by Simon Schama
Its original charismatic founder, Thomas Davidson, the illegitimate son of a Scottish shepherd, was an itinerant lecturer, mystic and socialist who had taken radical London by storm in 1881 with lectures on the woes of industrial society. Two years later the starry-eyed and the socialists split (naturally), the latter forming a club named, obscurely but tellingly, after Quintus Fabius Maximus, the Roman General who ‘waited patiently’, to the exasperation of the impetuous, before choosing his moment to strike hard at Hannibal. Fabianism committed itself to eschewing the half-baked, half-thought revolution in favour of a long campaign of re-educating both the political elite and the working class – the first to a new sense of their social responsibilities, the latter to a new sense of their legitimate social rights. Between them they were to make a modern, just and compassionate industrial society, without violence and without the sacrifice of freedom. There have been worse ideologies in the modern age.
But seldom have there been more dazzling propagandists. As early as 1884 the young Irish journalist George Bernard Shaw was writing regular, spectacularly vituperative Fabian essays denouncing the heedlessness of the landed and monied classes. Shaw was also an inexhaustible public speaker, giving 67 lectures in 1887 alone, talking, through the flame-red beard, almost always off-the-cuff in working men’s clubs, parks, town halls, pubs and on street corners. The message was the same. Unless the politicos and the plutocrats woke up to the serfdom that their infamous system perpetuated, the serfs would one day come and get them and then only two alternatives would remain – a police state or a bloody uprising against the propertied classes. When Shaw finally tired of oratory, describing it as ‘a vice’, his essay-writing for William Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette left no sacred Victorian cow unslaughtered, including the biggest, most sacred cow of all. Of a hagiographic jubilee history of the queen’s reign, Shaw wrote:
We know that she has been of all wives the best, of all mothers the fondest, of all widows the most faithful. We have often seen her, despite her lofty station, moved by famines, colliery explosions, shipwrecks, and railway accidents…. We all remember how she repealed the corn laws, invented the steam locomotive … devised the penny post … and, in short, went through such a programme as no previous potentate ever dreamed of. What we need now is a book entitled ‘Queen Victoria: by a Personal Acquaintance who dislikes her’.
It was when Shaw met Sidney Webb and his wife Beatrice that Fabian essay-writing really took fire. Beatrice had come from a family of businessmen and Liberal politicians. Her father, Richard Potter, had been director of the Great Western Railway and had made money from the development of the Barry docks, the principal outlet for the export of south Welsh coal. But her grandfather, also Richard Potter, had been a Benthamite reformer and campaigner for the Reform Act and Wigan’s first MP. Beatrice had carried on the radical family tradition, finding work as a researcher for Charles Booth, disguising herself, somewhat improbably, as an East End Jewish girl looking for work so that she could report on the sweatshops. On the rebound from a heated but doomed passion for Joseph Chamberlain she met his diametric opposite, the short, rotund ex-tradesman and civil servant Sidney Webb, whose head was colossally out of proportion to his body. He wooed her with excitable talk of social justice, but when he made the mistake of sending Beatrice a full-length photo she recoiled in horror, reminding Sidney that it was his head alone that she had agreed to marry.
The Webbs’ strategy (which both Shaw and H. G. Wells on occasions ridiculed) was ‘permeation’, and those whom they meant to permeate were the great and the good of late Victorian and Edwardian society. Fabian Essays, which sold first by the tens and then by the hundreds of thousands, were the means of persuading the middle class, from clerks and librarians to solicitors and doctors, of the inequities and injustices of modern society and of the responsibility of the state to correct them. Sidney and Beatrice also conducted an intensive dinner-party campaign to permeate with Fabian doctrines the great and the good in political life. They brought together round the same table Shaw or Wells (though the two often quarrelled), sympathetic Liberals like Richard Haldane or Herbert Henry Asquith, and even those Tories who, for all their suspicion and condescension, seemed to be ready at least to listen – including the prime minister, ‘Prince’ Arthur Balfour.
