health Service, which he recommended in principle but believed was not within his brief to discuss in detail. Beveridge is more often referred to than read, by academics and politicians. The formulation and implementation of the NHS was the work of Aneurin Bevan. Labour did not fully implement all of Beveridge’s recommendations, including his commitment that social insurance benefits should provide full subsistence—​enough to cover the essential needs of everyday life, though no more. Those who wanted a higher standard of living when sick, pensioned, or unemployed should, he believed, save, preferably through non-​profit institutions such as Friendly Societies. In its hurry to deliver to voters, Labour implemented benefits, including pensions, which have never been adequate for survival without the means-​tested supplements Beveridge detested for their costly, stigmatizing inefficiencies.10 Labour hoped to remain in office for more than six years and to develop more ambitious schemes in the long term when the problems of the economy were resolved. Not surprisingly, Beveridge was critical of Labour’s deviations from his plans.11

7 

C. Barnett, The Audit of War (London, 1986), p. 304. J. Harris, ‘Enterprise and the Welfare State’, in T. Gourvish and A. O’Day, eds., Britain since 1945 (London, 1991), pp. 39–​58. 9  ‘Any Questions’, BBC Radio 4, Mar. 1987, quoted in ibid., p. 40. 10  Thane, ‘Labour and Welfare’, pp. 97–​103. 11 Harris, Beveridge, p. 452. 8 

566   Pat Thane Beveridge has been attacked by some feminist historians for proposing a ‘male-​ breadwinner welfare state’ which rendered women who were not in the labour market dependent on their husbands for their benefits.12 In fact Beveridge, who was influenced by leading feminist Eleanor Rathbone, was much exercised about the difficulty of fitting women who did not earn, and so could not pay contributions, into a contributory social insurance system in a way that did not demean them. He was explicit in his 1942 report that he treated ‘housewives . . . not as dependents of their husbands but as partners’.13 He was highly critical of the existing unemployment insurance scheme, which treated wives as dependents, and of health insurance, which ignored them: None of these attitudes is defensible. In any measure of social policy in which regard is had to facts, the great majority of married women must be regarded as occupied on work which is vital though unpaid, without which their husbands could not do their paid work and without which the nation could not continue. In accordance with facts, the Plan for Social Security treats married women as a special insurance class of occupied persons and treats man and wife as a team.14

This echoed a strong argument of inter-​war feminists that women’s work in the home should be valued as real work—​as essential to economy and society as paid employment—​not denigrated and taken for granted.15 Beveridge did not, as is sometimes suggested, believe that married women should stay at home but, realistically enough, that most of them did so, given the difficulties of combining work inside and outside the home and the British state’s lasting refusal to provide affordable childcare except in wartime. Also, at the time he was writing, the ‘marriage bar’ excluded married women from work in many occupations. This mostly died out during the war, but that was not evident in 1942. Any insurance system had to take this into account, though there was no ideal solution. Beveridge feared that if wives’ benefits were funded directly by the state, they would be denigrated as worthless dependents upon hard-​working taxpayers—​presciently, as recent stigmatization of ‘shirkers’ living on benefits provided by ‘strivers’ suggests. Family allowance, which he also recommended—​the one wholly tax-​funded universal benefit provided by Labour in 1945 (albeit of a lower amount than Beveridge proposed)—​emerged in opinion polls as the least popular benefit, seen as designed to boost the birth rate (partly true) rather than to reduce family poverty; it was kept at low levels by successive governments.

12  E.g., J. Lewis, ‘Gender and the Development of Welfare Regimes’, Journal of European Social Policy, 2, 159–​73. 13  Sir W. Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services, (Cmd 6404, London, 1942), para. 117. 14  Ibid., para. 107. 15  P. Thane, ‘What Difference Did the Vote Make?’, in A. Vickery, ed., Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics 1750 to the Present (Stanford, 2001), p. 270.

Welfare and the State    567

III Many of Beveridge’s ideas are not quite as expected and he disliked the term ‘welfare state’, associating it with an all-​providing ‘Santa Claus state’ of which he was brusquely critical. He preferred to refer to the ‘social service state’, which he saw as prioritizing duties over rights; above all was the duty to be self-​supporting as far as possible, implying reciprocity between recipients of services and the state, and also the duty of better-​ off people to help those less fortunate, mainly through voluntary action which promoted social cohesion.16 He believed that voluntary action was important to society and he supported close collaboration between state and voluntary welfare, as he discussed in Voluntary Action: A Report on Methods of Social Advance (1948), which had considerable influence in Britain and abroad.17 Michael Young, the prominent social researcher and social innovator of the post-​ war decades, had similar views. As head of the Labour Party Research Department, he largely wrote Let Us Face the Future. Before the war he, like Beveridge previously, had lived and volunteered at Toynbee Hall, the pioneering East London community work settlement house. As the concept of the ‘welfare state’ emerged into public discourse, he became witheringly hostile to it. He wrote in 1951: The very name . . . is against it. It must have been invented by a diabolical copywriter who knew that if the nation was not poisoned by the first cold word [welfare], recalling the smell of carbolic acid and the tough brown paper of ration books, it could be done to death by the second cold word [state] suggesting the Law Court, the Sanitary Inspector and the Recruiting Officer.18

He became increasingly disillusioned with Labour mainly because he believed that the institutions it created, whether nationalized industries or social services, were too centralized, run by impersonal bureaucracies which allowed users no space to express their wishes, needs, or complaints; views with which Beveridge had growing sympathy as he observed the practice of post-​war policy.19 Young advocated a decentralized, participatory system of welfare in which the state collaborated with other institutions, including voluntary, non-​profit organizations, which he did much to create and promote for the rest of his life.20

16 Harris, Beveridge, p 452.

17  M. Oppenheimer and N. Deakin, eds., Beveridge and Voluntary Action in Britain and the Wider British World (Manchester, 2011). 18  M. Young, For Richer, For Poorer. Report to Labour Party Research Department (1951), quoted in A. Briggs, Michael Young, Social Entrepreneur (London, 2001), p. 71. 19 Harris, Beveridge, p. 452. 20  P. Thane, ‘Michael Young and Welfare’, Contemporary British History, 19 (2005), 293–​9.

568   Pat Thane Richard Titmuss, the leading British intellectual of post-​war British social welfare, professor of social administration at the LSE from 1950, and adviser to the Labour party, also used the term ‘welfare state’ cautiously: note the inverted commas in the title of his 1958 publication Essays on ‘the Welfare State’.21 He was critical of a mistaken ‘stereotype or image of an all pervasive Welfare State for the Working Classes’,22 which he believed emerged in Britain in the 1950s. The image, he feared, was serving to disguise both the inadequacies of social welfare provision in post-​war Britain and the fact that it had deepened rather than narrowed social divisions, due to the retention of means-​ testing, the survival of a substantial private sector supplementing state welfare for the better off (for example, occupational pensions and private schools), and its insufficient redistributiveness.23 Although not trained as a historian—​indeed, he did not have a degree and worked as a bookkeeper before becoming an academic—​Titmuss believed that social policy should be analysed in its historical context, and his Essays included thoughtful historical discussions of the relationship between war and social policy and of ‘The Position of Women’ in British society. He made an important contribution to contemporary history with his volume in the series of official histories of the Second World War, Problems of Social Policy (1950). This focused on evacuation, care of children, health care, and the impact of bombing, arguing that the war experience widened the government’s conception of its social responsibilities from a previous focus on destitution to enhanced awareness of the need to provide for the health and security of the whole population. It became particularly concerned to safeguard future generations by caring for children, to ensure that a physically fit generation survived the losses of war, as well as to sustain morale and the belief that the war was worth fighting. Titmuss argued that the experience of evacuation and bombing alerted many people to the realities of pre-​war inequalities and created a desire to eliminate them and to improve social conditions which outlived the war, providing the pre-conditions for Labour’s social reforms which, however inadequate, went further than ever before. He commented in the book and in his later Essays that similar concerns and policy developments had arisen from the Boer War of 1899–​1902 and the First World War, as subsequent research confirmed.24 Titmuss’s argument stimulated a genre of post-​war historiography, notably Paul Addison’s The Road to 1945 (1977), examining the striking range of policy changes and proposals during the war, arguing that the war created an unprecedented sense of national social cohesion and a popular cross-​party ‘consensus’ in favour of moderate social and economic reform to improve conditions and services for the entire population which survived through the Conservative governments of the 1950s. This interpretation was, and in some quarters remains, highly influential, but further research into popular attitudes during the war and post-​war policy differences between the major 21 

R. M. Titmuss, Essays on ‘the Welfare State’ (London, 1958, 1960, 1963). Ibid., (1963), p. 37. 23  ‘The Social Division of Welfare’, in ibid., pp. 34–​55. 24  Including G. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency (Oxford, 1971). 22 

Welfare and the State    569 parties has challenged it.25 Subsequent research suggests there was a certain increase in social cohesion during the war and a strong desire not to return to the conditions of the pre-​war depression, which contributed to Labour’s victory in 1945. Labour’s introduction of universal free health care, secondary education, and basic pensions consciously sought to appeal to all classes and arguably benefited middle-​class more than working-​class people, as critics including Titmuss pointed out. But social divisions soon re-​emerged, acutely by the time of the 1950 and 1951 elections, which returned the Conservatives, narrowly, to power.26 Titmuss shared his belief in the need to understand social policy historically with his close colleague at the LSE, and fellow Labour party adviser, Brian Abel-​Smith.27 Though trained as an economist, Abel-​Smith published The Hospitals 1800–​1948 (1964), a thorough survey of the system replaced by the National Health Service. Both encouraged younger scholars to extend the then limited historical understanding of welfare, both that provided by the state and otherwise. Titmuss supervised Jose Harris’ Cambridge PhD which became her book Unemployment and Politics. A  Study in English Social Policy, 1886–​1914 (1972), the first study of the emergence of modern understandings of unemployment and of policy-makers’ responses, leading to Britain becoming the first country in the world to introduce unemployment insurance in 1911. She then became the leading historian of British social policy and its underlying ideas. Brian Abel-​Smith, and for a spell Titmuss, supervised my LSE PhD on the origins of old age pensions policy, 1878–​1925, which was also previously unresearched. They had prepared a revised pensions policy for the Labour party (which was never fully implemented) and were curious to know how state pensions policy had come about. They stimulated a long-​ term interest in the history of social welfare and its representations in present-​day discourse, including a later book on the history of old age which responded to a growing panic about the ageing of British society from the 1980s and challenged nostalgic misconceptions about past experiences of old age evident in the public debate.28

IV That two people—​Beveridge and Young—​so involved with the birth of the post-​war ‘welfare state’ should have been so critical of the state and so keen to promote voluntary action might seem surprising, not least because the relationship between state and

25 

H. Jones and M. Kandiah, eds., The Myth of Consensus: New Views on British History, 1945–​1964 (London, 1996). 26  J. Harris, ‘Political Ideas and the Debate on State Welfare, 1940–​45’, in H.L. Smith, ed., War and Social Change (Manchester, 1986). 27  S. Sheard, The Passionate Economist: How Brian Abel-​Smith Shaped Global Health and Social Welfare (Bristol, 2014). 28  P. Thane, Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (Oxford, 2000).

570   Pat Thane voluntary welfare was long neglected by historians. Whatever its inadequacies, the welfare role of the British state was much greater after the war than before and state welfare, including its pre-​war antecedents, was seen by post-​war historians as a major feature of the twentieth-​century state which required research and explanation. Hence from the 1960s a succession of surveys emerged of the whole or parts of that long-​run development.29 Most focused on the politics of welfare, the social conditions that gave rise to it, and the pressures that shaped it. Voluntary action was not forgotten but was tacitly assumed to be of lesser and declining significance compared with its significance in nineteenth-​century society. This approach was challenged in Geoffrey Finlayson’s sadly posthumous Citizen, State and Social Welfare in Britain 1830–​1990 (1994), arguing that voluntary action had continued to have a role and a relationship with state welfare in what social scientists were quicker than historians to perceive as a ‘mixed economy of welfare’ prevailing since 1945.30 He recognized that it was not coincidental that he was writing following the attempts by the Thatcher governments of 1979–​90 to dismantle state welfare and encourage the voluntary and profit-​making sectors to replace it. This reminded historians and others that a substantial voluntary sector remained, and aroused curiosity about its past and present roles. Finlayson valuably traced the ‘mixed economy’ from the beginnings of the expanding welfare role of the state in the early nineteenth century, including the continuing, shifting significance of voluntary action after 1945 as it came to terms with the changing activities of the state. The historiography of welfare, like other historiographies, is influenced by contemporary context. Attention to the ‘mixed economy’ was further invigorated when, during the 2010 election campaign, another Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, referred to the need to support what he called the ‘Big Society’—​apparently meaning voluntary effort—​implying that it had been displaced by the still, in his view, over-​large ‘big state’. Curiosity as to whether he was right further stimulated an already growing historiography. In 2003 Jose Harris edited a volume of case studies of ideas and institutions concerning non-​governmental activities in Britain and elsewhere since the sixteenth century, making clear their continuing, continually shifting significance and our still limited knowledge of them.31 Having written a succession of illuminating books about the history of philanthropy in the period since the nineteenth century, Frank Prochaska went against the grain, arguing in Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain:  The Disinherited Spirit (2006) that voluntary action, inspired for centuries by Christianity, declined after

29 

Including M. Bruce, The Coming of the Welfare State (London, 1961); G. Williams, The Coming of the Welfare State (London, 1967); B.B. Gilbert, The Origins of National Insurance (London, 1966); D. Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State (London, 1973); P. Thane, The Foundations of the Welfare State (London 1982); R. Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945 (London, 1988). 30  E.g., S. Kamerman, ‘The New Mixed Economy of Welfare, Public and Private’, Social Work, 28 (1983), 5–​10; M. Brenton, The Voluntary Sector in British Social Services (London, 1985), pp. 5, 15–​23. 31  J. Harris, ed., Civil Society in British History (Oxford, 2003).

Welfare and the State    571 1945 as religious belief declined. That he was mistaken about the decline of voluntary action became clear in a series of volumes emerging from a project at the University of Birmingham tracing ‘NGOs’ (non-​governmental organizations)—​as they called them, in this territory where the terminology is as shifting as the activities it describes—​since 1945, locating their archives, and conducting and encouraging research into their activities.32 The volumes revealed a sector that, far from contracting, had steadily expanded. Institutions registered with the Charity Commission increased from 56,000 in 1950 to 180,000 in 2010, though not all charities registered and not all that registered would be regarded as charities, including public schools.33 Emerging from this and other research34 is a clearer picture of the relationship between the voluntary and state sectors over time and its importance for understanding the welfare roles of the state. As the British state began to take responsibility for improving social conditions in the nineteenth century, where possible it subsidized existing voluntary activities, including, from the 1830s, the provision of working-​class education by religious organizations. Only when it became clear that educating all children was beyond the capacities of the voluntary sector did the state take over direct provision, from 1870, though it delegated administration and funding to elected local authorities. Throughout the nineteenth century, central government delegated the funding and administration of new areas of social policy (including public health and policing) to local authorities or voluntary bodies where appropriate and encouraged co-operation between them. Voluntary organizations took on the role they have since sustained of identifying social problems needing resolution—​such as the lack of schools—​finding solutions, and trying to implement them, then putting pressure on government to take over when their resources could not meet the need. For example, the NSPCC was founded in 1884 to end the physical and sexual abuse of children. They identified and supported victims and publicized the issue for the first time, and persuaded government to punish guilty adults, then from 1908 to take the children into care, employing NSPCC inspectors to apply their experience to investigating cases.35 Such co-​operation between public and private agencies became a normal feature of state welfare as it grew at the beginning of the twentieth century. When free school meals were introduced in 1906, local authorities were expected to work with voluntary 32 

N. Crowson, M. Hilton, and J. McKay, eds., NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non-​State Actors in Society and Politics since 1945 (London, 2009); M. Hilton and J. McKay, eds., The Ages of Voluntarism: How We Got to the Big Society (Oxford, 2011); M. Hilton, N. Crowson, J.F. Mouhot, and J. McKay, eds., A Historical Guide to NGOs in Britain: Charities, Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector since 2005 (London, 2012); M. Hilton, J. McKay, N. Crowson, and J.​F. Mouhot, The Politics of Expertise: How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain (Oxford, 2013). 33  M. Hilton, ‘Politics is Ordinary: Non-​Governmental Organizations and Political Participation in Contemporary Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 22 (2011), 230-​68. 34  K. Bradley, Poverty, Philanthropy and the State: Charities and the Working Classes in London, 1918–​79 (Manchester, 2009); P. Thane and T. Evans Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth Century England (Oxford, 2012); P. Thane, ‘The “Big Society” and the “Big State”: Creative Tension or Crowding Out?’, Twentieth Century British History, 23 (2012), 408–​29. 35  G. Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870–​1908 (Stanford, 1982).

