Reform Schooled

Between 1999 and 2001, there was an outfit called the Pro-Euro Conservative Party, set up to contest the 1999 European elections, the first in which the whole United Kingdom used Proportional Representation. The media insisted on treating the PECP as a serious force and were left as near to dumbstruck as they could ever be when it failed to win a single seat. The PECP of the present is probably Restore Britain, which at Makerfield took fewer votes than the BNP had done in 2010, and less than one third of the Labour margin of victory over Reform UK. Parties have been wound up completely for better showings than that, and Leaders have been removed. As it is, Keir Starmer is being removed because his party won. What times these are.

And what of Nigel Farage? What has Christopher Harborne had for his £22 million to Reform, and for his five million to Farage personally? A policy of cryptocurrency deregulation that Farage and Reform are no nearer than ever to being in any position to implement. Mirroring Harborne’s £27 million is Reform’s 27 per cent in the polls, a figure lower than Labour’s result in 1983. Of five by-elections in this Parliament, Reform has won only the first, and that by all of six votes; even though none of them has been held in Northern Ireland, each of them has been won by a different party, although only Runcorn and Helsby has been won by a majority of 0.0 per cent. Half of Reform’s MPs were returned to this Parliament as Conservatives, including both of the Ministers responsible for Hadi Alodid’s indefinite leave to remain, and 40 per cent of the Reform MPs returned at the General Election have left the party. It is high time for the media to treat one of the two parties with with one in 81 MPs as just one of the two parties with one in 81 MPs. No doubt its previous donors are already doing so.

The Heartlands Tribune

Paul Knaggs writes:

We did not change our name because we changed our politics. We changed it because the name no longer tells the whole truth.

We have chosen this day deliberately. Midsummer is the old turning point, the longest day, the moment the year tips and the light begins its slow return journey toward winter. It is a day for letting go of what has run its course and turning to face what comes next. That is what we are doing.

Labour Heartlands was born in a very particular moment. It came out of the political wreckage after the EU referendum, when millions of working class people across the old industrial towns, mining communities, coastal seats and forgotten regions spoke clearly, only to be treated as fools, racists, dupes or embarrassments by many of the people who claimed to represent them.

That was the gap we stepped into. Labour Heartlands was never created as a house journal for the Labour Party. It was created because the people in the heartlands deserved to be heard in their own voice. Not filtered through Westminster. Not tidied up by think tanks. Not patronised by careerists who only discover the North when there is a by-election to fight.

The name made sense then. It said where we came from. It said whose side we were on. But ten years on, the political ground has shifted.

The Labour Party has not simply lost touch with its old heartlands. It has walked away from them. It has become a party of managers, donors, consultants, lobbyists and professional progressives, more comfortable with corporate boardrooms than working men’s clubs, more interested in policing language than rebuilding towns, more fluent in Davos than Doncaster. 

So keeping “Labour” in the masthead has become misleading. Not because we have abandoned the values that built Labour at its best, but because the party bearing that name has abandoned them.

We still stand for work, wages, industry, public ownership, democracy, civil liberties, peace, national sovereignty and the dignity of the common people. We still stand against the rule of money, the arrogance of Westminster, the hollowing out of our towns and the quiet contempt shown to those who build, care, serve, drive, clean, teach, nurse, fight and graft. That has not changed. What has changed is the banner.

From today, Labour Heartlands becomes The Heartlands Tribune. A tribune was never a courtier. A tribune was not there to flatter power. A tribune was there to speak for the people against power. That is the job, and that is why the name now fits better.

WHY WE ARE EVOLVING

This is not a retreat from our roots. It is a clearer statement of them. 

For ten years we held Labour to account, because Labour was where the betrayal of the working class was most visible and most personal. But the rot was never confined to one party. The hollowing out of the towns that once made things, the contempt for people too far from London to matter, the slow surrender of sovereignty to markets and machines: this is a settlement both main parties built and neither intends to tear up.

A name tied to one party cannot hold all of that to account. It invites the reader to file us under faction and move on, before a word has been read. To go after every centre of power without flinching, our journalism has to owe nothing to any party’s fortunes, least of all the one whose name we carried.

 “A tribune takes no patron. That was the point of the office. Now it is the point of ours.”

WHAT IS CHANGING

The name, chosen with care rather than grabbed off the shelf. Tribune is no neutral word on the British left. It was the title Aneurin Bevan helped give the paper he founded in 1937, the paper George Orwell served as literary editor. Older still, the tribune of the plebs was the office Rome built for one purpose: to stand between ordinary citizens and a patrician class that would otherwise have run the whole arrangement for itself. The man who held it could not lawfully be touched. That is the lineage we step into, and it describes the job.

