- Location
- Tamaki Makaurau
List of Leaders of the Freedom Party
1949-1952: Sir Ernest Benn
1952-1961: Edward Martell
1961-1969: Donald Johnson
1969-1976: Enoch Powell
1976-1984: Don Bennett
1984-2007: John Gouriet
2007-: Sean Gabb
In these times of uncertainty and the new electability of the far-right, it is perhaps natural to look back at the last time Western Europe turned to populist parties as one. In 1956, elections were held in West Germany, where the Federalist Union brought about a brief shock to the dominance of the CDU; in Italy, where the Monarchists performed a similar service; and in France, where a shopkeeper named Pierre Poujade started an anti-tax crusade which widened into a defence of the common man against bureaucrats, foreigners and politicians – readers will see similarities with a certain British party which broke through at the same time.
The story of the Freedom Party begins with the end of the story of the Liberal Party. Once an august party sweeping all before it, the Liberal Party crashed and burned when Labour succeeded in bringing the centre-left vote into their own auspices in 1945. They won 11 seats – fewer even than what became popularly known as the ‘Davies Liberals’ who were in permanent coalition with the Tories – and lost their leader, Archibald Sinclair, by a very narrow margin. The only remaining MP with any real experience or public profile was Megan Lloyd-George, daughter of David and sister of Gwilym, who was even further to the left than her father. Megan Lloyd George was a divisive figure in the Party: the first female party leader in British history by a long distance, and a proponent of oddball ideas such as Keynesianism and the Beveridge Plan. For most of the remaining Liberal members, these concepts were not only insupportable, but incomprehensible to boot.
What Megan Lloyd George failed to understand was that the bulk of the Liberal membership had joined because they believed in certain principles (for instance, free trade and free enterprise) which had flowered under Gladstone and been maintained even by the New Liberals, but no amount of hereditary loyalty would allow them to twist their principles into a philosophy redolent of Socialism. A group of discontented Liberals, led by Sir Ernest Benn (uncle of Tony), split off to form the Freedom Party, which would be built on these old certainties – but the new Party could not break through onto the centre stage until the way was clear.
With membership atrophying, candidates difficult to find or fund, and offers of electoral pacts with the Tories rebuffed, the Lloyd George Liberals were knocked down to two seats in 1950 (although Jo Grimond, not amenable to the new direction, was elected as an Independent Liberal in Orkney and Shetland). There had been no recovery by 1951, meaning that Megan Lloyd George herself lost her seat – she was later to join Labour, which many thought she ought to have done before destroying the Liberals. Roderic Bowen, the last Liberal MP, joined the Conservative Government on the same terms as Gwilym Lloyd-George, except for a less important ministry, and that was that for three-party Britain.
Or so it seemed.
The situation was to change in 1956. By this point, many voters had realised that the Tory Government wasn’t going to reverse the reforms made by the Attlee Government. Churchill, Eden, Butler – none of them had any intention of cutting back on the welfare state to allow the little man to stand on his own two feet. For all their talk, free trade in practice meant protectionism, and One Nation meant that the nationalised monopolies would remain nationalised, all of which meant - as far as they were concerned - that the fight against totalitarian Hitlerism had been lost in the peace.
The Freedom Party’s new leader, Edward Martell, was much more of a self-publicist than Sir Ernest Benn – he attracted headlines by organising what Socialists called ‘scab labour’. When the buses went on strike, he arranged for the Freedomites to run their cars as a replacement service; when the postal service went on a work-to-rule, the Party delivered letters – at a small mark-up for fundraising purposes. Martell’s charisma and Hayekian rhetoric, along with the votes of hacked-off free-marketers and inveterate malcontents, delivered over a dozen seats in the 1956 general election, introducing Britons to such faces as Oliver Smedley, S. W. Alexander, John Creasey, George Watson and Alan Peacock.
The Freedom Party was most successful when it united the anti-Socialist vote in industrial Labour constituencies (for instance, Edward Martell entered Parliament for Bethnal Green), in sharp contrast to the post-war Liberal Party, which seemed to be more of a rural phenomenon during its brief existence. Freedomites performed well in London and in the Yorkshire-Lancashire textile belt – for instance, the seats of Bolton West, Huddersfield West, Colne Valley, and Rochdale. But the surge was only temporary. The country had famously “never had it so good” in 1960, which seemed to legitimise the Butskellite consensus against which the Freedom Party railed. Martell resigned as leader shortly after going backwards in the election of that year.