572   Pat Thane organizations to supply them where possible. Claimants for the first old age pensions, established in 1908, were assessed by committees of local volunteers, supervised by a civil servant. National Health Insurance and Unemployment Insurance benefits, established 1911, were administered by ‘Approved Societies’, mainly Friendly Societies and trade unions, which had long experience of administering such benefits for their members. Public funding for pensions (the whole cost) and national insurance (majority funded by contributions from workers and employers) came from central taxation. Local authorities had rebelled against bearing the growing cost of an expanding range of state welfare policies. The state still gained financially from delegating the administration of welfare to non-​governmental bodies. Incorporating friendly societies and trade unions in the administration of national insurance also muted their opposition to competition from the state. But the Liberal governments of the early twentieth century also believed profoundly in the contribution of voluntary action to a stable, cohesive society, like the Liberal Beveridge, who advised Winston Churchill (then a Liberal minister) on the introduction of unemployment insurance in 1911. Co-​operation between public and voluntary institutions continued as state action expanded through the inter-​war years. Between the wars, despite the Depression, successive governments—​Conservative, Labour, and Coalition—​expanded, to varying degrees, state provision for housing, health, education, and unemployment relief, among other things. Total UK public expenditure on social services grew from 2.4 to 11.3 per cent of GNP in 1920–​38.36 For all the, justified, criticism of the stigmatizing administration of the ‘dole’, for the first time governments accepted that unemployment was not always the fault of the unemployed and provided minimally adequate relief for almost all unemployed people. All inter-​war governments feared the movements of left and right so active in continental European politics, especially after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and, as understanding of this period has grown, historians have argued that welfare measures and the relatively conciliatory approach even of Conservative governments towards the labour movement helped marginalize fascism and communism in inter-​war Britain.37 Research on twentieth-​century Britain has expanded since the 1980s, and still faster in the twenty-​first century when the whole century can be researched, with abundant sources, visual and oral as well as documentary. This expansion has been rather to the detriment of the nineteenth century which dominated modern historiography from the 1950s and dramatically expanded our knowledge of key developments. In particular, this scholarship anatomized the origins of state welfare in the early nineteenth century, as the state moved beyond the long established commitment to the minimal relief of destitution through the Poor Law, and analysed the

36 

A.T. Peacock and J. Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure in the UK (Princeton, 1961). P. Thane, ‘The Impact of Mass Democracy on British Political Culture, 1918–​1939’, in J. Gottleib and R. Toye, eds., The Aftermath of Suffrage: Women, Gender and Politics in Britain, 1918–​1945 (London, 2013), pp. 54–​69. 37 

Welfare and the State    573 growth of voluntary action through the century.38 Recently historians have tended to shift into the study of either a revived eighteenth century or the newly opened twentieth, though our knowledge of nineteenth-​century welfare will be extended by David Brown’s forthcoming edition of the diaries of Lord Shaftesbury,39 prominent philanthropist and campaigner for factory reform—​one of the first areas in which the British state acted to improve the ‘welfare’ of its people. Another exception to the neglect of the nineteenth century was Humphreys’ challenge to the conventional wisdom about the dominant role of the Charity Organization Society in late nineteenth-​century philanthropy, revealing the strong opposition to it among provincial charities.40 Recent study of the twentieth century has demonstrated how the expanding state welfare sector between the wars continued to delegate to the voluntary and local sectors whenever possible. Voluntary action grew further alongside, and in co-​operation with, state welfare. The National Council of Social Service (now the National Council of Voluntary Organizations, and still important) was established in 1919 to extend co-​ operation between voluntary and statutory bodies which had grown during the war and coordinate the work of voluntary agencies. It served as a channel for the dispersal of statutory funding to voluntary bodies, produced briefings to inform state policy, and held conferences on relevant issues.41 Knowledge of its role will grow with the publication in 2019 of a centenary history currently in preparation. As the state’s welfare functions grew, voluntary organizations adapted and collaborated, while always pressing for more state action. As Bradley has shown, London settlements, mostly established before 1914, moved into new fields, including women’s health, legal advice, and services for young people.42 Citizens’ Advice Bureaux (CABx, still indispensable and known as Citizens Advice) were established from 1939 as independent bodies to help people access state benefits and other forms of social support, as state welfare became increasingly extensive and complex, and to negotiate the expensive and, for many people on low incomes, inaccessible legal system.43 The Second World War saw not only a marked expansion of state welfare and proposals for action after the war, but also continued state promotion of voluntary action. The Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS; later Women’s Royal Voluntary Service, WRVS; recently Royal Voluntary Service, RVS, since it now includes men) was established in 1938 in preparation for the war, to mobilize women of all classes—​many of them already active volunteers—​to assist with the planned evacuation of children and help victims of 38  P. Thane, ‘Government and Society in England and Wales, 1750–​1914’, in F.M.L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–​1950 (3 vols, Cambridge, 1990), vol. III, pp. 1–​62. 39  In preparation for the British Academy Records in Social and Economic History series. 40  R. Humphreys, Sin, Organized Charity and the Poor Law in Victorian England (London, 1995). 41 Bradley, Poverty; M. Brasnett, Voluntary Social Action: A History of the National Council of Social Service, 1919–​1969 (London, 1969). 42 Bradley, Poverty. 43  O. Blaiklock, ‘The Work of Citizens’ Advice Bureaux, 1938–​1964’ (unpublished PhD thesis, King’s College, London, 2012).

574   Pat Thane the expected bombing with whatever other problems might arise as they did, invaluably supplementing seriously stretched official services.44 It was long thought that, after the war, Labour was hostile to voluntary action and thus caused its decline, identifying it with demeaning charity handed down from rich to poor and reinforcing class differences. Such attitudes indeed prevailed in sections of the labour movement, often with reason. Many voluntary organizations went through a period of uncertainty as to whether they had a role, as state welfare expanded and the donations on which they depended became scarce, partly due to high taxes and because donors also believed that the state was taking over.45 But it has recently been shown that Labour was not uniformly hostile to voluntary action.46 While resident at Haileybury House, an East London settlement, in the 1920s, Attlee—​a former public school pupil—​ was converted to socialism while volunteering at a boys’ club in Stepney, and while premier became President of Toynbee Hall. Also, as we have seen, Labour could not extend state welfare as rapidly as it hoped as it sought to reconstruct the post-​war economy. Instead, it continued and increased wartime state subsidies to voluntary bodies such as the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (NCUMC, founded 1918; later One Parent Families, now Gingerbread), giving unprecedented support to a deprived and stigmatized group.47 Local social services, long dependent on voluntary action, were encouraged and enabled by the National Assistance Act (1948) to expand their services, including institutions for older and disabled people, by working with and subsidizing voluntary services. The WVS continued post-​war to the present day (when, like CAB and other long-​standing services, they are being severely cut due to government cuts to local authority budgets), providing community services including ‘meals on wheels’ for housebound people. Labour continued to work with voluntary services during later periods of office in 1964–​70 and 1974–​9 while expanding state welfare, which reached the peak of provision and funding in the mid-​1970s, when the post-war era of the ‘classic welfare state’, as Rodney Lowe has termed it,48 ended amid international economic crisis and the emergence of anti-​state neo-​liberalism. As state welfare was eroded from the 1980s onwards, Labour’s attachment to the voluntary sector (the ‘Third Sector’, alongside the private and state sectors, as it was termed by Blair’s New Labour governments after 1997) grew. After 1945, existing voluntary bodies revived as they realized they still had a role and adapted to new circumstances, while new organizations emerged as they detected gaps in the ‘welfare state’. The National Corporation for the Care of Old People (now the Centre for Policy on Ageing) was formed in 1947 to protect the interests of older people. In 1946 the Association of Parents of Backward Children (now MENCAP) emerged to ensure that children then called ‘backward’ and now described as having learning 44 

J. Hinton, Women, Social Leadership and the Second World War (Oxford, 2002).

45 Bradley, Poverty; Thane and Evans, Sinners?, ch. 5; Thane, ‘Big Society’, 424–​5.

46  N. Deakin and J. Davis Smith, ‘Labour, Charity and Voluntary Action: The Myth of Hostility’, in Hilton and McKay, eds., Ages, pp. 69–​93. 47  Thane and Evans, Sinners?, pp. 106–​19. 48 Lowe, Welfare State.

Welfare and the State    575 difficulties were cared for in the new education and health systems. In the same year, the National Association for Mental Health (now MIND) was formed to fight for mental health services, which were seriously marginalized in the new NHS, although mentally ill people occupied 50 per cent of NHS beds. As decolonization progressed and international communications improved, overseas aid organizations, including OXFAM, developed, again supplementing generally inadequate British state ‘welfare’ for poorer countries. They often had religious roots, sometimes inheriting missionary activities, contrary to Prochaska’s pessimism about the decline of the Christian philanthropic impulse.49 Awareness of the gaps in the ‘welfare state’ grew by the 1960s as it became clear that poverty had not been almost eliminated except among older people, as had been widely believed and hoped. This was made clearest by the publication in 1965 of The Poor and the Poorest by Brian Abel-​Smith and his LSE colleague, Peter Townsend. Their research revealed alarming and wholly unexpected levels of poverty, especially among larger families. This ‘rediscovery of poverty’, as it was described, gave rise in 1965 to a new NGO, the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG, still active) to campaign for improved state support for low-​income families.50 It was one of several organizations founded in the 1960s in response to awareness of continuing deprivation.51 In 1966 Shelter was founded to campaign about homelessness and provide support for homeless people. This was not a new problem, but it had long been overlooked; the story of how and why the problem was identified at this time and of its impact remains to be written. Other important areas of post-​1945 state welfare whose extension was indebted to voluntary campaigning are gradually being opened up, notably care for physically disabled people—​another field neglected by government until, from the 1960s, disabled people themselves and their supporters started public campaigns.52 Recent research continues to transform our understanding of the importance of the shifting relationships of voluntary organizations and the state in the ‘mixed economy of welfare’, which is essential for understanding the history of state welfare before and after 1945.

V As we have seen, the historiography of welfare and the British state has been much influenced by issues in contemporary politics which have alerted historians to

49 

C. Saunders, ‘International Aid and Development: British Humanitarian Aid and Development NGOs, 1949–​Present’, in Crowson et al., NGOs in Contemporary Britain, pp. 38–​58. 50  P. Thane, ‘CPAG at 50’, Poverty, Journal of the Child Poverty Action Group, 150 (2015), 6–​8. 51  T. Evans, ‘Stopping the Poor Getting Poorer’: The Establishment and Professionalization of Poverty NGOs, 1945–​95’, in Crowson et al., NGOs in Contemporary Britain, pp. 147–​63. 52  J. Hampton, Disability and the Welfare State in Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy, 1948–​1979 (Bristol, 2016); G. Millward, ‘Invalid Definitions, Invalid Responses: Disability and the Welfare State’ (unpublished PhD thesis, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 2013).

576   Pat Thane previously unasked questions and areas of research. It has also responded to wider intellectual currents and related historiographical fashions. An important influence on this and other fields of historical writing was the work of the political left, especially following the publication of E.P. Thompson’s immensely influential Making of the English Working Class (1963). This did not lead to the invention of social history, as is sometimes thought; it had a longer history among liberal as well as left historians, but social history became more prominent and influential thereafter.53 It alerted historians of welfare to explore more closely the objects and beneficiaries of state welfare, the impact of policies, and the role of working-​class organizations in influencing change. The quasi-​ Marxist tendency imposed constraints as well as suggesting new approaches. It tended to be hostile to the very study of state social policy on the grounds that it was merely ‘reformist’, designed to undermine revolutionary tendencies (as indeed it often was) and so unworthy of attention,54 though it might be thought that seeking to understand the enemy could be an asset to any left movement. Also, despite Thompson’s insistence that class ‘is a relationship and not a thing’,55 the resulting historiography explored working-​class people and activities in great detail but gave much less attention to the other side of the relationship, the middle and upper classes, except sometimes to caricature them. This impeded understanding of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century state and philanthropic welfare since those promoting it were presented stereotypically as promoting their own interests and those of their class, seeking to impose ‘middle-​class values’ on the poor by demanding behavioural change in return for support—​exerting ‘social control’, a fashionable term in the left historiography of the 1970s. Gareth Stedman Jones’ Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (1971) was an innovative study of poverty in late nineteenth-​century London created by an insecure labour market and the responses to it of the labour movement, politicians, and the wider public. He examined the role of state welfare and philanthropy, drawing on the anthropologist Marcel Mauss to interpret philanthropic giving as essentially self-​serving, designed to ‘moralize’ the poor into respectable hard-​working behaviour, intended to assert and cement the authority of the giver. This may explain the motives of some voluntary givers—​understanding of the motives of charity remains highly imperfect—​but the notion that selfish motives were universal were convincingly challenged by Frank Prochaska. His Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England (1980) described the stresses and pain many middle-​class women volunteers encountered in the slums of nineteenth-​century cities, and their serious sympathies with and attempts to help impoverished people. It was hard work which they were not obliged to undertake; they made no obvious gain 53 

R. Floud and P. Thane, ‘Sociology and History: Partnership, Rivalry or Mutual Incomprehension?’, in A.H. Halsey and W.G. Runciman, eds., British Sociology Seen from Without and Within (Oxford, 2005), pp. 57–​69. 54  R. Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism (London, 1961). 55  E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (new edn, Harmondsworth, 1968), p 11.

Welfare and the State    577 from it and did not appear to seek any. Prochaska also pointed out how much help was given voluntarily by working-​class people to their poorer neighbours when they could, in the form of cash or services.56 Prochaska offered pointers to the complexity of the charitable world, including a description in his Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy (1995) of how the British Royal Family, from George III to Elizabeth II, encouraged and patronized charities in order to demonstrate their care for their subjects, all the more determinedly as the challenges of socialism and republicanism grew from the later nineteenth century and other European monarchies were deposed. George V, in particular, was keen to encourage voluntarism to counter the growth of ‘socialistic’ state welfare between the wars. Motives for philanthropy, as for state welfare, were diverse. Another important political/​social movement which influenced welfare, like other historiographies from the 1970s, was feminism. Historians, notably Sheila Rowbotham, were among the leading publicly active feminists of the ‘second wave’ feminist movement from 1969.57 They taught us to see women in history where previously they had been overlooked—​in the case of welfare history as campaigners for and administrators and objects of state and voluntary welfare—​and to see them in fact at its heart. Having failed to notice, in the late 1960s when studying the origins of pensions policy, that the majority of impoverished older people and of the first state pensioners were women, the women’s movement awoke me to the fact that women historically, as in the present, were more likely than men to suffer poverty. Unless they came from comfortable backgrounds, which most did not, they had fewer opportunities to work; if they worked they earned less than men and could save less; they were more likely to be widowed than men, often with small children whom they struggled to support, and were less likely to re-​marry. Later in the twentieth century the main cause of single motherhood became separation or divorce, which also generally left women poorer than men. Women have long tended to outlive men at all ages, leading often to impoverished old age. Of course there have always been very many impoverished men, but the relatively greater poverty of women had previously been overlooked.58 Women, as Prochaska described, were notably active in philanthropy in the nineteenth century and after, though men generally ran the voluntary societies. For middle-​ and upper-​class married women it was often the only permissible opportunity to be active outside the home, since they were effectively prohibited from paid work until the Second World War. Another expanding outlet for women from the 1870s was participation in local government administration of state social services, unnoticed until Patricia Hollis researched it. From 1869 the minority of women who were independent householders and ratepayers (mainly better-​off widows and single women), about a million by the end of the century, were granted the local vote. Local government’s responsibility for 56 

F.K. Prochaska, ‘Philanthropy’, in Thompson, ed., Cambridge Social History, vol. iii, pp. 357–​94. S. Rowbotham, Threads through Time: Writings on History and Autobiography (London, 1999). 58  P. Thane, ‘Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England’, History Workshop Journal, 6 (1978), 29–​51. 57 

578   Pat Thane caring services defined it as within the ‘women’s sphere’ while the work of central government was not, a view which some women shared. Once they had the vote, women fought to stand for election and were admitted to local school boards from 1870, then Poor Law boards, Rural and Urban District Councils, and from 1907 Borough and County Councils.59 Attention to women’s history has revealed that a feature of the wider women’s movement from the later nineteenth century was campaigning for state welfare, especially on behalf of women and children, while doing their best to provide voluntary support. For many women, an important reason for demanding the national vote was to eliminate social problems which a male-​dominated Parliament had ignored. Jane Lewis made a number of important contributions to this field, though tending to present women as victims of oppressive, disciplinary voluntary and state action which blamed them for their and their families’ poverty as much as stressing their agency in developing, and their gains from, public and private welfare.60 This approach was challenged by another product of late twentieth-​century feminism, the publication of letters written to the Women’s Co-​Operative Guild (WCG, the largest working-​class women’s organization of the late nineteenth/​early twentieth century) by working-​class women around the time of the First World War, many of them expressing their gratitude for help and advice from voluntary and official visitors rather than describing them as the intrusive busybodies they appear in some historiographical accounts.61 Deborah Dwork has described how the WCG and other women’s organizations campaigned for health and welfare care for mothers and their babies, including provision of cheap, pure milk, aiming to reduce the high infant mortality rates and improve the health of surviving children and their mothers. They advocated the establishment of free local health and welfare centres staffed by doctors and nurses, set up voluntary prototypes, and persuaded some local authorities to follow their example, until this was taken up as government policy from 1918. The women took advantage of the widespread concern about the health of the nation following revelations of the poor physical state of army volunteers for the Boer war, which intensified when the First World War created the need to replace the slaughtered generation with soldiers and workers for the future.62 After women gained the vote—​from age 30 in 1918, then 21 in 1928—​although few were elected to Parliament, many of them campaigned for, and some drafted, legislation guided through Parliament by supporters, male and female, promoting the welfare especially of women, including increasing the maintenance available to an unmarried mother from the father. They successfully put pressure on local authorities to

59 

P. Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865–​1914 (Oxford, 1987). Including J. Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood (London, 1980). 61  M. Llewelyn Davies, ed., Maternity: Letters from Working Women (London, 1915, 1978) and Life as We Have Known It (London, 1931, 1977). 62  D. Dwork, War is Good for Babies and Other Young Children: A History of the Infant and Child Welfare Movement in England, 1878–​1918 (London, 1987). 60 

Welfare and the State    579 implement legislation expanding provision for health, housing, and education, since it was normally permissive, leaving the authorities to decide when and what to implement.63 Women kept up these campaigns through the war, including for equal pay, which was achieved in the public sector in 1955—​a real gain to some women’s welfare. During the 1950s and 1960s, the women’s movement was less quiescent than was once believed. Recent research shows how they kept campaigning for and achieving real improvements, including in mental health care and air pollution.64 The ‘second wave’, despite initially sharing the disinclination of the 1970s left for formal politics, notably exposed the extent and horrors of domestic violence—​certainly nothing new, but long suppressed and ignored in public. They made it public, provided voluntary refuges, gained subsidies from sympathetic local councils, and achieved some, imperfect, legal controls.65

VI It has been possible only to skim the surface of a large subject area. An important theme that there has not been space to cover is that of comparative histories of state welfare, which are instructive in the British and other cases about the pressures, motives, and outcomes of welfare; international borrowings of policy innovations; and failures to learn from other countries’ experience.66 Another important omission in a volume about ‘British’ politics is comparison within Great Britain. Scotland has always differed, since Union in 1707, from England and Wales (tied to England since 1542) in its legal and administrative systems and much Westminster social legislation provides separately for Scotland. Among other differences, Scotland was ahead of England in educational reform in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its schooling remains differently structured, while standard university undergraduate degrees take four years, not three. For historians who do not specialize in Scottish history, the differences are hard to trace and there have been regrettably few attempts at comparison. The differences between England and Scotland, and increasingly also Wales, have grown since 1999, when responsibility for most social welfare matters, including health, housing, and education, were devolved. Understanding 63 

Thane, ‘What Difference Did the Vote Make?’; Thane and Evans, Sinners?, pp. 29–​53. C. Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women’s Movement in England 1928–​1964 (Manchester, 2013), pp. 189–​214. 65  L. Segal, ‘Jam Today: Feminist Impacts and Transformations in the 1970s’, in L. Black, H. Pemberton, and P. Thane, eds., Reassessing 1970s Britain (Manchester, 2013), p. 160; P. Thane, ‘Women in the 1970s: Towards Liberation?’, in ibid., p. 180. 66  See, among others, Hennock, The Origin of the Welfare State; P. Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare States, 1875–​1975 (Cambridge, 1990); S. Koven and S. Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York and London, 1993). 64 

580   Pat Thane of the history of the British state and welfare has grown immensely in the past 60 years, but it remains imperfect, and one gap is the need for comparative research on ‘British’ welfare.

