And yet there are still those who believe that this archaic doctrine must not be touched, that this is still the same Ark that ‘free-born Englishmen’ built three centuries ago, that it is the rabbit’s foot which keeps nasty things away. Now, that is what I mean by Druidism.
[1985
Mr Gladstone the Land Raider
The small houses stand far apart from one another, and yet are related. On the low-lying ground of the west coast of Lewis, or South Uist, the houses seem to float on the land like separate ships in a convoy. This isn’t a group of individual farmhouses, neither is it a village. It is the rarest of British communities: a crofting township.
There is no more ancient form of community in all Europe. It is the nearest thing to a peasantry that Britain can show. It is a community which treats land as a joint possession; the township has common grazing land for its members and, in a very few places, still ballots each year for who will till the patches of ‘inbye’ arable land. Most of Europe, it would seem, lived in this way in the Iron Age. Much of Africa still does.
Just a hundred years ago, Gladstone’s Government passed the Crofters’ Act of 1886. It was one of the most extraordinary, ‘un-British’ and imaginative laws a London government ever put through. Its importance was not merely that, without the 1886 Act, there would now be no townships, almost no people in the Isles and ‘crofting counties’ and – pretty certainly – no living Gaelic language. It was that the Act broke totally with the dogma of laissez-faire and market forces, and with the British tradition – still in force now – of an uncontrolled free market in land.
The Crofters’ Act did not ‘give the land to the people.’ The landlords still remain. But their rights were broken. The Act gave crofters security of tenure: they could no longer be evicted at will. It established an independent body to set ‘fair rents.’ It allowed the crofter to leave his tenancy to his children. Many newspapers of the day, backing the enraged landowners, called it pure communism, and screamed even louder when later Acts set about the purchase of land to redistribute to the crofters.
So ended the miserable tale of the Highland Clearances, the century during which the landowners – often the old clan chiefs – coaxed or violently drove their tenants off the land and into emigration. In non-Gaelic Shetland, the 1886 Act was an even greater day of liberation. It broke overnight the debt-slavery through which merchant lairds forced tenants to pay rents in fish and buy goods with truck-tokens at the merchants’ stores, on pain of eviction.
The Act and its successors recognise something which is anathema to our present rulers: the State’s duty to help a people’s wish to stay in a land and a way of life that they love. In their long struggle, conducted by land raids, occupation and fights against bailiffs, police and troops facing men and women armed only with sticks and stones, the people of the Highlands and the Islands challenged the very principle of private property. A Tiree crofter imprisoned for a land raid said: ‘The earth belongs to the people, and not to the Duke of Argyll or any landlord.’
The crofters did not ask to own their fields as individuals. They used the Bible to show that land should belong to the people as a whole, as the soil was apportioned among the Children of Israel in the time of Moses. The Highland ‘land leaguers’ formed a close alliance in the nineteenth century with those who fought the land war in Ireland; Parnell spoke for them too, when he preached ‘the eternal truth that the land of a country, the air of a country, belong to no man. They were not made by any man and they belong to all the human race.’
One might have expected that this centenary of the Act would be widely celebrated. There have been commemorative exhibitions in Stornoway and Edinburgh, and a fine historical picture-book, ‘As an Fhearann’ (From the Land) published in English and Gaelic by Mainstream, of Edinburgh. But contentious Scodand is still divided about the crofting question.
Professor Gordon Donaldson, the Historiographer-Royal, advised the Post Office not to issue a special stamp, on the grounds that the Act had been a disaster which only led to more emigration. Professor T. C. Smout makes the same point and calls the Act ‘an economic irrelevance.’
It is true that the Highland population dropped even more rapidly after 1886, falling by nearly 30 per cent between 1881 and 1931. This was mostly due to the decline of the fishing industry and to better communications with the Scottish cities. Land hunger remains, and the need of the crofting communities to regain huge tracts of pasture taken from them before 1886 to be used as private sheep farms and deer forests. But the biggest truth is that, without the protection laws, the Gaelic community would by now have entirely vanished.