He was succeeded by Carlisle MP Donald Johnson, who defeated Jo Grimond (Grimond had given up Independent status to join the Freedom Party in 1957) for the leadership, and who brought a new intelligence to the Freedom Party. Previously, it had stood for free enterprise, free trade, electoral reform and general anti-politician sentiment. Johnson and his lean new machine set a more constructive tone. Yes, the charming Johnson remained essentially a populist playing to the public gallery (his famous joke about Macmillan’s 69-seat majority is generally regarded as the nadir of Parliamentary debate), but he also exerted pressure on the Government to establish an Ombudsman and sell off the state-owned pubs (all public houses in Carlisle had been nationalised in 1916 - they really were public). Pamphlets flooded out from Freedomite presses, with titles like ‘The Unservile State’, ‘Free Trade = Cheap Food’ and ‘The Drift to a Corporate State’, all arguing for the abolition of price controls, exchange controls, the welfare state and nationalised industries. Admittedly, George Watson’s argument that Karl Marx invented genocide and that Hitler only had the idea for the Holcaust because he was a Socialist met with a considerable amount of opposition from all sides.
The fortunes of the Freedom Party rose again shortly after their 1960 setback when the economist Arthur Seldon won the Orpington by-election of 1962, thus proving that Freedomite ideas could appeal to the affluent suburbs where Butskellism was supposedly delivering the goods. During the 1960s, political commentators argued themselves hoarse over the relevance of the ‘Seldon Man’ – a comfortable middle-class man with a car and a three-bed semi, who might be attracted by the Freedom Party’s promises of individual liberty and a voucher system to get his children into public schools.
Other prominent Freedomites of the time included: Oliver Smedley, the owner of a pirate radio station; George Kennedy Young, a former MI6 agent who set up a private army with which he intended to launch a coup against Harold Wilson if he “went too far”; Wallace Lawler, who introduced the Freedom Party to the community-based style of vote-gathering which attracted so much criticism from the Labour Party; and John Creasey, the author of over six hundred crime novels and an exponent of a Swiss-style all-party permanent coalition. This proposal was included in the 1965 manifesto but was rejected out of hand by both Wilson and Maudling. Wilson's eight-seat majority was famously good enough for him.
The final intellectual strand of the Freedom Party, though, was opposition to immigration and the Common Market. The EEC, in particular, was a bug-bear of the Freedomites, symbolising everything that was wrong with the post-war consensus: a protectionist economy limiting trade with the world and fuelling high prices, high inflation and Socialist economic planning. Towards the end of the 60s, this issue became predominant, somewhat against the wishes of Donald Johnson, who preferred a broad-based approach. Enoch Powell, long a sympathiser of the Freedom Party’s economic policies, finally defected in 1968 after being sacked from Heath’s frontbench. Immediately, he resigned his Wolverhampton South West seat and won it back in a by-election, thus setting the Powell Precedent. And this moment of high drama delivered him the momentum to challenge Johnson for the leadership shortly afterwards. There was no contest.
Powell campaigned heavily on the Europe question in 1970 and achieved the Freedom Party’s most successful result by appealing to disaffected Tories who weren’t keen on Heath’s quasi-federalist position on the most important issue of the day. Both major party leaders went to bed before election day certain that they would win, but both were wrong: the Freedom Party held them to a hung Parliament, the first in forty years. John Creasy suggested an All-Party Coalition, but Wilson preferred to go into Opposition and rebuild – or, for less generous observers, keep his party from splitting apart on the Europe issue by sitting it out.
The referendum was held before the UK was due to enter, in 1972. This was part of the price Heath had to pay for the two-party coalition, the others being three Cabinet seats and the abolition of key Keynesian tools such as incomes policy. Naturally, the Cabinet seats resulted in vicious in-fighting between Powell and people like MacLeod, and the end of the Price and Income Board incited huge industrial unrest, and the referendum tore the coalition – not to mention the Freedom Party – apart.
A strong campaign from the Refrain side, uniting Freedomites, Labour left-wingers and some Tory mavericks, made Enoch Powell the most popular politician in the land, but it wasn’t enough to carry the country. In a 52-48 result, Refrain lost and Powell had to decide whether to stay in Government and carry out an entry process he thought would destroy the United Kingdom, or pull out impetuously and prove that the Freedom Party really wasn’t a serious governing party. He thought long and hard, but in the end, he sold out his much-vaunted principles in return for a much more stringent Commonwealth immigration policy, which would have included voluntary repatriation for the first time.
