Dear Mr Gladstone
27th April 2001
Since you have been credited with being one of Tony Blair's heroes, I wonder whether you would care to comment on my view that his New Labour "project" is the culmination of what you were seeking to achieve with Gladstonian Liberalism?
It seems to me that we should see the period between 1914 and 1989 as a giant cul-de-sac, dominated by the twin voids of German militarism and communism-creeds with nothing whatsoever to teach mankind. The politics of 2001 have returned to the same controversies of our day, before the two red herrings of 1914-89 began to stink out the 20th century.
The important issues of 1868-1902, the period when Disraeli, Rosebery, you and I took it in turns to serve as First Lord of the Treasury, were indeed eerily similar to today's.
Your two Irish Home Rule bills-which I in large measure defeated-proposed Celtic devolution from Westminster, in a form similar to that which Tony Blair has brought about today. I argued then that the result would be independence for Ireland and was proved right; is not Scotland now set upon that same route?
Instability in the Balkans dominated much of both your and my foreign policy, and prompted what we called "the federated action" of the Great Powers, which was usually naval in nature. For although you yearned to send British troops there you always held back, yet Blair actually made the leap you never did. We feared back in our day that our soldiers might never be withdrawn. Weren't we right?
Although Milosevic's crimes are easily the equal of those of the Turkish-backed "bashi bazouks" whom you argued should be flung "bag and baggage" out of the Balkans in 1878-9, would you have tried to put them on trial? Furthermore, the Labour government has now sent the papers regarding Saddam Hussein's misdeeds to Scotland Yard. Can you imagine us doing that with our imperial enemies such as the Khalifa, Chief Cetewayo, Paul Kruger or the Mahdi? And if they are going to act in this absurdly legalistic way, why not arrest John Major for having aided and abetted Saddam Hussein's escape from justice by foreshortening Desert Storm back in 1991?
You ensured that my House of Lords faced radical threats to "mend or end" the legislative powers of the hereditary peers, and there was much discussion as to what kind of second chamber should take its place. Although Blair has finally made your dream a reality, do you believe he has thought profoundly about what now needs to take its place? Can you imagine either of us creating new peers at the rate he does!
You will recall how self-government for London was high on our agendas, with my newly-created LCC of 1889 providing a new forum for the battle between the "Moderates" (Conservatives) and "Progressives" (Liberals). Do you think that the present situation can long endure in which Ken Livingstone-a populist radical you would instantly recognise as being like the young Jo Chamberlain-clashes with the central government?
The collapse of land prices and rentals during your and Rosebery's 1892-95 ministry inaugurated the worst crisis in British agriculture since your hero and my villain Robert Peel repealed the Corn Laws. How do you see the Blair ministry dealing with the present crisis in the long term? When I sat on the Royal Commission on Cattle Plague in 1864, we recommended a mass slaughter policy and defeated foot and mouth in a matter of a few months. Don't you think the Ministry of Agriculture-which I unfortunately created-has done pathetically badly?
As a former Chancellor of Oxford University, I am also most interested in your views on the Laura Spence affair. Was not Gordon Brown's ill-informed tirade not a typical instance of the class-based "gesture politics" that we used to despise?
Returning to Ireland, where you famously released Charles Stuart Parnell from Kilmainham gaol in 1882, what do you have to say about the agreement that your prot? Blair signed on Good Friday 1998, when you and I would both have been in three-hour church services? Does not the fact that hundreds of convicted terrorists have been released without any weapons being handed in or decommissioned invalidate it? As I told their Lordships in 1882, "When there is a suspicion or a strong belief that your conciliatory measures have been extorted from you by the violence that they are meant to put a stop to, all the value is taken away."
Both of us were great parliamentarians, at home fighting our battles on the floors of the two houses of parliament. So would you not agree that in favouring the presentation of policy outside Westminster, New Labour is showing a contempt for parliament that can only in the longer run work against the interests of representative government? I used to speak in blisteringly direct terms and cared not a jot for the black arts of what are now called public relations. Does not this ministry care more for the way it says things than about what it actually says?
Do you remember how I used to be accused of pursuing a mythical policy of "splendid isolation"? In fact my foreign policy was closely involved with those of Tsarist Russia, Bismarck's Germany and Republican France. In those days we were truly "in Europe but not run by Europe." Yet has not Blair's intention to hold a referendum on the euro soon after the next election put this great principle at risk? I believe we might be on the verge of ceding a key part of our national sovereignty-control over our own currency-to a power which we never had to face in our day, a kind of "Concert of Europe" with bite.
