Mr Balfour's Poodle (6 page)

The remainder of an often stormy three days' debate was chiefly notable for Balfour's wonderfully arrogant charge that the Prime Minister, who was in fact at his wits' end to show the country a few worth-while Acts, framed his legislative proposals for the express purpose of getting them rejected,
¹
and for a sustained piece of invective from Lloyd George, in which he showed that he had not taken too seriously previous royal warnings about the violence of his language on the subject.
²
Mr. Churchill
³
added his conviction that the House of Lords was ‘a one-sided, hereditary, unprized, unrepresentative, irresponsible absentee'.

This was all very good in its way and may well have given some satisfaction to angry Liberal supporters in the country;
but no such debate and no resolution would of itself do anything to bring the ending of the veto a day nearer. Was it the intention of the Prime Minister to press on with an attempt to place his plan on the statute book, if need be (and need there certainly would have been) dissolving on the issue? Nothing could have been expected in the session of 1907, but 1908 would have brought new opportunities. Why were they not taken? Mr. Spender has told us that in the autumn of 1907 the Prime Minister saw only two courses before the Government, ‘either to accept these conditions (a veto on all major aspects of Liberal policy) and be content with the minor legislation and administrative changes which were within the boundaries imposed by the House of Lords, or to go boldly forward and challenge that House. Campbell-Bannerman,' Spender added, ‘was never in doubt about the choice between those alternatives. Submission, he believed would be death to Liberalism; and a long term of inglorious office on the sufferance of the House of Lords was the last thing that he contemplated either for himself or his Government.'
^q

Professor Emily Allyn also assumes that the Prime Minister was all for immediate and decisive action, and writes: ‘The failure to take further action … was due in part, doubtless, to differences within the Cabinet; but the decisive factor was the illness and death of Campbell-Bannerman, and succession of Asquith to the premiership in the spring of 1908.'
^r

But the chronology of this argument is unconvincing. The Speech from the Throne at the opening of the 1908 session, which contained no hint of a Parliament Bill, was delivered on January 29, at the end of a week of preparatory Cabinets presided over by the Prime Minister himself, who had just returned from a convalescence at Biarritz. Although he had
only another two or three weeks of active life ahead of him, his illness involved no period of gradual decline. During this crucial week, according to the testimony of Spender, ‘He seemed to have recovered all his old buoyancy and energy … he was ready for the fray and confident that the session was going to be a great one'
^s
There seems no reason why, had he intended a Parliament Bill for this session, he should have lacked the enthusiasm to put it forward or the vigour to commend it to his colleagues. It is difficult to accept any conclusion other than that the Prime Minister intended to give the peers another year's trial before attempting to proceed any further; and it follows from this that the retirement and death of Campbell-Bannerman and the accession of Asquith made no practical difference to the date on which the issue between the two Houses was finally joined.
¹

Nor did the change in the premiership make as much difference to the balance of political forces within the Government as, two years previously, would have been expected. Lloyd George may not have been in the true Gladstonian tradition of Campbell-Bannerman, Morley, Bryce, or Ripon, but he was certainly not a Liberal Leaguer, and his promotion to the Exchequer did much to counter any impression of a swing to the right which the change at 10 Downing Street may have given. For the rest, there were no sensational appointments. No attempt was made by Asquith to retrieve for Haldane the Woolsack which the ineffective Relugas Compact
²
had failed to give him, and all Campbell-Bannerman's
Cabinet appointments, with the exception of Elgin at the Colonial Office (who was replaced by Crewe) and Tweedmouth at the Admiralty (who was replaced by McKenna
¹
), were left intact. There were viscountcies, without change of office, for Morley
²
and Fowler, and of the new appointments, that of Mr. Churchill to Lloyd George's old post at the Board of Trade probably excited the most interest. His promotion to the Cabinet strengthened what can best be called the radical opportunist wing of the Liberal Party.