Further reading N. Crowson, M. Hilton, and J. McKay, eds., NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non-​State Actors in Society and Politics since 1945 (London, 2009). J. Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford, 1977, 1997) R. Lowe, The Welfare State in Britain since 1945 (London, 1988, 2005) P. Thane, The Foundations of the Welfare State (London, 1982, 1996)

EPILOGUE

chapter 33

In Defenc e of C ontem p orary H i story Anthony Seldon and Mark Davies

‘Real’ historians, the ones who work only with documents, turn up their nose at contemporary history. For as long as it has been studied in Britain, contemporary history has been on the back foot—​less an embarrassing cousin, more of a bastard. I return to the subject of the status of contemporary history after a gap of almost 30 years, and I find myself disinclined to believe it needs to remain on the back foot any longer. In that 30-​ year period, contemporary history has moved onto the front foot. I do not relish this forward position to kick ‘real’ history, but merely to assert equality of status in the eyes of the academic world—​the status of a separate but equally valid craft. I will frame my argument around my personal experience of writing contemporary history of the most recent British premiers. Supposing I had written biographies of four prime ministers at the beginning of the period covered by this volume, Henry Addington (1801–​4), the Duke of Portland (1807–​9), Spencer Perceval (1809–​12), and Lord Liverpool (1812–​27). They were in office for 25 years. They are neatly balanced by the four prime ministers about whom I have written books, who were in office for the last 25 years of the period covered by this book. I refer to John Major (1990–​7), Tony Blair (1997–​2007), Gordon Brown (2007–​10), and David Cameron (2010–​16). Supposing I had written instead books on the earlier prime ministers? Would they have been more grounded historically, and of far greater value? The traditional historian might well answer ‘yes’ on the grounds that one is history and the other is mere journalism. All history is in one fundamental sense contemporary history; although the period under review might be in the distant past, the writer cannot free themselves, however hard they might try, from the preconceptions and dominant intellectual—​not to say, ideological—​outlooks of their own era. Events that historians in previous ages interpreted in political terms might today be reinterpreted in cultural terms, for example. The writing of contemporary history beyond British shores is nothing new; Herodotus and Thucydides practised it in Ancient Greece. Indeed, the Greek word historia refers to knowledge of contemporary events. For Thucydides, serious history

584    Anthony Seldon and Mark Davies could only be written by a contemporary, who could understand what people were saying: ‘Serious history—​according to Thucydides—​was not concerned with the past, but with the present . . . Thucydides dictated the paramountcy of contemporary history’.1

I Traditionally, the marginalization of contemporary history in Britain has primarily been justified not by the argument that contemporary historians lacked access to official documents until many decades had passed;2 rather, contemporary history was marginalized by the argument that historians of recent events lacked perspective: ‘it was necessary to know “what happened next”, and “next” meant at least two or three generations.’3 However, knowing what happens next can handicap the historian. Addington was one of the longest living prime ministers after leaving Downing Street—​a full 40  years, including a ten-​year spell as Home Secretary from 1812 to 1822, making him the longest holder of that office in history. It is difficult to imagine that historians can write about Addington as Prime Minister without having their judgement coloured by his life after Downing Street. Impossible, too, to imagine historians writing about Perceval without their judgement being coloured by the events of 11 May 1812, when he was killed by a man who shot him in the lobby of the House of Commons. In cases such as these, knowing what happened next can be a burden to the historian. Llewellyn Woodward warned of ‘the distorting influence of after-​knowledge’; one can never unlearn what one once knew.4 Furthermore, historians of the distant past can be handicapped not only by their knowledge of what happened next, but also by their knowledge of how others have interpreted the period. Historians of those early nineteenth-​century prime ministers will never be able entirely to free themselves of the way that great academics and writers have previously interpreted their period. The contemporary historian, by contrast, is beating their own path through the forest, not following the tracks left behind by others. The greatest minds can create fresh pathways through ancient forests of ‘real’ history, but the task is hard, and some of the pathways may lead nowhere if motivated by the desire merely to make a novel impact rather than to reveal truths. Nor is historical objectivity guaranteed by the passage of time; ‘Wherever vital issues or strong emotions are involved, whether events are as remote from us as the fall of the Roman Empire, the life of Christ, or the rise of Pericles, distance does not create

1 

A.D. Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (London, 1966), pp. 130, 135. This was reduced to 50 years in 1958, and then to 30 years in 1967. In 2013, the government began its move towards releasing records when they are 20 years old, a process that will be completed in 2022. 3  E.L. Woodward, ‘The Study of Contemporary History’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1 (1966), 1–​13, at 2. 4 Ibid., 7. 2 

In Defence of Contemporary History    585 consensus or guarantee certitude’, wrote Arthur Schlesinger Junior.5 George Santayana notes that posterity is composed of critics who are no less egotistical than contemporaries, and that these critics are obliged to rely upon documents that are easily misinterpreted.6 Schlesinger concludes, ‘One comes to feel increasingly that historians agree only when the issues as well as the people are dead’.7 Finally, the contemporary historian’s closeness to the events may give him greater insight: Tocqueville, reflecting on the French Revolution, observed that what contemporary writers know better than does posterity are the movements of opinion, the popular inclinations of their times, the vibrations of which they can still sense in their minds and hearts . . . the spiritual currents which men who are further removed may no longer find since these things cannot be perceived from the memoirs.8

II Historians of the early nineteenth century are able to consult most, if not all, of the documents that they would like to see. But this does not mean that our knowledge of Addington, Portland, Perceval, and Liverpool will be complete; far from it. Many key events will have had documents destroyed, or none were created in the first place. Besides, no document was ever written without having its own history. All documents were created for a subjective purpose, very far removed from offering objective help to the diligent historian inspecting the past through a long telescope of decades or centuries away; Cicero noted that Julius Caesar, in writing his commentarii on the Gallic and civil wars, aimed ‘to furnish others with material for writing history’.9 Furthermore, documents are of diminishing value as sources for the history of the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. In earlier centuries, the only method of record and communication was by written document, with the exception of face-​to-​face discussion, which was much less manageable between distant parties prior to the development of modern rapid transport. In more recent times, statesmen settle the world’s affairs via international telephone calls and video conferences; unless records or recordings are made or kept, their words disappear into the ether the very moment that they are spoken. Even with documents in hand, how far can historians of the early nineteenth century ever truly say that they ‘know’ the figures about whom they are writing? How far can 5 

A. Schlesinger Junior, ‘On the Writing of Contemporary History’, The Atlantic (Mar. 1967). G. Santayana, ‘On my Friendly Critics’, The Journal of Philosophy, 18 (1921), 701–​13, at 701. 7  Schlesinger Junior, ‘On the Writing of Contemporary History’. 8 Ibid. 9 Cicero, Brutus and Orator, trans. G.L. Hendrickson and H.M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA, 1939), p. 227. 6 

586    Anthony Seldon and Mark Davies they claim to understand deeply their subjects’ relationships with political colleagues and foes, with aides and family? Most of these prime ministers lived and worked in Downing Street, but few historians of the period have walked through the rooms where they walked, and none have breathed the air that they breathed, or smelt the odour on their clothes. How far can we truly understand these prime ministers when we know them only through documents, and are not even able to gaze upon their photographs or see moving images of them? Historians of these figures will spend many hours imagining themselves in conversation with their subjects or with those who worked with them. But the conversation will be a monologue, not a dialogue. How much better informed might be historians writing about Liverpool’s 15 years in office if they were able to speak to him and his contemporaries? How much more accurate might their work be if they could check facts and interpretations, and show drafts to the key figures who worked for Liverpool over those turbulent years? But any hope of such help is forlorn; the secrets are locked away in the graves of his associates, spread across the land. Fast-​forward 163 years from Liverpool’s fall, and John Major is entering Downing Street as Prime Minister. When writing a book upon him, two on Blair, and one each upon Brown and Cameron, I was not able to look at as many government documents as I would have liked to have seen, nor letters and diaries. That said, I had access to many key papers, Cabinet minutes, diaries, and electronic communications from that 25-​year period, because actors had kept them and were prepared to show me (I had always to ask myself, ‘Why?’). Some of the most important episodes were not recorded anyway, because the decisions took place without minute-​keepers present, or emails were not kept or mobile phone calls recorded. But what I, and others working in contemporary history today, can achieve is the boon of talking to the key figures involved. I recorded more than 2,000 interviews for these five books, at a length of some eight million words. Many of the interviews were conducted very soon after the events had taken place, and thus had the freshness of a diary entry or the liquid emotion of a letter. I could go back again and again to probe and challenge points of view. A biographer of Pitt the Younger, Robert Peel, or Benjamin Disraeli might make a list of the ten questions that they wish they could ask their subjects or their aides, because aides will often get to a deeper truth than the principals. The exercise might be fun but it is forlorn. However, the contemporary historian can ask and keep asking his or her questions, and this is an opportunity that is available uniquely to historians of the recent past. It is a profound benefit to be able to converse with those about whom you are writing—​to see where they worked, to walk in their footsteps. Yes, one’s objectivity can be compromised. But it would be a brave historian who would claim that they are free of subjective opinion with regard to figures in the past about whom they are writing, especially after they have become immersed in their subjects’ lives. The contemporary historian has the benefit of probing subjectivity by going back to living sources. Every single page that I wrote in those five books was read by at least two figures who knew intimately the events discussed on that page; most pages were seen by several witnesses from different perspectives. They would often come back with sheets of commentary—​ always illuminating, if not always accepted and used.

In Defence of Contemporary History    587 There still exists the residual feeling that interviews are the stock-​in-​trade of journalists and political scientists, but not of real historians. The root of this belief would appear to lie in excessive reverence for the document, an attitude held strongly in the nineteenth century and perpetuated by some historians who could have been more perceptive about the source-​problems faced by those writing on the contemporary period. Neither state nor private institutions, nor indeed individuals, immediately release their papers for general inspection; thus, interviews can be an essential stop-​gap which allows contemporary history to be written. The value of contemporary history and the limitations of document-​based history have been highlighted by the rise of information technology. While the existing material in the National Archives is almost all paper-​based, digital records will soon overtake paper in new transfers from government departments to the National Archives. These records include minutes, submissions, letters, and emails. Electronic documents are like any other document, and will thus be released under the 30-​years rule. However, concerns have been raised that these important documents are not being adequately preserved. A review undertaken by the Cabinet Office in 2015 found that although the process for organizing and maintaining paper records is well established, ‘the same is much less true of digital records’.10 ‘The processes have been burdensome and compliance poor.’11 Emails represent a particular challenge. The review noted that ‘there is no doubt that significant information and decisions are conveyed by email, and therefore need to be preserved as part of the official records’, yet found that saving emails into electronic document and record management systems or corporate file plans ‘seems to have been complied with even less rigorously than for other records’.12 The National Archives has found that non-​compliance is often a cultural issue, ‘where users are simply reluctant or too busy to manage emails’.13 The retention of electronic records entered public debate in America in 2016 as a result of the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while Secretary of State. Her opponents alleged that she had destroyed thousands of emails sent in her capacity as Secretary of State in order to avoid democratic scrutiny. In the UK, during his tenure as Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove was caught using an undisclosed private email account named ‘Mrs Blurt’ to discuss government business with advisers, and his staff were accused of destroying government emails.14 The inadequate preservation of electronic documents significantly compromises traditional document-​based history and underlines the importance of contemporary history, with its unique ability to interview living witnesses. Even if the historian has most of the documents at their disposal, there nevertheless may be gaps that interviewing can help to fill. Martin Gilbert, for example, when 10 

Sir A. Allan, Review of Government Digital Records (London, 2015), p. 4.

11 Ibid., p. 1.

12 Ibid., p. 10. 13 Ibid., p. 10.

14 .

588    Anthony Seldon and Mark Davies conducting research for the volume of his Churchill biography covering the years 1914–​ 16 (published in 1971), found that by conversation and correspondence with those who knew Churchill during this period . . . I have been able to include reminiscences of Churchill’s moods, and of the atmosphere of events not always obvious from the documents, and have been able to describe several incidents not recorded in any contemporary source.15

Charles Moore had access to vast documentation when writing his authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher, yet similarly found interviews to be valuable: So much of what happened and why cannot be captured by documents alone. Even when writing an authorized biography, with unfettered access to the full documentary record, the biographer remains heavily dependent on interviews to capture the atmosphere, differing interpretations of events, motives and even pertinent facts that never made it to paper and exist only in the memories of witnesses.16

Interviews can be particularly helpful in fleshing out documents when it comes to reconstructing the role and methods of personalities, and their relationships with others. Interviews can also assist by revealing the assumptions and motives lying behind documents. Reports of meetings often fail to reveal the full picture; convenient rather than real reasons for actions may have been recorded, or underlying philosophies might have been taken so much for granted by participants that no need was felt to elucidate them in the written record. By interviewing participants if they are still alive, contemporary historians can capture these invaluable memories for posterity. ‘The atmosphere of the time often does not appear in the documents’, said long-​ serving warden of Nuffield College Oxford, Norman Chester.17 Interviews can be a fertile source of mood and contemporary colour. Nigel Nicolson found when writing his biography of Lord Alexander of Tunis that interviews gave him insight into ‘the atmosphere of a headquarters, what Alex talked about in his mess’, as well as ‘how he arrived at decisions, his relationship with Monty and Patton etc’.18 This gain is all the more important because, as David Mitchell observed, ‘increasingly large volumes of papers found in archives, official or otherwise, can be colourless and impersonal collections of documents’.19 Insight into a subject’s personality and thought processes, and enrichment of one’s own experience and understanding through meeting, instead of just reading about, living people who made or witnessed great events, are further benefits. Warm and vivid contemporary history has almost always been written by authors who have conducted

15 

M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. III: 1914–​1916 (London, 1971), p. xxvi. Email, C. Moore to A. Seldon, 6 Mar. 2016. 17  Interview with Sir N. Chester, 28 Nov. 1981. 18  N. Nicolson, responses to oral history questionnaire, Aug. 1981. 19  D.J. Mitchell, ‘Living Documents: Oral History and Biography’, Biography, 3 (1980), 284. 16 

In Defence of Contemporary History    589 interviews; dull, clinical contemporary history is produced by those who have buried themselves in newspaper libraries and archives.20 It can be helpful when trying to understand the status of contemporary history to divide historical questions into those which are primary or secondary order. In the first category are questions concerning ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘who’. These questions can be answered equally well, if not better, by the contemporary historian—​as long as they have inside access—​than by the historian writing upon the more distant past. The secondary-​ order questions—​‘why’, ‘how’, and ‘with what effect’—​may be answered better by the historian of the more distant past. But even here, the question ‘how?’—​establishing the sequence of events and how they occurred, and understanding which meetings, individuals, and papers really did count—​can perhaps be done as well by the contemporary historian using interviews as by the traditional historian trying to piece together sequence from silent documents. Compared to historians of the distant past, contemporary historians have different challenges in answering ‘why?’ questions. Actors throughout history have often been poor at understanding their own motivation. They may be pregnant with reasons for why they took various actions, but the reasons they give are almost invariably incomplete. Politicians are temperamentally vain, and many are poor analysts of themselves. Officials, in contrast, are like lions watching their prey, observing minutely every move with faultless precision. Officials can thus be full of insight about the motivation of politicians, and their testimony less corrupted by self-​advancement. ‘It is almost axiomatic’, Beatrice Webb wrote, ‘that the mind of the subordinate in any organisation will yield richer deposits of fact that the mind of the principal’.21 What is often in letters, diaries, and documents are the reasons that individuals want others to believe, or want they themselves to believe, about why they took various actions. In the last analysis, I am not convinced that the question ‘why?’ can ever be answered in a wholly satisfactory manner by historians. Ultimately, ‘why?’ is not a question that can be answered with objective certainty. Events happened in the way that they did in the past; the Napoleonic Wars broke out, and the First World War broke out. Trying to find the definitive reasons is a valuable intellectual parlour game, but it is only ever a game. The final secondary-​order question—​‘with what effect?’—​can certainly, however, be answered better by the historian of the distant past than by the contemporary historian. The lack of access to many documents and reliance upon oral history do indeed present methodological challenges for contemporary historians. However, Peter Catterall reminds us that these challenges are ‘not necessarily greater ones than the paucity of evidence and its deliberate forgery in cases, or reliance on particular interpretative standpoints, such as provided by monastic chroniclers, which confronted historians of earlier 20  This paragraph and the previous two paragraphs draw upon A. Seldon, ‘Interviews’, in A. Seldon, ed., Contemporary History: Practice and Method (Oxford, 1988), pp. 3–​16. 21  ‘The Method of the Interview’, a four-​page appendix in B. Webb’s My Apprenticeship (London, 1926), pp. 423–​6.

590    Anthony Seldon and Mark Davies centuries’.22 Schlesinger suggests that contemporary history can be more reliable than the history of the distant past because contemporary history holds its practitioners to higher standards; this is because ‘contemporary history involves the writing of history in face of the only people who can contradict it, that is, the actual participants’. He further writes, Every historian of the [distant] past knows at the bottom of his heart how much artifice goes into his reconstructions; how much of his evidence is partial, ambiguous; or hypothetical; and yet how protected he is in speculation because, barring recourse to séances on wet afternoons, no one can say him nay, except other historians with vulnerable theories of their own. The farther back the historian goes, the more speculative his history becomes, until he gets to ancient history, which is a kind of brilliant ingenuity lavished on aimless and fragmentary remains, an exercise less in reconstruction than in creation.23

III It is a loss to history that we have no accounts by contemporary historians of the premierships of Addington, Portland, Perceval, and Liverpool. These accounts would not have been the last word, but they would have given subsequent biographers and historians much valuable material, especially if the historians compiling those accounts had meticulously kept their records for future historians to consult. Regrettably, the study of contemporary history in Britain only began a hundred years later, during the First World War. When history became established as a firm subject in schools and universities towards the end of the nineteenth century, periods beyond the Napoleonic Wars were seldom studied.24 Llewellyn Woodward reminds us that the English Historical Review from its first number in 1886 until after 1918 did not print a single article on English domestic history after 1852, and that the Modern History School at Oxford in 1914 ignored English political history after 1837. The results were predictable; the English governing class on the eve of the First World War knew less about the state of the contemporary world than they knew about ancient Greece and Rome. Ten or twelve newspaper correspondents in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries had a better understanding of the dangers which threatened the peace of Europe than most of the leading members of British Cabinets.25

22  P. Catterall, ‘What (If Anything) is Distinctive about Contemporary History?’, Journal of Contemporary History, 32 (1997), 441–​52, at 447. 23  Schlesinger Junior, ‘On the Writing of Contemporary History’. 24  See E.A. Fulton’s paper presented to the London Branch of the Historical Association in 1913, reprinted as ‘The Teaching of Contemporary History’, History, 26 (1941), 51–​5. 25  Woodward, ‘The Study of Contemporary History’, 1–​2.

