British Politics, 1910-1935: The Crisis of the Party System

British Politics, 1910–35

A well-written, erudite, stimulating and informative study which should be required reading for undergraduate courses. Robert D. Pearce, St Martin’s College, Lancaster

This accessible new study provides a much-needed guide to the pivotal period of British history between 1910 and 1935, against the background of upheavals such as the First World War and the transition to full democracy as a consequence of the Reform Acts of 1918 and 1928. Combining an up-to-date synthesis of previous work with a re-appraisal of the main personalities, themes and events of the period, David Powell brings clarity to this crucial yet complex period. Examining British politics on the eve of war, the author assesses the impact of war on the parties and the political system and the process of realignment that followed in the interwar period. In particular he analyses to what extent these events as a whole constituted a crisis of the party system. From the structure of the Edwardian political system and the party politics of pre-war Britain, through to the economic and political crisis of 1931 and the subsequent rebuilding of the party system, this comprehensive analysis offers an indispensable survey to all students of British history or politics. David Powell is Senior Lecturer in History at York St John, a college of the University of Leeds. His previous titles include The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901–14 (1996).

British Politics, 1910–35 The crisis of the party system David Powell

First published 2004 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2004 David Powell All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN 0-203-31033-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0–415–35106–5 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–35107–3 (pbk)

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction

vi vii 1

1 Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain

10

2 The crisis of partisanship, 1910–14

34

3 The crisis of war, 1914–18

58

4 Coalitionism and party politics, 1918–22

90

5 Three-party politics, 1922–4

117

6 Politicians and the slump, 1924–31

142

7 Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after

171

Conclusion Notes Further reading Index

190 199 212 215

Preface and Acknowledgements

The early twentieth century was a time of upheaval in politics as in other aspects of British life. The political changes of the period have been much studied, and the mass of specialist literature on particular topics such as the decline of the Liberal party and the rise of Labour, or the impact of the First World War, has become so vast that it is difficult to retain an overall picture of what was happening or to get a proper sense of the way in which the different parts of the historiographical jigsaw relate to one another. The present volume, while engaging with the main historical controversies, attempts to provide a framework for the study of British politics in the first half of the twentieth century which places the various debates and sub-debates in a pattern that enables them to be seen as part of a continuous story. As well as examining the fluctuating fortunes of individual political parties and the rise and fall of governments, it seeks deliberately to focus attention on the development of the party system as a whole and its relationship to wider changes in politics and society. As the subtitle of the book indicates, this approach is underpinned by the conceptual belief that the events of 1910–35 did not merely comprise a succession of political crises of differing degrees of severity but that together they constituted an underlying crisis of the party system itself, in which ideas and institutions inherited from the Victorian era were subjected to far-reaching challenges which resulted in a more serious threat to Britain’s political stability than has usually been admitted. It will be apparent to specialists in the field how much an overview of this kind is indebted to the work of other historians, although they may not necessarily endorse my emphases or interpretation. I have attempted to acknowledge my debts to the existing literature in the chapter notes and the guide to further reading. In addition, there are a number of individuals I would like to thank for their assistance. Jeremy Black helped me to get the original project for the book off the ground. The publishers at UCL and Routledge showed faith in it at every stage, and I am particularly grateful to Vicky Peters for her unflagging enthusiasm and support. Friends and colleagues have provided much appreciated encouragement. Finally I must mention my wife, Pyrrha, who has been there through it all, again.

Abbreviations

BEF BUF CPGB ILP IRA LCA LRC LWC MFGB NDP NLF NUCCA NUWM NUWSS SDF TGWU TUC UBC UDC UVF UWC WEWNC WSPU

British Expeditionary Force British Union of Fascists Communist Party of Great Britain Independent Labour Party Irish Republican Army Liberal Central Association Labour Representation Committee Liberal War Committee Miners’ Federation of Great Britain National Democratic Party National Liberal Federation National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations National Unemployed Workers’ Movement National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies Social Democratic Federation Transport and General Workers’ Union Trades Union Congress Unionist Business Committee Union of Democratic Control Ulster Volunteer Force Unionist War Committee War Emergency Workers’ National Committee Women’s Social and Political Union

Introduction

The emergence of an organised party system was one of the defining features of British political history in the nineteenth century. The supremacy of parliament had been established before 1800, but it was only after the extensions of the franchise in 1832 and 1867 that parties in something like the modern sense became a permanent feature of political life, crucial alike for sustaining governments with parliamentary majorities and for mobilising extra-parliamentary electoral support. In this way the shifting factions of the eighteenth century were gradually replaced by an increasingly coherent division of politicians into ‘Whigs’ and ‘Tories’, the forerunner of the Liberal–Conservative two-party system of the late Victorian period. The evolutionary process was generally smooth, despite the occurrence of occasional upheavals such as those of 1846 and 1886. In 1846 Peel’s Conservative party split over the decision to repeal the Corn Laws, and was out of power for a generation in consequence. Peel’s followers – Gladstone among them – subsequently joined forces with the Whigs to form the Liberal party of the late nineteenth century. But these developments took place in a comparatively closed parliamentary world, in which in any case party loyalties were still fairly fluid. They altered the balance within the party system that was evolving, but they did not completely overturn it, nor did they threaten the existence of the system itself. Similarly, the events of 1886 – when Gladstone’s Liberal party split over the question of Irish Home Rule – temporarily weakened the Liberals to the advantage of Conservatives but left the basis of the two-party system more or less intact. The capacity of the major parties for recovery over an extended electoral cycle was amply demonstrated by the Liberals’ overwhelming victory at the general election of 1906, which brought to an end nearly twenty years of Conservative predominance. In the thirty years after 1906 the party system was substantially transformed. The Liberal party, victorious in 1906, had, by the mid-1930s, been reduced to a forlorn remnant of its former self following the wartime split between Asquith and Lloyd George and subsequent electoral decline. The Labour party – in 1906 little more than a trade-union pressure group heavily dependent on Liberal support – replaced the Liberals as the main party of the left, forming minority governments in 1924 and 1929 and retaining the status of a national opposition party in the 1930s, its own split of 1931 notwithstanding. Even more striking, in

2 Introduction its way, was the resurgence of the Conservatives. Rejected by the voters in 1906, when it suffered its worst defeat since 1832, the Edwardian Conservative party seemed to be doing its best to tear itself apart, leading at least one historian to write of the ‘crisis of Conservatism’ which characterised the pre-war years.1 Yet the Conservatives recovered triumphantly from their early-century disharmony, regaining their majority in the House of Commons at the general election of 1918 and thereafter building for themselves a redoubtable electoral hegemony which was rarely challenged in the ‘Baldwin years’ of the inter-war period. The transformation in the fortunes of the respective parties took place in a wider context of political and social change. The period between the early 1900s and the 1930s saw the completion of the process of democratising the political system that had begun in the nineteenth century. The Parliament Act of 1911 reduced the power of the House of Lords and reflected the passing of the aristocratic era of political life. Individual members of the aristocracy retained political influence beyond 1914, and even the House of Lords was constitutionally far from negligible for the rest of the twentieth century. But the aristocratic dominance of politics was broken by the decline of the aristocracy as an economic interest and political power was passing into the hands of new elites, notably with the rise of Labour as a party of government.2 The transition to formal democracy was hastened by the Representation of the People Act of 1918, the most sweeping of the ‘Reform Acts’ which had punctuated the evolution of the political system since 1832. Manhood suffrage at last became a reality, and women over the age of thirty received the vote. The enfranchisement of women on the same terms as men in 1928 produced a further enlargement of the electorate, actually putting women voters in a majority. The expansion of the electorate, and its changing composition, necessitated, and was accompanied by, changes in electioneering, party organisation and the techniques of political propaganda. Public meetings and personal contact between politicians and the voters began to lose some of their importance, being supplemented, and in some cases supplanted, by the continued growth of the mass-circulation national press, by commercial advertising and by the new-fangled inventions of radio and the cinema newsreel. These changes can all be seen as a continuation of the evolutionary trends of the nineteenth century, in which the broadening base of the political nation and the realignment of parties went hand in hand and organisational structures responded to the demands of a widening electorate. It is true that the political history of these years exhibited an unusual degree of instability and was punctuated by a succession of crises: the intense party battles of 1910–14, especially over the House of Lords and Irish Home Rule; the ministerial and political crises of May 1915 and December 1916 from which emerged the coalition governments of Asquith and Lloyd George; the fall of the Lloyd George Coalition in October 1922 and the confused interlude of three-party politics between 1922 and 1924; the crisis which brought about the collapse of the second minority Labour government and the formation of MacDonald’s National Government in 1931. But such episodes could be interpreted as eddies in the evolutionary

Introduction

3

stream, or else the peculiar product of wartime disturbances, rather than as evidence of a more serious dysfunction. However, there is an alternative view to be put. This is that the events of the early twentieth century were qualitatively different from earlier periods of realignment and that the party system was indeed undergoing a prolonged and generalised crisis of which the specific emergencies referred to above were merely symptoms. Although there were similarities with previous periods – for example, the realignment of 1846–68 – on closer examination it is the contrasts that become more apparent, marking out the years between 1910 and 1935 as the decisive phase in the history of party politics and the party system in Britain since the early 1800s. At the very least, the idea that there was a general ‘crisis of the party system’ deserves proper consideration as an aid to understanding the turbulent history of British politics before, during and after the First World War. This extended crisis had three principal components. First there were the problems of the parties themselves. Each of the parties – Liberal, Conservative and Labour – experienced its own internal crisis, arising from conflicts within the party leadership or between the leaders and the rank-and-file, from divisions over policy or strategy, from weaknesses of finance or organisation – or from combinations of all these – which threatened its existence and in turn impacted on its standing in relation to other parties and the operation of the party system. The problems of the Liberal party were the most severe and had the most dramatic consequences. In the elections of 1910 the Liberals’ huge majority of 1906 was swept away and the Liberals survived in power as a minority government dependent on the support of Labour MPs and the Irish Nationalists. Labour’s challenge to the Liberals was partly contained by the continuance of an unofficial electoral pact which underpinned the so-called ‘progressive alliance’ between the two parties, but the extension of the pact to cover the general election of 1915 could not be guaranteed, opening up the possibility (already foreshadowed at by-elections) of a confrontation at the polls which endangered Liberal hopes of retaining office. But this was only part of the Liberal dilemma. In trying to forestall a loss of support to Labour, Liberal leaders had adopted a ‘New Liberalism’ committed to interventionist measures of welfare reform. However, it is not clear that by 1914 these measures had led to a strengthening of working-class support, while the ‘old Liberal’ wing of the party – representative of the Gladstonian tradition of limited government, sound finance and political nonconformity – was unhappy at the way its tenets were seemingly being pushed aside. Attempts to revive the fortunes of the Liberal party through Lloyd George’s Land Campaign might have provided a solution, uniting the old Liberalism and the New, but were rendered irrelevant by the overwhelming catastrophe of the war. The First World War eroded the Liberal party’s social and denominational foundations, weakened its organisational base and, following Lloyd George’s assumption of the premiership in 1916, split the parliamentary party from top to bottom. The ‘coupon’ election of 1918 ushered in four years of bitter civil war between the Asquithian and Lloyd Georgite wings of the party which even the subsequent ‘reunion’ in 1923 did not bring to an

4

Introduction

end. By then, in any case, the Liberals were fighting in vain to stem the tide of precipitate decline. Partial recovery in 1923 was followed by the electoral disaster of 1924. Neither Lloyd George’s money nor his innovative schemes to tackle the problem of the unemployed enabled the Liberals to escape from the third-party position they had come to occupy by the late 1920s. Between 1929 and 1933 the process of disintegration continued apace, hastened by the formation of the National Government in 1931, Lloyd George’s severance from the official party machine and the Samuelite–Simonite split which accompanied the withdrawal of the former group from MacDonald’s cabinet after the conclusion of the Ottawa agreements in 1932.3 The experience of the Labour party seems at first sight to be the obverse of that of the Liberals, a story of uninterrupted rise rather than unbroken fall. Yet the reality is more complex. Before 1914 the Labour party was still struggling to establish itself as a permanent feature of the political system, and this struggle generated at times fierce internal disputes about the party’s role and direction – disputes between supporters and opponents of the Liberal alliance, between socialists and trade unionists, between those who remained committed to the parliamentary road and those willing to consider a more direct challenge to the political structures of the country. The First World War provided Labour with a great political opportunity, first to participate in the coalition governments, then to move into the territory left vacant by a declining Liberal party. But the assumpton of a new role and status was not accomplished without friction and faltering. The parliamentary party was divided over Britain’s participation in the war, prompting the resignation of Ramsay MacDonald from the chairmanship. Although by 1918 the party was reunited around its post-war aims, the 1918 election provoked a fresh crisis. Some leaders preferred to remain loyal to Lloyd George rather than joining the bulk of the party in opposition to the Coalition. More seriously, most of the pre-war leaders – MacDonald, Snowden and Henderson among them – failed to retain their seats, leaving the parliamentary party without firm guidance in the immediate post-war period. Labour’s subsequent advance in the 1920s was more patchy and more precarious than the notion of an inevitable ‘forward march’ would suggest. The party was able to form minority governments because of the temporary parliamentary situations in 1924 and 1929, but it was still some way from achieving a majority in its own right, even with an influx of former Liberal support. Moreover, the rapidity of such success as had been achieved was a mixed blessing. Labour leaders had not had time to develop clear strategies for wielding power, nor had they, the experience that might have enabled them better to respond to unforeseen emergencies. The crisis of 1931 exposed the internal brittleness of relations in the party leadership, but it was also the consequence of the incompleteness of Labour’s transition from being a party of protest to a party of power.4 The breach with MacDonald and the general election defeat of 1931 may in retrospect be seen as a necessary catharsis in Labour’s long-term transformation into a party of government. At the time, the experience was traumatic in the extreme, and deepened the crisis from which the party began finally to recover only with

Introduction

5

Attlee’s assumption of the leadership and the first stage of electoral rehabilitation in 1935. Domestic problems were not confined to the parties of the left. Although the Conservatives emerged as the dominant party in the inter-war years, their position was not achieved without earlier trials, nor did it mean that harmony necessarily reigned within Conservative ranks. Reference has already been made to the ‘crisis of Conservatism’ before 1914. Internal divisions welled up after the defeat of 1906 as Chamberlainite tariff reformers sought to press home their advantage on a demoralised party. Balfour’s uncertain handling of the constitutional crisis of 1909–11 led to his being forced from the leadership in 1911 and to a fight for control of the party between ‘diehards’ and moderates under Bonar Law between 1911 and 1914. The internal struggles were exacerbated by the emotions aroused by the battle against the Liberal government’s Irish Home Rule Bill, in which Bonar Law led the party to, and possibly over, the brink of constitutionality in his desire to frustrate the Home Rulers and prevent a breakaway by his own right wing. The coming of war restored a measure of unity, and allowed the Conservatives to escape from opposition by joining the wartime coalitions of Asquith and Lloyd George. As supporters of the Coalition in 1918 the Conservatives acquired their first parliamentary majority since 1906. But dominance was not an automatic antidote to disunity. In fact the party became more and more divided in its attitude to Lloyd George’s premiership. In 1922 the rank-and-file of the parliamentary party voted to end the Coalition, thereby repudiating their leader, Austen Chamberlain. The division between coalitionists and anti-coalitionists marked the party’s politics at least until Baldwin had firmly established himself as leader after the election of 1924. Even then, Baldwin’s leadership was vulnerable to challenge, notably in the wake of the Conservatives’ defeat in the general election of 1929. The challenge to Baldwin was indicative of deeper strains within the parliamentary party and the party organisation. Baldwin weathered the storm, and led the party into the National Government, but some scars from the earlier struggles nonetheless remained.5 Internal party conflicts of this sort are the normal currency of politics in any era. However, they were given greater significance in the period under discussion, not just because they led to the virtual disappearance of one of the two major pre-1914 parties but because they were taking place at a time when the party system was simultaneously facing more deep-rooted problems of adaptation and adjustment. These problems constituted the second main component of the extended crisis of the party system, as the parties and their leaders strove to keep their footing in a rapidly changing political world. The members of the pre-war political elite faced a challenge that was a mixture of the social, the intellectual and the ideological. From 1918 they had to cope with a much expanded mass electorate, roughly three times as large as its Edwardian counterpart, which was overwhelmingly working class in its composition as well as including large numbers of women voters. That the politicians had themselves called this enlarged electorate into being, and that in the event it proved more docile and manageable than they feared, is in a sense irrelevant.

6

Introduction

The new democracy was seen as being at best unpredictable, at worst a beast to be tamed or appeased. It would have to be coaxed or appealed to, moreover, at the very time when habitual levers of electoral management and social control – the deference shown to employers and landlords, the influence of religious denominations and the organised Churches – were losing their purchase, when traditional political communities were being submerged by the flood of new voters and alterations to constituency boundaries, and when the composition of the governing elite itself was changing in ways which were equally subversive of established notions of collective social solidarity on the part of the nation’s ruling class. The arrival of the ‘cottage bred’ Lloyd George in Downing Street could perhaps be dismissed as an aberration brought about by the extremities of war, which justified a professional player being called in to give temporary succour to a team of gentlemen. But the changing social complexion of politics, and the emergence of Labour as a party of government, threatened, for some, more fundamental changes in the rules of the game. The organisational and psychological adjustments required to accommodate the broadening social and gender base of politics were accompanied by changes in the content of political debate. Even before 1914, politics were becoming increasingly concerned with questions of social welfare, economic and industrial policy and the future of the Empire. All of these issues were made still more pressing by the demands of the war and the altered circumstances of the postwar world. Depression and unemployment made welfare policy even more vital. The decline of basic industries such as coal, textiles and shipbuilding put fresh life into the debate between the adherents of Protection and Free Trade. The problems of managing an unsettled Empire and defending it against potential aggressors with inadequate resources loomed even larger in the 1920s and 1930s than they had before 1914. Yet the development of meaningful strategies of response necessitated a considerable reorientation of the axis of debate within a party system which in the late Victorian period had rested on a broad consensus in regard to economic and social policy, and revolved instead around differences over religion, the preservation of the Union between Britain and Ireland and the advance of ‘popular’ (as opposed to aristocratic) government. The parties had begun the reorientation process – the Liberals by emphasising the more interventionist ‘New Liberalism’, the Conservatives by committing themselves to Tariff Reform – but the modest reordering of the agenda that had occurred by 1914 was rapidly overtaken by the more sweeping demands of total war. In this situation, as will be seen, the more familiar dividing lines of pre-war politics were obscured by new fissures and the party system itself began to dissolve. The need to respond to a new agenda based on a more active role for the state was in turn only part of the intellectual and ideological challenge that made up what might be termed the ‘crisis of adaptation’ facing the party politicians at this time. The increasing emphasis on social and economic questions in politics was partly a product of objective circumstances. It was also a response by politicians to the growing importance of working-class and women voters. From the late nineteenth century, politicians had been aware of the crucial role of the

Introduction

7

working class in the politics of the future. Historians have subsequently argued when, or even whether, class became the principal determinant of electoral allegiance, but contemporaries saw this as the most likely eventuality. The rise of a Labour party with an obvious ‘class-industrial’ base seemed only to confirm what had been apparent to many commentators since the 1880s. The linking of ‘Labourism’ with the ideas of socialism (however incomplete in practice the linkage may have been) further emphasised the danger, even the inevitability, of class conflict becoming the basis of the future party system. This was something that the Liberal and Conservative parties had always, at least at an ideological level, striven to prevent, emphasising the ‘classless’ or ‘national’ appeal of their respective creeds. The emergence of a more explicitly class-based party as a major player in the electoral field created a crisis for the established parties which had at one and the same time to exploit the language of class for their own purposes while decrying its use by their opponents. The fact that Labour politicians, in their drive for respectability, were engaged in exactly the same process only served to make the whole situation even more problematic, adding to the difficulties of the individual parties and complicating the efforts of politicians to meet the organisational and intellectual challenges of the period. In addition to the internal problems of the parties and the difficulties that politicians faced in adapting themselves to changed conditions of politics, there was a third component to the general crisis which threatened the basis of the party system at an even more fundamental level. This may best be described as a gradual unbalancing of the delicate mechanisms of the party system, together with the rise of notions of government that were hostile to party politics on the conventional model, or even, in their more extreme form, to the idea of party or parliamentary government per se. The first signs of the ‘unbalancing’ of the party mechanism can be seen in the growing violence and partisanship of politics immediately prior to the First World War. A certain degree of partisanship was of course inseparable from the operation of a two-party system such as had evolved in the years after the second Reform Act. The Liberal and Conservative parties had developed their own distinct identities and programmes which they had made the basis of competitive appeals to the voters at successive general elections. For all that, a strong element of consensus underlay the patina of partisanship. In government the two parties showed as many similarities as differences, and there was broad continuity of policy on most major questions, albeit with variations of emphasis. In the last years of the Edwardian era, though, the consensus seemed to be breaking down. Beginning with the conflict between the Liberal government and the Conservative-dominated House of Lords over the ‘People’s Budget’, and climaxing with the battles over Irish Home Rule – in which the Conservatives appeared willing to sanction armed rebellion on the part of Carson’s Ulstermen – a violence first of language and then of deed was injected into British politics that was agreed on all sides to be unprecedented. Coupled with the fact that this was a period of minority government, and with the heightened tension arising from the upsurge of popular protest on the part of organised Labour, women’s suffrage campaigners and others, there

8

Introduction

was sufficient evidence of crisis for some contemporaries to believe that Britain was becoming ‘ungovernable’ and that the existing party system was unable to cope with the severe problems with which the country was faced. Perhaps paradoxically, the erosion of one form of governing consensus hastened the search for an alternative consensus on which more stable government could be based. This, however, involved the dismantling, or at least the suspension, of the forms of party politics that had hitherto been seen as integral to the conduct of the British form of representative government. The suggestion of some form of centrist ‘government of National Efficiency’ was first floated at the time of the South African War, when party loyalties were temporarily in flux and more general realignment seemed possible. The moves came to nothing, but the idea of a coalition government was revived in 1910 at the height of the constitutional crisis. Lloyd George, the author of this particular proposal, hoped for an agreement between the parties that would enable a number of contentious issues to be resolved, after which party activity could be resumed. But there were others who believed that the formation of a coalition could be the first step towards the superseding of party politics altogether.6 Their motives were heavily coloured by a technocratic brand of social imperialism, which would offer reform as an alternative to the revolution that they feared might otherwise occur. In 1910, as during the Boer War, these initiatives were stillborn, but they revived in stronger form during and after the First World War, especially after Lloyd George’s rise to the premiership in 1916. Lloyd George himself was to preach a gospel of national unity ‘above party’, which chimed in well with the anti-party theories of the social imperialist school. Lloyd George, as will be seen, failed in his attempts to create an alternative party structure. Nor could he perpetuate the peacetime coalition experiment of 1918–22. Nevertheless, although the Coalition was overthrown, it played its part in bringing to an end the pre-war pattern of party politics, in which the Liberals and Conservatives were evenly matched and the Liberals held office by virtue of their alliance with Labour and the Irish Nationalists. Instead, in the 1920s, a multi-party system was created (minus the Irish) which could provide stability only when the Conservatives were in power. The formation of the so-called ‘National’ government in 1931, while it drew on some of the same underlying critiques of party politics as its Lloyd Georgian predecessor, in reality only copper-fastened the Conservative party’s supremacy. However, by enhancing the dominance of one party, leaving the government without the check of an effective opposition or alternative governing combination, it posed in some ways an even greater threat to the existence of a balanced two-party system such as had existed from the time of the second Reform Act down to the outbreak of the First World War. A further, although as it turned out lesser, threat to the party system was posed by those movements which rejected not only the traditional parties but the fabric of parliamentary government as well. In the early twentieth century the liberal idea of representative government was being challenged throughout Europe by revolutionary movements of both the left and the right. In Russia, the

Introduction

9

tentative beginnings of parliamentary rule were snuffed out by the dictatorships of Lenin and Stalin. In Italy and Germany the Fascist and Nazi regimes established one-party rule at the expense of more pluralist systems. In France and Spain, as well as in Eastern Europe, centrist or democratic governments were threatened by violence and authoritarianism. The British variant of this European trend has usually been seen as a pale reflection of continental developments, which in some ways it was. Yet the growth of political extremism cannot be left entirely out of account in any discussion of party politics in this period. Since before 1914 extremist movements at either end of the political spectrum had questioned the efficacy of the parliamentary system and shown a willingness to confront the consensual structures of conventional party politics. The pre1914 Syndicalists favoured ‘direct action’ and a general strike to establish a workers’ state. Groups on the ‘radical right’ flouted parliamentary conventions in a bid to obstruct the ‘liberal-socialist’ revolution and were ready to back armed rebellion in Ulster against the elected government of the day. The First World War and the economic crisis of the early 1930s gave further leases of life to the extremists, represented between the wars by the Communists on the left and, in the 1930s, by Mosley’s British Union of Fascists on the right. Neither group achieved electoral success, but their appearance was a sign of continuing dissatisfaction with aspects of democratic politics and served as a warning of what might happen if the National Government failed and the party politicians could not provide a credible alternative. By 1935 this part of the crisis was over. The Labour party’s recovery in the general election, though far from complete, at least restored a measure of balance to the governing system. The extremes were isolated and, with the National Government more completely Conservative than ever, a form of twoparty politics had been re-created – a development that was to be confirmed, after the political truce of the Second World War, by the general election of 1945. A measure of consensus had also been restored, since the ideological confrontation between socialism and capitalism heralded by the Labour party’s rise had not materialised in more than rhetorical form. A ‘National’ government was in competition with a Labour party that aspired to be a ‘national’ opposition, appealing to all classes of the community and in some measure re-establishing the pattern of party rivalry within a framework of agreement that had pertained in the late Victorian era. All of this may strengthen the attraction of the evolutionary interpretation of early twentieth-century British political history, and lead to the conclusion that the ‘crisis of the party system’ was not really a crisis at all. Yet, as has been suggested, this would be to underestimate both the scale of the changes that had occurred and the seriousness of the problems that had to be overcome before a Liberal–Conservative duopoly could be replaced by a Conservative–Labour one. In the long run of hindsight, the transition may appear smooth and perhaps to a degree inevitable. Such was not altogether the case, as the following chapters will show.

1

Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain

The brief reign of Edward VII, from 1901 to 1910, was, politically speaking, a time of transition: recognisably Victorian in certain respects; in others suggesting more clearly the shape of things to come. The sense of change was partly symbolic. The death of Queen Victoria in 1901, at the beginning of a new century, was bracketed by the passing of two giants of the late Victorian political scene: Gladstone in 1898 and Lord Salisbury in 1903, the latter shortly after his resignation of the premiership the previous year. More substantively, at the general election of 1906, twenty years of Unionist supremacy were brought to an end in the Liberal landslide and the Labour party made its first significant breakthrough as a parliamentary force. But there was continuity as well as change. New issues – social welfare, tariffs, the problems of imperial and national defence – were coming to the fore, but older controversies – over religious education, Ireland or the House of Lords – still exerted a pull. The political structures of Edwardian Britain, though undergoing internal modification and responding to external pressure, were essentially those that had evolved in the course of the nineteenth century. The parliamentary and electoral conflicts of the Edwardian period represented a final flourishing of the late Victorian party system before it was plunged into a crisis of deepening severity after 1910. In order to understand the origins and nature of that crisis it is necessary first to examine the workings of the Edwardian political system in more detail, to consider the previous history of the Edwardian political parties and to survey the main trends of party politics prior to the two general elections of 1910 and the more serious conflicts of 1910–14.

The Edwardian political system Edwardian Britain inherited from the Victorians a political system which, over the previous seventy years, had become steadily more representative but which was still far from completely democratic. Parliamentary government had been established during the constitutional struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the early nineteenth century it had become clear that the elected members of the House of Commons would determine the fate of governments, even though ministers were appointed by the Crown and had considerable powers of patronage and influence at their disposal. As a result of the Reform

Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain 11 Acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884, and the accompanying measures of redistribution, the electoral base of the Commons had been made more directly representative of the population at large. The numbers of those qualified to vote in parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom rose from 813,000 in 1833 to 2.5 million in 1868 and 5.7 million in 1885. Even allowing for the simultaneous growth in population (from 24 million in 1833 to 36 million in 1885), this was an increase in the proportion of adult males eligible to vote from approximately one in five in 1833 to almost two in three after 1884.1 Again, those who were elected were more freely and fairly chosen than had been the case in the early or mid-nineteenth century. The secret ballot had operated in parliamentary elections since 1872. Measures such as the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 imposed limits on constituency spending and reduced the incidence of bribery and ‘treating’ which had already been made more difficult by the increase in the number of electors and the introduction of secret voting. The Redistribution Act of 1885 had created a more uniform map of mainly single-member constituencies so that the vast majority of the 670 MPs sat for seats whose distribution more closely reflected that of the population as a whole. There were still variations both in geographical extent and in the size of individual electorates; a number of two-member seats and the extraterritorial university seats remained. But the patronage or pocket boroughs of the early nineteenth century were a thing of the past by the end of Victoria’s reign. In the course of the nineteenth century local government, too, had become more representatively structured, following the extension of elected local government through the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, the County Councils Act of 1888 and the Parish and District Councils Act of 1894. Yet the march of democracy had its limits. The House of Lords remained a bastion of hereditary privilege, even if the elevation to the peerage of industrialists, senior politicians, imperial administrators and newspaper proprietors was rendering it less traditionally aristocratic.2 And although the powers of the Lords were curbed in the struggle between ‘the peers and the people’ which provided one of the great set-piece battles of modern parliamentary history between 1909 and 1911, the House of Commons which emerged victorious from the encounter was itself returned by the votes of fewer than half the adult population. No women were allowed to vote in parliamentary elections. The restrictions of a propertybased franchise and the workings of a complex and cumbersome registration system also disenfranchised up to 40 per cent of men. There were in addition other features which prevented the electoral system operating on a fully democratic basis. One was the persistence of plural voting in respect of the multiple ownership of property. There were over half a million plural voters in 1911, approximately 7 per cent of the total electorate of 7.9 million, and plural voting was one of the main targets of radical franchise reformers. Another defect of the system, in terms of strict fairness, was the disparity in the size of constituencies and the over-representation of some parts of the United Kingdom (notably Ireland) at the expense of others. Although the 1885 redistribution had attempted to introduce a more uniform pattern of constituencies it had made no pretence of absolute equality, and disparities were further exaggerated by population trends, so

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that constituencies like Durham (with fewer than 3,000 voters) had the same representation as Croydon (with more than 75,000).3 Thus not only was Edwardian Britain some way from ‘one man, one vote’ (let alone one person, one vote), its electoral system was also not delivering ‘one vote, one value’ – a fact compounded by the lack of proportionality inherent in the operation of the firstpast-the-post system at national level where, in 1906, the Liberals secured their landslide victory (and a majority of 129 over all other parties) on only 49 per cent of the popular vote. There has been much debate about the character of the electorate which the various franchise and registration provisions produced, and particularly about its composition in terms of social class. After the reforms of 1884–5 there was certainly a working-class majority in the electorate. The creation of singlemember constituencies also produced a number of predominantly working-class seats (Henry Pelling’s estimate was 89 seats, electing 95 MPs)4 in industrial areas and coalfields, just as it hastened the emergence of a separate political identity for middle-class suburbia. However, the social composition of the electorate was not identical even with that of the male population at large. This was partly because of the existence of business voters and an additional franchise for university graduates – both categories which benefited the middle class. But the working class were probably also disproportionately affected by specific exclusions from the franchise and by the operation of the registration system.5 While it is true that the exclusion of men other than householders (for example, sons living with their parents) from the main householder/occupier franchise (which in 1911 accounted for almost 89 per cent of the total electorate) was as likely to deprive middle-class as working-class young men of the right to vote, there were other exclusions – notably those of paupers, soldiers and domestic servants – which operated almost entirely against the working class. Similarly, although the registration provisions which stipulated twelve months continuous residence at the same address before qualifying for the vote were, in theory, class-neutral, in practice they were more likely to affect working men with less settled occupations. In some working-class districts removals could be as high as 30 per cent a year, thereby contributing to the generally lower levels of enfranchisement in working-class constituencies. It is difficult to provide precise quantification, not least because the registration picture was not static, but it is reasonable to assume that of the 4–4.5 million men who were unable to vote in 1910, more than half were working class and that, consequently, working men made up a smaller proportion of the electorate than they did of the population as a whole.6 Whatever the truth of this, the electoral system was undoubtedly one that emphasised the rights of property and placed a premium on education and permanent membership of settled communities. The political implications of this will be considered in due course, but to the extent that there was a link between democratisation and working-class enfranchisement, Neal Blewett’s verdict that ‘the [Edwardian] electoral system cushioned the impact of democracy’7 may not be too wide of the mark. That said, the class bias of the electoral system should not be exaggerated, nor should it be allowed to obscure the fact that by the early twentieth century

Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain 13 Britain had a genuine mass electorate, to the interests and concerns of which politicians had perforce to respond. The effects of this on the composition of the nation’s political elite were slow to be felt, but they did introduce a democratic dynamic that gave Edwardian politics much of their vibrancy and vitality. At its pinnacle the Edwardian governing elite was still, it is true, largely upper-class in character. The family and social interlinkages of the leading politicians illustrated the extent to which government remained the preserve of a self-consciously exclusive inner circle whose collective identity was sustained as much by a shared social background as it was by collaboration in the chambers and committee rooms of Westminster and Whitehall. Lord Salisbury was the last prime minister to be a member of the House of Lords, but he was succeeded by his nephew, Arthur Balfour, who came from a Scottish landowning family with aristocratic connections; by the Liberal Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the son of a wealthy Glasgow businessman; and by H.H. Asquith, who, despite his initially modest Yorkshire Nonconformist origins, had, through the patronage of a London uncle, risen to honorary membership of the upper class by a career at Oxford and the Bar before being launched authentically into high society by his second wife, Margot Tennant. Asquith’s Liberal cabinet was slightly less aristocratic in tone than Balfour’s Unionist one (containing six peers as opposed to nine in a total of nineteen),8 but it nevertheless reflected the continuing influence of hereditary elites. Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, was a member of an old Whig family; Winston Churchill, successively President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty, a renegade member of an old Conservative one. On the other hand, the boundaries of the ruling elite were not immovably fixed. Just as, in the nineteenth century, the aristocratic political establishment had admitted increasing numbers of middle-class ministers to cabinet office, so too the Edwardian cabinets opened their doors to new men. Asquith, indeed, though upper class by instinct, had earned his position by merit rather than birth. He was also personally less wealthy than most previous incumbents of his office. Two of his colleagues embodied the spirit of changing times even more graphically. David Lloyd George, the Welsh radical who became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1908, while not quite the child of poverty of later legend, undoubtedly came from a stratum of society not hitherto represented at the highest reaches of government. The presence in Asquith’s cabinet of the former socialist John Burns was, on a purely symbolic level, more important still. Burns, the leader of the 1889 London dock strike and MP for Battersea since 1892, had been appointed as President of the Local Government Board by CampbellBannerman in 1905 and was thus the first working-class minister of cabinet rank, surpassing the achievements of Henry Broadhurst and Thomas Burt who held junior posts in Gladstone’s last two governments. A gradual lessening of social exclusiveness was apparent at the general parliamentary as well as at cabinet level. The social composition of the House of Commons had been changing since the mid-nineteenth century, with a steady decline in the number of MPs drawn from the aristocratic or landed interest

14 Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain (probably fewer than a quarter of the total by 1900) and a corresponding increase in middle- and upper-middle-class MPs with incomes derived from industry, finance or the professions. Solicitors and barristers were the largest single professional group in the 1906 parliament, reflecting the close connection between law and politics, but a wide variety of groups and interests was represented.9 The 1906 parliament was also remarkable for the substantial rise in the number of working-class MPs, accounted for largely by the success of the Labour party at the 1906 election but also by the return of twenty-four ‘Lib-Lab’ MPs who were mostly working-class Liberal trade unionists. Yet the barriers in the way of further increases in working-class membership of parliament remained considerable. Working men lacked the educational and social skills of their middle- and upper-class counterparts, most of whom had been educated at public school and university. They faced hostility or indifference when they presented themselves as prospective parliamentary candidates, from workingclass voters imbued with a deferential preference for representatives drawn from among their social superiors as much as from middle-class election committees reluctant to support a working man. Finally, of course, there was the financial factor. Until the introduction of an annual salary of £400 for MPs in 1911, elected representatives were not paid. MPs were expected to finance, or contribute to the financing of, election campaigns, the payment of returning officers’ expenses and the running of constituency organisations, as well as supporting themselves during their time in parliament. Inevitably this loaded the dice of political fortune in favour of those with an independent income, except for those working men like the miners’ MPs with solid support from strong trade unions. The same fact helps to explain the high proportion of lawyers, financiers and businessmen (and, to a lesser extent, journalists, writers and academics) among Members of Parliament, and the importance, to ‘career’ politicians like Lloyd George and Churchill, of ensuring an adequate financial base for their activities before they entered the Commons. More democratic possibilities were opened up by the extension of representative local government. Since the reform of municipal government in the 1830s, new, largely middle-class, elites had been emerging in industrial and urban areas, consisting of local employers, professional men and representatives of the ‘shopocracy’.10 Further opportunities for ratepayers to influence and participate in local decision making existed through the elected boards of Poor Law Guardians and, from 1870, elected School Boards. For the Victorians, with their strong sense of community spirit and civic identity, urban local government became an important focus of political activity, as well as a training ground for those who, like Joseph Chamberlain, later rose to national prominence. The introduction of county and parish councils in the 1880s and 1890s had a similar democratising effect in the countryside. Until then, in rural areas, local government had rested mainly in the hands of the aristocratic Lords Lieutenant and of the squire and parson who, as justices of the peace, were responsible for a variety of tasks in addition to the administration of the law. The institution of elections exposed the predominance of the squirearchy and landed interest to challenge,

Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain 15 and paved the way for power to pass into other hands. The consequences of this must be kept in perspective. In England at least, prominent landowners retained a leading role on the new councils. It has been calculated that in 1911 over 20 per cent of the councillors and aldermen on England’s forty-seven county councils were listed in the ‘socially exclusive pages of Walford’s County Families’.11 Nevertheless, their power was now held at the behest of the electorate, and their fellow councillors represented a fuller cross-section of the local population than had ever previously been involved in county government. In some parts of the United Kingdom, moreover, the results of creating county councils had been more dramatic. In Wales, for example, the first election results in 1889 were, according to Kenneth Morgan, part of ‘an immense social revolution’ in which traditional rural hierarchies ‘were almost totally wiped out by the new nonconformist middle class’.12 It was at local level too that the political frontiers of gender and class were being pushed back most decisively. The London County Council elected in 1889 contained a number of working-class members, even though its first chairman was the aristocratic Lord Rosebery. Working-class and labour representation on local bodies increased steadily into the Edwardian period. Local government was also the arena in which women made their first breakthrough into the formal politics of the public sphere. Progressively, between 1869 and 1907, women ratepayers gained the right to vote in local elections, and women were eligible to be elected as members of local councils, Boards of Guardians and School Boards. The impact of this was limited but significant. In the pre-1914 period approximately 10 per cent of local voters were women. By 1910 there were over 170 women councillors and in excess of 1,300 women members of Poor Law Boards.13 The Edwardian political system, in short, like any political system, broadly reflected the nature of the society of which it was the product. The distribution of power corresponded to the distribution of wealth and property. Social hierarchy was an important key to political influence, and those who were most marginal in economic and social terms were excluded from direct participation in the political process. Yet equally the political system was adapting itself to the processes of social change: the declining importance of aristocratic and landed wealth; the expansion and consolidation of the working class; the assertion by women of their right to a political role beyond the ‘separate sphere’ of home and family. These changes may have been felt first at the grass roots, but they affected all levels of the system and emphasised the interconnectedness of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary politics. Although much of the high politics of Edwardian Britain still took place in a rarefied world of almost Trollopian dimensions – in gentlemen’s clubs, country houses and the salons and dining rooms of London society – this world was less self-contained, certainly less selfsustaining, than it had been in Trollope’s day. Even senior politicians were brought into regular contact with the mass electorate, either the voters in their own constituencies or the audiences at the rallies and public meetings which were such a feature of the late Victorian and Edwardian political scene. The years before the First World War marked the high point of political public

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speaking of the type inaugurated by Gladstone and his contemporaries, when the leading men of the day addressed crowds of thousands in halls and theatres the length and breadth of Britain. This was the classic age of what Winston Churchill, one of its foremost exponents, subsequently described as ‘hammer and anvil’ politics, when a parliamentary candidate ‘could address all his supporters who wished to hear him’ and ‘[a] great speech by an eminent personage would often turn a constituency or even a city’. According to Churchill, this was ‘a real political democracy’, in which ‘by a process of rugged argument the national decision was reached in measured steps’.14 In addition to the discipline of direct contact with the voters, Edwardian politicians were exposed to the currents of public opinion through other channels as well. ‘Pressure from without’ had been an established feature of politics throughout the Victorian period, with movements such as the Chartists or the Anti-Corn Law League mobilising mass support in an attempt to influence the parliamentary process or to reform parliament itself.15 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were large numbers of organisations and pressure groups which sought to attain their particular ends through lobbying, propaganda and interventions in constituencies at election times, or by other forms of demonstration or direct action. Trade unions were becoming an increasingly important factor in politics as the ‘labour question’ took on a more serious aspect.16 The churches, especially the Nonconformist denominations, had long been active practitioners of pressure group politics, in areas such as education and temperance reform.17 In Edwardian Britain they were joined by a plethora of other single-issue groups, campaigning for anything from the expansion of the navy to female suffrage. Politicians, of course, could use these groups as vehicles for their own propaganda efforts, as Chamberlain did with the Tariff Reform League. But this did not negate the role of pressure groups as an organised expression of popular opinion, which political leaders could not afford to ignore. The same was true of the press. As in the Victorian period, the newspaper press was a vital component of Edwardian political life, commenting on events and helping to shape public opinion as well as exerting its own influence on governmental decision making. Editors like C.P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian, J.L. Garvin of The Observer and A.G. Gardiner of the Daily News were formidable political personalities in their own right, while a new generation of ‘press lords’ such as Lord Northcliffe (owner of The Times, the Daily Mail and The Observer) aspired to political influence as much as commercial success. In its variegated forms – national, local, denominational – the press mirrored the kaleidoscopic nature of the political system itself, appealing to a diverse and sectionalised readership, with each publication reflecting the prejudices and concerns of its particular constituency.18 The links between politicians and the press were reinforced by the fact that many Members of Parliament were themselves contributors to newspaper columns or to the pages of the heavyweight journals such as The Speaker, the Nineteenth Century or the Fortnightly Review. They cultivated the owners and editors of the newspaper world to gain support for their policies

Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain 17 and publicity for their careers. At the same time, the susceptibility of politicians to the written as well as the spoken word encouraged them to take seriously the role of the press as a medium for interpreting a public mind which, in the days before opinion polls and market research, would otherwise have struggled to articulate its views. Politics in Edwardian Britain were thus open and pluralistic. Despite the existence of the hereditary power of the House of Lords, the restrictions of the franchise and the weighting of the representative system in favour of the propertied classes, the political framework was firmly constitutional and parliamentary in character. There were few checks on the free expression of opinion, elections were relatively uncorrupt and even those who were not included in the political nation as defined by the voting qualifications were able to organise openly in opposition to the government of the day or to press for change. Yet it was one of the features of Britain’s political history that this measured form of liberty had rarely, if ever, given way to licence, and ‘democracy’ (albeit in its virtual, technically attenuated version) had been for the most part compatible with the preservation of order. Britain had not experienced the revolutionary upheavals or the direct violent confrontations between rulers and ruled that had occurred in most other European countries. This had much to do with the political traditions of the British state: the engrained respect for parliament and the willingness of ruling elites to enact gradual reform. It was intimately connected, too, with the existence of a well-developed party system which, since the early nineteenth century, had played a crucial role in ensuring stability while facilitating change. So fundamental is this aspect of the political system to the present study that it deserves separate consideration.

Parties and politics By the beginning of the twentieth century political parties were sufficiently well established to have become legitimate subjects of academic enquiry, as demonstrated by the publication of studies such as Ostrogorski’s Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties in 1902. Historians have subsequently debated the origins of the modern party system and the point at which ‘two-party’ politics (seen as the characteristic feature of the British system) emerged in their mature form. Some have argued that the system took shape as early as the 1790s, during the struggles between the followers of William Pitt and Charles James Fox at the time of the French Revolution. Others have pointed to the 1830s as the first period of genuine two-party politics, with Peel’s Conservatives being the prototypical ‘modern’ political party in terms of their parliamentary cohesion, extra-parliamentary organisation and the more clearly articulated ‘conservative’ ideology embodied in the ‘Tamworth manifesto’ of 1835.19 However, Peel’s party split in 1846. The 1850s and early 1860s saw a minority Conservative party, under Derby and Disraeli, in almost permanent opposition to an evolving ‘Liberal’ combination under Aberdeen, Palmerston and Russell. Not until the late 1860s, when Gladstone and Disraeli stood forth as the acknowledged leaders

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of the opposing camps, did a fully fledged two-party system come into being, in the sense of having two evenly matched parties which alternated in power. The corollary of this was that ‘party’ government (in which governments were formed by the leaders of the majority party in the Commons in accordance with the number of seats won in a general election) finally replaced the older tradition of ‘parliamentary’ government, where majorities could be made or unmade by parliamentary negotiation. Between 1868 and 1880 Liberal and Conservative governments alternated in power, but they did so as a result of winning or losing elections rather than through the transference of support in the parliamentary arena.20 Party became the dominant organising theme of late Victorian politics. At Westminster the independent Member assumed the status of an endangered species as most MPs accepted either the Liberal or Conservative label. The internal discipline of parliamentary parties was tightened, with greater authority being given to the party whips and voting in the House of Commons taking place along more strictly regimented party lines.21 Meanwhile the increased size of the electorate after the 1867 Reform Act hastened the expansion of extraparliamentary party organisations. These had existed in a rudimentary form before 1867, but they rapidly became more professional and all-embracing. Conservative Central Office was established in 1870, under the direction of J.E. Gorst; the Liberal Central Association was founded in 1874. Networks of local associations were set up in the constituencies. The Conservatives had over 400 of these by 1873, grouped under the umbrella of the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations (NUCCA), formed in 1867. The Liberals likewise developed their local ‘caucuses’, which came together in the National Liberal Federation (NLF) in 1877.22 This flurry of organisation building was accompanied by an intensification of electoral activity as the party spirit spread to all levels of the political system. The number of seats uncontested at general elections fell sharply, from 212 in 1868 to only 43 in 1885.23 Also, while local issues remained important in deciding the outcome of individual contests, electioneering inevitably became more focused on national party themes as the ‘wire-pullers’ at party headquarters coordinated propaganda campaigns and orchestrated speaking tours by the party leaders. The more partisan spirit was picked up and encouraged by the press, which at both national and local level divided editorially on party lines. The division of parties rested on a number of factors. In origin it was a function of the workings of the parliamentary system. Since the days of Queen Anne, politics had been a contest between ‘ins’ and ‘outs’, between holders of and aspirants to government office. By the later nineteenth century the roles of government and opposition had become formalised in a way that placed MPs firmly on one side or other of the political divide. The adversarial relationship was reproduced outside parliament, where the dictates of electoral competition required party leaders to emphasise the differences between themselves and their opponents in order to gain an advantage in the battle for power. The differences were nevertheless real enough. Liberalism and Conservatism had developed as

Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain 19 distinctive ideologies in the nineteenth century, alongside the parties to which they gave their names. The parties represented contrasting outlooks, which found expression in the programmes and platforms presented to the voters. Nor were these differences confined to the parliamentary sphere. What gave the mass parties of the Victorian period their real strength was the way in which they grew upwards from local roots as well as being nurtured from above. John Vincent showed how the formation of the Liberal party in the 1860s was the result of a union between parliamentary Liberalism and a largely autonomous Liberal movement in the country.24 The party organisations that came into existence after 1867 similarly derived much of their impetus from the rising tide of party feeling in the localities. Party allegiances were influenced by a variety of social, religious and geographical considerations, which in turn shaped the electoral constituencies to which the parties could appeal. The Liberals, for example, had a particular affinity with the Nonconformist middle class and the urban artisans of the nascent Labour movement, and were electorally strongest in Wales, Scotland and the industrial centres of England. The Conservatives were the party of the Established Church and the landed interest, with a growing appeal for the propertied classes generally and for working men immune to Gladstone’s moral exhortations. As they developed, parties took on an organic existence independent of the narrower considerations of electoral politics, acting as ‘communities of sentiment’ which united a diversity of interests behind a common banner. Party organisations like the National Liberal Federation and the Conservative National Union provided vertical linkages between the different levels of the political system and opened up two-way channels of communication between leaders and followers, creating a forum in which party activists could air their views and attempt to influence the direction of party policy. They also facilitated the semiofficial incorporation of extra-parliamentary pressure groups into the party structure, the NLF in particular enabling a variety of ‘faddist’ organisations, mostly associated with religious Nonconformity, to gain a footing in Liberal politics and a voice in party councils.25 In the constituencies the social cohesion of parties was improved by other agencies: the influence of churches and chapels, the formation of Liberal and Conservative clubs, and the activities of bodies like the Conservative party’s Primrose League, which expanded rapidly after its formation in 1883 and may have had almost a million members by the early 1890s, attracted by its garden parties, lantern lectures and bazaars.26 What effect did the differences and divisions between the parties have on the business of government? The answer is less than might at first be supposed. The Liberal and Conservative parties represented opposing interests and ideas, and consequently approached the task of government with contrasting perspectives and priorities. Gladstone’s Liberals returned to power in 1868 committed to the disestablishment of the Irish Church, a measure which the Conservatives opposed. They pursued a programme of political and institutional reform – the introduction of the secret ballot, reform of the legal system, the abolition of the purchase of commissions in the army and of religious tests for entry to university

20 Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain – characteristic of Liberalism’s self-proclaimed assault on privilege, inefficiency and religious discrimination. Disraeli, meanwhile, in his Manchester and Crystal Palace speeches of 1872, pledged the Conservatives to defending the institutions of Church, State and Empire against the depredations of the Liberals, at the same time taking steps to ‘elevate the condition of the people’, which, by implication, the Liberals had neglected.27 These promises he was able at least partly to redeem in the social legislation of his 1874–80 ministry (notably in the areas of housing and public health) and through his policy of forward imperialism in Africa, India and the Mediterranean, for which in turn he was roundly denounced by Gladstone in the latter’s ‘Midlothian campaigns’ of 1879–80. On closer examination, however, the differences between the two governments seem less marked than their similarities. There were some important issues of contention, mostly involving questions that were religious in nature. Otherwise the records of the Gladstone and Disraeli ministries show a fair degree of continuity, even in areas where their policies are often portrayed as being sharply opposed. In social policy, for example, much has been made of the apparent contrast between the minimalist individualism of the Liberals, resistant to state intervention in social and economic matters, and the more ‘collectivist’, paternalist approach of the Conservatives. But in reality the interventionist aspect of Disraeli’s essentially permissive social legislation was distinctly limited, whereas the groundwork for some measures, such as the 1875 Public Health Act, had actually been undertaken by the previous Liberal administration.28 There was a similar continuity in the progressive extension of elementary education and in the field of trade union reform. Even the differences over foreign policy were less clearly defined than Gladstone’s denunciations of ‘Beaconsfieldism’ implied. After 1875 Gladstone was no longer Liberal leader and was operating in a freelance capacity as a critic of the government. The official leaders of the party, Granville and Hartington, actually supported Disraeli’s line in the Eastern Question crisis of 1876–8 – a crisis, moreover, which was brought to an end by the typically Gladstonian expedient of an international congress, rather than by the use of armed force. Underlying the partisanship of their electoral and parliamentary battles, therefore, was a broad consensus between the parties on the fundamental issues of national policy, symbolised, above all, by the Conservatives’ acceptance of the Liberal doctrine of Free Trade in the early 1850s. Despite the differing emphases of their rhetoric, both parties were committed to policies of gradual reform. Tories stressed the importance of ‘conservation’, Liberals of change. But neither wanted change to be too rapid or too extreme. Nor should this similarity of views be altogether surprising. For all their contrasting characteristics, the Liberal and Conservative parties were led by men from the same circumscribed social elite. The parties in parliament varied somewhat in composition: the Conservatives had a higher proportion of landowners and army officers; the Liberals were more strongly Nonconformist and even recruited a few working men MPs. Yet educationally and socially they had more in common with one another than with the electors who had returned them to Westminster. Indeed, it was precisely this

Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain 21 shared background and common culture that made the operation of the party system possible. Had the parties been irretrievably antagonistic, or representative of irreconcilable class or social interests, compromise would have been alien to them and a system which depended for its stability on the continuity of policy despite changes of government would have become unworkable. This is not to minimise those differences that did exist. It is also true that at the extremes of either party there were those for whom rhetoric and reality were more closely allied than they were for the practical men of business who filled the majority of places on either front bench. But certainly in the classic phase of the Victorian two-party system, between 1868 and the early 1880s, the areas of disagreement were kept within bounds and the changes of government were consequently far less disruptive than they might otherwise have been, enabling some historians to discern a ‘centrist’ tradition of government which operated irrespective of the party complexion of the administration in power.29 This classic phase, though, was short-lived, being roughly coterminous only with the Gladstone–Disraeli period between the second and third Reform Acts. From the early 1880s the social and political consensus of Victorian politics was beginning to break down. More serious causes of disagreement arose, particularly after the Liberals’ declaration in favour of Irish Home Rule. In Gladstone’s last years, following the departure of the Whigs, the Liberal party moved in a more aggressively radical direction. The political distance between the parties was further increased by divergences of policy over the Empire and by Conservative calls for the abandonment of Free Trade. Another factor that played its part in increasing partisanship was the altered structure of the political system introduced by the Reform and Redistribution Acts of 1884–5. The effects of the changes were many-sided, and perhaps unforeseen. The switch to predominantly single-member constituencies while retaining a first-past-the-post voting system inevitably sharpened the contest between the parties, preventing informal arrangements to allow shared representation such as had been a feature of the pre-1885 political scene. At the same time, the enlarged electorate was less homogeneous and more difficult to control. The parties had to cast their nets more widely to embrace a broader social and political spectrum, and they faced a challenge to their duopoly if they failed to appeal to new voters. Already by the mid-1880s there were signs that the simple Liberal–Conservative two-party system was entering a period of transition. Whereas between 1868 and 1885 majority, single-party governments had been the norm, between 1886 and 1914 there was only one comparatively brief period of single-party majority rule: the Liberal ministries of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith of 1906–10. Otherwise governments were formal coalitions (as in the case of the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists from 1895 to 1905) or were formed by parties that could not on their own command a majority in the House of Commons and depended on smaller parties to sustain them in office. The first third-party challenge to the two-party system came from the growth of an independent Irish Nationalist party. Irish MPs had sat at Westminster since the passage of the Act of Union in 1800 had abolished the separate Irish parliament,

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but until the late nineteenth century they had mostly been accommodated within the British party framework. Even Daniel O’Connell’s small ‘Irish party’ in the 1830s had formed an alliance with the Whigs. Then, in 1870, the Irish barrister MP Isaac Butt founded the Irish Home Government Association. At the election of 1874, fifty-nine ‘Home Rule’ MPs were returned and the Liberal–Conservative hold on Ireland began to crumble. Between 1879 and 1882 Irish nationalist politics received a boost from the mass agitation of Michael Davitt’s Irish Land League and the election of Charles Stewart Parnell, the Land League’s president, as chairman of the Irish Parliamentary Party.30 Under Parnell’s leadership the Nationalists demonstrated their independence of other parties by waging a campaign of obstruction in the Commons and establishing their own political organisation in Ireland. Assisted by the fourfold increase in the Irish county electorate after the 1884 Reform Act, they won 85 of the 100 Irish seats at the 1885 general election (plus one seat in Liverpool) and thus held the balance between the Liberals and Conservatives. Gladstone’s decision to endorse Home Rule, and the Conservatives’ rejection of it, frustrated Parnell’s hopes of preserving complete freedom of action for his party, and effectively committed the Nationalists to supporting the Liberals, at least until Home Rule had been achieved. Equally, however, the solid parliamentary position that they had built for themselves gave the Nationalists considerable political leverage, especially when minority Liberal governments were in power. The presence of the Irish Nationalist party, and the dependence of the Asquith government on their parliamentary support after the elections of 1910, was to be a key factor in the crisis of party politics in the pre-war period. More immediately, the emergence of the Nationalists had a destabilising effect on the party system in the 1880s and 1890s. The changes that occurred tended to weaken the Liberals and strengthen the Conservatives. The electoral success of the Nationalists in 1885 virtually ended Liberal parliamentary representation in Ireland, making it more difficult for them to win a majority at Westminster. The Liberal position was made still more precarious by the split in the party caused by Gladstone’s introduction of his first Home Rule Bill in 1886. Ninety-one Liberal MPs voted against the Bill, bringing about not only its defeat but the effective end of the ‘Liberal ascendancy’ that had dominated British politics since the 1830s.31 Under Lord Hartington and Joseph Chamberlain the anti-Home Rule Liberals formed a separate Liberal Unionist party, eventually joining forces with the Conservatives but maintaining their own parliamentary and electoral organisations, at least until the formal merger of the parties in 1912. Thus although politics retained a broad bipolar orientation around a Home Rule–Unionist axis, the opposing sides were composed of alliances of independent units, making the system ‘multi-party’ rather than two-party in the strictest sense. The possibility existed, moreover, of a further fragmentation of parties as a consequence of the appearance of nationalist and regional movements in other parts of the United Kingdom. In 1885–6 a group of radical land reformers in the Scottish Highlands formed a ‘Crofters’ party’ which won five seats at the 1885 election.32 In Wales, the late 1880s saw the upsurge of a more

Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain 23 assertive Welsh nationalism, associated with MPs like Tom Ellis and David Lloyd George, and with political-cultural movements such as Cymru Fydd.33 For a brief moment in the 1890s it seemed as if, in emulation of the Irish, the Welsh Home Rulers and the Nonconformists who were the backbone of the nationalist movement might abandon the Liberal party that they had supported hitherto in favour of a more independent position. In the event, both the Crofters’ party and the Welsh ‘revolt’ were reabsorbed into the Liberal mainstream, but their efflorescence was symptomatic of the volatility of party politics as the political system entered its more democratic phase after 1885. A more formidable threat to the Liberal–Conservative two-party system even than that presented by the politics of nationalism was posed by the politics of class – or, to be more correct, by the politics of Labour. Since the second Reform Act, working-class voters had been an important component of the electorate; after 1884 they were a substantial majority. The Liberal and Conservative parties had both responded to the increase in the number of working-class voters by constructing electoral platforms that could appeal to the broadest possible social constituency – the Liberals by emphasising the universality of individualism, the Conservatives by mixing imperialism and tradition with social reform. Liberalism, for good measure, insisted on the compatibility of the interests of capital and labour in the economic and industrial context. On this basis the Liberal party had built a solid relationship of cooperation with the organised Labour movement that had begun to form in the 1850s and 1860s, so much so that the trade unions became firm supporters of Gladstone’s Liberalism and ‘Lib-Labism’ evolved as a distinct strand of Liberal politics. The closeness of the relationship was signalled by the election of two Lib-Lab MPs (Thomas Burt and Alexander Macdonald) in 1874 and, in 1886, the appointment of Henry Broadhurst, secretary of the parliamentary committee of the Trades Union Congress, as a junior minister in Gladstone’s third government. However, by the time of Broadhurst’s appointment Liberal–Labour relations were already coming under strain. Despite the increase in the number of LibLab MPs to eleven in 1885, there was frustration in the unions that the Liberals had not done more to advance the cause of Labour representation. Their frustration was heightened by awareness of Labour’s enhanced electoral importance in the wake of the reforms of 1884–5 and the rapid expansion of the trade union movement under the influence of the ‘new unionism’ from the mid-1880s on. Some sections of the Labour movement were also receptive to the socialist ideas being propagated by organisations like the Social Democratic Federation, founded in 1884.34 The result was the emergence, mainly in the North of England, of a number of local ‘independent Labour’ groups, delegates from which met in Bradford to form the Independent Labour Party in January 1893. The ILP’s leader, Keir Hardie, had been elected MP for West Ham South the previous year after an earlier, unsuccessful, attempt to enter parliament at the Mid-Lanark by-election in 1888. He and most of the ILP’s other leading figures had broken with the Liberal party over its unsympathetic attitude to workingclass candidates, but they sought to broaden their attack by portraying

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Liberalism as an outmoded creed with little to offer the working man. Their ideological assault did not win immediate converts. At the election of 1895 all of the ILP’s twenty-eight candidates were defeated, and even Hardie lost his seat. But the direction of industrial politics in the 1890s provided the party with a new opening. After the successes enjoyed by the new unionism in the late 1880s, the employers had rallied to launch a ‘counterattack’ on the unions through lockouts, the use of non-union labour and legal sanctions against trade unions taking strike action. The Liberal party offered little resistance and the Liberal governments of 1892–5 were a disappointment from the unions’ point of view, failing to deliver on a range of promised labour reforms.35 By the end of the 1890s the time seemed ripe for a closer alliance between the unions and the ILP to secure a stronger voice for labour in parliament, to counteract the power wielded by the employers’ interest. Negotiations led, in February 1900, to the foundation of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC).36 The LRC brought together trade-union money and organisation with the ILP’s sense of political drive, symbolised by the choice of the ILPman Ramsay MacDonald as the LRC’s first secretary. The new body achieved a rapid initial success. Two LRC candidates, Keir Hardie at Merthyr and Richard Bell at Derby, were returned in the general election of 1900; a further three seats were won at by-elections in 1902–3. Trade-union affiliations increased swiftly after the adverse judgment of the House of Lords in the Taff Vale case threatened to make the unions financially liable for losses arising from strike action.37 At its annual conference at Newcastle in 1903 the LRC affirmed its independence from the Liberal and Conservative parties and established a parliamentary fund to enable it to fight the next election on the broadest possible front. The prospect was raised of a direct challenge to the two-party system and of a transference of class and industrial conflicts to the political arena in a way that seemed likely to undermine the consensual conventions on which the party system had previously rested. As will be seen, the immediacy of the threat was lessened by an electoral pact between the Liberals and the LRC, which restored a degree of unity to the ‘progressive’ wing of British politics and prevented an outright confrontation between the parties at the 1906 election. Nevertheless, the possibility of conflict remained a live one, and the acknowledgement of the LRC’s independence was a recognition, as the Liberals themselves admitted, of ‘a vital change in the organisation of parties’, pregnant with future difficulty.38 The emergence of third parties representing interests not fully catered for by the existing parties modified but did not at this stage completely transform the two-party system. However, the problems that the parties were experiencing in adapting to changing circumstances did lead to a more fundamental questioning, at least in some quarters, of the party system per se. At the turn of the century the doubts about the efficacy of traditional party politics crystallised most notably in what became known as the ‘National Efficiency’ movement. The background to this development was a shifting political agenda shaped by concern, across the party divide, about a range of interconnected issues: Britain’s faltering economic performance relative to other industrial powers like Germany

Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain 25 and the United States; the need for a modernisation of the country’s educational and social infrastructure; the scale of mass urban poverty as revealed by the surveys of Charles Booth, Seebohm Rowntree and others in the late nineteenth century, and its implications for economic prosperity and social stability. There was plainly a link, too, between the physical and economic health of the nation and Britain’s ability to maintain and defend her Empire in the face of growing imperial and naval rivalry with other European powers. This complex of concerns prompted a reappraisal of Victorian laissez-faire orthodoxy and fuelled the move towards an acceptance of a more active, interventionist role for the state in various aspects of national life. Both of the major parties were influenced by this trend – the Liberals in the direction of the ‘New Liberalism’ and its policies of industrial and welfare reforms; the Unionists in the direction of a Chamberlainite policy of Tariff Reform. But there were those who argued that the problems Britain faced were more deep-seated than a change of policy alone could address; that it was the system of party politics itself, with its outdated controversies over denominational schools and similar questions, that stood in the way of a thoroughgoing reorganisation of Britain and its institutions along more efficient, businesslike lines. The difficulties that the Liberal party in particular was experiencing in the late 1890s – which seemed to indicate to many observers that it was in a state of terminal decline – encouraged talk of a realignment which would unite the proponents of ‘efficiency’ in a new political combination, isolating old-fashioned, individualist Liberals and the more reactionary Conservatives who were still wedded to the forms of an increasingly obsolete party system. The South African War of 1899–1902 led to further discussion of political realignment because of the way in which it deepened the internal crisis within the Liberal party, with ‘pro-Boer’ and Liberal Imperialist wings reluctant to accept the moderating middle course marked out by the party’s new leader, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who had succeeded Sir William Harcourt in 1898. The war also boosted the appeal of ‘National Efficiency’ as a rallying cry, as early defeats in the field showed up the weaknesses of Britain’s military organisation and the poor health of recruits underlined the connection between improving social conditions at home and maintaining Britain’s strength abroad. From diverse quarters there were calls to set party differences aside and for the formation of a ‘national’ government which could respond to the situation by applying scientific and business methods on a non-partisan basis. As J.L. Garvin wrote: The party system may not be extinct, but it is in abeyance, and will remain so for the reason that politics are not now a question of abstract principles. They are a matter of management, and the real choice is between competence and folly.39 An Administrative Reform Association was founded in 1900, echoing the initiatives taken in the earlier struggle for modernisation of government during the

26 Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain Crimean War. Articles in the Fortnightly Review and the National Review proposed the appointment of a non-party figure like Kitchener or Lord Cromer to cabinet office in a bid to halt the drift of national decline. For many, Lord Rosebery was seen as the man best placed to lead a ‘National’ or ‘centre’ party. His earlier career had shown that he was equally interested in social and imperial questions. In 1889 he had been elected as the first Chairman of the London County Council, where he built a reputation as a progressive in fields such as housing and labour relations. As Foreign Secretary in Gladstone’s last two governments he supported policies of imperial expansion, notably in Uganda and South Africa. He had the authority of a former prime minister, yet since 1896 he had eschewed the role of party leader and so could appeal to all shades of party and non-party opinion alike. In the Liberal party he was particularly attractive to those on the ‘imperialist’ wing, who included prominent or rising figures such as Asquith, Edward Grey and R.B. Haldane, although ‘proBoers’ like Lloyd George were sympathetic to Rosebery’s ideas on social reform. But equally there was support for Rosebery from Conservative and even socialist ranks as well. Winston Churchill, returned as MP for Oldham in 1900, was one of a number of young Conservatives who looked to Rosebery as a potential leader. The Fabian Sidney Webb likewise saw Rosebery as the politician most likely to give National Efficiency a coherent political form.40 Rosebery’s own speeches, including that at Chesterfield in December 1901 (where he famously called on Liberals to abandon the ‘fly-blown phylacteries of obsolete policies’ and substitute a ‘clean slate’), raised hopes that he was about to take the initiative in creating an alternative to the existing patterns of party politics. There were two problems with this scenario. One was that Rosebery was temperamentally unsuited to sustained political activity and was therefore unwilling to accept the mantle of national leader which others were so keen to thrust upon him. The other was that, despite the vicissitudes of war, the underlying structures of the party system held firm. The Unionists were confirmed in power at the ‘khaki’ election of 1900. Thereafter not only did the Salisbury–Balfour governments prosecute the war to what could at least be portrayed as a victorious conclusion; they even began to implement some items on the National Efficiency agenda – for example with the Education Act of 1902 and the initiation of reviews of national and imperial defence policy. Significantly, Joseph Chamberlain, the one statesman who might have rivalled Rosebery as an alternative ‘centrist’ leader, was never attracted to the ‘efficiency’ banner as such, perhaps because he was too fully absorbed in his role as Colonial Secretary, but maybe also because he knew from the hard currency of personal experience how difficult it was to work outside the framework of the two-party system. The same considerations applied to Liberals like Asquith, Haldane and Grey. Although they supported the formation of the Roseberyite Liberal League in 1902, they never saw this as a body entirely separate from the existing Liberal machine, particularly since, once the war was over, Liberal electoral fortunes began to improve and the prospect of returning to office as members of a Liberal government began to exercise its understandably seductive pull. It was

Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain 27 only really on the fringes of the party system that National Efficiency as an alternative form of politics was kept alive by 1902, though a few mavericks like Churchill still yearned for a new ‘centre’ party. The Webbs did their best to promote the idea of ‘government by experts’ through the experiment of their non-party ‘Coefficients’ club, but they found their influence on events through this channel considerably less significant than they hoped.41 What could have developed into a major crisis for the party system at the beginning of the Edwardian period thus failed to materialise. The Irish Nationalists remained a separate group in parliament but were internally divided and had little real influence so long as a Unionist government was in power. After 1895 Liberal Unionists retained their own organisation yet they were effectively assimilated into a modified two-party system on the Conservative side. Labour, in the longer term, posed a more serious threat to the two-party system, though in the early 1900s it was still far from clear whether the LRC would be able to mount a credible independent challenge to the existing parties, any more than the ILP had done. The weakness and divisions of the Liberal party in the late 1890s had promoted talk of realignment, both on the left and in the centre, and had been an ingredient, along with the South African War, in generating support for an alternative government of National Efficiency, but circumstances had not been sufficiently favourable to bring about a fundamental change. The appeal of National Efficiency thinking was to revive as the Edwardian decade progressed, just as the Nationalist and Labour challenges to the two-party system were to gain renewed vigour. But in the aftermath of the South African War it was not these challenges but rather the revival of longer-standing forms of political partisanship that constituted the major factor on the political scene. It was this that, by 1910, had brought party politics to a more serious point of crisis, creating a situation in which the viability of the party system was once more put to the test.

