The Liberal Party Is a House of Many Mansions’, Sir William Harcourt Once Observed
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LIBEraliSM AND NaTIONAL IDENTITY THE VicTOriaN AchiEVEMENT ‘The Liberal Party is a house of many mansions’, Sir William Harcourt once observed. At the time it was not altogether a compliment. From the perspective of late-Victorian party management, the sheer variety of Liberalism in social and intellectual terms added considerably to the complications of keeping a parliamentary majority intact during what was notionally a seven-year term. On n its heyday from the 1850s to in integrating the various elements 1914 the Liberal Party enjoyed into the system and giving them the other hand, as the Isignificant support in England, a sense of Britishness that seems Wales, Scotland and Ireland; it increasingly elusive today. foundation for building included High Anglicans, Noncon- This was no small achievement, a coherent and inclusive formists, secular Radicals and Jews; for at the start of the nineteenth it mobilised agricultural labourers century Britain was a society sense of national and aristocratic landowners, trade experiencing great social and unionists and major employers, economic upheaval while being identity Liberalism monarchists and Republicans, dedi- run by a largely closed aristocratic looked a much more cated teetotallers and successful elite comprising just a few hundred brewers. This rainbow coalition not families. As John Vincent observed serviceable vehicle. By only reflected British society in all some years ago, the Liberal Party its inconsistency and exuberance, offered an answer to the question Martin Pugh. it also proved to be instrumental of who was to govern the nation 20 Journal of Liberal History 80 Autumn 2013 LIBEraliSM AND NaTIONAL IDENTITY THE VicTOriaN AchiEVEMENT after the landed aristocracy ceased involved never imprisoning men was a narrow movement too closely to be able to do so by themselves.1 without bringing them to trial, not linked to the Anglican establish- In effect the solution lay in levying taxes without parliamen- ment and the maintenance of privi- gradually curtailing, though not tary approval, and maintaining a lege generally. The 1846 split over overthrowing, aristocratic rule free press and freedom to criticise the repeal of the Corn Laws left the and supplementing it by drawing the highest in the land. Although party more dependent on its rural in talent from outside its ranks and the basis for this system was far and landed interests and reluctant eventually engaging comparatively from democratic – only 2.6 per cent to adjust to industrial-urban Brit- poor and powerless people in the of the population enjoyed a vote ain. After the expansion of the elec- political process. before the 1832 Reform Act – Lib- torate in 1867 and 1885 it retained To this end, nineteenth-century erals believed they had found the very little representation in Wales, Liberals developed what today means of steadily extending popu- and not much more in Scotland would be called a narrative designed lar participation without recourse until the Liberal split over home to explain the nation’s past and to the violence and revolutionary rule in 1886 boosted the party with its present. At the constitutional upheaval experienced by Conti- Liberal Unionist recruits. Above level this drew on the notion of a nental Europe in 1789–1815, in 1830, all, Conservatives were alienated rough-and-ready democracy dat- in 1848, in 1870 and at intervals from the Irish by virtue of their ing back to Anglo-Saxon England in Tsarist Russia. By contrast the links with the Anglo-Irish land- that had been subverted by the British had a genius for step-by- owners and the maintenance of Norman Conquest; in this analy- step reform. Although the ‘Whig’ the Anglican establishment over a sis, parliamentary reform could interpretation of gradual, managed Catholic population. Defence of be seen as patriotic and British. In political change tends to be dispar- The role of the Union with Ireland made the time the British had overthrown aged more than respected today, Conservative appeal more negative the absolutism of the Stuart Kings, it exercised a powerful influence Victorian and divisive than ever. In a reac- replacing it with a parliamentary on British thinking and on British tionary speech in 1886, Lord Salis- monarchy and a balanced system of politicians right up to the time of Liberals in bury deliberately polarised opinion government in which three institu- Clement Attlee. by disparaging the Irish for being tions, King, Lords and Commons, The role of Victorian Liberals in building a as unsuited to self-government as checked each other’s exercise of building a coherent idea of British- the Hottentots; he advised them to power. The Liberal philosopher, ness is the more obvious by com- coherent emigrate to Manitoba, a suggestion John Locke, argued that men placed parison with their Conservative almost as insulting to the