Mr Balfour's Poodle

by Roy Jenkins

  There was no suggestion here that it was the duty of the Upper House to hold up the hasty and the ill-considered proposals, and to allow to pass the well-matured, nor even that it was to attempt to judge measures on their merits. The distinction to be made was to be one purely of expediency. If it suited the tactics of the Tory Party for the ‘calm judgment’ of the House of Lords to be exercised in favour of the worst measure in the world, through it would go, without any delay or hindrance at all. But even from the point of view of the purest expediency Lansdowne was laying down rules of discreet behaviour which it would have been difficult for him to pretend, in subsequent years, that he and his followers were observing.

  The Plural Voting Bill, on the other hand, which had been opposed by the Tories in the House of Commons, was treated by the Lords with even less respect than the Education Bill. After a debate lasting little more than an hour and a half it was thrown out on second reading by 143 to 43. Both the mover of the reasoned amendment1 and Lansdowne himself rested their case less on the advantages of plural voting, which were difficult to put in a popular form, than on the more sophistical argument that there were a number of anomalies attached to our (or indeed any) system of representation, and that unless they could all be removed it was futile and unfair to try to remove one. Lansdowne was even seized with that sudden interest in votes cast, as opposed to seats won, which is sometimes a characteristic of Tory leaders in Opposition, and told the House of the plight of the under-represented Unionists of Wales. Against such dialectics the crude argument of the mandate was naturally powerless.

  The next session opened in February, 1907, with a King’s Speech which noted that ‘serious questions affecting the working of our parliamentary system had arisen from unfortunate differences between the two Houses’ and announced that ‘His Majesty’s Ministers have this important subject under consideration with a view to a solution of the difficulty’. A very substantial programme of legislation, including a Licensing Bill, was also announced.

  To what extent the Unionist Party was alarmed by this vague threat of constitutional reform is difficult to judge. F. E. Smith in the debate on the Address declared confidently—but not very accurately—that the Liberal Party had been attempting for 250 years to quell the House of Lords by resolution, and that their latest attempt was likely to be no more successful than previous ones had been. But the actions of Lord Newton1 and of the Unionist Peers who supported him were more significant than the words of the Tory Party’s principal frondeur. Lansdowne’s biographer, then an active but independent member of the Opposition in the Upper House, took advantage of the easy days in the early part of the session when there were no Government bills to mutilate and introduced a measure for the reform of the House of Lords. This was an issue which had been raised on a number of occasions previously, notably by Rosebery in 1884 and 1888. But neither of these attempts nor any of the others had prevented the Upper House emerging from the ‘century of reform’ in exactly the same mould, save only that bankrupt peers could no longer sit and vote, in which it had entered it.

  Nor was Lord Newton’s bill any more effective than the efforts of Rosebery and the others had been. Its significance lay not in its practical result, but in the fact that it emanated from the Unionist side, in the sweeping departure from the hereditary principle which its acceptance would have involved, and in the support which it received. It provided that hereditary peers not possessed of certain qualifications were to elect only one fourth of their number to represent them in the Upper House, and that the places so vacated were to be filled by life peers appointed by the Government of the day; and its supporters included the Duke of Devonshire, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Duke of Northumberland. Lansdowne and Cawdor, speaking officially for the Opposition, expressed no direct hostility to the proposals and contented themselves with postponing the issue by having it referred to a Select Committee, which was impressively strong in its composition, but which took eighteen months to report.

  The direct opposition to the bill had come from the unusual combination of Lord Halsbury,1 the die-hard ex-Lord Chancellor, and the supporters of the Government. Crewe, the Lord President, saw the issue with great clarity. Newton’s proposals, while they might make the House of Lords less of an anachronism, would do nothing to make it less partisan; his idea that there existed ‘a sort of reservoir of eminent men who were not partisans and who might profitably be added to the House’ was ‘pure fallacy’. In any event, it was ‘not expedient to proceed with the discussion of various proposals for reforming the constitution of this House until provision has been made for an effective method of settling differences which may arise between this House and the other House of Parliament’.l

  In this view Crewe had the full support of the Prime Minister, who, as his biographer has informed us, ‘from the beginning, was clear in his mind on one point: a Liberal Government would be extremely ill-advised to touch the composition of the Second Chamber until it had settled its powers. To set up a nominated Second Chamber composed of grave and reverend but necessarily conservative-minded individuals would, if such a Chamber succeeded to the powers of the present House, both increase the evil and abolish the remedy which the present system provided in the last resort through the creation of peers. On the other hand, to set up an elective Second Chamber would be to destroy the unique character of the House of Commons, and to introduce a new dissension into the heart of the Constitution’.m

  This was the soundest of radical doctrine, and a great advance on most Liberal thought on the subject during the ’eighties and ’nineties. The pursuit of these principles alone was to prevent the Liberal Party from becoming hopelessly lost amongst the quicksands of the constitutional conference of 1910; and temporary deviations from them were to lead to needless dangers and difficulties.

