The period between 1688 and the 1740s was roiled by culture wars and economic change as dramatic as our own. Long before today’s keyboard warriors stereotyped their enemies online — either as skinhead flag-shagging gammons or spittle-flecked blue-haired harpies — Grub Street partisans were doing much the same. Instead of mocking lager louts in England shirts, Whig propagandists attacked a target that was, in many ways, the 18th-century equivalent: the ruddy-cheeked fox-hunting squire who made up the backbone of the Tory Party.

Urbane Whig essayist Joseph Addison depicted the average Tory backwoodsman as being a savage boor with a passion chiefly for dogs, inebriation and xenophobia. He was depicted as a bluff, insular patriot hostile to travel (good only to teach a man how to “jabber French”) and foreigners, whom, he splutters, “will never be loved in England”. With Addison presenting the squire as a half-educated gout-ridden oaf, it’s not far off those online progressives sneering at the “Raise the Flag” movement today.

Such political caricatures, then as now, were rooted in the passionate hatreds inspired by both cultural divides and clashes of economic interests in a time of disorientating change.

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Reform is tearing the Tories apart

By Tanya Gold

The Tories had, in the period following the Glorious Revolution, become classic provincial “populists”. Their base — the staunchly Anglican landed gentry and their rural dependents — not only despised the Whigs for being the defenders of their religious enemies, the more radical Protestant Dissenters outside the Church of England, but also for material reasons. The Whigs, partisans of the new Dutch King William III, supported their new master’s expensive wars with France, wars which gave rise to higher taxes, rising state debt, and a new web of corrupt state clients in the form of government contractors, “stock-jobbers” and army officers. The cost of all this fell disproportionately on the Tory squires while a new financial elite prospered.

As a result, in the 1690s there was a dramatic political realignment as the old party of state authority and monarchy — the Tories — became the “country” party, hostile to the depredations of the central state. All the while, the old libertarianism of the Whigs faded as they became the party of a new, courtly “progressive establishment”.

The parallel with now is obvious. Just as the triumph of post-revolutionary Whiggery created fresh culturally inflected classes of economic winners (financiers, speculators) and losers (the rural gentry and their tenants), globalization over the past 30 years has created urban-progressive economic beneficiaries and provincial small “c” conservative economic casualties. Back then, Tories and Whigs clashed on the status of the Church of England and religious toleration, whereas now we debate trans rights and Net Zero. But if these debates are separated by hundreds of years, both nonetheless pitted “rooted” cultural conservatism versus the radicalism of a new “Anywhere” class. Then as now, meanwhile, such bitter divisions also reflect the material resentment that economically “left-behind” groups — the Red Wall and angry farmers now, the gentry interest then — have for their urban, “sophisticated” rivals who benefit from both economic openness and state patronage.

Both periods saw a new division — put crudely, nation and tradition versus international economic entanglements and cosmopolitan openness — replace the old political binary. What matters now as then is a dichotomy between those championing national cohesion, rooted in the ways of the provinces, versus those championing new paths of global dynamism rooted in innovation and “progress”. It’s Tory versus Whig all the way down.

There is, however, one major contrast between the two eras. As the Whigs went from being libertarian opponents of state overreach to defenders of a new economic status quo, one dominated by financial interests, so Labour has gone from being the champions of the provincial working classes to the party of socially liberal cosmopolitan graduates. That political realignment has its limitations for Labour, given urban progressives are always in a minority. But the modern Conservative Party has an even bigger problem: they have not made the “populist” transition that their ancestors did. Married to a world of globalization and neoliberalism, thanks to their donor class and backbench Thatcherites, they missed their chance to exploit realignment under Boris Johnson.

This mantle has instead been grasped by Reform. Farage’s revolt against the Blairite state resembles the populist Tory rebellion against the post-Glorious Revolution Whig settlement. Starmer, for his part, looks like a Whig desperate to hold back the tide against the dangers of an insular reactionary neo-Tory backlash. These parallels, in their complexities, hold lessons for both Reform and Labour.

The strength of the appeal of the “country” Tories of the early 18th century was that they combined all the energies of a provincial populist insurgency with a deep sense of tradition. They wanted to dismantle what they saw as illegitimate and alien innovations that were distorting the traditional constitution and endangering liberty — the power of a new breed of financiers and a new class of parasitic state toadies that leeched off the bloated post-revolutionary state — without mostly abandoning the essentials of the post-1688 constitutional settlement. They were genuinely skeptical about the destabilizing implications of incipient financial capitalism, and prepared to countenance major “radical” reforms to ward off its ill effects, while still remaining the party of the church, constitution and squire. In other words, then, the Tories were both profoundly radical and profoundly conservative.

