Mr Balfour's Poodle

by Roy Jenkins

  ‘The people in future, when they elect a new House of Commons, must be able to feel, what they cannot feel now, that they are sending to Westminster men who will have the power not merely of proposing and debating, but of making laws. The will of the people, as deliberately expressed by their elected representatives, must, within the limits of the lifetime of a single Parliament, be made effective.’b

  And on Home Rule he expressly freed the Liberal Party from the ‘self-denying ordinance’ which had made it eschew this subject in the 1906 Parliament.

  Arthur Balfour’s election address deployed arguments which have since become familiar. The attack on the House of Lords, he said, was only the culmination of a long-drawn conspiracy to secure a single-chamber legislature. These ‘conspirators’ wished the Commons to be independent not only of the peers, but of the people. This plot was ingeniously contrived, but was proving unsuccessful. The people were not insulted by having their opinion asked on the Budget, and they did not think that the House of Lords had exceeded its duty in asking for a dissolution on this point.

  The day before this address was issued the Chancellor of the Exchequer had begun his own campaign at Caernarvon. After arousing great enthusiasm by his announcement that he proposed to decline the offer made to him to contest Cardiff and to remain in his old constituency,1 he went on to employ, most effectively, a metaphor in his familiar pastoral style:

  ‘Yesterday I visited the old village where I was brought up,’ he said. ‘I wandered through the woods familiar to my boyhood. There I saw a child getting sticks for firewood, and I thought of the hours which I spent in the same pleasant and profitable occupation, for I also have been something of a backwoodsman; and here is one experience taught me then which is of use to me today. I learnt as a child it was little use going into the woods after a period of calm and fine weather, for I generally returned empty-handed.… But after a great storm I always came back with an armful.… We are in for rough weather, we may even be in for a winter of storms which will rock the forest, break many a withered branch, and leave many a rotten tree torn up by the roots. But when the weather clears you may depend upon it that there will be something brought within reach of the people that will give warmth and glow to their grey lives, something that will help to dispel the hunger, the despair, the oppression and the wrong which now chill so many of their hearths.’c

  Throughout the campaign Lloyd George remained in strong oratorical form. He joined eagerly in a ‘war scare’ with Germany2 argument which Balfour introduced, and told a Peckham audience on January 7 that ‘the believers in inevitable war are the men who make them. The Unionists, after having destroyed the Constitution, are prepared to destroy the fiscal system and to risk war with a European power, and all just to avoid valuation of their land.’d And he kept up his rhetorical pressure to the last moment, even to the extent of addressing a large meeting at Grimsby on the day of the poll, an intervention which was commonly thought to have had much to do with the Liberal gain which was achieved there. His visit incensed the local Unionists to the extent of making him repeat, in a less dramatic and ingenious form, his Birmingham escape of ten years earlier.1

  The election campaign generally was in no way outstandingly exciting—even the suffragettes called off their attempts to break up meetings after Christmas—although public interest remained high throughout. Inevitably, the attention of the voters strayed from the rather involved constitutional point at issue, and the Budget versus tariff reform was probably the main question upon which electors in Great Britain made up their minds. In other words, the Unionists got what they wanted: an election on the merits of the Budget rather than on the propriety of the peers’ behaviour. In Ireland, of course, the position was entirely different. The Budget itself would have won very few votes, but it had come to possess the contingent merit of opening up a way by which the veto might be destroyed; and to this end, which they knew to be a necessary step towards Home Rule, the bulk of the Nationalists were prepared to swallow the Budget and give close support to the Liberal Party. A minority of the Nationalists, however, rejected such a policy of compromise, and nine members, who had accepted Redmond’s leadership in the last Parliament, fought and were elected under the label of ‘Independent Nationalists’.

