Politics

Shirley Williams

Who are they?

Jill Stephenson

Who are the Liberal Democrats? While some commentators have sensibly pointed out that the Liberal Party was the oldest political party in Britain, many other people seem to regard the party of Nick Clegg as having risen without trace. Certainly, for much of the 20th century, it seemed that liberalism, in Britain and in Europe, was a spent, outdated force. Its heyday had been in the 19th century, up to the first world war.
     After that, it was superseded by more apparently ideological and, often, extreme political creeds. In Italy, for example, the dominant political creed after unification in 1861 was said to be liberalism. Up to Mussolini's appointment as prime minister in October 1922, the polity was known as 'Liberal Italy'. Closer inspection reveals that its defining characteristics were endemic corruption and, before the first world war, a political system based on a narrow franchise. There was, then, not much about 'Liberal Italy' that was liberal – except for the important feature of anticlericalism.
     Hostility between the new Italian state and the Vatican persisted from the 1860s into the 1900s, because the Italian state had appropriated Rome as its capital and because it enacted anticlerical legislation. The Vatican countered by instructing good Catholics to abstain from Italian politics, up to 1904, in response to which Italian governments made voting in elections compulsory – although the sanctions for not voting were and remain negligible.
     Anti-clericalism was the defining characteristic of European liberalism. The church – which tended to mean the Roman Catholic Church – had been a pillar of repressive ancien régime monarchies, and its influence was as much a target for the enemies of absolutism as were the monarchies. It is unsurprising that republicans and atheists had the church in their sights. But there were more moderate opponents, too, whose aspirations were generally summed up by their demand for a constitution. They were the heirs of the Enlightenment philosophies whose ideas had inspired the French Revolution's slogan 'liberty, equality, fraternity'.
     This appealed to those whose primary ambitions were freedom from arbitrary rule – at the whim of the monarch and his circle, without constitutional rights or guarantees – freedom from arbitrary arrest (in Britain there was, of course, already habeas corpus), freedom of conscience, equality before the law and equality of opportunity. The 'fraternity' aspect involved French Revolutionary armies in invading neighbouring countries to relieve them of tyrannical rule...and to impose French dominance on them. Appealing to national sentiment to encourage peoples to rise up against tyrants had the – for the French – unintended consequence of stimulating nationalist resentment against French rule.
     In these ways, the values that were espoused in Spain by Liberales were adopted by those who aimed for freedom from foreign domination. Thus the link between liberalism – the desire for a constitution that would curb the absolutist power of monarchs, nobilities and the church – and nationalism, or national self-determination, was established. But by the later 19th-century, it was clear that nationalism could also be illiberal: the unification of Germany by Prussia, the granting of autonomy to Magyars which allowed them a free hand in dominating their many subject nationalities, and the quest for cultural homogeneity through policies of Russification, Magyarisation and Germanisation in the eastern empires demonstrated that nationalism could also be oppressive and authoritarian.
     In this context, there was a clear liberal identity. Those who aimed for representative government, a secular education system and constitutional guarantees for freedom of speech, the press and association, and for the protection of private property, were not socialists and were mostly not even democrats, in the sense of favouring universal suffrage or a redistribution of wealth. They wanted an extension of the franchise to people like themselves and – perhaps, but only perhaps – the 'deserving poor', as well as law and order systems that would protect their property. They were mostly god-fearing but believed that religious belief and observance were private matters and that the state should provide and regulate schooling so that children would not be indoctrinated by any particular religious denomination through the education system.
     
There is a sad irony in the current spectacle in Britain where the party that outflanked the Liberals on the left and replaced them as the main opposition to the Conservatives in the 20th-century, namely the Labour Party, should be the party that has recently promoted an extension of the reach of state-funded 'faith schools'.
     When it comes to promoting divisiveness in British society, not even distinctions of wealth or the class system can compete with 'faith schools'. It is even sadder that the Lib Dems accept and defend the existence of state-funded 'faith schools'. I do not agree with Nick. I am happy to pay taxes to support state non-denominational schools – and would be even happier if their products were literate and numerate – but I deeply resent paying taxes to support other people’s religious prejudices.
     For most of the 20th-century, Liberals in Britain seemed out of kilter with class-based politics. They opposed Conservatives but were not of the working class and did not offer the socialist alternative that seemed appealing to many of those working in the big heavy industries of the first half of the century or the large nationalised industries of the 1940s to the 1990s.
     In other countries, where the more extreme political creeds of communism or fascism held sway, liberalism was deemed either irrelevant or dangerous. It says a lot in favour of liberalism that it was cordially loathed by both fascists and communists. Even after the fall of the regimes representing these creeds, in 1945 and 1989, and the demise of authoritarian dictatorships in Portugal, Greece and Spain in the 1970s, liberalism seemed to have little appeal compared with conservatism, often in the form of Christian democracy, and socialism, generally in the form of social democracy.
     'Democracy' has in recent decades been the watchword in Europe, although not in Britain, where success in remaining undefeated throughout the second world war meant that the existing political parties continued to function in their own inimitable and unreconstructed ways.
     How appropriate, then, that liberalism in Britain should have adopted the form of liberal democracy, from 1989, when there was a merger of the old Liberal Party and the very new Social Democratic Party.
    
The SDP consisted of Labour MPs and supporters who became increasingly disillusioned with the leftward lurch of the Labour Party in the 1970s and into the 1980s, after the overtly social democratic character of Labour governments under Harold Wilson. The infiltration of the party – in a process dubbed 'entryism' or, more pejoratively, 'enteritis' – by the Militant Tendency not only rendered it unelectable but threatened to return Labour to root and branch socialism of a kind abhorred by prominent Labour politicians in the 'gang of four', of whom Shirley Williams remains a senior active member of the Lib Dems.
     I remember trying to explain the Reformation to a student, in the early 1980s, by suggesting that Shirley Williams was the Martin Luther of the Labour Party – at the start, she had no intention of leaving Labour, but the faults that she divined in the party and the increasing improbability that it would revert to what she regarded as its essential character led her to conclude, in the end, that leaving was the only option. This may demonstrate only my minimal understanding of both the Reformation and the SDP.
     The common cause made by Liberals and the SDP in the 1980s was a shot in the arm for centrist politics, with the two together able to command far more support than the Liberals had, in the days – in the 1950s and 1960s - when it was said that their entire parliamentary party could be accommodated in a single taxi. I am not sure whether it is a coincidence or not that the coalescence of social democrats and liberals in the Lib Dems came at the very time when ideological politics was going into a decline, with the end of the cold war.
     It did not, however, seem auspicious for liberals that, with communism discredited and socialism tainted by association, 'New Labour' assumed a pragmatic, non-radical form of anti-conservatism that seemed to meet the requirements of the new mood. That its MO has been to cosy up to bankers and businessmen, wage an illegal war and launch an unprecedented attack on civil liberties has taken the shine off its initial bright new image. This cleared the way for another alternative to conservatism, with Nick Clegg and his colleagues the apparent beneficiaries of this trend – until the new distribution of parliamentary seats became clear. But beneficiaries they now are, in terms of their own career prospects, and crucially as the Conservatives' allies.
     This raises the tantalising prospect: should the coalition government's conduct of policy prove successful without attracting catastrophic unpopularity, might a new coalition ticket perhaps be on offer in 2015?

Jill Stephenson is former professor of modern German history at the University of Edinburgh