Cast your mind back, if you can, about 160 years to the end of 1858 – when the European crisis was emerging that would have a profound effect on politics in the UK.
There was the revolution under way that would see Garibaldi uniting Italy, and incidentally coining the word ‘Liberal’ (also the name of the patron saint of Treviso, by the way). There was tension with France that was leading to major rearmament on both sides (including the launch of HMS Warrior, still with us in Portsmouth).
As a result of this, and a combination of other factors, there was an increasingly close-knit alliance of political groups at Westminster. who were beginning to look to each other for support. In 1859, this was to emerge as the Liberal Party. The original meeting to form the new party, held in Willis’ Rooms in St James’ Street in London, and included well over two hundred Whigs, Radicals, Peelite Conservatives and pioneer Liberals like John Bright. When Lord Palmerston helped Lord John Russell up onto the platform, there was a huge burst of cheering.
At the end of 1858, to other intellectual giants were preparing their work for publication, which would emerge within weeks of each other. John Stuart Mill was putting the finishing touches to On Liberty; Charles Darwin was doing the same to On the Origin of Species.
So when we look ahead to our new year, 2018, we may see the beginnings of what may emerge as a new political tradition, born out of a realignment of the centre – and as the least sane members of the Conservative Party urge their leader to fling out Michael Heseltine, there may be some very big beasts indeed. But we should remember as that happens – and this is, I hope, the primary message of this blog for the year ahead – that new political alliances need new ideas if they are going to break out of the past.
In 1858/9, the ideas arrived as the party did. In practice, they were in the ether as the new grouping began to formalise itself and work together. The new party was not – because it could not be – some kind of compromised amalgam between Tories and Radicals. Nor did it really involve the humane elements of small-scale Liberalism that were to emerge within the first decade, but it was fuelled by the twin ideas of evolutionary progress and maximising liberty.
And when Radix co-founder Joe Zammit-Lucia said, in a letter to the Financial Times within the last few days, that the intellectual struggle for the new radical centre can’t be to defend the status quo, for example of the existing trading system, he was saying something similar.
It is, he said, “between those who cling to 20th-century thinking and refuse to address the shortcomings, in a 21st-century world, of the current international trading system and multilateral institutions that underpin it, and those who believe that survival of an open, peaceful world order depends on wholesale, radical reform…”
New political traditions require new intellectual underpinnings. In fact, I believe that one reason the Lib Dems found coalition such a bruising experience was that the intellectual underpinnings of the party needed renewal. They do so even more now.
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