Baldwin (13 page)

The two most senior members of the Government were Balfour (who joined as Lord President after Curzon’s death) and Austen Chamberlain. Both had been leaders of the Conservative Party. With neither did Baldwin establish very easy relations. Balfour’s charm was too subtle and serpentine for him. And with Austen Chamberlain there was always the old difficulty of a stiff man who had once been so much his senior. Baldwin gave him his head as Foreign Secretary and supported
him well. It required the full backing of the Prime Minister to get the Locarno Treaty through the Cabinet. But no intimacy was ever established. This was more for personal reasons than because of Baldwin’s alleged lack of interest in foreign affairs. He ran them, admittedly, on a loose rein. He devoted very little of his time to seeing foreigners. He hardly talked to any, except for the waiters in the hotel at Aix-les-Bains. He was also full of the widespread English anti-American prejudice of the 1920s, and he found French diplomatic life a little too rich, both politically and gastronomically, for his stomach. He never made the seventy-mile journey from Aix to Geneva, which was then the centre of the international world. It was rather as though Attlee or Macmillan had spent post-war autumn holidays at Saratoga Springs while eschewing any contact with the United Nations in New York. But Baldwin would move to see Austen Chamberlain, provided it was not to Geneva. ‘Whatever you do, I will support you,’ he wrote in 1927, ‘and if you want to have a talk I will meet you at Annecy at lunch any day you care to name….’
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Yet, such were the curious contradictions of his character that Baldwin always remained closely in touch with the work of the Foreign Office. Austen Chamberlain, the second man in the Government, went rarely to Chequers and never to Astley. Sir William Tyrrell,
one of the less distinguished of the chain of Foreign Office permanent under-secretaries, stayed at Chequers almost once a month, and occasionally at Astley. With a more interfering Prime Minister and a more suspicious Foreign Secretary it would not have been a happy arrangement.

By the end of his Government Baldwin was anxious to make a whole series of Cabinet changes. A number of ministers, including Austen Chamberlain, were manifestly tired or worse. Baldwin contemplated the happy idea of asking everyone who was older than himself to go. This would remove Balfour, Salisbury, Joynson-Hicks, Cushendun
and Bridgeman, but also Austen Chamberlain, of whom he felt he could not dispose.
Churchill had been long enough at the Treasury, and could perhaps go to the India Office. Neville Chamberlain must clearly be persuaded to accept promotion and another, longer, spell at the Treasury. Steel-Maitland could at last be moved from the Ministry of Labour, which had in many ways been the key departmental post of the administration, and in which he had throughout been ill-regarded but undisturbed. But perhaps the changes were better postponed until after the election. The country might prefer a tired to an unfamiliar team. So, at any rate, Baldwin decided. The election came first and the changes were never made.

Baldwin’s practice of dedicated delegation was not confined to foreign affairs. The great events of his administration were the return to the gold standard, the Treaty of Locarno, the General Strike, the Imperial Conference of 1926 which led on to the Statute of Westminster, and the measures originating in the Ministry of Health for the reform of local government and the extension of social security.

With only one of these five major developments was Baldwin centrally concerned. The return to gold was Churchill’s decision, even though, within the Treasury, he at first was hard to convince. Baldwin then made no demur against the Chancellor’s recommendation; there would have been a greater chance of his demurring had the decision gone the other way, not because of his views but because of his admiration and affection for Montagu Norman, the intellectually certain Governor of the Bank of England.

Locarno was primarily Austen Chamberlain’s work, and the Ministry of Health reforms perhaps even more decisively that of Neville Chamberlain. The elegant formula which enabled the dignity of the Crown to be combined with the reality of Dominion independence came from Balfour. Only in the case of the General Strike and the events which surrounded it did the participation of the Prime Minister match his degree of ultimate responsibility. His full involvement here was as inevitable as it was appropriate. Industrial relations, as the subject
today would be described, was an area in which he instinctively felt himself at home. The combination of his gentle business experience, his belief in the politics of personal relationships and his patience in waiting for a desired outcome were unusual and valuable qualities. They were admirably suited to a problem of framework or atmosphere. But that was by no means the core of his problem. This was the harder, more practical issue of the future of the coal industry. It employed over a million men. Its product was of overwhelming importance to the fuel needs of the nation. It was also geared, particularly in certain districts, to a large export trade. For this trade the industry had failed to maintain its pre-war competitiveness. There had been big profits before and during the war, but little investment or improvement of method. The collieries were run by one of the most obscurantist bodies of employers in the country, known collectively and appropriately as ‘the owners’. They had built up the industry on cheap labour, and their only answer to the challenge of foreign competition was to attempt to cut back the limited improvements in wages and hours which had been secured during and immediately after the war.

