[November 1996]
On the face of it the 1920s were an exceptional period in the history of British politics. The decade saw the emergence of the Labour Party as a possible and actual party of government for the first time, while the Conservative Party established a position of electoral dominance which has persisted to the present day. Squeezed in between these two political players, the Liberal Party, inheritor of the Whig tradition, which had in various guises dominated British government from the 1830s, was practically banished from the political map. In addition, Britain experienced increasing waves of industrial militancy—continuing and building on the rise in mass unionism and syndicalism of the pre-war period—which culminated in the general strike of 1926, the first and—thus far—only such event in British history. In Ireland, a new political party—the revolutionary nationalist Sinn Fein—completely supplanted the more moderate Irish Nationalists in the 1918 general election; and in 1921, after a bitter and bloody campaign, Britain finally ceded formal political control over its oldest colony (or at least the greater part of it). In 1920 the Communist Party of Great Britain was formed.
Thus in Britain, the country of conservative politics and political stability par excellence, the immediate post-war decade was a rare period of political shocks and re-alignments. The essential features of the parliamentary political system that emerged—Conservative Party dominance, occasional bursts of Labour government [1], the marginal position of the Liberals—persisted for much of the rest of the century (although it has been creaking increasingly ominously over he last 20 years, a sign perhaps of another period of re-alignment ahead). It would appear therefore that the 1920s can be regarded as something of watershed in British politics. Yet speaking in Parliament in 1928 Anthony Eden could declare: ‘We have never had democratic government in this country and I venture to suggest to Honourable members opposite that we shall never have it. What we have done in all progress of reform and evolution is to broaden the base of oligarchy.’ [2]
So what are we to make of the 1920s? A fundamental re-alignment of British politics? Or merely a ‘broadening of the base of oligarchy’ in which, it is implied, while the surface features may change the solid core remains essentially unaltered? The rest of what follows is an attempt to answer this question.
It is a notable fact of British history that the two main parties of the latter half of the nineteenth century can both date their origin in their modern form to a single political event. [3] It was the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 which lead to the split in the Tory Party between the followers of Disraeli, who constituted directly the continuity of the old Tory Party, and those of Peel, who, with their fusion with the Whigs in 1859, resulted in the formation of the Liberal Party in its modern form.
The period following the political crisis of the 1840s saw the domination of the Whig-Liberal tradition in British politics. Indeed, from 1832 to 1885 the Liberals, and before them the Whigs, won the vote in 12 out of the 13 general elections held in that time. When note is made of the eclipse of the Liberals in the parliamentary politics of the 1920s then it is against this backdrop of nineteenth-century supremacy that the phenomenon must be measured. However, it is central to any analysis of British politics to take note of the fact that the Strange Death of Liberal England was not the result of some short term or shock event but the end point of a long cycle of Liberal decline that had begun almost from the point that the party in its modern form had been founded. The highest percentage of the vote that the Liberal Party has ever gained was in 1859—the year of its foundation: its share of the vote has been in overall decline ever since. So whatever the effect of, say, the First World War or the split between Asquith and Lloyd George on the electoral fortunes of Liberalism they were not the precursors to its electoral decline, since this had already been underway for over half a century. The period of Liberal government of 1906-1915—its last as a government in its own right—was not a halcyon period of Liberal belle époque but rather as one put it ‘the dying spasm of an already mortally wounded beast.’ [4]
This long term decline of Liberalism is the key to an understanding of the political processes which came to fruition in the 1920s. Liberalism’s decline was at the expense of the rise of the Conservative Party as the party of establishment and reaction; and it was the political vacuum created by the decline of the Liberals that the Labour Party was to fill. In order to unearth the root of this decline it is necessary to examine briefly the social and economic course of development of Britain in the nineteenth century, and in particular initially that of the third quarter of that century—a period which, because of its central importance in the formation of modern British politics, Tom Nairn once called ‘the fateful meridian’. [5]
This particular passage of British history was marked by unparalleled British economic dominance on a world scale. It was also, as a consequence, the period of laissez-faire and economic liberalism par excellence, dogmas for which the repeal of the Corn Laws was a crucial harbinger. Eric Hobsbawm has summarised Britain’s position in the world economy at that time as one in which ‘both developed and undeveloped sectors of the world had an equal interest in working with and not against the British economy. [...] Many underdeveloped countries had virtually no one except Britain to sell to, since Britain was the only modern economy.’ [6]
This period of British development—free trade empire founded on British economic supremacy—coincided with the heyday of Liberalism’s dominance within domestic politics. But, paradoxically, even at this very point, the seeds that were to undermine the international dominance of British capitalism and which were to cut the ground from under the feet of Liberalism were already beginning to germinate. Precisely through its leading economic position Britain itself was responsible—through the mechanism of the export of capital goods and economic technique—for the fostering of a process of industrialisation in a number of key countries. Once they had taken what they needed from Britain, these countries—in particular Germany and the United States—began to outstrip Britain in terms of economic performance. ‘From then [i.e. from the end of the 1880s] on Britain was one of a group of great industrial powers, but not the leader of industrialisation. Indeed, among the industrial powers it was the most sluggish and the one that showed most obvious signs of relative decline.’ [7]
It is this period of decline, manifest from the ‘great depression’ of 1873 and onwards—and not the golden age of Pax Britannica that had preceded it—that produced the symbols and ideological paraphernalia of ‘Empire’ in its classical and familiar form: formal demarcation of colonies (‘colouring the map of the world pink’) and the ideology and sloganising of ‘jingoism’. [8] The party that is most closely associated with this ideology is of course not the Liberal Party but that of Conservatism. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century Britain ‘exchanged the informal empire over most of the underdeveloped world for the formal empire of a quarter of it.’ [9] The point is that the development of the British Empire in this form—and the triumphalist imperial demagogy accompanying it—was a symbol not of the strength of the British economy, but rather of its weakness.
