A Brief History of Britain 1851-2010

by Jeremy Black

  Politics was not banished for the remainder of the war. Important issues were raised, especially about the possibility of negotiations with Germany in 1917. This was an unsuccessful proposal that led to the resignation of its sponsor, Arthur Henderson (1863–1935), the first Labour Cabinet minister, from the War Cabinet, although Labour remained in the Coalition. By 1917, there was also a degree of trade union and Labour Party disquiet about the consequences of the conflict, notably food shortages and rising prices. There was also anger at wage controls, labour direction and profiteering; and at facets of social difference that appeared less acceptable in a period of total war.

  In 1918, Lloyd George’s war leadership was challenged by Asquith in a debate over the availability of troops for the Western Front, an issue on which Lloyd George had given the House of Commons misleading information. Lloyd George survived, in large part thanks to Conservative support, but the Liberals were now very bitterly divided.

  The Coalition was continued after the war, with Labour, benefiting from the growth in its resources and organization in 1917–18, newly important as a result of the major extension of the franchise in 1918. In that year’s general election, which was held under the new, greatly extended franchise (see p.105), Labour received more votes than the Liberals and won sixty seats. The traditional Liberal concerns with temperance, Church schools and Church disestablishment no longer seemed of interest or relevant to most of the electorate. The Liberals also lacked new or attractive policies and leaders, and their pre-war social welfare platform now seemed better, and certainly more popularly, represented by Labour.

  However significant in the medium term, Labour support rose, but the party did not win. The election, held on 14 December 1918, was known as the coupon election as Asquithian MPs were denied the letter of endorsement (or coupon) from Lloyd George and the Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law (1858–1923). Held in the relief and euphoria of victory, the election, the first since 1910, brought the Coalition more than 500, and maybe up to 523 out of 707 MPs: the precise figure is unclear as not all the Coalition’s supporters received the coupon. The Conservatives won 382 seats. Having lost three general elections before the war (in 1906 and two in 1910), and then drifted to the right, and further from electoral popularity, not least by supporting Ulster’s opposition to Irish Home Rule, the Conservatives had been offered by the war an unexpected way back to the centre of politics from where they were able to benefit from their skills in flag-waving.

  Irish Independence

  Ireland proved a key issue for the post-war government. Already, in 1916, there had been a nationalist rebellion against British rule, at the same time that far larger numbers of Irish men fought, as volunteers, for George V in the First World War. Launched by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, this rebellion, the Easter Rising, focused on Dublin. There was supporting action in other parts of Ireland, but, due to divisions in the leadership, nothing of note, which helped ensure that the rising in Dublin on Easter Monday (24 April) would fail militarily. Instead, it became merely a bold and bloody gesture. About 1,200 people rose and seized a number of sites, but their actions suffered from bad planning, poor tactics and the strength of the British response, which included the uncompromising use of artillery. The insurgents were forced to surrender unconditionally on 29 April.

  The rebellion, which revived long-standing fears of Ireland as a backdoor to Britain, was particularly unwelcome while Britain was involved in a difficult war and short of troops, but the firm British response served to radicalize Irish public opinion. Martial law was declared, and a series of trials, fifteen executions and numerous internments, provided martyrs for the nationalist cause, although, of course, far more Irishmen were dying as volunteers while fighting against the Germans, and the Easter Rising can be seen as stabbing them in the back.

  Nevertheless, Irish nationalism received a powerful impulse. The Irish Volunteers were swiftly re-established and, by the end of 1917, had begun public drilling exercises. Political support for independence grew in 1918, when a government proposal to introduce conscription was very unpopular. This proposal seemed necessary because troop numbers were a key issue after Germany’s victory over Russia. By the close of the war, the issue of conscription had undermined support for the Home Rulers, who had sought autonomy within the empire, but not independence. Instead, Sinn Fein, the Catholic nationalist movement, took the majority of the seats in the 1918 general election.

  In 1919, the Irish Volunteers, soon to rename themselves the Irish Republican Army (IRA), began terrorist activity. Fired by nationalist zeal, they were opposed to conventional politics, which they correctly saw as likely to lead to compromise. The British refusal to accept independence precipitated a brutal civil war in 1919–21, in which terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including the assassination of police officers, destroyed the British ability to maintain control despite the use of unauthorized reprisals by British auxiliary forces. In tones that were to become familiar from counter-insurgency operations elsewhere, Lieutenant-General Sir Philip Chetwode (1869–1950), Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff, claimed that victory was possible, but only if the Army was given more power, including control of the police, and the full support of British public opinion:

  The full incidence of Martial Law will demand very severe measures and to begin with many executions. In the present state of ignorance of the population in England, I doubt very much that it would not result in a protest which would not only ruin our efforts, but would be most dangerous to the army. The latter have behaved magnificently throughout, but they feel from top to bottom that they are not supported by their countrymen, and should there be a strong protest against severe action it would be extremely difficult to hold them.

  Public opinion would not have stood for it, while the government also deferred to American sensibilities, which were pro-Irish.

