Death and glory

It is repeatedly said at present that, although the only British prime minister in this or the last century to be accorded a state funeral has been Winston Churchill, in recognition as his role as leader during the second world war (the simple description 'war leader' is no longer particularly distinguishing amongst modern British prime ministers), nineteenth-century prime ministers such as Disraeli and Gladstone were given state funerals.

It appears to be a mistaken belief and that they also were given not state but public funerals:

"A public funeral was one paid for by Parliament through a resolution to the monarch. It was, and remains, a very rare event. In the nineteenth century only Nelson, Pitt the Younger, Charles James Fox, R. B. Sheridan, George Canning, the Duke of Wellington, Palmerston, and Napier of Magdala had been so buried (several had been offered and declined, for example Beaconsfield and Russell). Palmerston was the best precedent (and he had made the same requirement about his wife), but he had died in the Parliamentary recess and the procedures had had to be short-circuited. The Wellington funeral had been a lavish but rather chaotic affair; the catafalque being too heavy for the road which gave way under it in St James’ and too large to get through the gates of St Paul’s (where both Nelson and Wellington were buried) and the congregation was thus kept waiting for over an hour. Gladstone’s funeral was to be the first public funeral with a recognisedly modern aspect – worldwide press coverage via telegraph and the procession filmed."  

Moreover, the records of Glastone's funeral show it as, by current standards, a rather subdued affair without pomp and bombast. It was also the custom that the monarch, or members of the royal family, did not attend and Victoria had no intention of doing so (having ensured that news of Gladstone's death was entirely omitted from the court circular by means of an 'oversight', in contrast with the effusive mention of Disraeli's death, which she had herself written - Victoria, for all her popular reputation, was not the model of propriety that is our present queen). However, the prince of Wales defied her and acted as one of the pall bearers.

Gladstone left the rather ambivalent instruction in his will that his burial was "‘to be very simple unless they [his Executors] shall consider that there are conclusive reasons to the contrary’. Of course there are other ways of arranging one's own funeral.

Unite and Rule - or Division Time?

I did not hear the radio interview with our Chancellor of the Exchequer where he defended his claim that the recent conviction of Mick Philpott, who was drawing over £50,00 in state benefits for his seventeen children, for the manslaughter of six of them in a house fire of itself demonstrated the necessity of restructuring the welfare benefits regime.

Mr Osborne, however, is quoted as having said "I don't set out to be divisive – actually far from it,  ... I think a lot of the things that I've been saying … are in tune with what the great majority of the country think and experience in their everyday lives."

I have to wonder how in touch Mr Osborne - or any member of the government - actually is "with what the great majority of the country think and experience in their everyday lives", although no doubt he is surrounded by advisers whose professional task is to tell him their version of it.

One doesn't have to wonder about (rather than wonder at) how in touch the majority of the country is with the facts of the welfare system. Surveys have shown that public opinion majorly overestimates the cost of welfare, its generosity to claimants, the extent of abuse, the proportion of the total cost that goes to the unemployed (as opposed to, for example, pensions), and the amount that this country spends compared with other European states.

Yet it is that confident phrase "I don't set out to be divisive" that strikes me most. I can imagine it being proclaimed equally sincerely by any aspiring populist dictator - including, I cannot help but reflect, Hitler, one of whose most often repeated phrases was "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer". Here and now in Britian we have a Coalition, though not one nation.

The people united come first. Then may come the horrors. Not, of course, that Mr Osborne is indulging in anything like Hitler's strident rhetoric, but, when appeals to the popular will gain political precedence over reasoned appeals to the public benefit, we are entering dangerous territory.

It is noticeable how often, at other times, Mr Osborne and his conservative goverment colleagues couch their appeal to a public described in a particular way, as "strivers" or "those who want to get on" or "hard-working families" (vintage New Labour), implying clearly that those whose views or opinions matter are those who already agree with the government's vision of society and the direction changes to its structure should take - fellow travellers on the road to political reform and the big, if not comprehensive, society. It echoes the late Mrs Thatcher's underlying question, "Is he one of us?" Yet she was a populist of a different stamp. For all her genuine belief that she was battling in the interests of her country and countrymen and women, Mrs Thatcher never shrank from identifying an 'enemy within'. Her politcal heir and successor, Tony Blair, with his fixation on the middleground was also aware that his social vision was not entirely comprehensive, and it is a rarity indeed to find a politician who is genuinely concerned to unite the country across real existing divisions, or, who, when the going gets tough, is not prepared to take political advantage from majority disdain for other elements in society.

One people. The phrase with great historic currency in the United States is rather different: "One nation under god" although it was only in 1954 that Congress, with President Eisenhower's encouragement, put god in there. The daughter of the original author, in 1892, of the pledge of allegience, socialist minister Francis Bellamy, actually objected to the change. In another small irony, illustrating the difficulty of keeping these national tokens unsullied by any fortuitous association with rival, abhorrent regimes, the salute to the flag devised by Bellamy at the same time had to be changed during the second world war because it appeared too similar to the arm extended Nazi salute. 

