A Brief History of Britain 1851-2010
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The relatively benign 1890s gave rise to a more troubling situation in the following decade, and there was no Edwardian calm to British politics, despite subsequent suggestions from the vantage point of the troubled post-war world. Instead, Edward VII’s reign (1901–10) was a period of uncertainty and tension, such that these years, running on to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, while often seen as a continuation of the late nineteenth century, can be regarded, conversely, as its dissolution, a dissolution that had gathered pace before the war.
The twentieth century opened with Britain already at war, albeit that the Boer War (1899–1902) was very different in scale to the First World War. Moreover, in the early 1900s, the National Debt was rising substantially, and politicians were unsure about how best to respond to growing industrial militancy, as well as to concern about national efficiency and pressures for social reform. War and domestic issues were linked in anxiety about Britain’s strength relative to other powers, particularly Germany. Rudyard Kipling’s (1865–1936) poem ‘The Islanders’ (1902) saw the British as weak and self-regarding, concerned with trinkets and ‘the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals’. Far from there being any general complacency, there was a widespread feeling that something had to be done, a feeling exacerbated by serious defeats in the early stages of the Boer War. Moreover, to pay for the war, the government raised taxes, including income tax from 8d. (3p) to 1s. 3d. (6p) in the pound, and borrowed £135 million.
What was to be done was less clear. Salisbury and the Conservatives, then called Unionists because of their support for the existing constitutional arrangements in Ireland, won in October 1900 what was called a ‘khaki election’ because it was held when the Boer War was arousing patriotic sentiments and going well, while the Liberals were publicly divided over the merits of the war. In contrast, most of the electorate had no such doubt about the expansion of empire. Only 184 Liberals were elected and no fewer than 163 government supporters were elected unopposed.
However, this victory could not, for long, conceal important weaknesses in the Conservative position, including the inability to respond successfully to the growing demands of organized labour. The elderly Salisbury also failed to take advantage of the general election in order to reorganize and strengthen the government, and very few middle-class politicians were brought into office. The Liberals moreover were helped by the still considerable strength of their Nonconformist constituency.
A political freneticism on the part of some reflected the sense that real issues were at stake. The first lightning rod was cast by Joseph Chamberlain, Colonial Secretary from 1895 to 1903, who, concerned about the pressure of international competition, sought to replace free trade by tariffs (import duties), with, in addition, a system of imperial preference to encourage trade within the empire. The revenue tariffs produced was to be spent on social welfare, thus easing social tension, without increasing taxes. To Chamberlain, this policy offered imperial revival, populism and an opportunity to strengthen the Conservative government, but, in fact, his policy divided and weakened the party.
The popularity of the tariff policy was compromised because it was presented as a taxation on food imports that would hit the urban working class by increasing the price of food. In an instructive instance of the importance of the public dimension, Chamberlain’s campaigning gesture of 1903, when he held up two loaves of similar size to demonstrate that the tariffs he proposed would not have a great effect on consumers, was hijacked by opponents who contrasted the protectionist ‘little loaf’ with the current ‘big loaf’. The cheap big loaf was the key representation in posters, postcards and parades; a readily grasped image suited to an age of democratic politics. The Free Trade campaigners and the Tariff Reformers both actively sought popular support through local campaigns across the country.
Furthermore, the tariff issue united the Liberals and increased their popularity, thus demonstrating the political limitations of tariff reform for the Conservatives. Never underestimating the credulity of their audience, Liberal speakers focused on the price of food and ignored the wider questions posed by the challenges to the British economy represented by free trade, especially the serious competition for British industry. As a result both of their stance on cheap food and of their willingness to seek the support of organized labour, the Liberals were far better placed than the Conservatives to give voice to popular pressure for social reform and, more generally, for change.
Unable to unite the party over tariff reform, or to offer solutions on questions such as social reform, Salisbury’s successor, his nephew Arthur Balfour, resigned as Prime Minister on 4 December 1905. He hoped that, once in government, the Liberals would divide, providing the Conservatives with an opportunity to win the imminent general election, but instead the election, held in January 1906, led to a Liberal landslide, with the Liberals gaining 401 seats to the Conservatives’ 157. The Liberals had recovered well from earlier divisions over Ireland and the Boer War.
Moreover, growing pressure for more radical policies had led political opinion to coalesce and polarize to a considerable extent along social and class lines, with the working class increasingly Liberal and the less numerous middle and upper classes Conservative. In 1891, Gladstone had called for a reduction in factory work-hours, free education, electoral reform, and the reform or abolition of the House of Lords. In 1903, the Liberals secretly allied with Labour, in part because they saw a shared class interest, the two parties agreeing not to fight each other in certain seats lest they help the Conservatives. This cooperation was helped by common hostility to tariffs and by Labour anger with the Conservative government’s attitude towards trade unions. In the 1906 election, the majority of Liberal candidates included pledges for social reform in their election addresses.
