Conference announcement

Progressivism: Past and Present
3 July 2012, Senate House, London
Supported by the Centre for British Politics, University of Nottingham

A one-day conference, looking at contemporary and historical uses of the word ‘progressive’. What does it really mean? Is it always good? Does it have any limits?

Further details and call for papers. Deadline for proposals: 5 March.

Cultural/political/intellectual historians, political scientists, politicians, journalists and policy makers all welcome.

Confirmed speakers to date include Jon Cruddas MP.

Joe Twyman, Head of the Political & Social team at YouGov, will also present the findings of a new poll on public understandings of the word ‘progressive’.

‘History is what happened in the past’: reflections on The Iron Lady

As many commentators have pointed out, The Iron Lady is a biopic of one of Britain’s most divisive prime ministers – with all the politics left out. We get neither critique nor hagiography. Sadly, this is not a case of balanced neutrality, but of an anodyne approach that also manages to remove all traces of exciting and contingent history from Thatcher’s story. There is no sense that any of the events depicted in the film could have turned out any other way.

Much discussion has been given to the decision to frame The Iron Lady through the wandering mind of Thatcher as a senile old woman. Had this device been used to contrast Thatcher’s own recollections with popular perceptions or to bring some other new perspective to the story, its alleged ‘tastelessness’ could perhaps have been justified. Instead, it serves as an excuse to takes us on a reassuring tour through our own memories (Thatcher’s Francis of Assisi moment: check; Howe’s resignation speech: check).  This is history as nostalgia. And it is bland enough to be shaped to suit any political predilection.

Describing her surprise at the intense and bitter debates over the drafting of the National Curriculum for History, Margaret Thatcher remarked: ‘Though not an historian myself, I had a very clear – and I naïvely imagined uncontroversial – idea of what history was. History is what happened in the past.’ This film seems to take a similar view. Event follows event, and the fact that they ‘happened’ is authenticated by grainy archive footage (police horses charging poll tax rioters: check; topless women greeting the return of troops from the Falklands: check). Why they happened and whether they mattered do not seem to be questions worth asking.

However, when the time came to reflect on her own life as history, Thatcher’s view became rather more nuanced. While donating her papers to the Churchill Archives Centre in 2002, she offered a couple of ‘friendly warnings’ to historians. First, that in the historical documents, ‘the mood of the moment was lost. Tension and trouble […] are efficiently smoothed away by the note-takers.‘ Second, she ‘caution[ed] against politicians or historians imagining that a knowledge of the facts and access to past experience alone provide the answers to the most important questions’ – instead, a firm set of beliefs and instincts are required. She effectively argued for a greater awareness of historical contingency and for a clear political commitment. If only the makers of The Iron Lady had heeded these warnings, we might have had a more exciting, more contentious, and a fundamentally more interesting film.

Dreams of a Life

Back in October I saw a preview of Carol Morley’s documentary Dreams of a Life at the London Film Festival. The film is an attempt by Morley to piece together the life-story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a 38 year old who lay decomposed and undiscovered for three years after her death – the TV and Christmas tree lights still on.

Dreams of a Life clearly has a great deal to say to anyone interested in contemporary relationships and urban isolation. But it should also be of interest to historians. Like so many documentaries (see my previous piece on Waltz with Bashir), it is intrinsically concerned with questions of evidence, interpretation, truth and memory.

Morley discovers that Joyce was bubbly and beautiful, surrounded by friends and lovers. Yet inconsistencies and holes in the recollections of her friends trouble and disturb this impression. Did she deliberately hide particular sides of herself? Did they only see what they wanted to see? Or are they being selective when speaking to a camera?

Throughout the film we are made aware of the instability of oral testimony. In a particularly striking instance, one interviewee writes to Morley to correct his story of a particular day – now revealing that he had been punched by Joyce’s ex-boyfriend, a central character in the film. This irrevocably changes our impression of the ex and the way he presents his own story. Yet, it so nearly remained hidden.

Some of the key people in Joyce’s life (her sisters, a mysterious fiancée) were not willing to be interviewed.  Others presumably remain unknown, even to Morley. This leaves us wondering how different our impressions of Joyce’s life might look if different people had come forward – or if some had been more or less frank on camera. It is striking that only one person (an ex-boyfriend) is at all critical of her. He appears bitter; but is perhaps simply honest.

Morley painstakingly recovers the contradictory strands of Joyce’s life but makes no attempt to artificially reconcile them. In letting the piece stand as it is, she forces us to think about the traces and impressions we leave behind us and to ask how well we can be known by others – whether friends and family, historians or filmmakers.

History, memory and communism

I have a new article out in British Politics.* It’s about the final years of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). In particular, I’m trying to understand the way in which history and memory were used and understood by members as the party was breaking up.

The connection between history, memory and political identity is something I’m interested in anyway, but the CPGB is a particularly interesting case. It had a very strong sense of collective memory, which meant that members’ understandings of their own lives were inextricably bound up with narratives of the party and with the sense of ‘being communist’. The breakdown of this identity as the CPGB broke up and the USSR collapsed was painful for many members and led to intense discussions and attempts to build new narratives of the past and new identities for the future.

But this was about history as well as memory. Marxism is explicitly based on an interpretation of history and the historical process. This had long caused tensions within the CPGB, with most of its leading historians leaving the party in 1956. In 1989, Marxists (and Marxist historians in particular) struggled to make sense of the new historical context and the fear that history may not be on their side after all.

