09.10.1997

Echoes across the century

Jack Conrad reviews 'The strange death of Liberal England' by George Dangerfield (London 1997, pp364, £14.99)

George Dangerfield’s book is a minor classic. In certain respects it reminds me of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire or Kautsky’s Thomas More. The language is wonderful. The grasp of subject masterful. The insights profound.

Compared with what nowadays sometimes passes for ‘Marxist’ history - eg, James Klugmann and Noreen Branson, Tony Cliff and Donny Gluckstein - the man is a joy to read.

Sure, Dangerfield is no scientist. But neither is he a vulgar evolutionist. Nor a dull apologist. Nor a blinkered sectarian. His method is artistic. Real personalities, ideas and popular movements in their contradictory frame and totality are given due and proper place ... centre stage. No flatulent mix of deracinated quotes, a priori reasoning and half-digested categories. Instead Dangerfield makes do with a finely honed and highly cultured wit and intelligence. Give me such an objective bourgeois any day. In spite of themselves they are more Marxist than the Marxist dogmatist.

First published in 1935, over 60 years ago, the reappearance of this remarkable book could not be more timely. After all we are witnessing with Blairism the death of old Labourism. This foreshadows in all likelihood the strange rebirth of liberalism in the shape of Lab-Libism - ie, the re-emergence in Britain of an almost chemically pure form of bourgeois politics.

The focus of The strange death is the heady 1910-14 years. The great Liberal Party scored a spectacular landslide victory in the 1906 general election. Despite that, nemesis was not far off. Marx’s prediction that the Tories - a party of the capitalist aristocracy - were doomed by a reawakening working class proved wrong. The bourgeoisie found itself compelled to desert the sinking Liberal ship.

Without doubt the underlying set of determinates were economic. Britain was being relentlessly out-competed. The mighty industrial conglomerates of the US and Germany produced more, cheaper and better. The liberal shibboleth of free trade had to give way to parasitism, imperialism and empire preference. Adam Smith no longer articulated the interests of British capital. Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain did.

A military clash between declining Britain and rising Germany appeared inevitable. However, in 1910 the immediate problem for the ruling class in Britain was not so much the enemy without, but contradictions within.

Dangerfield concentrates on the three tectonic rebellions faced by the Liberal government. Each of which took to unconstitutional means and showed that the country could no longer be ruled in the old way.

First the Tories. After their 1906 humiliation they staged a partial comeback. To stay in office the Liberals were forced to rely on the support of John Redmond’s Irish nationalists and the newly formed Labour Party. There was a price. Social reform and Irish home rule.

The Tories fumed impotently in the Commons. But as today they had an overwhelming majority in the Lords. From this bastion of inherited privilege started their rebellion. Faced with a Lloyd George budget, which included measures against landed wealth, the Tory lords had already broken with constitutional convention and voted it down. Prime minister Asquith threatened to flood the upper house with Liberal appointees.

Now the Tories hit back by aligning themselves with the Ulster protestants and Sir Edward Carson. Against plans for Irish home rule the Tories were not content with expressing parliamentary discontent. They were quite prepared to ferment armed revolt. With Tory logistical and financial aid Carson equipped a huge counterrevolutionary militia. The officer caste openly voiced mutinous sentiments. The British army would not move against the disloyal Ulster loyalists. In the south nationalists too began to arm themselves. Civil war seemed imminent.

The government retreated. Despite Redmond’s objections Asquith made concessions. Ulster would initially be excluded from Irish home rule. It did no good. Matters only got worse. The government merely displayed weakness. Unconstitutional forces gained in boldness. Carson established a provisional government in Ulster. The nationalists began to desert Redmond and his parliamentary wheeling and dealing. Sinn Fein would soon leap from the shadows of obscurity.

Then there was the women - unfortunately not Dangerfield’s strong point. He is sympathetic, but prone to male condescension. Perhaps this is because the women’s rebellion had a dimension which impinged on intimate relations. Perhaps because it was often reduced to individual gestures. Either way Dangerfield does not grant the respect due.

In 1910 the stays of Victorian respectability were being thrown aside. The advanced element no longer imagined life in terms of home, husband and children. The yearning for education, freedom and genuine worth found expression in the political demand for equal suffrage. A mass movement burst onto the scene. It was not only the Ann Veronicas, but working class women and men who took up the cause. Kier Hardie and George Lansbury were outstanding allies and advocates.

The suffragettes’ arguments were, not least in terms of consistent democracy, impossible to oppose with intellectual honesty. But sexism and fear of the unknown has its own logic. Asquith and the government prevaricated time and again.

In utter frustration a militant minority - crucially the Women’s Social and Political Union under Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst - turned to terrorism. Government hypocrisy was answered. Hammers, bricks, knives and arson became a form of argument. Windows, including those of No10 Downing Street, were smashed in mass, coordinated attacks. Paintings were slashed before flabbergasted onlookers. Government ministers heckled and barracked at every appearance. Buildings, including churches, fired and bombed.

The struggle was exhilarating, intoxicating, empowering. But it demanded in return the highest levels of self-sacrifice.

Outraged, respectable society sought revenge. The militants must be punished for such unladylike behaviour. Policemen delighted in kicking, punching and manhandling them. Thugs pulled and ripped cloths, leaving victims naked. Judges imposed draconian sentences. Prison officers and doctors force-fed with clamps and tubes orally - and, if that failed, anally. State torture was supposed to break the women. It had the opposite effect. A terrorist cadre was steeled.

Finally Dangerfield discusses the workers’ rebellion. Wages had been suppressed; not least through Tory anti-trade union legislation. Though the economy was booming, capital was not inclined to compromise. Accumulation and competition from the US and Germany saw to that. But there is, despite what some economists say, no iron law of wages. Force decides.

Between 1910 and 1914 class war assumed open forms. There was wave after wave of strikes. Miners, building workers, dockers, rail, engineering and transport workers all took to the field. The Triple Alliance strike due in 1914 was only stopped by the outbreak of war with Germany. If it had gone ahead, Britain could well have found itself in a pre-revolutionary situation.

The workers, says Dangerfield, rebelled as much against the trade union bureaucracy as against employers. The dominant ideology amongst rank and file leaders was syndicalism. Here was the problem. Certain revolutionaries within themselves straddled causes. Jim Larkin and James Connolly - Ireland and labour. Sylvia Pankhurst - women and labour. But there was no Communist Party. The sects - including their outstanding personalities - were incapable of organising the workers under a programme that could unite all democratic forces in a decisive challenge to the state.

Dangerfield was very much a man of his time and space. An English radical who artistically understood the forces which killed the Liberal-Tory two-party system and thereby shaped 20th century politics. Here - in an almost uncanny ability to reflect what was truly significant in his surroundings - is the source of his enduring intellectual strength.

Jack Conrad