The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (88 page)

It was a tradition that only the House of Commons could alter money bills. If the Lords rejected the budget, it would be in breach of a constitutional convention. The People’s Budget would be the test, as Lloyd George put it, of ‘whether the country was to be governed by the King and the Peers or the King and the People’. But the House of Lords was so enraged by the budget, and by the idea of the state preparing to value every field in the country to estimate its unearned increment, that it completely lost its head. In 1909 the greatest landowners in the country still were, as they had been for centuries, the aristocracy and the landed gentry, whose relatives represented them in the House of Lords. Lloyd George’s tax seemed aimed at them, the 1 per cent of the population who owned 70 per cent of the country.

Lloyd George’s budget passed the Liberal House of Commons, but was thrown out by the House of Lords. The chancellor’s response was to cry, ‘We have got them at last!’ Asquith dissolved Parliament and called a general election for January 1910 on the ground that the rights of the Commons had been usurped. The election was bitterly fought. The peers made the great mistake of taking part in it. Their collective wisdom might have been encyclopaedic and their knowledge of local affairs second to none, yet the hustings revealed the lottery of heredity at its worst. Many of the lumbering backwoodsmen appeared eccentric and selfishly concerned with their own interests.

The election, the second of Edward VII’s reign, returned the Liberals to power, but the result was disappointing. The landslide had vanished. The Liberals had only three MPs more than the Unionists. To push their measures through, the Liberals were dependent on the votes of the Labour party and the Irish Nationalists. A new Home Rule Bill would be the payment demanded for the Irish Nationalists’ co-operation.

The Conservative Lords suddenly agreed to pass the budget. But Asquith and Lloyd George were not put off. Asquith introduced the Parliament Bill, which strictly limited the House of Lords’ powers: it should no longer be able to change or throw out a money bill; any bill which was passed by the House of Commons in three successive sessions, even if it was rejected by the Lords each time, should become law.

The Parliament Bill had only had its first reading in the Commons when the House adjourned for the Easter Break. But on 6 May 1910 the nation was abruptly distracted. Following a holiday in his favourite French resort of Biarritz, the genial Edward VII had died at Buckingham Palace after a series of heart attacks.

Last Years of Peace (1910-1914)

The new king, George V, was almost forty-five. As the second son of Edward VII he had pursued a career as a naval officer for fifteen years until 1892, when his elder brother, the sickly Duke of Clarence, died and he became heir to the throne. As a result of his years in the Senior Service, George V was sensible, businesslike and disciplined. He had a great sense of the empire, much of which he had visited on duty tours. To mark his becoming Emperor of India at the end of his coronation year, he gave a magnificent Durbar, or gathering, at Delhi. George’s wife was Princess Mary of Teck. The granddaughter of one of George IV’s brothers, the Duke of Cambridge, she had been born and brought up in England. They had six sons and daughters.

Hard-working and realistic, after his father’s funeral George V called a round-table Constitutional Conference with all the party leaders to seek a consensus on what should be done about the Parliament Bill. But, with no agreement reached and reluctant to see the crown interfere in politics, the Liberals decided on a second election. George V insisted that the bill should actually be voted on by the House of Lords before Asquith called a new election, in order for the Conservative peers to propose alternative suggestions. But the king also agreed, as William IV had done in the crisis over the 1832 Reform Bill, to create around 250 peers to swing the Parliament Bill through the second chamber if the Lords rejected it.

In December 1910 the Liberal government’s position was reaffirmed. The electoral result was practically unchanged: the Liberals and the Unionists had the same number of seats, 272 each, the Irish Nationalists had 84, an increase of two, while Labour’s share stood at 40. The new Parliament Bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons in May 1911 to great excitement and amid ungentlemanly scenes. The son of the Marquis of Salisbury, Lord Hugh Cecil, lost control of himself and heckled the prime minister so ferociously that he had to stop speaking. In the House of Lords a ‘Die-Hard’ group of peers started a last-ditch movement to get the peers to refuse the bill. But by July the message had got through. However furious the Lords might be about their ancient rights being trampled underfoot, the threat of being swamped ensured that by August 1911 enough had abstained for the bill to pass.

But there was yet more trouble for the government. An epidemic of strikes paralysed the country throughout the summer. Agitation and vituperation had surrounded the Parliament Bill. There was a feeling of alarm at the changing nature of things–not everyone in Britain was progressively minded, as the last elections had made clear. Then suddenly, at the end of June, a serious war scare began.

