Asquith (35 page)

The possibility of a peers’ rejection first began to be considered seriously after a speech of Lansdowne’s on July 16th, in which the Unionist leader somewhat ambiguously announced that the House of Lords “ would not swallow the Finance Bill whole without wincing.” Churchill replied to this in a speech at Edinburgh on the following day and stated, apparently without consultation, that a rejection would be followed by a dissolution of Parliament. The Palace immediately complained to Asquith, Knollys’s letter rather wearily beginning: “ The King desires me to say it is painful to him to be continually obliged to complain of certain of your colleagues.”
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But on this occasion the Prime Minister treated the indiscretion as seriously as did the Sovereign, and the Cabinet, at its meeting of July 21st, took the most unusual step of formally rebuking Churchill for “ purporting to speak on behalf of the Government in a way that was “ quite
indefensible and altogether inconsistent with Cabinet responsibility and Ministerial cohesion.”

The reason for this sharp reaction was that Churchill’s statement ran directly counter to Asquith’s tactic, which he continued into the autumn, of treating a peers’ rejection as quite unthinkable. “ Amendment by the House of Lords,” he said at Birmingham, “ is out of the question. Rejection by the House of Lords is equally out of the question.. . . That way revolution lies.” This did not mean that he was burying his head in the sand. He knew perfectly well that rejection was already more likely than not. Nevertheless, he thought that the best way to bring the constitutional enormity home to the country was for the Government publicly to stress its impossibility. Privately, ministers were more realistic. On September 8 th the Cabinet held a preliminary discussion about the consequences of rejection, and the Lord Chancellor and the Law Officers were instructed to go into the legal aspects. The Prime Minister reported to the King that in the opinion of the majority of the Cabinet “ such action on the part of the House of Lords ought to be followed by an acceleration of the Register, so as to secure at the earliest possible moment an appeal to the country. Churchill’s reaction had been no more than premature.
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On October 5th there was a further Cabinet discussion on the subject, but on this occasion the approach was cautious. “ It was agreed that until the course of events shapes itself more clearly it would be premature to decide upon any definite course of action,” was Asquith’s report.
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This may have been because he was to see the Kang at Balmoral on the following day, and was reluctant to limit his room for manoeuvre. At this audience he found the King, as he wrote to Crewe, “ in the most amiable and forthcoming mood.” His Majesty wanted to see the Unionist leaders and put pressure on them not to reject—a course to which Asquith gladly agreed. The King also wanted to know what he could offer them in return and suggested a January general election. Asquith disliked the idea and searched around for arguments against it. It would not, he thought, be of much attraction to Balfour and Lansdowne. They would have to fight at rather a flat moment. Furthermore, an election in the depths of winter was always inconvenient for both parties. There was the added consideration that the most likely result would be a close one, with the Irish holding the balance—“ a very undesirable state of things.” These were all arguments designed to appeal to the King, and it may well have been with
the same thought in his mind that Asquith refrained from using the real one—that to allow the Lords to force a dissolution would be to grant them more than half their case. In any event, he succeeded in turning the King’s thoughts away from the idea.

The meeting with Balfour and Lansdowne took place on October 12th. It served little purpose. The King had no influence on them, and they were less than frank with him. They told him no decision had been taken, which was formally correct, but in fact both the leaders had already decided in favour of rejection. On November 3rd the Cabinet held its first discussion based on the definite assumption that a rejection would take place. The preparation of a short Finance (No. 2) Bill dealing with the relatively non-controversial taxes was ordered. This was to be rushed through so as to legalise the collections which had already taken place and to reduce the financial dislocation. This bill was ready by November 5th. But it was never proceeded with. The policy upon which it was based was destroyed in a powerful memorandum which Sir Courtney Ilbert, clerk to the House of Commons, submitted to the Prime Minister on November 16th. To introduce a second bill, with some taxes cut out, would be to concede to the House of Lords the right to determine what financial legislation the House of Commons could and could not pass. It would also, Ilbert shrewdly added, going perhaps a little outside his clericly functions, give Mr. Balfour great dialectical opportunities. It would be much better to continue to collect taxes on the strength of the Commons’ resolutions and to hope for subsequent legalisation.
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There are occasions,” he concluded,
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when respect for the constitution must override respect for the law. This may be one of them.”
ⁱ

Asquith responded immediately to the force of this argument. At the Cabinet of November 17th the previous policy was reversed. When the Lords’ rejection took place there was to be no bill but an immediate dissolution of Parliament. But the policy on collection was to be more cautious than Ilbert recommended. Payment of the disputed taxes (including the whole of the income tax, which requires annual re-enactment) was to be purely voluntary until the new Parliament passed the Finance Bill, although the liability was then to be retrospective. The gap was to be filled by borrowing.

At the next meeting of the Cabinet a week later the details of the dissolution were fixed. As an immediate response to the action of the Lords the House of Commons was to be asked to carry the following
resolution: “ That the action of the House of Lords in refusing to pass into law the financial provision made by the House for the service of the year is a breach of the constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons.” This done, there was to be an adjournment on the next day. Prorogation was to be on January 8th, and polling was to begin on January 15th and be over by the end of the month. This programme was meticulously followed.

