Democracy: 1,000 Years in Pursuit of British Liberty
Peter Kellner
Mainstream Publishing
544pp
£25.00
Is there such a thing as ‘British liberty’? Peter Kellner answers that there is such a tradition, nourished as much by happenstance as by structural factors like a temperate island location near enough to the European mainland to benefit from trade in goods and ideas but separate enough not to be in the theatre of territorial wars. The politics of negotiation rather than absolutism, he contends, does have deep roots in Britain. While Britain may fall behind on occasion, particularly with respect to France and the United States, it has often exported liberating ideas like those of Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill – the latter as a liberal and an electoral reformer.
Ultimately, though, the questions of whether liberty is British, or how liberty and democracy relate to each other, are secondary to the book. This is not an authored piece, but a collection of primary sources edited to a length that seems to fit the modern attention span of around 1,000 words each. Kellner’s commentary on each piece is one of the pleasures of the collection: in a very economical way we get background and context, with the occasional flourish of wit. The uneven course of progress is told here through argument and negotiation – the core, says Kellner, of how we have ended up with our untidy, ramshackle but still somehow functioning constitution and liberties. I am more of a tidy-minded radical than Kellner, and have the occasional heretical thought that the Great Reform Act of 1832 was regrettable. Perhaps the alternative, a well-behaved liberal bourgeois revolution, might have swept away absurdities like the Lords a lot earlier, and made us freer and more equal? Kellner, though, cleverly argues that in political institutions as in natural science, evolution gets one further than ‘intelligent design’.
Reformers and radicals, from this collection, are at their best when they are at their boldest. Some of the finest and bravest statements are here, including William Wallace’s proud defiance of Edward I in 1305, Thomas Rainsborough at the Putney Debates, Mill’s On Liberty and Keir Hardie’s speech for socialism in 1901. So are some of those wonderful moments when an establishment figure sees an issue with sudden moral clarity, like William Gladstone’s beautiful speech for Irish Home Rule in 1886, or Lord Mansfield’s judgement in Somersett’s Case denouncing the ‘odious’ nature of slavery in 1772. Lloyd George’s speech at Limehouse on the budget in 1909 is here; at the time it became a byword for political vituperation, but is actually a compelling and logically argued case for a measure of wealth redistribution.
By contrast, there is something etiolated about many of the arguments made for ‘reform’ by moderates, like Earl Grey’s thin, bergamot-scented case for the great act of 1832, and Walter Bagehot’s half-hearted plea for further reform in 1864. But caution, and keeping a coalition with sensible conservatives who realise that reform is often the alternative not to stasis but to revolution, make for unattractive but necessary compromises.
Although the book is essentially a celebration of progress towards democracy, a few of the best pieces are by those holding out against progress. Defending the indefensible can be done in one of two ways. The simplest is boneheaded assertion, like the Duke of Wellington’s speech against parliamentary reform in 1830 which probably counts as the most self-destructive piece of oratory in British history and is reproduced here in all its astonishing glory. More modern, only in terms of chronology, is a preposterous argument given in 1959 in favour of criminal punishment of homosexuality. But the devil has all the best tunes, and some of the most ingenious arguments are made in order to obstruct reform, for instance, Lord Derby against bringing lawyers into his House with déclassé life peerages, or Michael Foot’s brilliant attack on Richard Crossman’s version of Lords reform in 1969.
The feline brilliance of Lord Cranborne (aka Lord Salisbury) is on display in a couple of places. I loved his rejection of the idea that the House of Lords should ‘watch newspapers, public meetings, and so forth, and only to reject when “public opinion”, thus ascertained, growls very loud. This plan gives a premium to bluster and will bring the House into contempt.’ Even Cranborne, though, met his match when he spoke against Benjamin Disraeli’s reform bill. Perhaps there really was a golden age of parliament and oratory in the second half of the 19th century.
Books that are agglomerations of unconnected quotations from other texts are often dreary – but Kellner’s book is anything but dreary. It is full of great, finely-crafted and engaging writing, with a small sample of the ridiculous represented as well. John Humphrys has written the foreword, and thereafter has allowed Kellner and his virtual, mostly spectral, guests all the time they need to get their points across without interruption. I just hope that it is not a sinister omen that the editor of the Daily Mail has the last word, and brings this enjoyable journey through centuries of progress to a grinding halt.