In Defence of Contemporary History    591 Following the First World War, ‘there was a widespread belief among the British political and diplomatic elite that had they known more about the recent history of Central Europe and the Balkans before 1914, they might have made more strenuous and, above all, more informed efforts to avert the catastrophe of war’.26 The war spawned an unprecedented burst of literature, flooding the library of the Imperial War Museum with more than 13,000 books and pamphlets within ten years of the armistice. The war also precipitated a novel if selective release of government papers by the Soviet Union from 1917, and by Germany from 1918.27 The British government decided that it too should be releasing documents on the war, and from 1930 started to publish an extensive series of volumes.28 Interest in contemporary history was especially encouraged by the bitter debate concerning ‘war guilt’. But were these developments enough to ensure that students in the 1930s would learn about the war that had so affected their lives? In 1939, Charles Oman wrote angrily, I deplore the present trend away from the preliminary centuries towards the very last periods that are permissible . . . Someone lately called the curriculum ‘the School of Very Modern History’.29 One might have assumed that the history frontier had at last indeed crept forward to the verge of the new world war. Not so. Even in 1946 the Oxford modern history degree terminated at 1878.30

The Second World War reinforced the centrality of the contemporary era. The predictable flood of literature followed, outstanding early examples being Lewis Namier’s Diplomatic Prelude 1938–​39, Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe and Hugh Trevor-​ Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler. Looking back on his work nearly 40 years after the events described, Trevor-​Roper wrote, ‘My evidence was largely “contemporary oral evidence”; even my documents were, in large part, contemporary oral evidence written down. What makes them more accurate, in some respects, than later reconstructions is this contemporaneity: the evidence was given when it was fresh’.31 Not even the imprimatur of such a senior historian flexing his muscles on recent history, however, nor the legions of historians who came to work on the massive official history of the war and its origins, were sufficient to convince others that the diplomatic history of the 1930s and the events leading up to the war were subjects worthy of study, not at least until a number of years after 1945. Major events were meanwhile occurring in the world of historical studies which should have made the study of contemporary history more appealing. The most notable 26 

R. Evans, ‘The Journal of Contemporary History and Its Editors’, Journal of Contemporary History, 50 (2015), 710–​37, at 715. 27  F.W. Pick, ‘Contemporary History: Method and Man’, History, 31 (1946), 31–​2. 28  G. Henderson, ‘A Plea for the Study of Contemporary History’, History, 26 (1941), 51–​5. 29  Sir C. Oman, On the Writing of History (1939), p. 255, quoted in Pick, ‘Contemporary History’, 29. 30  Pick, ‘Contemporary History’, 29. 31  Letter, Lord Dacre of Glanton to authors, 8 Apr. 1982, quoted in A. Seldon and J. Pappworth, By Word of Mouth (London, 1983), p. 171.

592    Anthony Seldon and Mark Davies of these was the Public Records Act of 1958. In the 1940s, the latest documents available for consultation at the Public Record Office were dated 1885, and for most of the 1950s the terminal date was 1902. The new Act ensured that year by year, without the need to lobby, most documents of 50 years old would become available for inspection. In 1967, the government was persuaded to pass a new Public Records Act reducing the period after which documents became available from 50 years to 30, issuing forth a rich harvest of documents on the inter-​war years. Nevertheless, for much of the post-​war era, British historians of contemporary history focused overwhelmingly upon inter-​war Germany, the two World Wars, and the international tensions preceding them. British historians lagged behind historians in Germany, France, and Italy in studying their own country’s contemporary history largely because the practice of contemporary history in those countries was connected to the reconstruction of their national identity after the traumas of 1914–​45. Hans Rothfels, Germany’s leading twentieth-​century historian, stated that the discipline originated as ‘crisis history’.32 And outside the West, decolonization and the birth of new countries led to an understandable concentration upon the contemporary in those countries, rather than upon the period during which they had been colonized. Britain, by contrast, had not suffered such ruptures to its national identity, at least not to so great an extent. Thus, interest among historians specifically in Britain’s contemporary domestic history failed to develop much before the 1980s. Yet, since the Second World War, Britain had experienced successive decades of the most compressed and fast-​moving history of its existence. In addition to its neglect by academic historians, post-​war British history remained a Cinderella subject in schools. There was no systematic treatment of momentous episodes such as the end of empire, the emergence of Britain as a nuclear power, and British accession to what is now the European Union. As I wrote at that time, ‘there is something inherently, indeed insanely, wrong in a nation’s education system that turns out young men and women lacking even a rudimentary knowledge of the nation’s recent past’.33 For these reasons, in 1986 Peter Hennessy and I  established the Institute of Contemporary British History, taking 1945 as our starting point for the contemporary era. The aim was to show the importance of an understanding of recent history as a key ingredient in improving contemporary decision-​making; the present cannot be understood without a proper understanding of the recent past, which requires a historical understanding. The Institute spawned two journals focusing upon contemporary British history—​Contemporary Record (now titled Contemporary British History) and Twentieth Century British History—​and Contemporary European History. The Institute

32  H. Rothfels, ‘Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe’, Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte, 1 (1953), 1–​8, here 5, quoted in Muller, ‘European Intellectual History as Contemporary History’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46 (2011) 574–​90. 33  Times Educational Supplement, 2 Oct. 1987.

In Defence of Contemporary History    593 encouraged the development of ‘witness seminars’, at which the key participants in certain episodes or institutions are gathered together and the discussions taped. Partly in response to the stimulus of the Institute, there was a significant expansion in the study of contemporary (which increasingly meant post-​war) British history. Universities, through a variety of approaches and departments—​international history and relations, economic and social history, media and cultural studies, history of science and technology, history and political science—​have offered an exciting and broad range of topics and courses. The digital revolution has had a significant impact on the writing of contemporary history. Contemporary historians can search enormous quantities of news materials and government documents instantaneously for ‘key words’, instead of having to labour through newspapers, journals, and archival material in hard copy or on microfilm. The result is that it can be easier to research the recent past than it is to research earlier periods; contemporary historians can quickly find useful sources and therefore devote more time to writing and analysis, and to raising the overall quality of their work.34 Schlesinger writes, ‘The ultimate explanation for the rise of contemporary history undoubtedly lies in the acceleration of the rate of change. The world has altered more in the last century than it had in the thousand years preceding’. For the whole of human existence until less than two hundred years ago, the fastest means of transport was on horseback, by which a man might average twelve miles in an hour; ‘Today with manned space vehicles he can make upward of 15,000 miles in the same hour . . . The increase in the velocity of history means, among other things, that the “present” becomes the “past” more swiftly than ever before’.35 The issue of ‘historical distance’ was explored previously in the chapter, with contemporary historians facing the argument that they are not sufficiently removed from the events they are considering. The acceleration in the rate of historical change has had a psychological effect upon the contemporary historian, meaning that the events of only a few years ago seem as remote from today as the events of 1700 seemed from the 1850s.36 The 1950s seem like a different era from today, although the 1950s is often considered part of contemporary history.37

IV In his An Introduction to Contemporary History, Geoffrey Barraclough argued that ‘Contemporary history should be considered as a distinct period of time, with

34  J. Cole, ‘Blogging Current Affairs History’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46 (2011), 658–​70, at 664. 35  Schlesinger Junior, ‘On the Writing of Contemporary History’. 36 Ibid. 37  Some parts of this section have drawn upon A. Seldon’s preface to B. Brivati, J. Buxton, and A. Seldon, eds., The Contemporary History Handbook (Manchester, 1996).

594    Anthony Seldon and Mark Davies characteristics of its own which mark it off from the preceding period’.38 Yet there is considerable ambiguity as to what is meant by the term ‘contemporary history’. Jane Caplan writes that, unlike other periodizations, the dates of contemporary history ‘pin down a moving target rather than a fixed set of book-​ends’.39 In 2008, Vanessa Ann Chambers sent questionnaires to History departments across the UK. Of the 36 replies she received, ‘Nearly half the respondents defined “contemporary” as from the Second World War or post-​1945. Five respondents defined it as from 1900 to the present day, a further five as “modern history”, four as from the First World War to the present day and three as covering the twentieth century’. Other respondents gave yet more definitions. She concluded that the term ‘contemporary’ ‘would appear to be fairly meaningless as a label for a specific period of history, as it has different meanings for different people’.40 The difficulty in defining ‘contemporary history’ is not new. In the opening article of the first edition of the Journal of Contemporary History, in 1966, Llewellyn Woodward wrote, Different historians have given different interpretations to the term ‘contemporary’. Lavisse, when he began to publish under his editorship in 1922 a Histoire de France contemporaine, took the French Revolution of 1789 as the starting-​point of his ten volumes, but no English historian would begin ‘contemporary’ history with the first administration of William Pitt or even with the battle of Waterloo. ‘Recent’ history is also too vague a term. To a historian of the Anglo-​Saxon period the death of Queen Anne is recent.41

The definition of ‘contemporary’ may vary between countries not only because of the dates of significant historical junctures in those countries, but also because of a country’s relationship with its history. The historian Herbert Butterfield has written: There is also in Ireland a peculiar relationship between past and present, utterly different from that peculiar relationship which the Englishman has had with his history. It involves a high consciousness of those events which one wants to celebrate and those wrongs which are to be kept in mind—​things which, even if they happened long ago, seem to be remembered as though they had taken place only last week.42

38 

G. Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (Harmondsworth 1967), p. 12. J. Caplan, ‘Contemporary History: Reflections from Britain and Germany’, History Workshop Journal, 63 (2007), 230–​8, at 230. 40  V.A. Chambers, ‘Informed By, But Not Guided By, the Concerns of the Present: Contemporary History in UK Higher Education—​Its Teaching and Assessment’, Journal of Contemporary History, 44 (2009), 89–​106, at 95–​6. 41  Woodward, ‘The Study of Contemporary History’, 1. 42  H. Butterfield, ‘Eighteenth-​Century Ireland, 1702–​1800’, in T.W. Moody, ed., Irish Historiography, 1936–​1970 (Dublin 1971), p. 61, cited in I. McBride, ‘The Shadow of the Gunman: Irish Historians and the IRA’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46 (2011), 686–​7 10. 39 

In Defence of Contemporary History    595 Vanessa Ann Chambers questions whether historians should even try to define periods. She asks: ‘Does the use of “ancient”, “medieval”, “modern” and “contemporary” limit our ability to draw broader connections or trace continuities over time?’43 Similarly, Fernand Braudel warned of the risk that the historian who confines himself to the recent past ‘will continually have his eye caught by anything which moves quickly or glitters’, yet it is ‘absolutely vital to know whether what one is witnessing is the rise of a new movement, the tail end of an old one, an echo from the very distant past, or a monotonously recurring phenomenon’.44 Thus Catterall believes that Barraclough’s definition is the most appropriate: ‘Contemporary history begins when the problems which are actual in the world today first take visible shape.’45 For Catterall, this gives contemporary history ‘an elastic hinterland, which may or may not begin around 1890’,46 which was the date suggested by Barraclough in 1967. I have always preferred to see contemporary history as a rolling frontier, stretching back approximately 40 years. This is the period when actors and witnesses will still be alive, when interpretations are most in a melting pot, and when lucid analysis most clearly is needed. The suggestion of a rigid frontier should be treated with caution; the historians cited in this chapter have correctly emphasized that it is a mistake to think that history is composed of sharp historical junctures, rather than a continuous stream with occasional deviations and accelerations.

V The transnational nature of contemporary European politics poses particular challenges for historians of contemporary British political history, and will continue to do so despite the 2016 referendum decision to leave the European Union. Jan Palmowski notes that the development of the European Union has completely transformed politics, law, economics, immigration, social legislation, human rights, and culture in the European nation-​state. The result is that it is now less possible than ever before to write history predominantly in national terms: ‘The contemporary state cannot be analysed with the same tools and assumptions about political sovereignty as its nineteenth-​century predecessors.’ Palmowski correctly states that ‘it would hardly be an exaggeration to assert that the contemporary history of any European country, whether a member state or not, cannot be written without taking into account its entanglement with the EC/​EU’. History has always been transnational to varying extents, but has now become supra-​ national. Even if Britain eventually leaves the EU, a full knowledge of the impact of EU membership upon Britain’s sovereignty will obviously be needed when writing about 43 

Chambers, ‘Informed By, but Not Guided By, the Concerns of the Present’, 100. Quoted in J.L. Gaddis, On Contemporary History (Oxford, 1995), p. 22. 45 Barraclough, Introduction, p. 12. 46  Catterall, ‘What (If Anything) Is Distinctive about Contemporary History?’, 451. 44 

596    Anthony Seldon and Mark Davies Britain’s history during the decades when it was a member of the EU. The globalization of movements of capital has further undermined the sovereignty of the nation-​state. All of this requires a transformation of the contemporary historian’s craft.47 In addition to the limitations placed upon Britain’s sovereignty during its membership of the EU—​limitations which may continue in some form even in the event of Britain’s departure from the EU—​contemporary historians need to be aware of a radically altered constitutional environment. In 1976, Lord Hailsham warned that the government in Britain had become an ‘elective dictatorship’. His concern was that the powers of British governments were, almost uniquely in the democratic world, unrestrained by an effective upper parliamentary chamber and by a judicially enforceable Human Rights Act, while being empowered by a highly centralized unitary system of government and by an electoral system that frequently provided governments with disproportionately large majorities, which they used to dominate the House of Commons. However, the constitutional situation has changed considerably since 1997. Important constitutional legislation enacted by the Blair government includes the Human Rights Act 1998, which permits judges to invalidate government actions that infringe human rights, and devolution, which has moved Britain away from a unitary system of government—​in which power is concentrated at the centre—​to a de facto federal system of government, in which the central government’s powers over the periphery are restrained. For Jeffrey Jowell, the Human Rights Act’s significance is that ‘it redefines democracy as being not only about majority rule but about the need for government to be limited in its power to violate human dignity and the rule of law’.48 Although the Human Rights Act may be amended or replaced, the statutory recognition of human rights is here to stay. Within Parliament, the government’s powers have been reduced by a House of Lords flush with confidence following the removal of most of the hereditary peers in 1999. This has increased the legitimacy of the House of Lords, which believes that the expertise and political independence of its membership entitles it to stand up to the government-​ dominated House of Commons. The government is also finding that its powers over the House of Commons are becoming increasingly limited. This is because of the rise of the multi-​party system, which means that governments are going to have to get used to governing with much smaller majorities than has been the case throughout much of the previous 150 years. Indeed, coalition governments and minority governments are likely to be common in the future. Within the Cabinet, prime ministers have seen their authority decline, as witnessed by the erosion of the constitutional convention of Cabinet Unity. Cabinet unity was suspended during Prime Minister Cameron’s Coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and also with regard to the 2016 European Union referendum campaign—​this for only the second time in history during a single-​party government. No prime minister 47  J. Palmowski, ‘The Europeanization of the Nation-​State’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46 (2011), 631–​57. 48  J. Jowell, ‘Publication Review: The New British Constitution’, Public Law (2010), 626.

In Defence of Contemporary History    597 prior to Cameron had to endure such public Cabinet dissent. Finally, the years since the Iraq War in 2003 have seen the creation of a very strong constitutional convention that the approval of the House of Commons must be secured before the prime minister can declare war. This is a momentous change compared to the previous situation, in which prime ministers were able to declare war without consulting Parliament. The impact of the new convention was made clear in 2013, when the House of Commons refused to authorize the government’s wish to declare war upon the Assad regime in Syria. Altogether, this is a stark change from the ‘elective dictatorship’ that prevailed in former times; present-​day prime ministers are in a far weaker constitutional position than their twentieth-​century predecessors. Contemporary historians need to take this into account when judging them. Vernon Bogdanor writes that the impact of all of these changes betokens ‘a new British constitution’. His central argument is that ‘We are now in transition from a system based on parliamentary sovereignty to one based on the sovereignty of a constitution’. Whereas Britain’s former constitution enabled the exercise of power at the centre, the new constitution disperses that power, devolving it downwards (to Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and London), surrendering it upwards to the EU (at least for the time being), subjecting it to judicial approval via the Human Rights Act, and exposing it to greater scrutiny in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Bogdanor believes that these recent constitutional reforms are of an ‘almost revolutionary kind’.49 Historians of Britain’s contemporary history, especially its contemporary political history, need to be aware of the new constitutional constraints within which Britain’s political leaders operate. For example, contemporary historians are as guilty as are historians of earlier periods when they claim to be writing British history when in fact they are writing English history. In the event of British exit from the EU, contemporary historians will need a comprehensive understanding of the constitutional implications of Britain’s post-​Brexit relationship with the EU, which is likely to be far from simple. And, as noted earlier, a full understanding of the impact of EU membership upon Britain’s constitution will be needed when writing about Britain’s history during the decades of its membership. There are additional challenges that are particular to contemporary historians. Spohr Readman notes: ‘In contrast to other historians, contemporary historians have to deal with instant interpretative conflicts between themselves (as professionals and contemporaries) and other contemporary witnesses, who often disseminate their views through oral history, memoirs, diaries and the media.’50 Contemporary historians also find themselves confronted by non-​professional historians working in non-​academic aspects of the public sphere, who are often able to reach larger sections of the public than academic historians. Geoff Eley highlights how, particularly since the 1980s, interest in the past has developed into a ‘boom in memory’, ‘saturating large areas of entertainment,

49 

See V. Bogdanor’s excellent book The New British Constitution (London, 2009). K.S. Readman, ‘Contemporary History in Europe: From Mastering National Pasts to the Future of Writing the World’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46 (2011), 506–​30, at 529. 50 

598    Anthony Seldon and Mark Davies popular reading, commercial exchange, and many other parts of the public culture’.51 Representations of history emanate from cinema, television, advertising, museums, magazines, exhibitions, internet blogs, and historical re-​enactments, sometimes drowning out the voice of academic historians.52 The near-​collapse of the book market this century has driven publishers more than ever to seek out sensationalist rather than balanced history titles, a temptation that many historians, contemporary and others—​ reliant as they may be upon sales income—​have found difficult to resist. This nostalgia industry is born out of understandable anxiety concerning the speed of societal transformation, and represents a desire for continuity in a world of change. It is a development that has been enabled in large part by the creation of the internet and by the significant increase in the number of television channels. Attention to historical events within living memory constitutes an especially large proportion of this popular boom in memory, leading Palmowski and Spohr Readman to reflect that the recent past has become ‘much more contested, as professional historians compete amidst a plurality of voices with media pundits and amateur historians on the internet and elsewhere’.53 Raphael Samuel noted that the result is that history has become ‘an organic form of knowledge’, ‘one whose sources are promiscuous, drawing not only on real-​life experience but also memory and myth, fantasy and desire’.54 This de-​professionalizing of history makes the work of contemporary historians all the more vital, as they place the recent past in historical perspective—​it is this ability that especially distinguishes historians from political scientists—​and expose popular myths and misconceptions to the objective analysis and rigorous approach to evidence that is characteristic of academic history. Contemporary historians provide a valuable public service; without them, the interpretation of the recent past may be left in the hands of polemicists and those willing to misrepresent it for political advantage, or simply in the hands of those who, despite good intentions, lack the unique skills that historians possess. Witness the feverish debate in Britain in the spring and summer of 2016 about the impact of Britain’s membership of the European Union; partisan figures on both sides regularly uttered statements without any attempt at historical accuracy. The internet provides historians not only with new sources, but also with the opportunity to write ‘current affairs history’. Writing current affairs history would involve historians informing public debate by contributing to discussions of matters of current public interest, and thereby improving political decision-​making in real time. They may do this especially via weblogs (internet blogs), which significantly exceed the reach of conventional forms of academic publication. Historian Juan Cole, who has published on

51 

G. Eley, ‘The Past under Erasure? History, Memory, and the Contemporary’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46 (2011), 555–​73, at 556. 52 Ibid., 572. 53  J. Palmowski and K.S. Readman, ‘Speaking Truth to Power: Contemporary History in the Twenty-​ First Century’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46 (2011), 485–​505, at 499. 54  R. Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Vol. I, Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London, 1994), 443–​4, cited in G. Eley, ‘The Past under Erasure?’, 561.

