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Mazda's Maps and Mwikiboxes

The Radical Social Liberal Party is one of Britain's more unique political institutions, originally founded as a non-partisan movement in the late 1940s by a group of servicemen returned from the occupation of West Germany, where they had been influenced by a small German party of the same name. The RSLP, from its inception, has promoted as its core tenets the three prongs of Freiwirtschaft - an economic policy invented by the German-Argentinean Silvio Gesell. Gesell believed in free trade (the RSLP's most mainstream idea), free land (i.e. communal ownership of land), and free money (i.e. the discouragement of money-hoarding by charging a demurrage tax on unspent currency). These ideas have been the basis of RSLP policy ever since.

Originally known as the Radical Social Liberal Movement, the group infiltrated the Liberal Party in one of its weaker historic phases, while publishing a vast quantity of pamphlets under its own auspices (David Hoggard has an almost-complete collection in his Political Ephemera Archive above the Izmir Kebab shop in Gainsborough, if you're interested). However, the link with the Liberals eventually came to an end in the late 1960s when the Party grew uncomfortable about joint projects with the Gesellschaft think-tank in Germany, which employed more ex-fascists than was deemed acceptable. The Radical Social Liberals, long since seen as "cranks" even by the oddballs who made up the supermajority of the Liberal membership in those days, were expelled in the dramatic 1969 Conference, which is still commemorated in song at the Lib Dem Glee Club.

The currency cranks founded an independent party in the aftermath of the rupture, and became a tabloid favourite: disreputable publications painted their Free Economics Courses as sessions for indoctrination and brainwashing, when in fact cultism proper was limited to a few splinters. The slavery case associated with the Institute of Free Economic Thought reflected negatively on the main stream of the movement due to media hostility, much to the concern of those who had thrust the culprits out of the Party as early as 1972.

Electoral victories eluded the RSLP in the early years, apart from some local election gains in areas of heavy organisation, such as Bradford. Fortunately for the Party, the UK implemented Single Transferable Vote for the 1979 European elections. The electorate jumped towards minor parties (leaving the default protest option, the Liberals, with a disappointing poll), returning one MEP apiece from the Ecology, Communist and Radical Social Liberal Parties, as well as three from the National Front - who split three ways before the next election.

Subsequently, while the RSLP has only ever held one seat in Westminster (Bradford West after the 2012 by-election), it maintained a presence in Strasbourg until Britain left the European Union. The Party's promotion of Free Trade caused some internal division on the EEC question in the early years, but they have generally held to the idea that the EU is a force for backward-looking protectionism ever since they discovered that it paid electoral dividends. They were, therefore, the centrist wing of Farage's Independence Alliance from its formation until the post-Referendum collapse. As an independent party, in 2019, they claimed credit for unseating the last Official National Front MEP, which caused some confusion among pro-Europe anti-fascists - the ONF, of course, being very much in favour of the EU.

There are big questions about what the RSLP's future looks like without EU funding or parliamentary seats. But one thing is certain: these cranks will never stop talking about local currency schemes.
 
Having kept largely to my own company for the last few weeks, I am now at the stage of mental disintegration that leads me to believe that this is a socially acceptable thing to do.

To Box His Wikis: A Self-Insert TL

Among the British politicians of the 20th century, few have been as reviled among their contemporaries as F. D. Hoggard, yet so popular within the rarefied circles of Internet-poisoned trivia nerds.

Born to a Methodist minister and theologian in the early years of the Edwardian era, Hoggard was always intended to enter the ministry on account of his uselessness at all forms of productive labour - combined with the intellectual laziness that made an honourable profession impossible. Even in those days, the Methodist Church of Great Britain fulfilled an integral function in society as a charitable home for the congenitally talentless. However, Hoggard was fortunate enough to come onto the scene at a time of great social change, when new vistas were opening up for the mediocre middle-classes. As the 20th century went on, more and more of these unfortunate people would trespass upon the halls of Westminster, hitherto monopolised by men distinguished by wealth, sexual appetite or intelligence. Emphasis on the 'or'.

The itinerancy demanded of Methodist preachers led to a peripatetic childhood that Hoggard's biographers compare pointedly to his political career. He was sent down from Ashville College for 'moral corruption' and for falsifying references in his essays - a fracas that discouraged the authorities at Cambridge from accepting him to study at the family University. Instead, Hoggard made do with the family second-choice University - that of Wales. While at Aberystwyth, he made his first foray into the political world that was to become his native habitat, and joined the University Labour Club.

One of the more arcane duties of the Club was to conduct the Labour campaign in the University of Wales constituency, which had for electors the graduates of the University. This involved assisting the campaign of George M. Ll. Davies in 1923, when he ran as an Independent Christian Pacifist endorsed by the Labour Party and won by ten votes; and again when he lost as an official Labour candidate in 1924. Davies was an important mentor for the young Hoggard, who was already repulsed by the sheer wastage of human life in the First World War and was now introduced to the Fellowship of Reconciliation and began to develop an outlook marrying together simplistic Socialism, Methodism and Pacifism.

Before taking his finals, Hoggard made the impetuous and extremely foolish decision to run away to New Zealand. By coincidence, he had been given an entire run of The New Age and some of the early works of Major C. H. Douglas shortly before his departure, and this suitcase-full of ideology proved to be the only reading matter on board the RMS Niagara. Inevitably, the intellectually weak Hoggard was ground down by the weight of literature and began to believe in a more specific form of Socialism that offered a utopian vision of guild socialism - not so much the fetishism of nationalisation, but of enabling the workers to guide their own labour and thereby overcome the enervating rupture of worker and capitalist. For Hoggard the primary object of state control was the creation of credit, upon which all economic activity depended. And this was all underpinned by a humanistic, ethical Christianity, which gave him hope that the human potential for peace, happiness and creativity could be unleashed by means of economic reform.

