Political defections, commonly known in Westminster parlance as ‘Crossing the Floor’, have been a phenomenon in Parliament since at least the 17^th century. This has either happened en masse, as part of major schisms within pre-existing parties (such as the establishment of the Liberal Unionists in the late 19^th century, or the Social Democratic Party in 1981 and The Independent Group/Change UK in 2019), or on an individual level, motivated either by political issues of national significance, or as a result of local contexts. In the History of Parliament’s Oral History archive, multiple former MPs have recounted their decision to ‘cross the floor’ and change party affiliation. These were frequently extremely difficult decisions, often at huge personal cost, in some instances causing the end of long-term friendships or associations. They also frequently reflected major changes in British politics happening well beyond their immediate experiences.

Some MPs took the difficult decision to leave their party because of local issues, typically involving conflicts with their constituency parties. In 1973, Dick Taverne, the moderate Labour MP for Lincoln (1962-74), resigned the whip after his local party deselected him due to his pro-European views, particularly for voting in favour of the UK joining the European Economic Community (EEC).

Taverne would subsequently resign his seat to trigger a by-election, which he won under the ‘Democratic Labour’ label. It was the first time a candidate other than the Conservatives, Labour or the Liberals had won an English by-election in the post-war era. While Taverne’s parliamentary career after Labour was brief (he was defeated at the October 1974 general election by Labour’s Margaret Beckett), it anticipated later political events, most notably the defection of Labour’s ‘Gang of Four’ and the establishment of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. Taverne himself would join the SDP, and later stand again for Parliament (in Dulwich, unsuccessfully) in 1983, before becoming a Liberal Democrat peer in 1996. In 1977, Reg Prentice (Newham North-East, formerly East Ham North, 1957-79; Daventry, 1979-87) left the Labour Party due to similar local conflicts, but took the far more controversial decision of defecting directly to the Conservatives. He would later change constituencies and serve as a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s first government. Once again, Prentice’s defection partly showcased the various political divisions emerging within the Labour Party at the end of the 1970s.

Other defections were directly motivated by national political issues. In 1976, Scottish MPs Jim Sillars (South Ayrshire, 1970-79; Glasgow Govan, 1988-92) and John Robertson (Paisley, 1961-79) both resigned from Labour to set-up the ‘Scottish Labour Party’ (SLP). They were motivated by the issue of devolution, and frustration with the failure of the incumbent Labour government to establish a devolved Scottish Assembly with substantial economic powers.

While Sillars never regretted his decision to leave Labour and set up the SLP, he did admit that it was a ‘rush to the head’ and not fully thought through.  

Nevertheless, though the SLP ultimately enjoyed little electoral success, and was dissolved by 1981, Sillars and Robertson’s defections reflected the growing influence of Scottish nationalism in British politics, and anticipated the left-wing, pro-European form it would take in the following decades. In 1988 Sillars was returned to Parliament following a by-election in Glasgow Govan, this time standing as a candidate for the Scottish National Party (SNP), on a platform designed to outflank Labour from the left

Like other defections, Nicholson’s departure from the Conservatives reflected wider developments, but was also of notable personal significance, being the member of a very prominent Conservative family.  

Our interviews with both Sillars and Nicholson emphasise the emotional cost of leaving their parties. Party membership is more than a collection of people with shared political outlook; very deep relationships are made and it can be a key part of a politician’s identity.  For Sillars, leaving the Labour Party was ‘like a Catholic leaving the church […] it’s a tremendous trauma, personal trauma’ and the pressure really affected his health (he developed ulcers), his family and marriage. Nicholson described being ‘extremely angry’ with the Conservatives before she left. In part her defection was her response to feeling ‘bullied’ by the whips and a determination to resist that behaviour. Yet it was a decision she reached ‘very sadly, because I am intrinsically a Conservative.’

One of the most unusual political defections recounted in our project was that of Andrew Hunter. Having sat as the Conservative MP for Basingstoke since 1983, Hunter resigned the party whip in 2002, before joining the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in 2004. This was the first time an MP for a mainland British constituency represented a Northern Irish party since T.P. O’Connor, the Irish Nationalist MP for Liverpool Scotland (1885-1929). Hunter’s decision was motivated by conflicts with the Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, particularly over the party’s controversial links to the right-wing Monday Club (which Hunter supported), disillusionment with the Westminster system, and a desire to pursue a political career in Northern Ireland, owing to his long-standing connections to the DUP and wider unionist community, particularly the Orange Order.  

Unsurprisingly, many of these defections sparked outrage among their former colleagues. Sillars would describe the ‘vicious’ reaction he received, while others would describe being accused of opportunism, cowardice or treason. In some instances, the defectors’ new political allies were not always entirely welcoming either. Interestingly, in many cases these defections were explained as not due to any significant change in the views of the MPs themselves, but out of discontent with their former party’s trajectory. Versions of the phrase ‘I didn’t leave the party, the party left me’ was commonly used by Labour defectors to the SDP in the 1980s, as well as by Emma Nicholson in 1995. Indeed, while some of these defections proved permanent, such as in the case of the SDP or Sillars, others were ultimately temporary. In 2016, Emma Nicholson rejoined the Conservative Party ‘with tremendous pleasure’ (BBC News, 10 September 2016), while more recently, Luciana Berger, who left Labour to form The Independent Group/Change UK in 2019 and later joined the Lib Dems, now sits in the Lords as a Labour peer. Both instances suggest that while defections have often been dramatic and bitterly divisive, reconciliation has also occasionally been possible.

Ultimately, stories from our Oral History Project reveal that political defections are often highly personal decisions and experiences, but can also reflect wider political developments, and even play a role in shaping subsequent events.

A.S. & E.P.

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Further Reading

Andy Beckett, ‘Emma Nicholson: Not her sort of party’, Independent, 31 December 1995.

Tom Chidwick, ‘“Return Taverne”: 50 years on from the Lincoln by-election’, Mile End Institute blog, 1 March 2023

Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Geoff Horn, Crossing the Floor: Reg Prentice and the Crisis of British Social Democracy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).

Ben Jackson, ‘From British Labourism to Scottish Nationalism: Jim Sillars’ Journey’, Scottish Affairs 31:2 (2022), pp.233-239.

Rebecca McKee and Jack Pannell, ‘MPs who change party allegiance’, Institute for Government blog, 12 March 2024.

Emma Peplow and Priscilla Pivatto, The Political Lives of Postwar MPs (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

On 6 July 1943 the Speaker informed the House of Commons of the deaths of two of its members, Brigadier John Whiteley, MP for Buckingham, and Colonel Victor Alexander Cazalet, MP for Chippenham. They had been killed in a plane crash at Gibraltar alongside the Polish Prime Minister General Sikorski, to whom Cazalet had been acting as Britain’s political liaison officer. They were among the estimated 165 MPs who served with the forces during the Second World War. An initial flurry of enlistment among MPs in 1939 was followed by a further wave after Germany’s invasion of France in 1940.

Commenting on the deaths of Cazalet and Whiteley, Winston Churchill voiced regret that ‘the list of Members who have given their lives in this second struggle against German aggression is lengthening’. He declared that when the Commons chamber – destroyed by German incendiary bombs on the night of 10-11 May 1941 – was rebuilt after the war,

‘we shall take care to inscribe their names and titles on its panels to be an example to future generations’.

Churchill’s proposal was incorporated within the reconstructed House of Commons chamber, opened in October 1950, in the form of 23 heraldic shields commemorating the MPs who died during the Second World War. These featured each MP’s family coat of arms or initials, with their surnames inscribed above. This format emulated the 19 shields installed in 1921 to commemorate the MPs who died during the First World War, which were replicated in the rebuilt chamber.

