The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  A young lawyer from a strongly nonconformist, Welsh-speaking coastal village in north Wales – where the Principality pokes a finger out at Ireland – Lloyd George had first made his mark as a Welsh nationalist. Attacking the Tories in the 1880s he spoke of ‘the English ogre, this fiendish she-wolf whose lair is in Westminster’. A good early indication of the Lloyd George style came from the obscure-sounding Llanfrothen Burial Case. The law had been changed to allow Welsh nonconformists to be buried in Anglican churchyards, but one rector had held out. Lloyd George searched for, and found, a dying Methodist whose family allowed his cooling corpse to be used to challenge the rector. They literally broke down the churchyard gate and buried him, against the Llanfrothen vicar’s will, alongside his daughter. Lloyd George then took the family’s side in the case, and won. It made him a Welsh national hero. This mixture of ingenious controversy-stoking, bad taste, courage and self-promotion will recur. As a Liberal MP he had quickly established himself on the radical wing of the party, supporting the Boers as if they were simple Welsh farmers and the Irish Catholics as if they were nonconformists, and generally taking a very high moral tone while engaging in ever more enthusiastic adulteries while his wife Margaret was left behind in Wales. He was a Liberal, however, not a socialist, warning as early as 1904 that if his party did not push social reform successfully, the newly formed Labour Representation Committee would one day sweep them aside: ‘the Liberal Party will be practically wiped out’. He was, of course, right about that. When, after the tariff row, Churchill stalked out of the Conservative Party, it was to the seat next to Lloyd George in the Commons that he stalked. And when the Conservatives under Balfour finally expired, Lloyd George became a member of the cabinet, President of the Board of Trade and, as his biographer put it, one ‘of the board of directors of the greatest Power on earth’.35 Yet his radical instincts appeared as sharp as ever. In 1906 he said in Birmingham that if the next Liberal government had done nothing after a Parliament ‘to cope seriously with the social condition of the people, to remove the national degradation of slums and widespread poverty and destitution in a land glittering with wealth . . . then a real cry will arise in this land for a new party and many of us here in this room will join it’.

  Pulling the teeth of dangerous radicals is an old British establishment sport. Lloyd George was cautiously welcomed at the Palace, flattered by the mainstream press and turned into a genial ‘card’, a buzzing, amusing Welsh ‘character’, by the caricaturists. In turn, as a cabinet minister in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal government, he was generally a reassuring figure. A radical reformer, yes, and one with a sharp wit, but a practical, sensible man who worked hard to reform the conditions of seamen and the safety of ships, to improve industrial statistics, to modernize patent law and to resolve dangerous industrial disputes, notably on the railways. It was, if not humdrum, the kind of thing any modernizing government in an age of international trade and growing industry had to do. The Welsh firebrand quietly plugged away. Fine fellow! Then Campbell-Bannerman died. Asquith made Lloyd George Chancellor of the Exchequer, a job he would hold continuously for longer than anyone else until Gordon Brown arrived in 1997. The fun began: Lloyd George turned to his wild side.

  There were plenty who believed the real radical in the new Liberal government was Asquith, not Lloyd George. As the outgoing chancellor, Asquith had prepared the ground for the early version of old-age pensions, and had begun to find the money to pay for them. Lloyd George too had been a long-time campaigner for some system of relief for the old. As we have seen, he was hugely impressed by Seebohm Rowntree’s book. During the Boer War he had complained at the waste of resources: every large shell exploding in Africa was money taken away from old-age pensions. The first reform was a minor, rather botched one. Determined to go further, Lloyd George used his summer parliamentary break in August 1908 to travel to Germany and Austria to find out at first hand what a really good system of welfare looked like. Germany hangs over Edwardian Britain in so many ways. The rising military and naval threat, she was in the forefront of industrial inventions. But she was also where radicals went to see the future of a fairer, better-organized way of treating people. Her coal miners had enjoyed some protection in hours worked and conditions since 1776; child and juvenile labour had been restricted since 1839. If there was no German Dickens, perhaps that was one reason. And from 1881 to 1889 Bismarck’s Germany extended insurance against sickness, old age and unemployment far more widely and rigorously than any other European power had so far even contemplated.