  Instead of coercion, there was a British withdrawal from much of Ireland under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. This withdrawal was the result of a partition of the island between a new, self-governing Irish Free State, which, initially, stayed within the empire, independent but with a Governor General, and a mainly Protestant Northern Ireland, comprising most of the historic province of Ulster. This remained part of the UK, which now became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The partition owed much to the violence that had followed Sinn Fein’s electoral victory in 1918 and to the sectional interests both of the Catholic Church and Sinn Fein, which turned Irish nationalism into a Catholic sectarian movement, and of the Northern Irish Protestant loyalists who oppressed the Catholic minority in the north. This partition was to be remembered in sharply contrasting fashion by the Nationalist and Unionist communities and to be very differently treated by histories written in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

  The partition was opposed by much of the IRA, the anti-Treaty forces known as the Irregulars, as they were unable to accept a settlement that provided anything short of a united Ireland. The Irregulars mounted a terrorist campaign in Northern Ireland in 1921, and also fought the newly independent government in the south in 1922–3 in what was a more bloody conflict than that of 1919–21. The IRA, however, was beaten both north and south of the border, the new government of the Irish Free State proving firmer than the British government had been; and, thereafter, IRA terrorism remained only a minor irritant until the late 1960s.

  The Lloyd George Government, 1918–22

  The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 was one of the many factors that lessened Conservative support for Lloyd George. Indeed, forty Conservative MPs voted against the Act. More generally, Lloyd George’s attempt to give the Coalition coherence, by creating a new centre party that would accommodate the Conservatives with the social reformism of the Lloyd George Liberals, fell foul of the incompatible views of both sides. In particular, the Conservatives limited Lloyd George’s freedom of action over peace terms with Germany, as well as with Ireland and labour relations, in each case pre
ssing for greater firmness. They were also unenthusiastic about social reform policies that would lead to high taxes. Taxes had already risen greatly during the war and the number of income tax payers had been considerably increased, which raised public and political sensitivity to taxation, a key development.

  Nevertheless, Lloyd George used the Conservatives’ fear that if they broke with him that might pave the way to a Labour government in order to retain power and have some leeway over policy, and his premiership served to give the government an aura of progressivism. Indeed, National Insurance was extended in 1920 to include those not covered under the 1911 Act. This helped to make the system more expensive, which created the financial crises of the late 1920s and 1930s, leading to restrictions on the right to claim unemployment benefits. The 1931 crisis over unemployment benefit (see p.81) can thus be set against a background of the long-term problem of funding social insurance with more claimants and with less money coming into the system.

  Most of the Conservatives were initially keen to maintain the Coalition in order to strengthen opposition to socialism. They were disturbed by Labour’s success in the recent 1918 general election, by trade union militancy, which markedly increased after the war, and by the spectre of Communism sweeping Europe: having seized power in Russia in 1917, the Communists triumphed in the Russian Civil War, and then supported Communist movements elsewhere.

  Post-war economic problems were serious and appeared linked to political radicalism. There were numerous strikes in 1919, including a railway strike, and these led to fears of a revolutionary working class seizing power through industrial militancy. Moreover, a worldwide depression in 1921–2 hit British exports. In 1921, unemployment rose markedly (to 1.8 million insured workers), as did industrial disputes, including an unsuccessful (coal) miners’ strike. Lloyd George no longer seemed able to control social unrest or to ensure industrial peace. The government’s popularity was further compromised in 1922 when a committee, under the chairmanship of the businessman Sir Eric Geddes (1875–1937), appointed to recommend cuts in the face of an anti-waste campaign in the Conservative heartlands, urged deflation, a classic instance of the economics that prevailed before the theories of John Maynard Keynes gained credence in mid-century. The ‘Geddes Axe’ included cuts in governmental expenditure on social services, education and housing (as well as defence), and, partly as a result, the government’s social politics seemed clearly different from what Labour offered.

  Yet Lloyd George was to fall because he lost Conservative support, and not because he increasingly alienated radicals. Much of the Conservative leadership, including the leader since March 1921, Austen Chamberlain (1863–1937), a son of Joseph Chamberlain, did not want to divide the anti-Labour vote by breaking with Lloyd George. Nevertheless, concern about Lloyd George and his policies led many Conservatives in 1921 to decide that they would not fight a second election in alliance with him. Support ebbed further in 1922, as the disclosure of Lloyd George’s sale of honours for party funds (at a scale greater than that allegedly under later prime ministers) led to a public scandal. He was no longer trusted, admired or felt necessary by the majority of the Conservative MPs.

  The Party Politics of the 1920s

  The year 1922, therefore, marked the post-war return of the party system. The Conservative revolt was staged by backbenchers, junior ministers and constituency activists, with a meeting of the parliamentary party at the Carlton Club on 19 October leading to the decision to abandon the Coalition, a meeting that gave its name to the Conservative backbench committee. In response, Lloyd George and Chamberlain resigned. Chamberlain’s predecessor, Andrew Bonar Law, returned as party leader and formed a totally Conservative government. Far from having broken the mould of British politics, Lloyd George was consigned to the political wilderness. When he held power, he had been unwilling to support electoral reform, the proportional representation (allocation of parliamentary seats in accordance with the ratio of total votes cast) that would have helped the Liberals in the 1920s, and, once out of power, he certainly could not obtain such a change.