The Conservatives were seen as overly linked to sectional interests – the employers, the agricultural interest, the Church of England and the brewers (who were unpopular with the Nonconformist temperance lobby) – and had not acquired any reputation for competence. They were blamed for the mismanagement of the Boer War and suffered from the sour taste the conflict had left. Furthermore, Balfour was unable to unite his party. He was also no populist and a poor campaigner. In the 1906 election, the Conservatives lost some of their urban working-class support, while the Liberals took the former Conservative strongholds of London and Lancashire, and also made important gains in rural and suburban parts of southern England, the Conservative heartland. Many of the latter gains were lost in the two general elections of 1910, but the Liberals then retained Lancashire and London, ensuring that they were the major party in all the leading industrial areas.
Politics was developing towards what was to be its class-orientated character for much of the twentieth century. The foundation of trade unions reflected the growing industrialization of the economy, the rise of larger concerns employing more people, and, by the end of the nineteenth century, a new, more adversarial and combative working-class consciousness. Moreover, the trade union lodge displaced the chapel as the main meeting place for men in many workingclass communities. The Trades Union Congress (TUC), a federation of trade unions, began in 1868, unionism spreading from the skilled craft sector to the more numerous semi-skilled and unskilled workers whose interests had not initially been represented, and TUC support led, in 1900, to the formation of the Labour Representation Committee, the basis of the Labour Party. Some working-class militants looked to a Marxist tradition: the Social Democratic Federation pioneered the development of socialism in the 1880s and was Britain’s first avowedly Marxist party. Most, however, looked to Labour. For example, the decision of the South Wales miners in 1906 to affiliate with the Labour Party marked the beginning of the end of Liberalism’s hold over the Welsh urban working class.
Greater radicalism contributed to, and in part reflected and sustained, a sense of doubt, if not a crisis of confidence in society. The demand for reform was matched by a pressure for security i
n a competitive international environment, the two combining to produce an uneasiness about present and future that fed into debate about the condition of the people and calls for National Efficiency: competence in government, and a more vigorous and better-educated populace.
New Liberalism
Some prominent Liberals, especially the dynamic David Lloyd George, a Welsh solicitor who became Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1908 to 1915 (and Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922), sought to change the state of the people by undermining the power and possessions of the old landed elite and by providing assured social welfare. As with much else in politics, problems provided a key context. Indeed, the New Liberalism of the Liberal Reforms was more to do with propping up the tottering Poor Law than bringing about social reform and harmony.
In 1909, Lloyd George announced a ‘People’s Budget’. Proposing redistributive measures in order to give force to assumptions about the necessary nature of society if Britain was to improve, this budget raised direct taxation on higher incomes, and prepared the way for taxes on land. The Liberals lessened the concern about redistribution by planning no tax increases on annual earned income below £2,000, a figure that then excluded the middle class; but the notion of redistributive taxation was indeed a threat to this group, as was to be shown clearly under Labour in the 1970s. The House of Lords rejected the budget, only for two general elections in 1910 to return a minority Liberal government dependent on support from Labour and the Irish Nationalists. Aside from the passage of the budget, the Parliament Act of 1911 replaced the Lords’ ability to veto Commons’ legislation with the right only to delay it, an Act only passed as a result of the threat of creating many more peers to pack the Lords with Liberal supporters, the policy already followed in order to push through the ‘Great’ or First Reform Act, of 1832.
The entire dispute was accompanied by strident social criticism of the aristocracy. In 1911, H.G. Wells, in his novel The New Machiavelli, presented Richard Remington as narrator, a fictional politician who advocated a ‘trained aristocracy’, universal education, feminism, and a more perfect, and thus stronger, Britain.
In 1911, Lloyd George’s National Insurance Act provided for unemployment assistance and for all males eligible for insurance to be registered with a doctor who was to receive a fee per patient, irrespective of the amount of medical attention required. Thus, with the key exclusion of children and most women from the health proposals, and of unskilled workers from the unemployment provisions, exclusions that reflected costs as well as notions of entitlement, there was already considerable provision of public welfare support prior to the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948. At the same time, the 1911 legislation reflected the determination to align private commitment to one’s own future alongside state security.
The legislation of the Liberal government was designed to provide an environment for further regulation, as with the first Town Planning Act, passed in 1909. The context, however, was one of social and political division. In 1906, the Liberals passed a Trade Disputes Act that gave the trade unions immunity from actions for damages as a result of strike action, and thus rejected the attempts of the courts, through the Taff Vale case of 1901, to bring the unions within the law. The latter verdict had threatened to make strike action prohibitively expensive.
The Liberals thus appealed to the working class, although, despite the populist and collectivist strain in New Liberalism, the Liberals were unhappy with using the language of class, unenthusiastic about powerful trade unions, and did not adopt working-class candidates. Yet, there was also a powerful radical strain to New Liberalism. In late 1913, Lloyd George proposed state-funded rural house building and a minimum agricultural wage, and, when war began in 1914, it cut short initiatives by the Liberal government that were being planned for health, housing, education and a minimum wage. Balfour had claimed in 1894 that ‘the best antidote to Socialism was practical social reform’, but it was the Liberals who seemed most determined and able to implement this policy.
