Mr Balfour's Poodle (10 page)

These talks served little purpose. The Unionist leaders informed the King that no definite decision had been reached, which was formally correct, as no meeting of the Unionist peers had taken place;
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but they knew, and he knew, how utterly remote had become the chance of a moderate course being chosen.

The Liberals also knew how nearly the die was cast, and however fanciful may be the theory that Lloyd George had originally framed his Budget with the principal object of exciting the peers, there can be no doubt that he and Mr. Churchill and some others were now extremely anxious that rejection should take place. ‘It would give the Government a great tactical advantage,' Mr. Churchill informed the National Liberal Club on October 8.
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The famous speeches which the Chancellor of the Exchequer delivered at Newcastle-on-Tyne during the week-end of October 9-11 were therefore designed to inject the maximum amount of heat into the already torrid controversy, and to make it as difficult as possible for the Unionists to retreat from the dangerously exposed positions they had already taken up.

‘They are forcing revolution,' he said. ‘But the Lords
may decree a revolution which the people will direct. If they begin, issues will be raised that they little dream of, questions will be asked which are now whispered in humble voices, and answers will be demanded then with authority. The question will be asked “Should 500 men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from among the unemployed, override the judgment—the deliberate judgment—of millions of people who are engaged in the industry which makes the wealth of the country?” That is one question. Another will be, who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite; who made 10,000 people owners of the soil, and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth; who is it—who is responsible for the scheme of things whereby one man is engaged through life in grinding labour, to win a bare and precarious subsistence for himself, and when at the end of his days he claims at the hands of the community he served a poor pension of eightpence a day, he can only get it through a revolution; and another man who does not toil receives every hour of the day, every hour of the night, whilst he slumbers, more than his neighbour receives in a whole year of toil? Where did the table of that law come from? Whose finger inscribed it? These are the questions that will be asked. The answers are charged with peril for the order of things the Peers represent; but they are fraught with rare and refreshing fruit for the parched lips of the multitude who have been treading the dusty road along which the people have marched through the dark ages which are now emerging into the light.'
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It was a wonderful popular oratory, with enough weight of content—an explosively radical content too—for there to be
no question of dismissing it as mere froth. Some of the imagery might be a little lurid for fastidious tastes—Lord Knollys begged the Prime Minister ‘not to pretend to the King that he liked Mr. Lloyd George's speeches, for the King would not believe it, and it only irritated him'—but it was not intended for fastidious people. It was intended to rouse the mass support of the Liberal Party and to goad the peers into a rash truculence. Towards both these ends it was extremely conducive, although by October the former was more necessary than the latter.

The final decision was taken by the Unionist Party by November 10, a week after the Finance Bill had left the Commons, when Lansdowne gave notice that on second reading he would move ‘that this House is not justified in giving its assent to the Bill until it has been submitted to the judgment of the country'. The motion was most carefully drafted, by Balfour and others, so as to present the intervention of the House of Lords in the most popular light possible. To this end it was as well-conceived as any motion could be, but the awareness of danger which this reveals makes it only more surprising that such an experienced party as the Unionist Party, under such experienced leaders as Balfour and Lansdowne, should ever have decided upon a course so reckless as a peers' rejection of a Budget. Their action did not kill the Budget, it greatly improved the electoral prospects of the Liberal Government, and it made the destruction of the Lords' veto inevitable; and all these consequences could have been predicted by any intelligent observer, and were predicted by many people. Why did the Unionist leadership ever agree to such a course?

It was not through lack of good advice. On the purely constitutional and legal plane they were not perhaps very well
served, for, of the leading authorities, the Unionists, Anson and Dicey, by declaring that rejection would be perfectly proper (in sharp conflict with the Liberal, Pollock, who declared that it would be most improper), showed themselves to be no more objective than most men. But there were plenty of sage Unionist politicians to point out the foolishness of the course which was being taken. The old Duke of Devonshire, who would undoubtedly have exercised a strong influence on the side of caution, had died in 1908, and Lord Goschen,
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who would have been on the same side, had predeceased him by a year.
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Nevertheless there was still Lord James of Hereford, Lord St. Aldwyn, and Lord Balfour of Burleigh, all of them former members of Unionist Cabinets and all of them most unhappy at the thought of a peers' rejection.

‘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.'
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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.'
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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'.
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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….'
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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.'
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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,
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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 been 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.