This was unacceptable to many of the hardcore supporters of the Freedom Party. John Kingsley Read, MP for Blackburn, declared the referendum “a provisional result which takes us to the next stage” and vowed to fight Europe and immigration even at the cost a corporatist state. Many of the new entrants to the Freedomite Parliamentary Party were of similar instincts, and they split off to form the National Party later in 1972, when it was beyond doubt that Powell had lost the sympathy of the people. So many MPs defected, in fact, that the Conservative-Freedomite coalition lost its majority, and had to eke out deals with Scottish and Welsh Nationalists, Dick Taverne’s short-lived Social Democrats, and even Vanessa Redgrave’s Radical Alliance, in order to survive into the spring of 1973. At this point, the Freedom Party was almost entirely wiped out. The new game in town was the National Party.
The four remaining MPs selected Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett, former commander of the Pathfinder Force in the Second World War and briefly a Liberal MP for 73 days in 1945, as their new Leader. This was a sensible choice, as he was just as opposed to the EEC as the National Party were, but hadn’t been tainted by the Coalition. He had resigned as Defence Minister the day after the referendum and saw out the Parliament on the backbenches. Unfortunately, Bennett was an Australian who didn’t suffer fools gladly and had a chip on his shoulder about the aristocracy, none of which was very attractive to the sorts of middle-class people who were previously amenable to voting for the Freedom Party. After twenty-two years in Parliament, the Freedomites lost all their seats in 1978 – Margaret Thatcher had by this point, of course, stolen most of their raison d’etre. However, Bennett did win a seat in the 1979 European elections, which were held under STV as part of the price for the Powellites’ continued support for EEC entry in 1972-3. Since then, however, the Freedomites have declined to the status of a Randian grouplet.
It is now the National Party, sustained for many years merely by European Parliament seats, who pose a populist threat to the two-party duopoly. And while it is tempting to muse on what Britain would be like if the Freedomites – or even the Liberals – had survived in any meaningful way, it is up to us to make sure that the current right-wing surge in Europe ends up being a flash in the pan in the manner of the French Poujadistes or the German Federalist Union, rather than the two-decade institution that was the Freedom Party.
1949-1952: Sir Ernest Benn
1952-1961: Edward Martell
1961-1969: Donald Johnson
1969-1976: Enoch Powell
1976-1984: Don Bennett
1984-2007: John Gouriet
2007-: Sean Gabb
In these times of uncertainty and the new electability of the far-right, it is perhaps natural to look back at the last time Western Europe turned to populist parties as one. In 1956, elections were held in West Germany, where the Federalist Union brought about a brief shock to the dominance of the CDU; in Italy, where the Monarchists performed a similar service; and in France, where a shopkeeper named Pierre Poujade started an anti-tax crusade which widened into a defence of the common man against bureaucrats, foreigners and politicians – readers will see similarities with a certain British party which broke through at the same time.
The story of the Freedom Party begins with the end of the story of the Liberal Party. Once an august party sweeping all before it, the Liberal Party crashed and burned when Labour succeeded in bringing the centre-left vote into their own auspices in 1945. They won 11 seats – fewer even than what became popularly known as the ‘Davies Liberals’ who were in permanent coalition with the Tories – and lost their leader, Archibald Sinclair, by a very narrow margin. The only remaining MP with any real experience or public profile was Megan Lloyd-George, daughter of David and sister of Gwilym, who was even further to the left than her father. Megan Lloyd George was a divisive figure in the Party: the first female party leader in British history by a long distance, and a proponent of oddball ideas such as Keynesianism and the Beveridge Plan. For most of the remaining Liberal members, these concepts were not only insupportable, but incomprehensible to boot.
What Megan Lloyd George failed to understand was that the bulk of the Liberal membership had joined because they believed in certain principles (for instance, free trade and free enterprise) which had flowered under Gladstone and been maintained even by the New Liberals, but no amount of hereditary loyalty would allow them to twist their principles into a philosophy redolent of Socialism. A group of discontented Liberals, led by Sir Ernest Benn (uncle of Tony), split off to form the Freedom Party, which would be built on these old certainties – but the new Party could not break through onto the centre stage until the way was clear.