The revival of two-party politics After the end of the South African War, the political history of Edwardian Britain until the year of the King’s death in 1910 falls into three distinct phases. The first, coinciding roughly with Balfour’s premiership of 1902–5, was a period of Unionist decline and Liberal revival, culminating in the formation of a minority Liberal government led by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in December 1905. The second, brief, phase was occupied entirely by the general election of January 1906, in which Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberals were returned with a landslide majority. The third and final phase, from 1906 to 1910, saw the Liberals facing a rejuvenated challenge from the Unionists, reflected in by-election results and the use by Unionist leaders of their majority in the House of Lords to obstruct contentious items of Liberal legislation. The climax of this strategy of resistance came with the Lords’ rejection of the Liberal government’s ‘People’s Budget’ in November 1909, precipitating a constitutional crisis which prompted Asquith, Campbell-Bannerman’s successor as prime minister, to call a

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further general election for January 1910. The motif that runs through all these twists of political fortune, however, is that of the revival of the two-party system, with Liberals and Unionists locked in a struggle for power in which smaller parties, such as Labour or the Irish Nationalists, played at most a subordinate or supporting role. At the same time, particularly after the Liberal victory in 1906, the return to a predominantly two-party orientation was marked by an escalation of partisanship that made an underlying consensus increasingly difficult to sustain. Herein lay the roots of the crisis that was to deepen in the more immediate pre-war years. The electoral revolution of 1906, in common with earlier swings of the pendulum, owed as much to a negative reaction against Balfour’s Unionists as it did to any more positive popular mood in the Liberals’ favour. Unionist unpopularity had been growing even before Balfour succeeded Lord Salisbury as prime minister in 1902, as the promise of speedy victory in the war against the Boers which had boosted Unionist fortunes at the ‘khaki’ election of 1900 was replaced by a drawn-out guerrilla war and controversy over the methods used by British forces. On the domestic front, the 1902 Education Act roused opposition among Nonconformists unhappy that Church of England schools were to receive public funding through local rates. Some Liberal Unionists found the measure difficult to support for this reason. Yet although these factors weakened the position of the government and introduced disunity into its ranks they were not the reason for its downfall. Part of the blame here must be placed on Balfour’s aloof, apparently detached, style of leadership, which lacked the natural authority his uncle had wielded for so long. But in any case he faced a disintegrating inheritance. The full extent of his problems was revealed in May 1903 when Joseph Chamberlain, still Colonial Secretary, publicly launched his campaign for Tariff Reform in a speech at Birmingham. Tariffs had begun to exert a renewed appeal in the 1880s, when the ‘Fair Trade’ movement had sought ways of protecting British industry from foreign competition. In Chamberlain’s ambitious prospectus tariffs would, in addition, provide revenue for social reform and open the way to closer imperial unity through the creation of a preferential trading bloc of Empire nations. Politically, however, the proposals were controversial in the extreme. The Unionist cabinet included confirmed Free Traders such as the Duke of Devonshire and virtually no one who was willing to endorse the full Chamberlainite programme. Balfour tried to steer a middle course between the extremes in order to hold his party together, but in doing so forced the resignation of Chamberlain and the Free Trade ministers from his government and increased confusion and divisions among Unionist voters and the party rank-and-file.42 Meanwhile the resurrected spectre of Protection was a boon to the Liberal party, which could heal its own divisions in defence of Free Trade and play on voters’ fears that the introduction of tariffs would lead to higher food prices. The Liberals benefited, too, from other measures, such as the Education Act, which emphasised the historic differences between the major parties and ensured that the big battalions of political Nonconformity, undergoing their own religious revival in 1904–5, were ranged squarely on the Liberal side. In the by-elections

Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain 29 that preceded it, and in the 1906 election campaign itself, it was probably these traditional issues – the basis of Liberal–Conservative rivalry through much of the nineteenth century – that had most effect on electoral opinion, although in these same years the Liberal party was also feeling its way towards the more social-reformist New Liberalism which was to flourish more fully under Asquith and Lloyd George once the Liberals were in power. More important in preparing the way for victory than ideological reorientation was the organising strategy that the party employed prior to 1906 – which can also be seen as an attempt to construct a two-party configuration that replicated the Liberal ‘golden age’ of the 1860s and 1870s in place of the pro-Unionist balance that had existed since 1886. The key figure here was Herbert Gladstone, the fourth son of the former prime minister, who became Liberal chief whip in 1899. Gladstone set about rebuilding the party organisation and recruiting the best possible candidates for winnable seats. He skilfully managed by-election campaigns, scoring a string of victories from 1902 onwards, and advised the leaders on speeches and policy statements to maximise the party’s appeal. His careful diplomacy assisted the defection of a number of Unionist ‘Free Fooders’ – Winston Churchill among them – from the Conservative ranks. Above all, in 1903, he negotiated a secret electoral pact with the Labour Representation Committee which gave LRC candidates a free run against the Conservatives in 40–50 seats at the 1906 election but ensured that the Liberals would be free from Labour opposition elsewhere, so forging a ‘progressive alliance’ which, for the time being at least, contained Labour within the broad ambit of Liberal politics and enabled the party to concentrate its main fire on the Unionists.43 Even then Balfour might have had some hopes that earlier Liberal divisions would re-emerge to undermine the party’s electoral prospects. Indeed, late in 1905, there were private discussions on the part of the Liberal Imperialists Asquith, Haldane and Grey to concert a plan for seizing control of a Liberal government by easing Campbell-Bannerman from effective leadership. Rumours of this ‘Relugas compact’44 prompted Balfour to tender his government’s resignation in December 1905 in the hope either that the Liberals would be unable to form an administration or at least that their party would present itself to the voters in as divided a condition as his own. Neither hope was realised. CampbellBannerman, refusing to become a figurehead premier in the Lords, outflanked his potential supplanters by offering them leading roles in the new ministry, Asquith accepting the Exchequer, while Grey and Haldane were eventually appointed to the Foreign Office and the War Office respectively. CampbellBannerman balanced the ‘imperialist’ element in his cabinet by giving the radical Lloyd George – the former ‘pro-Boer’ and one of the leaders of the Nonconformist revolt against the 1902 Education Act – his first ministerial appointment as President of the Board of Trade. After ten years in the wilderness it was thus a united, broad-based and perhaps uniquely talented Liberal government that offered itself to the electorate in January 1906. The general election of 1906 completed a transformation in the fortunes of the two main parties that had been begun by the events of 1902–5 and had been

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foreshadowed by Liberal and Labour by-election victories.45 The Liberals won 399 seats compared with the 183 they had secured in 1900. Their Labour allies won a further twenty-nine (in addition to the twenty-four ‘Lib-Labs’ on the Liberal benches). The Unionist parties, by contrast, suffered a rout. Only 156 Conservative and Liberal Unionist MPs were elected. The Liberal Unionists, with twenty-five seats, returned with little more than a third of their pre-election strength. For the Conservatives it was their worst result since 1832, its extent signalled by the defeat of their leader, Balfour, in Manchester as well as by the loss of a number of other front-bench figures. The Liberal victory appeared particularly decisive in the party’s areas of traditional strength. In Wales not a single Unionist was elected. In Scotland the Liberals won 58 of the 78 seats. More striking still was the fact that for the first and only time since the party split of 1886 there was a Liberal majority – 306 seats to 122 – in England, leaving only Ireland (which returned fifteen Unionists, three Liberals and eighty-two Irish Nationalists) and the universities (where Unionists won all nine seats) as areas where the Liberals were outperformed by their principal opponents. In terms of the way in which the topography of the House of Commons was reshaped by the result, the ‘landslide’ label seems wholly appropriate. Yet while the scale of the Liberal victory was certainly remarkable, its extent can easily be exaggerated. The winner-take-all nature of the electoral system rewarded the Liberals with more seats than, in proportional terms, their votes warranted. To take the most extreme case, in Wales 128,461 Liberal voters elected thirty-two MPs, whereas 65,949 Unionist voters returned not a single Member between them. In the United Kingdom as a whole, the Unionists polled 43.4 per cent of the votes but won only 23.3 per cent of the seats.46 What the voting figures suggested, moreover, was that, even in the shambles of their worst defeat in living memory, there remained a solid bedrock of Conservative support which was able to withstand a temporary geological disturbance. The Liberals had won many of their seats, especially in traditionally Conservative parts of England, on small majorities, and these would be vulnerable to any recovery of Conservative fortunes. That such a recovery was likely was borne out by previous experience as well as present circumstances. The elections of 1895 and 1900 had produced equally large landslides – but in the Unionists’ favour. The Unionists, furthermore, could console themselves with the thought that the conditions of 1906 were probably unique. The Liberals, for once, had been united as a party and had benefited from the accumulated unpopularity of a long term of Unionist government. In particular they had been able to exploit Unionist divisions over Tariff Reform and to capitalise on the electorate’s preference for the familiar policy of Free Trade. Their alliance with the Labour Representation Committee (now renamed the Labour party) had enabled them to maximise the anti-Tory vote and to win seats, in areas such as Lancashire, which in normal times they would not have secured.47 For many commentators, and subsequent historians, it was the emergence of the Labour party that was the most significant factor about the 1906 election. One later writer, George Dangerfield, famously argued that the Labour success

Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain 31 sounded the ‘death knell’ of the Liberal party.48 This is an argument that will be examined in more detail in due course. But even if it is true, it is a statement heavily conditioned by hindsight. In contemporary as well as in historical terms the real significance of the 1906 result, beyond the fact of the Liberal victory, lay in the extent to which it confirmed the re-establishment of a two-party orientation to the political system. The Labour party had the potential to develop into an independent political force, but in 1906 its victories were achieved largely on the basis of its alliance with the Liberals, making it not unreasonable to see it as one component of a broader centre-left ‘progressive’ majority. In any case, as has been said, although social and labour questions figured more prominently on the political agenda in 1906 than they had at previous elections, the dominant issues were those around which the Victorian two-party system had been organised: Free Trade versus Protection, the desirability or otherwise of denominational education, reform of the licensing and land laws. The focus of debate was beginning to shift to a wider range of economic and social problems – poverty, unemployment, social welfare – but the circumstances of the 1906 contest held up rather than hastened the transition. Viewed cynically, it might be thought that the Liberal leaders even encouraged this reversion to the norm, since it helped them to poll their full strength among traditional supporters while confining Labour to a subordinate role. In reality the terms of the contest probably reflected the issues in which the majority of voters felt the keenest interest, and the most important thing about the Liberal victory was that it reaffirmed the capacity of the two-party system to provide a strong alternative to the Unionists, the size of the Liberal majority scotching for the moment any imminent prospect of a major realignment. As politics settled down after the election, the party battle continued undimmed. The Liberal government embarked on a legislative programme designed to satisfy their various supporters in the Nonconformist and Labour movements. They also made some early forays into what Churchill, a junior minister in the new government, described in 1908 as ‘the untrodden field’ of social reform, most notably with the introduction of old-age pensions. The Liberals quickly ran into problems, however. An economic downturn in 1907–8 led to rising unemployment and created opportunities for critics on both right and left. The Labour party launched a ‘right to work’ campaign and took a seat off the Liberals at the Jarrow by-election in 1907, while another Liberal seat was lost to the independent socialist Victor Grayson at Colne Valley later in the same year. But these rifts in the progressive alliance were overshadowed by the revival of the Unionists and the boost that a faltering economy gave to the advocates of Tariff Reform. Ten government seats were lost to the Unionists at by-elections between the election of 1906 and March 1909. Although this in no way endangered the government’s parliamentary majority, it did hint at a turning of the electoral tide and a return to a more evenly balanced rivalry between the major parties. A still sharper edge was added to the party battle by the actions of the Unionist peers. A number of Liberal measures – an Education Bill, a Licensing Bill, two Scottish Land Bills and a Bill to restrict plural voting – were either

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vetoed by the Unionist majority in the House of Lords or so savagely amended that they had to be withdrawn. Other reforms – old-age pensions, children’s legislation, a Trade Disputes Bill reversing the effects of the Taff Vale judgment – were allowed to pass, but this merely emphasised the partisan nature of the Lords’ actions, since they were reserving the full weight of opposition for those measures to which the Liberals as a party had been most strongly pledged at the recent election. The confrontation between the Liberal government and the House of Lords was an integral part of the contest between the parties; its escalation between 1906 and 1909 was a sign of the increasing bitterness that party conflict was to assume in the later Edwardian period. The antagonism between the Liberals and the Lords was of long standing. Since the mid-nineteenth century the Liberals had championed ‘popular’ against ‘aristocratic’ government. Gladstone’s first and second ministries had both clashed with the Lords on a number of occasions. But prior to the Liberal split of 1886 the outright hostility of the Lords towards Liberal governments had at least been mitigated by the presence of the Whig peers on the Liberal side and by Conservative selfrestraint. After 1886 these saving graces no longer applied. Between 1892 and 1895 the Lords defeated or destroyed a sequence of Liberal Bills, including the second Irish Home Rule Bill in 1893. The Liberal party had already committed itself, in the 1891 Newcastle Programme, to the ‘mending or ending’ of the House of Lords, and the experience of 1892–5 confirmed this aim. By 1906 the anti-Liberal bias of the Upper House was even more blatant when compared with the result of the January general election. In the Commons the Liberals had an overwhelming majority, yet in the Lords the eighty-eight Liberal peers were heavily outnumbered by a combined total of 479 Conservatives and Liberal Unionists. Not only that, but Balfour and Lansdowne, the Unionist leader in the Lords, made it plain that their parliamentary strategy would be to use their majority in the Lords to make life as difficult as possible for the Liberal government, so that, as Balfour put it, ‘the great Unionist Party should still control, whether in power or opposition, the destinies of this great Empire’.49 Given the size of the Liberal majority in the Commons, it was almost inevitable that the conflict would move to a climax. Following the defeat of the Education Bill, in June 1907 Campbell-Bannerman moved a series of resolutions in the Commons in favour of restricting the Lords’ veto. It was not until the introduction of Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ in April 1909, however, that the struggle entered its decisive phase. In form, the issues at stake were constitutional. In practice it was the party political significance of what occurred that was uppermost. The 1909 budget, which aimed to raise additional revenue for social reform and naval rearmament by introducing a ‘supertax’ on the rich and a levy on the unearned increment from land, was essential to the Liberals if they were to recapture the political initiative and re-energise their supporters after the disappointments of the previous two years. Equally, if the budget succeeded, it would undermine Unionist calls for Tariff Reform by giving a fresh lease of life to the politics of Free Trade. Thus, while it would be wrong to suggest that the

Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain 33 budget was designed solely to provoke the Lords into rejecting it, the Liberals were presenting the Unionist leaders with a challenge they could hardly refuse. If the Unionists allowed the budget to pass, their own credibility would be damaged. If they took the chance of rejecting it, this would, as a minimum, force the government into an election that would offer the possibility of a Unionist return to power. Moreover, although the House of Lords had never previously rejected a budget, there was a constitutional case for saying that its veto was not thereby rendered inoperative, and the Liberal budget was sufficiently unusual and wide-ranging in form at least partly to justify claims that it was social legislation in the guise of a finance Bill and therefore not subject to the normal conventions that accorded supremacy to the Commons in matters of revenue and taxation.50 The upshot of this was that the budget unleashed a storm of controversy, some of it admittedly synthetic, and became the focal point of an increasingly fierce party battle in parliament and in the country. The Unionists formed a Budget Protest League to whip up opposition; the Liberals responded with their own Budget League, presided over by Churchill, who by this time was Lloyd George’s staunchest ally (apart from Asquith, the prime minister) in the Liberal cabinet. Lloyd George himself stumped the country and, in speeches such as those at Limehouse in East London in July and at Newcastle in October, not only mounted a vigorous defence of his budget but also an outspoken attack on the Unionist peers in the House of Lords. ‘Let them realise what they are doing,’ he warned at Newcastle. ‘They are forcing a revolution, and they will get it.’51 Whether this was deliberately provocative in intent or not, it created a situation in which it was difficult for the Unionist leaders to back down. When the budget finally reached the Lords in November, it was rejected by 350 votes to 75. Asquith responded to the unprecedented action by declaring it ‘a breach of the constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons’.52 He obtained a dissolution of parliament from the King and the country prepared itself for a general election in January 1910. Though it may not have been clear at the time, the ‘crisis of the party system’ had begun.

2

The crisis of partisanship, 1910 –14

Between 1910 and 1914 political conflict in Britain reached new levels of intensity. The period began with the two general elections of 1910 and the controversy over Liberal plans to reform the House of Lords. It continued with the deepening confrontation over Irish Home Rule and popular protest linked to large-scale labour unrest and the campaign for votes for women. There were problems within each of the major parties as well as in relations between the parties and in the relationship between the parties and the wider political community. By the summer of 1914, as Home Rule was about to be placed on the statute book and a general election loomed, there were fears that the normal conventions of parliamentary and party government were breaking down and that the country stood on the verge of civil war. In the event, such fears were not realised, not least because the outbreak of the First World War interposed itself into domestic concerns. But the increasingly febrile and partisan atmosphere of pre-war politics nonetheless played its part in the developing crisis of the party system, even if the coming of war prevented this phase of the crisis from reaching its natural conclusion.

The elections of 1910 Although other questions – women’s suffrage, the government’s National Insurance Bill, labour unrest, an international crisis arising from the German government’s despatch of the gunboat Panther to the Moroccan port of Agadir in a challenge to French influence – obtruded, the political scene in 1910–11 was dominated by the consequences of the Lords’ rejection of the 1909 budget. From the prorogation of parliament on 3 December 1909 to the closing of the polls on 10 February 1910 – ‘the longest election campaign in modern British history’1 – the country was in thrall to an at times violent general election centred on the merits of the budget, the Unionist alternative of Tariff Reform and the actions of the House of Lords. Even when the election was over, little was resolved. The Liberals remained in office, the Lords allowed the budget to pass, but the Unionists were determined to block Liberal plans for constitutional reform. The death of Edward VII and the accession of George V in May provided time for a political pause, and the summer of 1910 saw a ‘constitutional

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conference’ between the parties, which sought, ultimately to no avail, an agreed way out of the impasse. Following the failure of the conference, Asquith decided to press ahead with the attack on the Lords, persuading the new King to promise that, in the last resort, he would if necessary approve a mass creation of Liberal peers to force reform through, against the wishes of the Unionists, providing a second general election gave the Liberals a mandate for change. When the Lords duly rejected the Liberal reform proposals Asquith called a second election, which produced a similar result to that of January, and embarked on a long parliamentary battle which was only ended when the Unionist majority in the Lords fractured sufficiently for its more pragmatic members to agree to accept the Parliament Bill rather than face the swamping of the upper chamber with Liberal lords. In August 1911 the Parliament Act became law, replacing the Lords’ veto with a delaying power over non-financial legislation but making money bills henceforward the sole prerogative of the Commons.2 The elections of 1910 were significant not only for the part they played in the resolution of the constitutional crisis but also because they set the scene for the rest of the pre-war period. Indeed, the December contest elected the parliament that was to sit, because of the wartime extension of its life, until the end of the war in 1918. In addition, the results of the elections have been much analysed by historians trying to identify and interpret the underlying trends at work in the Edwardian political system, to see what they reveal about the state of the parties, the level of engagement or alienation among the voters and the direction in which political developments were moving prior to 1914. Before any of these questions can be examined the basic psephological evidence needs to be considered. On the face of it, the results of the January 1910 election seem more of a defeat for the Liberals than a victory. They won only 274 seats compared with 399 in 1906, whereas the Unionists increased their representation from 157 seats to 272. The Unionist share of the popular vote also increased, from 43.6 per cent to 46.8 per cent, while that of the Liberals fell from 49 per cent to 43.5 per cent.3 What rescued the situation from the Liberals’ point of view, and allowed them to claim a victory (albeit, in Churchill’s words, ‘a Wagram not an Austerlitz’),4 was the performance of the smaller parties who were willing for their own reasons to act as the Liberals’ parliamentary allies. The Labour party increased its representation from 29 MPs in 1906 to 40 in January 1910 (although this increase was accounted for mainly by the decision of the formerly Lib-Lab Miners’ Federation of Great Britain to affiliate to the Labour party in 1909 and the consequent redesignation of their parliamentary contingent). The Irish Nationalists retained their eighty-strong phalanx and remained on the Liberal side, since, despite their opposition to some aspects of Lloyd George’s budget, they saw in the confrontation with the Lords and a changed parliamentary situation an opportunity for making progress towards their principal demand of Irish Home Rule. Thus, even though the Liberal party had lost its independent majority, it could still be confident of commanding the support of the House of Commons and faced no immediate challenge to its retention of power.

36 The crisis of partisanship, 1910 –14 The election of December 1910 produced a broadly similar result to that of January, confirming the outcome of the earlier contest. The Liberals suffered a net loss of three seats, reducing their total to 271, but this was compensated for by the gains of their allies (Labour increasing its representation from 40 seats to 42 and the Irish Nationalists from 82 to 84), by the failure of the Unionists to make up any further ground (remaining unchanged on 272) and by the fact that, because the election had been fought more explicitly on the issue of reforming the Lords, the government could claim a sufficient mandate to enable them if necessary to call on the King to honour his pledge in regard to the creation of additional Liberal peers. The Liberals even increased their share of the popular vote slightly (from 43.5 per cent in January to 44.2 per cent), albeit on a reduced turnout, whereas that of the Unionists registered a small overall fall.5 The reduced turnout, however, did not betoken any lessening of electoral excitement. Although the campaign for the December election was shorter and less violent than the one in January, with over a million fewer people voting and turnout falling from 86.8 to 81.6 per cent, these reductions were accounted for largely by the rise in the number of uncontested seats, as parties saved themselves the expense of fighting constituencies they had no chance of winning, and the staleness of a 16-month-old electoral register which deprived a number of otherwise qualified voters from exercising their choice. But the particularly high turnouts in some marginal seats suggested that voters genuinely felt a sense of commitment to one side or the other and welcomed the opportunity to express their view. Interpreting these results, though, is more difficult than describing them. For one thing, although the elections are generally seen as a Liberal victory, another way of looking at the results was to say, as Edward Grey did after the January election, that the electorate had not had complete confidence in either of the major parties.6 But the enhanced role of third parties in a House of Commons, in which neither Liberals nor Conservatives had an independent majority, did not necessarily indicate that the electorate had desired this outcome. In Ireland, with its large Nationalist majority, this probably was the case. In Britain, where the main third party was Labour, the situation was less clear-cut and the significance of the Labour party’s performance is open to debate. It is a moot point as to whether, notwithstanding the increase in its parliamentary representation, Labour’s star was waxing or waning in 1910; still more whether it should be seen as a fully independent party or within the framework of a ‘progressive alliance’ as an adjunct of the Liberal forces. Labour advanced in both seats and votes in January 1910 compared with 1906, and won two additional seats in December even though fielding fewer candidates and consequently taking a smaller share of the popular vote. But these seats were almost all won in the absence of Liberal opposition, in a continuation of the electoral pact of 1906. Where the parties came into direct competition it was usually the Liberals who were successful, regaining seats like Jarrow, which had been lost to Labour in the 1906 parliament. Only in two seats (West Fife and Gower), and then in the absence of a Conservative candidate, did Labour win against Liberal opposition. In three-way contests it fared even worse. In 35 such contests in the two 1910 elections Labour

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finished third in 29, second in only 6 and won none.7 While it is true that the party was in some respects fighting at a disadvantage in 1910 (because it lacked the resources to fight two closely spaced election campaigns, and because the terms of the contest made the elections into a quasi-referendum on Liberal policies with which most Labour candidates agreed), the evidence seems to confirm the view that Labour was failing to make headway as an independent force. If voters saw it mainly as a substitute for the Liberals where no Liberal candidate was standing, this would reinforce the argument that the Liberal and Labour parties should be considered together as separate wings of a composite progressive movement, thereby making the 1910 results a more decisive triumph for the centre-left than the Liberal totals of seats and votes alone would justify. This may be to underestimate Labour’s sense of its own separate identity and the very real differences that existed between the Liberal and Labour parties. Yet the overriding impression of the 1910 elections is of a polarisation of political opinion between right and left, between the Unionists on one side of the political divide and the Liberals and Labour on the other. This polarisation was both geographical and social in character. Whereas in 1906 the Liberals had won majorities in all three countries, in Britain in 1910 a more normal post-1885 regional distribution of support reasserted itself. The Liberals retained their overwhelming majorities in Scotland and Wales, winning 58 of the 70 Scottish seats in both elections and 27 and 26 of the 34 Welsh seats in January and December respectively. Labour won a further five of the Welsh seats and raised their Scottish total from two to three in the December election. In England, however, it was a different story. The January 1910 result gave the Liberals 188 English seats to the Unionists’ 233, the corresponding figures after December being 186 and 234. Even if the Labour party’s thirty-four English MPs in December 1910 were added to the Liberal total, the progressive parties were still in an English minority.8 Moreover, the distribution of seats won by the parties in England revealed a north–south split which, as Beatrice Webb commented, divided the country ‘into two distinct halves’,9 with Liberal and Labour support being concentrated mainly in northern England while the Conservatives regained their hold on the south and east. Across Britain as a whole, according to Neal Blewett, the Unionists won 78 per cent of the seats south of the line between the Dee and the Humber, but only 36 per cent of those to the north and west. The regional differences also appeared to have increased compared with previous elections, so much so that Britain seemed to be becoming almost two nations: ‘never before had the anti-Unionists done so well in the North, Scotland and Wales while doing so badly in the South; never before had the Unionists done so well in the South, while doing so badly elsewhere.’10 The implication of this is that what was being seen was not merely the reassertion of a long-standing regional bias but that traditional divisions were being exacerbated by new trends. Since the Liberal–Conservative two-party system had emerged in the 1860s, the Liberals had been strongest in Scotland, Wales and the industrial districts of northern England. The split of 1886 had increased the party’s dependence on its heartlands, although its hold on Scotland

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had been temporarily weakened by the strength of Scottish Liberal Unionism. The election of 1906 had enabled the Liberals not only to re-energise support in these core areas, but also to capture swathes of Unionist seats in the south of England, many of them unexpectedly and by narrow margins. In 1910 the special factors of the 1906 contest – particularly the abstention or temporary defection of Unionists opposed to Tariff Reform – were counteracted by a renewed heightening of habitual party loyalties, reversing most of the Liberal gains in southern England and restoring the Unionist grasp on a majority of English seats. The resulting divisions on the electoral map were made starker by the operation of the first-past-the-post electoral system, but they nevertheless reflected real political variations between different parts of Britain and within the English hub of the British state. In these differences the themes of nationality, religion and social class all played their part. The Liberals as a party were more sympathetic to the national aspirations of the Scots, Welsh and Irish, whereas the Conservatives were more self-consciously an ‘English’ party, an identity reinforced by Unionist rhetoric against Irish Home Rule. Within England, as elsewhere in the United Kingdom, the Liberals were the party of religious Nonconformity, while the Conservatives were politically identified with the established Anglican Church. Both of these factors influenced the 1910 results, as they had shaped the electoral history of the entire post-1867 period. But according to some analyses it was the third divider, that of social class, which was overtaking the other two as the main determinant of party allegiance. The importance of class in politics was not, of course, a novel phenomenon. Since the 1870s the Conservative party had been appealing to middle-class voters alienated by fears of Liberal radicalism, and the electoral success of Salisbury’s Conservative party had been based at least as much on the ‘villa Toryism’ of the middle-class suburbs as on the votes of the imperially patriotic working masses. The Liberals, by contrast, though retaining some middle-class support, had built up special links with the trade unions and the organised labour movement, and this Lib-Labism was an important strand of Liberal politics which blended organically with the forces of Celtic nationalism and political Nonconformity to provide a solid base for Liberalism in most of the industrial regions of Britain, except where countervailing local factors such as workingclass hostility to the Irish (as in Liverpool) or support for the army and navy (in garrison and dockyard towns) gave the Conservatives an advantage. In 1910, however, there were signs that the question of social class was becoming more prominent than ever before. The emergence of the Labour party as a separate organisation was evidence of a growing assertiveness on the part of industrial workers. The issues at stake – the People’s Budget, social welfare, even the House of Lords – emphasised the way in which the outcome of the elections could be viewed in more straightforwardly class terms, and the results of the elections appeared to show a sharper division between the parties in terms of class than had been revealed in any previous contest. The Liberals actually improved their position in some industrial districts like Teesside and held on to their previous gains in working-class areas of London despite a general loss of support in

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southern England. Conversely, in middle-class constituencies the anti-Liberal swing of 6.2 per cent was much higher than the national average of 4.3 per cent.11 This may only have been a reversal of voting patterns temporarily distorted in 1906, but the impression created was of the increasingly stark division of Britain politically into ‘two nations’, with class and economic interest as the principal touchstone of electoral choice. The elections of 1910 thus reflected both a growing separation of parties on the basis of their traditional identities and, possibly, the beginning of a more decisive socio-economic shift in the political world, although it should perhaps be added that historians have become increasingly wary of placing too much reliance on straightforward class-based interpretations of political allegiance. In the short term, however, the importance of the 1910 results for the future of the party system lay less in their more distant implications than their immediate consequences. The excitement generated by two closely fought elections in less than a year, the narrow margin of the results and the inevitable sequel of a renewed parliamentary battle over the future of the House of Lords all contributed to an increase in political partisanship and intensified party conflict. The temperature of the struggle was raised still further by the realisation of politicians in the two main parties that the late nineteenth-century party system was entering a decisive period of change. It was the Conservatives for whom the situation seemed particularly desperate. They had fought three elections in 1906–10 but, despite regaining parity with the Liberals in 1910, still found themselves in opposition to the Liberal–Labour–Nationalist alliance. If the 1910 results represented the party’s maximum electoral strength, the future looked bleak indeed. For the Liberals, though, it was precisely their dependence on the smaller parties which constituted the nub of the problem. If they could not satisfy the Nationalists, or find a way of ensuring that their alliance with Labour became permanent, then they too faced an uncertain prospect. The problems of Liberals and Conservatives in turn created difficulties for the party system as a whole. The inability of either party to secure a majority in its own right, coupled with the intensifying partisanship that threatened to erode the last vestiges of a governing consensus, raised doubts about whether a more fragmented and conflict-driven party system was capable of delivering stable and effective government at all.

Crisis of Liberalism, crisis of Conservatism? The cohesion of the party system depended on the cohesion of the parties themselves. In the Edwardian period both major parties faced the problem of maintaining internal unity while adapting their policies and organisational structures to the social and ideological challenges of the new century. It is the apparent seriousness of these problems, and the reaction of contemporaries to them, that has given rise to the idea that the years before 1914 saw a point of crisis being reached in each of the country’s two main party-political traditions, with much debate over which party was experiencing the greater difficulties and over what the wider implications of those difficulties were.

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For a long time it was the problems of the Liberal party that held the historiographical centre stage. The internal divisions of the party in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were minutely examined, and much attention was given in particular to the success with which the Liberal party responded to the burgeoning challenge of organised Labour, both from the electoral and ideological points of view.12 In all of this the central dilemma facing the Liberals was seen as being how far an essentially individualist Liberal party could adapt to the more ‘social democratic’ requirements of state intervention which were associated with the parties of the left in the twentieth century, as opposed to the more laissez-faire tenets of reformers from the Victorian era. In retrospect it can be seen that the terms of this debate owed as much to the context in which historians themselves were writing as it did to the political situation in Edwardian Britain, yet their assumptions were sufficiently anchored in the contemporary Edwardian discourse to give their reconstructions an air of verisimilitude. Thus J.A. Hobson, one of the leading theorists of pre-1914 Liberalism, declared in an influential collection of essays published in 1909 that, ‘The real crisis of Liberalism lies … in the intellectual and moral ability to accept and execute a positive progressive policy which involves a new conception of the functions of the state.’ He called for the Liberals to develop an ‘organic plan of social progress’ which emphasised the need for state-sponsored social reform.13 Practising politicians were equally aware of the dangers of failing to propitiate the emergent forces of social democracy as represented by working-class voters and the Labour party. Lloyd George was among those who warned of the fate that awaited the Liberals if they ignored the work of social reform and concentrated solely on the concerns of traditional radicalism.14 Between 1906 and 1910 the governments of Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith sought to avoid this trap by pursuing a dual strategy, which combined measures to appeal to the party’s middle-class, Nonconformist supporters with social and industrial reforms more calculated to address the concerns of working-class and labour voters – the so-called ‘New Liberalism’. As has been seen, this strategy was partly undermined by the way in which the House of Lords obstructed measures connected with education, temperance and land reform, while passing old-age pensions, the Workmen’s Compensation Act and the Mines Eight Hours Act. But the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 provided a standard around which both traditional radicals and ‘social’ radicals could rally, establishing the New Liberal principles of redistributive taxation crucial to a programme of welfare reform yet at the same time targeting long-standing enemies of Liberal radicalism such as landowners, brewers and the House of Lords. The Lords’ rejection of the budget in 1909 and the struggle over the Parliament Bill that followed imparted a greater unity to the various wings of the Liberal movement than had existed perhaps since the Gladstonian heyday of the late 1860s, and gave the Liberal party a collective sense of purpose and direction that may have been lacking even in the more negative triumph over the Unionists in the landslide of 1906. The Liberals continued this dual strategy after 1910, introducing major

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welfare measures like the 1911 National Insurance Act alongside the Parliament Act to reform the House of Lords. In some respects, though, the situation that pertained after the elections of 1910 made it more difficult to maintain good relations between the various sections of Liberal opinion and the party leadership. The loss of the Liberals’ independent parliamentary majority should in theory have enjoined greater discipline on the Liberal benches in parliament, although in practice the availability of Labour and Irish votes meant that the government was never seriously threatened with defeat unless it alienated those two groups in addition to a portion of its own supporters. Yet the need to appease the separate interests of Labour and Irish nationalism brought its own drawbacks, particularly if these seemed to be receiving more favourable treatment than those of the Liberal sections. The government’s decision, because of its dependence on the Irish MPs, to commit so much parliamentary time to the third Irish Home Rule Bill was especially provocative in this regard, reviving some of the disruptive competititon between ‘faddist’ elements in the Liberal party that had been a factor in the destruction of the Gladstone and Rosebery administrations in the 1890s.15 In Scotland and Wales, nationalist Liberals revived their own demands for Home Rule only to see them ignored while the Irish were given precedence. Meanwhile English Nonconformists were frustrated at the absence of education and temperance reform from the government’s programme and feared that the Welsh Disestablishment Bill introduced in 1912 would delay indefinitely a similar measure for England.16 Two other concerns caused even more disquiet, even dissension, in Liberal ranks. One was foreign, and especially armaments, policy. The Liberals had come to power in 1906 pledged to reduce spending on armaments, but had instead embarked on an expensive programme of naval expansion in response to the perceived threat from Germany. This, and the general drift towards militarism, was deeply distasteful to the party’s radical pacifist wing, which would probably have been even more troublesome to the government had not foreign policy (including Britain’s emerging military agreement with France) been conducted largely out of the gaze of public and parliamentary scrutiny.17 The second highly contentious area was franchise reform. Women’s suffrage was one of the big political issues of the Edwardian period, not least because of the militant campaigns of Mrs Pankhurst’s ‘suffragette’ Women’s Social and Political Union. The government was split between the supporters and opponents of votes for women and consequently failed to produce a satisfactory reform measure.18 Its inaction, and what was seen by some as its duplicity, so infuriated the formerly pro-Liberal suffragist organisation the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies that its leaders transferred their support to the Labour party, while the government’s imprisonment and harsh treatment of suffragette militants further tarnished its liberal credentials. The question of women’s suffrage, which should have been straightforward for a party supposedly committed to radical reform, again revealed the divisions that existed within Liberal ranks and the difficulties that the party faced in adapting its ideas and policies to the changing face of contemporary society.

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The New Liberalism did nothing to heal the rifts that were opening up between the Liberal leadership and the traditional radical element within the party. If anything it made them worse, and indeed exposed tensions within the upper echelons of the party as well. Bona fide New Liberals were a minority in the parliamentary party, even more so among the rank-and-file of the party and its supporters in the country at large.19 Even in the cabinet there was far from unanimous backing for the initiatives of Lloyd George and Churchill, while in the House of Lords the former prime minister and party leader Lord Rosebery openly denounced the 1909 budget as ‘socialistic’.20 Unease about the trend of government policy was both ideological and practical. Although its advocates portrayed the New Liberalism as a natural evolution of nineteenth-century Liberal ideas, which broadened the definition of freedom without weakening the philosophical commitment to individual liberty, critics of the new departure were not convinced. They regarded the interventionist, high-tax policies of the New Liberalism, with their enlarged role for the state, as dangerously collectivist, a negation of the Gladstonian ideas of individualism, low taxation and limited government on which Victorian Liberalism had supposedly based its appeal. To these philosophical objections were added more practical concerns. Hobson, Hobhouse and the other New Liberals stressed the benefit to society as a whole of the policy of social reform by using the biological analogy of society as an organism which depended for its well-being on the health of its constituent parts, arguing that a reduction in working-class poverty would ultimately add to the prosperity of other classes as well, so reducing class antagonisms and contributing to the general peace and stability of the social community. But middle-class Liberals faced with higher taxes, and businessmen forced into making concessions to their workforce, took a more sceptical and self-interested view. The result was that there were large sections of the Liberal party in which the government’s welfare policies aroused little enthusiasm, the main feeling being one of frustration that so much legislative time was being spent on these questions when it could better have been devoted to more traditional Liberal concerns. Perhaps even more worrying from the point of view of the Liberal leadership than the lukewarm reception of the New Liberalism among their middle-class supporters, though, was its apparent failure to appeal to working-class voters or to prevent the Labour party from showing increasing restiveness within the confines of the progressive alliance. In the first place, there were strong traditions of individualism among working-class Liberals, including among the older generation of Lib-Lab trade unionists who preferred to improve their condition by their own efforts rather than relying on state intervention. Many members of the working classes, in addition, saw the state as essentially a coercive or punitive agency – as revealed, for example, in the operation of the Poor Law – and found it difficult to accept that Liberal policies represented any significant break with past experience. Among some groups of workers, too, the details of specific reforms aroused at least a degree of hostility. Whereas old-age pensions were reasonably popular, there was opposition from many quarters to the contributory nature of the National Insurance schemes, which was seen as a form of addi-

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tional taxation. And even where critics were not opposed to the idea of state intervention per se, there were those who argued the Liberal intervention was either inadequate or wrongly targeted. The government was criticised for adopting a policy of piecemeal reform rather than a more comprehensive strategy, as when they failed to respond to the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law in 1909.21 In this the Liberals suffered the inevitable fate of all reformers, of raising expectations that they could not immediately satisfy and so being denied full credit for what in other respects were highly innovative reforms. It has also been argued that the New Liberalism opened up a more fundamental ideological divide between the Liberal party and the Labour movement.22 The measures introduced by the governments of 1906–14 showed that the Liberals were willing to use the power of the state to legislate on behalf of the working class and to strengthen the position of working-class organisations such as the trade unions. But, at bottom, Liberalism remained a self-consciously classless creed. It recognised the existence of classes but argued that there was no unresolvable conflict of interest between them. Edwardian socialists such as Ramsay MacDonald – as secretary and chairman of the Labour party, a pillar of the progressive alliance – spoke a similar language. Nevertheless, as it was developing in the early twentieth century the Labour party was taking on a more class-specific appearance and developing the character and outlook of an authentically independent working-class party. The divergence of views between the Liberals and Labour was especially acute, not so much in the realm of general policy as in relation to those more explicitly ‘labour’ questions that were of particular concern to the Labour party and its trade-union wing. The Liberals had, in a deliberate attempt to retain Labour support, introduced a significant raft of labour legislation, not least the 1906 Trades Disputes Act, which reversed the effects of the 1901 Taff Vale judgment and gave the unions legal immunity from damages arising out of strike action. However, there were limits beyond which Liberalism would not go in making concessions to what could be perceived as a sectional interest. Both in theory and practice, the New Liberalism emphasised the need for a balance to be struck between the interests of capital and labour and between those of trade unions, employers and the community at large. In this scheme of things the role of government was at most that of referee rather than protagonist, ‘holding the ring’ between opposing sides and trying to enforce a degree of compromise in relations between them. Labour, by contrast, was, by definition, on the side of the workers, and this essential difference was highlighted by the events of the pre-war period. In the atmosphere of industrial confrontation that existed in 1910–14, with strikes in key industries and government attempts at conciliation being accompanied in a number of cases by the deployment of troops and police, it was easy for the Liberals to be branded by Labour as a ‘bosses’ party’, which was incapable of protecting the rights of the labour movement. What effect this had on electoral politics, and in particular what it meant for the future of the progressive alliance, have been topics of much debate.23 Some

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writers have emphasised those factors which seem to show that the Labour party was growing in strength and that it was taking a more independent stance in its dealing with the Liberals. Certainly the party was expanding in membership and putting down firmer organisational roots. Its affiliated membership (via trade unions and socialist societies) increased from 998,338 in 1906 to 1,612,147 in 1914; the number of trades councils and local Labour parties affiliated to the central organisation rose from 73 in 1905 to 177 by the outbreak of war. The total of Labour representatives elected to local authorities increased from 56 in 1907 to 184 in 1914.24 The party also benefited from the Trade Union Act of 1913, which enabled trade unions to ballot their members in order to set up political funds, thereby reversing the damaging effects of the Osborne judgment of 1909.25 The ballots that were held in 1913–14 showed a steady conversion of the unions to the idea of Labour party membership, and the promise of increased funding underwrote the establishment of a party newspaper and the expansion of the party’s paid agents and organisers. The enthusiasm of local parties for electoral activity was demonstrated by the number of parliamentary by-elections contested between 1910 and 1914 and by the plans that were being discussed for a broader electoral challenge to the established parties at the election of 1915. All of these factors, together with the greater coherence of the party under the leadership of MacDonald and Arthur Henderson, were evidence that Labour was consolidating its position as a permanent presence on the national political scene and that it was laying down a structural base from which future expansion would be possible. However, this is a long way from saying that Labour was on the verge of breaking its working alliance with the Liberals, still less that it had any realistic chance at this stage of aspiring to replace the Liberals as the major progressive party of government. Duncan Tanner, who has conducted an exhaustive analysis of the state of progressive grass-roots politics in the Edwardian period, has concluded that Labour’s growth, though real, was still patchy and limited before 1914, and that Labour was strongest in areas where Liberalism was weak (such as Lancashire) rather than in the Liberal heartlands – in other words, that the parties were complementary to one another rather than competitors, which of course was what made the progressive alliance such an electoral success.26 The by-election evidence of the period confirms the message of the elections of 1910 that Labour was not as yet strong enough to challenge the Liberals on their own ground, even in constituencies where working-class voters were in a clear majority. In fourteen by-elections in industrial seats between 1910 and 1914 Labour came bottom of the poll in each case and nowhere took more that 30 per cent of the vote. Two seats which Labour was defending (Hanley and Chesterfield, both in the Midlands coal-mining districts where Lib-Labism remained strong) actually fell to the Liberals, while a further two were lost to the Conservatives.27 A record such as this makes it unlikely that Labour leaders would have contemplated outright independence in 1915. The decision to intervene more widely in by-elections, although it was a sign of vitality and did have benefits in building up party support at local level, was probably seen mainly as a

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tactic to force the Liberals into negotiations over renewing the electoral pact rather than as the precursor to an outright repudiation of previous cooperation. There are even signs that MacDonald at least was willing to consider a formal coalition with the Liberals if the details of an electoral pact could be agreed. Be this as it may, for the Liberals the question of their future relations with Labour was a problem that had been contained rather than resolved, and was one which could possibly present a threat to the Liberals’ ability to survive as a party of government. Its importance was highlighted by other aspects of the political-electoral situation in which the Liberals found themselves. Between 1911 and 1914 the government had lost no fewer than fifteen seats to the Unionists at by-elections, making the Unionists the largest single party in the Commons by the outbreak of war. The Liberals’ alliance with the Irish Nationalists was also unreliable as a long-term source of support. However the Home Rule issue was resolved, once a Home Rule parliament had been set up the Nationalists would have no reason automatically to support a Liberal government in London. Since the establishment of a parliament in Dublin would also lead to a reduction in the number of Irish MPs at Westminster the value of Nationalist support was in any case going to decrease. In a situation where the Liberal party was suffering from internal divisions as well as the erosion of its external alliances it could well be argued that a point of crisis had been reached in the party’s development. Yet this is not the same as saying that the Liberal party was either on the verge of immediate disintegration or in the throes of an inevitable longer-term decline. It had powerful assets to offset its weaknesses. It still had a strong base of electoral support and the political authority deriving from its position as a party of government. It had experienced and popular leaders and a strong record of legislative achievement. Even the electoral trends of 1911–14 did not mean automatic defeat at the general election of 1915. For one thing, by-elections are an unreliable guide to a party’s performance in a general election. For another, there were some signs in early 1914 that the electoral tide might in any case have turned in the Liberals’ favour. Beyond that, two things were crucial. One was the future of the progressive alliance, which, as has been seen, was more likely to outlast the 1915 election than not, whatever its subsequent fate. The other crucial requirement – and in many ways the key to the party’s whole future – was to ensure that the rift between the old Liberalism and the New did not undermine the identity of the Liberals as a coherent electoral and political force. The ‘dual strategy’ of 1906–10 had on the whole achieved this well, although some tensions had surfaced as individual items jostled for attention in the party’s programme. But under Asquith and Lloyd George in particular, the various strands of Liberal radicalism were kept in play with some success. Perhaps the best example of this, after the ‘People’s Budget’, is the ‘Land Campaign’ which Lloyd George instituted in 1913. As recent research has shown, Lloyd George skilfully blended the ‘old Liberal’ animosities towards landlords with a socialradical prospectus that promised a variety of rural and urban reforms, including a minimum wage for agricultural workers, slum clearance and housing reform.28

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The programme, unlike some of the other New Liberal measures, seemed popular with voters, and even offered the prospect of regaining for the Liberals rural constituencies that had been lost to the Unionists in 1910.29In the longer run, the Liberal party was giving striking evidence of its continuing reforming vitality, notwithstanding the problems with which the Liberal government was beset in the immediate pre-war years. As historians have recently begun to emphasise, moreover, whatever the seriousness of the pre-1914 crisis of Liberalism, the problems facing their Conservative opponents were arguably even worse.30 Having benefited from Liberal disunity at the elections of 1886, 1895 and 1900, the Conservatives suffered three consecutive defeats at the hands of the Liberals and their Labour allies in 1906 and 1910. Unless the progressive alliance broke down, the prospect was of an indefinite period of Conservative opposition, which might at best provide opportunities for minority governments such as Derby and Disraeli had led in the long wilderness years of the mid-nineteenth century. In the meantime they would be obliged to acquiesce in the passage of a string of, to them, unpalatable radical measures such as the reform of the House of Lords, Welsh Disestablishment and Irish Home Rule. A Liberal reform of the franchise to extend the suffrage and abolish plural voting was likely to weaken the Conservatives and make the regaining of the electoral ascendancy even more difficult to achieve. Nor was this all. The circumstances and experience of defeat in 1910 had revealed serious organisational weakness in the Conservative party, and had led to mounting criticism of the party leadership and to increasing division and factionalism in the parliamentary party and among the rank-and-file of the party’s membership. These divisions in turn were linked to an important ideological debate about how Conservatism should respond to the actions of the Liberal government and the changing political agenda presented by the early twentieth century. At the centre of the ideological debate was the question of tariffs. Support for protectionist measures to safeguard British industry against foreign competition had been growing in some sections of the Conservative party since the 1880s, but it was the launch of Joseph Chamberlain’s campaign for Tariff Reform in 1903 that unleashed the full force of the tariff controversy on Conservative politics. Its impact on the fortunes of the Balfour government has already been noted, with the split between tariff reformers and ‘free fooders’ contributing to the downfall of the ministry and the subsequent defeat of the Conservatives at the polls. But the political significance of the tariff issue went deeper than that. Just as the New Liberalism gave the Liberal party a more active interventionist creed for the Edwardian period, so too, in Chamberlain’s version, tariffs were the cornerstone of a more positive, progressive Unionism that would define itself not only in opposition to Liberal measures but also would offer a comprehensive strategy for solving Britain’s problems at home and abroad. A policy of economic protectionism would restore the fortunes of British industry and so generate employment and greater prosperity. The revenue from tariffs could be used to fund social spending and rearmament without recourse to higher

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domestic taxation, while on the global stage Britain would be able to consolidate the unity of the Empire by offering preferential tariffs for colonial produce at the same time as transforming the Empire into a more exclusively British-dominated trading bloc. The theoretical neatness of a prescription that squared so many circles was so appealing that it deserved greater success. However, even more than the New Liberalism, Tariff Reform proved a double-edged weapon, both within the Conservative party and with the electorate at large. True, tariff reformers claimed that it was the party’s divisions over the policy rather than the policy itself which was the reason for the 1906 defeat, and in support of this they pointed to the fact that pro-tariff candidates appeared to fare better with the voters than those who were equivocal or hostile – as witnessed by the high proportion of Chamberlainites (109 MPs out of 157) in the reduced parliamentary party, and by Balfour’s own defeat in Manchester. On returning to the House of Commons Balfour was forced to concede as much, accepting the full tariff plan as party policy, even though some of the vigour was drained from the tariff campaign by the abrupt removal of Joseph Chamberlain from front-line politics by the stroke that virtually confined him to his Highbury home in Birmingham until his death in 1914. The success of the Conservatives in byelections in 1906–9, at a time of economic depression and Liberal disarray, again seemed to strengthen the hands of the tariff reformers, who by this time had won increasing support in the constituencies and the ranks of the National Union. But the change of fortune was not sufficient to bring victory in the election of 1910, and the return of prosperity and the passage of the Liberal budget seemed further to undermine the immediate case for tariffs. In Lancashire and some other areas of previously strong Conservative support there was evidence that the threat of ‘food taxes’ which tariffs implied was still unpopular, and the ‘free food’ case argued by Lord Robert Cecil and others had greater appeal. It was in response to this continuing electoral resistance to the tariff policy that Balfour, in the December 1910 election, proposed a referendum before a Conservative government introduced its full programme, but this tactic seemed more to antagonise the hard-line pro-tariff lobby than to reassure sceptical voters. Discontent with Balfour’s handling of the tariff issue was part of a larger crisis of leadership and direction in Conservative politics. Balfour was not an effective leader of the Conservative party in opposition. This was partly the result of a fastidiousness of temperament which meant that he found much of the routine of party politics distasteful, but more because the veering and vacillation of his policy made it difficult for him to impose his will on his followers or to give a clear lead to the party in the country. In fairness, he also had a far from easy situation with which to deal, given the scale of the 1906 defeat. He was perhaps unfortunate, too, in the illness that transformed Chamberlain from an active colleague to a brooding off-stage presence, leaving his acolytes to pursue a more wayward course, free from their master’s direct control. Balfour did, furthermore, take the decision to challenge the Liberal government in the House

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of Lords and did his best to rally his party, especially in the second election of 1910. Yet the story of the constitutional struggles of 1909–11 shows more the failure than the strength of Balfour’s leadership. He felt compelled to take a firm stand because of the pressure from the tariff reformers and the aggressive spirits in the parliamentary party, but in doing so he committed his party to a high-risk strategy which he was then unwilling to see through to its conclusion. Having failed to achieve electoral victory in January 1910, in December he backtracked on tariffs to promise a referendum. Even more damagingly for his standing with the emerging ‘diehard’ elements in his party, he was then, in 1911, willing to compromise with the Liberals over reform of the Lords rather than push his opposition to the last ditch. This final capitulation turned a behind-the-scenes whispering campaign into a public demand (in the slogan of Leo Maxse’s National Review) that ‘Balfour Must Go’ and the threat of an open challenge to his leadership at the annual National Union meeting in November 1911 – a challenge which Balfour pre-empted by resigning his post before he could be dismissed. The contest for the succession did nothing immediately to restore party unity or heal the wounds of recent defeats. Indeed, at first it seemed likely to tear the party further apart rather than to bring its various factions closer together. Only when the two principal candidates – Austen Chamberlain (son of Joseph, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, a strong pro-tariff man and a diehard in the struggles of 1909–11 despite his Liberal Unionist allegiance) and Walter Long (another former cabinet minister but more representative of traditional landed Toryism) – withdrew in favour of the Glasgow businessman Andrew Bonar Law was a definite rift prevented. Even then, the dour Bonar Law, whose CanadianScots, Ulster Presbyterian ancestry made him untypical of the party’s upper echelons and perhaps something of an outsider, inherited a party that was far from being at peace with itself. Arguments over the tariff policy continued, as Bonar Law himself discovered when his attempt to abandon Balfour’s referendum pledge and return to the ‘full tariff ’ policy occasioned a grass-roots revolt among Lancashire Unionists. A compromise – that food taxes would not be introduced until after a second Unionist victory – was only accepted after Law had threatened to resign as leader. Nor, in the wake of the defeat over the House of Lords, were tariffs the only bone of contention. ‘Diehards’ in the party, associated with a variety of Unionist splinter groups like the Halsbury Club, the ‘Confederacy’ and Reveille, wanted the party to adopt extreme methods of opposition to Liberal policies like Welsh Disestablishment and Irish Home Rule, and to defend the rights of landed property against the further depredations of Lloyd George and the radicals.31 If these groups were not satisfied with Law’s leadership, the fragmentation or break-up of the Conservative party remained a possibility, as did a diehard coup against Law himself. To problems of unity and strategy were added those of organisation. The 1910 elections revealed the extent to which the Unionists had fallen behind the Liberal and Labour parties in this respect and a Unionist Organisation Committee was appointed to review the party’s structure and suggest reforms. Its

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findings painted a fairly damning picture. Both Conservative Central Office and the National Union were revealed as being inefficiently run, with a lack of professionalism and initiative on the part of certain individuals. The system whereby the management of the party organisation was the responsibility of the parliamentary party’s chief whip was clearly no longer working; the quality of local organisation was too variable; and the party’s publicity and campaigning tactics had not kept pace with electoral and social change. The proliferation of leagues and pressure groups which drew support from Conservative activists (for example, the Tariff Reform League, the Navy League and the National Service League) did something to redress the lack of vitality within the party organisation itself, but it also distracted energies from grass-roots party work, which further compounded the organisational inertia that the committee uncovered.32 Under Bonar Law, some of these defects were addressed.33 The report of the Unionist Organisation Committee had been tentatively accepted by Balfour before his resignation, and Bonar Law embraced its spirit with enthusiasm. He confirmed the appointment of Arthur Steel-Maitland to the new post of Chairman of the Party Organisation, with authority over Central Office and, to a degree, the National Union, and allowed the new Chairman’s reforming instincts free play. The party’s financial position was improved by the appointment of a party treasurer and a fund-raising campaign, and these organisational changes gave a fresh impetus to the party’s electoral activities in the pre-war period. A further rationalisation was carried out in 1912 with the formal merger of the Conservative and Liberal Unionist party machines, the creation of a composite ‘Conservative and Unionist’ party being designed in part to reduce residual hostility between the two wings of the Unionist alliance that had been one of the factors, for example, in the opposition in Tory circles to the idea of Austen Chamberlain, a Liberal Unionist, becoming party leader. In his broader political strategies Bonar Law also sought to reconcile the disparate tendencies of his followers and broaden the party’s electoral base. He supported Tariff Reform but was sensitive to the qualms of ‘free fooders’. On issues like Ireland, as will be seen, he publicly voiced the diehard position on Home Rule, although in private negotiations he may have been prepared to be more conciliatory. He was also willing to sanction the activities of bodies such as the Unionist Social Reform Committee, which was attempting to provide the party with a social policy capable of being a counter-attraction to the New Liberalism. In all of this the aim was to modernise the Conservative party, enabling it to evolve in the direction of a ‘Unionism’ which successfully embraced aspects of Chamberlainism without abandoning its traditional constituency of Tory support. Bonar Law’s Conservatism was more hard-edged and less patrician than Salisbury’s, but it perhaps offered a way forward more in tune with the moods and concerns of the Edwardian era. Nevertheless, the ‘crisis of Conservatism’ had not been surmounted by 1914. Although it won a string of by-elections from 1911 onwards, taking its total of MPs to 287 by the outbreak of war and giving it a majority of thirty over the Liberals, the electoral prospects of the Conservative party were uncertain. As

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Austen Chamberlain had recognised in 1910, the emergence of the Labour party introduced a ‘new element into politics’ and deprived the Conservatives of the benefit of the ‘swing of the pendulum’.34 Five of its by-election gains had been achieved where Labour candidates had split the anti-Conservative vote, and if these favourable circumstances were eliminated by a revival of the Liberal–Labour electoral pact the Conservatives could find themselves still unable to overhaul the progressive parties – an eventuality that the appeal of the Liberals’ land reform proposals in some rural seats won by the Conservatives in 1910 seemed to make more likely. Unless the Conservatives could find a way of making ‘Unionism’ broader in its appeal, or of driving a wedge between the progovernment parties, their chances of returning to power remained slim. It was this realisation that added an air of increasing desperation to Conservative politics after 1910, which neither Bonar Law’s leadership nor the organisational reforms were able wholly to dispel. Tariffs had not proved the universal votewinner that Chamberlain had hoped and the party needed either a more popular policy or what Chamberlain would have called a change in the political weather to give it a realistic chance of regaining power. The existing party system seemed loaded against the Conservative party. The question facing the party’s leaders was how best that system could be challenged or changed.

The triumph of partisanship The question has often been asked whether there was something uniquely disturbed or dangerous in the political atmosphere of Britain in the years preceding the First World War. Certainly the conflicts of 1909–11 – over the budget and the House of Lords – were more keenly and intensely fought than any party battles since the Home Rule crisis of 1886. But was there more to it than that? Had party politics reached such an impasse of bitterness that the normal operation of the party system was called into question, or even threatened with collapse? Two factors at least support this contention. First, the elections of 1910 had created a new political situation which seemed set to impede the ebb and flow of party fortunes, the ‘swing of the pendulum’ on which, as Austen Chamberlain recognised, a system of alternating party government depended. The Unionists had regained ground vis-à-vis the Liberals, but the Liberals’ alliance with Labour and the Irish prevented their opponents from reaping any gains from their improved position. Second, and perhaps consequentially, the element of partisanship in politics continued to increase after 1910 to what were widely identified – then and subsequently – as unprecedented levels. As the middle ground of consensus was eroded, even submerged, by the rising tide of party feeling, relationships between politicians and their opponents, and between the parties they represented, became more difficult to sustain and the conventions of a party system which relied on partisan differences being contained within a framework of mutual accommodation and respect seemed more than once on the verge of breaking down. The first eruption of this more unrestrained partisanship occurred during the

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budget crisis of 1909 and the general elections of 1910. The way in which the election results revealed a deeper polarisation of politics has already been discussed. Similarly, the content and language of speeches showed an apparently fundamental division between the parties, with each side being accused by the other of threatening the constitution in a manner reminiscent of the clashes over the royal prerogative in the early 1780s or the fierce debates over parliamentary reform in 1830–32. As with these earlier conflicts, of course, it is possible that much of the extravagant rhetoric employed on party platforms was synthetic in nature – that it represented what politicians felt they needed to say to whip up electoral support rather than necessarily reflecting their own innermost views. Nevertheless, the fact that they felt it profitable to employ these tactics was itself significant, and in turn helped to inflame still further party passions among local activists and the electorate at large. Following the January 1910 election, when the Liberals set out on their final assault on the powers of the House of Lords, the temperature of the struggle rose yet again, exacerbated on the Conservative side by the bitterness of impending defeat and their sense of impotence in the face of the Liberal–Labour–Irish parliamentary alliance. Political leaders recognised the dangers of allowing partisanship to escalate unchecked. As G.R. Searle has written, in 1910 ‘on all sides, there was a feeling that party animosities were spinning out of control’,35 and that this presented a serious threat to the normal operation of the party system. An opportunity to step back from the brink was provided by the death, in May 1910, of King Edward VII and the accession of George V. It was symptomatic of the atmosphere of the time that ministers were blamed for hurrying the dead King to his grave because of the anxiety that the constitutional crisis had caused. Calls for the crisis to be resolved by negotiation were published in the national press and the politicians responded by convening a ‘constitutional conference’ which met on a number of occasions through the summer and early autumn of 1910. It included representatives from the Liberal and Conservative parties, but neither the Labour party nor the Irish Nationalists were invited to attend – an indication, perhaps, that one result that the leaders were trying to achieve was to reassert the authority of their respective parties, despite the electorate’s weakening allegiance to the two-party system. Discussions ranged over a number of issues, with various options being considered for reforming the House of Lords in ways that might be mutually acceptable to both sides.36 In the end, however, it was impossible for the two sides to reach agreement. The stumbling block was Ireland. The Liberals, dependent as they were on the Irish Nationalists, could not agree to any plan of reform that did not remove the Lords’ veto on Home Rule, whereas the Conservatives would not accept any proposal that reduced the constitutional barriers to Home Rule becoming law. The Irish thus determined the outcome of the conference, even though they had not been present at its deliberations.37 But the conference did not close without at least one attempt to by-pass the Irish problem. In August 1910, Lloyd George, one of the Liberal participants in the summer meetings, produced a remarkable memorandum in which he proposed that party differences should be set aside

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and a coalition government of Liberals and Conservatives formed. He argued that this was the only way in which ‘urgent problems’ could be solved, cooperation being more effective than ‘the normal working of the party machinery’. The agenda for action that he sketched out included housing, unemployment, national insurance, the Poor Law, education, ‘the Land’, foreign and defence policy and ‘Imperial Problems’, in connection with the last of which ‘the settlement of the Irish question would come up for consideration’.38 On the face of it, it seems strange that a politician so apparently partisan as Lloyd George should be the originator of a project intended to cut across party animosities in this way. Some historians have seen this as simply another example of Lloyd George’s essentially slippery nature; others have argued that it reflects a more deeply engrained antipathy to the constraints that party politics imposed on executive action and a desire to create a government of ‘national efficiency’ which prefigured his later coalition governments of 1916–18 and 1918–22.39 The likelihood is that Lloyd George was aware of contemporary opinion favourable to cross-party cooperation: his colleague Winston Churchill and the Conservative F.E. Smith were keen advocates of a ‘centrist’ combination, although ironically both, like Lloyd George, were in the forefront of their respective parties’ partisan campaigns. Then again, as a reformer whose main priority was to get things done, Lloyd George may simply have felt that coalition was an expedient worth trying if it enabled the passage of important measures that might otherwise be lost in the no-man’s land between the party machines on either side. His subsequent assertion in his War Memoirs that ‘the party and Parliamentary system was unequal to coping’ with the ‘grave issues’ of the time may well have reflected a genuine concern that the partisan hostilities which he had helped, Frankensteinlike, to conjure into existence were increasingly becoming an obstacle to the kind of progressive reforming changes that he wanted to see.40 Like the constitutional conference from which it emerged, though, Lloyd George’s coalition plan did not bear any immediate fruit. Although the proposal received some support from individuals, the leaders on either side were opposed. Asquith was sceptical of the benefits of the plan and in any case there was little prospect of persuading Liberal ministers voluntarily to relinquish their posts to facilitate the restructuring of government that would have been necessary to make the plan work. Balfour, while not wholly hostile to an idea that would at least get his party back to a share of power and give it a better chance of staving off Home Rule, nevertheless felt that he could not play the part of ‘another Peel’ in a move which could split his party, with consequences similar to those of 1846. In other words, while the idea of a coalition had some attractions for front-benchers anxious to escape the party battle, there was a realisation that the rank-and-file of their respective parties would not understand or endorse such a move. Since discussion of the Lloyd George memorandum did not at this stage become common knowledge, it is impossible to know whether this judgement was correct, but it does appear that party feeling had been aroused to such a pitch that the Lloyd George scheme had little chance of success. A compromise over the House of Lords might have been welcomed (particularly if the question

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of Ireland could have been shelved), but the impossibility of selling a coalition to their supporters seemed so self-evident that it was more than the party leaders could bring themselves to contemplate. With the failure of the constitutional conference, the party battle was rejoined in earnest, culminating in the drama of August 1911 when the House of Lords narrowly approved the Parliament Bill rather than face a mass creation of Liberal peers. Even the passage of the Parliament Act, though, was only a staging post in the larger struggle. As has been seen, the failure of Balfour’s strategy led to a revolt against his leadership and the closer organisation of the right-wing diehards in his party. Bonar Law, as the new Conservative leader, was bound to try to appease diehard sentiment in order to secure his own position and, as he admitted to Asquith, this would necessitate him in publicly appearing ‘very vicious’ towards the Liberals. The constitutional and political situation provided him with plenty of opportunities to keep the pot of controversy boiling. The Conservatives had strengthened their position in the House of Commons and were improving it steadily in 1912–13 with by-election victories. In the Lords, meanwhile, although the veto had been removed, Conservative peers still had the power to delay Liberal legislation for up to two years, providing a valuable weapon for the diehard strategy of unremitting resistance to the radical policies of the Asquith government. Inevitably it was the Irish question that caused the most trouble. The Liberal government introduced the third Irish Home Rule Bill in April 1912. Like its unsuccessful predecessor of 1893, which had been defeated by the Lords, the Bill proposed the creation of an all-Ireland parliament in Dublin which would have control of most aspects of Ireland’s domestic affairs. A reduced contingent of Irish MPs would continue to sit at Westminster, but the imperial parliament would have responsibility in the main only for Ireland’s external relations. The measure naturally aroused the ire of the Unionists, who saw it as the thin end of a wedge that would place Ireland under Nationalist government and lead to the break-up of the Union. Particular opposition focused on the lack of any special provision for the largely Protestant, pro-Union counties of Ulster within the Home Rule scheme. Since the 1880s, when Home Rule had first been proposed by a Liberal government, the Unionists of Ulster had been implacably determined not to submit to a Catholic-dominated Nationalist parliament in Dublin. This resolve had, if anything, hardened by 1912 as Home Rule became a stronger legislative possibility. Under the leadership of Sir Edward Carson the Ulster Unionist Council organised mass demonstrations against the Home Rule Bill, culminating in ‘Ulster Day’ in September 1912, when 250,000 Ulstermen signed the ‘Ulster Covenant’, pledging themselves to resist Home Rule by all means at their disposal. The lengths to which they were prepared to go became apparent in 1913 when the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force was inaugurated with 100,000 members and plans were laid for setting up a separate provisional government in Ulster if the Liberals went ahead with their Home Rule plans.41 In terms of the party battle, the crucial point was how far the Conservative party would go in supporting the Ulster resistance to Home Rule. The issue went

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to the heart of Conservative politics, since it was the defence of the Union that had given the party is modern raison d’être and that was arguably the only policy on which all Conservatives were agreed. The party’s commitment to Ulster went back more than twenty years, when it had been expressed most forcibly in Lord Randolph Churchill’s declaration in 1886 that ‘Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right’. In 1912 the possibility of fighting became more than rhetorical, but Unionists did not flinch from the prospect. A British League for the Support of Ulster and the Union, founded in March 1913, rapidly attracted the support of 120 Unionist MPs and 100 peers. Signatures for a ‘British Covenant’ were collected in major cities and members of the League publicly backed the Ulster Unionists and the UVF, which attracted many Conservative former army officers to its ranks. Officially Bonar Law committed his party to outright opposition to Home Rule and to Ulster’s right for special treatment if Home Rule were enacted. Unionist peers in the House of Lords used to the full the constitutional delaying powers they had been given by the Parliament Act to frustrate the passage of the Liberal Bill for as long as possible, rejecting it on its first two appearances in the Lords, although knowing that under the provisions of the 1911 Act if the Bill was sent up a third time by the Commons it could be forced through to Royal Assent without their approval. Bonar Law hinted at the possibility of even stronger measures. He gave the Ulster resistance the full imprimatur of his authority as Unionist leader when he attended a rally of Carson’s supporters at Balmoral near Belfast on Easter Tuesday 1912 and in his speech exhorted the Ulstermen to ‘save the Empire’ by their example. In July, in a speech to Conservatives at Blenheim Palace, he launched a more explicitly threatening attack on the Liberals and their policy. He denounced the government as ‘a revolutionary committee which has seized by fraud upon despotic power’, because, he claimed, Home Rule had not figured in the election campaigns of 1910 and the Liberals were only introducing it as a condition of Nationalist support for keeping them in power. This, in his view, justified the opposition in taking exceptional measures, and the issue of Home Rule was in any case so fundamental that it overrode conventional rules of political behaviour. As Bonar Law put it, there were ‘things stronger than parliamentary majorities’ and, in opposing Home Rule, the Unionists would ‘not be guided by the considerations … which would influence us in any ordinary political struggle.’ ‘I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go,’ he said with sinister deliberation, ‘in which I should not be prepared to support them, and in which, in my belief, they would not be supported by the overwhelming majority of the British people.’42 What precisely Bonar Law was doing here is open to question. His own opposition to Home Rule was deep and genuine. At the same time he needed to take a firm public stand to reassure diehard sections of his party and may also have seen implacability as the best tactic for extracting concessions from the Liberal government, perhaps along the lines of an arrangement to exclude Ulster from the Home Rule settlement in a way similar to that which was subsequently discussed. In the broader scheme of things there is no doubt that Home Rule

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was an issue which the Unionists believed they could use to embarrass the Liberals electorally, and perhaps even to destabilise the government to the extent of precipitating an early general election. Whichever of these aims was uppermost in Bonar Law’s mind, and notwithstanding the vagueness of the action that was being threatened, the stance that the Conservatives took over the Irish question was loaded with menace. Even allowing for the possibility that much of what was being said may have been no more than ‘bluff and bluster’,43 there was an undercurrent of outrage which perhaps consciously echoed earlier episodes of revolt against the actions of an over-mighty executive, something that went beyond the usual cut and thrust of party controversy and touched a deeper and more visceral chord. Some of the violent scenes that occurred in the House of Commons and elsewhere testified to the extremes of passion that were being stirred and the dangers for the political system that might still lie ahead. Parallels have been drawn between the Ulster/Tory ‘rebellion’ against Home Rule and other protest movements of the Edwardian period. In his classic account of The Strange Death of Liberal England, George Dangerfield argued that there were similarities between the Ulster resistance to the Home Rule Bill and movements such as trade unionism and the militant campaign for female suffrage. In all three cases, he claimed, there was a growing disposition to use forms of violent ‘direct action’ in ways that challenged the rule of law and the authority of parliament. The Conservative party, first by the violence of its reaction to the People’s Budget and Liberal attempts to reform the Lords, then, more seriously, by its encouragement of the Ulstermen in their threat of armed rejection of Home Rule, were agents of a process that threatened the foundations of the liberal parliamentary system. Most recent writers have dismissed Dangerfield’s version of events as fanciful or misleading.44 They acknowledge the strength of industrial militancy, represented by the rapid growth of trade unions, the wave of large-scale strikes that occurred in major industries between 1910 and 1914 and the occasional violence that resulted from clashes between strikers and the police or troops in areas such as South Wales or Merseyside. Similarly, the actions of the WSPU in support of its campaign for ‘Votes for Women’, which involved the disruption of political meetings, attacks on politicians and public property and a sustained campaign of civil disobedience, are well documented. Yet it is doubtful if these movements were really as revolutionary or anti-liberal (in the non-party sense) as Dangerfield supposed. The trade unions did have a more extreme Syndicalist wing, influenced by the ideas of continental socialists, which wanted to use industrial action to overthrow the existing economic and political system. But the Syndicalists were in a minority. Most trade-union action was peaceful and devoted to more limited industrial ends. The TUC rejected Syndicalism and reaffirmed its commitment to parliamentary action through the Labour party. In the same way, suffragette militants were in a minority in the women’s suffrage movement, the main component of which was the more law-abiding NUWSS. What all suffrage campaigners wanted, in any case, was not the overthrow of parliament but its reform. To that extent

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their actions were an affirmation of liberal values rather than a rejection of them. This is not to say that these movements did not have an important message for the politicians. The emergence of widespread extra-parliamentary protest was evidence that there were powerful social forces that felt excluded from, or inadequately represented in, the existing party system. Already the formation of the Labour party had breached the Liberal hegemony on the political left. The Labour party itself was criticised in some quarters for being too moderate, and discontent with its performance led to a temporary increase in the membership of the more radical ILP and the setting up of the British Socialist Party in 1912. At the very least this suggested that the party system needed to adjust itself to accommodate the changes that were taking place among the working classes, just as the success of the women’s movement in the Edwardian era underlined the need for a progressive ‘feminising’ of politics as part of the wider process of democratisation. For the moment, however, neither of these movements was a serious threat to the party or parliamentary system. The ‘Revolt of the Right’ was an entirely different matter. This was not because opposition to Home Rule as such was unconstitutional. The Unionists were fulfilling their role as a parliamentary opposition and were within their rights to use the constitutional provisions of the Parliament Act to promote their cause. Bonar Law’s arguments about whether the Liberals had a mandate for their measure raised some legitimate questions; the insistence on the rights of minorities such as the Protestants of Ulster raised even more. Where all of this threatened to spill over was in the question of what Unionists would do once the parliamentary processes were exhausted. Would they support armed revolt in Ulster? Would they encourage army officers to refuse to obey the orders of the Liberal government? Would they seek to involve the King in their quarrel by urging him to refuse his assent to the Home Rule Bill, so provoking another constitutional crisis? All of the possibilities were being seriously considered in the summer of 1914 as the Home Rule Bill edged its way towards the statute book. And behind them were the voices of those on the ‘Radical Right’ of the Conservative party, some of whom were becoming terminally disillusioned with a parliamentary system which seemed to give the Liberals unfettered and indefinite power, and who were willing to consider some unspecified coup against the party and parliamentary system, to replace the inconvenient pluralities of the liberal regime with a more authoritarian, strongman oriented pseudo-dictatorship.45 As with the threat from the left, more sceptical historians have been quick to minimise the right-wing challenge. They have emphasised the gap between rhetoric and reality and the probability that the Home Rule crisis would have been resolved, at least temporarily, by some arrangement for the exclusion of Ulster from the authority of a Dublin parliament – as, indeed, the Liberals proposed in their Amending Bill of 1914 and as Bonar Law and Carson seemed willing to concede. Yet in a sense this is to miss the point. Irrespective of its outcome, the confrontation between government and opposition over Home

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Rule had revealed depths of anger previously absent from the give-and-take of party politics. As John Ramsden has written, by 1914 ‘the basis of agreement on which parliamentary government rested had all but broken down’.46 It may be argued that some of this was just ‘sound and fury’, and that the intensity of the conflict at Westminster was not replicated in the country or among the electorate as a whole (Ireland excepted). But there were plenty of signs that violence of language had become the language of violence, and that, for the first time in more than a century, politicians might find themselves on opposing sides in a civil war What would have happened if the pre-war crisis had not been swallowed up and transformed by the larger crisis of the First World War remains, of course, a perennial ‘if ’. Following the reduction under the terms of the 1911 Parliament Act of the maximum length of a parliament from seven years to five, a general election had to be held no later than the end of 1915, but because of the outbreak of the war the general election of 1915 never took place, and by the time political leaders again faced the voters they were operating in a very different political world. The ‘crisis of partisanship’ shrank in the memory and other problems took centre-stage. The fact remains that the party system was being severely tested in 1914, with both its inclusiveness and its stability being called into question, and had the conflict over Home Rule been allowed by events to run its course there is no certainty what the outcome would have been.