These changes occurred at the beginning of April. Campbell-Bannerman resigned on the fifth, and on the following night Asquith left for Biarritz, where he had been summoned to kiss hands against the unusually exotic background of the Hôtel du Palais.
³
He was back in London on the tenth, and he drove from Charing Cross station on a fine spring evening, through the cheers of the crowd (which Mrs. Asquith hoped would not reach the ears of the dying ex-Prime Minister), to
call upon Campbell-Bannerman at Downing Street. He had reached the highest post at the age of fifty-five, after twenty-two years in the House of Commons and a career of unbroken, almost inevitable ascent. His constructive intellectual equipment was certainly more massive than that of any Prime Minister since Gladstone, he was in the fullness of his great powers of physical resilience, and he was to hold his high office for a longer continuous period than any of his predecessors since Lord Liverpool. Nevertheless, perhaps for the very reason that his rise had been so inevitable, his formation of a Government marked no new point of political departure. He had been brought to office by no great victory at the polls—there were only a few bye-election defeats to welcome him—such as had heralded Gladstone in 1868 and 1880, or Campbell-Bannerman in 1906, or Attlee in 1945; nor by a great shifting of parliamentary forces, as with Lloyd George in 1916 and Churchill in 1940. There was nothing of political cataclysm in the air, nothing which could sweep away old barriers and give him new opportunities. He was circumscribed by the limitations which had beset his predecessor, and was prevented, partly by these and partly, perhaps, by his own temperament, from that feeling of impatience to put his hand to the plough and to strike out in new directions which was to be experienced most strongly by Lloyd George and by Churchill when they, in turn, ascended to the central control of affairs. The programme for the session was laid down. There was the Licensing Bill, there was yet another attempt at an Education Bill, there was his own Budget, already prepared, and which he himself was to introduce a fortnight later, and there was the Old Age Pensions Bill which sprang from it. And, most important of all, there was still the House of Lords. Whether it was to be in the sand or in a more
fruitful soil, he could only, for a time at any rate, plough in clearly-marked furrows.

The Licensing Bill, a somewhat delayed
riposte
to Balfour's Act of 1904, received its second reading in the Commons at the end of April. Its object was a compulsory reduction in the number of public-houses, so that they should not in any area exceed a fixed ratio to the population.
¹
The money for compensation was to be raised by a levy on the liquor trade, but payments to the holders of extinguished licences were to cease at the end of fourteen years. The measure was denounced by the Unionists as confiscatory and vindictive.
²
Arthur Balfour is recorded by his biographer as being ‘furious about it', and as holding the belief that its effects were ‘against every interest of public decency and morality'.
^t
The Bill was opposed most bitterly at every stage of its passage through the Commons and did not secure its third reading until November 20.

In view of the experience with other bills, there was naturally a widespread expectation that the Lords would not allow the measure to pass. Indeed, as Lord Newton has recorded without comment, the brewers had already threatened to withdraw their support from the Unionist Party if this did not happen.
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The King, with the approval of the Prime Minister, had also attempted to exercise influence—but in the
other direction, and less effectively. He had summoned Lansdowne to see him on October 12, and had told him of his fear that ‘if the attitude of the Peers was such as to suggest that they were obstructing an attempt to deal with the evils of intemperance, the House of Lords would suffer seriously in popularity'. He assured Lansdowne that the Government was likely to accept an extension of the time limit to twenty or twenty-one years, and urged him to secure for the bill a second reading and to amend it, if necessary, in committee.

Lansdowne told the King that he had not discussed the matter since the summer ‘either with the front bench peers or with Mr. Balfour and those who act with him in the House of Commons', and added that it was impossible for him to decide what advice he would give to the Unionist peers until he had seen how ‘the Bill fared in the House of Commons'. He agreed however (it would have been a little shameless for him to have done otherwise) that ‘it was not desirable that the peers and the brewers should be
represented
(my italics) as in too close alliance'.
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For the rest, he warned the King that he saw danger in accepting the principle of the bill, and spoke of the ‘bitter experience' which the peers had undergone with the Old Age Pensions Bill.