All those commemorated were sitting MPs at the time of their death, except Roger Keyes, elevated to the Lords in 1943. While most represented English constituencies, they included the MPs for the Welsh seat of Barry and Llandaff and for County Antrim in Northern Ireland, as well as MPs with Scottish connections. Two of the group had first been returned to Westminster at the 1922 election, although the MP with the longest continuous service was Cazalet, who had represented Chippenham since 1924. After his sister Thelma was elected for Islington East in 1931, they had the distinction of being the second-ever pair of brother and sister MPs.

The wartime service of these 23 individuals reflected the wide-ranging nature of Britain’s war effort between 1939 and 1945. Many of the 165 MPs who served undertook home duties, performing valuable organisational roles while remaining engaged in parliamentary and constituency business. Those commemorated in the chamber included James Despencer-Robertson, Military Secretary at Southern Command Headquarters in his Salisbury constituency, where he died suddenly in 1942; Frank Heilgers, who was returning from his Bury St Edmunds constituency to duties as an Assistant Quartermaster General at the War Office when he was killed in the 1944 Ilford train crash; and Anthony Muirhead, who was helping to mobilise an anti-tank regiment in Oxfordshire when he died by suicide in 1939.

Not all the commemorated MPs were on active military service. James Baldwin-Webb was travelling to North America on a fundraising mission for the British Volunteer Ambulance Corps on the SS City of Benares when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat on 17 September 1940. The vessel was also transporting evacuees to Canada and Baldwin-Webb was praised for his bravery in assisting women and children into the lifeboats, while refusing a place himself. John Dermot Campbell – the most recently elected member of this cohort, having been an MP since February 1943 – was part of a delegation of six MPs visiting troops in Italy and Greece in January 1945. He and another MP, Robert Bernays, who had been serving with the Royal Engineers, were killed when the plane transporting them between Rome and Brindisi was lost in bad weather.

Bernays, a former journalist, had been a notable early critic of the Nazi government after visiting Germany in the early 1930s. This was in contrast with the position taken by another commemorated MP, Sir Arnold Wilson, who had attracted controversy because of his perceived pre-war sympathies with fascist regimes. Once the war was underway, however, Wilson trained for the dangerous role of an air gunner in the RAF, despite being in his mid-fifties. He was killed in May 1940 when the Wellington bomber in which he was a crew member crashed near Dunkirk.

Several more MPs also died in air crashes. Rupert Brabner, a flying ace with the Fleet Air Arm, had narrowly escaped the German attack on Crete in 1941 and the sinking of the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle in 1942, but was travelling to Canada to attend a ceremony as Joint Under-Secretary of State for Air when he was killed in a plane crash near the Azores in January 1945. Although he served with the army, Lord Apsley, a keen amateur pilot before the war, had used his flying experience to transport fellow officers while serving in the Middle East with the Arab Legion. He was travelling home on leave for Christmas 1942 when the RAF plane in which he was a passenger crashed in Malta. His widow Violet was elected in his place as MP for Bristol Central.

This was not the only example among these 23 MPs of a widow taking her husband’s seat. John Rathbone had a family tradition of parliamentary service, including his great-aunt Eleanor. He was serving with the RAF when he was reporting missing while piloting his crew’s first operational flight, a bombing raid on the German-occupied port of Antwerp in December 1940. After Rathbone’s death was confirmed, his widow Beatrice was elected unopposed for his Bodmin seat.

Also killed while piloting a plane was Peter Eckersley, who was training with the Fleet Air Arm in Hampshire when his aircraft crashed in August 1940. An experienced amateur pilot, before he entered the Commons Eckersley had captained the Lancashire county cricket team, 1929-35, earning nicknames such as ‘the flying cricketer’ because he often flew himself to matches.

Eckersley was not the only notable sportsperson in this group. Cazalet had been four times British amateur squash champion and competed in tennis at Wimbledon, while Patrick Munro had been an international rugby player and twice captained Scotland. Aged 58, Munro was the oldest MP to die on war service, as a member of the Home Guard. He was taking part in a major military exercise at the Palace of Westminster in May 1942 when he collapsed and died. A year earlier he had been the last MP to speak in the Commons chamber before it was destroyed by bombing.

Munro was not, however, the oldest person among the 23 commemorated. That was the 73 year old retired Admiral of the Fleet Roger Keyes, a peer at the time of his death. He had spent over half a century in the navy, serving across the globe before retiring shortly after his election as MP for Portsmouth North in 1934. In 1940-1 he served as Director of Combined Operations, organising and training the Commandos. Tragically his son Geoffrey died during a commando raid in North Africa in November 1941, posthumously receiving the Victoria Cross. Keyes was an unofficial observer with the U.S. fleet at a battle in the Philippines in October 1944 when he suffered smoke inhalation, which contributed to his death in December 1945. In contrast with the high-ranking Keyes, Dudley Joel was a lieutenant in the navy when he was among 63 crew members killed in the bombing of HMS Registan off Cape Cornwall in May 1941.

Almost half of the MPs commemorated for their Second World War service had also served during the First World War. Others had since gained military experience as members of the Territorial Army. In contrast, the youngest MP of this group, George Charles Grey, was born just after the 1914-18 conflict ended. He interrupted his university studies to serve with the Grenadier Guards after war broke out in 1939 and took part in the evacuation from Dunkirk. The ‘Baby of the House’ (and the youngest MP of the twentieth century), he was just 22 when he was elected unopposed for Berwick-on-Tweed in August 1941. He was killed by a sniper in July 1944 as his tank was advancing through Lutain Wood, Normandy.

While Grey had survived the 1940 retreat through France, two other MPs were less fortunate. The first MP killed in action during the Second World War, Richard Porritt, a captain with the Lancashire Fusiliers, died on 26 May 1940 during a German bombing raid near Seclin, France, where the British army was trying to establish a defensive line behind which troops could retreat to Dunkirk. Ronald Cartland, a major with the Worcestershire Yeomanry, was listed as missing in action during the retreat to Dunkirk, with initial reports suggesting he may have been taken prisoner. However, a few months later his family received confirmation that he had been killed by German fire near Watou, Belgium on 30 May 1940. His sister, the novelist Barbara Cartland, paid tribute to him with a memoir published in 1942.

These 23 MPs served in many different theatres of war. Somerset Maxwell initially served with the Royal Corps of Signals in France, before his duties took him to Palestine, Crete, Libya, Iraq and Syria. He became a welfare officer for forces across the Middle East in May 1942, but requested a return to combatant duties, and was placed in command of signals with an armoured division. Wounded in both knees when Allied troops were machine-gunned from the air during fighting in Libya, he died of septicaemia in a Cairo hospital in December 1942. Another casualty of the North Africa campaign was Edward Kellett, second in command of the 8th Armoured Brigade in Tunisia. He was killed during preparations for attacking the Mareth Line in March 1943, when a shell exploded beside his tank while he was standing up shaving.

Stuart Russell was serving in Sicily with the Coldstream Guards when he contracted a fever, and died in hospital in Egypt in October 1943. After spending time on home defence duties, John Macnamara, who had experience in both the regular and the territorial army, was keen for more active service. He was stationed in the Middle East before being appointed as Chief of Staff with the Land Forces Adriatic. Having been involved in operations in Crete and Yugoslavia, he was killed by a German mortar bombardment in Italy while visiting his former regiment, the London Irish Rifles, shortly before Christmas 1944. He was the last sitting MP to die as a result of enemy action.

KR

Short biographies of these 23 MPs written by the History of Parliament can be found on the UK Parliament website.

The seminar takes place on 28 October 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

In 2024, the family of J H Whitley, former Speaker of the House of Commons, most generously gave two items to the Parliamentary Art Collection. These were a rosette attached to a medal from Gladstone’s 1884 reform campaign; and a broken chain with padlocks which had been passed down the generations and reputed to be a ‘suffragette chain’.