With the name comes a new look and a wider editorial structure: dedicated room for regional politics, economic development and working class history, the threads that always ran through our work but rarely had a home of their own. You will see the new masthead first. The website address stays the same, and our social channels will follow shortly, so do not be alarmed to see both names in circulation for a while. We would rather get this right than get it fast.

WHAT IS STAYING THE SAME

The mission: holding power to account for people who are spoken for constantly and spoken to rarely. The commitment to writing about working class communities as adults, not as a problem to be managed or a vote to be harvested. None of that has moved an inch.

We are not becoming a different publication. We are taking our name back from a party that no longer deserves to lend it, and handing it to the people it was always about.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOU

More, not less. The same reporting you trust, with a wider field and nothing tying our hands behind it: deeper investigations, a broader range of targets held to the same standard, a platform that argues for the heartlands nationally instead of refighting one party’s quarrels.

We know a name change can feel like a loss, especially to readers in whom the old name struck something real. We will not pretend it on our side. There is sadness in setting it down, and underneath the sadness, if we are honest, something close to relief: relief at no longer carrying a word that has come to mean the opposite of what we built it to mean. We are not asking you to forget where we came from. We are asking you to see that the party broke faith with that name long before we did, and we are done lending it our credibility.

We are the Tribune of the heartlands. We answer to the people.

Punishment For A Crime That Was Never Charged

Geoffrey Robertson KC writes:

In a London court in 1670, a judge, livid with the jury, locked them away for two days without food, water or even a chamber pot. The jury’s offence? Defying the judge’s direction to convict the Quaker William Penn – the future founder of Pennsylvania – charged with preaching sedition in the City of London. The foreman, Edward Bushell, would not yield and, when the matter reached the chief justice of England, he ruled that no juror could be punished for their refusal to convict, entitling a jury to decide according to its conscience, whatever the bench directed. A plaque honours Bushell at the Old Bailey, so jurors on their way inside may contemplate the man who secured their right to acquit.

The legal principle has held for three and a half centuries and, in my 50 years of practice, I have witnessed many juries bring back “sympathy verdicts”, that is, acquittals, because they think a defendant has been oppressively or unfairly prosecuted. But they are not usually reminded by barristers of their right to do so because of the profession’s concern that they should not be urging juries to lay aside the oath they took to decide according to the evidence.

This right sits at the centre of the case of the Elbit four who last week were sentenced to more than 22 years combined, for their part in a direct action protest. Leona Kamio, 30, a nursery teacher, Samuel Corner, 23, and Fatema Rajwani, 21, both students, and Charlotte Head, 30, a domestic abuse caseworker, broke into a factory owned by Elbit Systems, an Israeli company that manufactures drones. They are among more than two dozen people – “the Filton 25” – being tried for breaking into an arms factory in Filton near Bristol, or in connection with the act. They are now in the process of going to court, spread over four trials.

The first group of defendants underwent not one, but two trials. At their first, they faced several charges, the gravest being aggravated burglary. Their leading counsel, Rajiv Menon KC, took to the floor to remind the jury of their historical right to acquit, and invited them to weigh the use to which the drones were being put. The judge, Mr Justice Johnson, referred Menon to the high court to be tried for the crime of contempt of court for breaching his order not to mention the jury’s right to acquit. The jury, however, went on to acquit the defendants of aggravated burglary. But they could not come to a majority decision on any of the remaining charges.

The prosecution decided that the defendants must face a retrial. This proceeded with the same Mr Justice Johnson presiding on the charges the first jury could not resolve: criminal damage, an offence ordinarily met with a fine or a sentence of 18 months or so. At this point, the four had already spent more than 18 months in pretrial detention. The second jury convicted the Elbit four of criminal damage.

One defendant was also convicted of grievous bodily harm without intent, having injured a female police officer with a sledgehammer. He said, and the jury must have accepted that, disoriented by the Pava pepper spray the officer had just deployed, he had swung the hammer to shield a co-defendant, accidentally hitting the police officer. His sentence nonetheless was seven years and eight months.

How does damaging property earn nearly eight years? At a secret hearing during the first trial, Mr Justice Johnson had ruled that the protest carried a “terrorist connection”. This was unprecedented in the history of direct action trials. His reasoning was that the defendants’ purpose was to “influence” the British government – which is the purpose of almost every political protest ever mounted. The judge’s ruling was kept secret from both the jury and the public, and the UK press was barred from reporting on it.

There was no terrorism in any ordinary sense: no violence meant to kill or maim, only a determination to expose British complicity in the killing of Palestinians. But the Sentencing Act of 2020, passed by the then Conservative government, has significantly widened what counts as terrorism. That fateful act allowed the judge to impose a far heavier sentence. As “terrorists”, they will serve longer times in prison before they are up for parole and 15 years on a list that makes them police suspects for real terrorism crimes.

