Coalition: The Politics and Personalities of Coalition Governments Since 1850 by Mark Oaten

I suppose I ought to make the obligatory joke about a well-hung parliament, but considering that I’m about to take out the knives for this review, perhaps naughty humour isn’t entirely suitable for the situation.

Coalition: The Politics and Personalities of Coalition Governments Since 1850 by Mark Oaten

Ever since the British political system began to settle into the particular alignment of factions and interests that we now recognise as the forerunners of modern political parties, voters have come to expect that a specific political party will be able to win a majority of seats and form a government. On the rare occasions when no one party has an outright majority — most often known as a ‘hung parliament’ — politicians and political parties have to scramble to find a solution and settle on an agreement that will be acceptable to the denizens of the Westminster village and (to a lesser exent) to the country as a whole. In other countries, this agreement takes the form of coalition governments, often given catchy names based on the identifying colours of the political parties involved — ‘traffic light coalition’ (from the German Ampelkoalition) or ‘purple coalition’ (the social-democrat-and-liberal coalition that governed the Netherlands throughout most of the 1990s). Yet coalitions are a rarity in British political history, found only in times of extreme stress on the existing political system. As Benjamin Disraeli’s observed, back in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘This too I know, that England does not love coalitions‘. With that statement in mind, Liberal Democrat MP Mark Oaten has taken it upon himself to examine the history of flawed and failed coalitions in British politics, attempting to determine whether Britain can embrace coalition government as an alternative to the ‘Punch and Judy’ tactics of combative government that have steadily lost favour in the polls.

Here, this review must pause for a moment, and attempt to separate the opinions of the copyeditor from the opinions of the political historian. All questions of content and analysis aside, I have never seen a professionally published book contain so many glaring punctuation, stylistic, and contextual errors. If I had left so many mistakes in a text that had passed through my hands, I would go to my supervisor and ask to be fired on the spot. There are simply no good or even mediocre excuses for some of the errors in this text. On the first page, readers are informed that the Corn Laws were repealed in 1946 (a full century off), and later on in the book a reference is made to the July 2004 London bombings (a year too early). There are sentences that simply do not make sense with the words given, as if someone was working from a taped transcription without bothering to actually check the text for context and word use. My copy of the book is the standard Harriman House hardback edition — not even a first printing or a proof copy, in which these mistakes might be understandable if not forgivable. But even without trying to look deeper into the text, readers first have to fight to actually read it from start to finish without becoming mired down in the words on the page.

That said, the analysis in itself is seems superficial at times. True, the history is there, but it wavers between being too simplistic for those who know the politics of various coalition governments and being too obscure for those who have never studied the subject before. More than a few conclusions are drawn without much of a solid argument to support them. Case in point, and symptomatic of a broader trend: Oaten believes that the established convention of hung parliaments that allows the ruling Prime Minister to attempt to form a government should be scrapped in favour of automatically giving the leader of the largest political party in the House the first crack at government-forming — he claims that existing conventions are not ‘fair’ to the party that wins the most seats. Setting aside the question of fairness in politics, the arithmetic of seats and votes do not always add up to make that the most advantageous choice for maintaining a stable government after an election, and he seldom brings in other opinions to back up his own.

Among the good aspects of Coalition are the brief chapter on the semi-successful coalition in the Scottish Parliament and the number of personal interviews which Oaten conducted and from which he was able to quote to illustrate the thinking of those who participated in two of the most recent attempts at coalition government in Britain: the Lib-Lab pact of the mid-1970s and the Joint Cabinet Committee between Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the late 1990s. The quotes included provide some interesting insight into recent political history. Yet even this recently published book has been overtaken by events — the structure of the last chapter hangs very heavily on how Sir Menzies Campbell might react as Liberal Democrat leader in a hung parliament, yet that task will fall to Nick Clegg now (or to whoever is Lib Dem leader at the time of the next election). In general, Oaten seems to conclude that a coalition government would be ever-so lovely but probably not that feasible, and that the Liberal Democrats will decide the balance of power at the next General Election. Disraeli could have told him the first, and the second is not nearly as cut-and-dried as the honourable member for Winchester might like to think.

Fourth Among Equals by Bill Rodgers

I can’t use the ‘dead politicians’ tag on this post, since Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank is still very much with us. TheyWorkforYou.com has a very nice profile of his most recent activity in the Lords, if you’re interested in such things.

