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Authors: Roy Jenkins

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It is clear from these addresses and from the spate of oratory which accompanied them that, apart from the fiscal controversy, which was outstandingly predominant, and apart also
from purely ephemeral issues, attention was most concentrated on the legislation which would follow from a Liberal victory, which both sides discussed in terms of measures dealing with education, licensing, the land, and possibly Home Rule.

The extent of the Government's victory became known only gradually, for polling in the different constituencies was then spread over a period of nearly three weeks. But from January 12, which brought the news of the first gain at Ipswich, and January 13, when Arthur Balfour lost his seat in a spate of Government successes in Manchester and the North-West, right through to the end, the story was always the same. Supposedly safe Conservative seats crumbled, and Government victories in the most unlikely places brought into the House of Commons a flood of new Liberals who had been fighting almost without hope. There were in all 377 Liberal members. And with them, in some ways an even greater sensation, came fifty-three Labour members, twenty-four of whom were closely allied to the Liberal Party, with the other twenty-nine elected under the auspices of the Labour Representation Committee; but even these twenty-nine had in most cases escaped Liberal opposition in the constituencies. The Irish produced their usual contingent of eighty-three, which, added to the Liberal and Labour strengths, gave a total of 514 members who, in a straight clash with the Tories, might be expected to support the Government. The Opposition numbered 132 Conservatives and twenty-five Liberal Unionists, or, by an alternative method of classification, 109 Tariff Reformers, thirty-two upholders of Balfour's tortuous view, eleven ‘Free Fooders' and five who were uncertain. The Government's normal majority was 357 —a preponderance unequalled since the Parliament of 1832—and
the Liberal Party's majority over all other parties was 129.

The election brought into the House of Commons more than 300 men who had not been members before, and many of these came from a social background which had not previously supplied more than a handful of members of Parliament. Obviously this applied with especial force to the new Labour members, but the Liberal Party itself was more widely based socially than had ever before been the case. Of its 377 members, which excludes the ‘Lib-Labs', sixty-four were practising barristers, twenty-two were service officers, and sixty-nine were in the category attracting the label of ‘gentlemen'; all these followed ways of life which had been well represented in previous Parliaments. There were eighty businessmen who had started life in well-to-do circumstances, and another seventy-four who had started from humble conditions. Both these categories had, of course, been represented in previous Liberal parties and in the Unionist Party, but never to this extent. Of the remaining sixty-eight Liberal members, twenty-one were solicitors, twenty-five were writers and journalists, nine were teachers, mostly university teachers, eight were trade unionists, and five were doctors of medicine.
1
In the Conservative and Liberal Unionist parties there were forty-eight ‘gentlemen', thirty-two service officers,
2
twenty-six businessmen who had started life in easy
circumstances, and thirteen who were self-made (the majority of these were Liberal Unionists); in addition there were six journalists and writers, five solicitors, three dons, two doctors of medicine, and one accountant. So far as the main categories are concerned, it is clear that the relative strength of barristers, solicitors, journalists and writers, and businessmen was greater on the Government side of the House, although only in the case of self-made businessmen was the preponderance overwhelming; officers and country gentlemen were much more heavily represented on the Opposition side.

In so far as their occupations are a guide, the Liberal members of this Parliament had clearly not become a true cross-section of the nation (no parliamentary party is ever likely to be quite this), but they had for the first time become a real cross-section of the middle and upper classes; and as such they were much more broadly based than their opponents.

This analysis of the social composition of the Parliament may be pushed a little further by a consideration of educational background. One hundred and twenty-five—a third—of the Liberal members had been to a public school, thirty-two of them to Eton; and 135 to Oxford or Cambridge. Of the Conservatives, eighty-two—nearly two-thirds—had been to a public school, and forty-five of them to Eton; fifty-six had been to Oxford or Cambridge. The Liberal Unionists had ten (out of twenty-five) who had been to a public school (five to Eton), and twelve who had been to Oxford or Cambridge.