3

The crisis of war, 1914–18

The First World War had a decisive impact on the development of the party system, although the extent to which it initiated change rather than accelerating changes that were already in train before 1914 has been a matter for debate. The war itself was undoubtedly in some measure an agent of transformation, however, since it altered both the content and context of party-political activity. It created new problems, and in some cases opportunities, for each of the main pre-1914 parties. It brought fresh challenges of ideology and policy, especially in relation to questions of war strategy and the degree of intervention and compulsion necessary to mobilise the country’s resources for the war effort. It also, very directly, produced what in retrospect can be seen as the final crisis of the Edwardian party system, bringing about the collapse of the last Liberal government and replacing it with coalitions that destabilised the pre-war party alignments and strengthened the movement in favour of a non-party government of national unity. By the time the war ended in 1918 the pattern of Edwardian politics had been irretrievably broken. The Liberal party was divided openly against itself, its progressive alliance with Labour was at an end and its former allies the Irish Nationalists were on the verge of extinction at the hands of Sinn Fein. The uncertainties of a party system in flux were compounded by the unsettled condition of the post-war world and the terra incognita of a more democratic electoral system. It is the purpose of this chapter to study the main phases of wartime politics and the impact of the war on the party system, both at parliamentary level and the grass roots. How far did the First World War deepen the crisis of the party system, and were its effects wholly destructive or did they lay the foundations of an alternative, more stable, post-war political dispensation?

Party politics and the coming of war An oversimplified view would be that the outbreak of the First World War repaired the pre-war divisions in British society and promoted a new spirit of national unity. The reality was more complicated, and in party politics as in many other respects the conduct of the war in its early stages was marked by a ‘business as usual’ approach which attempted to graft wartime expedients onto

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peacetime practice. Party considerations continued to influence wartime politics, even while the war was working its effect in the party system. The importance of party considerations can be seen even in the decision making that led to Britain’s entry into the war in 1914. As the July crisis in Europe unfolded, with Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum to Serbia following the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo and the subsequent Austrian declaration of war on Serbia, the British government had to decide on its course of action if the war broadened to include the other great powers. In particular, what would the British response be to a German attack on France, given that France and Britain had been involved in detailed military and naval discussions to prepare for such an eventuality?1 Asquith and his Foreign Secretary, Grey, felt that it would be necessary in Britain’s interest to honour their moral commitment to the French, even if in stricter legal terms there was nothing to compel British intervention. They were equally aware, however, that there was a sizeable group, possibly a majority, of the cabinet who were not, at the outset, converted to this view, and that, at least until 1 August, there was a strong anti-interventionist mood among Liberal MPs and the Liberal press. On the other hand, if war broke out among the great powers and Britain did nothing, there was the possibility that Grey would resign, the government would collapse, and the way would be opened for the Conservatives to take office. Once Russian mobilisation had triggered a German declaration of war on 1 August and the prospect of a German attack on Russia’s ally, France, became a near certainty, the stakes were raised higher still. The Unionist leaders Bonar Law and Lansdowne made the party dimension of the crisis quite clear with their letter to Asquith on 2 August offering ‘unhesitating support to the Government in any means they may consider necessary’ to support France, but stressing their view that ‘any hesitation in now supporting France and Russia would be fatal to the honour and to the future security of the United Kingdom’.2 Both sets of leaders were thinking as much in party terms as they were of the national interest. Neither side was willing to contemplate a coalition. When Churchill raised the idea with leading Conservatives on 31 July he received no encouragement, either from the opposition or his own colleagues. Instead, Asquith used the threat of a coalition to help him to force cabinet waverers into line with the policy that he and Grey wanted to pursue. Of course this was not the only factor. By the time the cabinet held its crucial meeting on 2 August the assembled ministers knew that a German attack on France was imminent, and of the likelihood that the German offensive would breach the neutrality of Belgium which Britain was committed by treaty to uphold. Gradually opposition to at least a limited intervention – use of the navy to protect the French Channel coast, insistence on respect for Belgian neutrality – fell away. When Grey spoke to the Commons on 3 August he had cabinet backing for an ultimatum to Germany to withdraw troops from Belgium and, in the event of this not being done, a declaration of war on Germany. In the ebb and flow of discussion all sorts of questions of conscience and policy played a part. But the Liberals were clearly swayed by a desire to maintain the existence of their government and to

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preserve its party complexion. If the war had to be fought, better it should be directed by Liberal hands. They were also conscious that any alternative would have split the party, wrecked the government and handed the initiative to their Conservative opponents, who would have been able to claim to be the only party capable of defending the country at a time of national crisis. Party calculation and party controversy did not end with the decision for war. There were some moves towards closer cooperation between the parties. The Conservatives, in the spirit of the Bonar Law–Lansdowne letter of 2 August, promised ‘patriotic opposition’ while the war lasted. The Liberals invited Balfour, the former Conservative leader and prime minister, to attend meetings of the War Council. On 28 August representatives of the Liberal, Conservative and Labour parties – Percy Illingworth, Edmund Talbot and Arthur Henderson – met to agree an ‘electoral truce’ to avoid contests at by-elections until January 1915 or the end of the war, whichever was sooner. A Parliamentary Recruiting Committee was formed to facilitate joint action by the parties to encourage volunteers to join the armed forces. Yet, notwithstanding these signs of crossparty collaboration, the pre-war party divisions remained intact, and were reinforced by unfinished business from which the outbreak of war had only temporarily diverted attention. The chief questions at issue were those of Irish Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment, where Bills has been on the verge of being passed under the provisions of the Parliament Act when the European crisis intervened. The Conservatives were scandalised when, on 15 September, the government announced that both measures would still be placed on the statute book, albeit with their implementation suspended for one year or until the end of the war. Even the promise of an Amending Bill to provide for the exclusion of Ulster from the Home Rule settlement could not appease Unionist indignation, and Bonar Law led a theatrical walk-out of his supporters from the Commons in protest against Asquith’s statement, which he felt was an unnecessarily partisan act at a time of national emergency. But if the war did not obliterate previous party divisions, it did create new problems for the parties and it began to alter the dynamic of the relationship between them. Party leaders worked hard to minimise the war’s disruptive effects. Asquith, as has been seen, managed, by skilful manipulation, to contain the immediate threat that the decision to go to war might have presented to Liberal unity. Only two cabinet ministers – John Morley, the Liberals’ Gladstonian conscience, and the former socialist John Burns – felt obliged to resign in protest, and neither had a significant backbench following, nor did they seek to lead a revolt against government policy. The junior minister C.P. Trevelyan, who also resigned, subsequently cooperated with other radicals and socialists in the Union of Democratic Control (UDC) which was formed in September 1914, but, at least in the early stages of the war, he and the other radicals who were represented in bodies like the Liberal Foreign Affairs Committee – which had opposed intervention in the war but allowed itself to be persuaded not to cause difficulties for the government – placed loyalty to their party above any nascent anti-war feeling. An important factor in the shift that

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took place in Liberal opinion in the first few days of August was the question of Belgian neutrality. For many Liberals the German ‘violation’ of Belgium gave them a principled reason for supporting a war to which they might otherwise have been opposed, and this feeling was shrewdly encouraged and exploited by Asquith, Grey and the other pro-war Liberal leaders. Lloyd George, in a major speech at the Queen’s Hall, London, on 19 September, similarly rallied Liberal opinion by portraying the war as a matter of national honour, being fought for the rights of the ‘five-foot-five’ nations against the bullying assault of ‘six-foottwo’ Prusso-German militarism.3 That said, the government’s decision to participate in a European war nevertheless came as a profound shock to the ‘Liberal mind’.4 Liberals had long stood for the principles of conciliation in foreign affairs, and there were many who feared that war might, in Churchill’s phrase, be ‘fatal to Liberalism’ and to the Liberal party as well. Even though church leaders supported the war, the Nonconformist conscience was deeply troubled by the necessity to fight. The methods by which the state organised itself for war could also be an a front to Liberal principles. There was no immediate adoption of conscription, but the restrictions imposed by the Defence of the Realm Acts and the harsh treatment of enemy aliens showed how the values of a liberal society could easily be eroded in the pursuit of victory. Moreover, as the first autumn and winter of the war passed without a decisive success on the military front, Liberal doubts about the war itself, and the strategies and methods by which it was being conducted, inevitably re-emerged. A limited naval war had proved impossible, and the cabinet had rapidly authorised the deployment of the British Expeditionary Force in France, followed by the raising of hundreds of thousands of volunteers for Kitchener’s armies – yet without result. In parliament, Liberal MPs for the most part loyally supported their government, though with diminishing enthusiasm. The executive emphasis of war limited the role and influence of backbenchers (one of whom described feeling ‘as useless as an empty soda bottle’),5 and the replacement of the experienced chief whip Percy Illingworth in December 1914 by the much less effective John Gulland weakened the links between the Liberal front bench and the parliamentary rank-and-file at a crucial time. It is perhaps going too far to describe the resulting situation as a crisis, but certainly the morale of the Liberal party both within parliament and outside was adversely affected by the experience of war, which put the party to an uncongenial task, deprived it of the cohesion imparted by the forward momentum of pre-1914 reform and began insidiously to undermine the Liberals’ collective sense of purpose and self-belief. The war caused similar problems for the Liberals’ pre-war allies. Although as late as 3 August Labour MPs had been opposed to British intervention, in the event a majority of them supported the declaration of war, as did the tradeunion wing of the labour movement. On 24 August Labour’s Joint Board (comprising representatives from the Labour party, the TUC Parliamentary Committee and the General Federation of Trades Unions) called for the ‘termination of all existing trade disputes’ to assist the war effort. On 2 September the

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TUC Parliamentary Committee offered its support for the national recruiting campaign. Large numbers of trade unionists volunteered for the army, demonstrating the extent of patriotic working-class support for the war in the first few weeks of the conflict. But the unity of the labour movement was not unbroken. On the Labour party’s socialist wing there was considerable anti-war feeling. Ramsay MacDonald resigned the chairmanship of Labour MPs because he did not feel able to endorse the government’s policy, his place being taken by Arthur Henderson. Other prominent figures, including Philip Snowden and Keir Hardie, also took an anti-war line. However, a number of factors prevented these divisions from developing into an outright split. First, the two sides recognised the sincerity of each other’s views, and there was indeed considerable common ground between them. Second, the federal structure of the Labour party prevented the differing factions from being drawn into a battle for control of the party organisation, with those on the anti-war wing operating mainly through the ILP and cross-party groups like the Union of Democratic Control. Third, all sections of the Labour party and the union movement, whatever their attitudes to the war, found a rallying point in their determination to protect the interests of the working class, who were likely to be the war’s most numerous victims. On 5 August 1914, the day after war was officially declared, the War Emergency Workers’ National Committee was formed by the Labour party, the unions, the Cooperative movement and socialist groups for precisely this purpose. Thus, while the coming of war created divisions in Labour ranks, it also imparted greater cohesion to the labour movement as a campaigning force. Within parliament, too, Labour’s position had subtly altered. Since the Conservatives had pledged support for the war, and since in any case by January 1915 at least a hundred Conservative MPs were serving in the armed forces, the government was in no immediate danger of defeat and was no longer reliant on Labour votes. Freed from the responsibility of sustaining their progressive allies in office, Labour politicians were able to emphasise their independence from the government and distance themselves from the conduct of what at this stage was still the Liberals’ war. When the Labour party joined the wartime coalitions in May 1915 and December 1916 its leaders sacrificed their freedom of manoeuvre, with the result that tensions increased between the party leadership and the rank-and-file, but in the longer term the way in which the war loosened the bonds of the progressive alliance, and ultimately destroyed its basis altogether, was to be one of its most significant political consequences. The war also brought a loosening of the bonds of the alliance between the Liberals and the Irish Nationalists, coupled with a reduction in the centrality of the Nationalists to party-political calculations at Westminster. John Redmond, the Nationalist leader, supported the government’s declaration of war and put his personal authority behind the voluntary recruiting campaign in Ireland. In return, the government placed Home Rule on the statute book, though its operation was to be suspended until the end of the war and the writ of a Dublin parliament was likely to be territorially restricted by an Ulster opt-out. Redmond accepted these limitations in the expectation of a short war and the early imple-

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mentation of the Home Rule settlement. Both expectations were confounded, and the position of Redmond and the Nationalists deteriorated accordingly. When the coalition government was formed in 1915, Redmond was invited to participate but felt unable to join a ministry that included his Unionist archenemy Sir Edward Carson. Meanwhile, Nationalist votes were no longer necessary to sustain a Liberal government in power and the party’s parliamentary leverage was correspondingly diminished. In Ireland itself, the Redmondite constitutional strategy became increasingly discredited, a process which was to lead to the Easter Rising of 1916 and the subsequent emergence of Sinn Fein as a challenger for the Nationalists’ electoral mantle. The consequences of this will be considered in more detail later, but the experience of the Nationalists provides another illustration of the way in which the war could affect the pattern of relationships in the pre-war party system as well as the fortunes of individual parties themselves. Whereas the Irish Nationalists turned out to be one of the main losers of the war, the Conservatives appeared to be among its principal beneficiaries. It could be said that the coming of war altered the political situation to the Conservatives’ advantage – negatively, by getting them off the horns of the dilemma created by their publicly uncompromising resistance to Home Rule; positively, by placing them closer to mainstream opinion by virtue of the heightened patriotism of wartime Britain which had more in common with Conservative nationalism than Liberal internationalism. In addition, they seemed well placed to benefit from any failings of the Liberal government in its conduct of the war, while even a successful war was likely to expose divisions within Liberal ranks and between the component parts of the Liberal–Labour–Irish alliance. In the event, as we know, the Conservatives were able to work their way back first to office and then to power, so that by the end of the war they had decisively turned the tables on their pre-war opponents and were well set to establish their electoral dominance over the politics of the interwar years. Yet, as John Ramsden has cautioned, this may be to exaggerate the depth of the Conservatives’ predicament in 1914 and the extent to which the war was responsible for reviving their fortunes.6 In any case, any advantages that the war brought to the party may be more obvious in retrospect than they were from the perspective of the winter of 1914–15. Initially, at least, the war rallied support to the government, and Asquith’s presentationally astute appointment of Lord Kitchener as Secretary of State for War gave the ministry a ‘national’ colouring that allowed it considerably to broaden its public appeal. The Conservatives, meanwhile, through the electoral truce and their policy of ‘patriotic opposition’, existed effectively in the government’s shadow, sharing only a palely reflected glory if things went well but sufficiently complicit in Liberal decisions to be inhibited from mounting a comprehensive critique in the event of government failure. The role of Balfour in meetings of the War Council, and the receipt of confidential briefings by Bonar Law and Lansdowne from senior ministers, blurred the line between government and opposition, and there is evidence that

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the Conservative leaders themselves were aware of the ambiguities of a position that gave them a measure of responsibility without the satisfaction of power. On the Conservative backbenches the frustrations of this position were even more obvious. By early 1915 there was mounting criticism by Conservative MPs both of aspects of government policy and the stance of their own leaders, with the backbench Unionist Business Committee (UBC) providing the most sustained and organised challenge to the ‘patriotic opposition’ strategy. It was out of the growing tension between the Unionist leaders and their MPs that the first major political crisis of the war emerged. There was dissatisfaction with the government’s direction of the war. After the early successes of 1914 – the rapid despatch of the BEF to France and its part in halting the opening German assault; Lloyd George’s achievement in stabilising the wartime financial position; the naval victory at the battle of the Falkland Islands (wiping out the earlier defeat at Coronel and other setbacks) – by the spring of 1915 the situation was becoming much more sombre. The massed armies of the Allies were dug in for a war of attrition against the Germans, with no prospect of a rapid victory. The government was embarking half-heartedly on a campaign against Turkey in the Dardanelles, but there were rumours of discord at the highest levels about what the plan was expected to achieve and whether it was to be a purely naval or a combined military and naval operation. More generally, the members of the UBC felt that the government’s actions were lacking in drive and determination – that there needed to be a more coordinated, businesslike approach to the war effort, for example in the mobilisation of manpower through the introduction of conscription. The frustration of backbench Unionists was shared by sections of the Conservative press, which singled out individual ministers for particular criticism, and this too put added pressure on Bonar Law to take a firmer line in his dealings with the government in order to maintain the support of the Conservative rank-and-file. Two issues brought matters to a head in May 1915. Partisan feeling on the Conservative benches had already been inflamed by Lloyd George’s attacks on the drink trade, which he blamed for undermining the productivity of munitions workers. But it was the broader question of munitions supply – the so-called ‘shell shortage’ – that caused serious political problems for the government. On 14 May The Times published details of a report from its military correspondent, Colonel Repington, which alleged, on the basis of information from the headquarters of the BEF, that the recent attack on Aubers Ridge had been hampered by lack of artillery ammunition and that the army as a whole was being inadequately supplied. Members of the UBC, who had been worried about the munitions question for some time, decided that the issue was now so urgent that it must be debated in the House of Commons. Before this line of attack on the government could be properly launched, however, rumours began to circulate of an equally damaging blow to the Liberal ministry – the resignation, on 15 May, of Admiral Fisher, the First Sea Lord, because of his dispute with the First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill, over the details of naval reinforcements to be sent to the Dardanelles. The ramifications of these two developments were such that

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they called into question the competence of the political direction of the war and made it extremely difficult for Bonar Law to keep his followers in check. He admitted as much privately in a meeting with Lloyd George on the morning of 17 May and confirmed his warning in person to Asquith later in the day.7 Asquith’s response to the crisis belied his reputation for passive inactivity. He saw immediately that a withdrawal of Conservative support, while it need not result in a parliamentary defeat, would fatally weaken his government, bringing an end to the electoral truce and triggering a general election at the latest by December 1915. Apart from the destabilising effect that such a contest would have in the middle of a major war, from a personal and party point of view it was also a relevant consideration that there was no guarantee that the Liberals would be returned to power. Consequently, although less than a week earlier he had said in the Commons that he saw no need for a coalition, in this emergency Asquith turned to the option of coalition as the lesser of two evils. Bonar Law accepted the invitation for his party to join a reconstructed government and thus, in a matter of hours, the first wartime coalition was formed. The causes and significance of these events have been much discussed. Historians are agreed that the end of the last Liberal government was an important factor in the longer story of Liberal decline.8 Trevor Wilson went so far as to describe it as ‘a triumph in party warfare for the Conservatives’.9 Really, though, it demonstrates the impact that the war was having on the political parties and the party system. Party politics continued, even under the electoral truce and the slogan of ‘patriotic opposition’. But more significant, perhaps, was that the prewar infighting within the parties, and especially within the Conservative party, continued as well. Bonar Law was willing to consider a coalition in May 1915, a course to which he had, like Asquith, previously been opposed, as a means of reasserting his leadership on an increasingly fractious parliamentary party. He feared an election in which his critics might gain the upper hand and he would be pushed aside, with inevitably damaging consequences for the spirit of wartime cooperation and possibly for the outcome of the war itself. The Conservatives might win an election, but they were less likely than the Liberals to retain Labour and Irish support, and for that reason a coalition seemed the safer bet. As John Turner has concluded, ‘The downfall of the Liberal Cabinet was engineered in a hurry because Asquith and Bonar Law, who each faced future difficulties in dealing with their own parties, seized a chance to escape into coalition’.10 Whether the collusion of the two front benches in 1915 represented a decisive break with the traditions of party politics, or merely the continuation of party warfare by other means, remained to be seen.

The Asquith coalition, 1915–16 The Asquith coalition, which lasted from May 1915 to December 1916, has not generally enjoyed a high reputation among historians. At best it is viewed as a ‘half-way house’ towards the more genuinely ‘national’ government formed by Lloyd George in 1916; at worst, as an unsuccessful attempt at multi-party

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government, based on the negative desires of Asquith and Bonar Law to avoid an election in 1915, but so badly riven by divisions of personality and policy that it was unable to evolve a coherent or coordinated approach to the conduct of the war. There have recently been some attempts at historiographical rehabilitation. John Turner has pointed out that many of the innovations subsequently identified with the Lloyd George government were actually initiated by its predecessor.11 Asquith’s role as a war leader has been sympathetically reappraised.12 It is also valid to stress that, in its parliamentary backing and party composition, the Asquith coalition actually enjoyed a broader nominal base of support than the administration that succeeded it. Nevertheless, the overall impression that is left is still coloured by a sense of the government’s failure. For the Liberal party, in particular, participation in the coalition was an unhappy experience, which produced dissension among its leaders and a succession of hammer blows to party morale, culminating in the split between Asquith and Lloyd George in December 1916 which spelt lingering death to the pre-1914 party system. This outcome was ironic in view of the strong element of party calculation that went into the making of the government. Asquith went to great lengths to retain a Liberal majority in the new cabinet (where Liberals outnumbered the Conservatives by 12 to 8) and to ensure a Liberal preponderance in the senior posts. Sir Edward Grey remained as Foreign Secretary; Reginald McKenna replaced Lloyd George at the Exchequer, with the latter moving to the newly created Ministry of Munitions; and Sir John Simon took over the Home Office from McKenna. Kitchener, officially a non-party figure, was kept on at the War Office, despite growing doubts about his fitness for the post, because of his value in reassuring public opinion (the ‘great poster’ of Margot Asquith’s phrase) and because Asquith calculated that the government would be damaged if it lost both Kitchener and Fisher at the same time. This left Balfour, who superseded Churchill at the Admiralty, as the only Conservative minister responsible for a major department of state directly connected with the war, while Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, self-effacingly accepted the comparatively junior post of Colonial Secretary.13 The ‘progressive’ bias of the ministry was increased by the inclusion in the cabinet of the Labour leader, Arthur Henderson, as President of the Board of Education and unofficial adviser on labour affairs. The composition of the new government did little to endear it to any of its various groups of supporters. Liberal MPs were stunned by the suddenness with which their government had been overthrown and the coalition deal done. When Asquith met his party’s backbenchers on 19 May he faced a potentially rebellious audience whose support he only secured by what one (admittedly hostile) observer described as ‘an address of great tact and cunning’.14 Even then, there was considerable sympathy for figures like Haldane, excluded from the new government at Conservative insistence for his allegedly ‘pro-German’ views, and residual hostility from other ousted ministers, including the embittered diarist Sir Charles Hobhouse, who resented the way in which they had been pitched out of office to suit the exigencies of the moment. Underlying the

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personal hurt was concern about the implications of the change of government for the future of Liberalism and the Liberal party. Charles Trevelyan wrote, ‘This is the end of the Liberal Party … all Liberalism will be abandoned and we shall live under conscription and martial law.’15 Lord Riddell, a close confidant of Lloyd George, similarly observed in his diary that ‘The Liberal party looks as if it were dead’,16 although the most elemental expression of anguish was probably that of the prime minister’s wife, who lamented, in a letter of commiseration to Haldane: ‘Our wonderful Cabinet gone!! Smashed!’17 Supporters of the Liberals’ coalition partners were not necessarily any keener on the new arrangements. A significant portion of the Labour party – including, at first, a majority of its MPs – opposed the decision to take office. Despite the ‘Treasury Agreement’ between the Liberal government and the trade unions, which had been negotiated by Lloyd George in March 1915, there remained numerous issues, from industrial relations to conscription, on which the coalition and the labour movement were likely to be at odds. Conservatives, too, were far from enthusiastic. Walter Long, Chairman of the Unionist Business Committee, confided to Sir Edward Carson, ‘I loathe the very idea of our good fellows sitting with those double-dyed traitors [the Liberals]’, though he added that ‘of course’ he would support ‘our leaders and the Government’.18 There was here partly a feeling on the part of the UBC faction that they had been outmanoeuvred by Bonar Law, but also that Bonar Law himself had been tricked by Asquith into accepting a subordinate status for the Conservative party, which would saddle it with responsibility for government policy without giving it the chance to determine what that policy should be. That both Liberals and Conservatives could feel themselves victims of Asquith’s tactical subtleties may be a testimony to the adroitness with which the prime minister (an enthusiastic bridge-player) had finessed the coalition’s formation, but it did not auger well for the harmonious working of the government as an effective instrument for fighting the war. The problems of the government were compounded by conflicting views on war policy, especially in relation to questions of strategy and manpower. There was no absolutely clear-cut division in the cabinet between ‘Easterners’ and ‘Westerners’ – between those who believed that victory could be achieved only as a result of the war in France and those who favoured attempting to defeat the Central Powers by a Mediterranean strategy involving campaigns in Gallipoli, Salonika and the Middle East. But there was a range of opinions which made agreement difficult to achieve.19 The cabinet continued to support the generals in giving priority to the Western Front, but they also reinforced the landings in the Dardanelles in search of an elusive breakthrough against the Turks which it was hoped might relieve some of the military pressure on the Russians and encourage the smaller Balkan powers to enter the war on the side of the Allies. As it became increasingly obvious that the breakthrough was not going to come, and with casualties from wounds and disease mounting amid scenes reminiscent of the Crimean War of the 1850s, ministers agonised over what course to take before finally authorising the evacuation which was completed in January 1916.20

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The divisions over strategy, however, were less acute than those over manpower. As the war proceeded, the state gradually tightened its grip on the workforce on the Home Front. One of the first measures introduced by the coalition was the Munitions of War Act of July 1915, which imposed stringent controls on labour and instituted a national register of manpower, though stopping short of industrial conscription.21 The issue of military conscription, though, was one that could no longer be avoided, for both practical and political reasons. Practically, there were signs that the voluntary impetus which had hitherto sustained the recruitment drive was beginning to flag, and that in any case it could not deliver the numbers of men which the generals claimed would be needed to sustain the offensive on the Western Front. As civilian labour became more closely directed, it was also essential to find fair and efficient ways of distributing available supplies of manpower between domestic industry and the armies in the field. The political imperatives were even more compelling. Conscription was a policy that some Conservatives had advocated, through organisations like the National Service League, since before 1914.22 By 1915 the Unionist Business Committee and most of the Conservative party’s leaders (with the exception of Balfour) were united in supporting it. For the backbench critics of the government in particular it was an issue that was not only important in its own right but as an earnest of the coalition’s resolve finally to abandon the methods of ‘business as usual’ and to adopt whatever means were necessary for the effective prosecution of the war. Asquith again used all his political skill to prevent an open breach between the pro- and anti-conscription factions in the government, and in this, in the short term, he was successful. But the end result was still a steady move towards a conscriptionist policy. The ‘Derby scheme’ of October 1915 – by which men were invited to attest their willingness to serve when required, thereby preserving the voluntary principle while ensuring a guaranteed pool of potential recruits – proved a disappointment. Married men were encouraged to attest by the promise that they would not be called up until the reserves of single men had been exhausted, but this gave no comparable incentive to the unmarried to come forward. By December 1915 only 840,000 of the 2,179,231 single men on the manpower register had attested under the scheme.23 Meanwhile, pro-conscriptionist pressure continued to build up, and it was in vain that the opponents of conscription raised not only objections of principle but also doubts about whether the larger numbers of men being demanded by the generals were either militarily necessary or economically affordable. In a succession of ministerial crises, Asquith was repeatedly threatened with a conscriptionist revolt that could bring down the government. It was accordingly announced in January 1916 that conscription would be introduced for all single men between the ages of 18 and 41, while a further decision in May extended the provision to married men in the same age groups. The impact of the conscription controversy on the internal politics of the coalition was twofold. First, it highlighted differences between Liberals and Conservatives. Whereas most Conservatives regarded the adoption of conscrip-

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tion as a test of the coalition’s commitment to waging an all-out war, for many Liberals what was at stake was the ability of the coalition to preserve the principles of liberalism in an increasingly illiberal world. The issue here was not the simple one of intervention versus laissez-faire. The majority of Liberals accepted the need for a more interventionist state, especially in the circumstances of war. Even before 1914, the Liberal governments had expanded the role of the state, not just in relation to the economy and social welfare but also through measures such as the Official Secrets Act of 1911.This trend continued both before and after the formation of the first coalition. But under the strains of war the divisions already inherent in pre-war Liberalism – between Gladstonians, New Liberals and Liberal Imperialists – were magnified so that the debate over the nature and purpose of state intervention, particularly insofar as they touched on questions of civil liberties and freedom of conscience, became more acute.24 Although some Liberals, including Lloyd George, were able to make a Liberal case for conscription, for others the very idea was a compromise too far. Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary, who had been suspicious of the statist tendencies of Liberal thinking since the 1890s, resigned from the cabinet rather than support the Military Service Bill introducing conscription in January 1916. A total of twenty-seven Liberal (and nine Labour) MPs voted against the measure, and they were representative of a more general unease in the Liberal ranks.25 This unease was not solely about conscription. It related to the manner in which the political decisions over conscription had been taken, and to other issues besides. Most Liberals still backed the government, out of loyalty to Asquith and their party, but also because the alternative was a more thoroughgoing Conservative administration which could be expected to have even less respect for liberal values. Yet Asquith’s steady retreat in the face of conscriptionist pressure was a warning that it was now the Conservatives who were the crucial factor in the political equation, since they could threaten to break up the government in a way that Liberal dissentients could never afford to do. The extent to which the balance of power had swung away from the Liberals in a government that they had dominated to begin with was confirmed by a number of other changes in policy that could be seen as attacking key elements of the pre-war Liberal platform. The introduction in McKenna’s 1915 budget of import duties on some items was a departure from the traditional Liberal policy of Free Trade, as was the acceptance of the outcome of the Allied Economic Conference in 1916. Then there was the problem of Ireland, the question that had defined the division between Liberals and Conservatives in the crisis years of 1910–14. Following the Easter Rising of 1916, Asquith and Lloyd George made a final attempt to settle the Irish question on Liberal lines by proposing an immediate implementation of Home Rule.26 Their plan was vetoed, though, by the Conservative leaders: another instance of the way in which the Liberals had become the prisoners of their Unionist coalition partners. Yet while the experience of coalition in some ways emphasised the continuing differences between Liberals and Conservatives, it also began to promote a subtle realignment of forces which crossed the party divide, strengthening the hands of

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those who argued that, at least for the duration of the war, party politics were irrelevant, and perhaps constituted an impediment to military success. In this last camp Lord Milner’s was an increasingly influential voice, as the former imperial proconsul publicly criticised the government’s failure to organise either itself or the nation in accordance with those principles of efficiency which could alone win the war.27 His criticisms were echoed from both sides of the party divide. In January 1916 the Unionist Business Committee re-launched itself as the Unionist War Committee (UWC). Its 150 members were reinforced by Sir Edward Carson, who had resigned from the government in October 1915 and who, like Milner, set himself up as a scourge of what he considered mismanagement and inefficiency at the highest level. The UWC began to exert itself in various ways to put pressure on the Conservative leaders to promote a reform of the machinery of governmental decision making, and questions were raised about Asquith’s continuation as prime minister and war leader. Significantly, however, it was not just Conservatives who were voicing their discontent. A similar, but smaller, Liberal War Committee (LWC) existed, with 40–50 members, which joined in the criticism of the government from the conscriptionist, efficiency perspective. Whereas many Liberals were concerned about the compromises of principle that their support for the government entailed, their colleagues in the LWC were willing to cooperate more enthusiastically with the Conservatives in order to win the war. This reordering of priorities was a good illustration of the way in which the war was beginning to act as a solvent on party loyalties, creating a series of challenges that transcended the categories of pre-war partisanship and knocked away some of the props of the pre-war party system. As the troubled history of the coalition unfolded, Lloyd George became the focus and the catalyst of the realignment process. Since his coalition proposal in 1910 he had been identified as a politician who put ‘getting things done’ above the ritual battles of party politics. The conditions of wartime placed a premium on executive achievement and increased his impatience with anything that stood in the way of practical solutions to pressing problems. His acceptance of the post of Minister of Munitions in May 1915 was influenced by his frustration at Kitchener’s handling of the munitions-supply side of the War Office’s business and his belief that new methods had to be employed to break through bottlenecks in the production system and mobilise the full strength of the country’s resources behind the war effort. Once the new ministry had been established, Lloyd George’s questing intelligence was applied to all aspects of the state’s wartime role. He was the leading Liberal advocate of conscription and more than once threatened to resign if Asquith did not support conscriptionist demands.28 In December 1915 he made a vague but powerful attack on the lack of energy with which the war was being prosecuted on the home front by characterising previous efforts as being ‘dogged by the mocking spectre of “too late” ’.29 In private discussions he was severely critical of the cumbersome machinery of cabinets and committees by which Asquith conducted the political side of the war and which Lloyd George regarded as a major impediment to rapid and effective decision making.

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Because of the stance which he took, Lloyd George inevitably moved closer to the Conservative elements in the coalition, becoming for the same reason an object of suspicion to his fellow Liberals (except those on the Liberal War Committee who shared his views). Clashes of personality intersected with those of policy, causing relations to deteriorate between Lloyd George and the other Liberal members of the cabinet, Asquith included. Although Asquith appointed Lloyd George as Kitchener’s successor as Secretary of State for War following the latter’s death in June 1916, he was increasingly aware of Lloyd George as a potential rival, a feeling encouraged by figures like McKenna and by rumours of Lloyd George’s dealing with Milner, Carson and the Conservative press. This is not to say that Lloyd George was actively conspiring against Asquith personally. The two men had had a long and fruitful political partnership and there was a real, if grudging, mutual respect between them. But Lloyd George and leading Conservatives had identified Asquith’s apparently indecisive style of leadership as one of the main causes of the logjam in the political/military machine. Lloyd George’s emerging alliance with the Conservative leaders and his growing acceptability to Conservative MPs as the ‘Man Who Might Win the War’ necessarily shifted the balance of power within the government and was a central factor in precipitating the crisis that led to the downfall of the Asquith coalition in December 1916. The background to the crisis was provided by a series of developments which underlined the seriousness of the war situation. The final abandonment of the Somme offensive in November 1916 emphasised the fact that the war was as far from being won as ever. With little immediate prospect of improvement, other questions became more pressing, among them the future shape of military strategy, the supply situation on the home front and the growing problems of food shortages caused by lack of shipping and the as yet undefeated U-boat menace. On all these issues urgent decisions were required, and yet urgency seemed to be what the existing political structures were unable to provide. The members of the Unionist War Committee were becoming increasingly restive and Bonar Law faced similar pressures to those that had built up in May 1915. The extent of Conservative disillusionment was shown by the high anti-government vote in the ‘Nigeria debate’ of November 1916 – a rebellion made even more pointed by the fact that, as Colonial Secretary, Bonar Law was the minister against whose proposal a large number of Conservative MPs voted.30 Meanwhile, Lloyd George had meetings with Bonar Law, Carson and others to discuss possible ways forward.31 Their aim was not, at least explicitly, to displace Asquith (who was still seen as having considerable value in reassuring Liberal opinion), but they were agreed that the conduct of the war needed to be placed under the day-to-day direction of a small executive committee, ideally with Lloyd George as its chairman. A proposal along these lines was put to Asquith separately by Bonar Law and Lloyd George. Asquith’s response went through several variations: rejection; acceptance; acceptance in principle but only if the prime minister had the right to chair the ‘War Committee’; rejection again. In all of this his mood was influenced by the

72 The crisis of war, 1914–18 extent to which the press, and his fellow Liberals, portrayed adoption of the War Committee scheme as a surrender to Lloyd George. Finally, faced with a declaration from Bonar Law that Conservative ministers would resign if there was no remodelling of the government and with a further threatened resignation by Lloyd George, Asquith decided on a pre-emptive strike of his own.32 He tendered his government’s resignation to the King on 5 December, expecting to be recalled to office when his opponents proved unable to form a ministry. At a meeting of political leaders at Buckingham Palace on 6 December he refused to serve under Bonar Law, whereupon Law advised the King to send for Lloyd George, who would be better able to command all-party support. After twentyfour hours of provisional cabinet-making – in which he secured Conservative, Labour and some Liberal backing – Lloyd George took office as prime minister of a new coalition government on 7 December. The events of December 1916 have been exhaustively analysed from the perspective of all their participants, both parties and individuals. Disagreement over details has not prevented a measure of agreement on essentials. All but the most partisan of Asquithians accept that the war had reached a critical stage at the end of 1916 and that some streamlining of the decision-making process was long overdue. The nature of the final crisis also highlights some of the fundamental weaknesses of the Asquith coalition itself. Born out of an attempt to preserve the balance of the party system, it never developed the character of a government ‘above party’ that would have made it an effective coalition. Asquith remained more of a party leader than a national leader, and this was reflected in the detailed history of 1915–16. A case can be made in Asquith’s defence. His government had to cope with immense and unprecedented problems. The ‘gradualist’ approach that he adopted on issues like conscription was essential if he was to hold the different wings of the government together, and probably helped to influence opinion in the country as well. In any case, the government was not wholly ineffective and did initiate a number of measures that came to fruition after its fall. But the considerations did not outweigh the coalition’s fatal flaws: its Liberal and Conservative members remained largely in separate camps, and neither of these felt primary loyalty to the coalition in its existing form. Liberals supported it because it was preferable to a more Conservative-dominated government, but this last was what many Conservatives wanted to bring about. When Lloyd George and his Liberal allies made common cause with the Conservatives against Asquith, they unsettled the unstable edifice of the coalition and ultimately brought it crashing down. Asquith could perhaps have prevented the catastrophe, but his grasp of events had been dulled by personal grief and he was too heavily influenced at the end by the advice of colleagues imbued with hostility to Lloyd George and by his own sensitivity to criticism in the press. It was perhaps fitting that the fate of the coalition was finally sealed by Asquith’s decision to resign. The coalition had come into existence as a move in the party game and as such it came to its end. The formation of the Asquith government delayed the breakdown of the Edwardian party system; its fall precipitated the eventuality which it had been designed to prevent.

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Lloyd George and national unity, 1916–18 Debate about the political significance of the Lloyd George Coalition has usually centred on two questions: the impact of the Coalition on the development of party politics, especially on the fortunes of the Liberal party; and the extent to which the new government was qualitatively different from its Asquithian predecessor. The discussion of the similarities and differences, continuities and discontinuities, between the two administrations has given rise to the idea that the government that Lloyd George led represented a new departure in British politics. R.J. Scally sees the Lloyd George Coalition as the culmination of a growing trend of ‘social imperialism’.33 G.R. Searle has similarly identified the Coalition as the embodiment of the National Efficiency movement, drawing on the concept of a national government ‘above party’ persistently advocated by the Milnerites and others, and prefigured in Lloyd George’s own coalition scheme of 1910.34 In the view of Kenneth Morgan, the advent of Lloyd George as prime minister ‘provides the essential divide between the world of party and of sectionalism … and the new consensus that endured well into the years of peace’.35 Yet it could equally well be argued that this more positive ideal of coalitionism was a product of the new government’s formation rather than its cause, and that while the concept of coalition challenged the more partisan notions of party politics that had characterised pre-war Britain, the Coalition itself acted more as a catalyst of continuing realignment rather than a replacement for the party system altogether. Certainly the Lloyd George government was different from the previous coalition in its composition and in its internal organisation and structure. The new cabinet was heavily dominated by the Conservatives, who also comprised a majority of the new regime’s parliamentary support. No fewer than 13 members of Lloyd George’s 23-man cabinet were Unionists, compared with 8 out of 22 under Asquith. With the exception of the premiership, most of the principal offices of state were in Conservative hands, including Bonar Law as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Balfour as Foreign Secretary. But it was in the creation of a smaller, five-man War Cabinet – consisting of Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Arthur Henderson and Lords Curzon and Milner – that the main structural innovation lay. By setting up this more exclusive executive body to run the war Lloyd George was giving effect to the impulse for more efficient decision making that had been a major factor in the change of government. In selecting its members on an individual rather than a party basis, he was emphasising that winning the war was his overriding concern. True, Bonar Law and Henderson were the leaders of their respective parties, and Lloyd George was bound to make greater use of Unionists in the absence of prominent Liberal colleagues. Even so, the choice of the proconsular figures of Curzon and Milner, the latter in particular associated with the supra-party National Efficiency movement, was a sign of the determination to place practical above party considerations, just as the government’s recruitment of prominent businessmen (and to a lesser extent trade unionists) to positions of ministerial and administrative authority beto-

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kened a determination to make use of the best available talent, wherever it was to be found. The establishment of a cabinet secretariat to minute meetings and provide administrative support for cabinet committees likewise reflected a more professional, businesslike approach to the conduct of government. Another difference between the new government and the old lay in the position of the prime minister himself. Whereas Asquith had been first and foremost a party leader, Lloyd George took office as an individual politician who had already placed himself to some extent beyond the trammels of conventional party politics. In due course, his lack of a secure party base was to prove a political weakness, but in the immediate circumstances of his accession to the premiership it was actually a strength. It meant that Lloyd George could pose as a genuinely national leader, above party, in much the same way that Winston Churchill was later to do in the summer of 1940. In this guise he was able to appeal for patriotic as well as personal loyalty, not just from those individual Conservatives with whom he was on good terms (or in whose eyes he was seen as the most effective available war leader) but from the Labour party too – as witnessed by his success in winning the support of Labour’s National Executive for his new administration in December 1916. The fact that he owed his position as prime minister to his personal standing rather than to party support also influenced the style of Lloyd George’s leadership. He was in any case a more dynamic, assertive personality than Asquith, but the nature of his situation encouraged what some commentators have seen as the ‘presidential’ traits in his character. While Bonar Law, as leader of the Coalition’s main bloc of supporters, was left with the more humdrum tasks of parliamentary management, Lloyd George concentrated on the executive conduct of the war, using his prime-ministerial authority to intervene personally in any and every aspect of government activity. Here too, in the substance of its policies as in the style of its leadership, the Lloyd George government seemed to represent a change from its predecessor. The new coalition took office at a critical stage in the war. On the military front the offensives of 1916 had failed. The Russians were coming under pressure that would take them out of the war in 1917; the Americans, though they entered the war as associates of the Allies in April 1917, could not bring effective military strength to bear until 1918 at the earliest. In the meantime there were real fears that the Allied positions on the Western and Italian fronts might deteriorate still further and that the German submarine campaign would bring Britain to its knees by cutting off vital supplies of food and war materials. Lloyd George, by his own account but also according to more impartial observers, played a key role in stabilising a dangerous and potentially catastrophic situation. The submarine challenge was tackled by the introduction of a convoy system for merchant shipping, which reduced sinkings, and by more effective organisation of the shipping industry. Faltering morale and mutterings in favour of a compromise peace were countered by the prime minister’s public confidence in total victory and the promulgation of more clearly defined war aims, coupled with improvements in the command and coordination of the Allied armies. Above all, the character of

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the new government as a government of national efficiency was underlined by a rapid reorganisation of the home front, including the establishment of new ministries in areas such as Shipping, Labour and Pensions, measures to extend state control and welfare provision and the introduction of food rationing to ensure the fair distribution of essential supplies. The inauguration of a Ministry of Reconstruction under Dr Christopher Addison in 1917 was an indication that the government was planning for the needs of peace as well as those of war, a precursor to the promise of a ‘fit land for heroes to live in’ that was to be heard in 1918. However, the contrast between the two administrations can be taken too far. The Lloyd George regime gives the impression (sedulously cultivated in the prime minister’s own War Memoirs) of having a more coherent, businesslike approach to policy, and to some extent its reputation is deserved. On the other hand, many of the war’s most important interventionist measures – the establishment of the Ministry of Munitions, the introduction of conscription, the Defence of the Realm and Munitions of War Acts – were the work of the Liberal-led Asquith government. Lloyd George’s appointment of businessmen to key posts (Lord Rhondda as Food Controller, Sir Joseph Maclay at Shipping) was a successful innovation, though once again there were precedents from the Asquithian period. The creation of a War Cabinet initially imparted a greater urgency to the dispatch of business, but, as Hankey, the head of its secretariat, recorded, it soon became as bogged down as its various predecessors, while some of the other new creations – like the Ministry of National Service – were either comparative failures or overlapped so promiscuously in their functions with other government departments as to confuse rather than clarify the implementation of policy. Even on the most fundamental questions of military strategy, the new civilian administration was not necessarily any more united or decisive than the one it succeeded, and in any event was dependent on the same military commanders whose advice, ultimately, it was difficult to ignore. When Lloyd George attempted to outflank his generals by supporting the ill-starred Nivelle offensive of April 1917 the results only emphasised the political unwisdom of civilians interfering in military decisions and left Lloyd George’s bête noire Haig more firmly entrenched in his command – and in the admiring thoughts of Conservative politicians, the King and the Northcliffe press – than he had been before.36 In the end this is only to say that there were similarities as well as differences between the two governments and the situations they faced. Where the Lloyd George administration does appear decisively different is in its underlying philosophy and ideology – a more clearly articulated social imperialism in which the combination of a patriotic prosecution of the war with an extended programme of state-sponsored welfarism was seen as the best way of appeasing an increasingly politically conscious working class and staving off the threat of revolution. In some quarters (particularly among the Milnerites who were active as ministers or ministerial advisers) the corollary of this was a realignment, or even a replacement, of party politics with an alternative structure of managerial corporatism

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for which the wartime government of experts could be the focal point or prototype. Yet once again it is questionable how widely this view was shared. Did the Coalition’s leaders see their government simply as a temporary interlude in the normalcy of party conflict, or as a vehicle for remodelling the political system on an entirely new basis that would preserve the ‘unity’ of wartime into the postwar world? If the Lloyd George government was less of a new departure in matters of policy than is sometimes claimed, was the same true of its image as a ‘non-party’ government fundamentally different from its party-based predecessors? Lloyd George was aware of the impact that wartime changes were having on the party system and speculated freely about alternatives to ‘old-style’ party politics. In 1917–18 he talked on numerous occasions in private about the possibility of forming a new party which would have a genuinely ‘national’ rather than a purely sectional appeal.37 His immediate practical concerns, however, were those of the war, and insofar as he concerned himself with the detail of domestic politics he was still working in a context in which party ties gave a meaningful structure to everyday political existence. The prime minister’s recognition that this was so was demonstrated by the importance that he attached to retaining a clearly identified body of Liberal support for his government. Before agreeing to assume office, he was careful to ascertain, via the efforts of his chief lieutenant, Christopher Addison, that there was a substantial body of Liberal MPs who were willing to support a Lloyd George premiership. Great significance was attached to recruiting high-profile Liberals to Lloyd George’s cabinet. He was disappointed when Herbert Samuel refused the offer of the Home Secretaryship out of loyalty to Asquith, but balanced this by recruiting H.A.L. Fisher as President of the Board of Education and, in 1917, Edwin Montagu as Secretary of State for India and Winston Churchill as Minister of Munitions – this last in the teeth of strong Conservative opposition. The appointment of Freddie Guest as Coalition Liberal whip further exemplified the need to consolidate the Liberal element in the Coalition’s parliamentary majority, while in other ways the Lloyd Georgeites were keen to project their Liberalism to Liberal opinion in the country. The sale of honours provided a source of income for organisational and propaganda activity; in 1918 the purchase of the Daily News gave them their own voice in the national press. Lloyd George himself took every opportunity to emphasise for the party faithful the essentially Liberal nature of the Coalition’s policies. The Conservative party, meanwhile, remained a self-consciously separate organisation, playing its full part in the Coalition but retaining its own independence and identity. The Conservatives’ relationship with Lloyd George was basically a pragmatic one – acknowledging his talents as a war leader and his appeal to sections of Liberal and Labour opinion, without fully trusting him personally or seeing him as a suitable ally in the longer term. Indeed, one factor that may have played its part in Conservative calculations was the benefit to be gained from using Lloyd George as a weapon to destroy the unity of the Liberal party, with the option of discarding the weapon once it had served its purpose.

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This is not to say that the Conservatives were complacent about the future shape of the political system or their place in it. In a speech to a special party conference in November 1917 Bonar Law warned his audience that the party would have to adapt to the altered conditions of post-war politics if it were to survive, in particular that it would need to recruit additional support from working-class voters, from ‘the section of Labour which is national and imperialistic’.38 This line was consistent with the backing that senior Conservatives gave to Lord Milner’s British Workers’ League, a ‘patriotic Labour’ organisation which in 1918 became the National Democratic Party. It pointed to a more social-imperialistic policy on the Chamberlainite or Milnerite model, and in 1918 made the Conservative leadership reluctant to break their alliance with Lloyd George while he could still lay claim to popular working-class support. In due course it provided a justification for a form of ‘coalitionism’ in which Lloyd George would play a similar role in relation to a Conservative or ‘National’ party as Joseph Chamberlain had in relation to the emergence of ‘Unionism’ in the 1890s. But until the last months of the war this feeling was subordinated to more partisan conflicts between Liberal and Conservative supporters of the Coalition, over issues such as the proposed Irish settlement, the extent of franchise reform to be included in the Representation of the People Act and the radical ingredients in the 1917 Corn Production Act, for example minimum wages for agricultural workers. Although in each case Conservative leaders supported the government’s proposals, and in some cases were enthusiastic about them, on the backbenches criticism was always likely to be more widespread. Likewise, for all those Conservatives who were comfortable with the Lloyd George agenda of expanded welfarism and state intervention in the economy (as in the wartime control of shipping, the railways and the mines), there were more who wanted to cut back on rising government expenditure and revert to pre-war levels of state control. The overriding needs of wartime did not therefore prevent coalitionism and Conservatism from coming into conflict or developing in divergent directions. Like the Conservative party, Labour too retained its separate identity despite its membership of the coalition governments, in fact becoming more rather than less independent as time went on. During the first coalition Labour still operated partly in the Liberal shadow, a vestige of the pre-war progressive alliance. In December 1916, when the coalition fell, Henderson was initially invited to participate in a conclave of Asquithian Liberal supporters. By joining Lloyd George’s government the Labour party publicly broke with official Liberalism, its enhanced status as a force in its own right confirmed by the pains that Lloyd George took to win over the party’s National Executive, by the appointment of Henderson to the War Cabinet and of two other Labour ministers, John Hodge and George Barnes, to the ministries of Labour and Pensions respectively. The Labour party’s link with the extra-parliamentary labour movement gave added weight to their position in government at a time when the maintenance of good industrial relations was seen as crucial to the war effort. On occasion, it is true, this could leave Labour’s political leaders in a difficult position, when government policy

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conflicted with the expressed wishes of the trade unions and industrial workers. But their dual role as government supporters and spokesmen for a powerful economic and social interest group ensured that the Labour party was never simply absorbed into the managerial ethos that may have been more congenial to other groups on the Coalition benches. In 1917–18, moreover, a number of developments reinforced the independent status of the Labour party, even while it remained formally a partner in the Coalition government. One was the groundswell of opinion in the labour movement in favour of a negotiated peace. The Russian revolution of February 1917 and Henderson’s visit to Russia in June led to support in the Labour party for participation in an international socialist congress in Stockholm at which the basis for a peace with Germany could be discussed. The War Cabinet vetoed the idea of Henderson’s attendance at any such gathering, whereupon Henderson resigned from the government. This did not terminate Labour’s involvement in the Coalition, since Henderson’s place was filled by George Barnes. But it did indicate a widening breach between Labour opinion and the Coalition as a whole, which Lloyd George belatedly tried to heal with a speech to trade unionists setting out the government’s war aims in January 1918. By then, however, the transformation of Labour into a fully independent, national political party was proceeding apace. Henderson, as party secretary, masterminded a thorough overhaul of the party machine, involving the formation of new constituency parties and the adoption of a new party constitution.39 The constitution, and a new party programme, (Labour and the New Social Order), also committed the party to a more explicitly socialist policy platform, which reflected the wartime radicalisation of working-class opinion and the popular determination that wartime sacrifices should be the prelude to widespread social change. The logical consequence of these internal reforms was that Labour should fight the next election on the widest possible front, finally breaking the shackles of the Liberal alliance, and as an independent entity, to which end its leaders decided that they would not continue in the Coalition beyond the end of the war.40 The party politics of the Coalition were further complicated by the position of the Asquithian Liberals. When Asquith had refused to take office under Lloyd George in December 1916 his Liberal supporters had retired to the opposition benches. Asquith had secured a vote of confidence from Liberal MPs for his continuation as party leader; he and his followers retained control of the official machinery of the party, including the Liberal Central Association and the National Liberal Federation, and the allegiance of the bulk of the Liberal press. However, although the Asquithians constituted the de facto opposition to the Coalition, with some MPs developing a habit of voting against the government, both the Asquith and Lloyd George camps were careful at this stage to avoid a formal split (what they called an ‘organic division’) in the Liberal ranks. Thus Asquith and his front-bench colleagues offered ‘organised support’ to the government and made no real effort to undermine its parliamentary position. There were some who thought Asquith was taking too supine a view, and at constituency level there was evidence of factional rivalry as Asquithians

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attempted to block the selection of Lloyd Georgeite candidates for by-elections. It is possible that Asquith’s bi-partisan stance had more to do with personal exhaustion than political calculation. Yet the broad consequence was that there was no division in Liberal opinion in the country comparable to the apparent sharpness of the parliamentary divide, and even the parliamentarians were for the most part reluctant unnecessarily to exacerbate that divide, so leaving open the door to full Liberal reunion once the temporary conditions of wartime no longer applied. Influential organs such as the Manchester Guardian, more sympathetic to the government than some Liberal papers, reflected this view, and the fact that for many of its members, inside and outside the government, the Liberal party was still a single political entity is something that can all too easily be overlooked as a factor in the wartime political balance. Politics in the latter stages of the war, then, were still as much about parties as about an alternative configuration of loyalties based on support for or opposition to the Coalition, and as the war neared its end a variety of scenarios for the future development of the party system were still theoretically possible. Much would turn on the outcome of the next general election. Once the Representation of the People Act had been passed in 1918 it was accepted that an election could not be indefinitely delayed.41 The question was on what basis and in what circumstances it would take place. One possibility was that the Coalition should be dissolved and that the parties should contest the election as separate organisations. This might have opened the way to Liberal reunion, particularly if, as Asquith wanted, the election could have been postponed until after the end of the war and the conclusion of the peace. Yet if the election were held in wartime (as for most of 1918, with no immediate end to the war in sight, seemed likely), the termination of the Coalition, even temporarily, was likely to have a disruptive and destabilising effect. Lloyd George wanted to preserve continuity while securing a new mandate for the prosecution of the war and for post-war reform. His own continuance as prime minister, to which he could hardly be expected to be indifferent, seemed in any case to be bound up with the continuation of the Coalition in some form. He had become increasingly sceptical about the viability of the Liberal party, describing it to Riddell in January 1918 as ‘a thing of the past [which] cannot be galvanized into life’.42 Even had he taken a more positive view of its prospects, he would not have relished the idea of once again subordinating himself to the Asquithian ‘old guard’, many of whom regarded him as little better than a traitor to the party for his actions in December 1916, especially if this also meant the loss of office and a return to opposition at the very moment when his reputation and power were at their height. That said, Lloyd George was also conscious of the strong ties of sympathy that united the different sections of the Liberal party and which animated even his closest Coalition Liberal supporters. If Liberal reunion could be effected without destroying the Coalition or dislodging him from the premiership it would also strengthen his hand in dealing with his coalition partners and make him less dependent on Conservative goodwill. The second option that surfaced

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recurrently during 1917 and 1918, therefore, was the creation of an even more broadly based ‘grand coalition’ that would include a reunited Liberal party in addition to Labour and the Conservatives, but under Lloyd George’s leadership. Such a government could seek a renewal of its mandate from the new electorate while postponing fundamental decisions about the future shape of the party system – rather as Lloyd George had wanted to use a coalition to by-pass the problems of party politics in 1910. Any plan along these lines foundered, however, on Asquith’s repeated refusal to consider rejoining the government, both in 1917 and as the election approached in 1918. Asquith himself issued a call for Liberal unity, but he must have known that this was only possible inside the government not outside. By November 1918, in any event, relations between the two wings of the Liberal party were being made more difficult by clashes over candidatures and by the aftermath of the Maurice debate of 9 May, when Asquith had pressed a motion for a Select Committee to enquire into whether Lloyd George had given false information to the House of Commons about troop strengths in France.43 The government had won the vote by 293 to 106, but 98 Asquithian Liberals had gone into the lobbies against Lloyd George. Even this was not necessarily a decisive breach, but Asquith’s rejection, for personal as much as political reasons, of Lloyd George’s conciliatory overtures – coupled with the Labour party’s determination to fight the election as an independent force – doomed the idea of a grand coalition almost before it had been formulated. With alternative options closed off, Lloyd George had to concentrate on preserving his existing power base. Discussions about the timing and conduct of an election campaign gathered momentum from early in 1918. In March, Lloyd George floated the idea of creating a new political party from among the procoalition forces, but neither in the Conservative party nor among Lloyd George’s Liberal followers did this suggestion find much favour. Once the decision to appeal to the country as a coalition had been taken, the next step, apart from the establishment of a more coherent Coalition Liberal organisation, was the negotiation of an electoral pact between the Lloyd George Liberals and the Conservative party. This ran into some opposition from Conservatives in the constituencies, who saw no reason to stand down in favour of Liberal candidates, but was eventually concluded by the Conservative whips over the heads of their rank-and-file. In all, about 150 Liberals loyal to Lloyd George were given a free run by the Conservatives, the unity of the coalition parties being publicly proclaimed by what Asquith derisively dubbed the ‘Coupon’ (in fact a letter of endorsement) issued to their favoured candidates by Lloyd George and Bonar Law.44 A small number of Labour MPs, including George Barnes from the War Cabinet, were persuaded to prolong their association with Lloyd George and also went to the polls as Coalition candidates, despite being repudiated by the official Labour party. As will be seen, the consequences of these decisions for the future of British politics – parties and individuals alike – were momentous. But the element of contingency in them deserves to be emphasised. What began as planning for a

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wartime election only at a late stage, because of the armistice of November 1918, turned into a peacetime one. Labour and the Asquithian Liberals had the opportunity to join the Coalition in its electoral appeal but chose not to do so. Lloyd George and the Conservatives were guided in their tactics by short-term necessity as much as by any deeper-laid strategic plan. The Conservatives may have seen the election as an opportunity to drive a wedge between the two sections of the Liberal party; they wanted to benefit from the popularity of Lloyd George and use him to some extent as a shield against Labour. Lloyd George, for his part, had to maintain the Conservative alliance because without it his chances of remaining in power were nil. To give what was essentially a marriage of convenience a more principled appearance he attempted to present the idea of coalition as a positive good in itself, urging an audience in Manchester in September 1918 to make the most of the wartime spirit of national unity, which the Coalition represented, ‘before that great spirit grows cold in the frigid atmosphere of self-interest’. ‘We want neither reaction nor revolution,’ he said, ‘but a sane, well-advised steadiness of bold reconstruction’, which by implication the Coalition alone could provide.45 Yet the limited degree to which this more positive coalitionism had seeped into the bones of his followers was demonstrated by the difficult wrangling that took place over the Coalition’s political programme and by the necessity Lloyd George faced of emphasising its Liberal aspects to Liberal audiences while stressing other facets to the Conservatives. The war had brought a coalition into being, but the old habits of party thinking had not been eradicated.

The road to 1918 Parliamentary politics were only part of the story. While the country’s parliamentarians were to some extent insulated from its effects by the operation of the party truce and the postponement of the 1915 general election, the war was nevertheless having an impact on the political world beyond Westminster. In order to understand the full range of factors that were influencing British politics as the war neared its end, it is necessary to turn our attention – as contemporary politicians were also having to do – away from the ‘high politics’ of wartime to what was happening at the grass roots, to the impact of the war on the wider political community and its implications for the parties and their levels of popular support. One of the problems with this is to decide whether the war influenced political opinion in a single direction – left or right – or whether it produced a less clearcut result. Certainly the outbreak of war stimulated feelings of patriotism and nationalism. The demonstrations that greeted the declaration of war and the early rush of volunteers for the army – 300,000 by the end of August 1914 – testified to the initial excitement. Spy scares and often violent hostility towards aliens reflected a less attractive, more xenophobic show of national feeling. As the war went on, this early excitement gave way to a grimmer, less romantic struggle for survival. In the course of 1915 voluntary recruitment fell off, necessitating the

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introduction of conscription in 1916. Yet what is remarkable throughout the war is the degree of popular, patriotic support that existed, encouraged by the prowar media and the efforts of government propagandists but representing a deeply determined national mood independent of both. The millions who served in the trenches were imbued with military discipline as well as patriotic virtues. On the home front, too, where families were not only united in spirit with their fighting men but shared directly in the dangers and privations of war through zeppelin raids, naval bombardments and more general economic and emotional hardship, the war engendered a sense of national unity based on identification with a common cause. The consequences of this may not be easily interpretable in narrow political terms. It would be simplistic to assume that wartime patriotism shifted public opinion permanently to the right, and that it automatically benefited the Conservatives. Among Liberals and, as recent research has shown, especially among working-class Labour supporters, patriotism was equally highly developed.46 But it may be that the unifying effects of war made pre-war party divisions seem less important, just as the existence of a coalition government in theory provided a framework for ‘national’ rather than partisan politics. As well as its role in promoting national unity, the war also led to a closer relationship between society and the state. State intervention had been increasing even before 1914, but the war made the state a more immediate presence in the life of the community in a variety of ways. This was most obviously the case because of the military demands of the war: the need to raise and equip mass armies and to sustain them in the field by the full mobilisation of the nation’s financial, industrial and human resources. The introduction of conscription was an extension of state intervention on a scale greater than any previous conflict, not excepting the earlier ‘Great War’ of 1793–1815. Nor was conscription the only measure that extended the control of the state over individual life and opinion. The Defence of the Realm and Munitions of War Acts restricted civil liberties, imposed limits on the freedom of labour and gave the government an unprecedented battery of regulatory powers. At a higher economic level the state took over the running of large sectors of industry such as the railways and the mines, and all sections of the community felt the impact of heavy increases in wartime taxation. Not all interventionist measures, it is true, were concerned with coercion or control. The war brought an expansion of pre-war welfare schemes, notably through the activities of the Ministry of Munitions, and there were government measures such as the Rent Restriction Act of 1915 to protect working-class families from the effects of wartime inflation and profiteering. The reconstruction plans that were being laid down in 1917–18 for further reforms in education, housing and national insurance provided additional evidence of the interventionist trend encouraged by the war. The net result of these changes was to make people much more conscious of the state in both its benevolent and restrictive guises. Together with the patriotic appeals for national unity, this was an important factor in forging a more coherent and integrated national political community.

