This article is from the November 2012 issue of Total Politics
“If you think about the heritage of the Liberal Democrats going back a century or more,” current Lib Dem party president Tim Farron tells me, “one might have thought that if we’d entered the coalition that Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown were looking at in the mid-1990s, we might well have lost our identity.”
Usually an impish Tory-basher extraordinaire, Farron spent his time at last month’s party conference defending the coalition, mainly with the argument that an explosive Con–Dem configuration was “better off starting with” than any Lib–Lab dealings, such as Gordon Brown mooted in vain in 2010 by tempting Nick Clegg’s co-operation with the juicy prospect of electoral reform.
This reluctant embrace of the Conservatives is in spite of Westminster whispers of backroom Liberal wooing of the Labour party, and the widely publicised fact of Ed Miliband and coalition loose cannon Vince Cable buddying up via text message.
It may be difficult to comprehend that the Conservative party is a lesser of two evils for the Lib Dems to join with in government. Superficially, the Lib Dems and Labour have more ideological similarities than the former share with the Conservatives, and the prospect of some kind of progressive alliance is undoubtedly appealing to those uncomfortable with David Cameron’s apparent capitulation to his party’s right wing. But the fraught history of Lib–Labbery tells a different story.
Just as with today’s political machinations, it is personalities, first and foremost, who have made Labour–Liberal love-ins more laborious. The first Labour prime minister and famed whiskered pacifist Ramsay MacDonald, perhaps bitter from failing to be selected as a Liberal candidate before his political career took off, never quite grew accustomed to the finer points of a Lib–Lab alliance.
Not only did he believe from the outset that Labour should be the most significant party of the left, even before it was called the Labour party and was only a coherent political party in its nascent form, he later was seen broadly to have betrayed the socialist party he had led with such loyalty – the Red Flag and the Marseillaise were the victory songs when he entered his first prime ministership – by joining in a coalition with the Conservatives. Despite his conscience dictating otherwise, he led the National Government of Labour, Conservative and Liberal cabinet ministers in the 1930s, and in going against his ideological instinct he lost many of his political friends and associates.
Indeed, his increasing inability to create harmonious co-operation between Labour and the Liberals, alongside his self-inflicted alienation, may partly have been because of his attitude towards his Tory allies-in-waiting. Vernon Bogdanor, research professor at the Institute for Contemporary British History, King’s College London, in a recent piece for the New Statesman, highlighted the Labour PM’s surprising derision of his Liberal counterparts, quoting MacDonald’s remark in 1924 that he “could get on with the Tories. They differed at times openly then forgot all about it and shook hands. They were gentlemen but the Liberals were cads.”
And David Marquand, historian and former Labour MP, has noted MacDonald’s desire from the onset to allow Labour to take on Westminster without a Liberal crutch, as even in his early years of campaigning “the obvious implication was that if the Liberals spurned Labour’s advances, Labour would fight on its own”.
MacDonald was not history’s only wayward Labour leader when it came to looking Liberals in the eye. In 1978, Jim Callaghan insisted on pushing through a Labour minority government, instead of calling an election as was expected by almost all onlookers and insiders alike. It broke Britain’s only post-Second World War official Lib–Lab pact, which he had entered into predominantly to bring down the inflation rate.
Margaret Thatcher accused the Labour front benches of being “chickens” due to Sunny Jim’s decision, and former Labour politician Roy Hattersley, who served under Callaghan, has written that his leader failed to renew the Lib–Lab pact because it “offended his partisanship and his pride.
“It was those emotions that prevented him, in the end, from extending the government’s life by the arrangement of another humiliating deal.”
Closely after, Labour was defeated comprehensively in 1979. If he’d swallowed his pride and taken Liberal hands in his clammy palms, would a “Progressive Alliance” have avoided 18 years of Labour being condemned to opposition?
In truth, the history of Lib–Labbery is fraught with a prevailing sense that it was an idealistic concept scuppered by messy political realities espoused both by individuals and general party outlook.
We don’t even have to peer too far back into Westminster’s musty past to see this. Around the time of Blair’s flirtations with Ashdown in the romantically dimmed light of a Labour majority, it was reported that deputy PM John Prescott, who appeared to loathe the Lib Dems, threatened resignation unless Blair suppressed his passion for transcending party politics. This personality obstacle can be translated to our modern hypothetical model of Lib–Lab loving; Ed Balls’ considerable boisterousness and Brownite baggage would surely stand in the way of any Liberal advances. And, mutually, today’s Labour party has hinted that while it could work with Cable as Lib Dem leader, the party would have to shed Clegg from the top spot.
As with all the setbacks littering the battleground of British political history, general election outcomes have destroyed even the most well-meaning of Lib–Lab alliances. Blair, an anomaly in Labour leadership due to his eagerness to associate with the Lib Dems, was met with equal enthusiasm by Ashdown, the party’s then-leader and current darling.
