Joe Chamberlain had become impatient. Two years was a long time to wait and he had always been in a hurry. He wanted Balfour to be more positive, perhaps even enthusiastic, in his acceptance of tariff reform, but enthusiasm was not Balfour’s style. Chamberlain began to show displeasure by finding fault with the government which he was pledged to support. Balfour addressed the party faithful in the Albert Hall but Chamberlain complained that it did not give enough emphasis to the fiscal issue. When the Conservative Central Office – ‘the spring of all abomination’ in Chamberlain’s opinion – issued a leaflet based on the Albert Hall speech, he complained that it had not dealt with colonial preference at all.
Balfour’s style did not suit a government under siege. On 22 May, pressed in the House to set out his own position on the question which obsessed the House of Commons, he remained ‘lolling with studied negligence on the Treasury Bench’. After forty minutes of uproar, he rose in his place. ‘It is not consistent with usage or ideas of justice that the criminal in the dock – and that is the situation which I am supposed to occupy – should offer his defence before he has heard the whole of the accusation.’ Forty more minutes of mayhem followed. Then the Deputy Speaker adjourned the House. Nobody believed that the government could last much longer. On 20 July 1905 it was actually defeated in the House of Commons on the motion to accept the Irish Estimates. Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Unionist Chancellor of the Exchequer only three years earlier, rushed into the Prime Ministers outside office and, in a passion which resulted both from his opposition to tariff reform and from respect for parliamentary propriety, announced, ‘The Prime Minister must accept defeat and resign.’38
The King, on the other hand, ‘insisted that every effort be made by Mr Balfour to maintain himself in office’.39 The Prime Minister gladly accepted his sovereign’s advice. Indeed, hanging on – motivated far less by personal ambition than the conviction that only his party could preserve the interests of the country – had become an obsession. ‘Surveying a suddenly riven party, he set himself the task of preventing any widening of the fissure … He had answered at question time, made speeches in successive debates and never committed himself by an embarrassing admission. That may not be the highest form of statesmanship. As an intellectual feat it is unparalleled.’40
On 10 August 1905 the Unionist leadership considered the arguments for an immediate election. Once again, like governments down the ages, it found the case for staying more persuasive than the alternative. Outrage over the Chinese indentured labour was subsiding. The Liberals were running out of money to maintain their organisation in the country. Given time, the party might rally round its leadership. That view was not confirmed when, three months later, the Duke of Devonshire declined, with appropriate aristocratic hauteur, to announce his reconciliation with the Prime Minister.
Then, in November, it seemed that the Unionists’ luck had at last changed. Lord Rosebery, speaking in Bodmin, denounced the Liberal Party’s traditional commitment to Irish Home Rule in the clear belief that he represented a substantial number of Liberals who opposed the party’s policy but lacked the courage to speak out against the Ark of Gladstone’s Covenant. In fact Asquith – who had openly expressed his own doubts about Home Rule – had come to an accommodation with Campbell-Bannerman. Indeed the Liberal Leader’s announcement of step-by-step devolution represented a compromise which had been successfully designed to unite two extremes. Lord Esher, who was with the Prime Minister when the decision to call an election was taken, claimed that, shortly after he had convinced the Cabinet that the time to dissolve Parliament had come, Balfour met Asquith and only then discovered that the Liberals would fight the election campaign united. ‘He seemed a little moved, which was not strange on relinquishing his great office, but his spirits revived almost immediately.’41
His despondency was justified. The Liberal Party – the beneficiary of circumstances as much as of wisdom and foresight – had pulled itself together. There was still dissatisfaction with Campbell-Bannerman. A clear majority of the parliamentary party would have preferred Asquith as leader. But, thanks to the prospect of office, open revolt was replaced by silent dissatisfaction. The ‘Compact of Regulas’ – a name taken from the place in which the plot was hatched – had aimed at persuading Campbell-Bannerman to take a peerage while Lord Spencer became party leader and putative prime minister and prepared the way for the party’s real choice. Hopes of success were encouraged by Campbell-Bannerman’s still deteriorating health and his growing concern for his wife’s even greater sickness. They were at first reinforced in their determination by the King who, in the early months of his reign, had taken such a dislike to the Liberal Leader that he was reluctant to dine at the same table. The dissidents then began to worry that Campbell-Bannerman’s radical supporters would accuse them of intriguing at Court against their lawful leaders. That problem was solved by Edward VII, who met the object of his dislike while on holiday in Marienbad and decided, after all, that he was not a bad fellow.