  The earlier part of the campaign was notable for the platform activity of the peers. Hitherto the regular sessional order of the House of Commons declaring that no member of the other House should concern himself in parliamentary elections had been fairly strictly observed, even when, as in 1880, it put the Unionists at a grave disadvantage by precluding their three leading figures1 from participation in the campaign. In the 1906 Parliament an apparent breach had occurred when the Duke of Norfolk wrote a public letter of support to the Unionist candidate in the High Peak bye-election,2 and the fact that the Committee of Privileges, to which the matter was referred, recommended no action may have encouraged peers to apply the rule more loosely at the general election than had before been the practice. Many of them decided that to participate fully up to the day on which the writs were issued, and then to abstain, would be a fair compromise.3

  Until January 10, therefore, there was a spate of senatorial oratory from Unionist platforms. Whether it helped the cause it was designed to promote is doubtful. Mr. R. C. K. Ensor has commented that ‘it had in some cases the disadvantage which the act permitting a prisoner to give evidence is generally allowed to have entailed for the prisoner’.e Lord Cawdor and Lord Curzon were perhaps the most vehemently immoderate of spokesmen in their own defence. Cawdor combined his vehemence with an engagingly demagogic approach, as when, at Leeds on December 18, he accused the Government of ‘wanting us to copy Bulgaria and Greece in getting rid of a Second Chamber, and Nigeria in its land law’.f Curzon was very different, and it is difficult now to imagine the reaction of his audience at Oldham on December 16 to his denunciation of the House of Commons for containing ‘no great generals or ex-Colonial Governors’, and his revelation that ‘Renan had said that all civilization had been the work of aristocracies,1 and Maine that a democracy in England would have prevented the Reformation and a series of other great political and economic reforms’.g

  In Birmingham they were less concerned with proclaiming the merits of aristocracy, a theme which would still have been uncongenial to both the leaders and the supporters of the Chamberlain faction, than with turning everything to the advantage of the cause of tariff reform. Joseph Chamberlain, who was again candidate for West Birmingham, was unable to leave the Kensington house where he had remained, incapacitated by a stroke, since 1906, but he poured out letters of encouragement to chosen candidates; and Austen, operating from Highbury and fighting East Worcestershire, was a willing if not altogether effective substitute. The tariff reform cause undoubtedly made some progress during this campaign,2 within the ranks of Unionist workers and outside, and Balfour, on the eve of the first day’s polling, both made it the principal subject of his last-minute message to the electors and joined with Joseph Chamberlain in signing a categorical denial that protection would affect the working-class cost of living.

  Asquith was always at home with this subject, and he responded eagerly to any gauntlets which were flung down before him by the Opposition leaders. ‘After seven years’ controversy,’ he said at Crieff on January 15, ‘the world is strewn with the wreckage of Mr. Chamberlain’s prophecies on Tariff Reform. Our oversea trade has expanded beyond expectation; the census of production has shown that we are more than holding our own, and that the injury of “dumped” goods is imaginary.’h

  He was glad to have something into which he could get his teeth, for many of the Unionist pronouncements on other topics (and some on this) presented the controversialist with nothing but a smooth, round surface. ‘We seek to build up; our opponents to destroy,’ wrote Austen Chamberlain, in a mystical mood. ‘We seek to promote union; our opponents to promote separation.’i ‘Liberal policy runs counter to the best thought of the time,’j said A
rthur Balfour, in one of the most unprecise and arrogant remarks which can ever have come from such normally precise, if not, in big things, over-modest lips.

  Polling began on January 15. Both parties were optimistic, as parties must always be, although the calmer spirits in both would probably have admitted that a near balance with the Irish holding control was the most likely result. London and Lancashire were regarded as the key areas, in which sweeping Conservative gains would be registered if the left-wing majority was to be destroyed.

  The first results were not discouraging for the Unionists. There were three gains for them in London, three in Lancashire and two in the three-member industrial borough of Wolverhampton; and in Birmingham the safe seats became still safer. But this early promise was not quite fulfilled. By the end of a week, with about three quarters of the results in, a net Unionist gain of seventy-five was shown, and it was certain that neither of the two main parties could secure a clear majority, but that the Government, with its allies, would be fairly comfortably placed.

