David Marquand: The 1926 UK Elections Revisited
History doesn't repeat itself, but as the old adage says, it does rhyme. The rhyming is now clamorous and incessant. If the Liberal Democrat surge that followed Nick Clegg's victory in the first televised leaders' debate continues, we shall be in spitting distance of a hung Parliament. Of course, it may not continue. The Clegg boom may peter out; residual "Labservative" tribal loyalties may reassert themselves. But when all the caveats have been entered, there is no doubt that the two old parties, the ugly sisters of British politics
, have had the fright of their lives. For old SDP-ers like me, it has been a moment to relish.
But it is also a moment for careful historical reconnaissance. There is no post-war parallel to the shock that seems likely to overwhelm the old parties when the votes are counted this May. There was a hung Parliament in 1974, but the circumstances then were so different from ours that it has no useful lessons for today. Yet there is a much older parallel: the election of 1923 and its sequel in 1924. In November 1923, Stanley Baldwin, the untried Conservative Prime Minister, suddenly called a general election to win a mandate for protective tariffs. Polling day came early in December, 1923. The Conservatives lost their overall majority, but they were still the largest party in the Commons. The rising Labour Party, led by the charismatic Ramsay MacDonald, came second. The recently reunited, but incorrigibly schismatic Liberal Party, led by the pre-First World War Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, came third.
But the principals kept their heads. Baldwin made it clear that he would have no truck with any anti-Labour deal. Asquith did the same. As the leader of the largest party, Baldwin rightly stayed on as Prime Minister until the new Parliament met in January 1924. His Government drew up a King's Speech. The Labour and Liberal parties joined forces to vote it down. Baldwin then resigned, and the King, George V, sent for MacDonald, who formed a minority Government – the first Labour Government in British history. It turned out to be spectacularly successful abroad and boringly competent at home, an ideal combination for a party whose chief task was to prove that the country and the constitution were safe in its hands.
In the end, the Conservatives and Liberals joined forces to defeat it. In the subsequent general election the Conservatives won a large majority, while Labour lost ground. But its defeat had a huge silver lining. The Liberals were crushed. Labour had become the Conservatives' opposite number in a new two-party system – the very system that Clegg is now trying to destroy....
Like Cameron, Baldwin was trying to lay the ghost of Conservative nastiness and to speak in a carefully crafted contemporary idiom instead of the grandiloquent language of the past. His ostentatiously honourable refusal to countenance an anti-Labour manoeuvre in early 1924 was part of that strategy. But the parallel mustn't be pushed too far. Baldwin had far stronger cards in his hand than Cameron has. He was Prime Minister at the start of the story and leader of the largest party throughout. It was far easier for him to contain Ramsay MacDonald's challenge than for Cameron to contain Clegg's. All he had to do was wait for Labour to run into trouble, whereas Cameron has to strain every nerve to recapture the ground lost to the Liberal Democrats.
Which is where the second parallel comes into the story: that between Brown's Labour Party and Asquith's Liberals. Asquith had been a hugely successful Prime Minister. His Government had been the greatest reforming government since Gladstone's in 1868. Yet after 1918, and the arrival of universal male and partial female suffrage, all this availed him nothing. He appeared pompous, boring and hopelessly out of joint with the times. The causes that made him – taming the House of Lords, Irish Home Rule, Free Trade – no longer resonated. He was like a whale, beached by the tides of history. He seemed out of tune, a ghost from another age....
The moral is clear. Clegg is absolutely right to pay no attention to Brown's shameless ogling. The much-touted suggestion that the Liberal Democrats are "really" on the same side as the Labour Party is both false and, from the Liberal Democrats' point of view, dangerous; and Clegg is both strategically wise and philosophically sound to reject it out of hand. But he also has to do something else. Like Labour in the 1920s, only in reverse, he has to show that the Liberal Democrats are the heirs of all that was best in the old Labour Party: that there was a libertarian strand in the Labour tradition, as well as a statist one, and that the libertarian strand is encompassed by the Liberal Democrat party of today. I suspect that the success of his project will depend on whether he can do the second as well as he is already doing the first.