by Roy Jenkins
‘If we are to do anything,’ St. Aldwyn wrote to Lansdowne on September 8, discussing a possible compromise policy of amendment, ‘this seems to me a reasonable course; but I own that my House of Commons feeling on finance is against it, and that I think both the right and the wise course is to pass the Budget as it comes to us.’f Lord James and Lord Balfour were, if anything, even more strongly opposed to action by the Lords, and they were supported in this view by Lord Cromer and Lord Lytton. The last, in particular, argued very powerfully that rejection would be not so much wrong as catastrophically foolish.
‘… a general election immediately following the rejection of the Budget,’ he wrote, ‘would, beyond all doubt, be disastrous to the fortunes of the Unionist Party. The Government would be returned with a sufficient majority to re-enact the Budget and to remain in office another five years. This would be bad enough, but it would be still worse if they obtained—as they must inevitably try to obtain—power to curtail the veto of the House of Lords. … If, on the other hand, the Budget were allowed to pass, its burdens would soon prove odious in practice, and the comforting theory on which it is now founded would be exploded. By the end of another year the Government would have to go to the country and would, I believe, suffer defeat. A Unionist Government would then be in a position to amend the Budget, strengthen the House of Lords against further attack, and save the country from the Socialism and class warfare which are being fostered today.’g
This was a most prescient forecast of what was to happen when the Budget was rejected, and an attractive, and not altogether implausible, forecast of what might have happened had the opposite course been chosen. This was very much the point of view which F. E. Smith was urging upon Balfour at this time. In the words of his biographer, ‘he (Smith) was convinced that the Lords should pass the Budget, so that when its brutalities were exposed and the Unionists returned to power, its terms could be altered and softened, its more violent clauses repealed’.h He was a useful if surprising ally for the cause of moderation (his attitude at this time was very different from that which he was to take up when it came to the Parliament Bill, eighteen months later), for he was untouched by the heresy of free trade, and was in this respect unlike all the ‘moderate’ peers mentioned above.
This was the key to the whole difficulty. Tariff reform was the issue which rallied the Unionist enthusiasts in the country. From a party point of view it was the popular thing with which to be associated. Those who stood aloof found that the applause they received from their followers in the constituencies was less hearty than it might have been, and that they were always in danger of being regarded as bad party men. The free trade element in the party was therefore suspect, and the advice which came from it was given far less attention than it deserved.
Nor was it quite enough not to be a free trader. The Bal-fourians, as opposed to the ‘whole-hoggers’, were also in a difficult position. Arthur Balfour himself was leading a parliamentary party the great majority of which was far to the right of him on the protection issue. To equivocate on this, while retaining the lead, had been difficult enough, and it meant that he could not afford to restrain the fighting spirit of his party on yet a second major question. Lansdowne suffered a double disadvantage. He was not only a Balfourian, he was also an ex-Whig, and not even a member of the Carlton Club. At a time when it greatly needed firm and far-seeing leadership the Tory Party had thus succeeded, by internal schism and distrust, in destroying the self-confidence of its leaders and making them incapable of anything more adventurous or valuable than a little gentle swimming with the tide.
It was not an accident that those who were most vehemently in favour of rejection by the Lords were also, broadly speaking, ardent tariff reformers. Partly it was a question of temperament. No one could deny that to hitch the Tory wagon to the star of protection was a bold act; those who had done this preferred the boldness, or foolhardiness, of a peers’ rejection to the nicely calculated tactics of calling off the battle at this stage. But there was more to it than this. There was also the fact that the protectionists feared the Budget per se more than did the free-fooders and the Balfourians. They had come to believe the propaganda of their opponents to the extent of accepting the view that Lloyd George’s proposals constituted the only effective revenue-raising alternative to a general tariff. They agreed with the substance if not with the form of the argument which the Prime Minister had used in the third reading debate:
‘What, then, are the two ways, and the only two ways, before the country of meeting the necessities of the nation? On the one hand you may do as we are doing. You may impose, simultaneously and in fair proportion, taxes on accumulated wealth, on the profits of industry, on the simpler luxuries, though not the necessities, of the poor.… That is one way—that is the way proposed by this Budget. What is the other, the only other, that has yet been disclosed or even foreshadowed to Parliament and the country? It is to take a toll of the prime necessaries of life; it is to raise the level of prices to the average consumer of the commodity; it is to surround your markets with a tariff wall…. That, Sir, is the choice which has to be made….’i
And because they agreed they were doubly anxious to destroy a Budget which would destroy part of the case for their beloved protection.