John Henry Whitley (1866-1935), known as ‘J H’, was Liberal MP for Halifax between 1900 and 1928. His first wife, Marguerita née Marchetti (1872-1925), was President of the Halifax Liberal Women’s Association; her father Guilio fought with Garibaldi in Italy before settling in the UK.

J H Whitley is best known today for giving his name to Whitley Councils, consultative councils between employers and workers, set up following a committee he chaired during the First World War. Whitley Councils continue today in the public sector. In Parliament, he was elected Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means in 1910 and then Chairman of Ways and Means, and therefore also Deputy Speaker, from 1910 to 1921.

As Speaker between 1921 and 1928 he oversaw the decorative scheme for St Stephen’s Hall. On retiring as Speaker, Whitley refused the customary peerage and went on to other public roles until his death in 1935. He married again in 1928 and his second wife, Helen née Clarke (1882-1981), had been a member of the British community in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Whitley was generally known to be a supporter of women’s suffrage, but this had not been researched in detail until I began to investigate the ‘suffragette chain’. As Deputy Speaker, and then Speaker, Whitley had to be politically neutral, of course; and yet office holders have their own personal opinions, and sometimes these may influence political events.

This image is from a report into all Liberal MPs’ attitudes on suffrage from the papers of David Lloyd George, which shows Whitley as a supporter of the first Conciliation Bill in 1910. He expressed support for married women in particular having the vote a year later; and made it clear in 1913 that he had not changed his mind. The Conciliation Bills were unsuccessful cross-party suffrage bills between 1910 and 1912 which would have given a limited measure of women’s suffrage. As private members’ bills they stood little chance of success without government backing.

The Speaker during the years of militant activism before the First World War was James William Lowther, an opponent of women’s suffrage. Lowther had to respond to various suffragette protests in the Palace of Westminster, including at least two known to involve chains. However, Lowther became most infamous in suffrage history for a controversial procedural ruling which scuppered a women’s suffrage amendment to a government bill in 1913. If Whitley had been in the chair, this may not have happened.

In one of history’s ironies, Lowther went on to (reluctantly) chair the Speaker’s Conference on Electoral Reform during the First World War, which under his leadership recommended a measure of votes for women, implemented in the 1918 Representation of the People Act. The Act gave the parliamentary vote to women aged 30 and over who met a property qualification. The battle for equal franchise went on in Parliament for the next ten years. During this time Lowther took the opportunity to scupper another women’s suffrage bill through a Speaker’s ruling in 1920. He stood down as Speaker in 1921, when he was elevated to the House of Lords as Viscount Ullswater.

In 1924 the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin made a pledge on equal franchise that his party ‘would if returned to power propose that the matter be referred to a Conference of all political Parties on the lines of the Ullswater Committee’. The Conservatives were elected and in due course Baldwin asked Whitley if he would chair another Speaker’s conference. Whitley refused, much to the relief of most of the Cabinet, who wanted to avoid discussion of wider electoral reform issues.

Despite strong opposition led by Winston Churchill, the Cabinet finally agreed to support equal franchise in 1927 and the 1928 Equal Franchise Act was passed the following year. Whitley oversaw all its stages in the Commons, standing down as Speaker shortly before it achieved royal assent in July 1928. It’s impossible to be sure, but it’s entirely possible that the ‘suffragette chain’ had remained in the Speaker’s Office all these years, until the issue received closure and this suffrage-sympathetic Speaker took it home as a retirement souvenir of his long parliamentary career.

The seminar takes place on 28 October 2025, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

MT

Some of this material was first presented by Mari Takayanagi at ‘Breaking the chains: Women’s suffrage and Parliament from the time of J.H. Whitley’, the 12th annual J H Whitley lecture at the University of Huddersfield on 17 October 2024. This year’s lecture will be given by the Speaker of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, on 30 October 2025.

Mari would like to credit Beverley Cook, Curator of Social and Working History at the London Museum; Kathryn Rix, Assistant Editor at the History of Parliament; and Elizabeth Hallam Smith, academic historian and archives consultant, for their assistance with research on the ‘suffragette chain’.

Further reading:

J. Hargreaves, K. Laybourn & R. Toye (eds.), Liberal Reform and Industrial Relations: J.H. Whitley (1866-1935), Halifax Radical and Speaker of the House of Commons (2018).

M. Takayanagi, Votes for Women and the Speaker’s Conference on Electoral Reform 1916-17. History of Parliament blog (2017).

M. Takayanagi, ‘Women and the Vote: The Parliamentary Path to Equal Franchise, 1918–28’, Parliamentary History, 37:1 (2018).

The seminar takes place on 3 June 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

The commanding Recording Angel memorial in St Stephen’s Porch, Westminster Hall, is dedicated to peers, MPs, officers, and their sons who lost their lives in the First World War. Designed by the Australian sculptor, Sir Bertram Mackennal, and unveiled in November 1922, the Recording Angel memorial includes three English-born sons of Welsh MPs – Iorwerth Glyndwr John (1894-1916), William Pugh Hinds (1897-1916), and William Glynne Charles Gladstone (1885-1915), himself an MP.

Through naming, it demonstrates the ways in which the Houses of Parliament captured expressions of English Welsh dualities within its political iconography in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The memorial also provides a useful vehicle through which to examine the performance of English Welsh dual identities during the war itself and the fluidity of identity formation back and forwards across the borders of England and Wales in the first decades of the twentieth century.

One of the ninety-four sons recorded on the memorial was Iorwerth Glyndwr John, son of the MP for East Denbighshire, Edward Thomas (E. T.) John. The Pontypridd-born MP, a keen advocate of home rule for Wales, had been an iron ore merchant in Middlesbrough before entering parliament. His son Iorwerth, born in Middlesbrough in 1894, was educated at New College, Harrogate and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read jurisprudence. Serving with the South Wales Borderers, he was killed near Loos in February 1916.

On Iorweth’s death, his alma mater recalled:

While at Oxford he showed keen interest in Welsh music and in the political and national life of Wales generally… Doubtless, if he had lived, he would have played a prominent part in the public life of Wales.

For Iorwerth’s epitaph, E. T. John chose an inscription which was drenched in Welsh symbolism, using lines adapted from the bard Hedd Wyn’s wartime poem, Nid â’n Ango ([It] Will Not Be Forgotten):

Un O Feibion Hoffusaf Cymru |  Ei Aberth nid el heibio | a’i enw annwyl nid a’n ango (One of Wales’s favourite sons | His sacrifice will not be passed over | And his dear name will not be forgotten)

This commemorative act signifies a clear desire by the bereaved father to emphasise the deceased’s links to Wales and the Welsh language, and to maintain linguistic communion with his son beyond death, despite Iorwerth’s ostensibly English upbringing.

William Pugh Hinds, who died from wounds in February 1916, was the only son of the Blackheath draper and MP for West Carmarthenshire, John Hinds. Born and educated in Blackheath, Hinds was studying engineering at the Electrical Standardising, Testing, and Training Institution, London before he enlisted in November 1914. He served as an officer in France with the 15^th (1^st London Welsh) Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers (RWF), a unit deliberately set up to accommodate Londoners of Welsh heritage and enthusiastically sponsored by his father.

Within months of volunteering, Hinds was severely wounded by a sniper’s bullet. Just days before his death, he was visited in an emergency field hospital by the then Minister for Munitions, David Lloyd George. This encounter had such an impact on the politician that when he returned to London, he confided to his mistress, Frances Stevenson, ‘The horror of what I have seen has burnt into my soul, and has almost unnerved me for my work.’

