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 Monday 20 July 1789, Henry Beaufoy, MP for Great Yarmouth, moved the third reading of a bill he had sponsored through the House of Commons for instituting a perpetual commemoration of the 1688 Revolution. The bill was a relatively simple one, seeking merely to insist that in December every year, clergy in the Church of England would read out the Bill of Rights, thereby reminding their congregations of the events that had seen James II expelled and William III and Mary II installed as monarchs.

Beaufoy’s bill had to compete with other rather more urgent measures. These included one for continuing an Act passed in the previous session for regulating the shipping of enslaved people in British ships from the coast of Africa; and another for granting over £20,000 towards defraying the costs of the Warren Hastings trial, which had commenced the previous year and would continue to annoy the House until 1795. Consequently, it was late in the day when Beaufoy got to his feet and, although his motion carried by 23 votes to 14, it was determined that as the House now lacked the requisite 40 members present to make a quorum, the Commons should adjourn.

Next day, Beaufoy tried again. Once more, there was opposition. During the two days when the bill was debated objections were raised by Sir William Dolben and Sir Joseph Mawbey, the latter arguing that Beaufoy was merely mimicking the Whig Club in seeking popularity, while Henry James Pye considered the measure ridiculous as it would result in two commemorative events each year. Others were warmly in favour, though and, when it came to a division, the motion to give the bill a third reading was carried. Following a failed effort by Mawbey to introduce an amendment granting to each clergyman required to read the declaration 20 shillings, the bill was passed and sent up to the Lords. [Commons Journal, xliv. 543-7]

Beaufoy’s bill had its origins in the centenary celebrations of the Revolution, which had been marked across the country the previous autumn. Like his bill, not everything had proceeded smoothly. Not least, there were obvious rivalries between the clubs and societies heading up the various events. There was even disagreement on precisely when to mark the day. The Revolution Society had chosen 4 November, on the basis that this was both William III’s birthday (and wedding anniversary) and the day that he had made landfall. The Constitution Club, on the other hand, chose to hold its entertainment on 5 November, which chimed with the date chosen by John Tillotson (soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury), when preaching his 1689 commemorative sermon. It also echoed celebrations of the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot and this dinner was rounded off with toasts to the ‘three eights’: 1588 (Armada), 1688 and 1788. [Gazetteer and Daily Advertiser, 6 November 1788]

Aside from somewhat petty disagreements about whether 4 or 5 November was most apt, several of the societies also had strikingly different political outlooks and exhibited fierce rivalry. Speaking at the Whig Club, Richard Sheridan concluded his remarks with proposing a subscription for erecting a monument to the Revolution, which appeared to get off to a fine start with £500 being pledged almost at once. The plan was for the edifice to be located at Runnymede, emphasizing the links between the safeguarding of English liberty with Magna Carta, and the completion of the process with William of Orange’s successful invasion.

Not everyone liked the idea of a physical monument, though, and when the proposal was read out at other clubs, it received either muted or downright hostile responses. Speaking at the Constitution Club’s dinner at Willis’ Rooms, presided over by Lord Hood and featuring around 700 diners, John Horne Tooke made no secret of his contempt for the Whig Club’s plan. It was at this meeting that Beaufoy first raised his idea for a day of commemoration to be legislated for by Parliament, though at least one paper reported that his speech had been drowned out by the noise around him.

Elsewhere, there was more harmony. One of the grandest celebrations of 1688 took part at Holkham Hall in Norfolk, where Thomas Coke (future Earl of Leicester) laid on a spectacular firework display as well as mounting a recreation of William’s landing at Brixham having brought in squadrons of horses and loaded them onto miniature ships, which were launched on a canal. Perhaps the most evocative event, though, was one of many held in London taverns, where an unidentified man, said to be 112 years old, was reported to have been in attendance and chaired by the company. According to the paper he was one of ten centurions residing in the French hospital on Old Street, but at 112 he was likely the only one of them who actually remembered the Revolution taking place. [E. Johnson’s British Gazette and Sunday Monitor, 9 November 1788]

All of this was cast thoroughly into the shade by the very unhelpful timing of the king’s illness, which had commenced that summer but become steadily more acute through October and finally reached a crisis on the symbolic date of 5 November. The Prince of Wales had been on his way to Holkham to take part in Coke’s celebrations, but was forced to turn back after being alerted to the king’s deteriorating condition. At a time when the stalwarts of the Revolution Settlement were trying to make the case for the stability it had provided in settling the throne on the House of Brunswick, the prospect of a king no longer able to fulfil his constitutional functions was a disaster.

By the time Beaufoy finally made his motion in the Commons, the king had recovered but that did not ease the progress of what always seems to have been a rather unwanted bill. Having made its way through the Commons, the measure was presented to a thinly attended House of Lords on Thursday 23 July 1789, and a motion for the bill to be given a first reading was moved by Earl Stanhope – a leading member of the Revolution Society.

Stanhope’s motion was objected to by the Bishop of Bangor, who insisted that a prayer was already said for the Revolution in church each year. Stanhope attempted to argue in favour of the ‘pious and political expediency’ of the bill, insisting that the event was not commemorated satisfactorily in church. [Oracle, 24 July] The Lord Chancellor left the wool sack to enable him to offer his own opinions on the matter, backing up Bangor’s view and arguing the bill to be absurd, before a final contribution was made in favour of the proposed measure by the Earl of Hopetoun. The motion for the first reading was then negatived by six votes to 13, after which the Lords resolved without more ado to throw the unwanted bill out. [Diary or Woodfall’s Register, 24 July; The World, 24 July] Sheridan’s wish for a grand monument met with a similar fate, though an obelisk celebrating the centenary was raised at Kirkley Hall near Ponteland in Northumberland, by Newton Ogle, Dean of Winchester, and another at Castle Howe near Kendal in Cumbria.

