The First Time As Tragedy

Books read this week: The Strange Death of Liberal England 9/10 (George Dangerfield)

Political parties rarely die except by their own hand. Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England is the story of the four tumultuous years between 1910 and 1914 when the old Liberal party discovered that it had to change, or to die - and elected to die. I say story rather than history because The Strange Death of Liberal England really reads more like a novel in which Dangerfield is trying to capture the feeling of an age and I think he succeeds very well. Of course, I have no first hand knowledge of pre-war England, and it lies at that grey intersection between human memory and proper history: I have met and spoken with people who were alive then , but I have much less of a feel for the time than I do of even the 1920s. Partly this is because of the immense shadow the Great War casts back in time, rendering the political arguments of the preceding years petty and insignificant. The overarching feeling one gets is of a pot about to boil over, a society bubbling and seething with tensions almost to the point of explosion, before plunging itself into the icy waters of war. Dangerfield's digression on the Great German Airship Panic - a flurry of what would be UFO sightings today - seems to sum up the character of the time perfectly.

The Strange Death of Liberal England is a truly superb book: by turns witty, scathing and tragic, and a perfect portrait of the death of the Victorian Respectable middle class which was the Liberal party. Dangerfield divides that death into three acts: the Tories' Rebellion (more properly the Ulster Rebellion), the Women's Rebellion and the Worker's Rebellion. In all three cases one gets the feeling that things were spinning wildly beyond the government's control, and yet Mr Asquith sat serenely in Downing Street while the country sped towards catastrophe. And yet the Liberal Party was willing to countenance a surprising amount of brutality (for a 'Liberal' party): the descriptions of force-feeding of suffragettes are very disturbing, and the passage George Lansbury's desperate attempts to get the government to stop (attempts which culminated in Lansbury being expelled from parliament and losing his seat in a by-election) are very moving. There is also some very black humour to be had: "What was to be done? Since Women's Suffrage was not a party question, the honour of the whole House seemed to be involved. Some members maintained that the women should be left to die; Lord Robert Cecil thought that deportation might answer: only Mr Keir Hardie suggested, as a logical solution, that women should be given the vote."

Fundamentally, the Liberal Party suffered from two political maladies which combined to kill it: a belief that politics was a game and not a matter of life and death and a chronic inability to keep the promises it had made. The second problem to a certain extent flowed from the first: the Liberals did not realise how important change was to the Irish, to the workers, to women, and so they though they could play their little games and people would accept the status quo. They were wrong and it is the strange persistence of these errors which has ensured that the Liberal party has never won a general election since the introduction of universal suffrage. It is perfectly encapsulated in an anecdote given in the Strange Death of Liberal England: Asquith, when Home Secretary, gave orders for troops to fire on striking workers. When confronted with a heckler who condemned him for "those men you murdered in 1892" Asquith's reply was "You are quite wrong - I murdered them in 1893". How witty! How urbane! How utterly morally bankrupt!

I have often thought the failings of the 19th Century Liberal party can be encapsulated in their approach to the problems raised by prostitution. A truly laissez-faire approach would be to do nothing. A social democratic approach would be to commission reports to look into the problem, to set up organisations to help the communities involved and to strengthen the welfare net so no one is forced into prostitution. The Liberal approach? The octogenarian prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone, personally wandering the streets of Soho at night, preaching the Gospel to "Fallen Women".

The Strange Death of Liberal England also left me with a renewed respect for Sylvia Pankhurst, Keir Hardie and George Lansbury, and a huge amount of admiration for George Askwith (a totally different, and far more interesting figure than Asquith the Prime Minister), the government's chief (indeed, apparently only) labour negotiator who seems to spent most of 1911 and 1912 dashing around the country patching up agreements between striking workers and their employers. It is just unfortunate for him that pretty much everyone higher up in the government (with the partial exception of Lloyd George, and the full exception of Winston Churchill) was so utterly useless.