Hinds’s death continued to haunt Lloyd George. When he returned to France in late 1916, he made a pilgrimage to Hinds’s grave at Merville Communal Cemetery, subsequently receiving a note of gratitude from Hinds MP that he ‘found time to visit our dear lad’s grave.’ As with E. T. John, Hinds selected a Welsh inscription for his offspring’s headstone: Yn Anghof Ni Chant Fod (They Will Not Be Forgotten), from the poem ‘Dyffryn Clwyd’, so that even in death he embraced his Londoner son in a Welsh martial identity.

The final MP’s son listed on the Recording Angel was William Glynne Charles Gladstone (William), also an MP in his own right. He was killed in 1915 whilst serving as an officer with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers (RWF) in France. William was born at 41 Berkeley Square, London in 1885, the son of William Henry Gladstone MP, and grandson of the former Liberal Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone.

Like his grandfather, William embodied an attachment to both England and Wales, inheriting the family estate at Hawarden Castle, Flintshire when he was twenty-one. As the Squire of Hawarden, William encouraged those in the district to join up and military service in the RWF further deepened his ties with Wales. In April 1915, for example, William and his mother exchanged correspondence on an orphanage at Hawarden which was being used for RWF convalescent soldiers, the former writing, ‘Please let the Orphanage soldiers know that they can wander over the Park Woods and Old Castle in case they don’t do it.’

William maintained a connection with his Welsh home through discussion of his family’s patronage, on both military and domestic fronts, of RWF soldiers. Following his death, William was often characterised in obituaries as ‘a border hero’ whose life criss-crossed the boundaries between England and Wales; the Liverpool Post noting, ‘the border counties lost a true and devoted son in the late W G C Gladstone, of Hawarden.’

Notably, John, Hinds and Gladstone all served with Welsh regiments: the South Wales Borderers, the 15^th (London Welsh), and the Royal Welsh Fusiliers respectively. This suggests that within Welsh diasporic families in England, those of military age were often prompted by patrilineal ties to approach their military enlistment through the lens of Welshness, seeking to serve in a Welsh regiment.

Ultimately, the Recording Angel memorial is important in acknowledging the existence of English Welsh dualities within wartime memorialisation which, in turn, acts to shore up a sense of shared Britishness. The memorial also highlights the functioning of a form of militarized Welsh patriotism amongst the male diasporic elite, some of whom were MPs, which occasionally demanded the sacrifice of their own sons.

WU

Wendy’s seminar takes place on 3 June 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

The seminar takes place on 20 May 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Protest marches in central London today usually follow a regular route. Assembling on the Thames Embankment, they march towards Westminster Bridge, past the Houses of Parliament, to Trafalgar Square or down the Mall to Hyde Park, where a big rally is held. This route has immense political symbolism and significance, following in the footsteps of previous generations of marchers.

Londoners of all political persuasions and social status witnessed or took part in processions at some point in their lives. The Lord Mayor’s parade and local guild processions marked key points in the civic and religious calendar, while royal processions at coronations and jubilees developed in grandeur during the long nineteenth century.

Electoral processions to and from the hustings at Covent Garden, and the ‘chairing of the member’ around the main streets of Westminster (and on boats along the Thames in the case of Middlesex constituency), enabled popular participation in the era before the 1832 Reform Act. Many of these traditions continued as the franchise widened.

However, this route through central London wasn’t always the same as it is today. The choice of streets and meeting places wasn’t regularised until at least the 1870s. Trafalgar Square wasn’t completed until the late 1840s. So before then, political gatherings assembled in various locations on the fringes of urban London such as Copenhagen Fields and St George’s Fields – which were built upon by the mid-nineteenth century.

Political rallies were banned in Hyde Park until members of the Reform League pulled up the railings to gain access in 1866. Ever since, protest march routes through the capital have been subject to debate and negotiation between protesters, government and police.

With the rise of the working-class parliamentary reform movements and trades unions from the 1790s, political processions became a central element of protest. Processions and marches were active claims by the working classes to form part of the wider body politic. Reform processions were a show of representing the ‘people’ to the public. Leaders and orators of the parliamentary reform movement employed the ‘grand entry’ into the city, in the mode not only of successful MPs after an election, but also of military leaders returning home after a victory, or with biblical allusions to Jesus Christ entering Jerusalem. ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ was a popular hymn played by bands at both electoral and radical processions.

Holding a political procession became a fraught process of negotiation between the political group holding the procession, and various overlapping layers of power in the capital, from the magistrates to the home office and sheriff of London. Legislation aimed at the democratic reform movement further shaped the locations and routes of the protests. The 1817 Seditious Meetings Act prohibited political meetings within a mile radius of the palace of Westminster while Parliament was in session. Protest marches, therefore, tended to avoid starting, ending or stopping in this area.

The Westminster Reform Society advertised the route of a procession to protest against the Peterloo Massacre on 1 November 1819, starting at the Crown and Anchor on The Strand to march down Fleet Street to Finsbury Square in the City, a distance of around four kilometres. The demonstration was held while Lord Liverpool’s government was pushing the ‘Six Acts’ through parliament, including another Seditious Meetings Act that prohibited the display of political banners and ensigns at demonstrations.

Procession routes, of all types of political and social composition, began to coalesce from the mid-nineteenth century into regular routes across London. The dominant direction of processions was pulled westwards as the built environment of the capital morphed, and Hyde Park became the main site for rallies.

The processional geography of London further evolved as the city expanded eastwards around the docklands from the mid nineteenth century. The increasing density of population in the East End pulled the start of trades’ processions to meeting sites of Mile End Waste, Stepney Green, and, after its opening, Victoria Park. Trades and unemployed marches in and out of the East End and the docklands intensified as newly formed socialist movements, most notably the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), took up street meetings and marches as key tactics during the severe economic downturn of the late 1880s.

The right to march was hard fought, and political movements asserted agency by claiming routes physically as well as symbolically. The period after the First World War brought new challenges and movements that again brought the right to march debates to the fore of policing and legislation.

Earlier compromises of non-interference were no longer effective. The emergence of the communist movement and violent clashes between police and the unemployed in the 1920s and 1930s continued the conflicts of the earlier decades. Culminating in the Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936, the provocative militant marching of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was opposed by a physical and material defence of territory by Jewish and communist communities in the East End. In response, the 1936 Public Order Act was rushed through Parliament and became law on 1 January 1937.

The legislation did not completely interfere with the popular right of assembly and protest. The tensions between protecting the freedom of passage and the liberty of assembly and free speech became inextricably entangled with issues of race, class and national politics for the rest of the twentieth century.

KN

Katrina’s seminar takes place on 20 May 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

The House of Lords Act 1999 was the last major reform to membership of the House of Lords; removing the rights of all but 92 hereditary peers to sit in the House. This act was intended to be a ‘first stage’ but since then other attempts to reform the Chamber have stalled. The presence of any hereditary peers in parliament at all has been called ‘undemocratic and indefensible’ by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer [BBC News, 5 September 2024], and the government included a bill in the July 2024 King’s Speech that would remove them entirely [Lords Library, 6 November 2024].

Almost since it passed, the 1999 Act has been criticised as a missed opportunity. Alexandra Kelso has argued that 1997 Labour government – who enjoyed a huge majority in the Commons and considerably popularity – had an ‘irrational fear’ that the Lords would hold up their governmental programme if reform was pursued, and ‘shrank’ from more ambitious measures [Kelso, 2011, p.111]. Subsequently the elections to choose which hereditary peers kept their seats, and to replace members when they died, have been described by Donald Shell as ‘nonsense’ [Shell, 2000, p.300]. However, reforming membership of the Lords is fraught with controversy, and consensus about what the House should look like is hard to reach.