As far as commemoration of 1688 was concerned this was far from the end of the story. Two centuries on, the tercentenary witnessed an unusual expression of unity from the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the Leader of the Opposition, Neil Kinnock. Moving a humble address to the Queen, expressing the House’s ‘great pleasure in celebrating the tercentenary of these historic events of 1688 and 1689 that established those constitutional freedoms under the law which Your Majesty’s Parliament and people have continued to enjoy for three hundred years’, Thatcher was answered by Kinnock, agreeing that it was: ‘a worthy act, not only because it celebrates a significant advance, as the Prime Minister just said, but because it requires us all to consider the character of our democracy…’

Father of the House, Sir Bernard Braine, was next to speak. He welcomed the rare moment of political harmony and underlined the key principal about what 1688 meant to everyone in the chamber:

‘It is the knowledge that the parliamentary system which we jointly serve is greater than the sum total of all who are here at any one time.’

RDEE

Further Reading:

John Brooke, King George III (1972)

Journals of the House of Commons

Journals of the House of Lords

On 10 February 1793, 21 Members of the Commons gathered at 106 Pall Mall. Over 50 had been expected only for the invitations to be sent out late. The attendees were mainly conservative Foxite Whigs, and all were horrified by events in France and the stance of Charles James Fox. They resolved to secede and form a ‘Third Party’ while providing qualified support for William Pitt’s Ministry. This secession, which augured the disintegration of the Foxites and the formation of the Pitt-Portland coalition, was pursued with considerable hesitation.

The anguished path towards secession was illustrated well in the man reluctantly acclaimed as leader, William Windham (1750-1810).

The scion of an old Norfolk family, Windham began his political career in 1778 with a well-received address opposing the American War. After a brief, difficult tenure as Chief Secretary for Ireland, he was returned as one of the Members for Norwich in 1784. Windham slowly grew into his role as a parliamentarian, occasionally crippled by anxiety and hypochondria, and first achieving note as one of the managers of the impeachment of Warren Hastings. Initially moderately liberal, Windham became increasingly conservative by the early 1790s, influenced by his close friend Edmund Burke.

Like many in the political nation, Windham was initially sympathetic to the French Revolution, visiting Paris in August 1789 and writing approvingly of the situation to Burke. Fox’s nephew, Lord Holland, thought him a ‘warm admirer’ of the Revolution. Windham was among a group of British visitors to Paris in August 1791 observing the formal ratification of the new Constitution, where the treatment of Louis XVI horrified him. Windham had come to France, as Lord Auckland recorded, ‘a great admirer’ of the Revolution and returned increasingly alarmed.

The schism of his close friends Burke and Fox over the Revolution by May 1791 anguished Windham profoundly. Like other conservative Foxites, he agreed privately with Burke, but was deeply reluctant to split from Fox and the Whigs’ de jure leader, the respected but indecisive conservative 3rd duke of Portland. By 1792 Windham was increasingly prominent as an anti-Jacobin, fostering social links with French royalist émigrés and supporting anti-sedition measures at home. Still, he was resistant to give way to secession, wishing that the Foxites ‘should act as cordially together as if no such difference had ever occurred’.

The increasing violence of the Revolution by 1792 and Fox’s continued sympathies eventually convinced conservative Foxites they could not sway Fox towards their position. With Portland more interested in avoiding a split, conservative Foxites looked increasingly to Windham for political direction. Fellow conservative Sir Gilbert Elliot opined in December that with Portland’s ‘indecision’, conservatives looked to Windham, who ‘stands higher at present, both in the House and in the country, than any man I remember’.

The execution of Louis XVI and the outbreak of war by early February 1793 finally provoked the secession with the aforementioned meeting of 10 February followed by another a week later. ‘The meeting has a good effect’, wrote Elliot:

It must show the Duke of Portland that we are determined to take our own line even without him; and it has pledged Windham more distinctly than he was before to a separation from Fox.

Despite this the ‘Third Party’ hoped to convince Portland to split from Fox and take ‘his natural place as our leader’. The seceders were thus forced into a curious situation of defecting from a faction whose nominal leader they still pined for. Their resolve was, however, demonstrated further with the secession of 45 men from the Whig Club in late February 1793.

Windham initially hoped for around 86 defectors, yet the number settled ultimately to 38, of which at most 28 were ex-Foxites. Of the 45 Whig Club seceders, 18 were MPs and only ten joined the Third Party. The party’s membership illustrates the Opposition’s ideological fluidity before the polarization of the 1790s. It included the ‘High Tory’ Foxite Sir Francis Basset; Lord North’s son Frederick North; John Anstruther, whose political trajectory mirrored Windham’s, and Thomas Stanley who abandoned his reformist-leaning sentiments after witnessing the storming of the Tuileries Palace. Crucially, however, prominent conservative Whigs such as Earl Fitzwilliam, Earl Spencer, Tom Grenville, and Portland opposed the move, considering Whig unity paramount.

Described by Elliot as ‘dilatory and undecided’, after this period of political activity Windham was initially a reluctant leader expressing to John Coxe Hippisley how ‘much against my will I have been obliged to act as a sort of head of a party’ nicknamed ‘as the sect of Alarmists’. Windham believed that if Portland continued to dither, they would ‘dwindle away and be dispersed in various channels till the very name and idea of the party will be lost’. Windham was finally roused into political action with his spirited opposition to Charles Grey’s motion on parliamentary reform in May 1793, after which he focused on urging Portland’s secession from Fox and preventing Pitt from poaching Alarmist MPs.

Under Windham the Alarmists pursued an independent line, providing outside support for Pitt while insisting that they would only rally to him as a collective and not individually. The latter, Pitt’s preferred strategy, had already seen Lord Loughborough (the future earl of Rosslyn) defect to become Lord Chancellor in January 1793, followed by other conservative Whigs such as Gilbert Elliot and future Member, Sylvester Douglas. Over summer 1793 Pitt attempted to coax Windham over to the Ministry with offers of high office, which Windham refused despite considerable pressure from Burke and others.