In many ways, the journey to New Zealand (and his subsequent experiences of a more egalitarian society) was the event which crystallised Hoggard's awkward worldview, and doomed him forever to wander from hearth to hearth in search of kindred spirits. Nothing much needs to be said of his Antipodean sojourn: for a few years, he lived in the far North and took up farming (badly) and writing (terribly). On the political front, Hoggard campaigned in the Bay of Islands for Hugh Sweeney of the Country Party in 1925, but returned to England before Capt. Rushworth won the seat in 1928.

Having substantially cacked it in New Zealand, Hoggard now returned to Britain - namely the parental manse at Derby, where he completed The Peaceable Economy, a political tract which sold several dozen copies and won him the Labour nomination in Belper, defeating an even less local candidate. To the surprise of some, he won the constituency: he ascribed the win to his ability as a middle class intellectual to appeal beyond the working classes, although others pointed to the intervention of a Liberal and the national swing to MacDonald's Labour Party.

Thus began a tortuous and ill-advised entrance into electoral politics, in which Hoggard's incompetence and fundamental unseriousness played a role which should have doomed him long before they, in fact, did.

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To Box His Wikis: Part II

And a brand new backbencher, Hoggard contributed little of consequence to the - admittedly dubious - achievements of Ramsay MacDonald's second minority government. Hansard records several patsy questions and a maiden speech mainly concerned with trivia regarding the Belper constituency, most of which he got wrong. Beyond Hansard, however, anecdotes from colleagues recall his habit of curling up in the foetal position underneath a table for several hours before a planned parliamentary intervention, and occasionally doing the same in the aftermath of a speech, except with considerably more weeping. We must have the appropriate amount of pity for a rare example of the non-exhibitionist politician.

In those early years, Hoggard made more impact behind the scenes than on the floor of the Commons. He found the meetings of the Independent Labour Party - a major affiliate of the broader Labour Party - a more congenial forum for his politics, speaking against the unimaginative policies of the Cabinet and calling instead for the nationalisation of the Bank of England and the use of its credit for productive purposes, with the ultimate objective of conquering unemployment. By nailing his colours to the mast in this way, Hoggard came into closer co-operation with members such as Oliver Baldwin (with whom he had much in common, but erroneously considered to be his intellectual inferior), John Strachey and - alarmingly - Sir Oswald Mosley.

Hoggard assisted Strachey in producing the groundwork for the Mosley Memorandum, although he privately deplored the vagueness of the resultant document and its focus on constitutional innovation. He disliked the notion of technocratic government, seeing at as a threat to the careers of unqualified amateurs like himself. However, Mosley did persuade him of the advisability of reforming the House of Lords to be based on economic groups, akin to the later Irish Seanad. After all, Hoggard argued, we spend at least as much of our waking life in labour as we do engaging in the life of our arbitrarily-drawn parliamentary constituency. Ultimately, though, the Mosley relationship was not a fulfilling one for Hoggard - he was intimidated by the Baronet's effortless comfort within the upper-class scene and his charisma with the masses. Additionally, he was jealous that Mosley got all the credit for the group's employment proposals while contributing very little of the work.

The Baldwin relationship was more fruitful, as the pair shared a social sphere and a fondness for an idealised England of charming villages freed from the harsh yokes of class-conflict and industry. Both were acolytes of the Williams Blake and Morris in their general outlook, which was fundamentally out of step with their times and with logic. However, despite these similarities, Hoggard thought Baldwin strikingly undeveloped in his critique of the financial system, and in fact gave his supposed friend a roasting in the dedication of his pamphlet Where Credit Is Due. Baldwin was, it seems, one of the "nascent reformers in dire need of education" for whom the publication was written. It mainly consisted of the dense monetary reform arguments cut from the final, politically saleable version of the Mosley Memorandum, and was therefore virtually unreadable.

When Mosley formed his New Party, Hoggard joined within days, but drifted away within weeks. It was a major blow to his self-esteem that Oliver Baldwin had worked out the end results of Mosley's drift to the Right within a day of joining. However, he later boasted that Strachey had taken much longer to divine the Fascist nature of Mosley's organisation than himself - this was a point of pride, as Strachey's literary output had always overawed Hoggard. Even so, it was not a good look to take personal gratification in only being the third-most-gullible member of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

But Hoggard was no longer a member of the PLP - neither the Party nor the ILP (at the time on a path of growing independence, something that Hoggard had favoured while a member) was massively interested in having him back, despite the bond that had emerged between Hoggard and James Maxton on the subject of hair styling. In fact, during his New Party dalliance, the local Party in Belper had held its nomination meeting, leaving Hoggard without an obvious way of continuing his career - such as it was. He stood as an Independent in the sudden 1931 election, holding no rallies and mounting no campaign. His woeful performance at the polls, together with his brutally knocked self-confidence and the disillusion he felt about the Government he had helped to elect in 1929, should by all rational measures have impressed upon Hoggard that politics was not the metier for him.

As we shall see, though, Hoggard very rarely learned a lesson if he could help it.