The German government had sent a gunboat, the
Panther
, to seize the port of Agadir in Morocco. Over the previous couple of years, German relations with Britain had improved under a new German chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, for he was intent on breaking up the over-cosy relationship between France, Britain and Russia. The kaiser himself had appeared to be in a more friendly mood, even visiting London in the early summer of 1911 for the unveiling of a memorial to his grandmother Queen Victoria. But, after the naval panic of 1909 and the generally threatening stance of the German government, the
Panther
could have meant anything. During the seventeen days when the German government refused to disclose its intentions, the world held its breath.

Rumours abounded that Germany was preparing for war and about to march through Belgium. Reports of the military camps in Germany, where the peacetime army approached a million men, and the increased number of German soldiers up against the Belgian frontier did nothing to dispel this. The strange elongated railway platforms, which could only have been built for troops, along the German frontier with Belgium had long been noticed by the British military. An Official Secrets Act was brought in for the first time to protect against the spying known to be going on in the dockyards and all over the country. The letters of anyone suspected of getting orders from Germany were opened.

The year 1911 saw the hottest summer for forty years. London sweltered in the heat as anxiety mounted about what Germany would do next. What did she want; did she want war? So anxious was even the pacifist Cabinet about Germany having control of a port from which her warships could raid British ships moving into the Mediterranean or across the Atlantic that it warned that Britain would go to war if the
Panther
was not removed. The Germans began to back down. They made it clear that they did not desire war with Britain or with anyone else. The
Panther
gunboat turned out to be their undiplomatic response to the French breaching the international agreement at Algeçiras that Morocco should be a free-trade area. Taking advantage of internal unrest there, the French were moving to annex the colony. Germany thought her commercial interests were being ignored by the French. The
Panther
was her way of asserting her right to interfere in Morocco if she chose.

In September, as negotiations went on with Germany, Britain was nevertheless believed to be so close to hostilities that soldiers were sent to guard the south-eastern railway lines. There was considerable anxiety about the strength of the French army, as its manpower was only three-quarters of the Germans. The once dim shape of conflict was becoming clearer. In November the Agadir crisis was over. The Germans had been given some more territory, 100,000 square miles in the Congo, so that the
Panther
could be withdrawn. But by 1912 the British military establishment had become immovably pessimistic about Germany’s future intentions. Haldane, who had pushed Britain into a state of greater military preparedness with a General Staff and the British Expeditionary Force, had in 1911 insisted on a War Book being drawn up. This was a plan for each government department setting out the procedures they should follow in the event of war. Another attempt at ending the naval race between Britain and Germany by a reduction in ships had foundered. The proposed German limitations were not large enough, and they were dependent on Britain ending her Entente with France and Russia and making an alliance with Germany only. To that Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, could not agree.

After Grey had turned down the German offer, the German naval estimates for 1912 were larger than ever. Britain’s reaction was to remove, very ostentatiously, the whole of her magnificent battle fleet from Toulon and away from the Mediterranean. Henceforth the two navies of the Anglo-French Entente were to divide the guarding of their respective waters between them. The French were to be responsible for the Mediterranean, while the British were to protect the Channel and North Sea.

The military links between the French and English governments became soldered together. Unknown to most of the Cabinet except for the foreign secretary and the prime minister Asquith, in 1912 France and England began to share military secrets and to second staff to one another’s armies.

Morally speaking there was now an alliance in all but name: an attack by Germany on France’s Channel ports or her northern and western coasts must, in the French view, bring Britain into the war. But the British government nevertheless refused to make it official. British public opinion would not allow the country to fight for France if France attacked Germany first. Three-quarters of the Liberal Cabinet were pacifists who would not countenance an alliance with France, and the government continued to wish not to alarm Germany with an alliance she would perceive as aimed at her. If it did come to war, the two Entente governments would meet to hammer out what would be their next move, whether in fact they would act together. With this curious position the French had to be content. But the actions of the Liberal government spoke louder than words. Early in 1912, spurred by the Agadir crisis, Asquith set up the Invasion Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence, which met off and on until 1914. Discussions on how to get troops to France began to absorb government attention.

The Agadir episode had been seen by other countries as a sign that force was rewarded, that aggression paid. During September 1911 when the Admiralty was quarrelling with the army about war procedure (the Admiralty wanted the army to stay offshore in boats while most of the battles were fought at sea), Italy successfully invaded Tripoli in north Africa. She had no difficulty in swiftly defeating its nominal overlord Turkey, which was racked by the chaos of a new regime. Italy’s success gave hope to all the unsatisfied Balkan countries for their own war against Turkey.

