THE TWO MAIN opposition parties to the Tories historically have been the Liberals (later Liberal Democrats) and Labour. Their histories are full of delusions and today their greatest one is that they can expect to survive, far less form a government.
The older of the two is, of course, the Liberals who provide many great names from British history – Palmerston, Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George – although today it would be just as easy to name ten famous Belgians or Albanians as ten famous Liberal Democrats. Formed under Palmerston, their key figure in the nineteenth century was the People’s William, the Grand Old Man, Gladstone who was credited with giving the ordinary man the vote, keeping the nation’s finances sound and having high moral principles.
His crusade against the Bulgarian horrors involved feats of oratory never seen before although when he applied the same principles of self-government he had recommended for the Bulgars to the Irish, he was immediately deserted by the chattering classes. Still the masses stuck by him (Gladstone famously said that he would ‘back the masses against the classes’) even though he boasted: “I am a firm believer in the aristocratic principle – the rule of the best. I am an out-and-out inequalitarian.”
This didn’t matter. Gladstone had given the vote to six out of ten working men in 1884 and working men supported his programme of retrenchment, the cutting of taxes on consumption, cheap food through free trade, and the cutting of public expenditure on civil service and colonial pensions, the army and the royal family. They had no desire for state intervention and regarded state education and the poor law with hostility and suspicion. Social workers, doctors and reformers kept criticising their way of life. They preferred instead to look to protect their own interests through friendly societies, trade unions and cooperatives.
Later on, with the growth of trade unions, the working class did organise itself but it kept close links with the Liberals even after the foundation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 and the Labour Party In 1906. All the early Labour leaders were more or less radical Liberals and the Liberal Party treated the Labour Movement almost as part of the Liberal one. When Liberals gave Labour candidates a clear run in constituencies, they won. When Liberal candidates appeared, they lost. Hence the phenomenon of ‘Lib-Lab’ MPs. Indeed, the Liberals cut their own throats in being so nice to the emerging Labour Movement. They negotiated an electoral pact with it in 1903, they passed a law enabling trade unions to organise a political levy and they reversed the law to ensure that unions would not be liable for damages sustained by employers during strikes.
All this meant that during the First World the Labour Party could build up huge political funds as the trades unions expanded and were not liable for damages caused by strikes later. Worse still, both Asquith and Lloyd George neglected backbenchers and party faithful during the war and split the Liberals in 1916, with Lloyd George taking the money and Asquith the membership. Then the split party discovered that the Labour Movement wanted nothing more to do with it and would challenge it for power. In 1923, indeed, Labour could form its first ever government. Key Liberals soon deserted to it and coming third in an electoral system which benefited only two parties, the Liberal Party entered a long period of (today, more or less terminal) decline.
Ever since 1923, the history of the Liberal Party has been one of holding on to the delusion it could somehow return to power. In practice this meant reattaching itself to the Labour vote since the Tories were the hereditary enemy. This would, however, never be easy. Its economic policies would always be capitalist and later on it became fanatically supportive of the EU which Labour only truly supported after 1988. Besides it had few seats in Parliament.
Still, Jo Grimond began a campaign for a ‘realignment of the Left’, David Steel gave his support to a dying Callaghan Government in 1979 for nothing in return. He then negotiated a Liberal-SDP Alliance and finally a merger between these two parties to form the Liberal Democrats. But Labour spurned them. Even Paddy Ashdown’s embarrassing bromance with Tony Blair led precisely nowhere. Then came another delusion.
In 2010 Nick Clegg agreed to join Tory Leader David Cameron in a coalition government, despite the fact the party membership consisted mainly of left-leaning Guardian readers, very many of them students. Clegg was abandoning Liberal tradition and principles (whatever they now amounted to) in return for power. And the most treacherous manifestation of this was his backing of Cameron’s proposal to allow universities to triple their tuition fees, despite Clegg’s specific pre-election pledge never to raise them. He also agreed to the ‘bedroom tax’. So in coalition the Lib Dems committed political suicide and got slaughtered in the 2015 election.
But things got even worse. Cameron, as a result of his unexpected majority in 2015, had to hold a referendum on EU membership which he lost. However, the Lib Dems who had passionately supported Remain had promised (as good liberals and democrats) to abide by the results.
Now they really lost the plot and fell prey to one (illiberal) delusion after the other. Within the space of less than a year they decided that Brexit – despite the clear vote of the majority of the electorate in support of it – had to be reversed. Liberalism and democracy were thrown to the winds. After the hapless Theresa May lost her majority in the 2017 general election, the Lib Dems decided to do everything possible to ‘Stop Brexit’. Their slogan in the 2019 European election would be ‘Bollocks to Brexit’. So much then for democracy.
But their tactics backfired. When the Supreme Court agreed with Lib Dem Gina Miller that Parliamentary sovereignty required a meaningful vote, three of these were held and all three rejected May’s deals with Brussels which would have kept us in the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union. The Lib Dems under their new leader Jo Swinson then proposed (even more undemocratically) to reverse Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty and thereby restore Britain’s EU membership instantly. But this blatant attack on democracy lacked wider Remain support. Then in a fit of utter delusion, on the basis of some rogue opinion poll, Swinson persuaded herself that her party could win a general election and with the help of the SNP pressured Corbyn into helping to bring one about.