The plot to remove him was finally frustrated by Campbell-Bannerman himself who – when the Tory tariff war seemed likely to topple the government – proceeded to prepare for office as if his right to the Downing Street tenancy was unquestioned and unquestionable. On 13 November 1905, Mrs Asquith, who was having her hair washed in her bedroom, was interrupted by her excited but not altogether contented husband. He gave her a verbatim account of a meeting with Campbell-Bannerman. ‘Suddenly he said that he thought things looked like coming to a head politically and that any day after parliament met, we might expect a general election. He gathered that he would probably be the man the King would send for … What would you like? The Exchequer I suppose?’42
Balfour resigned office on 4 December 1905. There was some disagreement within the Opposition leadership as to whether the Liberals should take office or force an immediate general election, and the sort of horse-trading which invariably accompanied the allocation of the senior portfolios when a new government was formed. The Compact of Regulas, still in the minds of Asquith and his friends, made them hope that the retirement which they could not impose might be accepted voluntarily And there was a moment when they thought that Campbell-Bannerman might step aside. But the prospect of office encouraged renewed loyalty. Asquith – so involved with the composition of the government that he left a fancy-dress party at Hatfield House and drove to Belgravia to impress his opinions on the putative prime minister – became universally acknowledged heir apparent. Parliament met only for the dissolution.
Campbell-Bannerman, anxious to preserve unity in his party, promised no Home Rule until after a second general election and Rosebery, misjudging the mood of the moment, tried so hard to alienate the Liberal high command from their leader that he only succeeded in alienating it from him. Ireland was barely an issue. Polling began on 13 January 1906. The Unionists won 157 seats in the House of Commons, Labour 53 and the Irish Nationalists 83. The Liberals, with 377 Members, had a majority of 132 over all other parties and could assume that, in most divisions, it would be supported by the Labour MPs, some of whom called themselves ‘Lib-Labs’. The apparently invincible Unionists had been defeated and the Liberals (once thought to be destroyed by Home Rule) began a full decade of government. They had still to reconcile deep division over Ireland and conscience and conviction had begun to turn Parliament’s mind to Ireland once again. But conscience and conviction were not enough to encourage the new Liberal government to expose its divisions. The defeated Unionists’ one consolation was that Campbell-Bannerman did not need the support of the Irish Nationalist Members of Parliament. The best for which Irish nationalists could hope was Home Rule by stealth and by instalments.
*For details of the Education Bill see Chapter 12, ‘Useful Members of the Community’.
*The Duke had married, late in life, the Dowager Duchess of Manchester. As a result she became known as the Double Duchess.
*Both Liberal Unionists who had served as Chancellor of the
Exchequer.
CHAPTER 7
Uniting the Nation
For most of the nineteenth century, men of goodwill and sound judgement had believed, despite the empirical evidence all around them, that the problem of poverty could be solved only by the poor themselves. The belief in self-help had, largely thanks to Jeremy Bentham, become the social doctrine of radicals as well as reactionaries. For a hundred years, politicians of all persuasions accepted that the encouragement to industry and thrift should be matched by disincentives to irresponsibility and sloth. In 1900, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 still restricted paupers’ access to ‘outdoor relief’ and offered them the daunting alternative of the workhouse, which Edwin Chadwick, the inspiration of the legislation, described as ‘uninviting places of wholesome restraint’. The notion that poverty was usually self-induced and could be reduced by imposing fearful penalties on the poor survived the death of Queen Victoria, but at the beginning of King Edward’s reign influential voices had begun to advance a different social theory. Perhaps the starving multitudes should be helped rather than punished.
In 1890, William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army (and no relation to Charles, his namesake, the social statistician), had published In Darkest England, a gloriously impractical plan for the elimination of unemployment. He proposed the creation of ‘Overseas Colonies’ to which willing workers would go after learning a craft in the ‘City Colonies’. In 1904, an Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration proposed a variation on the same idea. The ‘waste element in society’ should be transported.
Like so many early Edwardian policy-makers, the Committee members drew a sharp distinction between the needs of the deserving and the undeserving poor. Only four years earlier that distinction had been given official recognition. The House of Commons Select Committee on the Aged and Deserving Poor had recommended that ancient worthies should not be left to the mercy of the Boards of Guardians and the Poor Law Commissioners. They had proposed that £7 million be made available for distribution to anyone over seventy who was destitute and could be proven to have done all in his or her power to avoid becoming a pauper – including becoming dependent on the Poor Law. Its provisions were overtaken by a genuine, if not hugely generous, national insurance act.
However, even in the harshest days of what Alfred Doolittle called ‘middle-class morality’, the government understood that, while some adult citizens might be beyond redemption, most children were capable of salvation and that healthy minds were most likely to mature in healthy bodies. So the 1904 Committee’s recommendations included medical inspection in all schools and the provision of free school meals. It was not the beginning of the state’s acceptance of its obligations towards the very young. A year earlier, the Royal Commission on Physical Training in Scotland had proposed the introduction of school meals. But the 1904 report amounted to official sanction for a whole swathe of ideas which had gained ground in Parliament ever since the new Labour Members had come together to form a coherent group.
