Tory-Liberal Parallels with the Fox-North Coalition

There is a rather strange and embittered article in the Guardian today by Andrew Adonis, the former transport minister. He draws parallels between the new ‘Liberal Conservative’ administration and the Fox-North coalition which held power between April and December 1783.

The Tory Lord North, who famously lost America, formed an administration with the radical Whig Charles James Fox, after defeating the government of Lord Shelburne. It was an unlikely pairing and was bitterly opposed by George III who, among other things, was appalled by the influence of the libertine Fox on his son and heir, George Augustus Frederick. Though Fox and North were the prime movers, the prime minister was actually William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, Third Duke of Portland. Undermined by its own contradictions and lack of support, it collapsed before the year was out, making way for two decades of political dominance by William Pitt the Younger.

Though there are undoubtedly major hurdles ahead for Britain’s new administration, especially over policy, parallels with the North-Fox coalition do seem rather forced. The likes of Nick Clegg and David Laws, for example, do not seem hugely different in their economic and social outlook to the likes of David Cameron and George Osborne (Clegg is on record as saying that social democracy is dead). None are tainted by failure as yet (unlike North), nor does anyone resemble the colourful loose cannon that was Fox. They are not propping up a lame-duck PM, like the Duke of Portland. And The Queen seems happy enough with the arrangement. So it seems odd that the normally generous Adonis, the arch pragmatist, intelligent student of history and a former active member of the Liberal Democrats’ forerunner, the SDP, should see such similarities.

But there are resonances he has missed. The Duke of Portland was of Dutch extraction and educated at Westminster, like Clegg; and both North and Fox were schooled at Eton College. The grip of such schools on the body politic remains almost as great at the beginning of the 21st century as at the end of the 18th. Until very hard questions are asked about the nation’s education system and acted upon, it will remain so.

A Box of Electoral Reform Tricks

Watching the BBC’s coverage of the General Election, it was interesting to note that the two most eloquent commentators – Vernon Bogdanor and Peter Hennessy – were both historians. It looks like we may be on the verge of major reform of the UK voting system, currently, according to Hennessy, a ‘rigged market in an era of economic deregulation’. It is not so much that a reformed system would introduce fairness, but that it would mirror an increasingly fractured and fractious society. It would certainly not offer a promise of stability as it would be likely to open still further the fissures between the nations.

Bear in mind that the BNP got almost 70,000 more votes than the SNP (who now have six MPs) and that UKIP garnered almost one million votes, over twice that of the SNP and five times that of the Democratic Unionist Party (who now have eight MPs). The Greens, for whom this was supposedly a ‘breakthrough’ election, got their first MP, though they were backed nationally by less than 300,000 voters. If reform goes ahead, there will be many more ‘breakthroughs’ next time, though considerably less of the UK’s much-lauded political stability. Are we about to open a Pandora’s box?

The Long Constitutional View

The upsetting of the political apple cart that followed the first of the televised General Election debates of the party leaders (the second is screened live tonight on Sky1), has left political commentators floundering. Though it is possible we may be entering a period of profound political change, it is noticeable how few historians have been called upon to comment on the potential ramifications.

That’s one reason why Ben Wilson’s excellent volume What Price Liberty: How Freedom Was Won and Is Being Lost (Faber) is such an important and timely read. Apart from being a riveting and elegant survey of Britain’s constitutional changes over the centuries, it also reminds us of what the historian brings to the political party; a mindset fixed on the long view rather than the fripperies of the immediate.

‘We learn about liberty by experience,’ he writes, ‘and it gets its value and force from the experience and stories of people living in the past, contending with real issues. I do not mean history here as a static thing which hands us down precious artefacts that we must not sully, or indeed as desiccated morality tales. I mean it as a radical and dynamic force which we can draw upon to formulate and give expression to our own desires and grievances.’

There is certainly plenty of the latter around, but not a lot of consideration of our past political conflicts. One lesson of history is that we should be cautious about the British people’s apparent desire for change. Even Margaret Thatcher, the most radical of modern British premiers, thought them ‘a difficult people to move’.

Ben Wilson will be writing on the 18th-century constitution for the June edition of History Today, by which time the political settlement may be more apparent. Until then, read his book.