  By the end of the month all the returns, with the usual exceptions of the Scottish Universities and Orkney and Shetland, were complete, and it was possible to see the picture in detail. The Unionists had achieved a net gain (over their 1906 position) of 116 seats, and had brought themselves to within two of the strength of the Liberal Party itself; they were 273 and the Liberals were 275. The Nationalists, in addition to the defection of the ‘independents’, dropped one county division, and the Labour members, despite a gain from the Unionists at Wigan and the spur of the Osborne judgment (which had been given on December 22), sustained a net reduction of eleven, and fell back to forty.

  The Government coalition therefore had a nominal majority of 124, which, although very far short of the preponderance of 1906, was nevertheless the next largest majority which a Liberal Government had enjoyed since 1832.1 But it was not a very cohesive majority. To call the Independent Nationalists allies of the Government in any sense was to strain the meaning of language. They certainly could not be counted upon for support. And even the support of Redmond and his followers was highly conditional. But it was quite essential, for, even with the Labour Party solidly in the Government lobby, a temporary alliance of Unionists and Nationalists could defeat Asquith by forty. It was not an easy prospect which faced the Prime Minister.

  Where had the losses occurred which made the Liberal strength so much less than in 1906? Not, to any extent, in Wales, Scotland, or Ireland. The Celtic fringe, which in 1906 had given the Government parties 175 seats (out of a possible 235), gave them only four less in 1910. In Scotland there was even a net gain of one, for losses further north were more than balanced by an increase in Liberal strength on the Clyde. In Wales the ‘clean sweep’ of 1906 was not repeated, but there were only two Unionist gains, one in Radnorshire and one in the Denbigh District. In Ireland, as has already been mentioned, the Nationalists lost one seat (at Mid-Tyrone) and sitting Liberals were defeated by Unionists at North Antrim and South Tyrone.

  In England the position was markedly different. In 1906 the Government had held 338 of a total of 465 seats, but in 1910 they sustained a net loss of 112 and fell back to a minority —226, as against the Opposition’s 239.2 These losses, of course, were not evenly spread over the whole country.1 They were much heavier in the south than in the north, and they occurred more in county divisions and in small boroughs than, with the exception of London, in big towns. Asquith expressed at least some of the truth when he told his constituents at East Fife, after a few days’ polling, that ‘the Unionist gains have been chiefly in the smaller boroughs and cathedral cities; the great industrial centres have mainly declared for Free Trade.…’k

  Examples of ‘the smaller boroughs and cathedral cities’ which changed hands were to be found in Bath, Bedford, Cambridge, Chester, Colchester, Exeter, Gloucester, Kidderminster, Rochester, Salisbury and Warwick; and there were a number of others. The solidarity of ‘the great industrial centres’, on the other hand, was best illustrated in Lancashire and Yorkshire, where in the whole of the two counties, including the borough constituencies, the Government sustained a net loss of no more than six seats, one in a seaside resort and two in rural Yorkshire. But there were other features in the picture. There were the sharp Liberal reverses in the dockyard towns, with both the seats changing hands in Devonport and Portsmouth and the single seat at Chatham going the same way.2 There was London, where of a total of sixty-two seats the Unionists gained twelve, including not only the present-day ‘marginals’ like North Kensington and North Paddington, but also divisions which should have been much more solidly left-wing—Southwark West, Mile End, Bow and Bromley, Lambeth North and a number of others. These gains gave the Unionists a majority of six in London.