This last measure, providing for non-contributory pensions at the age of seventy, which had been taken earlier in the session, had not been warmly received in the Upper House. One peer had talked of it as ‘so prodigal of expenditure as likely to undermine the whole fabric of the Empire', and another had regarded it as ‘destructive of all thrift'. But the policy of amending it in committee rather than of rejecting it on second reading had been adopted. The resultant amendments, however, had been treated by the Commons as inadmissible, because the measure was a money bill. Under
protest, the Lords had accepted this, but they adopted the incident as an excuse for a more intransigent attitude on licensing.

This intransigence was decided upon at a meeting of Unionist peers held in Lansdowne House on November 24. Here a small but distinguished body of peers was opposed to rejection. They numbered about ten, and included St. Aldwyn, Cromer,
¹
Milner,
²
Balfour of Burleigh
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and Lytton.
⁴
Their motives were varied, but Milner, for example, was in favour of moderation both because he believed the bill to possess intrinsic merits and because he thought its rejection by the Lords would stem the Unionist tide which he saw flowing very strongly in the country. But the majority were probably more afraid of checking the brewers than of stemming the tide, and thought that in any event a clash between the two Houses had become inevitable, and that there was little point in attempting to postpone it.

Their policy was adopted. After a three-day debate, the House of Lords declined, on November 27, to give the bill a second reading by a vote of 272 to 96. It was a big attendance of peers, and Lord Fitzmaurice,
⁵
for the Government, remarked
that the Upper House was at least giving the bill ‘a first-class funeral. A great number of noble Lords have arrived who have not often honoured us with their presence.' Yet a third Education Bill had also perished at the hands of the Lords during the year.

In this way the third session of the 1906 Parliament came to an end. As in the two previous sessions, no measure, other than a money bill, had passed on to the statute book in anything like its original form unless, on third reading in the Commons, it had secured the acquiescence of Arthur Balfour. For three years the smallest Opposition within living memory had effectively decided what could, and what could not, be passed through Parliament. In the language of the day, the cup was full, and the sands were exhaustively ploughed.

At the beginning of 1909 three points must have been clear to the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or any other informed person who was considering the prospects of the Liberal Party. The first was that the Government was losing support in the country. Its bye-election record, which had been good during its first and second years in office, had worsened sharply. During 1908 it had been little short of disastrous. Mr. Churchill, standing for re-election on his appointment to the Board of Trade, had been defeated at North-West Manchester and had sought refuge at Dundee. And there had been other Unionist gains from the Government at Ashburton, Peckham, Ross-on-Wye, Shoreditch, Newcastle-on-Tyne, and Pudsey. The Conservative leaders and organisers who predicted after the Christmas recess that a general election would give them a majority of at least twenty were not indulging in baseless optimism.

The second consideration was that no useful purpose could be served by passing through the House of Commons controversial measures of social or political advance in a normal legislative form. Unless they could be incorporated in money bills they were certain to meet their death at the hands of the House of Lords. There were only two ways in which the Government could hope to regain the initiative, to satisfy its
adherents, and to rally its erstwhile supporters: by a full use of the Finance Bill, so that it achieved much more than the mere raising of a given amount of revenue; or by the destruction of the absolute veto of the Upper House.

The third factor was the Chancellor's need in the forthcoming financial year for substantially more revenue than Asquith had raised by the previous Budget. This arose partly from the cost of the new old age pensions and partly from increased expenditure on the Navy. Of the need for this latter increase a large section of the Liberal Party (including some members of the Cabinet)
¹
and all the Labour and Nationalist members were quite unconvinced. It was therefore necessary that the revenue to meet this unpopular outlay should be raised in a form acceptable to most of these normal supporters of the Government.