Although Ashdown’s diaries revealed that Blair maintained his keenness for negotiation with the Lib Dems post-election – even quoting his assertion of the need for electoral reform – Labour’s crashing landslide victory in 1997 meant that there was never a need for full coalition. When Charles Kennedy succeeded to the Lib Dem leadership, he let any residual cross-party amity slide.
And if not majorities, then it was minorities that put the same freeze on handshakes between the benches. Callaghan, crippled ultimately by the minority government he insisted on seeing through without dissolving parliament, possibly had greater (and more fragile) party pride due to his party’s weak position, making dependence on the Liberals less appetising.
Next, it was 2010’s hung parliament, which weakened Labour so much that Brown’s clumsy wooing of the Lib Dems, via his abortive fumblings with the prospect of liberal-friendly constitutional reforms, came to nothing.
But the quiet decline of the Liberal party, once mighty under William Gladstone, and the thumping rise to prominence of Labour, a young upstart compared to its opponents, suggests that breaking of links between the two parties often hit the Liberals hardest. Ironically, it was the ‘Grand Old Man’ himself, Gladstone, who laid the foundations for the Lib–Lab relations that developed throughout the century following his death.
His free trade, home rule and constitutional reform programme was appealing to the new labourist organisations springing up across the country, and this led to future conviviality between the two parties. Historian Henry Colin Gray Matthew, who was a lecturer in Gladstone studies at Oxford University, wrote that, “...even when, late in Gladstone’s career, labourist groups began to appear, they did so as developments from the Liberal party, not as enemies of it”.
Yet this unlikely aspect of Gladstone’s legacy eventually diminished the size and significance of the Liberal party, a result that was a far cry from the extent of liberal dominance that in 1894 led prominent Unionist politician Joseph Chamberlain to call the late 19th century ‘Lib-Labs’ “mere fetchers and carriers of the Gladstonian party”.
Gladstone’s youngest son, Herbert, when Liberal chief whip, negotiated a secret alliance now known as the Gladstone–MacDonald pact, which involved local agreements for Liberal and labourist candidates not to stand in some of the same constituencies, in order to avoid splitting the vote. The short-term reward of this was Liberal victory in 1906, but it was ultimately an irreversible leg-up for the embryonic Labour party.
Closely following the 1906 Liberal election victory, the 29 labourite MPs who were elected – they were known as Labour Representation Committee members at this point – formed a Labour party distinct from, and in opposition to, the Liberals.
It wasn’t only the size of the Liberal party that was compromised by the outcome of such agreements – its ideology also became an obstacle. This was the party for constitutional reform, free trade and meritocracy. Gladstone, the first leader of an officially named Liberal party, came from the Conservative benches, having served as president of the Board of Trade in Tory PM Robert Peel’s cabinet.
His contemporary Liberal statesman and biographer, John Morley, when he was discussing “Mr. Gladstone’s protracted journey from tory to liberal”, wrote, “I am far from denying the enormous significance of the party wrench, but it was not a conversion”.
Many have argued that the liberal tradition has more to tie it to conservatism than any labour movements. And it is at least true that the Liberals never quite managed to attract the working-class support that early labour organisations enjoyed, given the increasing prominence of workers’ rights on the political agenda and Britain’s snowballing urbanisation and industrialisation. Not to mention the new working-class electorate.
As MacDonald wrote in 1905: “Socialism, the stage which follows Liberalism, retains everything of value in Liberalism by virtue of being the hereditary heir of Liberalism”.
A cohesive agreement with Labour would have meant compromising ideology to capitulate to the loud voices of working-class representation, threatening to prove MacDonald right that socialism was the natural progression, and replacement, of liberalism.
Interestingly, this ideological threat is an aspect of Lib–Labbery about which even today’s Lib Dem politicians are most concerned.
For example, Nick Clegg’s former strategist Richard Reeves, who has advocated joining the “Tories first to avoid the assumption that we’re Labour’s little helper, waiting in the wings”, argues that it would be harder for the Lib Dems to “remain distinctive” in a coalition with Labour.
The phrase “Labour’s little helper” eerily echoes Chamberlain’s “fetchers and carriers” of the 19th century, when the relative significance of each party was the opposite way round.
The enduring cocktail of fiery personalities, erratic electoral realities and ideological compromise is just as problematic today.
These past negotiations suggest that the very concept is flawed, as observed through the various vain executions of such an alliance. At worst, it is doomed.
It is little wonder that Labour and the Lib Dems today are apprehensive about a shared future. And it’s perhaps a lesson learned too late that all our political parties should approach coalitions in general with caution.
Although neither Lib nor Lab, Margaret Thatcher spelt out the pitfalls of cross-party co-operation rather well: “Consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no-one believes and to which no-one objects.”