Primrose Lane: How Disraeli Would See Brexit

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

What would Disraeli do about Brexit? An apt question this Primrose Day weekend — an occasion to commemorate Benjamin Disraeli’s death in 1881 and promote his beloved Conservative party.

Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, was a principal founder of the Primrose League, formed to take advantage of Disraeli’s 1867 reform act that enlarged the voting franchise to growing numbers of the working and middle classes.

The League would educate and build on this new-found “Tory democracy” and, to echo Disraeli, “dish the Whigs.” As for its unique name, the League was named for the plant. Queen Victoria sent a wreath of its blossoms to Disraeli’s funeral with a note saying that the primrose was his “favorite flower.”

How would Disraeli feel about Brexit? It is well to remember Lord Brougham’s caution. “No one can pronounce with perfect confidence on the conduct which any statesman would have pursued,” he wrote, “had he survived the times in which he flourished.”

On Brexit, however, we can pronounce without hesitation Disraeli’s support. The ground of his political principle lay on the bedrock from which Brexit was born. For Disraeli, Britain and her independence were paramount: “The program of the Conservative party is to maintain the Constitution of the country.”

He was not averse to change but, when necessary, it “should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people.” The slow accretion of powers to the European Union from the United Kingdom can be seen as only an affront to the “organic” change Disraeli promoted in the manner set out by Edmund Burke.

Disraeli eviscerated liberalism’s intent “to make war on the manners and customs of the people of this country under the pretext of Progress.” Nothing less that the fate of Britain is at stake if the country remains within the clutches of the EU. “When we destroy such a Constitution we in fact destroy a nation,” Dizzy declared.

Nor did Disraeli’s love of imperial Britain hint at sympathies for the aims of the European super-state. He was a patriot; the insidious transfer of English liberties to Brussels would have appalled him. The empire of Dizzy’s imagination encouraged local diversity, pursuing a common foreign policy and, in any event, united by the Crown.

“The Monarchy of the Tories,” he boasted, “is more democratic that the Republic of the Whigs.”

Was Margaret Thatcher “channelling” Disraeli when she gave her Bruges speech condemning the EU’s growing appetite? “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state,” Mrs. Thatcher trumpeted.

Likewise, “centralization is the death-blow of public freedom,” Disraeli insisted. “It is the citadel of the oligarch from which, if once erected, it will be impossible to dislodge them.” His target was domestic mandarins at Westminster — plus ça change — how much greater his revulsion at foreign meddling?

That Westminster is hell-bent on overturning the people’s referendum only confirms Disraeli’s worst misgivings. He brought down Robert Peel’s anti-Corn Law ministry in the mid-1840s, after all, less on antipathy to free trade than on the idea that he and his fellow Conservatives campaigned for protection. Public trust was at issue.

The present state of his beloved Conservative party, therefore, would leave Disraeli aghast. He bequeathed it three axioms they ignore at their peril.

“Whenever the Tory party degenerates into an oligarchy, it becomes unpopular” — current polls bear out the party’s plummeting popularity. Former supporters are deserting to Nigel Farage’s “Brexit party,” to fight in European Parliament elections their “representatives” vowed need never be contested.

“Whenever the national institutions do not fulfil their original intention, the Tory party becomes odious” — a shameful but fitting epithet on the two House of Parliament, on most MPs and peers, and especially on the Conservative government and its prime minister, Theresa May.

Disraeli’s final axiom, however, offers hope. “When the people are led by their natural leaders, and when, by their united influence, the national institutions fulfil their original intention, the Tory party is triumphant,” he averred; “then, under Providence, it will secure the prosperity and the power of the country.”

Britain’s continuing prosperity was Lord Randolph’s goal in establishing the Primrose League. A pressing question at the time of Disraeli’s death was determining who would inherit “Elijah’s mantle” and take up their departed leader’s legacy.

Since that time, many worthy successors have led the Tories and, from No. 10 Downing Street, governed the nation. Now is not such a glorious time. “Nations have characters as well as individuals,” it was Disraeli’s genius to discern; “national character is precisely the quality which the next sect of statesmen in their schemes and speculations either deny or overlook.”

Securing Brexit and UK independence demand inspired leadership. Determining who will don Disraeli’s mantle and make Brexit reality is the question of the hour.

________

Stephen MacLean, long affiliated with the Disraeli MacDonald Institute, writes the Brexit Diary for the Sun and maintains the weblog The Organic Tory. Image: A pin of the Primrose League. Detail of a photograph. Via Wikipedia under Creative Commons License.


The New York Sun

© 2024 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use