"One nation" also has British political currency, as "one nation conservatism" and the tradition introduced to our social debate by Benjamin Disraeli, but the idea now has more campaigning appeal to the Labour than to the Conservative party, the latter famously mocked now for another once seemingly appealing slogan that "We are all in this together."

As yet the "condition of England question" has still to be explicitly revived by any politician.

Two nations

“Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.”
“You speak of — ” said Egremont, hesitantly. “ THE RICH AND THE POOR.”

Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil (1845)

Disraeli in 1878 by Cornelius Jabez Hughes

Disraeli's novel was set in the then present day. Published in 1845, the same year as Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, it's action takes place in the years 1837-44. The words quoted, and that phrase 'two nations', and the consequent notion of 'one-nation' politics that has resounded, one way or another in the Tory party and English politics since, right down to Ed Miliband's recent speech, were put in the mouth of Walter Gerard, father of Sybil and a working-class radical, but there is no doubt that they carry, to a large extent, the author's endorsement.

Disraeli, First Earl of Beaconsfield, was the British Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1850s and 60s, leader of the Conservative Opposition in the late 60s and early 703, and Prime Minister in 1868 and from 1874 to 1880. His policial career yoyo-ed with that of William Gladstone, leader of the Liberal Party. Queen Victoria much preferred Disraeli to the dourer moralist, Gladstone.

It is a long time since a British Prime-Minister to be wrote serious literary novels (or, perhaps, even read them: Harold Macmillan said he liked to 'take a little Trollope to bed' with him), but it is difficult to imagine any modern politician, even one sincerely convinced, uttering such social commentary so vividly. Ed Milliband certainly did not meet Disraeli's standard.

Disraeli was hardly the modern idea of a social paragon. As a young man he engaged in financial speculation was was ruined in his early 20s by the collapse of a South American mining bubble. he in fact returned to literature to try, with limited success, to recoup his financial fortunes (but was rather more than the Jeffery Archer of his times, on several considerations). Financial embarrasment plagued him until his marriage to a rich widow, twelve years older than he, in 1839. Though initially based on expediency, the marriage grew to be deeply affectionate. In earlier years, before he entered parliament, his dubious relations with woment, in the words of his biographer, Lord Blake, contributed to "the understandable aura of distrust which hung around his name for so many years".

Disraeli's social consciousness, though vivid and real, did not mean that, at the time of the great Reform Acts of the nineteenth century (how the word 'reform' has by comparison become debased to petty political partisanship in our own time), he was liberal in his political view or deviated from an idea of society in which justice and harmony were established by mutual respect and fulfilment of obligations between the classes rather than by equality.

Disraeli was of Jewish origin, but his parents were non-observant and he was baptisted in the Christian religion at the age of twelve and remained a practising Anglican throughout his life. Nevertheless, his obvious Jewishness hampered, though clearly did not thwart, his political career. It is difficult to imagine in our supposedly more inclusive and enlightened age someone so obviously Jewish, almost architypically so in appearance, becoming leader of one of our main political parties and Prime Minister.

A modest proposal

An article in one of our ‘serious’ newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, in the past few days has apparently proposed that voting in national elections here should be restricted to those who pay a minimum level of income tax. In that way voting would be confined to those who actually ‘make a contribution’ to society. How, other than financially, could anyone contribute to society?

Progressive though this suggestion is as a welcome partial re-introduction of the property qualification which we somehow lost in the nineteenth century, I have a much better one. Voting eligibility should be maintained as it now is, but all votes should be weighted according to the positive or negative contribution by the voter to the national exchequer. So the vote of someone who paid, for example, £50,000 income tax in the preceding year, would count as fifty positive votes, whilst that of someone who received £2000 in state benefits would count as two negative votes.

This idea has many advantages. It preserves the strangely hallowed twentieth-century shibboleth of ‘universal suffrage’. It reflects precisely the voter’s contribution to society across the entire range. It penalises tax exiles. It gives an incentive to governments both to increase marginal rates of taxation and to maintain state benefits for the poor: that would make mine truly a ‘one nation’ proposal, very likely to appeal to a Daily Mail readership, let alone the Daily Telegraph.

(I should explain for my North American readers that ‘one nation’, though always without the suffix ‘under god’, is a term that historically resonates in my country also, usually attached to our ‘natural party of government’ as ‘one-nation conservatism’, as embraced originally by Benjamin Disraeli, novelist and Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister 1868 and 1874-1880, as opposed to that dreadfully hectoring Liberal, William Gladstone. Could this nation today choose so conspicuously Jewish a figure as Disraeli as Prime Minister, or indeed so stern a moralist as Gladstone?)

Finally, my proposal has also the indirect advantage of surely bringing about a massive boost in tax receipts in the year preceding an election, to be emphatically utilised by the incumbent party to dispense largesse to the voters, and vice versa.

I rest my case.

For the avoidance of doubt, as they say, I should perhaps point out that this post takes its title from Jonathan Swift's 'Modest Proposal...' and the whole thing is intended ironically. Except, that is, for the reflections on prime ministers, where I do think that the Victorians, whom we tend to regard as somewhat hidebound and prejudiced, were perhaps more tolerant and publicly adventurous than we are today. Or maybe they were just tolerant of different things.