Without understanding the context of the 1999 House of Lords Act the current composition of the chamber indeed seems rather strange. The decision to save 92 hereditary peers was largely due to behind the scenes negotiations between leading Conservative and Labour peers. The back and forth of negotiations is described by the journalist Michael Cockerell in a 2001 article for the Journal of Legislative Studies, written based on interviews Cockerell held for a BBC documentary ‘The Lady and the Lords’. Our own oral history project has interviews with two of the key protagonists of these talks: Ivor, Lord Richard, who was Leader of the Lords from 1997-98, and Lord Cranborne, now the 7^th Marquess of Salisbury, who led the Conservative peers. Their reflections in our archive suggest further insights into the complicated politics around the 1999 Act.

In 1997 the Labour party were elected with a manifesto commitment to reform the House of Lords in a two-stage process. The ‘initial, self-contained reform’ promised to remove ‘the right of hereditary peers to sit and vote […] by statute’ [Labour Party, 1997]. Whilst this was clearly understood as the start of the process, no detail was included on further reforms. This was a significant change from the 1992 Labour manifesto, which had promised a largely elected House of Lords. A reform bill was not introduced in New Labour’s first parliamentary session, which was dominated by other constitutional changes such as devolution in Scotland and Wales.

However, behind the scenes in 1997 and 1998 talks were already underway between the leaders of the two parties in the Lords. In Salisbury’s 2016 interview for our oral history archive, he remembered that after the 1997 landslide he had accepted that Lords reform was coming, and hoped to reach a compromise to secure both stages of reform. He wanted to avoid a situation where hereditary peers were removed (stage one) with no former reform to follow: ‘unless we had some reminder that we still needed stage two, then we’d just have stage one and a purely nominated House’. This was both a matter of principle and of politics, he remembered, as it was easier to unite pro- and anti-reform peers behind the position ‘no stage one without stage two’. In this extract from his interview, Salisbury explained his tactics, as discussed with his then party leader, William Hague:

Salisbury proceeded to disrupt the government’s legislative programme in their first parliamentary session, notably the European Elections Bill, which was later forced through using the powers of the Parliament Act.

On the Labour side, our 2015 interview with Lord Richard also discussed the behind the scenes negotiations. In line with Salisbury’s reflections, the two sides believed they were getting ‘somewhat near a settlement’ on the full reform package in summer 1998:

As Richard mentions, at this point he was sacked as Labour leader in the Lords. Both he and Salisbury later reflected that this must have been because of opposition to an elected upper chamber at the very top of the New Labour government. This testimony suggests that rather than being ‘frightened’ into accepting hereditary peers in a newly-constituted House of Lords, the government were equally resistant to agreeing to an elected chamber, a deal the peers themselves were close to reaching.

With Richard gone, his place in the negotiations was taken by Blair’s close ally, the Lord Chancellor Derry Irvine. Salisbury describes the ‘utterly loopy’ negotiations to agree that 92 hereditary peers would remain: 10% of the hereditary peerage, with 15 further peers to man committees in the ‘interim’ period before further reform, and then adding in the Earl Marshall and Lord Chamberlain.

However, just before this deal was agreed and a bill to reform the Lords included in the 1998 Queen’s Speech, Conservative leader William Hague and a select group of his shadow cabinet rejected the deal. Instead, they wanted Salisbury and the Conservative Lords to continue to resist any reform. In our interview, Salisbury explained why he would not continue to do so. Firstly, he clearly accepted that Lords membership needed reform, but was opposed to a purely nominated chamber. Secondly, and importantly, he thought resisting all reform would be unconstitutional. The amount of opposition the Lords could give to an elected government was (and is still) governed by the terms of the ‘Salisbury convention’. This had been most recently defined by Salisbury’s grandfather, the 5^th Marquess (Conservative leader in the Lords 1942-1957): the Lords would not oppose a government bill if it had appeared in their manifesto. In his interview with us, the 7^th Marquess respected this as ‘grandfather’s convention’, and was not prepared to ignore it. Salisbury had spent a significant part of his childhood living with his grandfather when his own parents were away in Africa, and spoke about him with pride during his interview.

Nevertheless, Salisbury’s next decision to save his deal with Irvine was unorthodox, as he explains in this extract:

What followed was an extraordinary sequence of events where Salisbury dealt directly with his opponents in Number 10, including Blair and his chief of communications Alistair Campbell, to ensure his deal remained whether Hague wanted it or not. Salisbury and Campbell agreed the plan to save the 92 hereditary peers should be introduced as a crossbench amendment to the government’s bill, according to reporting in the Times the following week as an attempt to ‘bounce’ Hague into accepting it.

On the day the crossbench amendment was due to be announced, however, a furious Hague discovered that Salisbury had gone behind his back. Trying to seize the initiative, Hague announced the proposed deal to a shocked House of Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions, accusing Blair of reneging on his promise to remove all hereditary peers and trying to create a Lords full of ‘Tony’s Cronies’. Unfortunately for Hague, however, he had acted without knowing the feelings of Conservative peers. Instead of backing Hague they supported the deal to save 92 hereditary peers: indeed Hague was only able to secure a new Leader in the Lords (Lord Strathclyde, Salisbury’s close ally) and keep his front bench by agreeing that they could vote for the deal. Hague had to back down and ended up harangued on Newsnight over the whole episode.

This proved to be the end of Salisbury’s career in the Lords. Unsurprisingly sacked by Hague, he later retired from the House so as ‘not to cause trouble’ for Strathclyde. In his diary, Alistair Campbell expressed astonishment at Salisbury’s motives:

I still could not fully understand why he would do this – he didn’t know me from Adam, and what he did know he probably didn’t like and yet we had just sat down and agreed a line-by-line plan that he must know would damage his leadership, help us through a difficulty, and … he was going to be implicated. [Campbell, 30 November 1998, p.578]

From our interview these motives seem a lot clearer. At the end of the interview he reflected that he was ‘pleased’ with the outcome even if it was ‘a negative achievement’ as ‘if Blair had been able to go full-bloodedly for a stage one reform plan he might put the thing to bed for the foreseeable future’. Salisbury then laughed as he realised ‘You could say that he did that anyway! 17 years later, or whatever it is’ the Lords remains the same. Instead of being frightened into accepting that hereditary peers remain, the Labour government did create a mostly-nominated chamber.

E.P.

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Further Reading

Alistair Campbell, The Alistair Campbell Diaries, Volume Two: Power and the People, 1997-1999 (London: Arrow, 2001).

Michael Cockerell, ‘The Politics of Second Chamber Reform: A Case Study of the House of Lords and the Passage of the House of Lords Act 1999’, Journal of Legislative Studies 7:1 (2001), 119-134.

Alexandra Kelso, ‘Stages and Muddles: The House of Lords Act 1999’, Parliamentary History 30:1 (2011), 101-113.

Labour Party, New Labour: Because Britain Deserves Better (1997) [Accessed online: http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1997/1997-labour-manifesto.shtml]

Donald Shell, ‘Labour and the House of lords: A Case Study in Constitutional Reform’, Parliamentary Affairs 53:2 (2000), 290-310.

Even if the statues in Parliament Square are not ‘Made of Stone’, as the introductory music to our feature on Matt Chorley’s Radio 5live programme might suggest, the grand figures give an impression of timelessness. However, Parliament Square itself has developed in purpose and layout in the past 150 years, and of course the figures commemorated are complex and intriguing historical actors. I hope I’ve been able to thank on air my Victorian Commons colleagues, in particular Kathryn Rix, for their help in my research, and acknowledge in particular the work of Geoffrey Hicks, whose work on the square I have relied on.

Parliament Square first became a public memorial space in the 1860s, following the designs of Edward Barry, son of Charles, the architect of the rebuilt Palace of Westminster. As Hicks has argued, the initial aim of the Square was an ‘outdoor mausoleum’ and ‘sacred space’ for imperial Britain’s political leaders [Hicks, 165-67]. This was in the context of what historians have termed Victorian ‘Statue Mania’. Throughout the country, as Rix for example has recently discussed in an article describing public statues of politicians in the north and midlands, statues of ‘Great Men’ were erected as inspirational figures and decoration for new public spaces. Historians Terry Wyke and Donald Read have demonstrated the importance of the death of Prime Minister Robert Peel in starting this craze, which all seems rather strange in our more cynical political times.