The Elbit four will be labelled as “terrorists” because they were convicted, in substance, of a quasi-terrorist offence that was never charged, never put to the jury, and never proven by the prosecution. The jurors who found them guilty of criminal damage had no idea their verdict would be treated as a verdict on terrorism. The prosecution was not required to establish the terrorist connection beyond reasonable doubt, or to any standard at all.

It is another foundational principle of English law that no one should be convicted of an offence that has not been charged and proved. In this case, the principle was suspended. The secrecy compounds the injury. The open-justice principle exists, as Jeremy Bentham put it, because “publicity is the very soul of justice; it keeps the judge, while trying, under trial”.

The court of appeal struck down the trial judge’s decision to have Menon tried by the high court for contempt. The better view is that contempt citations should be referred to the attorney general to decide whether the public interest justifies a prosecution. The court ruled that Johnson’s decision was wrong; he apologised, but that did not stop him sentencing Menon’s clients when they were convicted at the second trial.

All of which returns us to Edward Bushell, and to what a jury is for. Juries have always had the power to temper law with mercy. It is among the oldest protections against an overbearing state. The difficulty is that judges seldom tell juries the power exists, leaving counsel to invoke it only obliquely.

Years ago, defending a woman who had killed a man for beating her every day of their life together, the great advocate Edward Marshall Hall closed with the words: “Just look at her, gentlemen of the jury. God never gave her a chance. Won’t you?” They did.

It would be far more transparent to bring the power into the open – to let the judge, where the defence claims it, remind the jury of the right, and let the prosecution argue against its exercise. Instead, the only lawful way to appeal to a jury’s conscience is to tell them to look at a plaque in the Old Bailey lobby.

The Elbit four did not act in ignorance of the consequences. Bentham held that a citizen may disobey a law they believe to be unjust, provided they are willing to accept the punishment. On that view, the protesters who knew very well they were breaking the law against criminal damage should have pleaded guilty. While on trial, they openly acknowledged participating in the factory break-in and damaging the drones. What no defendant should have to face is punishment for a crime of terrorism that was never charged.

Of Sound Mind

The Times editorialises:

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and expecting a different outcome, consider the return of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. That the proposed legislation faced almost 1,300 amendments in the House of Lords is testament to the poor quality of its drafting and strength of criticism. Kim Leadbeater’s private member’s bill was rightly consigned to the scrapheap in April. Peers did the country a service by exposing the risks inherent in allowing the introduction of state-sanctioned killing. Passing the Labour MP’s bill into law in undiluted form would have probably led to abuses.

Yet even though its flaws were exposed, the assisted dying bill refuses to die. Lauren Edwards, another Labour backbencher, has announced she intends to revive the legislation in order to “finish the job”. Having come second in this year’s private member’s bill ballot, hers will almost certainly receive a hearing in the Commons. This is a regrettable development. As Baroness May of Maidenhead discovered when trying to pass her Brexit legislation, attempting to drive contentious bills through parliament for a second time is highly unlikely to yield the desired result. Dusting off an unimproved bill and hoping it will sail through the Commons and Lords is delusional.

Assisted dying bills have been brought before parliament at regular intervals since the 1960s. But it was the bill proposed by Ms Leadbeater that made most progress, securing the backing of the Commons. Had it become law, it would have allowed an adult with mental capacity whom a doctor judged could reasonably be expected to die within six months to request lethal drugs for self-administration. Notional safeguards included provision of a second assessment by another doctor and final approval by a panel composed of a lawyer, a psychiatrist and a social worker. Some safeguards were eventually watered down.

Criticism of the bill was widespread. The Royal College of Psychiatrists said the bill was not fit for purpose, as did disability charities and hospices. The House of Lords identified a plethora of problems. Mired in objections, many entirely sound, the bill was timed out at the end of the last parliamentary session, a common fate for private member’s bills requiring further work. Supporters of assisted dying are seeking to paint their campaign as a struggle between the elected Commons and the unelected Lords. The truth is that, because assisted dying was not a part of Labour’s manifesto, it enjoys no mandate. Detailed scrutiny is the job of the Lords.

Such is the zealotry of campaigners in favour of state-assisted suicide that they are brandishing the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, typically used to drive government money bills, and occasionally bills based on manifesto commitments, through the Lords. For this to happen the revived bill must be unamended. Kit Malthouse, a Conservative supporter of assisted dying, says the bill does not have to be changed. Other supporters, such as the former cabinet minister Louise Haigh, argue that using the Parliament Acts would be wrong. This is correct: it would be a constitutional outrage to use them in this way. Ms Edwards claims that she does not have to use the acts to railroad her bill into law. But it remains a threat, given MPs are being urged not to amend the bill. If it does return, its myriad defects must be examined by both Houses.

