The Triumph of Unreason?
Pseudo-history and British Politics
One of the most striking features of British political life at present is a paradoxical one: at once an obsession with the past politics and the idea of past precedents and a complete ignorance of what actually happened in the political past and what those precedents actually are. While there have always been political myths and while these have always been important, the dominance of narratives about British political history that are simply not true is relatively new.
Examples abound, but consider just the following: it is now frequently asserted that the Conservative Party is the most successful political party in the democratic world (this is not correct: what has been striking about the Conservative Party has been its ability to adapt to change and to recover swiftly from heavy defeats: it has never been a thoroughly dominant party in the way that the Japanese LDP is or the Swedish SAP and Italian DC were), that the Labour Party has been dominated by a factional ‘Forever War’ between two eternally unchanging forces representing fundamentally different ideological tendencies (this one is actively ridiculous: factional alignment and the factions themselves within Labour have always been unusually malleable and amorphous for a social democratic party,1 and periods of outright civil war, though vicious and unpleasant, have generally been comparatively short), and that the Conservative Party won an upset victory at the 1992 General Election in the face of opinion polls that projected a comfortable Labour majority (the polls were wrong and the result was a surprise, but not in that way: it was expected that the election would be very close, but instead delivered a clear winner). A more complex case than any of these would be the way in which Mrs Thatcher’s premiership has been remembered, especially amongst the more extreme elements of the Conservative Party’s neoliberal wing: too easily it has been forgotten that when she famously declared that ‘the lady is not for turning’ she was already preparing to do exactly that.
None of these narratives are innocent in origin. Typically they serve as a means to legitimize behaviour that would otherwise be seen as strange or even immoral, or to try to actively shape political reality in an Orwellian sense: to try to control the future by controlling the past.2 But these things have a habit of taking on a life of their own, and most of the people who repeat these, and countless similar, narratives are not attempting to do any such thing: generally they will have no idea that what they are repeating is anything other than historical fact.
Does any of this matter? Yes, and for two reasons. The first is that the truth is important and is better if people do not believe actual lies. Augustinian morality might not be particularly fashionable, but there is something to it. The second is that political actors are always and inevitably heavily influenced by past behaviour: in an inherently uncertain set of occupations, precedents are often treated as guides, or at least as walking-sticks. As the brief fever-dream that was the Truss premiership demonstrates, this is not an abstract concern: it can result directly in idiotic decisions that cause direct material harm to large numbers of people. Fundamentally, it is not ideal from a good government perspective if political actors make decisions based on what is best termed as pseudo-history. The term is a useful one. The leading authority on it was the late Oliver Rackham, an historian of a subject (countryside and landscape history) even more prone to pseudo-historical absurdities than modern British political history. He was acute to the very real problems this caused (i.e. if people believe that all hedges in England are a mere two hundred years old or thereabouts, then it is easier to get away with removing an ancient and environmentally valuable hedge in order to slightly extend a field of ‘improved’ [sic] pasture), and consequentially regarded the fierce contestation of it to be an important part of his job. The following extract from The Illustrated History of the Countryside serves as both a definitive means of understanding what pseudo-history is and why it is so hard to combat:
'Pseudo-history is made up of factoids. A factoid looks like a fact, is respected as a fact, and has all the properties of a fact except that it is not true… Pseudo-history is not killed by publishing real history. This does not lead to a controversy in which one or the other version wins. In practice either the old version is re-told as if nothing had happened, or authors try to combine the two versions as if both could be true at once. Pseudo-history wins ground at the expense of real history.’
Consequentially, while dealing with this problem is not easy, it must be dealt with, and aggressively, otherwise it will only get worse.
Consider the case of Aneurin Bevan. As everyone knows, he was the leader of the Party’s left-wing in the turbulent early 1950s and a great rival of Attlee’s heir apparent and eventual successor Hugh Gaitskell. What is rather less well known - even though the speech remains much quoted! - is that he left his own faction in 1957 when he launched a fierce attack on unilateralism at the 1957 Labour Party Conference.
It should be noted that in some cases the initial propagators of the pseudo-history quite genuinely believed it to be so - this is certainly the case for pseudo-histories about the Labour Party that originate in CLPD or Trotskyist circles - but this does not make them any less false or any less of a problem.