Centre Ground

A sports centre named after the late Sir Cyril Smith MP, 29 stone at his peak? Whatever next?

Well, why ever not? Rochdale really ought to erect something in honour of a former Mayor who went on to spend 20 years representing the place in Parliament. A school might have been more suitable, since at one point he was a governor of 250 of them, something that boggles the minds of those of us with experience of school governor work. But here we are. I ask again, why ever not? And what a thing it must be to have so loyal a godson that he would use his council seat to propose such a thing; he is hotly tipped to be the Lib Dem nominee for his godfather's old seat in 2015.

In Cyril Smith, there came together several of the best features of the old Liberalism that has a vitally important contribution to make to the revivification of what is currently this country's thoroughly moribund political culture. He embodied individualism, municipalism (it is just priceless that his mother served as a cleaner at the Town Hall during the day and then as his Lady Mayoress at that same Town Hall in the evenings), local communitarian populism, unashamed provincialism, patriotism in general and reverence for Parliament in particular, traditional family values, the Nonconformist conscience, and the working and lower-middle-class self-help and self-improvement that, as well as informing his strong commitment to education, also placed him in the same tradition as the Rochdale Pioneers of the co-operative movement.

Like them, he came out of Rochdale as a centre of Unitarianism due to the coincidence there of at least two of the movements that coalesced into that denomination during the nineteenth century. One derived from the Great Ejection and was related to such phenomena as the Dutch Remonstrandt Brotherhood, the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, the Socinian 'New Licht' within the early Free Church of Scotland, and the descent of New England Puritanism into little more than "the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Neighborhood of Boston"; all alike are stark, and currently timely, warnings of the perils of hyper-Augustinianism. The other derived from the explosive preaching of Joseph Cooke within early Methodism, the Cookite experience being a stark, and currently timely, warning of the dangers of departure from the truths that the Augustinian tradition is both keenest to articulate and most successful in articulating.

But Cyril Smith seemed to point to an earlier time, when Unitarianism was still in some sense Christian rather than post-Christian or whatever it is now. Yes, yes, I know. But on both points, you know what I mean. He was totally pro-life on all issues but one, and even on that, his mercifully never realised desire to restore capital punishment (also the position of at least one other Liberal MP of the period), placed him within the tradition that correctly identified an inseparability between uncompromising civil liberty and the vigorous sentencing of those whose guilt could therefore be accepted as having been proved beyond reasonable doubt. His defence of the preborn child was such that his eulogy was delivered by no less a pro-life figure than David Alton.

So we may say that he would have been punished for that stance by being hounded to his death if the allegations made against him in the distant past, and obscenely reprinted in the week of his funeral, had been made in the years nearer to his death. Special Branch and the Director of Public Prosecutions, hardly noted for letting Liberal parliamentarians off the hook in the 1970s, dismissed the whole thing as unworthy of serious attention, and Smith was advised by his counsel that the periodicals in which it had appeared could not conceivably have paid the astronomical damages that he would have been awarded if he had sued. In any case, neither Michael Howard nor the Duke of Edinburgh has ever sued Mohammad Fayed. For the perfectly good reason that the allegations in question are beneath contempt.

Sir Cyril's record on asbestos is also unfortunate. But he was hardly the only parliamentary speech-maker ever to have relied heavily on material supplied by his business interests. Is it because he was not in receipt of the Conservative Whip, or is it because he did not deliver his speeches with a public school accent? A poisoner of the poor, never mind the other guff, does not get a eulogy by David Alton, or the turnout of weeping crowds at his funeral in politically a very divided town, despite the BBC's jaw-dropping assertion during the Gillian Duffy business that it was a safe Labour seat; it had a Lib Dem MP at the time, but they could not be bothered to check anything so basic when it came to anywhere "oop north".

Rather, such a send-off bespeaks a politician positively on fire with individualism, with municipalism, with local communitarian populism, with unashamed provincialism, with patriotism in general and reverence for Parliament in particular, with traditional family values, with the Nonconformist conscience, with working and lower-middle-class self-help and self-improvement, with the recognition that liberty and responsibility are inseparable, and with a determination to protect the child in the womb. A politician richly deserving to have a sports centre named after him.

Parliament could do with an awful lot more politicians like that.