This article uses the approaches of critical family history to explore the practices of settler democracy and nation‐building in early 20th‐century New Zealand and its participation in wider efforts to forge a new British commonwealth on the world stage after 1918. Our attention focuses on John Barr, the author's ancestor. Barr put himself forward as a suitable man for parliamentary office by obscuring details of his humble origins and claiming to be an imperial expert. We consider how Barr's political self‐fashioning, which relied on a number of silences, echoed New Zealand's contemporary reimagining of itself as a progressive nation at the vanguard of social reform and democratic governance, a process aided by the influential histories of William Pember Reeves. Barr was subsequently involved in efforts to promote collaboration between British democracies through the activities of the Empire Parliamentary Association in the mid 1920s. The association's attempts to present the British commonwealth as a force for good in international affairs relied on downplaying or ignoring difficult relations with other parts of the empire. Finally, we consider Barr's involvement in New Zealand's troubled efforts to deal with unrest in mandate Samoa, an uncomfortable history suppressed in official and family narratives.

In this introduction we make the case for a new understanding of the relationship between settler colonialism and the development of democratic governance. The concurrence of franchise reform in Europe with the establishment of parliaments in the settler colonies during the mid 19th century is usually seen as consolidating an exclusionary concept of citizenship rooted in the values of whiteness, manliness, and respectability, undermining existing forms of political assertion by marginalised peoples. While still emphasising the fundamental inequalities of power which settler‐led governments fostered, the articles in this special issue consider how the advent of settler democracy and the variety of constitutional experiments initiated in the colonies complicated understandings of what parliamentarism meant. Far from there being a narrowing of concepts of democratic norms and practices in the second half of the 19th century, these concepts became increasingly multivocal and disparate as different interest groups sought to assert their right to participate in parliamentary democracy. Understanding the historical challenges to settler democracy, as well as its legacies, is important when considering the ongoing dilemmas which parliaments face in making political decision‐making more inclusive for all communities.

This article uses election addresses to consider how the early women parliamentary candidates sought to make their case to English voters. It then explores the insights that Mass Observation's election surveys offer into public attitudes to women politicians, and gender and political leadership more broadly, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. While the pioneer female candidates argued that they should have more representatives at Westminster to better uphold the ‘woman's point of view’ this approach was gradually undermined from the 1920s onwards with the growth of programmatic politics led by Labour. Mass Observation found that voters claimed to focus more on which party had the best programme rather than the personalities of candidates. However, their findings also indicate that women candidates continued to face many additional prejudices which their male opponents did not.

Parliamentary HistoryVolume 42, Issue 2 p. 285-286 Review Reform and its Complexities in Modern Britain: Essays Inspired by Sir Brian Harrison. Edited by Bruce Kinzer, Molly Baer Kramer, and Richard Trainor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2022. ix, 309 pp. Hardback £75.00. ISBN 9780192863423. David Thackeray, David Thackeray University of ExeterSearch for more papers by this author David Thackeray, David Thackeray University of ExeterSearch for more papers by this author First published: 07 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/1750-0206.12680Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume42, Issue2June 2023Pages 285-286 RelatedInformation

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Age of Promises explores the issue of electoral promises in twentieth century Britain—how they were made, how they were understood, and how they evolved across time. It does so through a study of general election manifestos and election addresses. The premise of the book is that a history of the act of making promises—which is central to the political process, but which has not been sufficiently analysed—illuminates the development of political communication and democratic representation. The twentieth century saw a broad shift away from politics viewed as a discursive process whereby, at elections, it was enough to set out broad principles, with detailed policymaking to follow once in office, following reflection and discussion. Over the first part of the century, parties increasingly felt required to compile lists of specific policies to offer to voters and detailed, costed pledges. We live in an age of growing uncertainty over the authority and status of political promises. In the wake of the 2016 EU referendum––during which an (alleged) promise was famously written on the side of a bus––controversy erupted over parliamentary sovereignty. Should ‘the will of the people’ as manifested in the referendum result be supreme, or did MPs owe a primary responsibility to their constituents and/or to the party manifestos on which they had been elected? Age of Promises demonstrates that these debates build on a long history of differing understandings about what status manifestos and addresses should have in shaping the actions of government.

While various historians use Mass Observation sources to study popular engagement with politics in the 1940s, they tend to rely on file reports summarizing research or the writings of the national panel, which paid limited attention to how the public engaged with key aspects of electioneering. By contrast, we re-examine Mass Observation's various election surveys to explore people's assumptions about how election campaigns should be conducted, the qualities looked for in political parties, and their reflections on the records of governments. Our conclusions shed light on the transformation of British public politics after 1918. During the interwar years it became common thinking to assume that parties would centre their campaigning around a detailed programme for government. Whereas Mass Observation's employees often claimed that much of the public was apathetic about politics, a reanalysis of the survey results indicates that many people were eager to be seen to be able to offer a considered assessment of the veracity of the competing parties' promises. Mass Observation's election studies were criticized for their supposed amateurism. However, they offer richer insights into how the public engaged with party programmes than the quantitative surveys that came to dominate election studies in the 1950s and beyond.