Fourth Among Equals by Bill Rodgers

Bill Rodgers was one of the four founding members of the Social Democratic Party, the ‘Gang of Four’ as the press and the public soon dubbed them. Along with Roy Jenkins, David Owen, and Shirley Williams, Rodgers left the Labour Party in 1980 in response to the growing militancy of the Labour left and their trade union affiliates, particularly the creation of an electoral college that would have given the trade union block vote a definite and potentially deciding advantage on Party policy issues. They formed the Social Democratic Party, specifically distancing themselves by name from the word ‘labour’, which had lost its public appeal in the wake of the strikes and general social discontent of the late 1970s.

Rodgers was never as public a figure as his colleages. Roy Jenkins had name recognition as a former Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and European Commissioner, and had the carefully cultivated air of an elder statesman; David Owen had been the youngest Foreign Secretary ever, with a fiery style and a flare for the dramatic that served him well in debates in the Commons; and Shirley Williams was a committed European-ist and, well, a woman. (Which is not to underestimate her political abilities in the slightest — it is merely a reflection of politics at the time, for when Harold Wilson placed her in his Cabinet in the mid-1970s, his Cabinet was the first to have contained the grand total of two women.) Even the book’s title shows Rodgers’ wry acceptance of his position in the SDP’s collective leadership, since the title is a play on the idea of the Prime Minister as being primus inter pares (’first among equals’). If his choice of words is a ploy to lend credibility to his idea of himself as being a sort of detached observer of the meteoric rise and rapid decline of the SDP…well, for the most part, it seems to work in his autobiography.

The book starts off as many political memoirs do — the sense of community of the town where he was born, the family relationships and early connections to political life, the experiences that shaped his concept of politics, anecdotes of his time in National Service and at Oxford. (And like many memoirs, the section dealing with Rodgers’ time at Oxford University rather devolves into a list of ‘Eminent People I Might Have Once Seen Whilst Walking Through The Streets’.) Rodgers was a member and would later become a General Secretary of the Fabian Society, that wild-and-crazy pamphlet-producing hotbed of intellectual socialism. What Rodgers does succeed in creating from this long life story is a sense that breaking ties with the Labour Party was not at all an easy choice for him to make. The rise and decline of the SDP would take another book to explain fully, but Rodgers tells his side of the story with rather more regard for balanced opinion than what I’ve read from David Owen and Roy Jenkins. I actually found the parts where Rodgers talks about his work as a Liberal Democrat life peer in the House of Lords to be more interesting than the tales of SDP in-fighting and drawn-out political bargaining with David Steel’s Liberals.

So where do I stand on this book? It’s made me want to go back and reread David Owen’s memoirs (which I haven’t yet posted my review of here) to see where the two men disagree on what happened to the SDP. As a political memoir, it’s very readable and far less tiresome than some other memoirs I’ve read. But I can’t quite decide if the sense of disquiet I was left with when I closed the book was due to the sad story of the demise of the Gang of Four, or the strangely fatalistic calm with which Rodgers recounted it.

The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair by David Marquand

Slipping in yet another history of the political (centre) left in twentieth-century Britain.

The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair by David Marquand

Political writer and former Labour (and then SDP, and then Lib Dem, and then New Labour, and then anti-New Labour) politician David Marquand’s book isn’t as much of a polemic as, for instance, Edmund Dell’s strange and eventful history. Nonetheless, the author does have quite a bit of criticism to direct at the politicians he mentions in this book. The Progressive Dilemma is a collection of interconnected essays, beginning with the ‘ghost’ of Liberal Prime Minister H.H. Asquith and continuing through to Tony Blair and New Labour, that presents a historical assessment of why the centre-left was an electoral failure for so much of the twentieth century. It should be noted that this book is a revised edition of Marquand’s earlier book of similar name, which was published in 1991 and therefore only went as far as Neil Kinnock.

Marquand’s main message, it seems, is that the Labour Party’s long-standing insistence on defining itself as the party of the working-class (or rather, the trade unions) severely hampered its ability to re-orient its policies in lines with demographic and societal shifts. The image of Labour as the party of trade unions worked to exclude many Liberals and liberals (note the capitalisation differences) from joining to the party and contributing to its intellectual and political development…which eventually led to stagnation and electoral defeated. The radical redefinition of Labour’s political programme may have made it electable once more, but the lack of a defineable ideology left it crippled, overly prone to drifting with public opinion and, as Marquand worries, less able to govern effectively.