It had been a Labour MP who had moved, from the back benches, a bill which the government adopted and passed into law as the Education (Provision of School Meals) Act, 1906. That legislation empowered local education authorities to provide meals for the ‘necessitous poor’. In the same year, the Education (Administrative Provisions) Bill instituted the system of medical inspection which the Committee on Physical Deterioration had proposed two years before. An amendment to add the creation of a schools medical service, which would have allowed diagnosis to be followed by treatment, was defeated, but the notion of child welfare had become clearly established in the official mind. In 1907 ‘borstals’ were established for young offenders. The regimes were rigorous, but minors were no longer to serve their sentences in adult gaols. The Children’s Act of 1908 made neglect a criminal offence for the first time. The decision, taken in 1902, to require the registration of midwives was of equal benefit to mothers and babies. Registration was only available to women with rudimentary nursing knowledge and skills. Mrs Gamp’s day had passed.
Improvements in welfare have always resulted from a combination of altruism and political expedience. In 1905, Balfour – oppressed by divisions within his party over tariff reform and harassed by the Labour Party – was anxious to make a gesture of friendship towards organised labour. He was not prepared to meet the unions’ demand for legislation which reversed the Taff Vale Judgement – the High Court ruling that made them liable for damage caused by their members to the interests and property of employers.* But he was willing to take action against unemployment. He regarded providing work for the willing as right and necessary on its own merits. Balfour was amongst the first Conservatives to realise that Britain would only maintain its position in the world if the health and education of the labour force were improved. Rowntree, Cadbury and Charles Booth had made clear that health depended on standard of living and that standard of living depended on remunerative and regular employment.
Balfour therefore introduced an Unemployed Workers Bill which he hoped would meet the nation’s needs and the trade unions’ demands at a minimal cost. An even cheaper palliative was the Aliens Bill which fulfilled the promise of the 1900 election to restrict the number of immigrants who entered the country. Cabinet fears that imposing restrictions on entry would be ‘full of difficulties’ had been confirmed when, in 1904, the first bill failed to gain a parliamentary majority. It was redrafted so as to require immigrants to prove that they could support themselves rather than to prohibit categories of immigration and was passed in 1905.
The Unemployed Workmen’s Act, which did little more than monitor local levels of unemployment, was approached with great caution, under the supervision of Gerald Balfour, the Prime Minister’s brother, who had succeeded Walter Long – essentially a country squire despite his years in government – at the Local Government Board. The acceptance that the government should take even indirect action to alleviate unemployment amounted to a huge shift in both the political philosophy and the economic judgement of the Conservative Party. Indeed, even Gladstonian Liberals believed that Parliament’s only duty was to protect the nation from invasion and its citizens from crime. Balfour had, therefore, made a great ideological leap. His letter to the King of 28 February 1905 demonstrated how anxious he was not to appear to be hurtling headlong into uncharted territory. In London, a local employment committee supervised by the Board of Guardians and the borough councils had already initiated schemes which matched unemployed workers to jobs. If such a scheme were implemented with ‘severe but kindly conscientiousness … much good would be done and many persons who would otherwise sink into pauperism and become a charge on the rates might be able to tide over the season of commercial depression and wait for better times.’ However, there were dangers. It was particularly important to make sure that the funds made available by the Bill were not squandered on schemes which debilitated rather than redeemed.
It would be a social calamity if these labour committees were to make such a use of the penny rate as to create a new class of semi-paupers … i.e. labourers who got employment in the ordinary way during the summer months and each recurring winter claimed from the local authority to be provided with work out of public funds. Those persons would have the privileges of pauperism while retaining the full rights of citizenship.1
To prevent such a calamity, the President of the Local Government Board examined the draft bill ‘to see if anything could be done to guard against abuse’. The objective was achieved by changes which ‘cut out everything which involved the payment of wages out of rates’.2 The result was what Balfour called ‘a machinery bill’. It gave the Local Government Board power to set up local employment committees on its own initiative. Local rates could be used to keep a register of the unemployed, establish labour exchanges, assist emigration and acquire land for farm colonies – another adaptation of the ideas laid down by William Booth in the much derided In Darkest England. They could not, however, be use
d for direct payment to the unemployed and the immediate relief of distress. A public appeal for funds, led by Queen Alexandra, raised £125,000 to supplement the committees’ activities. But it was not the extension of the privilege of pauperism that caused Balfour most concern. He knew that the machinery which the Unemployed Workmen’s Act set up to fit men to jobs did little to reduce unemployment. Realising that more was needed, but uncertain about how to proceed, he took refuge in the expedient employed by uncertain prime ministers down the ages. He set up a Royal Commission on the Poor Law. It was almost his last act before leaving office.
Lord George Hamilton, a free-trade rebel, was the surprise choice for chairman. Balfour’s motives were altruistic, but his instinct was political. He had therefore hoped to embarrass the Opposition by asking Lord Rosebery to take on the job. But colleagues had convinced him that the former Liberal Prime Minister would grow bored with the continual meetings and abandon the work half done. Balfour’s first approach was made instead to the Duke of Devonshire in the expectation – justified as it turned out – that he would be flattered, but would decline. Hamilton was appointed, partly because Balfour thought that he should earn the ‘first class pension’ which he had received after resigning from the India Office over the issue of free trade and the Cabinet in 1903. It was an unpropitious beginning to what turned out to be a crucial step along the road to the new view of the government’s responsibilities: the condition of the poor was becoming the government’s concern.
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