Robert Blake on an austere historian
The Impact of Labour 1920-1924 Maurice Cowling (cup 0.40) Mr Maurice Cowling is an austere and un-t compromising historian who does not cater for popular tastes or fashionable ideas. Like his book on the Reform Act of 1867, The Impact of Labour is caviare to the general. It is written in a compressed allusive style— essentially for people who already know a good deal about the subject. It is political history aimed not at the public or even the politicians, but at the political historians. As such it is a fascinating and important work whose ultimate influence may well be more far reaching than its immediate effect.
Mr Cowling is concerned with 'high poll, tics'. Not for him the study of the grass roots, the party machines, the raising of funds, the election pamphlets and all the other themes of electoral sociology so popu- lar today. This is in no way to suggest that he despises them, merely to say that he is simply investigating a political system which 'consisted of fifty or sixty politicians in con- scious tension with one another, whose ac- cepted authority constituted political leader- ship'. Mr Cowling does not hesitate to point out that this approach means excluding a very large part of the nation :
The poor had no place in government. With rare exceptions whelk-stalls figured little in the experience of leading politic- ians whose function in relation to the public is best understood as something bet- ween corporate monarch, witch-doctor and bard. Incantations varied according to fashion and taste: they were made cynic- ally or seriously According to temperament and education. They were made in the shadow of the fact that the involvement they encouraged electors to feel was negli- gible and that the reality they protected was a way of proceeding with the nation's business.
This is a perfectly legitimate restriction to impose upon an historical study. One cannot write about everything, and anyone who tried would be a crashing bore. Nevertheless I do not doubt that some reviewers will treat Mr Cowling as unfairly as they have treated Dr Cameron Hazlehurst, whose self-imposed limitations in his recent Politicians at War 1914-15 were somewhat similar, and will Claim that he ought not to have written his book but a different one. It is as easy for an expert on Grey's foreign policy or the Dar- danelles campaign to say that Dr Hazlehurst left out a great deal as it is for an expert on Curzon's foreign policy or the growth of the trade union movement to argue that Mr Cowling has left out important matters. Of course they have, but that is not the point. Unless a historian chooses palpably ridicu- lous boundaries to his• field he should be Judged on what he is tryinig to do, and not on what he is not trying to do. Like Dr Hazlehurst Mr Cowling is con- cerned with the relations between politicians, their plans, manoeuvres, combinations and Objectives, the rise and fall of governments, the fortunes of party leaders. The theme of Mr Cowling's study is the way in which the British party conflict became polarised between Labour as the party of change and
Conservatives as the party of resistance to socialism during the years 1920 to 1924 which saw four prime ministers, three general elections and the fall of three governments. The period begins with the Spen Valley by- election of January 1920. (It is perhaps a criticism of Mr Cowling's allusiveness that he nowhere gives the full details of this contest which resulted in a Labour gain from Coali- tion Liberal and also a defeat for the Asqui- thian, Sir John Simon.) The period ends with the general election of 1924 which killed the Liberal party as a serious con- tender for power thenceforth.
Mr Cowling has made an extensive and intensive search into the original sources for this period, largely the unpublished private political correspondence and diaries of the leading participants. The only papers of importance which he does not list are collec- tions which for one reason or another— and one can guess the reason in some cases— are not available to researchers. But it is unlikely that the picture would be different if they were. Research like other things is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Private papers are perhaps not absolutely essential for all forms of history. On the great issues of policy public men are on the whole remarkably honest. What they say in Parliament, on the platform, or nowadays in the television studio is far more often than not what they actually believe. A history of the welfare state or of colonial policy would suffer if it were exclusively written from pub- lic archives but it would not suffer disas- trously. However, for the sort of history that Mr Cowling is writing, this confidential material is vital. As he says, with generous recognition of the too often forgotten efforts of the heirs of eminent politicians, 'Without the care taken by owners and others to pre- serve it and make it available, historians would be unable to move beyond the desic- cated contentions of political science or the formal pieties of official history'.
The reason is twofold. The calculations of political and personal advantage which inevitably influenced the manoeuvres of the leading men during this period of fluid, shifting allegiances are not the sort of thing which people reveal in public. Secondly there is nothing easier for politicians than to persuade themselves in restrospect that because a particular combination or alli- ance in which they figured came off success- fully, this was what they were aiming at all along. Examination of the contemporary letters or diaries which they actually wrote may reveal a very different state of affairs. Mr Cowling is skilful in discerning and bringing out what people did and said and thought at the time as opposed to what they thought they did and said and thought in the light of later events.
What are the conclusions of Mr Cowling's study? He agrees that to some readers the problem why the Conservative party became the party of resistance is no problem at all; obviously it would be such a party. But the question iS why it took so long to establish this polarisation and what element in the Conservative party emerged triumphant and why the Liberals were effectively smashed both as exponents of 'progress' and as bar- riers to 'socialism'. It is here that Mr Cowl-
ing's emphasis on the problem of the Labour challenge is a most valuable corrective to the usual accounts. He rightly points out that the 1918 election was recognised at the time as a freak result. In a low poll of a hugely increased electorate with unpredictable loyalties only twenty-five per cent of the total voted for the Lloyd George coalition which nevertheless commanded an over- whelming majority in the House. This pat- tern could not recur, and the by-elections of 1919, followed by Spen Valley, 'marked the beginning of a psephological earthquake which politicians recognised for what it was'. The feature of the earthquake was the dis- placement of both the Liberal parties by Labour, now operating on its own for the first time. The problem for the various groups of Liberal and Conservative poli- ticians was what to do about it as the coali- tion became less and less capable of coping with the situation.
There were any number of different soh'. tions: 'fusion' of Liberals and Conservatives under Lloyd George; detachment of the Conservatives from Lloyd George; a centre party of Asquithians, 'respectable' Labour, and non-diehard Conservatives; a new 'pro- gressive' Liberal party under Lloyd George; a similar party under Grey. The list is long. The fact that a particular combination triumphed does not mean that its triumph was inevitable. As Mr Cowling points out, from Spen Valley till polling day 1924, 'there was something resembling equality of oppor- tunity for all the groups concerned'.
The victor was Stanley Baldwin who by 1924 had taken Lloyd George's role of chief resister to socialism, without the need to give office to a single Liberal, though in fact he did include Churchill. The crucial decision, though it did not finally settle the matter, was the break-up of the coalition in October 1922. A group of second-rank politicians could not have done this, if Bonar Law had not been willing to put himself at their head. Even more important, as Mr Cowling points out, Salisbury so handled the diehards that the Conservative break occurred not at the division between the right and the centre but at the division between the Coalition minis- ters and the rest of the party. Otherwise die- hards would have stood against official Con- servatives and the 1922 election would cer- tainly have been lost.
Mr Cowling's book is a most careful and subtle study of the way in which that section of the Conservative party represented by Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Bridgeman, Amery, Wood and Lord Salisbury won the day as the party of resistance. One can safely predict that in future no one will be able to write about this period or its personalities without reference to his percipient analysis.
Robert Blake is Provost of Queen's College, Oxford, a recently-created Life Peer, and himself a celebrated historian
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