Eamon Dyas

I remember when I worked at the British Library at Colindale discovering how most English towns, and even quite small towns, usually had two newspapers covering national and local events from either the Tory or Liberal perspective. The heyday of this was in the 1880s. It went into decline when Gladstone’s Irish policy created a fracture in the Liberal camp. However the rudiments of this continued into the decade before the First World War, having been further damaged by the Chamberlain tariff reform issue. Its decline also coincided with the growing commercialisation of the local newspaper industry as newspaper groups were increasingly being formed in ways that prioritised profits rather than service with the result that family run newspapers with a political loyalty to either of the two parties began to disappear. 

The emergence of the Labour Parry came about in the aftermath of the heyday of this phenomenon and although there were local newspapers with a Labour perspective around from the late nineteenth century the extent to which they existed never emulated the earlier saturation of the small towns of Britain by Liberal and Tory papers. The absence of a Labour network of local newspapers has always struck me as a factor in its subsequent evolution.

But then again the emerging Labour perspective was framed along the guidelines of progressive liberals and it never fully escaped that legacy so there was no strong local basis other than the trade union one that such a perspective could be constructed. Robert Blatchford, the founder of what could be seen as a local network around a labour perspective could not escape the Tory/Liberal legacy of British politics. He admitted himself to be a Tory democrat who was an Englishman first and a socialist second. His criticism of the Labour Party on its formation in 1900 was that it remained too subservient to its liberal inheritance. 

Nonetheless, it remained possible for the Labour Party to develop an independent perspective based on its connection to the trade Union movement and it continued to serve the working class as long as the trade unions provided it with a bedrock of power within the wider community. But the weakness of that position was that should that bedrock begin to weaken there was no other independent perspective that it could call upon to give it direction. It might have been able to evolve a wider working-class perspective that embraced but was not limited to, its trade union bedrock. But that was only possible if it had fully replaced the Liberal Party in the British two-party system. It was the continued existence of the Liberal Party that prevented this happening. After the First World War the Liberal Party continued to possess its national local network out of all proportion to its presence at Westminster but it was its presence in Westminster that remained as a piece of political grit in the machinery of British politics. 

This had the effect of spoiling the ability of the two main parties – Tory and Labour – from being true to themselves. What should have seen the evolution of a hard crust between Tory and Labour perspectives was softened by the perpetual possibilities of coalition government involving the rump of the old Liberal Party. Such an outcome became the means by which what should have provided a hard alternative between Tory or Labour policies at elections being viewed instead as aspirational in terms of the programmes of both parties. Politics became the domain of the deal makers in a political arena where there remained the ongoing prospect that government might require a willingness to use policies as bargaining counters, with the result that there could be no hard and fast attachment to even basic principles.