The contrast with Reform seems glaring. Firstly, there is every risk that Reform will be nobbled by the same donor class that rendered the Tories irrelevant, with the power of capital transforming Reform into another appendage of the uniparty. Secondly, elements within Reform appear to be ultra-liberals, albeit of a Right-leaning kind, who want to sweep away the Lords (or perhaps appoint their own cronies to it, Farage isn’t clear) and allow non-parliamentarians to sit in a US-style “cabinet”. They give the impression of skepticism towards a “woke” monarchy and of holding a desire to trash many of our institutions. Either or both of these tendencies may prove far from popular with precisely the marginalized provincial voters Reform is banking on, especially if they win power and the white-hot resentment of voters against the old two established parties fades with time.

This is why the defection of Danny Kruger seems surprising, but perhaps also hopeful. He is, after all, a Tory of the old school: a communitarian Christian and no “Right-Jacobin”. Given all this, he seems well-placed to help Reform negotiate these contradictions and channel the strengths of 18th-century Tory “country” radicalism. That there might also be more than an element of political calculation in the move as Kruger seeks to save his seat is probably true. Principle and pragmatism are, of course, not necessarily enemies, although he might find it a struggle to overcome the very different instincts of men like Richard Tice. We shall see how such a tension plays out.

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Meanwhile, Keir Starmer (or whoever succeeds him) will not avoid being swept away by a provincial populist backlash in the way that the original Whigs did: by the accession of George I, a king more than prepared to rig the political game in the Whigs’ favor. Nonetheless, Starmer might learn a lot from the man who helped secure Whig hegemony back in the early 18th century: Robert Walpole. Walpole wanted the Whig settlement to be truly secure, and he knew that the best way of doing that was to dampen down the deep economic and religious divisions that, when provoked, tended to work against the Whigs and in favor of the Tories.

So Walpole managed his new Whig economic and religious settlement very carefully. He gave the Tories much of what they wanted: he scrupulously avoided foreign wars and entanglements, kept taxes low and left the Church of England mostly alone. He reined in radical elements on his own side — defying his supporters from the ranks of Protestant Dissent who wished to curtail the privileges of the Church of England further — and compromised. In short, the economic and cultural wounds of the preceding generation were given time to heal. Political partisanship certainly didn’t disappear. But the temperature dropped, and Walpole remained in power for 20 relatively stable years.

The same principle could work today. There is no majority in the country for neo-Whig policies of open borders and neoliberal globalization. But Labour could — in theory — do what Walpole did and make his peace with the provincial patriots who otherwise look likely to power Reform to victory. He could give them what they want on immigration, just as Walpole gave the gentry what they wanted on peace. Starmer could also take real steps to assuage the economic pain of the hundreds of small cities and towns decimated by globalization, as Walpole reduced the land tax and bolstered domestic manufacturing. Starmer and Reeves could actually pull some of the economic levers available to the government: an industrial strategy with teeth and resources behind it, capitalizing regional investment banks, and a return to protective tariffs for key industries.

Alas, one fears that Reform will end up as a debased version of the current Tory Party and Labour will be unable to respond in any convincing way to the electoral tsunami that threatens to engulf them. The result could be a never-ending spiral of voter discontent and rising provincial fury. Let’s hope that Starmer and Kruger get mugging up on their 18th-century history, and soon.

“Let no damn Tory index my history!” Such, it’s said, was the declaration of the historian Thomas Macaulay on his deathbed. It may surprise some to learn that the innocuous piece of apparatus that you barely notice in the back of a book could inspire such vehemence. But in the 18th century, when the “index wars” raged, it was a political weapon. Whig and Tory partisans took to circulating home-made indexes to their opponents’ works; and, as a hilarious chapter in Dennis Duncan’s new history of the index makes clear, they didn’t even pretend to objectivity.

Here, for instance, is a flavour of “A Short Account Of Dr Bentley, By Way Of Index,” written by one of the theologian Richard Bentley’s opponents:   

The index is also a way of solving the problem of Big Data. As soon as you accumulate even a moderately large collection of written material, the important question becomes not what it contains, but how you make it navigable. That’s where the interpretation comes in: indexers make a body of data useful to its reader. This problem is not new: Duncan’s book draws a historical line that connects Google to the Great Library of Alexandria.

His white whale is the modern subject index. Nowadays, it’s done — or should be — by skilled professionals. I have the honour to serve as honorary president of the Society of Indexers, which trains and accredits the people who do this vital work. Many people — among them, alas, some publishers — seem to think any fool or, ideally, a computer, can do the job. They are wrong. As the words Macaulay uttered on his deathbed make clear, indexes are always — at least if they’re any good — the product of a human hand and a human mind.