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To Box His Wikis: Part III

The damage to Hoggard's self-esteem caused him to take drastic action. Fearful of the consequences of financial crisis overwhelming the world, and doubtful of his ability to contribute any meaningful salve to the problem, he adopted a Quietist attitude of private self-betterment in the face of a social crisis. Being perverse, though, his route to betterment lay not in education or the acquisition of status, but in attempting to join the proletariat from which he had hitherto set himself apart, even within the Labour Party. He returned to Wales - this time the Valleys of South Wales, where he took a gruelling job as a miner. He was desperately unpopular in Derbyshire on account of all the things he'd said and done.

This was, in part, a self-imposed purgatory of dust, grime, darkness, unsociable hours and animal abuse. In part it was also an unattractive form of tourism, as Hoggard could easily have turned to the Methodist Church for a job and was therefore taking a low-paid position that would have been a godsend for a genuinely unemployed poor person at the lowest depths of the Depression. Even more damningly, the decision to go down the pit came partly out of considerations relating to his remaining political ambitions. He would, he imagined, become purified of the Fascism-by-association that had come his way through his friendship with Oswald Mosley by taking a horrible and stereotypically left-wing employment.

Furthermore, Hoggard's choice of destination owed a substantial amount to his psephological studies: in choosing to live in Merthyr Tydfil, he consciously chose to live in a constituency where a third of the voters had surmounted the psychological barrier of voting for a member of the New Party in 1931, and where the sitting MP was a fairly elderly ILPer. The ILP (which appealed to Hoggard on account of its proclivity towards tolerance of radicalism, nonconformity and pacifism) was at this stage haemorrhaging members on account of its disaffiliation from the Labour Party. ILP MPs had argued for their right to break the whip to vote against Ramsay MacDonald's orthodox financial policies, but had been denied even by the majority faction of the Labour Party, who broke with MacDonald anyway. On the ground, this meant that the Independent Labour Party was desperate for warm blood, even that belonging to F. D. Hoggard.

The story of Hoggard's political resurrection is easily told: he made himself indispensable to the Merthyr ILP and, when Wallhead inevitably died, leveraged his (politically calculated) personal friendships to defeat a former Glasgow MP for the selection. Then it was just a matter of organisation and communication of his position as a South Wales Miners' Federation delegate and Peace Pledge Union activist to overcome the challenge from Official Labour's S. O. Davies, who was superior to him in every way but was less able to appeal to middle class non-Socialists who had supported the New Party with varying degrees of enthusiasm three years before. Hoggard was back. Just.

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But this success came at a cost. Hoggard's position within the ILP was holed below the waterline by his gamesmanship of the selection against the candidate aligned with Maxton's Glasgow clique, and the reception from the other MPs was therefore rather frosty. In fact, almost as soon as he had arrived anew at Westminster, Hoggard was tempted to defect to a new splinter group called the Independent Socialist Party, which boasted Katherine Mansfield's widower as a member. As someone with a New Zealand connection, Hoggard was star-struck - but declined the offer. He clearly still had some tenuous grasp on rationality at this point, then.

But life in the ILP was still difficult, not least because of the relatively high concentration of outright Communists in the Party. Hoggard had a profound distaste for Communism - while he believed that their objective of creating an egalitarian utopia was intrinsically Christian, and therefore good, he found their insistence on making the Revolution boring and bureaucratic a real turn-off, and he claimed never to have finished a book which unironically used the word 'dialectic'. For Hoggard, Socialism was a romantic crusade, and he was sickened by those who didn't share his view. This anti-Communism was ultimately to shove Hoggard in a very different direction - and, once again, reignite the Frankenstein's Monster of his career.

At the general election of 1935, shorn of support from the national Party and lacking the chaotic presence of vote-splitting candidates, Hoggard was defeated by Davies, who went on to be a much more effective standard-bearer for the good people of the Valleys.

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To Box His Wikis: Part IV

The end of his second, entirely undistinguished, spell in Parliament had not come as a major surprise to Hoggard, and he was similarly confident that his time in the Independent Labour Party would have to come to an end. Quite apart from the opposition of the Maxton machine, Hoggard would also point to the decision at the 1935 Party Conference to oppose economic sanctions on Italy over the invasion of Abyssinia - in the absence of physical force, economic force was for him the mainstay of an ethical foreign policy, and he did not expect the ILP's call for Socialist revolutions in both Italy and Africa to find fertile ground. Especially not, in terms of Italy, without a tangible demonstration of solidarity from the outside world. After his fissure with the ILP, Hoggard made the breach permanent by condemning their violent intervention in Spain, which also put him offside with most of the radical Left of the time. These opponents he described with a broad brush as fellow travellers of the inhuman Bolshevik menace.

But we get ahead of ourselves. Hoggard was in fact forced to resign his membership of the ILP in late 1935, after the publication of 2020 Vision, a mediocre Bellamy knock-off. This novel explored a far-future time in which Old Toryism and Socialism had fused in an anti-Liberal synthesis, in which a paternalist state is forced by an environmental crisis to convert industrial, materialist society to a co-operative agrarianism with feudal trappings. In the context of the story, this is painted as a good thing for some reason (incidentally, Hoggard's capacity for grandiose delusion is exemplified by the fact that the hero is called 'David Swineherd'), and this caused some controversy among the British Left of the time.

However, the ideas proposed by Hoggard found some favour within the National Labour organisation of his old target, Ramsay MacDonald. This splinter group, who had coalesced with the Tories in the wake of the Depression, were casting around for a unique selling point, and believed they had found one in Hoggard's idea of 'Tory Socialism'. As such, when Jimmy Thomas was forced to resign his seat upon giving away Government secrets, Hoggard was the perfect candidate: a man with a Derby background and a glimmer of temporary profile. Although up against a sportsman, he prevailed narrowly in the by-election with the assistance of a verbose, idiotic and sex-mad Independent candidate splitting the left-wing vote.

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Despite putting out a number of pamphlets explaining Tory Socialism and pleading the case for National Labour (he was now mature enough to stop talking quite so much about financial reform, out of deference to those of his colleagues who had favoured the Gold Standard), Hoggard failed to save the Party's prospects. In fact, Harold Nicolson, who thought along the same lines, thought his efforts risible. Additionally, his freedom of speech in Parliament became restrained in 1937 when Neville Chamberlain appointed him Secretary for Mines. The appointment was partly on account of Hoggard's mining experience, but mostly because the Government needed a token non-Tory Minister in the Board of Trade. Nevertheless, the new Minister's efforts to create a petroleum stockpile stood the UK in good stead during the initial phases of the Second World War.

When that War came, Hoggard's knee-jerk pacifism was moderated both by his loyalty to the Government which had given him a pay rise after a lifetime of disloyalty and crankiness, and by his opposition to Fascism. During the 1930s, he had used his experiences as a Moseleyite as fodder for speeches in opposition to Blackshirt rallies, but he didn't go as far as favouring intervention against the Falangists or serving in a War Government. His resignation, in fact, arrived only twenty minutes after Chamberlain had sent a messenger to tell him he wasn't needed in the reshuffle.

So Hoggard unleashed his inner coward and failed to stand up openly for pacifism in 1939-45 - instead, he abstained on votes that troubled his conscience and asked many parliamentary questions on behalf of abuses of wartime measures on the home front, and particularly on the interests of conscientious objectors. Even these minor, constructive protests, however, made him unwelcome in National Labour, from which he was expelled in 1940. Without Hoggard as an ideologue and pamphleteer, the Party essentially ceased to exist as an organisational entity.

Instead, the newly Independent MP for Derby took up with a high-minded group of predominantly Christian intellectuals called the 1941 Committee, who were interested in the implementation of socialist policies at home as part of the War effort. When the Committee was subsumed into the Common Wealth movement, Hoggard became one of several MPs under the leadership of another Socialist-convert Baronet, Sir Richard Acland. He became one of their main platform speakers and, among other adventures, clashed fruitlessly with Tom and Kitty Wintringham over their Marxist distaste for Christian moralism as a justification for Socialism. He also led the way for a policy change from 'self-management for victory' to 'self-management for post-war reconstruction' which was adopted by Common Wealth in the later stages of the War, when eventual victory seemed more assured.

Although considering himself superior in intelligence to Acland, Hoggard followed him loyally until it was clear that the wartime truce would end with the end of the War in Europe, and that the only real route for political progress was, once again, the Labour Party. Like most of the rest of the Common Wealth players, he pursued secret negotiations with Labour, hoping to change horses once more and remain in the politics to which he had become addicted. The price of this was standing aside for Labour's two candidates in Derby, and running instead in a constituency without a functional Labour branch. Hoggard fulfilled his debt of honour to Common Wealth by standing in their interest in a hopeless constituency in Worcestershire - and just as practically everyone wearily expected, he drew his plans for yet another unwarranted comeback.

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Walpurgisnacht said:
The idea of paternalist Tory Socialism as a raison d'être for National Labour is pretty interesting, and deserves its chance to shine elsewhere.

Another very witty update which I enjoyed.
Click to expand...
I'm glad people are enjoying this, it's much more encouraging than splurging self-referential bollocks into the void.

They did talk a good game about synthesising Socialism and Toryism in various ways, but this seems to have been mostly internal and in any case it didn't achieve much cut-through with the voters, even before the War intervened. When Nicolson arrived as an MP, Ramsay Mac gave a speech roughly along these lines to the caucus, and Nicolson just made some disparaging remarks in his diary, despite the fact that he was also trying to come up with a USP at that time. Nicolson then wrote a short story with the author insert character explaining National Labourism to a bloke on a train - but, hilariously, the latter asks too many difficult questions and the main character gets flustered and slams a door in his face. This was put out as a pamphlet by the Party.
 
To Box His Wikis: Part V

Fourteen years after leaving it, Hoggard rejoined the Labour Party in 1945. To be precise, he rejoined it through the Co-operative Party, perhaps unwilling to be a boring Government backbencher after so long masking his personal dullardry with attention-seeking party affiliations. It was said that he couldn't let a dinner party go by without boring his neighbours with a description of what his party of the day stood for and why it was going to take the world by storm - like the most odious sort of entrepreneur. In the Co-operative Party, Hoggard saw an opportunity to feign individuality - and also an opportunity to get in at the ground floor of the next development in British politics.

In seeing this prospect, Hoggard was most certainly ahead of his time, showing a foresight which he had notably failed to exploit hitherto. The Co-operators, in 1945, were the strongest minor party in terms of organisational strength: they benefited from the relatively high concentration of conscientious objectors in their membership, from the fact that their youth wing was both active and existent (in sharp contrast to the Labour League of Youth), and most of all from the fact that women were represented heavily among their membership. As such, while the men went off to War, the Co-operative Party declined in activity the least among the political movements in Britain. They returned 23 Members of Parliament in 1945 under their arrangement with the Labour Party, and this figure was soon to become 24.

Hoggard assaulted the by-election selection meetings with indecent vigour, so hoggish was he to enter Parliament for the fourth time - no less. In this pursuit he became acquainted with Edward Shackleton (son of the explorer), who was on the same circuit and beat him to the nomination in Bournemouth. By the time Preston came around, Hoggard was well-used to Shackleton's company and, having arranged to speak before him at the meeting, stole most of his points and jokes. Shackleton was - to use an impolite metaphor - cast adrift on the waves of impromptu speechmaking, and the selectors landed on Hoggard. He did indeed have some attractive qualities as a candidate for the by-election: his mother's family had lived in the town, and he himself had experience of winning a by-election in a two-seat constituency (Derby in 1936). Attlee's Government was still in its honeymoon phase, so the victory, while narrow, was assured. Nevertheless, Shackleton never warmed to Hoggard after this affair.

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Back on the Government side of the House, Hoggard generally associated with old friends like John Strachey and articulate rebels like John Platts-Mills, with whom he often reminisced about New Zealand. During this period, Hoggard drifted farther than ever before from his professed principles in the hunt for a career and a decent pension. Once a principled pacifist even when it came to Spain, he now stayed silent over Malaya and, later, Korea. Previously an intransigent monetary reformer, he now merely exulted in the nationalisation of the Bank of England as a "substantial step towards credibility on the subject of credit", without actually lobbying for the next step - the nationalisation of the creation of credit. Even on the topic of worker control and ownership (on which point he had favoured the Co-operators over the nationalise-and-bureaucratise element of the Labour Party), Hoggard obeyed the whip when nationalisations came up and failed to barrack for the co-operative movement when the industrial assurance companies were targeted. He accepted the argument that their practices were exploitative, whatever about their ownership models.

This new colourlessness and lack of principle was noted in high places, to the extent that he was rewarded with a minor pay rise as Assistant Postmaster General. This mainly consisted of going to international postal conferences in attractive resorts and arranging for the printers to make errors every so often in order that the resultant stamps could be sold at a massive profit to collectors. This secretive racket, not uncovered until very recently, was an important line item in the Budgets of most countries, and it is unlikely that the NHS could have been constructed in its proper form without the funds that came from Britain's part in the Great Postage Stamp Conspiracy.

Obviously, this tarnished Hoggard's integrity, but nobody outside the inner circle discovered the sham while he was still alive. What did damage his reputation among that minority which believed his hype was his voting record (as described above) and his shameful decision to take his name off the Nenni Telegram six minutes before it was due to be sent. For so long a rebel, an ideologue and an individualist, Hoggard now appeared in his true guise as a coward who would rather pretend to be quirky and principled as a major figure in a small party than to actually work for his professed ideals when given an opportunity to take part in the first professedly socialist majority Government in British history. What had once appeared to the gullible as a string of high-minded party-changes now seemed to be merely a series of adolescent pleas for attention.

Hoggard stood in Preston South when the two-seater was split in 1950, and held on in what was now a tight marginal. In the same year he was given a promotion to Under-Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, partly to boost his prestige in his constituency. However, this necessitated a visit to Southern Rhodesia and other African colonies during the sudden election of 1951, in which the absent Hoggard only won his seat by a single vote - the closest result in British electoral history.

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He could have been expected to come back to Opposition rededicated to nursing his constituency, or perhaps to bloodlessly manoeuvring for a more senior position in the next Labour Government. But if there's one trait that defined Hoggard, it was inconstancy. The next parliamentary term would cover his most quixotic adventure yet.
 
To Box His Wikis: Part VI

It is possible that Hoggard might have continued to be a team player if he had been elected to the Labour Party's Parliamentary Committee (the forerunner of the later development of the Shadow Cabinet) in either 1951 or 1952, as he felt was his due as a middle-aged white man with a high opinion of his own worth. As an unbiased observer would have observed, though, his history of disloyalty and his recent failure to articulate a genuine vision were twin barriers to his advancement. Hoggard sulked on the Opposition backbench, occasionally making an intervention to decry the appalling racism he had seen in Rhodesia (his recent visit clearly having affected him). But Hoggard's star was clearly fading even from the pinprick it had been at its zenith.

If he could have been said to belong to a faction, Hoggard was closer to Bevan than Gaitskell in the Labour Party of the 1950s, but he was not a faction-fighter and instead seemed more interested in serving the Co-operative Party group within Labour, principally by touring the retail and agricultural co-ops of the country in the interests of pressing the flesh, reminding them of the existence of the Party and encouraging them to make donations. Now: the managers of these co-operatives had for a while been disappointed with the dedication of the Co-op MPs, seeing them as careerists sailing under a flag of convenience and failing to secure the interests of the movement which endorsed them. Ever the wily tactician, Hoggard encouraged them in this belief in the hope that he himself would come across as a different breed, a tribune for the collective alternative to bureaucratic state control - despite his earlier opposition to the industrial assurance firms.

Hoggard also spoke at the frequent Young Co-operators get-togethers and Party summer schools, calling for the development of an independent policy - for instance, on trade, industry, consumer protection and foreign affairs - which could be pressed upon a Labour Government, with the Co-op MPs judged on their achievements in relation to the policy. Within the tiny number of people sufficiently strange to dedicate time and energy to the Co-operative Party, he gathered a following which could be organised into a decent voting bloc at the Party's Conferences. Many of this faction were Co-op activists who were not minded to become Labour members, including at least one Communist. And when the time was right, Hoggard was confident that he could lead his friends out to form an independent party - a party under his own control, after thirty years of campaigning for other people.