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Both the heightened sense of patriotism and the increased role of the state seem, broadly, to underpin the ‘social imperial’ inclinations of the Lloyd George Coalition, blending elements of all the main pre-war party creeds – socialism, New Liberalism and paternalistic Tariff Reform Unionism. On the other side, of course, there were movements which challenged aspects of the wartime consensus. There was opposition to the war, or the methods by which it was being fought, from organisations such as the ILP, the UDC and the No Conscription Fellowship. A small number of pacifists and conscientious objectors rejected war outright, while from the end of 1916 there was growing support for a negotiated peace, not just from those of the political left but from Conservatives like Lord Lansdowne, who published a letter in favour of a compromise peace in November 1917. Even though these anti-war campaigns were mostly small scale, restricted to the political intelligentsia and some working-class socialists, by 1917 they might have hoped to benefit from a more widespread mood of war weariness brought on by mounting casualty figures and domestic economic and social hardships unrelieved by the prospect of ultimate victory. One recent writer has identified the winter of 1917–18 as ‘the low point of morale’,47 with a potentially revolutionary mood being stimulated by the example of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Yet in the event no broadbased oppositional movement emerged. There was working-class discontent, over issues such as food shortages and prices. The middle and upper classes were unhappy about the high levels of taxation and the possible social consequences of the war in giving extra power to the workers and increasing the scope of government regulation. But none of this discontent found expression in mass opposition to the war as such, just as among the soldiers in the front line the hardships of war failed to produce the large-scale mutinies that affected, for example, the French or Russian armies. Despite the deep trauma caused by the length of the conflict and the scale of the losses (750,000 killed, over a million more wounded), the overwhelming feeling appears to have been determination to see things through, in the hope that the better future promised by the politicians might make the sacrifices of the war worthwhile. As well as its general effects, though, the war had an impact on the political climate in other, more detailed, ways, some of which suggested the possibility of greater conflict. The politics of Ireland, for example, followed a path very different from politics in other parts of the United Kingdom. Although at the outset both the Unionists and the Nationalists gave their support to the war, by the time the war came to an end in 1918 Ireland was on the verge of a political revolution. The key event in the transformation was the Dublin Rising of Easter 1916. The Rising itself was the work of a minority in the pre-war Volunteer movement who broke with Redmond over his support for the war, arguing instead that nationalists should use the opportunity provided by the war to seize independence by force of arms. They joined with other groups such as the Irish Republican Brotherhood and James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army to plan and carry out the rebellion of 1916. The Rising was a military failure; few, even among southern Irish nationalists, supported it. But the aftermath, in which the

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British authorities summarily executed the Rising’s leaders and imprisoned many others, produced a reaction in public opinion. The failure of the Home Rule talks in 1916 and of an Irish Convention to reach agreement on new political structures marked the end of the road for old-style constitutional nationalism and undermined support for Redmond and his party. Their place was taken instead by Sinn Fein, capitalising on the new mood in Irish politics with its aim of an independent Irish republic. In the latter stages of the war, Sinn Fein candidates fought a series of bitter by-election contests with the old Nationalist party, usually ending with the Sinn Feiners as the victorious faction. Redmond’s death in 1918 weakened the Nationalists, while the unpopularity of the threatened extension of conscription to Ireland swelled the ranks of Sinn Fein. Whatever the post-war shape of Irish politics became, it was apparent that they would be marked by greater extremism on the nationalist side, with even less scope for compromise between nationalists and Unionists and the strong likelihood that any change in the balance of forces in Ireland would affect the balance of parties in Britain too. Another development that had potentially significant implications was the impact of the war on the position of women. The women’s movement had been growing steadily in Britain in the years before 1914, culminating in the campaign for ‘Votes for Women’ and the militant civil disobedience of the WSPU. The less militant National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies continued its suffragist activities into the war itself, though the emphasis of Mrs Pankhurst’s WSPU switched to patriotic support for the war. Both groups, however, collaborated in a ‘right to serve’ march in London in July 1915, which pressed the authorities to make maximum use of women’s talents to aid the war effort. Their calls were not in vain, and as the war progressed the female population was increasingly fully mobilised. Some women served directly in the female auxiliary units of the armed forces, or as nurses in military hospitals, or in the ranks of other bodies like the Women’s Land Army. Others replaced male employees in clerical and administrative roles, thereby releasing men for military service. An additional 500,000 women were drafted into the factories engaged in munitions production, bringing the total number of women employed in the industry to over 800,000 by 1918.48 These various activities have attracted a certain amount of historiographical mythology. The number of women employed in industry only increased by less than a third between 1914 and 1918, from 2.1 to 2.9 million. There was no rapid influx of middle- or upper-class women to the munitions factories, where over 90 per cent of employees were working class. Although nearly a million women were in white-collar employment in 1918, 1.6 million were in domestic service. The wartime role of women was thus much more closely related to pre-war patterns than is commonly supposed, and even – or perhaps especially – in wartime the primary responsibility of most women was to home and family. Nevertheless, the war did give some women the opportunity to move beyond the domestic sphere. All women, perhaps, gained a sense of being part of a national community engaged in a larger struggle. Perhaps most importantly, the perception of women’s contribu-

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tion to the war, and to society generally, was altered in a positive way, recognised by the terms of wartime welfare legislation and subsequently by post-war reforms. As with other underlying social changes, the short-term political consequences of this are difficult to gauge. It has been argued that it was the contribution that women made to winning the war which was decisive in gaining a measure of female enfranchisement in 1918. This is debatable. A few politicians may have changed their minds for this reason (Asquith cited the suspension of militancy as an influence on his own decision to abandon his former opposition to votes for women), but in fact the tide had probably turned in favour of suffrage reform before 1914.49 In any case, as will be seen, the 1918 Act excluded from the franchise many of those younger women who had been the most active participants in war work. Equally unclear is what effect the war had on the political outlook of women themselves. The experience of war suggested that women responded to the same patriotic impulses as men, yet they also suffered disproportionately from the effects of bereavement, widowhood, and the social and family strains of a ‘man’s war’. Whether, together with the (albeit limited) consequences of emancipation and the growing politicisation brought about by the war this would produce a more feminist women’s agenda for postwar politics remained to be seen. The war had produced some individual women’s issues, but would the result be the emergence of a separate ‘women’s party’ or would politically active women be content to be integrated into the existing party organisations of what remained still an essentially male-dominated political system? If the politics of gender were a source of anxiety to politicians, so, even more, were those of class. Even before 1914 the ‘Labour Question’ in its various forms had been a major topic of concern. The First World War only served to increase its importance. The war years saw a sustained expansion of the trade-union movement, from a membership of 4 million in 1914 to 6.5 million in 1918. The industrial nature of the war enhanced the importance of good labour relations and increased the leverage that the unions could exert over both the employers and the government. The inclusion of the Labour party in the wartime coalitions, and of trade-union officials in production committees and other bodies, testified to the recognition by political leaders of the need to tie organised labour into the war effort in what some writers have seen as an early form of ‘corporatist’ approach to the management of industrial politics.50 Yet, notwithstanding these initiatives, and also the carrot-and-stick strategy of welfare reform and the restriction of strike activity under the terms of wartime legislation, the signs were, from fairly early in the war, that discontent among industrial workers was building up from a number of causes. Most of these were to do with detailed issues of wages and terms of employment, for example the ‘dilution’ of skilled labour in engineering by the recruitment of semi-skilled workers. But there was rank-and-file dissatisfaction, too, at the way in which labour and trade-union leaders were collaborating with government, sometimes against what the workers felt were their interests. The ‘shop stewards’ movement among engineers on

86 The crisis of war, 1914–18 Clydeside in 1915–16 was one example of this unrest, and there were more generally rising levels of industrial discontent in the last two years of the war. In 1917 a total of 730 stoppages – including a strike of 200,000 engineering workers – cost 5.6 million working days of lost production. In 1918 there were over a thousand stoppages, despite the continued operation of the Munitions of War Act and other restrictions. These totals were, admittedly, low compared with those of the immediate prewar period, or indeed 1919 and 1920. A case can be made, too, for the basically patriotic instincts of British workers, with industrial militancy being used only as a last resort. But this only made those strikes that did occur all the more worrying, since, as the government’s special committee on industrial unrest recognised, they might be symptomatic of a wider mood of disaffection. Historians have also discussed the extent to which the economic and social effects of the war helped to produce a heightened sense of solidarity among the working classes, leading to a more highly developed collective political consciousness.51 This is a controversial topic. Even among trade unionists, sectional economic interests remained the principal trigger for disputes. On the other hand, the War Emergency Workers’ National Committee campaigned on more general issues. The presence of prominent employers in government (albeit alongside labour representatives) created a sense that the war was a ‘bosses’ war’ – feelings encouraged by the rumours and reality of wartime profiteering, and by a suspicion that the hardships of war were being more widely felt by the working classes than by their middle- and upper-class counterparts. There is evidence of increasing support for socialist groups and socialist ideas, suggesting that the war may have hastened a move away from older political ideologies associated with a failed capitalist system. Here, then, was another factor of uncertainty for politicians as they contemplated the likely shape of the post-war political world. The impact of these underlying changes was made more problematic by the wartime reform of the electoral system. The issue of electoral reform had been a live one in pre-war politics, not just because of the debate about women’s suffrage but as a result of other anomalies and inconsistencies in the existing system. The Liberals had attempted to introduce a Franchise Bill in 1912, which had fallen victim to party wrangling and had had to be withdrawn for procedural reasons. During the war, however, the operation of the electoral system had been periodically discussed in the context of successive decisions to extend the life of the 1910 parliament and postpone the creation of new electoral registers. On all sides there was an awareness that at some point there would have to be a thorough review of the system before a general election could take place on fair terms. Accordingly, in 1916, the Asquith government appointed a Speaker’s Conference, chaired by Speaker Lowther, to consider the comprehensive reform of the electoral system. The Conference’s 34 members (13 Liberals, 13 Conservatives, 4 Labour representatives and 4 Irish Nationalists) reported in January 1917 and recommended sweeping changes, including full manhood suffrage, the enfranchisement for parliamentary elections of women who were either themselves or who were married to local-government voters, a redistribu-

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tion of seats and – most intriguingly – a system of proportional representation (PR) to replace the first-past-the-post method currently in use. Undeterred by the more pressing events of the war, or by some opposition from Conservative backbenchers, Lloyd George’s government acted swiftly on the recommendations. In March 1917 the Commons approved the introduction of a Bill by 341 votes to 62. This paved the way for the passage of what became the Representation of the People Act of 1918. The 1918 Act – which has been seen as the most extensive of Britain’s parliamentary Reform Acts – introduced far-reaching changes.52 All men over the age of 21 were to be eligible to vote, subject only to a six-month residential qualification. The right to vote was also extended to women over the age of 30 if they were householders, the wives of householders or occupiers of property worth £5 a year. This added approximately 8.4 million women to the electoral roll; coupled with the additional male voters it increased the total size of the electorate to 21.4 million, roughly three times its pre-war strength. There were other significant changes in the arrangements for the conduct and financing of elections. A redistribution of seats was to be carried out with the aim of creating a uniform map of single-member constituencies with about 70,000 voters in each, eliminating the vast disparities that had existed in the old system. To equalise the operation of the system even further, tighter restrictions were placed on candidates’ expenditure and candidates would no longer be expected to pay returning officers’ expenses (although they would have to pay a £150 ‘deposit’ which they would forfeit unless they received at least an eighth of the votes cast). Finally, polling in all constituencies was in future to take place on the same day, reducing the ‘bandwagon’ effect that had played a part in previous contests, including the landslide of 1906. Unquestionably the Act was a major measure. There were some disappointments for more radical reformers. For example, plural voting was not completely abolished, and about 300,000 plural voters – mainly businessmen or university graduates – remained in the reformed system. A more serious disappointment for some was the defeat of proposals for proportional representation, or even the alternative vote in individual constituencies. Ironically, Lloyd George himself had opposed the introduction of PR which he denounced as ‘a device for … disintegrating parties’,53 though its absence was to play a crucial part in the reshaping of party politics to the detriment of his own Liberal party in the 1920s. Another limitation to the boldness of the Bill was the refusal to give the vote to women on the same terms as men – a vestige of ‘separate spheres’ thinking which also reflected a level of uncertainty about how women would use the political power that was being conferred on them. Even when all this has been said, however, the significance of the reform should not be underrated, not least for the way in which it was enacted with comparative lack of controversy in the middle of the worst period of the worst war in the nation’s history. Yet while the contents of the Act and the manner of its introduction are a testimony to the wartime consensus, and perhaps to the confidence of the political elite in their ability to control the enlarged electorate they were bringing into

88 The crisis of war, 1914–18 existence, for the individual parties the reformed electoral system posed almost as many challenges as the war itself. An increased number of voters, new constituency boundaries, altered rules of electoral engagement, all required an organisational response which some parties were better placed than others to provide. The Conservatives, for example, had fewer problems than their rivals. According to John Ramsden, ‘the party organisation emerged from the war years in reasonably good shape … its local and national structures were attenuated but intact’.54 There had been a reduction in constituency activity during the war, but the party had maintained its Central Office organisation and a skeleton staff at regional level. At the grass roots, local activists had switched their energies to campaigns such as those of the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee in 1914–15 or the War Savings movement and other forms of voluntary organisation. But there remained a reservoir of support that could be mobilised when the party battle resumed. The financial health of the party was good and its morale had been improved by the leading role that it had taken in the wartime governments, especially after December 1916. Once the details of the post-war electoral framework became clear, and in preparation for a general election which they recognised would have a crucial bearing on the party’s future, the Conservative organisers were able to revive the party machine and to realign it at local level in accordance with the new constituency map to ensure they were optimally placed for the contest ahead. Labour, too, emerged from the war in a much strengthened position. Before the war, the Labour party’s organisation had been patchy and localised. Although some moves were being made to organise on a more national basis, these had made only limited progress and the party’s parliamentary candidatures were still heavily dependent on Liberal support. The war altered Labour’s position both at national and local level. Nationally, Labour was able to break free from the progressive alliance and to enhance its status through membership of the wartime coalitions. Locally, by 1918 Labour was establishing at least the framework of a nationwide party organisation. The number of constituency bodies affiliated to the party increased from 179 in 1914 to 389 in 1918. In the same period the affiliated trade-union membership of the party rose from 1.5 to 2.9 million. Henderson’s organisational efforts in 1917–18 began to weld these elements into a more effective political fighting machine, a process helped by the adoption of the new party constitution in 1918. Labour had the advantage also that it was establishing its new local organisations in parallel with the redrawing of constituency boundaries following the passage of the 1918 Act, while it benefited on the ground from the activities of related or affiliated bodies like the WEWNC and the ILP, and the recruitment of former Liberals who had been attracted to the party by its attitude towards war aims, conscription and social reform. Like the Conservatives, Labour seemed in tune with an element in the national mood, which its expanded organisation gave it the opportunity of turning into increased electoral support and so establishing itself as an independent political force in the post-war world. Of the major pre-war parties it was the Liberals who were least equipped to meet the electoral challenges of post-war politics. A basic difficulty was the situa-

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tion created by the events of December 1916. Although in theory the party was not formally divided, in practice the Lloyd Georgeite and Asquithian wings began to develop separate identities, and the election of 1918 would find them, in effect, on opposing sides. This left neither wing of the party well placed to appeal to the more democratic electorate. Apart from in Wales, where they were strongly supported at constituency level, Lloyd George and his followers were dependent largely on Conservative organisation in 1918. In the longer run, the failure of Coalition Liberalism to develop an independent and self-sustaining electoral appeal was to be one of the key factors in its demise. But the Asquithians were not necessarily any more successful in adapting to the demands of the new electoral regime. They retained control of the official party machinery after 1916, and the party had substantial financial resources as well as considerable press support. However, the drift and lack of clarity in its parliamentary tactics was replicated in the constituencies. Activists were confused and demoralised by the parliamentary split. Party organisers placed little emphasis on fund-raising or voluntary activity, with the result that the Liberals were left behind by their rivals in establishing local associations in the new constituencies. Uncertainty about strategy delayed the selection of candidates and preparations for an election, which in any case the leadership wished to avoid. Indeed, Asquith’s protests against an early election were motivated at least as much by a belated recognition of how ill-prepared his party was as by any more altruistic desires to avoid party controversy at a time of national emergency. Superficially, politics at the end of the First World War showed many similarities with those of 1914. In parliament, at least, there were the same parties, the same personalities, as there had been before the war. But the underlying reality was very different. Even in parliament, the crisis of war had put an end to the pre-war configuration of politics: the Liberal–Labour–Nationalist alliance was replaced by a Unionist-dominated coalition pursuing a broadly ‘social imperial’ policy of nationalism and social reform. The Liberal party had been deeply divided, and perhaps fatally wounded, by the experience of war and the consequences of the Asquith–Lloyd George split. In the political world outside Westminster the changes the war had brought were potentially even more farreaching: heightened patriotism, a new relationship between the individual and the state, the emancipation of women, the rise of Labour and the transformation of the democratic basis of the political system. Not all of these changes had clear or unequivocal consequences. They interacted in any case with other ingredients in the political equation and with the engrained traditions of an established community which had been altered but not completely overthrown by the war. It was this complex interplay of past and present that would determine the course of British politics and the party system on the road that led to the election of 1918 and beyond.

4

Coalitionism and party politics, 1918–22

The politics of the immediate post-war period were dominated by the Lloyd George Coalition and speculation about its future. Could the Coalition provide a permanent alternative to the ‘normal’ workings of the party system, or would it prove to be no more than a temporary interlude before the re-emergence of party politics in some more conventional form? If party politics did again become the norm, how would they differ from their pre-war pattern, and what, in particular, would be the ‘impact of Labour’ on the party system?1 The answers to these questions were bound up with specific issues and problems in post-war political debate, and not least with the personality and politics of the prime minister, David Lloyd George. To understand the eventual fate of Lloyd George and the part played by the government he led in reshaping the party system it is necessary to examine in more detail the political context of these years and the reasons why Lloyd George’s attempt to perpetuate the politics of coalitionism and national unity was ultimately doomed by developments external to the Coalition and by its disintegration from within.

The new political landscape The politics of post-1918 still showed some contours of an older morphology, but they also lacked many familiar landmarks and were marked by a number of novel and even disturbing features. The general election of 1918 was itself a unique contest, held in unique circumstances. It was the first election to take place under the terms of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, consequently the first on the new electoral boundaries, the first in which women were eligible to vote and the first in which polling in all constituencies occurred on the same day (in this case 14 December). Its uniqueness, though, was not confined to the electoral process. The imbalance of forces between the government and its opponents was remarkable. Indeed, there was hardly any opposition in the sense of there being a coherent, credible alternative to the outgoing administration. Labour was fighting its first election as a fully independent party on a national basis, but was not a realistic challenger for office. The Asquithian Liberals fielded candidates in fewer than half the constituencies and likewise, on this occasion, were not a potential governing party. This distinguished 1918 even from other

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wartime or post-war campaigns that have produced landslide majorities. In the ‘Khaki’ election of 1900 the Unionist coalition retained its majority in an election that merely preserved the status quo, but it did so against a Liberal party which, in less than six years, recovered to win a landslide of its own. In 1945, Churchill, leader of the all-party coalition that had won the Second World War, fought the election at the head of a Conservative government comprehensively beaten by Attlee’s Labour. Moreover, neither of these results, decisive though they were, completely broke the mould of their respective party systems. The 1918 election, by contrast, concluded what the war had begun – the destruction of the Edwardian party system – and ushered in a new and uncertain political world. Yet, when set against the momentousness of its consequences, the election campaign itself seems to have been a relatively quiet affair. It was not the jingoistic frenzy of popular myth, and there appears to have been an unusual degree of consensus between government and voters on priorities for the new parliament. These included the idea of a ‘just peace’, and for some people this meant punishing Germany for its role in starting the war. Lloyd George recognised this feeling in his campaign speeches, promising that Germany would be made to pay ‘to the limits of her capacity’ for the damage she had caused.2 There were others who talked intemperately of ‘hanging the Kaiser’ or squeezing Germany ‘until the pips squeaked’. But these verbal excesses were not the dominant tone of the campaign. On the international front the main concern was for a peace settlement that would prevent the occurrence of a future war. An equal, if not greater, concern, was that the post-war government should commit itself wholeheartedly to the work of domestic reconstruction and social reform. This was the main burden of three of Lloyd George’s six major campaign speeches (at Wolverhampton, Newcastle and Leeds) and it figured heavily in the speeches and election addresses of Coalition candidates – Conservative, Labour and Liberal – throughout the country. The aspirations of many Coalition supporters were summed up by the Unionist candidate for Birmingham Ladywood, Neville Chamberlain, who felt that the aftermath of a great war was a time to set aside personal and party divisions to work for the good of the country. ‘I have repeatedly stated my conviction’, he told his electors, ‘that we could best show our gratitude to those who have fought and died for England by making it a better place to live in.’3 Faced with the breadth of this consensus it was difficult for the parties outside the Coalition to make much headway. Labour emphasised its commitment to social reform and was able to base its campaign on a specific appeal to workingclass and trade-union voters. On its war record as a whole, however, it was more vulnerable. The party had participated in the wartime coalitions and could claim a share in the eventual victory. But it was also placed on the defensive by the activities of its ‘anti-war’ socialist left wing. Labour’s decision to leave the Coalition opened it to accusations of deserting the national cause, while the continuing presence in the government of former Labour leaders like George Barnes and his colleagues in the National Democratic Party enabled Coalition

92 Coalitionism and party politics, 1918–22 propagandists to play up supposed distinctions between ‘patriotic’ and ‘unpatriotic’ wings of the labour movement. As the campaign went on, Labour was increasingly portrayed by its Coalition opponents as a revolutionary, ‘semiBolshevik’ party somehow alien to Britain’s mainstream political tradition. If Labour’s position was vulnerable, that of the non-Coalition Liberals was even more exposed. Labour at least was able to make a coherent case against the Coalition; the Asquithians had no such clear-cut identity. Indeed, they began their campaign by welcoming the Liberal aspects of Lloyd George’s programme and promising that their MPs would continue to support the government as long as it was pursuing ‘Liberal’ policies. Only when sections of the Liberal press became restive at the lack of definition to their party’s public image did Asquith take a slightly more combative line. At Huddersfield on 28 November he warned of the danger that a large Coalition majority would lead to a ‘gagged and fettered House of Commons’, threatening the ‘liberty’ for which the war had been fought.4 But this rather academic point served merely to highlight the weakness of the Liberals’ situation. They were fighting at best to be the opposition rather than the government – in Trevor Wilson’s words, ‘non-participants in the struggle for power’.5 Even the Liberal weekly The Nation had advised its readers to vote Labour, as the Labour party represented ‘the one powerful, integral force … outside Mr George’s compact’.6 The more truculent stance taken by Asquith in the closing stages of the election thus did little more than call down the full force of Lloyd George’s scorn on his former colleagues, as for example in his final speech of the campaign at Camberwell on 13 December. To many Liberals, in any case, Lloyd George seemed a more formidable champion of Liberalism than the Asquithian leaders who had apparently failed the challenge of war and were unable to articulate a vision for the peace. The strength of the Coalition and the weaknesses of its opponents made the election more of a coronation than a contest. When the results were announced after a two-week delay to permit the counting of service votes, Lloyd George and his supporters were seen virtually to have swept the board. The pro-Coalition parties won 526 of the 707 seats, amassing between them some 5.6 million votes. Of the various ‘opposition’ parties, Labour took 57 seats, the Asquithian Liberals 28 and in Ireland Sinn Fein completed the near extinction of the old parliamentary Nationalist party by winning 73 seats to the Nationalists’ seven.7 Ireland was the one part of the United Kingdom to resist the blandishments of the Coalition, but elsewhere the Coalition triumphed in all parts of Britain. It is true that the headline figures of its success were exaggerated by an electoral system which gave it 74 per cent of the seats for 54 per cent of the votes. The total of 526 seats also includes at least 48 ‘uncouponed’ Conservatives, some of whom were victorious at the expense of the official ‘couponed’ candidate (usually a Liberal). The overall turnout for the election was much lower than in pre-war elections as well, with only 57 per cent of electors casting their vote (including no more than 900,000 of the possible 3.9 million voters in the armed forces). Yet this may reflect the general feeling that the result was a foregone conclusion rather than hostility to the Coalition as such. Even when reservations about its

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scale have been noted, the size of the victory, and therefore of the Coalition’s mandate, remains staggering enough. What else does the result tell us about the political mood in Britain at the end of the war? In some ways, despite the gains for Labour, the 1918 election appears to signal a shift to the right. The Coalition’s majority was predominantly Conservative: 383 MPs compared to 133 Coalition Liberals and 10 MPs from the National Democratic Party. It was widely believed that the Coalition Liberal and NDP candidates had depended heavily on ‘Conservative’ votes and Conservative constituency organisation. Then again, left-wing radical and socialist candidates seemed to have done particularly badly. The Asquithian Liberals lost many pre-war radicals amid their general collapse. On the Labour side, prominent anti-war ILP-ers were swept away by the Coalition tide, including Ramsay MacDonald at Leicester and Philip Snowden at Blackburn.8 On the other hand, to see these results in straightforward ‘left–right’ or party terms may be a mistake. It is possible that the Coalition and its leaders (or leader?) had an appeal that transcended party politics, and their emphasis on a ‘new politics’ of patriotism and social reform struck a responsive chord, especially among first-time voters without established electoral habits. Certainly there is evidence that Coalition candidates performed best in constituencies with high numbers of new voters, and that many women voters generally responded positively to the Coalition message of reconstruction and national unity. Here, perhaps, was a potent political force, if only the Coalition’s strategists could find a way of harnessing it on a permanent basis. The 1918 parliament was naturally very different from its predecessor in both tone and membership, although its composition was far from being revolutionised by social and franchise changes. Despite the appearance of a small number of women candidates, none of those who stood in Britain was elected, while the Sinn Feiner Constance Markiewicz elected in Ireland did not take her seat. Not until 1919, when Lady Nancy Astor won a by-election at Plymouth, did the House of Commons admit its first woman MP. Similarly, the advance of the Labour party produced only a slight increase in the proportion of workingclass MPs compared with the combined Labour and Lib-Lab totals of pre-1914. In other respects, however, the changes were more marked. There was a high proportion of new members (at least 260 had not sat in the previous parliament), a result of the length of time since the last general election but more particularly of the heavy defeats suffered by many sitting Liberals. The middle-class, business element was more widely represented than either before or subsequently: 179 MPs were ‘company directors’ (against an average of 139 for other inter-war parliaments); 86 MPs had links with commerce and finance.9 These totals do not perhaps justify Baldwin’s oft-quoted comment about ‘hard faced men who looked as if they had done well out of the war’. Businessmen were not in any case automatically opposed to progressive social policies, as the career of Baldwin himself testifies. But this was a more ‘bourgeois’ parliament than most others, with the aristocracy and the working class pushed to the margins. It was also an older one too. Only 100 of its MPs were under the age of 41, which

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promised the possibility of tensions between the younger men, many of them with war service, and an ‘old gang’ which might not move far or fast enough in key areas of national renewal. The new parliament was obviously also distinctive in the sheer disparity between the forces of the government and those of the opposition, and this affected the politics of the period in a number of ways. The imbalance was even greater than the overall results of the election suggested, since the 73 Sinn Fein MPs refused to attend at Westminster and instead established their own parliament, the Dail, in Dublin. The remaining opposition seats were divided between Labour and the Independent Liberals. But these two groups were unable to combine to offer a united opposition to the government, and their parliamentary effectiveness was further weakened by the absence of their most prominent leaders who had been defeated at the general election. Thus the Asquithian Liberal remnant was led in the Commons by its parliamentary chairman, Sir Donald Maclean, following Asquith’s rejection by the voters of East Fife and the similar eclipse of most of the party’s other pre-war luminaries. Asquith returned to parliament at the Paisley by-election of February 1920 but was never able to re-establish his old easy mastery of the House in the altered circumstances. Labour’s pre-war leaders likewise fell victim to the voters in 1918, Henderson joining MacDonald and Snowden in defeat. The party was led in parliament by W.R. Adamson (until 1921) and J.R. Clynes. Henderson’s success at the Widnes by-election in 1919 reinforced its depleted front bench, but its MPs lacked either the experience or the debating power, let alone the numbers, to mount a sustained challenge to the government. To a degree, therefore, in the parliament of 1918–22 the normal operation of a party system organised around government and opposition was in abeyance. The real political task for the Coalition’s leaders was to arrange their huge majority so that the absence of opposition from without was not an invitation for the different groups within the Coalition to fight among themselves. To this end, it was a shrewd tactic to employ Bonar Law, leader of the Coalition’s largest party component, as Leader of the House until his retirement in 1921. Lloyd George’s close relationship with Bonar Law gave the prime minister a finger on the pulse of parliamentary opinion which he would otherwise have lacked, and made the task of managing the Coalition’s disparate majority that much easier. Even so, as will be seen, difficulties did arise. Sometimes these followed the Liberal–Conservative fault-line between the main Coalition partners. There was also, however, a group of as many as 40 to 50 Conservative ‘diehards’ who were willing to offer sustained internal opposition to the Coalition and its leader. In any attempt to configure a ‘new politics’ they were likely to be a thorn in the Coalition’s side and a reminder of the more traditional animosities that had infected the pre-war party system. If the continued existence of the diehards recalled the political conflicts of pre-1914, in other respects things had moved on. The war, as has been shown, had brought about significant changes in both the content and context of politics. It had had an impact on individual parties and on the party system. The

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Reform Act of 1918 had created millions of new voters and a new electoral map, which added to the difficulty of constructing a stable political framework in the post-war world. After 1918 some of the issues which had been integral to pre-war party politics – notably religious denominationalism and Celtic nationalism – no longer had the same relevance or resonance. Changes were beginning to occur in the conduct of political campaigning and the methods of mobilising public opinion, where again the war had accelerated the creation of a national rather than a local or regional structure of politics, a process mirrored by the increasing dominance of the national over the provincial press and the emergence at the highest levels of a few politically influential ‘Press Lords’ such as Northcliffe, Rothermere and Beaverbrook.10 These detailed changes, furthermore, were occurring in a world whose international outlook had been transformed by the twin upheavals of the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution, which had shattered the liberal-monarchical fabric of the old Europe and left what to many contemporaries – among them even quite staid British politicians – seemed to be a broken civilisation teetering on the brink of imminent collapse. In the domestic arena, although many of the questions with which the government had to deal had similarities to those which had faced the Liberal administrations of the Edwardian period, there were differences too, either in the character of the issues themselves or the way in which they affected, or were affected by, the party-political situation. For example, once the IRA had launched its ‘War of Independence’ in 1919, Ireland was an even more pressing problem than it had been during the Home Rule struggle before 1914. But while Irish policy still had the capacity to divide opinion in Britain, the existence of the Coalition meant that British politics were no longer orientated around a Unionist Home Rule axis in the way they had been in the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Other causes of partisan conflict in the old Liberal–Conservative party system had either been marginalised by the war or minimised by the effects of cooperation in government. There was still talk of reforming the House of Lords, but the ‘peers versus people’ debate of the Edwardian era had run out of steam – a reflection of the reduced influence of the aristocracy as much as the collapse of radical Liberalism. Welsh Disestablishment was settled by agreement in 1920, almost without anyone noticing. Lloyd George’s land taxes, which had caused such controversy in the 1909 budget, were quietly dropped after the war, with the agreement of their author himself. Even Tariff Reform, along with Ireland the other major defining question of Liberal–Conservative politics before 1914, was temporarily less of an issue, the debate having been blurred by the limited protectionist measures employed by the wartime coalitions, although it could still stir party passions and was to do so again when Baldwin raised the protectionist standard once more in 1923. The removal or eclipse of many of the main differences between Liberalism and Conservatism emphasised the emergence of an alternative orientation centred on the rise of Labour. The ‘Labour Question’ had of course already

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been a major feature in Edwardian politics, as politicians sought to accommodate the Labour party in an existing party system at the same time as devising policies to deal with the problems of industrial relations and industrial reform. After the war, however, the scope of the Labour question had widened. The trade unions were much stronger, industrial unrest was more widespread and the wartime extension of state intervention in industry had brought government and unions into closer contact. On the political side, the Labour party had broken free of its progressive alliance with the Liberals and embarked on a challenge for power in its own right. This ‘industrialisation’ of politics, with the overtones of class and sectional conflict which it suggested, has been seen by historians such as Maurice Cowling and Keith Middlemas as the main factor in reshaping party politics in the early 1920s, eventually replacing the old Liberal– Conservative axis with a Labour–‘non-Labour’ one.11 Such a development was already implicit in the new status of the Labour party as the ‘semi-official’ opposition to the Coalition and the severing of its ties with the Liberals. It was strengthened by the importance of industrial and labour questions in the politics of the period, and by the tendency of the Coalition to be seen increasingly as an ‘anti-Labour’ front. In these circumstances, the party system began to remake itself along new lines, even while the old parties retained some of their former character and some politicians were attempting to transcend the party system altogether. In the immediate aftermath of the war the final form of the new politics could be only dimly discerned, but already a straightforward return to the previous Liberal–Conservative duopoly was the least likely option, and there was a clear need to forge new structures for a new world.

The failure of fusion, 1918–20 At the beginning of 1919 the Coalition and its leader – bolstered by their landslide election victory, backed by a mountainous parliamentary majority and sustained by a broad base of public support – appeared to be in a position of overwhelming strength. Lloyd George’s personal reputation, as the ‘Man Who Won the War’ and one of the most powerful figures in the world at the Paris peace conference, had never stood higher, even in his days as the ‘People’s David’ before 1914. Yet in its very nature such absolute eminence was evanescent. The government faced serious problems – notably in relation to the economy and to labour and industrial unrest – which would soon damage its standing on the home front. More problematic was the stability of the Coalition as a governing platform and the degree to which it could be made a permanent part of the political landscape. Lloyd George was aware that a purely personal ascendancy, even if it could be sustained, was unlikely to be enough to transform the Coalition from a temporary phenomenon into a longer-term political force. The Conservatives had accepted his lead in 1918 but there was no guarantee that they would continue to do so, while his own Liberal followers were a minority within the Coalition and were electorally dependent on Conservative support. In hindsight it might seem inevitable that the Coalition should break up

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into its component parts and a more normal pattern of party politics be reasserted. This was by no means the case. But finding a basis for the permanence, or at least the continuance, of his government was Lloyd George’s underlying political preoccupation for the whole of the 1918–22 period, until such calculations were finally rendered irrelevant by the fateful meeting of Conservative MPs at the Carlton Club in October 1922. The chances of creating some new form of political combination looked initially promising. The supporters of the Coalition had developed a habit of cooperation in parliament which had stood the test of two years of war and the rigours of a general-election campaign. The peacetime cabinet which Lloyd George restored in October 1919, though reducible to party components (eleven Conservatives, eight Liberals, one Labour), was in reality a more cohesive executive machine whose senior members were committed to the coalition experiment. Most prominent in this regard were Churchill (Secretary for War, 1919–21; Colonial Secretary 1921–2) and Birkenhead (the Lord Chancellor), both of whom had been advocates of coalition since the secret discussions of 1910. Milner, Colonial Secretary until 1921, was a long-standing enthusiast for governments of national efficiency, regardless of party. But even the more ‘partyconscious’ leaders of the cabinet – Addison, Fisher and Montagu for the Liberals, Bonar Law, Balfour and Austen Chamberlain for the Unionists – were loyal supporters of the Coalition and close allies of the prime minister. The strength of ‘coalitionism’ at cabinet level was mirrored on the back benches, notably in the ranks of the New Members’ Group, formed in April 1919. Made up mainly of younger men who had served as junior officers in the war and who had been elected in 1918 on the Coalition ticket as followers of Lloyd George, it included rising stars such as Sir Oswald Mosley and Walter Elliot and its 100 or so members constituted a sympathetic audience for ministers seeking to escape from the sterilities of old-style party warfare.12 Coalitionism had a programmatic and ideological basis too. The government had an agreed set of policies in areas such as social reconstruction, industrial relations and foreign affairs. Underpinning these was the concept of the Coalition as a ‘national’ government which could unite different classes and sections of the community, and of a state which embodied collective, communal concerns rather than acting as the agent of any selfish or sectional interest. Another way of presenting this was to portray the Coalition as the moderate ‘Centre’ between the extremes of revolution and reaction, an image with which Lloyd George had made great play during the 1918 election. There was an element of ambiguity in these ideas, and perhaps some intellectual sleight of hand. In particular, the definition of national interest as opposed to sectional interests seemed increasingly to cast the Labour movement in the role of an ‘enemy within’ rather than as an integral part of the national community. The inclusion of the NDP in the government was a way of counteracting this message and emphasising class unity, but its credibility was undermined by the NDP’s failure to develop an electoral presence and by the resignation of the NDP ministers from the government in 1920. It appeared therefore as if the

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‘national’ claim could be upheld only by defining a significant portion of the working class out of the ‘nation’. Nevertheless, for all its ambiguity, this set of ideas did provide the Coalition with a coherent ideological and political identity, and one which could also be seen as a fusion of the main pre-war tendencies of New Liberalism and constructive Unionism, each of which emphasised the role of the state as an agent both of regulation and reform. Even the suspicion of organised Labour as a sectional interest which might be in conflict with the needs of the community as a whole was part of New Liberal as well as Conservative thinking, and so helped to provide common ground on which a Coalition ideology could be built. The question was whether parliamentary cooperation and ideological agreement between parties would lead to closer organisational unity, and if so what form this would take. Some of those who were keenest on the idea of a ‘national’ government took as the corollary of this the rejection or abandonment of party politics altogether. In practical terms, however, this non-party or anti-party approach could only be adopted in conditions where electoral competition had been suspended, as for instance during the wartime party truce. Once parties outside the government had resumed electoral activity the government itself was bound to follow suit, and for this purpose some form of party machinery was necessary. The only ways in which the wartime spirit of national unity could be perpetuated was either by appealing to the ‘higher unity’ of coalition (which set aside party differences for the national good) or by forming a ‘National’ party incorporating the idea of ‘unity’ as part of its basic message. In 1918 the first of these options had been employed, with the ‘coupon’ as a symbol of the unity of the government’s Conservative, Liberal and Labour wings. It was plainly possible for a similar arrangement to continue to operate after the election, employing electoral pacts between the Coalition parties to avoid contests between progovernment candidates at by-elections and present a common front to the voters. The alternative was to press ahead with the creation of a single ‘fused’ party to reflect and reinforce the ‘fusion’ that was taking place at parliamentary and programme level. Lloyd George did not seriously engage with these organisational issues until after his return from the Versailles conference in July 1919. Then, however, following consultations with his closest advisers, he very quickly decided in favour of attempting to implement the ‘fusion’ option at the earliest possible opportunity. There were a number of reasons for this decision. The main one was the advantage, from Lloyd George’s point of view, of having a single-party organisation of which he would be the acknowledged leader. This would be the best way to ensure the stability of the Coalition and would also be a public demonstration of the government’s determination to construct a new basis for post-war politics, free from the baggage of past controversies. More prosaically, a rapid move towards fusion might nip in the bud the re-emergence of any incipient Liberal–Conservative rivalries within the Coalition and would absolve the Coalition Liberals from having to build up a separate electoral organisation. Timing here was a crucial factor, since planning for the next election could only

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be undertaken once it was known on what basis it was to be fought. There was the further consideration that in mid-1919 the Asquithian Liberals were undergoing an electoral revival which again might destabilise the Coalition by siphoning off its Liberal support. All of these arguments pointed, in Lloyd George’s mind, to the conclusion that it was best to seize the moment, while political alignments still showed some of their wartime fluidity, rather than allow existing arrangements to drift without trying to fashion them into a better instrument for his political ends. Between July 1919 and March 1920 Lloyd George and his associates worked hard to bring the fusion project to fruition. Churchill set the tone on 15 July with a speech to the New Members’ Group at the Criterion Restaurant in London. He revealed in public for the first time the secret of the failed coalition talks of 1910, after which ‘we slid headlong into the most bitter, dangerous political period which has ever happened in this country in modern times … until at last we came to the very verge of civil war’. He contrasted this with the national unity shown during the war, and not surprisingly drew the conclusion that ‘party spirit, party interest, party organisation, must, in these very serious times, be definitely subordinated to national spirit, national interests, and national organisation’. These latter qualities, happily for Churchill’s argument, were those with which he believed the Coalition could claim identity, under its inspirational leader, ‘the most necessary man this country has had for many years’.13 Churchill’s view that only a broadly based ‘national’ government could provide the country with stability was echoed by Lloyd George in a speech at Manchester in December 1919, where he argued that ‘National unity alone can save Britain, can save Europe, can save the world’.14 The extravagance of the rhetoric indicates the extent to which the Coalition’s leaders were influenced by, or sought to play on, fears of apocalyptic social collapse, against which the Coalition was the only possible bulwark. It was in this context that the idea of a ‘National’ or ‘Centre’ party was introduced as the means by which the temporary stability provided by the Coalition could be made permanent. Birkenhead published an article in the Weekly Dispatch in January 1920 making the call for a ‘National Party’ explicit (though the name itself had already been appropriated by a small right-wing splinter group founded by the Unionist MP Sir Henry Page-Croft in the latter stages of the war). Meanwhile, in January and February, he, together with Fisher for the Liberals and Robert Horne for the Conservatives, had begun work on a manifesto for a merged party, which Lloyd George and Bonar Law agreed they would present to their respective groups of followers as the prelude to forming a new party organisation. It was at this point that the carefully choreographed plan broke down. Two meetings – one between Lloyd George and Liberal ministers on 16 March, a second between the prime minister and Coalition Liberal MPs – effectively killed off the fusion scheme. The problems were those of presentation and substance. Liberal advocates of fusion justified their support for it in one of two ways. Addison, for example, stressed the progressive possibilities of a new centrist combination committed to social reform. Churchill, on the other hand, focused

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on the negative need for an anti-socialist alliance. Lloyd George, in his meetings with ministers and MPs, made the mistake of inclining more to the Churchill than the Addison line, perhaps thereby revealing the extent to which he had already psychologically thrown in his lot with the Conservatives but also forgetting the lesson of November 1918, when it had been his forthright defence of Liberal principles which had won the support of his party followers for continuing the Coalition beyond the end of the war. What this approach failed to take into account was the extent to which the Liberal name and Liberal tradition were of fundamental importance to the Coalition Liberal group. Among ministers, Fisher, Montagu and others were unhappy at any suggestion of abandoning the ‘Liberal’ label (this, in Fisher’s case, despite his work in drafting the manifesto for a new party). Not only did they regret the possible loss of their historic Liberal identity in any merged party; they also argued that the formation of a new party could lead to a damaging loss of support from Liberal opinion in the country.15 Indeed, one of the by-products of this whole episode was to reveal the strong preference of many Coalition Liberals for eventual reunion with the Asquithians over merger with the Conservatives. Faced with this strength of opposition Lloyd George had no alternative but to shelve the fusion idea, contenting himself with the face-saving formula that ways of achieving ‘closer cooperation’ between the Coalition parties would be explored. The only partial (albeit unintended) way in which the discussions aided the larger fusionist design was that when they became public they led to greater hostility from the Asquithians to the ‘Coaly Libs’, as was demonstrated when a number of Coalition Liberal MPs were forced to withdraw from the annual NLF meeting at Leamington in May after prolonged heckling. Confronted with the proof of their political isolation from official Liberalism, the Coalition Liberals set about establishing their own Coalition Liberal organisation, which became the National Liberal Party in 1922. The Coalition Liberal rejection of the fusion plan was decisive. It consequently saved the Conservatives from having to repress their own doubts. Bonar Law was a very reluctant fusionist, just as he had been a reluctant coalitionist in 1915. He had spoken to Conservative party workers of a ‘permanently fused party’ in October 1919,16 and he had accepted Lloyd George’s merger strategy in March 1920. Yet, despite his support for the prime minister (expressed to the Liverpool Conservative Archibald Salvidge at the time of the 1918 election as a belief that ‘we must stick to the little man’),17 he was in no hurry to create a single party under Lloyd George’s leadership. He realised that such a move would meet strong opposition within the parliamentary party and that it would be deeply unpopular in some quarters at constituency level, where party activists would have been extremely reluctant to embrace former Liberals at the expense of abandoning their traditional Conservative identity. The possibility of a diehard revolt and a party split could not be ruled out if the fusion plan went ahead. It was thus a relieved Bonar Law who wrote to Balfour after the Liberal meetings to explain that he was ‘not sorry at the turn events have taken’. ‘I do not like the idea of complete fusion if it can be avoided …,’ he went on. ‘I had

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come to think that it was really inevitable if the Coalition were to continue … [but] since the necessity for going slowly in the matter has come from L.G.’s own friends and not from ours I do not regret it.’ He hoped instead for ‘cooperation something on the lines of the Liberal Unionists and Conservatives in the early days’.18 The fusion debate was important for what it revealed and for its consequences. It showed that party feeling remained strong, even within the Coalition. Ironically the Liberal Coalitionists, who as individuals arguably had most to gain from a merger which could have protected their seats and careers, were strongest for its rejection, though had they been in favour it is likely that Conservative opposition would have been more vocal, as the party’s annual conference in 1920 to some extent confirmed. In retrospect, then, perhaps by the spring of 1920 the high tide of coalitionism had peaked and the rejection of fusion was, as Morgan argues, ‘a historic divide’ in the history of the post-war government, after which ‘the Coalition always had an air of impermanence’.19 This may be to go too far. The defeat of fusion did not spell the end of the Coalition. It was possible, as Bonar Law suggested, that a more organic relationship might evolve from continued cooperation. Even fusion itself, in a different form, might eventually take place, as had the merger between Conservatives and Liberal Unionists in 1912. But Morgan is right that the failure of fusion in March 1920 was a defeat for Lloyd George and for his vision of a new, broadly based centre party under his leadership. Lloyd George was forced to identify himself more closely with the Liberal wing of his government and with what became the ‘Lloyd George’ Liberal party in order to mend his fences on the left, and in so doing became more a figure of suspicion to those on the right – more of a party, less of a national, leader. The Coalition could continue, while it served its purpose and while there was no alternative. But after March 1920 it relied on the weaknesses of the party system for its survival, rather than the bolder strategy of reshaping the system in its own image.

Liberals and Labour While the Coalition parties were deliberating their own future relations, there were equally important issues to be decided on behalf of the opposition. The Coalition would probably have won the 1918 election by a large margin in any event, but its task was made easier by the fact that it faced an opposition divided into Liberal and Labour camps. The severity of any future external challenge to Lloyd George’s government was likely to depend not just on the strength of the opposition parties individually but also on the development of relations between them – in particular whether there were any moves to revive the pre-war progressive alliance or whether instead the parties became rivals for the antiCoalition vote. For the Liberals, there was the additional problem of their relations with the Liberal Coalitionists and their bearing on the prospects for any future Liberal reunion. Between 1918 and 1922 events occurred which had a crucial effect on the history of the Liberal party, its relations with Labour and, consequently, the evolution of the whole post-war party system.

102 Coalitionism and party politics, 1918–22 Assessing the strength of the Liberals after the war is made more difficult by the divided state of the party. If all those elected under the ‘Liberal’ label are added together, the party made quite a respectable showing in 1918: 163 MPs and 2.7 million votes, 25.6 per cent of the total poll. This was a substantial drop in support compared with 1910, but it left the Liberals as comfortably the second party in the state, well ahead of Labour in both seats and votes. Nor is this method of calculating Liberal strength altogether fanciful, since at constituency level differences between Asquithians and Lloyd Georgeites were not as clearly marked as they were in the higher echelons of the party. The fact remains, however, that the bulk of Liberal MPs were elected as supporters of the Coalition, with the benefit of the ‘coupon’ and of Conservative organisational and electoral support. The real measure of Liberal strength may therefore well be lower than the raw totals of seats or votes suggests. Certainly if the performance of the Asquithian wing of the party at the 1918 election is analysed more closely, serious causes of concern emerge. The party’s heavy loss of seats had deprived it almost entirely of representation in its former industrial heartlands and in the major cities, confining it mainly to the Celtic fringes of Britain and some scattered rural districts. Another measure of its failure was the party’s inability to win seats against Conservative opposition or in three-way contests. Of the 163 Liberal MPs, only 20 had faced Conservative opponents and no more than 12 had been involved in three-cornered fights. In 144 three-way contests in 1918, Liberals came second in 40 but third in 92. Without the lifebelt of the Coalition the future for the Liberals as a party looked bleak indeed, and as Trevor Wilson has argued ‘their very existence as a political force was in jeopardy’.20 Liberals could, and did, console themselves with the thought that the circumstances of 1918 were exceptional and that the crisis facing their party was temporary rather than terminal. And they had some bona fide grounds for renewed optimism. Although the Asquithian Liberal MPs felt obliged to form themselves into an ‘Independent Liberal’ party in parliament in opposition to the Coalition in February 1919, the hopes of reunion with the Coalition Liberals were kept alive, at least until the unpleasant scenes at the Leamington meeting of the NLF in May 1920. In the meantime, the independent Liberals (or ‘Wee Frees’ as they were dubbed by their erstwhile Coalition colleagues)21 showed signs of electoral and intellectual revival. Three seats – West Leyton, Hull Central and Aberdeen Central – were gained from the Unionists at by-elections in March and April 1919, the result at Hull being an especially spectacular victory in which the Liberal candidate, Commander Kenworthy, overturned a Coalition majority of more than 10,000 votes to take the seat. Electoral progress was accompanied by efforts to rethink aspects of party policy, updating the party’s pre-war New Liberalism to meet the altered conditions of post-war Britain. The lead was taken by a group of Manchester Liberals, among them Ramsay Muir and Ernest Simon, supported by the progressive voice of the Manchester Guardian. From 1921 this group organised the annual Liberal Summer Schools at which party members, academics and intellectuals debated the appli-

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cation of Liberalism to the problems of the day.22 The first fruits of this were seen with the adoption of a new ‘Industrial Programme’ by the NLF in 1921. However, the Liberal revival was neither sustained nor substantial enough to reverse the reality of the party’s decline. After the ‘false dawn’ of March–April 1919 its electoral performance was deeply disappointing. The Liberals suffered widespread losses in the 1919 municipal elections and their record in parliamentary by-elections from mid-1919 onwards was equally dispiriting. Asquith held the Paisley seat at the beginning of 1920, but only two further gains were made in the remainder of the parliament – Louth in June 1920 and Bodmin in February 1922. The party continued to suffer badly in three-way contests. In 24 such by-elections in 1918–22 the Liberals came third in no fewer than 15; their aggregate share of the vote, at 24.8 per cent, was lower than Labour’s 35.1 or the Coalition’s 40.1.23 Equally worrying was the large number of seats the Liberals left uncontested for organisational or financial reasons, thus ceding the anti-Coalition vote to Labour and depriving themselves of the opportunity to attract new voters and activists to the Liberal cause. In the multi-dimensional politics of this period, the Asquithians faced particular problems caused by their relations with the Coalition Liberals and with Labour. Until the Lloyd George Liberals began to establish their own regional federations from mid-1920 onwards there was inevitable friction within local constituency associations between Coalitionists and anti-Coalitionists, particularly over the selection of candidates. The classic example of this occurred in the Spen Valley by-election of 1919, when the Asquithian candidate Sir John Simon was challenged at the polls by a Coalition Liberal, with the result that the seat went to Labour on a split vote. On another occasion, in the Cardiganshire byelection of 1921, rival Liberal candidates fought out a private contest between themselves, with Lloyd George’s candidate beating the Asquithian by 3,000 votes. Internecine war of this sort was inevitably damaging to Liberal unity and Liberal morale. It also prevented either Liberal faction from claiming undisputed right to the Liberal name and tradition, and was doubly confusing for potential voters at a time when electoral loyalties were in a state of flux. Independent Liberal attempts to build bridges to Labour, and to re-create some form of progressive alliance, were similarly unsuccessful. Arthur Henderson accepted Liberal support at the Widnes by-election of 1919, but the Labour party did not reciprocate by withdrawing in the Liberals’ favour when a seat fell vacant in the nearby middle-class constituency of Rusholme. Only at Hull Central did Labour openly back the Liberal Commander Kenworthy (a fact which helped to explain the 32.9 per cent anti-government swing in the Liberals’ favour), and even this gesture was subsequently shown to be less altruistic than it seemed when Kenworthy eventually became a Labour MP. The problems in its relations with other parties were only part of the broader crisis of direction and strategy that independent Liberalism faced after the debacle of 1918. There were pockets of new thinking, but the party as a whole seemed to be too shell-shocked by the scale of its defeat to respond creatively to the changing political situation. Asquith came in for particular criticism for his

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inertia and for being stuck in the past. In truth, though, this lack of dynamism was characteristic of most of the surviving pre-war leadership. Other leaders retired from politics or were forced to pursue alternative careers following electoral rejection. Yet it was not just that the party’s leaders were too patrician or preoccupied to make contact with the new voters. A more basic difficulty was trying to decide what the party stood for and where it should be located on the left – right spectrum of post-war politics. Increasingly this resolved itself into the question of whether to be pro-or anti-Labour, a choice that emphasised how marginal Liberalism was in danger of becoming to the major issues of political debate. Even then, there were almost as many answers as there were Liberals. The Manchester Liberals and some MPs like Wedgwood Benn favoured radical social and industrial policies and were willing to consider measures like the nationalisation of the railways and the mines; others, like the parliamentary chairman Sir Donald Maclean or Sir John Simon, took a more Gladstonian stance and wanted to prioritise cutting public expenditure. These tensions between ‘old’ Liberalism and ‘New’ had been present in the Edwardian era, but after 1918 they looked increasingly like indecisiveness or irrelevance. The same ambivalence characterised electoral strategy. The party attempted to cooperate with Labour at parliamentary by-elections, yet it also formed anti-socialist pacts with the Conservatives for municipal elections in cities like Sheffield, Bristol, Derby and Wolverhampton. In earlier days this flexibility had been a strength, enabling the Liberals to maximise their appeal in social and geographical terms; by the early 1920s it threatened to leave them sidelined, without a coherent identity or base of support. The Labour party, by contrast, had a more clearly defined identity as the party of the organised, industrial working class. What was as yet unclear was whether it had the potential to make the transition from being a sectional pressure group to a more broadly based national political party capable of challenging the Coalition or replacing the Liberals as the major party of the centre-left. The 1918 election provided only limited evidence on which to base a long-term judgement. The party’s expansion and reorganisation during the war (together with the 1918 Reform Act’s provision for state payment of returning officers’ expenses) enabled it to field 361 candidates and thus to increase its share of the total vote to 20.8 per cent (compared to its previous highest of 7 per cent for 78 candidates in January 1910). Yet its number of MPs increase only slightly, to 57 (plus four independents), and these almost all came from the urban and industrial areas where the party had already been strong before 1914. A majority of the parliamentary party were trade unionists, and 25 of them were miners – replicating a tradition of parliamentary representation for the mining unions that went back to the Lib-Labism of the 1870s and 1880s. It is true that Labour came second to Coalition candidates in a further 79 seats, pushing the Liberals into third place and providing some optimism about the prospects of future growth. Also, as has been acknowledged, the circumstances of the 1918 contest were unique, and Labour was trying to establish itself as a new party in opposition to an overwhelmingly popular government when many of its own leaders were on the defensive because of their anti-war views. It was not easy to impro-

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vise an electoral machine to take on the might of the Coalition and its associated supporters in the national press. Even so, the 1918 result represented a disappointing return, and failed to give substance to the more lurid fears of the party’s Coalition opponents about the scale of Labour success. It was perhaps significant that Labour’s popular vote of 2.2 million was only a third as large as the total trade-union membership in 1918, suggesting that even many rank-and-file members of the labour movement chose to vote for non-Labour candidates. There were signs of further growth between 1918 and 1922, but again these have to be interpreted with caution. The party gained a total of fourteen seats at by-elections, from Bothwell in Lanarkshire in July 1919 to Pontypridd in South Wales in July 1922. These gains came at the expense both of Coalition Liberal and Coalition Conservative candidates and in some cases – as at Southwark in December 1921, where there was an anti-government swing of 39.7 per cent – showed a big shift of opinion since the general election. However, Labour also suffered setbacks. Ramsay MacDonald, still unpopular because of his criticism of the war, was defeated at Woolwich East in March 1921 by a Unionist. More generally, it was uncertain how firm a platform by-election victories would provide for a broader national campaign. The evidence of local-election results suggested some volatility in levels of Labour support. The party made widespread gains in the 1919 municipal elections. In the London boroughs alone Labour representation increased from 48 to 573 seats and Labour gained control of 12 of the 28 London boroughs. But in local elections in 1920 and 1921 the party did less well. Similarly, party membership fluctuated rather than showing an uninterrupted rise. By 1920 there were 433 local Labour parties and the party’s affiliated membership was 4.5 million, most of it based on the trade unions. Between 1920 and 1922, on the other hand, although the number of local branches increased to 527, party membership fell to 3.3 million. This was largely because of the contraction of the unions during the post-war slump, although the socialist societies (including the ILP) also saw their membership decline from a peak of 52,700 in 1918 to 31,760 in 1922.24 Many local branches had only a precarious paper existence in any case, which loss of affiliation income made it even more difficult to turn into a properly staffed permanent organisation.25 In all these respects, Labour was still some way from being a robustly structured, genuinely national political party. The political-industrial context of the time also created problems as well as opportunities for a political party that was part of a wider labour movement. Labour benefited electorally from dissatisfaction with the Coalition’s economic and industrial policies. It was able to make common cause with the unions over issues such as the nationalisation of the coal mines, which was the theme of a joint Labour party–TUC ‘Mines for the Nation’ campaign. The rise in unemployment, from only 287,000 in June 1920 to 2,171,000 by June 1921, provided a further reservoir of discontent on which Labour could draw, as it had in its ‘Right to Work’ agitation before 1914. But the political benefits of this situation were far from automatic. Labour’s close identification with the unions during a period of widespread and sometimes violent industrial unrest made it more

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difficult to attract middle-class and non-union working-class support. At the same time, though, Labour’s lack of clear economic policies and the absence of the immediate prospect of serious parliamentary influence, let alone real political power, led many on the trade-union wing of the movement to prioritise industrial rather than electoral activity. In 1921 the TUC reorganised its Parliamentary Committee as a ‘General Council’, a move which symbolised the growing strength of the unions and their confidence in the ability of union power to win real gains for the workers. In 1920 the formation of ‘Councils of Action’ to prevent military aid being sent to the Poles in their war against the Soviet Union had apparently shown the utility of the strike weapon (used by dock workers who refused to load the cargo ship the Jolly George with arms) in the political as well as the industrial field. Another sign that Labour’s parliamentarism was not universally accepted was the foundation of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which provided a revolutionary alternative to orthodox Labour politics throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The Labour party, then, was still in an uncertain and transitional phase. Despite its electoral growth, it was able to exercise less direct influence on government policy in 1918–22 than it had as part of the progressive alliance with the Liberals before 1914. It lacked clear leadership or a strategy for obtaining power. Its close relations with the unions were a source of weakness as much as strength. That said, real progress was being made. Labour had established itself as an independent political party, free from electoral pacts. Although as yet confined to its industrial heartlands, mainly in the mining districts, it at least possessed a coherent social and geographical base which, for example, was more dependable than anything on which the Asquithian Liberals could rely. The electoral weakness of the Coalition Liberals, who had retained large numbers of industrial constituencies in the unique circumstances of 1918, provided Labour with realistic potential for growth even if it had to rely solely on its heartland areas, though a steady trickle of former Liberal recruits attracted by Labour’s social and international policies held out the possibility of more broadly based expansion. What remained true, however, even by 1922, was that the Liberals and Labour were competing for the anti-Coalition vote without much prospect of dislodging the Coalition itself. Labour was emerging as the main anti-Coalition party, but as yet lacked the critical mass necessary to defeat the government at the polls. For all the important developments taking place affecting the opposition parties, it was thus still the future of the Coalition that held the key to the future of the party system.

The downfall of the Coalition, 1921–2 For those who subscribe to the Disraelian maxim that ‘England does not love coalitions’ there is nothing surprising about the eventual collapse of Lloyd George’s government. Since the failure of the fusion plan in 1920 the Coalition seemed to be living on borrowed time, its demise merely a formality. Yet it is worth recalling that Disraeli’s remark was made in defiant but unavailing opposi-

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tion to the Aberdeen coalition of 1852, a Whig–Peelite combination which successfully governed Britain for most of the next two decades, becoming the parliamentary basis of Gladstone’s Liberal party. In more recent history, the Conservative–Liberal Unionist partnership of Salisbury, Hartington and Chamberlain had sustained a government for the best part of another twenty years – ten of them as a formal coalition – and led to the formation of the Unionist party which was the dominant element in Lloyd George’s government of 1918–22. Given these precedents, together with the continuing divided state of the opposition and the self-interest of a Coalition Liberal party cut off from its natural roots and a Conservative party which had not won a parliamentary majority without pact or coalition since 1874, it was no foregone conclusion that the Lloyd George Coalition would succumb to an inevitable fatal flaw. Despite a bad run of by-election losses, it did not suffer parliamentary or electoral defeat. Its downfall was a more complex process, a combination of underlying causes and short-term contingencies in which policy issues, party politics and the personalities of individual politicians all played a part. Nor should it be forgotten that for the first two years of its life the peacetime Coalition was a relatively successful and harmonious body. Abroad, the problems of the peace settlement were safely negotiated and the ill-judged anti-Bolshevik intervention in the Russian civil war brought to an end. The massive task of demobilisation was completed without undue friction and at least until the middle of 1920 the country enjoyed the prosperity associated with a post-war economic boom. Above all, a steady stream of constructive social legislation gave effect to the government’s Reconstruction programme in a spate of reform which one historian has compared favourably with the New Liberal welfare measures of the Edwardian period.26 A Ministry of Health was established in 1919 and the Housing and Town Planning Act of the same year provided government subsidies for house-building in part fulfilment of Lloyd George’s ‘homes for heroes’ pledge. Old-age pensions were increased to 10 shillings a week to take into account the rise in the cost of living, while the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1920 extended the benefits of the pre-war national insurance scheme to a further 12 million workers. In all these ways the Coalition seemed to be living up to its ideal of a ‘national’ government and acting in accordance with the promises made to voters in 1918. However, the good times of 1919–20 did not last. This was literally so in the field of economic and social policy, where the onset of depression led to rapidly rising unemployment by late 1920 with which the Insurance Act was unable to cope. The government’s deflationary policies and downward pressure on wages did nothing to alleviate hardship whose effects were all the more traumatic because of the suddenness of the slump. The political impact of the depression on the Coalition was equally severe. One consequence was to open up a debate within the government and outside about levels of public spending and taxation. In January 1921 the newspaper owner Lord Rothermere founded an ‘Anti-Waste League’ to campaign for cuts in government expenditure. ‘Anti-Waste’ candidates scored dramatic by-election victories at Dover in January 1921 and at

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Westminster and Hertford in June. The Anti-Waste cry was taken up by Conservative MPs, especially those on the party’s diehard wing, and became too loud for the government to ignore. In August 1921 the Geddes Committee was appointed to recommend reductions in the budget, leading to the wielding of the ‘Geddes axe’ on a range of departments in February 1922. Even before the axe fell, there had been casualties among the government’s social programmes, particularly those presided over by Addison at the Ministry of Health, which included housing within its area of responsibility. Practical difficulties with the implementation of the housing plan had already led to Addison’s removal from the Health Ministry in March 1921, and in July he resigned from the government altogether, bitterly disappointed at the lack of support he felt he had received from Lloyd George. Addison’s departure was symbolic of the abandonment of the Reconstruction programme in which Liberal supporters of the Coalition in particular had placed such high hopes, and his defection to the opposition – first to the Asquithians and then to Labour – was a serious blow to the Coalition’s credibility as a government of progressive social reform.27 Another area in which internal differences between government supporters occurred was that of foreign and imperial policy. There were disagreements over some facets of the peace settlement and its consequences, and over the policies to be adopted towards Soviet Russia, Germany and the Middle East.28 India caused controversy between the Coalition’s Conservative and Liberal wings. There was some Conservative opposition to the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms of 1919, which cautiously extended the involvement of Indians in the administration of their country. Further discord resulted from the refusal of sections of the Conservative party to condemn the actions of General Dyer, the commander of the troops responsible for the Amritsar massacre in which over 300 Indian demonstrators were killed in April 1919. In the Amritsar debate in the Commons, 122 Conservative MPs opposed Dyer’s dismissal, and Conservative pressure was eventually a contributing factor in forcing the resignation of the Liberal Montagu from his position as Secretary of State. Ireland similarly aroused strong feelings among Conservative diehards, provoking a potentially serious revolt against government policy in 1921. The background to this was Lloyd George’s attempt to bring to an end the Irish ‘war of independence’. The Government of Ireland Act of 1920 had provided for the establishment of separate Home Rule parliaments in Belfast and Dublin, linked to a ‘Council of Ireland’ drawn from both North and South. This solution had been rejected by Sinn Fein and the IRA, and neither the 1920 Act nor an increasingly brutal campaign of military reprisals by British forces had suppressed what to Unionists was the Irish rebellion. Accordingly, in the summer of 1921, Lloyd George agreed a truce with Sinn Fein and entered into negotiations for what became the Anglo-Irish Treaty, keeping Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom but setting up a twenty-six county Irish Free State as a separate entity with dominion status under the British Crown. While the negotiations were taking place, however, Conservative backbenchers, rallied by the diehard leader, Lord Salisbury, and receiving encouragement from Bonar Law,

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organised to prevent what they feared would be a ‘sell-out’ of Irish Unionists worse than anything contemplated by the Liberals before 1914. Only when Austen Chamberlain (who succeeded Bonar Law as Conservative leader in March 1921) made a forceful speech at the annual conference of the National Union at Liverpool in November 1921, pledging the government to safeguard the position of Ulster and provide guarantees for southern Unionists, was the immediate sting taken out of the revolt.29 But the Anglo-Irish Treaty was not popular with the Conservative right, and the outbreak of the Irish civil war and events such as the IRA’s assassination of the Ulster Unionist MP Sir Henry Wilson on the steps of his London home in June 1922 kept alive the Irish question as a source of discord in Coalition ranks. A third area of difficulty, which also had political implications for the Coalition, was the labour question. Industrial relations were in a highly disturbed state: in 1919 1,352 stoppages caused the loss of 34.9 million working days; in 1920 26.5 million days were lost in 1,607 stoppages. Major industries like engineering, the railways and the coal mines were badly affected, initially as workers sought wage increases and shorter hours to take advantage of post-war prosperity, then later as they attempted to protect themselves from the threat of wage cuts and unemployment. The Coalition employed a variety of strategies to deal with the problem.30 There were some high-profile and innovative measures, including the establishment of the National Industrial Conference in February 1919 to bring together representatives of employers, unions and government in an early form of ‘corporatism’; the setting up of the so-called ‘Whitley Councils’ (forty-one of which had been formed by 1919) to provide a permanent framework for negotiation in selected industries; and the introduction of an Industrial Court as a forum for resolving disputes about workers’ rights. These reforms were all consistent with the government’s stated intention of promoting a new spirit of cooperation and harmony in industrial relations, so perpetuating the wartime industrial truce. In practice they were less effective than more familiar methods of coercion and ad hoc intervention. Troops were deployed on Clydeside during the unrest of 1919. In 1920 an Emergency Powers Act was passed to give ministers greater authority to deal with industrial disputes and their consequences. In the coal industry in particular all of Lloyd George’s old troubleshooting skills were employed to outwit the unions and manage a succession of crises. In 1919 the appointment of the Sankey Commision to enquire into the future of the industry averted a coal strike. In 1920 a six-month wage subsidy and the promise of a national wages board terminated another dispute. In 1921, after the mines had been returned to private control and the owners had locked out workers who refused to accept wage cuts, the refusal of the railwaymen and transport workers to take sympathetic action (on what became known in the labour movement as ‘Black Friday’) eventually forced the miners to accept the owners’ terms and could be seen as another victory for the government’s strategy. From the political point of view, however, the success or failure of particular measures is only half the story. A plausible case can be made for arguing that the

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Coalition coped as well as any government could have done with the disturbed industrial conditions of 1919–21; and, moreover, that by the end of 1921 levels of industrial unrest were falling and the worst of the post-war crisis was over. But politically this brought no benefits to the government, for two main reasons. One was that the Coalition’s handling of industrial relations branded it in the eyes of the labour movement as an ‘employers” government. Lloyd George’s pre-war reputation as the ‘friend of labour’ was finally destroyed by his cynical manipulation of the disputes in the coal industry and his refusal to back the Sankey Commission’s recommendation in favour of nationalisation of the mines. This in turn further undermined the electoral position of the Coalition Liberals in areas like South Wales, where they were heavily dependent on working-class voters, and accelerated the drift of the labour movement away from Liberalism which had already set in before the First World War. In a second way, the Coalition was a victim of its success. A large part of its raison d’être had been to resist the ‘challenge of Labour’. On the industrial front at least by the end of 1921 this challenge seemed to have been met and defeated. Britain had avoided the extremes of ‘Bolshevism’ and revolution which the more alarmist reports to the cabinet committee on industrial unrest had predicted. Labour’s political challenge remained, but even that seemed less threatening than it had in the more uncertain atmosphere of 1918 and 1919. In any case, for Conservatives, one of the principal attractions of Lloyd George and his Coalition Liberals as allies had been their supposedly greater appeal to workingclass and labour voters. If, as by-election results suggested, this particular magic had faded, what further function did the Coalition serve? This was increasingly the question in some Conservative minds, and one illustration of the way in which, paradoxically, the achievement by the Coalition of one of its major aims was at the same time a contributory factor to its eventual downfall. By late 1921, then, the future of the Coalition was in serious doubt. Differences had opened up between its Liberal and Conservative wings over a range of issues: social reform, economic policy, Ireland and India. To these could be added revived disagreement over the question of tariffs versus free trade which was stirred by the mildly protectionist Safeguarding of Industries Act of 1921 and the opposition of Tory MPs from rural constituencies to the government’s agricultural policy, in particular plans to repeal the guaranteed prices to farmers contained in the 1920 Agriculture Act. While in each case (except the last) a ‘centrist’ compromise was arrived at, as the record of the government as a whole came under attack it was no longer clear whether centrism would be enough to ensure its survival. The resignation of its remaining Labour ministers was more a propaganda than an electoral blow, given the weakness of the NDP, but developments on the left and right of the Coalition suggested that the breadth of the centre was being dangerously eroded. The Coalition Liberals were a declining force. They were weakened in parliamentary terms by the loss of Addison and in morale by the abandonment or cutting back of the government’s social programmes. Many of them were uncomfortable about the illiberal policy of repression and reprisal in Ireland, which Asquith had tellingly

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condemned from the opposition benches. The party’s by-election results were poor and the efforts to establish a separate organisation in the constituencies largely a failure. Even Conservative organisers realised that the weakness of their Liberal allies was a serious obstacle to the Coalition’s survival, if it did not invalidate its purpose altogether. At the other extreme were the Conservative diehards, an increasingly wellorganised group in parliament whose anti-Coalition posture was winning more and more support among MPs and in the constituencies and the party organisation. The size of the anti-government vote in the Amritsar debate and of the potential revolt over the Anglo-Irish Treaty showed the extent of right-wing dissatisfaction with Coalition policies and with the Coalition per se. It was also becoming more difficult for party leaders to hold this dissatisfaction in check. Crucial here was the retirement from the government in March 1921, on grounds of ill health, of Bonar Law, and his replacement as Conservative leader by Austen Chamberlain. Law had established a firm hold of authority on the party, yet he was also, while in office, a loyal associate of Lloyd George, as his reluctant willingness to support the latter over fusion in 1920 proved. Chamberlain had no such grip on the affection or loyalty of his followers. Although initially acceptable to the party’s right because of his diehard past and his track record as a tariff reformer, his reinvention of himself as ‘an ideological coalitionist’31 and almost an acolyte of Lloyd George was out of step with the prevailing trend of Conservative politics in the latter phase of the Coalition’s life. He was able to bring his party dramatically to heel over the Irish negotiations in 1921, but this was a trick that could not be repeated too often and may even have encouraged Chamberlain to flout the instincts of his party even more brazenly. With the diehard revolt far from dead, and Bonar Law, his health partly restored, a looming presence in the background, this was a recipe for a further crisis in the politics of the Conservative party, and therefore of the Coalition as well. The issue that was bound to bring matters to a head was the timing and planning of the next general election. In December 1921 the Coalition’s leaders discussed the possibility of an early election. Birkenhead was strongly in favour, believing that they should capitalise on the defeat of diehard opposition to the Irish settlement by bouncing the Conservative party into an election on a coalition basis. For the Liberals, McCurdy, the Coalition Liberal whip, endorsed the plan as being the best way to ensure his party’s electoral survival. When Austen Chamberlain agreed to take soundings in the Conservative party, however, he ran up against a wall of opposition. The party chiefs, including his brother Neville who was closely in touch with Unionist opinion in the Midlands, advised him that the party’s grass roots would resent being forced into a snap election in alliance with the Liberals. The party chairman, Sir George Younger, went a stage further. He sent a letter to constituency parties in effect inviting them to express their hostility to an election, at the same time encouraging a similarly negative reaction from the Conservative press. The results of this carefully orchestrated demonstration of party opinion were not surprising: the party’s

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chief agent warned that an election would ‘split the Unionist party from top to toe’.32 Austen Chamberlain could only report to Lloyd George that the election plan would have to be dropped, which it was. Even Chamberlain himself seems not to have shared the enthusiasm for example of Birkenhead or McCurdy and may have had doubts about provoking the party so soon after the November meeting of the National Union. What the ‘election kite’ episode revealed was the groundswell of opposition in the Conservative party not just to an early election but to any election that was not held on a party basis. If this was not quite the same as rejecting the continuance of the Coalition on any terms, it was certainly a rejection of the Coalition in its existing form. Here Chamberlain, and other Conservative ministers like Balfour and Birkenhead, were clearly out of touch with the mass of their party. Chamberlain believed that the Coalition still had an important part to play in British politics, and that Lloyd George should continue as leader. In Chamberlain’s eyes the greatest danger was socialism, and there was a better chance of resisting socialism and preventing a further Labour advance if the Coalition remained in being as a rallying point for the anti-socialist forces. His opponents in the party challenged this view. To their mind, it was possible that the immediate danger of socialism had been exaggerated. In any case, the Coalition had served its purpose as an anti-Labour combination. Coalition Liberalism was in decline; far better for the Conservative party to stand forward unfettered by pacts or compromises and appeal to non-socialist forces to gather in the Conservative camp. This was partly a tactical argument, but it was also one of principle. The critics of the Coalition in the Conservative party believed firmly in preserving their party as an independent entity in order to promote Conservative policies and Conservative ideas. By the summer of 1922 this was the prevailing view at all levels of the party organisation, save in the inner circles of the party leadership. Even Conservative junior ministers, in a meeting with Chamberlain on 20 July, stressed the threat to party unity which the continuance of the Coalition presented, and that at the very least there needed to be a change at the top to enable a Conservative prime minister to give a more Conservative appearance to the administration. Younger repeated this as the party’s demand in September, while Lord Derby warned Chamberlain that the mood in the party had swung decisively against the Coalition and the chief whip, Sir Leslie Wilson, admitted that at least 180 constituencies were prepared to run independent Conservative candidates at the next election rather than support Coalition nominees.33 The revolt against the Coalition was even more emphatically a revolt against its prime minister. Lloyd George had been accepted by rank-and-file Conservatives as a necessary evil during the war and in 1918. But few other than those who worked closely with him in cabinet regarded him with any more positive feelings, and as Derby reported to Chamberlain in September 1922 the prime minister was ‘looked on with the greatest distrust by the Conservative party as a whole’.34 This distrust had many causes. Least important was Lloyd George’s Liberal past; more so was the fact that he was seen as being danger-

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ously devoid of principle, at least in any way that accorded with Conservative views. The policies with which he was associated were unpopular with large sections of the Conservative party; they also disliked his personality and his methods. In June 1922 the publication of the latest Honours list, which contained some questionable figures nominated, it was said, for cash considerations, fanned the flames of an ‘honours scandal’ which was felt to be only too symptomatic of what a later generation might have described as the sleazy style of Lloyd Georgian government. Petty racism was employed against the ‘little Welshman’ and the breakdown of Lloyd George’s relations with the Northcliffe press ensured that the newspapers – hitherto his staunchest supporters – exploited and encouraged his isolation and weakness. Doubts began to arise, too, over Lloyd George’s political judgement, especially in his handling of foreign affairs. The Cannes and Genoa conferences of 1922 were widely regarded as failures.35 Then, in the summer, there was the issue of Lloyd George’s support for the Greeks against the Turks in the ‘Chanak’ affair – a policy in which Lloyd George may have been following an historically impeccable Liberal policy (not necessarily a recommendation for Conservatives) but was risking a war against Turkey for which Britain was wholly unprepared and in which she would have had few allies and little or no international support. The Turkish crisis only served to increase the political and personal isolation of the prime minister in the last days of his government and added another powerful weapon to the armoury of arguments which could be deployed by his critics in the Conservative ranks. The fate of the Coalition was finally decided in the early autumn of 1922. On 17 September Lloyd George met the leading coalitionists – Chamberlain, Birkenhead, Churchill and Horne – to discuss electoral strategy. Although Chamberlain had ample evidence that his party would not willingly continue to serve under Lloyd George, the assembled ministers agreed on a general election to be held before the Conservative National Union met in November. If this was a last, desperate ploy to outwit or forestall the Coalition’s opponents it failed. Younger told Chamberlain that the party must be given the chance to express its views on the future of the Coalition, and a series of meetings in early October further impressed on Chamberlain the real danger of a party split if he maintained his support for Lloyd George. The hitherto low-profile President of the Board of Trade, Stanley Baldwin, was the first cabinet minister to indicate that he would not fight an election under Lloyd George’s leadership. He was joined by Curzon and the Minister of Agriculture, Griffith-Boscawen, who were both prepared to resign rather than accept a Coalition election.36 Chamberlain attempted to stem the tide of defeatism with a strong defence of the Coalition in a speech at Birmingham on 13 October, but three days later Conservative junior ministers, in a meeting at the Metropole Hotel, reiterated their demand that the Unionist party should fight the election as an independent party and that in the event of the Unionists being the largest party in parliament after the election ‘the leader of the Unionist Party shall be prepared to accept the responsibility of forming a government’.37 Despite its careful phrasing, the resolution which

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accompanied this ‘under secretaries’ revolt’ was a clear challenge to Austen Chamberlain’s strategy, and thus to his leadership of the party, and it was in a final effort to extinguish the flames of revolt that he summoned his MPs to the Carlton Club on 19 October. Chamberlain’s handling of the crucial meeting was maladroit in the extreme. In one sense he was unlucky. He delayed the meeting until the 19th in the expectation of a Labour victory in the Newport by-election, which he believed would strengthen his case for continuing the Coalition, only to find that it was the Conservative candidate who was victorious.38 But even then he did not play his remaining cards very well. He opened the meeting with a stiff, lecture-like speech, which offered little more than a restatement of the case for the Coalition and a demand for loyalty to the leadership. There was no attempt to conciliate MPs or to show understanding of their concerns, nor even a prepared resolution on which the meeting could vote. The way was therefore left open for the Coalition’s critics to take control. Baldwin damningly denounced Lloyd George as a ‘dynamic force’ who threatened to ‘smash’ the Conservative party just as he had smashed the Liberals. Even more effective, perhaps, was an intervention from Bonar Law, the party’s former leader and a credible alternative to Chamberlain if the party wanted a change of course, whose presence at the Carlton Club signified that he was willing to resume the leadership should the need arise. In a dignified speech he recognised Lloyd George’s services to the nation but likewise argued that the time had come for the Conservatives to reclaim their independence. This was the view summed up in the motion then proposed by two backbench MPs Ernest Pretyman and George Lane Fox that the Conservative party should ‘fight the election as an independent party with its own leader and its own programme’. The motion was passed by 187 votes to 88 and Chamberlain, viewing it as a vote of censure on his leadership, withdrew almost immediately from the fray. The result of the vote was reported to Lloyd George, waiting in Downing Street, who had been prepared for the verdict by foreknowledge that Bonar Law would attend the meeting and what this meant for its likely outcome.39 His premiership ended with his resignation and the replacement of the Coalition by a caretaker Conservative government under Bonar Law. The Coalition’s demise was triggered by the Carlton Club meeting, but the meeting, as has been seen, was the product of longer-term tensions within the Conservative party and across the Coalition as a whole. It is possible that, even at this late stage, a more conciliatory response from Chamberlain could have saved the Coalition: it is clear that the Carlton Club majority were voting in favour of an independent Conservative party fighting the election, but the resolution that was passed left open the possibility of continuing cooperation with the Coalition Liberals, and there was no explicit campaign against Chamberlain himself. If he had accepted the resolution, or been willing to press his position as leader of the majority party to take over the premiership from Lloyd George, the Coalition, or at least a coalition, might have survived. Nevertheless, there was more at issue than Chamberlain’s highly developed sense of personal honour. Conservatives

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might have accepted continued cooperation with the Liberals, but there was widespread mistrust and dislike of Lloyd George. One factor in the junior ministers’ revolt was their frustration at the disproportionate share of appointments, especially at cabinet level, which the Coalition Liberals enjoyed. Bonar Law and Baldwin spoke for a more general sense among Conservative parliamentarians, and Conservatives in the country, that the time had come to reclaim the inheritance of their party before the party was either irrevocably split into pro and anti-Lloyd George factions, or simply absorbed into a less clearly defined political organisation under Lloyd George and Chamberlain, a former Liberal and a former Liberal Unionist. Even in October 1922, perhaps, the Coalition could have been saved, but to have satisfied the Conservative critics of Lloyd George’s leadership it would have had to have been a very different animal, and a party-based election and the displacement of Lloyd George from the premiership seemed to be the non-negotiable minimum that the majority of Conservatives would accept. What then was the impact of the Coalition on the party system and how should its record be assessed? The government, as a government, was not a bad one. It had a number of policy achievements to its credit: it successfully managed the transition from war to peace and it steered a careful middle course between the extremes of revolution and reaction as its leaders promised. Britain’s experience in these years compared favourably with that of most other European states which had been involved in the war, and this owed much to the efforts of Lloyd George and his colleagues. The Coalition’s failure, notwithstanding the disappointments of its last two years, was a failure of politics rather than policies, and as such may have been inescapable given its origins. The attempt to create a genuine ‘national’ government, above party, was undermined by the failure to prevent Labour’s withdrawal from the Coalition in 1918 or to negotiate the return of the Asquithian Liberals. Although these parties were overwhelmed by the Lloyd George landslide of 1918, their existence signalled a partial return to party politics and, in the case of Labour, the existence of an organised national force which might eventually prove the Coalition’s nemesis. Having failed to construct an all-inclusive coalition, Lloyd George and his associates fell back on the idea of a ‘National’ party, which could claim the centre ground and isolate the extremes. The problem with this was not only that the rhetoric of extremism did not always accord with the reality, but that the creation of a new party was itself a highly controversial step. It seemed to be the antithesis of the spirit of coalitionism, which sought to minimise the role of party in politics; but it also reawakened traditional party loyalties within the Coalition in a way that ultimately proved fatal. It was significant that the idea of fusion was first rejected by the Liberals, although they had most in the short term to gain from it. But it was the revival of Conservatism that spelt the end of the coalition experiment. This was in part a ‘diehard revolt’, but the ‘independence movement’ of 1922 went far beyond the diehard ranks, for reasons which have already been discussed.40 The continuance of the Coalition after 1918 had already split the Liberal party; there was a mounting determination that it should not be allowed to split the Conservative party as well.

