Just like last year’s book, Lords of Finance about the bankers role in the 1920’s Crash and Great Depression, David Marquand’s new book, Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy looks at Labour’s leapfrog of the Liberals back in the 1920’s and the years since is also well timed as we are in the middle of a General Election campaign that might see the Liberal Democrats emerge as the second party of UK politics ahead of Labour.
There are plenty of caveats of course such as the First Past the Post System favours a two party system, no one knows the true strength of Lib Dems new support or how tactical voting will play out plus the TV debates have skewed the Election coverage meaning we are now having a political beauty contest.
But David Marquand writing about the similarities between then and now in the Independent said ‘What does this complex story tell us about the politics of 2010? What parallels are there between the political actors of 1923-4 and those of today?
Three stand out. The most obvious is the parallel between David Cameron and Baldwin. Indeed Cameron sometimes seems to be trying, quite consciously, to act the part of Baldwin Mark II – emollient, inclusive, honourable and, above all, reassuring. His penchant for cycling to work (with photographers in tow) is a 21st century equivalent of Baldwin's penchant for striding along country lanes, clad in a baggy tweed suit (and also with photographers in tow). Before the First World War, the Conservatives had been the nasty party, using their majority in the Lords to throw out the Budget in 1909, and then flirting with armed rebellion in Ulster.
Like Cameron, Baldwin was trying to lay the ghost of Conservative nastiness and to speak in a carefully crafted contemporary idiom instead of the grandiloquent language of the past. His ostentatiously honourable refusal to countenance an anti-Labour manoeuvre in early 1924 was part of that strategy. But the parallel mustn't be pushed too far. Baldwin had far stronger cards in his hand than Cameron has. He was Prime Minister at the start of the story and leader of the largest party throughout. It was far easier for him to contain Ramsay MacDonald's challenge than for Cameron to contain Clegg's. All he had to do was wait for Labour to run into trouble, whereas Cameron has to strain every nerve to recapture the ground lost to the Liberal Democrats.
Which is where the second parallel comes into the story: that between Brown's Labour Party and Asquith's Liberals. Asquith had been a hugely successful Prime Minister. His Government had been the greatest reforming government since Gladstone's in 1868. Yet after 1918, and the arrival of universal male and partial female suffrage, all this availed him nothing. He appeared pompous, boring and hopelessly out of joint with the times. The causes that made him – taming the House of Lords, Irish Home Rule, Free Trade – no longer resonated. He was like a whale, beached by the tides of history. He seemed out of tune, a ghost from another age.
The same was true – in spades – of the Liberal Party. It embodied a great tradition of individual freedom and equal opportunity going back to John Locke and John Stuart Mill. The Whig ancestors of the Liberal Party had carried the great Reform Act of 1832. Liberal governments had broken the Anglican stranglehold on the ancient universities, reformed local government, abolished the sale of Commissions in the Army and almost secured Home Rule for Ireland. Gladstone, the greatest peacetime Prime Minister in our history, was a Liberal. So was Lloyd George, the founder of the welfare state and the second greatest wartime Prime Minister. Liberal thinkers such as TH Green, the philosopher, LT Hobhouse, the father of British sociology and JA Hobson, the precursor of Keynesian economics, had dominated the national conversation.
But the liberal ideal perished in the trenches and mass mobilisations of 1914-1918 and the class conflicts that followed. The age of the individual gave way to the age of the collective. The still, small voice of liberal individualism was drowned out by the big battalions of labour and capital. Despite occasional spurts of intellectual energy, the Liberal Party was hopelessly at sea in a mass society whose politics were dominated by the rival collectivisms of paternalist conservatism and state-centred socialism. It was consumed by factional disputes – backward-looking Asquithian grandees versus Lloyd Georgite adventurers – that meant nothing to the electorate.
If this sounds familiar, it is. In the intervening 90 years, the wheel has come full circle. The age of the collective is over. A new kind of individualism is in the ascendant. The mass society has disappeared; its preoccupations have disappeared with it. The great liberal issues that seemed quaintly archaic in the 1920s – citizenship rights, the devolution of power, individual freedom – have returned to the centre of the stage. The state-centred collectivism which the rising Labour Party offered in place of liberalism, and to which it still obstinately cleaves, is patently a busted flush, just as liberalism was in the 1920s. And, again like the Liberals of those days, Labour is consumed by personal bickering that means nothing to anyone outside its inner circle.
Against that background, the third of my parallels – that between the Liberal Party of today and the Labour Party of the 1920s – falls into place. The Liberal party of that era was sick, but it did not die of its own accord. It was Labour, and above all Labour's leader, Ramsay MacDonald, that despatched it to the knacker's yard. Labour's strategy had two prongs. First, it sought to re-draw the map of politics: to prove that the old battle between Liberals and Conservatives was over; that a new battle between socialism and capitalism had taken its place; and that in that new battle, Labour was ranged equally against both the old parties. Secondly, however, Labour also sought to show that it was the heir of the old Liberal Party, that what MacDonald had once called "advanced and sturdy radicals" now belonged in the Labour Party, that democratic socialism in fact encompassed liberalism.
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