They were confronted by mining communities which were close-knit, isolated, well-organized, and intensely internally loyal. Only in the Midlands, where the methods were more modern and the communities less separate, was there some doubt about the solidarity of the miners. Elsewhere, in South Wales, in Durham, in Yorkshire, in Scotland, they were the best-trained, most battle-scarred fighting troops of organized labour. As a huge union they were powerful in the Trades Union Congress. Many of the most influential other union leaders, Thomas
from the right wing, Bevin from the left-centre (which was his position in those days), might have considerable doubt about the tactical skill of the miners’ leaders. But they had no doubt about the emotional hold of the miners over the Labour movement. The miners occupied the central sector of the industrial battlefront. Baldwin’s task, if he
wanted peace, was to prevent this sector from flaring into conflict. If he wanted victory, it was to separate the miners from their half-reluctant allies.

Which did he want? The answer, as was often the case with Baldwin, was that he did not quite know. But this indeter-minedness was neither unique nor wholly surprising. He wanted, from his own point of view, as much as he could get of the best of both worlds. He wanted peace, provided it was compatible with the superiority of the state and the then accepted view of that somewhat shifting concept, the sanctity of private property. If peace was not obtainable on these terms, then of course he wanted victory, and he wanted to know before he started the battle that he could be certain of gaining it. But he also wanted the battle to be as bloodless as possible. He knew he would have to live afterwards with the vanquished. He did not wish to make a desert and call it peace. What he did wish was to emasculate his opponents, and then to pretend they were coming together as equals.

Where he was intellectually confused was that he failed to see any close connection between the economic stance of his Government and its industrial problems. He once shone a surprising shaft of original light on to the economic scene. In 1924 he spoke in the House of Commons of the need to reduce exports. The general view was that this was a slip of the tongue for ‘imports’, but Baldwin when questioned persisted in his first statement. What he meant was that, with the terms of trade running strongly in Britain’s favour and with a substantial underuse of resources, the economy was too much directed towards the depressed export trades—coal, steel, shipbuilding and cotton—and not enough towards newer industries which would mainly supply an enlarged home market. It was a fumbling towards the shift of men and activity from South Wales to the Slough Trading Estate or from Scotland to the Ford factory at Dagenham which symbolized the economic geography of the later period of his power. But it was one thing to want to see some medium-term alteration of the shape of
British industry. It was another—particularly if you were supposedly seeking industrial peace with a full recognition of the crucial position of coal—to pursue an exchange-rate policy which would be certain to make as difficult as possible the transition period for this and other traditional export trades. Yet this is precisely what Baldwin did.

Despite this basic contradiction, he began with a notable act of conciliation. Most Conservative opinion had long been opposed to the system whereby a trade union could contribute to the Labour Party a proportion of each member’s subscription, unless the member specially contracted out. They wished to change the rules and require the politically committed members to contract in. For obvious reasons the difference in practice would be substantial. A private member’s bill to effect this change was brought forward in late February, 1925. Although there was some division of Conservative opinion, it appeared that a majority both of the Cabinet and of the backbenchers favoured either the acceptance of the bill or a Government measure doing roughly the same job in its place.

Baldwin treated the matter with the utmost seriousness. He made a lot of soundings, appointed a special Cabinet committee to go into the subject, and held a special Cabinet to receive its report. At the special Cabinet, and curiously for a Prime Minister who wishes to get his own way when his colleagues are at best perplexed, he invited everyone else to give their own views before himself intervening. He then delivered what was certainly his most effective Cabinet intervention until that date, and probably his most effective ever. Birkenhead, the chairman of the committee, which had produced rather limp conclusions, is reported to have broken an awed silence to announce that if the Prime Minister spoke to the House as he had just spoken to the Cabinet he would do so with unanimous support and triumphant outcome. Austen Chamberlain was equally enthusiastic at the time, but later put the occasion into somewhat more critical perspective by saying that it was the only time in fourteen years that
he had ever known Baldwin to influence a Cabinet decision.
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Baldwin’s speech to the House came a week later on a Friday morning. It was the normal time for a private member’s bill, but it was certainly not the normal time for a major Prime Ministerial oration. However, he had no difficulty in securing a large and attentive House. His speech lasted about an hour. It was quiet, reminiscent, a little sententious. Its two most memorable passages were, first, a somewhat rose-tinted picture of industrial life in the heyday of his family company (’It was a place where nobody ever got the sack and where … a number of old gentlemen used to spend their days sitting on the handles of wheelbarrows smoking their pipes. Oddly enough, it was not an inefficient community’); and, second, a small peace-offering not so much across the floor of the House as across the gulf of industry: