It's easier to think highly of people after they're dead. It's even
easier to think highly of them if they died almost a century and a half
ago and have a statue in Parliament Square. Early on in yesterday's conference speech,
Ed Miliband name dropped Benjamin Disraeli and his 'One Nation' pitch
to the Tory party of the 1870s. By the time he finished up an hour later
the Labour leader had said "One Nation" another forty-five times. Of
Disraeli, Miliband started out with "he was a Tory, but don't let that
put you off", indeed there are plenty of reasons to dislike Disraeli
aside from his party.
Given that Miliband's speech took aim at Britain's bankers it's
ironic that Disraeli had both made and lost a fortune playing the
markets with shares in mining companies. Given the high value Miliband
afforded to tolerance it's ironic that Disraeli was such a reactionary
figure when it came to the rights of Catholics, especially in Ireland.
When Disraeli took the office of Prime Minister for the first of his two
ministries, he famously announced that he had "climbed to the top of
the greasy pole", and yet Disraeli was a politician who did more than
most to grease the pole in the first place. He fell out with Sir Robert
Peel when the Prime Minister overlooked him in forming a government in
1841, and in retribution Disraeli became an influential opponent of the
Corn Law Repeal that Peel forced through the Tory government against the
interests of the landed aristocracy and in favour of the working poor.
What would today be known as an arch flip-flopper, Disraeli's great
rival, William Gladstone, became consumed with an almost religious zeal
to do away with the "Beaconsfieldism" (Disraeli was made Earl of
Beaconsfield by Queen Victoria) by which Disraeli governed without any
consistent principles. Away from home and Disraeli was something of a
war monger, his close relationship with Queen Victoria was useful given
his frequent unpopularity with politicians and public alike, and as such
he was an imperialist by nature. He recommended that Victoria should
make herself Empress of India, and took Britain into Afghanistan to
expand her empire against the interests of Russia. Towards this same aim
he was unmoved by Ottoman atrocities in the Balkans, and looked rather
to the need for Ottoman allegiance against Tsar Alexander II.
During his time in office Disraeli did conduct reforms to the good
of the working poor, permitting a degree of union action and legislating
for improvements to public health and housing. In 1867 his Tory
government beat the Liberals in the race to extend voting rights to
almost a million workers and thereby harness the impetus of the Reform
movement to Tory advantage. For the most part Disraeli was a very human
politician, that is to say
that he was self-preserving, opportunistic and frequently petty. He was
not the pantomime villain that many of his contemporaries made of him, often with anti-semitic allusions to his Jewish background, but
neither is there much reason beyond his notoriety to celebrate him a
hundred and forty years on.
The nod that Disraeli got yesterday in
Manchester makes me fear for the Labour Party conference of the year
2152, when delegates hear of the visionary David Cameron and his plan
for a 'Big Society'. At lunch the conference delegates will unplug
themselves from the conference and plug themselves into the restaurant
table without having to leave their seats. Some of them will teleport
home whilst others take the everyman option and climb into their
hovercar. The politics won't have changed much, which is why the same
lines will work just as well, and Cameron will bring with him nothing
more than the approval of a stock character from history.
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