The Fall of Liberal England
Writing in The Book, Isaac Chotiner reviews "The Strange Death of Liberal England", which covers the fall of the Liberal Party in the UK:
George Dangerfield’s beautifully written book, originally published in 1935, explains how, in the four years leading up to World War I, Britain’s ruling Liberal Party was gradually engulfed by three crises, or rebellions. Dangerfield analyzes the movements for labor rights and women’s suffrage as they played out against a backdrop of Tory and Ulster Unionist insurrection over the Irish question. “It was in 1910 that fires long smouldering in the English spirit suddenly flared up, so that by the end of 1913 Liberal England was reduced to ashes,” he writes. “The War hastened everything—in politics, in economics, in behaviour—but it started nothing.” Dangerfield tells this vertiginous history in sparkling prose and with a surprising amount of wit and humor. His book’s continued pertinence lies in the question around which it is structured: What happens when an elected government can no longer address the demands of its electors?
The Liberal Party’s roots lay in the demise of the Whigs, whose support for the Reform Act of 1832—which led to an expansion of the franchise, and a burgeoning middle class—ended up dooming the party. The Liberals who emerged, most notably under Gladstone, also took up the cause of electoral reform and land reform, and achieved some success in both areas. “Whatever his political convictions may have been, the Englishman of the ‘70s and ‘80s was something of a Liberal at heart,” Dangerfield writes of a sensibility that was famously captured and embodied by Dickens. “He believed in freedom, free trade, progress, and the Seventh Commandment. He also believed in reform. He was strongly in favour of peace—that is to say, he liked his wars to be fought at a distance and, if possible, in the name of God.” It was this Liberalism which would be tested in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Just as Upton Sinclair’s investigation, in 1906, of working conditions in the United States had a profound impact on what historians like to call “American consciousness,” British muckraking focused attention on the abysmal state of the United Kingdom’s laborers. And with the unions now under the sway of syndicalism, striking workers erupted in England, Wales, and Ireland. Dangerfield is very good at explaining that the cause went beyond wages: “They were striking about money. (A strike about money is not at all the same as a strike about wages: for while a strike about wages demands either a definite rise or the restoration of a definite cut, a strike about money comes from a sense of injustice. It is not specific, but incoherent and ominous).” He adds: “The workers did not want to be safe any more; they wanted to live, to take chances, to throw caution to the winds: they had been repressed too long. And so the deepest impulse in the great strike movement of 1910-14 was an unconscious one, an enormous energy pressing up from the depths of the soul.”
The Liberals, under Prime Minister Asquith and Lloyd George, took a number of steps to combat the unrest, but their meliorist measures disappointed all sides. (“Mr. Lloyd George was a friend of the people,” Dangerfield observes about the cabinet minister who recklessly threw himself into labor negotiations. “That was still being said, and by nobody with more conviction than Mr. Lloyd George himself.”) While a Conservative government might have avoided the issue altogether, or simply sided with capital, the Liberals proved that government could indeed act, but not decisively. Dangerfield argues that the weakness of the government was about more than its leaders—that the creed of Liberalism was also to blame. “It is a profoundly conscience-stricken state of mind…The poor, it says, are always with us, and something must certainly be done for them: not too much, of course, that would never do; but something. The poor might reasonably be expected to have their own opinions about this; and, indeed, in certain periods of the Victorian era they gave vent to these opinions in a most disconcerting manner.” Or as Algernon asks in The Importance of Being Earnest, “Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?”
Meanwhile, at a time when a formidable woman could, in Dangerfield’s wry formulation, be “suspected…of having an independent mind,” the rising suffragette movement was becoming increasingly extreme in its methods. It resorted to arson and milder forms of terrorism, and the resulting incarcerations led to hunger strikes. Dangerfield again makes clear that the motivating factors of the mostly female campaigners concerned more than tangible victories: women were disgusted that an increasingly liberated society nonetheless kept them chained to domestic duties and to their husbands. For an unmarried woman, Dangerfield notes, the problem was distinct, if related: “Everything was denied her. Education, business, love—all were impossible…When a husband is a woman’s career, the woman without a husband is as good as dead…Such are the results of living in a world of men.”
Dangerfield’s description of the parliamentary debate over suffrage—a debate in which one MP was accused of never having gotten over “the indignity of having been born of a woman”—is very lively. “Since Women’s Suffrage was not a party question, the honour of the whole House seemed to be involved,” he writes. “Some members maintained that the [hunger-striking 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.” Asquith and Lloyd George talked up the issue, and made feints in the direction of pushing through a suffrage bill. In the end, the Liberals double-crossed the suffragettes, leaving them even angrier.
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