Welsh Church disestablishment was pushed through in 1914, although, with the intervention of war, it was not implemented until 1920. Irish Home Rule was also a key issue, although the Liberal government initially sidelined it. The determination of the Ulster Protestants, who were in a minority in Ireland, to resist Home Rule took the country to the brink of civil war in 1914. The formation of the Ulster Unionist Council (1905) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (1913) revealed the unwillingness of the Ulster Protestants to subordinate their sense of identity to Irish nationalism. They were assisted by the Conservatives, from 1912 the Conservative and Unionist Party, who did their best to resist the Home Rule Bill introduced by the Liberal government in 1912. The Bill, twice rejected by the House of Lords, was passed in an amended form in 1914, with the proviso that it was not to be implemented until after the war. The crisis defined the political forces in Ireland and gave a powerful impetus to the consciousness of the Ulster Protestants. The authority and power of the British state was challenged in a fashion that was far more potent and threatening than the Boer War.
Prior to the First World War, the Liberal Party, with its desire for the cooperation of capital and labour and its stress on class harmony for all except the aristocracy, still displayed few signs of decline at the hands of Labour, and showed much confidence in its future. Another general election was due by 1915, and, although the Conservatives were in better shape than they had been after the 1906 election, there seemed many reasons to assume that they would face a fourth election defeat, not least because they had fewer allies than the Liberals.
Period costume dramas on television and film, notably The Shooting Party and Upstairs Downstairs, suggest that it was an elysian (or, in contrast, far less than perfect) world that was to be swept away by war. These works offer an image of class, gender and political stereotypes, but one that dramatically underplays the dynamism of the period. In particular, there was a widespread conviction among politicians, writers and key sections in society that change was necessary and beneficial. The aristocracy indeed opposed the Liberal Party because it not only sought to preserve its political position, but also to resist what appeared to be an entire ethos of change centring on the policies of the extension of the power of the state, collectivism and the destruction of the Union with Ireland. The aristocracy saw a danger that democracy might entail the poor plundering the rich, or, in the eyes of its supporters, the social justice of redistribution. There was scant sense that the change also seen in other aspects of life, notably technology and the economy, would not affect social power and politics.
The First World War
The terrible and unexpected strains of the First World War resulted, in May 1915, in the establishment of a coalition government, with Liberal, Conservative and Labour Cabinet ministers. Conservative backing for the war led them to accept higher taxation and a massive expansion in state power, but the conduct of the war divided the Liberals. Herbert Asquith (1852–1928), who had been Prime Minister since 1908, proved less successful as a wartime leader than as a peacetime reformer, in large part because he lacked the single-minded determination and drive to rise to the challenges posed by industrial warfare. Governmental instability arose because the most dynamic minister, Lloyd George, who had moved to the key Ministry of Munitions in order to deal with the serious shortage in shells of the Army, understandably lost confidence in Asquith’s ability to lead the country. Lloyd George wanted to mobilize all the country’s resources for war, and this attitude and determination found more favour with the Conservatives than with many Liberals.
There was powerful opposition, however, within the Liberal Party to conscription (compulsory military service) which was seen as opposed to the Liberal tradition of civil liberty. Prominent Liberals, such as Reginald McKenna (1863–1943), Lloyd George’s replacement as Chancellor of the Exchequer, resisted the measure. Nevertheless, Lloyd George and the Conservatives were determined to see it through in order to provide sufficient
men for the trenches on the Western Front, not least due to the heavy and unexpected casualties of the first year of the war. A fudge, Lord Derby’s semi-voluntary scheme, introduced in October 1915, failed to produce sufficient recruits and, faced with Lloyd George’s threat to resign, Asquith gave way. The Military Service Act of January 1916 introduced conscription for single men, and, in response to a sudden surge in weddings, it was extended to the married in April.
Nevertheless, there was still widespread political dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war and particular pressure from backbench Conservative opinion. Differences between Conservatives and Liberals prevented coalition cohesion and contributed to a sense of malaise. The management of the war seemed inadequate. This situation led to pressure in November 1916 for a small war committee to direct the war effort. Asquith saw this call as aimed against his premiership, but his effort to preserve his position collapsed in the face of the growing alignment of Lloyd George and the Conservatives.
In December 1916, Lloyd George took control of the war effort. Less politically skilful than in the past, the overconfident Asquith was displaced, and the government was recast. Lloyd George became Prime Minister, and both Conservatives and Labour continued to offer support. Stubborn as well as weak, Asquith, however, refused to hold office in the new government and was supported in this by most of the Liberal ministers. Lloyd George therefore had divided the Liberals, even as he brought new vitality to the government, not least with the formation of a War Cabinet. As a result of this division, Conservative support for the government was much more important than when Asquith had been Prime Minister.