Churchill in War and Peace

Another of my Hay purchases was a biography of Winston Churchill that I picked up for a couple of quid. It was written by the Labour MP Emrys Hughes in 1950, and is basically a long election pamphlet explaining why Churchill would be a disastrous choice in the 1950 or 1951 election.

It is a fascinating document and shows how the contents of campaigning has changed little in the intervening 60 years. Churchill is portrayed as a disastrous leader who is only ever right by luck and would lead Britain into war as soon as he could.

To be fair to Hughes he was consistent in his opposition to war: he notes he was one of the Labour delegates at the 1940 special conference to vote against endorsing the coalition and spoke out then ("The resolution says the new Prime Minister commands the confidence of the nation. Even in war time this is too much for me." p172).

However he plays every trick in the leaflet writers lexicon: quoting out of context, attacking a change in position over several years as a bad thing (is it perhaps possible that Hitler and Germany had become a bigger threat than the Soviet Union?), attacking Churchill for not prolonging the war to deal with Soviet abuses, and attacking Churchill for his attacks on the Soviet Union. Churchill's position on the abdication is attacked by Hughes, but it isn't clear whether Hughes agrees with Baldwin or with Churchill: this reservation of position is used in several places and is quite sneaky. The section on the start of the war is good too.

One favourite bit is on p174: Churchill's famous "I have nothing to offer but blood, toils, tears and sweat" speach is observed to be, brace yourself, not wholly original but to have classical and later historical predecessors ("Livy, Cicero, Ennius, Pizarro and Garribaldi").

The shelving of the Beveridge report is mentioned, what isn't is that it was part of the Conservative 1945 manifesto as well as both the Liberal and Labour parties.

There is plenty og grounds to attack Churchill of course: his move from Conservative to Liberal and back; his excessive praise of Mussolini; the Dardanelles campaign and the British intervention in the Russian civil war to pick four.

However this is a terrific hatchet job: Churchill is not the Labour candidate so he must be shown to have no merit at all. Success is in spite of him, failure because of. This is still eveident in the election dialogue of all parties.

There is relevance today: this is the style of political campaigning that AV would limit. There is no positive reason to vote for Labour given, just a reason not to vote Conservative. When everyone does this why are we surprised that turn out falls? I might annoy people with a return to this theme later.

Sympathy for a Tory MP

OK, maybe it is a sign of encroaching Coalition think but... (The symptoms are similar to those members of the Labour party who'd defend everything the last Labour government do, and now accuse LibDems of betraying "progressive" politics.)

Various places ran stories like this one about Dominic Raab. The claim is that he is refusing to take emails from constituents.

The tone is outraged, and they provide his email address as a link to encourage you to share your outrage with him. You are meant to think "how dare he hide from his constituents".

I think I would have ignored the story if it wasn't for childish inclusion of email address in these posts.

The first problem is... it is up to him and his constituents. They elected him and get to kick him out. That is the system. So noting the hypocricy of me commenting on this having observed it is nothing to do with me, we move on.

Secondly it isn't true that you can't contact him. I checked his website, and he provides a way to email him. Albeit an irritating one. There is also a contact email address for his consituency party which I am sure would be bounced to his office. From reading his blog I see the form was added in response to the furore. However this does show he is willing to be contacted.

Third 38 Degrees are just plain rude. They Work For You gave an example of how to do this politely. An MP asked not to get faxes or emails via the site, and they honoured this. People who tried to went to a page that told them the MP had asked for this and gave his postal address. I think the MP in question was wrong to do this, but it was up to his constituents.

Next, reading the quote on LFF Mr Raab didn't say no email from constituents, just no prepackaged email from a pressure group. Another way of saying this is that they twisted the facts. They said his publishing his address was enough to let them off the hook. I disagree, and observe that this is the claim of Spammers throughout the world. The address is not being used for the purpose it was published. But that doesn't matter in the world of twitter: as what has been tweeted world over is the headline.

Fifth the parliamentary email address is for parliamentary business. He needs to be able to see what is urgent in that inbox. I guess Parliamentary IT or Mr Raab are not up to filtering! If the pressure groups are stopping him doing his work, and the nuisance of the fake indignation of bloggers and tweeters.

However, Mr Raab was (at best) naive to do this. It is bad politics, and he should have seen it coming. He assumed that a pressure group wouldn't want to raise publicity for their causes. How does someone as intelligent as Mr Raab clearly is not spot the problem in that.

To be honest the best approach is to publish a casework email address that goes to his office or to filter the email to parliament to send it to the office. (The office can then send replies.) It'd be hard to object to an email saying "please send these to my office address" if that was the approach taken. This is a problem with a trivial technological solution that doesn't have political implications. There should be IT support for new MPs to fix these problems.

If you want a thought through response from an MP send a personal letter/email. Otherwise they will bounce you a standard reply from their party. I am sure the fake indignation brigade will rise to this, but if you put in no effort why should they? A candidate I spoke to in a no-hope seat told me that his email inbox bulged and he could spend all his time responding. In a winable seat it must be even worse.

Coalitions and Liberal Parties

As I said on Monday I've just finished reading A Short History of the Liberal party 1900-1988.

One thing that has become clear is how bad coalitions were for the Liberal party. Of course we aren't the Liberal Party, we're the Liberal Democrats. Totally different. But a quick recap is sobering:

1915-1922 Coalition under Asquith and Lloyd George saw us go from 270 seats in 1910 election to 36 seats in 1922. Having split into Liberals and Coalitions Liberals.

The 1931 election elected 72 Liberals (split into Liberals and National Liberals). The National Liberals were in coalitions with the Tories (and Labour for some of it), and by the end of the crisis in 1945 we were down to 12 seats.

In case you think it is just a Tory thing, don't forget in 1974 we had 13 seats, and the Lib-Lab pact cost us 2 seats net. (over 15%!)

Mind you it has to be said that this does knock the idea that coalitions are unstable on the head: both coalitions lasted over the length of a modern parliament. Didn't do us much good electorally though.

A Short History of the Liberal Party (1900-1988)

Another of my Hay purchases was Chris Cook's A Short History of the Liberal Party 1900-1988.

This was the third edition of the book, the first being 1900-76, the second 1900-1983. Since 1988 there have been editions for 1900-2001 and oddly enough a new edition is due out later this year.

It is a well written book for the most part. If I was to be very critical I'd comment on three things:

1. Often Cook mentions some important controversy without explaining the detail. Whilst this is fine for the Thorpe scandal (say), it is a bit more of an issue when talking about (say) the Taff Vale decision.
2. The book does gloss a little over the scandals of Liberalism: we don't get much on the Lloyd-George honours scandal, and the Thorpe conspiracy trial isn't mentioned at all.
3. The later sections aren't as detailed as the early sections, becoming catalogues of by-elections.

The third one is probably inevitable. The sources for the details on the spats and controversies of the earlier chapters is presumably private papers that only become available over time. Except for the merger talks, where the fighting was so public, the details of these since the 1970s weren't available in 1988.

I'm quite inclined to buy the new edition when it comes out, partly to see if the 1970s onwards bits have improved, however I'd imagine the bits about the Kennedy and Campbell era will be short of the important details about knife wielders...

I could summarise this book (or, to be fair, the subject matter) with three sentences. For each era pick one...

• The performance of the Liberals at the general election of XXXX failed to live up to the promise of the by-elections or polls; or
• Then the party split into two or more parts; or
• Both of the above

The second one particularly happened when we had coalitions with the Tories. I'm just saying.

Overall it was an enjoyable quick guide, but just a starting point. Definitely worth the £2.50 I paid at Hay.