The forces of wealth, and particularly of landed wealth which counted for so much in the Unionist Party, were also against any retreat. The platform activities of some of the dukes might not have been well-regarded by many Conservative politicians, but when it came to a behind-the-scenes discussion of policy, the influence of these magnates was much too great for their point of view to be ignored. The liquor trade, which had clearly demonstrated its power over the Unionist Party in the previous session, was also all for a fight. And the Unionist organisation in the country, which had responded with zeal, as constituency organisations do, when their parliamentary army had marched up to such advanced positions during the battle in the House of Commons, was now by no means anxious that these positions should be evacuated. As Lord James of Hereford succinctly summed up the pressure for rejection: ‘The agents, the organisations, and the Licensed Victuallers’ Trade all demand it. They know nothing of, and care nothing for, Constitutional Law.’j
This was the clamour which carried Balfour and Lansdowne along. It is sometimes suggested that they were the victims of intense pressure from a small number of tariff reform peers who had secured an alliance with important sections of the Tory press. This was not the case. Lord Milner’s famous ‘Damn the consequences’ Glasgow speech, which is often thought of as an example of this sort of pressure, was not in fact delivered until November 26, during the course of the rejection debate in the House of Lords, and long after all the decisions had been made. If pressure there was, it came not from a few peers, but from the whole of the unthinking section of the Unionist Party—always a formidable force—and from much of the thinking section as well; and if the pressure was not resisted, that was because Balfour and Lansdowne themselves half-believed rejection to be the right course, and because the weakness of their position dictated that they should follow those halves of their minds rather than the other.
The debate in the Lords began on November 23. It continued for five parliamentary days. Most of the peers of note on both sides and on the cross-benches took part,1 and, as is so often the case when the House of Lords is engaged in reaching a peculiarly silly decision, there were many comments on the high level of the debate and on the enhancement it gave to the deliberative quality of the chamber.
After Crewe had formally moved the second reading, Lansdowne opened the debate by proposing his amendment. In the view at least of Morley, this was the best statement of the case heard from the Opposition benches. Lansdowne argued that ‘tacked’ on to the Finance Bill were a number of extraneous matters. ‘Tacking’ was a practice of which the House of Commons had become increasingly guilty, and it fully justified the Upper House in reviving the right to reject a money bill which had b
een expressly conceded in the Commons’ arguments of 1689. On the tactical issue, he put forward the point that the House of Lords would do itself less harm by standing and fighting than by running away and abandoning for all time the right to interfere with the financial policy of a radical Government, however outrageous that policy might be.
Of the other speeches for the amendment, those of Halsbury and Curzon2 were among the most extreme, and that of Ritchie of Dundee, who had opposed his party and voted with the Government when the Lords were engaged in mutilating the Education Bill of 1906, was among the most surprising.
Balfour of Burleigh argued with great force on the other side. He pointed out the full enormity of the claim which the Upper House was making for itself.
‘Finance differs from all other legislation in this respect. If a Bill is rejected either by a vote of this House or by disagreement between the two Houses the status quo which existed before the Bill was proposed survives and remains. It is not so in finance. If you are to establish a system whereby this House or any other authority has the right to establish a referendum as it is called—a reference to the people in matters of finance—you would spoil and destroy the control of the other House of Parliament over the Government, and would make, I venture to say, perhaps the most momentous change in the Constitution, as it has grown up, which has been made in the whole history of that Constitution…. My Lords, if you win, the victory can at most be a temporary one. If you lose you have altered and prejudiced the position, the power, the prestige, the usefulness of this House.…’k
He ended by warning the peers against walking into a trap set by their enemies, by doing which they would ‘offend the deeper conservative instincts of the country’.
Lord James added similar counsel; Lord Rcay remarked ominously that ‘oligarchies are seldom destroyed and more frequently commit suicide’; Lord Rosebery denounced the Bill, but announced, to the great disappointment of the Unionists, that ‘he was not willing to link the fortunes of the Second Chamber with opposition to the Budget’, and said that he would not vote; and Lord Morley combined an accusation that the Lords were in effect repealing the Septennial Act with a curious homily about socialism and the ‘fertilising residue of good’ which he believed that ‘socialistic movements and experiments would leave’.
Lorcburn, the Lord Chancellor, read out a Government declaration saying, ‘It is impossible that any Liberal Government should ever again bear the heavy burden of office, unless it is secured against a repetition of treatment such as our measures have had to undergo for the last four years.’ And Crewe, who wound up the debate, announced that ‘… we must… set ourselves to obtain guarantees, … fenced about and guarded by the force of statute, guarantees which will prevent that indiscriminate destruction of our legislation of which your work tonight is the climax and crown’. He also assured their lordships that ‘they were not the victims of a Ministerial plot; the great majority of the Ministers, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had hoped to the last that the Bill would pass’.
These late warnings, not surprisingly perhaps, were unheeded. When the question ‘that the Bill be now read a Second Time’ was put, the contents were seventy-five and the not-contents were 350; so the not-contents had it. There were few surprises in the division lists. A fine collection of Lloyd George’s ‘backwoodsmen’ turned up. Balfour of Burleigh was almost the only dissenting Unionist who voted for the bill. The great majority of bishops, including the Primate, abstained, although the Archbishop of York1 and three others voted for the Government. The Bishop of Lincoln voted with the Opposition.