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The downfall of the Coalition can thus be seen as a defeat for ‘coalitionism’ and the reassertion of a more conventional form of party politics. It was also a very personal rejection of Lloyd George, the Coalition’s leader. Yet the events of October 1922 did not end Lloyd George’s influence on British politics, any more than they resolved the continuing crisis of the party system to which the Coalition had attempted to provide a solution. The reality was that the Conservative party had split, at least temporarily, in circumstances frighteningly reminiscent of 1846 – most of its coalitionist leaders had gone one way, while the ‘brute votes’ of the backbenchers had followed Baldwin and Bonar Law. How this situation would develop could not easily be foreseen. Equally, it was unclear what alternative combinations might emerge, or whether any party or grouping of parties could provide the stability or leadership that the Coalition had represented. The Liberals remained divided, Labour was still a long way short of being a credible governing party. The Lloyd George Coalition was dead, and its eponymous leader out of office. Could a viable party system be remade without them?

5

Three-party politics, 1922–4

The twenty-five months from October 1922 to October 1924 were some of the most confused and disturbed in British political history, with three general elections, three changes of government and four of prime minister. They were also crucial in the emergence of the outlines of a new party system from the ruins of the Coalition. The brief period divides into two main phases. In the first, from October 1922 to December 1923, the Conservative government which Bonar Law formed after the fall of the Coalition won a majority at the 1922 general election, taking office with the opposition divided between an enlarged Labour party and two separate Liberal fragments, headed by Asquith and Lloyd George. Bonar Law was forced to retire from the premiership in May 1923 because of ill health and was succeeded by the for-some-unlikely figure of Stanley Baldwin, whose decision to call a further general election in November 1923 in pursuit of a mandate for protection ended the life of the first Conservative government of the twentieth century and plunged politics into crisis once more. The December election, which marks the start of the second phase, cost the Conservatives their majority and enabled Labour and the Liberals to gain ground at the Tories’ expense, both parties benefiting from their identification with Free Trade. When Baldwin resigned, having been defeated in the Commons, the Conservatives were replaced in January 1924 by the first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald, a minority administration which held office with the tacit acceptance of the other parties. The Labour government lasted only nine months and came to an end amid some controversy, but its short existence consolidated Labour’s position as the main alternative to the Conservatives and exposed the Liberals to external pressures and internal conflict. The election of 1924, which saw Labour’s defeat and the return of the Conservatives to power, also witnessed what appeared to be the final collapse of the Liberal party, its uncertain future resting in the hands of a mere forty MPs. The sequence of events that brought about this outcome needs to be examined with some care, as do the underlying processes of realignment which were influencing the evolution of the party system in the 1920s. How far were the developments that occurred the inevitable product of broad forces of social and political change, how far the result of the calculations and miscalculations of politicians themselves?

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Bonar Law and Baldwin Bonar Law came to the premiership late in life, unexpectedly, and perhaps with some reluctance.1 He was certainly fully conscious of the difficulties of his position. Having been instrumental in the overthrow of his predecessor, he took the precaution of securing the ratification of his own resumption of the leadership at a party meeting before accepting the King’s commission to form a government. Even then, his problems were far from over. The Chamberlainite ex-ministers, though denying any wish to indulge in ‘fractious opposition’, made it clear that they would not serve in the new administration, leaving Bonar Law with what Churchill unkindly described as ‘a government of the second eleven’ and Birkenhead more tartly derided as the ‘second class brains’. Law himself privately bemoaned the prospect of attempting ‘to rule the country with the sort of people that will be left to make up the Cabinet’ after the Carlton Club vote.2 In fact the cupboard was not quite as bare as he implied. The new ministers included figures who had served under Lloyd George, including Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, Baldwin, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Lord Derby, the new Secretary for War. Among those elevated to cabinet status were the former under-secretaries Edward Wood (later Lord Halifax) at the Board of Education, Leo Amery at the Admiralty and Lloyd-Graeme at the Board of Trade. Neville Chamberlain became Postmaster General.3 As John Ramsden has said, these men may have lacked ‘brilliance’, but they were not without talent, and they provided the backbone of Conservative governments throughout the inter-war period. However, they were in many cases comparatively unknown and untried individuals, and it was uncertain how effective they would be or whether they could exercise an electoral appeal sufficient to offset the lure of Lloyd George and the other Coalition stars, or withstand the attacks of the Liberal and Labour opposition. The electoral aspect of this question was uppermost, since almost Bonar Law’s first act as prime minister was to announce a dissolution of parliament on 26 October and a general election for 15 November. The decision was motivated by his desire to secure as early a mandate as possible for the new government, but it took the party by surprise and was by no means guaranteed to produce a clear-cut or favourable outcome. The election campaign itself was in many ways a curious affair. The major parties all had their manifestoes and programmes. Bonar Law emphasised the need for a period of ‘tranquillity’ and stable government. The Labour and Liberal parties promised variations on the themes of international peace and social reform, augmented in Labour’s case by a proposal to nationalise the railways and the mines and for the Liberals by the inclusion of proportional representation on the legislative agenda. Yet in reality the detail of these programmes was less important than the fact that all the parties were striving to distance themselves from the Coalition and its works. This was easier for Labour and the Asquithians, who had been opposing the Coalition for the past four years. It posed more of a problem for the Conservatives, who, although they had now broken with the Coalition, had nevertheless been its parliamentary

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mainstay for six years, who had responsibility for some of its unpopular policies (for example, the repeal of the 1920 Agriculture Act) and who not only still had prominent coalitionists in their own ranks but, at local level, were still involved in electoral pacts with the Coalition Liberals. Bonar Law thus had to prove, to his own supporters as much as to the electorate generally, that it had been right to overthrow the Coalition, without alienating coalitionist sympathies or provoking a split in the Conservative party. For all the other parties, Lloyd George’s presence in the election was somewhat akin to that of the ghost at the feast. What they feared was that the ghost might take on more corporeal form. After all, as a recently deposed prime minister, a statesman of international reputation and the leader of his own party, the Welshman remained a powerful factor in the political equation, particularly if the election did not produce a decisive result. Certainly there were few who seriously believed that 1922 would be the end of Lloyd George’s ministerial, even prime ministerial, career, and he himself was alert to the opportunities that might be presented by the still fluid state of the party system. To this end, his own election campaign was comparatively muted. This was not because, as some commentators have argued, he had nothing to say; rather that he realised it might be to his advantage to say as little as possible. He made a necessary defence of his government’s record, and continued to preach the virtues of cooperation between parties in the national interest. But his main concern was to ensure the return of the largest possible number of ‘National Liberal’ candidates as a bargaining counter in the multi-party politics of the next parliament. As neither coalitions to the right or the left could be ruled out, nothing was to be gained from provoking a Conservative retaliation against their former Coalition Liberal allies, nor by burning bridges of reconciliation to the Asquithian or Labour opposition. Lloyd George’s low-key campaign may have been dictated partly by the personal disorientation of a prime minister suddenly shorn of power, and by the organisational deficiencies of the National Liberal party which he led, but in the circumstances it was also the most sensible political tactic to employ, keeping his options open until the future began to take on a more definite shape. However, the election results gave the immediate future a shape more favourable to Bonar Law than to Lloyd George. The Conservatives won thirtyeight fewer seats than in 1918, and their overall share of the poll (38.5 per cent) was only maintained because they fielded more candidates than in the earlier contest. But the central fact of the election was that the return of 344 Conservative MPs gave Bonar Law a majority of seventy-three over any combination of opposition parties and so ruled out any necessity of contemplating a renewal of coalition government. The other ‘anti-Coalition’ parties also made substantial gains. Labour almost doubled its pre-dissolution strength, winning 142 seats and 4.2 million votes (29.7 per cent of the total) compared with the Conservatives’ 5.5 million. The Asquithian Liberals’ progress was more modest, though nonetheless representing a partial recovery from the nadir of 1918. The party won 62 seats and 2.6 million votes (18.9 per cent of the total poll), and their 43 gains, mostly from the Conservatives, would have given them an even

120 Three-party politics, 1922–4 larger presence in the new parliament had they not lost 14 of the seats won in 1918.4 The Lloyd George Liberals, by contrast, suffered an almost unmitigated defeat. They lost over half their seats, returning to the new parliament with at most fifty-three MPs.5 Lloyd George himself survived, but a number of other prominent National Liberals did not, including Freddie Guest in East Dorset and Churchill, beaten by a ‘Prohibitionist’ candidate at Dundee.6 Even worse was that the experience of the election gave no encouragement to the idea that Lloyd George’s party could sustain any kind of longer-term independent existence at all. It had proved difficult to find new National Liberal candidates, and no fewer than twenty-one seats won in 1918 were allowed to go undefended. Equally significant, 121 of the 144 candidates who did go to the polls had benefited from the absence of Conservative opponents by virtue of local or regional pacts, but this had still not been enough to bring success at the polls. There was a certain irony in the fact that the Coalition had ended at Westminster only to be perpetuated in the constituencies. The underlying message, though, was that a reinvigorated and independent Conservative party could snap the lifeline of coalition Liberalism whenever it chose, while Labour’s success at the Lloyd Georgeites’ expense in South Wales and the industrial districts of Scotland and the north of England dispelled any lingering notion of a special affinity between Lloyd Georgeism and the working class. Lloyd George’s hopes of being a major independent arbiter or power broker in a new world of multi-party politics were thus effectively dashed, and the party system that emerged from the 1922 election rapidly took on a more formalised tripartite Conservative–Labour–Liberal configuration. This did not mean that the new situation was completely stable. For one thing, the Conservative government was not free from serious difficulties. The former coalitionists still held aloof from the Bonar Law regime. On 30 November, forty-nine MPs attended a dinner in honour of Chamberlain which was seen in some quarters as giving a clue to the scale of any possible dissentient movement. Nor was Bonar Law entirely sure of commanding the obedience of his own cabinet. In January 1923, when Baldwin returned from the United States having negotiated a settlement of Britain’s wartime American debt, Law wanted the cabinet to repudiate the deal Baldwin had accepted, even threatening to resign if his view did not prevail. Faced with a split between prime minister and Chancellor, the cabinet on this occasion backed Baldwin. Bonar Law was persuaded to carry on as prime minister, contenting himself with the nonetheless sufficiently extraordinary step of writing an anonymous letter to The Times criticising his own government’s policy. The government suffered a further setback in February, losing three by-elections in the space of a week, East Willesden to the Liberals and Mitcham and Liverpool Edge Hill to Labour. In the case of Mitcham their embarrassment was compounded by the fact that the unsuccessful Conservative candidate was Griffith-Boscawen, the Minister of Health, one of the architects of the downfall of the Lloyd George Coalition, who had already lost his previous seat at the recent general election.

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Worse was to come. By March Bonar Law was too ill to be able to speak in the House of Commons. In April, on the advice of his doctors, he embarked on a convalescent cruise which, however, had to be cut short because of his deteriorating condition. When the cancer of the throat which was to kill him a few months later was finally diagnosed, he resigned the premiership and party leadership in May, leaving the Conservatives to find their third leader in seven months. With the Chamberlainites out of the reckoning, the choice for the succession fell between Curzon and Baldwin. The former had chaired the cabinet in Bonar Law’s absence and was a figure of considerable experience. He was also, however, felt by colleagues to be arrogant and self-important, while his peerage was seen as a disqualification for the premiership in a more democratic age when the main opposition party had none of its leaders in the House of Lords. Bonar Law thus did not recommend Curzon to the King as his successor, but neither did he recommend Baldwin, with whom he had clashed over the American loan in January. In the absence of any formal electoral procedure for choosing a new Conservative leader it was therefore left to backstairs intrigue to settle the question.7 The King’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, took soundings from Balfour and other leading Conservatives. J.C.C. Davidson, who had been close to Bonar Law, produced a confidential memorandum which subtly conveyed the impression that Curzon would be unacceptable to the party, with the result that it was eventually Baldwin who was invited by the King to form a government and consequently to become leader of the Conservative party.8 The choice, even by these rather arcane means, of the middle-class former industrialist Baldwin over the aristocratic Curzon was viewed as a symbolic indication of the Conservatives’ intention of embracing a moderately progressive future direction rather than harking back to any kind of diehard past. Balfour’s preference for Baldwin may have been a sign that some of the wounds of the Carlton Club were beginning to heal, as was the decision of one former coalitionist, Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, to accept office in the Baldwin cabinet. The Baldwin succession nevertheless quickly led to a renewed period of turbulence in Conservative politics and to a further upheaval in the party system as a whole. The issue here was the familiar one from pre-war years of Protection. On 23 October Baldwin told a surprised cabinet that he had become convinced of the need for the immediate introduction of a tariff policy and that he would be announcing his conversion at the annual National Union meeting in Plymouth two days later. This, to the ‘loud and continued cheering’ of the party faithful, he duly did. There was, however, a political snag. At the 1922 election Bonar Law had pledged that his party would not introduce a general tariff without referring the decision to the people – in effect committing the Conservatives to a general election on the tariff question before any major change of policy could be introduced. It is not clear whether Baldwin realised that an immediate election would be the consequence of his Plymouth speech; he also spoke of a ‘period of education’ before going to the polls. But in the event the momentum of speculation unleashed in the press and elsewhere by the Plymouth declaration appeared to

122 Three-party politics, 1922–4 force his hand. On 9 November the possibility of an early election was discussed in cabinet and on 12 November Baldwin secured a dissolution from the King, with polling day fixed for 6 December. Baldwin’s motives for this departure – like Gladstone’s over Irish Home Rule in 1885–6 – have been intensely scrutinised.9 There were economic factors behind the decision. Unemployment was on a rising curve again in 1923 and, as Baldwin told his Plymouth audience, he had come to the conclusion ‘that the only way of fighting this subject is by protecting the home market’. Both agricultural and industrial interests were pressing for protectionist measures, and the October meeting of the Imperial Economic Conference had called for an extension of imperial preference. Baldwin himself had been a tariff reformer since the days of Joseph Chamberlain. Yet it has been argued (and Baldwin subsequently partly admitted as much) that the timing of Baldwin’s declaration had more to do with Austen Chamberlain than with his father. By coming out in favour of Tariff Reform Baldwin may have hoped to hasten the reintegration of the Chamberlainite coalitionists into the main body of the Conservative party, forestalling the possibility of a renewed attempt at cooperation between the Chamberlainites and Lloyd George and repairing the damage done to party unity by the Carlton Club vote. An added twist to this scenario is the suspicion that Baldwin was influenced by rumours that Lloyd George himself was about to declare a protectionist policy, and that the Plymouth speech was intended to steal ‘the Goat’s’ thunder. Even if these interpretations are too cynical, it is still likely that Baldwin’s motives were as much political as economic. The tariff decision gave him an opportunity to stamp his authority on the government and the party in a way that made it difficult for his critics – Chamberlainite or otherwise – to oppose him. It also provided the party with a distinctive policy that emphasised traditional differences between Conservatives and Liberals, while at the same time providing an alternative interventionism to Labour’s calls for nationalisation or a capital levy. In that sense, the tariff declaration was the policy equivalent of Baldwin’s speech at the Carlton Club, re-establishing the Conservative party as an independent entity in ideological as well as electoral terms and drawing some clearer lines of demarcation in a hitherto confused party situation. Baldwin’s initiative certainly had an immediate effect. The Labour party was on an almost permanent campaign footing following its success in 1922 and its by-election victories in 1923, but the unexpected bonus of an imminent general election galvanised it into even more fervent activity. The impact on the Liberals was more dramatic still. Since the election of 1922 the Liberal party had remained divided into its rival factions. There had been attempts to engineer a formal reconciliation. In March 1923, seventy-three Liberal MPs signed a memorandum in favour of Liberal reunion. The idea of reunion was supported by local and regional associations and by the Liberal Magazine. In April, Lloyd George made a speech publicly proclaiming his renewed Liberalism and making overtures to the Asquithian leadership. Asquith and his allies, though, were cautious in their response. They wanted a period of cooperation in parliament to precede a reunion of party organisations. They were influenced, too, by their

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personal antipathy to Lloyd George and suspicions as to his future intentions. The appointment of the anti-Lloyd George Vivian Phillipps as Liberal chief whip underlined the reluctance of the official party to renew its connection with the former prime minister, and this line was confirmed at the 1923 NLF meeting at Buxton where, despite some rank-and-file support, pro-reunion resolutions were unable to carry the day. But then Baldwin’s declaration and the prospect of an immediate election transformed the situation. Rather than four years of opposition in which its internal differences could have been resolved at leisure, the Liberal party was faced with a sudden opportunity to restore its fortunes and return to power. Self-interest dictated that as united a front as possible should be presented to the voters and the pressure for at least an alliance between the two wings of the Liberal army became irresistible. On 13 November Asquith and Lloyd George met in the company of Vivian Phillipps and Sir Alfred Mond to agree an election strategy for a reunited Liberal party. A joint Liberal Campaign Committee was established and Lloyd George agreed to contribute to a single campaign fund. This much Baldwin may have foreseen, perhaps intended. It was to his advantage to divide Lloyd George from the Conservative coalitionists and place him firmly in the opposition camp. Yet the response of the prime minister’s own party, to say nothing of the electorate, to his new departure must have been less gratifying. As in 1922, the party organisation was unprepared for an election, and many MPs resented being thrown into an unnecessary contest, just before Christmas, only a year after the previous campaign. The ground on which Baldwin had chosen to fight was also not as conducive to party unity as he might have hoped. Austen Chamberlain welcomed the adoption of a tariff policy but was critical of the vagueness of Baldwin’s proposals. At the other extreme, there were at least twenty Conservative MPs (and indeed some members of the cabinet) who were committed free traders and who therefore found it difficult to embrace the new party line. Lack of preparation and lack of clarity consequently gave the Conservative campaign a blurred focus, though the evidence suggests that a more sharply defined protectionist message could have alienated even more Conservative voters and supporters. As it was, in the latter stages of the campaign Baldwin himself was forced to recognise that Tariff Reform was an electoral liability and to fall back on a cruder anti-socialist message in an attempt to limit Labour successes, frighten voters away from the Liberals and prevent the draining away of government support. In this he was only partially successful. The Conservative vote of 5.5 million (38 per cent of the poll) held up quite well compared with 1922, but was boosted by an increased number of candidatures, mostly in seats formerly left to the Coalition Liberals. In the hard currency of parliamentary seats the Conservatives did less well, winning only 258 – a net loss of 88 seats, which cost them their overall majority. They remained the largest single party, but both of the opposition parties had improved their positions. The Liberals made substantial gains. The battle between Free Trade and Protection revived traditional Liberal–Conservative divisions and gave the reunited Liberal party a rallying cry

124 Three-party politics, 1922–4 which evoked memories of 1906 and briefly restored the party’s morale and sense of purpose. A total of fifty-three seats were won from the Conservatives, including no fewer than five in the Free Trade citadel of Manchester. Overall the Liberals won 158 seats (compared to the 115 for Asquithians and National Liberals combined in 1922) and their 4.3 million votes represented 29.7 per cent of the national total. The Liberals’ success, however, still left them, narrowly but crucially, in third place behind Labour, whose 4.4 million votes (30.7 per cent of the total) won them 191 seats – more than three times the number they had secured just five years earlier in 1918. Far from recreating a Liberal–Conservative polarisation reminiscent of pre-1914, therefore, the election had consolidated a genuine three-way division of political opinion in which each of the parties could claim a substantial degree of popular support. How they could use it, and what kind of government could be formed from the parliament which had just been elected, it was more difficult to tell. Baldwin’s gamble on Protection had apparently undermined the ‘tranquillity’ which Bonar Law had aspired to create in 1922. What, now, could the politicians put in its place?

The first Labour government It was not inevitable that the result of the 1923 election would lead to a Labour government. Six weeks elapsed between the declaration of the poll and Baldwin’s resignation as prime minister. In the intervening period, the leaders of all three parties were considering the options open to them and how best to use the situation to their own advantage. The formation of a Labour government was thus only indirectly the work of the electorate who had voted in December 1923. It was more the product of the calculations and manoeuvres of politicians at Westminster playing the hand the voters had dealt them.10 In these calculations the party leaders had to balance short-term considerations against their longer-term strategic aims. Labour’s position was perhaps the most straightforward. Although some Labour figures were opposed to taking office unless the party had a majority, the view of the official leaders, MacDonald especially, was that they should form a government if the opportunity presented itself.11 To do otherwise would lend credence to the claim that Labour was unfit to govern and would consequently harm the party’s long-term prospects, whereas taking office could give them a decisive advantage over the Liberals, the party Labour was working to replace as the main expression of left/progressive opinion. Ironically, MacDonald’s strategic appreciation was similar to that of his Conservative opposite number. Baldwin, frustrated by the Liberal electoral revival that had cost him his anticipated majority, felt that the Conservatives would do better in the long run in a two-party system in which the Labour party was the principal opposition, agreeing with Amery’s view that ‘the real healthy and natural division of parties in this country is between constructive Conservatism … [and] Labour-Socialism’.12 He accordingly rejected the advice of those of his colleagues who favoured a deal with the Liberals to ‘keep

Three-party politics, 1922–4 125 Labour out’, deciding at a fairly early stage after the election that a Labour government would be preferable to any arrangement that assisted a further Liberal recovery or a revival of coalitionism. Equally, however, to squeeze maximum party advantage from the situation, he wanted the onus – and opprobrium – for installing a ‘Socialist’ administration to be placed squarely on Liberal shoulders. Rather than resign immediately after the election, therefore, he determined instead to meet the new parliament as an incumbent government, forcing the opposition parties to combine if they wanted to bring about his defeat. While MacDonald and Baldwin were accomplices in attempting to create a new two-party system, the Liberals acquiesced in their own demise. To be fair, as the third-largest party in a triangular contest they had the most difficult hand to play, but they compounded their difficulties by tactical and strategic confusion. In December 1923 they were divided on what immediate course of action to take. For those on the right of the party, preventing a Labour government was the main priority, for which they were willing to contemplate a deal with the Conservatives (either to keep the Conservatives in power, or for a Liberal government with Conservative support). Lloyd George, on the other hand, told C.P. Scott that he favoured an agreement with Labour that would enable the two parties to collaborate on an ‘advanced Radical programme’, although he also retained contact with Conservative coalitionists like Birkenhead.13 Asquith, supported by Sir John Simon, concocted a more complicated plan, in which the Liberals would first combine with Labour to oust the Conservatives, then join forces with the Conservatives to prevent a Labour government, thereby opening the way to a minority Liberal administration with opposition support, probably from the Conservatives.14 The problem with all of these suggestions – apart from the fact that they depended on other people falling in with the Liberals’ wishes – was that they lacked a single clear objective. Was the aim, somehow, by whatever means, to bring about a Liberal government (supposing this to be a practical proposition), was it to prevent one or other of the two larger parties from gaining or retaining office, or was it simply to ensure a parliamentary agreement that would give the Liberals some influence on the direction of affairs, either as part of a coalition or in some other way? All of these courses had their pros and cons. The Liberals’ failure to decide between them, to adopt a firm strategy and stick to it, was to leave them in the most uncomfortable of all possible worlds, and ultimately to cost them dear at the polls. Asquith did, however, take one fateful decision. On 18 December, in a speech to Liberal MPs at the National Liberal Club, he made it clear that he would not keep the Conservatives in office. He may still have hoped that this would lead, sooner or later, to a Liberal return to power. In any event he reasoned that the electorate had voted against Protection and that there should therefore be a Free Trade government. If Labour, as the larger of the Free Trade parties, were to form a government, this was an experiment that could hardly be tried under safer conditions, since the Liberals would be able to act as a parliamentary brake on any signs of socialist excess. This same line of reasoning led the Liberals to

126 Three-party politics, 1922–4 support a Labour amendment to the Address during the debate on the Conservative government’s King’s Speech in January 1924 which, when it passed by 328 votes to 256, brought about Baldwin’s resignation and the King’s invitation to Ramsay MacDonald to form the first Labour government. Labour’s accession to power, albeit as a minority government, was a key moment in British political history. A new party, scarcely more than two decades old, with its roots outside parliament rather than among the traditional parliamentary elites, had broken the duopoly of the older parties that had operated, in one form or another, ever since a party system had existed at all. Labour’s rise was helped by external factors – its early electoral pact with the Liberals, the effects of the war, the chance to become the main opposition to the Coalition – but it rested too on strong underlying foundations: the institutional and financial support of the trade unions; the electoral concentration of unionised workers in certain constituencies; a growing sense of political and social confidence on the part of the working classes generally in the more democratic conditions of postwar politics. Also important was the work of dedicated individuals, both at local and national level. Henderson, as party secretary, masterminded Labour’s organisational and electoral expansion in the early 1920s. Above all there was the enigmatic but charismatic figure of Ramsay MacDonald. As the first secretary of the LRC and Labour’s parliamentary chairman before the First World War MacDonald was perhaps more responsible than anyone else for Labour’s establishment as an independent political force. Restored to the chairmanship in 1922 (narrowly defeating Clynes in a close-fought contest), MacDonald then became the first real Leader of the party whose position was acknowledged inside parliament and without.15 In 1922–3, and in the 1923 election, MacDonald’s growing parliamentary reputation, his commanding personal presence and effective platform oratory had much to do with enhancing Labour’s credibility as a contender for power, even if this was not immediately translated into a huge increase in the party’s popular vote. It was his intuitive grasp of the situation’s strategic potential which ensured that Labour would accept the challenge of office in 1924, despite the warnings of those in the movement who feared this would simply expose them to the machinations of the two capitalist parties. The existence of the Labour government, brief though it was, had an important impact on the party system. Most obviously, as MacDonald was keen for it to do, it established that Labour was a governing party, capable of being trusted with the responsibility of national administration. The government did not collapse immediately under the weight of its own incompetence (as some of its opponents hoped it would), nor did it court an irresponsible martyrdom by promulgating a millenarian socialist policy (as urged by some on the left). Rather its watchwords were moderation and respectability. This was reflected in the composition of the Labour cabinet. Only two of its members – John Wheatley, the Minister of Health, and Fred Jowett – were seen as authentically on the left of the party. The senior figures – MacDonald as prime minister and Foreign Secretary, Philip Snowden the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Arthur Henderson, the Home Secretary – were all by this point closer to the centre or

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right. Snowden in his earlier days had been one of the more radical members of the ILP, and MacDonald employed the rhetoric of socialism when it suited him to do so, but neither contemplated using the government for propagandist gestures. Meanwhile, the recruitment of a number of ministers from outside the party, or from recent converts to it, emphasised MacDonald’s determination to broaden Labour’s appeal and reinforce the impression of administrative competence. Thus the former Liberal, Lord Haldane, became Labour’s first Lord Chancellor, and was joined in the cabinet by three other ex-Liberals (C.P. Trevelyan, Josiah Wedgwood and Noel Buxton) and by two Conservatives – Lord Parmoor (who became Lord President of the Council) and Lord Chelmsford (First Lord of the Admiralty). Other ministers included the Fabian advocate of ‘gradualness’ and former Progressive member of the London County Council, Sidney Webb, who was made President of the Board of Trade, and, in the government’s junior ranks, future prominent moderate leaders such as Margaret Bondfield and Clement Attlee. As in its composition, so in its performance the Labour government did much to reassure an initially nervous public opinion. After some early hesitation over whether ministers should wear court dress on formal occasions, the government was scrupulous (in the minds of its more radical supporters, overly scrupulous) in the observance of parliamentary and royal conventions. Its policies – though less unadventurous and more subtly nuanced than has sometimes been realised – steered a pragmatic middle course between what was desirable and what was achievable. In foreign policy, MacDonald won widespread praise for his work in resolving the crisis that had led to the French occupation of the Ruhr and in brokering the American Dawes Plan to deal with the problem of German reparations. Labour took the controversial step of suspending work on the Singapore naval base, which allowed it to restore some of the cuts in social spending that were the result of the ‘Geddes axe’. Snowden produced an orthodox Free Trade budget, which earned him congratulations from Asquith, though he combined tax cuts with the provision of an additional £28 million for public works to combat unemployment. The government’s other main excursion into the social field was the Housing Act, the work of the Clydeside ILP-er John Wheatley, a measure extending the provision of subsidies for public housing usually, and rightly, seen as the 1924 administration’s major legislative achievement. In all areas of policy, though, while critcised by some for being too cautious, the government demonstrated an overall competence that enhanced Labour’s reputation in the political community and bolstered its place in the party system. Although some of MacDonald’s followers regretted the absence of a more ‘socialist’ programme, outside the party – at Court with the King, in the City and the press, in parliament and among the voters – the idea of Labour as a potential party of government, and the principal opposition to the Conservatives, gained growing acceptance, in itself a justification of MacDonald’s strategy. The experience of government necessarily had an influence, too, on the internal politics of the Labour movement and on Labour’s relations with other

128 Three-party politics, 1922–4 parties. Within the Labour party it raised the standing and authority of the parliamentary leadership. MacDonald especially found his position strengthened by having been prime minister and by the powers of patronage and discipline which a prime minister, real or prospective, could deploy.16 There was similarly a change in Labour’s relationship with the trade unions.17 Prior to 1922 the unions were the dominant wing of the labour movement. Even after that, with union membership falling from its post-war high and Labour’s parliamentary strength and that of socialist groups like the ILP on the increase, the role of the unions in the Labour party was still vital. No fewer than 101 of the 191 MPs elected in 1923 were nominated or sponsored by the trade unions; MacDonald’s government included a number of present or former union leaders. At local level, constituency parties and trade-union branches worked closely together and were in many cases virtually indistinguishable. Nevertheless, the situation was not static. The process of expansion, including the influx of former Liberal MPs, had enlarged the middle-class, non-union element of the parliamentary party. More than that, once the party was in government it was to some degree forced to distance itself from the trade-union point of view. Indeed, MacDonald realised that if Labour wanted to attract the level of support necessary to secure an eventual parliamentary majority it would have to be able to demonstrate that it was more than just the political arm of the TUC. This determination to prove that Labour could represent the national and not merely a sectional interest led the Labour government to take a hard line on industrial discontent, for example employing the Lloyd George government’s 1920 Emergency Powers Act to deal with the consequences of a rail strike on the London Underground. The resulting tensions did not completely undermine the closeness of the Labour–union relationship, and Labour continued to rely heavily on the unions for finance and support. Yet at the same time the 1924 government helped definitively to establish Labour as a political party rather than simply a pressure group for the unions, elevating the importance of the political as compared to the industrial wing of the labour movement. The 1924 government was even more decisive in defining Labour’s relationship with the Liberals. Despite his government’s minority position, and the fact that the Liberals had voted with Labour to remove the Conservatives from office, MacDonald made no effort to enter into any kind of pact or agreement that would ensure support for the government on a more formal basis. This was partly because of his personal dislike and mistrust of the Liberal leaders, Asquith and Lloyd George. He was aware, in any case, that many Liberal MPs would have been reluctant to give organised backing to a Labour administration even if an agreement could have been reached, which was doubtful. But mainly he saw quite clearly that the parties were rivals, and that Labour’s aim, having gained the upper hand, must be to replace the Liberal party rather than rehabilitate it through any revival of a reconstituted progressive alliance. Even without this strategic imperative, the Labour rank-and-file would have found it difficult to combine with a Liberal party which at the recent election, notwithstanding its common ground with Labour over Free Trade, had entered into anti-socialist

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pacts with the Conservatives in a number of constituencies (including MacDonald’s at Aberavon) in an attempt to prevent the return of Labour candidates, thereby calling into question any remaining progressive credentials they may have possessed. In the highly competitive world of three-party politics, and particularly where there was a chance of reducing those three parties more nearly to two, Labour’s decision to retaliate electorally against the Liberals, and in the meantime to do as much as possible to humiliate them in parliament and expose their divisions, was a perfectly rational one, emphasising Labour’s independence and taking maximum advantage from the party’s temporary tenure of the ministerial front bench. For the Liberals, the 1923–4 parliament was little short of a disaster. In the absence of an agreement with Labour, Asquith’s belief that the Liberals could control the parliamentary situation was overly optimistic. They could treat issues ‘on merit’, supporting or not supporting Labour proposals as they chose, but they could only displace the government with Conservative support – and the Conservatives, for reasons of their own, showed no urgency in their opposition to the Labour administration, much less any desire to be instrumental in replacing it with a Liberal one. In the meantime the ‘wait and see’ policy produced divisions among the Liberals themselves. Lloyd George had favoured an arrangement with Labour, but when one was not forthcoming he was ready to vote against the government, preferably engineering a showdown over an issue such as unemployment where the Liberals could attack the weak points of Labour’s social and economic policies. Other leaders were not willing to seize the initiative in this way, although some were already seeing the future of Liberalism in an alliance with the Conservatives rather than Labour. Churchill took this position to its logical conclusion by leaving the party altogether, contesting the Westminster by-election as an independent ‘Anti-Socialist’ candidate before securing nomination to a Conservative seat for the 1924 election. The difficulties the Liberals faced were twofold. One was that there was no basic agreement in the party on the strategy which should be pursued. The second – both cause and consequence of the first – was lack of leadership and direction, which affected unity and morale. This was reflected in parliament, in the constituencies and in the realms of policy and ideas. In parliament there were continuing divisions between Asquithians and Lloyd Georgeites, showing the limits of the reunion that had been achieved in 1923. These were compounded by disagreements over policy issues, which combined with an overall lack of discipline in the parliamentary party to produce several embarrassing instances of Liberal MPs being found in opposing division lobbies on key votes. The party as a whole became reactive rather than proactive. Despite urgings from Lloyd George in particular, there was no sustained effort to develop new policies or programmes, leaving the Liberals sadly under-prepared either for another general election or for taking office if the opportunity occurred. Organisation in the constituencies continued to deteriorate. The Liberal performance in by-elections during the lifetime of the Labour government was uniformly poor, nor was much emphasis placed on campaigning in the country

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or building the foundations of a sustained electoral challenge. Here the feud between Lloyd George and the Asquithians continued to cast its shadow, since Lloyd George refused to release money from his personal Political Fund for electoral purposes unless he was given greater control over the party’s policies and campaigns. The result was a period of stasis and even decline, in which Liberalism as an organised political movement began to disintegrate at both parliamentary and local level. The Liberals’ sense of their own electoral weakness in turn made them even more cautious in their parliamentary tactics, reluctant to risk precipitating an election that they were ill-equipped to fight. By contrast, Baldwin’s Conservatives were able to play cat to the Liberals’ mouse. Despite losing the 1923 election, the Conservatives’ underlying position was a strong one, and it became stronger the longer the Labour government lasted. Perhaps surprisingly, given the way in which he had apparently thrown away the majority of 1922, there was no serious challenge to Baldwin’s leadership. If anything, his position was strengthened by a vote of confidence from a party meeting at the Hotel Cecil on 11 February, and by the agreement of Austen Chamberlain and other former coalitionists to join the party’s shadow cabinet. The ‘reunification’ of the party with Conservative opinion in the country was accomplished by Baldwin’s dropping of full protectionism from the party’s immediate programme, thereby reassuring Free Trade Conservatives in Lancashire and elsewhere who had voted Liberal or abstained in 1923. At the same time, the search began for an alternative platform on which to appeal to the voters. A general review of Conservative policy was instituted and there were other improvements to the party’s research and information services, for example the establishment of a shadow-cabinet secretariat to provide professional support for the Conservative front bench team.18 Baldwin himself embarked on a major campaign of public speeches in the spring and summer of 1924 and there was a high level of organisational and electoral activity to put candidates in place and to gear up the party machine for an election whenever it came. An election at some point was a definite part of Baldwin’s plan. He was happy that Labour had established itself in government at the Liberals’ expense, but he wanted to be able to capitalise on Liberal disarray to return the Conservatives to power with a restored majority. Not until the summer of 1924, however, did he feel ready to move, and only then when issues had arisen which gave the Conservatives the most favourable ground on which to fight. Fortunately for Baldwin, the issues and the timing coincided to a tee. A large part of the Conservative case against Labour was based on opposition to ‘socialism’, even though for most of its life the Labour government had been remarkably unsocialist in character. Then, in the summer, the government proposed a series of commercial treaties with the Soviet Union, providing for British loans to the Bolsheviks even though Russia’s previous debts to Britain remained unpaid. The Conservatives, motivated by a powerful mixture of outraged propriety and tactical expediency, seized on the Russian treaties as the issue of principle on which they would challenge the government, daring the

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Liberals either to sustain the government by supporting ‘socialist diplomacy’ or voting with the opposition and bringing the government down. Before this plan could be put into operation, however, a second, and more colourful, controversy was provided by the ‘Campbell case’, in which the government was suspected of interfering to stop the prosecution of a communist journalist accused of inciting mutiny in the armed forces by calling on soldiers to refuse to be used against striking workers in industrial disputes. The details of the case were not entirely what they seemed,19 and the government was probably innocent of anything other than presentational incompetence, but Baldwin was presented with another chance both to topple the government and to trap the Liberals into the bargain, since once again if they voted with the government they could be attacked as ‘soft’ on socialism and if they voted against it they played into Baldwin’s hands. The Conservatives tabled a motion of censure against the government over their role in the Campbell case, placing the onus of decision onto the divided Liberals. The Liberals, not for the first time, were in a quandary. They were increasingly frustrated at the way in which Labour had rebuffed their conciliatory overtures and at the dismissive way in which their spokesmen were treated in the House of Commons. Like the Conservatives, they were critical of the Russian treaties (although they had earlier supported recognition of the Soviet Union) and they certainly did not want to be tarred with the socialist brush. Yet they also recognised, belatedly, the exposed nature of their position. Their hopes of forming a government if Labour resigned had been dashed: neither of the other parties would support them. They needed to avoid an early election, and for that reason were reluctant to bring the government down. Desperately they tried to find an eleventh-hour escape route by suggesting last-minute compromises over both the Russian treaties and the Campbell case, but Asquith’s ingenuity was to no avail. A Liberal attempt to move an amendment to the Conservatives’ censure motion, proposing instead a committee of inquiry, which Asquith argued the government could accept without loss of face, simply called forth from MacDonald an announcement that he would treat any vote, whether on the amendment or the substantive motion, as a vote of confidence. This enabled Baldwin to close the trap on the Liberals. The Conservatives switched their votes to the Liberal amendment to their own motion. The Labour government was defeated on 9 October by 364 votes to 199 and MacDonald immediately secured a dissolution from the King, with polling day to elect a new parliament being fixed for 29 October. MacDonald, like Baldwin, seems to have been more than willing to have an election at this stage. His government had achieved as much as could have been expected of it and the prime minister was personally and politically exhausted by the strain of keeping a minority administration afloat. Labour might lose an election but, like the Conservatives, had much to gain, in terms of securing a subsequent return to power, from eliminating the Liberals as a credible third force. This was substantially what the general election of 1924 achieved. The ‘red scare’ aspect of the Conservative campaign was accentuated at a late stage

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by the Daily Mail’s publication of the ‘Zinoviev letter’ (purportedly an appeal by the leader of the Communist International for revolution in Britain),20 but it is likely that the main battles of the election had been won and lost much earlier. The Conservatives were the overwhelming victors, with 7.8 million votes and 412 seats. Labour lost forty seats compared with 1923, but its total vote rose to 5.4 million. The Liberals, as they themselves had foreseen, were squeezed between the ‘millstones’ of the larger parties. Their vote fell to 2.9 million and they lost over a hundred seats, returning only forty MPs. The result, according to the Fabian and Labour minister Sidney Webb, marked ‘The funeral of a great party’.21 He might equally have said that it represented at least the partial success of the MacDonald–Baldwin strategy of creating a new two-party system from the confusion of three-party politics that had pertained since the collapse of the Coalition two years earlier.

The politics of realignment The events of 1922–4 obviously led to a substantial realignment in party politics, with both the Conservatives and Labour gaining ground at the Liberals’ expense. But how far was this part of an ‘inevitable’, long-term process, how far the product of a series of short-term accidents or the agency of individuals? What were the underlying factors at work in shaping the fortunes of the parties and the attitudes of the voters, and how do these relate to the broader transformation that was occurring in the early twentieth-century party system? Before looking at the parties separately, it is worth recapitulating the main elements of contingency in the political situation and emphasising the chance character of some of the results produced by the electoral system. The 1922 election had at least returned a majority Conservative government, albeit on a minority vote. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened had the 1922 parliament run its full course, in particular what would have happened to the opposition parties. Would there, for example, have been a more organic Liberal reunion, giving the Liberals a better chance of establishing themselves as the main alternative to the Conservatives; would they have rebuilt an alliance with Labour; would a more permanently triangular system of politics have emerged, perhaps underpinned by an agreed measure of electoral reform? None of these questions can be answered, but posing them highlights the importance of Baldwin’s decision to call the 1923 election, in effect forcing the pace of political change and providing Labour with the opportunity to consolidate its position as the second party ahead of the Liberals. Yet even this result was largely accidental. The 1923 election, more than most, revealed the lottery-like dimension of the electoral system, especially when confronted with a multi-party pattern of politics in a first-past-the-post contest. Thus the Conservatives received roughly the same share of the vote in 1923 as in 1922 (38 per cent rather than 38.5 per cent), and secured a slight increase in their total poll,22 but actually won eighty-six fewer seats. More tantalisingly, as has been seen, Labour’s margin over the Liberals was very narrow: 4.4 million as against 4.3 million

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votes, 30.7 compared to 29.7 per cent of the poll. These votes and their distribution were enough to give Labour thirty-three more seats than the Liberals and therefore on this occasion to make them the second party, but it is not impossible to envisage a situation in which a small swing in votes and seats might have given this crucial advantage to the Liberals, in which case the politics of 1923–4 might have taken on a wholly different character. For those who stress the importance of agency and accident, then, the 1923 election and its result were critical. From them, much else flowed: the Labour government, the Liberal collapse, the further election of 1924 in which MacDonald and Baldwin attempted to put an end to the uncertainties of multiparty politics and guide the voters back to a species of two-party system. At each stage of this process, decisions were taken which had far-reaching consequences, notably those of Asquith and Baldwin to install a Labour government, and which if taken differently would have produced different results. Yet is it credible to see the whole process of realignment as simply a ‘crisis of events’? Were there deeper currents of change at work which made outcomes similar to those that occurred at least likely if not in every sense inevitable? The argument can be debated in relation to individual parties as well as the system as a whole. In discussing the decline of the Liberal party, for instance, historians have pointed to the series of ‘accidents’ from which the party suffered, most famously in Professor Wilson’s image of the pre-1914 Liberal party as a healthy pedestrian struck down by the ‘rampant omnibus’ of the First World War. Other ‘accidents’ followed: Lloyd George’s assumption of the premiership, the split at the time of the coupon election, the accident of finishing in third place behind Labour in 1923. Leaving aside the question of whether a political party or an individual exhibiting such a capacity for accidents might not in some degree be culpable for its own misfortunes, there is of course an alternative case to be put. This is that the Liberal party was already experiencing problems before 1914, not least in its relations with Labour, and that already in the elections of 1910 it had been unable to secure a parliamentary majority independently of the progressive alliance. The First World War may have been a species of historical accident, but it contributed to an undermining of the traditional bases of Liberalism and exposed fissures within the Liberal party which had already been apparent in the Edwardian period. After 1918, the contest between the Liberals and Labour prefigured by developments before 1914 took off in earnest, in circumstances much less favourable from the Liberal point of view. Even before 1922, though, the Liberal party was facing serious long-term problems of disunity and disorientation which made it more difficult for it to withstand further ‘accidental’ injuries between 1922 and 1924. The party’s underlying problems were not resolved by the temporary improvement in performance at the 1923 election. The Liberals continued to lose support to Labour in industrial Britain, gaining 10 seats but losing 23. They did less well than either of the other parties in the big cities, a fact also reflected by the virtual collapse of their base in municipal local government in many parts of the country. It was also noticeable that the party performed particularly badly

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in three-cornered contests, often coming bottom of the poll. Against this, the electoral ‘recovery’ of 1923 rested on insecure foundations. The Liberals gained fifty-three seats from the Conservatives, but few of these were in areas with a strong Liberal tradition. Five seats were won in Manchester, largely on the Free Trade issue, but the example of 1906 had shown that these were unlikely to represent long-term gains if the Conservatives abandoned their tariff policy. Similarly, again as in 1906, a number of traditionally Conservative seats were won elsewhere on small majorities because of the peculiar nature of the 1923 contest, constituencies like Basingstoke, Blackpool, Chelmsford and Chichester falling to the Liberals in straight fights with the Conservatives. The Liberals were not therefore re-creating or consolidating any obvious regional or social base, and their gains were likely to be vulnerable to any recovery of Conservative support or to the intervention of Labour candidates, which would turn two-way into three-way contests and split the anti-Conservative vote. Of course it could be argued that the other parties were just as vulnerable to the vagaries of the electoral system or the ‘churning’ effect of gains and losses inherent in a multi-party situation with three more or less evenly balanced parties. Certainly with proportional representation, or perhaps even with the alternative vote, the Liberals’ long-term prospects would have been improved. But in the absence of electoral reform the Liberals did suffer substantial disadvantages compared with the other parties. The more even distribution of the Liberal vote gave them far fewer safe seats and made it more difficult for them to establish a ‘heartland’ from which they could mount a sustained challenge for power. This difficulty was compounded by the organisational and financial problems which led to wide fluctuations in the numbers of candidates the party could field at elections and the quality of campaigns it could run. The 1924 election revealed this only too graphically. The party’s overall total of candidates was down by over a hundred (339 rather than 457 in 1923) and 136 seats fought in 1923 were not contested in 1924. Most of the seats gained in 1923 were lost, and further defeats laid bare the underlying weakness of the Liberal position. No fewer than 105 of its seats went to the Conservatives, including all but four of those the party was defending in the English counties. The party did equally badly in urban and industrial Britain. Only one seat (Swansea West) was retained in South Wales. In 139 constituencies in the eleven largest English cities the Liberals won only six, only one of them (Percy Harris in South West Bethnal Green) against Conservative opposition. Only 7 of the 40 successful Liberal candidates were elected in three-cornered contests, and for the most part the party was relegated to the regional peripheries of South-West England, North and Mid-Wales and the Scottish Highlands.23 Part of the blame for the scale of this collapse can be put down to the ‘accidents’ of a divided leadership and a poorly coordinated campaign. Asquith spent much of the election deeply embattled at Paisley (which he lost), while Lloyd George – frustrated at the way his ideas on strategy and policy had been spurned – was sparing in the time and money he devoted to the official Liberal cause. The circumstance of a contest polarised between ‘socialist’ and ‘anti-socialist’

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forces also made it more difficult for the Liberals to establish a clear campaign identity, having both supported the Labour government and been instrumental in bringing it down. But in a sense these factors were incidental to the deeper Liberal problem, which was that while there were still large numbers of actual or potential Liberal voters (even in 1924 the party secured 17.9 per cent of the total poll) it proved impossible to meld them into an organic or sustainable Liberal movement such as had existed in the late Victorian or even Edwardian periods. This was partly because the nature of society and politics had changed; partly because ‘Liberalism’ was no longer the automatic expression of intellectual or community identity – for example, in the Nonconformist North of England – in the way that it had been in the nineteenth century.24 The Liberals were also facing the more deeply rooted social challenges of a Conservative party which was able to incorporate a broad swathe of middle-class and propertied interests, and a Labour party which had its own class-based radical appeal. Poor organisation, the loss of key activists and the low morale of many of those who remained were symptomatic of the Liberals’ problems, and the divided state of the party in the early 1920s made it more difficult to establish a presence among the new voters, but the basic difficulty perhaps was that the Liberal party was losing its central historic role in the British political system. The ‘accident’ of third place behind Labour in 1923 and having to support a Labour government accelerated the Liberals’ disintegration and decline; they were not its sole cause. To some extent the process of realignment that was taking place in the 1920s involved the replacement of the Liberals as a major party by Labour – a process that was affected by individual events and contingencies but not entirely determined by them. Labour benefited from the Liberals’ problems but showed a steady pattern of growth irrespective of Liberal performance. In the three general elections of 1922–4 its total vote increased from 4.2 million in 1922 to 4.4 million in 1923 and 5.5 million in 1924 (a percentage share increase from 29.7 to 33.3 per cent in the same period). The enlarged vote was partly explained by the increase in the number of candidates fielded – itself a reflection of the party’s growing strength and confidence – from 414 in 1922 to 514 in 1924. This in turn was facilitated by a corresponding expansion of party organisation. McKibbin has calculated that the number of constituency Labour parties increased from 397 in 1918 to 626 in 1924, leaving only 19 divisions without some form of Labour presence.25 The party benefited, too, from the higher profile that went with being a party of government, which may also help to explain the increase in its vote in 1924 despite a net loss of seats. To what extent the increased support came directly from the Liberals, though, is debatable. Where the Liberals did not contest seats in 1924 Labour was able to step into their shoes as the anti-Conservative party. Labour’s intervention in 1924 in what had previously been direct Liberal–Conservative clashes may have siphoned off some Liberal support. At constituency level as in parliament there was a movement of activists from one party to the other as Labour seemed to become a more viable vehicle for radical politics. Yet it is also worth noting that there was at the same time an overall increase in the total number of those voting for the

136 Three-party politics, 1922–4 three main parties (from 13.8 million in 1922 to 16.1 million in 1924), suggesting that at least some of those who voted in 1924 may not have done so in the earlier contests. Labour’s growth was assisted by structural changes in the political system as well as by Liberal weakness. The 1918 Reform Act had increased both the size of the working-class electorate and the proportion of constituencies that could be described as predominantly working class from about a quarter to a third. The number of mining constituencies alone increased from 40 to 66. It is not necessary to subscribe fully to the ‘franchise factor’ theory that Labour’s progress before 1914 had been artificially restricted by the electoral system to appreciate that these changes were likely to benefit a working-class party which relied heavily on trade-union support. Labour’s post-1918 strength on the coalfields was the bedrock on which much of its electoral strength in the early 1920s was based, its supplanting of the Liberals in the latter’s former Lib-Lab bastions giving the Labour party a concentrated geographical base, which the Liberals lacked. Labour also benefited to a greater extent than the other parties from the payment from the rates of returning officers’ expenses, since they had fewer wealthy candidates and even with trade-union support were often short of funds. The electoral changes may have helped the Labour party in a further way too, by introducing what Michael Childs has described as the ‘generational factor’ into the broader electoral equation. Put simply, the argument is that the considerably expanded electorate after 1918 not only contained many people (perhaps two-thirds of the total) who had never voted before, but also a high proportion of younger voters with no established political or electoral allegiance. Labour was able at least to compete on equal terms for these new voters, and may even have been at an advantage because of its ‘new’ image and freedom from association with the ‘old gangs’ of Liberals and Conservatives.26 There are weaknesses to this view. The new women voters, for example, were all over 30 and may have been part of families with long-standing political loyalties. But the point that Labour did not rely solely on attracting voters from the existing parties and that the conditions of the early 1920s provided it with a unique opportunity to carve out an electoral niche among the recently enfranchised is nonetheless a valid one, particularly given the confused nature of the political picture in which a united, independent Labour party could present itself as a more constant and reliable factor than its major rivals. The Labour party that was emerging in the 1920s was not therefore simply a ‘like-for-like’ replacement for the Liberals. It came to represent – indeed, had grown out of – the Liberals’ former industrial constituency among the working class, though not among middle-class employers. It inherited some of the Liberal party’s Nonconformist radicalism but also had a more economically based socialist or Labourist ideology. In the 1920s, and for some while after, it was less successful than the Liberals at penetrating the communities of rural Britain, partly because these were where Liberalism lingered longer as a force than it did in most of the major cities but also because Labour’s identity was more that of an urban industrial environment. This mixture of similarity and complemen-

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tarity was why the progressive alliance between the two parties had worked so well before 1914. It also made it difficult for Labour wholly to provide a substitute for the Liberals, and was one reason why the Liberal party was ultimately to survive, albeit in an attenuated form. On the other hand, another reason why the pre-1914 progressive alliance had done so well was that it enabled the Liberals to benefit indirectly from Labour’s ability to appeal to working-class voters who would otherwise have voted Conservative. After 1918 the Labour party’s opposition first to the Coalition then to the governments of Bonar Law and Baldwin strengthened its claims to be a working-class alternative to the Conservatives as well as the Liberals and may have enabled it to attract support from both the ‘capitalist’ parties.27 Labour’s ability to draw support away from the Conservatives as well as the Liberals emphasises that realignment was a multi-layered and multi-directional process that was more complex than the replacement of one ‘progressive’ party by another. A further vital fact in the process was that the Conservatives were themselves the beneficiaries of realignment resulting from Liberal decline. This transference of support occurred by a variety of means. In some cases Liberals switched directly from one party to another, either despairing at the state of Liberalism or positively attracted by the Conservative party’s appeal as a nonsocialist reforming party which could protect middle-class interests. A more staged process resulted from cooperation in the constituencies, which the former Lloyd Georgeites had been used to in the days of the Coalition but which continued in the elections of 1922 and 1923 as well as in local government. The experience of working local ‘anti-socialist’ pacts provided a bridge by which many former Liberals could cross into the Conservative camp. Even in 1923, when the issue of Free Trade versus Protection revived traditional party divisions, cooperation at local level continued in a number of constituencies. In 1924, when the reduced number of Liberal candidatures deprived many Liberal voters of the chance to exercise their choice of first preference, voting Conservative seemed the next best thing, and was often advised by local Liberal leaders.28 Thus the Liberal party’s inability to provide for its own supporters, coupled with the ‘red scare’ aspect of the 1924 election, which encouraged moderate and right-wing Liberals to look for the best possible defence against ‘socialism’, contributed to the growing strength of the Conservative party and to the scale of its 1924 victory. Other factors were also important in establishing what has sometimes been described as the electoral ‘hegemony’ of the Conservative party in inter-war Britain. Like the Labour party, the Conservatives benefited from structural changes in the political system after 1918. One major change was the removal of the Irish Nationalists from Westminster as a consequence of the Sinn Fein victory in the 1918 election and the Anglo-Irish settlement of 1921. This took out of the Westminster arithmetic a party which had, by virtue of its alliance with the Liberals, helped to exclude the Conservatives from office before 1914 and, it has been calculated, together with the retention of Unionists from Northern Ireland, represented a net gain to the Conservatives of approximately

138 Three-party politics, 1922–4 sixty seats compared with pre-1914.29 (It might be noted in passing that with the Home Rule struggle dead the Irish vote in Britain underwent a realignment, switching mainly from the Liberals to Labour, although the Conservatives continued to benefit from anti-Irish and anti-Catholic feeling in the sectarian politics of cities like Liverpool and Glasgow.) In Britain, too, structural changes worked to the Conservatives’ advantage.30 The new constituency boundaries created a larger number of middle-class suburban constituencies which were ‘safe’ Conservative territory, while eliminating or amalgamating seats with smaller electorates elsewhere which had previously been held by Liberals. Altogether, the electoral map contained between 200 and 300 seats which returned Conservative MPs at all, or most, of the inter-war elections and which gave the party a solid base from which it could mount a regular challenge for power. The preservation of the separate ‘business vote’ and of the university seats probably helped the Conservatives more than the other parties, as did the protection by the 1918 Act of a number of seats representing a defined agricultural ‘economic interest’ and which invariably returned Conservative Members. Perhaps the most important aspect of the post1918 system that worked in the Conservatives’ favour, though, was the decision to retain the first-past-the-post method of election in single-member constituencies. This regularly allowed the Conservatives to secure totals of seats much higher than warranted by their proportion of the votes. Indeed, in 1922 the party won a majority of seats on only 38.5 per cent of the popular vote – actually 5 per cent lower than they had achieved in their landslide defeat of 1906. In any discussion of Conservative ‘hegemony’ the extent to which they benefited, especially in the 1920s, from the splitting of the anti-Conservative vote must be taken into account, and was also a factor in the evolution of the party system as a whole. This is not to say that the Conservatives did not contribute to their own success. The Conservative party was the best organised and best funded of the major parties, and it responded most imaginatively to the demands of the new mass politics in its electioneering and campaigns.31 It emerged from the First World War with a national network of constituency associations and a strong cadre of paid agents and local activists. Central Office had been reorganised before the war and was able to provide coordination and direction to campaigns on the ground, as well as overseeing the publication of party literature and propaganda material. In the inter-war years the party continued to develop both its professional machinery and its popular organisation. A ‘Party College’ was established in 1923 to train agents and speakers. The selection of candidates became increasingly professionalised (even if the type of candidate selected changed only gradually). At local level a wide variety of social and political activities was used to draw people into the party’s orbit. This was something the Conservatives had been good at in the nineteenth century, pioneering workingmen’s clubs and recruiting over a million members into the party’s Primrose League. In the 1920s the attempt to mobilise the social forces of Conservatism continued. A Women’s Unionist Organisation had a membership of a million by

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1928; over 400 constituencies had separate women’s branches; ‘Conservative Clubs’ welcomed women members to emphasise the party’s openness to new voters. All of this effort greatly extended the permanent presence of the Conservative party in the constituencies and was of great value at election times, providing activists and voluntary workers to supplement the work of the professional party machine.32 The Conservatives were also more successful than the other parties in making use of what was to become an increasingly important component of political campaigning, the media. Since the beginning of the expansion of the electorate in the 1860s the newspaper press had played a big part in politics, with the national and provincial press divided into Liberal and Conservative camps and the Labour and socialist movement when it emerged from the 1880s onwards keen to establish its own party papers. In the era of the First World War the role of the press had become even more closely enmeshed with the political process at the highest level, as ‘Press Lords’ like Beaverbrook and Northcliffe saw themselves as power-brokers and participants in party politics rather than merely cheerleaders for their parties or conduits for official party opinion. But by the 1920s the nature of the electorate as well as the press had changed. No longer were the highbrow daily or weekly papers carrying on elevated, though partisan, debate for a limited, educated, propertied electorate. They, and more especially the mass-circulation papers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express, were offering simplified politics for a democratic political community that was overwhelmingly working class or lower middle class in character. In the battles of the big-press battalions the Conservatives had the upper hand. A few limited circulation broadsheets continued to support the Liberal cause. Other ‘progressive’ papers like the Manchester Guardian divided their support between the Liberals and Labour. Labour had its own more popular paper, the Daily Herald. But in the main propaganda medium of the day, the Conservatives had by far the greatest breadth and depth of support, particularly by 1924, as a realignment of the press accompanied and encouraged a realignment of voters and parties.33 The Conservatives were more ‘media conscious’ in other ways too. The 1924 campaign was organised with a view to its press and media impact as much as to the direct influencing of voters on the ground. Baldwin’s schedule as leader was limited to major speeches which were widely reported at strategic points in the campaign, with other front-bench figures being deployed to reinforce the party’s message. MacDonald, by contrast, embarked on a gruelling, barnstorming series of public meetings in the provinces, relying on Labour’s traditional tactics of ‘meeting the people’ but also perhaps trying to outflank the anti-Labour bias of the London media.34 The campaign may have energised grass roots support and helped to swell the Labour vote, but as polling day approached, as his unconvincing handling of the ‘Zinoviev’ allegations demonstrated, MacDonald was an exhausted and somewhat diminished figure. His public image was not assisted either by the decision to transmit coverage of one of his mass rallies as a Labour party radio election broadcast. According to one commentator, MacDonald’s speech sounded ‘the merest ranting’ compared to the low-key studio-based

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performance in which Baldwin – in another example of the Conservatives’ greater professionalism – appealed, in informal ‘fireside chat’ mode, for a return to ‘sane, commonsense government’, his tone as well as his words providing reassurance for an unsettled electorate.35 The Conservative victory of 1924 brought to an end a distinct phase of the realignment process. Martin Pugh has argued that what occurred between 1922 and 1924, and especially between 1923 and 1924, was mainly a realignment of the non-Conservative vote, but as has been seen the Conservatives improved their position in absolute terms as well as relatively because of the weakening of the Liberal challenge. What was happening in this period was that both the Conservative and Labour parties were consolidating their presence in the new political system at the Liberals’ expense. There were ‘accidental’ factors involved in this – Baldwin’s decision to call an election in 1923, the Liberals’ narrow failure to take at least second place – but longer-term changes were also at work. How far this represented a straightforward realignment of party allegiance on lines of social class is debatable. The working class did not automatically support Labour and continued, throughout the inter-war period, to vote Conservative (and to a lesser extent Liberal) in large numbers. Nevertheless, what was beginning to emerge was a modified version of the social-geographical distribution of electoral support that had existed prior to 1914, with the Conservatives as the party of middle-class suburbia and southern England (with some areas of strength in northern England and Scotland) while Labour took over the Liberal role as the voice of the industrial North of England, the West of Scotland and South Wales, and the Liberals were consigned to a definite third-party status which had few significant social or regional concentrations of support. Did this end the crisis of the party system, which in 1922–4 manifested itself mainly in the instability that resulted from the attempts of politicians (and voters) to accommodate three parties in an electoral and parliamentary structure basically designed for two? MacDonald and Baldwin, between them, had done what they could to hasten a return to two-party politics by refusing parliamentary cooperation with the Liberals and attacking Liberal MPs in their constituencies. The strategy had partly succeeded, and one of the most persuasive arguments in Baldwin’s election campaign of 1924 was that wavering Liberals should vote Conservative in order to ensure a period of stable, single-party government. The voters appear to have responded to this call, with over 80 per cent of them voting for the two main parties compared with a two-party Labour–Conservative vote in 1923 of 68.7 per cent. And yet clearly this was not quite the end of the story. The Liberal party was a diminished presence in the new parliament, but it was not yet extinct as a political force and there was the possibility that under fresh leadership it might yet revive sufficiently to reclaim a place at the centre of power. More generally, as long as the Liberal and Labour parties were antagonistic rivals for the anti-Conservative vote it was uncertain whether an alternative stable majority to that provided by the Conservatives could be assembled from the non-Conservative parties. Until it had been demonstrated that this essential prerequisite for a fully functional two-party system had been achieved

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the potential for a further period of instability remained and the ongoing crisis of the party system was still unresolved.

6

Politicians and the slump, 1924–31

The late 1920s saw an apparent settling down of the new party system. The Conservative government elected in 1924 served a full five-year term and had expectations of being returned to power for a further period of office. However, at the 1929 election a combination of Labour advance and Liberal revival produced another ‘hung’ parliament and a second minority Labour government. Between 1929 and 1931 all three parties experienced serious internal problems and the renewed instability raised more general doubts about the future of the party system as a whole. Finally, in the summer of 1931, a major financial and political crisis led to the fall of the second Labour government and the formation of another coalition. The subsequent landslide victory of this ‘National Government’ in the general election of 1931 upset the delicate balance of forces that had been evolving in the 1920s, although whether this was a temporary diversion or a more fundamental change in the direction of Britain’s political development it was too early to tell. What was clear, though, throughout the period, was the common thread provided by the inability of politicians and the existing party system to cope with Britain’s deepening economic problems and the sudden consequences of world recession. As in other countries, where economic crisis resulted in the collapse of parties and a challenge to democratic values, so too in 1931 Britain stood on the brink of a more serious test of its social and political fabric than at any time since the First World War.

