by Roy Jenkins
Baldwin’s remaining years of power did however see a great reduction in strikes, but also a growing involvement of the unions in consultation on a much wider range of issues than wages and the length of the working day. The first point was epitomized by Ernest Bevin reacting furiously to the formation of the National Government in 1931, not with the remotest contemplation of industrial action, but by deciding to offer himself as a Labour candidate (he chose Gateshead with little more concern than someone selecting a cigarette from a case, and was beaten by 13,000 in a seat which in 1929 had a Labour majority of 16,000). The second was exemplified by the Mond-Turner talks towards the end of Baldwin’s second premiership and by the increasing tendency of the TUC during his third premiership to talk directly and robustly to the Government on international affairs without worrying much about the sometimes more equivocal attitude of the Labour Party.
Overall, therefore, it would be wrong to regard the Baldwin fifteen years as having disadvantaged the unions. He had resisted the General Strike, but so would have any other likely alternative Prime Minister of the period. He had not deliberately caused it, in spite of some equivocation in his negotiating behaviour during the forty-eight hours before its start.
He could however be accused of having inadvertently created the circumstances out of which it was spawned. This he did by allowing Churchill to take sterling back to the gold standard in April 1925, and at the old pre-1914 parity. Britain faced the world of the twenties with overexpanded, rather out-of-date basic industries geared to export markets which were no longer there. Some difficult adjustment would have been necessary in any event. To revalue the currency by approximately 10 per cent was to guarantee that the operation took place not merely without an anaesthetic but with the nerves specially sensitized.
Churchill hesitated over the foolish decision. He then accepted the determined advice of the official Treasury and the Bank of England. Baldwin appears to have given no consideration to this crucial decision of the administration over which he presided. This was the down-side of his devolved and relaxed methods. He sought to govern by mood creation rather than by decision. This meant that others were liable to take decisions which contradicted the mood he sought to create.
After his electorally unfortunate lurch towards protection in 1923, Baldwin did not seek to impose economic policy. Although his pre-Prime Ministerial experience of office (exiguous by most standards) was exclusively in economic departments—four years as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, nineteen months as President of the Board of Trade, seven months as Chancellor of the Exchequer—his practice in 10 Downing Street was to reserve his energies for the wider politics of the office and to leave the economics to his Chancellor. He gave as great a freedom to Churchill, whose approach was broad-brush, as to Neville Chamberlain, who was informed and meticulous. In the National Government it was MacDonald who a little mistily sought wider international solutions, as with the London Economic Conference of 1933, and Chamberlain who dealt not at all mistily with the nuts and bolts. Baldwin was the man of party power behind the facade of MacDonald’s leadership and was Chamberlain’s political chief. But it is difficult to trace much direct Baldwin influence on economic policy beyond a predisposition towards ‘sound finance’, provided dogma was avoided and the knots of public expenditure meanness were not pulled too tight.
Baldwin’s reputation cannot be equally detached from the economic performance during his years of power. Until recently this was generally held to be a substantial count against him. A man who fought the general election of 1929, when unemployment was over 1 million, on a slogan as static as ‘Safety first’, and who then held power for over half of the 1930s years of distressed areas, basic industries without orders, and men without work, must surely have been guilty of a complacency verging upon discreditable negligence. The summing up of even such a right-wing commentator as Harold Wincott in the 1960 essays was that ‘if in economic terms the Baldwin Age was a bad age to live through it was a good age to learn from’ (and the lessons he thought had been learnt were the avoidance of deflation at home and of ill-ordered currency movements abroad).