The first five statues are squarely in this tradition: five prime ministers, all added in the decades after their deaths. First to be moved to the Square was George Canning (1770-1827), who until recently was the Prime Minister with the dubious honour to have been in office for the shortest time period. Nevertheless, our biography describes him as ‘One of the most singular and remarkable of the leading statesmen of his time’ [Stephen Farrell] – all the more fascinating given his relative lack of privilege for a political figure of his time. Canning’s statue, by Sir Richard Westmacott, had a difficult origin, falling off the hoist in the studio and killing an assistant sculptor in 1831, and moved from New Palace Yard in 1867 during works on Westminster ground station, to the area now known as Canning Green.

Next to follow Canning was a very different figure, a pillar of the establishment: Edward Stanley, 14^th Earl Derby (1799-1869). This statue, unveiled by his close political ally Benjamin Disraeli in 1874, has excellent reliefs by John Thomas on the plinth commemorating Derby’s political life. Henry John Temple, 3^rd Viscount Palmerston (1784-1865) by Thomas Woolner was added to the square in 1876, after earlier versions were considered too small. Palmerston’s colourful private life, despite being considered ‘the supreme epitome of Victorian pride, respectability and self-respect’ [Stephen Farrell] featured in our piece. Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), whose statue was added fourth, also in 1876 (after an earlier version was rejected after MPs), led a political life so complex and interesting it was very difficult to squeeze any of it into 8 minutes! Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) was the last of the Victorian leaders first added to the square, in 1883. The statue’s role as a shrine to Disraeli by the Primrose League, the Conservative grassroots organisation, in the years after his death demonstrated the extent these Victorian politicians were admired.

That, however, all changed with the First World War, as politicians were blamed for the catastrophe and commemoration shifted to honouring the war dead. However the sixth addition, a copy of Augustus Saint-Gardens’ statue of US President Abraham Lincoln in Chicago, was originally due for inclusion in 1914. Almost as soon as he arrived Lincoln left visitors (and Matt!) asking why he was there; the answer to celebrate Anglo-American friendship in the centenary after the end of the war of 1812-14. As Hicks argued, Lincoln was the first figure added to the square to present a different view of Britain to the wider world as its imperial power declined. [Hicks, p.172]

After the Second World War, Parliament Square was reorganised by the architect George Grey Wornum largely into the design we know today. Canning and Lincoln have remained in Canning Green, with the other four organised around a grassy central area. Two spaces were left for new additions, although the Ministry of Works rather felt that the Square was ‘finished.’ [Hicks, pp.174-5] No-one had told Winston Churchill, however, who on his return to government in 1951 proposed a statue to his friend and war cabinet member Jan Smuts (1870-1950). Smuts was probably the most difficult of the individuals on the square to talk about in a short slot on the radio. Reconciling Smuts, the defender of the Commonwealth and liberal world statesman who directly influenced both the League of Nations and the Preamble to the UN Charter, with Smuts as one of the leading figures and chief architects of a racially segregated South Africa is hard to do justice to in a short period of air time. Churchill (1874-1965) himself was added in 1973, apparently having chosen his prime slot close to the Commons in the 1950s (although this story is doubted by many of his biographers). In recent years the wartime leader has also become a controversial and contested figure.

The final four figures in the Square were all added in the 21^st century, in a ‘reinvigorated’ political space, now as much as a place of protest as a ‘sacred’ space to honour parliamentary politics. The final additions were ‘radical politicians that do not proclaim too obviously the conservative nature of the project.’ [Hicks, p.180] Many of their predecessors would also have been shocked to see direct political opponents honoured in the same way they were! Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) and David Lloyd George (1863-1945) were unveiled within a few months of each other in 2007, Mahatma Ghandi (1869-1948) in 2015 and Millicent Fawcett (1847-1929) in 2018. As these figures are all much more familiar to a modern audience, the ‘Made in Stone’ recordings focused more on the campaigns for their commemoration. Mandela, Lloyd George and Fawcett all made it to the square after considerable public pressure; particularly Fawcett as the first, and so far only, woman.

Excitingly, we have more in store for those of you who have enjoyed the ‘Made in Stone’ series so far, as we have recently recorded another seven pieces on statues and memorials all around parliament, from Boudicca to George V. So keep tuning in for more!

E.P.

Catch up with the series so far on BBC Sounds.

Further Reading:

Geoffrey Hicks: ‘Parliament Square: The Making of a Political Space’ Landscapes 16:2 (2015) 164181

Donald Read, Peel and the Victorians

Kathryn Rix, ‘Living in Stone or Marble: The Public Commemoration of Victorian MPs’ in Memory and Modern British Politics: Commemoration, Tradition, Legacy ed. Matthew Roberts (Bloomsbury, 2024), 13970

Kathryn Rix: Parliaments, Politics and People Seminar: Dr Geoff Hicks on ‘Memorialising Britain’s politicians: the politics of Parliament Square’

Terry Wyke, ‘Memorial Mania: Remembering and forgetting Sir Robert Peel’ in People, places and identities: Themes in British social and cultural history, 1700s-1980s eds Alan Kidd and Melanie Tebbutt (MUP, 2017)

The seminar takes place on 25 February 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

The two world wars of the 20th century were – perhaps surprisingly – something of a golden age for select committee scrutiny in the House of Commons.

A committee on national expenditure (CNE), to ‘examine the current expenditure defrayed out of moneys provided by Parliament and to report what, if any, economies consistent with the execution of the policy decided by the government may be effected therein’, was first appointed in 1917. It published its final report in 1920.  A committee with a similar remit was appointed between 1939 and 1945.

The difference between the activities of these committees and their unambitious peacetime equivalents in the early twentieth century was stark.

In particular, CNEs in both wars did much more than simply report ‘economies’ (potential savings in public expenditure). They made a number of recommendations on the administration and management of departments and, on occasions, touched on matters of policy. This was unusual at a time when the prevailing principle was that parliamentary discussion of policy should only take place openly in the Commons, where ministers could respond. Committees, often meeting behind closed doors, were not seen as appropriate mechanisms for policy debate.

The establishment of the World War I committee may have been prompted partly by a series of military disasters, including defeats in Mesopotamia and the Dardanelles, in the middle years of the war. Public disquiet about the conduct of the war extended from military matters to questions about the fitness of the war machine as a whole.

The CNE was appointed in August 1917, with the highly experienced former Minister Herbert Samuel in the chair. He was supported by civil servants seconded from ministries, who acted as secretaries to sub-committees.  This structure of sub-committees allowed each to focus on a small group of departments – specialisation which contributed to the effectiveness of the CNE.

The CNE worked hard to cover the field of government activity, examining no fewer than 48 departments and sub-departments and holding a total of 265 meetings in its first year alone. Reports covered a wide range of government activity, from the war office to food production.  An earlier experiment with an equivalent estimates committee between 1912 and 1914 had been nothing like as productive.

In the early autumn of 1917 the Committee visited the Front, where they took evidence from Sir Douglas Haig and other senior commanders. The CNE’s first report included a radical recommendation which must have been unwelcome to Haig. This was that the Imperial General Staff, ‘the advisers of His Majesty’s Government on all matters of military operations’, should be ‘required to take into close and constant consideration the comparative cost of alternative proposals before reaching their conclusions’. This was not, as far as we know, ever implemented.

The CNE was also bold in challenging the work of Winston Churchill as minister of munitions. The same first report of 1917 accused the ministry of ‘very serious instances of lack of financial control’. Churchill reacted strongly to the criticism, complaining in the Commons in April 1918 that it was unfair and selective in its conclusions.  But the committee continued to attack the munitions ministry, and others where waste and disorganisation were evident. The press duly took notice.