Indexers will know as no computer can when “Number Ten” is a metonym for the Prime Minister and when it refers to a building, or that the “Charles” on page 36 refers to the Holy Roman Emperor and that the “Charles” on page 37 refers to the river in Boston. They will have thought about what’s important in the text — what the reader might need to find — and what is not. And indexers specialise: you need to know a bit about physics to index a book on physics, just as knowing a mirepoix from a mirabelle is handy if you’re indexing a cookbook.

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The English scholar and preacher Robert Grosseteste, who was said to have “got his surname from the greatness of his head, having large stowage to receive, and store of brains to fill it” created a Tabula distinctiones — a list of 440 concepts or subjects with locators (there being no page numbers, he had to use his own set of symbols) identifying where they were to be found in his library. Here was an index not to a single book, but to a lifetime’s reading — and the prototype of the modern subject index.

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That distinction, in one story Duncan tells, saved a man’s life — a 16th-century scholar working on a Biblical concordance escaped execution for heresy only when he could demonstrate that he was doing the mechanical work of reordering the Bible text rather than in any way adding, altering or retranslating it.

The distinction between these two types of index continues to this day. Google, for instance, is not indexing the web in quite the sense that an indexer indexes a book. Rather, it’s compiling a sort of global concordance. No coincidence that its parent company is called Alphabet. Yet, as Duncan observes, the now ubiquitous hashtag on social media is a sort of subject-indexing tool. We still need technologies to make vast data collections navigable — and digital or analogue, those technologies haven’t changed in their underlying nature.

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Can it be 12 years since Barack Obama talked up ‘the arc of history’ in his acceptance speech? In paraphrasing Dr King, who said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, Obama made perhaps the most famous latter-day recap of the Whig View of History.

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How knitters got knotted in a purity spiral

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So deeply enmeshed was slavery in the times, so powerful were its vested interests, that even the great lions of abolition were in fact all nervous gradualists, anxious not to ruffle many feathers. It is the second battle, which lasted until 1833, that the book covers. It has its heroes: Thomas Fowell Buxton,Thomas Clarkson, Zachary Macaulay. More interesting are the villains, occasionally because of outrageous cruelty, but just as often because they are almost comically blithe.

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The words are Henry St John’s (Viscount Bolingbroke), from his Letter on the Spirit of Patriotism written in 1736 after a turbulent political career in early Georgian England. The sentiment echoed that of the Roundheads, but it only became an issue of ‘party’ towards the end of the Restoration period. In January 1679, King Charles II dissolved the “Cavalier Parliament”, so-called because he had first summoned it in 1661 when it had been overwhelmingly Royalist. Since then it had become troublesome.

A loose grouping of members of both houses – known as the ‘Country party’ – had increasingly opposed the Court’s influence in Parliament, particularly its bribes and patronage, as well as the King’s pro-Catholic foreign policy (or, at least, pro-French). The word Country signified, rather high-mindedly, the interests of the country as a whole rather than of the Court. The word “party” was used in the sense of a grouping on one side of a dispute, rather than in its modern sense of a structured political party.

The new parliament of 1679 consisted of many more of the Country persuasion than before, and began to divide further on religious lines. Those of the Country Party who fought most vigorously against the Court Party’s jobbery and expensive foreign policy also strongly opposed the Established (Anglican) Church’s persecution of Protestant non-conformists.

Even more controversially, with Charles having no legitimate heir, they opposed the presumptive succession of the King’s Catholic brother, James. As a result the party was dubbed “Whiggamore”[1. Reference to the Whiggamore Raid of 1648, when Covenanters – extreme Presbyterians – from the south-west marched on Edinburgh, dispersed the Royalist party and put the Marquis of Argyll in power. Seemingly the Covenanters consisted of a good many Whiggamores – in Old Scots, “horse drivers.”] – shortened to “Whig” – a term of abuse originating in the Scots Lowlands. The Court party, meanwhile, through their support of James’s claim to the throne (and the supremacy of the Anglican church) were dubbed “Tories”, a term of abuse originating in Ireland.[2. Thought to derive from Irish toraidhe “outlaw, highwayman”, from tóir “pursue”. The word was used of Irish peasants dispossessed by English settlers and living as robbers, and extended to other marauders, including those in the Scottish Highlands.]

The “Tories” temporarily prevailed, and the Catholic James succeeded to the throne in 1685, but just three short years later he was deposed by the Whigs. Fiercely Protestant William of Orange and his Anglican wife, James’s daughter Mary, were proclaimed joint monarchs in his place – the episode that came to be known as the “Glorious Revolution”. The Whig tendency thus came to be the power in the land.

