Tradition

Though decided on the AV debate - #Yes2AV - following the political mudslinging over the recent weeks has proven curiously captivating.

This morning I stumbled across this interview of Baroness Warsi conducted by the ever pugnacious Adam Boulton. Surprisingly, and not merely because he was on 'my side', Boulton came across rather well, particularly during his dissection of what Warsi classified as 'tradition' (She did not actually use the word, but statements such as 'fundamental principles' and 'generations have fought for' suggest what she is getting at. Well at least it did for me).

Two semantic problems arise from this which probably should trouble us more than they do.

First, how old is 'tradition'? Warsi was appealing (erroneously of course) to a tradition beginning around 1945, thus disregarding from tradition a long history of parliamentary adaptation. In a similar vein the Old Price rioters at Covent Garden theatre during the Autumn of 1809 classified the rights of Englishmen to public entertainments as existing since 'time immemorial'. In the same way that Milton's Areopagitica claimed press freedoms to be inalienable, the OP rioters had a dislocated and distorted sense of what terms such as 'tradition' and 'ancient' meant. Equally during a period of acute food shortages in the early-nineteenth century, Justice Kenyon prosecuted against forestallers and regrators. These practices, which inflated food prices artificially, were perfectly legal. However common law and custom stated that they were not, and thus many ignored the 1771 legislation repealing prohibitions on these practices. Kenyon, under the Cruikshankian gaze, became a popular hero, a defender of natural rights. Yet, there is more, the legislation making forestalling and regrating illegal was neither ancient nor natural but had clear sixteenth century legislative origins.

Tradition then is a complex beast. And depends on the perspective of those who claim something or other to be traditional. Indeed as environmental historians are keen to tell us, there is nothing ancient or traditional about any of this. Human existence, Bill McKibben notes, is to the lifespan of the Earth but a blink of the eye.

Second, whose tradition is tradition? This may seem a very obvious point, but if 'tradition' has chronological problems it is also impacted upon by gender, class, nationality, faith et al. This is exemplified by returning to our forestallers and regrators - for 'the people' (I use that word begrudgingly, with an awareness of the huge problems it entails...) treating food as a special case, as outside of market forces, was customary; for the acolytes of Adam Smith on the other hand food was just another product, another unit to be monetised (and so followed land, labour and, in the present day, carbon - see Doreen Massey's beautiful essay on such matters here).

For Warsi and many in the #No2AV camp, 'tradition' is associated with post-war frugality (both intellectually and financially), settling and stoicism. For many in the #Yes2AV camp, like myself, 'tradition' is something more theoretical, something more timeless (at least in theory, it can, I guess, never be so in reality) - that being a simple belief in individual agency and in a rejection of clannish traditions based upon words enshrined upon paper which one may not question.

Tradition then is the very rejection of tradition. And I suspect this definition (if we swap over the two traditions) nicely encapsulates where Warsi stands on the issue too.