: Electing Our Masters. The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair. Oxford 2010 : Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-955012-8 XVI, 328 S. € 38,99

: Your Britain. Media and the Making of the Labour Party. Cambridge 2010 : Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-05002-0 X, 272 S. € 27,00

Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
Benjamin Schröder, Berlin

It was a strange thing when, despite having won the war, Winston Churchill lost the general election in 1945. The Labour Party’s landslide victory baffled contemporaries, and it has continued to puzzle scholars to this day. With ‘Your Britain’, a book based on her PhD thesis, Laura Beers seeks to contribute to our understanding of just how this could happen. Beers focuses on Labour’s use of the media from the inception of the party until 1945, with an emphasis on the inter-war years. At that time, the introduction of popular newspapers, later cinema newsreels and the BBC, as well as the advent of a new culture of consumption, challenged the political class to find new ways of attracting attention and convincing voters. This was all the more important as the franchise expansions of 1918 and 1928 quadrupled the electorate, giving the vote to a public which was widely viewed as uneducated.

From the foundation of the Labour Party, its leadership was up to these challenges, as their dedication to using visual propaganda, such as leaflets and posters, or the foundation of a press and publicity department in 1917 seems to indicate. In the years immediately following the war, however, the party suffered a setback. As it appeared to become more successful and also more dangerous in terms of its policy, the press, which was in the vast majority conservative, turned against Labour in the early 1920s. The party was denounced as socialist, foreign, extremist, and, for good measure, as atheist. Within the movement, this strengthened the sceptics who thought that any attempt at using the capitalist media was doomed to fail. Consequently, Labour developed a hostile attitude towards newspapers and the BBC, letting slip many opportunities to present their case to the public in their own words.

Over the 1920s, this approach changed gradually, the public-relations disaster of the general strike in 1926 marking a turning point. Its failure demonstrated to the Labour leadership that the party needed to use all the communications channels that were available in order to win over public opinion. They could not simply ignore the press or the BBC, or worse, attack them, just because they felt they were treated unfairly. Although many in the party continued to harbour resentment, Labour leaders now developed a more pragmatic attitude towards the media, courting journalists and seizing more opportunities to influence public debates. Soon they outstripped their rivals. Even though in 1931 the media turned against Labour much as it did in the early 1920s, this time the party did not abandon engaging the press and the BBC. Labour became increasingly professional at handling the media, and it also experimented with new kinds of propaganda. External experts were employed to produce innovative material like the commercially successful ‘Your Britain’ magazine, which gives the title to Beers’s book. The 1944/45 Labour election campaign was ‘easily’ the most modern campaign ever fought in Britain to that date (p. 178), involving commercial illustrators, printing experts, journalists, and campaign strategists.

Throughout this narrative, Beers focuses not only on how the Labour Party dealt with the media, but also on what message it tried to convey: Labourites attempted to make the party appealing to Britons from basically all kinds of social backgrounds (except for the very rich), aiming to attract a broad electorate not limited to the working class. Also, her analysis is much more detailed than this review suggests. Beers makes clear that there was no ‘one Labour Party’ and consequently not a single approach to the media, but a variety of actors within the movement, whose differing views are discussed throughout. It is another strength of the book that Beers points out limits of her argument, in two ways.

Firstly, as her narrative focuses on explaining election victory, her story is necessarily a story of success, albeit with obstacles along the way. There is a fundamental problem with this narrative, however, which Beers devotes a whole chapter to discussing (ch. 10): It is in no way clear whether there is a connection between propaganda and electoral success. Historians are mostly confined to talking about the construction of political messages and images, there is usually far less they can say about their reception. Beers does present some evidence of the impact of Labour’s propaganda efforts, for example contemporary praise for its efficacy and audience figures, but it will probably remain open to debate how convincing this is. In any case, the book also contains a somewhat different, no less interesting narrative, which is not burdened by such methodological problems. ‘Your Britain’ can also be read as the story of politicians ‘practicing democracy’ (Margaret Anderson), that is as the story of Labour leaders learning (by doing) to change their conduct of politics to adapt to the changes of the political system and the development of a media and consumerist society.

Secondly, Beers points out that, by concentrating on the national party organisation and on national media, she deals with just one aspect of a larger subject: “the story of mass parties and their relationship to the democratic public”, as she herself puts it (p. 2). Another aspect of this story is what Jon Lawrence’s ‘Electing our Masters’ is about. Lawrence gives a sweeping account of continuity and change in the face-to-face interaction between British Members of Parliament and the public during election campaigns spanning the long period from the 18th century until today. His narrative traces the transformation of the traditional electoral culture associated with the nomination of parliamentary candidates at the ‘hustings’, that is platforms or pavilions from which candidates addressed their constituents in the 18th and 19th century. Central themes in the book are violence and disorder, the role of gender and class, bribery and corruption, technological innovation and the media.