Windham persisted with his independent stance, stressing in August 1793 that a coalition was only possible ‘if others could surmount those objections’. September saw Windham appeal to Portland to lead his followers from Fox, feigning a wish to be ‘a mere member of Parliament’. He stressed that a Whig reunion was impossible and that the only options were to ‘remain a third body’ or join en masse with Pitt. Portland continued awkwardly to affirm his support for the war and opposition to Pitt.

Conservative horror was heightened further by the execution of Marie Antoinette in October and the fall of Toulon in December. Realizing the inefficacy of his stance, Portland finally led an exodus of 51 MPs. The Portlandites adopted the independent line at a meeting attended by Windham and Burke and joined the Third Party, now under Portland’s leadership. ‘Being able to form an independent Party under so very respectable a head’, Frederick North expressed to Windham, was ‘the most desirable political Event’. Despite Portland assuming leadership, though, Windham remained a significant presence.

With around 77 former Whigs among their ranks, the seceders now outnumbered the remaining 66 Foxites. What had begun with a mere 21 MPs in Pall Mall had grown to include over half of all Foxite Whigs. Despite some individual defections to Pitt, Windham’s line of ‘no longer answer[ing] separate’ remained. After negotiations, a Pitt-Portland coalition was agreed with the new ministers receiving their seals on 11 July, Windham among them as Secretary at War.

While short-lived, the party ultimately succeeded in its central objectives. An independent, hawkish, conservative Whig faction was later seen in the form of the Grenvillite ‘New Opposition’, which opposed Henry Addington’s Ministry from 1801. That stridently anti-peace faction was led in the Commons, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the resident of 106 Pall Mall.

JO

Further Reading

Herbert Butterfield, ‘Charles James Fox and the Whig Opposition in 1792’, The Cambridge Historical Journal, ix (1949), 293-330.
Leslie Mitchell, Charles James Fox and the disintegration of the Whig Party, 1782-1794 (1971).
Frank O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (1967).
Max Skjönsberg, The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2021).
David Wilkinson, ‘The Pitt–Portland Coalition of 1794 and the Origins of the ‘Tory’ Party’, History, lxxxiii (1998), 249-64.

Described by the novelist Mary Shelley as ‘a plain silentious but intelligent looking man’, Gaskell served as MP for Wakefield from 1832 until his defeat in 1837. Whilst a family inheritance enabled him to lead a comfortable life as a country gentleman, his Unitarian faith set him apart from the traditional political class. He was enthusiastically supported in his parliamentary career by his wife, and the often under-valued political role of women is another major theme to emerge in our research.

Gaskell was one of around 40 Unitarians who sat in the Commons during the 1832-68 period. His grandfather, a linen draper, and his father, a merchant, had both worshipped at Manchester’s Cross Street Unitarian Chapel. Gaskell was born in Manchester, but moved to Lupset Hall, near Wakefield, following his marriage in 1806. He and his older brother Benjamin were the major beneficiaries under the will of their cousin, James Milnes, and acquired considerable urban and rural property. Lupset Hall ‘received all the embellishment which taste and art could confer upon it’ and became ‘the seat of the most liberal hospitality’. Gaskell was acquainted with prominent figures such as the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, although Mary Shelley considered him and his wife to be ‘country folks in core’.

The Radicals in the newly enfranchised borough of Wakefield – which had one MP from 1832 – invited Gaskell to be their candidate. He initially accepted, but subsequently withdrew. He was, however, persuaded to reconsider. In August 1831, his nephew, James Milnes Gaskell, who had begun canvassing Wakefield as a Conservative, recorded that ‘the radicals had so effectually worked upon my uncle’s anxious and sensitive mind that he considered it a point of conscience’ to stand. Milnes Gaskell withdrew in his uncle’s favour in March 1832, finding a safe seat at Wenlock instead. Gaskell was elected unopposed in December 1832, when his political platform included retrenchment in public spending, shorter Parliaments, the secret ballot, the abolition of slavery, revision of the corn laws and reform of the Church.

Alongside local Radical pressure, Gaskell’s formidable wife, Mary, played an important part in encouraging her ‘reluctant spouse’ to stand. Although women were debarred from the parliamentary franchise, their political influence in this period should not be overlooked, whether as local voters, petitioners, electoral patrons or, in Mary Gaskell’s case, political wives. ‘Unquestionably a character’, who ‘drew upon herself a great degree of notice from the leading part she took in public matters’, she was described as ‘a sort of zealot in the patronage of ultra-Liberals’. She went to hear sermons from the Unitarian preacher, William Johnson Fox (later Radical MP for Oldham), and ‘was a kind and generous friend’ to the radical journalist and novelist William Godwin and his family, including Mary Shelley, who was his daughter. In April 1831 James Milnes Gaskell told his mother that ‘it is, in fact, my Aunt, that would be member of Parliament’.

Despite his initial reluctance to stand, Gaskell was ‘punctual in his attendance’ at Parliament. Mary Shelley marvelled that

he attends the house night after night and dull committees and likes it! – for truly after a country town and country society, the dullest portion of London seems as gay as a masked ball.

Despite her comments about Parliament’s dullness, Shelley took advantage of her friendship with Gaskell to make use of his parliamentary franking privileges, encouraging correspondents to send letters to her via Gaskell, who could receive them without payment.

