It would be a brave person who walked up to Paddy Ashdown or Shirley Williams and told them to their face that they are history, or even old, but they are two of the most charismatic, interesting and thoughtful members of the living history class – people who have been around in politics long enough to be able to talk at first hand about not only the origins of the Liberal Democrats but prior events too. So to have both on the bill at the Liberal Democrat History Group’s Autumn 2011 conference fringe meeting not surprisingly resulted in a spacious room being packed, leaving people standing at the sides, the back and in the doorways. However, the star of the show in many ways was the less well-known third speaker, then of The Guardian and now of Downing Street, Julian Glover.

All three were introduced to the meeting by the Group’s chair, and one of the lead authors of the book being launched, Peace, Reform and Liberation, Duncan Brack. He reassured the audience that the meeting was maintaining historical party traditions, for Paddy Ashdown was going to have to leave early … and Shirley Williams was late! He also quoted Paddy Ashdown’s words on the importance of political history to a party, taken from his autobiography, A Fortunate Life, in which Ashdown recounted some of the problems of the 1989 SDP–Liberal merger. He wrote that, ‘Being a relative outsider compared to the older MPs I had, in my rush to create the new party, failed to understand that a political party is about more than plans, priorities, policies and a chromium-plated organisation. It also has a heart and a history and a soul.’

The same applies to a newspaper, too, and in kicking off with the first main speech Julian Glover took a look at one part of his newspaper’s history and soul – its on/off, love/hate relationship with the Liberal Party and its successors. Glover cited The Guardian’s May 2010 editorial urging people to vote Liberal Democrat. But, as Glover added, ‘As soon as we did it, we changed our minds.’ That prevarication is nothing new and, he implied, not necessarily much of a problem for the party given that polling showed that Labour support amongst Guardian readers went up after that 2010 editorial.

The paper’s political advice has varied much over the years. Julian Glover even located a 1950s Guardian editorial which urged people to vote out Clement Atlee and vote in the Conservative Party. But much of the time the paper had been a Labour-supporting outlet which urged best wishes on the Liberals and their successors, often advising the party to be just a little different in a benevolent / condescending (delete to taste) way.

Much of the editorialising about Britain’s third party has been, as Glover highlighted, variants on a common theme: to bemoan that the third party is not fully backing whatever cause is of most concern to the paper at the time. The other theme, he added, is to write off the third party as doomed. On occasion, The Guardian has combined both themes in one leader, including in a 1987 leader that said, ‘These are dire days for the Alliance. They have some of the most thoughtful and radical politicians around.’ Glover added, ‘As a paper we certainly seem to enjoy nothing more than praising the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats while going on to explain why we can’t actually support it.’ The party’s 1992 general election manifesto received praise from the paper: ‘it far outdistances its competitors with a fizz of ideas and an absence of fudge’, but even that was not enough for the paper to call for Paddy to become prime minister. ‘So there you have it, 150 years from The Guardian and the Manchester Guardian calling on the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats to be brave, radical; praising the party’s policies and then writing it off as irrelevant’, concluded Julian Glover.

He was followed by Paddy Ashdown, who in typical fashion strode towards the audience before starting to quiz everyone in the room, testing people’s knowledge with quotes from history. After an easy duo with ‘Go back to your constituencies and prepare for government’ and ‘I intend to march my troops towards the sound of gunfire’, with the audience easily and correctly guessing (or in many cases, remembering) David Steel and Jo Grimond, Ashdown posed a tougher one with, ‘Ideas are not responsible for the people who believe in them’. The answer? Paddy himself (on being particularly exasperated by Alex Carlisle). Probably. He admitted he may have borrowed it from someone else and forgotten. (A search through Hansard finds him first using the phrase in Parliament 1986, in a different context and even then not sure if he had penned it himself).

He went on to entertain and enlighten the audience with a sequence of many other quotes from past Liberals, including from Lord Acton: ‘A state which is incompetent to satisfy different races, condemns itself. A state which labours to neutralise, to absorb, to expel them destroys its own vitality. A state which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government.’ Acton got several mentions, with Ashdown also picking out what he described as one of his favourite quotes: ‘It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than it is to find people fit to govern’. The quote should be emblazoned across the party’s political manuals, he said, making the implicit point that many of the lessons past liberal drew from their contemporary experience are still highly relevant today.