The State of the Tory Nation

Age has neither withered nor mellowed Norman Stone, described as ‘Lady Thatcher’s favourite historian’ in the headline to his piece in yesterday’s Evening Standard. The former Oxford Professor has spent the last 13 years at Bilkent University in the Turkish capital Ankara, writing a brilliantly concise and idiosyncratic history of the First World War and a newly published and very personal history of the Cold War. But he occasionally emerges to comment upon British politics and never fails to entertain.

He argues that the ‘Dianified’ Conservative Party of David Cameron is unworthy of holding office and should ‘let a new Lib-lab coalition take the responsibility’ for cleaning up Britain’s economic and social travails. Prof Stone’s Tory vision is rather at odds with the Notting Hill modernisers: ‘A real Conservative Party would just promise to put an end to the stupid vexations we have to put up with,’ he writes.

‘ Does anyone really want to live in a country where the government has the power to stop people from smoking in private clubs? Or where the perishable rubbish is collected every two weeks (in Istanbul they collect rubbish twice a day, because otherwise the cats scratch open the bags; and since we are on the subject, if an able-bodied young man started begging, he would be honour-killed and quite right, too; the begging slot is reserved for old women who deserve it).’

Hard to see Norm’s policies being much of a basis for negotiations with the Lib Dems should a hung Parliament arise, but a Conservative Party led by the Grand Vizier Boris Johnson may be interested in the lessons of Turkish social policy.

On the subject of the crisis in the Conservative Party as it approaches the General Election on May 6th, I picked up a book titled Is Conservatism Dead?, published in 1997 and co-authored by the Tory MP David ‘two brains’ Willetts (who thinks it isn’t, of course) and the political philosopher, former Thatcherite and all-round pessimist John Gray (who thinks it is). Gray blames the Conservative Party’s embrace of neo-liberalism for the demise of the Western world’s most successful political party:

‘The hegemony of the Conservative Party, exercised in British politics for more than a century and a half, depended on its skill in renewing a particular kind of social order. Generations of Tory statecraft bound the Conservative Party by unnumbered threads to institutions and interests central in the life of the nation. Its dominance in national politics reflected its success in building and protecting networks that linked it with centres of power in the country at large. The hegemony of the Conservative Party stood on its successful construction of a Tory Britain. The effect of nearly 20 years of New Right policies, in conjunction with vast changes in the global economy, has been to blow over that construction.’

Margaret Thatcher was anything but a Conservative, having much more in common with the old Manchester Liberals. We won’t know until May 7th, but how ironic if the modern incarnation of the Liberal Party was to be the greatest beneficiary of her legacy?

The Pre-Reform Constitution in Britain

As the General Election campaigns fires up and the electorate garners unfeasible promises from its aspiring masters, a fascinating article from Diana Spearman published in History Today in 1955 which warns us of the perils of short-termism.

Diana Spearman explains the deep complexities of the pre-Victorian political landscape and electoral system in The Pre-Reform Constitution in Britain

Where are the Political Roots?

Mark Mazower, the British-born professor of history at Columbia University in New York, writes an interesting review of Richard Evans’s recent book Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge University Press). In the New Republic piece, Mazower makes the point that many British historians have been moved to study other countries’ past because they ‘find the stability of modern political life in Britain less noteworthy than the radical instability of the world of fascism and totalitarianism. Why bother with Oswald Mosley—a study in failure—when the Nazis give you the real thing?’

That may not be the case for much longer. The forthcoming general election may herald a period of instability in British politics, the consequences of which may be troubling. In part, the current uncertainty surrounding British politics and public dissatisfaction with the major political parties stems – as the historian Jeremy Black claimed last night at the launch of his 98th (98th!!!) book The Politics of World War Two (SAU) – from their abandonment of a historical context, the desperate desire to seem modern and not to call upon their ideological roots. For this and other reasons, Mazower claims that Evans’ study will be read as ‘a paean to a time when history’s public role could be taken for granted. This is no longer true, at least in Britain. And perhaps this is another, sadder, reason why so many British historians find their warmest reception abroad, not least in the United States, where history still seems to matter’.