Above all, they turned the daunting tomes of Booth and Rowntree into an impassioned argument for rethinking and, in fact, overturning the kind of nostrums about the poor that Beatrice would have heard from most of her rich social equals. There was unmistakable evidence that the problem of extreme destitution in towns and cities was seldom to do with issues of moral character, as the Victorian reformers had insisted. There might be a core of able-bodied persons who were incorrigibly dissolute, drunk or criminal (although the Webbs thought one of the most revolting aspects of hard-hearted Victorian philanthropy was to deny charity to aged alcoholics on the grounds of their dissipation). But the mass of the very poor were made up of men and women victimized by the fickleness of the business cycle: extreme fluctuations in seasonal employment; and the increasing ruthlessness (at the docks, for example) by which floating immigrant labour was exploited to drive down wages. It was subsistence or below-subsistence wages that reduced men and women to working outrageously long hours; sleeping in the overcrowded squalor of tenements; turning those places into breeding grounds of infection; or, if even those job opportunities deserted them, taking to the streets for a life of petty crime or prostitution or both. This kind of misery, argued the Webbs and other Fabians such as Sydney Olivier and Graham Wallas, was not going to go away. In fact, as competition in tailoring or boot-making or hosiery became more intense, dependence on insecure piecework in unregulated conditions was likely to increase. Testimony given to a Commission on Physical Deterioration had also suggested that low pay rather than any defect of character was the major factor in condemning the poor to a life of squalor and disease and to producing the ‘stunted’ children who would be unfit to defend the empire.
It was time for the government to take responsibility for safeguarding the decent working class from this kind of pauperization; to see them through years of difficulty over which they had no control; to think of introducing unemployment insurance, labour exchanges and old-age pensions. This was not, the Fabians argued (to the irritation of Wells in particular, who thought the entire approach a mealy-mouthed version of socialism that dared not announce itself as such), the high road to revolution. On the contrary, it would be the best way to prevent one.
One of those listening to the Webbs – more carefully than Beatrice’s judgement of him as a bumptious, egotistical reactionary suggested – was Winston Spencer Churchill. It is true that Churchill was no shrinking violet. He seemed to have taken seriously his own observation that life was just like a cavalry charge – ‘So long as you are all right, firmly in your saddle, your horse in hand, and well-armed, lots of enemies will give you a wide berth.’ When in doubt, Winston certainly charged. Violet Bonham Carter, Asquith’s daughter, remembered ‘the slightly hunched shoulders from which his head jutted forward like the muzzle of a gun about to fire’. But the enemies, around 1903, were more likely to be on his own side of the House of Commons than on the Liberal opposition benches. He had made no bones about his rejection of Chamberlain’s policy of imperial protection, a line that did not go down well in his constituency of Oldham, where the beleaguered textile manufacturers were all for it. He attacked his own front bench for inflated army and navy estimates. But more than anything, he sensed that the intellectual spirit, the energy of ideas, was all on the other side. H. G. Wells, then a Fabian socialist, would become a regular at Churchill’s ‘Other Club’ dinners where the two became friends, notwith-standing the fact that Wells regarded with undisguised contempt the Macaulayite historical epic to which Winston was so attached. It was history, Wells insisted, that had dragged Britain down. Instead of being sedated by the past it badly needed to think about the future, in particular how Britain coul
d become the techno-scientific society that alone would master what was to come. While Churchill was pottering around writing the vindicatory history of his father, Wells was writing Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1902).
But Wells’s antiseptic utopia of a classless Britain, its memory wiped clean of the congested absurdities of the past, would never have changed Winston Churchill’s party allegiance. When in May 1904 he finally, and unsurprisingly, crossed the floor of the House of Commons to join the Liberals, he aligned himself with the long tradition of pre-emptive progressive reform personified by the Whigs in 1832; by Disraeli sponsoring the Reform Act of 1867; and, as he imagined, by his father’s reinvention of ‘Tory Democracy’. To make sure no one missed the filial significance of the gesture, he seated himself in Randolph’s old place amidst the opposition benches. He was now, he told an audience during his first election campaign as a Liberal in Manchester, devoting himself to the ‘popular cause’.