The new party system, 1924–9 Two trends that had been in train since the 1860s reached their culmination in the 1920s. One was the process of the formal democratisation of the political system by means of the 1928 Equal Franchise Act, which gave women over 21 the vote on the same terms as men, creating an enlarged electorate of 28.8 million in which for the first time women were in a majority.1 The second was the trend that accompanied the transition from an aristocratic system to one of mass politics, namely the growing importance of a range of economic, social and labour questions in political debate. This ‘industrialisation’ of politics in turn had two related aspects. On the one hand it pushed industrial and welfare issues to the fore, so that in the 1920s politicians were having to grapple with the prob-

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lems of the decline of Britain’s traditional heavy industries, rising unemployment and the increase of trade-union power, demonstrated most dramatically in the General Strike of 1926. At the same time, divisions over economic and social policy appeared to become more deeply embedded in the political system, with two major parties representing respectively the interests of industry and big business and those of the trade unions and industrial workers. In practice the two-party dichotomy between ‘Capital’ and ‘Labour’ was never as absolute as its caricature suggested. The Conservatives were closely allied with employers’ organisations and with propertied interests generally, but they also had a substantial working-class membership and electoral support. Labour aspired to be more than the political mouthpiece of the trade unions. Nevertheless, in rhetoric, image and social identity the new Conservative–Labour two-party system seemed to be polarising around class and industrial questions in the way that previously Conservatives and Liberals had been divided by issues of religion, landownership or national identity. In this altered context, party politicians had a difficult path to tread. They had to adapt their policies to the new agenda while finding the most effective way of presenting their case to the voters. To be successful it was not enough for an electoral appeal to be aimed solely or narrowly at a party’s core support. It was necessary to win over uncommitted or moderate voters to assemble an electoral coalition capable of winning a majority at a general election. In that sense all parties in the 1920s were battling for a share of the middle ground, the mythical ‘centre’ of the spectrum of political opinion. This was something that could soften the harder edges of partisan rhetoric, though equally, as in 1924, the winners might play on fears of the extremism of the other side in order to stampede wavering voters into their own corner. Similarly, the political situation dictated that both Labour and the Conservatives were trying to attract support from a declining Liberal party, but they were also conscious of the potential for recruitment among previously unenfranchised, and especially women, voters. Martin Pugh records that in 1924 63 per cent of candidates made specific appeals to women in their election literature, a figure that rose to 67 per cent in 1929.2 These factors blurred the sharpness of electoral politics as a straightforward clash between Capital and Labour, even if they did not diminish the importance of the industrial dimension of the political debate. Each of the three main parties responded to the electoral challenge in a way that reflected the character and outlook of their respective leaders as well as the realities of their political positions. Baldwin, in leading his party back to power in 1924, sought to re-establish the Conservatives as the ‘national’ party, capable of uniting all classes and sections of the community. This would be achieved not merely through the ‘stability’ that Baldwin had promised in the 1924 campaign but also through more positive policies of conciliation and social reform. He called upon his fellow Conservatives to display the ‘spirit of service’3 and described his own aim in politics as ‘the binding together of all classes of our people in an effort to make life in this country better in every sense of the word’.4 Central to this ‘New Conservatism’ was Baldwin’s attitude towards the

144 Politicians and the slump, 1924–31 Labour party and the labour movement. Electoral necessity compelled Baldwin to attack Labour as a dangerous and destructive force, primarily sectional in its motivations (‘Socialism divides, Unionism unites’), much as Disraeli in the early 1870s had attacked the disruptive and ‘un-English’ tendencies of Gladstonian Liberalism. Yet at the same time Baldwin established good personal relations with MacDonald and was instrumental in accommodating Labour as the principal opposition party in the parliamentary system in preference to the Liberals. He also went out of his way to be conciliatory to the trade unions. When, in March 1925, a Conservative backbencher brought forward a Private Member’s Bill to restrict the trade unions’ political levy, Baldwin blocked the move with one of his most accomplished parliamentary performances. Drawing on his own experience of industrial relations, he deplored any action which might increase conflict in the industrial sphere or in society at large. His government would not ‘fire the first shot’ in any class war. They wanted to ‘create an atmosphere, a new atmosphere in a new Parliament for a new age, in which the people can come together’. Typically, for Baldwin, his appeal concluded with a prayer: ‘Give peace in our time, O Lord.’5 In the immediate context of the mid-1920s, Baldwin was keen to retain the support of former Liberals and working-class voters who had given the Conservatives their majority in 1924, but his strategy of building the broadest possible social base for the party was consistent with the methods employed by his nineteenth-century predecessors, from Peel in the 1840s to Salisbury and Chamberlain in the 1890s. In that sense, apart from Baldwin’s distinctive language and political persona, the only thing ‘new’ about the ‘New Conservatism’ was that it marked a reversion to type after the excursions into ‘diehardism’ of the Edwardian and post-Edwardian years.6 Even then, the Conservative party’s membership of the Lloyd George Coalition had associated it with the progressive social reforms of the Reconstruction period, at least until these had been curtailed by the ‘Anti-Waste’ campaign and the Geddes axe. Nevertheless, ‘New Conservatism’ was also a statement of intent. It reassured those like Austen Chamberlain (who rejoined the government as Foreign Secretary) that the large Conservative majority would not be used for purely ‘reactionary’ purposes, and it signalled Baldwin’s desire to restore the party to its ‘one nation’ traditions of inclusiveness which had been lost sight of during the diehard revolt. Baldwin’s acceptance that Protection was not possible in the stillprevailing climate of support for Free Trade was another sign of his political realism which fitted in with his desire to conciliate the widest possible segment of Liberal–Labour opinion. The appointment of Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer was perhaps more explicable as a Baldwinian whim, or a desire to place the recent re-convert in a position of loyal dependence on his leader, but it also fitted in with the aim of reassuring free traders and giving the new administration a more dynamic, reforming edge. The most practical legislative expression of the New Conservatism came in the field of social policy. Neville Chamberlain, reinstated at his own request at the Ministry of Health after his brief spell at the Treasury in 1923, was the main

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driving force behind the principal reforms, with strong support (and occasional competition) from the new Chancellor, Churchill. The first major measure to be introduced was the Widows’, Orphans and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act of 1925, which introduced pensions for all workers over 65 covered by the National Insurance scheme, as well as for their widows or orphans, in addition to the existing non-contributory provision for the over-70s. Another area to be reformed was unemployment relief. Acting on the recommendations of the Blanesburgh Committee (appointed by Baldwin in 1925), in 1927 the government passed an Unemployment Insurance Act which extended the right to indefinite unemployment benefit for those unemployed ‘genuinely seeking work’, thereby making some attempt to provide for the long-term unemployed who were increasingly a feature of a national economy performing at less than full capacity. Finally, in 1929, a Local Government Act (again the work of Chamberlain) abolished the old Poor Law Unions, transferring the responsibility for local welfare provision to elected local authorities and giving councils, for example, an expanded role in hospital provision and health care. These measures, and others which accompanied them, amounted to a substantial recasting of the welfare system.7 Chamberlain’s strengths, however, lay in detailed schemes rather than bolder strokes of political presentation, and the government gained little electoral credit from its ambitious programme of reform. Opposition critics focused on weak points or omissions. In some cases, as with the Local Government Act and Churchill’s parallel plan for ‘de-rating’ agricultural land and industrial plant, the measures were too complicated or introduced too close to an election to be fully appreciated or understood. Then again, their potential value as propaganda for ‘caring Conservatism’ was more than outweighed by the government’s failure to live up to its protestations of intent in other ways, most notably in the key areas of industrial reorganisation and industrial relations.8 In the 1870s Disraeli had combined welfare reforms with important pieces of trade-union and labour legislation extending the rights of workers and their organisations, such as the Conspiracy and Protection and Property Act of 1875 (which legalised picketing) and the Employer and Workmen Act.9 In his early speeches as prime minister in 1925, Baldwin had suggested a similarly sympathetic attitude towards the unions within an overall relationship of industrial harmony (the so-called ‘truce of God’). Such hopes were emphatically undermined by the government’s handling of the events that led to the General Strike of 1926 and its aftermath. The wider background to the General Strike was the Conservatives’ failure to adopt an economic policy that could help Britain’s ailing heavy industries. Having, for electoral purposes, abandoned the idea of full Protection, the government had only the more limited option of ‘safeguarding’ selected industries from foreign competition, and even this remedy it was reluctant to apply (for instance, in the case of steel) for fear of its knock-on effect on other parts of the manufacturing sector. The decision to return Britain to the Gold Standard in 1925, although widely supported by expert opinion, had a damaging impact on the export trades, pushing up the price of their products in overseas markets.10 It

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played its part, too, in exacerbating the problems of the coal industry, which led directly to the General Strike. The coal mines had been the focus of industrial strife since their return to private control by the Lloyd George government after the First World War. The industry enjoyed a brief revival of prosperity in 1923–4, while Germany’s mines were closed by the French occupation of the Ruhr, but its underlying problem of high costs and declining markets remained unresolved. Consequently, by 1925 the coal-owners were looking to reverse wage rises granted in 1924 and introduce longer working hours. The miners, the most powerful and heavily unionised section of the industrial workforce, refused to accept the owners’ terms and called on their allies in the rail and transport unions for support. In 1925 the threat of widespread industrial unrest forced the government to intervene. A temporary subsidy was provided to maintain wage levels and a Royal Commission appointed under the chairmanship of Sir Herbert Samuel to enquire into the state of the coal industry and make recommendations for its future. If this was in the spirit of the new atmosphere that Baldwin had claimed to want to create in the nation’s industrial and political life, its sequel was not. When the Samuel Commission reported in March 1926 in favour of a compromise that accepted the need for wage cuts and a reorganisation of the coal industry but rejected the owners’ arguments in favour of longer hours, the government did little to use its influence to bring the two sides together. The owners announced they would impose their own settlement when the government subsidy ran out at the end of April; the unions renewed their plans for industrial action in the face of employers’ intransigence. Meanwhile, the government had used the breathing space provided by the Samuel Commission to prepare contingency plans for maintaining essential services in the event of a large-scale stoppage. This is not to say that they were deliberately seeking a confrontation with the unions. They entered into eleventh-hour negotiations with the TUC at the beginning of May in an attempt to find a solution. By then, however, the miners had been locked out by their employers, and when the government broke off negotiations on 3 May the TUC General Council called out 1,500,000 transport, power and engineering workers in a ‘general strike’ in support of the million locked out miners.11 Baldwin deserved credit for keeping his nerve in the face of an industrial stoppage on an unprecedented scale without succumbing to right-wing calls for draconian measures to fight ‘extremism’. He may well have known privately that the TUC leaders were themselves nervous about the potential political consequences if the strike was allowed to get out of hand and were consequently anxious to end it as soon as possible. They welcomed Samuel’s offer to act as an intermediary and, after further discussions, the General Strike was called off on 12 May. Thereafter, however, the government appeared more concerned to consolidate a victory than conciliate the strikers. No guarantees were given to prevent strikers from being victimised when they returned to work. The government still refrained from exerting pressure on the mine-owners to accept the Samuel proposals. When the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB)

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refused to accept the TUC’s authority to end the dispute the coal strike continued until October, when the miners were forced back to work on the owners’ terms. Contrary to his reputation as an anti-union hardliner, Churchill, with Baldwin’s support, did make efforts over the summer to end the strike sooner, yet to no avail. Conservative opinion generally, though, hardened against the unions during the strike. Baldwin’s emollient position of 1925 was no longer acceptable to the party right and in the aftermath of the strike they were determined to hit back at the threat of union power. Against the advice of party moderates (including the Minister of Labour, Steel-Maitland), and even of the party’s allies in the main employers’ bodies, the Federation of British Industries and the National Confederation of Employers’ Organisations, in 1927 the government introduced a Trades Disputes and Trade Union Act which declared general and sympathetic strikes illegal, placed tighter restrictions on workers’ right to picket and on civil servants’ membership of unions affiliated to the TUC, and, in a revival of the 1925 proposals which Baldwin had defeated, stated that trade unions could only maintain a political levy if their members individually ‘contracted in’ rather than merely giving individuals the right to ‘contract out’ which had existed under previous legislation. It could legitimately be pointed out that the measures might have been even stricter still, and that Baldwin had to that extent perhaps exerted a moderating influence, but the impression was nevertheless created of a Conservative party using its parliamentary majority for class and party ends rather than in the interests of the nation as a whole. The change of course was such that, according to one historian, ‘By 1928 Baldwin’s New Conservatism seemed to be in ruins and his party to have reverted to type’.12 This begs the question of what ‘type’ was, since the party was to some extent at odds with its business and industrial supporters as it was with the unions. The programme of domestic reform in any case continued into 1928–9. However, the latent tensions between Baldwin’s liberal sympathies and the party’s core constituency were coming to the surface, and after the General Strike there was greater emphasis on the more negative, anti-socialist stance that had apparently worked so well in 1924. Baldwin himself seems to have lost confidence in the policy of conciliation and to have relapsed into a more quiescent, possibly fatalistic, mood. His personal appeal was still the party’s greatest asset, but he lacked energy or new ideas. This might not have mattered had the party’s economic policies been more successful, or had the long-predicted revival of trade at last taken place. Promises of lower taxation and a firm line against the unions were not necessarily unpopular with Tory voters, who might also respond to an appeal couched in terms of community interest as distinct from the more sectional concerns of organised labour. But the absence of more demonstrable successes and of specific plans for the future did mean that when it came to the election of 1929 the party had to fall back on a platform of ‘more of the same’, based on a defence of property and the status quo, summed up in the slogans of ‘Trust Baldwin’ and ‘Safety First’ – an overly complacent and less inspiring programme than the New Conservative prospectus which Baldwin had

148 Politicians and the slump, 1924–31 presented in 1924, and with less to offer voters motivated by a desire for social and economic reform. The Conservative retreat from the centre opened up opportunities for the other parties, if only they could seize them. However, they also had to find ways of coming to terms with the industrial and social agenda and building a broader electoral base in the reformed system. In both the Labour and Liberal parties, moreover, there were internal tensions to be resolved, and arguments over the parties’ orientation and direction were brought to a head by the General Strike. Labour’s electoral post mortem after 1924 was dominated by questions of leadership, strategy and policy. There was criticism of MacDonald’s handling of the events which had led to the defeat of the Labour government, and Snowden and the Clydesiders discussed the possibility of a change of leader, with Henderson being mooted as an alternative. No challenger emerged, and MacDonald was able to reassert his authority, but the fact that his position was even in doubt was itself significant. Moreover, doubts about the leader were linked to doubts over the direction in which the party was being taken. While there was a general recognition of the difficulties under which the Labour government had operated, and genuine pride in its achievements, there was also a feeling that the party had allowed itself to be put at a disadvantage by accepting office without a parliamentary majority. A resolution proposed by the Transport Workers’ leader, Ernest Bevin, that the party should not again form a minority government was defeated at the 1925 Labour conference, and MacDonald was given a ‘free hand’ over strategy, but there was unease, particularly on the left, that this would lead to further compromises over policy and to a delay in the achievement of socialism. The alternative, voiced in particular by the ILP, in which James Maxton and the Clydeside MPs were increasingly influential, was for the party to take on the capitalist parties more openly and to campaign for a majority in favour of more explicitly socialist policies. This alternative strategy was in due course embodied in a new ILP programme, ‘Socialism in Our Time’, published in 1927, designed to provide the Labour party with a series of specific policies to combat poverty and unemployment, including the idea of a national minimum or ‘Living Wage’ which went beyond anything that the 1924 government had attempted to achieve. At the same time as the leadership’s strategy was under attack from the left, the parliamentary party was also in danger of being marginalised by the swing of the trade unions away from political activity through the Labour party to direct action on their own account. The unions continued to fund the Labour party, but the rising generation of union leaders, associated with big union amalgamations that were themselves a feature of the early part of the decade, believed that in the short term more could be achieved by industrial than by political action. The experience of ‘Red Friday’ in 1925, when the combined strength of the revived ‘triple alliance’ of miners, railwaymen and transport workers seemed to have forced the government and the coal-owners into retreat over wage cuts, encouraged the emphasis on a more militant industrial strategy, of which the General Strike was perhaps the inevitable outcome. The Labour party took little

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direct part in the strike, its role being limited to calls for a negotiated settlement and a determination not to be drawn into condoning any action that might give rise to another ‘red scare’ on the lines of 1924. Only when the strike had ended were MacDonald and his colleagues able to regain the initiative. A chastened union leadership and the demoralised miners were forced to realise the limitations of industrial action when confronted with intransigent employers and a determined government. The Trades Disputes Act of 1927 hammered home the vulnerability of the unions to a hostile parliament, rather in the manner of the Taff Vale Case which had boosted union support for the LRC in the early 1900s, and renewed the belief in a more balanced dual strategy, in which the political and industrial wings of the labour movement cooperated for their mutual benefit. This rapprochement was important for the Labour party in the late 1920s, but there were still difficulties to be overcome. The provisions in the 1927 Act to alter the basis of the unions’ political levy to ‘contracting in’ rather than ‘contracting out’ led to a fall in the party’s affiliated union membership from 3.5 to 2 million and a drop of approximately 20 per cent in its union income. The party’s individual membership in 1928 was only 215,000, far lower than the Tories’, and there were only 169 full-time Labour agents in 1929, reflecting the fact that many of its constituency parties still had little more than a nominal existence.13 Moreover, the renewal of Labour’s alliance with the unions had drawbacks as well as advantages, to some extent cutting across MacDonald’s aim of demonstrating that Labour could be just as much a ‘national’ party as the Conservatives, rather than merely a class or sectional pressure group, and thus potentially making it harder to appeal to ‘centre’ and middle-class opinion alienated by the class-warfare element inherent in a political system apparently dominated by divisions derived from those of the industrial world. It emphasised the extent to which Labour in the 1920s was still largely, if not exclusively, a working-class party, staking its claim for popular support on its ability to defend working-class interests, for example by attacking the reduction of benefits to the unemployed or the consequences of abolishing elected boards of Poor Law Guardians, which was likely to lead to stricter interpretation of the rules for granting poor relief.14 There was scope for compromise, and for cooperation between the classes – as the unions showed by participating in the ‘Mond–Turner’ talks with employers’ organisations in 1928–9. Labour leaders made efforts to reassure middle-class voters and to win their sympathy for the poor and unemployed. The 1924 government had shown that Labour in power could be moderate and even-handed in its administration of the state, not least in industrial relations and labour policy. But the party’s 1928 programme, ‘Labour and the Nation,’ however nebulous in its concrete policy proposals, still committed the Labour party to ‘socialism’ (just as Clause IV of the 1918 constitution enshrined the idea of public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange), and it was as a party rooted in the experience of the working class and the institutions of the labour movement, as opposed to the propertied interests represented by the Conservatives, that Labour mainly built up its electoral identity.

150 Politicians and the slump, 1924–31 Given what appeared to be the emergence of a party system increasingly polarised along class-industrial lines, the divisions of which were reinforced by a ‘north–south’ split in which Labour had taken over areas of former Liberal strength in industrial England, Scotland and Wales, the prospects for the Liberal party seemed far from rosy. After the debacle of 1924 the party was in disarray. Lloyd George was elected chairman of a diminished band of Liberal MPs, but the party organisation remained in the hands of his Asquithian enemies and Asquith himself, though out of parliament until his elevation to the peerage as Lord Oxford, was still party leader. The election of 1924 had laid bare the serious weaknesses of the party in organisation and finance. More fundamentally, the 1924 result confronted the party with a severe crisis of identity and morale. What did Liberalism stand for in the altered conditions of the 1920s? Were the Liberals a party of the left or the right? Had they been condemned to a permanent third-party status, or could they aspire once again to be a party of government? Above all, was the Liberal party still relevant in the new world of industrial politics, or was it inevitable that it would gradually dissolve – as it already showed some signs of doing – into its constituent parts, with most of its members joining either Labour or the Conservatives, save perhaps for a few isolated outposts in the Celtic periphery? As with the other two parties, the General Strike helped to bring the Liberals’ internal conflicts to a head. The Asquithian leadership firmly backed the government in its handling of the strike. Asquith personally showed sympathy for the coal-owners. Sir John Simon publicly declared the General Strike to be unconstitutional and illegal, a view endorsed by the Liberal shadow cabinet. The only leading figure to dissociate himself from this hard line was Lloyd George, reverting to his former persona as a friend of Labour and calling for the government to negotiate a compromise settlement. For this he was severely criticised by the party hierarchs. Asquith wrote that Lloyd George’s behaviour was ‘impossible to reconcile with … the obligations of political comradeship’,15 and Asquith’s colleagues (including Simon, Grey, Maclean, Phillipps and Runciman) wanted to use this as the occasion to force Lloyd George out of the parliamentary chairmanship, and possibly out of the party as well. Their plan, however, backfired. Lloyd George retained the support of a majority of Liberal MPs, and there was considerable sympathy for his conciliatory and statesmanlike stance at the party’s grass roots. The London Liberal Candidates’ Association passed a resolution ‘viewing with profound dismay any intention to exclude Mr Lloyd George from the Councils of the Liberal Party’,16 and while the NLF’s annual meeting expressed its ‘unabated confidence’ in Asquith, it also made it clear that this was in no way a censure of Lloyd George. When Asquith suffered a stroke in June 1926 that led to his retirement from active politics and his resignation of the leadership in October, Lloyd George was able to take over as party leader with support from the Liberal rank-and-file, even if the Asquithian ‘old guard’ proved impossible to reconcile. In the late 1920s the Liberal party underwent both an electoral and an intellectual revival. Sir Herbert Samuel – distanced from the internal conflicts by his

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time as High Commissioner in Palestine and his service on the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry – took over as chairman of the party organisation and, armed with Lloyd George’s money and his own determination and enthusiasm, set about revitalising the party’s grass roots with a plan to field over 500 candidates at the next general election, making the Liberals at least theoretical challengers for power in a way they had not been in 1924. The morale of the party received encouragement from a marked upturn in its performance at byelections from 1927 on. One seat (Southwark North) was gained from Labour in March 1927 and there was a string of successes in Conservative constituencies: Bosworth (Leicestershire) in 1927, Lancaster and St Ives in 1928, Eddisbury and Holland-with-Boston in March 1929. Most of these were in rural or semi-rural constituencies in which Labour was weak and the Liberals were the repository of a mid-term protest vote. They did not necessarily signify a complete transformation in Liberal fortunes. But coupled with strong polls in other contests they at least suggested that the party was climbing back from its nadir of 1924 and that it might be able to anticipate an enlarged presence in the next parliament. Further momentum was given to the Liberal revival by a major revision of the party’s policies. The process of ideological renewal had begun in the early 1920s with the annual Liberal Summer Schools. Lloyd George was another creative influence following his reunion with the party in 1923. The early fruits of his activity came in the form of a controversial report entitled Land and the Nation (the so-called ‘Green Book’ from the colour of its cover) in 1925, which recommended radical reforms in landownership and use.17 These proposals went too far for many Liberals and did not become official party policy, but this did not stop Lloyd George from enlisting the support of the Summer School experts – including Keynes, Samuel, C.F.G. Masterman and the social investigator Seebohm Rowntree – in the more ambitious ‘Liberal Industrial Inquiry’, which published its findings as the ‘Yellow Book’, Britain’s Industrial Future, in 1928. The ‘Yellow Book’ was the most detailed policy study undertaken by any of the major political parties in the 1920s. It analysed the problems facing British industry and suggested a range of far-reaching remedies for the reform of industrial relations and arresting the country’s industrial decline. The result was in many ways an extension of the party’s pre-war New Liberalism, a Liberal ‘third way’ between the polarities of Conservative Protectionism and Labour Socialism. It advocated extensive social and industrial reforms, including copartnership and profit-sharing in industry and the introduction of a national minimum wage. It recommended increased government planning, through a Board of National Investment and the establishment of an ‘Economic General Staff ’. It also set out the case for extensive schemes of public works, to boost the economy and to help the unemployed. This final section, published by Lloyd George as the ‘Orange Book’, with the challenging title We Can Conquer Unemployment, was the centrepiece of the party’s campaign at the 1929 general election.18 Opinions are divided about how practical or effective the Liberal proposals would have been, and there has been justifiable scepticism about how fully they

152 Politicians and the slump, 1924–31 were embraced or even understood by the majority of the party’s candidates and supporters. The same could have been said about the New Liberalism in the Edwardian period. But what the Lloyd George programme did offer was an answer to the criticism that the Liberals had nothing to contribute to the debate about Britain’s economic and social problems, and that there was nothing distinctive about Liberalism’s approach to the central question of how to apply the power of the state to the management of an advanced industrial economy. The Liberals went further in an interventionist direction than the Conservatives, yet in balancing the roles of intervention and private enterprise they stopped deliberately short of Labour’s ideological goal of nationalisation and state control. The Liberals could also claim, as they had before 1914, that since they were not tied either to big business or the trade unions they were better placed than the other parties to act as a mediating force in the industrial/political conflicts of the 1920s, and that they alone were capable of acting disinterestedly in the national cause. Whatever the truth of these claims, it was an achievement that it was the Liberal proposals that provided the main talking point of the 1929 election campaign. The election occurred simply because Baldwin’s government had reached the end of its term. It was attended, in the words of the Annual Register, ‘by little excitement’19 and neither the Conservatives nor Labour had significant policy initiatives to put forward. Lloyd George’s plans filled the vacuum of debate, and predictably both they and their sponsor were attacked from all sides. The government employed civil servants to compile a White Paper criticising the Liberal public works programme as impractical and inefficient; the Daily Telegraph denounced the Liberal plans as a ‘programme of imposture’. Baldwin further argued that major policy changes were unnecessary since improvements in trade supplemented by the extension of safeguarding would lead to an industrial recovery. The election was a choice between ‘private enterprise’ and ‘nationalisation’, and the Liberals were an irrelevance.20 The Labour line was somewhat different. Labour agreed with the Liberals that unemployment was an urgent problem and that the government was guilty of complacency. Labour’s election manifesto also included a commitment to public works, though less specific than the Liberal ‘Orange Book’. The Labour argument, though, was that they were more to be trusted than the Liberals to solve the country’s problems, playing especially on working-class memories of the fate of Lloyd George’s earlier pledges on social reform in the election of 1918. How much effect the various party campaigns had on the outcome of the election it is difficult to say. Polling took place on 30 May, again ‘with complete absence of excitement’.21 It was the first time the enlarged electorate created by the 1928 Reform Act had voted and each of the three main parties fielded over 500 candidates in a genuine three-way contest.22 The result was a defeat for the Conservatives, who saw their share of the vote slump to 38.1 per cent and who lost over a hundred seats, returning only 260 MPs. The main gainers were Labour, recording their highest share of the vote (37.1 per cent), their highest total poll (8.4 million votes to the Conservatives’ 8.7 million) and becoming for

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the first time the largest single party in the House of Commons, with 287 MPs. The most disappointed were the Liberals. Although improving their share of the vote (23.6 per cent) and their total of seats (59) compared with 1924, the party was still stuck in a distant third place. Its total of 5.3 million votes was a creditable performance, but overall the result represented, in the subsequent verdict of the Liberal Magazine, ‘a lost battle in view of our hopes and aims’.23 Lloyd George’s last gamble for power appeared decisively to have failed. When analysing these results in terms of the political developments of the 1920s, certain things stand out. One was that the Conservatives had lost the support of many Liberal voters who had supported them in 1924. The Liberal revival to that extent harmed Baldwin’s chances of a second term, returning the Conservatives to their inter-war ‘bedrock’ vote of 38 per cent. Here again, though, the vagaries of the first-past-the-post electoral system played their part. The same share of the vote that had given the Tories power in 1922 was not enough in 1923 or 1929. Even though polling more votes than Labour they still won fewer seats. Labour was the double beneficiary of Liberal intervention and Conservative unpopularity, winning large numbers of marginal industrial or semi-industrial constituencies in northern England and the Midlands. In this case it was significant that, despite the Liberal emphasis at national level on unemployment, on the ground the verdict of the unemployed themselves, and of the industrial districts generally, seems to have gone in favour not of the Liberals but of Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour party. Labour benefited from the consolidation of its ‘class’ identity as well as its enhanced post-1924 status as a prospective party of government. Yet even among the working classes it was some way short of achieving majority support. On the assumption that threequarters of those who voted in 1929 (17.2 million out of 22.6 million) were ‘working class’, Labour’s 8.4 million votes was still less than half the total of potential working-class voters.24 The party had broadened its base beyond the trade unions (whose total membership was only 4.8 million, only 3.7 million of whom were in unions affiliated to the TUC), perhaps by attracting younger, nonunionised working women as well as other non-union workers and middle-class voters, but it had not become the truly national party, either socially or geographically, that MacDonald wanted. Despite the superficially straightforward reorientation of the party system along lines of class and occupation, and an ideological and social divide between ‘Capital’ and ‘Labour’, electoral realities were more complex. The revival of the Liberals was a reminder that the ‘inevitable’ realignment, if it was occurring, was not yet complete. A further period of three-party politics was the consequence, and a second minority Labour government the immediate result.

Parties under strain, 1929–1931 The danger in 1929 was that the installation of a minority government would lead to renewed political instability. Labour, as the largest party, was in a stronger position than it had been in 1924, but it needed support from the

154 Politicians and the slump, 1924–31 Liberals or the cooperation of the Conservatives, or at least to prevent a Conservative–Liberal combination, to guarantee its survival in office. The uncertainty of the situation was increased by two further factors. One was that, in the wake of the 1929 election, all three parties, Labour included, underwent internal crises which produced potential or actual splits or splinters and threatened the more general fragmentation of the party system. The other factor was the impact of a deteriorating economic position on the political system. Within a few months of Labour coming to power the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 occurred, followed by a rapidly deepening depression and a succession of financial crises. Central to the political debate remained the question of unemployment, which rose steeply from 1.1 million in June 1929 to 1.5 million by January 1930, 2.3 million by July of the same year and 2.5 million by December. Not only was this a serious social problem, with attendant misery and the potential for producing disaffection and unrest. Its relief also placed a heavy drain on the financial resources of an already overburdened state, posing an acute dilemma for politicians, destabilising the Labour government and leading to a further crisis involving all the parties, the King, and the future of the party system itself. In each case the internal crises that the parties experienced were shaped by the ways in which long-standing tensions interacted with the situations the parties found themselves in. For example, the Conservatives’ problems were partly the product of their 1929 defeat, but they had deeper roots in dissatisfaction with the Baldwin government and the factional and ideological divisions within the party which stretched back to the early 1900s.25 It was natural, in the aftermath of defeat, that there should be criticism of the party’s lacklustre campaign and of the failure to present the voters with positive reasons for supporting the Conservatives. Increasingly, attention focused on Baldwin’s deficiencies as party leader. Although his reputation with the general public was still high, by 1929 he was much less widely revered as a prophet in his own party. ‘New Conservatism’ had not produced its intended electoral dividends – Baldwin himself was surprised by the 1929 defeat, and particularly its scale – and the leadership appeared unwilling to commit to any more distinctively Conservative cause. Baldwin, moreover, was not an instinctive or inspiring leader of the opposition. Far from assaulting the minority Labour government in the way that Bonar Law had attacked the minority Liberal regime of 1910–14, Baldwin went out of his way to be supportive and helpful, assuring MacDonald in a private meeting shortly after the election that he would not engage in petty or unnecessarily partisan tactics.26 This did nothing to rally the Tory troops in parliament or Conservative opinion in the country, which wanted a more combative approach. Baldwin’s position was further weakened by the altered balance of forces within the parliamentary party. Younger, more progressive Conservatives in marginal seats (like Harold Macmillan at Stockton) had suffered disproportionately in the electoral rout, leaving a party more heavily dominated by anti-Baldwin and diehard elements who wanted the party to take a fundamentally different course.

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The discontent was about issues as well as personalities. Particular areas of controversy were the future of India and the extent of the party’s commitment to Tariff Reform. India had aroused diehard disquiet during the Lloyd George Coalition, manifesting itself in opposition to the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms and support for General Dyer, the man responsible for the Amritsar massacre. By the time of the second Labour government, further departures in Indian policy were in train, which to many on the Conservative right seemed to threaten the very future of the Empire, much as Irish Home Rule had in the late nineteenth century. The diehards’ ire was roused by the ‘Irwin declaration’ (made by the Conservative Viceroy, Lord Irwin, later Lord Halifax), which announced ‘Dominion status’ as the ultimate goal of British Rule in India. The policy was an attempt by the Labour government and the Indian authorities to pacify nationalist opinion in India, increasingly under the control of the Gandhi–Nehru Congress party, and it did not include a specific timetable for action, although it did pave the way for the ‘Round Table’ talks in London in 1930–31 between the government and the nationalist leaders. What made the whole issue doubly contentious in diehard eyes, though, was the fact that Baldwin endorsed the Irwin declaration and the government’s policy without consulting his colleagues or the party at large. This fuelled an anti-Baldwin Indian rebellion, orchestrated by groups like the Indian Empire Society, which was supported by some senior figures in the party leadership, among them Winston Churchill.27 The ‘India revolt’ rumbled on from 1929 until the spring of 1931, and reemerged again in the mid-1930s. Of perhaps greater importance as a cause of dissent within the party was the question of tariffs. Since the failure to secure an electoral mandate for Protection in 1923, the Conservatives had confined themselves to the more limited policy of ‘safeguarding’ specific industries through restricting imports. However, both the defeat of 1929 and the intensifying world recession convinced tariff reformers that full protectionism was necessary to save jobs and sustain the economy. The depth of the economic crisis might well make voters more receptive to radical solutions. The introduction of tariffs was also seen as having wider aims in that it would facilitate a more fully fledged system of imperial preference, bringing Britain into a closer relationship with the Dominions and realising Joseph Chamberlain’s dream of the Empire as a self-sufficient trading bloc able to withstand the vagaries of the world economic system. Baldwin was not opposed to this in principle, as his 1923 initiative showed. But he was sceptical about the political benefits, especially since taxes on food imports (which would be necessary to sustain an imperial preference system) were likely still to be unpopular with voters who feared they would lead to higher prices and a rise in the cost of living. Baldwin’s reluctance to embrace a more forward policy, however, was increasingly out of step with the party’s rank-and-file. He also faced a situation similar to that with which Balfour had had to deal after 1906, of leading a parliamentary party in which electoral defeat had both strengthened the Tariff Reform element and made Tariff Reform the rallying point for a challenge to his leadership.

156 Politicians and the slump, 1924–31 The discontents over tariffs and India overlapped and reinforced one another. Furthermore, both attracted the attention of the ‘press lords’, Beaverbrook and Rothermere, who became a more active presence in the Conservative politics of this period. Rothermere supported the diehards over India. Beaverbrook’s main concern was with tariffs, or what he christened the campaign for ‘Empire Free Trade’. His ‘Empire Crusade’ ran in his newspapers from the middle of 1929, and in 1930 he and Rothermere launched a ‘United Empire Party’ to promote Tariff Reform candidates along similar lines to the ‘Anti-Waste League’ of the early 1920s. The two press lords were not completely agreed on either policy or strategy, and Beaverbrook was the more willing to compromise with the Conservative leadership. Nevertheless, their campaign attracted considerable support from the grass roots of the Conservative party and revealed widespread disillusionment with the Baldwin regime. An Empire Crusade candidate defeated the official Conservative at the South Paddington by-election in October 1930, and a confidential survey conducted by the party’s chief agent, Robert Topping, appeared to confirm the deep malaise in which the party found itself. One senior Conservative expressed the view that ‘The party is simply rotting before our eyes.’28 This perspective has been supported by a recent historian of the crisis, who has written that in September and early October 1930 ‘the Party came to the very brink of internal collapse’. ‘Despair affected all levels, high and low. There were alarming signs of disintegration in the local Associations, on an unparalleled scale.’29 This state of virtual civil war in the Conservative party was only brought to an end after Baldwin had gone some way to meet his critics. He had appeased Beaverbrook for a while in early 1930 with the promise of a referendum on tariffs. The rapprochement did not last, but it gave Baldwin time to regroup and prepare a counterattack against his opponents. One victim was Baldwin’s henchman J.C.C. Davidson, who had proved unpopular as party chairman. He was replaced by Neville Chamberlain, a move which had the advantage, from Baldwin’s point of view, that it bound up the fortunes of one of his main rivals with those of the existing leadership. Baldwin also exploited party distrust of Rothermere’s role in the Empire Crusade and resentment at his attempts to dictate the policy and composition of a future Conservative government. The turning point of the internal crisis came in October 1930, when Baldwin and Chamberlain agreed a new policy on tariffs, abandoning the idea of a referendum and replacing it with plans for a 10 per cent across-the-board import tariff in accordance with the imperial preference proposals of the Canadian prime minister, R.B. Bennett. This was not quite the end of the story, but Baldwin’s announcement of the new policy at the Caxton Hall on 30 October and his defeat of the India revolt in early 1931 did much to restore his authority and position within the party. The process of reunification was completed in the spring of 1931 when Beaverbrook and Rothermere unwisely gave Baldwin the opportunity to deliver the coup de grace to their electoral challenge. The intervention of a Crusade candidate in the East Islington by-election resulted in the loss of a Conservative seat to Labour. Then Beaverbrook brought forward another candidate in the safe Conservative seat of

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St George’s Westminster. Since this coincided with Chamberlain’s delivery of the critical Topping report to Baldwin, it seemed at the time that Baldwin was under renewed pressure, and he briefly considered resignation. Yet in the event the Baldwinite candidate Duff Cooper easily won the by-election, which also provided the occasion for Baldwin to deliver a famous denunciation of press lords who were threatening constitutional government by aiming at ‘power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’. The result effectively ended the anti-Baldwin revolt and by the summer of 1931, according to Stuart Ball, ‘a new and stable consensus within the Party had been reached’.30 The Conservative party was saved by its instinct for self-preservation and its appetite for power. The Beaverbrook–Rothermere challenge helped Baldwin to deflect what might otherwise have become an irresistible threat to his leadership from within the parliamentary party and from the party’s grass roots. He was helped, too, by the lack of an obvious available alternative party leader. Chamberlain, his most likely successor, allowed himself to be talked into accepting the party chairmanship, from where his sense of duty and personal honour made it difficult for him to appear as a contender for Baldwin’s crown. In any case he was not really convinced that he wanted to be leader at all. Another possible contender, Churchill, might have been acceptable to the diehards because of his stance on India, but he was suspect to most of the party because of his opposition to tariffs and his Liberal past. Even his critics realised that Baldwin’s hold on public opinion was one of the party’s strongest electoral assets. Once Baldwin had shown himself more willing to take a definite lead, and to lead the party in a direction in which (at least over tariffs) it was comfortable to be led, much of the desire for change evaporated. The United Empire Party, although it briefly attracted a mass membership and achieved some by-election successes, was too much of a one-issue pressure group to be a serious alternative to the Conservative party, and the fact that it was seen, quite rightly, as a tool in the hands of the maverick press lords eventually played a part in returning rebellious Conservatives to the official party fold. Even so, while the Conservative party’s internal crisis ended without a party split, this does not mean that there were not serious issues at stake or that the threat posed by the internal party revolt was negligible. The rank-and-file wanted to have a greater say in determining party policy, and the battle over tariffs and between diehardism and Baldwin’s more centrist, liberal doctrines had to be resolved if the unity of the party was to be preserved. It was, but Baldwin was fortunate that hostility to the interference of the newspaper magnates in the party’s affairs produced a favourable reaction in favour of his regime and encouraged the majority of the party’s members to rally round their leader. No such reaction in favour of unity occurred in the increasingly divided ranks of the Liberal party. Personality differences remained a problem. The suspicion and dislike that the former Asquithians felt towards Lloyd George was in no way lessened by the 1929 election.31 Many of the party’s prominent figures had grouped themselves into the ‘Liberal Council’ shortly after Lloyd George became leader, and they remained a bastion of anti-Lloyd Georgeism in the new parliament. Yet, as in

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the Conservative party, questions of personality were bound up with issues of strategy and policy. After the 1929 election, the Liberals had a similar problem to that they had faced in 1924. Although saved from having to put Labour into office by Baldwin’s post-election resignation, the Liberals still had to define their attitude to MacDonald’s government. Should they support the government as long as it was pursuing policies compatible with Liberal ideas (and who would determine whether this was the case?), or should they combine with the Conservatives to remove the government from office? Here was the nub of the Liberal dilemma as a third party. They could aspire to a measure of influence by treating issues ‘on their merits’, but they were ultimately dependent on cooperation with one of the other parties to gain a permanent foothold in the governing process. Could they make their support sufficiently valuable for one of their rivals to make a bid for it, and if they did what price could the Liberals demand in return? Lloyd George’s preference was for an agreed policy of cooperation with the Labour government, while demonstrating that the Liberals were still willing to take an independent line if they disagreed with the government over specific issues. Thus in December 1929 it was decided to vote against Labour’s Coal Mines Bill on the grounds that it did not go far enough in its proposals for reorganising the industry. The Liberals forced the government to amend their proposals by introducing a subsequent further measure of reform, but the episode also provided an early warning of the possible impact on party unity of Lloyd George’s strategy, with six Liberal MPs abstaining and two actually voting for the government. In the course of 1930, however, Lloyd George’s plans began to achieve greater success. Despite MacDonald’s initial wariness of the Liberals, and of Lloyd George in particular, by the summer of 1930 government ministers had entered into detailed discussions with the Liberals over policies for the reform of agriculture and the relief of unemployment.32 A potentially beneficial by-product of this relationship for the Liberals was the prospect that the government would be willing to enact a measure of electoral reform. Although an all-party conference presided over by the former Speaker, Lord Ullswater, had been unable to reach agreement on a more proportional system of representation, the government did agree to bring forward a Bill to introduce the alternative vote for parliamentary elections.33 This bound Lloyd George’s Liberals more closely to the Labour government, so much so that by 1931 there was talk, if not of formal coalition between the parties, then at least of individual Liberal ministers taking office in the Labour cabinet. Yet the more success Lloyd George’s strategy achieved, the more difficulties it created. The closer the relationship between the Liberals and the government became, the harder it was to maintain a distinctive Liberal identity in parliament or the country. One MP, William Jowitt, had already defected from the Liberals immediately after the election to become MacDonald’s Attorney-General. If others followed, or if the parties entered a formal coalition, the dividing lines would be even more blurred, allowing the Conservatives to attack the Liberals for sustaining a ‘socialist’ government as they had in 1924. Even more pressing,

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however, was the opposition to Lloyd George’s tactics within the Liberal party itself, which by mid-1931 had brought the parliamentary party to the verge of an outright split. The most prominent figure in this rebellion was the erstwhile Asquithian heir apparent Sir John Simon, Lloyd George’s inveterate enemy since the Spen Valley by-election of 1919.34 In November 1930 Simon was one of five Liberal MPs who voted for a Conservative amendment to the King’s Speech, in defiance of the official decision to abstain. Simon accompanied this by publishing a letter which he had sent to Lloyd George in October, in which he branded his leader’s policy of supporting Labour a failure and warned that ‘we are in danger of carrying offers of assistance to the point of subservience’.35 By March 1931 he and his followers had become what the chief whip, Sir Archibald Sinclair, described as ‘a nucleus of disaffection and disloyalty in the Party’, ‘bent on turning out the government’,36 a process which reached its logical culmination when Simon and two other MPs formally resigned the Liberal whip in June. The experience of 1929–31 once again underlined how hard it was for the Liberals to operate as a third party in what was basically an adversarial two-party system. Electorally this had damaged them in 1929. As one of their MPs, Percy Harris, reflected: ‘Those who were afraid of Labour voted Tory to keep them out, those who hated the Tories and wanted to make sure of defeating them, voted Labour. The middle party lost to both the right and left.’37 But what happened after the election suggested that this left–right divergence had infected the parliamentary party as well, with Lloyd George inclining to Labour and the ‘Simonites’ preferring accommodation with the Conservatives. It was this potential for structural cleavage that made the position of the Liberals different from that of other third parties which had operated more successfully in earlier decades. The Irish Nationalists, for example, had been a coherent party with a solid electoral base, united by the objective of using their parliamentary strength to secure Home Rule for Ireland. This made them part of the Westminster system, but also to some extent separate from it. The Labour party, too, in its early days, although a competitor of the British parties, was more of a sectional pressure group than a challenger for power, while its electoral pact with the Liberals protected it from the full impact of three-party politics in the constituencies. The Liberals, on the other hand, were a party with a long history of government, and their policy objectives were similarly diverse. In the context of the 1920s they lacked a single unifying objective and they were too easily trapped into trying to locate Liberalism in the left–right spectrum of the other parties rather than presenting it as an alternative to both of them. Lloyd George’s 1929 programme perhaps offered a distinctive form of ‘radical centrism’, which could have provided a way forward, but it is doubtful how far the bulk of the party – or its voters – shared his views. In the absence of this essential unity of purpose it was possibly inevitable that the party would fissure around specific issues and that it would begin to fragment under the play of conflicting forces. This was the position that had been reached in the summer of 1931. The Simonite Liberals (or ‘Liberal Nationals’ as they were beginning to call themselves) were ready to enter into an alliance with the Conservatives, even if this

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meant accepting protection as an economic policy. Lloyd George was once again eyeing the prospect of coalition, though this time with Labour rather than the Tories. The remainder of the party, in parliament and in the country, had yet to make up its mind which of these paths it wanted to follow, or whether it would stay on a more independent course, risking marginalisation at Westminster and exposure to electoral defeat. Insofar as it delayed a decision over these choices, or rather allowed the Liberals to pursue all three courses simultaneously while maintaining a tenuous unity, the formation of the National Government in 1931 came as a welcome, albeit temporary, relief. For the Labour party, by contrast, the events that led to the formation of the National Government intensified an internal crisis instead of providing a diversion from it. As with the other parties, tensions had been building in Labour ranks since the election of 1929, and the increasing severity of the country’s financial and economic crisis reopened earlier rifts. MacDonald himself was determined that this time Labour would not easily be swept aside and remarked, presciently, that the party would remain in power for at least two years. Yet this did not mean that there were not difficulties to be overcome. Labour’s position was still a minority one, dependent on the Liberals for a Commons majority. Electorally, too, it remained vulnerable. A significant proportion of its seats had been won on narrow majorities, in many cases because Liberal candidates had split the non-Labour vote. As by-elections showed a drop in support for both Liberals and Labour, the temporary nature of Labour’s ascendancy over the Conservatives was emphasised. On the other hand, Labour’s success, temporary though it might have been, had raised fresh expectations among Labour MPs and supporters in the country that could not automatically be fulfilled. The second Labour government introduced some worthwhile reforms, but it was not as radical as its enthusiasts wanted. Dissatisfaction over the limited nature of the Coal Mines Bill in 1929 (from a party which had earlier backed nationalisation of the mines) was an early indication of the problems that could arise. Labour’s failure to repeal the 1927 Trades Disputes Act also revealed the constraints of its minority position as well as frustrating the party’s trade-union wing. The rock on which the Labour government foundered, however, was that of the economy, in particular the consequences of rising unemployment. There has been much discussion of the extent to which Labour contributed to its own downfall by its handling of the economy and the alleged rigidity of its economic thinking.38 Some of the retrospective criticism levelled at the government is unfair. Neither the world recession nor the long-term problems of the British economy were Labour’s fault. MacDonald did his best to relieve the pressure on the unemployed and to enlist expert advice to inform ministerial decisions, even if he did not always act on the advice he received. He created an Economic Advisory Council which brought together industrialists, economists (including Keynes) and trade-union leaders such as Bevin of the TGWU and Walter Citrine, the general secretary of the TUC. The Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry was appointed to provide an overview of the economy, and a cabinet minister, J.H. Thomas, was charged with special responsibility for

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devising measures to tackle unemployment. An additional £42 million was made available for public-works projects and there was a relaxation of the rules governing the allocation of unemployment relief which had been introduced in the Conservatives’ Insurance Act of 1927. The problem was that none of these initiatives made much impact, either politically or economically, and in the absence of more decisive action the government was reliant on the orthodox policies of Snowden and the Treasury. Meanwhile, from within the Labour movement and outside, as the unemployment figures mounted the clamour for action became more insistent. The Liberals demanded greater investment in public works and industrial reorganisation; the Conservatives wanted Protection. Inside the Labour party, even inside the government, divisions began to emerge. The ILP, which, under Maxton, had been pressing since 1927 for the adoption of the ‘Living Wage’ policies of ‘Socialism in Our Time,’ regarded the economic crisis as a vindication of its critique of capitalism and an opportunity to introduce more explicitly socialist measures. Another voice in favour of radical action was that of Sir Oswald Mosley, the aristocratic former Conservative who had joined the Labour party and whom MacDonald had appointed as one of the ministerial team working under J.H. Thomas. In February 1930 Mosley produced what became known as the ‘Mosley Memorandum’, advocating a massive extension of state control of industry and banking, the introduction of restrictions on imports and of protective tariffs, together with increases in pensions and other benefits to raise purchasing power and boost the economy.39 There was no way that Mosley’s schemes would recommend themselves to Snowden (a committed Free Trader and usually referred to as ‘Gladstonian’ in his attitudes to public spending), and they were rejected by the cabinet. Mosley, having resigned in protest from the government, attempted, without success, to win over the Labour parliamentary party and the party’s annual conference at Llandudno, where a speech from MacDonald had a temporarily reassuring effect on the assembled delegates. But although Mosley’s revolt against the leadership had failed, it did touch a nerve. In December 1930 a published version of his memorandum was endorsed by the miners’ leader, A.J. Cook, and by seventeen MPs, including the young Aneurin Bevan. If Mosley’s frustration had not led him to leave Labour to launch his own ‘New Party’ in February 1931 he might conceivably have come to pose a bigger threat to the MacDonald regime. Ironically, though, the fall of the Labour government came about not because it did too little for the unemployed but because it was doing too much. The soaring cost of unemployment relief increased the gap between government expenditure and depression-hit tax revenues in a way that seriously unbalanced the national budget. The government had already appointed a commission to report on the future of the Unemployment Insurance Fund when in February 1931 pressure from the opposition parties forced it to establish a further committee, under Sir George May, to recommend ways in which public spending could be brought under control. When Snowden presented the May Report to the Commons at the end of July it painted a grim picture. The budget

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deficit would be £120 million by April 1932. May’s remedy was a package of £24 million of tax rises and £96 million of spending cuts, a significant proportion of which would have to be found from cuts to welfare benefits and public sector salaries. The situation was given fresh urgency by banking collapses in Austria and Germany and by a resulting crisis of confidence that led to a run on the pound. There was wide agreement that unless immediate measures were taken to restore confidence by implementing the May recommendations, the crisis might spin out of control. This was the atmosphere in which politicians met in the middle of August 1931. Even so, MacDonald and Snowden were unable to carry the whole of the Labour cabinet with them in support of their proposed economy measures. The TUC leaders, too, rejected the proposed scale of economies and benefit cuts. The unity of the government was destroyed and MacDonald felt obliged to tender its resignation to the King. Within a matter of hours, the second Labour government had collapsed and a new coalition – in which MacDonald continued as prime minister, but without most of his former colleagues – had been installed in its stead.

The crisis of 1931 The formation of the National Government in August 1931 took the political world by surprise. There is agreement that the change had far-reaching effects on politics and the party system. Reginald Bassett, author of the classic account of the crisis, compared its impact to that of the Conservative split over the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.40 But there is more debate over the government’s origins and the motives of those involved. Was the formation of the National Government a revival of the ‘coalitionism’ of 1918–22 or a reaction against it? Did it constitute a short-term response to a particular emergency or was it part of some deeper-laid plan or conspiracy? What role was played by leading individuals such as MacDonald, Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, Herbert Samuel and the King? These questions need to be considered before the significance of the events of August 1931 can be assessed and the nature of their outcomes analysed. The idea of coalition government had been rejected by the leaders of the Conservative and Labour parties after 1922. It was associated in their minds with what they viewed as the dishonesty and corruption of the Lloyd George years and with the dubious figure of Lloyd George himself.41 They attempted instead to construct a two-party system which would consolidate their own positions, eliminate or marginalise the Liberals and so deny Lloyd George – their arch rival and bête noire – any chance of a political comeback. Yet despite the unwritten compact between Baldwin and MacDonald (attested to, for example, in the diaries of their cabinet secretary, Thomas Jones), coalitionism as a movement or habit of thought did not entirely die out. Lloyd George retained his contacts with former colleagues and continued to speculate on possible future combinations. During periods of minority government, such as occurred in 1923–4, talk of coalition revived. The deepening crisis of 1929–30 increased the attractiveness of some form of ‘national’ government as an alternative to the

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apparent ineffectiveness of the incumbent administration and a divided opposition. There were a number of strands of thought behind the revived movement for alternative forms of government. One was that the scale of the national emergency required that there should be an abandonment of party strife, as there had been during the war, with the country once again coming together under strong leadership. This was the argument advanced by the former Secretary for War Sir John Seeley in a letter to The Times in December 1930, similar sentiments having been voiced by the Conservative MP and novelist John Buchan in the Commons in October.42 For others such a move was all the more essential because they feared the existing party system was on the verge of collapse and that in any case party politicians had only a limited grasp of economic realities. Harold Macmillan privately expressed the view in July 1930 ‘that the economic situation is so serious that it will lead to a breakdown of the whole party system’.43 Harold Nicolson recorded a discussion at the Astors’ house, Cliveden, where the guests included Macmillan, Duff Cooper, Mosley and Lord Lothian (Philip Kerr), which concluded ‘that Parliament, though susceptible to dealing with politics, is hopeless at finance and economics. That we are about to enter the worst crisis in our history. And that unless the economic situation can be dealt with on undemocratic lines, ie independent of votes, we shall go smash.’44 J.L. Garvin, another houseguest of the Astors, wrote in The Observer at about the same time that ‘No one remembers a time when discontents were so rife in all parties together and when movements were so kaleidoscopic. The whole country feels that fundamental changes are required … Amongst the younger generation in all parties the strongest sentiment is in favour of “clearing out the Old Gangs”.’45 Some of this was wishful thinking, not least by those who felt they might benefit from any shake-up in the existing system. Mosley, having resigned from the Labour party, was about to establish his New Party (which Nicolson, among others, originally supported) and may have fancied himself in the role of ‘national saviour’. Lloyd George was another eager to respond to any call to save his country, as he had done in the war. But there was more to this developing critique of the parliamentary and party system than thwarted ambition. Rather as in the earlier movement for national efficiency, there was a growing consensus in favour of greater planning in economic policy, to be carried out by a government of experts, directed by an economic ‘war cabinet’. Interestingly, this was not the same as the socialism advocated by the left. Indeed, as with earlier coalitionist movements it represented an alternative to socialism, and for that reason was supported by industrialists such as Sir Arthur Balfour and the car manufacturer William Morris, the second of whom helped found a ‘League of Industry’ in December 1930, which planned to run candidates in favour of a ‘businessman’s government’ at the next election. Insofar as these disparate groups had an ideal, it might have been Mussolini’s Italy, where the Duce was in the process of establishing his corporate state which prioritised the interests of big business and, at least according to its propaganda, had been able to resist the impact of international depression by economic planning and strong government.

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However coherent the thinking of these disparate groups and individuals, though, they were not the figures at the heart of the political revolution of 1931. As G.R. Searle has demonstrated, the crisis atmosphere of the second half of 1930 had largely dissipated by the spring of 1931, perhaps in part because of the stabilisation of the Conservatives after Baldwin’s victories over the diehards and the Rothermere–Beaverbrook faction. The National Government was the creation, in Leo Amery’s words, of the ‘old gangs and old gangsters’, not of a rising ‘war generation’ or leaders-in-exile who were casting themselves as a ‘national opposition’ to the existing parties. To what extent was this realignment foreshadowed by the way in which those parties and their leaders had operated since 1929? There was some evidence of a more cooperative, less partisan mood among the parties. MacDonald set the tone for this with a speech in July 1929 in which he appealed to all sides of the Commons to consider themselves ‘more as a Council of State and less as arrayed regiments facing each other in battle’.46 Baldwin had responded constructively both publicly and privately, and where possible had been willing to pursue bipartisan policies even at the expense of trouble with his own supporters, for example in supporting the government’s India policy. As has been seen, Lloyd George and the Liberals (at least a majority of them) were also prepared to cooperate with the government, and from the summer of 1930 onwards they were entering into closer collaboration over legislation and policy, with some talk even of a Labour–Liberal coalition. It is unclear, though, how far MacDonald intended this to be the outcome. He had prefaced his ‘Council of State’ appeal with an assurance that this did not mean abandoning ‘any of our party positions’. There is some suspicion that he was ‘stringing the Liberals along’ to give him a working majority, rather than contemplating a lasting arrangement. Yet if any coalition was likely in the summer of 1931 a Labour–Liberal one seemed the only possibility, perhaps balanced by the Simonite Liberal Nationals aligning with the Conservatives. Baldwin certainly had no thoughts of a grand coalition with Labour. He had turned down MacDonald’s invitation to talks on unemployment in 1930. The issue of tariffs remained a major barrier to agreement between the parties. In any event, Baldwin was taking a more combative line towards the government over its financial and economic policies, with every expectation of an early general election that would return an increasingly buoyant Conservative party to power. In these circumstances there was nothing to be gained from a coalition and everything to be lost. All this points to the National Government as being something that emerged from the events of August 1931 rather than as the result of steadily growing pressure for a coalition or the working out of some deep-laid conspiracy or plan. The short-term pressures were those connected with the financial crisis that suddenly confronted the Labour government in the middle of the month. Earlier, even when the May Report was published at the end of July, there was no sense of imminent crisis. MacDonald had agreed that the government would consider an economy package but had then departed for his annual holiday at

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Lossiemouth. As the ripples of the continental banking collapses spread, however, alarm bells began to ring in Downing Street, the Treasury and London’s financial and banking circles. MacDonald returned to London on 11 August and entered into immediate discussions with cabinet colleagues. He also held talks separately with Sir Herbert Samuel (deputising for Lloyd George because of the latter’s incapacity after a serious operation) and with Baldwin and Chamberlain to keep them informed about developments. It was this ‘twin track’ approach of internal cabinet discussions and external consultations with the opposition parties that produced the sequence of events which led to the Labour government being replaced by an ‘all-party’ coalition. Space precludes a full account of these discussions in all their intricacy, but the main factors in the situation are clear enough.47As a result of its initial deliberations the cabinet agreed a provisional package of £56 million of cuts (including £22 million from the unemployment insurance fund). The opposition parties agreed to support the plan if the banks gave an assurance that this amount (less than the £96 million recommended by May) would be enough to restore confidence and stem the run on the pound. Two things then happened. The continuing drain on the reserves and the worsening crisis of confidence led to Snowden being advised by the Bank of England that the proposed cuts would be unlikely to satisfy the markets. Simultaneously, opposition mounted in the cabinet and the Labour party, including the trade unions, to any reductions in unemployment benefit. This had been an issue between MacDonald and Snowden on the one hand and their senior colleagues in the party and the unions even before the summer crisis. Bevin, in particular, fortified by the insights he had gained from his membership of the Macmillan Committee, argued in favour of an alternative economic strategy rather than one based on deflation and balanced budgets. Crucially he won the support of Henderson, the party’s leading ‘heavyweight’ after the ‘big two’ of Snowden and MacDonald. Consequently, by the time MacDonald brought revised proposals to cabinet on 23 August, he knew that a determined minority would oppose him. He won the backing of a narrow majority, by 11 votes to 10, and knew if necessary he could rely on Conservative and Liberal support in the Commons. But he reasoned that, with his party so irredeemably split, to press ahead would provoke an even more fundamental breach, and it might therefore be a better course to resign and allow a new government to implement the economy measures. MacDonald’s precise sequence of mind-changes at this stage of the crisis is difficult to follow. However, as his biographer David Marquand confirms, there is probably no truth to the subsequent Labour charge that MacDonald deliberately betrayed the Labour party by tendering his government’s resignation knowing that he would personally retain power as prime minister of a coalition. Nor, equally, is there any evidence that the other parties actively wanted to bring a coalition about. Both Conservatives and Liberals were agreed that the crisis could best be resolved by Labour carrying the necessary economy measures with opposition support. This point was made by Samuel to the King whom he met at Buckingham Palace on 23 August. Yet if the Labour government collapsed, a

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new situation would be created. The Conservatives had no desire to assume office as a minority government to take responsibility for unpopular tax rises and spending cuts. A Conservative–Liberal coalition was unlikely given differences over Free Trade and Liberal reluctance to be trapped into a subordinate role such as Lloyd George’s Liberals had found themselves in in the latter stages of 1918–22. On the other hand, given their electoral weakness and their ongoing internal strife, Liberal leaders were unwilling to face an early test at the polls, even supposing the immediacy and severity of the financial crisis could have withstood the uncertainties of a general election campaign. Thus, in his meeting with the King, Samuel had cited the continuance of the Labour government as his first preference, but a ‘national’ government containing representatives of all three parties as the next best thing. When MacDonald tendered his resignation, therefore, the King invited him to return to the Palace the following day for consultations with the other party leaders, and it was from these discussions that the National Government was born. The Conservatives were really manoeuvred into accepting a national government by events rather than by their direct will. Baldwin spent much of the crisis characteristically on holiday at Aix-les-Bains, leaving affairs in London in the hands of Neville Chamberlain. Chamberlain’s preference, like Baldwin’s, was for the cuts to be carried by the Labour government, followed by a party election which the Conservatives would win. When this proved impossible, there was less clarity. A coalition would be better than a purely Conservative ministry, to ‘spread the blame’ for the cuts, but if the other parties were divided there was a case for a Conservative prime minister. In the event, though, there was a realisation that MacDonald’s prestige would be a greater asset if he retained the premiership, and might act as a deflector of unpopularity which could otherwise attach to the Conservatives. The King, encouraged by Samuel, in any case proposed the solution that Baldwin should serve under MacDonald as prime minister, and thus the political outcome that few envisaged and none (save perhaps Samuel and the King) had actually sought, came about, and the National Government was formed.48 Even then the National Government was seen by its creators as a temporary, emergency measure. MacDonald formed a ‘cabinet of individuals’ with members drawn from the three main parties, but with the intention that the government would be dissolved once the financial crisis had been dealt with and a general election held on a normal party basis. It was only the assurance of its temporary nature that could have reconciled the Conservatives in particular to the composition of MacDonald’s ten-man cabinet. MacDonald himself was prime minister, Snowden remained Chancellor of the Exchequer and there were two other Labour members (J.H. Thomas and Lord Sankey) despite the fact that the bulk of the Labour party had refused to follow MacDonald’s lead and had gone into opposition. In addition, two Liberals from the Lloyd George/Samuelite wing of the party, Sir Herbert Samuel and Lord Reading, held the offices of Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary respectively, giving the cabinet a distinctly ‘progressive’ tinge and a Free Trade majority. Only four

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Conservatives held office at cabinet level: Baldwin as Lord President of the Council, Neville Chamberlain as Minister of Health, Sir Samuel Hoare at the India Office and Cunliffe-Lister at the Board of Trade. Numerous senior figures had to be content with offices outside the cabinet, or in some cases with no offices at all. Significantly, the two surviving ‘big beasts’ of the former Coalition, Churchill and Lloyd George, were excluded altogether – Churchill because he was at odds with his party leader, Lloyd George because he was still convalescent following his operation and was therefore not expected to be able to play an active role before the government was dissolved, although he supported Samuel’s decision to join and sent a goodwill message to a meeting of Liberal MPs approving the acting leader’s participation. However, a number of factors combined to turn this temporary expedient into the foundation of a government that was to last, through various internal transmutations, until Churchill formed his wartime administration in 1940. The first factor was that the financial crisis proved more difficult to solve than had been foreseen when the National Government was formed. An emergency budget was introduced which combined spending cuts and tax increases to the tune of £170 million, but the markets were not satisfied and the run on the pound continued. A mutiny of sailors at the Invergordon naval base protesting against pay cuts compounded the atmosphere of crisis. Finally, in desperation, Snowden was driven to recommending the abandonment of the Gold Standard, one of the very things the government had been formed to prevent. The situation gradually steadied, but there were fears that an early election on a party basis would lead to renewed instability: that in a sense, with the Gold Standard gone, the National Government itself had become the symbol of the country’s commitment to sound finance and the only guarantee of a more settled future. Other considerations were political as much as financial. Each of the partners came to see that the continuation of the government might have some merit, if only they could negotiate favourable terms for their future involvement. MacDonald seems at first to have assumed that it would be possible to resume his leadership of the Labour party, but any lingering hopes in this direction were brutally dashed when he and the other Labour supporters of the National Government were expelled from the party and denounced as ‘traitors’ by their former comrades. The choice they faced was thus between an early retirement or perpetuating the government. There was the fear, too, that by breaking up the government before an election they risked undermining the precarious measure of stability they had won, thereby making their personal sacrifice in vain. For similar reasons, the other parties came to see advantages in remaining sheltered by the ‘National’ umbrella. The Liberal party was ill-prepared for a general election as an independent party. A continuation of the coalition might delay an election, or, if an election occurred, at least offer the security of electoral pacts to maintain the party’s existing strength. Even Conservative views shifted in the course of September and early October. They likewise began to see that the ‘National’ label could be an electoral asset, and that MacDonald’s association with the government was likely to be valuable in winning over working-class

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support. There were still those who favoured a complete break, and a partybased election on a clear Tariff Reform programme, but Baldwin and Chamberlain came round to a more subtly calculating view: that they could best defeat Labour and win a Conservative majority by exploiting the ‘National’ appeal rather than by more narrowly party-based methods. For Baldwin, there was perhaps the additional consideration that the need to cooperate with Labour and Liberal members of the government could give him a weapon to use against the Conservative right and so reinforce the internal party victory he had won in March. If they were to remain in the government, however, the Conservatives were determined that there must be an early election to enable them to press home their party advantage and to give the National Government a solid mandate of electoral support. It was precisely the likely party advantage that the Conservatives would reap which made their coalition partners wary of an early appeal to the voters. In particular, Liberal and Labour ministers were worried that a swing to the Conservatives under the National banner would give the new parliament a protectionist majority rather than one in favour of Free Trade. As the parliamentary mainstay of the government, though, the Conservatives were bound to get their way, and it was only a matter of time before resistance to an early poll began to crumble. In mid-September twenty-two ‘Simonite’ Liberals sent a memo to the prime minister assuring him that they would support him ‘in whatever measures he and the majority of his Cabinet colleagues may think necessary to maintain financial stability and restore the balance of trade’49 – coded language indicating that they were willing to back not only a general election but tariffs as well. This guaranteed the government some Liberal support even if the Samuelites resigned, strengthening the hand of the pro-electioneers. MacDonald, himself wavering over Protection, was steadily worn down by Conservative pressure and eventually agreed that an election must take place, but he was still keen to keep the Samuelites on board if at all possible, to avoid becoming entirely the prisoner of the Conservative-protectionist forces. It was this, together with the Samuelites’ reluctance to cast themselves adrift from the safety-net that the National Government provided, which produced the eventual compromise of the ‘doctor’s mandate’. MacDonald as prime minister would appeal for the voters to give the government a free hand to introduce any measures deemed essential for tackling the crisis, but the individual parties would issue their own separate manifestoes, so that the Liberals need not publicly be seen to endorse the abandonment of Free Trade. On this rather curious basis the election took place in October 1931. It was fought out on two connected but separate levels. The main contest was between the National Government and the Labour opposition. But there were also a variety of inter- and intra-party conflicts providing significant sub-plots. For example, the war of words between MacDonald’s ‘National Labour’ party and his former party, now led by Arthur Henderson, was especially bitter. MacDonald, Snowden and the other Labour ministers were subjected to fierce personal attacks for betraying the working class; Snowden replied by denouncing

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Labour’s electoral programme as ‘Bolshevism run mad’. Yet if anything the battle between opponents was less revealing of political realities than that waged between nominal allies. The Liberal coalitionists fought the election as two separate factions, the official Samuelite Liberal party and Simon’s ‘Liberal National’ group. Moreover, although both wings of the party supported the government, they had very different relations with their Conservative ‘partners’. The Simonites ran 41 candidates, of whom 35 did not face Conservative opposition (because of their generally more pro-Conservative stance and their willingness to support protection). Of the 112 Samuelite candidates, on the other hand, 81 (including Samuel himself – a member of the cabinet and one of the National Government’s major figures) were opposed by Conservatives. The Liberal warwithin-a-war was further complicated by the attitude of Lloyd George. He had at first supported the government but he denounced the election as ‘a mere Tory ramp to exploit a national emergency for Tory ends’,50 breaking off relations with Samuel when the latter refused to resign from the government and fighting the election as a virtually isolated figure at the head of his ‘independent’ Liberal party whose six candidates consisted mainly of members of his own family. These sub-plots provided much of the colour and detail of the election. Four of Lloyd George’s six candidates (including himself, his daughter Megan and son Gwilym) were successful. MacDonald’s ‘National Labour’ party won 13 of the 20 seats it contested. The battle of the Liberal factions was narrowly shaded by the Simonites, who returned 35 MPs to the Samuelites’ 33. Oswald Mosley’s New Party ran 24 candidates but they were all defeated, between them polling only 36,377 votes. With both the potential ‘national saviours’ sidelined, the overwhelming victors were the Conservatives, who used the ‘National’ label to score their biggest ever electoral triumph, winning 469 of the 517 seats they contested and polling 11,851,226 votes, 54.8 per cent of the popular total. The collective triumph of the National parties was even more staggering: 14,532,519 votes (67.2 per cent of the poll) and 554 seats. Labour, the principal opposition, lost over 200 seats compared with 1929, returning only 52 Members to the new parliament, although there was some perhaps cold comfort to be gleaned from the fact that the party still managed to win 30 per cent of the votes, its poll only falling by 2 million from the previous high of 1929. In an election where once again Henderson, their leader, had lost his seat, along with most remaining members of the party’s front bench, Labour clearly faced a long uphill struggle to regain the ground it had lost, while the immediate future belonged to the National Government presided over by the man Labour members regarded as the ‘arch-traitor’, Ramsay MacDonald. The crisis of 1931 ended, or at least severely interrupted, the evolutionary development that had been taking place in the party system since the mid-1920s. Labour’s expansion from its class-industrial base into the middle ground was halted. For a time, the whole strategy of ‘MacDonaldism’ was discredited, along with MacDonald himself, and the party was forced onto a more introspective course. This required not just a reappraisal of strategy but of ideology and policy as well, since the failure of the second Labour government has to be

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explained at a deeper level than simply MacDonald’s ‘betrayal’ or a ‘banker’s ramp’ engineered by anti-Labour forces. The internal conflicts in the party over economic policy, and over how best to advance ‘socialism’, which had taken place between 1929 and 1931, were a starting point for this more searching analysis, which occupied much of the next decade as the party clawed its way back into contention for power. At the same time, however, the events of 1931 finally shattered the prospect of a stable, centre-left majority being built on Labour–Liberal cooperation. The similarities between the parties’ policies and the improving relations between MacDonald and Lloyd George had seemed to provide a possible basis for a new progressivism in 1930 and 1931, even at the expense of a Simonite exodus into the Conservative camp. But the formation of the National Government ended this possibility, preserving a temporary and tenuous Liberal unity without resolving the party’s internal and strategic problems. The three-way division of the party at the 1931 election struck the final blow to Lloyd George’s attempt to revive Liberalism in the late 1920s and to give it a distinctive place in the new party system. Participation in the National Government disguised the scale of the party’s failure but could do no more than delay what threatened to become a terminal decline. The 1931 crisis shifted the balance of power decisively in favour of the Conservatives and paved the way for the victory of their protectionist economic strategy over the public works, welfarist and Free Trade policies of Labour and the Liberals. By detaching the Liberals from Labour it also moved the centre of political gravity to the right in a way that had considerable implications for the future of the party system. In the late 1920s Labour and the Conservatives had become fairly evenly matched in electoral and parliamentary terms; a Labourinclined Liberal party gave the left-of-centre forces a majority. As has been seen, this created tensions within the Liberal party, and the Conservatives were making gains from the ‘progressive’ parties even before the summer of 1931. But a Conservative electoral victory would not have been as sweeping as that of the National Government, nor would it have created an outcome so heavily biased against a Labour minority. In effect, the realignment that had occurred under the pressure of the financial crisis had revived the broad-based anti-Labour front, which in an earlier incarnation had been represented by the Lloyd George Coalition, both socially and electorally. The imbalance between the new ruling coalition and the diminished opposition was even greater than it had been in 1918–22. For the time being this ended the problem of instability in the party system that had been a factor in the crisis of 1931, but had it done so at the cost of destroying the delicate mechanisms of balance within the party system itself ?