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William’s foreign policy – war with France and several other Catholic polities, which continued with the rein of Queen Anne – soon proved even more expensive than had Charles’s. The former anti-Establishment party had become the new Establishment.

The political tables were therefore turned once again with a new Country Party emerging as a form of opposition, this time consisting mainly of Tories, but also disaffected Whigs. Its manifesto will sound familiar: the government should be frugal and efficient, taxes should be low, personal liberty should be protected, and the local militia should substitute for a dangerous and expensive standing army. (No army meant there could be no war; a somewhat simplistic formula). The Country Party leaders stressed the civic duty of the gentry and aristocracy to engage in politics in the national, rather than narrow factional, interest.

Anne favoured the Tories rather more than had her brother-in-law and sister (William and Mary) – they identified more with her beloved Church of England – but her ministries were mixed. After her death in 1714, with the accession of the George I of Hanover, the Whig Party once again gained ascendancy, for the Tories were never quite free of the taint of Jacobitism (support for the old, Catholic, Stuart line).

Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who had served as one of Anne’s ministers, became the new Country Party’s informal leader. In 1709 he had written, “We have now been twenty years engaged in the two most expensive wars that Europe ever saw. The whole burden of this change has laid on the landed interest this whole time.”

After the Viscount’s fall from grace with the accession of George I, he came increasingly to speak for a section of society that felt beleaguered and disempowered by the transformation of finance and government brought about by the Glorious Revolution. In this respect, we can see parallels with the rise of Corbyn’s opposition party. While Jeremy Corbyn is no Bolingbroke – for a start “the landed interest” is hardly his concern – his party of protest against New Labour’s own Blairite “Glorious Revolution” echoes that same sense of frustration that the many were paying for the few.

The inherent contradiction in the Country Party, however, was that it was protesting against the mechanisms that, principally through investment and the protection of overseas trade routes, had actually made its supporters richer and more powerful. They enjoyed the advantages of public debt but were not prepared to concede its price: central government’s ability to tax, regulate, and spend. And while on behalf of small farmers, merchants, and landholders – the “middling classes” – Bolingbroke railed against corrupt, unrepresentative political institutions, his real loyalty lay with the rural elites whence he himself came and whose old power was being sapped by London.

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The trouble with trade wars

By Allan Mallinson

Mixed motives are not necessarily bad motives, but they can lead to confusion over a party’s identity. The gradual expulsion of “Old Labour” men from Blair’s government made for exactly this confusion. When just about the whole of the Don Valley and adjacent seats in South Yorkshire were taken over by Oxford PPEs, for example, having previously been held by members of the National Union of Mineworkers, the party’s instinctive empathy for the core Labour voter diminished – and with it the core Labour voter’s instinctive trust in the party. Unsurprisingly, UKIP, posing as a rather different sort of “Country Party”, made great gains, and South Yorkshire delivered one of the strongest votes for Brexit in the UK.

In the end, the Country Party withered away because of its inherent contradictions: it was impossible to change a system of which its members were already a part. Although in the first half of the Eighteenth Century there were a number of serious financial crises (most notoriously, the “South Sea Bubble”), giving the Country Party’s arguments renewed appeal, by the 1760s it was clear that public debt was the unavoidable price of running a modern state. Meanwhile the gradual professionalising of the bureaucracy and curbing of the worst forms of jobbery and corruption lessened the middling classes’ moral outrage.

For a time, the difference between Whig and Tory was more of personalities than policy, although it seemed to grow over the question of parliamentary reform in the 1830s. Often the differences boiled down to the pace of change: the Tories were generally sceptical, whereas the Whigs tended more to embrace change.

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The concern of the elites of both parties, however, was principally the preservation of their own power, the rate of change being therefore that which was necessary to preserve it. Only with the growth of Socialism in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century did a real challenge to the Whig and Tory Establishments develop. After 1920, as Labour gained strength in parliament, Tories and Whigs once against morphed into a single bloc, for there has never been room for three strong parties.

History would suggest that big government, with all its vexations, is an inescapable corollary of the successful modern state, and that parties formed to tilt against specific abuses do not have a long shelf life. The (radical) party of opposition very quickly becomes the mainstream Establishment party once in power.

History shows us that wresting the power of government out of the hands “that employed it weakly and wickedly” is the easy bit. Making that power pleasing to the many who helped wrest it is far harder. Otherwise – as with Blair’s New Labour – it is mere substitution. As some observed at the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, the Whigs simply wanted to replace the “Divine Right of Kings” (as the Tories were characterised) by the Divine Right of Whigs.