In Defence of Contemporary History    599 the history of Iraq, regrets that more historians did not use the platform that the internet provides to inform public debate in the months preceding the Iraq War in 2003, when the West attempted to establish democracy in a country whose history and ethnic divisions it did not understand. Cole urges historians to make use of ‘blogging’, arguing that it is a genre of writing that can be endowed with academic attributes: [M]‌y blog entries on the Shiites of contemporary Iraq took up concerns and used sources little different from the ones I  would have deployed had I  been writing about Iraqi Shiism in the 1950s . . . Historians on the internet offer what they always do: attention to change over time; the challenging of essentialisms; close analysis of texts and other primary sources in the original languages; the exploration of rival narratives; the weighting of evidence; and the problematizing of easy binaries.55

In the aftermath of the Iraq War, Cole’s weblog on Iraq received a million views a month, at a time when the typical academic monograph sold fewer than a thousand copies. He was, in consequence, invited to testify before the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Cole writes, What we now call democracy, as Aristotle pointed out, all too easily spirals down into demagoguery, and citizens of democratic politics have a duty to counter that tendency. Historians who worry that they will lose respect if the public views them as political partisans because they have intervened in a debate on current affairs should also worry that the public will consider them irrelevant if they never have so intervened.56

VI It is inescapable that history is rooted in the period in which it is written. However much historians might claim to be impartial, they inevitably will be reflecting the preoccupations of the period in which they are writing, as well as their own personal outlooks. All history writing is thus contemporary history. The most that historians can ever do is to understand the subjectivity of the process, be honest about it, and celebrate it. The growing professionalism and self-​awareness of the contemporary historian has been a heartening development of the past 30 years, and has completed the case for contemporary history being afforded the same respect as every other branch of serious history. We need both long-​term history and contemporary history, and we need both to be executed with consummate professional skill and integrity.

55 

Cole, ‘Blogging Current Affairs History’, 667.

56 Ibid., 668.

600    Anthony Seldon and Mark Davies

Further Reading G. Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (Harmondsworth, 1967). B. Brivati, J. Buxton, and A. Seldon, eds., The Contemporary History Handbook (Manchester, 1996). P. Catterall, ‘What (If Anything) Is Distinctive about Contemporary History?’, Journal of Contemporary History, 32:4 (1997), 441–​52. J. Palmowski and K.S. Readman, ‘Speaking Truth to Power:  Contemporary History in the Twenty-​First Century’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46 (2011), 485–​505. K.S. Readman, ‘Contemporary History in Europe:  From Mastering National Pasts to the Future of Writing the World’, Journal of Contemporary History, 46 (2011), 506–​30. E.L. Woodward, ‘The Study of Contemporary History’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1 (1966), 1–​13.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘f ’ and ‘t’ refers to figures and tables. Abel-​Smith, B.  569, 575 Aberdeen, Lord  560–​1 abortion 243 Abrams, L. 431 Abrams, M.  441, 448 Abyssinia 509 Acland, R.  358–​9 Act in Restraint of Appeals  224 Act of Settlement (1701)  112 Act of Union (1706)  112 Act of Union (1800)  112, 176 Acton, Lord  117 Addison, P.  359, 568 Additional Members System (AMS)  185 administrative devolution  176, 179, 180, 181, 182, 187 advertising industry  44, 440–​1, 444, 451, 446–​7 Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS)  146 affluence and modernity  276, 277, 278 and socialism  276 Alexander, S. 424 Ali, Ras  509 Ali, T.: Redemption 327 Allison, R. 214n62 Amalgamated Engineering Union  144 Amery, J.  311–​12 Amery, L. 312 Anderson, P. 338 Anglican Church  96, 216, 224, 229 Anglo-​French Suez Canal Company  519 Anglo-​German naval agreement (1935)  515 Anglo-​Japanese alliance  514 Anti-​Corn Law League  54, 262, 429, 457, 458

anti-​slavery movement  26, 232, 457, 464 appeasement 558 Arabi Pasha  510 Aristotle 599 armed forces  74, 75, 237, 313, 514, 515, 525, 530t Armstrong, R.  114, 132 Arnstein, W. 210 Artists’ International Association  358 Asquith, H.H.  23, 125, 236, 297, 313 Asquith, I. 159n20, 168 Association of Democratic Monarchists Representing All Women  215–​16 Association of Parents of Backward Children (now MENCAP)  574–​5 Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff  146 Atkinson, Mrs 215n72 Attlee, C.  108, 269, 317, 377, 439, 574 Attlee government  75, 142–​3, 564 Auden, W.H.  61 Augustine, St 374 Australia  58, 220, 512, 516–​17 Australian Monarchist Alliance  220 Australian Monarchist League  220 Australian Orange Order  220 Australians for Constitutional Monarchy 220 Avebury, Lord  530t Badiou, A. 505 Baer, M. 408 Bagehot, W.  211–​12, 525, 249, 391 Bailyn, B. 21 Baines, E. 234 Bain, J.T.  331

602   Index Baldwin, S.  24, 36, 240, 259, 269, 312 on fringe parties  345 and General Strike  142, 315 and ideology  283 and luck  314–​15 and modernity  273–​4 and National Government  316 political language  42, 44–​5, 373 vision of democracy  486 Bale, T. 333 Balfour, Lord (A. Balfour)  180, 312 Ball, J. 442 Ball, S.  274, 560 Balls, E. 342 Bank of England  495 Baptist Church  230 Barber, M. 109 Barker, E.  18, 208–​9 Barker, H. 408 Barnes, T. 162 Barnett, C.  564–​5 Barraclough, G.  593–​4, 595 Bassett, R. 481 Baumol, W. 504 BBC  131, 269, 443, 448, 450, 486 Beaverbrook, Lord  168, 315, 350, 440, 442 Bebbington, D. 235 Becker, L. 198 Beers, L.  275–​6, 331 Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement (1998)  186–​7 Bellamy, R. 281 Bell, D. 415 Bell, T. 444 Benemy, F.W.G.  106 Bennett, J.M.  428 Benn, T.  333, 357, 415 Benthamism 22 Bentham, J. 16 Bentinck, G. 308 Bentley, M.  18, 24, 35, 42, 273, 310, 408 Berelson, B. 401 Berlin, I. 16 Best, A. 551 Bevan, A.  181, 276, 533, 565 Beveridge Report (1942)  75, 128, 565 Beveridge, W.  128, 565–​7 Bevin, E.  75, 518

Bevir, M.  333, 366 Bew, J. 377 Biagini, E.  292, 293, 547 Billig, M.  207, 221 Bill of Rights (1688)  458 Bismarck, O. von  563 Black, J.  365, 554, 555 Black, L.  269, 276, 278, 446, 448 Blair, T.  322, 323, 326, 436, 541 and democracy  362 and EU  549, 562 and No. 10 Policy Unit 134 Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit  109 and socialism and affluence  276 Strategic Communications Unit  118 ‘third way’ 25 Blake, Lord (R. Blake)  106, 306–​7, 308, 309, 318, 323, 324 Blatchford, R. 335 Blaxill, L. 466 Blewett, N. 406 Blond, P. 334 Blue Labour  327, 333–​5, 336, 337, 338–​41, 342 Boaks, B.  215–​16 Board of Education  124 Board of Trade: Labour Department  124 Bodin, J. 175 Boer War  73, 235, 311, 512 Bogdanor, V.  173, 206, 207, 211, 597 Bolingbroke, Lord  20, 247n Bonar Law, A.  36, 313, 314 Bonney, N. 212 Booth, C.  72, 230 Bourdieu, P. 436 Bourne, J.M.  123 Bradley, K. 573 Brandeis, L. 178 Brand, H. 92 Braudel, F. 595 Brazier, R.  210–​11 ‘bread-​and-​circus politics’  371 Brewer, J.  21, 68 Brexit  152, 324, 561, 597 Civil Service and  121, 136 historians and  365 referendum (2016)  78, 544, 545, 554 Bridges, E.  127, 129, 540 Briggs, A.  327, 388

Index   603 British and Foreign Society schools  233–​4 British Colonial Office  517 British Gazette 482 British Monarchist League (BML)  217–​19 British Monarchist Society (BMS)  218–​19 British Nationality Act (1981)  352 British National Party (BNP)  349, 353 British Quarterly Review  164–​5 British Telecom  501 British Union of Fascists (BUF)  59, 61, 316, 345–​6, 350, 353, 354, 357, 454 British Workers’ League  349 Brittan, L. 540 Broad, R. 550 Brooke, S.  272, 329 Brougham, Lord 248n2 Brown, D.  547, 561, 573 Brown, G.  323, 326, 327 Bryant, C. 327 Bryce commission (1917–18)  99 Bullock Report (1977)  146, 147 Bulpitt, J. 188 Burford, Oxfordshire  51 Burgwin, E. 199 Burke, E.  16, 173, 247, 248, 283, 362 Burma  510, 511, 518 Burrow, J. 18 Burt, T. 347 Bute, Lord  160 Butler, D.  348–​9, 401–​2, 405, 415, 440, 444–​5 Butler, J.R.M.  384–​5, 386 Butler, L. 333 Butler, L. J.  522 Butler, R. 133 Butler, R.A.  317, 318, 533–​4 Butterfield, H.  19, 21, 25, 37, 363, 594 Byrne, L. 342 Cabinet  103–​19, 596–​7 and collective responsibility  112, 113, 119 definition of  111–​12, 113 development of 118 early history of  105, 106, 108–​9 existing literature on  104–​11 relationship with prime minister  112–​13, 115 requirements for fuller assessment of  111–​13 role of 113

Cabinet Office  114, 115, 129 creation of 126 development of  118–​19 history of  105, 106 secretariat 126 Cadbury, L. 442 Cain, P.J.  511 Cairns, Lord  96 Callaghan, J.  144, 147, 184, 539 Calman, K. 186 Cambridge school  14, 436, 438 Cameron, D.  278, 283, 323–​4 big society  25, 284, 570 Brexit referendum  545 and Scottish devolution  186 Campbell, A.  118, 401 Camps, M. 553 Camrose, Lord  442 Cannadine, D.  205–​6, 210, 278–​9 capitalism  60, 289, 327, 335–​7, 340, 481, 510–​11 and democracy  474 EU institutions and  555 global capitalism  45 Keynes and  497–​8 municipal capitalism 192n17 popular capitalism  483, 500 Caplan, J. 594 Carlyle, T.  14, 373 Carnarvon, Lord  163, 561 Caroline of Brunswick, Queen  52 Carter, B.E.  106 Carter, H. 332 Catholic Association  225–​6, 457 Catholic Relief Act (1829)  225–​6 Cato Street conspiracy  50 Catterall, P.  589–​90, 595 Central Office of Information (COI)  446, 449, 450 central policy review staff (CPRS)  134 Centre for Policy on Ageing (formerly National Corporation for the Care of Old People) 574 Centre for Research on Socio-​Cultural Change (CRESC), Manchester  503–​4 Ceylon 518 Chadwick, E. 191 Chalaby, J. 162 Challe, M. 520

604   Index Chamberlain, J.  193, 295, 311–​12, 349, 373 declinism 505 and Irish home rule  294 and political parties  250, 256 on South Africa  512 Unauthorized Programme (1885)  369, 411 Chamberlain, N.  316–​17, 515–​16, 529, 531, 532 Chambers, V.A.  594, 595 Chancellor of the Exchequer: office of  116 Charity Commission  571 Charity Organization Society  573 Charmley, J. 549 Chartism  48, 51–​5, 163–​4, 261–​2, 291–​2, 346, 457 Chase, M.  163–​4, 292 Chatfield, Lord  515 Chester, N. 588 Child Benefit  503 Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG)  575 Christian evangelicism  493 Christian socialism  253, 262 Church, see religion Churchill, R.  160, 311, 510 Churchill, W.S.  24, 103, 251, 312, 372, 449 coalition government  318 on democracy  481 de-​rating programme  201 election broadcasts  439–​40 and free trade  312 and General Strike  315 legacy 373 and trade unions  142 and warfare  75, 317, 517, 532 Church of England  230, 296, 309 Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero)  585 Cinema Act (1932)  240–​1 Citizens’ Advice Bureaux (CABx)  573 Citizen’s Charter (1991)  133, 134 Citrine, W. 54 civil expenditure  535 Civil Service  76, 81, 121–​36, 482 and Brexit  121, 136 Central Policy Review Staff  131 Central Statistical Office  128, 129 and Civil Service Department  131 criticism of 131 development of  122–​5 Economic Section  128, 129

First Division  126 and Haldane Report (1918)  127 and home rule  178 Northcote-​Trevelyan report (1854)  122–​4 numbers  126–​7, 127f, 128–​9, 133, 134–​5 post-​war changes  129–​34 and prime minister, office of  116 Programme Analysis and Review (PAR) 131 Senior Policy and Management Group  131 and welfare reforms  125 and WWI:  125–​6 and WWII:  128 Civil Service College  131 Civil Service Commission  125 Civil Service Department  131, 132 civil society  264, 283 Civin, J. 465 Clapson, M. 278 Clark, A.  321–​2 Clark, C.  502, 558 Clarke, K. 323 Clarke, P.  2. 43, 296, 402, 403, 404, 405 Clarke, W. 480 Clark, J.C.D.  391–​2 class issues dealignment 348 deindustrialization 327 middle-​class consciousness  290–​1 post-​Blair  278–​9 working class identity  294–​5 Clifford, H.  513–​14 coalition governments  125, 260–​1, 311, 314–​16, 318, 347 Cobbett, W. 458 Cobdenism 555 Cobden, R.  154–​5, 157, 161–​2, 163, 561 Coetzee, F. 408 Cold War  359, 482, 506, 540 Cole, G.D.H.  326, 335, 336, 337, 476, 481 Cole, J.  598–​9 collectivism  240, 262, 369, 494 Colley, L.  18, 19 Collini, S.  14, 266, 281 Combination Acts: repeal of (1824)  54 Common Market (EEC)  319, 553, 556 Commons, see House of Commons Commons Journals 460

Index   605 Common Wealth party  358–​9, 439 communism  345, 354–​9 Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB)  37, 60, 61, 327–​8, 330, 345–​6, 353–​4, 356–​9, 439 Congregational Church  230 Connor, W. 175 conscription  74, 75, 237, 313 consensus politics  76 conservation organizations  63 conservatism  24–​5, 29–​30, 61, 139, 142, 295–​6, 306 Conservative Central Office  256, 259, 442 Conservative-​Liberal Democrat coalition government  260–​1 Conservative party  306–​24 and advertising agencies  444 and branding  434 and Church  231, 309 and constitutional reform  29 election broadcasts  439 and electorate  259 and equality  283 and EU  548–​9, 554 and law  138, 143 memorialization of past  251 and modernity  273, 275 One Nation vision  307, 318 party membership  32–​3 and Peterhouse School  37 and secularization of British politics  240 and trade unions  138, 139–​40, 141, 142, 144–​6, 147, 149, 150–​1 see also Primrose League Conservative Political Centre  24 Conservative Research Department  24, 442 Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act (1875) 140 Constitutional Monarchy Association 220, 221 constitutional reforms  29, 597 consumer democracy  476 Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869)  72, 235, 458 Contemporary European History 592 contemporary history  583–​99 blogging 599 Brexit, effect of  597

challenges to  597–​8 and contemporary European politics  595–​8 current affairs history  598–​9 definition of  593–​5 digital records  587, 593 documents  585–​6 importance of recent history  590–​3 internet and  598–​9 interviews  586–​9 marginalization of  584–​5 Contemporary Record (now Contemporary British History) 592 Contemporary Review 162 Cook, C. 406 Cooke, A.B.  37, 363 Co-​Op Bank  327 co-​operative movement  327, 330, 336, 340, 476 co-​ownership  299 Corbyn, J.  278, 331, 333, 334, 339–​40, 342 Cornewall Lewis, G.  249 Cornford, J.P.  402, 403, 404, 405, 410 Corn Laws  22, 95, 103, 231, 273, 302, 308 corporatism 76 Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act (1883) 256, 395 corruption  161–​2, 203, 253–​4: see also Old Corruption Corrupt Practices Prevention Act (1883)  390 council housing: sale of  500, 501 council tax 80 Counter-​Terrorism and Security Act (2015) 471 Cowley, P. 484 Cowling, M.  20, 310, 377, 391 and high politics  35–​6, 37–​41, 43, 44, 46, 252, 404–​5 Craig, D.  205, 211 Craig, F.W.S.  412–​13 Crewe, I. 402 Crick, B. 397 Crimean War  525, 556, 561 Cripps, S. 350 Crosland, A.  335, 336, 338, 340, 448 Crossman, R.  109, 182, 202, 397 Crowcroft, R.  40, 333 Crowson, N.  548–​9, 554 Crowther, Lord  182, 183 Cruddas, J. 335

606   Index Cruikshank, G. 400 Cullen, P. 227 cultural anthropology  16 cultural politics  35–​6, 43 Curran, J.  161, 170, 448 current affairs history  598–​9 Curtin, J.  516–​17 Curzon, Lord  43, 314 Cyprus 518 Daddow, O. 553 Daily Chronicle 442 Daily Express 167, 442 Daily Herald 442 Daily Mail  167–​8 Daily Mirror 167 Daily News 258 Daily Telegraph 442 Dalton, H. 518 Dalyell, T. 177 Darwin, J.  510, 513, 516, 517 Daunton, M. 526 Davey, J. 551 Davidson, J.C.C.  259, 442 Davidson, R. 242 Davies, N.  175, 209n29 Davies, R. 185 Davis, J. 200 Daylight Savings Time  74 Deacon, R.  181–​2 death penalty: abolition of  243 debt servicing  515 decentralization 335 declinism  505–​6, 537 defence spending  533–​5, 535t, 536, 537–​8, 540, 541–​2, 542t Defence Studies Working Party  536 Defence White Paper (1957)  521–​2, 534 deflation  495, 496–​7 Defoe, D. 160 de Gaulle, C.  319 Deighton, A.  553–​4 de-​industrialization  504 Delane, J.T.  157, 162 Delaney, T. 444 Delap, L. 423 democracy  361–​79, 471–​89, 501

consumer democracy  476 development of  476–​83 historiography of  471–​6 industrial democracy  146–​7, 476 language of  476–​80 liberal democracy  427–​8 media and  486–​7 nature of  32–​3 practice of  483–​8 property-​owning democracy  476, 501 and public opinion  479–​80, 482 role of politicians in  361–​79 social democracy  473 transition to 463 see also Reform Acts; suffrage movement Derby, 14th Earl of  307, 308–​9, 548, 549 Derby, 15th Earl of 561 Derby, Countess of  561 Despard Conspiracy  50 devolution  78, 133, 173–​88, 484–​5 administrative devolution  176, 179, 180, 181, 182, 187 executive devolution  187 Ireland  176–​9, 181 legislative devolution  187 Northern Ireland  186–​7, 188 Scotland  174, 176, 179–​81, 182–​5, 186, 188 sub-​state communities  175–​6 Wales  174, 176, 179, 181–​2, 183–​5 Dicey, A.V.  141, 173–​4, 177, 494 Dickens, C. 400 digitization  410–​14, 466, 587, 593 Dilke, C.  193, 529–​31 diplomacy: studies of culture of  550–​2 Diplomatic Service  121 Disraeli, B.  53, 96, 251, 252, 369, 561 biography of Bentinck  308 on coalitions  313–​14 and Europe  549 and franchise extension  273 on Irish question  176 legacy 373 on liberalism  13 and military/​naval power  525 and reform  39, 309–​10 divorce 241 Dixon, R. 135 dole, see unemployment benefits