  Lloyd George visited German factories, old-age insurance offices, seamen’s organizations, harbours and social democratic politicians. Back at Southampton he told a waiting reporter for the Daily News: ‘I never realized before on what a gigantic scale the German pension scheme is conducted . . . no amount of study at home can convey to the mind a clear idea of all that state insurance means to Germany.’ Churchill, now promoted to Lloyd George’s old job at the Board of Trade, was if anything more evangelical still, badgering Asquith for labour exchanges, unemployment insurance, health insurance, public works to mop up unemployment, compulsory education until seventeen and state control of the railways – in fact, much of the agenda of his later enemy Clement Attlee in 1945. Back in 1908 he told the prime minister: ‘Germany with a harder climate and far less accumulated wealth has managed to establish tolerable conditions for her people. She is organized not only for war but for peace. We are organized for nothing except party politics . . . I say – thrust a big slice of Bismarckism over the whole underside of our industrial system & await the consequences whatever they may be with a good conscience.’36 Or as he put it later in one of his happiest phrases, ‘we must bring the magic of averages to the rescue of the millions’.

  The growing vision of Lloyd George and Churchill, had it been given concrete expression in the Edwardian age, might have transformed the story of modern Britain, and spared the country much of the hardship and despair to follow. Yet there was a strong tradition of hostility to the German way, too bossy and organized for the traditions of small-state freedom-loving Britain. W. J. Braithwaite, a key official sent to study the big slice of Bismarckism in more detail, reported back that it was too bureaucratic. Much better to base insurance on the tradition of the voluntary friendly societies and the private insurance companies, whose members would prevent malingering. Lloyd George wasn’t enough of a details man, and perhaps wasn’t enough of a socialist, to resist such arguments. So a prologue to the eventual National Insurance Bill of 1911 explained that ‘the only really effective check . . . is to be found in engaging the self-interest of the workmen themselves . . . a purely State Scheme . . . would inevitably lead to unlimited shamming and deception’. While there is some truth in this, learned the hard way in more recent times, it discarded the basic principle of the German state-welfare scheme in favour of ‘the most trivial level of borrowing of individual devices’.37 But where would the money come from? Recession and unemployment stalked industrial Britain. Out in the streets, patriotic crowds were chanting for the latest hugely expensive war machines, the British Dreadnought battleships: ‘We want eight and we won’t wait.’ Guns or butter? Welfare or warfare? This was what really set the radical Liberal leaders on their collision course with the old establishment.

  Lloyd George needed to find, he calculated, £8 million for the Dreadnoughts, and another £8 million ‘to save 700,000 people from the horror of the workhouse and £2 million for 200,000 aged paupers’. Most of the money would come from higher income tax and from estate duties, but also from alcohol and tobacco duties, a rising amount (still small in total) from the new motor cars and from petrol. There would be a super-tax and a land tax, both highly provocative for the small number of the super-rich. Few of the million or so people then paying income tax were earning enough to be hit by the new proposals. Only 12,000 people would face supertax and only 80,000 estate duty. Yet these, of course, were the people with the influence i
n Edwardian Britain. The Liberal cabinet was, in the main, horrified. The land value taxation turned out to cost more to collect than it raised and would be withdrawn again, with Lloyd George still in office as prime minister, in 1920. But back then, had it not been for Churchill’s unstinting support, Lloyd George would not have survived the weeks of angry ministerial discussion. By this stage, the close political friendship between the Welsh firebrand and the Duke’s nephew seemed truly bizarre. Churchill’s only political guest at his wedding had been Lloyd George. He had invited this rising class warrior to stay with him at Blenheim, where Lloyd George had walked off to try to find a nonconformist place of worship ‘under the shadow of this great palace – found them at last in a United Prayer Meeting in a field. They soon spotted me and were delighted, poor lads.’38 As the controversy grew about the ‘socialistic’ measures, Churchill came to be regarded as a class traitor by others in his family and social circle. He may well have been psychologically prepared for this. Forty years earlier his father Sir Randolph had also been ostracized from polite London society, though for threatening the Prince of Wales with exposure in a complicated divorce action, and by some accounts for actually threatening him with a duel. This had been done for reasons of family loyalty: Randolph was protecting his elder brother Blandford, later the Duke of Marlborough, a man who according to newspapers of the day was known for ‘brutal and profligate behaviour . . . a foul-mouthed fellow, a ruffianly wife-beater, a man who if many in both Houses of Parliament had their way, would have been subjected to the ignominious punishment of the lash’.39 Nevertheless, the vicious ostracism, including the need for the Churchills to decamp to Ireland since few titled families would receive them, was long remembered by Winston, who never treated King Edward very seriously and whose readiness to step outside the magic garden of the aristocracy began early. By 1909 the Duke of Beaufort thought Churchill, despite his grand connections, as much of a threat as Lloyd George and said he would like to see them both torn apart ‘in the midst of twenty couples of dog hounds’.

