Profound advances were made in the treatment of prisoners. Jail sentences were shortened. Young people under fourteen could no longer be sent to prison; instead they were held in borstals–remedial centres with educational facilities. The use of solitary confinement for all prisoners on arriving at jail was stopped, as was automatic imprisonment for non-payment of fines. The Liberal government anticipated the concerns of many penal reformers fifty years later, believing that the experience of prison was in itself harmful. Prison libraries were introduced, as well as a lecture system, to fit prisoners for the outside world to which they must in the end return. The Liberals believed that the treatment of crime and criminals was one of the real tests of civilization.
Legislation to compensate workmen for injuries received at their place of employment was finally passed in 1908. The hours to be worked in a coalmine were fixed at eight hours per day. The Trade Disputes Act of 1906 repudiated the Taff Vale case, which had forced the railway union to repay the cost of its strike in damages to the Taff Vale Railway Company. Union funds became untouchable. In 1909 a Trade Boards Act produced wage-fixing machinery to prevent sweated labour, while another act created stricter safety standards for coalmines. In 1914 the Liberals tried to reduce the number of hours of work in shops from eighty to sixty per week, but were defeated by pressure from shopkeepers. However, the government succeeded in getting one early-closing day a week, and the British tea break was enshrined in law in 1911.
The misery of seasonal unemployment was tackled by a national system of Labour Exchanges pioneered and run by a protégé of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, a young university lecturer named William Beveridge, whose special interest it was. Thirty-five years later in 1944, after a career as director of the London School of Economics, the same man would issue the Beveridge Report that gave birth to Britain’s welfare state and the National Health Service, to protect the population ‘from the cradle to the grave’.
But an early version of that care was given by the 1911 National Insurance Act and the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908. They were the greatest innovations of the Liberal government and they were driven through the Commons and the Lords by the energy and conviction of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. The Old Age Pensions Act ensured that every old person had five shillings a week from the age of seventy, if he or she did not have more than eight shillings a week income from other sources. In return for a small weekly contribution by employer and employee, the National Insurance Act gave sickness benefit, free care by a doctor, and money for every week out of work. The Liberal government was on a crusade against poverty. But how was it to finance the reforms, especially as the threat from Germany was prompting a level of expenditure on both the army and navy that was unheard of in peacetime Britain?
The Liberal secretary of state for war, R. B. Haldane, who had close links with Germany, was so alarmed by the military preparations taking place there that he not only increased army spending but created the small, superbly equipped British Expeditionary Force with which Britain would help defend France against the Germans at the beginning of the First World War. The Anglo-French Entente had the effect of driving a paranoid Germany to still greater lengths to increase her navy and throw her weight around over her further colonial expansion. Germany believed that she was merely protecting her commercial interests. For France and Britain, however, she was unacceptably aggressive when in 1905, in a bid to halt the French colonization of Morocco, she threatened war if there were not a conference to discuss its future. The great-power conference at Algeçiras in Spain the following year demonstrated that Germany’s rough behaviour had worked: the development of Morocco was to take place under international supervision, which would make room for German trade.
Then at the Hague Conference on Disarmament in 1907, Germany refused utterly to decrease her Dreadnought-building programme in return for reductions by the British. She was convinced that this was a cunning British gambit to make her navy less powerful. Admiral Tirpitz, head of the German navy, had been delighted that the Liberal government had lowered the amount of spending allotted by the Conservatives to Dreadnoughts in order to finance its social reforms. This had given him time to start his own programme to build Dreadnoughts, which he did with gusto.
In a world perpetually anxious about Germany it was inevitable that Britain would seek ways to protect the empire from German activities. The Entente drew her into a relationship with France’s ally Russia. Once Britain’s greatest enemy in central Asia, Russia had been revealed as a spent force when she was defeated by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Now it seemed far more important to achieve joint collaboration to check German penetration of the Middle East. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 in theory committed Britain to nothing. It merely declared that Britain’s influence was recognized as supreme in Afghanistan and southern Persia, while Russia was accepted as the dominant power in northern Persia. But the understanding between Russia and Britain increased Germany’s fear of encirclement.
In 1908 the underlying tension in Europe was ratcheted up several levels when Serbia threatened to attack Austria–Hungary, and Germany retaliated by announcing that Russia would face war with her if she backed Serbia. Fearing that the Young Turk revolution at Constantinople would undermine the position she had built up over thirty years, Austria–Hungary had finally annexed the Balkan lands of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which she had occupied since 1878. But, just as the days of deference were passing in Britain, new forces were operating in relations between old empires and young upstart nations like Serbia. Austria–Hungary might think of Bosnia and Herzegovina as compensation for her lost empire in Italy and Germany, but Serbia believed she had more right to the two provinces because of their large Serb population. She was sufficiently self-confident to fight for them to create her dream of a greater Serbia, a South Slav or Yugoslav Empire, and she appealed to Russia as the special protector of the Slavic peoples to back her against Austria–Hungary.
