Peter Clarke: Britain's Third Party Looks to History
[The writer's book, ‘Keynes: The Twentieth Century’s Most Influential Economist’ (Bloomsbury), is out in paperback.]
This is the most interesting British election in 10 years – against extremely weak competition, admittedly. In 2001 and 2005, Labour was in control, the Conservatives were in disarray and the Liberal Democrats were in the shade. No longer. We need to go back not 10 but 100 years to gauge the significance of what is happening.
All the politicians say it is an election for change. There have indeed been great transformative contests throughout British electoral history. In 1906 it was the apparently rock-solid bastion of Unionism (as Conservatism was known in those days) that was swept away, after virtually 20 years of power. Instead, it was the turn of the Liberals and Labour to triumph. They worked together in a “Progressive Alliance” (to use contemporary terminology again) that lasted until the first world war.
Nothing quite like it was seen for 40 years, until Labour achieved its dramatic landslide victory in 1945. This too was transformative. The “postwar consensus” – if only an agreement to differ within agreed parameters – lasted until the 1970s. Then Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979 again moved the goalposts for a generation.
When New Labour finally conquered under Tony Blair in 1997, it was on terms still impregnated with all sorts of Thatcherite assumptions. Yet the turn of the tide was as unmistakable as it had been in 1906 or 1979. It was a sort of sea-change that had been partially masked in 1945 by reluctance, against all polling evidence, to credit that the great Winston Churchill himself was about to be deposed at the zenith of his personal ascendancy.
In short, when the country is so fed up with a long period of government by a party that it would do anything to punish, the official opposition is riding the crest of a big wave – and everybody knows it. Leaders as inconsequential as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman seemed in 1906, as nondescript as Clement Attlee in 1945, let alone as distrusted as Mrs Thatcher in 1979, are not in themselves the big story. Even Mr Blair’s charismatic appeal in 1997 simply enhanced a Labour victory that would have occurred under the late John Smith (or a young Gordon Brown).
And now? Though 13 years of government have left Labour looking jaded, the Conservatives do not look popular enough to deliver one of these great electoral coups. There is no buzz in the air for them, no echo of the hoofbeat of history. Perhaps we need an alternative historical template.
Could it be that the Conservatives might lose? Of course, it depends on what we mean by “lose”. Failing to win an overall majority would feel like failure for a party that has set its sights on government. Such a scenario was starting to look conceivable a week ago, and a week is a proverbially long time in politics. It is worth thinking back to elections that confounded conventional wisdom about their supposedly inevitable results...
Read entire article at Financial Times (UK)
This is the most interesting British election in 10 years – against extremely weak competition, admittedly. In 2001 and 2005, Labour was in control, the Conservatives were in disarray and the Liberal Democrats were in the shade. No longer. We need to go back not 10 but 100 years to gauge the significance of what is happening.
All the politicians say it is an election for change. There have indeed been great transformative contests throughout British electoral history. In 1906 it was the apparently rock-solid bastion of Unionism (as Conservatism was known in those days) that was swept away, after virtually 20 years of power. Instead, it was the turn of the Liberals and Labour to triumph. They worked together in a “Progressive Alliance” (to use contemporary terminology again) that lasted until the first world war.
Nothing quite like it was seen for 40 years, until Labour achieved its dramatic landslide victory in 1945. This too was transformative. The “postwar consensus” – if only an agreement to differ within agreed parameters – lasted until the 1970s. Then Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979 again moved the goalposts for a generation.
When New Labour finally conquered under Tony Blair in 1997, it was on terms still impregnated with all sorts of Thatcherite assumptions. Yet the turn of the tide was as unmistakable as it had been in 1906 or 1979. It was a sort of sea-change that had been partially masked in 1945 by reluctance, against all polling evidence, to credit that the great Winston Churchill himself was about to be deposed at the zenith of his personal ascendancy.
In short, when the country is so fed up with a long period of government by a party that it would do anything to punish, the official opposition is riding the crest of a big wave – and everybody knows it. Leaders as inconsequential as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman seemed in 1906, as nondescript as Clement Attlee in 1945, let alone as distrusted as Mrs Thatcher in 1979, are not in themselves the big story. Even Mr Blair’s charismatic appeal in 1997 simply enhanced a Labour victory that would have occurred under the late John Smith (or a young Gordon Brown).
And now? Though 13 years of government have left Labour looking jaded, the Conservatives do not look popular enough to deliver one of these great electoral coups. There is no buzz in the air for them, no echo of the hoofbeat of history. Perhaps we need an alternative historical template.
Could it be that the Conservatives might lose? Of course, it depends on what we mean by “lose”. Failing to win an overall majority would feel like failure for a party that has set its sights on government. Such a scenario was starting to look conceivable a week ago, and a week is a proverbially long time in politics. It is worth thinking back to elections that confounded conventional wisdom about their supposedly inevitable results...