Dare to Be a Daniel (19 page)

My campaign to rid myself of the peerage began in 1955, five years before my father died. I introduced a private bill in that year and appeared before the Private Bill Committee of the House of Lords, in the Moses Room, to present my case, backed up by a petition from the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Burgesses
of
Bristol and by the Bishop of Bristol. That committee dismissed my claim.

My father then introduced a public bill in the Lords, which was also defeated. That is why when he died in 1960 at the age of eighty-three, I found myself excluded and was taken to the Privileges Committee of the House of Commons, which demanded that I produce my parents’ marriage certificate, my elder brother’s death certificate and my own birth certificate, as the basis on which it recommended my exclusion from the Commons.

Throughout this whole period my mother and father, and Caroline and my family, supported my campaign unhesitatingly. Indeed, Caroline was most passionate in her views.

A few months after my exclusion my seat was declared vacant and a by-election occurred to find a successor. At that time there was a loophole in the law, which enabled electoral officers (in my case the Town Clerk of Bristol) to accept as candidates all persons who were ‘properly nominated’ – even if disqualified for some reason, as I was. Thus I was actually able to stand as the Labour candidate despite the peerage complication. One minor consequence of my campaign was that this loophole was later closed.

I was duly re-elected with a much bigger majority, having circulated to my constituents a letter of support from Winston Churchill and having received backing from a range of people. I therefore turned up at the House of Commons as the newly elected Member of Parliament and the Speaker told the Doorkeeper, Victor Stockley, that if I tried to enter the Chamber to take my seat, he was to keep me out – ‘if necessary by force’.

My Tory opponent, Malcolm St Clair (who, unbelievably, was also the heir to a peerage), took me to an election court presided over by two judges sitting alone, and I presented my own case
after
spending months studying peerage law with the help of Michael Zander; I found myself up against two QCs.

My initial speech took about four days to deliver. At the end the judges reported that I was disqualified on the basis of a judgement by Mr Justice Dodderidge, who in 1626 ruled that a peerage was ‘an incorporeal hereditament affixed in the blood and annexed to the posterity’, which (loosely interpreted) meant that it was a bit of real property in my blood that I could not get rid of.

On that basis, the candidate I had beaten was seated in the House as the new MP for Bristol South East and I was out in the wilderness, with no prospect of serving in the Commons again.

However, public support for my campaign, reflected also in the by-election result, led the Tory government to set up a select committee to look at the matter. In the summer of 1963 it recommended that an heir to a peerage could renounce within six months of succession. But when the Peerage Bill that included this provision went to the Commons, they made an amendment to exclude peerages that had
already
been inherited. This would have kept me out for ever.

Strangely, it was the House of Lords which reversed that amendment and allowed me to benefit. It may possibly be that one reason was that the Earl of Home was a potential candidate for the leadership of the Tory Party when Macmillan resigned (which he did later that year, on health grounds), and so they wanted to keep the door open for him. At any rate the bill was passed and I was sitting in the gallery of the House of Lords when the Royal Assent was given. When the words ‘
La Reine le veult
’ were spoken, I shot out of the gallery and the door banged audibly, then I went to the Lord Chancellor’s office with my Instrument of Renunciation and became a free man.

One amusing aspect of this was that when I went into the Lord Chancellor’s office, the Doorkeeper said, ‘Good afternoon, my Lord’ and as I left he said, ‘Goodbye, sir’.

Malcolm St Clair then resigned from the Commons, there was a further by-election, and I was returned again as the MP for Bristol South East in the autumn of 1963.

What I learned from it all was that an appeal for justice taken to the top rarely succeeds and it was the backing of my constituents and of the Constituency Labour Party that forced the government to shift – a strange way, you may think, to learn what every socialist has always known: that all progress comes from below, and that struggle has to be waged there.

Just before I renounced my peerage, I went to hospital and a kind doctor took some blue blood out of me, which I wanted to keep, since I knew I was about to lose it. I still have it in a bottle, and though the blood is clotted now, it would have been a ticket to a seat in Parliament (the Lords) for life, if I had been ready to accept the peerage.

When I left the Commons in 2001, Mr Speaker Martin recognised the fact that Ted Heath and I had both served for fifty years and conferred upon us both the new honour of ‘Freedom of the House’, which entitles us to use the Tea Room, the Library and the Cafeteria, and even to sit in the peers’ gallery of the House of Commons if we want to attend debates there. I therefore enjoy all the privileges of peerage without the humiliation of actually being a lord!

Throughout my political life, until her death in November 2000 (just before I retired), Caroline had been my sternest and most rigorous critic. Unlike me, she was a real intellectual, with a mind that could get to the bottom of any issue. Whenever I would
submit
a text to her for advice, she would read it and ask, ‘Well, what are you really trying to say?’ which sent me off to start afresh.

During our early years she had the four children to look after: Stephen, our eldest who has worked for many years as the Parliamentary officer of the Royal Society of Chemistry; Hilary, now an MP and in the Cabinet; Melissa, a writer, novelist and broadcaster; and Joshua, who is responsible for IT work in the Housing Corporation. The friendships she formed with them were deep and real, thinking about their needs and characters, just as she did later about our ten grandchildren, giving her full attention to them – a quality she showed to all her many friends around the world. She kept up a formidable correspondence with them almost to the day of her death.

Marriage to a Member of Parliament is a very demanding assignment and, despite her later reservations about the parliamentary world, Caroline would come willingly to the constituency and to meetings, and accepted the disruption to normal family life that Parliament involved and which made me a very inconsiderate partner.

She loved music and enjoyed going to concerts with her many friends, not least to Wexford with Peter Carter and to the Cincinnati Music Festival, which she attended whenever she could, travelling alone and combining it with a tour of her American relatives.

Her interest in education began in earnest when, having sent our children to Holland Park Comprehensive School, she became a governor there and served as Chair for twelve of her twenty-four years with the school, later being co-opted onto the LEA in London, which appointed her to be a governor of Imperial College and Mary Datchelor Girls’ School. Later she began to teach for
the
Open University, being a passionate believer in adult education. This continued when she taught at our local college, only retiring at seventy.

She became a keen gardener in London and at Stansgate, where she bought a field and turned it into a nature reserve. Her concerns about the environment were real and led her to campaign actively on environmental issues. Both of us became vegetarians, converted by our son, Hilary, on the grounds both of agricultural economy and animal welfare.

But the real contribution Caroline made was as a writer about, and campaigner for, comprehensive education, working with Professor Brian Simon to produce a book entitled
Halfway There
which recorded the progress made by every local education authority.

Later, with Professor Clyde Chitty, she wrote a second book called
Thirty Years On
, which carried the story forward. And as a founder of the Campaign for Comprehensive Education, she moved on to be President of the Socialist Education Association and wrote many articles for learned journals about every aspect of education. She also headed up a Labour movement study of the work of the Manpower Services Commission, attending endless meetings and seminars, but never seeking any publicity for herself.

Her speaking style was quite unique: having prepared every word with the care that would normally be given to a university lecture, she stood rigidly, without a gesture, and spoke so softly that it was hard to hear it; but she was always listened to in absolute silence with rapt attention.

Apart from her novel, Lion
in a Den of Daniels
, which was published in England and America, her one major book was a life of Keir Hardie, which was recognised as the best account of the formation of the Labour Party. Caroline travelled to Scotland,
America
and the Netherlands to collect material for it, and received wonderful reviews from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Her formidable archives (unfortunately not as well indexed as they should be) will be a source of immense interest to generations of scholars, and I hope they will find a home where they can be widely studied.

Caroline was very tough, and the guiding commitment in her life and work was to equality, democracy and socialism; she gave me the Communist Manifesto for Christmas one year, knowing that I had not read it and that I should understand the meaning of Marxism if I was to be any good in politics.

Two annual lectures in her memory take place every year, and a book of essays on education and democracy, dedicated to her, has been published.

But there was a great deal more to her than that, for she was a woman of strong character and immense courage, revealed when in her last four years she suffered from a serious cancer and decided that she would not fight it, but would live with it to enjoy every remaining moment that she had.

She taught me how to live and how to die, and you cannot ask any more of anyone than that: loving, caring, thoughtful, critical when necessary, always understanding and forgiving. I had the good fortune and the privilege of living with her, and learning from her, for so long and she was the centrepiece of my life and of the life of my family.

We discussed my decision not to stand again for Chesterfield and it was she who suggested that I should explain it by saying that ‘I was giving up Parliament to spend more time on politics’.

Part Three

Now: Essays and Speeches

Introduction

The themes explored in Part Three reflect both the lasting influence of my parents, and their interests and concerns, and my own experiences during more than half a century of war, peace and political activity. The first four essays set out a reassessment of the role of a Member of Parliament, of the reality of ministerial office in government, and of the prospects of peace and of a new British foreign and defence policy in a challenging and dangerous world dominated by an American empire. These essays are followed by speeches, made in my last years as a Member of Parliament, which restate my enduring interest in and commitment to peace, justice, democracy and socialism.

I have described how my father and my grandfathers had all served as MPs and how I hoped that I too would follow in their footsteps. My growing up was therefore dominated by the idea of public service. I began my parliamentary life seeing the pursuit of social justice and peace as achievable through the Labour movement in Parliament. I then believed that the situation was getting
better
, although more slowly than I had hoped. Now it sometimes seems that the situation is getting worse, more rapidly than I feared.

If the skill and money now available were spent on resolving the world’s problems, instead of preparing for Armageddon against communists, terrorists or whoever else dares to challenge the hegemony of the wealthy, there is nothing we could not achieve if we turned our minds to it. The relationship between social justice, peace, democracy and internationalism now dominates my thinking.

I have lived to see the defeat of the Nazis, the ratification of the Charter of the United Nations, the establishment of the welfare state and the development of a National Health Service (all of which are now under threat), and a welcome end to the old European empires. There has been some progress in women’s rights, with equal pay legislation and more recently the ordination of women in the Church of England – a cause for which my mother campaigned for much of her life.

Like my father, I have found myself moving politically to the left as I have got older. The reason in both cases is similar: experience taught us that democracy does not just mean electing someone to government every five years, but achieving progress through collective effort and a clear understanding of where power truly rests.

In medieval times power was exercised by kings, conquerors and land owners, and in more recent times by multinational corporations, the military and the media. Effective democracy has to develop beyond the idea of an elected Parliament to the exercise of greater control over all these powers that determine our destiny.