by Roy Jenkins
During the ten years of Unionist Government which followed Rosebery’s resignation in 1895, the Upper House was more than usually quiescent. The tendency for the peers to be more active against a Liberal Government, which we have seen growing and which reached its culmination after 1906, was accompanied by an equally strong tendency for their repose to be more complete when a Government of the right held office. The most controversial legislative proposal of these ten years was the Education Bill of 1902. It marked a sharp departure of policy on an issue which aroused very strong sectarian feeling; it was bitterly opposed by the Liberal Party (although supported by the Irish Nationalists); it was introduced against the known wishes of an important section of the Government; and it was passed by a House of Commons in the election of which a discussion of the issue had played no important part. Yet the only reaction of the House of Lords was to insert into it an amendment, moved by the Bishop of Manchester, which made it a still more extreme and partisan measure. Many of the same considerations applied to the Licensing Bill of 1904; and the Government had by then begun to lose very heavily in the bye-elections. But the Lords passed it with alacrity.
It was therefore difficult to predict with any degree of certainty the treatment which the new Liberal Government would get from the Upper House. Obviously there could be no doubt of the power of the Lords to wreck a Liberal legislative programme; and equally obviously there could be no hope that throughout the whole life of the Government this power would remain entirely unused. But on the basis of what had been said and what had been done in the past there was good room for hope that at least the earlier and electorally more discussed measures of this enormously popular Government would be allowed to pass. If the electorate were not held to have spoken with a clear voice in 1906, the test of audibility must have been an unusually severe one.
Nevertheless, too much reliance could not be placed on precedent. The growing partisanship of the House of Lords made a more extreme course of action a possibility. This view was strengthened by Balfour’s ominous remark, made in an election speech at Nottingham on January 15, 1906, that it was the duty of everyone to see that ‘the great Unionist Party should still control, whether in power or whether in Opposition, the destinies of this great Empire’. Asquith interpreted this as a direct call to the House of Lords to redress the balance of the constituencies. To what extent this was so could not be determined at the time, but the unfolding of events quickly provided the answer.
III Ploughing the Sands
The king’s speech at the opening of the 1906 session forecast a great crop of legislation. Twenty-two bills in all were promised, but pride of place was clearly to be given to the Education Bill. This was the only measure which achieved a paragraph of its own in the Gracious Speech. ‘A Bill will be laid before you at the earliest possible moment,’ it ran, ‘for amending the existing law with regard to Education in England and Wales.’ A Trades Disputes Bill, to rectify the position created by the Taff Vale and Quinn v. Leathens decisions, and a Plural Voting Bill, to prevent the owners of numerous property qualifications from exercising more than one vote, were the other contentious measures. The remainder could be described, at least for the purpose of reassuring the King, as ‘uncontroversial’ or ‘departmental’.a
The Education Bill, which, while leaving intact the administrative structure created by the Act of 1902, sought to remedy some of the more keenly-felt grievances of the Noncom-formists,1 was introduced into the House of Commons by Augustine Birrell on April 9. It was greeted with a storm of protest, not only from the Unionist Party but also from the Anglican and Roman Churches. The Bishop of London took the Albert Hall for a demonstration of opposition.
In the meantime, with the two Houses in recess, Balfour and Lansdowne were using the interval to discuss the general strategy of dealing with Liberal legislation. Lansdowne had prepared a memorandum a few days before Parliament rose in which he set forth a proposal for closer liaison between the leaders of the Opposition in both Houses.
‘The Opposition is lamentably weak in the House of Commons and enormously powerful in the House of Lords. It is essential that the two wings of the army should work together, and that neither House should take up a line of its own without carefully considering the effects which the adoption of such a line might have upon the other House. In dealing with such Bills as the Trades Disputes Bill or the Robartes Bill, I cannot help thinking that the leaders in the House of Commons should have before them at the very outset a definite idea of the treatment which the question might receive in the event of either of those Bills coming before the House of Lords later in the session. Similarly, there are very important questions which will from time to time be debated in the House of Lords and which should be discussed with an eye to the effect of the discussion upon the temper of the House of Commons. At this moment no such machinery as I have suggested is in existence.
‘Mr. Balfour might like to call a few of us together after the holidays in order to consider the procedure which might be adopted.
‘I should myself be inclined to propose that he should institute a not too numerous Committee, including, say, four or five members of each House, who might meet in his room at the House of Commons, once a week at least, for an exchange of ideas.…
‘As a House of Lords’ delegation I would suggest Lord Halsbury, Lord Cawdor, Lord Salisbury, and myself.’1b
Balfour replied on April 13, hedging on Lansdowne’s specific proposal, but going on to a general analysis of the position.
‘The real point is, as you truly say, to secure that the party in the two Houses shall not work as two separate armies, but shall co-operate in a common plan of campaign. This is all-important. There has certainly never been a period in our history in which the House of Lords will be called upon to play a part at once so important, so delicate, and so difficult.… I conjecture that the Government methods of carrying on their legislative work will be this: they will bring in Bills in a much more extreme form than the moderate members of their Cabinet probably approve: the moderate members will trust to the House of Lords cutting out or modifying the most outrageous provisions: the Left Wing of the Cabinet, on the other hand, while looking forward to the same result, will be consoled for the anticipated mutilation of their measures by the reflection that they will be gradually accumulating a case against the Upper House, and that they will be able to appeal at the next election for a mandate to modify its constitution.