  Lloyd George’s Budget speech in 1909 was very long and by all accounts dull listening, yet it would ignite the great confrontation of pre-1914 British public life. He argued that four Dreadnoughts were the minimum needed. Granted, it would have been an act ‘of criminal insanity’ to throw money required for other purposes ‘on building gigantic flotillas to encounter mythical armadas’ but for Britain, ‘naval supremacy is essential for national existence’. He moved on to praise Germany’s national welfare system, call for better use of Britain’s land and natural resources and explain in meticulous detail why he was raising particular taxes. He concluded, however, by describing it as ‘a war Budget . . . raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness’ and looking forward to the time when ‘wretchedness and human degradation . . . will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests’.

  Early reaction was calm, but as the full import of the taxation of the rich hit home, it swiftly became intemperate. The government faced an increasingly self-confident and aggressive Tory opposition, most importantly in the Lords, which had thrown out Liberal measures, notably on the licensing of pubs. Churchill had warned that the Lords would be sent ‘such a Budget in June as shall terrify them; they have started a class war, they had better be careful’. Lord Rosebery, the languid grandee and former Liberal prime minister, replied when it arrived that this was ‘not a Budget but a revolution’ and went on to imply the Commons did not have the authority to impose it. This was ‘pure socialism . . . the end of all, the negation of faith, of family, of property, of Monarchy, of Empire’. A campaign began in the press, in the City, among landowners, in the House of Lords, as the establishment began to hit back. Financiers held meetings, aristocratic and wealthy Liberals went to protest in person to Asquith, an Anti-Budget League was formed and the newspaper letters pages were brimming with well-bred bile.

  And so Lloyd George was found, that hot July evening, down at Limehouse, with the suffragette protestors finally expelled and the huge crowd quiet and expectant. In the eyes of many, including Tory peers, the Conservatives were successfully beating the elected government by working through the Lords. Their leader, Arthur Balfour, was enjoying the discomfiture of radicals who had beaten him at the polls but were now themselves being thrashed in the gilt and mahogany surroundings of Pugin’s aristocratic palace. Lloyd George had always had a strong line in anti-landlord rhetoric. He seems genuinely to have despised the peerage, just as he was an enthusiast for ‘new money’ and the coarse, pushing-ahead men later called entrepreneurs. He was building on a long radical tradition of opposition to the Lords, which wanted to see the upper house abolished, or at least so neutered that it would never be able to challenge the elected chamber. This was a real confrontation, an historic one, between urban democracy and landed power. It was about more than simply raising money. On that night Lloyd George blew on the fire with all his magic-dragon might and brought the trouble to boiling point.

  He had needed the money for Dreadnoughts, he told his audience, and the workmen had ‘dropped in their coppers’. But when he went round Belgravia, ‘there has been such a howl’. Was it not a shame that a rich country like Britain should allow those who have toiled all their days to die in penury and starvation? In one of the most moving passages, he recounted being down a coal mine, half a mile deep:

  We then walked underneath the mountain, and we had about three quarters of a mile of rock and shale above us. The earth seemed to be striving – around us and above us – to crush us in. You could see the pit props bent and twisted and sundered, their fibres split in resisting the pressure. Sometimes they give way, and then there is mutilation and death. Often a spark ignites. The whole pit is deluged in fire and the breath of life is scorched out of hundreds of breasts by the consuming flame.

