The Strange Death of Liberal England [Paperback]

In 1906 the Liberal Party came to power with a landslide unmatched until the rise of New Labour in 1997. The Cabinet was arguably the most talented ever assembled, including Herbert Asquith, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Lord Grey, and revolutionised the machinery of British society. Finding their Acts stonewalled by the heavily Tory House of Lords, they forced it to vote away a huge swathe of its own power by threatening to saturate it with Liberal life peers. By 1912, this constitutional battle had been won, the welfare state was in existence via the National Insurance system and the People's Budget had applied the principles of wealth taxation to fund it.

In 1916, the prosecution of the Great War had forced the political parties into coalition. The Liberals have never held power since, and nearly disappeared altogether in the 1950s. George Dangerfield's book takes the story to the outbreak of war, and shows that, far from disrupting a way of life that was stable, secure and stratified, it was the climax of a decade of social unrest and was almost greeted with relief after all the internal turmoil.

Dangerfield starts with a Liberal triumph: the constitutional victory over the Lords. Mr Asquith and his colleagues seem paragons of cool composure against the rantings of the senile, inbred and / or feudal extremists among the Upper Chamber. Then come his descriptions of three great rebellions which shattered the Government's confidence and popularity, and pulled the generally understood principles of Liberalism out of any recognisable shape.

First, industrial relations collapsed. Miners, railwaymen, dockers - all went on strike one after another, then at the same time and in all imaginable configurations in between. Trade Unions were becoming aware of their strength and working class anger, tempered in the near slavery of the Industrial Revolution and, burst out in conflict after conflict. For the first time in history, a government was drawn into the minutić of individual disputes. Asquith was browbeaten, Churchill sent in troops - neither approach was successful.

Women wanted the vote, and were not prepared to be fobbed off or patronised in this area any longer. Politicians were attacked, heckled and their summer cottages burned to the ground. Suffragettes were imprisoned and force-fed, and their rallies charged by the police. Once the lines were drawn, the Liberals were trapped - give women the vote after all that and you enfranchise the other half of the electorate, most of whom will vote for anyone but you.

Finally, Ulster rebelled. Home Rule was an old Liberal warhorse from the days of Gladstone, defeated again and again by Tory and Unionist collaboration. When it seemed that this was now a genuine possibility, the Protestants of Northern Ireland - with decidedly Machiavellian help from the Conservatives - rose up, and were on the verge of armed insurrection when 1914 came along.

Politically, I would say (though I am quite prepared to be corrected) that its slant is Labour, setting the scene for its ascendancy as the party of the Left by showing the demise of its predecessor in that rôle. This is humanist history, however, and the larger tectonic shifts of the day are never allowed to dwarf the individuals and groups struggling to cope with them. Individual cameos leap out - an incensed George Lansbury berating the Prime Minister for his treatment of the suffragettes, and having to have his ejection from the House explained to him by his Labour colleagues and the Sergeant at Arms; and a totally bewildered and demoralised Asquith weeping at the despatch box as he tries to explain how his good intentions have precipitated yet more strike action. The ongoing and mutually respectful war of eternal negotiation between Messrs Askwith and Larkin almost constitutes a running joke, and the portraits of the Pankhurst family (especially the High Tory / religious maniac crossover Christabel) are an eye opener to anyone who thought of them solely as political activists.

George Dangerfield's book was written in the 1930s, and had a great influence on the style of A J P Taylor. It is compulsively readable and, for its time, very objective. Bear in mind also that he was telling the tale from newspaper cuttings, memoirs and published records, when many of the key players were still alive and potentially litigious and very little private correspondence had been released, and it is a miracle of intuition and interpretation.

For me, the most intriguing part of the Dangerfield's work is his contention that there is no economic reason why all these areas of turmoil should have happened over the same five or six years, and within the lifespan of a progressive government supported by a healthy economy. Even where the Liberals were not working for betterment of the situation, such as in the arena of female suffrage, this could just as easily have been a major problem for Balfour, or Bonar Law. What happened, argues the book, was that after some years of stability and affluence the very human frailty of boredom set in. Consequently, after a few years of domestic squabbling, the fight was exported to Flanders. This is a theory that could provoke free, frank and never-ending discussion, and students of political economy may sneer at its emotive content, but it rings true. There was no economic reason for the ejection of the Conservatives in either 1964 or 1997 - indeed, it is a great quality of this book that its message has bestrode the decades. Huge majorities can disappear like smoke in the wind, and great political parties can be broken and left in the wilderness.

Having read this many years ago I was prompted to buy it and re-read it following a review on the BBC Radio 4 programme "A Good Read" where, with one conditional exception, it was praised to the rafters by the programme participants.

It is a "good read" but history it is not. What it is, is difficult to define. If Dangerfield was more open with his political stance (he appears left-leaning, possibly Socialist, possibly a Labour Party supporter), it might be described as a work of polemics.