Although he was assiduous in his attendance, Gaskell seldom spoke in debate. One obituary recorded that ‘the atmosphere of publicity’ was not ‘congenial to his tastes and habits’. He was, however, remembered as ‘an excellent committee-man’, highlighting the fact that contributions in the chamber were only one aspect of parliamentary engagement. While Gaskell gave general support to Whig ministers, he expressed concerns that they ‘did not proceed in the path of Reform so rapidly as was generally expected; indeed some of their early measures seemed to indicate a retrograde movement’. Reflecting his claim that ‘I have attached myself to no party’, Gaskell’s votes in the division lobbies displayed considerable independence. He often divided in the minority with Radical and Irish MPs, on issues ranging from the ballot to the introduction of a moderate fixed duty on corn. His radical leanings prompted joint Whig-Conservative efforts to find an opponent to him at the 1835 election. He survived this contest, but was defeated in 1837. His parliamentary service was rewarded with the presentation of ‘two massive pieces of silver plate’ in 1838: a vase from the ‘ladies’ of Wakefield and a soup tureen from 1,700 male subscribers.

After several years’ absence from the Commons, Gaskell reluctantly agreed in December 1845 that he would stand again for Wakefield to support the cause of free trade. With the general election delayed and the corn laws repealed, he withdrew in April 1847 on grounds of his age and health. Widowed the following year, he subsequently dedicated his energies – and up to half his annual income of £4,000 – to charitable works. He was a particularly generous benefactor to the Unitarian church, donating £1,000 in 1856 to assist poorer congregations in the north of England. He also supported educational causes, contributing £3,000 towards new premises for the Wakefield Mechanics’ Institute in 1855. He died in December 1875.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on the Victorian Commons website on 27 June 2016, written by Dr Kathryn Rix.

On 7 Feb. 1775 the House of Lords considered an address from the Commons claiming for the first time that ‘a Rebellion at this time actually exists’ in the Massachusetts Bay colony. The inflammatory language was accepted, and in consequence a bill to restrain the trade of the Massachusetts Bay colony was introduced. Both its committal at second reading on 16 March and its eventual passage five days later led to violent debate. Another bill to extend trading restrictions to the colonies south of Massachusetts was debated at third reading on 12 April.

Inevitably, events on the ground in America overtook many of these discussions, as on 19 April American militiamen and British troops exchanged gunfire at Lexington and Concord. Crucially, news of their confrontation did not reach Britain until the end of May, and the House continued unaware that armed conflict had already begun. On 17 May Charles Pratt, Baron Camden, brought in a bill to repeal the Quebec Act, one of the so-called Coercive Acts of 1774. The government’s motion to reject the repeal bill occasioned yet another debate.

In all, these matters occasioned eight divisions in the Lords between 7 February and 17 May 1775. The government won every one handily, with the numbers in the minority ranging between 21 and twenty-nine. In other words, there was a core of about 22 lords who consistently opposed the government’s bellicose policies towards the colonies during the tense spring of 1775. Both then and in the years following, the opposition’s main concern was domestic, as they fought against what they saw as the corruption, ‘secret influence’, and tendency to arbitrary rule of George III’s government.

The opposition used the ministry’s mismanagement of the American crisis as a means to attack the Crown and seek for ‘new measures and men’ in government. With a few exceptions, however, they did not apply themselves to addressing the substantive constitutional questions raised by the colonists.

There were some within the opposition who came close to an actively pro-American stance, or at least made an attempt to understand the colonists’ complaints, such as Willoughby Bertie, 4th earl of Abingdon. Charles Lennox, 3rd duke of Richmond, also took a ‘radical’ Whig stance both in 1775 and for the following 30 years, and remained one of the most frequent, and forceful, speakers for the opposition.

A third, was Thomas Howard, 3rd earl of Effingham, who was summed up by Horace Walpole as ‘a rough soldier, of no sound sense [Walpole’s Last Journals, i. 439]. As a captain in the 22nd Foot Regiment, Effingham had adopted a pro-American stance as early as 1774. On his estates near Rotherham, he built a hunting lodge which he dubbed Boston Castle, where he forbade the drinking of tea, in honour of the Boston Tea Party.

Throughout the spring of 1775 Effingham acted with the opposition, acting as a teller for the minority in three of the eight divisions. On 18 May the government sought to block an opposition motion that a memorial from the New York Assembly should be read out. Effingham intervened, but quickly turned away from the technical procedural issues with which the House was embroiled. He made clear his sympathy with the colonists, declaring ‘Whatever has been done by the Americans I must deem the mere consequence of our unjust demands’. He predicted imminent bloodshed (which, of course, had already occurred), for all it would take was ‘a nothing to cause the sword to be drawn and to plunge the whole country into all the horrors of blood, flames and parricide’. He then turned to himself. Speaking of his love for the military life, he confessed that he now found himself bound to resign his commission in the Army, as:

‘the only method of avoiding the guilt of enslaving my country and embruing my hands in the blood of her sons. When the duties of a soldier and a citizen become inconsistent, I shall always think myself obliged to sink the character of the solider in that of the citizen, till such time as those duties shall again, by the malice of our real enemies, become united’. [John Almon, Parliamentary Register, vol. 2 (1774-5). 154-56].

Effingham was briefly the toast of the country for his act of self-sacrifice. Walpole was asked, ‘Was there ever anything ancient or modern better either in sentiment or language than [Effingham’s] late speech?’. [Walpole Corresp., xxviii. 208-9] Although Walpole thought that Effingham ‘was a wild sort of head’, he admitted the intervention had been ‘very sensible’. [Walpole’s Last Journals, i. 466] Effingham was apparently a bit of a showman. It was widely reported that in a dramatic conclusion, he flung his sword clattering down on to the floor of the House.

Effingham’s speech was the last in this particular debate, and at 8.30 at night the House rejected hearing the memorial from New York. Parliament was prorogued a week later, about the time news of the armed confrontation at Lexington reached Britain. That changed everything, and although the Second Continental Congress made one last-ditch effort at peace with its ‘Olive Branch Petition’ of 8 July, the king rejected it out of hand. On 1 August he issued a royal proclamation declaring that the colonists were ‘engaged in open and avowed rebellion’. The declaration left Britain and the American colonists formally at war.

