Historical Notes: Blair and Cromwell, conservative radicals

RECENT MODERNISING ambitions for Britain's constitution evoke the turbulence of 17th-century England. Although Blair's reforms do not call for royal heads to roll, his calls for "sweeping away the old establishment", the hereditary House of Lords in particular, and for the common man to take his place in a meritocratic sun, provoke comparison with the zealous Oliver Cromwell.

To an hereditary peer Blair's radical credentials may seem real enough. While for others, sceptical of New Labour's limited ambitions, the Cromwellian comparison is dismissed as ludicrously overblown.

Aptly, however, there is a third way: a valid comparison of Blair and Cromwell, one which is not based on superficial radical credentials but rather on a deeper conservatism. A conservative radical? This contradiction requires some explaining.

Living under an absolutist and decadent monarchy, 17th-century England's constitution was badly in need of modernisation. Cromwell was the man of the hour, realising the need for a realignment of power in which Parliament would have precedence over the Crown.

His radical ambitions were shared by many in the land-owning class. A riotous commoner class was also alienated from the state. It was readily mobilised by the progressive parliamentarians to provide the manpower for Cromwell's New Model Army.

All the same there was a certain hesitancy among the parliamentary grandees, for they knew that mobilising the masses was like provoking a hornets' nest that could, and did, unleash political ambitions that would go well beyond merely stinging the crown into surbordinance. Among the rabble were groups like the Levellers and Diggers who were fomenting some truly revolutionary ideas which questioned the very institutions of private property and demanded political franchise for every man.

While Cromwell may have been radical by the standards of the status quo, for many of his foot-soldiers and other dissident groups, his "revolution" did not go far enough. His Jerusalem was limited to an oligarchic republic, whereas the aspirations of the masses extended to a much more democratic state of affairs.

These ideas survived to influence much of what we take for granted in today's one-person one-vote democracies. But what is interesting is how the power of these ideas was circumscribed at the time by the so-called radical parliamentarians.

During the period known as the Putney Debates of late 1647, the New Model Army rank and file were seriously challenging the parliamentary grandees on the depth of their democratic beliefs. When it was put to Cromwell's aide Henry Ireton that the "poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he", his response demonstrated the challenge posed by such natural rights: "I would fain have any such man show their bounds, where you will end and take away all property". In other words it was simply too hot to handle.

In the following years, Cromwell began suppressing Levellers and other dissidents with imprisonment, and the parliamentary grandees, after having first abolished the monarchy, then began nervously seeking the stability of a "crown in Parliament". In 1688, the English monarchy was restored - albeit in a subordinate position to Parliament. In this way the British constitution was modernised, but the modernisation was mainly for prevailing conservative purposes.

Thus when Tony Blair takes the Cromwellian measure of sacking hereditary peers for the purpose of "modernising Britain's constitution", we might be sceptical of any radical delivery of greater democracy. Indeed divisions of wealth and power in British society may end up being radically conserved.

Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood are the authors of `A Trumpet of Sedition' (Pluto Press, pounds 9.99)