When it came to it, there was no time to organise a seemingly principled split at a Co-op Conference, as had been the original intention. Matters moved too quickly in the corridors of Westminster. In late 1954, over 50 Bevanites rebelled over German rearmament, giving Hoggard the idea of provoking a fissure on the nuclear issue - a reflection of his old commitment to pacifism, to which he now returned. In March 1955, he colluded with his old leader Sir Richard Acland (now also a Labour backbencher) to vote against the bipartisan consensus on the development of a British H-bomb, and then to resign their seats and fight by-elections on the issue. Privately, they thought they could attract a number of Bevanites, and ideally the man himself. But a mixture of party loyalty and fear of losing by-elections dissuaded the Left of the Labour Party from following the quixotic charge of the Cold War peacemakers - even though Bevan had the whip temporarily withdrawn for speaking out on the nuclear issue a week later. He was later to repudiate unilateral nuclear disarmament.

A small minority of the Co-operative Party walked out to the Independent Co-operative Party which Hoggard had been arranging, and within a week of taking the Chiltern Hundreds a coalition had been agreed between the ICP, the Independent Labour Party and the remnants of Common Wealth to form a 'Co-operative Commonwealth Federation' of parties, with electoral pacts with Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Nationalists to boot. The CCF was launched with much fervour, and all five parties held a large rally in Trafalgar Square which attracted substantial press attention.

The platform of the new federative party involved the following broad principles: unilateral nuclear disarmament; the promotion of co-operative enterprises; the devolution of management of nationalised industries to the workers; the creation of an Ombudsman with remit over state departments and consumer protection; the use of state planning and social credit to shift from industrial development towards the growth of primary and service industries; the liberation of the colonies; and, inspired by the millenarian tenor of the times, a return to the simplicity of small-scale communal/village living which would, with the development of agricultural co-operatives, become environmentally sustainable (avant la lettre) and defeat the doom of Malthus which - Hoggard argued - was the root cause of war and inequality.

In short, the CCF was a radical party, threatening primarily to take votes from a Labour Party which was still internally hung up on the arguments of socialism versus social democracy. The CCF was comparable to the Dutch Pacifist Socialist Party which emerged at about the same time, and it was arguably the world's first Green Party - although clearly of the old style, bringing together idealised agrarianism, monetary reform and population control. It must be said, in charity, that there is no direct evidence that Hoggard's ideas for limiting the population to "the number which the productive capacity of the nation could bear" would necessarily have involved eugenics or bigotry. Or, indeed, worse. Many of Hoggard's papers were lost in a fire.

While the superstructure of the CCF was being built, the by-elections at Gravesend and Preston South still loomed. Acland (playing second fiddle to the older Hoggard in their second venture together) wrote to the Whips of both major parties to persuade either of them to move the writs for the by-elections. He even contacted the Liberals, who were if anything the party most threatened by the emergence of the CCF - a rival for the protest vote. But it was not to be, and in the meantime the pair lost out on the opportunity to speak in the House, losing them a large quantity of publicity. This example was later to influence the SDP defectors against resigning their seats.

Even worse was soon to come, for Prime Minister Eden took advantage of the chaos on the Left to call a general election. While by-elections can be won on issues, voters at general elections mainly want to elect a Government, and the oxygen that by-elections could have given to the CCF was now, therefore, cut off. That May, only a couple of dozen Co-operative Commonwealth Federation candidates were able to stand, and the only ones achieving relative success were Hoggard, Acland, and former MP John Loverseed. Even in this dubious pantheon, Hoggard was the only one to save his deposit (then set at 12.5% of the total poll).

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Hoggard had finally got what he'd always wanted - a party organised to cater for his queer ideological whims - and the British public had conclusively rejected it (the CCF carried on until it merged into the Green Party, although many of the central figures focused on the Federation's 'apolitical' front, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, once it was set up). One might feel a degree of pity for Hoggard over this blow, but one shouldn't: rather than put the work in to rebuild and continue to the crusade he himself had started, Hoggard resigned as Leader of both the CCF and the Independent Co-operative Party, and turned his back once and for all on the people who had been duped by his manufactured air of moral righteousness. The gadfly had revealed himself as a feckless grifter who would surrender at the first reverse, having ruined the prospects of many of his acolytes along the way.

But even so, he would yet emerge from well-deserved obscurity for one final, ill-conceived pass at politics.
 
To Box His Wikis: Part VII

The final stage of Hoggard's political career saw him simultaneously at his most august and at his most pitiful. We take up the story in 1955, when he lost his seat and therefore his sole source of income other than donations to his political party. Predicting that these would dry up (or would, at the very least, be an absolute pig to keep coming in) he sought to get out, giving scant consideration to the people who had made sacrifices to follow him into the Independent Co-operative Party and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation.

The only co-ops which had affiliated to the ICP were based in Northern Ireland, where there had been a rather fraught debate around co-operatives affiliating, via the Co-operative Party, to Labour. In actual fact, these co-ops had strong links to the Ulster Unionists, and backed the ICP nationally in a bid to break the relationship between the co-op movement and the Labour Party. They ideally wished the movement to become a non-partisan pressure group, and were not loyal to the oddball politics of the CCF. As such, there was a process of disaffiliation and rededication to the programme of the Co-operative Union over the late 1950s and early 60s. Before this, though, they gave Hoggard an opportunity to escape his bed of thorns by offering him a management job.

Little needs to be discussed of this period, except that part of Hoggard's job involved lobbying on behalf of the co-ops in Stormont, and this attracted the attention of the Ulster Unionist Party, some of whom were clearly impressed with his articulacy. Members of the Government used their influence to win him the selection for the Willowfield seat in eastern Belfast ahead of the 1958 Northern Ireland election, although Hoggard's left-wing history and his calculated decision to join the Orange Order only a fortnight before the selection inspired two defeated contenders to oppose him in the election. In the end, Hoggard, already marked out as a dangerously liberal Unionist won with barely a quarter of the vote. However, the locals' fears that Hoggard would prove to be a covert Papist, rabble-rouser or defector were allayed for the time being by his conscientious, if unexceptional service. He was re-elected in 1962.