CGDL

Further reading:
John Almon, The Parliamentary Register, vol. 2, (1775)
Frank O’Gorman, ‘The Parliamentary Opposition to the Government’s American Policy, 1760-1782’, in H. T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the American Revolution (1998), pp. 97-123
Alison Olson, The Radical Duke: The Career and Correspondence of Charles Lennox, 3rd duke of Richmond (1961)

The 1835 and 1865 general elections both took place under the electoral system established by the 1832 Reform Act, with 1865 being the last general election before the 1867 Reform Act made significant changes to the representative system. There were, however, many ways in which electioneering had evolved in the thirty years which separated them.

These two elections happened in rather different circumstances. The 1865 contest – one of five July general elections during the period between 1832 and 1867 – took place because the Parliament elected in 1859 was approaching the end of its maximum seven year term. The elderly Viscount Palmerston and the Liberals retained office after slightly increasing their majority, although Palmerston’s premiership ended with his death in October 1865, meaning that it was Earl Russell who was prime minister when the new Parliament met for the first time in February 1866.

In contrast the general election of 1835 – which took place across January and February and was one of only two winter elections in this period – had been called by a minority Conservative government. Sir Robert Peel had taken office in December 1834 at the end of a turbulent year that had seen the resignation of four Cabinet ministers from Earl Grey’s Whig government over proposals to reform the Anglican Church in Ireland, including the future Conservative prime minister Edward Smith Stanley (later Lord Derby). This had precipitated Grey’s resignation in July 1834. He was succeeded as Whig prime minister by Viscount Melbourne. In November 1834, however, King William IV dismissed Melbourne’s ministry, the last time in British history that a monarch used their power to remove a government.

Peel, who sought to present a moderate reforming Conservatism in his ‘Tamworth manifesto’, improved his party’s position at the 1835 election, and scuppered Stanley’s hopes of forming his own ‘third’ or ‘centre’ party, the so-called ‘Derby dilly’. However, the Conservatives failed to secure a majority of seats. Although some members of the ‘Derby dilly’ gave him their support in the division lobby, Peel was forced to resign in April 1835 after a series of Commons defeats, with Melbourne returning to lead another Whig ministry.

As this summary suggests, one difference between the 1835 and 1865 elections was the role played by party. Party labels were much less clear-cut and party affiliation far more fluid in 1835 than in 1865, which had an impact on electioneering and the ways in which candidates presented themselves and their political message. Statistics compiled by our research fellow Dr Martin Spychal indicate the range of party labels used by non-Conservative MPs in 1835, including Whigs, Reformers, Radicals, moderate Whigs, moderate Reformers and Repealers. In contrast, in 1865 the vast majority of non-Conservative MPs were listed as Liberals.

Alongside this, the presence of the ‘Derby dilly’ and other ‘independent’ MPs who were willing to give Peel’s minority government ‘a fair trial’ meant that the party system in operation in 1835 looked rather different from the more obvious Liberal/Conservative distinctions in 1865. In an article published in February 1835, The Examiner analysed the likely voting patterns of 71 MPs it considered to be ‘doubtful men’ when it came to their party affiliation. However, party allegiances were by no means set in stone in 1865. There were around 50 MPs – mainly Conservatives wishing to indicate their moderate views and willingness to give general support to Palmerston’s ministry – who termed themselves ‘Liberal Conservatives’. Meanwhile, not all Liberals could be relied upon to support their party leaders, as the ‘Adullamite’ rebellion against the Russell ministry’s 1866 reform bill made plain.

The evolving complexities of party were not the only ways in which the 1835 and 1865 contests differed. Although no major Reform Act was passed until 1867, other legislation had altered the framework of electioneering. At both contests, 658 MPs were elected, but the constituencies for which they were chosen were not identical. In 1835 Sudbury and St Albans each returned two MPs. However, persistent corruption in these constituencies meant they were stripped of their representation in 1844 and 1852 respectively.

Their four seats were redistributed in 1861. One went to the new borough of Birkenhead, whose voters chose the shipbuilder John Laird as MP at a by-election that year, and re-elected him in 1865. There was also a by-election in 1861 to select a new third MP for the previously double-member constituency of South Lancashire. Voters for the final two new seats had to wait until the 1865 election, when the double-member West Riding of Yorkshire was split into two double-member constituencies. Lancashire South’s third seat took on an added significance in 1865 when it was won by William Gladstone, then Liberal chancellor of the exchequer, who needed a new berth after being rejected by Oxford University’s voters.

Other reforms had a nationwide impact. In 1835 polling in most constituencies lasted two days, the exception being Irish counties where the polls could be kept open for up to five days. For borough constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales, 1835 was the last general election at which two day polls took place. Legislation later that year cut the length of the poll in these seats to just one day.

It was hoped that this would help to curb the expense and corruption of elections, by reducing the window of opportunity for bribery, treating, intimidation and disorder. It had not been uncommon for electors to delay casting their votes until the second day of polling, in the hopes of securing larger bribes as the close of the contest approached. Praising the shift to a one day poll, the Radical MP Richard Potter noted that ‘the mischief under the old system was generally done in the night’. Successive reforms – for Irish boroughs in 1847, English, Scottish and Welsh counties in 1853, and Irish counties in 1850 and 1862 – meant that at the 1865 election, the only constituency where the poll was allowed to last for two days was Orkney and Shetland, although in the event its Liberal MP was re-elected unopposed.