As he said, ‘our history is our present’ – just after quoting Gladstone on Afghanistan. Different centuries, different wars but the same humane, liberal creed: ‘That philosophy of liberalism that combines a solution to the questions of liberty and freedom – and sometimes, as John Stuart Mill said, they oppose each other, the freedom to and the freedom from – you have to determine where that balance lies for your time, for your nation and for your generation. It does not lie always in the same place. You have to determine that. That is why liberalism is a living creed.’ He finished saying, ‘The thing that we have in our party title – liberal – goes back thousands of years. You should be proud of that. It should give us strength, and it should make us campaign even harder … Henry Gibson once said, ‘You do not go out to battle for freedom and truth wearing your best trousers.’ Sometimes I think our party wears its best trousers too much. This is our heritage and it is also our message today – and we should be proud of it’.

It would take a speaker of rare skill to match Ashdown’s speech, but Shirley Williams is one of the select band who could – and did, even though she opened joking that she wished she had after all agreed to speak before rather than after him. She contrasted Ashdown’s drawing of lessons from the more distant past with her own talk – looking at the lessons from more recent political history, in particular the way the limited teaching of history in the US helps shapes its leaders’ worldview – if you only teach American history, you end up with people who do not think much beyond the boundaries of America. This had ‘devastating consequences’, Shirley Williams argued, when the lessons of the Vietnam War and the state the country was left in were not applied to Iraq.

She then turned to the way the Liberal Party declined so sharply in the early twentieth century, becoming reduced to near irrelevance. ‘What kept it going were the deep roots it had put down in some parts of the country – the Pennines, parts of the West Country and of course the Celtic Welsh and Scottish Liberals,’ Shirley Williams explained. Her own roots, of course, are in the social democracy rather than liberalism – a distinction she described as being based on being less distrustful of the powers of the state, but also a distinction that has faded as the merged Liberal Democrats have evolved.

Returning to America and the uses of history, Williams said that lessons from the 1930s are still very relevant. One of her conclusions from them is the need to consider a job creation program, aimed particularly at young people, funded by a dedicated temporary tax. More optimistically, she thinks politicians have learnt from the 1930s that they should not ‘simply take the dictation of the market without any question as to whether it is right or whether it isn’t.’ Then only the American President FDR amongst western leaders bucked that consensus of treating the recession as an act of inevitability, introducing instead a liberal and democratic government to fight that which other people viewed as inevitable.

The USA is also responsible for her views on coalition. Williams revealed that initially she would have preferred a minority Conservative government, with a confidence and supply arrangement rather than a formal coalition. However, she has since changed her mind, drawing on what she has seen in the USA and the dangers it shows of ‘total political polarisation’ stopping the government from taking necessary action in an economic crisis. As a result, she now thinks forming a coalition ‘was necessary and it was right … One had to make the political system work, even if it was painful and difficult to do so.’

Finally, looking back a century to Britain’s own history, Shirley Wiliams said there were three failures of the Liberal Party in 1911: on gender, inequality and Ireland. ‘It was appalling that Asquith consistently refused to consider suffrage for women,’ she said, before stressing that in her view the party had made far too little progress in improving the diversity amongst its MPs – and has a diversity problem illustrated by the near all-white audience for the fringe meeting. The success of ‘zipping’ in introducing gender balance amongst the party’s MEP’s points the way, she said, towards the need for action in other areas.

The second failure was shown by the so-called workers’ rebellion, fuelled by a dramatic drop in real wages. As with gender, this source of 1911 failure is a challenge for the modern party too, with real wages once again dropping. But on this issue Williams said the party was getting right, with its emphasis on a fairer tax system, keeping the 50 per cent tax rate and increasing the basic rate income tax allowance to £10,000. When she was first elected in 1964, the ratio between the pay of the country’s leading chief executives and the average wage of people who worked in manufacturing was about 8:1 she said; now it has risen to over 80:1. ‘That’s not just inequality: it is appalling obscenity.’