‘This scheme is an ingenious one, and it will be our business to defeat it as far as we can.
‘I do not think the House of Lords will be able to escape the duty of making serious modifications in important Government measures, but, if this is done with caution and tact, I do not believe that they will do themselves any harm. On the contrary, as the rejection of the Home Rule Bill undoubtedly strengthened their position, I think it is quite possible that your House may come out of the ordeal strengthened rather than weakened by the inevitable difficulties of the next few years.
‘It is, of course, impossible to foresee how each particular case is to be dealt with, but I incline to advise that we should fight all points of importance very stiffly in the Commons, and should make the House of Lords the theatre of compromise. It is evident that you can never fight for a position which we have surrendered; while, on the other hand, the fact that we have strenuously fought for the position and been severely beaten may afford adequate ground for your making a graceful concession to the Representative Chamber.’c
Lord Lansdowne’s biographer comments that the ‘only flaw’ in this exposition was the view that the Upper House might emerge from the struggle with its position strengthened; but others may take the view that Balfour’s calm assumption that half the Liberal Cabinet did not believe in the measures which he himself found distasteful—a not untypical Tory illusion—was equally dangerous.
The Education Bill, after its second reading on May 10, was bogged down in committee for twenty parliamentary days an
d its emergence at the end of this period was only secured by an extensive use of the guillotine. It was given a third reading on July 30 by 369 to 177, but the shadow of the House of Lords lay heavily upon the debate on this occasion. J. A. Spender, in his life of Campbell-Bannerman, has told us that ‘Liberals, seeing their overwhelming preponderance in the House of Commons, found it difficult to believe that the Peers would venture even the one stroke (the attack on the Education Bill).…’d This may have been the view at the beginning of the session, but it had certainly changed by the time that the bill reached its final stage in the Commons. Balfour, in a famous passage of his speech, expressed his view that ‘the real discussion of this question is not now in this House and has not been for some time; the real discussion must be elsewhere; and everybody is perfectly reconciled to the fact that another place is going to deal with large tracts of the Bill which we have not found time even to touch upon … it is in the highest degree improbable that the Bill will come back in the shape in which it leaves us. The honourable Gentleman who has just sat down controverted a prophecy of mine that the Bill will never pass. Does he think the Bill will ever pass? I do not think he or anybody else does.’e Birrell was naturally more cautious, but his words implied no great confidence in the future of the bill, while a Liberal backbencher, the radical and Anglo-Catholic Charles Masterman,1 said that ‘they were sending the Bill to another place knowing that large changes would be made there and were prepared to accept at least a certain number of those changes.… It was sad to think that this great democratic movement … should have as one of its first results the fact that 2,500,000 Catholics and a more indefinite number of Liberals were saying: “Thank God for the institution of the House of Lords.” ’f
If in fact this was the position (which is very doubtful), it was for Arthur Balfour and not only for their lordships that God should have been thanked; for it was his views rather than those of the peers themselves which determined the future course of the bill’s progress. He advised them to let it through on second reading, which they did without a division. He drew up and presented a detailed memorandum setting forth a whole table of amendments, which they accepted, so that the bill returned to the Commons in a quite unrecognisable form. What had been intended as a measure of relief for the grievances of Nonconformists became a bill which would place the upholders of denominational teaching in the schools in a position still more favourable than that which they enjoyed under the 1902 Act. The behaviour of the House of Lords in regard to this bill, even more perhaps than on any other occasion, fully justified the taunt of Lloyd George from which this book’s title is taken.
When the bill came back to the Commons, early in December, two courses were open to the Government. They could either attempt to recover their original measure by the long and laborious process of stripping off layer after layer of destructive amendment; or they could take the unprecedented but effective and time-saving course of moving to disagree with the Lords’ amendments en bloc. The latter alternative was chosen, and despite Opposition protests at the new departure (to which the Government retorted with at least equal force that the extent of the Lords’ amendments was also without precedent), the motion was carried by the enormous majority of 416 to 107, the Irish voting with the Government.1
A week later the matter again came before the Lords, and Lansdowne moved, and carried by 132 to 52, a motion ‘that this House do insist on its amendments to which the Commons have disagreed’. There was a small revolt of the ‘moderates’ against the official Unionist attitude which led the Duke of Devonshire2 and Lord Ritchie of Dundee3 into the Government lobby, but it did not extend to men such as Lord St. Aldwyn4 and Lord James of Hereford,5 who were later to be included in this category. The Archbishop of Canterbury6 and seven other bishops voted with Lansdowne; with the exception of Dr. Percival of Hereford, who voted with the Government, the remainder abstained.