Index   607 Doyle, B. 196 drunkenness  71–​2 Dunbabin, J.P.D.  404 Duncan Smith, I.  323 Duncombe, T. 346 Dundee Friends of Liberty  50 Dunn, J.  14–​15, 30 Dutton, D. 299 Duverger, M. 260n39 Dwork, D. 578 Easter Rebellion (1916)  236, 237 Ecology Party  62 economic determinism  19 Economic Information Unit  449 economic institutions  28–​9 economic liberalism  320, 321, 324 Economist, The  157n9, 442 economy  28–​9, 490–​507 Budget crisis (1909/​10)  496 Christian evangelicism and  493 economic decline  505 Edwardian  495–​6 and politics of austerity  491–​2 public spending  493 statistics  505–​6 sterling crises  538 Eden, A.  317, 519–​21, 533–​4 Edgerton, D.  128, 332, 500, 506, 528 education  75, 76, 502 religion and  233–​4, 235–​6 Education Act (1870)  233 Education Act (1902)  200, 235–​6 Education Act (1944)  241, 318 Education Bill (1843)  234 Edward VII, King  212, 219 Edward VIII, King  316 Egypt  510, 511–​12, 519–​21, 557 Eisenhower, D.D.  519 elections  26, 400–​16 1918 Khaki election  349, 350 1940s/​1950s  61–​2 1945: 439 1983:  444–​5 1987: 445 1997: 445 and changes of government  257

class-​based voting  296 constituency campaigns  415 and digitization  410–​14 early period  400, 402–​3, 408 electoral sociology  401–​6, 407, 410 first-​past-​the-​post (FPTP) system  32, 62, 99, 260n39, 344 London County Council elections (1934) 449 linguistic approach  401, 406–​10, 414–​15 local elections  484 multiple vote system  255, 256, 484 Nuffield studies  401, 405–​6 one-​person-​one-​vote system  32, 255, 256 and political apathy  488 pollbooks  403, 410, 413–​14 proportional representation  300 psephology  401, 412–​13 registration of voters  254–​6 revisionism and  406–​8 second (transitional) period  400–​1, 408 software tools  410–​11, 412 and text mining  410–​12 third (modern) period  401 turnout 62 see also local elections; Reform Acts Electoral Reform Society  396 electoral sociology  401–​6, 407, 410 Eley, G.  331, 597 Elizabeth II, Queen  210, 211, 419, 577 Ellison, N. 280 Ell, P. 467 Elton, G.  1, 6, 33, 36 Empire Day  59, 61 Empire Free Trade Crusade  350 employment full employment  76, 564 para-​state employment  503–​4, 504t Employment Policy White Paper (1944)  498 Engels, F. 254 English Historical Review 2 Englishman, The  58 English National Party (ENP)  49–​50 environmentalism 63, 324 e-​petitions  456 Episcopalian Church  229 Epstein, J.  462, 465

608   Index Equal Franchise Act (1928)  396 Erskine May, T.  92, 93, 249n10 Escott, T. 160 Established National Church  224 Established Protestant Church  225 ethical socialism  253 European Convention on Human Rights  485 European Economic Community (EEC)  319, 553, 556 European Elections Act (1999)  99 European integration  78, 116, 133 European Union (EU)  340, 544–​62 Anglo-​European peacetime relationship  556, 557–​9 Anglo-​European wartime relationship  556–​7 British domestic policy and  557–​8 British foreign policy and  556–​7 and British political history  546–​7 Conservative party and  548–​9, 554 generational study and British relationship with  559–​62 and international history  546–​7 Labour party and  549–​50, 554 Liberal Democrats and  550 Liberal party and  547–​8 and national history  595–​6 orthodox view of  553 post-​revisionist view of  554 revisionist view of  553–​4 Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) and  550 Single Market  321 and trade unions  152 UK Independence Party (UKIP) and  550 Euroscepticism  323, 324, 353, 545, 554 Evangelical Revival  229–​30 Evans, R. 7n16 Exchequer, see Treasury executive devolution  187 Fabianism 338, 347 Fabian Research Department  356 Fabian Society  58, 356, 396 Factory Act (1833)  302 Falklands War  321, 527 family allowances  503, 566 Family Credit  503

Family Income Supplement  503 fascism  49, 61, 345, 352–​3, 355, 357–​8 Favretto, I. 331 federalism 173, 177 feminism  48, 423–​4, 577, 579 Ferguson, A. 247 Fielding, S.  267–​8, 328n13, 329, 358–​9, 451 Figgis, N. 14 Financial Management Initiative  131 Finlayson, A. 339 Finlayson, G. 570 First Gulf Wars  527 First Lords of the Treasury  111, 113, 115, 116 First World War, see World War I fiscal policy  497, 499 Fisher, G.  242–​3 Fisher, J. 551 Fisher, W.  126, 127 Fishman, N. 356 Fitzgerald, G. 174 Flowers, P. 327 Foley, M.  106–​7 Foot, M. 346 Forster, A. 554 Forster, W.E.  234 Fortnightly Review 160 Foucault, M.  16, 27–​8, 68, 436 Fowler, H.H.  192 France  473, 478, 526–​7 and Egypt  512 press  157, 161, 165 relations with  551–​2 revolutionary France  50, 69, 122 Francis, H.  327, 329 Fraser, P. 453 Freeden, M. 254n23, 281 Freedom of Information legislation  209 Freeman, E.A.  18 free trade  26, 103, 296, 298, 299, 309, 312, 463 19th-​century treaties  555 economy and  495, 496, 497 and imperialism  509–​10 Freud, S. 19 Friedman, M. 131 Friendly Societies  494, 565, 572 Friends of the Earth  63 fringe parties  343–​59 Fry, G.K.  125

Index   609 Fukuyama, F. 374 Fulton Report (1968)  129, 130–​1, 135 Gaber, I. 331 Gaitskell, H. 276 Gallagher, J.  509, 510, 512–​13 Galloway, G. 327 Gambles, A. 309 Garrard, J. 196 Garvin, J.A.  311–​12 Gash, N.  22, 254, 308, 389 gay politics  48 General Strike (1926)  51, 142, 315, 448, 450, 482 generational study  559–​62 Geographical Information System (GIS) technology  466–​7 George V, King  208, 211, 577 George VI, King  208, 211, 316 Germany: economic success  537 Ghana 522 Gilbert, M.  587–​8 Gilbert, W.S.  83, 343 Gillray, J. 400 Gingerbread (formerly National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (NCUMC), then One Parent Families) 574 Ginsberg, M. 141 Gladstone, W.E.  22–​3, 53, 70, 96, 227, 368, 561 and Acton  117 and democracy  362 and home rule for Ireland  177, 293–​4, 310 and income tax  526 legacy 373 and Liberalism  293 on local government  189, 196 Midlothian speeches  437 and military/​naval power  525 Northcote-​Trevelyan report (1854)  123 political language  373 on politicians  361 on press  163 and religion  230 and select committee inquiry system  93 and temperance  232, 233 Glasman, M.  334, 335, 336–​7, 339, 340, 341 Gleadle, K.  171, 420, 429, 459

global capitalism  45 globalization: and trade unions  151 Glubb, J. 519 Goldman, L. 26 gold standard  70, 315, 495, 496–​7 Goldthorpe, J. 277 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement (1998)  186–​7 Goodman, H. 340 Google Ngram  410 Gordon, P. 212 Gore-​Booth, P.  523 Goschen, G.  190, 199 Gove, M. 587 Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)  150–​1 gradualism 60 Graf, A.  336, 340 Graham, J. 234 Grant, J.  156–​7 Grant, M. 446 Granville Barker, H.: Waste  223–​4 Great Eastern Crisis (1876-​80)  310 Great Reform Act (1832) see Reform Acts Great War, see World War I Green, E.H.H.  24, 25, 266, 283–​4, 548 Greenleaf, W.H.  369, 370 Green party  62, 349, 353 green politics  48 Green, T.H.  16, 23 Greenwood, F.  160, 162 Gregory, I. 467 Greg, W.R.  159, 161 Grenville, Lord  109 Grey, Earl  122–​3, 249, 385–​6 Griffin, B.  421–​2 Griffin, R.  352–​3 Grimley, M. 283 Grimond, J. 300 Grob-​Fitzgibbon, B.  554 gross domestic product (GDP)  75, 77, 491, 499 and public spending  502, 542t and social services  535–​6 and WWII:  527 gross national product (GNP)  69, 75, 80, 493–​4 and defence  533, 534, 542 social services and  572 Grosvenor, B. 549

610   Index Grunwick dispute (1976-​8)  146, 147 Al-​Gurg, E.  524 Gurney, P. 330 Hadfield, B. 177 Hague, W.  322–​3 Hailsham, Viscount  307, 596 Haldane Committee  126 Haldane, R.B.  23 Haldane Report (1918)  127–​8, 135 Halévy, É. 191 Halifax, Viscount (formerly Lord Irwin) 315, 481 Hall, P. 212 Hall, R. 533 Hall, S. 206n8, 327 Hamilton, A. 374 Hammond, E. 150 Hampton, M. 166 Hanham, H.J.  389, 402, 403, 405, 410 Hannam, J. 431 Hansard 6 Hardie, K. 347 Harling, P.  123, 190, 526 Harmann, G. 406 Harris, J.  37, 281, 336, 441, 569, 570 Harrison, F. 160 Harrison, R.  39, 388 Harris poll  444 Harrop, M. 443 Hartington, Lord  103, 109, 116, 250 Hastings, A. 238 Hattersley, R. 326 Hawkins, A.  308–​9, 362, 548, 549, 552 Hawthorn, G. 30 Hay, C. 332 Hayek, F.A.  369 Hayes, N. 201 Hayes, P. 512 Head of the Civil Service (HoCS)  126 Healey, D.  499, 521, 535, 539 health insurance  566 health issues  71, 72, 235 health spending  542t Heath, E.  143, 182–​3, 319–​20, 372, 536, 549 Heath government  202, 319, 536 Hegel, G.W.F.  374

Hennessy, P.  106, 114, 129, 130, 592 Hennock, E.P.  197, 563 Henry VIII, King  224 Henson, H. 242 Hervey, Lord  108–​9 Heseltine, M.  321, 322 Hickson, K. 280 high politics  25–​6, 32–​46 and cultural politics  35–​6, 43 ‘great man’ approach  33–​5 normative historiography  33 and social policy  495 Hilson, M. 331 Hilton, B. 22 Hilton, M. 271 Hinton, J. 37 Hirst, P. 337 History Workshop Journal 328, 424 Hitler, A.  316–​17 Hobbes, T.  175, 374 Hobhouse, L.T.  16, 23, 351, 480 Hobsbawm, E.  33–​4, 36, 206, 327 Hobson, J.A.  16, 23, 480 Hoggart, R.  327, 338, 436 Holliday, I. 274 Hollins, T. 443 Hollis, P. 577 Holton, S. 421 Holyoake, G.J.  346 Homans, M. 212 Home Civil Service  121 homelessness 575 home rule  103, 173, 182, 463 Honours (Prevention and Abuses) Act (1925) 100 Honours and Appointments branch  117 Hood, C. 135 Hopkins, A.G.  511 Hopkins, R. 531 Hoppit, J. 463 House of Commons Committee on Petitions  55 relationship with House of Lords  94–​9, 101 and select committee inquiry system  93 House of Lords  28, 94–​101, 258, 596 Blair reforms  100–​1 hereditary peers  32

Index   611 relationship with House of Commons  94–​9, 101 and select committee inquiry system  93 Housing Act (1919)  200 housing reform  296 Howard, M. 323 Howarth, J.  404, 409 Howe, A. 547 Howe, G.  144–​5, 150, 151, 321 Hudson, H. 445 Human Rights Act (1998)  596 Humboldt, W. von  406 Hume, D. 247n1 Hume, J.  54, 193 Humphreys, R. 573 hunger marches  51, 61, 356 Hunt, H.  52, 53 Hunt, K.  428, 431 Hussein, King of Jordan  519 Hutchins, C. 209n29 Hyam, R.  508–​9, 521 Hyslop, J. 331 Ibbs Report (‘Next Steps’ project) (1987) 132, 136 idealism 16 ideology  19–​20, 21, 24–​5, 266–​86 and class inequalities  277–​8 and constraints  267–​72, 279 and equality  279–​83 and modernity  272–​9 political differences and  282 Imperial (Overseas) Civil Servants  121 Imperial Conference (1937)  515 imperial policy  59, 61, 508–​24 decline of Empire  518 free trade and  509–​10 informal empire  509–​10 WWII and  515–​17 Imperial War Museum  591 Independent Labour Party (ILP)  50–​1, 58, 239, 330, 347, 349–​50 India  316, 513, 518 India Bill (1935)  316 industrial democracy  146–​7, 476 Industrial Relations Act (1971)  144–​5, 147 inflation  75, 147, 502

Innes, J. 463 In Place of Strife (white paper, 1969)  144, 147 Inskip, T. 531 Institute for Public Policy Research  338 Institute of Contemporary British History  592–​3 Institute of Economic Affairs  131, 502 intellectualism 30 International Monarchist League  221 International Monarchist League in Australia 220 interventionism  74–​5, 80 interviews contemporary history  586–​9 and history of prime minister/​Cabinet  114 Ireland 116, 513 Anglican Church in  96 Catholic Association  225–​6 and conscription  237 devolution  176–​9, 181 Established Protestant Church  225 home rule  99, 177–​9, 250, 259, 261, 293–​4, 303, 310 independence  236–​7 religion in  225–​8 unionism 176 see also Northern Ireland Irish Catholic Association  261–​2 Irish (later Northern Ireland) Civil Servants 121 Irish Free State  236–​8 Irish Nationalist Party  348 Irish Repeal Movement  262 Irish Republic  186 Irwin, Lord (later Lord Halifax)  315, 481 Israel 520 Jackson, A.  174, 524 Jackson, B.  267, 280, 333, 339, 362 Japan 514 Jarrow March  61, 454 Jarvis, M. 283 Jay, D. 81 Jefferys, K.  32, 341 Jenkins, R.  243, 534 Jennings, I. 396 Jephson, H. 457 Jerrold, D. 49

612   Index jingoism  59, 309, 311 Jobson, R. 334 John Hampden New Freedom Party  49 Johnson, B. 372 Johnson, R.W.  221 Joll, J. 546 Jones, A.  37, 163 Jones, G.  106, 113, 114, 116 Jones, J. 144 Jones, K. 168 Jordan  519, 520, 522 Joseph, K. 202 journalism  160, 161–​2, 166, 167, 486 Jowell, J. 596 Joyce, P.  79, 264, 292, 407, 437 Judt, T. 34 Junior Imperial League  259 Kahn-​Freund, O.  141–​2, 143 Kavanagh, D.  106, 348–​9, 406 Kennedy, P.  536–​7, 546, 558 Kenny, M. 339 Kent, J.  553–​4 Kenwright, B. 429 Kenya  518, 522–​3 Keynesianism  497–​9 Keynes, J.M.  128, 282, 497–​8, 517 Kilbrandon, Lord  183, 188 Kimberley, Lord  561 King, T. 541 Kinnear, J.B.  162 Kinnear, M.  404, 413n59 Kinnock, N.  322, 334, 450 Kirk, N. 407 Kitson Clark, G.  124 Knights, M.  462, 463 Korean War  533 Koss, S.  169–​70, 442 Kuhn, T. 16 Kuhn, W. 210 Kuwait 522 Labnet 328 Labour History Review  327–​8 Labour Independents  350 labour market  71, 77–​8, 82, 124

labour movement  54, 60–​1: see also Labour party; trade unions Labour party  60–​1, 251, 296, 312, 325–​42 1931 general election  39–​40 1945 general election  317 and advertising agencies  444 Clause IV 258 conservatism of  339–​40 criticism of 326 election broadcasts  439 and EU  549–​50, 554 and gradualism  60 and ideology  281–​2 Labour historians  325–​9 land nationalization  60 and leadership/​class  41 Let Us Face the Future manifesto (1945)  564, 567 and modernity  275–​6 and National Executive Committee (NEC)  258 party membership  32–​3 People’s War  267–​8 political culture  329–​34 and religion  239 and secularization of British politics  240 socialism  253–​4 and trade unions  142–​3, 145–​6, 151 and universal suffrage  29 and voluntary sector  574 and welfare state  564–​5 see also Blue Labour; New Labour Labour Party Research Department  356, 448, 567 Labour Representation Committee  258, 347 Labour Representation League  347 Laite, J. 329 Land and Labour League  49 land reform  253, 296, 298, 463 Lang, C. 242 Langford, P.  106, 112 language of democracy  476–​80 linguistic approach to elections  401, 406–​7 of petitions  466 political ideas and  13–​30, 252–​3, 254 political language  42, 44–​5, 373 stock phrases and rhetorical styles  372–​4 Lansbury, G. 356 Lansdowne, Lord 248n2 Lapping, B. 519

Index   613 Lascelles, A. 208 Laski, H.  16, 109, 336, 337, 439–​40, 481 law Conservative party and  138, 143 Corn Laws  22, 95, 103, 231, 273, 302, 308 law-​making, Parliament and  84–​91 Poor Law reform  302, 492 and trade unions  138 Lawrence, J.  9, 41, 44, 268, 271, 286, 294–5, 330, 340–1, 405, 407–08, 409, 415, 448, 454, 465 Lawson, N. 565 Lawson, W. 232 Lawton, D. 212 Layton, W. 442 Lazarfield, P. 401 leadership  35–​6 Leagas Delaney Advertising (advertising agency) 444 Lecky, W. 371 Lefevre, C.S.  92 Left Book Club  356 Lenin, V.I.  355 Levellers 51 Levi, L.  526, 530t Lewis, J. 578 Leys, C. 453 Liberal Association  256 Liberal Central Association  256 liberal conservatism  306 liberal cosmopolitanism  495, 505 liberal democracy  427–​8 Liberal Democrat party  260, 347, 550 Liberal Imperialism  303 liberalism  16, 22, 282–​3, 293, 300, 339 Cobdenite 493 decline of 295 and democracy  474 Disraeli on 13 new liberalism  23, 276 popular liberalism  48–​9, 57 social liberalism  324 see also neo-​liberalism liberal market theory  138 Liberal Nationals  299, 349 Liberal party  23–​4, 62, 251, 288–​305 and Beveridge Report (1942)  299 and Church  231 and class identity  289

and dealignment  299–​300 and EEC  300 election broadcasts  439 and EU  547–​8 future research  303–​5 and Irish home rule  303 Liberal governments (1906-​14)  73 Liberal Yearbook 256 and nationalization  299 New Liberals  296 and patriotism  303 post-​war  300–​1 and proportional representation  300 and radicals  291–​2 and reforms  302 splits in  259, 261, 293, 297–​8, 299, 302 transformations in  301–​3 Victorian 269 see also Whig party Liberal Registration Association  256 Liberal Unionist Association  256 Liberal Unionist party  293, 294, 349 Liberation Society  230 Licensing Act (1872)  232–​3 Liddell Hart, B.  528–​9 life expectancy  71 Life Peerages Act (1958)  100 Lijphart, A.  186–​7, 344 Lindsay, A.D.  472, 474, 481–​2, 485–​6 Lipman, V.D.  191–​2 Lippman, W. 337 Littlewood, Joan  358 Llafur 328 Lloyd, G. 312 Lloyd George, D.  24, 36, 60, 349 and Cabinet  109, 118 coup against Asquith  297–​8 and honours system  100 legacy 373 and Ministry of Munitions  125–​6 and partition of Ireland  513 People’s Budget (1909)  73 Prime Minister’s Secretariat (Garden Suburb) 118 War Cabinet  105, 118 wartime government  75 Lloyd-​Jones, N. 412n55 Loach, K.: The Spirit of ’45 327