What reactions did this decisive rejection produce? The Liberal leaders were certainly not greatly distressed. A Punch cartoon—and Punch was then rather pro-Government— which showed the news being discussed at a hilariously happy Cabinet, was probably somewhat wide of the mark, although more in form than in substance perhaps. What was the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s personal position? There are two pieces of directly contradictory evidence to be reconciled. There is Lord Crewe’s statement, which is of importance both because he was a man most unlikely to say something which he knew to be untrue for the sake of oratorical effect, and because of its precision. He did not say that all Ministers wished to see the bill pass; he said ‘the great majority1… including the Chancellor of the Exchequer’. It is difficult to see why, if he was not bound by the truth, he should have chosen this intriguingly qualified degree of misrepresentation.
On the other hand, we have a biographer of Lloyd George, Mr. J. Hugh Edwards, who was clearly very much persona grata with his subject, and whose book, published in 1930, tells how, at the dinner which the Chancellor gave to celebrate the passing of the Finance Bill through the House of Commons, only one toast was drunk, that of ‘May the Lords reject the Budget!’m This story, for which no corroboration can be found, is a little implausible when it is remembered that the Prime Minister and Haldane, as well as Lloyd George and his henchmen, were present at the dinner. Nevertheless, its spirit is more in keeping with Lloyd George’s behaviour at this time than is Crewe’s statement. It is not necessary to accept the theory that the Budget was designed from the first as a trap for the peers in order to believe that when rejection occurred the Chancellor of the Exchequer was very well satisfied.
‘If the Budget has been buried,’ Lloyd George declared, ‘it is in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection.’ ‘Liberty,’ he went on, ‘owes as much to the fool-hardiness of its foes as it does to the sapience and wisdom of its friends. … At last the cause between the peers and the people has been set down for trial in the grand assize of the people, and the verdict will come soon.’1
The Liberal leaders were pleased, but the public showed no signs of excitement. A demonstration in Parliament Square, called by the Political Committee of the National Liberal Club for the evening on which it was thought that the vote would take place in the House of Lords, was a complete failure,2 and throughout the country the spontaneous protests of 1831 and 1884 were entirely absent.
Conservative spokesmen, naturally enough, gave loyal support to the action of Lansdowne and his followers. ‘Is he wrong?’ Arthur Balfour asked a Manchester audience. ‘He is abundantly right, and there never was an occasion when this power, rested by the Constitution in the Second Chamber, was more abundantly justified.’n But there were many people, far from the ranks of the Liberal Party, who disagreed sharply with Mr. Balfour. Lord Knollys,3 the King’s private secretary, told the Clerk to the Privy Council ‘very gravely and emphatically that he thought the Lords mad’.o Balfour of Burleigh and not Lansdowne had been right: ‘the Lords had not merely treated the Liberal Government outrageously, they had also succeeded in offending the deeper conservative instincts of the country’; and Lord Reay had been right too: an oligarchy was performing the act of suicide.
VI The Verdict of the Nation
Any course other than immediate dissolution was out of the question. The legislature had refused Supply, and in these circumstances no government could carry on. It was this, most of all, which gave the full measure of what the Lords had done. They had not merely confronted the Government with the choice of an immediate election or of acceptance of the loss of a particular measure, as they had frequently done before. They had left the Government with no choice, and had taken upon themselves the right of deciding when a Government could carry on and when it could not, when a Parliament should end and when it should not. It was a claim which, if allowed, would have made the Government as much the creature of the hereditary assembly as of the elective assembly.
Asquith responded to the challenge on December 2, when he moved in the House of Commons ‘that the action of the House of Lords in refusing to pass into law the financial provision made by this House for the service of the year is a breach of the Constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons’. He commended his motion to the House in what his biographers describe as ‘a serious argument enlivened by brilliant rail
lery’,a which was very well received by his followers. In the course of his speech he announced an immediate dissolution—‘at the earliest possible moment we shall ask the constituencies of the country to declare that the organ and voice of the free people of this country is to be found in the elected representatives of the nation’. The resolution, supported by both the Irish and the Labour Party, and opposed by a sick Arthur Balfour,1 was carried by 349 votes to 134.
Prorogation took place on the next day, and the King’s Speech, after thanking the Commons for the ‘liberality and care with which (they) provided for the heavy additions to the national expenditure due to the requirements of imperial defence and social reform’, noted with regret ‘that their provision had proved unavailing’. The dates of the election were not known at once, but on December 23 it was announced that the writs would be issued on January 10, and that polling would be spread over the fortnight beginning January 15. Nevertheless the campaigns, which had begun sporadically as soon as the dissolution was announced, were formally opened on December 10, when Balfour issued his address to the electors of the City and Asquith spoke at the Albert Hall.
The Prime Minister’s audience, which numbered 10,000 and was described by The Times as ‘boiling over with enthusiasm, was by careful design exclusively male, for the suffragettes were very active at the time,2 and strict precautions were thought necessary. Its members were told that the three major issues on which the country had to pronounce were ‘the absolute control of the Commons over finance, the maintenance of Free Trade, and the effective limitation and curtailment of the legislative powers of the House of Lords’. In amplification of the last point he had said: