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

Added to these difficulties, Balfour faced a great groundswell of labor discontent from the fact that the wage-earning segment of the population experienced a decline in standards of living in the period 1898-1906 because of the inability of wages to keep up with the rise in prices. This inability arose very largely from the decision of the House of Lords, acting as a Supreme Court, in the Taff Vale case of 1902, that labor unions could be sued for damages arising from the actions of their members in strikes. Deprived in this fashion of their chief economic weapon, the workers fell back on their chief political weapon, the ballot, with the result that the Labour membership of the House of Commons increased from three to forty-three seats in the election of 1906.

This election of 1906 was a Liberal triumph, that party obtaining a plurality of 220 over the Conservatives and a majority of 84 over all other parties. But the triumph was relatively short-lived for the upper-class leaders of that party, like Asquith, Haldane, and Edward Grey. These leaders, who were closer to the Conservative leaders both socially and ideologically than they were to their own followers, for partisan reasons had to give free rein to the more radical members of their own party, like Lloyd George, and after 1910 were unable to govern at all without the support of the Labour Party members and the Irish Nationalists.

The new government started off at full tilt. The Trade Disputes Act of 1906 overturned the Taff Vale decision and restored the strike as a weapon to the armory of the workers. In the same year a Working-men’s Compensation Act was put on the books, and in 1909 came an Old Age Pension system. In the meantime the House of Lords, the stronghold of Conservatism, tried to halt the Liberal tide by its veto of an Education bill, of a Licensing bill which would have reduced the number of “public houses,” of a bill restricting plural voting, and, as the coup de grace, of Lloyd George’s budget of 1909. This budget was aimed directly at Conservative supporters by its taxation of unearned incomes, especially from landed property. Its rejection by the Lords was denounced by Asquith as a breach of the constitution, which, according to his belief, gave control over money bills to the Lower House.

From this dispute emerged a constitutional crisis which shook English society to its foundations. Even after two general elections, in January and in December 1910, had returned the Liberals to power, although with a reduced majority, the Lords refused to yield until Asquith threatened to create enough new peers to carry his Parliament bill. This bill, which became law in August 1911, provided that the Lords could not veto a money bill and could not prevent any other bill from becoming law if it was passed in three sessions of the Commons over a period of at least two years.

The elections of 1910 had so reduced Asquith’s plurality that he became dependent on Irish and Labourite support and, for the next four years, was of necessity compelled to grant to both concessions for which he personally had little taste. In 1909 the Lords, again as a Supreme Court, declared the use of union funds in political campaigns to be illegal, thus destroying the political weapon to which Labour had been driven by the Taff Vale decision of 1902. Asquith was not eager to overthrow this so-called “Osborne Judgment,” at least for a while, for as long as union political activities were illegal the Labourite members of the Commons had to support Asquith in order to avoid a general election they could no longer finance. In order to permit the existing Labour members to live without union funds, the Asquith government in 1911 established payment for members of Parliament for the first time. Labour was also rewarded for its support of the Asquith government by the creation of Health and Unemployment Insurance in 1911, by a Minimum Wage Law in 1912, and by a Trades-Union Act in 1913. This last item made it legal for labor organizations to finance political activities after approval by a majority of their members and from a special fund to be raised from those union members who did not ask to be exempt.

Assaulted by the supporters of women suffrage, dependent on the votes of Labour and the Irish Nationalists, and under steady pressure from Nonconformist Liberals, the Asquith government had an unpleasant period from 1912 to 1915. The unpleasantness culminated in violent controversies over Irish Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment. Both bills were finally jammed through without the acceptance of the Lords in September 1914, in both cases with provisions which suspended their application until the end of the war with Germany. Thus the weakness and divisions of the Asquith government and the alarming divisions in Britain itself were swallowed up in the greater problems of waging a modern war of unlimited resources.

The problem of waging this war was given eventually to coalition governments, at first (1915-1916) under Asquith and later (1916-1922) under the more vigorous direction of David Lloyd George. The latter coalition was returned to power in the “Khaki Election” of December 1918, on a program promising punishment of German “war criminals,” full payment by the defeated powers of the costs of the war, and “homes fit for heroes.” Although the Coalition government was made up of Conservatives, Liberals, and Labour, with an ex-Liberal as prime minister, the Conservatives had a majority of seats in Parliament and were in closest contact with Lloyd George so that the coalition government was, except in name, a Conservative government.

The political history of Britain in the years between 1918 and 1945 is a depressing one, chiefly because of Conservative errors in domestic economic policy and in foreign policy. In this period there were seven general elections (1918, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1929, 1931, 1935). In only one (1931) did a party receive a majority of the popular vote, but in four the Conservatives obtained a majority of seats in the House of Commons. On the basis of these elections Britain had ten governments in the period 1918-1945. Of these, three were Conservative-dominated coalitions (1918, 1931, 1940), two were Labour supported by Liberal votes (1924, 1929), and five were Conservatives (1922, 1923, 1924, 1935, 1937) thus

Lloyd George

December 1918-October 1922

Bonar Law

October 1922-May 1923

Stanley Baldwin

May 1923-January 1924

Ramsey MacDonald

January 1924-November 1924

Second Baldwin

November 1924-June 1929

Second MacDonald

June 1929-August 1931

National Government

(MacDonald)

August 1931-June 1935

Third Baldwin

June 1935-May 1937

Neville Chamberlain

May 1937-May 1940

Second National Government

(Churchill)

May 1940- July 1945

The Lloyd George coalition was almost a personal government, as Lloyd George had his own supporters and his own political funds and feuds. Although technically a Liberal, Lloyd George had split his own party, so that Asquith was in opposition along with the Labour party and about an equal number of Conservatives. Since the 80 Irish Nationalists and Irish Republicans did not take their seats, the 334 Conservatives in the coalition had a majority of the Commons, but allowed Lloyd George to take the responsibility for handling the postwar problems. They waited four years before throwing him out. During this time domestic affairs were in a turmoil, and foreign affairs were not much better. In the former, the effort to deflate prices in order to go back on the gold standard at the prewar parity was fatal to prosperity and domestic order. Unemployment and strikes increased, especially in the coal mines.

The Conservatives prevented any realistic attack on these problems, and passed the Emergency Powers Act of 1920, which, for the first time in English history, gave a peacetime government the right to proclaim a state of siege (as was done in 1920, 1921, and 1926). Unemployment was dealt with by establishment of a “dole,” that is, a payment of 20 shillings a week to those unable to find work. The wave of strikes was dealt with by minor concessions, by vague promises, by dilatory investigations, and by playing one group off against another. The revolt in Ireland was met by a program of strict repression at the hands of a new militarized police known as “Black and Tans.” The protectorate over Egypt was ended in 1922, and a reexamination of imperial relations was made necessary by the refusal of the Dominions to support the United Kingdom in the Near East crisis arising from Lloyd George’s opposition to Kemal Ataturk.