More recent events enable a more favourable gloss to be put on the performance of the Baldwin governments than in those bad old days when Macmillan was following Attlee, Churchill and Eden down the primrose path of full employment. In 1986 the Baldwin record looks a great deal better than it did in 1956 or 1966 or 1976. The 1.2 million unemployment figure which Baldwin handed over in 1929 had risen to 2.8 million by the end of the Labour Government in August 1931. Under the National Government it continued to rise, but more slowly, for another eighteen months, so that it almost touched 3 million in the first months of 1933. This peak represented a higher percentage (18.5 per cent) than the same figure would today, because of a smaller population and fewer women within it seeking to work. The geographical incidence of the unemployment was even more concentrated than today. Wales had an unemployment figure of 34 per cent, and Scotland of 26 per cent. Unemployment was also associated with a more abject level of absolute poverty than is the case today.
All that said, unemployment at these levels was a much more short-lived phenomenon in the 1930s than in the 1980s. Already by the time of Baldwin’s last general election in 1935 it was below 2 million. By the time of his retirement in 1937 it was down to 1.5 million. The prospects for an unemployed man in 1931, particularly of course if he had youth and mobility, were much better than in 1981.
To some substantial extent the improvement of the thirties stemmed from rearmament, and indeed it required not merely the threat of war but more than a year of war itself to eliminate unemployment entirely in 1940/1. But as the next and main count against Baldwin is his dilatoriness in repairing the nation’s defences, it would be ludicrous to dismiss his unemployment record on the ground that he had secured an improvement only by squandering money on rearmament. Nor would it be true. The house-building boom, which was substantially a response to low interest rates (2 per cent bank rate from June 1932 until August 1939), was at least as significant as rearmament to the recovery and began several years earlier.
No exegesis could make the 1930s into a period of full employment and British economic renaissance. But the comparative performance was not quite so bad as was commonly assumed in the long years of post-war labour shortage. It is also the case that while the basic industries went through a very bad time in the first half of the decade, their capacity was not permanently destroyed. Work on the Queen Mary at Clydebank, to take a famous example, was suspended for two and a half years for lack of Cunard funds (until it was restarted with a Government subsidy), but the shipyard was not closed down or dismantled. The steel works, the coal mines, the heavy engineering plants, even the textile mills, all survived and were available to be called back into full use in their original or other capacities when first rearmament and then the war sent demand soaring.
The other indicators of the period presented a mixed picture. Real wages (obviously only for those in work) rose steadily and significantly. The first glint of middle-class standards began to touch the helmets of manual workers in the more prosperous industries and the more favoured parts of the country. There was a widening of the gaps between the unemployed and the employed and between the old industrial areas and the new Britain of arterial roads, semi-detached gabled houses and factories which looked like exhibition pavilions. Britain’s overseas accounts were more or less in balance, although heavily dependent on the revenue from the foreign investments of previous generations. Agriculture remained depressed, and we imported two thirds of our food. Inflation was not a problem, although the sharp price falls of 1929-31 (5 per cent a year) did not persist, and there was even some gentle (and beneficial) upward pressure from 1934.
Baldwin presided over a vastly unequal society and somewhat stagnant economy disfigured by pockets of appalling poverty (but so, it must be said, did Lloyd George and Asquith before him and MacDonald alongside him) and did so with some c
omplacency. But his record on unemployment was incomparably better than Mrs Thatcher’s, and he witnessed no such precipitate decline of Britain’s relative wealth as occurred between 1958 and 1973.
So we come to the third issue and what became the major count against Baldwin: that he closed his eyes to the threat of Hitler, neglected his country’s defences, and was only narrowly saved by the subsequent exertions of others from being responsible for the end of a thousand years of independent British history. This was the view which, when Chamberlain’s death in late 1940 removed the protection for Baldwin of having a rival in obloquy, was well propagated by mostly left-wing journalists, ruined the latter part of Baldwin’s retirement, appeared to be endorsed in Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, and was inadequately refuted by G. M. Young.
Should such a refutation have been provided by a more friendly and less barren biographer? It could not have been done on the ground that Baldwin did not carry the full responsibility for defence policy. Apart from the residual responsibility which must always rest with someone who held his high position, defence was one of the subjects, together with the management of the House of Commons and India, with the supervision of which he was specifically charged and was supposed to occupy his time, even while MacDonald was still Prime Minister.