Canadi- themselves under society on the rivals. No doubt Conservatism also idea of Brit- ans as it was to the Irish!2 The most basis that the state guaranteed to mobilised a wide range of support the Conservatives achieved was to safeguard their lives and property, when forced to do so by the expan- ishness is win sixteen to seventeen seats in with the clear implication that sion of the electorate. Later in the the more Ulster, in the context of a hundred failure to do so gave them a legiti- century, under Disraeli and Salis- for Ireland as a whole, by exploiting mate reason for rebellion against bury, it promoted its claim as the obvious by the fears of the Protestant minority. authority. patriotic, imperial and monarchist In effect Conservatism became In this way emerged the char- party as a challenge to Liberalism as comparison the English party, as it is today, acteristic liberal belief that liberty the national party; but in the pro- rather than the British party. Con- was integral to Britishness and Brit- cess Conservatism confirmed itself with their servatives even struggled to come ain the most free society on earth, as a much more exclusive force, reli- to terms with provincial England a view widely endorsed by Conti- ant on exploiting fears and antago- Conservative and its leaders, apart from the Glas- nental observers by the nineteenth nisms about external factors. For wegian Andrew Bonar Law, were century. Among other things this much of the century Conservatism rivals. essentially English. Admittedly Journal of Liberal History 80 Autumn 2013 21 liBEraliSM AND NATIONal idENTITY: THE vicTOriaN achiEVEMENT Arthur Balfour had a home in the excluded the church courts from While Con- to the emergence of the Liberal Scottish Borders but his mental the process of divorce in 1857.4 It Party in the mid-Victorian period outlook was entirely dominated by was also responsible for disestab- servatism than his more equivocal views on metropolitan society, London clu- lishing the church in Ireland in 1869 domestic reform, for he was instru- bland and Hertfordshire. Visits to and in Wales in 1920. In 1858 Liber- increasingly mental in popularising a Liberal the provinces left Balfour feeling als helped remove the disability that narrative based on the steady pro- queasy. ‘Public meetings in great excluded Jews as non-Christians took its stand motion of reform and self-deter- towns have attendant horrors in from sitting as MPs. These reforms mination against autocracy and the way of subsidiary luncheons would have attracted condemna- on defence the abuse of power by emperors and dinner’, he complained to Lord tion from the Daily Mail as being and Catholic regimes all over the Salisbury, ‘which are fatal to one’s anti-Christian, politically correct of the Angli- Continent. temper at the moment and to one’s and multicultural, though fortu- can estab- For Liberals this cause went digestion afterwards.’3 He was not nately it did not come unto exist- hand in hand with the other key altogether sorry to be defeated at ence until the end of the century. lishment, vehicle of progress: the implemen- Manchester East in 1906! Even so, reforms of this kind were tation and extension of free trade. Today, with British national not achieved without some politi- Liberalism The rationale was both material identity unravelling fast, the cal cost, though they gradually had and moral. Free trade raised the liv- apparently secure Britishness of the effect of fostering the inclusive managed ing standards of the growing urban Victorian society seems remark- society of the pre-1914 era. population, kept down the costs able, rooted as it was in pride in Rather less complicated, though to be more of the manufacturers and boosted economic success, parliamentary even more efficacious, was the both direct exports and indirect government, imperial expan- association of Victorian Liberal- inclusive. earnings from investment, ship- sion and popular monarchism, not ism with the British success story ping and insurance. Free trade least because Britain comprised in the shape of Britain’s role as a This was created the confidence that an ever- four distinct nationalities and suf- pre-eminent manufacturing and expanding industry would eventu- fered from divisions of all kinds. commercial power. Mid-Victorian symbol- ally create work for everyone who Religion, for example, gener- Liberals were imbued with an opti- was capable and thereby eliminate ated political controversy right mistic belief in the inevitability of ised by W. E. poverty from British society. But up to 1914. But while Conserva- progress that distinguishes their Liberals also invested free trade tism increasingly took its stand on society from ours. The mood was Gladstone, with moral implications in that by defence of the Anglican establish- typically expressed by the histo- drawing other countries into a sys- ment, Liberalism managed to be rian, H. T. Buckle, in his History who was tem of economic cooperation and more inclusive.