It is remarkable that Sir Keir Starmer, who supports the principle of assisted dying, has said almost nothing about the bill. Andy Burnham, the frontrunner to replace Sir Keir if he wins the Makerfield by-election, has expressed scepticism about it. Wes Streeting, the former health secretary, is adamantly opposed. It is not too late for Ms Edwards to think again. This shoddily constructed bill represents a danger to patients. It belongs in one place: the history books.

And Professor Kathleen Stock writes:

Here we go again. Like Kim Leadbeater before her, Labour MP Lauren Edwards says she is introducing a Private Member’s Bill for an assisted dying service.

The plan, just as before, is to enable doctors to help terminally ill patients to die – that is, help them commit suicide, should they wish to – and Edwards has indicated her wording will not deviate from Leadbeater’s original. This means that, should the new bill pass in the Commons any rejection by the Lords can be overridden and the bill made law nonetheless.

I have recently written a book arguing against the organised deliverance of assisted suicide by NHS doctors, which is what Edwards and her backers are trying to get. As news of her bill was breaking, I was at the Lake District book festival, debating with a Dutch doctor Dr Rob Jonquière who himself has euthanised two people and who is now an influential international advocate for euthanasia legislation.

We had a respectful and friendly discussion; but still, what I heard from him and several others during the session only intensified my concerns.

For Jonquière, a Leadbeater-Edwards style bill doesn’t go far enough, since it confines provision only to people with a prognosis of six months to live or fewer, and not – as he would prefer it – to anyone “intolerably” suffering from a physical or mental disorder, whether terminally ill or not. This is the norm in the Netherlands and Belgium, where they sometimes euthanise physically healthy people with mental illnesses in their 20s and 30s.

My discussions with assisted dying supporters across the country suggest that some would agree with this approach, wishing an easy doctor-delivered death to be available wherever personal suffering is too intense to handle, and with no need for people to be dying first. They see an assisted death service for the terminally ill as the first step in opening up access to other suffering groups: severely disabled people, mentally ill people, people with dementia.

And they seem impervious to the way that, over time, this nihilistic stance inevitably saps energy from other ways of caring for especially vulnerable people; for death is a highly effective way of ending suffering, and also very cheap. If our aim as a society is to be merciful or compassionate to those in physical or mental pain, surely we can do better than this.

But even if we stick to a service aimed only at the terminally ill, there are many reasonable concerns here, reinforced by various people I’ve met over the past few months. This week, a GP told me that, when a commitment to 24/7 palliative support was withdrawn in her area, the system for end-of-life care became much more chaotic.

Like me, she worries about introducing assisted death as an option when alternative means of controlling pain are not widely available; for this will obviously funnel more people towards assisted death instead. A hospice worker also talked of the devastating lack of funding affecting her sector, with a dwindling pot of charity donations trying to cover around 70 per cent of the costs.

And perhaps most strikingly, a woman whose mother died on the notorious Liverpool Care Pathway – a standardised medical protocol for withdrawing treatment that quickly became an inhumane cost-cutting exercise – reminded me of how impersonal NHS systems aimed at ease and efficiency can go very wrong.

In the past few months, I have also met a retired care home manager, keen to convey to me how unscrupulous the relatives of elderly people can be, particularly where money is involved – an aspect of human nature with obvious repercussions for assisted death services. I’ve heard from parents of learning disabled children, frightened of a future in which their highly suggestible daughter or son might meet an over-zealous doctor.

Oncologists have explained how easy it is to get a terminal prognosis wrong, and senior psychiatrists have admitted that they have little idea how to assess the mental capacity of someone intending to end his own life.

In short, I’ve heard from a range of people with professional or personal skin in the game, gravely concerned about the ramifications of introducing state-backed suicide into a health service. Yet according to high-profile supporters of assisted dying, these worries are foolishly panic-mongering. I find this attitude bafflingly irresponsible and naïve.

Parliamentary scrutiny of the Leadbeater bill has revealed many shortfalls yet Edwards says she will be incorporating no amendments.

This means, among other things, there will be no requirement that applicants get a specialist palliative care consultation before proceeding to take their lives; no enhanced scrutiny of applicants’ backgrounds to rule out the possibility of family coercion; no prohibition on doctors suggesting assisted death to a patient unprompted; no exemption for learning disabled people generally; no engagement with the evidence offered by Royal College of Psychiatrists that the Mental Capacity Act is not a good fit.