Nor could it be refuted on the ground that Baldwin was a resolute anti-appeaser and that, had he remained in office instead of handing over to Neville Chamberlain, the dictators would have been met with a stern front of British resistance. Baldwin would not have pursued appeasement with the self-righteous energy which Chamberlain devoted to it. He would not have excoriated its opponents in the way that Chamberlain did. More important, he would never have clambered three times into a small aeroplane, in September 1938, to fly twice to Bavaria and once to the Rhineland.
We would therefore have been spared both the pretence that Munich was an agreement for peace and not a surrender, and the attendant foolishness of waving a piece of paper and talking about ‘peace with honour’. Baldwin’s lethargy had indeed already brought him one bonus before he retired. In the summer of 1936, Tom Jones (see page 144 infra) had tried hard to persuade him to take a German holiday and see Hitler in the course of it. That was not Baldwin’s idea of a holiday, even when he was feeling more vigorous than in that summer. Assisted by Eden’s opposition, he wisely declined. The advantage of this immobility was that, unlike his old enemy Lloyd George, his old protégé Edward Halifax, and his successor Neville Chamberlain, he was never in danger of succumbing to Hitler’s meretricious charm. The disadvantage was that it made it easier for him to avert his mind from foreign disagreeable-ness.
Baldwin’s objection to Chamberlain’s foreign policy, however, stemmed almost entirely from style and not from substance. This came out clearly in his ineffective House of Lords speech on the Munich Agreement. There is no reason to think that he would have been prepared to fight for Czechoslovakia in 1938 any more than he was prepared to fight to prevent Hitler moving into the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936 (for which cause, it must be said, hardly anyone wanted him to contemplate fighting).
The ‘low case’ for Munich, as opposed to the totally indefensible ‘high case’ which Chamberlain theatrically presented on his return, is that it was a necessary but inglorious delay: necessary because at that stage British forces lacked the strength to fight Germany, and the Dominions lacked the will to do so; inglorious because it involved the betrayal of Czechoslovakia. This ‘low case’ was well deployed in Iain Macleod’s Neville Chamberlain (1961). In part it is damaging to Chamberlain, because it is wholly incompatible with the ‘high case’, which he did not hesitate to deploy, the claim that he was a prince of peace who had brought back a brilliant and honourable diplomatic settlement from Germany. In part, and perhaps the more important part, however, it is damaging to Baldwin. He was not responsible for the attitude of the Dominions in 1938, although it could be argued that had he talked more to their Prime Ministers about the ‘dismal subjects’ of Hitler and the Spanish Civil War, and a little less about the Abdication, they might not have required the extra year of shock before they were prepared to go to war in 1939. What he was much more clearly responsible for was the relative deterioration in British arms, so sharp that while the Germans could not have fought against the British (and French) at the time of the reoccupation of the Rhineland in early 1936, the British (and French) could not fight against the Germans in late 1938. If this was a valid excuse for temporizing at Munich, the blame must rest with Baldwin. The decisions (or non-decisions) which determined the level of British preparedness in September 1938 were taken prior to his resignation in late May 1937.
Baldwin cannot therefore be acquitted of the charge that, during the period when he was indisputably in general charge of defence policy, either as Lord President and the leader of the biggest party in the coalition or as Prime Minister, the most menacing regime in modern European history, easily eclipsing in this respect those of both Napoleon and the Kaiser, was allowed to move on to a track of military superiority. The defence that remains is that no alternative Prime Minister would have done any better. It is not by its nature a strong one. Politicians get the credit when things go well, even if accidentally, under their stewardship. It is not usual to challenge the war-winning records of Lloyd George or Churchill on the grounds that Lord Milner or Lord Woolton might have done the jobs quicker. By analogy, it is not therefore reasonable to exculpate Baldwin on the ground that on the firm evidence of their public statements a government under Attlee or Samuel (the Liberal leader) would have been still slower to rearm, and that an earlier Chamberlain premiership would certainly not have produced a greater national resistance to the dictators. He had the responsibility. They did not.