No one amongst the Liberals had any cause to suspect Churchill of mixed feelings or suspect loyalties, even if he did protest a bit too much and a bit too often about his current hatred of the Tories. They were, he told a Manchester audience in May 1904, ‘a party of great vested interests, banded together in a formidable confederation, corruption at home, aggression to cover it up abroad … dear food for the millions, cheap labour for the millionaire’. After the 1906 election, which removed the Conservatives from power and reduced their number in the Commons to 137, Churchill revelled in their annihilation and gave the distinct impression to the more radical members of the new government, like David Lloyd George, that, if Balfour did carry out his threat to use the huge Tory majority in the House of Lords to frustrate legislation, then the child of Blenheim would be in the van of the counter-attack. As a new boy he was fortunate to get a government office, even if it was only colonial undersecretary, answerable to Lord Elgin, the ex-viceroy of India. The post enabled Churchill to combine a radical posture with imperial swagger and not see any contradiction. It also let him go with Elgin on a tour of Africa, where he revisited the battlefield of Omdurman, bagged a rhino, netted butterflies for his collection and wallowed for hours in his bath like a hippo, dictating memoranda and articles for Strand Magazine. ‘Sofari sogoody’ was his famous verdict. The same could be said for his initiation as a government minister.
But all this was a prelude to the real business at hand. When the prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, died in the spring of 1908 he was succeeded by Asquith, with whom Churchill was on good personal terms – although, like everyone else, he never quite understood what really made him tick. Lloyd George took Asquith’s post as chancellor of the exchequer and Churchill moved up into Lloyd George’s place at the board of trade. He was in the cabinet at 33, even younger than his father when he had joined Salisbury’s government.
Asquith’s cabinet was rich with talent, but it was also a comprehensive portrait gallery of the history of liberalism, both old and new. It included Gladstone’s biographer, the gaunt, high-minded John Morley, who was there to uphold Victorian canons of moral improvement, and John Burns, who despite his leadership of the strike of 1889 was the personification of ‘respectable’ labour. But as far as Churchill was concerned the entire cabinet, including Asquith himself, was overshadowed by the fiery light coming from David Lloyd George. It is unlikely that Churchill had ever encountered anyone quite like the former lawyer from the Welsh village of Llanystumdwy – a background that (while a lot less impoverished than Lloyd George made out) was not supposed to produce the razor-sharp intelligence, the political ferocity and the quicksilver oratory, peppered with dangerous, sly jokes, which the ‘wizard’ could turn on, seemingly, at the drop of a hat. The backgrounds of the two men could not have been more dissimilar, yet they quickly recognized each other as kindred spirits: both were possessed by burning personal ambition, both were driven to take the fight to the enemy. In parliamentary tactics as well as public speaking, Lloyd George was very much the teacher and Churchill the student. Winston had a tendency to rumble and bellow; Lloyd George charmed people to self-destruction. Churchill raised his voice in the Commons; Lloyd George made sure to soften it, giving his best impersonation of reasonableness. But as a political double act they were unbeatable: the hammer and the stiletto.
By 1908, both felt much the same about the needs of imperial defence. Lloyd George had been as ferocious a public enemy of the Boer War (alongside Campbell-Bannerman) as Churchill had been a supporter. But both now recognized that the war had burdened successive governments with a huge debt; compounded by the expensive necessity, as it was thought, of keeping the Royal Navy at a superior strength to its major rival, imperial Germany. But defending the empire was, by this time, not just a matter of military book-keeping. The Fabians had argued that imperial survival depended as much, if not more, on the social health of Britain as on dreadnoughts. Germany, after all, was hardly a socialist state, and yet the government there had accepted the need for labour exchanges and unemployment insurance. To the modern-minded chancellor and the president of the board of trade Germany seemed the model of an organized state, whereas Britain was a muddle of habits and prejudices. As far as they were concerned the introduction of comparable reforms, along with old-age pensions, was as much a matter of effective self-defence as it was of social justice. The question, however, was where the money would come from to fund both pensions and battleships. The Conservative answer had always been to impose indirect taxes, often on the staple commodities of daily life. But apart from the inherently regressive nature of those taxes, 1907–8 was a period of economic slump, especially in the most embattled industries such as coal mining. This was certainly not the time to be paying for pensions by taxing those who could least afford it.
