This year’s Reith lecturer is the historian and activist Rutger Bregman. Given the way things work in the BBC, it comes as no surprise that a Dutchman, however charismatic, has been chosen to lecture us on modern British history. There are dozens of extremely well-qualified historians in British universities who could have spoken rather more insightfully.
Given the way things work in the BBC, it comes as no surprise that a Dutchman has been chosen to lecture us on modern British history
It isn’t surprising either that in Bregman’s first lecture on ‘Moral Revolution’ he should have declared himself to be a social democrat. The BBC simply cannot understand real diversity of the mind and they ‘turn left’ reflexively. At the moment of Bregman’s declaration, half the audience at home will have winced; some will have switched off – not because they are of a different party, but because no one talking about history should need, or want, to declare their political affiliations. The facts, presented properly and fairly, speak for themselves.
Bregman deserves credit for his second lecture, at least, on the history of British anti-slavery. It is a corrective to all the many BBC programmes and broadcasts that berate Britons, then and now, for having traded or owned slaves at a time when slavery was ubiquitous across the globe. The really important historical question, as Bregman understands, is not why the British owned slaves but why they came to see that slavery was wrong.
It’s in Bregman’s third lecture, released this week, that the problems with his approach and the limitations of his knowledge become clear. Bregman told us in his first lecture that his aim is to ignite a moral revolution in the West. He attempts to do this in his latest lecture by comparing the Fabian Society, the famous socialist think tank founded in 1884, with the neo-liberal movement that emerged after the Second World War to counter the growth of state socialism. Like so much BBC history, Bregman presents it simplistically as ‘goodies versus baddies’, the joyless Sidney and Beatrice Webb versus Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. But it’s Bregman’s misunderstanding of Fabianism which is most revealing and, from the mouth of a self-declared moral reformer, most concerning.
There are the expected errors, of course. The eight-hour-day, votes for women, and public education were ideas that reached the public sphere in the 1860s and 1870s, long before the Fabian Society was founded. They were certainly not, as Bregman suggests, ‘utterly fringe’ ideas, apparently awaiting the Fabians to implement them. The Tyneside engineers had won the eight-hour day in 1871. Elementary education was compulsory by 1882. Unsuccessful amendments to the 1866 and 1884 Reform bills had tried to enfranchise women.
Worse, Bregman ignores inconvenient – because immoral – facts about the Fabians. Mentioning by name H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, he fails to tell us that these two Fabians, along with the Webbs themselves and many more in the society, were enthusiastic eugenicists. Wells and Shaw would not just have limited the family size of those they deemed degenerate: they would, out of their own mouths, have sent them to their deaths.
Nor is there anything about the Fabians later on. In 1935, after a visit to Stalin’s Potemkin villages and at a time of mass starvation and the purges in Russia, Sidney and Beatrice Webb returned from the Soviet Union and published that classic of political and moral blindness, Soviet Communism. A New Civilisation. Bregman refers to the Fabian Society as a ‘Conspiracy of Decency’. Really?
But for a self-declared moral revolutionist, Bregman’s worst failing is that he doesn’t understand either the Fabians or the other traditions of British socialism, many of which were deeply critical of Fabianism as anti-democratic, top-down, socialist elitism. The Fabians believed that by taking control of the state, pulling the right levers, and constructing the correct apparatus, they could dragoon everyone into the ideal socialist society of the future. Morality and consent had nothing to do with it: the people would be reformed whether they liked it or not by policies and structures that the Webbs thought good for them, and all in the name of socialist efficiency.
Writing in his notebook in 1912, the Christian Socialist and genuine moral reformer, R.H. Tawney, probably the most widely read and admired British socialist of the 20th century, had this to say:
‘This is where I think the Fabians are inclined to go wrong. They seem to think you can trick statesmen into a good course of action, without changing their principles, and that by taking sufficient thought society can add several cubits to its stature. It can’t, as long as it lives on the same spiritual diet. No amount of cleverness will get figs off thistles. What I want to do is to get clear in my mind what those moral assumptions or principles are, and put others in their place.’
Bregman has told us in each of his lectures that he wants just such a moral transformation, and he’s used history to exemplify it. But to put it bluntly, he’s backed the wrong horse. There was indeed a strong tradition of ethical socialism in Britain: that of John Ruskin, William Morris and Tawney, to which the earnest, Christian working men who really created the Labour party looked for inspiration. But its focus was on the principles by which we should live, not on the structures of the state. As Eric Hobsbawm (who scorned and derided the Fabians) pointed out long ago, true Labour ignored the salon socialism that Bregman thinks will save us.
The real problem with all of this is the conception of history shared by Bregman and by the BBC: that it is raw material for a message, a creed, a call to arms, a social-democratic crusade. The BBC will continue to present history badly and incorrectly for as long as it tries to use it to enforce an approved message. History is nobody’s fool and it certainly cannot be bent to the will of BBC executives living off licence fee payer handouts as if in some Fabian paradise.
Professor Lawrence Goldman is Executive Editor of History Reclaimed and author of The Life of R. H. Tawney. Socialism and History (Bloomsbury, 2013)
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