In terms of the British economy’s relationship with the rest of the world a very important shift occurred at this point: ‘As her industry sagged, her finance triumphed, her services as a shipper, trader and intermediary in the world’s system of payment became more indispensable. Indeed, if London was ever the real economic hub of the world, the pound sterling its foundation, it was between 1870 and 1913.’ [10] As Britain’s manufacturing base became increasingly less competitive in comparison to its rivals British investment abroad began to reach levels equivalent to investment in Britain itself from the 1870s on, and eventually overtook it. The answer to the perennial question of why British industry became less and less competitive over this period in relation to its rivals is that it had less need to: the balance of the economy could be increasingly maintained by other means. [11] Historically, the party which represented the interests of the magnates and financiers who were to play an increasingly central role in the economy through this process was not that of the Whig-Liberal tradition but that of the Conservative Party. [12] The shifting of the centre of gravity of the British economy from manufacturing to the City coincided with the shift of the political balance of power from Liberalism to Conservatism.
But if it was the shifts in the orientation of the British economy that laid the foundation of the undermining of British Liberalism, it was the perennial problem of Ireland that finally tipped the political balance. Just as Tory dominance was shattered over the issue of Catholic Emancipation in 1830, Ireland was again to become the thorn in the side of British party political fortunes once Gladstone had been converted to Home Rule for Dublin. The previous period had already seen Conservatism crystallise out into the stable social bloc that is still recognisable today; once Ireland began to dominate the parliamentary stage again the Conservative logic of financier politics and an imperialist state finally pushed Liberalism into the political abyss. It was the split between Gladstone and Chamberlain over Home Rule that bolstered the Unionist ascendancy which was ushered in with the close of the century.
The working classes of Britain had in the first half of the nineteenth century engaged in successive cycles of popular revolt and rebellion, running the gamut of political forms from Jacobinism, Luddism and Owenism through to the great Chartist movement of the 1830s and 40s; but by 1848 this chapter of working class history had been firmly closed. The pinnacle of Liberalism’s ascendancy and British economic dominance coincided with an unprecedented period of quiescence between employer and employed which was itself fuelled by the very economic conditions of relative affluence in which it occurred. The capitalist class ‘now felt rich and confident enough’ [13] to afford such changes as a move away from lengthening hours and shortening wages to facilitate profits, and subjected themselves to the rigours of, for example, the 1847 Ten Hours Act (initially in the cotton industry but by example increasingly elsewhere) and the 1867 factory legislation. This period of relative peace between the classes had been ushered in by the repeal of the Corn Laws, which in practical terms for the urban poor meant little more and little less than cheap food.
The political corollary of these developments was the 1867 Reform Act, which began the process of significantly increasing the working class franchise, opening up the way to the modern electoral system which, in essence, involves the political parties competing amongst themselves for the capture of the allegiance of the working class.
