British Parties: Some Reflections on their History

BRITISH PARTIES: SOME REFLECTIONS ON THEIR HISTORY KEITH FElLING FOR some three hundred years now party has been an established element in British government, loose and disorganized enough if measured by modern standards, but real in fact as early as the memorable year 1641, and from the Restoration onwards hardening slowly into continuous, though persistently varying, groups. If good and patriotic men frowned upon it as faction and Marlborough spoke of the "detested names of Whig and Tory," party nevertheless achieved fair discipline under Walpole and respectability under Burke. As a cross-section of British society it has become as vital a th.lng as a church in the sixteenth century, or a great feudal estate of the fourteenth, with laws and development of its own, a body of dogma, and roots in the earth. The bare existence of party assumes the prior existence, at least in tolerable strength, of the common constitutional freedoms, of election, of speech, and of opinion. Not that these freedoms in themselves can guarantee an unrestricted progress of party. In every genuine federal government, for example, there are sub-divisions possessing an original purpose and authority which arrest the normal development of federal parties, and much the same is true of countries where some force in society, whether the army, a church, or bureaucracy_, has solidified into an almostvolcanic rock, as it did for instance in nineteenth-century France, making hard cores which the ordinary ebb and flow of party tides could never shake. Such laws as I suggest, then, will probably only apply to the history of party in Britain. There only perhaps a continuity unbroken by invasion or real revolution, a mature tradition of mercy or compromise, a con~ centration in a small area, a social system always one, as Bagehot wrote, of "removable inequalities," an ancient territorial scheme of election by single-member constituencies, have all converged to a great result, that party is the government. In no other country, we might claim, could a daughter of Oliver Cromwell have assisted at the coronation of George I, or Lord Goderich have served successively under Liverpool, Grey, and Peel, or Philip Snowden have died a peer. And all this with the paradoxical conclusion that party government is accepted as trustee for the country at large, and is duly rejected if it fails in that larger role. 213 214 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Given such ruling conditions, British party evolution appears normally to obey this rule: that, as some new crisis breaks on the Left, whether a Wilkes, an American Revolution, Home Rule, or Socialism, the mass of the Left centre are driven back on the Right, whose faith and practice they then proceed to colour, modify, or transform . So Burke recast the party of Pitt, or Chamberlain that of Salis- bury . Occasionally, by some freak of circumstance or ambition, the far Left and far Right may temporarily coalesce against the new centre, but not for long, and if the general rule be accepted, it follows that the normal British party is always historically a coalition, and the normal British politician himself a compromise. All of which helps to explain the power of those in the middle or in transition, and of the "silent" voter who writes so much to The Times. Attempts are perpetually being made to give some permanent content or continuity to the terms Whig and Tory, Liberal and Conservative , though with mediocre success-to describe the Tories, for instance, as the party of old age, of the Established Church, of the Empire, of the liquor interest, or the stupid party, or the party of the land. A party that includes Canning and Peel, Salisbury and Disraeli , Bonar Law and Baldwin, cannot be all these things, and hist ~rians are forced back on a more minute examination of a party's genealogy. The sources·for our older party history are subject to the same vicissitudes as those for all political fact. Thus some fifty collections of those originally surveyed by the Historical Manuscripts Commission have been lost to sight. George Grenville's papers went to California ; part of Shelburne's are in Canada and part in Michigan. Again, some ministers...