The most significant corrupt practices legislation in the 1832-68 period was the 1854 Corrupt Practices Prevention Act, which provided detailed definitions for the existing offences of bribery and treating and created the new offence of ‘undue influence’ or intimidation. Its stipulation that payments for ‘chairing’ victorious candidates after the poll would be considered illegal had the effect of curbing one of the most colourful aspects of election ritual. Chairings were relatively common in 1835, as at Swansea, where the newly re-elected MP John Vivian was carried through the town by sixteen men ‘with shirts decorated in blue and yellow’, in a chair bearing the slogan ‘Vivian and independence’, accompanied by a procession with a band of music. Although some MPs took part in informal victory processions in 1865, we have not yet found any examples of the traditional chairing ceremony.

When it came to the prevalence of bribery, however, 1835 and 1865 had much in common. In terms of the number of successful election petitions, which unseated MPs for electoral malpractice, the latter contest was in fact worse than its predecessor. In 1835 there were 12 cases in which the election result was overturned, while in 1865 there were 16. The most shocking examples of corruption in 1865 included Lancaster, where an astounding 64% of voters took or gave a bribe, and Totnes, where as much as £200 was offered for a single vote. These two boroughs, together with Great Yarmouth and Reigate, suffered the same fate as St Albans and Sudbury, being disfranchised for corruption under a special clause in the 1867 Reform Act.

KR

For more on changes in electioneering during the nineteenth century, see Dr Philip Salmon’s article on developments in transport to the poll and Dr Kathryn Rix’s article on elections under the secret ballot.

For a young man seeking political independence and prestige but having little by way of financial stability to obtain it otherwise, Pitt’s strategy for targeting Cambridge made sense. But even with his failure at the 1780 election and his rapid turn of fortune, Pitt held onto his conviction. Once the opportunity arose in March 1784, Pitt opted to contest the University again, against the backdrop of his dramatic ascent to power. Standing alongside him was George FitzRoy, Earl of Euston, son of the University’s Chancellor. Opposing them were the two sitting members, James Mansfield and John Townshend, who represented Foxite interests.

While Pitt’s success in the University election seems inevitable in retrospect, this was not the case at the time of the dissolution of Parliament. From the outset, the contest was projected to be very fierce. Writing to his friend the Duke of Rutland, Pitt admitted that Cambridge was ‘unexplored ground’, though he was ‘sanguine in [his] expectations’. Owing to its position as a respectable and pious institution, the electoral culture and processes of the University significantly differed from the disorder often associated with Hanoverian elections. Hustings, dinners, and speeches were prohibited and its erudite electorate was expected to make independent choices which benefitted the nation at large.

Nevertheless, voters still expected to be courted, and with the official canvassing period being only nine days, all candidates had much to keep them occupied. Written correspondence was a key part of the canvassing process. Generic letters from candidates ‘taking the liberty’ to request ‘the honour’ of the recipient’s support were sent to all voters. But more important were the ‘personal application’ letters, used to solicit votes directly. James Talbot, Regius Professor of Hebrew, advised a prospective candidate for the 1700 election that electoral success at the University ‘must be gained by personal application, and the solicitation of private friends, letters from patrons, relations’. [Cook, Representative History, 228-9]. This was an established practice, and Pitt and his agents managed an extensive operation of sending these applications throughout the short and intense canvassing period. Some were sent directly to voters, but they often went to a ‘middle-man’ (sometimes middle-woman) – a friend of Pitt and/or the administration who could make applications to the voter(s) on their behalf.

The relationship between the ‘middle-man’ and the voter varied from patronage and friendship to kinship. In a letter between Pitt’s friends and election agents, John Charles Villiers and Thomas Pretyman-Tomline, an extensive list of ‘connexions’ which ‘sh[oul]d be immediately attended to’ was attached. Unfortunately, the list was quite rudimentary, consisting mostly of pairs of names connected by a single line, for instance: ‘[Thomas] Lund [of St John’s] – L[ad]y Irwine’. A few items contained clues regarding particular connections, such as: ‘L[or]d Aylesford c[oul]d perhaps get us even a single vote from Rev[erend] Mr Barnard of St John’s to which he has just been given a living’. [TNA, PRO 30/8/315]

Pitt and his agents had at their disposal an expansive network of contacts which covered a broad geographical, ideological and institutional range, from the reformers of the Association Movement in Yorkshire to the friends of the King such as William Hayward Roberts, Provost of Eton. The applications were not always successful, but not for reasons one might expect. Mistakes, such as targeting disenfranchised voters, were extremely common. Pre-existing personal obligations or attachments to other candidates also prevented voters from committing to Pitt. Carrington Garrick of St John’s, for example, could not vote for Pitt, having already made promises to Mansfield and Townshend, but was happy for Pitt to instruct him on the vote he also possessed for the Cambridgeshire county election [TNA, PRO 30/8/315]. Rather than political partisanship, it was often the influences and obligations associated with personal relationships which swayed the voters towards particular candidates.

Besides the letters, candidates themselves were expected to be involved on the ground, and their every move was reported in the national press. Letters exchanged between Pitt’s agents emphasised the importance of Pitt being physically present at the University, as he was expected to pay in-person visits to certain key University figures, such as the heads of the colleges. Richard Watson, bishop of Llandaff and Regius Professor of Divinity, recalled in his memoir that during Pitt’s visit, he set out some policy expectations for the Prime Minister-to-be. [Watson, Anecdotes, 211-15]

Throughout the nine days, the contest remained unpredictable. Townshend was projected to top the poll, but Pitt soon took the lead. Mansfield, whose odds were poor from the beginning, reportedly planned to oust Pitt by transferring his votes to Townshend on election day. Euston’s prospects were uncertain, but his affiliation with Pitt would save him from his father’s poor reputation. By election day, set for 3 April, most of the English boroughs had already made their returns, making the University one of the last constituencies to go to the polls before the county elections began.