Here, at least, is one area in which Blair does not seem to be seeking to fulfil your political programme of 1894. You would not have considered surrendering the pound sterling, not only because you were a great reforming chancellor who strengthened the currency, but also because you were, despite the imperial backslidings that I used to denounce, a profoundly patriotic politician. Even if the so-called "five Treasury criteria" were met (as they doubtless one day will be), would you ever have countenanced voting "Yes" in a referendum on the euro?
When Disraeli's biographer Lord Blake wrote of "the cant, high-minded humbug and general waffle to which Gladstone was, and Tony Blair is, addicted" he might have been thinking about your shared belief that you have God-given missions in politics. Do you agree with me that (excepting the euro) Blair has a kind of New Gladstonian project in mind, which goes hand in hand with the kind of sheer opportunism that you also rarely eschewed?
Salisbury
Dear Lord Salisbury
30th April 2001
You are right that the Blair era displays much similarity to the late Victorian period which together we dominated. The main issues of the day-Britain's relations with the continent, the nature of international morality, the shape of the United Kingdom, the role of the state, are those with which you and I grappled.
Today, as you recognise, there is much in the New Labour project-constitutional reform, humanitarian intervention in Kosovo, engagement with Europe-which reflects the agenda of 19th-century liberalism, rather than 20th-century socialism. I find myself in sympathy with much of this programme, especially its international aspects, and I remain a firm believer in the Concert of Europe. In my own day, I sought to extend the notion of the role of law from national to international society. You and your followers rejected this approach as too idealistic, preferring the realism of the balance of power, which in practice meant ignoring the claims of the weak while appeasing the strong. No wonder Conservatives so admired Bismarck, the first authentic modern advocate of power politics. After the first world war, your party was sceptical of the League of Nations, preferring to do deals with dictators. The outcome was Munich and another world war. You will not be surprised to learn that I welcomed Tony Blair's intervention in Kosovo as a powerful assertion of the liberal doctrine of collective security, by contrast with Douglas Hurd's policy of appeasing Milosevic. Without Tony Blair's intervention Milosevic would probably still be ruling in Serbia.
You remain, I am not surprised to hear, a sceptic about European integration, what is now called a Eurosceptic. But does not the 20th century show that Britain cannot stand apart from developments on the continent? The idea that we could remain in "splendid isolation" was an error made by the pre-1914 radicals in my own party, and by the pre-1939 appeasers in yours. The consequences of this doctrine, as of your own Euroscepticism, is that while we remain deeply affected by decisions made on the continent, we have much less influence on these decisions than we ought to have. The policies of your party today, as championed by such men as William Hague and John Redwood, would in effect make us a satellite of the US. Yet we have neither votes nor representation in Congress, and the Americans do not want us to become the 51st state. That is why I so much welcome the moves of the Blair government, fitful as they have been, towards a closer engagement with Europe. The whole history of the 20th century shows that there is no other role for Britain.
I fail to see how Tony Blair's offer of a referendum on the euro puts our future at risk. Does it not allow the British people themselves to decide their future? I was of course against the referendum in my time, since I saw it as a weapon of those who wanted to deny Home Rule to Ireland. Now, however, there seems no other way of resolving an issue which cuts across normal party lines. And of course I shall urge my present day followers to vote "Yes," since I believe that the breaking down of national barriers in currency and trade offers the best hope of permanent peace on our tortured continent.
Your policies did tremendous damage to Britain's relations with Ireland. You argue that Home Rule would have led to independence for Ireland, and claim that you were "proved right." In fact it was the denial of Home Rule that led to independence, as I had foreseen. I cannot understand how you can claim that you were "proved right" when the one thing the Unionists did not achieve was to preserve the Union with Ireland. It was no accident that your party ceased to use the title Unionist after 1922 when Ireland achieved her independence. The Irish problem continues to haunt us today, thanks to your folly. "What fools we were," George V told Ramsay MacDonald in 1930, "not to have accepted Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. The empire would not have had the Irish Free State giving us so much trouble and pulling us to pieces."
Your only answer to Irish grievances was repression or emigration-manacles or Manitoba as my colleague John Morley called it. My alternative was to replace a Union based on force with a Union of Hearts, a voluntary union. That would have allowed us to restore Anglo-Irish relations on a new basis of respect. The outcome could not have been worse than the one which resulted from following your policy.
