by Frank McLynn
The other relevant consideration, helping to show how the avoidance of land warfare on native soil helps to ward off revolutionary situations, is that, since Britain always depended for its defence overwhelmingly on the Royal Navy, the role of the army was significantly reduced. Almost by definition a navy cannot stage coups d’état or intervene significantly in domestic politics. Barracks-based military are another matter entirely, as the history of Latin America reveals vividly.42 Even in Europe the army has been an omnipresent political factor. Ever since Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, the Spanish military has been a major factor, first in the Carlist wars of the nineteenth century, then most dramatically in 1930–6, precipitating the Spanish Civil War, and a reliable menace to political stability as late as 1981. The Romanovs relied heavily on the military during their long period of despotism, and it was the collapse of the military that led directly to the Russian Revolution. The most striking case is that of France. In the seventeenth century it was racked by civil war, not just during the period of the Fronde but also in the long-running military duel between ‘the great Condé’ (Louis de Bourbon, Prince de Condé) and Turenne (Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne).43 Some scholars speculate that the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ represented an attempt by the Bourbons, conscious or unconscious, to export endemic military violence onto an international stage. The rise of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, for the first time introducing a meritocratic and even proletarian officer class, immensely complicated nineteenth-century French politics, and this baneful legacy surfaced most menacingly at the end of the nineteenth century in the crises involving General Boulanger and the Dreyfus case.44 Yet the most disturbing manifestations of the military probably came in the twentieth century, especially in the great crisis over Algeria in 1958–62. France in these years hovered close to civil war. In Algeria there was particular intra-military tension, both between units of the regular army and national servicemen drafted to North Africa and between regular army regiments and the French Foreign Legion.45 Nothing like this has ever occurred in Britain, and the military is generally considered thoroughly socialised and non-political. Yet even here the exclusion of the military has not been absolute. One should always beware when it is asserted that the military ‘never would’ intervene in politics; the same was said of the army in Chile before General Pinochet’s bloody coup in 1973.46 When Ian Smith and his party made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Rhodesia in 1965, it was widely considered that the British army could not be used against the rebels as they were ‘kith and kin’, much to the general fury of Black Africa.47 Even more serious was the insufficiently known ‘Curragh Mutiny’ of 1914. When the Liberal government under Asquith passed the Third Home Rule Bill, envisaging a united Ireland in which the Catholic south would predominate, Sir Edward Carson raised the paramilitary Ulster Volunteers to oppose Home Rule by force; ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’ was his watchword. British army units in southern Ireland were ordered north to deal with the Ulster Volunteers but, in a notorious incident, fifty-seven out of seventy army officers based at the Curragh barracks in Kildare resigned rather than constrain their fellow Protestants. Technically, they avoided outright mutiny by resigning before announcing that they would never use force against Ulster, but it was clear to everyone that this was a case of the army refusing to obey the orders of a civilian government.48 On paper it created the most catastrophic crisis. Asquith ducked the issue by claiming that he had been ‘misunderstood’ and the rebellious fifty-seven were reinstated. The Curragh Mutiny is regarded by some historians as the key to an ongoing mystery: why did the Asquith government give such ambiguous and misleading signals to Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in the run-up to the Great War of 1914–18? While it is conceded that Germany might have drawn back had it been certain that Britain would enter the war on the side of France, the idea is that Asquith and his cabinet preferred to fight a bloody war in Europe, with all the bloodshed that involved, rather than face the implications of the army revolt in Northern Ireland.49
Because of the relative marginality of the army in British life, the central apparatus of government repression has always been weaker in these islands than in continental countries. Unable in normal circumstances to deploy overwhelming military force against rioters, rebels, demonstrators and other dissidents, the British Establishment has had to use extreme cunning to keep the lid on simmering discontents. Even the most vehement critics of the British power elite concede that the timing of its concessions and its handling of revolutionary situations have usually been impeccable. Whereas the French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions, once again exhibiting those common features that have so beguiled sociologists, took place after the elite carried out reforms that were too little, too late, the British State always acted just in time, especially during the critical period of Chartism in the 1830s and 1840s.50 Here is one Marxist critic on the astuteness of the elite in these years: ‘An attack by the authorities on a large demonstration, or the kind of harassment of the common people that had been practised in Ireland before the rising of 1798, might have goaded a desperate population into armed resistance. No such provocation occurred.’51 Trotsky, grudgingly conceding that the ruling classes always granted ‘timely concessions, always very niggardly’, thought that the English avoidance of revolution was highly dependent on their perception of revolution elsewhere: the spectacle of France after 1789, for example, awoke the rulers of Britain from their dogmatic slumbers and made them institute nick-of-time reforms.52 Another perennial tactic of the ruling class has always been a clever