The style, at first entertainingly irreverent, soon grates as being just too glib, too long on opinion and far too short on references or sources to be considered a serious work. It is a long personal commentary. Between the covers the reader of history will discover very little, except perhaps the germination of what later would be known as political satire. Given that Dangerfield was Literary Editor of Vanity Fair magazine at the time this book was published, it's not surprising that it is in essence a very long article of the kind to be found in that magazine. It also explains why magazine articles are necessarily truncated; there is a limit to the length beyond which this style of writing shouldn't stray.

I'd recommend this as worth reading for anyone who is seeking an introduction to the events covered with the caveat that it is an overly-wordy pen-picture, that much of the personality assessments are almost caricatures and certainly partisan.

The most important point that this book does portray is that the years immediately preceding the outbreak of The Great War was not the stable, Imperial bucolic utopia whose death was instigated by that war. The issues covered, Irish Home-Rule, Women's suffrage and reform of the House of Lords were merely postponed (to different degrees) by the outbreak of war.

Barbara Tuckman wrote a classic account of the European pre-World War I period, entitled The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War, 1890-1914. George Dangerfield's account examines a smaller portion of that period, limited to one country, England. It was written in the `30's, and was a classic assignment of "AP history" classes in the `60's. Both books help dispel the understandably, after WW I, nostalgic myth, that the pre-war period was some sort of Golden Era. It wasn't, but obviously looked fairly enticing to someone being gassed in the trenches.

There are three principal historical forces that Dangerfield highlights: the Suffragette movement; the Tory Rebellion in Ulster (ah, the "Irish troubles"); and the Labo(u)r movement. The book commences with the death of Edward VII, and the ascension of George V to the throne, in 1910. It is now just over a hundred years ago, and the political "movers and shakers" of the times, with names like Baldwin, Asquith, Lloyd George, et al., are unfamiliar to many Americans. But before "liberal" became the "l-word," Dangerfield's description of a liberal resonate today: "He believed in freedom, free trade, progress and the Seventh Commandment. He also believed in reform. He was strongly in favor of peace--that is to say, he likes his wars to be fought at a distance and, if possible, in the name of God."

Concerning the "Irish troubles," which would reach culmination in the Easter uprising in Dublin, in 1916, Prime Minister Asquith had promised the Irish "Home Rule" in exchange for their parliamentary support on certain measures. This precipitated the rebellion in Ulster. Dangerfield examines the underlying forces, but does focus on the actions of the main political players. Frankly, at some point, my eyes begin to glaze over in reading the machinations involved in the Irish "wars of religion." Not so, the "women's rebellion." Certainly Dangerfield's prose and perspective helps. Consider: "When a husband is a woman's career, the woman without a husband is as good as dead. She must color her drab existence with good works, gossip, hypochondria, and religion, until, at last--unused and unwept--she dies. Such are the results of living in a world of men." DeBeauvoir could not have said it better in The Second Sex (Vintage classics). In another section, Dangerfield debunks the idea of economic determinism, saying that it does not account for the motivation of the human soul.

Dangerfield devotes almost a 100 pages to the pre-WWI labor strife. There was a "Grand Alliance" of workers from the miners, transport workers and the railroad workers who could effectively shut the country down through collective action. The first Minimum Wage Law was passed in this manner. Many of the strands of the continual conflict, and jockeying for position between "Capital" and "Labor" were played out, with some unique distorting factors: mainly the tremendous amount of gold coming from South Africa, which dwarfed total existing stocks in Europe, the Americas, and the Colonies.

Dangerfield is wonderfully erudite, rendering much of the entire pre-war cultural life. His judgments can be quite acerbic; consider his description of the origins of the members of the august House of Lords: "That most peerages sprung from the curious powers of survival in some obscure medieval family, or from a dishonest bargain struck in the eighteenth century, or from a talent for guessing right on the stock exchange, or from a genius for keeping business projects on the windy side of the law..." Or, in summing up the outlook of a republican sheet, "The Liberator": "...which posterity is likely to cherish except its quaint belief that monarchs and not millionaires were the symbols of twentieth century tyranny..."

The author summarizes the state of the three major political movements at the beginning of 1914. There direction, and quarrels would suddenly be overwhelmed by events in far off Sarajevo. Towards the very end, he repeats the famous quote of Sir Edward Grey, made at dusk, on August 4: "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Dangerfield ends his narrative, as he commences it, with the quintessential WWI war poet, Rupert Brooke, whom the author had not heard of, at the age of 12, in 1918. It was Brooke who would not live to see the lamps lit again, dying not in combat, but of mosquito-borne illness, in 1915, before the assault on the beach at Gallipoli.

Dangerfield won the Pulitzer Prize in History, in 1953, much deservedly, for this work. Gas street lights are no longer lit, and there have been some other changes as well, but many of themes continue to play themselves out, over and over again. A solid 5-star read.

Attn: With the outrageous price currently being asked by the recent publisher, no doubt to "stiff" the students required to read this book, one is much better off buying a copy of the original publication in the secondary market.

(Note: Review first published at Amazon, USA, on January 31, 2011)