  There were the West Midland industrial boroughs (apart from Birmingham), where the Liberal tide ebbed sharply, with losses in Walsall, Wednesbury, West Bromwich and two of the three Wolverhampton seats. Last, and most striking of all, were the Liberal reverses in the southern agricultural counties (east of the Devon border) and in the suburban fringes of the Home Counties. Two seats were lost in Berkshire, two in Dorset, four in Essex, two in Hampshire, two in Hertfordshire, three in Kent, three in Middlesex, three in Oxfordshire, three in Somerset, four in Suffolk, three in Surrey, two in Sussex, and four in Wiltshire. The turn-over in this belt amounted to a half of the total number of seats, and gave the Unionists a third of their total gains.

  A feature of this election was the extent to which the gains were not all one way. The balance, of course, was enormously in favour of the Unionists, but their gross gains were offset by the Liberals winning twelve seats which the Unionists had won in 1906, and by the Labour Party winning one. This was quite different from the position in 1945, for example, when the sweeping Labour gains were not offset by a single Conservative gain from Labour; the contrast may be explained by the greater influence which was exerted by the local campaign and the personalities of the candidates in 1910. Without doubt it was widely held at the time that electors were more open to the influence of a powerful speech delivered in the constituency or of some other local factor than is now usually thought to be the case. The results attributed to Lloyd George’s polling-day intervention at Grimsby have already been noted; and Austen Chamberlain, writing to Balfour a few days after the contests and discussing the failure of the Unionists to make gains in Devonshire, said ‘… we were overwhelmed at the last moment by the weight of oratory on the Government side—three Cabinet Ministers and other lesser lights, against whom we could set none but local men. But for this we ought to have won three or four more seats down there’.l This may have been an exaggerated view even then, however.1

  Another feature of the results was the almost complete unanimity with which the seats where the Unionists had made bye-election gains during the previous Parliament swung back to the Liberals. North-West Manchester, where Mr. Churchill had been defeated in 1908, Ashburton, Newcastle-on-Tyne (where the Unionist had broken through a huge Liberal majority) Pudsey, Bermondsey, and a number of others all returned to their 1906 allegiance by substantial majorities.

  Bye-elections are always an uncertain guide; and those who have assumed that the behaviour of the Lords was almost wholly responsible for the contrast between the general election result which a projection of bye-election returns before the introduction of the Budget would have given and the result which was in fact obtained nine months later may well have applied too mechanistic an interpretation to events. The approach of a general election in itself rallies support to the Government, and this, combined with the fact that the Budget, both for its own merits real or supposed and as an alternative to tariff reform, was a vote winner, is enough to explain the recovery in the strength of the Government. It is therefore by no means certain that Lord Lansdowne and his followers lost the first general election of 1910 for their party. Their action in November did not make the Budget popular. It was already so—although the opposition of the duk
es had had something to do with this. What the peers’ rejection did was to make the Budget an effective stepping-stone towards the destruction of the veto and the implementation of much legislation which had hitherto been blocked; and it therefore made the Liberal electoral victory not necessarily greater, but far more fertile, than it would otherwise have been. It was a more modest victory than that of 1906, but it was to be a less sterile one.

  VII The Beginnings of the Parliament Bill

  The new parliament, which had looked as though it might be difficult to lead, did nothing to belie this reputation in its first few weeks of life. But this may have been due more to Asquith’s temporary loss of nerve and touch than to the inherent complexity of the situation. The left-wing parties had between them a very substantial majority, and they were firmly united on the two main issues of the day: they were all anxious to curb the veto and to give Home Rule to Ireland. The Irish (and a fortiori the Labour Party) could have found no basis of alliance with the Unionists, and while they had their differences with the Liberals, it was never likely that they would carry a dispute to the extent of putting the Government out. The dispute on the Budget, which even in the freedom of the previous Parliament had not led the Nationalists to vote against the third reading of the Finance Bill, was about the Irish share of a £1,200,000 increase in the spirit duty. It was a trivial item to set against the other issues at stake.

  The essentials of the situation were therefore that the Government was committed not by the exigencies of the parliamentary position but by its own desires to giving the Irish the main things they wanted, and that, this being so, the Irish could easily be brought to heel on points of detail or precedence.