“Progressive” is usually seen to emerge as a political term in the late 1880s, signifying new liberalism and its alliance with social democracy. This is also the period in which Koselleck noted that “progress” became an empty “catchword,” used across the political spectrum. This paper explores this semantic shift. It focuses on two periods of “Progressive” municipal politics in Britain: the London Progressive Party elected in 1889, and the anti-socialist Progressive Parties of the inter-war years. It asks how the champions and opponents of municipal socialism could both call themselves “progressive” and what this reveals about the fracturing of liberalism.
The 2015–17 Parliament was the first time in history that the Conservatives were in government with no easily assembled majority in the House of Lords. This has fundamentally altered the role that Labour is able to play in the Lords and, conversely, that peers are able to play in the Labour party. Yet the political significance of this situation has not yet been fully appreciated by a party which remains culturally antagonistic and constitutionally wary of the Lords. In this paper, we draw on interviews with Labour peers, particularly the late Baroness Hollis of Heigham, who have been able to use the essentially conservative powers of the Lords for social democratic ends. We suggest that the Labour party needs to incorporate the second chamber into both its practical and symbolic politics, and to find ways to use this new source of constitutional power without accommodating to it.
English Conservative politicians of the early twentieth century sought a way of articulating the present as a stage between past and future that needed to be cared for; but which was nonetheless an inherently transient phase of existence, contrasting with the eternal. After the Russian Revolution, not only was the time of human existence to be conserved; it was a time in which the ideas that underpinned Conservatism urgently needed proselytization. Conservatism had to provide a contribution to social arguments within the present, to counter social upheaval. It provided empirical, scientific detail, drawn from present observation, to counter abstract theory. This development of the arguments against the French Revolution advanced by Edmund Burke took on a new scientific flavour in the work of a writer like Walter Elliot. In the rhetoric of Stanley Baldwin, a hymn-like eulogy of the constant English ‘present’ could reach up into the evocation of an eternal mission comparable with that of ancient Rome. Concluding with a fresh reading of the Conservative author Pierse Loftus, this chapter argues that Conservatives drew on the experience of the present to locate the grandeur of their national or imperial project within a human frame. Unlike present-minded socialists, Conservatives were less concerned with an emerging complex picture of everyday life, and more with an idea of everyday life that they could essentialise.
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