With membership atrophying, candidates difficult to find or fund, and offers of electoral pacts with the Tories rebuffed, the Lloyd George Liberals were knocked down to two seats in 1950 (although Jo Grimond, not amenable to the new direction, was elected as an Independent Liberal in Orkney and Shetland). There had been no recovery by 1951, meaning that Megan Lloyd George herself lost her seat – she was later to join Labour, which many thought she ought to have done before destroying the Liberals. Roderic Bowen, the last Liberal MP, joined the Conservative Government on the same terms as Gwilym Lloyd-George, except for a less important ministry, and that was that for three-party Britain.
Or so it seemed.
The situation was to change in 1956. By this point, many voters had realised that the Tory Government wasn’t going to reverse the reforms made by the Attlee Government. Churchill, Eden, Butler – none of them had any intention of cutting back on the welfare state to allow the little man to stand on his own two feet. For all their talk, free trade in practice meant protectionism, and One Nation meant that the nationalised monopolies would remain nationalised, all of which meant - as far as they were concerned - that the fight against totalitarian Hitlerism had been lost in the peace.
The Freedom Party’s new leader, Edward Martell, was much more of a self-publicist than Sir Ernest Benn – he attracted headlines by organising what Socialists called ‘scab labour’. When the buses went on strike, he arranged for the Freedomites to run their cars as a replacement service; when the postal service went on a work-to-rule, the Party delivered letters – at a small mark-up for fundraising purposes. Martell’s charisma and Hayekian rhetoric, along with the votes of hacked-off free-marketers and inveterate malcontents, delivered over a dozen seats in the 1956 general election, introducing Britons to such faces as Oliver Smedley, S. W. Alexander, John Creasey, George Watson and Alan Peacock.
The Freedom Party was most successful when it united the anti-Socialist vote in industrial Labour constituencies (for instance, Edward Martell entered Parliament for Bethnal Green), in sharp contrast to the post-war Liberal Party, which seemed to be more of a rural phenomenon during its brief existence. Freedomites performed well in London and in the Yorkshire-Lancashire textile belt – for instance, the seats of Bolton West, Huddersfield West, Colne Valley, and Rochdale. But the surge was only temporary. The country had famously “never had it so good” in 1960, which seemed to legitimise the Butskellite consensus against which the Freedom Party railed. Martell resigned as leader shortly after going backwards in the election of that year.
He was succeeded by Carlisle MP Donald Johnson, who defeated Jo Grimond (Grimond had given up Independent status to join the Freedom Party in 1957) for the leadership, and who brought a new intelligence to the Freedom Party. Previously, it had stood for free enterprise, free trade, electoral reform and general anti-politician sentiment. Johnson and his lean new machine set a more constructive tone. Yes, the charming Johnson remained essentially a populist playing to the public gallery (his famous joke about Macmillan’s 69-seat majority is generally regarded as the nadir of Parliamentary debate), but he also exerted pressure on the Government to establish an Ombudsman and sell off the state-owned pubs (all public houses in Carlisle had been nationalised in 1916 - they really were public). Pamphlets flooded out from Freedomite presses, with titles like ‘The Unservile State’, ‘Free Trade = Cheap Food’ and ‘The Drift to a Corporate State’, all arguing for the abolition of price controls, exchange controls, the welfare state and nationalised industries. Admittedly, George Watson’s argument that Karl Marx invented genocide and that Hitler only had the idea for the Holcaust because he was a Socialist met with a considerable amount of opposition from all sides.
The fortunes of the Freedom Party rose again shortly after their 1960 setback when the economist Arthur Seldon won the Orpington by-election of 1962, thus proving that Freedomite ideas could appeal to the affluent suburbs where Butskellism was supposedly delivering the goods. During the 1960s, political commentators argued themselves hoarse over the relevance of the ‘Seldon Man’ – a comfortable middle-class man with a car and a three-bed semi, who might be attracted by the Freedom Party’s promises of individual liberty and a voucher system to get his children into public schools.
Other prominent Freedomites of the time included: Oliver Smedley, the owner of a pirate radio station; George Kennedy Young, a former MI6 agent who set up a private army with which he intended to launch a coup against Harold Wilson if he “went too far”; Wallace Lawler, who introduced the Freedom Party to the community-based style of vote-gathering which attracted so much criticism from the Labour Party; and John Creasey, the author of over six hundred crime novels and an exponent of a Swiss-style all-party permanent coalition. This proposal was included in the 1965 manifesto but was rejected out of hand by both Wilson and Maudling. Wilson's eight-seat majority was famously good enough for him.