use of political camouflage, mystification and obfuscation. Over the years ploys as various as the Official Secrets Act, D-Notices and a draconian law of libel (still in existence) have been used to this end. The culture of secrecy – so ingrained that there is even secrecy about the use of secrecy, as the modern phenomenon of judicial ‘superinjunctions’ shows clearly – makes it difficult for dissidents to target the enemy properly or to see the shape of the opposition in full focus; one frequent result is the splintering of revolt, with a number of riots or disturbances aiming at different targets instead of concerted efforts on a single one that might be vulnerable to concentrated force.53 Another frequently used agent of camouflage is the cult of the amateur, which insinuates that everything is a matter of well-meaning semi-incompetents muddling through, instead of the cold-eyed and ruthless calculations of an inner circle. Many observers have pointed to the paradox that England was the pioneer of professionalism in medicine, the law, architecture, etc, but is anti-professional in ethos. The Elizabethan age, with characteristic figures like Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney, is sometimes seen as the dawn of amateurism in English life. It is asserted, variously, that Cromwell was self-taught and not a professional soldier like Napoleon, that Gladstone was an amateur classical scholar, Churchill an amateur historian, and so on. Some claim that amateurism promotes a tendency to see the humorous or absurd side of everything, so that resentments and hatreds are dissolved in laughter. Others aver that amateurism makes society less brittle. ‘A society with an amateur quality is a society with a good circulation, less liable to clots and seizures’ is one estimate.54 One of the most lauded historians of the first half of the twentieth century, Sir Lewis Namier, had this to say about the cult of the amateur:
We prefer to make it appear as if our ideas came to us casually – like the Empire – in a fit of absence of mind … specialisation necessarily involves distortion of mind and loss of balance, and the characteristically English attempt to appear unscientific springs from a desire to remain human … What is not valued in England is abstract knowledge as a profession, because the tradition of English culture is that professions should be practical and culture should be the work of the leisured classes.55
Yet perhaps the pièce de résistance in the entire gallimaufry of mystification and obfuscation is the use of the monarchy. Walter Bagehot, the Victorian critic, long ago pointed out the vagaries of the unwritten British co
nstitution, which used the ‘dignified’ element of the system to bamboozle and mesmerise the masses while Parliament, the ‘efficient’ part of the system, did the real work.56 Defenders of monarchy have argued that the institution gives the ship of state an inherent buoyancy, since governments can totally lose credibility while the regime or system itself does not. The argument is that a scandal like that of Watergate in the USA triggers a constitutional crisis and impeachment proceedings where a rough analogue in the UK, the 1963 Profumo scandal, say, discredits the government but leaves the regime intact because it is symbolised by the monarchy. Naturally critics riposte that this is simply another layer of the general mystification, yet another veil that has to be lifted in the dance of the veils connoted by the Privy Council, the royal prerogative, the principle of Crown-in-Parliament, and so on. Meanwhile the monarchy continues to devalue intellect and meritocracy in favour of tradition and inherited privilege, effectively infantilises society and reinforces hierarchy and deference; even Bagehot, a supporter of the status quo, made the point about deference.57 Vulgar Marxists have tended to dismiss the monarchy as a mere sideshow alongside the core issue of class struggle, but more thoughtful opinions on the Left have pointed up just how crucial, albeit baneful, the institution has been historically. As one critic has written, the reverence for monarchy suggests that Britain is more a nation of butlers than of shopkeepers and that royalism ‘may express something deeply and incorrigibly archaic about the society whose institution it is’.58 One view of the British monarchy describes it as ‘surrogacy’, taking the role that in other nation-states would be played by crude nationalism, and an appanage of finance capitalism, always the favoured modality of capitalism in Britain – for the interests of the City have always been placed ahead of those of manufacturing industry.59 Indeed, the more the British monarchy is studied, the more protean and multi-faceted it appears, suggesting that serious discourse about royalty is very much above the intellectual salt.60 We should remember that the monarchy was used as one of privileged society’s ‘big guns’ after the Chartist challenge. The Treason Felony Act of 1848 made advocacy of republicanism a criminal offence attracting transportation to Australia (later life imprisonment). Only in 2003 did the Law Lords formally rule that the act did not cover the mere abstract advocacy of republicanism.61
Yet, as the phenomenon of monarchy illustrates, in politics there is always a very fine line between subjective perception and objective reality – necessarily so since most people are more influenced by myth than fact. One clear objective aid to the elite in its bid to ward off revolution is the entire intellectual culture of empiricism. ‘Fog in Channel. Continent Isolated’ is a famous joke illustrating British insularity but it helps to illustrate the gulf between the island nation and its continental neighbours. ‘Too clever by half’ is another adage with no equivalent in any of the continental languages. The usual interpretation is that the British (and especially the English) distrust and despise intellectuals because, though they will allow differences of rank based on hereditary aristocracy or inherited wealth, they will not tolerate any suggestion of intellectual differences or rankings of intellect.62 This in turn has been traced to the mere fact of living on an invasion-free island. The British live in what was (at least until recently) a remarkably homogeneous society.63 