Masses Against the Taxes. posted by Richard Seymour

Charles Kennedy’s sweater-wearing egg-heads and ‘beautiful soul’ liberals must yearn for the days when “mass liberalism” was not a figment of the imagination, something devoutly to be wished but always deferred to that future parliamentary majority. But I’ve been trying, of late, to understand the hegemony of Liberalism in 19th Century Britain, and the absence of a Marxist party until the early 20th Century. I’d put the problem roughly as follows: the Liberal party was the party of the industrial middle class, dominated by aristocratic Whigs and espousing the ideals of the bourgeoisie (Free Trade, laissez-faire economics, antipathy to aggressive imperialism* etc), so how did it obtain the support of the overwhelming bulk of the working class?

There are a number of ways that historians have attempted to explain this. Three views which usually emerge from social historians and Marxists are:

1) Working class liberalism was a result of the defeat of Chartism, which led to the politics of accommodation, compromise and so on. This is a model which accepts that 1848 was the high watermark of British radicalism, and what ensued was a downhill struggle.
2) There was a labour aristocracy, a layer of skilled artisans who were better rewarded for their work and could be bought off by the liberal elite, and this enabled them to sink their roots into working class communities. This is Hobsbawm’s thesis.
3) Liberalism can be seen as a conjugation of different single issue campaigns and pressure groups, rather than as a party programme.

In the latter view, Gladstonian liberalism is seen as deriving its support from an inchoate mass of different groups, often with incompatible goals. Indeed, pressure groups based on Nonconformism were a bed-rock of liberal support in this era. Gladstone, in this model, would be the galvanising force that managed to weld a liberal majority through his charismatic political interventions. Consider, however, some of the pressure groups which built up liberal support: the United Kingdom Alliance (a temperance movement), the Liberation Society (for disestablishment of the Church of England), the National Education League (for secular education outside of the Anglican establishment), the National Liberal Federation (an embryonic political party led by Joseph Chamberlain). The last two were Joseph Chamberlain’s political bases for opposing and seeking to depose Gladstone from the left. The liberal policies which Chamberlain proposed were of the kind that appealed to working class radicals (state intervention in the economy rather than laissez-faire), while Gladstone preferred the more staid, non-interventionist policies of classical Liberalism.

I mean to say, Liberalism’s support did rest on some unlikely coalitions, but not as a result of myopic single-issue campaigns. There was a split in liberalism between the gentrified Whiggery of the Westminister leadership and the radicalism of the working class, and the story of how this was overcome is not just one of indirection and moral fervour.

Which is not to say that moral issues did not have their place. Gladstone was notorious for his moral campaigns. According to David Vincent, this was likely to be because Gladstone could not promise anything material to the working class, being committed to laissez-faire economics. He had to work with moral symbolism, hence the attempt to capitalise on the series of atrocities carried out by the Ottomans against Bulgarians. Many include his commitment to Home Rule among these, but that particular policy demands explanation more than it explains. Firstly because the policy was not a popular one, and it split the party in two. Second, because Gladstone’s handling of Ireland involved the most authoritarian extremities where he thought it was appropriate, including the suspension of habeas corpus, arbitrary detentions etc. The most likely explanation of this policy is that Chamberlain was against Home Rule, would never swallow it, and therefore Gladstone would be rid of a powerful rival in the caustic former mayor of Birmingham (who had founded the first local ward cells as a means of mobilising the masses, and therefore had a strong base). Indeed, Chamberlain did beat a hasty exit, and two years later became a Tory, foisting his protectionist and interventionist ideas on the future party of ‘small government’.

Eugenio F. Biagini argues (in Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860-1880, 1993) Liberal hegemony is not, in fact, something that requires special explanation, but is a natural result of the historically radical ideas contained in liberalism. Wheras other historians saw 1848 as the decisive break in radical history, Biagini avers that what is striking is the continuity – by 1880, for instance, most of the Chartists’ demands had become the law of the land, because mainstream liberalism had adopted and nurtured the causes of the radicals. Liberalism, far from being an incoherent mess of conflicting claims, was a cohesive ideology which answered many working class needs. Further, Biagini believes it is mistaken to associate liberal ideals with the middle class – many of those policies which seem most conservative are in fact historically radical working class ideas.

The most obvious continuity is in the reform programme. The extension of the franchise was continuous with the Chartist demand for universal suffrage; anti-corruption legislation enacted by Gladstone’s government answered a demand to end corruption; anti-statism, which is seen as a conservative idea, was one of the key ideas of working class radicals. The state had been seen as a coercive and potentially dangerous institutions. Tax was seen as an evil to be avoid because, in those pre-welfare times, taxes tended to come down heaviest on the working class. Free Trade was also a means of ensuring small government, as it meant there was less need for regulation and taxes on consumption. From this followed anti-imperialism, or retrenchment, in which belligerent foreign policy was seen as wasteful and likely to lead to larger government. Indeed, the 1906 Liberal landslide owed itself to a Free Trade programme and lower taxes on food. Anti-clericalism was a radical idea, as the working class resented paying tithes and taxes to sustain the Church of England, while temperance had been propounded by William Lovett.

In Biagini’s view, there was no Marxist party in 19th Century Britain because liberalism could itself answer many of the demands of the working class; in that view, Labour replaced the liberals not because of a natural working class interest, but because the liberals alienated many of their supporters by neglecting and suppressing unions. The Liberals, says Biagini, were the natural party of the workers in the 19th Century.

Well, so much for this. The continuities which Biagini emphasises are not illusory, but neither do they simply quash the discontinuities. Home Rule was not a natural demand of the working class, and Biagini exaggerates the anti-statism of the working class, as there was broad support for intervention and regulation of the economy. As Michael Mann wrote in 1997:

“States were … expected to do much more for citizens: to provide infrastructures integrating their territories, to engage in mass mobilization warfare, and to organize more social welfare. As Perez-Diaz (1993) notes, the state became "the bearer of a moral project". The notion surged on the far right, in the form of proto-fascism (Sternhell, 1994). It also surged amid centre-leftists like the German "Socialists of the Chair", British "New Liberals", French Republican Radicals, Russian liberal zemstvo intelligentsia. Leftists and Marxists lagged until after World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution.”

The Liberal foreign policy was not as anti-imperialist in practise as its ideology stipulated, to riot in understatement. The answer has in part to be because the Liberal Party was an amorphous party, a ‘broad church’ as the Nonconformists liked to say. Chamberlain exemplified the party’s left-wing, attracting and mobilising the radical grassroots, while the Whigs worked away at reassuring and defending the industrial middle class. In that view, then, although Chamberlain was a threat to Gladstone, he was of enormous use to the Liberal Party as a whole. Liberalism was able to cross classes in much the same way that the US Democrats have been able to up until now, by hegemonising the left vote with radical words and serving capital in deeds.

*Not that Victorian liberalism lived up to these claims. One of Gladstone’s many torments in office was the Liberal foreign policy record, which included the 1882 invasion of Egypt.