These are just a few of the red flags that most sensible, conscientious people can see from space. Even amongst voters who support the idea of assisted death in principle, recent polling suggests that most are keen to see proper safeguards built in; and yet the people pushing the process at the top seem disturbingly keen to press on regardless.

Alongside professed compassion for suffering people, an even more popular justification of assisted death services is that they give people “autonomy” and “choice”, and never mind that the choice will hang more heavily over some than others. The attitude was effectively summed up by another person I met this weekend, who asked me why her own personal choice to die exactly as and when she wanted should be impeded by social problems affecting other people.

Rather than shocking, I found her frank expression of self-interest rather refreshing. I tend to suspect her sentiment is more common than usually admitted, and especially amongst politicians. The rest of us just have to make sure – once again – that such cheerfully myopic people do not get the last word.

The Idea of a National Interest

Yesterday saw a roaringly successful International Anti-War Conference in London, complete with Russian and Ukrainian peace activists literally speaking side by side, and a boy from the anti-conscription German school strikes who was notably a member of the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, pointing to the potential for the healing of certain schisms. The event was of course organised by the only people who ever did organise that sort of thing, and not unrelatedly there was a very great deal of talk about sovereignty. But broader potential alliances do exist. In the financial year 2024-25, the Government wrote off £6.6 billion of public money, with £1.6 billion of that being mismanagement and cancelled projects at the Ministry of Defence for which every other Department of State has been ordered to make yet further cuts. And as Peter Hitchens writes:

This has been quite a week for warmongers. Moscow has been in flames and I suspect quite a lot of people have been muttering 'serve them right!' And two British oldsters, proudly sailing in the Nelson tradition, have pluckily confronted a sinister Russian warship in the English Channel. Surely it is time for war against Russia?

Or perhaps not. I'll come to that. Yet if I suggest that things are not that bad, or that calls for war are unwise, I am invariably attacked by upstanding patriots who accuse me of being in Kremlin pay, or perhaps of having been hired by Russian spooks during my years in Moscow, 36-odd years ago. Here we go again.

Actually, the KGB believed that I was a British spy. When I lived in the Soviet capital, they shadowed me on trains and on visits to the Soviet interior.

They bugged my flat and my car and installed agents in my home, who worked for me (rather well) as drivers, cleaners and interpreters.

My telephone would repeatedly go dead, as the listeners changed the spools on their clunky old Communist tape recorders. I hated them and still do. But believe what you want.

My concern, I state it once again, is for Britain, my own country. We are deluded about war in Britain because we have watched too many war films and too much Dad's Army.

We think war is a cosy affair in which, safe in our snug island, we drink strong tea and eat nice, thick bully-beef sandwiches as we stare out to sea next to a big gun, ready to repel the distant enemy. Not really.

War is rationing, shortages, power cuts, censorship, rising prices, travel restrictions, jobsworths checking your documents, relentless interference in your private life by authority, family separation – and all this in an atmosphere where complaining is disloyalty and there are no general elections. And that's before they start on conscription and the enemy begins to rocket-bomb our cities, while we bomb theirs, for year after dismal year.

Sure, there are times when you have to fight wars, when you are in genuine danger from a nearby enemy which desires to destroy or subjugate you. But Putin's scrap-metal state cares little about us. It's not that they like us or loathe us, just that they are indifferent to us.

So ponder a few things. Amid all this fuss about defence spending, what is it that we are supposed to be defending ourselves against?

If there is war, it will be like what Nato did to Moscow last week. And be sure it was Nato. Ukraine doesn't have the money, the military intelligence, the equipment, the skills or the ammunition to shower Russian cities with accurate attacks on key installations. Russia knows this. Do you think it possible Moscow might retaliate against Nato cities? I do. And if it does, it will come in the form of drones and missiles.

As the people of Tehran, Beirut, Tel Aviv, Kiev and Moscow can testify, this is the new face of war. If you want a war with Russia, drones and missiles are what you will get, and our cities could be scorched and terrorised with smoke and flame as Moscow was last week.

We are utterly unprepared for this. Why then do our leaders, and many in our media, apparently court and desire such a war? Are they in fact as stupid as I have long thought they were? Give Britain an Iron Dome first. Then, if you really want to, you can talk about war.

In the meantime, a bit of accuracy would be good. Many media have repeatedly stated that the Russian frigate fired at the English yacht. It categorically did not. The shots were aimed away from the yacht. On this, the Russians, the UK Ministry of Defence and the yachting couple are all agreed. So why keep saying something that is not true?

Also, you may patriotically call the place where this happened 'the English Channel' if you like – but it is in international waters where the Russians are legally allowed to be.