On Ireland, Williams reminded the audience that Ireland was long a passion of William Gladstone. The tragedy of his inability to secure home rule for Ireland was a heavy burden on Britain and Ireland’s subsequent histories. But, much less well known is that when in office Gladstone offered the Zulus a military alliance against the Boers. When he fell as prime minister the proposal fell apart, with huge costs to South Africa, too. On this point, Williams did not explicitly say what the lessons for modern Liberal Democrats are, the implication was left hanging in the air that it meant – at least some of the time – being willing to militarily support the oppressed. What she did say in conclusion was that history matters, for ‘we must learn the lessons, even the painful ones, and not make the same mistakes again’.

In answers to questions from the audience, Ashdown agreed that Gladstone’s love of thrift and voluntarism is still very relevant – environmentalism is a form of thrift and community politics is based on voluntarism. But community politics is greater than voluntarism, for community politics must also be about shifting power.

Williams agreed, saying the country was increasingly realising how unreal the New Labour economic boom had been, based on unsustainable debt producing a mirage which both the public and the government believed in. For her thrift has a moral and psychological purpose, making us more happy, she thinks, given the costs of the anxiety that comes from seeking ever-more riches rather than enjoying what you have.

On voluntarism, Williams again agreed with Ashdown, pointing to the amazing care that hospices provide, thanks to a system based on voluntarism. Repeating her high profile opposition to some aspects of the government’s health reforms, she nonetheless saw a key role for such voluntarism.

The question and answer session was rather taken over by contemporary political questions, including very strong comments about the importance of the party improving the diversity of its parliamentary party in the Commons from both Williams and Ashdown. The latter admitted to changing his mind on the topic and is now willing to support more radical temporary measures if necessary than he was when leader of the party.

Ashdown also retold a story of a meeting between Henry Kissinger and Mao Zedong. Seeking to kindle a shared interest in history to smooth the business, Kissinger asked Mao what he thought would have happened if it had been Khrushchev and not John F. Kennedy who had been assassinated. Mao pondered before saying that he doubted that nice, rich Greek ship owner would have married Mrs Khrushchev.

Closing the meeting, Duncan Brack reminded people of the comment made by the distinguished historian and Liberal Democrat peer, the late Conrad Russell, that the party via its predecessors was probably the oldest political party in the world. This 350 years of history is captured in the new history of the party – to remember, to celebrate and to learn.

You can buy Peace, Reform and Liberation from Amazon here or reviews from William Wallace and Iain Sharpe.

* Declaration of interest – I’m one of the chapter authors.

Watch the event in full

* Mark Pack is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and writes a monthly newsletter about the Liberal Democrats.

Courtesy of Biteback, you can now read the full, unexpurgated version penned by the author of Whisky Galore and sometime British secret agent and you can therefore see how what worried the government was not racy tales of foreign adventures but lengthy lists of spies, their assistants and their working methods.

The simple test of whether or not you should read it is whether or not you want to read in full a 12 point “Memorandum on proposals for control of passenger traffic from and to Greece”. In other words, for the specialist, this is a book is crammed full of useful detail. What tales of drama there are (such as the bizarre story of an agent who forgot his alias and had to hide in a toilet for two days) are smothered in long bureaucratic accounts and extensive arguments over detailed points of narrative which are never clearly explained to the uninitiated reader.

Aside from the occasional toilet-style incidents, and frequent complaints about the temperature, the book is livened up by Mackenzie’s frequent swipes at others who have retold the same events. They are variously described as “pathetic”, “credulous”, “eager apologists”, “harlequin”, “stupid” and more. In an effort to demonstrate that he alone can be trusted to give the authoritative account (which just happens to be flattering to himself), he buries the reader in a collection of documents and details.

The publishers have done little to help guide the reader through this detail. There are, for example, no explanatory footnotes for the first time a new significant name or organisation is introduced in the text.

There is, however, in an appendix the details of the concerns the government had over names and procedures that the unexpurgated text gave away. Reading through them, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that removing much of this was really doing the book a favour by removing much of the excess detail. Perhaps too the government did him a favour by helping inspire Mackenzie to turn to fiction the following year to settle more scores in the form of the excellent satire Water on the Brain.