It’s a complicated-sounding summary, and Marquand’s book is fairly complex. I might argue that it’s not very accessible to anyone who doesn’t have a general understanding of twentieth-century British history, particularly in the context of the forces that shape electoral politics. I also would have liked a few more references and citations in the text (more footnotes generally can’t hurt a history book), but that’s my personal preference in such matters. In the end, though, Marquand’s underlying message is a welcome plea for historical context and balance. He points out the flaws with both neoliberal Thatcherite economics and the socialist belief that economies can be micromanaged and engineered precisely to a government’s standards. Yet he also denounces how both sides exaggerate and inflate each other’s faults, creating a falsely persuasive argument against either the ‘bloated bureaucratic socialists’ or the ‘greedy heartless Tories’. That sort of arguing leads nowhere, he claims — and it certainly doesn’t provide an answer to the ‘progressive dilemma’ that continues to pose problems for British politicians in the early years of the twenty-first century.

A Life at the Centre by Roy Jenkins

Closing out the last day of this year’s Lib Dem conference with an appropriate political memoir.

A Life at the Centre by Roy Jenkins

Roy Jenkins (1920-2003) spent a long and varied career in British and European politics. During his time as a Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Harold Wilson’s governments, he was the embodiment of Britain in Europe, an advocate of British entry to the EU at a time when the Labour Party seemed generally determined to stick its fingers in its ears and sing very loudly to itself to drown out any thought of possibly joining the European Community. His support of Europe was ‘rewarded’ (I use quotation marks here only because some might consider it a rather dubious reward) by the invitation he received to become a European Commissioner in 1976 — right at a time when it seemed fairly certain that he no longer had any chance of becoming leader of the Labour Party and thereby a potential candidate for prime minister. He served as President of the European Commission during his time in Brussels. But in the late 1970s, he and three other renegade Labour MPs got together and created the Social Democratic Party (SDP), a reaction against both the rise of Thatcherism and the increasingly militant left-wing stance of the Labour Party. Roy Jenkins ended his political career as the leader of the Liberal Democrats (the combined SDP and Liberal Party) in the House of Lords, and wrote several massive biographies about dominating figures in British political history: Churchill, Gladstone, and Asquith, to name a few. In A Life at the Centre, Jenkins switches from political biography to political autobiography as he looks back on his origins, his opinions, and his political career.

A Life at the Centre is not immune to the autobiography’s tendency to drag and meander in sections, particularly at the beginning. Probably the best reason to read this memoir is for the parts where Jenkins discusses (not without a hint of bitterness, I might add) just how divisive a subject the European question was to the Labour Party. Granted, the squabbling over Europe really had its roots in inner-party divisions that had existed inside Labour since the early 1950s, and many commentators have suggested that Harold Wilson’s resignation in 1976 was timed to coincide with a period when Jenkins’ Europeanist stance made him an unacceptable choice for the party rank and file. (It’s a time-honoured tradition with Labour leaders, apparently, if the Clement Attlee-Herbert Morrison example and the more recent Tony Blair-Gordon Brown relations are considered.) But Jenkins resists the temptation to turn to vitriol, both over Europe and over the tensions that marked the uneasy Alliance between the SDP and the Liberals in the 1980s. In an autobiography, that’s worthy of note.

A comprehensive biography of Roy Jenkins hasn’t yet been published. There’s a 1983 biography that has obviously been overtaken by events, and Giles Radice’s Friends and Rivals: Crosland, Jenkins, and Healey does quite a bit to fill in the gaps but only focuses on the connections between its three title subjects. Until someone brings out a biography that tackles both the Jenkins papers and the papers in the National Archives (which are now available through the end of Jenkins’ time in the Labour Party), A Life at the Centre is possibly the best choice for anyone interested in looking at a history of Roy Jenkins’ life and for a notable perspective on the social democratic tradition in postwar British political history.

Neither Left Nor Right? The Liberal Democrats and the Electorate by Andrew Russell and Edward Fieldhouse

With the Lib Dem conference going on at the moment, it only makes sense to post a book review about one of the more recent works on the party in question.

Neither Left Nor Right? The Liberal Democrats and the Electorate by Andrew Russell and Edward Fieldhouse

It’s a simple fact that third-party politics tend to be overlooked in a two-party system. The only time anyone really pays attention to a third party is when something happens to draw attention to it — and most of the time, that comes down to either a scandal or a really surprising election result. Finding solid political research and analysis about a third party that doesn’t focus on the scandals or the election surprises isn’t easy. And that, in essence, is the reason for Andrew Russell and Edward Fieldhouse’s book Neither Left Nor Right? The Liberal Democrats and the Electorate.

