Robert Saunders

@robertsaunders.bsky.social

28237 Followers 666 Following

Historian of modern Britain, singer and political nerd. Author of "Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum & Seventies Britain". "A jaw-dislocating page turner"(Andrew Marr). Deputy-director @mileendinstitute.bsky.social, Reader @QMHistory

"When Astor took the parliamentary oath, a Liberal Coalitionist who accompanied her into the House sat ‘stiff and silent’, before informing her that ‘he had always been opposed to women entering Parliament and he held that opinion now’. Another told reporters that, ‘as a married man I think that my wife and every other man’s wife should stop at home’. Winston Churchill complained of feeling like a woman ‘had entered my bathroom and I had no sponge with which to defend myself’. (Astor reassured Churchill icily that ‘You’re not handsome enough to have worries of that kind’).
Some MPs, Astor joked, ‘looked upon me more as a pirate than a Pilgrim!’ ‘I don’t blame them’, she added, though ‘it was as hard on the woman as it was on them’. Though she usually made light of her experiences, she confessed that ‘Pioneers’ were ‘often rather lonely’. A painting of her taking the parliamentary oath had to be taken down after protests from MPs, though not before it had been defaced, and Horatio Bottomley ran a muck-raking campaign in his paper, John Bull, about her divorce from her first husband, an abusive alcoholic. Even at the Conservative Party Conference, which had a substantial female audience, she complained of being treated ‘more like a poor relation than the only Unionist woman MP’; and years after her election, she would still encounter the ‘regular old Noah’s Ark man’, who told her that she was ‘a very stupid woman’, but ‘a very attractive one’. ‘What women are up against’, she concluded, ‘is not what they see, but the unseen forces. We are up against generations and generations of prejudice’."

Silly Tory social media post from 2024 of Starmer with the caption "I won't work after 6pm on a Friday".

Multi-millionaire Nigel Farage in front of the Reform UK bus.

Opening image from the classic 1980s cartoon "Superted".

"As the success of the fraudster, conspiracy-theorist and hyper-nationalist Horatio Bottomley in Hackney demonstrated, neither women nor working-class voters seemed immune to that appeal. Bottomley, who promised to hang the Kaiser, ‘drain Germany dry’ and expel foreigners from the country, rarely appeared without a crowd of adoring female supporters. Women were urged to ‘bestow their kisses on him’ by putting their ‘dainty little crosses’ on the ballot-paper, though at least one ‘buxom young wench’ took the instruction more literally and went straight for the horse’s mouth. Bottomley was not only popular with women; he was widely quoted in the press as someone who could speak on their behalf, calling himself ‘the women’s champion’ and writing articles on ‘Why women support Lloyd George’. He romped home with nearly 80% of the vote, crushing a Coalitionist who had the coupon from the government." Followed by a picture of Horatio Bottomley in Hackney in 1918, surrounded by female supporters.

A young Gladstone looking sultry.

"You can feel like something unjust has happened to you, but it's not an excuse to be disrespectful or not do the right thing," he said of the handshake. "After every game, I try to shake everyone's hands. This game was no different. The most important thing for me is also to give the correct example to people watching.
"This is something I'm aware of: that the World Cup might be the first time a lot of American viewers are tuning in. It's important just to show people that whatever things happen to you, good or bad, just to continue to be yourself."

"Intergenerational fairness is fundamental to maintaining a functional
society. A responsible government would pay close attention to it. Ministers must decide where to spend and cut based, at least partially, on which portions of the population need help or can afford to carry more of the burden. The student loan system is layering stress on to people in their 20s and 30s in a way that did not apply to previous generations. The country needs the younger generation to be the engine room of Britain in the years to come. Although balancing the books today is important, the government cannot always choose the politically convenient option of loading additional fiscal burdens on to younger generations while hoping that young people will not notice the extra weight for decades to come. (Conclusion, Paragraph 30")"

A handsome black cat lies balefully on top of a green wheelie bin.

Allister Heath, "Burnham has declared war on the South. Your homes and savings are no longer safe".

The problem is not that leaders have ceased to be “good chaps,” but that we no longer seem to care when they behave badly. Boris Johnson may be unusually contemptuous of constitutional and ethical norms, but this was hardly a secret before he became prime minister. At a leaders’ debate in 2019, the audience openly laughed when he claimed to believe that “truth matters.” Yet it was an indulgent, giggling laugh: as if a loveable little scamp, his mouth smeared with chocolate, had solemnly denied raiding the sweetie-jar. That sniggering complacency is as dangerous to our constitution as any prime ministerial misdeed.

Screenshot of The Telegraph, with a clip of Andy Burnham's speech and the lunatic headline: "Live: Burnham to take Britain back to the 1970s".