The final intellectual strand of the Freedom Party, though, was opposition to immigration and the Common Market. The EEC, in particular, was a bug-bear of the Freedomites, symbolising everything that was wrong with the post-war consensus: a protectionist economy limiting trade with the world and fuelling high prices, high inflation and Socialist economic planning. Towards the end of the 60s, this issue became predominant, somewhat against the wishes of Donald Johnson, who preferred a broad-based approach. Enoch Powell, long a sympathiser of the Freedom Party’s economic policies, finally defected in 1968 after being sacked from Heath’s frontbench. Immediately, he resigned his Wolverhampton South West seat and won it back in a by-election, thus setting the Powell Precedent. And this moment of high drama delivered him the momentum to challenge Johnson for the leadership shortly afterwards. There was no contest.
Powell campaigned heavily on the Europe question in 1970 and achieved the Freedom Party’s most successful result by appealing to disaffected Tories who weren’t keen on Heath’s quasi-federalist position on the most important issue of the day. Both major party leaders went to bed before election day certain that they would win, but both were wrong: the Freedom Party held them to a hung Parliament, the first in forty years. John Creasy suggested an All-Party Coalition, but Wilson preferred to go into Opposition and rebuild – or, for less generous observers, keep his party from splitting apart on the Europe issue by sitting it out.
The referendum was held before the UK was due to enter, in 1972. This was part of the price Heath had to pay for the two-party coalition, the others being three Cabinet seats and the abolition of key Keynesian tools such as incomes policy. Naturally, the Cabinet seats resulted in vicious in-fighting between Powell and people like MacLeod, and the end of the Price and Income Board incited huge industrial unrest, and the referendum tore the coalition – not to mention the Freedom Party – apart.
A strong campaign from the Refrain side, uniting Freedomites, Labour left-wingers and some Tory mavericks, made Enoch Powell the most popular politician in the land, but it wasn’t enough to carry the country. In a 52-48 result, Refrain lost and Powell had to decide whether to stay in Government and carry out an entry process he thought would destroy the United Kingdom, or pull out impetuously and prove that the Freedom Party really wasn’t a serious governing party. He thought long and hard, but in the end, he sold out his much-vaunted principles in return for a much more stringent Commonwealth immigration policy, which would have included voluntary repatriation for the first time.
This was unacceptable to many of the hardcore supporters of the Freedom Party. John Kingsley Read, MP for Blackburn, declared the referendum “a provisional result which takes us to the next stage” and vowed to fight Europe and immigration even at the cost a corporatist state. Many of the new entrants to the Freedomite Parliamentary Party were of similar instincts, and they split off to form the National Party later in 1972, when it was beyond doubt that Powell had lost the sympathy of the people. So many MPs defected, in fact, that the Conservative-Freedomite coalition lost its majority, and had to eke out deals with Scottish and Welsh Nationalists, Dick Taverne’s short-lived Social Democrats, and even Vanessa Redgrave’s Radical Alliance, in order to survive into the spring of 1973. At this point, the Freedom Party was almost entirely wiped out. The new game in town was the National Party.
The four remaining MPs selected Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett, former commander of the Pathfinder Force in the Second World War and briefly a Liberal MP for 73 days in 1945, as their new Leader. This was a sensible choice, as he was just as opposed to the EEC as the National Party were, but hadn’t been tainted by the Coalition. He had resigned as Defence Minister the day after the referendum and saw out the Parliament on the backbenches. Unfortunately, Bennett was an Australian who didn’t suffer fools gladly and had a chip on his shoulder about the aristocracy, none of which was very attractive to the sorts of middle-class people who were previously amenable to voting for the Freedom Party. After twenty-two years in Parliament, the Freedomites lost all their seats in 1978 – Margaret Thatcher had by this point, of course, stolen most of their raison d’etre. However, Bennett did win a seat in the 1979 European elections, which were held under STV as part of the price for the Powellites’ continued support for EEC entry in 1972-3. Since then, however, the Freedomites have declined to the status of a Randian grouplet.
It is now the National Party, sustained for many years merely by European Parliament seats, who pose a populist threat to the two-party duopoly. And while it is tempting to muse on what Britain would be like if the Freedomites – or even the Liberals – had survived in any meaningful way, it is up to us to make sure that the current right-wing surge in Europe ends up being a flash in the pan in the manner of the French Poujadistes or the German Federalist Union, rather than the two-decade institution that was the Freedom Party.