Within these processes there arose in the 1860s and 70s a layer of skilled workers—an ‘aristocracy of labour’—who enjoyed sufficient material and social privileges to separate their outlook from the mass of the working population. It was out of this stratum of society that the nascent modern trade union movement emerged. These ‘craft’ trade unions (as opposed to the trade unionism of the Owenite period—‘all embracing in its organisation and idealistic in its political philosophy’ [14]) were explicitly not ‘socialist’. As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, the relative affluence of those involved meant that: ‘There were no socialists to dream of a new society. There were trade unions, seeking to exploit the laws of political economy in order to create a scarcity of their kind of labour and thus increase their members’ wages.’ [15] It is natural, then, given this background, that the early British trade union movement should initially seek political representation through Liberalism rather than through an independent political voice. Even the broadening of the trade union movement through mass trade unionism (the ‘new unionism’), a trend that increasingly gathered pace after the great dock strike of 1889, was not sufficient to break the labour leaders form Liberalism, a state of affairs that in 1894 led Frederick Engels to declare in exasperation: ‘One is indeed driven to despair by these English workers with their sense of imaginary national superiority, with their essentially bourgeois ideas and viewpoints, with their “practical” narrow mindedness, with the parliamentary corruption which has [...] infected the leaders.’ [16] The contrast with the rest of Europe is striking: at the time Engels was writing Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Belgium and Austria all had independent socialist parties with mass following.
This situation in Britain was not to last long, however; although it is the case that the trade union-Liberal alliance was broken not so much at the volition of the labour leaders but by the actions of the employers and the government. It was the defeat of the engineers’ strike of 1897 and the government-inspired Taff Vale judgement of 1901—in the context of an already waning Liberalism—that finally prompted the formation of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) by the TUC in 1901. We should note, however, Perry Anderson’s judgement that, although the LRC opened up the way for an eventual breach in the ‘Lib-Lab’ compact, the role it played initially was that of a ‘modest outrider of Liberalism, negotiating for a few seats with it.’ [17]
It was the industrial militancy of the immediate pre-First World War period—and crucially the development of a tradition of revolutionary syndicalism—that finally broke labour’s attachment to Liberalism. The special conference of the Labour Party in 1918—which approved the organisational form and constitution of the party that survived almost up until the present day—established Labour in its modern and familiar twentieth-century form; and it is with the arrival of the Labour Party in this form that the last piece of the political jigsaw of the of the twentieth century slots into place. However, we should note that although 1918 represented a definitive formal break with Liberalism, Labour succeeded in inheriting a great deal of Liberalism’s ideological baggage. To stretch Gwyn Alf Williams’ memorable characterisation, Labour, ‘which had struggled to life within the Liberal shell, was still the child, even if a bastard child’, of Liberalism. [18] It should be noted that the first act of the new Labour Party was the agreement of a secret electoral agreement with the Liberals, while practically the last act of the last Labour government we have seen was the conclusion of a parliamentary pact with Liberalism. The first Labour Members of Parliament proper were elected in 1906 on the back of a Liberal landslide, prompting James Hinton’s remark that ‘the new Labour Party had arrived on the political scene not as the grave-digger of Liberalism, but as an integral part of a great Liberal revival.’ [19] The talismanic figures of post-Second World War Labour Party policy—William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes—were themselves Liberals. This lingering attachment between Labourism and Liberalism should perhaps not surprise us for, as Anderson points out, post-First World War Labourism ‘inherited the space left by Liberalism without ever having to engage in a direct conquest with it’. [20]
We are now in a position to summarise the events described above and evaluate their significance. The shifts in the party political alignments that came to fruition in the 1920s are clearly not the result of some short-term event [21] but rather have deep and structural roots in the changing patterns of the relationship between the British economy and the wider world, and in the impact of those patterns on political and social structure of Britain itself. These roots stretch back into the nineteenth century and are inextricably linked to the particular nature of Britain as the first, and thus for a period the only, industrial nation of note. The heyday of British international economic dominance from 1846 to 1873 and the halcyon era of Whig-Liberal political dominance of 1832 to 1886 are inseparably bound together. But during this period the factors that were to undermine British economic hegemony and Liberal political supremacy were already taking root. After the Home Rule crisis of 1886 it was the Conservative Party—the natural repository of all that is archaic and reactionary in British political culture—that emerged as the dominant party of establishment and order. This passage from Liberal to Conservative ascendancy mirrors both the slippage of the British economy’s international position of unchallenged dominance to a period of increasing international competition and the shift of the centre of gravity of the British economy from manufacturing to international finance.