Problems remain. Soldiers returning from the Flanders trenches seized acres which they considered they had redeemed with their blood. The last wave of land raids took place in 1948, in Knoydart. Even today, 0.01 per cent of the Highland population own two-thirds of the area, 38 people own 84 per cent of Sutherland, and 76 people own 84 per cent of Ross-shire. Almost all crofters supplement their incomes by fishing, weaving or commuting to light industry, and – especially on the mainland – the need to regain estate land for township common grazings remains desperate.
Crofters do not regard themselves as romantic earth-nurture people. In the right conditions, crofting could be a highly efficient form of land use. As a Crofting Commission report put it back in 1937, ‘(the crofter) has long since rejected the role of the noble son of Nature who rejoices in homely fare … he prizes his Gaelic culture, but not to the extent of being treated as a museum piece.’
But this is a story important not only for a part of Scotland. Meditating on the 1886 Act, one can draw lessons for the past and present of Britain. The first is that the Act would never have happened without the background of the tremendous unrest in Ireland, leading to the land reforms which broke up estates and redistrubted them to the peasantry. In turn, this huge break with British reverence for landed property was possible only after the experience of land reform in India. Lord Napier, whose commission preceded the 1886 Act, had been the administrator of Madras.
And to look back on the superb figure of Gladstone himself is to understand what we have lost; a gigantic confidence. This year is also the centenary of his fall, betrayed and defeated in his attempt to carry the Irish Home Rule Bill of 1886. Gladstone had the power to challenge all orthodoxies, from the sovereignty of Parliament and the idea of a unitary State to the sacredness of private property and the free market in land. For him, the British Constitution and tradition was not an untouchable Druidic Ark of the Covenant, but something made by men for men, elastic enough to be changed radically in order to fit new needs.
But today, everything has fossilised. Debates on economic policy, civil rights, devolution, show a small-minded terror of making exceptions lest the whole antique British structure collapses. The Crofters’ Act would be unthinkable now, and so would be laws to protect the small farmer throughout Britain on the lines of modern French or German practice. This is the year to honour Gladstone, but also to mourn the finest of all Victorian virtues: flexibility.
[1986
Gladstone’s Defeat and Our Loss
The anniversary of the ‘Anglo-Irish Agreement’ is not a very happy first birthday. We have no sturdy infant, but a poor little creature guarded still in its ward by brawny, apprehensive nurses. A friend of mine involved in its conception told me that the Agreement was intended to acquire ‘incremental assent’ from the Ulster Unionists. Marching, oathing and covenanting, they have so far offered it only excremental dissent.
A hundred years ago, in 1886, another such plan fell dead at birth with a crash that shook British politics for a generation. This was Mr Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill, offering all Ireland a simple, sweeping version of what we would now call devolution.
The 1886 Bill arose from a hung Parliament, in which the Irish Home Rulers led by Charles Stewart Parnell held the balance between Salisbury’s Tory Government and Gladstone’s Liberals. Late in 1885, Gladst
one changed his mind and announced his conversion to Home Rule. The Parnellites joined him, Salisbury fell and Gladstone became Prime Minister at the head of a large majority in the House. A few insects dared to suggest that The Grand Old Man had changed his opinions merely to get back into office. But this, as usual with Gladstone, was a Saul-Paul conversion of fearsome sincerity.
It all went wrong. The Scottish Liberals, for all their Presbyterian revulsion from the ‘Papist’ Irish, stood firm by Gladstone; so did the Nonconformist Welsh. It was English Liberals -Chamberlain, Harrington, Bright and the rest – who deserted, defeating the Bill and the land reform that was to go with it.
Just before the defeat, at the Bill’s second reading, the 77-year-old Gladstone made his last, unforgettable appeal. ‘Ireland stands at your bar expectant, hopeful, almost suppliant. Her words are the words of truth and soberness. She asks a blessed oblivion of the past, and in that oblivion our interest is deeper than even hers…. Think, I beseech you; think well, think wisely, think, not for the moment but for the years that are to come, before you reject this Bill.’