Out of those deliberations came one of the epic confrontations of British political history, to rank alongside the debate over the Petition of Right in 1628–9 and that over the Reform Act of 1832. And, arguably, more was at stake between 1908 and 1911 than at either of those times: a double revolution that saw assumptions about the legitimate business of the British state transformed, and the power of the House of Lords emasculated.
The gauntlet was thrown down by Lloyd George in 1909 in a budget that proposed paying for old-age pensions, and raising the rest of the £16 million extra annual revenue needed to put the desired social reforms in place, by a stiff rise in death duties. He favoured the introduction of a surtax of sixpence in the pound on incomes over £5000 and, most explosively of all as far as the old aristocracy were concerned, a duty of 20 per cent on the unearned appreciation of land values, to be paid whenever estates were sold, inherited or transferred. There was also to be a charge of a halfpenny in the pound on undeveloped land and mineral sources, and fairly steep tax increases on alcohol. The slap in the face of the old governing class was so obvious that it left even the most ardent members of the cabinet slightly breathless; looking at the document, as John Burns said, ‘like nineteen rag pickers round a heap o’muck’. Apart from anything else, its execution presupposed a complete survey of British land.
Marshalled by Balfour, up to this point the Lords had been obstructionist but not over money bills. This time it was different. They rose to Lloyd George’s loaded bait like trout to the hook. Off on the stump went Lloyd George and Churchill, the latter now president of the Budget League (formed in opposition to the Budget Protest League), doing what they loved doing best: savaging the stuffy. In May 1909, Churchill had seen his Labour Exchange Act through the Commons, and now he felt entitled to present himself as the people’s champion. What was more, who better than a baby of Blenheim to judge what history did, and did not, entitle their noble lordships to? At Norwich in July he sounded half like Edmund Burke, half like Tom Paine, declaring the upper house ‘an institution absolutely foreign to the spirit of the age and to the whole movement of society’. It was absolutely natural for a country so attached to tradi
tion to sustain a ‘feudal assembly of titled persons’, but they had long outstayed their welcome. Had the Lords been content with their largely decorative status, they could have had a gentle twilight: ‘Year by year it [the House] would have faded more completely into the place to which it belonged until, like Jack-in-the-Green and Punch and Judy, a unique and fitful lingering memory would have remained.’ But no, they insisted on resisting the will of the people. They had launched a class war. Let the outcome be on their own heads. At the Victoria Opera House in Burnley in December, Churchill had a lot of fun with Curzon’s claim in nearby Oldham that the ‘superior class’ by blood and tradition had inherited the right to ‘rule over our children’. What did the noble lord say? That ‘“all great civilisation has been the work of aristocracies”. They liked that in Oldham (laughter). … Why, it would be much more true to say the upkeep of the aristocracy has been the hard work of all civilisations” (loud cheers and cries, “Say it again”).’
On the People’s Budget road show, however, Winston was merely the warm-up act; it was Lloyd George who was the star. The great mesmerizer, by turns wicked comedian, saw-them-in-half illusionist-cum-juggler, and (to slay the audience at the end) master of tragic opera, was nowhere more on song than back home in Wales. At Swansea in October 1908 he apostrophized the well-to-do about the need for unemployment insurance:
What is poverty? Have you felt it yourselves? If not, you ought to thank God for having been spared its sufferings and its temptations. … By poverty I mean real poverty, not the cutting down of your establishment, not the limitation of your luxuries. I mean the poverty of the man who does not know how long he can keep a roof over his head, and where he will turn to find a meal for the pinched and hungry little children who look to him for sustenance and protection. That is what unemployment means.