The University’s election took place, as it always had, in the Senate House, accompanied by the ‘notable Bustle’ from its learned population. The University enjoyed relative control over its electoral process: unlike other constituencies in this period, votes were cast in ‘secret’. Each voter would inscribe his own and his chosen candidates’ names onto a ballot paper (in Latin) before depositing it at a designated table. Each ballot was then read aloud, and subsequently recorded in the poll book. Voting took place throughout the day, with an adjournment in the early afternoon, at which point the number of votes was read out. Once voting resumed, it lasted until the end of the day, and the final count was announced. [Ceremonies Observed in the Senate-House, Wall ed. Gunning, 230-33].

According to the accounts of William Ewin and John Robinson, Pitt was ‘secure’ quite early on in the count, at two o’clock in the afternoon, and there were ‘sanguine hopes’ for Euston. For Ewin, however, Euston’s success was little more than the results of ‘the little Electioneering Tricks of making over Votes & people breaking their words & promises’. Never one to shy away from gossip, Ewin suggested that this was the result of the ‘art’ and machinations used by ‘a Certain great man’. It is unclear whom this comment targeted – Pitt certainly seemed a prime suspect, but it is not unreasonable to assume that it could be the King, who was certainly pleased with the Ministry’s sweeping victory at the University.

Pitt would faithfully represent the University until his death in 1806. Though history has been kind to him, it has been less kind to the University as a political institution. Much like other features of Hanoverian politics, it was lambasted by the Victorians as corrupt and anachronistic. By examining some of its unique characteristics, however, we can begin to recalibrate our understanding not only of Pitt or Cambridge but also of the inner workings of political life in this period.

NSJ

Further Reading
John Cannon, The Fox-North Coalition: Crisis of the Constitution, 1782-4 (Cambridge, 1969)

David Cook, The Representative History of the County, Town, and University of Cambridge, 1689-1832 (University of London PhD thesis, 1935)

John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989)

Joseph S. Meisel, Knowledge and Power: The Parliamentary Representation of Universities in Britain and the Empire (Parliamentary History: Texts & Studies, 4, 2011)

Peter Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1997)

‘William Pitt and Pembroke’, Pembroke Annual Gazette (Pembroke College Society, Vol. 8, 1934), held in Pembroke College Archive, Cambridge

One of the seminal moments of Pulteney’s career occurred at the end of the parliamentary session on 31 May 1725 when he was dismissed from his post as cofferer of the household, on account of his opposition earlier in the session, most notably over the Civil List bill. There followed a period of opposition which ended only with the resignation of Sir Robert Walpole from the Treasury on 3 February 1742. Pulteney then entered the Cabinet, but consistent with his oft-repeated pledge not to take office, he did not take an administrative post. On 14 July, the penultimate day of the 1741-2 session, he was raised to the earldom of Bath, taking his seat in the Lords on the following day.

Pulteney lost a lot of popularity when entering the House of Lords, and he failed twice to attain major office in the years following: he was overlooked in favour of Henry Pelham, as first lord of the Treasury, upon the death of the earl of Wilmington in July 1743 and failed to construct a ministry when the Pelhams and most of their colleagues resigned in February 1746. From then on, his political career is deemed to have been over and he spent his time in ‘retirement’.

However, there was another side to Pulteney, related to the accumulation of power and influence. On the very day he took his seat in the Lords, a bill to prevent the marriage of lunatics received the royal assent. This was managed through the Commons by Pulteney’s long-term associate Phillips Gybbon and served to offer some protection to Pulteney’s investment in the reversion of the estates of the Newport, earls of Bradford.

The heir to the estates of Pulteney’s friend, Henry Newport, 3rd earl of Bradford (1683-1734) was Bradford’s illegitimate son, John Newport, whose mother Ann Smyth was on her deathbed. The reversion of Bradford’s estates had been granted to Pulteney (in return for paying for Newport’s maintenance and the debts of the third earl). Now Newport could not be married off by unscrupulous operators for the estates. Similarly, the third earl’s brother, Thomas Newport, who succeeded to the title as 4th earl of Bradford, was a certified lunatic.

The Bradford estates were destined for Pulteney’s son, William, Viscount Pulteney, who pre-deceased his father in June 1763. Sir Lewis Namier detailed the battle waged by Bath to become lord lieutenant of Shropshire following the accession of George III. Bath used his connexions with the new king and John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute, to overcome the claims of his rival, Henry Arthur Herbert, created Baron Herbert of Chirbury in 1743 and promoted earl of Powys in 1748. In 1736 when Ann Smyth had petitioned for a bill to allow her son (at the time known as John Harrison) to be adopt the surname Newport, the first two-names on the drafting committee were Herbert and Pulteney, with Herbert managing the bill through the House.

The death of Viscount Pulteney did not end Bath’s interest in the Bradford estates. On 21 March 1764 a bill received the royal assent allowing the guardians of John Newport to make leases of his estates during his lunacy. It was managed through the Lords by Pulteney’s ally, Samuel Sandys, Baron Sandys, and through the Commons by John Rushout, the future Baron Northwick (son of Pulteney’s friend, Sir John Rushout, 4th bt.).

Bath turned 80 on 22 March, but continued to exhibit considerable vigour, sitting on eight of the 18 days remaining in the session, including on 2 April despite being begged by Lady Elizabeth Montagu ‘not to lose all this lovely morning in the House of Lords’ [https://emco.swansea.ac.uk/emco/letter-view/1297/]. Following the end of the session, Bath travelled to Shropshire, where he reviewed the militia at the end of May. Upon his return to London, he fell asleep in a garden, caught a fever and died on 7 July 1764.

The dynastic implications of Bath’s actions become clear if we look beyond the contemporary criticism levelled at him for leaving his estate to his elderly brother, General Harry Pulteney. In fact, the descent of the estates followed the intentions laid down by Henry Guy in his will of 1711 (which provided the basis of Bath’s wealth). Guy’s list of remainders ended with the male heirs of Daniel Pulteney, Bath’s cousin.