I wouldn't wander near anybody's warship in a small boat. All captains are trained to be touchy when this happens. Why? In October 2000 the US Navy destroyer USS Cole had a huge hole blown in its side by a suicide bomb packed into a small boat, which came alongside it in Aden. The bomb murdered 17 men and wounded nearly 40 more.

The people in the boat were making friendly gestures to the Cole's crew just before they touched off their explosives. See what I mean?

Calm down, and carry on, and build that Iron Dome.

While Professor Jeremy Black reminds us:

Frames of reference vary by culture, country and group, and political parties are no exception. A Conservative Party that draws pride and purpose from Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher naturally emphasises an active, even interventionist, approach to foreign policy and employs “appeasement” negatively. But what is the “deep history” of Tory attitudes to foreign policy? That offers a perspective on the Conservative position today, one that can be incorporated into analyses of changes in attitude, or seen as part of a continuing breach with pre-1939 attitudes. If the latter, did these earlier attitudes have merit and retain value?

From its origins in the late 17th century, the Tory Party tended towards opposition in word and deed to allegedly feckless interventionism.

This promotion of the “national interest”, caution and prudence lasted across the centuries. The characteristic features of 18th century Tory foreign policy are generally regarded as insularity, a focus on maritime power in defence of trade routes and Empire, an aversion to Continental commitments and a marked lack of enthusiasm for Whig calls for international intervention. It thus embraced doubts about grand European alliances, opposition to external international projects which impaired Britain’s freedom of manoeuvre, scepticism about the idea of the balance of power, and an non-ideological pragmatism in approach and practice. It opposed what was later seen as “regime change”.

In whole or part, these themes and attitudes can be identified as a typical Tory stance. They were linked to the Tory concern about an over-expanded and expensive state, as well as avoidance of the burden of taxation necessary to maintain a large army and Continental commitments, the last including subsidy treaties to allies and the hiring of foreign units to fight in the British army.

In contrast, the Whig tradition was one of collective security, a system of mutual guarantees that required continual oversight and frequent intervention. The Whigs referred back to historical justifications in terms of Elizabeth I and Oliver Cromwell.

However, in practice, Elizabeth had been cautious about making a full commitment on behalf of the Dutch rebels and war with Spain had not begun until 1585. The Cromwellian republic had been an atypical British government, with an unusually strong army and navy. The Tories in the 18th century drove home the idea that Continental interventionism was linked to corruption and the money interest. In 1771, Samuel Johnson asked “how we can be recompensed for the death of multitudes, and the expense of millions, but by contemplating the sudden glories of paymasters and agents, contractors and commissioners, these harmless vultures of the field”.

From that perspective, the present zeal to increase military expenditure would have been seen as misplaced, whilst the Tory criticism of confrontation with Russia in 1718–21 contrasts greatly with current attitudes towards the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

There was also a climbdown from confrontation with Russia in the Ochakov Crisis of 1791, in which many “Independent” MPs deserted the interventionist line, leading William Pitt the Younger to abandon the policy and its foundation, an alliance with Prussia, and to turn instead to isolationism, refusing to join the Austro-Prussian attack on France in 1792.

The Ochakov Crisis, however, underlines the problems sometimes involved in defining the Tory stance, as in 1791 both the Independent MPs and Pitt can be seen as Tories whilst the formal Opposition was Whig, led in the Commons by Charles James Fox. Thus, alongside long-term continuities in attitude and policy, there were also essentially political responses in specific circumstances, responses in which the faces of government and opposition played a major role.

There was also an important psychological element. An underlying Tory pessimism affected Conservative domestic thinking and was extended to foreign policy, with a marked lack of confidence about the ability of governments to fix outcomes, and therefore caution about alliances and commitments.

Tories drew on experience showing human effort could not produce a perfect society, domestic or international. Traditional Tory refrains focused on the impermanence of human actions and achievements, and on the risks of moralism, not least its threat to a balanced assessment of risks and opportunities.

Furthermore, the idea that a system based on the views and interests of others was inherently flawed constituted a major theme in Tory thought. The emphasis on the uncertainty of human affairs reflected a distinct religious, moral and intellectual position. Tories prided themselves on realism, an appreciation of an international anarchy in which there was no reason to assume that allies would act well.

Mist’s Weekly Journal, the leading London Tory newspaper, in its issue of 4 June 1726, claimed, “We are not to depend upon being always in friendship with any Prince, those people who well consider the different interests of two nations will be of opinion that a true and lasting amity is not to be expected.” Tory patriotism thus proposed a self-sufficiency, an emphasis on nation rather than on government.

At the outset of Tory ministerial politics, Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of Nottingham, a secretary of state from 1689 to 1693 and from 1702 to 1704, proved particularly significant in that he encouraged the development of “Blue Water” policies with their focus on maritime strength and activity. This contribution was taken forward during the 1710–14 Tory ministry by Viscount Bolingbroke and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and their example set the tone of Tory thought on foreign policy.