In the election that followed she proved a disaster and lost her seat. The Tories gained a majority of eighty. All Brexit rebels lost their seats too and today the Lib Dems, no longer liberal or democratic, have only eleven seats in the House of Commons. Their future is behind them. But their tactics ensured both that May’s deal could never pass without a vote and that Boris could have his election victory. Brexit is their true memorial.
The Labour Party today is almost in the same position as the Liberals who it replaced as the main opposition to the Conservatives after 1918. Not that it had a spectacular rise to dominance. Between the wars it was only in office for nine months in 1924 and again from 1929 till 1931. Its 1918 constitution committed it to public ownership of large parts of the economy (Clause 4) but its leaders were essentially old-fashioned Liberals committed to peace, retrenchment and reform. A strike wave after 1919, supposed sympathy for the Bolsheviks and the 1926 general strike gave the trade union movement a reputation for socialist extremism but Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden were prepared to cut the dole in 1931 and then joined the Tories in a National Government with a 500 majority in Parliament. Britain had no need to fear red revolution.
MacDonald’s ‘great betrayal’ meant that ever afterwards, particularly when the party was out of office, it would be riven by ideological disputes, debates over its constitution and leadership challenges, usually by factions which deluded themselves that true socialism alone, or true socialism combined with pacifism, would restore the party to power. These delusions were on display from the 1930s onwards and still plague the party today. The result was that it took almost a World War to put Labour in office – MacDonald in 1923 and Attlee in 1945. Thereafter, periods of Labour rule grew further and further apart. It was out of power from 1951-1964, from 1979-1997 and has now been out of power since 2010 with the next election due in 2024 when it will face the prospect of overturning a Tory majority of 80.
One part of the problem has been that a large part of its activist base believes in Marxism and over the years has alienated the old Lib-Lab core. Marxism is unfortunately bunk and its core tenets make no sense. History, for example, is largely the history of class collaboration not class struggle. In Britain, for example, at the time of the emergence of the Labour Party, workers were employed in workshops of about only 29 men on average. They often knew their bosses personally and attended the same football or boxing matches. They also believed in the essential fairness of the political system: Parliament was like a football match, with two teams regulated by a referee. Again, British monarchs, unlike Continental emperors, did not mix in politics but represented the continuity of British history. Nor were the workers oppressed. The rule of law protected them. So class collaboration was the norm. Again, all respectable economists scoffed at Marxist economics, particularly the labour theory of value. The Fabians preferred the theories of Henry George. Finally, Marx’s sociology seemed bunk too. To say that classes only had a role in history once they were conscious of themselves seemed merely a means of allowing bourgeois intellectuals (like Marx and Engels themselves) to (mis)lead the working class.
In any case, after political defeats it became the habit of the Labour Party to lurch to the Left. Thus in 1933 the party conference laid down a series of regulations to bind the hands of the leadership and in 1934 its manifesto entitled ‘For Socialism and Peace’ advocated the nationalisation of banking and credit, transport, fuel and power, agriculture, iron and steel, shipping, textiles, chemicals and insurance. Peace meant adhering to the League of Nations and before 1937 abolishing the RAF.
In 1935 the party suffered a catastrophic election defeat.
Nonetheless after the war ‘Socialism and Peace’ became a constant theme. Attlee’s Governments nationalised the dud 20 per cent of the economy saddling the taxpayer with its losses. Thereafter, nationalisation was rarely practised again by Labour governments but when out of power the party was riven by Bevanites, CND, Scargill, the ‘Loony Left’ and the Militant Tendency. It took hard work by Smith and Kinnock to rescue it but then, just when it seemed to be back on a winning streak, Blair, its new saviour, deluded himself that he could save Scotland through devolution (which would kill nationalism ‘stone dead’) and that he could save the world from evil through ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the Balkans, Africa and the Middle East.
In fact, Blair and his cronies new nothing about foreign affairs (Clinton’s advisers mocked him as ‘Winston’) but his thirst for world attention ended up in his total support for the second Gulf War which US President George W Bush and the US Neo-Cons unleashed supposedly to bring democracy to Iraq. Blair told the British public its leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which could be unleashed on Britain in 45 minutes. The war itself was a disaster. It cost maybe one million lives and no WMD of note were ever found.
Blair became a reviled figure although he still wanders the world like the Flying Dutchman offering his expertise to one and all – often dictators. Meanwhile Scotland was lost to Labour, through devolution allowing an SNP victory in 2007. Following Brown’s defeat in 2010 the party eventually experienced another episode of ‘Socialism and Peace’ under the ineffable leadership of the Marxist, pacifist, terrorist supporting Jeremy Corbyn, who, ineffective in dealing with the growth of anti-Semitism in his party, reluctantly resigned after another catastrophic election defeat, this time to Boris Johnson at the end of 2019. Labour now lost large chunks of its traditional heartlands in the Midlands and the North without making any gains in Scotland where it has only one MP in a country it dominated politically for decades.
At present Labour is led by the uncharismatic, rather wooden lawyer, Sir Keir Starmer. He was an arch-opponent of Brexit but has apparently come to terms with it, which may or may not be true of most of his colleagues. He has been outmanoeuvred over the Covid pandemic by the success of the government’s vaccination programme. He is behind in the polls. He has nothing original to say on anything and his party looks as if it would like to be rid of him even if there is no obvious replacement, certainly no moderate or popular one. Still, like the Lib Dems, Labour also deludes itself it must have a glorious future. I wouldn’t bet on it – unless the Tories delude themselves. Boris, however, remains totally unpredictable.
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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