Your party seems to have finally learnt the lessons of the 19th century, at least so far as Ireland is concerned, even if you yourself have not. The Conservatives have accepted the Good Friday agreement which you in your letter denounce. Whatever the flaws of the agreement, is there any way of securing peace in that troubled province other than by ensuring that Unionists and Nationalist share power. Are you arguing once again for manacles and Manitoba?
You will not be surprised to learn that I favour devolution to Scotland, since a policy of not responding to grievances is the policy most likely to break up the United Kingdom. Your party is now trying to stoke the fires of English nationalism, fortunately without success. William Hague wants to lead an English army, but he has few followers. The English are more mature than those who claim to speak for them.
I would claim that just as my party, the Liberals, were the true Unionist party in the 19th century, so today Liberal and Labour supporters of devolution are following the path most likely to hold us together.
I would give a cautious welcome also to the other constitutional reforms of the Blair government. The Duke of Wellington declared before the Great Reform Act that our pre-1832 constitution was the best that could have been devised by a beneficent creator. Perhaps you believe the same about the pre-Blair constitution. Labour's constitutional reforms disperse power, something one would have hoped the Conservatives would applaud. We had become vastly over-centralised, and perhaps also a little too insensitive to human rights. In the past, the Conservatives, under their ex-Liberal leader Winston Churchill, played a notable part in drawing up the European Convention of Human Rights. I am sad that today's Conservative leaders are so hostile to the Human Rights Act, which patriates the Convention.
There was, however, one constitutional reform towards which you yourself, influenced by your friend Lewis Carroll, were quite sympathetic-more sympathetic indeed than I: proportional misrepresentation, which you saw as a Conservative weapon. Are you still sympathetic?
The doctrines you espoused have not, I fear, stood the test of time. That is no accident. The central principle of Conservatism, as I once said, is mistrust of the people qualified by fear. Your politics could be summed up in the slogan "no surrender." You explained popular grievances as the result of agitation by malcontents; repression was your only answer. But that, as the tragic history of Ireland has shown, was no answer at all.
WE Gladstone
Dear Mr Gladstone
1st May 2001
Well, at least we are agreed on the desirability of the death of British socialism, which Tony Blair has played a fine part in bringing about.
I am, however, astonished that even a liberal internationalist such as yourself could believe that the League of Nations as it was constituted could ever have brought Adolf Hitler to heel. Once your Liberal disciple David Lloyd George signed that Carthaginian peace treaty at Versailles in 1919-which neither of us would have put our names to-the scene was set. To assume that the League could have done anything more than the UN does today to prevent genocide is wishful thinking.
Certainly we Cecils need no lectures on appeasement, for it was my grandson Bobbety, the 5th Marquess, who resigned from Neville Chamberlain's ministry over the appeasement of Italy. The Tory appeasers forgot that Britain needed to be "in Europe but not run by Europe," and tried to extricate themselves altogether. Yet the lesson of the 1930s was not that "there is no other role for Britain" than being part of a European state, indeed it was only because we stayed independent from the continent that world civilisation was saved.
Neither was Bismarck the problem 40 years earlier; I had his measure from the Congress of Berlin onwards. It was Kaiser Wilhelm II and the fools who took his place who caused all the trouble.
We can trade with America without becoming her 51st state. One of the attractions of Nafta is that Washington does not seek to extract the political dues from its trading partners such as Canada and Mexico that Brussels does. We have the world's fourth largest economy. Plenty of smaller economic powers have retained their independence, so what a counsel of despair it is for you to say that "there is no other role for Britain" than to be politically subsumed, and all for "a greater voice" in the affairs of an EU that we all know will ultimately be run in the interests of Germany and France as before.
The reason that the euro referendum is a danger is that it will not be conducted fairly. Although I was never a believer in one man, one vote-never understanding why seven labourers should be able to impose their will on six Rothschilds-the idea that the "Yes" campaign will be funded indirectly by the taxpayer (via Brussels) and the "No" campaign by private citizens is anathema. It will de-legitimise the result and thus legitimise protests against it for years afterwards.
Your idea of an Anglo-Irish "Union of Hearts" is the sort of thing I would have expected from "the Queen of Hearts" rather than from a hard-headed political thinker of your calibre. By preserving as much as he could for the Union, at least Lloyd George saved a couple of million crown subjects from the despoliation to which it was always the nationalists' intention to subject them. The fact that the southerners fought so vicious a civil war against one another shows what my descendants protected the Ulstermen from in 1922.