The critique of Whiggery for unnecessary wars and excessive taxes looked forward to William Pitt the Younger’s support for peace, imperial preference and low taxes in the 1780s. Pitt’s peacetime stance, in turn, was seen as an inspiration for 19th century Tories, such as Benjamin Disraeli. He presented the Tories as a national party, offering a contrast with what was depicted as the cosmopolitan rootlessness of other political groups, notably Whigs, Liberals and those Tories who were led astray, which was how Sir Robert Peel was described.

Seeking economy, notably in the early 1870s when he pressed the need for caution about expensive expansionist projects, Disraeli, nevertheless, was no isolationist. He argued that it was necessary to preserve the appropriate system and situation in Europe as well as Britain and in the late 1870s employed deterrence as a response to Russian expansionism.

This was in line with a foreign policy tradition emphasising the pragmatic defence of national interests in which both Empire and Europe took a part, each interpreted with reference to particular conjunctures. Earlier, with the Revolutionary French threatening to reject the international order and take over the Low Countries, Pitt the Younger had perforce become a war prime minister in 1793, and the Tories mobilised the nation for a battle of survival.

Then, in the face of repeated defeats from 1794, pragmatic issues surfaced in the shape of how far it was possible to maintain ideological purity in terms of non-recognition of the Revolution. Indeed, to the horror of Edmund Burke, negotiations were soon pursued by the Pitt government, in 1796 and 1797, only for the option to be closed by the French until terms were agreed in 1802 by the Tory ministry of Henry Addington.

Nevertheless, alongside the more complex issue of tactics, the Tories offered an ideological cohesion in their hostile response to Revolutionary France. However, unlike the Second World War, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars did not lead to large-scale post-war interventionism. Indeed, the difference between the situation in 1815 and 1945 helped direct contrasting post-war stances.

It would not be really appropriate to use the term “Splendid Isolation” for the period from 1815 to the Anglo-French entente of 1904, as there was a willingness to engage with other powers, for example in support of the Greek struggle for independence from Ottoman (Turkish) rule, and with the international coalition involved in the Crimean War (1854–56) as later in the First World War.

Yet, there was a Tory scepticism with Liberal engagement towards freedom, notably for High Tories, such as the Duke of Wellington. In other words, there were, as always, exogenous pressures and the related domestic perceptions and politics. These caused divisions within as well as between political movements.

The need for the containment of international disruption was outlined in 1858 in a circular from James, 3rd Earl of Malmesbury, the talented foreign secretary in the new Conservative government. He argued that as peace “cannot be disturbed in any quarter without the risk of the disturbance becoming more general”, Britain would therefore “always be ready, by her good offices, to contribute to moderating angry discussion, to avert hostile collisions, or to remove entanglements which may threaten to alienate nations from one another”.

At the same time, there was a political inclination toward caution that was seen in a deliberate strategic rebalancing away from the idea of a “Concert of Europe”. There was caution about the pressure on British resources, military, financial and economic, not least in the aftermath of debt-accelerating wars, particularly from 1763, 1783, 1815 and 1856.

There was also a particular response to specific circumstances and events at the time, especially the wish to avoid the commitments involved in alliances and guarantees. These commitments included domestically the costs, notably the burdens of taxation, the increase of debt, and curtailment of individual liberty, that conflict often begins.

This caution was also in part a product of the Royal Navy’s interest in “Blue Water” primacy and the political acceptance of a leading navy but not of a large army. This was a political theme dear to Tories, notably in reaction to Oliver Cromwell, William III and others associated with such an army. This antipathy, however, was not an attitude that survived the world wars when, indeed, the Conservatives were close to the army and largely abandoned earlier navalist views.

When did the Conservatives change? Was there a ruling Euro-isolationist doctrine that collapsed and if so, when and why? Or was there, instead, largely a succession of responses by very different administrations to European (and sometimes European colonial) events, one that mostly (but not always) conformed to minimising Britain’s European engagement?

Whichever approach is taken, how best to place Disraeli’s central role in the Congress of Berlin (1878) and the 1904 entente with France? Furthermore, after the activism of 1918–20, notably in the Russian Civil War, and the stance of Austen Chamberlain as foreign secretary (1924–9), particularly the diplomacy underlying the Locarno Pact of 1925, there was a more cautious stance by the Conservative-dominated National Government, as in the support for the Hoare-Laval Pact of 1935, which was seen as a way to defuse the Italo-Ethiopian War.