There was of course one other ‘alternative’ Prime Minister available throughout the thirties. That was Churchill. It was not a very realistic alternative, in the sense that hardly anyone considered it remotely likely. But as he was there, the most senior (in terms of offices held) of all living politicians except for Lloyd George, eager for power, and in Downing Street within three years of Baldwin’s retirement, he cannot be wholly excluded from consideration. D. C. Somervell’s defence of Baldwin did not attempt to do so. He set himself to argue that had Churchill become Prime Minister in 1933 it would not necessarily have made all that much difference, and would certainly not have automatically prevented ‘the Unnecessary War’, as Churchill chose subsequently to call it.
Parts of Somervell’s argument are convincing, but the whole is not. An earlier Churchill Government might easily not have avoided war, might have faltered over Abyssinia and again over Spain, might not have successfully stiffened the French, might have bungled parts of the rearmament programme. But it is nonetheless impossible to believe that it would not have provided a different, more urgent, less comfortable note of leadership, which would have led to an earlier strengthening of our defences and resistance to Hitler.
At the very least the whole national tone would have been different. Baldwin always believed in letting policies flow from national moods and in helping to create such moods by the tone of his speeches. It is therefore reasonable substantially to judge his defence policy by the most memorable passages of his speeches on the subject. There are three which are preeminent. The first was on 10 November 1932, when he told the House of Commons, ‘the bomber will always get through,’ and added, ‘the only defence is offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.’1 The message was perfectly sensible (a good deal more so than President Reagan’s claims for SDI), yet intangibly defeatist. It became a recipe for hopelessness rather than for action.
The second (it was the third chronologically, but as its thought was retrospective it fits more naturally into second place) was his ‘appalling frankness’ speech, again to the House of Commons. Describing the mood at the East Fulham by-election in October 1933, he said: ‘Supposing I had gone t
o the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must rearm, does anyone think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that moment. I can think of nothing that would have made the loss of the [general] election from my point of view more certain.’2
The third was in the run-up to the general election of 1935, when on 31 October he addressed the Peace Society. ‘I give you my word’, he said, ‘that there will be no great armaments.’ The phrase was well drafted to leave room for manoeuvre, but by no stretch of the imagination did it sound a clarion call for preparedness. It fitted in well with the other two speeches. The ‘pacific democracy’ was to be massaged and nudged, but not challenged. The nudging was in the right direction, but it was not heroic. It was a method of leadership for which a case can always be argued. But it is not the only method. Not only was it not Churchill’s, it was not Gladstone’s, or Lloyd George’s or Gaitskell’s. Arguably, however, it was Franklin Roosevelt’s, so it cannot be dismissed as being only that of petty politicians or leaders who are below the level of events. It did not serve Britain well in the mid-thirties. But it is not different from the way in which at least forty of the forty-eight Prime Ministers since Walpole would have behaved. Baldwin, like Asquith, was unlucky in having to engage at the end of his career with major events to the handling of which his talents were ill-suited. This engagement cannot be held to enhance his reputation. It should not be allowed to destroy it.
CHAPTER ONE
A Quiet Beginning
Baldwin’s political career is of a deceptive shape. At first sight it looks almost perfectly balanced, fitting into the inter-war decades like a bordered picture into a frame. He first joined a Cabinet in March 1921, two years and four months after the Armistice. His last day as Prime Minister was 28 May 1937, two years and three months before the start of the Second War. He assumed the highest office at fifty-five. He voluntarily relinquished it on the eve of seventy, the only man of this century to have been Prime Minister three times.1 He died at eighty, after a full span of the retired leisure for which he had so frequently sighed, both publicly and privately.