The New Social Alliance or New Social Movement was an idea supported by some British Conservatives in 1871 for an alliance between working-class leaders and aristocratic Conservatives to ameliorate the conditions of the working class. [1] The historian John Vincent has called the New Social Alliance "conservative socialism" and a "poor man's Young England". [2]
The Conservative Party, officially the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom. The governing party since 2010, it is the largest in the House of Commons, with 313 Members of Parliament, and also has 249 members of the House of Lords, 18 members of the European Parliament, 31 Members of the Scottish Parliament, 12 members of the Welsh Assembly, eight members of the London Assembly and 8,916 local councillors.
John Russell Vincent is a British historian and a former Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Vincent was educated at Bedales School and Christ's College, Cambridge. He was Professor of Modern History, and later History, at the University of Bristol from 1970 until his retirement when he became Visiting Professor at the University of East Anglia. In the 1980s he was a controversial columnist for The Times and The Sun newspapers for four years, until students from the University of Bristol disrupted some of his lectures at his university and forced him to take two terms unpaid leave. He continued his journalism and has also written for many other publications, including book reviews and articles for New Society, The New Statesman, the Listener, The Spectator, The London Review of Books, the Observer, the Sunday Times, and the Guardian.
Young England was a Victorian era political group born on the playing fields of Cambridge, Oxford and Eton. For the most part, its unofficial membership was confined to a splinter group of Tory aristocrats who had attended public school together, among them George Smythe, Lord John Manners, Henry Thomas Hope and Alexander Baillie-Cochrane. The group's leader and figurehead, however, was Benjamin Disraeli, who bore the distinction of having neither an aristocratic background nor an Eton or Cambridge education.
In July 1871 the Conservative MP John Pakington proposed to Lord Derby a committee or a commission of Conservative peers and landowners to consider the needs of the artisan class as articulated by their leaders. The idea originated with John Scott Russell, a Scottish engineer and ship builder. This would unite the landed class with the working class against the mercantile and manufacturing employers. Derby noted that "J. Manners takes it up warmly, Carnavon rather approves, Pakington is hot for it, and Disraeli sees in it a new method of outbidding the Whigs, or rather Gladstone". [3] Some of the demands included: limiting the hours of work to eight hours a day; the right to take land compulsorily for working class housing; the sale of articles for consumption would be put on state account, suppressing the small tradesman; establishing technical schools; increased state provision for recreation and pleasure. [4]
John Somerset Pakington, 1st Baron Hampton,, known as Sir John Pakington, Bt, from 1846 to 1874, was a British Conservative politician.
Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby,, known as Lord Stanley from 1851 to 1869, was a British statesman. He served as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs twice, from 1866 to 1868 and from 1874 to 1878, and also twice as Colonial Secretary in 1858 and from 1882 to 1885.
John Scott Russell FRSE FRS was a Scottish civil engineer, naval architect and shipbuilder who built the Great Eastern in collaboration with Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He made the discovery of the wave of translation that gave birth to the modern study of solitons, and developed the wave-line system of ship construction.
Derby opposed limiting working hours as this would involve, as he wrote in his diary,
...in principle something like an economical revolution, and that the whole scheme pointed in one direction – to the suppression of the capitalist, which would very soon be followed by that of the landowner and fundholder...In fact the plan, as he laid it before me, is that of the Socialists, as lately stated by themselves in a manifesto called Rights and Wrongs of Workmen, only with the part relating to the land left out. [5]
In October Pakington gave a speech in which, according to Derby, he said "that the State was bound to provide the workingmen with lodging at fair rents and wholesome food at reasonable price". The newspapers saw this as "an attempt at coalition between Conservatives and Socialists, on the basis of 'Young England' ideas of twenty-five years ago". [6] The Spectator claimed that Pakington gave a speech "inclining almost too strongly to that beneficent view of Government which but a few years ago political economy was never weary of denying" and claimed:
The Spectator is a weekly British magazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. It was first published in July 1828. It is owned by David and Frederick Barclay who also own The Daily Telegraph newspaper, via Press Holdings. Its principal subject areas are politics and culture. Its editorial outlook is generally supportive of the Conservative Party, although regular contributors include some outside that fold, such as Frank Field, Rod Liddle and Martin Bright. The magazine also contains arts pages on books, music, opera, and film and TV reviews.
Political economy is the study of production and trade and their relations with law, custom and government; and with the distribution of national income and wealth. As a discipline, political economy originated in moral philosophy, in the 18th century, to explore the administration of states' wealth, with "political" signifying the Greek word polity and "economy" signifying the Greek word "okonomie". The earliest works of political economy are usually attributed to the British scholars Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, although they were preceded by the work of the French physiocrats, such as François Quesnay (1694–1774) and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781).
We can scarcely doubt that this address was really intended to strike the first note of an aristocratic and Tory movement on behalf of the working man,—which should outflank Mr. Gladstone's political justice by a liberal offer of social generosity. [7]
The Spectator later wrote that the proposal was designed to carry out Disraeli's ideas as aspoused in Coningsby and Sybil by "filling the chasm between "the two nations"". [8]
Coningsby, or The New Generation is an English political novel by Benjamin Disraeli, published in 1844. It is rumored to be based on Nathan Mayer Rothschild. According to Disraeli's biographer, Robert Blake, the character of Sidonia is a cross between Lionel de Rothschild and Disraeli himself.
Sybil, or The Two Nations is an 1845 novel by Benjamin Disraeli. Published in the same year as Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Sybil traces the plight of the working classes of England. Disraeli was interested in dealing with the horrific conditions in which the majority of England's working classes lived — or, what is generally called the Condition of England question.
At a speech at Blackheath on 28 October, the Liberal leader Gladstone warned his constituents against Pakington's scheme:
...they are not your friends, but they are your enemies in fact, though not in intention, who teach you to look to the Legislature for the radical removal of the evils that afflict human life.... It is the individual mind and conscience, it is the individual character, on which mainly human happiness or misery depends. (Cheers.) The social problems that confront us are many and formidable. Let the Government labour to its utmost, let the Legislature labour days and nights in your service; but, after the very best has been attained and achieved, the question whether the English father is to be the father of a happy family and the centre of a united home is a question which must depend mainly upon himself. (Cheers.) And those who...promise to the dwellers in towns that every one of them shall have a house and garden in free air, with ample space; those who tell you that there shall be markets for selling at wholesale prices retail quantities—I won't say are imposters, because I have no doubt they are sincere; but I will say they are quacks (cheers); they are deluded and beguiled by a spurious philanthropy, and when they ought to give you substantial, even if they are humble and modest boons, they are endeavouring, perhaps without their own consciousness, to delude you with fanaticism, and offering to you a fruit which, when you attempt to taste it, will prove to be but ashes in your mouths. (Cheers.) [9]
The historian Richard Shannon has written that Disraeli took no more than "a politely benign general interest in the scheme" and it quickly faded from the political scene. However Shannon noted that "Disraeli's name and reputation became, and remain, indelibly identified with its central argument as the vital element of what was later mythologised into Disraelian Conservative and Tory Democracy". [10]
Richard Shannon is an historian best known for his two-volume biography of William Ewart Gladstone. He was appointed Professor of Modern History at the University College Swansea, University of Wales in 1979.