Far from "stoking the flames" of English nationalism, Hague is actually trying to douse them. He has merely asked the West Lothian question in reverse. As a former MP for Midlothian, what is your answer to the riddle of why Scotch MPs should vote on purely English bills while English MPs cannot vote on Scotch legislation? Also, how do you feel about your Liberal party acting as New Labour's poodle? My friend Lewis Carroll did try to interest me in proportional representation, but do you think Tony Blair will ever really grant it to the Liberals?
"No surrender" is not an ignoble cry if you are fighting for things worth defending. The problem of the 20th century was the number of Britons who were only too willing to surrender, many of them on the liberal wing of my party.
Salisbury
Dear Lord Salisbury
2nd May 2001
You say that "no surrender" is not an ignoble cry if one is fighting for things worth defending. Was a Union with Ireland based entirely on force, which was the outcome of your defeat of Home Rule, worth defending? You applaud the Lloyd George settlement of 1920-2, which was by then the best that could be hoped for. But the Lloyd George coalition, dominated by Conservatives, had to concede far more to the Irish nationalists than I would have done and did so without securing in return the goodwill which would have resulted from my policy. Remember that in 1914, with the third Home Rule bill on the statute book, the Irish nationalist leader John Redmond supported the British war effort. Thank goodness that Tony Blair has learnt from your errors.
What are you defending with your vacuous slogan "in Europe, but not run by Europe"? How does that help preserve British influence? Compare the relative influence of Britain and France, both ex-colonial powers, since the European Coal and Steel Community was formed, just 49 years ago? Which of the two countries is now more influential? De Gaulle and his successors willingly took part in the construction of Europe, not to subsume themselves politically, as you suggest, but to strengthen France. Few in France feel that they have lost their national identity, or that they are run by Brussels. It was thanks to the folly of post-war governments, both Conservative and Labour, that we did not follow the same path, which Liberals alone favoured. In the end, however, even Conservative prime ministers understood that there was no other role for Britain. Harold Macmillan applied to join the community, having rejected it in his 1959 election manifesto. Margaret Thatcher signed the Single European Act in 1985, which greatly extended majority voting, and accepted the aim of monetary union. She was often much more sensible in practice than her rhetoric would lead one to think. And did not you yourself once say that "the federated action of Europe is our sole hope of escaping from the constant terror of war, which weighs down the spirits and darkens the prospect of every nation in this part of the world. The federation of Europe is the only hope we have." Even I never went as far as that!
The source of your error in each case is the same. It is to make a shibboleth of the concept of sovereignty. I prefer us to be playing a full part in the decisions that affect us, rather than being on the sidelines like Switzerland or Norway. Oddly enough, it is I not you who turns out to be the truly realistic politician. Tony Blair too is a realist. He has dropped Clause Four socialism, modernised the constitution, and put in train reforms designed to strengthen families and communities, aims which Conservatives should applaud. Labour under Blair has come to be dominated by sensible reformers very much in the liberal mould; and does not the history of the 20th century tell us that liberalism is not only sensible, but realistic too?
WE Gladstone
Dear Mr Gladstone
3rd May 2001
I'm glad you quoted the speech on European Federation I gave in March 1888 as it proves that we Tories are not Little Englanders or isolationists. "In Europe but not run by Europe" is no "vacuous slogan" but a succinct summation of British foreign policy followed since the reformation, which your Tony Blair wishes to overturn. France may be more influential in the EU (like France, statist and corporatist), but she is not more influential than us globally. Since you mention Switzerland, I would far sooner Britain be sidelined yet enjoy her average per capita income.
Your conception of Ireland being held down "entirely by force" between 1801 and 1922 is farcical. Relatively few troops were stationed there and other than in Easter 1916 there were no significant revolts against Westminster. Political agitation was the bane of Ireland, aided and abetted by you. As for the first world war, yes, many Irishmen fought and died for the crown when she was part of the empire, but once she was a "free state," Ireland disgracefully stayed neutral in the struggle against Nazism.
Salisbury
(As told to Andrew Roberts)
Dear Lord Salisbury
4th May 2001
I admire your tenacity if not your judgement in defending your failed Irish policy. I do not think you will find many historians to agree with your view that British rule in Ireland was based on principles of generosity and beneficence.
You say that British foreign policy since the reformation was based on the European balance of power. But, in the 20th century, that balance was permanently overturned by two world wars, as Churchill was the first to see. "There I sat," he declared at Tehran in 1943, "with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey who was the only one who knew the right way home." If Europe fails to take her fate in her own hands, then the vital decisions affecting her future will be taken by powers outside Europe, for whom the welfare of our people will be but a secondary consideration.
WE Gladstone
(As told to Vernon Bogdanor)