Abstract We explore the ongoing importance of election promises since 1997. Even if the way that promises are disseminated has changed with the growing importance of the internet and social media in campaigning, expectations surrounding manifestos remain roughly those that were set during the twentieth century. And yet the Brexit controversy has arguably created an acute crisis in trust in politicians’ promises and uncertainty about the authority of election manifestos. In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, manifestos enjoyed a more central role in the 2017 and 2019 elections than they had achieved at other elections during the early twenty-first century, not least because of the ambiguities of the mandate provided by the referendum.

Election addresses emerged in the nineteenth century from a vibrant tradition of broadsides, ballads, and hustings speeches. Following the ending of formal hustings meetings in 1868, the issue of election addresses acted as the formal start of the campaign, and became the key means for candidates to set out their cause. The high regard in which this form of election literature was held owed much to the actions of party leaders. From the 1860s onwards the election addresses of Gladstone and Disraeli were widely circulated by newspapers and in pamphlet form, and came to be commonly referred to as ‘manifestos’. While candidates commonly took inspiration from party leaders’ manifestos, these addresses were often brief statements of principle, which did not outline a formal programme for government. The nascent Labour Party offered novel ways of ‘doing politics’, centring each of their election campaigns around a manifesto programme.

While the 1964 election marked a high point in confidence in state-led modernization, by the 1970s there was a widespread loss of faith in the ability of governments to deliver on their promises. Long-term planning was replaced by short-term crisis management. The Scottish and Welsh nationalists and the Liberal Party created the authority of the Westminster duopoly, reinvigorating the local campaign with their ‘pavement politics’. However, the New Right was the main beneficiary of this crisis. As Conservative Party leader from 1975, Margaret Thatcher believed that politics had been debased by parties competing for power by making promises of state expansion and greater public spending which were unrealistic and led to poor outcomes. Thatcher based the Conservatives’ 1979 manifesto around a small number of pledges, reviving the anti-promise rhetoric which had been key to Baldwin’s appeal in the 1920s and 1930s.

Manifestos became increasingly central to the electoral campaign and the parties’ efforts to develop a ‘national’ rather than purely sectional appeal after 1918. The party leader’s address-as-manifesto did persist, but it became a rarity. Labour was at the forefront of the development of programmatic politics, producing more substantive and heavyweight manifestos than their more slogan-based pre-1914 equivalents. While the other parties eventually followed Labour’s lead in providing more detailed manifestos outlining proposed legislation, distrust of programmatic politics still lingered. Some politicians, most notably Stanley Baldwin, criticized the apparent escalation of election promises. Although election addresses remained vital to the local campaign, in part as a result of the introduction of the free postal communication in 1918, their relative importance declined in relation to manifestos. Addresses became increasingly uniform documents, designed to complement manifestos, as a result of increasing use of material from party press services.

Let Us Face the Future became the archetype of manifestos, which the Conservatives in due course felt obliged to follow in form or method, however much they disliked its policy content. In turn, the technique of promise-making that it represented affected expectations of how government should be conducted. Winston Churchill was a reluctant supporter of programmatic politics, often employing an anti-promise rhetoric. However, the Conservatives came to embrace a programmatic politics in the 1950s. The Salisbury–Addison Convention meant that the Lords would not attempt to frustrate policies that had been included in the governing party’s manifesto. While the growing word count of manifestos made them less accessible to voters, their contents were increasingly summarized in shortened popular versions and discussed in TV election broadcasts. While election addresses remained an important means for candidates to outline their character, principles, and record, the local campaign declined in significance.

Labour’s internal crisis, which had led to clashes over the content of election manifestos in 1974 and 1979, worsened in the early 1980s with both the Left and the Right of the party claiming to act as ‘custodians of the manifesto’. Some of those unhappy with the growing authority of the Labour Left broke away to create the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. While the SDP sought to ‘break the mould’ of British politics, the Alliance struggled to define a coherent progressive programme and identity. Labour’s disastrous ‘suicide note’ manifesto in 1983 led to a change of approach, from 1987 it stressed the moderate nature of its programme. Tony Blair drew inspiration from Thatcher’s approach, centring the New Labour programme in 1997 around a small series of pledges, which were presented as a ‘contract’ with the British people.