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As a private member, Hoggard took as his main cause the promotion of credit unions, which were just beginning to crop up over in the Republic at the tail-end of the 50s. However, he was quickly promoted to a junior role as Parliamentary Secretary for Health and Local Government, in which he helped to speed up the building of houses - particularly Council houses. But these dwellings were famously difficult to acquire if one was a member of the Catholic community, and Hoggard seems to have made no concerted effort to reduce discrimination in the provision of housing, or to reform local government elections. Both of these issues helped light a powder-keg within a decade, and yet Hoggard, with his much-vaunted radical reputation, was seemingly happy to let them continue so long as he could draw a salary from a conservative government.

In 1963, with the succession as Prime Minister of his ally, Terence O'Neill, Hoggard was promoted to Minister of Labour, his first taste of Cabinet rank - albeit at a rather lower level of importance than that which he might have enjoyed in the British Cabinet, to which it was not impossible that he might have ascended the next year when Wilson won a general election. However, Hoggard achieved nothing of note in the role except the continuation of his own career. Despite his perpetual disloyalty and lack of any obvious skills, he had the bizarre talent of failing upwards. It is often said that the scum always rises to the top.

Hoggard had by now resiled from any claim to radicalism or principle: he was a member of an Establishment party whose rule was based on bigotry and discrimination, and even when he had the power to change things from within, the victims of the system saw no amelioration. A man who had once claimed to irritate the powerful now revealed himself as just another grey-haired, grey-spirited politician.

Even worse, he clearly refused to accept the reality of his role in Northern Irish politics. In 1965, the position of Minister of Labour was abolished - and Hoggard refused any other Department offered him, choosing instead to plough his old rut. Yet another 'principled resignation' ensued, with Hoggard making a condemnatory speech to an empty chamber at Stormont, decrying O'Neill's inattention to the working classes and his failure to secure real economic development despite all his efforts. Nothing about the obvious oppression of Catholics: this speech was calculated to gain Hoggard entry to the Northern Ireland Labour Party, a party frightened of coming down on either side of the sectarian issue, which had attracted 25% of the vote in 1962 and believed itself to be on the cusp of victory. Hoggard evidently concurred with their assessment.

The NILP and its newest convert were both to be proven wrong at the general election later that year.

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This was the last election F. D. Hoggard ever contested. Now in his 60s, he gave up on politics and lived out his days eking out his pension and the ever-diminishing royalties from his books. He died on the second of May 1976, shortly after putting out an abundantly self-critical autobiography, from which this account is largely culled. He was unloved and unmourned, except for an obituary in the CCF's newsletter. He never married, apparently due to his ugly personality, although if he had he'd probably have chopped and changed as often as he switched parties.

Hoggard never achieved anything in politics, although some of his values are still in evidence in the Green Party, a descendant of the CCF. No wars were stopped by his oratory; no bills were passed that wouldn't have gone through if someone else was sponsoring them; no elections were won or lost through his intervention, apart from in his own seats. When the tedious nerds of today remember him, and fill the chat threads of Internet forums with Hoggard-adjacent memery, all they really care about is his one genuine achievement: he was, and remains, the only British parliamentarian to sit under eleven party affiliations. Labour, New Party, Independent Labour, Independent Labour Party, National Labour, Independent, Common Wealth, Labour Co-operative, Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, Ulster Unionist and, finally, Northern Ireland Labour.

And as this series has proved, this wasn't nearly enough to make him as interesting as he so badly wanted to be.
 
I have three novel ideas (i.e. ideas for novels, definitely not any new and interesting ideas) that I've been batting around my head this year, and I reckon that if I write them down in a reasonably public sphere, I might be able to guilt-trip myself into getting to work.

1) Elysium. A sort of sequel to the Wikibox series directly above, taking the form of a murder mystery. It is the early 80s and Britain elects MEPs using Single Transferable Vote. When a Tory MEP for the North Midlands constituency dies in puzzling circumstances, an MI5 agent is drafted in to help solve the crime, which may implicate overseas operatives or the victim's political opponents. Our standard-issue-detective-with-demons must solve the crime before the by-election is completed, while encountering problematic reminders of a past mission in deep cover within a radical protest movement.

2) Untitled NZ whodunnit. Against the intrigue of the 1912 vote of confidence in the ailing Liberal Government of Sir Joseph Ward, in which allegations fly of undecided votes being bought by the Reform Party, a murder takes place which threatens to implicate some of the major figures of Auckland's nascent Labour movement. (Not AH but a historical novel, which means I have to come up with a mystery story that connects day-by-day with real events, which is proving quite difficult to do. On the plus side, it allows for sequels set against the Waihi strike, Watersiders strike, unity conferences, etc. etc.).

3) The Pursuit. In 1868 New Zealand, an angsty, unsympathetic journalist is covering the last dregs of the Land Wars for his British newspaper, but is repeatedly stymied in his hunt for a good story and takes solace in sex and gambling - until he is given the chance of genuine adventure. He is invited to accompany the Army expedition to chase down a Maori rebel and mystic who is definitely not Te Kooti, no sirree - the only issue is that he has been seducing the wife of the commanding officer. (It will cover similar ground to this vignette but I'm going to try to be a bit ambitious in terms of style. Also, it won't be AH.)
 