Another question which may be asked about the members of this Parliament is the extent to which they were men of
great wealth. In the case of many individuals this is, for obvious reasons, a difficult question to which to reply accurately, but the answer appears to be (the degree of error which may exist should at least be constant for the different parties) that 102 Liberals (27%), forty-six Conservatives (35%), and ten Liberal Unionists (40%) fell within this category. The variation between parties was surprisingly small.

The geographical spread of the Liberal strength also requires analysis, and here it is of interest to make a comparison with the distribution of Labour strength in 1945—the only occasion since 1906 on which a great left-wing majority was elected to the House of Commons. It is a commonly held view that these two majorities were geographically almost identical. Mr. Churchill, for example, expressed in 1949 his belief that ‘the House returned in 1906 represented … more or less the same slice of the population, the people who elected it coming very largely from the same homes and from the same areas, as does this majority today'.
f
This view contained a great deal of truth although there were certain striking exceptions to the general proposition. The Liberals of 1906 were very strong in Scotland, Wales, East Anglia, the West Country and most of the industrial areas. They were fairly strong in London and most of the mixed agricultural and residential counties of England. They were weak only in the Universities, in Northern Ireland, and in Birmingham, Liverpool and Sheffield. Labour strength in 1945 was less evenly spread. It was greater in London and most of the industrial areas than that of the Liberals had been, but overwhelmingly low in the Highlands, rural Wales and the West Country, and substantially low in most English agricultural and residential districts. Conservative successes in industrial
seats were somewhat more frequent in 1906 than in 1945, but in the small country town, the mixed county division, or the seaside resort the Liberal candidate of 1906 was a much stronger contestant than his Labour counterpart of thirty-nine years later.
1

II The New Government and the Lords

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had taken office with a big majority against him in both Houses of Parliament. He had been able, quickly and sensationally, to rectify the position in the Commons, but in the Lords the strength of the Opposition remained unimpaired. At the beginning of the first session of the new Parliament there were 602 peers, including twenty-five bishops, who were entitled to take part in the proceedings of the House of Lords. Of these only eighty-eight described themselves as Liberals—and this number included a few who were as uncertain in their support of the Government as was Lord Rosebery. One hundred and twenty-four were Liberal Unionists and 355 were Conservatives, leaving only thirty-five, including fourteen bishops and a number of Princes of the Blood, who gave themselves no political label. The nominal Unionist majority was 391, a preponderance still more decisive than that of the Government in the new House of Commons.

This degree of Tory dominance in the Upper House was of comparatively recent growth. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in a House of about 150 members, there had been a small Whig majority, which Queen Anne, in the year 1711 and on the advice of the 1st Earl of Oxford of the
Second Creation,
1
had turned into a still smaller Tory majority by the simultaneous creation of twelve peers for the specific purpose of securing a Government majority for the ratification of the Treaty of Utrecht. A few years later, after the death of the Queen, this change was reversed by a more gradual programme of creations, and the Whigs resumed control. And they continued to hold it until the accession of the younger Pitt to the premiership. Thereafter, creations proceeded on a hitherto unknown scale. During Pitt's seventeen years as Prime Minister, 140 ennoblements took place. The Tories were not merely given a majority in the House of Lords, as had happened to themselves and the Whigs on previous occasions. They were built up into a position of ascendancy from which they could not be dislodged save by a policy of creation on an almost revolutionary scale.

It has been suggested that Pitt's creations brought a new social and occupational element into the House of Lords. In a passage in
Sybil
, Disraeli tells of his having ‘created a plebeian aristocracy and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of second-rate squires and fatgraziers. He caught them in the alleys of Lombard Street and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill.'
a
But this view is hardly borne out by a consideration of the individuals concerned; for the most part they were Tory country gentlemen, and very reactionary ones. They and their first heirs provided the greater part of the vote against the Reform Bill in 1831.