Table showing that "Income tax receipts are concentrated amongst taxpayers with the largest incomes in 2023/24".

"Remember the rights of the savage, as we call him. Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own. Remember that He who has united you together as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love; that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilisation; that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its unmeasured scope."

"At a stroke all that anxiety about wasting votes and splitting votes, which is the secret of all party political manipulation vanishes.
Proportional Representation is not a faddist proposal, not a perplexing ingenious complication of a simple business; it is the carefully worked out right way to do something that hitherto we have been doing in the wrong way.
It is no more an eccentricity than is proper baking in the place of baking amidst dirt and with unlimited adulteration, or the running of trains to their destinations instead of running them without notice into casually selected sidings and branch lines.
It is not the substitution of something for something else of the same nature; it is the substitution of right for wrong."

"There is a growing discord between governments and governed. The new situation which confronts [us] is the contempt and hostility of the voters for their elected delegates and governments.
This discontent, this resentment, this contempt even, and hostility to duly elected representatives is no mere accident of this democratic country or that; it is an almost world-wide movement.
America seems hot for a Caesar. If no Caesar is established, then it will be the good fortune of the Republic rather than its democratic virtue which will have saved it.
In Great Britain, at the present time the two political parties are both profoundly unpopular with the general intelligence, which is sincerely anxious, if only it could find a way, to get rid of both of them.
The organised masses of labour … are losing faith in their votes … They mean mischief because they are hopeless and bitterly disappointed."

"They’re clever, rat-like, sure — but they’re not real people. It is remarkable to me how many of them proclaim to understand the “workers”, yet they’ve never held a proper job."

Over the ‘long’ twentieth century, democracy achieved a unique political status: one that was both hegemonic and ‘essentially contested’. For the first time, a single idea was recognised across much of the world as the only legitimate basis of authority, making it ‘irresistibly potent … as a political rallying-cry’. To invoke democracy was to assert ‘the central political value’ of the modern world, ‘claimed by everyone, everywhere’. Yet the meanings of democracy, and the institutions through which it should be expressed, have always been fiercely contested. In the long struggle to imbue the demos with kratos, democrats have argued bitterly over who constitutes ‘the people’, the instruments by which they should ‘rule’ and the questions that should be subject to their control. Democracy, in W.B. Gallie’s resonant phrase, is an ‘essentially contested concept’: it is the essence of democracy that is the subject of political contention. Since all forms of democracy are imperfect, the result, as John Dunn notes, is ‘an endless tug of war between … different senses of democracy’, in which ‘democracy as a political value constantly subverts the legitimacy of democracy as an already existing form of government’.

First: the referendum required government to do something unprecedented: to carry a massive, highly complex and hugely controversial policy through a parliament in which it had no effective majority. In normal circumstances, UK governments either have comfortable majorities that allow them to dominate Parliament, or they trim their legislative ambitions accordingly. The referendum in 2016, followed by the hung election of 2017, produced a wholly new situation. The solution might have been to work across party lines, but British politics has little tradition of cross-party co-operation and the two main party leaders in 2016 were especially tribal. (Martin Selmayr, the Secretary-General of the European Commission, was astonished to discover in 2018 that Jeremy Corbyn did not have the Prime Minister’s mobile phone number. Corbyn was equally astonished at the idea he would ever want to call her.) That made Brexit a party fight, when no party had the numbers to impose its will.

Picture of an Old Testament prophet raising his staff, with the words "Prophetic Democracy?"

Selection of newspaper headlines: "Hey Big Suspender" (Sun); "Boris Takes the Gloves Off" (Daily Mail); "The Prime Minister Must Give Effect to the Will of the Nation" (Daily Telegraph); "Ignore the Will of the People at Your Peril" (Daily Express); "Who Do EU Think You Are?" (Sun ); "Brexit: The Die is Cast" (Daily Express).

In the early days of her government, May’s attempts to exclude Parliament from the withdrawal process drew strong support from the Brexit press and the leadership of the Leave campaigns. The Daily Express condemned ‘enemies of democracy’ for mounting ‘spurious court cases’, when ‘we have an elected Government acting on direct instructions from a nationwide vote’. When the courts ruled that only Parliament could trigger Article 50, beginning the two-year countdown to exit, the Daily Mail denounced the judges as ‘Enemies of the People’, who had ‘declared war on democracy’. The Daily Express called it ‘the day democracy died’. Dominic Raab—a future Justice Secretary—deplored an ‘undemocratic verdict’ by ‘an unelected judiciary’, while the former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith accused the courts of ‘pitting Parliament against the will of the people’. When May was forced, in 2017, to promise a ‘meaningful vote’ on the terms of any agreement, the Daily Mail was appalled. A parliamentary vote, it warned, might ‘sound admirably democratic’, but not when ‘the majority of MPs are in conflict with the will of the people’.
As the terms of May’s deal became apparent, however, her critics began to shift their ground. Writing in the Daily Express, Leo McKinstry claimed that May’s deal breached ‘the spirit of the Leave vote’. The ‘result of the referendum’ had ‘not been fulfilled’, making it not just the right but the duty of Parliament to intervene.

Daily Express: "PM Tells "Tired" Britain: I'm on Your Side".

Ed Miliband saying "The Government is a servant of this House!" and Theresa May replying "The Government is a servant of the people! We are delivering what the people want".

Sign post pointing in multiple directions to "This Way", "That Way" etc

Two newspaper front-pages: "Ignore the Will of the People At Your Peril" (Daily Express) and "Who Do EU Think You Are?" (Sun).

The referendum lock was introduced in the Commons by the Europe Minister, David Lidington: a committed pro-European who would later chair the Königswinter Conference for Anglo-German friendship. Strikingly, his speech centred on the failures of British, not European, democracy. Lidington told MPs that there had been ‘a profound disconnection between the will of the British people and the decisions taken in their name’. For too long, the people had ‘been denied their say’. The referendum lock would ensure that ‘the people can make the big decisions’, the implication being that they were not ‘making decisions’—were not having ‘their say’—through Parliament. Indeed, Parliament was strikingly absent from the vision of democracy articulated in these debates. The referendum was cast as a direct link between ‘the government’ and ‘the people’, in a manner that would become commonplace after 2016:
This Government are determined to reconnect with the British people … to decentralise the power from the Government to the British people … This Government are committed to allowing the British people to have their say.
Here were the lineaments of an argument that would become more prominent after the referendum: that ‘the will of the British people’ had been ignored; that Parliament had failed in its representative function; and that enabling ‘the British people’ to ‘have their say’ required a mechanism outside the parliamentary system. In short, while the desire to leave the EU drew on a critique of European democracy, it was the alleged failings of British democracy that framed the demand for a referendum.

Two headlines from the Daily Mail: "Enemies of the People" (about judges) and "Crush the Saboteurs" (about MPs).

Brexit as Democratic Crisis: Parliament, People and Prophetic Democracy, 2016–2019*

‘The most precious thing this country has given the world is the idea of parliamentary democracy’. Boris Johnson, June 2016

‘We have been paralysed by a broken Parliament that simply refused to deliver Brexit’. Boris Johnson, November 2019

‘this … [is] a vastly more democratic Parliament, because it will not waste the nation’s time in deadlock, division and delay’. Boris Johnson, December 2019

The vote to leave the European Union, on 23 June 2016, struck British politics like a volcanic eruption. Within hours of the result the Prime Minister had resigned, the Leader of the Opposition was fighting for his survival and a three-year contest had begun that threatened to consume both major parties. The struggle to ‘Get Brexit Done’ triggered two general elections, three leadership contests, two historic court cases and an attempt to suspend Parliament. It saw judges cast as ‘enemies of the people’ and Members of Parliament as ‘saboteurs’ to be ‘crushed’, while bringing terms like ‘the will of the people’ into mainstream political usage. ‘Brexit’ was more than a policy dilemma—more, even, than a contest for power. It raised fundamental questions about how Britain was governed, who made decisions and what it meant to be a democratic state. For its supporters, Brexit became a test of Britain’s democratic credentials and of the willingness of those in power to accept defeat at the polls. For its critics, it had sent a ‘wrecking ball’ crashing through ‘democratic norms and institutions’. Amid claims of Russian interference, campaign-finance violations and the abuse of parliamentary procedure, it became almost routine to say that democracy had been ‘hijacked’, that a ‘coup d’état’ was afoot or that one side or other was trying ‘to shut down democracy’.

A once-begingered, but now balding academic speaks silently into camera, with a speech bubble saying "Bagehot was writing in an age before universal suffrage, before mass education..."

Screenshot of Makerfield result, showing 59% turnout.

Brexit as Democratic Crisis: Parliament, People and Prophetic Democracy, 2016–2019*

‘The most precious thing this country has given the world is the idea of parliamentary democracy’.
Boris Johnson, June 2016
‘We have been paralysed by a broken Parliament that simply refused to deliver Brexit’.
Boris Johnson, November 2019
‘this … [is] a vastly more democratic Parliament, because it will not waste the nation’s time in deadlock, division and delay’.
Boris Johnson, December 2019

The vote to leave the European Union, on 23 June 2016, struck British politics like a volcanic eruption. Within hours of the result the Prime Minister had resigned, the Leader of the Opposition was fighting for his survival and a three-year contest had begun that threatened to consume both major parties. The struggle to ‘Get Brexit Done’ triggered two general elections, three leadership contests, two historic court cases and an attempt to suspend Parliament. It saw judges cast as ‘enemies of the people’ and Members of Parliament as ‘saboteurs’ to be ‘crushed’, while bringing terms like ‘the will of the people’ into mainstream political usage. ‘Brexit’ was more than a policy dilemma—more, even, than a contest for power. It raised fundamental questions about how Britain was governed, who made decisions and what it meant to be a democratic state. For its supporters, Brexit became a test of Britain’s democratic credentials and of the willingness of those in power to accept defeat at the polls. For its critics, it had sent a ‘wrecking ball’ crashing through ‘democratic norms and institutions’. Amid claims of Russian interference, campaign-finance violations and the abuse of parliamentary procedure, it became almost routine to say that democracy had been ‘hijacked’, that a ‘coup d’état’ was afoot or that one side or other was trying ‘to shut down democracy’.

Tim Bale standing next to Mantis in the Avengers movie, saying "kick names, take ass".

"the mayor thinks Labour has been too focused on Hampstead and not enough on Hull. “Chasing middle England and middle-class voters and saying that’s the only thing that matters and we’ll all fight on that ground” is one of the signs that “politics has lost its way”, he says."

An impossibly handsome cat sleeps the sleep of the just.

So, as I say, I was pleased to see the old relic, and was preparing to issue a very hearty pip-pip when I noticed that the feeling did not appear to be mutual. On the contrary, as she picked pieces of plaster out of her hair, the old ancestor appeared to be distinctly steamed up.

‘Bertie, you tiresome young man’, she began. ‘How often have I told you not to block your fireplace?’

I rather took umbrage at this. It was years since coal fires had been permitted in Berkeley Mansions, and I was dashed if I was going to shiver through the winter months, on the off-chance that an eccentric Aunt might choose that particular mode of ingress. Like most civilised people, I kept a hole in the wall specifically for the purpose of receiving visitors. It was called a door, and it seemed to me that the sooner this aunt departed through it, bearing her infant chain-gang behind her, the better.

Naturally, I didn’t say any of this; chiefly because the aged relative was still speaking. Show me a river in full flood, and I will show you an aunt addressing a long-suffering nephew.

‘I have a task for you, Bertie. I need you to steal a cow-creamer’.

For Powell, race was "the deepest and strongest instinct" of mankind: "plain and visible distinctions, such as colour", were incompatible with a cohesive society, "for men assume that those who look differently from themselves have different interests". "Every person in every country in the world", Powell insisted, was "a racialist", and three decades later he was still adamant that "racism is the basis of nationality".

It was this, for Powell, that made Commonwealth immigration such a menace. It implanted into the soil of England a population that he insisted could never be English, no matter how many generations might pass. "The West Indian or Asian", he told an audience at Eastbourne, "does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman". He might, by legal fiction, gain British citizenship, but he remained, "in fact, a West Indian or Asian still". For Powell, it was this "immigrant-descended population" - a people born and raised in Britain, but bearing its difference on its skin - that "creates the extreme urgency of action".

Lunatic headline in the Daily Mail, 14 May: "With that smoky voice, Kemi filleted Wes so skilfully even Starmer yelped with mirth".

A prime minister cannot serve two masters. If a Head of Government is receiving large financial payments from a private donor, totalling tens of thousands of pounds, a democracy has a right to know. Those payments might be entirely innocent: a simple token of esteem, from one person with more money than he needs, to another with less money than he wants. But the public cannot make a judgement on that if the arrangement is kept secret.

We cannot know if the donor was bidding for government contracts, or lobbying for a change in their tax arrangements. We cannot know if they were looking for a seat in the House of Lords, or an appointment to a public body. We would not be told if they had received an honour, or access to ministers, or a regulatory change that saved their business millions.

The line from ministers seems to be that, so long as the taxpayer didn't pay, the source of the money is "none of our business". In fact, the reverse is true. It is because the taxpayer isn't paying that it is so important we find out who is. Who handed benefits worth tens of thousands of pounds to our prime minister, and what they might want in return?

A second line of defence notes that, when the story began to leak, the prime minister changed course and paid the bill himself. But that suggests that he knew the arrangement was indefensible. In that respect, it reinforces the importance of public scrutiny as a defence against misconduct. We do not know whether other such arrangements are in place. And we still do not know - because the prime minister refuses to tell us - from whom he initially accepted the donation.

If someone relieved me of a bill for £58,000, I would feel greatly in their debt. The only debt a prime minister should feel is to the electorate. If a prime minister cannot live on his official salary, but is dependent on financial gifts from wealthy patrons, we need to be certain that this is not coming with conditions that pit private against public interests.

A series of images of an apparently deranged man in full rhetorical flame.