After being so recently defeated by the Japanese, Russia was in no condition to take on Germany as well as Austria–Hungary. Austria–Hungary retained her new provinces, but that only stored up trouble for the future. Though Serbia was forced to back off, agitation about her Serb brothers in Bosnia and Herzegovina did not die away. In fact it became stronger with every passing year. The European atmosphere was not improved by an interview the kaiser gave to the London Daily Telegraph in which he said that most Germans detested the British and would happily go to war with them, and that he was their only friend.
In 1909, right in the middle of the crisis over the Balkans and as Britain’s demands for an international conference were being ignored, came news of secret German plans for a vast increase in the size of the German navy. The German naval estimates revealed to Parliament spread panic through the country. Admiral Tirpitz had already caught up with Britain in the number of Dreadnoughts. With the new programme, he might overtake the British. Many soldiers, including Lord Roberts the commander-in-chief of the Boer War, wanted immediate conscription. The urgent need to build new Dreadnoughts was captured in the music-hall song, ‘We want eight and we won’t wait’. Even the Liberals, with their antipathy towards military spending, were convinced that the naval race with Germany called for more battleships to be built that year and the next.
But where was the money to come from? Not only did extra money have to be found for the ships, the new welfare provisions had to be funded too. For David Lloyd George, the chancellor of the Exchequer, the answer was a graduated income tax to get the rich to pay more. But the super-wealthy had their well-ensconced defenders in the House of Lords. Ever since the split over Irish Home Rule there had been no peers left on the Liberal side of the House. Moreover the Lords had become far too accustomed to using its Conservative majority to defeat bills sent up by the Liberal Commons.
The Liberal government’s measures to promote greater fairness in British life had created a malevolent hostility in the House of Lords. Encouraged
by the fact that the last two prime ministers Salisbury and Balfour had been aristocrats, many peers felt a resurgence of the conviction that those born to wear ermine were born to the purple too. Bills to end plural voting, a new licensing bill which allowed a drinks licence to be withdrawn by the local council if it so wished, and a bill to increase the number of smallholders in Scotland, all incensed their lordships for one reason or another, and were rejected.
In 1894 Gladstone had warned the Lords when they rejected Home Rule that they were tampering with the constitution, since an unelected House was interfering with the wishes of the elected House. He had told them that they should fear for their future if they continued to thwart the democratic will. The Liberals had experienced thirty years of the Lords throwing out their measures whenever it suited them. They had had enough of their smart new twentieth-century legislation being destroyed by a group of people whom Lloyd George daringly described as being ‘five hundred men, ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed’. Should they, he asked, ‘override the judgement–the deliberate judgement–of millions of people engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of this country?’ Hereditary privilege was beginning to look absurd. Lloyd George decided to get rid of the powers of the Lords once and for all. He would raise the immense funds he needed by a method almost guaranteed to arouse the wrath of the Lords: a super-tax on top of income tax for higher incomes, plus a higher rate of death duty for the wealthier estates. Most infuriating of all was a tax on any unearned increase in the value of land, to be paid whenever land changed hands.
It was a tradition that only the House of Commons could alter money bills. If the Lords rejected the budget, it would be in breach of a constitutional convention. The People’s Budget would be the test, as Lloyd George put it, of ‘whether the country was to be governed by the King and the Peers or the King and the People’. But the House of Lords was so enraged by the budget, and by the idea of the state preparing to value every field in the country to estimate its unearned increment, that it completely lost its head. In 1909 the greatest landowners in the country still were, as they had been for centuries, the aristocracy and the landed gentry, whose relatives represented them in the House of Lords. Lloyd George’s tax seemed aimed at them, the 1 per cent of the population who owned 70 per cent of the country.
Lloyd George’s budget passed the Liberal House of Commons, but was thrown out by the House of Lords. The chancellor’s response was to cry, ‘We have got them at last!’ Asquith dissolved Parliament and called a general election for January 1910 on the ground that the rights of the Commons had been usurped. The election was bitterly fought. The peers made the great mistake of taking part in it. Their collective wisdom might have been encyclopaedic and their knowledge of local affairs second to none, yet the hustings revealed the lottery of heredity at its worst. Many of the lumbering backwoodsmen appeared eccentric and selfishly concerned with their own interests.
The election, the second of Edward VII’s reign, returned the Liberals to power, but the result was disappointing. The landslide had vanished. The Liberals had only three MPs more than the Unionists. To push their measures through, the Liberals were dependent on the votes of the Labour party and the Irish Nationalists. A new Home Rule Bill would be the payment demanded for the Irish Nationalists’ co-operation.
The Conservative Lords suddenly agreed to pass the budget. But Asquith and Lloyd George were not put off. Asquith introduced the Parliament Bill, which strictly limited the House of Lords’ powers: it should no longer be able to change or throw out a money bill; any bill which was passed by the House of Commons in three successive sessions, even if it was rejected by the Lords each time, should become law.
The Parliament Bill had only had its first reading in the Commons when the House adjourned for the Easter Break. But on 6 May 1910 the nation was abruptly distracted. Following a holiday in his favourite French resort of Biarritz, the genial Edward VII had died at Buckingham Palace after a series of heart attacks.