Uhura's Mazda said:
I have three novel ideas (i.e. ideas for novels, definitely not any new and interesting ideas) that I've been batting around my head this year, and I reckon that if I write them down in a reasonably public sphere, I might be able to guilt-trip myself into getting to work.

1) Elysium. A sort of sequel to the Wikibox series directly above, taking the form of a murder mystery. It is the early 80s and Britain elects MEPs using Single Transferable Vote. When a Tory MEP for the North Midlands constituency dies in puzzling circumstances, an MI5 agent is drafted in to help solve the crime, which may implicate overseas operatives or the victim's political opponents. Our standard-issue-detective-with-demons must solve the crime before the by-election is completed, while encountering problematic reminders of a past mission in deep cover within a radical protest movement.

2) Untitled NZ whodunnit. Against the intrigue of the 1912 vote of confidence in the ailing Liberal Government of Sir Joseph Ward, in which allegations fly of undecided votes being bought by the Reform Party, a murder takes place which threatens to implicate some of the major figures of Auckland's nascent Labour movement. (Not AH but a historical novel, which means I have to come up with a mystery story that connects day-by-day with real events, which is proving quite difficult to do. On the plus side, it allows for sequels set against the Waihi strike, Watersiders strike, unity conferences, etc. etc.).

3) The Pursuit. In 1868 New Zealand, an angsty, unsympathetic journalist is covering the last dregs of the Land Wars for his British newspaper, but is repeatedly stymied in his hunt for a good story and takes solace in sex and gambling - until he is given the chance of genuine adventure. He is invited to accompany the Army expedition to chase down a Maori rebel and mystic who is definitely not Te Kooti, no sirree - the only issue is that he has been seducing the wife of the commanding officer. (It will cover similar ground to this vignette but I'm going to try to be a bit ambitious in terms of style. Also, it won't be AH.)
Click to expand...

These are already listed in ascending order of interest. Having an idea for a character, in particular, makes the third one the best option IMO.
 
Uhura's Mazda said:
I have three novel ideas (i.e. ideas for novels, definitely not any new and interesting ideas) that I've been batting around my head this year, and I reckon that if I write them down in a reasonably public sphere, I might be able to guilt-trip myself into getting to work.

1) Elysium. A sort of sequel to the Wikibox series directly above, taking the form of a murder mystery. It is the early 80s and Britain elects MEPs using Single Transferable Vote. When a Tory MEP for the North Midlands constituency dies in puzzling circumstances, an MI5 agent is drafted in to help solve the crime, which may implicate overseas operatives or the victim's political opponents. Our standard-issue-detective-with-demons must solve the crime before the by-election is completed, while encountering problematic reminders of a past mission in deep cover within a radical protest movement.

2) Untitled NZ whodunnit. Against the intrigue of the 1912 vote of confidence in the ailing Liberal Government of Sir Joseph Ward, in which allegations fly of undecided votes being bought by the Reform Party, a murder takes place which threatens to implicate some of the major figures of Auckland's nascent Labour movement. (Not AH but a historical novel, which means I have to come up with a mystery story that connects day-by-day with real events, which is proving quite difficult to do. On the plus side, it allows for sequels set against the Waihi strike, Watersiders strike, unity conferences, etc. etc.).

3) The Pursuit. In 1868 New Zealand, an angsty, unsympathetic journalist is covering the last dregs of the Land Wars for his British newspaper, but is repeatedly stymied in his hunt for a good story and takes solace in sex and gambling - until he is given the chance of genuine adventure. He is invited to accompany the Army expedition to chase down a Maori rebel and mystic who is definitely not Te Kooti, no sirree - the only issue is that he has been seducing the wife of the commanding officer. (It will cover similar ground to this vignette but I'm going to try to be a bit ambitious in terms of style. Also, it won't be AH.)
Click to expand...

Would read and review the hell out of the last one, and can also imagine it would be a good sell to certain publishers
 
BClick said:
These are already listed in ascending order of interest. Having an idea for a character, in particular, makes the third one the best option IMO.
Click to expand...
I mean, I have some decent* ideas for characters for the other ones, as well, it's just that the third one is much more character-driven. But yes, I get what you mean and in any case I agree with your ranking.
 
I agree that 3 is the best of the bunch; it's accessible, it has a good market, and it seems like the most fun.

My only concern is that, if you're situating it in Te Kooti's War (or a wink-and-nod allegory to it), there's a risk of treading on ground Maurice Shadbolt already covered in Season of the Jew.
 
Tsar of New Zealand said:
I agree that 3 is the best of the bunch; it's accessible, it has a good market, and it seems like the most fun.

My only concern is that, if you're situating it in Te Kooti's War (or a wink-and-nod allegory to it), there's a risk of treading on ground Maurice Shadbolt already covered in Season of the Jew.
Click to expand...
You're right, it is accessible - I'd better sustain my self-esteem by doing the STV one and feeling superior whenever I get a negative review.

I haven't read any Shadbolt, but at a glance I don't think there's a huge amount of similarity there. Be that as it may, I think the world can probably stomach having two books set around the same events.
 
Uhura's Mazda said:
You're right, it is accessible - I'd better sustain my self-esteem by doing the STV one and feeling superior whenever I get a negative review.

I haven't read any Shadbolt, but at a glance I don't think there's a huge amount of similarity there. Be that as it may, I think the world can probably stomach having two books set around the same events.
Click to expand...
At least it's not treading on Tim's ground
 
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