7

Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after

The 1930s were a dangerous decade. Across the world, their passage was marked by economic depression, war and the approach of war. There was a rising challenge to democracy and liberal parliamentary systems of government, which few countries survived unscathed. The United States escaped its worst excesses, thanks to the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan, the Soviet Union and many of the countries of central and eastern Europe fell under the rule of dictatorship or a one-party state of left or right, while France suffered the near-permanent political crisis of the dying days of the Third Republic. Britain stood aside from these trends, but not wholly so. The National Government has been viewed as a species of dictatorship or one-party state. There were movements committed to extremism, revolution and political violence and opposed to parliamentary democracy. Not until the mid-1930s had the threat posed by these movements been neutralised and a measure of balance restored to the party system. This final chapter, accordingly, examines the nature and impact of the National Government, assesses the challenge presented by political extremism and concludes with a survey of the reviving party system as it was developing in the late 1930s and beyond.

The National Government The reputation of the National Governments of the 1930s has fluctuated over time. For a long while, judged mainly on a Churchillian view of their foreign policy and the ‘Guilty Men’ perspective of their critics, they stood condemned in the dock of popular memory. These were the politicians, the ‘little men’, who had failed to deal with the mass unemployment of the depression and who had failed to stand up to Hitler, exposing thousands to poverty and thousands more to the death and destruction of the Second World War.1 Recently a more balanced view has prevailed.2 The foreign policy of the National Governments, especially relating to the ‘appeasement’ of Hitler and the question of rearmament, has been sympathetically reappraised.3 The governments have been given credit, too, for the imagination and variety of their domestic policies, including those in the economic and social field, and for their handling of other

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questions, such as the Empire. Yet there is still debate over the political significance of the National Governments, both in terms of their essential nature and their impact on the political system. How ‘national’ were they? Did they constitute some form of ‘Tory dictatorship’ or ‘one-party state’, which ran counter to Britain’s more pluralist political traditions and threatened to take the country along the rightward, authoritarian road that much of the rest of Europe was following? It is also interesting to see how they compared with earlier coalitions: the Lloyd George governments of 1916–22, the Pitt–Liverpool regime of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the Whig–Liberal administrations of the mid-nineteenth century. Were they a product of the party system or an alternative to it? In its composition the government formed after the 1931 election could lay a justifiable claim to the ‘National’ label. The Conservatives, with 469 of the government’s 554 seats, were clearly the dominant party, but the Liberal and Labour components between them were far from negligible in their importance to the government’s position. This was clearly recognised in the composition of the new cabinet, where, despite their overwhelming parliamentary majority, the Conservatives occupied only 11 of the 19 seats. The two Liberal factions between them took five places, including the senior posts of Home Secretary (Samuel) and Foreign Secretary (Simon). The National Labour group was similarly given representation disproportionate to its parliamentary strength, with four seats in the cabinet, although one significant change was that the Free Trader Snowden had to relinquish the Exchequer to the Conservative protectionist Neville Chamberlain. MacDonald, however, remained as prime minister (Baldwin being content to continue as Lord President) and thus provided a reassuring symbol of the government’s all-party status. Moreover, MacDonald’s influence on the policy and direction of the government, at least in its early stages, should not be underestimated. He was far from being in 1931 and 1932 the feeble and embarrassing figure he had become by 1934–5, and he retained much of his personal authority and statesmanlike appeal, at home and abroad. Except for the fact that it lacked the support of the diminished Labour opposition, the government was as close to being a ‘national’ one as it could have been. Even after the resignation of the Samuelite Liberals in 1932, and their move into opposition in 1933, the presence of the Liberal Nationals continued to provide a plausible national colouring to what might otherwise have been perceived as a purely Conservative administration. The national basis of the government was electoral as well as parliamentary. True, the formation of the government in the first place was more of a highpolitical coup, designed to prevent the voters from becoming involved in the crisis rather than to enlist their support. But once it had come into existence the National Government received widespread public backing, and this translated into an unprecedented level of popular support at the 1931 general election. The 67.2 per cent of the vote garnered by National candidates was higher than that won by the Lloyd George government in 1918. It was national support, too, in that it came from all parts of the United Kingdom. Only in Wales,

Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after 173 where Lloyd George and Labour between them took a majority of votes and seats, did the government fail to establish itself decisively as the popular choice. In England its 69.1 per cent of the votes was even higher than the UK average, but in Scotland too 63.9 per cent of the voters supported the government, despite the residual strength of Labour and the appearance of a number of smaller parties. Nor was it only the scale of the government vote that was impressive. Another feature of the 1931 result was the breadth of support from all social classes and from voters who had previously supported nonConservative parties. Liberal voters seem overwhelmingly to have supported the government, even where this meant voting for Conservative National candidates, with perhaps only 20 per cent of former Liberal votes going to Labour. Similarly, it has been calculated that as many as 100 to 150 of the Conservative MPs elected may have owed their seats to ‘Liberal’ votes, while perhaps 70 were elected in mainly working-class seats which had voted Labour in 1929.4 Women voters in particular seem to have found the idea of a ‘National’ government an attractive alternative to more partisan politics, and helped to give the government a genuinely national base. The scale of the government’s victory owed much of course to the circumstances in which the 1931 election was fought, to the absence of a credible alternative and to the virtual monopoly that the government had over press and media support. Be that as it may, the rainbow colouring of the winning electoral coalition did influence the way in which the government behaved once it had been returned to power, and made ministers conscious of the need to operate in what was demonstrably a consensual, ‘national’ way. The effect of this was to emphasise in their minds the importance of maintaining the allparty nature of the government and in particular to give Liberal and Labour members of the cabinet an influence in government greater than that warranted solely by their parliamentary numbers, because the Conservatives were aware of the extent to which their own triumph was based on the support of Liberal and Labour voters. An instance of the practical consequence of this desire for compromise and consensus can be seen in the government’s careful handling of the controversial issue of tariffs. Support for Protection had been steadily increasing prior to 1931, and the election produced a large pro-tariff majority both in parliament and in the cabinet. Nevertheless, the majority used their strength with restraint, and did all they could to ease the consciences of the government’s remaining Free Traders. A temporary Abnormal Importations Act introduced by the Simonite President of the Board of Trade, Runciman, which permitted a six-month import duty on manufactured articles entering the country in ‘abnormal’ quantities, was followed by an enquiry into the desirability of a more general tariff. Given the balance of opinion in the government, it was inevitable that the enquiry would lead to a more permanent protectionist measure, in the form of the Import Duties Act introduced, with excusable filial pride, by Neville Chamberlain in 1932, providing for a general 10 per cent tariff on imports and a system of imperial preference. But in an exceptional departure from the conventions of cabinet responsibility, the Free

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Trade ministers – Snowden and the Samuelite Liberals – were given the freedom of an ‘agreement to differ’ which allowed them to speak and vote against the measure in the Commons. It may be that this was in some ways a purely cosmetic piece of political management. Yet this was not the only issue on which ministers attempted to follow policies that reflected a conciliatory, consensual approach, which perhaps amounted to a distinctively ‘national’ style of government. For Baldwin this was an instinctive strategy that had clear affinities with the ‘New Conservatism’ of the 1920s, but it blended that with ideas drawn from Liberal and Labour thinking and from the non-party movement in favour of greater industrial and economic planning. The result was a series of policies that were a coherent attempt to boost the economy and improve social and working conditions. Financial policy maintained low-interest rates, which stimulated housebuilding and other activities. The devaluation of the pound combined with the introduction of tariffs encouraged exports while safeguarding the home market. The spending cuts introduced as emergency measures in 1931 were gradually restored, for example in the Unemployment Act of 1934 which returned benefits to their 1931 levels. The government was generally conciliatory in its attitude towards the trade unions while at the same time promoting a number of measures to improve working conditions (such as the Shops Act of 1934) and to foster the rationalisation of industry and the economic revival of areas in long-term industrial decline. The Special Areas (Development and Improvement) Act of 1934 led to the appointment of ‘Special Commissioners’ to tackle the problems of ‘depressed areas’ in South Wales, Scotland and the North of England, with government funds being provided to promote industrial regeneration. The government also established a number of agricultural marketing boards and, later in the decade, introduced legislation to promote the reorganisation and modernisation of the cotton, coal and iron and steel industries. The creation of the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933 was another instance of the vogue for rationalisation and planning which demonstrated a more national approach to government policy. The government’s policies on foreign affairs, the Empire and rearmament showed a similar desire to maintain a centrist consensus that would not only keep the government united but would maintain its broad-based majority among the nation’s voters. There were attempts to take the logic of this stance still further, by developing a ‘National’ party to embody the principles of a National government. The most prominent proponent of this line was Neville Chamberlain, who wrote privately to his sisters as early as 1931 that such a course would have many advantages, not least the abandonment of ‘that odious title of Conservative which has kept so many from joining us in the past’.5 Baldwin appears to have considered a similar ‘rebranding’ exercise, and in June 1934 The Times published a manifesto in which 100 Conservative MPs called for the creation of a ‘National Party’ by fusing the various elements of the coalition into a single organisation. Many of them sat for formerly Labour working-class seats and may have seen a new party as the best way of perpetuating their

Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after 175 tenure. However, others believed it was precisely the all-party nature of the government that emphasised its national character. The Simonites formally launched their National Liberal party in 1933, stressing their separateness from the Conservatives so as to maximise support from Liberal voters but also to enable Simon and his colleagues to preserve their share of cabinet offices, which a merger with the Conservatives might have denied them. The ‘multi-party’ strategy was reaffirmed by all three party leaders in October 1934 when Baldwin and Simon joined MacDonald at a National Labour party lunch and publicly extolled the virtues of inter-party cooperation in preference to the conventional adversarial patterns of more competitive party strife.6 The National Government, then, was a broad-based social and political coalition that brought together the bulk of the non-Labour electoral forces under a single banner. Like the earlier Lloyd George Coalition, it constituted an alliance of ‘centrist’ politicians who were committed to isolating the extremes of right and left and to pursuing consensual policies on the key national issues. As with the earlier government, however, the very scale of the National Government’s electoral success created problems for the functioning of the party system. If there was not strictly a ‘one-party’ state, there was nonetheless the danger that the virtual hegemony that the National combination had established at the polls and in the Commons would make it impossible to sustain the normal conventions of parliamentary government. Without an effective opposition, and a political system representing a genuine plurality of views, the threat that lurked beneath the National Government’s huge majority was that of dictatorship – possibly benign, perhaps commanding widespread public approval, but capable, conceivably, of atrophying into something of an altogether darker hue. That this danger was averted owed much to the engrained parliamentarism of the British political tradition. Although the election of 1931 had reduced the opposition parties to a contingent barely one-tenth the size of the massed ranks of the National MPs, the conventions of the parliamentary system were maintained. The Labour MPs and Lloyd George’s Liberals – playing a role not unlike that of Fox’s Whigs in opposition to the overwhelmingly superior coalition of Pitt and Portland in the 1790s – did their best to question and scrutinise government policy, while, in fairness, it must be admitted that MacDonald, and especially Baldwin, treated the opposition parties with consideration and respect. On some issues – for example, the 1934 Unemployment Act which upheld the unpopular ‘means test’ for those applying for relief – parliamentary opposition was able to draw upon extra-parliamentary indignation to remind ministers that there was a wider world of public opinion beyond the chamber of the House of Commons. Another question where the government moved cautiously for fear of provoking more general opposition was that of rearmament, although ministerial reluctance to alarm the peace lobby was reinforced by concern about the cost of any rearmament programme and its effect on economic recovery. However, the government’s awareness that at times parliamentary opposition might be part of a larger movement, and their sensitivity to

176 Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after electoral reverses at by-elections such as that at East Fulham in 1933 (where Labour overturned a government majority of 14,000 to win by a margin of 5,000 votes, supposedly on a platform of opposition to rearmament),7 prevented them from ever taking either parliament or people entirely for granted, and ensured that at least the outward forms of an alternating party system were maintained. In addition, between 1931 and 1935, the size and scale of the opposition that the National Government faced did increase, both within its ranks and outside. Within, there was discontent among the diehards on the Conservative right, partly over specific policies (notably the continuing programme of reform in India which led to the 1935 Government of India Act) but also more generally over the way in which Baldwin seemed to them to be overly willing to sacrifice Conservative interests in order to satisfy the coalition’s Liberal and National Labour members. The position of MacDonald as prime minister was questioned and the Liberal National Sir John Simon was another target for frustrated Conservatives. They viewed the official Liberals and their leader Sir Herbert Samuel with even greater suspicion and contempt, and welcomed the Samuelite withdrawal from the government in 1932–3. Still, though, there were sections on the Conservative right, intermittently supported by prominent dissidents like Churchill, who were restive under the MacDonald–Baldwin regime and who wanted a more assertively ‘Conservative’ government, particularly in relation to foreign policy and imperial issues. While there was discontent on the right, the government’s strength on the centre-left was weakened by the loss of the Samuelite Liberals. The Liberal departure from the government was a drawn-out and not especially dignified affair. In 1931 the Samuelites had agreed reluctantly to accept an election to which they had originally been opposed. After the National Government had been returned to power they faced the even more difficult test of remaining as Free Trade members of an increasingly protectionist cabinet, their consciences only partly salved by the ‘agreement to differ’ over the Import Duties Act of 1932. Among the Liberal rank-and-file, however, there was growing unease at the way in which Liberal principles were being abandoned simply to permit the party to stay in office. The 1932 NLF annual meeting reaffirmed ‘the independence of the Liberal Party as a whole and its freedom from any obligation to support the policy of the National Government’.8 Finally, in September 1932, after the Ottawa agreements had established a new framework for imperial preference, the Samuelites responded to the prompting of their grass roots and resigned from the government, although even then their MPs continued to sit on the government benches until, in October 1933, they completed the journey from government to opposition by crossing the floor. The loss of the Samuelites barely dented the government’s overall majority. It did not even deprive the National Government of a Liberal wing, since the Simonites remained firmly in place. Nevertheless, the Liberals’ decision to reclaim their independence was important, the more so perhaps because it came in response to pressure from the party’s grass roots rather than as a result

Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after 177 of a purely parliamentary calculation. It ensured (or at least made possible) the survival of the Liberals as a separate party, providing a rallying point for nonsocialist opposition to the National Government and its policies. It also brought the official Liberals back in touch with their erstwhile leader, Lloyd George, who by 1934–5 was busy with his plans for a nationwide campaign in favour of a Liberal ‘New Deal’ under the auspices of his ‘Council of Action for Peace and Reconstruction’. Whether the ever-fertile wizardry of Liberalism’s ‘lost leader’ could combine with the more staid virtues of the Samuelites to spark new life into the embers of a traditional radicalism based on Nonconformity, land reform, the peace movement and other nostrums was perhaps doubtful. But in the 1930s, despite their diminished electoral strength, the Liberals could still call on figures of high intellectual and political stature, and command sufficient organisational and regional strength, to be, if not an alternative to, then at least principled opponents of, the National regime. The Labour party also showed some signs of recovery from its low point of 1931. In the immediate aftermath of the election its problems intensified rather than eased. The party had lost almost the entire generation of its founding leaders through defection or defeat; its parliamentary party was reduced once again to a small band of mainly trade-union MPs, as it had been in 1918. In 1932 it suffered a further split when the long-brewing internal conflict over party rules led to the disaffiliation of the ILP. However, Labour retained the nucleus of a national party and a mass membership. It had been badly beaten but not destroyed, and gradually the process of rebuilding its position in the party system got under way. George Lansbury replaced the defeated Henderson as party leader, providing an inspiring figurehead as well as a Hardie-like moral appeal that reminded the party of its pioneering days. As Lansbury’s parliamentary deputy, Clement Attlee emerged as a quietly effective performer who grew rapidly in stature. The events of 1931 also brought Labour back into a closer relationship with the trade unions. Bevin and Citrine played a vital role in stabilising the party, reviving the National Joint Council as a formal link between the political and industrial wings of the labour movement. As the National Government’s electoral high tide receded, Labour’s recovery was rewarded at the polls. The party gained nine seats from the Conservatives at byelections between April 1932 and July 1935. It similarly restored and even improved its position in local government, gaining over 450 seats at the 1932 municipal elections and in 1934 winning control of the London County Council. Labour was still a long way from being able to challenge for power at national level, but, like the continuing presence of the Liberals, its partial recovery was a reminder to the National Government and to the voters that alternatives to the status quo did exist and thus helped to maintain the plurality essential to the proper functioning of a party system. In assessing the extent to which the National Government exercised a dominance amounting to ‘dictatorship’ over the political system in the early 1930s it is worth reflecting as well on other aspects of the contemporary political scene. The vigour and independence of local government, as demonstrated by

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Labour’s success, was a real factor in the larger political picture, despite some attempts by central government to curtail local freedoms, for example in social policy and the relief of unemployment.9 The press was another vehicle for political debate and the propagation of alternative views. Although the National Government enjoyed significant newspaper support it did not have a monopoly on the expression of opinion. The government did receive a largely favourable showing in cinema newsreels, but the BBC, for instance, prided itself on its independence and (with some exceptions of self-censorship) provided opportunities for genuine debate on the issues of the day. In the formal political structures of elections and electioneering the government was challenged not only by the Liberal and Labour parties but by newer, if smaller, parties such as Plaid Cymru in Wales and the Scottish National Party in Scotland. Perhaps of more general significance in the politics of the 1930s were larger pressure groups and campaigns which mobilised public opinion independently of the government. The trade unions, although shorn of some of their strength by the depression, remained economically important and, as has been seen, retained an institutional link with the Labour party.10 The concern in the 1930s with questions of international relations and the threat of war also stimulated mass membership of organisations like the League of Nations Union whose platform of collective security potentially conflicted with the National Government’s private emphasis on rearmament and provided a meeting place for those who might on other grounds be critical of the Conservative-dominated National regime. In other words, Britain in the 1930s, although it had a government whose political position was overwhelmingly strong, was neither a one-party state nor a dictatorship. A plurality of viewpoints existed, within the government and without, and it was possible to express them openly according to the established traditions of a liberal parliamentary democracy. The government was sensitive to the movements of public opinion and was concerned to pursue consensual policies that would preserve the widest possible degree of electoral support. Baldwin argued that it was precisely this broad-based centrism of the National Government which provided the best safeguard for democracy in the dangerous and illiberal world of the ‘devil’s decade’, since only a strong government could act as a bulwark against renewed instability and the threat of the extremes. In this, consciously or otherwise, he was echoing what his arch-enemy Lloyd George had said after the First World War. Both men may have been right, yet the experience of the 1920s should perhaps have injected a note of caution into Baldwin’s analysis. The collapse of the Lloyd George Coalition had been followed by instability because only the Conservative party could provide majority government, and in a multi-party system the Conservatives could not always rely on enough support to keep them in office. The ConservativeNational government could provide stability while it lasted, but what would happen if it, too, collapsed or failed? If the other constitutional parties were not strong enough to provide a stable alternative (as they had been unable to do in 1924 and 1929–31) might not the way be opened to the extremes after all?

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The challenge of the extremes Britain is usually portrayed as being largely insulated from the general tendency to extremism that characterised other parts of Europe in the 1930s. This may be so, for reasons which can be explored.11 Yet British politics were not totally unaffected by European trends. Indigenous Communist and Fascist movements grew up which drew support and inspiration from foreign models. Perhaps more worrying was the extent to which anti-democratic, anti-parliamentary attitudes gained a lodgement in the major parties. It is in this larger context that the challenge of extremism needs to be re-evaluated before a final assessment of its seriousness can be made. The extremist challenge came from both the right and the left. On the right, since before the First World War, there had been support for movements opposed to the liberalisation and democratisation (‘modernisation’) of society, hostile to socialism and Labour, and willing to use direct action and anti-parliamentary methods to achieve their ends. Under Bonar Law’s leadership the Edwardian Conservative party had sanctioned and sponsored the activities of the so-called ‘radical right’ with its plethora of leagues and pressure groups committed to an increasingly militaristic and xenophobic British nationalism, tinged in places with anti-semitism. The Unionists supported the threat of armed rebellion in Ulster and seemed prepared to undermine the constitution in their opposition to Irish Home Rule. The ‘National Efficiency’ movement, while drawing support from all parties, also offered a critique of parliamentary politics and a party-based system of government. This is not to say that these movements were necessarily proto-fascist, or that the Conservative party itself had become an extremist organisation. But there was a potential for extremism that was unmistakable. It coexisted and overlapped with more organised expressions of diehardism in Conservative politics, as in the Edwardian struggles over the constitution and in the post-war resistance to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and to Indian reform. The upsurge of industrial unrest after the First World War and the rise of the Labour party further inflamed opinion on the Tory right and fostered a crisis mentality in which extreme solutions might be contemplated as the only way to save the country from a slide into chaos and revolution. In the 1920s and 1930s more explicitly fascist organisations appeared on the scene.12 The first of these was the ‘British Fascisti’, formed in 1923 by Rotha Lintorn Orman, and a variety of other bodies followed, including the Britons Society, the Imperial Fascist League (founded by Arthur Leese) and the Nordic League. All of these groups were small, with no more than a few hundred mainly middle-class members, including a high proportion of cranks and other socially and politically dysfunctional types. They shared a philosophy that was nationalist, racist and anti-socialist, but their propaganda reached only a very limited audience and they did little more than eke out a precarious existence on the fringes of the formal political process. Nevertheless, their failure to make a larger impact should not be taken as evidence of a complete lack of sympathy for right-wing or fascist views. As has been seen, the Conservative party

180 Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after provided a home for a diversity of opinions, from Baldwinians to diehards. There were also a large number of non-party organisations committed to particular causes – such as the British Empire Union, the Middle Class Union and the National Citizens’ Union – which had a broadly right-wing agenda. Exservicemen’s groups were a feature of the British scene, as they were in other countries. While there is a big gap between reputable patriotism, and a desire for strong government, and fully fledged fascism, it was also the case that in the 1920s Mussolini acquired many admirers in the British political establishment for what he had achieved in Italy, and in the 1930s there were a significant number of what Richard Griffiths has called ‘fellow travellers of the right’13 who similarly admired and wanted to foster closer links with Hitler’s Germany. This at least suggests that the potential reservoir of support for more extreme forms of right-wing politics may have been greater than the exiguous membership of the ‘fascist fringe’ of the 1920s might imply. The man who came closest to mobilising the extreme right in a mass movement was Oswald Mosley. In his earlier career Mosley had boxed the political compass. Elected to parliament in 1918 as a nominal Conservative, an enthusiastic supporter of the Lloyd George Coalition and a ‘self-conscious … spokesman for the ‘lost generation’14 which had perished in the war, he broke with the government over its policy of repression in Ireland, abandoned the Conservative party and re-emerged later in the 1920s as a Labour MP and a member of the second MacDonald government. His failure to gain cabinet and Labour party backing for the ‘Mosley Memorandum’ on the unemployment question has already been discussed, as has his subsequent decision to leave Labour and found his own New Party. An attempt to ‘break the mould’ of oldstyle party politics and to capitalise on Mosley’s growing reputation and charisma at a time of national crisis, the New Party failed dismally. Mosley attracted initial support from some younger Conservative and Labour MPs, and entered into confidential discussions with senior figures such as Lloyd George, but the New Party was swept away in the National Government landslide of 1931 with even Mosley losing his seat. Yet through all these twists and turns, a common thread was emerging. Mosley had developed an almost messianic belief in his own abilities as a potential ‘national saviour’, encapsulating the spirit of the ‘war generation’ and propounding a distinctive programme of policies embracing the twin pillars of ‘strong government’ and economic planning. Having been rejected by the established parties and by the electoral and parliamentary system they controlled, it was perhaps inevitable that Mosley would turn to fascism, the doctrine of the future and the cult of the strong leader, as his passport to power. Mosley launched his British Union of Fascists (BUF) in October 1932, accompanying this with the publication of an extended statement of his political credo in The Greater Britain. In its comparatively brief existence in the 1930s (before Mosley’s internment under wartime security regulations) the BUF went through three separate phases of development. The first, from 1932 to 1934, saw Mosley attempting to retain some support from former New Party

Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after 181 colleagues while building a mass base for his party and appealing to sympathetic groups in business and the press. Although New Party members such as Harold Nicolson and John Strachey were alienated by the switch to fascism, in other respects the strategy achieved some success. By 1934 the BUF claimed 500 branches and as many as 50,000 members. Mosley’s public meetings were attended by large crowds (despite attempts to disrupt them by Communists and other anti-fascist groups) and he received favourable coverage in sections of the Conservative press, notably Rothermere’s Daily Mail. For a time it seemed that the Mosleyites were being taken seriously as an alternative by the anti-Baldwin right, and that they might expect to win even more support if hostility to the National Government increased. Then, however, came the notorious Olympia rally of June 1934, when Mosley’s ‘Blackshirts’ dealt violently with hecklers and tarnished the movement’s reputation for respecting the law. There is debate over how far Olympia itself was a turning point in public perceptions of fascism. The physical force aspect of fascism was already apparent before that in Mosley’s increasingly paramilitary style. It is possible that a deeper source of concern may have been Mosleyism’s similarities to the Nazi movement that had recently come to power in Germany. Whatever the cause, Mosley lost mainstream support from late 1934 onwards, including the crucial backing of the Rothermere press. Between 1934 and 1936 the BUF concentrated instead on a more populist anti-semitism, aimed especially at London’s East End. When this sparked violent confrontations between the BUF and their opponents – culminating in the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in October 1936 – the government responded with a Public Order Act curtailing the BUF’s paramilitary activities and banning the wearing of uniforms by members of political organisations. Even then, however, the BUF reincarnated itself for a third time in the late 1930s, its pro-German views gaining it a place in the peace movement trying to prevent Britain from going to war with Hitler. Assessments of the BUF and of British fascism generally usually emphasise the small scale of the movement and the limited nature of its appeal. Up to a point this is a fair enough view. Concentrations of BUF support developed only in a few areas – London, North-West England, parts of Yorkshire – with more scattered support elsewhere in England (particularly the South-East), Wales and Scotland. Many branches had only a short life and there was a rapid turnover in individual membership, with a comparatively small cadre of long-term members. The 50,000 members of 1934 had become at most 20,000 by the late 1930s. Mosley himself recognised the weakness of the BUF compared with the major party machines when he decided not to contest the 1935 general election, preferring instead to keep his powder dry for a later date and in the meantime concentrating on local-government elections in districts where the BUF had a better chance of success. Yet when all this has been said, it would be wrong to judge the BUF wholly by the standards of conventional politics. Even there, its success in improvising a national organisation from scratch in a short space of time was not negligible. The BUF proved successful in appealing to groups and individuals alienated by conventional politics as well as to more senior establishment figures.

182 Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after It was able to attract a cross-section of middle-class and working-class support; at least 20 per cent of its members were women.15 Recent research has highlighted the extent to which the BUF, even in a short time, was able to put down genuine roots in local communities.16 More to the point, fascism has to be judged not in terms of its actual support, but its potential. Many more people were influenced or intrigued by Mosley than joined the party. As has been shown, there was a larger ‘ultra-Conservative’ right, which had some affinities with the ideas Mosley espoused. Above all, fascism was a movement intended to respond to crisis, as Mussolini and Hitler had done in Italy and Germany. While the British crisis was in abeyance – in political terms, while the National Government remained strong – fascism was bound to remain weak. But if the National Government failed, and there was a return to instability and a revival of the left, the foundations that the BUF had laid in he early 1930s could have provided a platform for much greater political success. For the extremists of the left, by contrast, it was the strength of the National Government and the failure of the Labour party in 1931 that provided fresh opportunities to attack the existing parliamentary and party system. Like fascism, Communism had pre-war roots but was influenced by post-war foreign models, in this case the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the emergence of the Soviet Union as the home of the Communist International. The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), formed in 1920, incorporated or drew support from a variety of precursor groups, including the British Socialist Party and the syndicalist movement.17 The immediate post-war period, with its rapid expansion of trade unionism, its atmosphere of class conflict and the apparent success of political strikes like those organised by the TUC Councils of Action in the Jolly George affair, seemed to offer a climate favourable to the spread of Communist ideas. However, the growing strength of the parliamentarist Labour party, the influence of the Bevinite pragmatists in the TUC after the failure of the General Strike and the Labour party’s refusal to allow the Communists to affiliate to the Labour-party organisation restricted the CPGB’s avenues for expansion. The case for revolution was drowned out by the success of MacDonaldite ‘gradualism’ and the Labourist tendencies of the bulk of the working-class movement. After some isolated electoral successes in the early 1920s, in 1929 the Communists ran twenty-five candidates at the general election, but none of them was elected and they polled only 50,634 votes, 0.2 per cent of the national total. Yet again, as with the BUF, election results do not necessarily give an accurate measure of Communist strength, nor does the situation in the late 1920s reflect the potential for growth in the altered conditions of the early 1930s. CPGB membership doubled between 1930 and 1931, from 2,500 to 6,000. At the 1931 election the Communist vote also increased, the party’s twenty-six candidates between them polling 74,824 votes. By 1938 party membership – boosted by the Spanish Civil War and the Europe-wide struggle against fascism – had risen to 18,000. But more important for a party that was hostile to the capitalist parliamentary system, and which promoted its revolutionary inten-

Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after 183 tions as much by underground or conspiratorial activity as by open campaigning, was the success of Communist front organisations and of Communist infiltration of trade unions and other bodies. Bevin’s Transport and General Workers Union was a particular target for Communist activists who established local power bases among groups like the London bus workers. The coalfields of South Wales and Scotland saw Communist successes at local level, in South Wales building on the syndicalist traditions of the Edwardian period. Individual communists were also active as leaders of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, which attracted a membership of at least 50,000 in the early 1930s. Communist cells were established at the universities and there were sympathetic or fellow-travelling journalists, writers and intellectuals who spread the movement’s propaganda and influence to the middle and upper classes as well as its more obvious working-class constituency. The real prize for the Communists, though, lay in taking over, breaking up or destabilising the Labour party. In the early 1930s it appeared that this strategy might be achieving some success. First of all the Communists were able to benefit from the rift between the Labour party and the ILP. Since its formation in 1893 the ILP had been the radical socialist conscience of the labour movement and the source of much of the Labour party’s inspiration and campaigning momentum. However, the growing professionalisation of the Labour machine, the influence of the moderate trade unions and the gradualist strategies of the MacDonald/Fabian political and intellectual leadership had increasingly isolated the hard-core ILP activists as a ‘party within a party’ and left them frustrated and excluded from the work of the second Labour government. The Labour party’s rejection of the ILP programme, ‘Socialism in Our Time,’ was symbolic of the divergence of views between the Labour party and its radical wing. Maxton and the ILP leadership attempted to counterattack by demanding that Labour MPs who were also members of the ILP (of whom there were over a hundred in 1929–31) should support the ILP programme rather than the official Labour line. Those who refused to do so were excluded from the ILP parliamentary group, which consequently became a smaller but more homogeneous band of about eighteen MPs. However, this in turn provoked retaliation from the Labour leadership, which withdrew recognition from the ILP’s parliamentary candidates. The separate effects of this are difficult to discern amid the greater electoral disaster of 1931, but it may have contributed to the ILP’s poor showing. Of the 19 ILP candidates, only three (Maxton, Wallhead and McGovern) were elected, although two trade unionsponsored MPs – David Kirkwood and George Buchanan – joined the much reduced ILP parliamentary group.18 In one sense the 1931 result gave the ILP the chance to win back its central role in Labour politics. Its social and economic policies had been made more relevant by the crisis of 1931 and Maxton would have shone as a parliamentary leader on Labour’s diminished front bench. But the rift proved impossible to heal and the ILP formally disaffiliated from the Labour party in 1932. The intention was for it to become a broad-based campaigning alternative to

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Labour, seeking support for socialism among the working classes but still committed to the parliamentary road. Instead what happened was that the ILP was infiltrated by the Communist ‘Revolutionary Policy Committee’ and that it moved steadily to the revolutionary left. It established links with the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement and formed a ‘United Front’ with the Communist party in May 1933, shortly after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. ILP membership declined from about 15,000 in 1931 to less than 5,000 in 1935, with substantial concentrations of popular support in only a few areas such as Maxton’s Glasgow. The ILP added to the variety of the revolutionary left and provided a theoretical alternative to the Labour party, but neither it nor the Communists represented a serious threat to the parliamentary system in the 1930s. A more potent danger was that the Labour party itself would adopt a more extreme anti-parliamentary stance. This was an eventuality that could not be entirely ruled out. The experience of 1931, and indeed of 1929–31 as a whole, had raised doubts about Labour’s ability to achieve socialism by conventional parliamentary means. It seemed that the capitalist parties and their associated vested interests would always be too strong for Labour under the existing rules of the political game, and this was a view that gained added support following the abrupt halting of Labour’s evolutionary ‘forward march’ in 1931 and in the face of the National Government’s towering majority in the new House of Commons. Within the Labour party new groups emerged, like the Socialist League (including among its members Stafford Cripps, G.D.H. Cole, Harold Laski, R.H. Tawney and Aneurin Bevan), which began to debate not only what programme the Labour party should adopt but also how a future Labour government could avoid being blown off course by another ‘bankers’ ramp’ or the obstruction of vested interests. To a number of leading figures, like Cripps, and even, for a time, Attlee, the answer appeared to lie in some form of emergency or ‘enabling’ legislation which would allow a Labour government to override or by-pass parliamentary opposition. The practical difficulties of this were never fully explored, and there was still an assumption on the part of most that Labour would first have to win power by more conventional means, but the fact that such ideas were taken seriously is evidence of an increasing frustration in Labour circles with the parliamentary system, just as the support of Cripps and others for improving relations with the Communists (and possibly even Labour membership of a ‘United Front’) indicated at least a potential willingness to consider more extreme solutions if circumstances required.19 That British politics in the 1930s did not take this more extreme course was due to a number of factors. The deep-rooted parliamentary traditions of the country were certainly important, as was the respect for them on the part of the vast majority of politicians and voters alike. Despite the emergence of revolutionary and anti-parliamentary ideas, the parties in which these were most obviously embodied remained limited in their appeal and perhaps too ‘foreign’ in their ideological and political character. Even in times of crisis, the major party organisations were able to command the allegiance of a mass electorate

Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after 185 and their ‘centrist’ leaders were able to keep their respective radical wings in check. It is important to recognise, too, that the underlying conditions of economy and society in the 1930s contributed to the maintenance of political stability. The problems of depression and unemployment were real, but they were only part of the picture. Although the traditional industries remained in slump for most of the 1930s, at least until rearmament began to kick in towards the end of the decade, in the south and east of England and the Midlands in particular the ‘new’ economy of car manufacturing and consumer goods was booming, with attendant economic benefits for those directly employed and for the related service sector, building trades and so on. The National Governments that presided over this economic recovery were seen by many voters as successful and sympathetic regimes attuned to the interests of what a later generation would call a ‘property-owning democracy’. If there was alienation from the prevailing ethos of 1930s Britain, it seems to have bred apathy rather than revolution, or else to have been catered for by a Labour party whose support was once again heavily concentrated in the depressed areas rather than by the alternative prospectuses of Communism or fascism.

The restoration of party politics Even if Britain in the early 1930s did not succumb to either extremism or dictatorship, its political system was still in an unusual and unbalanced state. The parliamentary and electoral dominance of the National Government was not entirely unprecedented. Reference has already been made to the Pitt–Liverpool administrations of 1794–1827 and the mid-Victorian Whig–Liberal ascendancy of 1846–74 – periods of sustained power by a ruling combination broken only briefly by alternative or minority governments of opposing parties. In the late nineteenth century the Salisbury–Balfour ministries held office for nearly twenty years with only one three-year interval of Liberal rule. Lloyd George’s government of 1918–22 outnumbered its opponents by almost as great a margin as the National Government of 1931–5 did its Labour and Liberal opposition. Yet implicit in all these examples, except perhaps the last, was the existence of a potential alternative regime: the Whigs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, who eventually came to power in 1830; the Derby–Disraeli Conservative party which formed minority governments in the 1850s and 1860s before overturning the Liberals’ majority in 1874; the Gladstone–Irish Nationalist alliance that held power in 1892–5. Even under the Lloyd George Coalition there was the possibility that alternative governing combinations could emerge from the realignment of parties in parliament or their electoral reinforcement. The situation after 1931 seemed to be of a totally different order. The National Government was so strong, and after the departure of the Samuelite Liberals so comparatively homogeneous, that it looked unshakeable; the Labour opposition, conversely, was so weak that it was doubtful whether it could be an opposition in any meaningful sense at all. In these circumstances, politics could continue, since there was a sufficient

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plurality of views within and outside the government to ensure discussion and debate, but the excessive imbalance between government and opposition, amounting to the absence of a credible alternative regime, inevitably placed the operation and future of the party system in renewed doubt. In fact balance was restored rather more quickly than could have been envisaged in 1931. In 1945 a rejuvenated and largely reinvented Labour party swept to a landslide victory of its own, re-establishing a functioning two-party system and helping to forge what has been described as a post-war ‘consensus’ which lasted at least until the 1970s. How much the impact of the Second World War, and in particular the rehabilitation of Labour through its membership of Churchill’s wartime coalition, contributed to this dramatic transformation is a matter for debate. Yet even before the Second World War, and perhaps as early as 1935, there were indications that a new, more conventional framework of party politics was beginning to emerge, and that in that sense the worst of the crisis which threatened the party system may have been over. The developments that were taking place affected both government and opposition. By 1935 the National Government, although still theoretically an all-party administration, had taken on a much more obviously Conservative character. This process had begun with the resignation of the Samuelite Liberals in 1932 and their move into opposition in 1933. Simon’s Liberal National party, despite its separate organisation, was never an electorally independent body, being almost entirely reliant on its pact with the Conservatives, mediated through a National Coordinating Committee set up in November 1932. The Simonites, moreover, were not only linked to the Conservatives through electoral necessity but increasingly appeared indistinguishable from them in matters of policy too. This can charitably be taken as a confirmation of the ‘national’, consensual character of the government, and it is true that the Conservatives and Liberal Nationals did not formally merge until 1947, but in effect the Simonites had become little more than a wing of the Conservative party long before. MacDonald’s National Labour party had an even less real existence by the mid-1930s. It was unable to establish a lasting hold on the loyalties of working-class voters and its serving MPs, including MacDonald himself, were vulnerable to a renewed Labour challenge even with Conservative support. MacDonald’s personal decline was in keeping with the general failure of his party. Although in the early days of the government he was still a figure of independent substance, by 1934 he had become little more than a figurehead, his remaining public appearances painfully confirming his loosened grip on events and the premature senility of a despondent and worn-out man, with nothing of the fire and charisma of earlier times. The arrangement by which he and Baldwin exchanged offices in June 1935, so that Baldwin became prime minister for the third time, was a recognition both that MacDonald was unequal to the task of leading the government in another general election campaign and of the reality of the power that the Conservative party wielded in the government, regardless of the National label. While the Conservative hold on the government was tightening, Labour was

Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after 187 confirming itself as the principal opposition. Equally important, despite the lure of the revolutionary left and the talk of the Marxist-inclined members of the Socialist League about the need for a socialist dictatorship employing emergency powers, the Labour party remained firmly committed to a constitutional parliamentarist strategy. This did not mean simply a return to ‘MacDonaldism’. In the early 1930s there was a great deal of creative thinking going on in Labour circles, through organisations like the New Fabian Research Bureau as well as through more formal party channels such as the Policy Committee established by the party’s National Executive. The trade-union and political wings of the movement came together to produce a ‘practical socialism’ based on the nationalisation of key industries and more rigorous economic planning. The 1934 policy document For Socialism and Peace emphasised the linkage between economic prosperity and social reform at home and the internationalist perspective of the labour movement, which wanted to improve foreign relations and reduce the threat of war through a strategy of collective security and disarmament. This overhaul of the party programme, coupled with organisational reforms and the encouraging electoral successes achieved in parliamentary by-elections and local government, meant that by 1935 Labour, if not yet totally credible as a potential government, at least had the unity and confidence to be a credible opposition. The replacement of the ageing Lansbury by the more effective Attlee shortly before the 1935 election also symbolised the success of the internal ‘modernisation’ of the party and the passing of power into the hands of a younger, more executive-minded political generation. The 1935 general election was a more even contest than 1931, though one in which the National Government still had a considerable advantage over the opposition parties.20 All sides were agreed that the two main issues were the economy and the international situation. On the former, Labour challenged strongly on the continuing high levels of unemployment and the unpopularity of some government measures with working-class voters, particularly the notorious ‘means test’ for relief from the Public Assistance Committees set up under the 1934 Unemployment Act. Yet, while this struck a chord with the population of the ‘depressed areas’, and perhaps with sympathisers elsewhere, for most of the people, especially in England, the mid-1930s were a time of rising prosperity. Voters credited the National Government with having stabilised the economy and created the conditions for growth, and regarded the continuance of its policies as the best safeguard for their property, savings, incomes and jobs. Chamberlain’s careful stewardship of the national finances was thus an important key to the National Government’s electoral success. Similarly, he and Baldwin were keen to allay fears roused by opposition charges of ‘warmongering’ that the National Government was about to engage in an escalation of the arms race. The government reassured public opinion that its policy was in effect the same as the opposition’s, that is the pursuit of collective security through the League of Nations. There would be rearmament, but it would not be excessive. The Anglo-German Naval Treaty of June 1935 was evidence of

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the government’s commitment to the limitation of armaments and could be used to placate the supporters of the ‘Peace Ballot’ organised by the League of Nations Union shortly before the election.21 When Baldwin had become prime minister in June, Anthony Eden had been appointed as Minister for League of Nations Affairs, and at the time of the election Baldwin was supporting League policy by imposing sanctions on Italy in response to Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia.22 The success of the National Government’s campaign and the generally reassuring nature of its message was reflected in the election results. The government easily retained its overall majority, polling 11,755,654 votes (53.3 per cent of the popular total) and winning 429 seats. Within this majority the preponderance of the Conservatives was even more obvious than in 1931, with the party returning 386 MPs compared to 33 for the Liberal Nationals and only 8 National Labour.23 (The failure of the last was underlined by the embarrassing but not unexpected defeat of Ramsay MacDonald in his Seaham Harbour constituency by Labour’s Emanuel Shinwell.) The Conservative vote was 10.4 million, compared with just over 1.2 million for its coalition partners, and it is likely that the bulk of the latter’s votes came in any case from Conservative supporters. The ‘National’ ticket may still have attracted some voters in 1935, but it seems to have been less generally potent as an electoral weapon. The other side of the electoral coin, though, was the recovery of the opposition. This term should perhaps be qualified in relation to the further diminished Liberal party, whose 161 candidates polled only 1.4 million votes (6.8 per cent of the total) and won a mere 21 seats. Lloyd George’s self-styled ‘Council of Action’ was an electoral failure and even the party’s official leader, Samuel, lost his Darwen seat. Nonetheless, the Liberals could at least claim that their seats had been gained in open combat with the other parties and that the survival of their party had been temporarily secured, giving a new leader, Sir Archibald Sinclair, a chance to rebuild its fortunes and morale. A more genuine recovery, however, was that of Labour, which reasserted its right to be taken seriously as a potential governing party. Its popular vote of 8.3 million (38.1 per cent) was close to its previous high of 1929, and the party gained nearly a hundred seats, entering the new parliament with 154 MPs. This was fewer than some optimists had hoped for. It left the party still largely confined to the industrial heartlands and depressed areas from which it had sought to break out into government in the 1920s. Compared with 1929, Labour suffered too from the reduction in Liberal candidatures, which left it facing more straight contests with the Conservatives or Liberal Nationals. However, the party was at least part of the way along the road back; its parliamentary ranks were reinforced with enough talent to enable it to mount a more consistent and effective opposition in the Commons; and it had decisively beaten off the competition of the revolutionary left, the ILP winning only four seats and the Communists returning only a single MP, Willie Gallagher in West Fife. In the late 1930s this realignment of the political system along more conven-

Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after 189 tional lines continued. There was a brief ripple of intrigue at the time of the Abdication crisis in 1936, when Churchill among others threatened to form a ‘King’s Party’ in defence of Edward VIII, but this had little impact other than to enhance Churchill’s reputation for reactionary eccentricity. The retirement of both Baldwin and MacDonald in 1937, and the succession to the premiership of Neville Chamberlain, emphasised the Conservative character of the National Government, Chamberlain’s earlier support of the idea of a National party notwithstanding. Labour’s recovery likewise continued. The party gained thirteen seats at by-elections between 1935 and 1939. Attlee, confirmed as leader after the 1935 election, proved an astute coordinator of parliamentary forces and the grass-roots level was brought into closer relation with the party leadership by the Constituency Parties Movement whose campaign led to better constituency representation on the NEC.24 The influence of the party’s socialist extremists was correspondingly reduced and there remained a majority against the idea of a ‘United Front’ with the Communists.25 At the same time, however, the trend of foreign affairs brought Labour more support from moderate left and liberal opinion. The Spanish Civil War and the growing threat of Hitler made the Labour party a focus for resistance to fascism, to which Labour responded by finally abandoning its policy of voting against increased parliamentary allocations for rearmament in 1937. What Maurice Cowling has called the ‘impact of Hitler’26 on British party politics was thus many-sided. The National Government claimed to be the only guarantee of a strong defence for Britain yet pursued a policy of appeasing the dictators. Internal dissident groups, notably around Churchill and, after his resignation as Foreign Secretary over Chamberlain’s overtures to Mussolini, Anthony Eden, were critical of aspects of government policy. Labour, initially reluctant to support rearmament, had by 1938–9 become a potential ally for those supporting a more principled stand against the dictators. This at least allowed debate to be conducted around policy issues between government and opposition, even if in practice the differences between them were less great than might be supposed or subsequent recollection would like to suggest. This is some way from saying that Labour would have won a general election in 1940 under peacetime conditions. Much would have depended on the European situation and whether a European war had been fought while Britain stood aside, and the likely mood of public opinion is difficult to read. There was general relief at the reprieve offered by the Munich settlement of 1938; this had turned more in the direction of resolution and collective guilt by 1939. Yet the electoral trends up to the outbreak of war do not suggest any major weakening of the government’s position. Although a number of by-elections had been lost to Labour, the average anti-government swing was only 3–4 per cent – not enough to produce a Labour victory in a general election.27 Labour’s electoral record outside its heartland areas or seats which it had previously held remained disappointing. The virtual collapse of the independent Liberal vote in the last years of peace helped the Conservatives rather than Labour. Of course, a war in which Britain did not fight but saw its allies and interests undermined

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would have opened up all kinds of alternative scenarios. But otherwise Labour’s best hope in 1940 seemed to be to consolidate its recovery, and with it the reemergent two-party system, and plan instead for the longer haul. The virtual historiography of an imaginary 1940 can be endlessly fascinating. In reality, Britain’s decision to go to war in September 1939 led to the suspension of electoral activity by the main parties and delayed the general election until 1945. The immediate political impact of the war was otherwise limited. All parties supported the government’s decision. Chamberlain carried out a partial reconstruction of his government (Churchill returned to the Admiralty as a symbol of the will to victory, rather as Kitchener had been drafted in to reassure public opinion in 1914) but otherwise normal parliamentary life continued. Not until May 1940, as Hitler’s Blitzkrieg gathered momentum, did more far-reaching changes occur. The government’s reduced majority in the debate on the failure of the Norwegian campaign, during which Chamberlain had unwisely appealed to ‘his friends’ for support, convinced the prime minister that a coalition would have to be formed. The Labour leaders made it clear that their party would not allow them to serve under Chamberlain and thus, after Lord Halifax had ruled himself out of contention, the premiership fell to Churchill. He immediately formed a government containing all three party leaders, included Chamberlain and girded himself and the nation for the long, but ultimately victorious, struggle against Nazi tyranny. In one sense the Second World War had a more dramatic effect on British politics than the First, yet in terms of the development of the party system its main impact was to confirm trends that had been in train before 1939.28 The Churchill coalition did not produce the kind of splits and realignments that had occurred between 1914 and 1918. The three main parties retained their separate organisations and identities and so were able to resume their normal operations when the war was over. The fact that Churchill accepted the Conservative leadership when Chamberlain was forced to retire by ill health gave him a party power base which Lloyd George, for example, had lacked, and made it unnecessary to seek to establish new political combinations. This does not mean that politics stood still. The Labour party in particular benefited from training a new generation of leaders in the practical work of government, Attlee as deputy prime minister and Bevin as Minister of Labour being especially successful. Moreover, although there was a ‘wartime consensus’ on war policy and post-war social reform (the latter captured in the Beveridge Report of 1942 and the White Papers which followed), Labour became more clearly identified in the public mind with a progressive social-welfare programme, and this stood them in good stead with a post-war electorate eager to wreak vengeance on the ‘Men of Munich’ and the ‘depression governments’ of the 1930s. Without the educative egalitarianism and social solvent of the war, things might not have moved this far this fast, or indeed they might have moved in a different direction altogether. Certainly the general election of 1945 does have the feel of a delayed action verdict on the National Governments of the 1930s. The Labour and Liberal

Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after 191 parties refused Churchill’s invitation to continue the coalition at least until after the end of the war with Japan, and so, shortly after VE Day, the wartime government was replaced by a caretaker Conservative administration and the country faced its first all-party election since 1935. Churchill was feted everywhere by large and enthusiastic crowds but was fighting against a legacy of anti-Conservatism which his personal popularity could not dispel. The Liberals were almost an irrelevance. It was Labour that was victorious all along the line, not only winning a parliamentary majority for the first time but achieving a landslide comparable to the great Liberal success of 1906. As with that earlier landslide, the pendulum soon swung back as the Conservatives adjusted to the post-war world. Within six years Churchill was back in Downing Street and Labour began thirteen years in opposition. However, the 1945 election completed the return to a more balanced system of two-party politics, the foundations of which had been laid in the 1930s. Political conflict would continue, but the extended crisis of the party system was finally over.

Conclusion

The crisis of the party system began in the Edwardian period before the First World War. It arose out of a struggle between the Liberal and Conservative parties that had its origins in the Victorian era but which erupted into a fiercer partisanship in the battles over the People’s Budget, reform of the House of Lords and Irish Home Rule. However, this historic conflict between Liberal radicalism and the Conservatives’ defence of the established order was overlaid by newer concerns. Politicians of both major parties were aware of mounting pressures for social, economic and political reform that threatened the basis of their traditional duopoly. Most obviously there was the challenge of Labour, which the Liberals partly contained through the electoral expedient of the ‘progressive alliance’ but which nevertheless introduced a more explicit class/industrial element into the political equation. Other groups, notably women, were protesting at their exclusion from the political process. Yet the more the Liberals moved to respond to radical pressures – whether the ‘old’ radicalism of nationality and Nonconformity or the ‘new’ of social welfare, industrial reform and democratisation – the more desperate Conservative opposition became. The Conservatives countered New Liberal policies of progressive taxation with the alternative interventionism of tariff reform, but otherwise mounted an increasingly strident defence of aristocratic privilege and the status quo, even to the extent of countenancing violent rebellion in Ulster against parliament’s enactment of a Home Rule Bill. The broad consensus that had underpinned the Liberal–Conservative party system in late Victorian Britain was breaking down. So, too, was the two-party system itself. The Liberals after 1910 were dependent for a parliamentary majority on Labour and the Irish. The Conservatives, unable to escape from their own minority status, were slipping into the dangerous waters of anti-constitutionalism and a revolt of the ‘radical right’. The First World War did not entirely resolve the pre-war crisis but altered its context. Many of the traditional causes of Liberal–Conservative rivalry were rendered irrelevant. On the other hand, a series of new political, ideological and social challenges emerged. The single-party Liberal government that had entered the war gave way in 1915 to the Asquith coalition, an unhappy combination which was succeeded by Lloyd George’s government in 1916. In the

Conclusion 193 course of this transition the Liberal party was split, creating a rift from which it never really recovered. Yet the wartime ‘crisis of Liberalism’ consisted of more than the breach between Asquith and Lloyd George. The realities of war assaulted the ideas and principles of Liberalism at a number of levels and undermined much of the cohesion and moral confidence of Liberalism as a political movement. Ideologically, the challenge of war went deeper still, requiring a huge increase in the role and power of the state if the resources of the community were to be mobilised effectively. All parties had been moving in an interventionist direction before 1914. But the war gave government interventionism a particularly statist, ‘social imperial’ character which was well reflected in the Lloyd George Coalition, a ‘businessmen’s government’ which drew heavily on the technocratic experts of the ‘National Efficiency’ movement. The resulting amalgam, forged in the crucible of war, proved notably effective, both in securing military victory and laying the foundations of post-war Reconstruction. But it blurred the lines between the traditional parties and helped to intensify the crisis of the old party system by raising the prospect of the wartime coalition becoming the basis of a new, alternative form of ‘national’ government. For the Coalition’s leaders, at least for the Conservatives and for Lloyd George, the attraction of perpetuating their national alternative to old-style party politics was increased by the social and political uncertainties of the postwar world. The war had increased social discontent and industrial unrest. The Labour party decided to abandon both the Coalition and its progressive alliance with the Liberals and was seen as a major, and possibly revolutionary, challenge to the older parties. Apprehension over the future was compounded by speculation as to the consequences of the 1918 Reform Act, which tripled the size of the electorate and gave large numbers of women the vote for the first time. All of these, and other, considerations led to the decision to appeal to the voters on the Coalition ‘coupon’ in 1918, resulting in the decimation of the Asquithian Liberals and the virtual destruction of what remained of the Edwardian party system. Yet Lloyd George’s attempt to replace old-style politics with a new form of centrist government uniting the forces of national moderation against the extremes of revolution and reaction also failed – partly because of the internal divisions of the Coalition and the growing unpopularity of the prime minister himself, partly because the basic premise of a centre bordered by extremes was itself false, given the moderate Liberal/Labour character of the principal opposition groups. What finally led to the downfall of the Coalition was a revival of party politics: the National Liberals’ rejection of ‘fusion’ and the Conservatives’ rejection of Lloyd George. The Coalition had certainly acted as an agent of change, but its main effect had been to restore the Conservatives to power, split the Liberals and open the way for Labour’s advance rather to supersede the system of party politics altogether. The fall of the Coalition ushered in a phase of three-party politics in which stable government was only possible when the Conservatives were in power. Baldwin’s decision to call an early election in 1923 led to a confused interlude in

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which no party could command a majority, either in parliament or the country. His second administration of 1924–9 provided a return to stability, but its defeat led to the second minority Labour government and the renewed instability of 1929–31. Throughout this period, and indeed from 1918 on, the key question was that of the relationship between the Liberals and Labour. Although the balance between them had shifted in Labour’s favour compared with pre-1914, for most of the 1920s the Liberals, at least when they could mobilise their full organisational resources, were still able to command significant electoral support. For the operation of the party system this was important in two ways. First, because a strong Liberal showing drew support away from the Conservatives and made Labour’s prospects brighter. Second, the social and geographical distribution of Liberal–Labour support remained largely complementary, as it had been before 1914. Labour had advanced at the Liberals’ expense in industrial Britain, but the Liberals retained substantial support among the middle classes, in rural districts and in the Celtic peripheries of Scotland, Wales and South-West England. If this electoral congruence could have been matched by cooperation at parliamentary level, as Asquith attempted in 1924 and Lloyd George in 1929–31, the progressive parties could still have mounted an effective opposition to the Conservatives and a stable left-of-centre alternative to Conservative government could have re-emerged. That this did not happen says much about the complexities of the political situation in the 1920s and contributed to the difficulties of the party system. Labour–Liberal cooperation was hampered by a number of factors. The main one, perhaps, was that with the end of the progressive alliance and the reversal of their pre-war roles they saw themselves more as rivals than allies. The 1923 election, which placed Labour ahead of the reunited Liberals, was crucial, in that by opening the way to a Labour government it increased Labour’s determination to eliminate the Liberals rather than be seen as in any way dependent on their support. In the short term the strategy worked. The Liberals collapsed at the 1924 election and, although they again held the balance of power in 1929–31, they were never able to challenge Labour on anything like equal terms. Paradoxically, this may have made a new alliance between the parties easier, since the Liberals would clearly have been the junior partners, and the discussions between MacDonald and Lloyd George suggest that some form of closer arrangement was not entirely impossible. The problem with this was the differences it would have opened up, not just in the parliamentary Liberal party but between the Liberal party and its electoral base. At local level in the 1920s the Liberals had been more likely to enter ‘anti-socialist’ pacts with the Conservatives than agreements with Labour. Electoral evidence suggests that when Liberal candidates were not standing Liberal voters were more likely (perhaps by as much as 3:1) to support Conservative rather than Labour alternatives. Many left-inclined Liberal activists and former MPs had already joined the Labour party, pushing the Liberal centre-of-gravity more firmly to the right – all of which testifies to the difficulty that Liberal and Labour leaders would

Conclusion 195 have had in sustaining a new ‘progressive’ relationship, even if they had been wholly and unequivocally committed to the task. In the absence of a progressive rapprochement on the left, or the elimination of the Liberals altogether, it was almost impossible for Labour to fulfil MacDonald’s dream of becoming a genuinely ‘national’ alternative to the Conservatives. He came nearest to achieving his goal in 1929, when Labour became the largest party in the Commons, but even then the electoral base of Labour’s success was shallow and its position vulnerable to small shifts in the electoral tide. Labour would probably have lost an election in 1931 in any circumstances. The formation of the National Government and the nature of the 1931 contest made it inevitable that Labour’s defeat would be heavy, and potentially catastrophic. In the event, Labour retained its bedrock support, the trade union alliance remained firm and the party avoided a lurch into extremism which might have destroyed it as a political force. On the wider stage, the success of the National Government in stabilising the economy and enlisting a broad social and electoral coalition in favour of its policies prevented the revolutionary, anti-parliamentary movements of right or left from obtaining mass support or posing a serious threat to the basis of constitutional government. Even so, it was only after the general election of 1935 that the party system showed signs of righting itself after the storms of 1931, with Labour’s recovery providing the democratic safeguard of an alternative to the National Government from within the party system itself. Although it was not until 1945 that Labour finally triumphed at the polls – and then in conditions shaped by the Second World War – at least by the late 1930s it appeared likely that party politics would be resumed in something approaching their traditional form, albeit with a Conservative–Labour alternation replacing the Conservative–Liberal one of the Victorian era. So, how serious was the crisis through which the party system had come, as the framework of the Victorian/Edwardian party politics collapsed and politicians struggled to construct a stable alternative to put in its place? The impact of the crisis on individual parties obviously varied. The Conservatives, though at times experiencing severe internal problems, emerged with their position enhanced. Labour likewise suffered its own vicissitudes but ended the period stronger than it had been at the beginning, having made the transition from pressure group to party of government. The historic Liberal party, by contrast, was virtually destroyed. The break-up of one of the two major parties in the Edwardian governing system under the twin assaults of Labour and the First World War was by any standards a political development of huge significance, and one whose effects were felt far beyond the Liberal party alone. The unbalanced state of the post-war political system, and the instability of the three-party politics of the 1920s, all stemmed from the Liberal collapse. The implications for the party system were all the more unsettling because the downfall of the Liberal party coincided with the challenges posed to the older styles of politics by the threefold increase in the size of the electorate, the emergence of new political issues and ideologies, and the growing support for non-party or anti-party forms

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of government which were both part of the electoral/ideological challenge and a response to it on behalf of the established elites. The electoral challenge was surmounted by the extension and adaptation of existing techniques of party organisation and political management, coupled with the growing use of the mass media, including radio, cinema and the newspaper press. Before 1914 the existence of numerous protest and pressure groups outside the party system had suggested that the party organisations were becoming less inclusive than they had been a generation earlier and that there was dissatisfaction with the party system on the part of disaffected or alienated groups. After 1918, however, the expansion of the electorate made it ever more vital to the parties that they appeal successfully to the previously excluded groups – to women voters especially – and that party organisations become as inclusive as possible. The Conservatives were the most successful in this regard, just as they had been in late Victorian times, supplementing a mass-membership Conservative party with a range of constituency-based social clubs and other organisations that drew even larger numbers of people into the orbit of Conservative activity. Labour built a mass membership on an individual and constituency basis following the party’s constitutional reorganisation in 1918, complementing its strong links with the trade unions and the labour and cooperative movements. The Liberals were least successful at appealing to and incorporating the new voters, partly because of the divisions and organisational deficiencies of the party, partly because some of the former bastions of Liberal strength such as the Nonconformist churches and pressure groups were in decline, partly perhaps because Liberalism, as some historians have argued, was intrinsically less suited to the electoral popularism and social camaraderie that the other parties were able to employ. The process of adjustment was not entirely smooth, and differences also arose between party leaders and their rank-and-file, for example in the grass roots revolt against Baldwin’s leadership of the Conservative party in 1929–31. Nevertheless, on the whole the party machines were able to adapt reasonably well to the influx of new voters and to assimilate and accommodate them in an evolving version of the party system. The task of electoral management was assisted, at crucial points, by the employment of the ‘national’ appeal of coalition governments whose broad-based strength effectively deprived the voters of a real political choice. This was what happened in 1918 and again in 1931. Situations that might otherwise have led to damaging instability were resolved by parliamentary agreement so that the appearance of democratic choice was maintained but in conditions which carefully controlled its outcome. The challenges presented by ideology and policy were similarly managed with a fair degree of success. The one period when the clash of ideas threatened to get out of hand was in the highly partisan atmosphere of 1910–14, where the conventions of party politics were under strain and talk of violence leading to civil war became commonplace. The seriousness of the ‘Edwardian crisis’ should not be underrated even if, Ireland apart, it was a crisis largely confined to the political classes at Westminster which had much less resonance in the country as

Conclusion 197 a whole. However, there were wide differences between the parties which were not easy to resolve, the more so because Conservative opposition to Liberal measures was driven by their frustration at being excluded from power by the Liberal–Labour–Irish alliance and their consequent inability to defend the class interests of their supporters as much as by opposition to the specific reforms themselves. The First World War, by providing the Conservatives with a route back to power and altering the context in which decisions on issues like Irish Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment were taken, drew the sting of the pre-war conflict, although Conservative diehardism remained as a reminder of the earlier conflicts and a brake on any moves in a more liberal direction by Conservative leaders. It appeared, though, as if the social and ideological conflicts between Liberalism and Conservatism had been resolved only to be replaced by even deeper cleavages of class conflict, based on the rise of Labour and socialism. This danger had already been perceived as a threat to the party system, and to society generally, before the war. The last Liberal governments had responded with the social-welfare policies of the New Liberalism and with measures of industrial conciliation to reduce social tensions and reaffirm their ideological belief in the cooperation of classes rather than conflict between them. The political effect of the war encouraged the idea of national community and the patriotic social imperialism of the coalition governments, which was also intended to counter revolutionary tendencies by offering economic and social benefits to workers willing to support the existing system. Even so, after 1918, the prospect of class war seemed to become more likely. Trade-union activity was increasing and becoming more militant; the Labour party was advancing, armed with a socialist programme; further to the left were the Communists and a variety of Bolshevik-inspired revolutionary groups. The propertied classes rallied behind the Lloyd George Coalition as the only alternative to social revolution and the moderate Liberal centre dwindled in disarray. The rhetoric of class division continued to echo through the politics of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly on Labour platforms, where it replaced the attacks on landlordism and the aristocracy that had provided the linguistic reference point for an earlier generation of the radical left. Yet, in reality, neither politically nor ideologically did class war become the dominant theme of the period. The apparent ‘industrialisation’ of politics in the 1920s, symbolised by the events surrounding the General Strike, never translated into an outright political confrontation between Capital and Labour. Conservative and Liberal politicians continued to pursue conciliation, and industrial and social reform. For Labour, ‘socialism’ remained an aspiration rather than a policy. The Labour party inclined more to the gradualist Fabian traditions of social democracy rather than the Marxist alternative, even in the 1930s, and Labour governments were keen to establish good relations with industry and the City, sometimes at the expense of the short-term interests of their trade-union supporters. In practice, then, as in the Victorian period, a divergence of rhetoric concealed an underlying convergence of outlook between the parties. The evolution of this new

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consensus, reflected in support for economic planning and the continuity in policies of social reform, marked the emergence of a revived centrism in political debate, in which there were differences between the parties but with sufficient common ground to prevent them from becoming completely estranged and to enable a workable system of party politics to continue to operate. Once again, the various coalition and national governments of the period assisted this process, providing a framework for cooperation between politicians of different parties and encouraging voters to think in national rather than class terms. The danger was that ‘national’ regimes would themselves be seen as agents of a particular class or sectional interest, or that they would so firmly occupy the centre ground that their opponents were necessarily forced to the extremes. The success of all-party or non-party governments was thus itself a threat to the normal functioning of the party system. In the period under discussion, however, this danger was minimised by the continuation of party politics alongside the workings of coalitionist regimes. The Lloyd George Coalition did not last long enough to transform the party-based culture of politics, and in the end was defeated by it. The National Governments of the 1930s lasted longer, but by the mid-1930s they had become Conservative governments in all but name, allowing ‘normal’ party politics to revive and limiting the space available for more extremist movements. Indeed, the experience of the 1930s in particular testifies to the enduring strength of conventional party structures, the alternative propaganda of extremism and coalitionism notwithstanding. Across the period 1910–35 as a whole, therefore, it is the firmness of the commitment to party and to a party-based political system that stands out. Voters and politicians believed that parties and their leaders should cooperate in times of national emergency, and there were those who argued in favour of party divisions being more permanently set aside, but parties had a deeper and more organic existence which did not allow the contours of the party system to be completely erased. Parties had grown up in the nineteenth century as the expression of widespread social, political and religious movements, as well as mechanisms for marshalling voters and organising parliamentary opinion. This basic characteristic was preserved from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. The years between the early 1900s and the 1930s saw immense changes. The Edwardian political system had to adapt to altered circumstances in order to survive. The result of this multiple ‘crisis of adaptation’, the character of which was made more complex by the impact of the First World War, was that the Liberal-progressive regime of pre-1914 was replaced by the predominantly Conservative regime of the 1930s; the Liberal party succumbed to the challenge of Labour. But through all these changes the basic fabric of party politics was somehow preserved. The party configuration that can be discerned by the mid1930s was to remain at the heart of British politics for the remainder of the twentieth century. The party system had faced its sternest test, but it had survived.

NOTES

Introduction 1 E.H.H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880–1914 (London, 1995). 2 David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Yale, 1990). 3 For a summary of these developments and their historiography see G.R. Searle, The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration, 1886–1929 (London, 1992), Paul Adelman, The Decline of the Liberal Party, 1910–1931 (2nd edn, London, 1995) and the classic account in Trevor Wilson, The Downfall of the Liberal Party, 1914–1935 (London, 1966). 4 Valuable recent summaries of the Labour party’s history include Henry Pelling and Alastair J. Reid, A Short History of the Labour Party (11th edn, London, 1996) and Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party (2nd ed, London, 2001). 5 The ‘crisis’ theme is developed in Stuart Ball, Baldwin and the Conservative Party: The Crisis of 1929–1931 (Yale, 1988). See also John Ramsden, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin, 1902–1940 (London, 1978). 6 R.J. Scally, The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition: The Politics of Social Imperialism, 1900–1918 (Princeton, 1975), chapters V and VII; G.R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency (Blackwell, Oxford, 1971), chapter VI. On ‘coalitionism’ generally, see G.R. Searle, Country Before Party: Coalitions and the Idea of ‘National Government’ in Modern Britain, 1885–1987 (London, 1995).

1

Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain

1 Martin Pugh, The Evolution of the British Electoral System, 1832–1987 (London, 1988), p. 7. 2 E.A. Smith, The House of Lords, 1815–1911 (London, 1992). 3 A.K. Russell, Liberal Landslide. The General Election of 1906 (Newton Abbot, 1973), p. 20. 4 Henry Pelling, Social Geography of British Elections, 1885–1910 (London, 1967), pp. 419–20. 5 This was the contention of H.C.G. Matthew, R.I. McKibbin and J. Kay, ‘The Franchise Factor in the Rise of the Labour Party’, English Historical Review (henceforth EHR), June 1976, pp. 723–52. Their conclusions were challenged by P.F. Clarke, ‘Liberals, Labour and the Franchise’, EHR, October 1977, pp. 582–90 and Duncan Tanner, ‘The Parliamentary Electoral System, the “Fourth” Reform Act and the Rise of Labour in England and Wales’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 56 (1983), pp. 205–19, but the controversy continues. 6 Duncan Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 119, suggests, however, that the discrepancy was only slight, with working-class voters constituting 76 per cent of the electorate compared with 80 per cent of the popula-

200

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Notes tion. But he admits that if plural voters are taken into account the working-class share of the electorate was probably nearer 70 per cent. Neal Blewett, The Peers, the Parties and the People: The General Elections of 1910 (London, 1972), p. 364. W.L. Guttsman, The British Political Elite (London, 1968), p. 78. J.A. Thomas, The House of Commons, 1832–1901 (Cardiff, 1939) and The House of Commons, 1906–1911 (Cardiff, 1958). Derek Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England (Leicester, 1976). Gregory D. Phillips, The Diehards: Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England (Harvard, 1979), p. 69. Kenneth O. Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales, 1880–1980 (Oxford, 1980), p. 52. Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865–1914 (Oxford, 1987), p. 486. Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life (London, 1930), pp. 352–4. For background on the various extra-parliamentary agitations see Patricia Hollis, Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England (London, 1974), J.T. Ward (ed.), Popular Movements, c1830–1850 (London, 1970), D.A. Hamer, The Politics of Electoral Pressure (Brighton, 1977). David Powell, British Politics and the Labour Question, 1868–1990 (London, 1992); Ben Pimlott and Chris Cook (ed.), Trade Unions in British Politics (London, 1982). G.I.T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1869–1921 (Oxford, 1987); Stephen Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics (London, 1975). Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press, 1855–1914 (London, 1976); Stephen Koss, The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (London, 1990). For summaries of the debate on the party system see Eric J. Evans, Political Parties in Britain, 1783–1867 (London, 1985) and Frank O’Gorman, The Emergence of the British Two-Party System, 1760–1832 (London, 1982). The ‘Tamworth Manifesto’ was Peel’s address to the voters, issued during his ‘hundred-day’ ministry of 1834–5. The transition from ‘parliamentary’ to ‘party’ government is fully explored in Angus Hawkins, British Party Politics, 1852–1886 (London, 1998). Hugh Berrington, ‘Partisanship and Dissidence in the Nineteenth Century House of Commons’, Parliamentary Affairs, XXI (1968), pp. 338–74. See also, T.A. Jenkins, Parliament, Party and Politics in Victorian Britain (Manchester, 1996), chapter 5. H.J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management in the time of Disraeli and Gladstone (2nd edn, Brighton, 1978) is the most authoritative account of this topic. Martin Pugh, The Making of Modern British Politics, 1867–1945 (3rd edn, Oxford, 2002), p. 15. John Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party, 1857–68 (London, 1966). Hamer, Politics of Electoral Pressure, explores the role of a number of such groups, including the National Education League, the Liberation Society and the temperance organisation, the United Kingdom Alliance. The same author’s Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery (Oxford, 1972) deals with the implications of ‘faddism’ for the party as a whole. On the Primrose League, see Martin Pugh, The Tories and the People, 1880–1935 (Oxford, 1985). The phrase comes from the Crystal Palace speech. Paul Smith, Disraelian Conservatism and Social Reform (London, 1967). Brian Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom (Oxford, 1982). For more detail on the background to Irish politics in this period, see D.G. Boyce, Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 1990), chapter 6. T.A. Jenkins, The Liberal Ascendancy, 1830–1886 (London, 1994), pp. 203–26. D.W. Crowley, ‘The “Crofters’ Party”, 1885–1892’, Scottish Historical Review, October 1956, pp. 110–26.