The deadlock was now complete, the more so because private negotiations had already taken place and failed. There had been several conversations between the Primate and the Prime Minister and a conference attended by Asquith, Crewe, Birrell, Balfour, Lansdowne, Cawdor7 and the Archbishop had been held on the day before the final vote in the Lords. Both sides had been willing to retreat a little from their public position, but even very substantial Liberal concessions failed to meet the minimum Tory demands. The King had used considerable personal influence to try to bring about a settlement, but it was compromise from both sides, rather than a recognition by the Lords of the relevance of the recent Liberal electoral victory, that he urged.
There was nothing further for the Government to do but to move to discharge the order and abandon the bill. This Campbell-Bannerman did in the House of Commons on the day following the vote in the Lords. The enormity of the action of the Upper House in rejecting the much-canvassed, first major measure of a Government elected by a huge majority, whereas four years previously it had let through without a whimper a far more revolutionary and less discussed bill on the same subject, introduced by an old and weak administration, was plain for all to see.
‘It is plainly intolerable, Sir,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘that a Second Chamber should, while one party in the State is in power, be its willing servant, and when that party has received an unmistakable and emphatic condemnation by the country, the House of Lords should then be able to neutralize, thwart, and distort the policy which the electors have approved.… But, Sir, the resources of the British Constitution are not wholly exhausted, the resources of the House of Commons are not exhausted, and I say with conviction that a way must be found, a way will be found, by which the will of the people expressed through their elected representatives in this House will be made to prevail.’g
One method by which a way might have been sought was by an immediate dissolution, with a proposal to curb the power of the Lords in the forefront of the Liberal programme. Campbell-Bannerman’s biographer tells us that ‘a few, a very few, voices’ were raised for this, but that ‘the great majority’ thought that the education issue was not big enough to afford favourable ground from which to force the issue.h Another consideration working against dissolution was the comparative poverty of many Government members. They did not want the expense of a second general election, unless it were quite unavoidable, within eleven months. The writeri of a contemporary statement of the Liberal case gives considerable importance to this point, and suggests that Balfour depended on it in calculating his risks.
There would have been much to be said for an immediate dissolution. The result would certainly have shown a Liberal majority almost as great as a year previously, and the constitutional issue might well have been resolved before it was allowed to waste away so much of the Liberal strength. Mr. Spender tells us that ‘more than once during the subsequent months he (Campbell-Bannerman) was heard to express a doubt whether he had been right in not taking up the challenge and going to the country again in December 1906’.j
Had the Lords treated all the major measures of the session in the same way as the Education Bill, the Prime Minister’s decision might have been different. But their behaviour towards the Trades Disputes Bill, the loss of which would have caused more popular indignation than the loss of the Education Bill, was more circumspect, although the constitutional case for damage or delay would here have been much stronger.
When the Liberal Government came in there was common agreement amongst its members that a measure was to be introduced to undo the effect of certain recent decisions in the Courts and to restore the presumptive meanings of the Act of 1871. The law of conspiracy was to be relaxed, peaceful picketing was to be legalised, and trade union funds were to be given special protection. So much was agreed; but there was sharp disagreement in the Cabinet as to the method by which the last objective was to be attained. The lawyers, who were very strong both in numbers and in ability, wished to proceed indirectly by restricting the law of agency, while some others wished to give a direct exemption. At this
stage the lawyers won, and a bill along their lines was introduced.
This was coldly received by the powerful new Labour group, and one of its members, Walter Hudson, introduced a private member’s bill embracing the principle of direct exemption. The Prime Minister listened to the arguments deployed in favour of this bill, and proceeded, without consultation, to accept it on behalf of the Government. The protagonists of the original measure accepted the change with a bad grace, and so (if anything, with a somewhat better grace) did Arthur Balfour. The Opposition divided against neither the second nor the third reading of the bill.
This left Lord Lansdowne with little room for manoeuvre if he was to act in accordance with the principle laid down by Balfour in his memorandum of the previous April: ‘It is evident,’ Balfour had then written, ‘that you can never fight for a position which we have surrendered.’ Lansdowne agreed, and neither a motion of rejection nor an amendment to the bill was put forward in the Upper House, although several peers spoke strongly against its provisions. Lansdowne tried to justify his own position, which even his biographer, Lord Newton, clearly regarded as quite unjustifiable, in the following terms:
‘We are passing through a period when it is necessary for this House to move with very great caution,’ he said on December 4. ‘Conflicts, controversies, may be inevitable, but let us, at any rate so far as we are able, be sure that if we join issue we do so upon ground which is as favourable as possible to ourselves. In this case I believe the ground would be unfavourable to this House, and I believe the juncture is one when, even if we were to win for the moment, our victory would be fruitless in the end. I say then that, so far as I am concerned, I shall not vote against the Bill. I regard it as conferring excessive privileges upon the Trade Unions, as conferring dangerous privileges upon one class and on one class only—privileges in excess of what the most trusted exponents of their views have formerly asked for, privileges fraught with danger to the community and likely to embitter the industrial life of this country; but I hold also that it is useless for us, situated as we are, to oppose this measure.’k