614   Index local elections: turnout  80, 203 local government  189–​204 and central government  79 central state intervention  201, 202–​3 and daily life  68 expenditure  80, 199–​201, 202–​3 indebtedness 200, 203 independence of  201–​2 local government bodies  56–​7 multiple elements of  190–​1 municipal electorate  193–​5, 196–​7 municipalization  192–​3 municipal trading  200–​1, 202 as political education  195–​6, 197 rationalization of  191–​3 reforms of 28 women in  197–​9 Local Government Act (1929)  201 Local Government Advancement Committee 199 Local Government Association  204 Local Government Board (LGB)  124, 200 localism 24 Local Taxation Account  199 Locke, J.  14, 253 Lockwood, D. 277 London Chamber of Commerce  510 London Naval Conference (1930)  516 Lords, see House of Lords Lords Journals 460 Louis, W.R.  521, 522 Lovell, K. 442n20 Lovell, S. 559 Lovett, W. 460 Lowell, A.L. 250n12, 257n32 Lowe, R.  124, 130, 132–​3, 134, 478, 574 Low, S. 109 Lowther, H. 87 Lucas, W.S.  522 Luddites 51 Lugard, Lord  513 Lynch, P. 408 Lyons, J.  148–​9 Macaulay, T.B.  230, 308, 509 McCallum, R.B.  405, 439 McCarthy, H. 551

McClymont, G.  327 McConnell, J. 185 McCullough, R. 113 MacDonagh, O. 22 MacDonald, A.  347, 515 MacDonald, R.  211, 239–​40, 275, 315, 447 MacDonnell Commission (1914)  125 Machiavelli, N. 374 Machinery of Government Committee  126 McHugh, D.  332, 409 Macintyre, A. 28 McKenzie, R.T.  343 McKibbin, R.  29, 206–07, 270, 277, 326, 328, 331, 340, 341–​2, 354–5, 358 Mackintosh, J. 109 Macleod, I. 523 Macmillan government  319 Macmillan, H.  283, 285–​6, 318, 321, 450, 520, 521, 522, 523, 533–​4 McPhee, W. 401 Madison, J. 374 Magna Charta Association  58 Major, J.  132, 133, 134, 322, 541, 543, 562 Malay States  513–​14, 518 Malmesbury, Lord  560, 561 Malta 519 Manchester school  436, 438 Mandelson, P.  436, 445, 451 Mandler, P.  23, 284, 286, 526, 553 manhood suffrage  55, 56, 258, 298,303, 426 Mannheim, K. 559 marketing: and political communication  444–​8 Marquand, D. 333 Marr, A. 170 Marshall, A.  72, 494 Marsh, P. 555 Martin, J. 457 Marxism  354–​5, 437 Marxism Today 326 Marx, K.  19, 254 Mass-​Observation  46 Mates, L. 332 Matthew, H.C.G.  43, 44, 70 Maud Report (1964)  203 Mau, Kenya  522–​3 Maw, J. 57 Maynooth Grant  95, 231, 308 May, T.  321, 323–​4

Index   615 Meade, J. 128 media and democracy  486–​7 and General Strike (1926)  448 and modernity  275–​6 and monarchy  213–​14 newspapers 52, 58 and political communication  438–​45 and political identity  43–​4 and political power  45 print propaganda  59 wartime censorship  74 Meibion Glyndŵr (Sons of Glyndower)  60 Melbourne, Viscount  105, 231, 248n2, 307 MENCAP (formerly Association of Parents of Backward Children)  574–​5 Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage  459 Methodist Church  229–​30 Michels, R.  257–​8 Middlemas, K. 446 Middlesbrough Liberal Association  57 Middleton, R. 127 Middleton, S. 277 Midgley, C. 459 Midgley, D. 209n29 Miliband, E.  278, 324, 326, 331, 333, 335, 342 Miliband, R.  326–​7, 338 Militant party  334, 350 military expenditure  529, 531–​3, 536–​7, 538–​9, 541 Millar, J. 247 Mill, J.S.  16, 193, 196, 479, 494 Milner, A. 312 MIND (formerly National Association for Mental Health)  575 Miners’ Strike (1984-​5)  148–​9, 320–​1 minimum wage  71, 296, 502 Ministry of Health advertising campaigns  446–​7 Ministry of Munitions  125–​6 Ministry of National Insurance  180 Minogue, K. 376 Mitchell, D. 588 Mitchell, J. 351 mixed economy  570 Modern History School, Oxford University  590–​1 modernity  272–​9 affluence and  276, 277, 278

Baldwin and  273–​4 Monarchist League of Canada  220 Monarchist League of New Zealand  220 monarchy  205–​21 Anglicans and  216 biographies  208–​9 and media  213–​14 and monarchism  214–​21 and national identity  213 Royal Archives  209 and voluntarism  577 monetarism 147 monetary policy  497, 499 Monro, C. 508 Moore, C.  320, 390–​1, 588 Moore, D.C.  402, 403, 405 Moore, M.  449–​50 Morgan, E. 175 Morgan, K. 327 Morgan, K.O.  41 Morgan, S.  429, 547 MORI 444 Mori, J.  551–​3 Morning Star 154 Morrison, H.  179, 449–​50 Morris, W.: News from Nowhere  54–​5 Morton, A. 209 Morton, H. 198 Mosley, O.  316, 346, 347, 350 Mösslang, M. 551 Moyn, S.  15, 471 Mullen, A. 550 Muller, J.-​W.  485 Mulligan, W. 546 multinational corporations  77–​8 Munich, A. 212 municipal capitalism 192n17 Municipal Corporations Act (1835)  193, 255 Municipal Corporations Act (1869)  197 Municipal Franchise Act (1858)  196 Murdoch, R.  168, 331 Murray-​Brown, J.  441 mutualism 335 Nairn, T.  205–​6, 207, 214n62, 221n85, 338, 339 Namier, L.  6, 18–​19, 22, 25, 30, 377, 591 Namier Revolution  18–​19

616   Index Napoleonic wars  492, 560–​1 Nasser, G.A.  519 National Archives  114, 587 National Assistance Act (1948)  574 National Association for Mental Health (now MIND) 575 National Coal Board  148 National Complete Suffrage Union  54 National Corporation for the Care of Old People (now Centre for Policy on Ageing)  574 National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (NCUMC, later One Parent Families, now Gingerbread)  574 National Council of Social Service (now National Council of Voluntary Organizations) 573 national debt  515 National Democratic Party  349 National Economy Act (1931)  201 National Front (NF)  352 National Government  211, 315–​16, 497 National Health Insurance  125, 572 National Health Service (NHS)  75, 76, 81, 318, 502, 565 national identity: and democracy  471 National Industrial Relations Court  144 national insurance: public funding  572 National Insurance Act (1911)  73 nationalization 262 National Labour  349 National Liberal Club  59 National Liberal Federation (NLF)  256, 257, 480 National party  350 National Party of Scotland  348 National Radical Union  250, 256 National Society of Conservative Agents (NSCA) 256 National Theatre  223 National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM) 60, 356 National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations (NUCCA)  255–​6 National Union of Miners (NUM)  148, 320–​1 National Union of the Working Classes (NUWC) 53 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS)  59–​60, 421

National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association 269, 458 Navickas, K.  454, 462, 465–​6, 467 Neidpath, J.  514, 515, 516 neo-​liberalism  29, 339, 363, 364, 500–​1 Newcastle, Duke of  248 Newcastle Papers  19 New Labour  278, 280, 325–​6, 331, 333, 335, 336, 339, 341, 342, 357, 449 and BNP  353 and Civil Service  133, 134 New Left  336–​7, 338, 357 new liberalism  23, 276 New Liberals  296 New Party  316, 346, 347 new public management (NPM) agenda  132, 134, 135, 136 New Right  336–​7, 339 News Chronicle 442 New Speenhamland  503 New Unionism  356 ‘Next Steps’ project (Ibbs Report) (1987)  132, 136 NGOs (non-​governmental organizations)  330, 571 Nicolson, H. 208 Nicolson, N. 588 Nietzsche, F.  27–​8, 374 Nigeria 513 nimbyism 90 Nineteenth Century, The 163, 165 Niskanen, W. 131 Noblemen, Clergymen, Gentlemen and Freeholders of Wiltshire  466 nonconformism  253, 262, 296 non-​governmental organizations (NGOs) 330, 571 North Briton, The 156 Northcliffe, Viscount  168, 171 Northcote, S.H.  122, 125 Northcote-​Trevelyan report (1854)  122–​4, 135 Northern Ireland devolution  186–​7, 188 Northern Ireland Parliament  178, 186 Stormont  178–​9 Northern Star, The  52, 163–​4 Northgate End Victorian Chapel Mutual Improvement Society, Halifax, West Yorkshire 239 Nossiter, T.J.  402, 403, 404, 405

Index   617 Nott, J. 540 NSPCC 571 Nuffield studies  401, 405–​6, 438, 439 No. 10 Downing Street  115 No. 10 Policy Unit  134, 540 Nuttall, J. 333 Nutting, A. 519 NUWC (National Union of the Working Classes) 53 NUWM (National Unemployed Workers’ Movement) 60, 356 NUWSS (National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies)  59–​60, 421 Nyasaland  522–​3 Nym Mayhall, L.E.  420–​1 Oakeshott, M.  16, 24–​5, 37, 369, 375 O’Brien, B. 49 Occupy movement  327 O’Connell, D. 225 O’Connor, F.  52, 53, 164, 346 O’Connor, T.P.  173 O’Donnell, G. 136 Offer, A. 332 Office for National Statistics (ONS)  503–​4 O’Gorman, F. 465 Old Age Pensions Act (1908)  296 Old Corruption  69–​70, 122, 123, 493, 526, 529–​30, 531 Old Labour  333 Olechnowicz, A. 431 oligarchies  253–​4, 257–​8 Oman, C. 591 O’Neill, T.  178, 187 One Nation Labour  334 One Parent Families (formerly National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (NCUMC), now Gingerbread) 574 opinion polling  439, 444–​5, 447, 448 Options for Change defence review (1990) 541 Osborne, S.P.  135 O’Shaughnessy, N.  438–​9, 446 Ostrogorski, M. 257 Otter, C. 78 Otte, T.G.  550–​1, 558, 559–​60

outsourcing 151 overseas aid organizations  575 Overseas (Imperial) Civil Servants  121 overseas expenditure  538–​9 Oxford Movement  309 Packard, V.  440–​1 Page Croft, H.  350 Paine, T. 335 Paisley, I. 371 Palestine 518 Pall Mall Gazette 160 Palmerston, Lord  162, 232, 248n2, 369, 371, 376, 560–​1 and democracy  362 and empire  509 and Liberalism  293 and military/​naval power  525 Palmowski, J.  595, 598 Pankhurst, C.  347–​8 Pankhurst, E. 347 para-​state employment  503–​4, 504t Parkes, J. 193n19 Parliament  83–​102 annual parliaments  52, 53, 54, 55 law-​making  84–​91 private/​public bill legislation  88–​92, 89f, 90f, 91f, 94 procedural reforms  84–​8, 86t, 91–​3 reporting facilities  84–​7 and rise of democracy  85–​7 select committee inquiry system  85n4, 93 see also House of Commons; House of Lords Parliament Act (1911)  98–​9, 116 Parliament Act (1949)  99 Parliamentary and Municipal Elections Act (1872) 395 parliamentary reform  383–​98 constitutional reform  383–​4 electoral reform  383–​4 and political modernization  389–​91, 397 procedural reform  383–​4 revisionism  390–​4 see also Reform Acts parliamentary sovereignty  175, 176, 177, 249, 376 Parnell, C.  228, 234 Parr, H. 549

618   Index Parry, J.P.  23, 36, 40, 70, 122–​3, 214–15, 269, 270, 276–7, 290, 291, 294, 303, 526, 547, 560 party membership  32–​3, 45, 62, 261, 484 Patriotic Club, London  49, 50 patriotism 24 patronage  95, 114–​15, 116, 122, 125, 133 Payling, D. 332 Pedersen, S.  7, 35 Peel, R.  22–​3, 116, 251 and Corn Laws  273 and Europe  549 and Ireland  176, 227 Tamworth manifesto  307–​8 Pelling, H.  326–​7, 402, 403, 405, 410 Pemberton, H. 333 pensions  77, 127, 565, 569, 572 Pensions Act (1908)  73 Pentonville prison  72 People Party  62, 349 People’s Charter  52, 53, 55 People’s History Museum  327 People’s March for Jobs (1981/​1983)  51 People’s War  267–​8 Perry, T. 162 personal papers: as basis of history  19 Peterhouse School  20, 35–​6, 37 Peterloo 52, 454 petitioning and demonstrating  452–​67 counter-​petitions  466 demonstrations  50, 52–​3, 453–​6, 459, 460, 461–​7 e-​petitions  456 future research  461–​7 material culture of  465 petitions  48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 452–​3, 455–​60, 461–​7 remonstrances 460 and social network analysis  467 Pickering, P. 465 Pimlott, B. 210 Pinsent, G. 114 Pitt, W., the Younger  103, 104–​5, 109, 373 Plaid Cymru  183, 185, 348, 350, 351 Plato  14, 370, 374, 377 Platt, D.C.M.  509–​10 Playfair Commission (1876)  124 Plunkett, J. 213 Pocock, J.G.A.  14, 16, 17, 21

Polanyi, K.  335, 336, 339 police forces/​policing  71, 571 Policy Unit  117, 118 political communication  434–​51 definition of 438 and marketing  444–​8 media and  438–​45 and political identity  437–​8 social sciences and  438 political ideas: and language  13–​30, 254 political identity media and  43–​4 political communication and  437–​8 political marketing  438–​9 political modernization  389–​91 political parties  247–​65 class and  264 and constituencies  255 and cult of prominent figures  251 development of term ‘party’  247–​8 and elections  248–​9 and electorate  254–​9 fringe parties  343–​59 further research  264–​5 and ideology  253–​4 linguistic turn  252–​3, 254 and parliamentary government  249–​50 party alignments  249–​50, 257 party organization  255–​6, 257 and representation  259–​61 see also Conservative party; Labour party; Liberal party political rationalism  375 Political Studies 260 Political Studies Association  260 politicians actions of  367–​72 bribery for votes  370–​1 and crisis of political history  362–​6 role in democratic regime  361–​79 stock phrases and rhetorical styles  372–​4 and truth/​image  371–​2 Pollard, A.F.  386 Pollock, F. 14 Poole, R. 454 Poor Law Amendment Act (1834)  71, 255, 492 Poor Law reform  302, 492 Pope-​Hennessy, J.  208

Index   619 popular capitalism  483, 500 popular constitutionalism  262 popular culture  436 popular liberalism  48–​9, 57 popular politics  25–​6, 48–​63 and commemoration  48, 50–​1 demonstrations  50, 52–​3, 453–​6, 459, 460, 461–​7 petitions  48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 452–​3, 455–​60, 461–​7 print culture  52 and radicalism  48 and suffrage  56 and violence  50, 60 see also Chartist movement popular sovereignty  175, 249–​50, 260 Porter, A.N.  521 positivism 262 poster campaigns  59 Post Office  79 post-​war taxation  75 poverty  72–​3, 575, 577 Powell, E.  219, 350 Powell, J. 118 power, asymmetries of  30 pragmatism 22, 24, 25 Precedent Book 114 Presbyterian Church  229, 230 press  154–​7 1 anonymity of journalists  162 and corruption  161–​2 and development of radical/​working-​class politics  163–​4 free press, emergence of  155–​6 independence of  159–​61, 170 influence of  165, 168 press barons  168 role of  154–​5, 156–​7, 158, 166–​9, 171 technology and  164–​5, 171 wartime censorship  74 see also media pressure groups  26 Price, R.  328–​9, 407 prime minister, office of  103–​19, 596–​7 biographies of prime ministers and  107–​8 changes in 116 and Civil Service  116 definition of  111–​12, 113 early history of  104–​5, 106–​9

existing literature on  106 patchiness of history of  104–​11 prime ministerial staff  117–​18 relationship with Cabinet  112–​13, 115 requirements for fuller assessment of  111–​13 role of  113, 114–​17 prime ministers biographies of  107–​8 and British Empire  115–​16 as Minister for the Civil Service  117 Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit  109, 134 Primrose League  57–​8, 256, 443 prisons 72, 407 Pritt, D.N.  353 Prittlewell petition  459 Private Office  117 private/​public acts  88–​91, 89f, 90f, 91f privatizations 76 Privy Council  105, 112 Prochaska, F. on monarchy  211, 212, 214 on welfare state  570–​1, 575, 576–​7 Prodat project  462 Progress (organization)  334 progressivism  23–​4 property-​owning democracy  476, 501 proportional representation  28 prostitution  71–​2, 235, 329 protest groups  26 protest marches  454 psychology  284–​5 public bill committees (standing committees)  93–​4 public borrowing  502 public debate  53–​4 public expenditure  103, 534, 535–​6, 535t, 539–​40, 541 Public Expenditure Survey  131–​2 Public Expenditure Survey Committee (PESC) 130 Public Health Act (1848)  71 public health issues  196, 200, 571 public opinion  260 democracy and  479–​80, 482 and devolution  185 and high politics  34, 39 ideology and  272 Irish 226

620   Index public opinion (cont.) Labour party and  331, 341 parliament and 83 petitioning and  459–​60 political communication and  436, 438, 447 political parties and  252, 260, 264 press and  156, 157–​8, 162, 165, 168–​9 and religion  226, 242 trade unions and  146, 149–​50 women and  431 public policy  83, 138 Public Records Acts  591–​2 Public Safety Democratic Monarchist White Residents  215–​16 public spending  69, 179, 318, 370, 493–​4, 495 and GDP  502, 542t Pugh, M.  354, 357, 443, 454 Pulzer, P.  344, 355 Puritanism  239–​40 Purvis, J. 421 Questions of Procedure for Ministers 114 radicalism  48, 57, 291–​2, 293, 303, 491, 493 radical thinking  253 Radical War (Scottish rising) (1820)  50–​1 railways  89, 93, 124, 150–​1 Rainbow Circle  23 Ramsden, J. 442 Rates Act (1984)  203 Rathbone, E.  485, 566 Rathbone, W. 189 Rayner, D. 132 Readman, A.  405, 439 Readman, K.S.  597, 598 Readman, P.  332, 409, 412n55 Reagan, R. 363 recessions 76 Redistribution of Seats Act (1885)  57, 256, 403 Red Toryism  334, 335 Referendum party  350, 353 Reform Acts  385, 387, 388, 394, 395 1832 (Great Reform Act)  53, 122–​3, 249, 254–​5, 291, 307, 389, 390, 392, 393, 395, 403, 463