All the same, they rejected it. But here one has to get a grip on oneself. It’s all too easy to surge off on the current of Gladstonian rhetoric – a sensation rather like surfing down a tidal wave of Guinness – and declare that this is the centenary of Britain’s last chance with Ireland, that all the bloodshed of the succeeding 100 years stems from England’s failure to pass the First Home Rule Bill. That, however, is bad history.
Even if the Bill had been passed, would it have worked? While Gladstone did not ignore the feelings of Ulster Protestants, he grossly underestimated them. It is easy to blame the Tory Unionists for fanning those flames in later years. But Lord Randolph Churchill, a Tory populist, had already taken his opposition to Home Rule to the Belfast crowds, provoking wild riots, and they had been told that ‘Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right.’ The writ of a devolved Dublin Parliament would simply not have been obeyed in the Protestant North.
And it was not the debacle of 1886 which turned Irish nationalism away from the parliamentary track and back towards the Fenian tradition of violence. Gladstone’s defeat left the Home Rulers quite sanguine, confident that they would get what they wanted from Westminster in the end. The root of evil lies in Parnell’s fall in 1891, after his naming in Kitty O’Shea’s divorce. English moral humbug (not Irish Catholic feelings) made Gladstone declare he would no longer cooperate with the adulterer Parnell.
Knowing that Gladstone was the only statesman who could deliver Home Rule, the Irish MPs had to choose between the cause they loved and the leader they revered. Most chose the cause; the party split. A young Irish generation saw Ireland’s hero broken because their men at Westminster had bowed to English pressure, and the turn away from the ballot-box and back towards conspiracy and revolution began.
Most politicans invent their own Ireland for themselves. I remember Andy Tyrie, chief of the Ulster Defence Association, telling me that most Northern Catholics were not Republicans at all but secret Unionists. Parnell’s people imagined a large number of Northern Protestants eager for Home Rule from Dublin. And Gladstone, too, with his respectable and respectful, ‘almost suppliant’ Ireland – how much easier to imagine the Irish as the poor cousins of his own Midlothian electors!
And yet there is a great deal worth remembering from the 1886 Bill and the debates it generated. It may not have been a turning-point in Anglo-Irish relations. But it makes amazing reading in Britain today. We live in a State whose constitutional arrangements are stiff with age, hopelessly unsuitable for a modern society but treated – in a superstitious, dogmatic way – as untouchable. A hundred years ago, those arrangements still had some spring left in their timber, and statesmen were not afraid to strain them.
Think of the Devolution Bills of the 1970s, fat catalogues of fiddling little provisions for every detail of the Scottish and Welsh Assemblies. Gladstone’s ‘Government of Ireland’ Bill was just 17 pages long, with a mere 41 clauses. It did not spell out what an Irish Parliament could do. It did the opposite: listed what an Irish Parliament was not allowed to do. For the rest, Dublin could pass what laws it pleased.
The financial side of the Bill was marvellously simple and confident. There was almost nothing of the suffocating web of Treasury regulations which now insist that scarcely a penny drops without Whitehall permission, nothing of the dogma of ‘unitary demand areas’ enforcing fiscal uniformity. In 1886, London proposed to keep coinage issue and Customs and Excise duties. The Irish Parliament could invent and levy any tax it liked, or none. But Dublin had to pay London fixed annual sums for the armed forces, the national debt and the Imperial Civil Service. How it raised the cash was Ireland’s affair.
Gladstone’s first plan was that the the Irish should leave Westminster. Otherwise they might in theory vote on English and Scottish matters, although English and Scottish MPs could no longer vote on Irish affairs. In the 1970s, this non-problem returned as Tarn DalyelPs ‘West Lothian Question’ and utterly baffled the imagination of the House of Commons, although the proper answer to the ‘West Lothian Question’ was brief: ‘So what?’ Gladstone was later forced to climb down on this point, though the Irish were as happy to depart as most English MPs would have been to see them go.