Notes

201

33 Kenneth O. Morgan, Wales in British Politics, 1868–1922 (3rd edn, Cardiff, 1980). 34 Henry Pelling, Origins of the Labour Party (2nd edn, Oxford, 1965) still provides the standard account of these developments. 35 David Powell, ‘The Liberal Ministries and Labour, 1892–1895’, History, October 1983, pp. 408–26. 36 Pelling, Origins of the Labour Party, chapter X. For the subsequent history of the LRC, see Frank Bealey and Henry Pelling, Labour and Politics, 1900–1906 (London, 1958). 37 The Lords ruled that the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants was liable for damages payable to the Taff Vale Railway Company for losses incurred during a strike. 38 Memorandum by Jesse Herbert, Viscount Gladstone Papers, BL Add MSS 46025, f 131. 39 Quoted in Searle, Country Before Party, p. 58. 40 See, for example, Sidney Webb, ‘Lord Rosebery’s Escape From Houndsditch’, The Nineteenth Century, September 1901, pp. 366–80. 41 Scally, Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition, chapter III. 42 David Brooks, The Age of Upheaval: Edwardian Politics, 1899–1914 (Manchester, 1995), chapter 2, provides a good summary of Balfour’s predicament. 43 A.K. Russell, ‘Laying the Charges for the Landslide: The Revival of Liberal Party Organisation, 1902–1905’, in A.J.A. Morris (ed.), Edwardian Radicalism, 1900–1914 (London, 1974), pp. 62–74. On the electoral pact, see two articles by Frank Bealey: ‘The Electoral Arrangement between the Labour Representation Committee and the Liberal Party’, Journal of Modern History, 1956, pp. 353–73, and ‘Negotiations between the Liberal Party and the Labour Representation Committee before the General Election of 1906’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 1956, pp. 261–74. 44 So called after the name of Grey’s fishing lodge where discussions between the three took place. 45 For a full analysis of the election, see Russell, Liberal Landslide. 46 F.W.S. Craig, British Electoral Facts, 1885–1975 (London, 1976), p. 6. 47 P.F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971). 48 George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London, 1935). 49 Quoted in G.H. Le May, The Victorian Constitution (London, 1979), p. 170. 50 The fullest account of the budget crisis is Bruce Murray, The People’s Budget (Oxford, 1980). Roy Jenkins, Mr Balfour’s Poodle (London, 1954) gives a good narrative of the events of 1909–11 as a whole. See also David Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901–1914 (London, 1996), chapter 2. 51 Herbert Du Parcq, Life of David Lloyd George, vol. IV (London, 1913), pp. 686–96 provides the full text of the speech. 52 Motion carried in House of Commons, 2 December 1909.

2 1 2 3

The crisis of partisanship, 1910–14

Blewett, Peers, Parties and the People, p. 103. Powell, Edwardian Crisis, chapter 2. Craig, British Electoral Facts, p. 7. The Unionists’ total vote of 3,104,407 was also considerably higher than the 2,422,071 they had polled in 1906 and was their highest aggregate vote under the 1884 franchise (though of course they had far fewer unopposed returns than in their victories of 1886, 1895 and 1906). 4 Quoted in Blewett, Peers, Parties and the People, p. 141. 5 From 46.8 to 46.6 per cent. 6 Memorandum, 31 January 1910, quoted in Blewett, Peers, Parties and the People, p. 141. 7 Pugh, Modern British Politics, p. 133. 8 The Unionist advantage was increased by their clean sweep of the university seats.

202

Notes

9 Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership (London, 1948), pp. 443–4, quoted in Blewett, Peers, Parties and the People, p. 380. 10 Blewett, Peers, Parties and the People, p. 381. 11 Ibid., p. 400. 12 There is a useful summary of this discussion in Searle, Liberal Party, chapter 4. Some of the major contributions to the debate are P.F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism; the same author’s Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978) and Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism (Oxford, 1978). See also David Powell, ‘The New Liberalism and the rise of Labour, 1886–1906’, Historical Journal, 29, 2 (1986), pp. 369–93. 13 J.A. Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism (London, 1909), pp. xi, xii. 14 For example in his speech to the Welsh Liberal Convention at Swansea in October 1908, quoted in Du Parcq, David Lloyd George, vol. IV, p. 640. 15 Hamer, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery. 16 Koss, Nonconformity in Modern British Politics, pp. 116–24. 17 A.J.A. Morris, Radicalism Against War, 1906–14 (London, 1972). 18 David Morgan, Suffragists and Liberals (London, 1975). 19 The picture which P.F. Clarke painted of the strength of ‘progressive’ New Liberalism on the basis of evidence from Lancashire should be compared with other regional studies, e.g. Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘The New Liberalism and the Challenge of Labour: the Welsh Experience, 1885–1929’, in K.D. Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History (London, 1974), pp. 159–82; Martin Pugh, ‘Yorkshire and the New Liberalism’, Journal of Modern History (1978), pp. 1139–55. Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party gives a comprehensive survey of local variations. There is a useful historiographical survey in Keith Laybourn, ‘The Rise of Labour and the Decline of Liberalism: The State of the Debate’, History, June 1995, pp. 207–26. 20 Lord Crewe, Lord Rosebery (London, 1931), vol. II, p. 623. 21 The Royal Commission had been appointed by the Balfour government in 1905 and included the Fabian Beatrice Webb among its members. Derek Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State (2nd edn, London, 1984), pp. 158–62 describes the Commission’s work and the Liberal response. 22 Powell, ‘New Liberalism and the Rise of Labour’. 23 On the electoral aspects of the progressive alliance see Martin Petter, ‘The Progressive Alliance’, History, 58 (1973), pp. 45–59; G.L. Bernstein, ‘Liberalism and the Progressive Alliance in the Constituencies, 1900–1914’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), pp. 617–40. 24. Henry Pelling, ‘Labour and the Downfall of Liberalism’, in Henry Pelling, Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain (2nd edn, London, 1979), p. 117. Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–1924 (Oxford, 1974) offers a more comprehensive picture or organisational developments, although some of his conclusions have been challenged by later writers. 25 The Osborne case had resulted from the successful attempt of a Liberal member of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, W.V. Osborne, to prevent his union from contributing to Labour party funds without his consent. The Osborne Judgement had the effect of reducing the availability of union funding for the Labour party until the restriction on the establishment of political funds by the trade unions was lifted by the Trade Union Act of 1913, subject to a ballot of members. 26 Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party provides confirmation of this point. Pugh, Modern British Politics, pp. 138–141, also emphasises the importance of the regional differences in political culture and Labour’s success in attracting support from working-class Conservatives in areas such as Lancashire. 27 The by-elections are more fully analysed in Roy Douglas, ‘Labour in Decline, 1910–1914’, in K.D. Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History, pp. 105–25. See also

Notes

28

29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45

46

P.F. Clarke, ‘The Electoral Position of the Liberal and Labour Parties, 1910–1914’, English Historical Review, 1975, pp. 828–36. Ian Packer, Liberalism and the Land: The Land Issue in Party Politics in England, 1906–1914 (London, 2001). See also, H.V. Emy, ‘The Land Campaign: Lloyd George as Social Reformer, 1909–14’, in A.J.P. Taylor (ed.), Lloyd George: Twelve Essays (London, 1971), pp. 35–60. The appeal was not necessarily confined to rural areas. The Liberal victor in the mining seat of Hanley in 1912, R.L. Outhwaite, was a radical land reformer. The urban land plan was intended to appeal to a spectrum of urban middle- and workingclass opinion. Packer suggests this might have been worth as many as twenty seats to the Liberals in a 1915 election. Green, Crisis of Conservatism, offers the fullest discussion of this topic. See Phillips, Diehards. The role of extra-parliamentary Leagues is dealt with in Franz Coetzee, For Party or County: Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Popular Conservatism in Edwardian England (New York, 1990). Ramsden, Balfour and Baldwin, pp. 45–62. A. Chamberlain to Balfour, 29 January 1910, quoted in Austen Chamberlain, Politics from Inside (London, 1936), p. 198. Searle, Country Before Party, p. 45. J.D. Fair, British Inter-Party Conferences: A Study of the Procedure of Conciliation in British Politics, 1867–1921 (Oxford, 1980) gives a full account of the conference. See also Jenkins, Mr Balfour’s Poodle, chapter IX. Although not formal participants, the Nationalists were kept informed on the progress of the talks by Birrell, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, who was a member of the Liberal team, and by Lloyd George. The full text of the memorandum is printed in John Grigg, Lloyd George: The People’s Champion (London, 1978), pp. 362–8. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency, chapter VI, and Scally, Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition, chapter VII. D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs (London, 1938), pp. 20–24. A.T.Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis (London, 1967). The Times, 29 July 1912. Jeremy Smith, ‘Bluff, Bluster and Brinkmanship: Andrew Bonar Law and the Third Home Rule Bill’, Historical Journal, 36, 1 (1993), pp. 161–78. See also Richard Murphy, ‘Faction in the Conservative Party and the Home Rule Crisis, 1912–14’, History, 1986. For a fuller summary of this discussion, see Powell, Edwardian Crisis. A. Sykes, ‘The Radical Right and the Crisis of Conservatism Before the First World War’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), pp. 661–76; G.R. Searle, ‘Critics of Edwardian Society: The Case of the Radical Right’, in Alan O’Day (ed.), The Edwardian Age: Conflict and Stability (London, 1979), pp. 79–96. Ramsden, Balfour and Baldwin, p. 85.

3 1

203

The crisis of war, 1914–18

On the background to the war, see Zara Steiner, Britain and the Origins of the First World War (London, 1977). On the ‘July crisis’, see Keith Wilson, ‘Britain’, in Keith Wilson (ed.), Decisions for War, 1914 (London, 1995), pp. 175–208 and Cameron Hazlehurst, Politicians at War, July 1914 to May 1915 (London, 1971). 2 Quoted in Hazlehurst, Politicians at War, p. 41. 3 ‘Through Terror to Triumph’, reprinted in D. Lloyd George, Through Terror to Triumph (London, 1915), pp. 1–15.

204

Notes

4 Michael Bentley, The Liberal Mind, 1914–1929 (Cambridge, 1977). 5 Josiah Wedgwood to Walter Runciman, 25 August 1914, quoted in Hazlehurst, Politicians at War, p. 128. 6 Ramsden, Balfour and Baldwin, p. 110. 7 There are various accounts of these meetings. For a recent version, see R.J.Q. Adams, Bonar Law (London, 1999), pp. 180–87. 8 Martin Pugh, Modern British Politics, p. 152 describes it as a ‘fatal step towards the disintegration of the Liberal Party’. Trevor Wilson, Downfall of the Liberal Party, p. 49 concludes that it was ‘a major event in the Liberal retreat’. 9 Wilson, Downfall of the Liberal Party, p. 53. 10 John Turner, British Politics and the Great War: Coalition and Conflict, 1915–1918 (Yale, 1992), p. 61. 11 Ibid., pp. 55–111. 12 George H. Cassar, Asquith as War Leader (London, 1994). 13 Bonar Law had been ruled out by Asquith as a potential Chancellor because of his pro-tariff views and because Lloyd George’s move to Munitions was seen as temporary, with a right of reversion to the Exchequer. Had Kitchener been moved, Bonar Law could have been made Secretary for War, but this might have aroused Liberal opposition and in any case Asquith seems to have doubted the ministerial competence of Conservative leaders (Balfour excepted). 14 Charles Hobhouse diary, 19 May 1915, Edward David (ed.), Inside Asquith’s Cabinet (London, 1977), p. 245. 15 Charles Trevelyan to Mary Trevelyan, 21 May 1915, quoted in Hazlehurst, Politicians at War, pp. 286–7. 16 Lord Riddell, War Diary (London, 1933), p. 88. 17 Margot Asquith to Haldane, 18 May 1915, quoted in Wilson, Downfall of the Liberal Party, p. 49. 18 Walter Long to Carson, 25 May 1915, quoted in Hazlehurst, Politicians at War, p. 286. 19 David French, British Strategy and War Aims, 1914–1916 (London, 1986). 20 Churchill, chief architect and advocate of the Dardanelles campaign, resigned from the government in November 1915 to continue his war as a serving officer on the Western Front. 21 Keith Grieves, The Politics of Manpower, 1914–1918 (Manchester, 1988). 22 R.J.Q. Adams and Philip Poirier, The Conscription Controversy in Britain, 1900–1918 (London, 1987). 23 Turner, British Politics and the Great War, p. 73. 24 The ideological issues are discussed in Michael Freeden, Liberalism Divided (Oxford, 1986). See also, Bentley, Liberal Mind. 25 A higher number (about forty) had voted against the second reading. 26 Turner, British Politics and the Great War, pp. 91–4. 27 Searle, Country Before Party, pp. 95–7. 28 John Grigg, Lloyd George: From Peace to War (London, 1985), Bentley B. Gilbert, Lloyd George: Organizer of Victory, 1912–1916 (London, 1992). 29 House of Commons, 20 December 1915, quoted in Gilbert, Lloyd George, p. 281. 30 The ostensible issue at stake was who should be allowed to purchase German economic interests in West Africa. 31 The story of the events that lead to the downfall of the Asquith coalition has been told from the different perspectives of participants and historians, from Lord Beaverbrook onwards. Turner, British Politics and the Great War, pp. 124–41 gives a judicious summary, while biographies of the key individuals add their own emphases. 32 There is uncertainty over how Asquith interpreted Bonar Law’s news, and indeed how Bonar Law presented it (whether as an ultimatum or an offer to give the prime minister a free hand in reconstructing his government). Asquith’s handling of the

Notes

205

crisis is discussed in Roy Jenkins, Asquith (London, 1978), pp. 444–63. For Bonar Law’s role, see Adams, Bonar Law, chapter 11. 33 Scally, Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition. 34 Searle, Quest for National Efficiency and the same author’s Country Before Party. 35 Kenneth O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government, 1918–1922 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 13–14. 36 D.R. Woodward, Lloyd George and the Generals (London, 1983). 37 His comments are recorded in Riddell, War Diary. 38 Quoted in Ramsden, Balfour and Baldwin, pp. 118–19. 39 McKibbin, Evolution of the Labour Party, pp. 91–105. 40 It is fair to add that the decision caused much debate in the parliamentary party, where a majority of MPs initially favoured prolonging the coalition, and between MPs and the party in the country. The decision to leave the government was not finally taken until 14 November, three days after the signing of the armistice. McKibbin, Evolution of the Labour Party, pp. 106–11. 41 For a fuller consideration of the 1918 Act, see below. 42 Riddell, War Diary, 27 January 1918, p. 309. 43 Turner, British Politics and the Great War, pp. 298–302. See also Wilson, Downfall of the Liberal Party, pp. 109–11. 44 For the 1918 election, see below, chapter 4. 45 12 September 1918, quoted in Peter Rowland, Lloyd George (London, 1975), pp. 450–1. 46 Evidence for this is provided by the Merthyr by-election of 1915, where after the death of the anti-war MP Keir Hardie the new MP was the pro-war C.B. Stanton. Martin Pugh is among those who have emphasised the patriotic instincts of the Labour movement. Pugh, Modern British Politics, pp. 171–3. 47 John Davis, A History of Britain, 1885–1939 (London, 1999), p. 131. 48 Gerard de Groot, Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War (London, 1996), pp. 126–9. 49 Martin Pugh, Electoral Reform in War and Peace, 1906–1918 (London, 1974). 50 Keith Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society (London, 1979). 51 J.M. Winter, The Great War and the British People (London, 1986). 52 Pugh, Electoral Reform in War and Peace; G.I.T. Machin, The Rise of Democracy in Britain, 1830–1918 (London, 2001), pp. 143–7. 53 Quoted in Pugh, Electoral Reform in War and Peace, p. 158. 54. Ramsden, Balfour and Baldwin, p. 125.

4

Coalitionism and party politics, 1918–22

1 Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour (Cambridge, 1971) introduced this concept into the historiographical discourse, arguing from an examination of the ‘high politics’ of the period that the actions of non-Labour politicians were largely motivated by their response to the emergence of the Labour party after 1918. 2 At Bristol on 11 December. 3 Quoted in Keith Feiling, Life of Neville Chamberlain (London, 1946), p. 81. 4 Quoted in Wilson, Downfall of the Liberal Party, p. 170. 5 Ibid., p. 179. 6 The Nation, 23 November 1918, quoted ibid., p. 169. 7 Craig, British Electoral Facts, p. 10. (Other sources give slight variations in the totals of sets for the various parties.) 8 Elsewhere candidates who had had a ‘good war’ appeared to benefit at the polls. 9 Charles Loch Mowat, Britain Between the Wars, 1918–1940 (London, 1968), p. 8.

206

Notes

10 Koss, Political Press, pp. 745–849. On individual ‘press lords’, see Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie, Beaverbrook: A Life (London, 1992) and J. Lee Thompson, Northcliffe: Press Baron in Politics, 1865–1922 (London, 2000). 11 Powell, British Politics and the Labour Question, pp. 66–76. 12 Searle, Country Before Party, pp. 117–20. 13 Speech, 15 July 1919, quoted in R.R. James (ed.), Churchill Speaks (London, 1981), pp. 379–82. 14 Quoted in Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘1902–1924’, in David Butler (ed.), Coalitions in British Politics (London, 1978), p. 25. 15 That they may have been right is suggested by the poor performance of the merged Liberal and Social Democratic parties as the ‘Democrats’ in the late 1980s, a decline only reversed following the re-emphasising of the word ‘Liberal’ in the new party’s title. 16 Morgan, Consensus and Disunity, p. 184. 17 Stanley Salvidge, Salvidge of Liverpool (London, 1934), p. 167. 18 Bonar Law to Balfour, 20 March 1920, quoted in Morgan, Consensus and Disunity, p. 187. 19 Morgan, Consensus and Disunity, p. 188. 20 Wilson, Downfall of the Liberal Party, p. 182. 21 The reference was to a sect that had broken away from the Presbyterian Church of Scotland in the ‘disruption’ of the nineteenth century. 22 On the Summer Schools, see John Campbell, ‘The Renewal of Liberalism’, in Gillian Peele and Chris Cook (ed.), The Politics of Reappraisal, 1918–1939 (London, 1975), chapter 3. 23 Chris Cook, A Short History of the Liberal Party (London, 1976), p. 82. 24 McKibbin, Evolution of the Labour Party, p. 137. Some of the fall in the membership of the socialist societies may have been the result of individual members joining Labour party branches instead following the organisational reforms of 1918 and the establishment of more constituency associations. 25 The number of full-time paid agents only increased from 112 in 1920 to 133 in 1922. McKibbin, Evolution of the Labour Party, p. 137. 26 Morgan, Consensus and Disunity, p. 84. 27 On Addison, see Kenneth O. Morgan and Jane Morgan, Portrait of a Progressive: Viscount Addison (Oxford, 1980). 28 Morgan, Consensus and Disunity, chapters 5 and 13. 29 There is a good account of this in Salvidge, Salvidge of Liverpool, pp. 189–221. 30 See Morgan, Consensus and Disunity, chapter 3, and C.J. Wrigley, Lloyd George and the Challenge of Labour: The Post-War Coalition, 1918–1922 (Hemel Hempstead, 1990). 31 Ramsden, Balfour and Baldwin, p. 151. 32 Quoted in Morgan, Consensus and Disunity, p. 273. 33 Adams, Bonar Law, p. 313. 34 Derby to A. Chamberlain, 9 September 1922, quoted in Adams, Bonar Law, p. 313. 35 Morgan, Consensus and Disunity, pp. 304–6, 310–16. 36 Curzon, though, was still keeping a foot in both camps. It was only on the eve of the Carlton Club meeting that he finally threw in his lot with Bonar Law and the anticoalitionists. 37 Adams, Bonar Law, p. 322. 38 Technically this was a gain from the Coalition Liberals, but the circumstances of the contest were complicated and susceptible to differing interpretations. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity, pp. 348–9. 39 Salvidge, Salvidge of Liverpool, pp. 236–41. 40 For example, thirty-six of those who voted against Chamberlain at the Carlton Club were members of the New Members Group. Searle, Country Before Party, p. 137. For a

Notes

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full analysis of the anti-Coalition movement, see Michael Kinnear, The Fall of Lloyd George: The Political Crisis of 1922 (London, 1973).

5

Three-party politics, 1922–4

1 On Bonar Law, in addition to R.J.Q. Adams’ biography, see Robert Blake, The Unknown Prime Minister (London, 1955). 2 Quoted in Salvidge, Salvidge of Liverpool, pp. 237–8. 3 Neville Chamberlain only accepted after consulting his brother, but he was otherwise fully in sympathy with those who had broken with the Coalition, having his own personal animus against Lloyd George over the latter’s treatment of him as Minister of National Service during the war. For Bonar Law, Chamberlain’s inclusion was a way of associating the Chamberlain name (and thus Birmingham) with his government, and also keeping open a line of communication to Austen and his associates. 4 For a more detailed treatment of the election results see Kinnear, Fall of Lloyd George and Chris Cook, The Age of Alignment: Electoral Politics in Britain, 1922–1929 (London, 1975), pp. 17–26. 5 Two of those elected as National Liberals immediately applied to take the Independent Liberal whip. On the history of the National Liberals generally, see Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘Lloyd George’s Stage Army’, in A.J.P. Taylor (ed.), Lloyd George: Twelve Essays, pp. 225–56. 6 Churchill had spent most of the campaign sidelined following an operation for the removal of his appendix. 7 Robert Shepherd, The Power Brokers: The Tory Party and Its Leaders (London, 1991), pp. 126–7. 8 On Davidson’s role, see Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Memoirs of a Conservative: J.C.C. Davidson, Memoirs and Papers, 1910–37 (London, 1969), pp. 150–65. 9 See, for example, Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin (London, 1969), pp. 212–49; Roy Jenkins, Baldwin (London, 1987), pp. 68–76. 10 On the manoeuvres which led to the formation of the government, see Cook, Age of Alignment, pp. 180–96. The best account of the 1924 Labour government is still R. Lyman, The First Labour Government (London, 1965). 11 David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London, 1977), pp. 297–9. 12 Amery to Baldwin, 8 December 1923, quoted in Cook, Age of Alignment, p. 183. 13 John Campbell, Lloyd George: The Goat in the Wilderness (London, 1977), p. 81. See also, C.J. Wrigley, ‘Lloyd George and the Labour Movement after 1922’, in J. Loades (ed.), The Life and Times of David Lloyd George (Bangor, 1991), pp. 49–70. 14 Simon later denied advocating such a scheme, and Asquith himself may only have entertained it as a possible option. 15 Robert McKenzie, British Political Parties (London, 1955). 16 Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald, p. 299. 17 Patrick Renshaw, ‘The Depression Years, 1918–1931’, in Ben Pimlott and Chris Cook (ed.), Trade Unions in British Politics (London, 1982), pp. 104–7. 18 Ramsden, Balfour and Baldwin, pp. 194–5. 19 For one thing, the journalist turned out to be a wounded war hero. 20 Ramsden, Balfour and Baldwin, pp. 203–6 examines Conservatives’ use of the letter. 21 Quoted in M. Cole (ed.), Beatrice Webb’s Diaries, 1914–1932 (London, 1956), p. 48. 22 Accounted for mainly by the increased number of the party’s candidates, which rose from 482 to 536. 23 Cook, Short History of the Liberal Party, pp. 103–4. 24 The erosion of the Liberalism of the intelligentsia had begun in the late nineteenth century and was hastened by the spread of socialism. J.A. Hobson, one of the main

208

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Notes

exponents of the New Liberalism, helped to formulate the economic policies of the ILP in the 1920s. Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats. McKibbin, Evolution of the Labour Party, p. 137. Michael Childs, ‘Labour Grows Up: The Electoral System, Political Generations and British Politics, 1890–1929’, Twentieth Century British History, 1995, pp. 123–44. Martin Pugh, ‘The Rise of Labour and the Political Culture of Conservatism, 1890–1945’, History, October 2002, pp. 514–37. For example in Sheffield where, in the absence of any Liberal candidates, the Liberal leader in the city, Sir William Clegg, advised Liberals to support the Conservatives. Robert Self, The Evolution of the British Party System, 1885–1940 (London, 2000), p. 160. Ibid., pp. 160–63; Pugh, Modern British Politics, pp. 203–7. Ramsden, Balfour and Baldwin, chapter 10. On party finance, see Michael PintoDuschinsky, British Political Finance, 1830–1980 (Washington, 1981). Even so, membership of Conservative social organisations did not automatically mean that members would vote Conservative, though it may have encouraged them to do so. The disappearance of the Liberal provincial press, which had been a feature of the nineteenth century, was another factor that contributed to the decline of the Liberal party between the wars. The way in which the press exploited the ‘Zinoviev letter’ showed that Labour’s suspicions were well-founded, as well as demonstrating the skilful manipulation of the media by the ‘dirty tricks’ department at Conservative Central Office. Mowat, Britain Between the Wars, p. 187.

6

Politicians and the slump, 1924–31

1 15.1 million women: 13.7 million men (52.7:47.3 per cent). Pugh, British Electoral System, p. 7. 2 Pugh, Modern British Politics, p. 212. 3 Speech at victory rally, 1924, quoted in Ramsden, Balfour and Baldwin, p. 211. 4 Speech at Stourport, 12 January 1925, quoted ibid., p. 266. 5 House of Commons, 6 March 1925, quoted ibid., p. 277. 6 To be fair, Baldwin himself stressed the continuities with earlier Conservative leaders, especially Disraeli. 7 For further detail on the reforms see Keith Laybourn, The Evolution of British Social Policy and the Welfare State (Keele, 1975), pp. 188–92, 199–203. On Chamberlain’s contribution, see David Dilks, Neville Chamberlain, vol. 1 (London, 1984). 8 One exception to the lack of intervention was the creation of a ‘national grid’ for the supply of electricity and the establishment of the Central Electricity Generating Board. 9 It might be noted, however, that despite the union leader Alexander Macdonald’s recognition that under Disraeli the Conservatives had done more for the working man in five years ‘than the Liberals had done in fifty’, Labour still supported the Liberals at the 1880 election, in which Disraeli’s government was defeated. 10 Davis, History of Britain, pp. 176–81. 11 There are numerous studies of the General Strike, e.g. Patrick Renshaw, The General Strike (London, 1975) and G.A. Phillips, The General Strike: The Politics of Industrial Conflict (London, 1976). 12 Ramsden, Balfour and Baldwin, p. 288. 13 Pugh, Modern British Politics, pp. 209–10. 14 One of the aims of Chamberlains’s local government reforms had been to curb ‘Poplarism’, whereby Labour-run local authorities like Poplar in London had funded more generous social provision from local rates.

Notes

209

15 Asquith to Lloyd George, 20 May 1926, quoted in Roy Douglas, The History of the Liberal Party, 1895–1970 (London, 1971), p. 194. 16 Quoted in Wilson, Downfall of the Liberal Party, p. 332. 17 Campbell, Lloyd George, pp. 118–28. 18 Ibid., chapter 7. 19 Annual Register, 1929, p. 43. 20 Ibid., p. 16. A Liberal government, Baldwin predicted, was ‘hardly a likely contingency’. 21 Ibid., p. 45. 22 The Conservatives fielded 590 candidates, Labour 569 and the Liberals 513. 23 Liberal Magazine, September 1929, quoted in Cook, Age of Alignment, pp. 337–8. 24 Pugh, Modern British Politics, p. 214. 25 The Conservatives’ problems in 1929–31 are most fully analysed in Ball, Baldwin and the Conservative Party. 26 Ibid., p. 28. 27 Ibid., chapter 6. See also Graham Stewart, Burying Caesar: Churchill, Chamberlain and the Battle for the Tory Party (London, 2000), chapter 5. 28 Ormsby-Gore to Salisbury, 5 October 1930, quoted in Ball, Baldwin and the Conservative Party, p. 98. 29 Ibid., pp. 96, 97. 30 Ibid., p. 166. 31 As was revealed, for example, in the Liberal Sir Chares Mallet’s hostile Mr Lloyd George: A Study (London, 1930). 32 There are doubts, however, about how seriously these discussions were taken by Labour ministers. Comparisons could be made with joint committees established under the Lib-Lab Pact of 1977–8 or the Blair–Ashdown discussions on constitutional reform in the 1990s. 33 If enacted, this would have enabled voters to number candidates in a particular constituency in order of preference, with the lowest-placed being eliminated and their votes redistributed in succession until the winning candidate had a majority of votes cast. This would not have been a proportional system, and would not necessarily have benefited the Liberals more than other parties, but it would have addressed the problem of candidates being elected on a minority vote because of a three-way split of votes under the first-past-the-post system. 34 On the relationship between Simon and Lloyd George, see David Dutton, ‘Lloyd George, Simon and the Politics of the Liberal Party, 1919–1931’, in Loades (ed.), David Lloyd George, pp. 71–86. 35 Simon to Lloyd George, October 1930, quoted in Viscount Simon, Retrospect (London, 1952), pp. 163–4. 36 Sinclair to Fisher, 20 March 1931, quoted in Wilson, Downfall of the Liberal Party, pp. 362–4. 37 Percy Harris, Fifty Years In and Out of Parliament (London, 1947), p. 114. 38 Robert Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump: The Labour Government of 1929–1931 (London, 1967); Ross McKibbin, ‘The Economic Policy of the Second Labour Government, 1929–1931’, in Ross McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class (Oxford, 1990), pp. 197–227. The most recent account is Neil Riddell, Labour in Crisis: The Second Labour Government, 1929–1931 (London, 1999). 39 Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump, chapter 8. 40 R. Bassett, Nineteen Thirty-One: Political Crisis (London, 1958). 41 Morgan, Consensus and Disunity, pp. 1–9. 42 Searle, Country Before Party, pp. 162–3. 43 Quoted in Nigel Nicolson (ed.), Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters, 1930–39 (London, 1969), pp. 47–8 (entry for 2 July 1930).

210

Notes

44 45 46 47

Ibid., p. 58 (entry for 30 November 1930). The Observer, 2 November 1930, quoted in Searle, Country Before Party, p. 156. Quoted in Mowat, Britain Between the Wars, pp. 355–6. Bassett, Nineteen Thirty-One provides a detailed account. There are other versions in the party histories and the biographies of the main participants. Self, British Party System, pp. 179–83 offers a good historiographial summary. See also Philip Williamson, National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and the Empire, 1926–1932 (Cambridge, 1992). 48 Viscount Samuel, Memoirs (London, 1945), p. 204. On the King’s role see, Kenneth Rose, King George V (London, 1983), pp. 373–9. 49 Quoted in Douglas, Liberal Party, p. 219. 50 Letter to The Times, 10 October 1931, quoted in Mowat, Britain Between the Wars, p. 410.

7

Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after

1 Churchill’s view is contained in W.S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (London, 1948), the first volume of his history of the Second World War. Guilty Men was the title of a book authored by left-wing critics of the National Government, including Michael Foot, published under the collective pseudonym of ‘Cato’ (London, 1940). 2 Nick Smart, The National Governments, 1931–1940 (London, 1999) provides a good survey. 3 For instance in John Charmley, Chamberlain and the Lost Peace (London, 1989). There is a comprehensive review of the debate in R.A.C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement: British policy and the Coming of the Second World War (London, 1993). 4 Pugh, Modern British Poliitcs, p. 221; Self, British Party System, p. 186. For a full study of the election, see Andrew Thorpe, The British General Election of 1931 (Oxford, 1991). 5 Neville Chamberlain to his sisters, 19 September 1931, quoted in Searle, Country Before Party, p. 181. 6 Searle, Country Before Party, p. 181. 7 In fact the seat was more marginal than the figures suggest and there were other local issues involved. Pugh, Modern British Politics, p. 237. 8 Quoted in Wilson, Downfall of the Liberal Party, pp. 374–5. 9 As with the 1934 Unemployment Act. 10 Richard Shackleton, ‘Trade Unions and the Slump’, in Pimlott and Cook (ed.), Trade Unions in British Politics, pp. 120–148. 11 For a discussion of the main themes, see Andrew Thorpe (ed.), The Failure of Political Extremism in Interwar Britain (Exeter, 1988). 12 Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain (London, 1998). 13 Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts For Nazi Germany, 1933–9 (Oxford, 1983). 14 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, p. 16. For a full account of Mosley’s career, see Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (London, 1985). 15 G.C. Webber, ‘Patterns of Membership and Support for the British Union of Fascists’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1984, pp. 575–606. On the role of women, see M. Durham, ‘Women and the British Union of Fascists, 1932–40’, Immigrants and Minorities, March 1989, pp. 3–18, and Julie Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement, 1923–1945 (London, 2000). 16 Thomas P. Linehan, East London for Mosley: The British Union of Fascists in East London and South-West Essex, 1933–40 (London, 1996). 17 Henry Pelling, The British Communist Party (London, 1958), N. Branson, The Communist Party of Great Britain (London, 1985), John Callaghan, The Far Left in British Politics (Oxford, 1987).

Notes

211

18 G.D.H. Cole, A History of the Labour Party Since 1914 (London, 1948), pp. 263–5. 19 Ben Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s (Cambridge, 1977). 20 Tom Stannage, Baldwin Thwarts the Opposition: The British General Election of 1935 (London, 1980). 21 The ‘Peace Ballot’ itself requires careful analysis, since a majority of those who voted were willing to support military sanctions against aggression, providing these were employed under the auspices of the League of Nations. Pugh, Modern British Politics, p. 237. 22 Daniel Whaley, British Public Opinion and the Abyssinian War, 1935–6 (London, 1975), chapter 1. 23 In votes, the Liberal Nationals polled 886,354 (3.7 per cent), National Labour candidates 339,811 (1.5 per cent). 24 Pimlott, Labour and the Left, pp. 118–24, 134–40. 25 Though Martin Pugh argues that there was a significant minority (400,000 votes at the party conference) in favour of a United Front. Pugh, Modern British Politics, p. 241. 26 Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy, 1933–1940 (Cambridge, 1977). 27 John Stevenson and Chris Cook, The Slump: Society and Politics During the Depression (London, 1977), pp. 260–61. 28 On wartime politics, see Paul Addison, The Road to 1945 (London, 1975) and Kevin Jeffreys, The Churchill Coalition and Wartime Politics, 1940–1945 (Manchester, 1991).

Further reading

There are two excellent historiographical surveys which cover the whole period: Martin Pugh, The Making of Modern British Politics, 1867–1945 (3rd edn, Oxford, 2002) and Robert Self, The Evolution of the British Party System, 1885–1940 (London, 2000). Other works which provide useful background are: John Davis, A History of Britain, 1885–1939 (London, 1999), P.F. Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–1990 (London, 1996), Keith Robbins, The Eclipse of a Great Power: Modern Britain, 1870–1992 (London, 1994) and Arthur Marwick, A History of the Modern British Isles, 1914–1999 (Oxford, 2000). Two older works that remain extremely valuable are Charles Loch Mowat, Britain Between the Wars, 1918–1940 (London, 1968) and A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965). Much of the detailed material on individual parties has been referred to in the chapter notes. It may be helpful here to mention again the key texts, together with some additional items. On the Conservative party, the standard work is John Ramsden, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin, 1902–1940 (London, 1978). Other general surveys which cover the history of the Conservative party in the twentieth century include Robert Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher (London, 1985), John Charmley, A History of Conservative Politics, 1900–1996 (London, 1997) and Stuart Ball, The Conservative Party and British Politics, 1902–1951 (London, 1995). There are useful essays on various aspects of the party’s history in Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball (eds), Conservative Century: The Conservative Party Since 1900 (Oxford, 1994). Martin Pugh, The Tories and the People, 1885–1935 (Oxford, 1985) examines the development of popular Conservatism through a study of the Primrose League. On this theme, see also Neal R. McCrillis, The British Conservative Party in the Age of Universal Suffrage: Popular Conservatism, 1918–1929 (Ohio, 1998). For the Liberals, the starting point in many ways is still the classic account by Trevor Wilson, The Downfall of the Liberal Party, 1914–1935 (London, 1966). P.F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971) was another important work that formed part of the early debate about the reasons for the Liberal decline. Both writers in different ways stressed the essential health of the party before 1914, in contrast with George Dangerfield’s account in The Strange Death of

Further reading

213

Liberal England (London, 1935). More recent surveys of the debate are G.R. Searle, The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration, 1886–1929 (London, 1992) and Michael Bentley, The Climax of Liberal Politics: British Liberalism in Theory and Practice, 1868–1918 (London, 1987). Chris Cook, A Short History of the Liberal Party, 1900–1998 (London, 1999) offers a straightforward account of the party’s electoral fortunes. The older study by Roy Douglas, History of the Liberal Party, 1895–1970 (London, 1971) is an ‘insider’s’ account written by a former party activist, while Alan Sykes, The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism, 1776–1988 (London, 1997) takes a broad sweep which combines an acute thematic treatment with telling detail. The decline of the Liberal party is historiographically entwined with the rise of Labour, notably in Duncan Tanner’s Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, 1990). There are a number of more localised studies, for example Keith Laybourn and Jack Reynolds, Liberalism and the Rise of Labour, 1890–1918 (London, 1984), which focuses on West Yorkshire. On the organisational history of the Labour party, Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–1924 (Oxford, 1974) is the standard work, and there are two more general single-volume histories: Henry Pelling and Alastair J. Reid, A Short History of the Labour Party (London, 1996) and Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party (2nd edn, London, 2001). On the history of the party in the early twentieth century there is much of value in biographical studies, especially David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London, 1977). Chris Wrigley, Arthur Henderson (Cardiff, 1990) looks at another major figure in the party’s history, while the brief studies in Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour People (Oxford, 1987) convey some of the changing flavour of Labour politics during its transition from being a party of protest to a party of power. Ben Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s (Cambridge, 1977) remains an important work on the inter-war period. In addition to writings on individual parties, there is an equally large literature on particular themes and topics. The political history of the years before 1914 is covered in David Brooks, The Age of Upheaval: Edwardian Politics, 1899–1914 (Manchester, 1995) and David Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901–1914 (London, 1996). George Bernstein, Liberalism and Liberal Politics in Edwardian England (London, 1986) deals in greater detail with one side of the party divide, while E.H.H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism (London, 1995) offers the most thorough study of the Conservatives. On aspects of the Conservative ‘crisis’, however, it is worth seeing also Alan Sykes, Tariff Reform in British Politics (Oxford, 1979), David Dutton, ‘His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’: The Unionist Party in Opposition, 1905–1915 (Liverpool, 1992) and Jeremy Smith, The Tories and Ireland, 1910–1914: Conservative Politics and the Home Rule Crisis (Dublin, 2000). For the war and inter-war period there are also a number of valuable texts. On wartime politics, the most detailed account is John Turner, British Politics and the Great War: Coalition and Conflict, 1915–1918 (Yale, 1992). Cameron Hazlehurst’s Politicians at War, July 1914 to May 1915 (London, 1971) forms a prelude to Turner’s work. The full context of the war is brilliantly analysed in Trevor

214

Further reading

Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Polity Press, 1986), and there are relevant essays (including one by Martin Pugh on ‘Domestic Politics’) in Stephen Constantine, Maurice W. Kirby and Mary B. Rose (eds), The First World War in British History (London, 1995). Post-war politics are dealt with from differing perspectives in Kenneth O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government, 1918–1922 (Oxford, 1979), Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour, 1920–1924 (Cambridge, 1971) and Chris Cook, The Age of Alignment: Electoral Politics in Britain, 1922–1929 (London, 1975). For the 1930s, John Stevenson and Chris Cook, The Slump: Society and Politics During the Depression (London, 1977) provides a good general survey. Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor (eds), Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997) contains some important material on the complex relationships of parties and voters. The war and post-war periods have also given rise to more general thematic reflection on the relations between coalitions and party politics. Turner, British Politics and the Great War and Morgan, Consensus and Disunity, mentioned above, provide empirical treatments. A more sustained analysis of the nature and purpose of ‘coalitionism’ is offered in G.R. Searle, Country Before Party: Coalitions and the Idea of ‘National Government’ in Modern Britain, 1885–1987 (London, 1995), but see also David Butler (ed.), Coalitions in British Politics (London, 1978) and R.J. Scally, The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition: The Politics of Social Imperialism, 1900–1918 (Princeton, 1975). On the later phases of coalition government in the period, Philip Williamson, National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and the Empire, 1926–1932 (Cambridge, 1992) explores the context from which the National Governments of the 1930s emerged, while Nick Smart, The National Governments, 1931–1940 (London, 1999) traces their subsequent history. This by no means exhausts the wealth of source material for the study of politics in this period. In particular there is a rich literature of biography and autobiography, and there are plentiful primary sources in the form of collected letters, diaries, etc. Some guidance on these can be found in the notes to earlier chapters and in the bibliographies of many of the works cited above.

INDEX

Abdication crisis, 189 Aberavon, 129 Aberdeen, Lord, 17 Abnormal Importations Act, 173 Abyssinia, 188 Adamson, W.R., 94 Addison, Dr Christopher, 75, 76, 97, 99, 108, 110 Administrative Reform Association, 25 Agadir, 34 Agriculture Act (1920), 110, 119 Allied Economic Conference, 69 Amery, Leo, 118, 124, 164 Amritsar massacre, 108, 111, 155 Anglo-German Naval Treaty, 187 Anglo-Irish Treaty, 108–9, 111, 179 Anti-Corn Law League, 16 Anti-Waste League, 107–8, 156 Asquith, H.H., 13, 26, 29, 86, 110–11 as prime minister (1908–15), 27, 33, 35, 45, 52, 53, 59, 61, 76 and coalition government (1915–16), 65–72 and Liberal party, 66–7, 78–9, 80, 92, 94, 103–4, 122–3, 129, 134 and Lloyd George, 71–2, 74, 78–9, 80, 117, 122–3, 129, 150, 193 and women’s suffrage, 85 and first Labour government, 125, 127, 128, 129, 131, 194 Asquith, Margot, 13, 66, 67 Astor, Lady Nancy, 93 Attlee, Clement, 5, 91, 127, 177, 184, 187, 189 Austria, 162 Austria-Hungary, 59 Baldwin, Stanley, 93, 118, 120, 193

and Lloyd George Coalition, 113, 114, 115, 116 as prime minister, 95, 117, 121–2, 126, 132, 144–7, 152 and Conservative party, 122, 123, 130, 139–40, 143–4, 147–8, 154–7, 176, 196 and first Labour government, 124–5, 130, 131, 133 and General Strike, 146–7 and National Government, 162, 164–8, 174, 175, 178, 186, 188, 189 Balfour, A.J., 5, 13, 27–30, 32, 47–8, 52, 53, 60, 63, 66, 67, 73, 97, 100, 112, 121 Balfour, Sir Arthur, 163 Ball, Stuart, 157 Barnes, George, 77, 78, 80, 91 Bassett, Reginald, 162 ‘Battle of Cable Street’, 181 BBC, 178 Beaverbrook, Lord, 95, 139, 156, 157 Belgium, 59, 61 Bell, Richard, 24 Bennet, R.B., 156 Bevan, Aneurin, 161, 184 Beveridge Report, 190 Bevin, Ernest, 148, 160, 165, 177, 183, 190 Birkenhead, Lord, 52, 97, 99, 111, 11, 113, 118, 125 ‘Black Friday’, 109 Blanesburgh Committee, 145 Blewett, Neal, 12, 37 Boer War, see South African War Bonar Law, Andrew, see Law, Andrew Bonar Bondfield, Margaret, 127 Booth, Charles, 25 Britain’s Industrial Future, 151 British Covenant, 54

216

Index

British Empire Union, 180 British Expeditionary Force (BEF), 61, 63 British Fascisti, 179 British League for the Support of Ulster and the Union, 54 British Socialist Party (BSP), 56, 182 British Union of Fascists (BUF), 9, 180–82 British Workers’ League, see National Democratic Party Britons Society, 179 Broadhurst, Henry, 13, 23 Buchan, John, 163 Buchanan, George, 183 Budget League, 33 Budget Protest League, 33 Burns, John, 13, 60 Burt, Thomas, 13, 23 Butt, Isaac, 22 Buxton, Noel, 127 By-elections Mid-Lanark (1888), 23 Colne Valley (1907), 31 Jarrow (1907), 31 Hanley (1912), 44 Chesterfield (1913), 44 Aberdeenshire Central (1919), 102 Bothwell (1919), 105 Hull Central (1919), 102, 103 Rusholme (1919), 103 Plymouth (1919), 93 Spen Valley (1919), 103, 159 West Leyton (1919), 102 Widnes (1919), 94, 103 Louth (1920), 103 Paisley (1920), 94, 103 Cardiganshire (1921), 103 Dover (1921), 107 Hertford (1921), 108 Southwark (1921), 105 Westminster (1921), 108 Woolwich East (1921), 105 Bodmin (1922), 103 Newport (1922), 114 Pontypridd (1922), 105 East Willesden (1923), 120 Edge Hill (1923), 120 Mitcham (1923), 120 Westminster (1924), 129 Bosworth (1927), 151 Southwark North (1927), 151 Lancaster (1928), 151 St Ives (1928), 151 Eddisbury (1929), 151

Holland-with-Boston (1929), 151 South Paddington (1930), 156 East Islington (1931), 156 Westminster St George’s (1931), 156–7 East Fulham (1933), 176 Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, 13, 25, 27, 29, 32 Campbell case, 131 Carlton Club meeting, 114 Carson, Sir Edward, 53, 56, 63, 67, 70, 71 Cecil, Lord Robert, 47 Chamberlain, Austen, 5, 48, 49, 50, 97, 109, 111–115, 120, 122, 123, 130, 144 Chamberlain, Joseph, 14, 16, 22, 26, 28, 46, 47, 50, 77, 107, 122, 144, 155 Chamberlain, Neville, 91, 111, 118, 144–5, 156, 157, 162, 165–8, 172–4, 187, 189, 190 Chanak, 113 Chartists, 16 Chelmsford, Lord, 127 Childs, Michael, 136 Church of England, 19, 38 Churchill, Lord Randolph, 54 Churchill, Winston, 13, 14, 16, 26, 64, 66, 118, 167, 189 and Liberal party, 31, 33, 42, 120, 129 and coalition governments, 52, 59, 76, 97, 99, 113 and Conservative party, 29, 76, 129, 144, 145, 147, 155, 157, 176 prime minister, 74, 91, 190, 191 cinema newsreels, 2, 196 Citrine, Walter, 160, 177 Clydeside, 86, 109 Clynes, J.R., 94, 126 coal industry, 6, 82, 105, 109, 146–7, 174 coalition governments Aberdeen, 106–7 Asquith, 2, 65–72, 192 Lloyd George, 2, 8, 52, 73–81, 90–116, 172, 185, 192–3, 198 See also National Governments Coalition Liberals, 80, 89, 98, 99–100, 102, 103, 106, 110, 119, 120 coalitionism, 73, 97–8, 101, 116, 162–3 Coal Mines Bill (1929), 158, 160 ‘Coefficients’, 27 Cole, G.D.H., 184 Commons, House of, 10, 11, 13–14 Communism, 9, 182–3, 197 Communist International, 132, 182

Index 217 Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), 106, 182–3, 184, 188, 189 Confederacy, the, 48 Connolly, James, 83 Conservative Central Office, 18, 49, 88, 138 Conservative governments 1874–80, 20 1895–1905, 2, 26, 28, 185 1922–3, 117, 118–123 1924–9, 142–53, 194 Conservative party nineteenth century, 1, 17–21, 22, 23, 185 1900–1914, 2, 5, 28, 29, 35–9, 46–50, 51, 53–4, 192 and First World War, 5, 59–60, 63–4, 65, 67, 68–72, 73, 76–7, 80–81 1918–22, 111–15 1922–29, 8, 119–22, 123, 137–40, 143–8, 193 1929–31, 154–7 1930s, 186 conscription, 61, 67, 68–9, 70, 75, 82 Constituency Parties Movement, 189 Constitutional conference (1910), 34–5, 51–2 Cook, A.J., 161 Cooper, Duff, 157, 163 Coronel, battle of, 64 Corn Laws, 1, 162 Corn Production Act (1917), 77 Corrupt Practices Act (1883), 11 Council of Action for Peace and Reconstruction, 177, 188 Councils of Action, 106 County Councils Act (1888), 11 Cowling, Maurice, 96, 189 Cripps, Stafford, 184 Crimean War, 26, 67 Crofters’ party, 22, 23 Cromer, Lord, 26 Croydon, 12 Cunliffe-Lister, Sir Philip, 167 Curzon, Lord, 73, 118, 121 Cymru Fydd, 23 Daily Express, 139 Daily Herald, 139 Daily Mail, 16, 132, 139, 181 Daily News, 16, 76 Daily Telegraph, 152 Dangerfield, George, 30–1, 55 Dardanelles, 64, 67

Davidson, J.C.C., 121, 156 Dawes Plan, 127 Defence of the Realm Acts, 61, 75, 82 Derby, Lord (14th Earl), 17 Derby, Lord (17th Earl), 46, 112, 118 Derby scheme, 68 Devonshire, Duke of, see Hartington, Lord Diehards, 5, 48, 94, 100, 108, 111, 116, 144, 154–5, 157, 176, 179, 197 Disraeli, Benjamin, 17, 20, 46, 106, 144, 145 Durham, 12 Dyer, General, 108, 155 Easter Rising, 63, 69, 83–4 Eastern Question, 20 Economic Advisory Council, 160 Eden, Anthony, 188, 189 education, 10, 52 Education Act (1902), 26, 28, 29 Edward VII, 10, 34, 51 Edward VIII, 189 Elections, see general elections, byelections electoral system, 11–12, 87, 138, 153 see also electorate, Reform Acts, proportional representation electoral truce, 60, 65 electorate, 2, 5, 11–12, 87 Elliot, Walter, 97 Ellis, Thomas Edward, 23 Emergency Powers Act (1920), 109, 128 Empire, British, 6, 20, 21, 25, 47, 155, 174 Empire Crusade, 156 Empire Free Trade, 156 Employer and Workmen Act (1875), 145 Equal Franchise Act (1928), 2, 142, 152 Falkland Islands, 64 Fascism, 9, 179–82 Federation of British Industries, 147 First World War, 3, 57, 58–89, 95, 133, 192–3, 197 Fisher, Admiral Lord, 64, 66 Fisher, H.A.L., 76, 97, 99, 100 For Socialism and Peace, 187 Fortnightly Review, 16, 26 Fox, Charles James, 17 France, 9, 41, 59, 61, 63, 67, 171 ‘franchise factor’, 136 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 59 Free Trade, 6, 20, 21, 28–9, 30, 32, 69, 123, 125, 128, 134, 144, 166, 168, 173

218

Index

French Revolution, 17 fusion (of parties), 98–101 Gallagher, Willie, 188 Gardiner, A.G., 16 Garvin, J.L., 16, 25, 163 ‘Geddes axe’, 108, 127, 144 General elections 1868, 18 1874, 23 1885, 18, 22, 23 1886 46 1895, 24, 30, 46 1900, 24, 26, 28, 30, 46, 91 1906 1, 3, 10, 12, 14, 27, 28, 29–31, 46, 47, 191 1910 (January), 3, 10, 28, 34, 35–9, 46, 47, 48, 51, 104 1910 (December), 3, 10, 34, 35–9, 46, 48, 51 1918, 3, 80–81, 90–93, 102, 104, 193 1922, 117, 118–120, 132, 135 1923, 117, 122–4, 132, 134, 135, 193, 194 1924, 5, 117, 131–2, 134, 135–6, 140, 194 1929, 5, 152–3, 182 1931, 168–9, 172–3, 182 1935, 181, 187–8 1945, 9, 91, 190–91 General Federation of Trade Unions, 61 General Strike, 143, 145–7, 148–9, 150, 182, 197 George V, 34, 36, 51, 72, 75, 122, 131, 162, 165, 166 Germany, 9, 24, 41, 59, 91, 108, 162, 171, 180, 181, 182, 184 Gladstone, Herbert, 29 Gladstone, W.E., 1, 10, 16, 17, 20, 22, 32, 122 Glasgow, 184 Gold Standard, 145, 167 Gorst, J.E., 18 Government of India Act (1935), 176 Government of Ireland Act (1920), 108 Granville, Lord, 20 Grayson, Victor, 31 Greater Britain, The, 180 Grey, Sir Edward, 13, 26, 29, 36, 59, 61, 65, 150 Griffith-Boscawen, Arthur, 113, 120 Griffiths, Richard, 180 Guest, Freddie, 76, 120 Gulland, John, 61

Haig, Douglas, 75 Haldane, R.B., 26, 27, 66, 67, 127 Halifax, Lord, 118, 155, 190 Halsbury Club, 48 Hankey, Maurice, 75 Harcourt, Sir William, 25 Hardie, James Keir, 23, 24, 62 Harris, Percy, 134, 159 Hartington, Lord, 20, 22, 107 Henderson, Arthur, 4, 44, 60, 62, 66, 73, 77, 78, 88, 94, 103, 126, 148, 165, 169, 177 Hitler, Adolf, 171, 181, 182, 184, 189 Hoare, Sir Samuel, 167 Hobhouse, Charles, 66 Hobhouse, L.T., 42 Hobson, J.A., 40, 42 Hodge, John, 77 Home Rule, Irish, see Irish Home Rule Home Rule Bills (Ireland), 5, 22, 32, 41, 53 honours, sale of, 113 Horne, Robert, 99 Housing Act (1924), 127 Housing and Town Planning Act (1919), 107 Illingworth, Percy, 60, 61 Imperial Economic Conference, 122 Imperial Fascist League, 179 Import Duties Act, 173, 176 Independent Labour Party (ILP), 23–4, 56, 62, 83, 88, 105, 127, 128, 148, 161, 177, 183–4 India, 20, 108, 110, 155, 157 Indian Empire Society, 155 Industrial Court, 109 industrial relations, 96, 109–10, 149 see also, strikes, trade unions Invergordon mutiny, 167 Ireland, 10, 11, 22, 30, 83–4, 92, 108–9, 110 Irish Citizen Army, 83 Irish Convention, 84 Irish Home Government Association, 22 Irish Home Rule, 1, 2, 5, 7, 21, 22, 34, 35, 38, 45–9, 51–6, 60, 62, 69, 84, 122, 155, 179, 192, 197 Irish land League, 2 Irish Nationalists, 3, 8, 21–2, 27, 28, 30, 35, 36, 38, 41, 45, 51, 58, 62–3, 83–4, 92, 137, 159 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 95, 108, 109

Index 219 Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), 83 Irwin declaration, 155 Irwin, Lord, see Halifax, Lord Italy, 9, 180, 182 Japan, 171, 191 Jolly George, 106, 182 Jones, Thomas, 162 Jowett, Fred, 126 Jowitt, William, 158 Kenworthy, Commander, 102, 103 Keynes, J.M., 151, 160 Kirkwood, David, 183 Kitchener, Lord, 26, 63, 66, 70, 71, 190 Labour and the Nation, 149 Labour and the New Social Order, 78 Labour governments 1924, 1, 117, 124–8 1929–31, 1, 2, 142, 153–4, 160–2, 194 Labour party pre-1914, 1, 4, 7, 10, 14, 30, 31, 35–8, 41–5, 50, 51, 56 and First World War, 4, 60, 61–2, 67, 74, 77–8, 80, 88 1918–22, 4, 90–94, 96, 104–6 1922–24, 118, 119, 124, 126, 128–9, 135–7 1924–31, 4, 143, 148–9, 153, 160–61, 169–70, 194 1930s, 4–5, 177, 182–4, 186–191 Labour Representation Committee (LRC), 24, 27, 29, 30, 126, 149 Lancashire, 30, 44, 47, 130 Land and the Nation, 151 Land Campaign, 3, 45 Lane Fox, George, 114 Lansbury, George, 177, 187 Lansdowne, Lord, 32, 59, 63, 83 Laski, Harold, 184 Law, Andrew Bonar, 5, 48, 53–6, 59, 60, 63–7, 71–4, 77, 80, 94, 99–101, 108, 109, 111, 114121, 154, 179 League of Industry, 163 League of Nations, 187 League of Nations Union, 178, 188 Leese, Arthur, 179 Lenin, V., 9 Liberal Central Association (LCA), 18, 78 Liberal Council, 157

Liberal Foreign Affairs Committee, 60 Liberal governments 1868–74, 19–20 1892–5, 24, 41 1906–10, 21, 31–3, 40 1910–15, 40–46, 58–60, 64–5, 192 Liberal Industrial Inquiry, 151 Liberal Imperialists, 25, 26, 29 Liberal League, 26 Liberal Magazine, 122 Liberal Nationals (Simonites), 159–60, 164, 169, 172, 175, 186, 188 Liberal party nineteenth century, 17–21, 22, 23, 107 1900–1914, 3, 26–30, 35–9,40–46, 51 and First World War, 3, 58–61, 65–7, 69–72, 76–80, 88–9 1918–22, 3–4, 90, 92, 101–4 1922–24, 118–19, 122–6, 128–32, 133–5, 137 1924–31, 142–3, 150–52, 157–60, 169–70, 194 1930s, 176–7 Liberal Summer Schools, 102–3 Liberal Unionists, 21, 22, 27, 28, 38, 101, 107 Liberal War Committee, 70, 71 Lib-Labs, 14, 23, 38, 42, 104, 136 Liverpool, 38, 138 Lloyd George, David, 14, 118, 119, 120, 180 pre-1914, 8, 13, 14, 23, 26, 29, 33, 40, 42, 45, 48 coalition memorandum (1910), 51–2 and First World War, 61, 64, 67, 69, 70–81 as prime minister, 2, 6, 65, 66, 73–81, 87, 89, 90, 91, 94, 96–7, 108, 110, 111–16, 190, 193 and Liberal party, 1, 3, 4, 40, 45, 70–72, 76, 78–80, 92, 98–101, 117, 122, 123, 129, 133, 134, 150, 151, 152, 157, 177 and Labour governments, 125, 128, 158–9, 160, 164, 170, 194 and National Government, 162, 163, 169, 173, 188 Lloyd George, Gwilym, 169 Lloyd George, Megan, 169 Lloyd-Graeme, P., 118 local elections, 14–15, 44, 104, 105, 177 local government, 11, 14–15, 177–8 Local Government Act (1929), 145 London, 38, 181

220

Index

London County Council, 15, 26, 177 London Passenger Transport Board, 174 London Underground, 128 Long, Walter, 48, 67 Lord, House of, 2, 7, 10, 11, 27, 31–3, 34, 38, 39–41, 46, 48, 50–52, 95, 192 Lothian, Lord (Philip Kerr), 163 Lowther, Speaker, 86 Macdonald, Alexander, 23 MacDonald, J. Ramsay, 4, 24, 43–5, 62, 93–4, 105, 117, 124–8, 131–3, 139–40, 144, 148–9, 153–4, 158, 160–62, 164–70, 172, 176, 186, 188, 194 Maclay, Sir Joseph, 75 Maclean, Sir Donald, 94, 104, 150 Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry, 160, 165 Macmillan, Harold, 154, 163 Manchester, 30, 124, 134 Manchester Guardian, 16, 79, 102, 139 Markiewicz, Constance, 93 Marquand, David, 165 Masterman, C.F.G., 151 Maxse, Leo, 48 Maxton, James, 148, 183 Maurice debate, 80 May Report, 161–2, 164, 165 McCurdy, C.A., 111 McKenna, Reginald, 66, 69, 71 McKibbin, Ross, 135 Merthyr Tydfil, 24 Middle Class Union, 180 Middlemas, Keith, 96 Midlothian campaigns, 20 Military service Bill, 69 Milner, Lord, 70, 71, 73, 77, 97 miners, 14, 104, 136, 146–7 Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, 35, 146–7 Mines Eight Hours Act (1908), 40 Ministry of Health, 107, 108 Ministry of Munitions, 66, 75, 82 Ministry of National Service, 75 Ministry of Reconstruction, 75 Mond, Sir Alfred, 123 Mond-Turner talks, 149 Montagu, Edwin, 76, 97, 100, 108 Montagu – Chelmsford reforms, 108, 155 Morgan, Kenneth O., 15, 73, 101 Morley, John, 60 Morris, William (Lord Nuffield), 163

Mosley, Sir Oswald, 97, 161, 163, 169, 180–81 Mosley memorandum, 161, 180 Muir, Ramsay, 102 Munich agreement, 189 Municipal Corporations Act (1835), 11 Munitions of War Act (1915), 68, 75, 82, 86 Mussolini, Benito, 163, 180, 182, 188, 189

Nation, The, 92 National Citizens’ Union, 180 National Confederation of Employers’ Organisations, 147 National Democratic Party, 77, 91, 93, 97, 110 National Efficiency movement, 8, 24–7, 73, 79, 193 National Governments (1931–40), 2, 5, 8, 9, 142, 160, 162–70, 171–8, 185–8, 195, 198 National Industrial Conference, 109 National Insurance Act (1911), 41–3 National Labour Party, 168, 169, 172, 175, 186 National Liberal Federation (NLF), 18, 19, 78, 100, 103, 123, 176 National Party, 99 National Review, 26, 48 National Service League, 49, 68 National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), 183, 184 National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations (NUCCA), 18, 19, 47, 48, 109, 113 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), 41, 55, 84 Navy League, 49 Nazism, 9, 190 New Conservatism, 143–8, 154, 174 New Fabian Research Bureau, 187 New Liberalism, 3, 6, 25, 29, 40, 42–3, 45–9, 83, 102, 104, 151, 152, 197 New Members’ Group, 97, 99 New Party, 161, 163, 169, 180 Newcastle Programme, 2 newspapers, 2, 16–17, 139, 196 Nicolson, Harold, 163, 181 Nigeria debate, 71 Nineteenth Century, The, 16 Nivelle offensive, 75

Index 221 No Conscription Fellowship, 83 Nonconformity, 3, 16, 19, 23, 28, 31, 38, 40, 41, 136, 192, 196 Nordic League, 179 Northcliffe, Lord, 16, 95, 139 Northern Ireland, 108, 137 Observer, The, 16 O’Connell, Daniel, 22 Official Secrets Act (1911), 69 old age pensions, 31, 40, 42, 107 Orman, Rotha Lintorn, 179 Osbourne Judgement, 44 Ottawa agreements, 4, 176 Page-Croft, Sir Henry, 99 Palmerston, Lord, 17 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 41, 84 Parliament Act (1911), 2, 35, 41, 53, 54, 56, 57 Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, 60, 88 parliamentary reform, see Reform Acts Parmoor, Lord, 127 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 22 payment of MPs, 14 Peace Ballot, 188 Peel, Robert, 1, 17, 144 Pelling, Henry, 12 People’s Budget, 7, 27, 32–3, 38, 40, 42, 45, 50–51, 55, 192 Phillipps, Vivian, 123, 150 Pitt, William, 17 Plaid Cymru, 178 plural voting, 11, 46, 87 Poland, 106 Poor Laws, 42, 43, 52, 145, 149 Pretyman, Ernest, 114 Primrose League, 19, 138 progressive alliance, 3, 29, 43–4, 46, 58, 77, 96, 133, 137, 192, 194 Proportional Representation (PR), 87, 118, 158 Protection, 6, 121, 125, 144, 168, 173 see also tariffs, Tariff Reform Public Assistance Committees, 187 Public Health Act (1875), 20 Public Order Act (1936), 181 Pugh, Martin, 140, 143 Radical Right, 9, 56, 179, 192 radio, 2, 139, 196

railways, 82, 109, 118 Ramsden, John, 57, 63, 88, 118 Reading, Lord, 166 rearmament (1930s), 175–6 Reconstruction, 107–8, 193 ‘Red Friday’, 148 Redistribution Act (1885), 11, 21 Redmond, John, 62, 63, 83, 84 Reform Acts 1832, 1, 11 1867, 1, 7, 11, 18, 23 1884, 11, 21 1918, see Representation of the People Act 1928, see Equal Franchise Act Relugas compact, 29 Rent Restriction Act (1915), 82 Repington, Colonel, 64 Representation of the People Act (1918), 2, 79, 85–7, 90, 95, 104, 136, 138, 193 Reveille, 48 Rhondda, Lord, 75 Riddell, Lord, 67, 79 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 171 Rosebery, lord, 15, 25, 26, 42 Rothermere, Lord, 95, 107, 156, 157, 181 Rowntree, Seebohm, 25, 151 Runciman, Walter, 150, 173 Russell, Lord John, 17 Russia, 8–9, 59, 78, 83 Russian revolution, 78, 95, 189 Safeguarding of industries Act (1921), 110 Salisbury, Lord, 10, 13, 28, 107, 144 Salonika, 67 Salvidge, Archibald, 100 Samuel Commission, 146 Samuel, Sir Herbert, 76, 146, 150–51, 162, 165, 166, 169, 172, 176, 188 Sankey Commission, 109, 110 Sankey, Lord, 166 Scally, R.J., 73 Scotland, 19, 30, 37–8, 41, 150, 173, 174, 181, 183 Scott, C.P., 16, 125 Scottish National Party (SNP), 178 Searle, G.R., 51, 73, 164 Second World War, 9, 171, 186, 190 secret ballot, 11 Seeley, Sir John, 163 Serbia, 59 shell shortage, 64 Shinwell, Emanuel, 188 Shops Act (1934), 174

222

Index

Simon, Ernest, 102 Simon, Sir John, 66, 69, 103, 104, 125, 150, 159, 169, 172, 175, 176 Sinclair, Sir Archibald, 159, 188 Sinn Fein, 63, 83, 92, 94, 108, 137 Smith, F.E., see Birkenhead, Lord Snowden, Philip, 4, 62, 93, 94, 126, 127, 148, 161, 162, 165, 167, 168–9, 172 Social Democratic Federation (SDF), 23 social imperialism, 73, 75, 83 Socialism in Our Time, 148, 161, 183 Socialist League (1930s), 184, 187 Somme, battle of, 71 South African War (1899–1902), 8, 25, 27 South Wales, 110, 120, 134, 174, 183 Soviet Union, 106, 108 130, 131, 171, 182 Spain, 9, 171 Spanish Civil War, 182, 189 Speaker, The, 16 Special Areas Act (1934), 174 Stalin, Joseph, 9 Stamfordham, Lord, 121 Steel-Maitland, Arthur, 49, 147 Strachey, John, 181 Strange Death of Liberal England, The, 55 strikes, 34, 43, 55, 85–6, 105–6, 109 Syndicalism, 9, 55, 182, 183 Taff Vale case, 24, 32, 43, 149 Talbot, Edmund, 60 Tamworth manifesto, 17 Tanner, Duncan, 44 Tariff Reform, 6, 25, 28, 30–32, 34, 38, 46–7, 49, 95, 122, 123, 155 Tariff Reform League, 16 tariffs, 46–8, 50, 122, 155–7, 164 Tawney, R.H., 184 taxation, 40, 42, 46–7, 82, 147 Teesside, 38 temperance reform, 41 Tennant, Margot, see Asquith, Margot Thomas, J.H., 160–61, 166 Times, The, 16, 64, 174 Topping, Robert, 156, 157 trade unions 16, 23–4, 43–4, 55, 67, 77, 85–6, 96, 105, 124, 138, 143–9, 174, 183, 197 Trade Union Act (1913), 44 Trades Disputes Act (1906), 32, 43 Trades Disputes and Trade Union Act (1927), 147, 149, 160 Trades Union Congress (TUC), 23, 55, 61, 105, 106, 128, 146, 147, 153, 182

Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), 183 Treasury Agreement, 67 Trevelyan, C.P., 60, 67, 127 Turkey, 64, 114 Turner, John, 65, 66 Ullswater, Lord, 158 Ulster, 9, 53–4, 56, 179, 192 Ulster Covenant, 53, Ulster Unionist Council, 53 Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), 53, 54 unemployment, 6, 31, 52, 105, 122, 143, 151–2, 154, 160, 171, 187 Unemployment Act (1934), 174, 175, 187 Unemployment Insurance Acts 1920, 107 1927, 145, 161 Union of Democratic Control (UDC), 60, 62 Unionist Business Committee (UBC), 64, 67, 68, 70 Unionist Organisation Committee, 48–9 Unionist Social Reform Committee, 49 Unionist War Committee, 70, 71 Unionists, see Conservative party, Liberal Unionists United Empire Party, 156–7 ‘United Front’, 184 United States of America, 25, 171 university seats, 11, 30 Versailles conference, 98 Victoria, Queen, 10 Vincent, John, 19 Wales, 15, 19, 22–3, 30, 37, 41, 89, 150, 172–3, 181 Wall Street Crash, 154 War Cabinet, 73–5, 77–8 War Council, 60, 63 War Emergency Workers’ National Committee (WEWNC), 62, 86, 88 We Can Conquer Unemployment, 151 Webb, Beatrice, 27, 37 Webb, Sidney, 26, 27, 127, 132 Wedgwood, Josiah, 127 Welsh Distestablishment, 41, 46, 48, 60, 95, 197 Welsh nationalism, 23, 41 Wheatley, John, 126, 127 Whigs, 1, 21, 185

Index 223 Whitley Councils, 109 Widows’, Orphans and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act (1925), 145 Wilson, Sir Henry, 109 Wilson, Sir Leslie, 112 Wilson, Trevor, 65, 92, 133 women, 84–5, 136, 143, 173, 182, 192, 196 Women’s Land Army, 84 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), 41, 55, 84 women’s suffrage, 2, 7, 34, 41, 55, 84–7, 142

Women’s Unionist Organisation, 138 Wood, Edward see Halifax, Lord Workmen’s Compensation Act (1906), 40 Worthington-Evans, Sir Laming, 121 Yellow Book, see Britain’s Industrial Future Younger, Sir George, 111, 112 Zinoviev letter, 132, 139