A dissolution was of course inevitable once the Lords had performed the act of rejection. There was no dispute in the Cabinet about this. The legislature had refused Supply, and in these circumstances no government could carry on. This fact gave the full measure of what the Lords had done. They had not merely confronted the Government with the choice between an immediate election and acceptance of the loss of a particular measure, as they had frequently done before. They had left ministers 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 a creature of the hereditary assembly as of the elective assembly.

Yet what was the dissolution to achieve? No doubt it would force the Lords, provided the new House of Commons produced a majority in its favour, to accept the disputed Finance Bill. This in itself would hardly be a great victory. Even in their most arrogant moments the peers had never claimed a right beyond that of forcing a general election on a measure which they disliked. But would it enable a new and satisfactory balance between the two Houses to be struck? Would it open the way towards the legislative implementation of the Campbell-Bannerman resolution of 1907? Many enthusiastic Liberals assumed without question that it would. But their assumption was too optimistic. On November 28th Knollys, who was himself a Liberal even if not an enthusiastic one, had written to Asquith saying that “ ... to create 570 new Peers, which I am told is the number required, (to coerce the House of Lords) would practically be almost an impossibility, and if asked for would place the King in an awkward position.”
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And on December 15th, after the campaign had begun, he sent for Asquith’s secretary, Vaughan Nash, and was still more explicit. “ He began by saying,” Nash recorded, “ that the King had come to the conclusion that he would not be justified in creating new
Peers (say 300
¹
) until after a second general election and that he, Lord K., thought you should know of this now, though, for the present he would suggest that what he was telling me should be for your ear only. The King regards the policy of the Government as tantamount to the destruction of the House of Lords and he thinks that before a large creation of Peers is embarked upon or threatened the country should be acquainted with the particular project for accomplishing such destruction as well as with the general line of action as to which the country will be consulted at the forthcoming Elections.”
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¹
_{The number seemed to be rather volatile at this stage.}

Asquith had therefore to fight the campaign burdened by the knowledge that it could only be the beginning and not the end of the struggle, yet unable to share this knowledge at all widely. The burden was made greater by the fact that, in his opening speech at the Albert Hall, five days before Nash’s interview with Knollys, although after Knollys’s letter, he had made a statement which was generally assumed to mean that he had a far more satisfactory understanding with the King. “ We shall not assume office and we shall not hold office,” he said, “ unless we can secure the safeguards which experience shows us to be necessary for the legislative utility and honour of the party of progress
.. . .”
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In the circumstances it was not surprising that he sometimes showed a lack of zest during this campaign. It was not always so. His opening speech, before an enthusiastic Albert Hall audience of 10,000 was a great success.
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And at Liverpool just before Christmas he indulged in some brilliant sustained raillery at the expense of Curzon, who had been particularly orotund at Oldham a few days before. But towards the end he flagged somewhat. Churchill, writing a year later to congratulate him on his handling of the second 1910 election, ventured then to speak of his being “ far more effectively master of the situation and argument than at the January election.”

²
_{Its most notable passage was that in which he expressly freed the new Parliament from the “ self-denying ordinance ” not to raise Home Rule which the Liberals had imposed upon themselves in 1906.}

As soon as the January campaign was over Asquith retired to Cannes, forgetting in his hurry to get away (what were his secretaries doing?) that he had an engagement to dine and sleep at Windsor. This solecism led both to the King’s displeasure and to some publicity, and
could only be smoothed away by Asquith allowing the King to accept the excuse that he was “ completely knocked up by the election.” This statement was an exaggeration, but the very fact that it had to be made may have edged the truth a little nearer to it. For several weeks after his return to London on February 9th he exhibited less sureness of touch than at any other stage in the long constitutional struggle.

¹
_{Independent in the sense that they had broken with Redmond over what they regarded as his excessive subservience to the Liberal leadership. Their whole
raison d'etre
was therefore to be totally unreliable as supporters of the Government.}

The election result was not so bad as to be a debilitating shock to the Prime Minister. The Liberal losses were heavy—somewhat more so than the party organisers expected—and the great independent majority of 1906 had melted away. The Unionists gained 116 seats and became the majority party in England. Scotland and Wales redressed the balance. The shape of the new Parliament was:

This gave the Government a normal majority of 112, which as Asquith himself pointed out “ compared favourably with the majorities which such statesmen as Lords John Russell and Palmerston considered adequate.” It was in fact the largest left-wing majority, with the solitary exception of 1906, since 1832. But it was not of course an independent majority. If the Irish chose to oppose the Government they could put them out. This was exactly the situation which Asquith had foreseen in his conversation with the King on October 6th. It may have been an unwelcome development, but it was not a surprising one to the Prime Minister.

How cohesive was the new majority? Redmond was held to have made a threatening speech at Dublin on February 10th, and the Labour Party, at its Newport conference two days earlier, had spoken in an independent tone. The difficulty with the Irish was that
they did not like one aspect of the Budget. They regarded the .£1,200,000 increase in the spirit duty as a blow at the Irish whiskey trade, and they were even more dependent upon liquor interests than were the Tories. But in the previous Parliament, while they had voted against the second reading of the Finance Bill, the shadow of the House of Lords had caused them to abstain on third reading. The two great issues of the day were the curbing of the veto and Home Rule. On both of these the Irish (and the Labour Party) were at one with the Liberals. This being so they had no basis of alliance with the Unionists and were most unlikely to wish to put the Government out. Provided it did not waver on these main issues and kept its nerve, the Cabinet could afford to be tough with its allies on matters of detail or precedence.