It’s true that Gladstone accepted the central lunacy of the British Constitution: the dogma of the total and inalienable sovereignty of Parliament. But his Bill would, in practice, have made it almost impossible for Parliament to revoke Irish devolution. Nobody would dare to try and fence in the almighty House of Commons like that in our time.
After reading the chronicles of 1886, and in spite of all the illusions of that grand debate, I feel a sense of loss. Not so much about an answer to Ireland’s misery, perhaps only to be overcome when both sides in the North are induced to hate us more than they hate each other. The loss is a loss of vision, imagination, confidence to change the State’s architecture to make room for new times and needs. Gladstone was ready to knock down walls. But the ancestors of our modern preservationists, who are too awed to change a coal-scuttle of the Ancient British system, knocked him down instead.
[1986
Telling Sid
‘Sid! Sid..?’ But he’s gone at last, and none too soon. The British Gas shares have been sold to the public, a national asset has been privatised, and Sid is off the hoardings just as the graffiti artists were getting his measure. Whatever he meant -Shareholders’ Immune Deficiency? – he has melted away into the mists of hyperbole and gold-rush psychosis which gave him birth.
Mrs Thatcher calls the process ‘popular capitalism.’ Britain is now offering crash privatisation courses to governments from Paris to Singapore. One nationalised industry after another is ‘floated’ and its shares are sold on the market, a process which is to culminate with the auction of British Coal and British Rail. The Government itself is astounded at the stampede for profit it has unleashed.
But ‘popular capitalism’? Contemplating the manifold imbecility of this slogan, the first people I am sorry for are those who really do believe in untrammelled capitalism, the apostles of the free market who dwell in the Adam Smith or David Hume Institutes. Because privatisation, as performed by this Conservative Government, amounts to a custard pie flung in their faces.
Where is the free market in all this? ‘Privatisation’ simply means the reconstitution of monopolies: public enterprise without competition, but rather better protected against government regulation in the name of the consumer.
Mrs Thatcher went to Hungary and admired the new entrepreneurs there. But what can she say to Tibor Liska, darling of Hungarian and British free marketeers and the most terrifying economic visionary alive, who preaches the endless, shark-pool struggle of entrepreneurs to offer a public service at lower cost? Capitalism is about Mr Jones driving the appalling British Telecom out of business with a better telephone network, or Mr Smith bankrupting Sid with his own gas rigs and pipelines. Not much sig
n of that.
Secondly, the fact that something like an average of 15,000 people per constituency will have bought shares in these pseudo-private monopolies by the time of the next general election does not create ‘popular capitalism,’ whatever that may mean. Here we are dealing with a set of elderly, quackish and absurd prescriptions for overcoming ‘social divisions,’ which have drifted around the Conservative and Liberal parties for generations.
It is alleged that to spread share ownership throughout society gives ordinary people ‘a direct stake in the means of production and distribution.’ It is suggested that by putting money into British Gas or whatever it may be, classes hitherto outside the capitalist system finally give that system their historic assent.
This is pure nonsense, and in several ways. What has happened is extremely simple. In order to raise cash for tax-cutting, the Government has offered an astute but astonished nation outsider prices for odds-on favourite horses: ‘a ten-pound note for a fiver.’ In their millions, the British have accepted the invitation to have a flutter. This is nothing to do with normal private investment in shares, as practised by the old middle classes. It is a rapid gamble on a hot tip – something the working class has always been good at.
There is not the slightest evidence that spreading share-ownership affects political or class behaviour. The West Germans have been pursuing a ‘property formation’ strategy for 30 years, without visible effect; if there are fewer strikes and higher productivity there or in Sweden, it is for quite different reasons to do with better management, better collective bargaining structures and so forth. Even Communist Hungary now sells shares to its population, but at least the Hungarians don’t pretend that they are transforming society by doing so.
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