This is a book for the specialist, not for the casual reader.

You can buy Greek Memories by Compton Mackenzie from Amazon here.

At under 14 minutes it is well worth listening to in full:

Both On Liberty by John Stuart Mill and John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand by Richard Reeves are available from Amazon.

Hat-tip: Jonathan Calder

On the historical front is rather more of a mixed bag than his previous In Search of the Trojan War. That had a full series to in which he could play historical detective, trying to locate the truth by tracing a story around the Aegean and through the works of different historians.

This time each piece of historical detective work is condensed into just one 50 minute episode. For Sheba and Arthur that means a helter-skelter journey through many conflicting tales, raising many questions and showing many beautiful scenes but offering little in the way of historical answers amongst all the conflicting thoughts. The other two, Shangri-La and Jason are rather better in this respect and each involve him tracing one continuous journey, making it for a historically-enriched travelogue through some of the most beautiful parts of the planet.

However, even the weaker episodes are still highly enjoyable and are likely to have you reaching for the computer either to find out more about them or to see how you can visit some of the locations on holiday.

You can buy from Michael Wood’s In Search of Myths & Heroes Amazon here.

There are some lovely pictures in the full set, including David Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald and James Callaghan. The set has been put together by political historian Professor Russell Deacon and artist Dan Peterson.

The Welsh playing cards are available from Protest and Survive.

The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.

The answer is after the jump.

Answer: John Maynard Keynes.

(Which does, incidentally, make me wonder how many people who now call themselves Keynesians really are. Many on the left outside the Liberal Democrats, certainly, view such attitudes to the role of the state – when expressed by 21st century politicians – as something to abhor. But in that respect, Keynes is rather like William Beveridge, whose views on benefits does not sit comfortably with many on the left who like to invoke his name with pride.)

Julian Glover gave a very funny speech about his newspaper’s love/hate relationship with the party – “So there you have it, 150 years from The Guardian and the Manchester Guardian calling on the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats to be brave, radical; praising the party’s policies and then writing it off as irrelevant”.

Shirley Williams turned to the history of America and of the 1930s, drawing lessons for the current economic difficulties, including why American history has made her a supporter of coalition government in the UK.

Paddy Ashdown’s speech included a collection of his favourite liberal quotes and why the lessons contained in them are still highly relevant to contemporary liberal politicians, ending with this exhortation:

The thing that we have in our party title – liberal – goes back thousands of years. You should be proud of that. It should give us strength, and it should make us campaign even harder … Henry Gibson once said, ‘You do not go out to battle for freedom and truth wearing your best trousers’. Sometimes I think our party wears its best trousers too much. This is our heritage and it is also our message today – and we should be proud of it.

Here is the meeting in full to watch, and chances are it is much better than quite a few of those Christmas TV repeats you’ll otherwise find yourself watching…

You can buy Peace, Reform and Liberation from Amazon here.

* Declaration of interest – I’m one of the chapter authors.

It was not that he and colleagues had a particular love for hills, if anything the opposite – for the gravitational pull of hills affected sensitive surveying instruments of the time. Without knowledge of the Earth’s composition (some at the time believed it was hollow), these effects could not be calculated theoretically. So instead, the committee set out to measure the actual effects and work backwards from there not only to come up with appropriate adjustments for instruments but also therefore to divine more about the composition of the Earth itself.

Maskelyne himself was awarded the Royal Society’s highest honour for his role in leading the research but the committee’s name should also live on in the heart of every bureaucrat.

(Committee discovered via Rachel Hewitt’s Map of a Nation.)

That makes this book, based on voluminous access to secretive Russian official records, an impressive and important piece of scholarship. It also means that the accounts in the book are often fragmentary, with the scattered evidence building up a broad picture of one of the most violent parts of Stalin’s secret state apparatus but also picking up and dropping incomplete fragments of the picture with great regularity. Moreover, the author, Vadim Birstein, has decided to document in as much detail as he can the changing bureaucratic structures of SMERSH.

