Weekend Column: There are two sides in politics, but which are you on?

It is strange how the terminology changes however. I suspect that few of those at present arguing that “low-information” voters, led astray by charismatic demagogues, should never have been trusted with the Brexit vote, would consider themselves to be conservatives.

Nevertheless that attitude, which even the most stalwart defender of liberty and democracy must grudgingly acknowledge has some small merit, has been consistently expressed by conservatives and reactionaries since Plato.

Among those politicians and writers now considered founders of the European conservative movement in the nineteenth century were many who had passionately embraced the French Revolution.

It was perhaps the profound feeling of betrayal these elite would-be radicals experienced, as events across the channel turned to mass murder and state terror, that led to their own zeal for any measure intended to keep the passions of the masses in check.

Renowned now as the laudanum-swigging lake poet and chum of Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at the forefront of this transition in Britain.

In France: An Ode, he charts his change of heart:

O France, that mockest Heaven, adulterous, blind,

And patriot only in pernicious toils.

Coleridge and Burke argued that it was not in the gift of man to structure his own society, and any attempt to do so would lead to disorder and bloodshed at the hands of the mob.

Those afraid of the people had plenty to lament over the following decades.

The infamous Peterloo Massacre of peaceful suffrage protestors 1819 was followed by increasingly violent demonstrations. In 1831 prisons and stately homes were torched and Bristol was taken over by armed agitators.

The following year parliament passed the Representation of the People Act, or ‘Great Reform Act’, extending suffrage to encompass a fifth of adult men, despite fierce opposition from their lordships in the upper house – long a bastion against democracy.

By the mid-1840s revolutions were ten-a-penny on the continent, and further reform acts followed. The strategy was laid out by Tory leader Sir Robert Peel in 1834, and keenly adopted by the opposition.

He announced that from henceforth his party would enact piecemeal reform wherever a “proven abuse” could be demonstrated.

The idea was to appease mounting demands for greater freedom and representation just enough to avert revolution, yet without the elite having to concede too much.

The attitude of the elite had not changed however. In 1850 conservative philosopher Thomas Carlyle wrote:

It is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise; to be guided in the right path by those who know it better than they. This is the first ‘right of man’, compared with which all other rights are as nothing.

Even liberty’s champion, JS Mill, preferred rule by the few.

This year we celebrated the anniversary of the Representation of the People Act 1918. As was much trumpeted by MPs, the act gave the vote to some women, namely those aged over 30 who owned property.

The perspective we did not get was that the government had again been forced to extend suffrage, now to all men, by popular pressure in the wake of the Russian Revolution.

It was to counter this influx of uncouth, ill-educated hoi polloi to the electorate that ladies of leisure were granted the vote (if you were a working class woman you had to wait another decade).

In each case the same arguments were made – the conservative argument that the people were not educated or informed enough to be trusted with the running of their country, and were vulnerable to demagoguery.

The merits of this point of view are up for debate, as are the principles of our current parties (if they have any), but at least it might shed a little more light on what’s at stake in the politics of the day if those taking part recognise which side of history they are on.