The Crisis of Authority

By J. H. PLUMB

THE ESTABLISHMENT, the Ascendancy, the Right People, We, Them; a society divided into governors and governed by a complex mixture of money, status, education, inheritance and possession of land—how true has this been of England over the last few centuries? If true, what has it wrought, for paternal government may be good, bad or indifferent? And what `of the present? Is paternalism as powerful as it was and does it exist irrespective of party? Is the habit of obedience so strong in the British people that any government but the paternal is impos- sible? Such questions are becoming increasingly fashionable with sociologists, historians and journalists: and judging by the success of Anthony Sampson's Anatomy of Britain, the public's appetite is equally great. And this tren- chant, witty, highly original essay of Professor Thornton's* will whet the appetite further rather than satisfy it, for ideas, which deserve a book hi themselves, flow from his pen like rain in a monsoon.

Indeed, the only way to pay a proper tribute to the liveliness of this book is to adopt the method of Sir Lewis Namier who preferred quotation to make or mar a book : Peel's misfortune was that, as an emigrd from the industrial north, he was trained to, but not - bred in, Toryism.

On Joseph Chamberlain: `Jack Cade' vanished behind orchid and eyeglass taking his radicalism with him.

And again :

Chamberlain's attacks had grown rancorous, but with the rancour of the ego, not that of a class.

The Tories in 1906: The Tories had not produced a capable econo- mist since Pitt. They did not produce one now. They could not even attract a capable adventurer to do them service, in the style of Canning or Disraeli. Their aristocracy of birth . . . closed its ranks but they found neither a banner to wave nor a cause to exploit.

On the Socialists in 1930: In 1930 G. D. H. Cole published The Next Ten Years in British Social and Economic Policy. In its preface he remarked that twenty years back, in 1910, socialism was still in the main ..an exercise in fantasy. He might have added that in 1930 it was that still. A year later . . . the fantasy took on the quality of a nightmare.

But short quotations cannot really do justice to this book, nor would long ones, for although the book flashes and sparkles like a firework display at the old Crystal Palace, underneath the * THE HABIT OF AUTHORITY: PATERNALISM IN ENGLISH HISTORY. A. P. Thornton. (Allen and Unwin, 45s.)

glitter and the crackle there is a deep and serious purpose—a penetrating analysis of the nature of British society over the last few hundred years and of its present crisis of authority.

Professor Thornton's thesis is that the British people have always been governed: that, in spite of tributes to liberty and freedom and the repre- sentative nature of Parliament, government has always been for the people, never by it. Primarily the governors have been the aristocracy and the landed classes, at least until 1914, aided and abetted by the more successful middle-class families and also by successful professional men, often drawn from the cousinage of the landed. The habit of authority creates the habit of obedience; and this natural relationship, once accepted, shuns intellectual investigation about the general principles on which society is based, preferring expediency, custom, tradition. This is true of left as well as right. Revolutionaries and intellectuals have never controlled English socialism. Tom Paine was revered in France and America; in England he was read but scarcely believed. Robert Owen was domesticated as an irreligious eccentric. Neither Marx nor Engels could ever establish any authority over the British working classes; indeed Marx thought that the British proletariat would only be saved by foreign invasion.

And is it surprising if one considers the antics of the Lancashire working classes who not only voted consistently Conservative, but gave their devotion entirely to the Stanleys, Earls of Derby? Only trade unionists as accepting of the basic patterns of English life as was Ernest Bevin, achieved any magisterial authority with the British workers. Indeed, the Earls of Derby on the one hand, and Ernest Bevin on the other are the true symbols of traditional power; men who were distrustful of ideas and suspicious of change if not of alteration. Even when the millenium came and Labour had its great overall majority in 1945, there was no change in social structure or traditional habits of authority. The govern- ment nationalised a few half-bankrupt utilities and produced welfare. Not a finger was laid on the hierarchical structure of a society whose spoils still went to the traditional establishment. Yet from the 1940s the old patterns of social authority began to disappear, washed away by the changes wrought by war, by a vaster indus- trial revolution and by the continuing dissolution of Empire.

No new patterns, however, arose and so the country still waits, suspicious, distrustful, yet hungry for leadership, for an authority that they can recognise as having moral weight. The Tories had thirteen years in which to impose a new pattern of authority, a new paternalism, but failed to do so because they were too entangled in the old Imperial tradition, with its final bankrupt gesture at Suez. In the 1950s the country wanted a vision of the future: it was merely congratulated on its present well-being. And yet so deep is the attach- ment of Englishmen to their traditional authority that, even in 1964, they could not change, their allegiance overwhelmingly to others. By their vote they rebuked the Tories, they did not give' Labour power. If Mr. Wilson can fill the void of leadership, then Professor Thornton thinks their allegiance w:11 change at last. If it does, the social structure of inherited status will go too.

Professor Thornton's case is a strong one, but I do not think that his analysis goes quite deep enough. Over the last two hundred years England has been hobbled by its very curious dual role. Industrial Revolution and acquisition of Empire went hand in hand and yet socially they were mutually incompatible, even though strategically they proved irresistible. The needs of an Imperial governing class diverted education towards the formation of character, to the creation of men with an instinctive sense of authority and not towards technical accomplishment; the public schools, not the polytechnics, became the breed- ing grounds for future generations. Yet the upper classes could not themselves provide sufficient rulers for so far-flung an Empire that demanded ever vaster navies, and so a steady stream of middle-clas men of ability was drawn into a different orbit, thereby denuding industry of talent and enterprise.

Worse, the panoply of Imperial service, its glamour, its sense of belonging to another more romantic world not only increased the social authority of those classes most deeply involved in, t, but also diminished that of the men who made the factory wheels turn. And there was a subtler twist to this development. The rulers, the noblemen and gentry with their mysterious and powerful empire were obviously not Gradgrinds, nor the obvious, profit-seeking owners of ill-kept factories and gas-filled mines. They were outside the direct conflict between owners and workers, or so it seemed. Hence they were both magnetic yet remote. In these circumstances how could a grease-stained engineer seem so important or so detached and Olympian as a beplumed colonial servant? Who would sweat in the dark, Satanic mills when offered the foothills of the Himalayas? The topee mocked the spanner.

And yet, as the American Revolution had shown, the Empire was doomed before it started; by its very nature it was contrary to the morality of humanity : whereas the Industrial Revolution had to grow, swell, expand, ultimately absorb the entire population and its inner morality was in tune with mankind's needs. With Empire in dissolution, the peasants in the factories or on the tractors, that natural authority of the Con- servative party began to disappear, for the party never fully accepted the social values of industry as against inherited status : the.anti-Americanism of the English upper classes over the last'hundred years is sufficient comment on that. To the pro- consuls, the vulgarity and greed of a money- conscious American democracy was always more apparent than its achievements, especially its achievement in creating a sense of expansive, yet equal opportunity.

The Conservative party, however, should take a long hard look at America, at the Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin, at John Kennedy and LPL By so doing they might comprehend the necessity to forge a purposeful vision of capitalism, to try and convince Englishmen that they can work for a new horizon, a greater society; a vision which comprehends Bootle but ignores Knowsley. At least if they read Professor Thorn- ton, as they should, they will understand the depth of their dilemma. For what have Salisbury, Powell, Amery, Boyle or Cyril Osborne now in common, except a distaste .of socialism? And vision, not distaste, saves countries.