With few significant upheavals, there was no need for reinventing oneself. Intellectuals, on the other hand, flourish in more fluid and changeable societies where anything is possible. Some have even brought the weather into the picture and argued that the brute facts of climate preclude in Britain the kind of cafe society where general ideas can be discussed with gusto over coffee or alcohol. Whatever the ultimate reasons, the crevasse between the continental ethos of a priori rationalism and British empiricism is a gaping one. Leftists frequently deplore English separateness, backwardness and traditionalism, fact-worshipping empiricism and the instinctive trust of reason, which produces a coagulated conservatism suffused with philistinism, with the bourgeoisie supine and the proletariat subordinate, plus ‘a dilettante literary culture descended from the aristocracy and the crudest of lumpen-bourgeois utilitarian ethics’.64 One can understand the frustration and impatience. Where continental Europe has produced the epic theories of Marx and Freud, to say nothing of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, etc, etc, Britain has turned out a philosophical tradition vacuous in its sterile conservatism and blinkered empiricism. The reactionary politics of Edmund Burke and his famous political duel with Tom Paine are well known, but even Britain’s greatest philosopher, David Hume, could not ground his theories in anything more ground-breaking than ‘custom and habit’ – a duo Hume tends to use with mantra-like effect.65 Two examples may be cited from the twentieth century to show the profound conservatism of mainstream British political and philosophical thought. Here is Michael Oakeshott, famous for his definition of politics as ‘the pursuit of intimations’. The ship of state, he says, has ‘neither starting place nor appointed destination … the enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel … To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter [italics mine] to utopian bliss.’66 And this is J. L. Austin, another deeply conservative figure, doyen of the school of ‘ordinary language philosophy’, the dominant dogma at Oxford University at the mid-century:
Our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth making, in the lifetime of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonable practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our armchair of an afternoon – the most favoured alternative method.67
It is not surprising that ‘ordinary language philosophy’ was finally buried under a blizzard of criticism, but the salient point is that to continental philosophers it was like listening to the talk of Martians.68
When we have discounted the arguments from the peculiarity of the English, the power of anti-intellectualism and the entire quasi-philistine nature of British empiricism, certainly as primary factors in the entire revolutionary debate, four main theories remain to explain the British avoidance of revolution. The first is the key factor that Britain developed earlier and faster than the continental countries: it had its civil war and ‘revolution’ earlier; it industrialised earlier; it embraced capitalism earlier; it solved its peasant problem earlier. Some would extend the argument to conclude that Britain was the first real nation-state.69 The Civil War of the 1640s swept away the potential for an absolutist monarchy that would have left Britain as brittle and ossified a society as France was under the Ancien Régime. The ‘dialectic’ established thereafter between a constitutional monarch and a sovereign parliament has sometimes been hailed as the final triumph of the fusion of Norman and Anglo-Saxon elements, with the Norman tradition working in favour of strong monarchy and the Anglo-Saxon emphasising the collegiality of the old witan or primitive assembly of the ‘Ancient Constitution’. Some scholars, however, maintain that regal absolutism had shallow roots and that the Tudor despotism of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I was only possible because the nation temporarily ‘ran for cover’ after the turmoil and exhaustion of the Wars of the Roses.70 At all events, having jettisoned royalist, ecclesiastical and feudal residues, Cromwell’s successors hastened to solve the problem of the peasantry through enclosure. The way was now clear, since the move towards enclosure had been stoutly resisted before the Civil War by Charles I’s Star Chamber. There is no need to posit a master plan to introduce new types of capitalism, for the main impetus for the changes came from the wool industry. Simply put, the profits to be made from wool encouraged sheep pasturing, and this in
turn led the yeomanry to deprive the peasants of their commons and strips of agricultural land.71 Moreover, this process took place over time. The ‘hidden violence’ whereby capitalism destroyed the peasantry through enclosures was a gradual process, and achieved by parliamentary and legal means rather than brutal immediate expropriation, thus avoiding the worst social tensions. Gradualism manifested itself elsewhere too. The rural elites, who traditionally and in most societies have relied on a combination of strong monarchy and the peasantry to maintain their position, were sucked into the power elite by a ‘bourgeois impulse’. An alliance or symbiosis between bourgeoisie and landed aristocracy, which some have claimed was unique to Britain, was consolidated in the eighteenth century. From 1650 onwards a streamlined modern system emerged – a political coalition of landlords and merchants, cohesive, financially efficient and self-confident.72 Insofar as there was conflict, this took the form of competition between manufacturing and agrarian interests for the support of the have-nots, and the equilibrium thus engendered knocked out all the more selfish and thus dangerous repressive measures which might have triggered a revolution.73 The euthanasia of the peasantry was possible in England because of the country’s small size. In geographically vast nations the peasants were cocooned in rural hinterlands and backwoods and thus the impact of modernising trends in the market was considerably diffused; for example, rural isolation meant that the French peasantry was not reached by Enlightenment thought before 1789.