  Yet when he and Asquith went to the landlords and asked for something to keep out of the workhouse ‘these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old . . . they are broken, they can earn no more’, the aristocrats scowled, turned away and called them thieves. Well, said Lloyd George, ‘I say the day of their reckoning is at hand’.

  By this stage some landlords had begun petty protests, such as refusing to pay their customary subscription to the local football club or threatening to sack labourers if the Budget was passed. Lloyd George was merciless and continued the attacks: ‘Are they going to threaten to devastate rural England by feeding and dressing themselves? Are they going to reduce their gamekeepers?’ What, he asked his working-class audience, would they find to do in the season? ‘No weekend shooting with the Duke of Norfolk or anyone.’ With the support of the people behind him, he later added, ‘we can brush the Lords like chaff before us’. A fully equipped duke, he told his audience, costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts, ‘and dukes are just as great a terror – and they last longer’. The typical nobleman ‘has one man to fix his collar and adjust his tie in the morning, a couple of men to carry a boiled egg to him at breakfast, a fourth man to open the door for him, a fifth man to show him in and out of his carriage, and a sixth and seventh to drive him’. The chancellor knew his country-house economics: this was incendiary wit.

  On his yacht at Cowes, Edward VII, who spent a fair proportion of his time shooting grouse with dukes, purpled with anger at Lloyd George’s words. Asquith wrote to Lloyd George warning him that the monarch, whom they would need as an ally in threatening to destroy the Lords by swamping it with peers, was ‘in a state of great agitation and annoyance . . . I have never known him more irritated or more difficult to appease, though I did my best.’ Lloyd George wrote to the King pointing out how much he had been provoked. Edward replied from his royal yacht that, though he personally took no position on the Budget, ‘the language used by the Chancellor of the Exchequer . . . the King thinks was calculated to set class against class and to inflame the passions of the work
ing and lower orders against people who happen to be owners of property’. The Times was equally condemnatory, saying in a leader two days after Limehouse that he had been ‘openly preaching the doctrine that rich men have no right to their property, and that it is the proper function of Government to take it from them’ and attacking his ‘studious misrepresentations . . . violent invective . . . his sophistry . . . his coarse personalities . . . his pitiful claptrap’.

  Neither the royal rebuke nor the one from The Times had much impact on Lloyd George. A few months later in Newcastle he demanded to know who was governing the country, people or peers? The Budget had not been formed to provoke a constitutional fight with the Lords but now that had happened, how was it possible that 500 ‘ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the ranks of the unemployed’ could push aside the will of the millions who made the country’s wealth? If there was a revolution, it would be sparked by the Lords but then directed by the people. Edward Carson, the savagely brilliant and uncompromising lawyer who would lead the Ulster campaign, announced that Lloyd George ‘has taken off the mask and he has preached openly a war of classes, insult to individuals, the satiation of greed and the excitement of all the passions which render possible the momentary triumph of the demagogue’. Churchill was seen as not much less socialistic. He had already warned that if social reform was halted there would be ‘savage strife between class and class’ and was just as ready as Lloyd George to mock ducal lifestyles, despite his own Blenheim connections. Dukes, he told a Leicester audience, were unfortunate creatures who ought to be left to lead quiet, delicate sheltered lives: ‘Do not let us be too hard on them. It is poor sport – almost like teasing goldfish . . . These ornamental creatures blunder on every hook they seek and there is no sport whatever in trying to catch them. It would be barbarous to leave them gasping on the bank of public ridicule upon which they have landed themselves. Let us put them back gently, tenderly, into their fountains.’40 Yet again, the court intervened: the King’s private secretary wrote a letter of protest to The Times, which Churchill thought showed that both he and the King had gone mad.