  A more broadly based Labour had replaced the divided Liberals as the leading party of opposition. Labour was therefore the party that opposition to the Conservatives had to cohere round were it to be successful. Although there were important exceptions, for example in Liberal-dominated Cornwall, and in many agricultural areas, Labour had become the natural first-choice party of the working class, and, as such, was strong in all major conurbations and industrial areas. Labour benefited from the rise in class politics and from the growing prominence of class issues, such as industrial relations. Trade union membership had doubled from 4 million in 1914 to 8 million in 1920, and the party constitution of 1918 consolidated trade union domination of Labour. The new electorate was not interested in such pre-war Liberal Nonconformist causes as the disestablishment of the Church of England, the temperance movement and Church schools. The Labour Party also enjoyed a measure of support in rural areas among agricultural workers, although that was to ebb as the agricultural workforce declined, while the rural workforce anyway tended to be less unionized than their urban counterparts. Labour, moreover, profited greatly from the weakness of its radical challengers: Communism and the Independent Labour Party. Labour’s dominance of the left was, thereafter, a key element in British politics and contrasted, for example, with the strength of the Communists in Italy and Spain.

  The Liberals suffered from this shift in working-class support. Yet, many of the Labour voters were new voters enfranchised in 1918, and, rather than the Liberals losing support to Labour, they lost it more heavily to the Conservatives. The Liberals also suffered from their divisions, and, more lastingly, from the effect of the absence of proportional representation on a party whose support was evenly spread and perennially second to Labour or Conservatives at the constituency level.

  The Conservatives formed a government in 1922, their first since 1905, and easily won the general election of 15 November 1922. However, their hold on power proved shortlived. Suffering from throat cancer, Bonar Law resigned as Prime Minister (and party leader) in May 1923, dying soon after. He was succeeded by Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947), a Midlands manufacturer who had become the Chancellor of the Exchequer, rather than by the Foreign Secretary, George, Marquess Curzon, an aristocrat who felt that he had the best claim to the post.

  However, Baldwin’s strong support for tariffs, which he felt necessary in order to improve the economy, was distrusted, unpopular and widely perceived in class terms as a measure that would help the few, not the many. Protectionism was presented by its opponents as likely to increase food prices. Whereas the Conservatives had won 344 seats in 1922, they gained only 258 in the general election held on 6 December 1923: Labour won 191 and the Liberals 158. The reunion of the Asquith and Lloyd George Liberals hit the Conservatives in the constituencies.

  No party had a majority in the Commons. The Liberals refused to support the Baldwin government, which was voted out on its protectionist King’s Speech by the new House of Commons in January 1924, thanks to cooperation between the Liberals and Labour, both of which were opposed to protectionism. Labour then took office as a minority party, without Liberal support, although, in effect, the Labour government depended on the Liberals. This was a contrast to the situation before the First World War when Labour had supported the Liberals.

  The new government was led by Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), the illegitimate son of Scottish farmworkers. He was determined that Labour should replace the Liberals as the key anti-Conservative force, and this brief government was important because it showed that Labour could rule without causing any crisis in British society, still less sponsoring revolution. There were no serious upsets, and financial policy was particularly prudent, with the orthodoxy of Philip Snowden (1864–1937) making him an ideal Treasury-minded Chancellor of the Exchequer. Far from introducing a capital levy or wealth tax, Snowden was a supporter of tax cuts.

  The Labour gove
rnment also kept the unions at a distance, but a loss of Liberal backing over the treatment of a Communist agitator led to a fresh general election on 29 October 1924 that was won by the Conservatives under Baldwin. The supposed (in practice very limited) sympathy of Labour for the Soviet Union and Communism was an issue in the election, not least due to the publication on 25 October of an apparently compromising letter, allegedly by Grigory Zinoviev, the President of the Communist International, giving instructions to British sympathizers to provoke a revolution.

  This letter did not greatly hit the Labour vote, which was larger, in terms of both number and percentage of votes, than in earlier elections. The Liberals, however, did very badly, winning only forty seats. They were affected by serious financial problems in what was the third election in quick succession, and did not contest 207 seats, which helped the Conservatives to dominate the anti-Labour vote. The Liberals also lacked a viable strategy. Their role in putting Labour into power had alienated much of their middle-class support and also helped reunite the Conservatives. In turn, Liberal weaknesses cost Labour seats – Labour lost forty, which assisted the Conservatives, who appeared as the party best placed to protect property. During their months in opposition, the Conservatives had ended the division that had stemmed from the Carlton Club meeting, abandoned tariff reform, and improved their organization. In October 1924, they took 48.3 per cent of the votes and won 419 seats, gaining the largest majority (223 seats) for a single party since the Great Reform Act of 1832 had transformed politics.