The next important change in the party balance in the Lords occurred with the secession of the Peelites from the Conservative Party and their gradual move towards alliance
with the Whigs. Then, for the first time since the French Revolution, the Tories were almost balanced by a combination of Whigs and Peelites. This did not last long. The natural tendency of an hereditary House to move to the right soon came into play, and by the closing stages of the Crimean War the Lords were in opposition to the Aberdeen Coalition. A few years later, in 1860, there was a majority of eighty-nine against the second reading of Gladstone's Paper Duty Bill. But this measure, which was supported only very lukewarmly by the Prime Minister, probably attracted more than the normal anti-Government vote into the ‘not-content' lobby.
1

This vote did much to foster the growing radicalism of Gladstone, and this in turn, with its effect upon the development of the Liberal Party, still further increased the Tory bias of the House of Lords. An evenly-balanced Upper Chamber, recruited mainly by the inheritance of titles and partly by the ennoblement of men of great wealth, was possible only so long as the differences between the two parties were more superficial than real or, in so far as they had reality, corresponded only to the difference between one form of wealth and another. The growth of radicalism and of the Liberal hold on the working class inevitably meant the decline of Liberal strength in the House of Lords.

It was quite a rapid decline. In 1868 Lord Granville informed the Queen that, excluding the bishops and nominal Liberals who preferred to vote Tory, the anti-Government majority in the Upper House was between sixty and seventy.
b
A few Liberal creations then followed, but they did little more than compensate for defections which were simultaneously taking place. When Gladstone came in again, in 1880, he
assembled a Cabinet which with one duke, one marquess,
1
and five earls (of a total of twelve members) should have personally, if not politically, recommended itself to their lordships. But this did not avail. The rate of defection became greater rather than less. Three great magnates who were members of the Government itself—the Duke of Argyll, the Duke of Bedford and the Marquess of Lansdowne—were impelled by the Government's attitude to the Irish land question to join the move to the right. They were followed by others of lesser note during the lifetime of this Government.

These changes were as nothing to the shifting of allegiance which followed the events of 1886, when Home Rule, in Rosebery's words, ‘threw the great mass of Liberal Peers into the arms of the Conservative majority'.
c
This marked both a social and a political upheaval. Lord John Manners wrote that ‘Gladstone can't find a duke who will allow his wife to become Mistress of the Robes',
d
and the Government vote in the Upper House was reputed to have fallen to thirty. It was seven years before there came a test vote on a major issue, the Home Rule Bill of 1893, and that showed a majority of nearly four hundred—419 to 41—against the Government. The Liberal Party had taken a decisive turn towards radicalism and it had paid the price of creating a Conservative predominance in the House of Lords of a degree never approached before, not even after the creations of the younger Pitt, and which has persisted ever since.

In 1906 it was therefore a House of Lords of which the political shape had been largely formed by the events of 1886 and 1893 that confronted the new Liberal Government. The eighty-eight nominal Liberals, had they been allied with the
124 Liberal Unionists,
1
the sons of men who had followed Hartington and Chamberlain in 1886 or, in many cases, the men themselves, would have been a respectable minority. On their own their only strength was that they were allied to political forces which, in the House of Commons, had just won nearly three-quarters of the seats.

To what extent this was to be recognised by the majority of their lordships as a legitimate source of strength and as a reason why they should exercise their own power with circumspection was a question to which an answer was eagerly awaited. It had not been held for many years that the Lords should be indifferent to the opinion of the constituencies as expressed through the House of Commons. Even such a high Tory as Lord Lyndhurst
2
had declared, in 1858, that ‘I never understood, nor could such a principle be acted upon, that we (the House of Lords) were to make a firm, determined and persevering stand against the opinion of the other House of Parliament, when that opinion is backed by the opinion of the people.'
e
This statement begged the vital question of who was to decide when the opinion of the House of Commons coincided with the opinion of the people, but it would be difficult to argue that the period immediately following a great electoral victory should not be so regarded; certainly this had been the view immediately after 1832, when the
removal of the rotten boroughs—of Croker's ‘certain elasticity which acted like springs, and … prevented violent collision'—gave the problem for the first time a modern form.

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