Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- PART ONE INTRODUCTION
- PART TWO FORMATIVE INFLUENCES
- PART THREE THE TERMS OF THE CONTEST
- 5 The pale of the Constitution
- 6 The politics of the street
- PART FOUR THE RECONSTITUTION OF LIBERAL LANCASHIRE
- PART FIVE FIELDS OF RECRUITMENT
- PART SIX GOING TO THE COUNTRY
- PART SEVEN CONCLUSION
- APPENDICES
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The politics of the street
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- PART ONE INTRODUCTION
- PART TWO FORMATIVE INFLUENCES
- PART THREE THE TERMS OF THE CONTEST
- 5 The pale of the Constitution
- 6 The politics of the street
- PART FOUR THE RECONSTITUTION OF LIBERAL LANCASHIRE
- PART FIVE FIELDS OF RECRUITMENT
- PART SIX GOING TO THE COUNTRY
- PART SEVEN CONCLUSION
- APPENDICES
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Whatever one may think about democratic government, it is just as well to have practical experience of its rough and slatternly foundations. No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections. Here you come in contact with all sorts of persons and every current of national life. You feel the constitution at work in its primary processes. Dignity may suffer, the superfine gloss is soon worn away; nice particularisms and special private policies are scraped off; much has to be accepted with a shrug, a sigh or a smile; but at any rate in the end one knows a good deal about what happens and why.
Churchill, Great ContemporariesElection campaigns were entered upon with zest and lived out their phrenetic course in a blaze of histrionics. Their importance did not rest in their capacity to effect dramatic conversions (they were the road to Westminster not Damascus) but their effect upon voting, although imponderable, cannot be ignored. The Edwardians acted out their politics in public, in a style more reminiscent of their fathers' forthrightness than of their descendants' reticence. An election campaign was perhaps a time to articulate inherent social attitudes politically, or perhaps a time for a preconceived political role to be cast off: a period for the crystallisation or disintegration of previous loyalties: a time for affirmation, or denial, or withdrawal.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Lancashire and the New Liberalism , pp. 130 - 150Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1971