1867 (Second Reform Act)  38, 39, 57, 95, 232, 252, 255, 303, 308, 309, 389, 391, 395, 463, 493 1884 (Third Reform Act)  57, 256, 477 1918 (Representation of the People Act)  258, 313, 478 Reform Crisis (1830-​2)  50, 53, 310 Reform League  55–​6, 57 Reid, T. 247 religion  28, 223–​44 Anglican Church  96, 216, 224, 229 and anti-​slavery campaign  232 Baptist Church  230 Christian evangelicism  493 Church National Schools  233–​4 Church of England  230, 296, 309 church rates  231 Congregational Church  230 development of permissive society  242–​3 disestablishment  99, 223–​4, 232 and education  233–​4, 235–​6 Episcopalian Church  229 Established National Church  224 Established Protestant Church  225 Evangelical Revival  229–​30 in Ireland  225–​8 Methodist Church  229–​30 nonconformism  224, 229–​32, 233–​5, 240 and political allegiance  263 political nonconformity  231, 234–​5 and political radicalization  239 Revised Prayer Book  242 secularization of British politics  236–​44 socialism and  259 Sunday schools  234, 241, 259 and temperance movement  232 tithe controversy  231 and voluntary action  232, 233–​4, 570–​1 Wesleyan Church  229–​30 Religious Census (1851)  230, 232 remonstrances 460 Rendall, J. 421 Representation of the People Act (1918) see Reform Acts republicanism 253 Rethinking Modern British Studies conference, Birmingham (2015) 332

Index   621 revisionism  390–​4, 406–​8, 553–​4 Reynolds, K. 551 Rhodes, C. 508 Rhodes, R.A.W.  133 Ricardianism 22 Richard Commission  185 Richard, I. 185 Richards, D. 134 Richardson, S.  420, 429, 459 Richmond, Admiral  516 Richmond and Gordon, Duke of  180 Riddell, S. 214n62 Riotte, T. 551 Roberts, M.  44, 408 Robertson, G. 542 Robinson, E. 333 Robinson, L.  329, 450–​1 Robinson, P. 187 Robinson, R.  509, 510, 522 Robson, W.A.  201 Roman Catholicism  457 British mainland  237, 238, 239 in England  309 in Ireland  225–​6, 237, 261–​2 Rosebery, Lord  110 Rose, J.  166–​7 Rosenbaum, M. 415 Rose, R.  106–​7 Rothermere, Viscount  315, 331 Rothfels, H. 592 Rothschild, Lord  511 Rousseau, J.-​J.  374 Rover, C. 393 Rowbotham, S. 577 Rowbottom, A.  216–​17 Rowlands, E. 181 Rowntree, B.S.  72 Royal Air Force  515 Royal Commission on Scottish Affairs (1952)  180–​1 Royal Commission on the Constitution (1969–73)  182–​3, 188 Royalist Party  218–​19 Royal Navy  514, 515 Royal Prerogative  119 Royal Sanitary Commission (1871)  189 Royal Society of St. George  219–​21

Royal Voluntary Service (RVS, formerly Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), later Women’s Royal Voluntary Service (WRVS))  573–​4 Royle, E. 269 Rubinstein, W.D.  122, 123 rural reconstruction  296 Ruskin College  327 Ruskin, J. 253 Russel, A. 162 Russell, J.  193, 230–​1, 248n2, 529–​30 Rutherford, J.  335, 338–​9 Saatchi and Saatchi (advertising agency)  441, 444, 451 St James’s Gazette 160 Salisbury, Lord  96–​7, 103, 163, 180, 195, 251, 258, 310–​11, 312, 561 and modernity  273 Salisbury/​Unionist coalition  311 Salmon, P.  291, 390, 414 Salmon Report  203 Samuel, H.L.  23 Samuel, R.  338, 598 Sandys, S. 109 Santayana, G. 585 Särlvik, B. 402 Sartori, G. 344 Saturday Review  196, 525–​6 Saunders, J. 329 Saunders, R.  362, 463, 552 Savage, M.  332, 494 Scammell, M.  446, 447 Scanlon, H. 144 Scargill, A. 148 Schengen Area  555 Schlesinger, A., Jr.  584–​5, 590, 593 Schroeder, P. 558 Schwarz, B.  42–​3 scientific socialism  262 Scotland 153 devolution  174, 176, 179–​81, 182–​5, 186, 188 Scotland Act (2012)  186 Scottish Development Department  181 Scottish Economic Planning Board  181 Scottish Enlightenment  21

622   Index Scottish Labour Party  347 Scottish Martyrs  50 Scottish National Insurance Commission (1919) 180 Scottish nationalism  339, 340 Scottish National Liberation Army  60 Scottish National Party (SNP)  62, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 261, 348, 351–​2 constituency campaigns  415 and Europe  550 Scottish Office  179–​80, 181, 183 Scottish Parliament  182, 184 Scottish Party  348 Scottish Patriots  183 Scottish rising (Radical War) (1820)  50–​1 Scott, J.C.  50 Scowen, C. 113 SDP-​Liberal Alliance  445 Seaton, J. 448 Second Boer (South African) War  480, 529, 557 Second Reform Act (1867) see Reform Acts Second World War, see World War II secret ballots  463–​4 secularism 253 Seditious Meetings Acts (1795, 1817, 1819)  456 Seeley, J.R.  17–​18, 371 Seldon, A.  106, 114, 274–​5, 553 Select Committee on Public Petitions  460–​1 self-​help movements  57 Senior Civil Service  133 70 Whitehall  115 sexuality: politics of 329 Sexual Offences Act (2000)  99 Seymour, C. 385 Shaftesbury, Lord  157, 158, 573 Shah, E. 169 share ownership  500–​1 Shawcross, W. 208 Shelter 575 Silk Commission (2011)  185 Silk, P. 185 Simms, B. 546 Simon, J. 532 Singapore  514–​16 Single Market  321 single-​member constituencies  463–​4 Six Points, see People’s Charter

Skinner, D. 322 Skinner, Q.  14, 15, 16–​17, 20, 21, 27, 254 slave trade  231, 457 Small Tenements Rating Act (1850)  196–​7 Smith, A.  230, 247, 253, 490–​1 Smith, J. 185 Smith, Lord  186 Smith, T.D.  203 SNP, see Scottish National Party social contract  145, 370 social democracy  473 Social Democratic Federation  50, 58 Social Democrat Party  62 social expenditure  535–​6 social history: and high politics  34, 37 social inequality  82 social insurance schemes  75–​6 socialism  143, 253–​4, 262, 282 and affluence  276 Christian socialism  253, 262 ethical socialism  253 scientific socialism  262 Socialist League  54–​5, 58 Socialist Workers’ Party  327 social justice  253–​4 social liberalism  324 social network analysis  467 social policy: and high politics  495 social reforms  296 social sciences  264, 438, 463 social security  75, 77, 81, 502–​3 unemployment benefits  74, 77, 298–​9, 572 social security spending  542t social services  73, 74–​5, 79, 80, 495, 572 Society for the Study of Labour History  327 Society of Certified and Associated Liberal Agents (SCALA)  256 Society of Friends of the People  50 Socrates 361 Sons of Glyndower (Meibion Glyndŵr)  60 South Africa Boer War  73, 235, 311, 512 Second Boer War  480, 529, 557 South Wales Miners’ Federation  51 South Wales Rising (1839)  51 sovereignty autonomous sovereignty  249, 260 electoral sovereignty  260

Index   623 parliamentary sovereignty  175, 176, 177, 249, 376 popular sovereignty  175, 249–​50, 260 Speaker of the Commons  92, 257 Speaker’s Conference (1944)  397 Speaker’s Conference on Devolution (1919)  188 speech-​act theory  15 Speenhamland decision (1795)  492 Spencer, H. 16 Spender, W.  178–​9 Spiegel, Der 544 stagflation  81, 131, 499 Standard, The 160 standing committees (public bill committees)  93–​4 Star, The 442 state  67–​82 central bureaucracy reforms  69–​7 1 fiscal-​military state  68–​9 intervention by  67, 70, 72, 73–​5, 127, 201, 202–​3, 493 Napoleonic-​era British state  67, 69 and national defence  68–​9 social conduct measures  71–​2 state formation: future lines of inquiry  78–​82 Victorian minimal state  67, 70, 72–​3, 78–​9, 190 see also warfare state state intervention  67, 70, 72, 73–​5, 127 Stead, P. 41 Stead, W.T.  159–​60, 162–​3, 165, 167 Stears, M.  335, 337–​8, 341 Stedman Jones, G.  41, 56, 58, 123, 253, 291, 407, 437, 576 Steele, E.D.  547 Stevens, C. 409 Steward, G. 447 Stewart, D.  156, 247 Stewart, R.  308–​9 Stockwell, A.J.  512, 517, 521 Stockwell, S. 522 Stokes, D.  405, 440 Stonehouse, J. 49 stop-​go cycle  498 Strategic Communications Unit  117, 118 Strauss, L. 366 strike action  139, 140, 144 flying pickets  148

General Strike (1926)  51, 142, 315, 448, 450, 482 Miners’ Strike (1984-​5)  148–​9, 320–​1 railway workers  275 secondary picketing  149 unofficial strikes  146 Stubbs, J. 18 Study of Parliament Group  397 subliminal advertising  440–​1 Suez Canal  510, 523 crisis (1956)  519–​21, 557 suffrage movement  26, 54, 459, 484 class and  293 manhood suffrage  55, 56, 258, 298, 303, 426 petitions 458 universal suffrage  29, 49, 61 voting system reforms  298 women’s suffrage  48, 49, 55, 56, 59–​60, 296–​7, 298, 347, 420–​2, 430, 463 suffragettes  420–​1 Sullivan, A.  83, 343 swingometer 343, 344 Taff Vale decision (1901)  480, 494 Talbot, C. 87 Tamworth Manifesto (1834)  231 Tanner, D. 327 tariff reforms  59, 103, 119, 495 Tawney, R.H.  335, 337, 338 Tawney Society  338 taxation 572 capital gains tax  73 council tax 80 death duties  73, 74 economy and  491–​2, 496 excess profits taxes  74 and French wars  69 import duties  495 income tax  77, 526 late 20th-​century cuts  77 Local Taxation Account  199 poll tax  321 post-​war  75 progressive taxation  73 super-​tax  73, 74 Victorian era 70 wartime excise taxes  74 wartime tax reforms  75

624   Index Taylor, A. 214 Taylor, A.J.P.  6, 353–​4 Taylor, M.  41, 346, 387–​8, 407 temperance movement  232–​3 Temperance Society  232 Temple, W.  241, 242, 564 Test and Corporation Act (1828)  230 Thackeray, D.  408–​9 Thane, P.  422, 559 Thatcher governments  202–​3, 500–​1 Thatcherism  24, 37, 243, 306–​7, 437, 541 Thatcher, M.  103, 132, 243, 251, 272, 320–​1, 353, 363, 376 and defence  540 economic liberalism  320, 321 and Europe  549 and ideology  283, 286 and National Front  352 and political communication  434 and trade unions  148, 151 Theakston, K.  106, 108, 129 Theatre Workshop  358 Theebaw, King of Burma  510 Third Reform Act (1884) see Reform Acts Thomas, G. 409 Thomas, J.  331, 446 Thompson, D. 419 Thompson, E.P.  34, 335, 339, 388, 407, 576 Thompson, J. 331 Thompson, P.  267–​8 Thomson, Lord  167 Thomson, M.  284–​5 Thorneycroft, P. 534 Thorpe, A.  329–​30, 549–​50 Thucydides  30, 378, 583–​4 Tichborne Claimant  58, 459 Tichborne Gazette 58 Tichborne News and Anti-​Oppression Journal: A Weekly Newspaper Advocating Fair Play for Every Man 58 Tickner, L. 454 Tilly, C.  455, 457–​8, 462 Times, The  157, 159, 160, 162, 171 Tiratsoo, N.  267–​8 Titmuss, R.  568, 569 Tocqueville, Alexis de  230, 362, 585 Today 169 Todd, S.  270, 277, 332

Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival  51 Tomlinson, J. 285 Tooze. A.  490, 505 total war  74–​5 Toulmin Smith, J.  196 Tout, T.F.  18 Townsend, P. 575 Toye, R.  282–​3, 333, 548 Trade Disputes Act (1906)  140, 141 Trades Union Congress (TUC)  51, 141 Trade Union Act (1871)  140 trade unions  137–​53, 356 and agency employment  151 arguments against  138–​9 and closed shop  139, 140, 149 collective action  139 collective bargaining  71, 141, 144, 151 collective laissez-​faire  141, 143 and Conservatives  138, 139–​40, 141, 142, 144–​6, 147, 149, 150–​1 craft mentality  139, 143 and democracy  486 GCHQ trade union membership ban  150–​1 industrial action  147–​8 and Labour party  142–​3, 145–​6, 151, 152–​3 and law  138 membership  149–​50, 501 national wages policy  143 and outsourcing  151 picketting  140, 147, 148, 149 power of 76 reforms  143–​6, 149 shop stewards  144 Taff Vale decision (1901)  480, 494 weakening of 501 and Winter of Discontent  147–​8, 501 see also strike action transnationalism 151 Transport and General Workers’ Union 144 Treasury (Exchequer)  115 Central Statistical Office  128, 129 Economic Section  128, 129 inter-​war period  126–​8 and local expenditure  80 Organisations and Methods division  129 prime minister, office of  116–​17

Index   625 and reform of Civil Service  124, 126 and welfare initiatives  73 see also First Lords of the Treasury Trevelyan, C.E.  122–​4, 125, 135 Trevelyan, C.P.  23 Trevelyan, G.M.  18, 385–​6 Trevor-​Roper, H.  591 Trollope, A. 157 Tully, J.  26–​8 Turner, J.  6, 554 Turner, M.J.  523–​4 Twentieth Century British History  592 UK Independence Party (UKIP)  48, 50, 62, 350, 353, 415, 550 UK Uncut  327 Ullman, T. 450 Ulster Solemn League and Covenant (1912) 458 Ulster Unionists  348, 350 unemployed workers’ movement  49, 51 unemployment  72, 497, 498 unemployment benefits  74, 77, 298–​9, 572 unemployment insurance  127, 566, 572 Unger, R.  27, 28 Union between Great Britain and Ireland (1801) 116 Unionism  311, 312, 313 Union of South Africa  512 United Britons/​United Englishmen  50 United Kingdom Alliance  232 Unity Theatre  358 universal suffrage  29, 49, 61 utilitarianism 16, 22 vagrancy  71–​2 venereal diseases  72, 235 Vernon, J.  35, 264, 366, 392–​3, 407, 437, 465 Victoria, Queen  210, 212, 219, 419 Vieira, R.  88, 102 Vincent, J. 7n16, 43, 293, 310, 363, 378, 405 on elections  402, 403, 408 Vinen, R. 272 voluntary organizations  571, 573, 574, 577 civil service and  125 democracy and  485

ideology and  283–​4 Labour party and  336 and monarchy  221 popular politics and  54 religion and  232, 233–​4, 570–​1 Wahrman, D. 393 Waldegrave, W.  371, 374–​5 Wald, K.D.  405 Wales Anglican Church in  229 devolution  174, 176, 179, 181–​2, 183–​5 protest marches, South Wales  51 Welsh Assembly  184, 185 Welsh church disestablishment  99 Welsh Liberal party  240 Welsh nationalists  62 Welsh Office  181 Wallace Brothers (finance house)  511 Walpole, R.  20, 104, 107, 109, 160 Walsh, J. 248 War Crimes Act (1991)  99 Ward, G. 146 Ward, M. 199 warfare  525–​43 Boer War  73, 235, 311, 512 Crimean War  525, 556, 561 Falklands War  321, 527 fiscal-​security compromise  528, 529–​30 Gulf Wars  527 House of Commons approval  597 Korean War  533 Second Boer (South African) War  480, 529, 557 security-​fiscal compromise  525–​7, 529, 530 total war  74–​5 see also World War I; World War II warfare state  67, 76, 128, 499–​500 Washington Conference (1921)  514 Waters, C. 448 Waters, F. 442 water supply  80, 89, 124 Watt, D.C.  546 Wavell, Lord  518 Webb, B.  356, 589 Webb, S.  347, 356 Webster, A.  510–​11 Weekly Review of the Affairs of France 160

626   Index welfare state  262–​3, 298, 499, 528, 529, 563–​80 free school meals  571–​2 national differences  579–​80 origin of term  563 post-​war  75–​7 use of term  564 Wellington, Duke of  109, 160, 226, 307 Wesleyan Church  229–​30 Westminster Review 189 Weyl, W. 337 Wheeler-​Bennett, J.  208 Whig party  16, 18, 19–​20, 53, 251, 288–​91, 307 see also Liberal party Whitehouse, M.  269, 458 White, S. 335 Whyte, J. 178 Wickham-​Jones, M.  333 Wiener, M.  505, 506 Wilkes, J.  156, 160 Wilkinson, E.  331–​2, 450 William IV, King  307 Williams, B. 30 Williamson, J. (Baron Ashton)  97 Williamson, P.  42–3, 44–5, 46, 211, 212, 215, 274, 283, 314 Williams, R.  213, 338, 436–​7 Willis’s Rooms meeting (1859)  291 Wilmott, C. 591 Wilson, H.  116, 118, 143, 183, 271, 276, 306, 371–​2, 522 Windelsham, Lord (D. Hennessy)  440–​1 Windscheffel, A.  34–​5, 408 Winter of Discontent  147–​8, 501 Wittgenstein, L. 406 Wolffe, J. 212 women and campaigns for social legislation  578–​9 and Chartism  52, 55 and local government administration of state social services  577–​8 and philanthropy  576–​7 and poverty  577 suffrage  48, 49, 55, 56, 59–​60, 296–​7, 298, 347, 420–​2, 430, 463 women’s movements, history of  423 see also women’s politics Women’s Co-​Operative Guild (WCG)  578

Women’s Institute  54, 429 Women’s Library  327 Women’s Party  347–​8 women’s politics  417–​33 future research  430–​3 historiographical trends  418–​25 and liberal democracy  427–​8 and political history  425–​7 and political parties  422–​3 working-​class politics  424 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)  50, 60, 421 Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS; later Women’s Royal Voluntary Service, WRVS; recently Royal Voluntary Service, RVS)  573–​4 Woodward, E.L.  383, 584, 590, 594 Woolf, L. 481 Worcester, R. 443 workhouse system  71, 72–​3 Working Families Tax Credit  503 Workmen’s Compensation Acts  125 World War I:  73–​4, 525 and changes to Cabinet  119 and Civil Service  125–​6 Conservatives and  313 Empire and  512–​13 Labour and  297 Liberals and  297 World War II:  525 Civil Service  116 Empire and  515–​17 and GDP  527 rationing system  75 and social security  74–​5 Worley, M. 329 Wring, D.  331, 446, 449 Yorkshire Association  457 Young Britons organization  259 Young, H. 550 Young, J.  553–​4 Young, M.  338, 448, 567 Ziegler, P. 208 Zimmern, A. 564