Against this background of international lawlessness the peaceful fabric of British life, which had successfully survived the upheavals of the industrial revolution, frayed to breaking point. The trade unions, the suffragettes, the Conservative and Ulster Unionists, all one way and another were dissatisfied by too many or too few government reforms. Despite the Parliament Bill, many of the more recent elements in politics–the working classes, the trade unionists and the militant suffragettes–were disappointed by the slow nature of the Parliamentary process. All broke with traditional or legal methods of expressing themselves; anarchy loomed.

During 1912–14 Britain was swept by a series of national strikes that almost brought the country to her knees. Labour had lost 25 per cent of their seats at the January 1910 election. From fifty-three MPs their numbers went down to forty. It confirmed the blue-collar workers’ disillusionment with Parliament as a way of addressing their concerns. The single-ballot system was weighted against a third party, which made it hard for Labour to get elected, and its supporters felt that they were not being represented in numbers proportionate to the Labour party membership. This bitterness was aggravated after 1909 when sixteen Labour MPs had to go without salaries after the Osborne case had dried up the party’s funds. The Liberal-supporting railwayman W. V. Osborne had successfully challenged his trade union’s compulsory levy to the Labour party, the Law Lords ruling that trade unions could no longer provide for Parliamentary representation by a compulsory levy. In 1911 the Liberals remedied this when they instituted the payment of MPs, a Chartist demand since the 1840s.

But the damage was done. The optimism which the historic number of Labour MPs in Parliament had created turned to anger when they appeared to make so little difference. Hardship remained widespread for many industrial workers. Wages had remained the same from the beginning of the century, even though prices and the cost of living had risen. People wanted instant solutions, which the threat of stoppages provided. Thanks to Labour pressure, laws relating to strike action had recently been relaxed. As a result the country was rocked by them. To the short-sighted they seemed an easier route to power than Parliament; some trade unionists came under the influence of the French Trade Union or Syndicalist movement which distrusted Parliamentary methods, preferring the strike as a method of operation. The Syndicalists looked to a Utopian future where trade unions would form the basic unit of society.

In 1910 the government reluctantly used troops against miners in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales who had attacked a pithead to get more pay. At first it sent only London policemen. The Liberals were disturbed by the thought of using soldiers in industrial disputes, believing that the owners were frequently as unreasonable as the men. But the use of troops deepened the unions’ sense of grievance. During the summer of 1911, in the midst of the Agadir crisis, another rash of strikes by the seamen’s, firemen’s and dockers’ unions brought the Port of London to a standstill until there were pay rises all round. It was followed by what was very nearly a national railway strike to protest against the deaths of two rioting dockers in Liverpool fired on by soldiers. The strike shut down most of the industrial midlands for four days. So tense was the situation, and so great was the fear of revolutionary action, that troops were brought into the centre of London. In the blistering heat their tents crowded the dried-up lawns of St James’s Park, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, which were more usually thronged with prams. But Lloyd George was skilful in his handling of the union. The new leader of the Parliamentary Labour party, Ramsay MacDonald, joined the negotiations and the railway strike ended with no recriminations and no job losses.

Permanent machinery was set up to sort out the railwaymen’s grievances. The generally sympathetic treatment the unions received helped ensure that, despite talks between the dockers, the miners and the railwaymen about a general strike, in Britain strikes never became a revolutionary instrument for social change. In 1912 after a new miners’ strike for a minimum wage, when the intransigence of the owners prevented attempts to fix it mutually at local level, the Liberals passed a minimum-wage bill. By 1913 there was still less room for discontent when the government rescinded the Osborne judgement. The 1913 Trade Union Act made it legal for trade union levies to be spent on politics as long as members were canvassed for their views. Any member of a different political persuasion could decline to contribute.

The strikes petered out, but London was now subjected to an arson campaign. This was conducted by a militant branch of the suffragette movement, the Women’s Social and Political Union, or WSPU, founded in 1903 when the Independent Labour party failed to include women’s suffrage in their programme. It was run by the charismatic Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Sylvia and Christabel; Christabel had been prevented from reading for the bar, despite her law degree, because she was of the female sex.

The 1907 Qualification of Women Act allowed women, married or single, to be councillors, aldermen or mayors and to sit on county and borough councils, but the Parliamentary vote continued to be denied them. Thousands of women marched for the vote, but nothing was done. Mrs Pankhurst, her daughters and other suffragettes were imprisoned several times for causing public disorder when they heckled Liberal election rallies. Two attempts at franchise reform failed, the first because the Liberal government would not introduce a bill to enfranchise single women with property, as that would mean increasing the vote of the traditionally Conservative spinster. In frustration the Pankhursts decided to abandon constitutional means.