‘POLITICAL PARTIES are machines designed to gain, regain or retain power. The most successful ones, naturally, have the job of retaining power, which means that they usually win elections and are prone therefore to campaign on a programme of ‘more of the same’.
This, of course, is the basic outlook of conservatives although the German historian, Hans-Gerd Schumann puts it rather more cynically when he defines conservatism as ‘conscious political action taken by socially privileged classes, states or groups to safeguard the institutions in which their social position is embedded, against attempts to alter the norms prevailing in the political domain.’
In Britain the most successful party by far is indeed the Conservative or Tory Party whose policies are generally designed to retain the status quo and whose leaders usually eschew ideology or grand designs. This saves them from self-delusion although there have been times when, as we shall see, the status quo has been abandoned in favour of ideological goals. This has always led to division, often delusions but once or twice to disaster.
The history of conservatism goes back to the writings of Sir John Fortescue (c.1394–1479) with his ‘Praise of the Laws of England’ and ‘The Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy’. Fortescue praised English parliamentary and common law, trial by jury and the protection of property, comparing the resulting prosperous state of England with the poverty and misery on the Continent brought about by royal absolutism there. In his view progress came from trial and error with modest reforms based on traditional institutions and practices.
The later absolutism of the Stuarts was opposed by a number of eminent conservative lawyers including Coke and Eliot, but the greatest defender of the English legal tradition was John Seldon, lawyer, philosopher and MP, a polymath who knew twenty languages, who got Parliament to pass the Petition of Right in 1628. This contained all the rights later included in the US Bill of Rights of 1791. Seldon was England’s greatest conservative thinker and all the theory now attributed to Burke derived from him, to whom Burke himself gave full credit. Seldon, he wrote, knew all about the rights of man but wisely preferred historical rights to speculative ones.
Burke famously became the arch opponent of the French Revolution and he demanded that the regicide regimes in France be exterminated by British intervention. His books became best-sellers but he met with Pitt the Younger to drive his points home personally. According to a witness of their conversation, the prime minister ‘took it all very patiently and cordially’ but only wanted neutrality not war. Like all Tory politicians he preferred a quiet life. Even after war came about with the French invasion of the Low Countries, Burke still had no faith in Pitt. A few days before his death he asked to be buried anonymously in a grave separate from his family, he was so sure that the Jacobins would successfully invade England and an attempt would be made to desecrate his final resting place.
Burke was wrong. Britain defeated the French Revolution and Napoleon and the Tories went on fighting not just revolutionary change but practically any kind of change for the whole nineteenth century.
In power after Waterloo till 1830 their legislation included a profusion of Treason Acts, Gagging Acts, Newspaper Acts, Combination Acts and others (the Two Acts, the Six Acts) all designed to keep radicalism, trade unionism, criticism, journalism as well as treason at bay. They were lucky that Cobbett the leading journalist of the day, was a Tory. Then came a serious delusion. Sir Robert Peel repealed the Corn Laws, the basis of agricultural wealth, and split his party, leaving it in the hands of the camp, opportunistic Disraeli, who had no principles or programme and kept it out of power for thirty years. The status quo was now a Whig or Liberal one.
A few deluded souls have sought to picture Disraeli as an intellectual. True, he wrote novels in one of which he discovered that in England there were rich and poor. Yet this was hardly a profound intellectual insight. As prime minister he allowed cabinet colleagues to pass a few minor reforms suggested by civil servants while he preferred the more flashy roles—making Victoria Empress of India, gaining Cyprus at the Congress of Berlin, addressing mass rallies and buying Suez Canal shares. There was no consistency to him. He had previously called colonies ‘a millstone around our necks’ and had attacked Palmerston for opposing Russia during the Crimean War. He complained that power had come too late. His one real achievement had been in ‘dishing the Whigs’ by passing a second Reform Bill in 1868 thereby almost doubling the electorate. Yet even this did not pay any immediate political dividends.
Since the few reforms passed by his government failed to increase party popularity, his main successors did not bother to think up any more. Ironically, the party now came under the leadership of Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour (his nephew) both exceptional intellectuals but who believed in nothing at all save the rigid defence of the status quo. Salisbury didn’t even like the status quo but there it was. Conservatism he once defined as the belief that ‘nothing matters very much and few things matter at all’. When asked what advice to give to a young man who wanted to do good in the world, he told him to expect a life of bitter disappointment. All concessions to change had to be resisted. Better to defend the apparently indefensible: ‘New wine will burst old bottles, a healthy diet will kill a sick man outright. Sir Robert Walpole’s bribery saved his country, Necker’s purity ruined his.’ There were no Christian ethics. God was inscrutable. The principles of the Sermon on the Mount did not apply to foreign affairs.
