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British parallels

by Jack Stollsteimer

The world’s greatest capitalist power, the one nation capable of projecting military power anywhere on the globe, laid low by political gridlock over the redistributive legislative agenda offered by the country’s ruling liberals. A January election produces a surprising result, which emboldens the country’s conservative party to maintain its obstructionist position leaves the liberal leadership groping for a way out.

America in 2010? Yes. But also Great Britain 100 years earlier, in March of 1910.

Are there lessons we can learn from these two amazingly coincidental political moments in the histories of the two great English speaking powers?

Consider: In 1910 Great Britain was still the world’s leading economic power, although it had already lost its position as the workshop of the world to its two great rising competitors: America and imperial Germany (like the rise of China and India today). Its political class was divided over whether Great Britain’s decline as an economic superpower was permanent or temporal, just as in America today. And most strikingly, each nation’s legislative and executive power was in the hands of its liberal party (in Great Britain they were called the “Liberal” Party) in a historically two party system.

The British Liberals had won a great electoral victory in 1906, capitalizing on policy disagreements in the conservative ranks. By 1909, the Liberals felt politically strong enough to offer their great reform legislation—the People’s Budget—which sought to drastically “soak the rich” with higher taxes in order to fund pension and unemployment insurance programs for working class families placed at risk by Britain’s changing post-industrial economy. This legislation was economic redistribution in its truest sense – conservatives called it “Socialist.”

While the People’s Budget passed the House on the backs of the large Liberal majority, the bill was defeated in the upper chamber, the House of Lords, dominated by conservative hereditary peers. The Liberal dissolved Parliament and went to the people with a populist message—“The People against the Peers”—and stunningly lost their majority in the national election of January 1910.

The Liberals lost 125 seats—not just one in Massachusetts—and Parliament was “hung”; slang for what we today call “gridlock.” What would the Liberal leaders do, its supporters wondered in March of 1910? Go forward or retreat from its great reform agenda?  And can we learn anything today from this historic “teachable moment”?

The Liberals of 1910 were led by figures of historic proportion—Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and the “heavenly twins” of his cabinet, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill—who were each in turn three of the greatest Prime Ministers in British history. To paraphrase a later British leader, these men each possessing great statute and political experience and convinced of the rightness of their cause, were “not for turning.”

They reintroduced the People’s Budget in 1910 and when it was again defeated by the Lords, and after a summer spent seeking genuine bipartisan compromise at the insistence of the new King George, took their case to the voters in an election in December of 1910. When that second election failed to break the deadlock, the Liberal Cabinet then reached for the strategy that ended the stalemate: reform of the upper chamber itself. Faced with the prospect of having their veto power over legislation permanently eliminated through the creation of hundreds of new liberal peers, the Lords backed down.  The party of No in 1909-1910 voted to end their own powers of stalemate and to enact far reaching legislation that improved the lives of ordinary citizens.

The lesson here, at least to this student of history, is self-evident, and its seemingly one President Obama and the Democratic Congressional leadership has taken to heart by passing health care reform legislation even as many doubted it could be done. And its a lesson they should continue to heed. If they are convinced of the rightness of their legislative agenda, they need to steel themselves to the task at hand: passing their legislation irregardless of polling data, losses at the election booth, and the attacks of their opponents. Statesmen govern, politicians equivocate. Now is the time for statesmanship.

Most importantly, end the filibuster rules of the Senate that have effectively turned a 77 seat Democratic majority in the House and 18 seat majority in the Senate into a “hung” Congress. Governmental checks and balances are important, but the filibuster is an anti-democratic dinosaur that must be made extinct.

The writer is a lawyer and Democratic committeeman in Delaware County.

March 28, 2010 at 1:17 pm

--Jack Stollsteimer

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