The first 150 pages of the study describe what could be called a civilizing process. Nomination rituals at the hustings were carnivalesque and often quite violent affairs. Candidates were subjected to heckling, mockery, and occasionally to dead cats thrown at them. After 1872, when the traditional nomination ceremonies were abolished, frequent election meetings took over many of the functions of the hustings. Politicians were now expected to hold a multitude of open meetings per election campaign, facing an often irreverent public who saw it as their right to interrogate (and to abuse) their prospective MPs. While disorder and violence at election meetings had been viewed as deplorable but unavoidable for a very long time, it was only in the inter-war years that public politics attained a more sober tone. Lawrence sketches a parallel development of the role money played in electioneering. Although officially disapproved of, bribery of electors and later the ‘nursing’ of constituencies was somehow expected of candidates who wanted to be elected. Only after the Corrupt Practices Act (1883) and the franchise reform of 1918, which significantly lowered campaign expenses, did lavish spending in the constituencies slowly come to a halt.

One reason for these developments, Lawrence argues, can be found in the gradual extension of the franchise. As more and more people were given the right to cast a vote, it was less necessary for them to ‘have their say’ at open meetings, simply because they could now do so in the poll booth. The enfranchisement of women, in particular, made the violent male ‘macho’ culture of election meetings seem much less desirable. Moreover, the ascent of the Labour Party undermined the meaning of traditional electoral rituals. These presupposed that candidates were wealthy and influential men of status, gentlemen who had to woo their constituents and humble themselves to the often humiliating ordeal of facing the people to demonstrate that they were their equals. At the same time these rituals confirmed the underlying social hierarchies. The advent of Labour candidates and so-called ‘carpet-baggers’, men of modest means sponsored by the central parties, changed the social relations on which this electoral culture fed. These candidates really were the ordinary voters’ equals, and they fought for participation instead of deferring to the traditional ruling class, at whose expense a little fun might be had during election campaigns.

As election meetings had become more civilized affairs over the course of the first half of the 20th century, they also became more boring. Attendance dwindled and new forms of interaction between politicians and the people, such as walkabouts, surgeries, or corresponding with constituents, gained ground, even before elections moved onto the TV screen from the late 1950s onwards. In the second half of the 20th century electioneering became the national media events that we know today. Consequently, in the two concluding chapters Lawrence’s focus shifts somewhat to account for the relations between politicians and broadcasters in more detail. Lawrence argues that from the 1960s to the 1980s, the election meeting having died, real voters were increasingly pushed into the background in the media as well. Interaction on TV and on photographs was controlled and carefully stage-managed, politicians would mostly be interrogated by journalists. This has changed somewhat over the last two or three decades, with live audiences returning to the studios. But Lawrence, in a tone of political commitment that characterizes the last 50 pages of his book, still sees the need for broadcasters to devise new formats that bring politicians and the public together in more meaningful ways than recent programmes do, while at the same time providing entertainment.

Just like the election meeting had taken over many functions of the traditional nomination hustings, the media adopted many of the meeting’s functions, most importantly: to hold politicians accountable to the public. At the same time, the ‘ethos of the old hustings could still cast a long shadow’ (p. 232), such as when John Major turned to open-air soapbox oratory to save his career in 1992 or when Tony Blair adhered to a ‘masochism strategy’ of deliberately seeking out being grilled publicly by voters in 2005. The reason for this seems to be a long continuity spanning more than two centuries: Interacting with the people, or rather being seen to interact with the people, still lends legitimacy to politicians today, much as it did at the end of the 18th century.

It is not often the case that one wishes for a book to be longer, but ‘Electing our Masters’ feels as if it could have benefited from a few extra pages. The book is well-written and even quite entertaining. At the same time, however, it is very dense. Lawrence pays little attention to the content of politics. Issues and controversies relevant to the election campaigns whose conduct he describes are often only hinted at. This asks readers to be quite competent about British political history and culture, particularly as the book covers such a long period of time and a vast amount of subjects, which of course could not all be addressed in this review. A little more background information would have been welcome to make it easier to follow Lawrence’s imaginative arguments, and it would have made the book more appealing to all those who are interested but not experts. Nevertheless, ‘Electing our Masters’ is highly recommended reading, as is Laura Beers’s study on the Labour Party. Both books offer interesting approaches and contribute significantly to our understanding of the dynamics of modern democratic politics.

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