The committee worked on for the rest of the war and a short time into peace,  examining not just wartime spending but permanent features of the financial landscape such as the form of the spending estimates presented to the Commons.  

But when peace came, the supporting civil servants went back to their home departments.   And the focus of financial control moved away from the Commons. In the immediate postwar years there was growing anxiety about the cost of government, but in Whitehall there was a sense that the Commons and its committees should no longer be central to inquiring into it. The Geddes committee, which effectively wielded the eponymous and infamous axe to public spending in 1921 and 1922, included just one MP, Sir Eric Geddes, a former transport minister, and four senior business figures.  

In the period between the wars, the Commons apparently lost interest in the potential of committees to seek economies and improve administration.  There was a Commons estimates committee between 1921 and 1939, but despite a membership numbering up to 30, it did not normally appoint sub-committees.  This unwieldy body was generally unambitious and very rarely touched on policy.  

But the start of World War II prompted the appointment of a new CNE.  Again, the crucial decision was taken to work largely through sub-committees. Civil servants were again seconded – the WWII CNE had a substantial staff of 11. There was very strong ministerial support, with Churchill, first lord of the admiralty, saying he was ‘entirely at the disposal’ of the committee in case of any difficulty. Clement Attlee, lord privy seal, welcomed the committee as doing ‘work of national importance.’ Ministers generally appreciated the work of a committee that could keep the vast machinery of war production and supply on its toes.  

Emboldened by this, CNE sub-committees travelled extensively and made some radical recommendations. They considered issues as varied as weapons production, hours of work in munitions factories, food supplies, naval dockyards and the lack of coordination between the public relations departments of the various services.

As was the case in WWI, the CNE in the WWII was lucky in its chairman. Sir John Wardlaw-Milne, Tory MP for Kidderminster, was highly energetic in pursuing inefficiencies. But he was also a highly effective critic of the general conduct of the war, being hailed by the Manchester Guardian in May 1942 as having a ‘position of much influence in the House of Commons’.

The fall of the Libyan city of Tobruk to Axis forces in June 1942 crystallised a mood of  dissatisfaction with the Government, and on 1 July Wardlaw-Milne moved that the Commons had ‘no confidence in the central direction of the war.’ His role as Chairman of the CNE seems to have given him the confidence to mount a general attack on the government’s conduct of the war. Wardlaw-Milne bungled, however, in advocating the appointment of the Duke of Gloucester as minister of defence. Gloucester entertained little respect among MPs and the result was laughter on the benches and the end of any chance of a government defeat on this motion.

Nevertheless, the CNE continued to cause concerns in Whitehall. Sir John Anderson, Lord President of the Council, was outraged in April 1943 that the committee had taken evidence from ‘a subordinate official without the  knowledge of the department concerned’. But in July the same year, Anderson, having had discussions with the Chairman of the CNE, accepted the right of the committee to call non-departmental witnesses without consulting the relevant department, and even to attend weapons trials.

Despite, and perhaps because of, this level of influence and access, the CNE did not long survive the end of the war. As in 1919, the seconded civil servants went back to the ministries. The staff of the post-1945 estimates committee was half that of the CNE, and it had difficulty in taking evidence from non-departmental bodies and travelling abroad for many years after the war. There was little strengthening of the Commons’ machinery of scrutiny until the advent of specialised committees in the mid-1960s.

The CNEs stood out from the generally feeble scrutiny committees of the first half of the twentieth century because they had confident leadership, a measure of support from ministries and the access and resources to do the job. They enjoyed a high profile in the press and seemingly among the public. But when the support of Whitehall, both political and technical, was withdrawn, the committees could not continue. For parliamentary scrutiny to be consistently effective, the consent of the scrutinised was, and is, vital.

PA

Philip’s seminar takes place on 25 February 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It will be hosted online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

The seminar takes place on 11 February 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

In March 1988, on the eve of his final bid for the leadership of the Labour Party, Tony Benn addressed a meeting of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, who he nicknamed his ‘foul-weather friends’. It was an apt descriptor.

While a bewildering number of campaigns and organisations came and went during the Labour left’s three decades of marginalisation within the party (c.1985-2015), one constant was the Campaign Group. Formed by Benn and his small gang of parliamentary supporters in 1982 in the fractious aftermath of the 1981 deputy leadership election, it remains one of the last organisational legacies of Labour’s ‘new left’.

Although for much of the party’s history Labour’s parliamentary left had organised in groups and factions (which included the Socialist League, the Bevanites and the Tribune Group), the Campaign Group saw itself as an entirely new organisation of left-wing MPs. A 1985 leaflet listed its aims as being to provide ‘a socialist identity within parliament’, but also to ‘build a campaigning function within the PLP’ and to ‘forge links with the labour and trade union movement outside’.

Alongside the more immediate factional divisions between Labour’s ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ left in the early 1980s, the Campaign Group’s formation was sparked by a deeper ideological discontent with the established practices of its left-wing predecessors, with the officially autonomous Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and even with the Westminster majoritarian system itself. Rather than being the only arena of political contestation, the Campaign Group saw Westminster as just one part of a wider struggle, and Labour MPs as just one part of a mass movement. This implied a political strategy based on dedicated socialist activity in the Commons, but also the cultivation of a powerful grassroots movement outside it.

Starting with 23 MPs in 1982, the Group’s membership reached a peak of 43 by 1987. Its MPs maintained a busy parliamentary schedule, presenting dozens of early day motions and private members’ bills to the Commons between 1983 and 1985.

In 1988 alone, Tony Benn presented five of the most radical private members’ bills of the era. He used the bills as tools of political education, to demystify parliamentary procedure and make hoped for changes ‘almost tangible’. Before long, the Group had also established itself as the PLP’s most consistent backbench rebels. From 1983 to 2010, the Campaign Group was involved in three-quarters of all Labour parliamentary rebellions.

Beyond the Commons, the Campaign Group held weekly meetings open to external speakers, which included students, trade unionists, feminists, social workers and foreign delegations. From 1984 to 1987, the Group published a book and seven policy pamphlets, and from 1986 produced a monthly newspaper, Campaign Group News, which had a circulation of around 4,000 by 1987.

By that same year, approximately 100 local Campaign Groups had been set up around the country, with some, such as in Scotland, Manchester and Teesside, producing their own publications and organising local conferences. While far removed from power, and treated with explicit hostility by party leader, Neil Kinnock, the Campaign Group appeared a substantial presence in parliamentary and party life. If Benn’s hair’s breadth defeat to Denis Healey in 1981 was the high point of the Labour left’s factional power for the next thirty years, it had not been quite so clear at the time.

By establishing local Groups and forging connections with wider social movements, the Campaign Group demonstrated a major departure from the insular parliamentary focus of its immediate predecessors, most notably the Tribune Group. The common desire to, in Jeremy Corbyn’s words, ‘be there on the picket lines and at the workplace level’ demonstrated a new conception of an MP’s role as a supportive auxiliary to, rather than necessarily the leaders of, political struggles.

Similarly, Tony Benn described the Campaign Group as a ‘resource’ or as ‘paid officials of the labour movement’, rather than as traditional political leaders. Through their privileged position in Parliament, a national profile and easy access to the media, Campaign Group MPs also emphasised their role in providing a voice for otherwise marginal causes. 

As Diane Abbott described it, ‘the thing about being an MP is you’ve got a platform, people listen to you’. Similarly, according to John McDonnell: ‘we campaign within parliament so that the campaigns which are excluded by the Westminster elite and the media get a voice and some recognition’.