Balfour was just as pessimistic. As Irish Secretary he told the Irish (Salisbury called them ‘Hottentots’): ‘There has never been an historic Irish state. Irish unity has been created by British conquest and every Irish political idea including the conception of an Irish Parliament has been of British origin.’ He did however undertake some land reform in Ireland and in 1902 passed an important education Act. Still as Tory leader after 1902 he opposed all the Liberal governments’ reforms and even encouraged the ‘Die Hards’ in the Lords to resist Lloyd George’s ‘people’s budget’. Having lost three elections by 1911, though he was forced out. His successor Bonar Law went even further in his resistance to Liberal policy encouraging the Protestants in Ulster to risk civil war by opposing Irish Home Rule. The party therefore still opposed change. And although it could still command the support of intellectually gifted men – Lord Halifax, who was a possible alternative to Churchill in 1940 had a first from Oxford and was a Fellow of All Souls – these people had no great interest in policy.
All this is not to say, however, that Tory Party history is one long undramatic saga of incremental change under leaders, with or without ideas or visions, intellectual or unintellectual. Far from it. The nineteenth century may have been like that but from the end of that century the party was subject to takeovers by men and women of pronounced ideological fervour.
The first of these was that refugee from Gladstone’s Liberal Party, Joseph Chamberlain, who saddled the Tories with the Boer War and then a campaign for tariff reform and imperial preference. There was always the chance that Chamberlain might have returned to the Liberals he left over Irish Home Rule in 1886, but, alas, the aged Gladstone clung on till 1894 and the mass of his party supported him. So Chamberlain stuck with the Tories. His delusions about empire then brought about or certainly helped bring about disaster.
Salisbury recognised that Chamberlain’s policies foretold trouble. War in South Africa would be difficult and expensive and even the Boer territories if gained, he predicted, would be of no economic value to Great Britain. However, he could see no way of avoiding war and allowed it to break out. And indeed it pushed the national debt up from £640 million to £800 million, bitterly divided public opinion, and lasted from 1899-1902. It also saw six out of ten volunteers being rejected as physically unfit. Britain became isolated internationally. Still Salisbury won an election in 1900 with patriotic support.
Chamberlain then began his campaign for tariff reform, his delusion being that the empire could be transformed into some kind of trading block with common external tariffs and defence ties. By this time, however, the dominions enjoyed self-government; free trade meant cheap grain from the USA and cheap refrigerated beef from the Argentine and elsewhere. India meanwhile had developed its own trading links with America. Chamberlain, it is true, also thought that tariffs could pay for social improvements but the Liberals had their more popular alternative: persist with free trade and cheap food but tax the rich to pay for any improvements. The tariff reform slogan ‘Tariff reform means jobs for all’ was given an addendum by them: ‘chopping up wood in the workhouse’.
The Tories were crushed in the general election of 1906, although Chamberlain had won over the party. Balfour meanwhile had tried to avoid the issue or had proposed unrealistic compromises. Churchill later wrote that ‘the greatest achievement he had known in his long parliamentary life was the silence of Arthur Balfour in the years between 1903-05 during the battle between Free Trade and Tariff Reform’. Indeed he only kept the party leadership because Chamberlain suffered a near-fatal stroke. The campaign was revived by Baldwin after he became party leader after the downfall of the Lloyd George coalition. Once again the cause went down to defeat in the election of 1923.
There were of course other dramatic takeovers of the party in the course of the twentieth century. Churchill becoming prime minister was one. But there was no delusion there. Thatcher’s period as leader was another. But again it involved realism rather than delusion although her support of the poll tax, covered on this site in a previous article on Scottish history, was completely deluded, for which she paid the price.
The really deluded takeover was that by Harold Macmillan (pictured) and his Eurofederalist associates which dragged Britain from its traditional path as a sovereign democracy into membership of a bureaucratic, unnecessary and failing EEC. It cost us billions annually in contributions, destroyed our fishing fleets and communities, raised the price of our food, brought us no extra international influence or military support (peace in Europe was guaranteed by NATO and the division of Germany), cost us more billions through temporary ERM membership, and imposed European law on our legal systems.
All of this because Macmillan and his third-rate acolytes like Heath and Hurd believed in a European superstate en route to world government. No wonder it brought division and eventually Brexit. It was the greatest delusion in British history. And far too many of our chattering classes are deluded still. Like those pathetic Lefties between the wars who supported Stalin despite his crimes because he championed international socialism, international solidarity with fellow Europeans whose languages, history and geography they are scarcely aware of, keeps our Remainers intellectually warm at night.
Still, Brexit seems secure and there is little prospect given the failure of the EU to organise its vaccine rollout for it to be challenged. The Tory Party has a comfortable majority and is under no threat from any Opposition party. Its greatest threat may be to delude itself over the merits of various extravagant post-Covid reconstruction programmes under Boris or his heirs – watch that space!
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Alan Sked was educated at Allan Glen’s School in Glasgow, before going on to study Modern and Medieval History at the University of Glasgow, followed by a DPhil in Modern History at Merton College, Oxford. Sked taught at the London School of Economics where he became a leading authority on the history of the Hapsburg Empire, also teaching US and modern intellectual history and the history of sex, race and slavery. Alan Sked is now Emeritus Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. @profsked
Photos of Harold Macmillan and President John F Kennedy by Cecil W. Stoughton – from the original work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82475492
