A Little Politics

I NEVER THOUGHT I’d be talking about Vladimir Ilyanovich Lenin on the Hundleby weblog, but it’s an interesting idea.

The pub where I am a regular is one of those which have several shelves of books. I am one of the very few customers who actually read them, when I can find one worth reading, that is. For these books are obviously acquired by the truckload and you need to trawl through yards of dross to find the odd nugget.

I’ve found A G McDonnel’s England Their England sitting next to a 1924 textbook on accounting; Sinclair Lewis’ Dodsworth and Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage squeezed between rows of Georgette Heyer and Peter Cheyney. I’ve even discovered Shakespeare’s Henry V translated into German.

‘Uns wen’ge, uns beglücktes Haüflein Brüder . . .’

And then, the other day, sitting next to Lord Montgomery’s war memoirs was volume 12 of the Selected Works of Lenin: Theory of the Agrarian Question.

I haven’t read it and I won’t, because I’m prejudiced, not to mention easily bored. But what little browsing I have done shows that it’s hardly a serious economics discussion, more a political polemic. But my eye was caught by the mention of Lincolnshire in his chapter on ‘Capitalism in Agriculture.’

His aim is to demonstrate that the agricultural worker, whom he variously describes as ‘the small producer in agriculture’, ‘the small tiller of the soil’, or ‘the small peasant’, was even worse off, in the late nineteenth century, than the artisan or industrial worker. For not only did the farm labourer work his fields as long as there was light, he also had to repair his equipment, tend to his and his animals’ buildings and his tools; all things which the industrial worker would expect to be paid for as overtime.

He quotes from a British Parliamentary Commission of 1897, where a witness from Lincolnshire stated, ‘I have brought up a whole family and almost worked them to death.’ Another said, ‘We and the children sometimes work 18 hours a day; on an average we work form 10 to 12 hours.’ ‘We work harder than the day labourers; we work like slaves.’

Maybe I’m wrong, but I rather get the impression that these witnesses were farming their own, or at least rented land. Which makes them capitalists themselves, doesn’t it?

*

BE THAT AS IT MAY, Lenin never had many adherents in Lincolnshire, although God knows farm workers’ wages were always appallingly low and the amount of forelocking tugging that went on was sickening. For all that, the county has always been staunchly Tory, apart from the county town itself which until ten years ago was usually marginal. It’s represented currently by a former ‘Blair Babe’, who probably rings the PM for the right answer before she answers the question, ‘Is it raining?’

My own personal interest in politics began at the time of the 1966 general election when Harold Wilson’s government was returned with a large majority. We had a mock election at school and I acted as agent to the Labour candidate. Who won, I might add. Our 500-strong electorate reflected pretty closely the country as a whole, except for the fact that our Communist opponent did unexpectedly well. My explanation was that he’d bribed all the first-years with promises of longer school holidays and the summary execution of the headmaster.

During the campaign, my father, Ernie (pictured on his wedding day in 1948), took me to see George Brown who spoke from a makeshift platform in Boston Marketplace. It was a good old-fashioned political speech, complete with hecklers, whom George saw off with ease. As I recall, he was sober. He was always Dad’s hero, proof that you could reach the top from humble origins.

Somehow I was invited to attend our constituency count. This was ‘Holland-with-Boston’, by the way, a longtime Conservative stronghold. To be precise it was a ‘National Liberal’ stronghold, a label that went back to the days of Ramsay Macdonald’s National government, when many Labour and Liberal MPs defected.

The old MP, who had had a high personal vote, had retired and Labour sensed a chance to take the seat. They nearly did. At the count I watched the bundles of ballot papers for the two candidates stacking up and creeping along trestle tables, neck and neck. I saw a huddle of officials consulting with them and then there was the announcement that there would be a recount. Finally, the result, and I declare that Richard Body, Conservative, is duly elected to serve as Member of Parliament for this constituency.’ Something like that is how it goes.

He won by about 300 votes. Body was later to become Sir Richard and a strong opponent of the European Union, a stand which moved me to write to him once, urging him to keep up the good work.

*

MY FATHER, ERNIE HUNDLEBY, was always a staunch Labour man. He was the first person I ever heard speaking disparagingly about Winston Churchill. Great war leader he may have been, but that counted for little against the fact that he was an upper-class Tory. I grew up in the fifties, when MacMillan was prime minister, another Tory toff much despised by my father. I rather liked Supermac’s style, which was one of languid nonchalance and aristocratic aloofness.

Dad just snorted when Macmillan described the resignation of several members of his cabinet as ‘a little local difficulty’ and responded to an angry outburst by Khrushchev by politely asking if he might have the translation.

But Dad’s support for the Labour Party was never ideological. It was a matter of class. Labour was the only party interested in improving working conditions, the health service and education, and making the rich pay for it. He wasn’t bothered about egalitarianism, and so he was pleased when my sister and I found places at local grammar schools. I suppose he was interested in opportunities to rise, rather than bring everyone down to the same level.

But even Dad had a political crisis. In the seventies, the Left was taking control of the party and Dad was appalled, for the working class is essentially rather conservative. It doesn’t want a different kind of cake, just a bigger slice of the one on offer.

So, when Dick Taverne, Labour MP for Lincoln, resigned to fight a by-election under the ‘Democratic Labour’ banner, Dad supported him. Taverne won and but it was a brief victory for the movement which was later resurrected later as the SDP and finally in the person of Tony Blair.

Dad was long gone by then, sadly, and it’s one of my great regrets that he died too early for us to share many a great political argument.