Divided After Harold

"This time, New Labour has to win not by defining ourselves by what we're against, but by what we're for, so that New Labour is finally liberated to govern on our own terms" - Alan Milburn, the Guardian, January 15

There's long been a fashion for assigning oneself and one's friends to one or other of two polarised groups. Roundhead or Cavalier? Extrovert or introvert? Lover or hater of Marmite? In Victorian times there was another distinction on which people divided with passion. Saxon or Norman? Was the nation better or worse for Harold's defeat at Hastings?

At one level, this was a dispute about the writing of history. Some historians held that pre-conquest England was a fine and enlightened civilisation that the Normans brutally wrecked. Others believed that the Normans had rescued Britain fromdegrading, complacent inertia. Without the Normans, asked Thomas Carlyle, what would it have been? "A gluttonous race of Jutes and Angles capable of no grand combinations; lumbering about in pot-bellied equanimity; not dreaming of heroic toil and silence and endurance such as leads to the high places of this universe, and the golden mountain tops where dwell the spirits of the dawn."

I remember the thrill of those words when I first heard them at school. And now, after years of vain searching, I have found them again in a fine book by Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: the Rise and Fall of the Victorian City. Hunt establishes that Saxon v Norman went far beyond academic debate. These two sets of values were seen as alternative formulas on which to base a political society. (This was no new argument. The Diggers, the group established by Gerrard Winstanley in the 17thcentury, had constantly railed against a "Norman yoke" that was crushing Saxon liberties.)

Essentially, Victorian Saxons believed in self-government and choice at the local level, in a tradition that William and his authoritarian Normans had done their best to stamp out. Saxon institutions had been communal, collegiate: the mark, the weald, the witenagemot, drawing on general wisdom, seeking to involve every citizen in the political process. The Normans had swept that away, replacing it with a centralised system conducted by the king and his baronial agents.

Though the Saxons dominated the 19th-century argument, they did not go uncontested. Just as the libertarian Bishop Magee of Peterborough raised the cry against impending legislation on drinking - "Better England free than England sober" - so champions of the Saxon tradition sometimes seemed ready to accept the perpetuation of squalor and want rather than bow to outside pressure.

Some municipalities, like Joseph Chamberlain's Birmingham, were enthusiastic and tireless improvers; but others, to the fury of social reformers, used their right to govern themselves to do little or nothing to rescue their people from squalor and poverty. Better, in Saxon thinking, to have a system where some local governors failed to deliver than to suffer the fate of the French, where the centre obsessively sent in inspectors to crush every kind of local initiative.

Since reading Building Jerusalem, I keep thinking that I hear echoes of Norman v Saxon in present day politics. In Tony Blair's insistence, for instance, on an "unremittingly New Labour" third term; or in Alan Milburn's Guardian piece last Saturday with its pledges of what "we" are planning to do. Who exactly are "we" in this context? Not the party at large, to be sure; those days are over, which is one reason why the membership is falling. The parliamentary party? But most of them are as much in the dark as the rest of us about the platform on which they'll be called on to fight in a few months' time. The cabinet? Not even the whole of the cabinet: only the trusties.

In this context, "we" means the king and those he has gathered about him. The reported emergence of Lord Birt, late of the BBC, as a kind of central strategic planner at Tony Blair's right hand has a particularly Norman smack about it. And Robert Peston's book on Blair v Brown is full of resentments against Blair's Normanic policy-making.

Yet there's a further factor that even the most Saxon-minded of present-day politicians cannot entirely ignore - one powerfully underlined by the transformation of the old inclusive, disputatious, election-losing tradition of Labour politics into the mean machine that triumphed eight years ago. Normans tend to be better equipped for winning than Saxons. Ask Harold.