WINDSOR
George V (1910-1936)
Last Years of Peace (1910-1914)
The new king, George V, was almost forty-five. As the second son of Edward VII he had pursued a career as a naval officer for fifteen years until 1892, when his elder brother, the sickly Duke of Clarence, died and he became heir to the throne. As a result of his years in the Senior Service, George V was sensible, businesslike and disciplined. He had a great sense of the empire, much of which he had visited on duty tours. To mark his becoming Emperor of India at the end of his coronation year, he gave a magnificent Durbar, or gathering, at Delhi. George’s wife was Princess Mary of Teck. The granddaughter of one of George IV’s brothers, the Duke of Cambridge, she had been born and brought up in England. They had six sons and daughters.
Hard-working and realistic, after his father’s funeral George V called a round-table Constitutional Conference with all the party leaders to seek a consensus on what should be done about the Parliament Bill. But, with no agreement reached and reluctant to see the crown interfere in politics, the Liberals decided on a second election. George V insisted that the bill should actually be voted on by the House of Lords before Asquith called a new election, in order for the Conservative peers to propose alternative suggestions. But the king also agreed, as William IV had done in the crisis over the 1832 Reform Bill, to create around 250 peers to swing the Parliament Bill through the second chamber if the Lords rejected it.
In December 1910 the Liberal government’s position was reaffirmed. The electoral result was practically unchanged: the Liberals and the Unionists had the same number of seats, 272 each, the Irish Nationalists had 84, an increase of two, while Labour’s share stood at 40. The new Parliament Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons in May 1911 to great excitement and amid ungentlemanly scenes. The son of the Marquis of Salisbury, Lord Hugh Cecil, lost control of himself and heckled the prime minister so ferociously that he had to stop speaking. In the House of Lords a ‘Die-Hard’ group of peers started a last-ditch movement to get the peers to refuse the bill. But by July the message had got through. However furious the Lords might be about their ancient rights being trampled underfoot, the threat of being swamped ensured that by August 1911 enough had abstained for the bill to pass.
But there was yet more trouble for the government. An epidemic of strikes paralysed the country throughout the summer. Agitation and vituperation had surrounded the Parliament Bill. There was a feeling of alarm at the changing nature of things–not everyone in Britain was progressively minded, as the last elections had made clear. Then suddenly, at the end of June, a serious war scare began.
The German government had sent a gunboat, the Panther, to seize the port of Agadir in Morocco. Over the previous couple of years, German relations with Britain had improved under a new German chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, for he was intent on breaking up the over-cosy relationship between France, Britain and Russia. The kaiser himself had appeared to be in a more friendly mood, even visiting London in the early summer of 1911 for the unveiling of a memorial to his grandmother Queen Victoria. But, after the naval panic of 1909 and the generally threatening stance of the German government, the Panther could have meant anything. During the seventeen days when the German government refused to disclose its intentions, the world held its breath.
Rumours abounded that Germany was preparing for war and about to march through Belgium. Reports of the military camps in Germany, where the peacetime army approached a million men, and the increased number of German soldiers up against the Belgian frontier did nothing to dispel this. The strange elongated railway platforms, which could only have been built for troops, along the German frontier with Belgium had long been noticed by the British military. An Official Secrets Act was brought in for the first time to protect against the spying known to be going on in the dockyards and all over the country. The letters of anyone suspected of getting orders from Germany were opened.
The year 191
1 saw the hottest summer for forty years. London sweltered in the heat as anxiety mounted about what Germany would do next. What did she want; did she want war? So anxious was even the pacifist Cabinet about Germany having control of a port from which her warships could raid British ships moving into the Mediterranean or across the Atlantic that it warned that Britain would go to war if the Panther was not removed. The Germans began to back down. They made it clear that they did not desire war with Britain or with anyone else. The Panther gunboat turned out to be their undiplomatic response to the French breaching the international agreement at Algeçiras that Morocco should be a free-trade area. Taking advantage of internal unrest there, the French were moving to annex the colony. Germany thought her commercial interests were being ignored by the French. The Panther was her way of asserting her right to interfere in Morocco if she chose.
In September, as negotiations went on with Germany, Britain was nevertheless believed to be so close to hostilities that soldiers were sent to guard the south-eastern railway lines. There was considerable anxiety about the strength of the French army, as its manpower was only three-quarters of the Germans. The once dim shape of conflict was becoming clearer. In November the Agadir crisis was over. The Germans had been given some more territory, 100,000 square miles in the Congo, so that the Panther could be withdrawn. But by 1912 the British military establishment had become immovably pessimistic about Germany’s future intentions. Haldane, who had pushed Britain into a state of greater military preparedness with a General Staff and the British Expeditionary Force, had in 1911 insisted on a War Book being drawn up. This was a plan for each government department setting out the procedures they should follow in the event of war. Another attempt at ending the naval race between Britain and Germany by a reduction in ships had foundered. The proposed German limitations were not large enough, and they were dependent on Britain ending her Entente with France and Russia and making an alliance with Germany only. To that Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, could not agree.
The Story of Britain Page 79