The Tamworth Manifesto Today
Revisiting the origins of the Conservative Party.
The Conservative Party is in a bad place at present. It faces the prospect of an existential defeat at the hands of Labour, having spent the past twenty years occluding itself from any morsel of its eponymous tradition to avoid this exact outcome. Its commitment to conservatism has been only to catalyse its political ruination in Britain, which appears all but complete and perhaps shall be formalised in the party’s destruction. Responsible thought should thus turn to a reconstitution of conservatism both within and beyond electoral politics, in other words the adaption and reapplication of the yet valuable tradition to prevent it undeservedly withering away. Nearly 200 years ago, the Tories faced a similarly serious crisis in how to operate within the new paradigm established by the Great Reform Act of 1832. In December 1834, the newly appointed Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet, answered this challenge in a nationally published address to his electors in Tamworth, known today as the Tamworth Manifesto. In doing so, he transformed the Tories from an almost exclusively reactionary grouping, whose opposition to electoral reform drove the country to the brink of popular insurrection, to the modern Conservatives which have become one of the most successful parties in the Western world. Accordingly, could Peel’s principles again act as a bedrock for British conservatism and revive its seemingly doomed fortunes?
Peel’s unequivocal acquiescence to both the text of the Reform Act and to its spirit, although he opposed both as a Tory during the law’s passage, also formed the main point of contention a conservative of subsequent eras could have with the manifesto. He defined this spirit, or at least an interpretation to which he could accord, as:
“a careful review of institutions, civil and ecclesiastical, undertaken in a friendly temper combining, with the firm maintenance of established rights, the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances.”
As the historian John Cannon’s Oxford Dictionary of British History discusses on this subject, the passage above “left open who was to decide what was proof, what the word ‘real’ signified, and what would happen if the reform of abuses threatened established rights,” making Peel’s approach either “a policy of prudent adjustment or… a recipe for continual surrender.” The Conservatives’ performance in recent decades may suggest the latter has ultimately proven true, but that was certainly not Peel’s original intention. The simplistic notion which has been supposedly extracted from Peel by recent generations, that the Conservative Party must keep restlessly reforming itself to survive no matter what, is undone by his description of the reformist spirit he opposed:
“if, by adopting the spirit of the Reform Bill, it be meant that we are to live in a perpetual vortex of agitation; that public men can only support themselves in public estimation by adopting every popular impression of the day, — by promising the instant redress of anything which anybody may call an abuse — by abandoning altogether that great aid of government — more powerful than either law or reason — the respect for ancient rights, and the deference to prescriptive authority… I will not undertake to adopt it.”
This characterisation is closer to the contemporary Conservative Party, or at least its outward appearance of stumbling from one emergent problem to the next, than the earlier extract. Spin and spats, social media and ever-shifting news cycles, massed polling and dogmatic preachers for issues at every turn, all these lend to the plausibility that Peel’s desire for prudent governance has fallen into the very “vortex of agitation” he feared. The knowledge of and respect for long-established rights, institutions and customs are thus crucial for the body of principles in the manifesto to work effectively. Without that grounding, a doctrine that repeatedly capitulates to whoever defines claimed abuses or grievances becomes much likelier. With them, Peel’s dictum remains a fundamental expression of the conservative approach to government.
Following this general declaration of principles, Peel spent the remainder of the manifesto applying them to several matters of the day. For instance, he expressed openness about considering any conclusions of the ongoing royal commission into municipal corporations, which found them in 1835 to be a particularly corrupt and dysfunctional unit of local government. He also endorsed reforms to the potential misuse of Civil List pensions and religious equality regarding civil privileges. Overall, whilst his platform in the manifesto may not seem exciting to modern readers, nor resembling the exhaustive plans of recent party manifestos, it was both of a moderated conservative temperament and entirely consistent with his stated principles. He summarised his government’s other objectives with less direct reference to principle:
“the maintenance of peace — the scrupulous and honourable fulfilment, without reference to their original policy, of all existing engagements with Foreign Powers — the support of public credit — the enforcement of strict economy — the just and impartial consideration of what is due to all interests — agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial.”
