Mr Balfour's Poodle (11 page)

Of the other speeches for the amendment, those of Halsbury and Curzon
²
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 York
¹
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 majority
¹
… 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.

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 raillery',
^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:

‘The people in future, when they elect a new House of Commons, must be able to feel, what they cannot feel now, that they are sending to Westminster men who will have the power not merely of proposing and debating, but of making laws. The will of the people, as deliberately expressed by their elected representatives, must, within the limits of the lifetime of a single Parliament, be made effective.'
^b

And on Home Rule he expressly freed the Liberal Party from the ‘self-denying ordinance' which had made it eschew this subject in the 1906 Parliament.

Arthur Balfour's election address deployed arguments which have since become familiar. The attack on the House of Lords, he said, was only the culmination of a long-drawn conspiracy to secure a single-chamber legislature. These ‘conspirators' wished the Commons to be independent not only of the peers, but of the people. This plot was ingeniously contrived, but was proving unsuccessful. The people were not insulted by having their opinion asked on the Budget, and they did not think that the House of Lords had exceeded its duty in asking for a dissolution on this point.

The day before this address was issued the Chancellor of the Exchequer had begun his own campaign at Caernarvon. After arousing great enthusiasm by his announcement that he proposed to decline the offer made to him to contest Cardiff
and to remain in his old constituency,
¹
he went on to employ, most effectively, a metaphor in his familiar pastoral style:

‘Yesterday I visited the old village where I was brought up,' he said. ‘I wandered through the woods familiar to my boyhood. There I saw a child getting sticks for firewood, and I thought of the hours which I spent in the same pleasant and profitable occupation, for I also have been something of a backwoodsman; and here is one experience taught me then which is of use to me today. I learnt as a child it was little use going into the woods after a period of calm and fine weather, for I generally returned empty-handed.… But after a great storm I always came back with an armful.… We are in for rough weather, we may even be in for a winter of storms which will rock the forest, break many a withered branch, and leave many a rotten tree torn up by the roots. But when the weather clears you may depend upon it that there will be something brought within reach of the people that will give warmth and glow to their grey lives, something that will help to dispel the hunger, the despair, the oppression and the wrong which now chill so many of their hearths.'
^c

Throughout the campaign Lloyd George remained in strong oratorical form. He joined eagerly in a ‘war scare' with Germany
²
argument which Balfour introduced, and told a
Peckham audience on January 7 that ‘the believers in inevitable war are the men who make them. The Unionists, after having destroyed the Constitution, are prepared to destroy the fiscal system and to risk war with a European power, and all just to avoid valuation of their land.'
^d
And he kept up his rhetorical pressure to the last moment, even to the extent of addressing a large meeting at Grimsby on the day of the poll, an intervention which was commonly thought to have had much to do with the Liberal gain which was achieved there. His visit incensed the local Unionists to the extent of making him repeat, in a less dramatic and ingenious form, his Birmingham escape of ten years earlier.
¹

The election campaign generally was in no way outstandingly exciting—even the suffragettes called off their attempts to break up meetings after Christmas—although public interest remained high throughout. Inevitably, the attention of the voters strayed from the rather involved constitutional point at issue, and the Budget versus tariff reform was probably the main question upon which electors in Great Britain made up their minds. In other words, the Unionists got what they wanted: an election on the merits of the Budget rather than on the propriety of the peers' behaviour. In Ireland, of course, the position was entirely different. The Budget itself would have won very few votes, but it had come to possess the contingent merit of opening up a way by which the veto might be destroyed; and to this end, which they knew to be a necessary step towards Home Rule, the bulk of the Nationalists
were prepared to swallow the Budget and give close support to the Liberal Party. A minority of the Nationalists, however, rejected such a policy of compromise, and nine members, who had accepted Redmond's leadership in the last Parliament, fought and were elected under the label of ‘Independent Nationalists'.