This transfer of the balance of political power occurred in the context of a broadening of the base of organised labour through the rise of ‘new unionism’—particularly from 1889 onwards; and it was the Conservative reaction to this development, in the face of an already mortally wounded Liberalism, that prompted the labour leaders, however reluctantly, finally to seek an independent political voice. Thus organised labour began a slow process of breaking with Liberalism, a process only consummated definitively with the establishment of the Labour Party in its modern form in 1918. But modern Labour was born with a strong and congenital Liberal inheritance: it was not so much that Labourism displaced Liberalism but that it reluctantly filled the political vacuum created through Liberal default. This heritage weighed heavy on Labour: it was never explicitly ‘socialist’ in either policy or programme, and, as the two periods of 1920s Labour government clearly indicate, it was a party not remotely interested in a challenge to the established order of a capitalist Britain. As Ralph Miliband noted: ‘Of political parties claiming socialism to be their aim, the Labour Party has always been one of the most dogmatic—not about socialism but about the parliamentary system.’ [22]
We can now return to the question posed at the start of this essay: for all the manifest changes in the landscape of British party politics that arose in the 1920s, to what degree had there been as a result a fundamental shift in the nature of the British political system? An answer to this question may perhaps be indicated through a superficial comparison between twentieth-century Britain and the rest of continental Europe: while the latter was ravaged by revolution, fascism, periodic economic collapse, national occupation and national break-up, Britain arrives at the end of our turbulent century virtually unmarked by its rigours: its archaic political and civil structures intact, its chauvinist and jingoistic national ideology still as pristine as it is out of touch with contemporary reality and backward looking. It is instructive that of all the great European royal houses that entered the twentieth century it is the British one alone that remains at its close: intact and still central to Britain’s constitutional structure and sense of national identity. What is striking about the British political system is not its archaic and antediluvian nature (although this is manifest as even the most cursory attention paid to such constitutional high-days as the state opening of Parliament would indicate) but its intractable stability and ability to absorb social and political change.
How this political system will adapt to the exigencies of the twenty-first century and the possible rigours of European integration remains to be seen. The evidence of the past, however, would seem to indicate that it will continue to limp along, absorbing and accommodating the shifts and shocks of economic and social change, as it did in the 1920s, and beyond, for some considerable time to come.
[1] ‘Occasional’ is the operative word here. Over the course of the twentieth century the Labour Party has operated very much as a junior party in government, enjoying a mere 20 years or so in office. The term ‘two party system’ in this sense, if taken too literally, is something of a misnomer.
[2] Cited in Keith Burgess, The Challenge of Labour (London, 1980), 216.
[3] This point is forcefully made in John Ross, Thatcher and Friends, (London, 1983), 10. The analysis of the electoral decline of the Liberals that follows is based on Ross’s reasoning (ibid., 10-17). While Ross’s book provides an innovative and stimulating explanation of the shape of British politics as witnessed in 1983, his overall analysis suffers from a number of serious flaws, not the least of which is his prediction of the imminent collapse of the British political system and the centrality ascribed to the Social Democratic Party in this process. This prediction, seen with the benefit of hindsight, seems seriously overblown today.
[4] Ross, 14.
[5] ‘The reason for the extraordinarily formative influence of this period is that in it the exhausted quiescence of the class struggle coincided with the maximum florescence of British society in the world outside.... In this unique conjuncture, the British economic revolution was carried outwards successfully while a social counter-revolution triumphed at is heart.’ Nairn, 5.
[6] E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London, 1990), 138.
[7] Ibid., 134.
[8] So named after the popular music hall song: ‘We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do, We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.’ Andrew Gamble, Britain in Decline, (London, 1981), 248.
[9] Hobsbawm, 150.
[10] Ibid., 151.
[11] See the account of this process in Ross, 62-3.
[12] Space does not permit anything more than a simple assertion of this fact; for an analysis of the point see Perry Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, English Questions, (London, 1992), 15-47, and ‘Figures of Descent’, ibid., 121-92.
[13] Hobsbawm, 124.
[14] Tom Nairn, ‘The Anatomy of the Labour Party’, New Left Review 27 (September- October 1964), 40.
[15] Hobsbawm, 126.
[16] Frederick Engels (Letter to G. V. Plekhanov, May 12, 1894), Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Britain (Moscow, 1962), 583.
[17] Anderson, ‘Figures of Descent’, 160.
[18] Gwyn Alf Williams, ‘Imperial South Wales’, The Welsh in their History (London 1985), 186. Williams’ characterisation in the original reads: ‘The Labour Wales which had struggled to life within the Liberal shell was still the child, even if a bastard child, of imperial south Wales.’ Liberalism’s unprecedented dominance in Victorian Wales, however, was such that ‘imperial south Wales’ and Liberalism effectively amounted to pretty much the same thing.
[19] James Hinton, Labourism and Socialism (Brighton, 1983), 74-5.
[20] Anderson, ‘Figures of Descent’, 161.
[21] Such as, for example, the First World War. Tempting though it is to ascribe the developments of the 1920s to the effects of this shocking and cataclysmic event, the fact of the matter is that had the war not taken place then the political map of twentieth-century Britain would in all probability have emerged in essentially the same form as it actually did. The notable thing about the war is not the effect that it had on British society but the fact that it left British society so unchanged. Once again, the contrast between Britain and the rest of Europe is striking.
[22] Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism (London, 1972), 13.