The ultimate beneficiary in 1767 was Frances Pulteney, daughter of Daniel and the wife of William Johnstone, who took the name Pulteney after Frances succeeded to the Pulteney estates. This William Pulteney succeeded his brother (Sir James Johnstone) as 5th baronet in 1794 and spent over 30 years as MP for Shrewsbury. His daughter and heir, Henrietta, was created successively Baroness Bath (1792) and countess of Bath (1803). Upon her marriage to Sir James Murray, 7th bt. in 1794 he also took the name Pulteney.

SNH

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)

Burns first published his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in Kilmarnock in 1786 and, encouraged by his local supporters, arrived in Edinburgh in January 1787 to arrange a second edition. He quickly found a patron there in James Cunningham, 14th earl of Glencairn making an introduction through common Ayrshire connections. Both the earl and his mother, the dowager countess, strove to ensure that his poems would appear in a new edition from an Edinburgh publisher, with Glencairn putting Burns in touch with bookseller William Creech, Glencairn’s tutor during his Grand Tour, who agreed to produce it.

Glencairn encouraged Burns to dedicate the new volume to the Royal Caledonian Hunt, an elite social and sporting club. At a meeting on 10 January Glencairn persuaded the members of the Hunt to pledge to purchase 100 copies, bringing Burns £25 in advance. Glencairn also sent blank subscription forms to James Graham, marquess of Graham, in order to have them filled up by the ‘first Scottish names about Court’. He also enlisted William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, 3rd duke of Portland, to solicit subscriptions from other peers in London [Letters, i. 73]. Few English subscribers signed up, apart from the duchess of Devonshire and countess of Derby. When Burns’s revised Poems appeared in April, it was dedicated to the Caledonian Hunt, which headed the list of subscribers. Between them Glencairn and his mother pledged to purchase 24 copies, the countess dowager alone subscribing for sixteen.

Glencairn had succeeded to his peerage in 1775, and three years later was commissioned a captain of the Western Fencible Regiment, a temporary outfit raised to defend the Scottish west coast. Like many Scots, he was angered by Westminster’s unwillingness to trust the Scots with a more established domestic military force, on the lines of the English militia.

Elected one of the 16 representative peers in 1780, Glencairn quickly joined the patriot movement for an independent Scottish militia. In spring 1782 he witnessed the unsuccessful attempts of Lord Graham to promote a Scottish militia bill in the Commons. Glencairn took up the cause himself and was its main driver from the summer. He was in Westminster in June 1783 when Graham once again brought the Scots’ desire for their own militia before the Commons. However, the session was prorogued a month later without the militia bill having been introduced.

Glencairn supported the Fox-North coalition and voted for its East India Company bill in December 1783. He failed to be included on the Court’s list of representative peers for the general election, and was heavily defeated when standing as an independent. For the rest of his life he opposed William Pitt and his Scottish manager Henry Dundas. On 6 Dec. 1785 he was named to an Ayrshire committee tasked with countering Dundas’s planned diminution of the number of judges on the Court of Session. [Public Advertiser, 26 Dec. 1785] He was also a member of the Independent Friends, a society of Scottish Whigs. As he had done in 1784, Glencairn threw his interest behind the Opposition candidate in Ayrshire elections in 1789 and 1790, but without success.

Thus, when Glencairn met Burns in late 1786 he already had extensive credentials as a Scottish patriot and quickly became an enthusiastic supporter of Burns’s wish to project a genuine Scottish voice. Burns was solicitous of Glencairn’s opinion on his poems, especially those with political content. He submitted his piece on the American war, When Guilford Good, for Glencairn’s approval, worried that ‘my political tenets… may be rather heretical in the opinion of some of my best friends’ [Letters, i. 77]. Glencairn countenanced its inclusion in the Edinburgh edition, and would have agreed with Burns’s positive view of the Americans’ cause.

Burns and Glencairn also found common cause on the issue of the Scottish militia. Burns’s 1784 poem The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer urged the 45 Scottish MPs to fight back against an Act that had increased the excise on whisky. He felt that if the measure were allowed to continue, Scotland, already on edge because ‘Her lost Militia fir’d her bluid’ [blood], would be ready to resort to violence.

Burns did not have many years to enjoy his friendship with Glencairn and the earl’s death on 30 Jan. 1791 while returning from a trip abroad distressed Burns greatly. He composed a Lament, which concluded: ‘The mother may forget the child / That smiles sae sweetly on her knee;/ But I’ll remember thee Glencairn / And a’ that thou hast done for me!’. In 1794, Burns even named his newborn son James Glencairn Burns.

Another Ayrshire native and peer who encouraged Burns’s poetry in 1787 was Archibald Montgomerie, 11th earl of Eglinton, a fiercely proud Highlander. He had commanded a regiment in America during the Seven Years War and served as a representative peer for 20 years. James Boswell described him to Dr. Johnson as ‘a person who was as violent a Scotsman as he [Johnson] was an Englishman’ [Life of Johnson, iii. 170, 503]. In January 1787 Eglinton provided Burns with an unsolicited donation of 10 guineas [Letters i. 79, 84], and subscribed to 42 copies of his Poems, one of the largest individual subscriptions.

In 1796 all these connections were abruptly severed, beginning with Burns’s own death on 21 July, aged just thirty-seven. On 24 September Glencairn’s younger brother, John, the 15th earl, died childless, and the title became extinct. Eglinton died without a male heir on 31 October, and his distant cousin Hugh Montgomerie of Coilsfield (mentioned in The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer) succeeded him in the peerage.

CGDL

Further reading:
Ian McIntyre, Robert Burns: A Life (1995)
The Letters of Robert Burns, Vol. 1: 1780-89, ed. G. Ross Roy (1985)
J. Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (1985)
Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill (6 vols., 1934-1950)