From this perspective, it was Hitler that forced a change of direction by pushing Churchill to the fore. Neville Chamberlain had guaranteed Poland and Romania, but lacked the fervour of interventionism seen with Churchill (a Liberal from 1904 to 1924). His crossing the floor in 1904 was to a great extent a consequence of his belief in free trade and unwillingness to back Conservative protectionism.

He subsequently backed other international positions that scarcely matched prudence. This was particularly so during the Russian Civil War and in the Chanak Crisis of 1922 with Turkey. Each represented a serious failure of assessment concerning the international, military and domestic political contexts.

Both crises ended in what can be seen as appeasement but, more properly, compromise, and the bulk of Conservative MPs opposed the risk of war with Turkey, the crisis helping provoke their rejection of the coalition with the Lloyd George Liberals, despite that enjoying the support of the leadership.

Yet, modern conservatism’s direction of travel is set by an avoidance of prudence, and, indeed, a continuing rejection of the particular and popular instance of prudence at Munich in 1938.

Arguments can of course be made for or against sabre-rattling in particular modern crises, and for or against a more general attempt at a great-power role with the accompanying costs. What, however, is less convincing is an attempt to present recent and present-day interventionism as in accord with fundamental Tory principles.

Of course, to electioneer on the basis of prudence and conservatism would not readily accord with the modern assumption that parties ought to be able to promise improvement, nor with the tendency of parties to define themselves in terms of aspirations and policies presented in idealistic terms and a moralistic tone. The Conservatives, in their search since the mid-20th century for a politically usable past, have been captured by Whiggish progressivism and Liberal interventionism.

At the same time, this search reflects not only an ability to draw on varied aspects of the national past, notably in terms of the battle for survival, but also one made distinctive for the Conservatives by their emphasis on the nation state, rather than any kind of internationalism.

The emphasis has been on the politics of patriotism and nationalism, and these provide a convincing account of the idea of a national interest even if its implementation is scarcely free from debates about content.

Resigned To His Fate

When will Keir Starmer resign? As soon as possible, of course. For sheer poetry, though, I am hoping for next Saturday, the tenth anniversary of his resignation from Jeremy Corbyn’s frontbench. But it is going to be sooner than that. Or not at all.

For Starmer to force a contest by endorsing Wes Streeting would be to endorse Streeting’s critique of Starmer’s Leadership, thereby rendering that first endorsement worthless. Happy days.

And what form will be taken by the customary and ceremonial departure of the Prime Ministerial family from Downing Street? It ought to be a veritable carnival of baby mommas, sugar daddies, rent boys, and one shudders to think what else. I can hardly wait.

Through Casements Darted Their Desiring Eyes

Truly, this is the land of Shakespeare. A faction at court has laid the groundwork for a pretender long banished to the provinces, where he has become a mighty warlord, to ride into the capital city and seize power. In Britain. In 2026.

What if Andy Burnham made Ed Miliband Chancellor of the Exchequer, and nothing happened? No Liz Truss meltdown, nothing? What would the City failures and the perpetual mediocre Economics undergraduates of the right-wing media and their parties say to that?

Like Burnham, Miliband was in the Cabinet of Gordon Brown. He is no John McDonnell, with whom again the City and the markets would have coped without difficulty, having always wargamed the outside chance of a Left Labour Government. It was Tufton Street that they could not even begin to accommodate, or vice versa.

In any case, as he prepares to become the First Lord of the Treasury, Burnham is taking the advice of Andy Haldane, former Chief Economist of the Bank of England; of Richard Hughes, former Chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility; and of Jim O’Neill, former Chair of Goldman Sachs. Make of that what you will, but here we are. A former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, indeed.

Keir Starmer’s remaining bodyguards are Steve Reed, who is up to his neck in the rigging of at least one parliamentary selection that will now be going to a criminal trial, and Peter Kyle, who is up to his neck in a whole lot worse. Knowing that there were not the numbers for a Starmer continuity candidate such as Darren Jones, Starmer’s ultras are saying that the Opposition would have a point if it called for a General Election because Burnham was implementing policies that had not been in the 2024 Labour manifesto.

Well, what about the things that were? This Government was elected to abolish leasehold, to make employment rights begin with employment and apply regardless of the number of hours worked, and to equalise the national minimum wage regardless of age. When are those going to happen? When is anyone going to resign because they had not?

Instead, the Government has delivered fiscal drag, falling growth, galloping inflation, mass unemployment, a 50 per cent increase in workers’ bus fares, an increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions so as to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, a measure to force working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to giant American agribusinesses, a proposal to restrict trial by jury and to end the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court, an impending social media ban that would necessitate universal digital ID, and attempts to remove the Winter Fuel Payment from almost all pensioners, to persecute the disabled to death through the benefits system, to retain the two-child benefit cap, and to cancel the local elections of 4.6 million people.