This makes for a book that is heavy reading – full of useful information for the specialist but short of excitement or drama for the casual reader. Starting with three acronyms in the foreword’s first sentence, the book follows up with a second sentence containing four acronyms and continues in that vein.

The writing style is also rather unsettling for, whilst Birstein is undoubtedly still full of righteous anger at what Stalin did to millions of innocents, the tortures, murders and disappearances are often reduced to the level of statistical organisational detail. Occasional stories insert a reminder of the humans behind the numbers, as with Stalin’s order to General Zhukov, “You should not believe in prisoners of war. You should interrogate a prisoner under torture and then shoot him to death” or this reminder of the horrors of war, from a Moscow citizen:

I saw children sliding down a hill … After I approached them, I realised that they were using [as a sled] the frozen body of a Fritz [i.e. German soldier]. His boots had been removed and his feet were cut off. Water was poured over the body, and it was covered with dung. The nose was destroyed … The kids pulled the body uphill with a hook.

But much of the time the book presents lists of numbers and details in a factual manner, written in a style that could just as well apply to a history of pig production under the Communists.

Perhaps necessarily because of the patchy evidential record, there is little analysis of why SMERSH did what it did. Certainly there were huge numbers of innocent victims, but Birstein never gives the reader much of a sense of how much of the brutality was driven by fighting actual subversion and spying, how much by a brutal approach to enforcing military discipline, how much by internal score settling and how much by out of control sociopaths. Yet there were – as the book mentions – very extensive spying efforts aimed at Stalin’s regime and it was a regime that had at least some internal opponents. At the end of a book of 500 pages I was left none the wiser as to how large, small or insignificant a proportion of those accused were actually guilty or what the motivation was for persecuting the many innocent people who were victims.

Those criticisms of the book are perhaps inevitable given that Birstein is the first person to attempt a detailed history of SMERSH and, whatever its faults, the book is an important and necessary contribution to rescuing its violent history from the forgotten corners of history. For the first such book on a highly secretive topic, it rescues an impressive amount of information.

You can buy Smersh: Stalin’s Secret Weapon by Vadim Birstein from Amazon here.

It was a dedicated group of people who led the way in mapping, and for all their dedication they were also curiously unfocused, often being distracted into side projects which were worthy but delayed the mapping of the country. It may have made for slower mapping but it makes for all the more interesting history.

In writing the book, Hewitt has filled a gap in the historical record, producing a charming account of the many varied personalities and technical developments that accompanied the production of the first comprehensive map of the country.

Yet in that tale she also highlights the limitations of history, for the organisation the Ordnance Survey (OS) had become by the early twenty-first century was one almost at odds with the principles of its creation. The OS was still an organisation dedicated to mapping with a strong belief in the necessity and utility of maps, but in its origins it had shown a strong commitment to openness, with its data widely available for reuse. As a result, although military requirements were a major prompt in the early days of the OS’s history, its information was always made public – available to all, not locked away as military secrets on confidential maps, knowing the widely available data would garner more support for its funding and would end up being better data as mistakes would be spotted and employees would be encourage to keep on their toes. Early cartography also had a healthy two-way relation with technology, but stimulating and benefiting from the creation of new, ingenious and ever more accurate instruments. The knock-on technological benefits could be very surprising, as with the need to be able to see a trigonometry point on a far peak in poor visibility inspiring the development of limelight which ended up being widely used in the West End’s theatres to illuminate not distant peaks but the theatrical stage.

Yet, at least until spring 2010, the 21st century version of the Ordnance Survey was one often seen as hostile to the modern equivalents of these – the idea of open data, sharing information and encouraging innovate reuse of information. Rather than being a proponent of open data, the OS had become a close repository, insisting on high payments that restricted use and innovation to a small number of rich enterprises rather than making its data available to all in the spirit of its early days. The freeing up of some key data sets on 1 April 2010 was a return to those Ordnance Survey roots which Rachel Hewitt’s book so charmingly documents.

Two quick caveats to watch out for if wondering whether to buy this book: despite the topic, it is text heavy and despite the title, it is about the Ordnance Survey’s pre and early history. Despite these caveats, it is a great read.

You can buy Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt from Amazon here.