Another major departure was clear in the Group’s attitude to the parliamentary system itself. For one, Campaign Group MPs exhibited little deference to the niceties or rituals of parliamentary procedure, and through various acts of protest, both individual and collective, they contributed to a significant uptick of ‘disorderly’ behaviour within the Commons by the 1980s.

More substantively, while key figures of Labour’s ‘old left’, like Aneurin Bevan, had embraced Westminster’s majoritarian system as the essential weapon in the struggle for socialism, the Campaign Group took a more critical view. This was demonstrated in one of its early publications, Parliamentary Democracy and the Labour Movement (1984), which called for the transfer of all Crown prerogatives to the decision of the House of Commons, and even the direct election of Labour Cabinets by an electoral college at the party’s annual conference.

While the transfer of prerogatives, like the power to declare war, constituted a firm assertion of parliamentary supremacy, transferring the power to call elections, or even freely appoint the Cabinet, were also drastic restrictions of Prime Ministerial power and patronage. Previous iterations of the Labour left had been happy to use the Westminster majoritarian system virtually unreformed in the name of socialism. However, the Campaign Group was more circumspect. They were conscious of how the discretionary powers of the executive had often been used to moderate Labour programmes and discipline backbench rebels, as seen in the 1970s, rather than ensure their implementation.

Proposing that party conference elect the Cabinet also underlined a desire to integrate the officially autonomous PLP into the full participatory, decision-making structures of the wider party. This illustrated the integral ‘new left’ belief that Labour’s parliamentarians were but the privileged delegates of a wider mass movement and therefore had to be directly accountable to it.

The Campaign Group’s membership and organisation fluctuated and declined after 1985, riven by political divisions and personality clashes. Nevertheless, a consistent feature of its activity remained a radical scepticism towards Parliament and a far less paternalistic attitude to the role of Labour MPs within it.

This encouraged an innovative and – despite countless setbacks, failures and outright disasters – robust factional strategy. As my paper demonstrates, this strategy helps explain the highly unlikely election of Jeremy Corbyn, one of Benn’s ‘foul-weather friends’, as Labour leader in September 2015.

A.S.

The seminar takes place on 11 February 2025, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Further reading

Jad Adams, Tony Benn: A Biography (London: Biteback, 2011)

Tony Benn, The End of An Era: Diaries 1980-90 (London: Arrow, 1994)

Alan Freeman, The Benn Heresy (London: Pluto, 1982)

Richard Heffernan and Mike Marqusee, Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Inside Kinnock’s Labour Party (London: Verso, 1992)

David Judge, ‘Disorder in the “Frustration” Parliaments of Thatcherite Britain’, Political Studies 11 (1992), 532-553

Maurice Kogan and David Kogan, The Battle for the Labour Party second edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2018)

Nick Randall, ‘Dissent in the Parliamentary Labour Party, 1945-2015’ in Emmanuelle Avril and Yann Béliard (eds.), Labour United and Divided from the 1830s to the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 192-220

Patrick Seyd, The Rise and Fall of the Labour Left (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987)

The seminar takes place on 26 November 2024, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Any observer of a new peer’s introduction ceremony will be struck by the splendid figure of Garter King of Arms leading the new peer and their supporters into the Lords chamber. Yet preceding this event, Garter plays an even more significant role by settling each new peer’s title on behalf of the Crown, as previous Garters have possibly done since before Henry VIII’s reign.

After the offer of a peerage has been accepted and announced, the nominee’s first task is meeting Garter to discuss the title by which they will be known. Once this is agreed, the proposed title is forwarded to the Prime Minister who in turn submits it to the Sovereign.

Following royal approval, letters patent of creation are affixed with the Great Seal (as shown below) and the title is published in the Gazette. Until this happens, however, the matter requires confidentiality, as a peer-designate’s first preference can face multiple obstacles.

During the twentieth century the settling of new peers’ titles was not always straightforward, and even occasionally required resolution by Number Ten or the Palace. My paper for the Parliaments, Politics and People seminar on 26 November is the first in-depth study of this process.

Garter’s deliberations were guided by written rules approved by the Crown. These aimed to ensure that titles were as distinctive as possible, followed a certain form and did not attract criticism or mockery embarrassing to the Crown as the fount of honour.

The process often involved consulting various third parties, such as existing peers with a similar title, although titles were sometimes granted over other peers’ objections. In 1979 the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper became Lord Dacre of Glanton despite the 27^th Baroness Dacre’s vehement protests. Of course new peers also consulted their family, and a wife’s opinion could be especially important.

The three main forms of titles are geographical (like Lord Bolton, a title from 1797), surname-based (Lord Taylor, 1958) or a name and geographical suffix (Baroness Taylor of Bolton, 2010). On occasion titles have used invented words: Lord Chancellor Loreburn’s title, from 1906, came from Dumfries’ motto ‘A Lore burne’, based on the war-cry ‘To the Lower Burn’.

Initially, geographical suffixes were added simply to add a nice ring. But in 1912 a new rule restricted such suffixes to names which had already featured in a current or extinct title, to ensure differentiation. Conversely, if the surname concerned had never appeared in a title, a suffix could not normally be added. Geographical suffixes forming part of the title itself differed from territorial designations simply providing an identifying location in the letters patent, as in ‘Baron Fisher, of Kilverstone in the County of Norfolk’.

Traditionally most titles have been territorial, reflecting the historic connection between the peerage and land ownership. However, this became less common during the twentieth century. Politicians sometimes feared obscurity behind an unfamiliar new title, but even less famous peer-designates increasingly opted to preserve their name.

Consequently, repeated use of common names made achieving distinctiveness harder, especially as geographical qualifiers often disappeared from everyday use. Even with just two ‘Russell’ titles there was sufficient confusion that in 1959 the 3^rd Earl Russell and 2^nd Lord Russell of Liverpool wrote The Times a single-sentence letter explaining for correspondents’ benefit that ‘neither of us is the other’.

Partly to avoid this, successive Garters encouraged the adoption of territorial titles but rarely succeeded. Between 1958 and 1999 about five percent of life peers did so, and such titles were viewed by some as grandiose. Those especially anxious to preserve their identities could seek to hyphenate their given names and surnames in their title, a formula much scorned by traditionalists.

One early twentieth-century Garter dismissed the suggestion as unthinkable, but in 1930 Labour’s Noel Buxton secured approval to change his surname to ‘Noel-Buxton’. These titles invited confusion with dukes’ and marquesses’ younger sons, like ‘Lord Randolph Churchill’, but the introduction of life peerages in 1958 saw such creations increase, including for eminent figures like Lord Chancellor Lord Elwyn-Jones.

There were also guidelines to follow regarding places. A place-name could be unavailable owing to previous use in a title, or deemed too difficult to pronounce. It might also be judged either too small or too large to be appropriate. Many of these were subjective questions and there could be inconsistencies.

The selection of certain places occasionally caused criticism, even after a title secured the necessary approvals and was gazetted. Citizens and councillors in Knaresborough objected to their former MP Sir Henry Meysey-Thompson becoming Lord Knaresborough in 1906, as he had only very briefly represented them twenty-six years earlier. He later represented Brigg then Handsworth for much longer, and few in Knaresborough remembered him.

More seriously, in 1923 Viscount Leverhulme’s territorial designation ‘of the Western Isles in the Counties of Inverness and Ross and Cromarty’ prompted a Scottish outcry over perceived similarity to the historic title ‘Lord of the Isles’. To prevent further such episodes, Garter thereafter consulted his Scottish counterpart Lord Lyon King of Arms over titles featuring Scottish places or surnames, although disagreements between the two chief heralds later resumed.

During my forthcoming Politics, People and Parliament seminar, I will further explore the rules for settling peers’ titles in the twentieth century as far as can be known, discuss different factors which peers considered and examine selected cases where settling a title proved especially challenging.

DS

The seminar takes place on 26 November 2024, between 5:30 and 6.30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.