The book looks at voting patterns and party organisations to determine who votes for the Liberal Democrats and how these voting patterns have changed over the course of past elections. It looks at the various forms of the Liberal Party, including the Social Democractic Party and the SDP/Liberal Alliance of the 1980s. It also compares and contrasts the Liberal Democrats with the Labour and Conservative parties, exploring several key questions. Who votes for the Liberal Democrats, and why? How does the party leadership affect voting patterns? (The book was written and printed before the whole leadership kerfluffle with Charles Kennedy, so the information on that front is really only valid up through the Kennedy leadership.) How do the Liberal Democrats have to adapt their tactics in different constituencies, in a way that neither Labour nor the Tories really have to consider? And what is the importance of the grassroots organisation on a party that — as the authors state nearly ad nauseam in their analysis — tends to believe that for something to be real, it has to be local?

The analysis in Neither Left Nor Right? appears to be good but fairly basic; the authors don’t really make any conclusions that seem to me to be glaringly mistaken or out of step with what I’d already felt to be true about the Lib Dems and their political workings. There were more than a handful of good, succinct pen-portraits of grassroots campaigns and the influences that work on the political situation in different areas of the country. The book on the whole is a bit repetitive, but would likely appeal to those interested in political sociology and the workings of third-party politics in a traditionally two-party system. But there was one particular thing about the book that really annoyed me. Perhaps it’s just the copyeditor in me showing through (though since it’s what I’m doing for a living at the moment, I probably shouldn’t be so surprised when it does), but my edition of the book was very poorly edited. Grammatical inconsistencies, punctuation problems, actual misspellings of fairly simple words…I actually had to put it down once or twice because I was all but reaching for my red and blue pencils. Some editor clearly was asleep (quite possibly catatonic) on the job, and that always makes me wonder about the quality of the information itself.

If this book runs into future editions, I’d like to go back through and look at it again. At the moment, though, the mistakes are distracting enough to make me save this book only for the infrequent times when I need to look at primarily statistical data.

A Strange Eventful History: Democratic Socialism in Britain by Edmund Dell

I’d originally thought to link this review with David Marquand’s The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair, but I think I’ll save that one for a review to come. Dell’s book deserves to stand on its own, anyway.

A Strange Eventful History: Democratic Socialism in Britain by Edmund Dell

There’s a saying that’s usually attributed to Labour politician Herbert Morrison — ‘Socialism is what a Labour government does’. I’ve always found it to be a fascinating statement, because simply by shifting the emphasis in that statement, you can say one of two things: 1) a Labour government is, by definition, a government that will implement the classic ideas of socialism; or 2) the definition of socialism depends entirely on the Labour government that claims to be implementing it. This particular book kept me thinking about that old saying, and where the emphasis in that saying really lies. And while I can’t deny that Edmund Dell’s book is in many ways a polemic, 500-plus pages of thinly-veiled bitterness about what the Labour movement has become, it’s a book that really does keep you thinking about that possible change in emphasis all the way through.

Now, the late Edmund Dell wasn’t one who had many kind things to say about the Labour party. His book The Schuman Plan and the Abdication of British Leadership in Europe is positively vituperative in its condemnation of the Labour Party’s fear of Franco-German cooperation and further European union. An unsurprising sentiment, perhaps, since he was one of the Labour MPs who broke with the Party and joined the SDP in 1980…in part because of Labour’s anti-Europe stance, though the party’s general drift to the left also played into Dell’s decision to jump ship. But Dell doesn’t seem to have much sympathy for any aspect of Labour government or democratic socialism — at least, not in the way that it has been defined by various Labour politicians and thinkers over the years. And in some ways that lack of sympathy is the book’s main weakness: it’s not always easy to tell when his criticism of Labour’s interpretation of democratic socialism is fully justified, or when he’s attacking Labour out of sheer spite.

Dell is clever with words, I must admit. There’s a wonderful description of Harold Wilson’s desperate, angry pleading with Lyndon Johnson over the shabby state of Britain’s finances in the 1960s: ‘like a suicide threatening to cut his throat on his neighbour’s doorstep’. And I must admit that he does an excellent job with the historical writings, tracing the threads of democratic socialism from the early socialist thinkers in the trade unions right up through Labour’s victory in 1997 (where his account ends). But A Strange Eventful History has to be read with one eye on the writer, always remembering that this history of democratic socialism was written by a man who sadly fell out with the Labour government that claimed to espouse the very ideals of democratic socialism…back when more people considered it to be a truly viable political movement.