McKibbin - Parties and People

PARTIES AND PEOPLE

England 19141951

ROSS MCKIBBIN

The Ford Lectures delivered in the
University of Oxford in Hilary Term 2008

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Ross McKibbin 2010

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ISBN 9780199584697

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This book has a somewhat complicated history. It is the published version of the Ford Lectures in British History which I gave in the University of Oxford in 2008. The lectures themselves arose from my book Classes and Cultures: England 19181951 (1998) which was originally commissioned by the Oxford University Press as a volume in the New Oxford History of England. In this instance the author exercised insufficient discipline and the volume got out of hand. As a result I suggested to the Oxford Press that the single volume become twoone primarily social and the other primarily political. The Press understandably rejected this suggestion but generously agreed to publish the predominantly social volume as Classes and Cultures. It was, however, not entirely social. A significant part of the book, particularly the chapters on the social classes, was in the broadest sense political. That was deliberate; without it the book lacked a conceptual spine. But there was undoubtedly an awkward element in this. When I was asked to give the Ford Lectures I decided to deliver them as the unwritten second volume. As a result, there is inevitably some overlap between Parties and People and Classes and Cultures, especially in the second chapter. Where this occurs I have noted it in the footnotes. But even where there is overlap the argument is not necessarily the same. The explanation, for instance, I gave in Classes and Cultures for the radicalization of opinion during the Second World War, a fairly conventional one, missed the only explanation that can be drawn from the evidence. The treatment of the Second World War here differs both in argument and length from its treatment of Classes and Cultures. This book also begins earlier. I thought it necessary to have a chapter on the nature of the Edwardian political system and the effect of the First World War on it. Otherwise what happens after 1918 makes little sense.

Parties and People is a study of England. It comes from what was to be a history of England, but that is not the only reason why it is confined to England. It concentrates on England not from any insensitivity to the plurality of the United Kingdom, nor simply because Englands size made its political system the most important in that idiosyncratic Kingdom, but because in this period English politics were to a quite unusual degree in step with the politics of Scotland, and Wales, if not so in step with Northern Ireland. It is also a study of the political culture of a democratic society. After 1918, nearly everyone thought of England as a democracy and almost all were agreed that a parliamentary system based upon a wide (and after 1928 universal) franchise, together with free and apparently class-neutral political and judicial institutions, was both democratic and desirable. Even in the darkest days of war and depression few thought that this system could or should be undermined. There was, however, less agreement as to whether democracy meant more than this. How far, for example, was it to be social? How far was the state to be an instrument of democratization? How far were the political parties themselves to be democratic, to be open rather than closed institutions? How far should they encourage democratic behaviour among the electorate? And how far was there to be a democratic relationship between the electorate and political and social elites? To what extent, in other words, did the electorate make up its own mind on politics or allow others to do it for them? What kind of democracy did emerge and what other forms might have done so? As well as being a study of Englands political culture this is, therefore, a history of the sociology of the English electorate in this period and the forces that shaped its political opinion and behaviour. These are questions not unique to this book. David Marquand has recently tried to answer them in Britain Since 1918 (2008), but the treatment of them here is significantly, indeed almost completely different, both as to method and answer.

The second theme of the book is what we might call structure and contingency. There was in this period a party-political transformation which happened in three stages. The first was the disappearance of the Liberal Party as Englands major progressive party after the First World War and the simultaneous emergence of Labour in that role. The second occurred in 1931 when the failure and then collapse of the 1929 Labour government made possible a huge regrouping of the anti-socialist electorate in a National government Conservative in almost all but name. The third was the unexpected overthrow in 1940 of the Conservative predominance established in 1931something formally recognized by the voters in 1945 when Labour won its first outright victory. How we explain this transformation largely depends on what kind of balance we draw between structure, what seems likely given underlying social and economic evolution, and contingency, those unpredicted and unpredictable historical accidents that can still have profound consequences: one of which was to determine not only the fate of the parties themselves but the type of democracy England was to be. If, for example, the Liberal Party had survived or the politicalmilitary crisis of 1940 had not undone Conservative predominance, England could easily have developed different constitutional forms and a different kind of democracy.

There were six lectures in the series and each lecture has become a chapter in this book. Although each chapter is longer than its original, the structure of the lectures has been preserved. The first chapter I have described. The second chapter has two main foci: the reasons for the failure of Lloyd Georges coalition to transform itself into an anti-socialist party embracing all anti-Labour forces, which seemed within the logic of English politics at the end of the war; and the inability of the political system to adjust to post-war social change. The third chapter considers the apparent failure of the second Labour government (192931), why that happened and why the 1931 crisis re-founded a stable political system based upon a moderate constitutional Conservatism whose electoral hegemony seemed permanent. That hegemony did come to an end, however, and the fourth chapter considers what part the Second World War played in this. The fifth chapter is concerned primarily with the policies of the Attlee government, their ideological origins, their results and the way the electorate (and the Conservative Party) did or did not react to them. The sixth chapter sums up the argument of the whole book: the development of class as the principal (but by no means perfect) determinant of political behaviour, the relation of events to structures, and the emergence of a hybrid democracy, neither individualist nor social, whose institutions and values were allowed to survive more for the stability they promised than for the democracy they promoted.