However, this wasn’t a problem for all communists. Other parties, such as the New Communist Party, Communist Party of Britain and Socialist Workers Party, interpreted the events of 1989 rather differently and so were able to hold their narratives and their identities together.

*If you don’t have a subscription to British Politics but would like to read it, let me know.

What is political?

I have recently been looking at press coverage of the first election of the London County Council in 1889. I have been struck by the way that commentators from across the political spectrum insisted on treating the elections as non-political, even going out of their way to recommend candidates with whom they disagreed on most matters. The constant refrain seems to have been that these were administrative posts and that to take account of the candidates’ political positions would be ‘to act as insanely as to choose the captain of your ship by his politics instead of by his knowledge of navigation’ (Spectator, 12 Jan 1889).

Often, this was a response to the corruption of the late Metropolitan Board of Works, so that, in the words of the Pall Mall Gazette (5 Jan 1889), ’Other things being equal, it would be desirable, no doubt, to have nobody but good all-round Radicals upon the Council; but to insist as a sine quá non upon a candidate being right upon ground rents is really no more to the purpose than it would be to insist upon his being a vegetarian or a Primitive Methodist. […] An upright Tory will make a far better County Councillor than a shady Radical; and to this extent at any rate the ratepayer will do well to prefer men to measures.’

Yet, there was also a powerful sense that most of the matters with which the new London County Council would have to deal were not political at all. One letter to the Radical paper, The Star, spelled this out very plainly:

Equalisation of rates, the bearing by rich London an equal share in the heavy burden of poor London in the East and elsewhere; open spaces as playgrounds for the pallid children of the overworked who crowd the unsanitary dwellings of the artisan and laborer [sic]; a reformed higher educated, and more efficient police; cheaper water, better light, fewer drinking shops, and lower rates – these are subjects altogether apart from politics, and Liberals, Radicals, Unionists, and Tories will do well to sink their political feelings and unitedly support those who have proved themselves the people’s friends. (6 Nov 1888)

This is so striking because of the difficulty of imagining questions of taxation and redistribution being conceived as ‘subjects altogether apart from politics’. It brings to mind the old Electoral Commission adverts in which a non-voter who grumbles about various matters of state and municipal provision is reprimanded with the words ‘If you don’t do politics, what do you do?’

The most likely explanation seems to be that by ‘politics’, the various commentators mean ‘national politics’ and the key dividing lines that had grown up within them, the most potent being between Unionists and supporters of Home Rule for Ireland. The Spectator recommended Lord Thring to its readers, despite his support for Home Rule, on the grounds that ‘He has too much belief in Local Government. That is no reason why he should not be supported when Local Government is what we want’ (12 Jan 1889). This is a salutary reminder that our current political divisions and frames of reference are contingent and temporary, not primordial and inevitable.

Another letter to the Star (9 Nov 1888) complained that its editors were falling into a trap: ‘It is all very well for Tories and drones to preach no politics’ and to encourage voters to judge on experience and good character because this was likely to benefit the same class interests it always had. Instead, the writer urged working-class voters ‘to avail yourselves of the opportunity now afforded you and elect one of your own class to the County Council.’ Yet, while the direct representation of the working class remained paltry, constituency after constituency went against its parliamentary voting record and returned members with radical liberal or socialist views. A seemingly non-partisan election resulted in a radically interventionist and redistributive Council.

Unsurprisingly, claims of apoliticality did not last long. The Council members soon formed themselves into parties: a Progressive majority and Moderate opposition and within a fortnight of the election the Spectator was complaining of “party bias” and political intrigue (2 Feb 1889). What is more surprising is the ubiquity such claims achieved during the first election campaign.

Conservatism, conservation and commerce

For many Conservatives, the Coalition government’s eagerness to sell off forests and to build on the green belt goes considerably against the grain. It is, as Peter Oborne wrote in the Telegraph last January, ‘contrary to all Conservative teaching and experience’. 

Oborne and others have been quick to trace these destructive instincts back to the Thatcher governments. The Iron Lady’s rather ambiguous relationship to the national past gained a lot of attention, both at the time and since. Radical planning decisions, which consistently favoured commerce over heritage, sat alongside stirring invocations of ‘Victorian values’ and pleas to take inspiration from our great and glorious past.

The standard explanation of this is that Thatcher was not a Conservative at all; she was an old-fashioned Liberal. Thus the values of middle class capitalists replaced those of the landed upper-class. The ‘Victorian values’ Thatcher emphasised were those of progress and industry, not of sentimentalism or paternalism.

Yet, pro-commerce, anti-conservation Conservatism goes back much further than Thatcher, as this article in the Liberal Pall Mall Gazette on 4 December 1888 shows:

It is curious to note how Conservatives belie their name when they come to deal with objects which are worth preserving only because of their beauty or antiquity. A few years back, under Conservative auspices it was proposed by a private bill in Parliament to pull down the old Charterhouse and erect warehouses on the site. This wonderfully interesting relic of monastic architecture, with all its historical and literary associations, was only preserved from destruction by the determined action of a knot of Radicals in the House of Commons. More recently we have had the Daily Telegraph, thundering for the demolition of the beautiful church of St. Mary-le-Strand, and now the Times is gloating over the threatened destruction of Newgate gaol, and its replacement by “handsome shops.”

The truth is that our aristocracy has become a plutocracy, and no longer cares for anything which does not contribute to the accumulation of £ s. d.

 

More to follow as I investigate this over the next few months!

Sale now on!

Two and a half months ahead of publication, my book has already been discounted by 25% on Amazon. If this carries on, hopefully it will be a vaguely affordable price by January!!