  Campbell-Bannerman had his own opportunity to stand by the simple principle of the supremacy of the Commons and to show his distaste for attempts to solve the problem by institutional innovation. This came in the late spring of 1907, when the Cabinet committee which had been set up early in the year to consider means of adjusting the relationship of the two Houses reported in favour of joint sittings between the Commons and a delegation of a hundred peers, which would take place in the event of disagreement, and the decisions of which would be final. The Prime Minister greatly disliked this scheme, and he attacked it strongly in a memorandum dated May 31,n alternating effectively between high constitutional arguments and practical objections. Where would the joint assembly meet? Who would preside over it? What would its rules of procedure be? And would the House of Commons continue to meet during its sittings? As an alternative he revived the proposals for a suspensory veto which John Bright had put forward in a speech at Leeds in 1883. In the event of disagreement a conference of perhaps five or ten members of each House should be set up. If this body produced a scheme which the Government could accept, no further special procedure was likely to be needed. If it failed to do so, the bill in question, after passing twice more through the Commons, could become law over the heads of the peers. No minimum period of time for this process was laid down; theoretically it could all have been done with a lapse of no more than six months from the first rejection by the peers. Between the bill’s first and second passage through the Commons the Government could make whatever changes it thought fit; but on the third occasion the bill would be required to maintain the form in which it had most recently passed.

  Decisive action from the Government was now urgently necessary. The session had not so far been marked by any fresh conflicts between the two Houses, but the shadow of the Lords lay heavily upon everything which the Government tried to do. A short Education Bill, a poor substitute for the lost measure of the previous session, had been introduced, but it so disappointed the Government’s friends, without propitiating their enemies, that it had been withdrawn after a few weeks. An attempt to legislate for Ireland failed equally dismally, and for much the same reasons. A �
�Home Rule’ Chief Secretary, serving under a ‘Home Rule’ Prime Minister, was forced by circumstance to introduce a petty little devolution bill.1 It was attacked by Arthur Balfour and rejected by an Irish National Convention. It made enemies, but no friends, and, like the second Education Bill, had ignominiously to be withdrawn. The Licensing Bill, which had been announced in the Speech from the Throne as the chief business of the session, had not even been introduced. It was clear to the Cabinet that any measure which would command the support of the Liberal Party would be heavily assailed in the Lords, that the Government could hardly sustain a second major legislative defeat within eighteen months without dissolution, and that the cause of temperance reform, dear though it was to Liberal hearts, was not the most popular of election issues.

  At Whitsuntide, therefore, the outlook for the Government was not bright. There was a general desire to avoid an autumn session, and if this was to be met,1 the Prime Minister was left with only ten weeks in which to achieve something to show for a year’s work. The bye-elections, at that stage, had indicated no substantial falling-off in support for the Government—only Brigg had changed hands to the Unionists—but it was feared that this would not continue if more achievement could not be shown.

  There were four land bills to be brought forward—an Evicted Tenants Bill for Ireland, a Small Holdings Bill for England, and a Small Landowners and a Land Values Bill for Scotland; but it was doubtful whether there was sufficient time to get all these through the Commons, and, even if this were achieved, four Liberal measures, although not of the first importance, on their lordships’ favourite subject, could hardly be regarded as a certain harvest for the Government.2 What was required, and required urgently, was some indication of how the Liberal leaders proposed to deal with the Lords.

  Campbell-Bannerman had first to secure agreement in the Cabinet to his proposals as opposed to the plan of the Cabinet committee. In this task he succeeded, although not without difficulty. Asquith, at this stage, was a seeker after solutions less drastic than that of the suspensory veto. This is clear from his speech in the House delivered a few weeks later. It was not only his explicit statement: ‘personally I have been a slow and, to some degree, even a reluctant convert to the necessity of this particular method of dealing with the problem’;o nor his confession that he had ‘coquetted with the referendum’; but the whole tenor of his speech which indicated that his natural approach to the question differed widely from the robust radicalism of the Prime Minister.

  Against this opposition Campbell-Bannerman did well to carry the day at all, and doubly well to be ready by June 24 to lay his plan before Parliament. He proceeded by the innocuous, but then usual, method of a Government resolution in the House of Commons. By a vote of 432 to 147 the Lower House resolved ‘that, in order to give effect to the will of the people as expressed by their elected representatives, it is necessary that the power of the other House should be so restricted by law as to secure that within the limits of a single Parliament the final decision of the Commons must prevail’. An amendment to abolish the House of Lords, moved by Arthur Henderson, had previously been rejected by 315 to 100, the Irish and a few radicals voting with the Labour Party. The resolution as carried was given more specific meaning by the speech of the Prime Minister, which also contained a notable attack on Balfour’s disloyalty to the House to which he belonged and to the tradition of moderate statesmanship which he should have inherited from his predecessors. ‘I cannot conceive of Sir Robert Peel or Mr. Disraeli,’ Campbell-Bannerman said, ‘treating the House of Commons as the rt. hon. gentleman has treated it. Nor do I think there is any instance in which, as leaders of the Opposition, they committed what I can only call the treachery of openly calling in the other House to override this House. These great states men were House of Commons men. I venture to say that if Bills were mutilated and rejected elsewhere when Sir Robert Peel sat upon that bench, it was not done at his instance’.p

  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. Churchill3 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 Compact2 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 McKenna1), were left intact. There were viscountcies, without change of office, for Morley2 and Fowler, and of the ne
w 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.