This was, if rather brief, a recognisably conservative economic and foreign policy for the time, consistent with his Tory predecessor the Duke of Wellington. Peel’s second premiership in the early 1840s saw these ideas pursued more earnestly.
Another notable facet of the manifesto is who Peel chose to name explicitly, Viscount Althorp, later 3rd Earl Spencer, and Lord John Russell, later 1st Earl Russell, alongside proposals of theirs he supported. Both were prominent Whig politicians who had counted amongst the major proponents of the Reform Act. This was to reinforce his previously stated convictions rather than indicate outright consensus with the Whigs since another expressed desire, to advance Anglican interests in Ireland, was a clear fault line between parties that ended his first premiership. Indeed, his description earlier in the document of those to whom he addressed his manifesto confirms his pragmatic approach towards party politics:
“to that great and intelligent class of society of which you are a portion… which is much less interested in the contentions of party, than in the maintenance of order and the cause of good government.”
The nascent Conservatives had to be closer to Whig opinion due to Peel’s support of the reforms prior Tories had opposed and the evident unsustainability of anti-reform positions. However, his arrangement of priorities leads to a more consistent and responsible idea of government, one firmly valuing national political interests over the merely partisan, which can even be carried into opposition effectively. This statement is also a demonstration of the loose party control during this period, since the non-partisan ideal of government Whigs had successfully perpetuated for over a century only began breaking down in the late 1820s, as debates over Catholic emancipation and electoral reform became pitched. The current state of party discipline and general partisanship, though, lacks tolerance for approving statements about political opposition like Peel’s, in spite of the commonalities parties may share. This points towards the wider difficulty of reapplying the manifesto to today’s politics, namely the radically changed milieu since the 1830s. These principles easily retain their usefulness as long as the opposition is not diametrically opposed to their spirit or underpinnings. The bulk of Whigs could have been trusted in this regard at the time, but not all parties or factions since have been so kind to the place of venerable customs or institutions in politics. Although this does not render Peel’s ideas untenable, it reflects the greater challenge of governing conservatively in modern times.
Whilst Peel’s government fell in 1835 to a coalition of Whigs, Radicals and Irish Repealers, the Conservatives’ minority position in the Commons was substantially improved by the election that year. Two elections later in 1841, under a policy programme still based on the Tamworth Manifesto, his party were returned with their first majority and Peel became Prime Minister for the second time. Meanwhile, the composition of the party system remained in flux for a few more years after 1834, albeit far less than the years before the Reform Act, partly because of the foundation of the Conservative Party in this slightly accommodating manner.
There is somewhat of an irony in considering the manifesto today, since to reassume such a measured politics might take a considerably greater degree of institutional reform than Peel envisioned in his time. However, this may equally be a critical misreading of Peel’s doctrine. Conservatives fundamentally believe in institutions, in building and maintaining them to be inherited in relatively good order by future generations, not in pulling them down or gutting them when issues emerge. Hence, whether contemporary tempers are strained or not, the act of careful review and correction will always be a prudent, conservative response to political problems. The impulse to wipe the institutional slate clean in some way, which despite all the Tory histrionics the Whigs largely resisted in the 1830s, is fraught with danger, not least its tendency to perceive itself above the accumulated knowledge that has sustained political institutions’ functionality for sometimes centuries of ever-altering conditions. The products of such an impulse have so often been rootless things, formulations of abstract principles incapable of resolving the grievances which spurred their creation and proving far less adaptable than what they replaced. If Britain’s departure from the European Union initiated a contemporary realignment of politics, there are no current indications of arrival at the same point of conclusion and reflection as Peel had reached by late 1834. The main parties are openly volatile in composition and the high politics which precipitated the realignment has not yet been properly resolved; new constitutional ambiguities and uncertainty still abound. Whatever becomes ascendant in the end remains completely unpredictable for now. However, the principles contained within the Tamworth Manifesto still remain an eminently sensible and naturally conservative approach to government, worthy as a source of inspiration for the future evolution of conservatism in politics.