Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Of the 415 M.P.’s on the Conservative side in 1938, 44 percent (or 181) were corporation .directors, and these held 775 directorships. As a result, almost every important corporation had a director who was a Conservative M.P. These M.P.’s did not hesitate to reward themselves, their companies, and their associates with political favors. In eight years (1931—1939) thirteen directors of the “Big Five banks” and two directors of the Bank of England were raised to the peerage by the Conservative government. Of ninety peers created in seven years (1931-1938), thirty-five were directors of insurance companies. In 1935 Walter Runciman, as president of the Board of Trade, introduced a bill to grant a subsidy of £2 million to tramp merchant vessels. He administered this fund, and in two years gave £ 92,567 to his father’s company (Moor Line, Ltd.) in in which he held 21,000 shares of stock himself. When his father died in 1937 he left a fortune of £ 2,388,453. There is relatively little objection to activities of this kind in England. Once having accepted the fact that politicians are the direct representatives of economic interests, there would be little point in objecting when politicians act in accordance with their economic interests. In 1926 Prime Minister Baldwin had a direct personal interest in the outcome of the coal strike and of the General Strike, since he held 194,526 ordinary shares and 37,591 preferred shares of Baldwin’s, Ltd., which owned great collieries.

The situation of 1938 was not much different from the situation of forty years earlier in 1898 except that, at the earlier date, the Conservative Party was subject to an even more centralized control, and the influence of industrial wealth was subordinated to the influence of landed wealth. In 1898 the Conservative Party was little more than a tool of the Cecil family. The prime minister and leader of the party was Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil (Lord Salisbury), who had been prime minister three times for a total of fourteen years when he retired in 1902. On retirement he handed over the leadership of the party as well as the prime minister’s chair to his nephew, protégé, and handpicked successor, Arthur James Balfour. In the ten years of the Salisbury-Balfour government between 1895 and 1905, the Cabinet was packed with relatives and close associates of the Cecil family. Salisbury himself was prime minister and foreign secretary (1895-1902); his nephew, Arthur Balfour, was first lord of the Treasury and leader in Commons (1895— 1902) before becoming prime minister (1902-1905); another nephew, Gerald Balfour (brother of Arthur), was chief secretary of Ireland (1895-1900) and president of the Board of Trade (1900-1905); Lord Salisbury’s son and heir, Viscount Cranborne, was undersecretary for foreign affairs (1900-1903) and lord privy seal (1903-1905); Salisbury’s son-in-law, Lord Selborne, was undersecretary for the colonies (1895-1900) and first lord of the Admiralty (1900-1905); Walter Long, a protégé of Salisbury, was president of the Board of Agriculture (1895-1900), president of the Local Government Board (1900-1905), and chief secretary for Ireland (1905-1906); George Curzon, another protégé of Salisbury, was undersecretary for foreign affairs (1895-1898) and viceroy of India (1899-1905); Alfred Lyttelton, Arthur Balfour’s most intimate friend and the man who would have been his brother-in-law except for his sister’s premature death in 1875 (an event which kept Balfour a bachelor for the rest of his life), was secretary of state for the colonies; Neville Lyttelton, brother of Alfred Lyttelton, was commander in chief in South Africa and chief of the General Staff (1902-1908). In addition, a dozen close relatives of Salisbury, including three sons and various nephews, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, and a score or more of protégés and agents were in Parliament or in various administrative positions, either then or later.

The Liberal Party was not so closely controlled as was the Conservative Party, but its chief leaders were on intimate relations of friendship and cooperation with the Cecil crowd. This was especially true of Lord Rosebery, who was prime minister in 1894-1895, and H. H. Asquith, who was prime minister in 1905-1915. Asquith married Margot Tennant, sister-in-law of Alfred Lyttelton, in 1894, and had Balfour as his chief witness at the ceremony. Lyttelton was the nephew of Gladstone as Balfour was the nephew of Salisbury. In later years Balfour was the closest friend of the Asquiths even when they were leaders of two opposing parties. Balfour frequently joked of the fact that he had dinner, with champagne, at Asquith’s house before going to the House of Commons to attack his host’s policies. On Thursday evenings when Asquith dined at his club, Balfour had dinner with Mrs. Asquith, and the prime minister would stop by to pick her up on his way home. It was on an evening of this kind that Balfour and Mrs. Asquith agreed to persuade Asquith to write his memoirs. Asquith had been almost as friendly with another powerful leader of the Conservative Party, Lord Milner. These two ate their meals together for four years at the scholarship table in Balliol in the 1870’s, and had supper together on Sunday evenings in the 1880’s. Mrs. Asquith had a romantic interlude with Milner in Egypt in 1892 when she was still Margot Tennant, and later claimed that she got him his appointment as chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue by writing to Balfour from Egypt to ask for this favor. In 1908, according to W. T. Stead, Mrs. Asquith had three portraits over her bed: those of Rosebery, Balfour, and Milner.

After the disruption of the Liberal Party and the beginnings of the rise of the Labour Party, many members of the Liberal Party went over to the Conservatives. Relationships between the two parties became somewhat less close, and the control of the Liberal Party became considerably less centralized.

The Labour Party arose because of the discovery by the masses of the people that their vote did not avail them much so long as the only choice of candidates was, as Bagehot put it, “Which of two rich people will you choose?” The issue came to a head because of a judicial decision. In the Taff Vale case (1901) the courts decided that labor unions were responsible for damages resulting from their economic actions. To overcome this decision, which would have crippled the unions by making them financially responsible for the damages arising from strikes, the working classes turned to political action by setting up their own candidates in their own party. The funds needed were provided by the labor unions, with the result that the Labour Party became, for all practical purposes, the Trade-Union Party.

The Labour Party is, in theory, somewhat more democratic than the Conservatives, since its annual party conference is the final authority on policies and candidates. But, since unions provide the bulk of the members and the party funds, the unions dominate the party. In 1936, when the party membership was 2,444,357, almost 2 million of these were indirect members through the 73 trade unions which belonged to the party. Between party conferences, administration of the party’s work was in the hands of the National Executive Committee, 17 of whose 25 members could be elected by the unions.

Because of its working-class basis, the Labour Party was generally short of funds. In the 1930’s it spent on the average £ 300,000 a year, compared to £ 600,000 a year for the Conservatives and £ 400,000 a year for the Liberals. In the election of 1931 the Labour Party spent £ 181,629 in campaigning, compared to the £ 472,476 spent by non-Labour candidates. In the election of 1935 the two figures were £ 196,819 and £ 526,274.

This shortage of money on the part of the Labour Party was made worse by the fact that the Labour Party, especially when out of office, had difficulty in getting its side of the story to the British people. In 1936 the Labour Party had support from one morning paper with a circulation of two million copies, while the Conservatives had the support of six morning papers with a circulation of over six million copies. Of three evening papers, two supported the Conservatives and one supported the Liberals. Of ten Sunday papers with an aggregate circulation of 13,130,000 copies, seven with a circulation of 6,330,000 supported the Conservatives, one with a circulation of 400,000 supported Labour, and the two largest, with a circulation of 6,300,000, were independent.