From this point of view the very weak MacDonald Government of 1924 (with only 191 seats in the House of Commons) and the fairly weak MacDonald Government of 1929 (289 seats) served his purposes well. The rigid but unradical ‘exclusivity’ of the Labour Party, which meant that they would rather take their economic policy from J. P. Morgan and Company than from the Liberal Yellow Book, neatly matched Baldwin’s 1920s view of how Britain should be governed.
There were therefore no great difficulties for him personally about MacDonald being summoned to Buckingham Palace in January 1924. What he had publicly anticipated nearly a year before had merely come to pass rather earlier than he expected or wanted. Nonetheless it must have been a considerable shock to many of those he represented—the conventional elements in a deeply class-conscious nation. The British Court and Government, while free of some of the rigidities which had recently been swept away from Vienna and St Petersburg, were
still organized as the regal fount of the greatest imperial power the world had seen. Whitehall, the armed forces and the Palace had of course been recently used to seeing Lloyd George, with his
parvenu
classlessness, in the supreme political position, but it was nonetheless a substantial further step to see a Prime Minister who was not even a Privy Councillor because he had never held any office, and who moreover had been a pacifist in the war, leading a Government largely made up of ‘working men’ (to use that now archaic but then appropriate phrase) into positions, if not of great collective power, at least of high individual prestige. Nor probably was it made easier by the fact that he also led them, in the intervals of their being told how to behave in Cabinet by Lord Haldane and at tea by Mrs Sidney Webb, to struggle into frock coats and even levée dress.
That Government achieved little radical reform, let alone socialism, except for some sensible foreign and housing policy changes, and lasted a bare ten months. But the fact that it had come relatively smoothly into office, passed off calmly, although leaving a legacy of some bitterness about the methods of its electoral defeat at the end, and, few doubted, had set a precedent which would be repeated, owed a great deal to Baldwin. At the beginning he was in favour of the experiment not only because it fitted in with his view of the future of party politics, but also because it was the course which involved least casting around for new combinations in a Parliament without a majority, and therefore least threatened his position as leader of the defeated party. During its course he confronted it with little factious (or fractious) opposition. And when it was over he uttered the minimum of taunts about its shortcomings.
Against the 1929 MacDonald Government Baldwin was if anything even more restrained. This was partly because he was then so occupied with the twin challenges to his own leadership, the one about India, the other about tariff reform, that he had practically no time to spare for the Government. This lack of partisanship was however endemic with Baldwin, and was just as much a third cause as a result of his leadership troubles.
Baldwin out of office was a fish out of water, but he did not resent such turns of the political wheel nearly as much as do most politicians. He liked the longer holidays, and he lacked both the messianic conviction and the self-pity which might have made him feel cheated. Partly in consequence, weak MacDonald Labour Governments were subjected to much less bitter opposition than was the strong Attlee Government of 1945. This assisted the somewhat sickly infancy of Labour in government and meant that by 1930 quite a respectable attempt at a new two-party balance had been created.
Then, in 1931 (see
pages 122
-30
infra
), Baldwin allowed himself to be a reluctant but nonetheless crucial party to an unnecessary upsetting of this delicate balance, to the creation of which he had devoted a substantial part of his efforts over the previous nine years. This came about through a mixture of indolence and too great a readiness to be persuaded against his own instinctive judgement by a contrary build-up of the forces of conventional wisdom. The result was the gross imbalance of British politics in the thirties, an uncomfortable four years of half-occluded power for himself, and a substantial offset to his previous well-earned reputation for influencing the broad lines of political development with wisdom and foresight.
The industrial thrust of labour he necessarily handled differently. He was a great exponent of emollience in industrial relations, both in his recollections of what life had been like when he worked in his family firm and as a principal weapon in his House of Commons armoury. But he had no desire, comparable with his approach to the 1920s Labour Party, to share power with Herbert Smith and A. J. Cook, the miners’ leaders of the General Strike period. Nor, of course, did the Labour Party, not merely of MacDonald but of Henderson and Clynes too, have any desire that he should do so. The General Strike was as great an embarrassment to them as it was a challenge to Baldwin. They were almost as relieved as he was when he got it over in nine days.
Did he handle it well? On the whole, the answer is ‘yes’, provided a sharp distinction is drawn between the General Strike itself and the coal dispute, which was both the cause and the relict of the Strike, dragging on for another six miserable months after the collapse of the general challenge. Baldwin postponed the Strike for a year by a combination of subsidy and the Samuel inquiry, used the interval to make some sensible defensive preparations, faltered somewhat during the final phase of the pre-Strike negotiations, but probably not in a way that made any difference to the main sweep of events, was firm but calming during the Strike itself, and avoided the language of humiliation when he had won.
He did however allow the Trades Disputes Bill to become law a year later. The provisions of this Act do not today appear extreme in the context of current trade union legislation discussion, but they were bitterly resented at the time and for twenty years subsequently (until repealed in 1946), and were considered by Lord Blake (writing in 1960) to stem from an undesirable ‘surrender to his own right wing’. This he attributes to ‘the state of exhausted apathy’ into which Baldwin typically fell after the main crisis was over. Whether or not this explains the Trades Disputes Act (similar legislation was nearly presented, without Baldwin’s opposition, during the Strike itself), it was certainly a fact and made Baldwin (unlike his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill) barren of resource during the long months while the coal dispute ground its way to a bitter and expensive end. The cost was a good 5 per cent of the national income, and dragons’ teeth were sown deep in what was then, by a large margin, Britain’s major industry.
Baldwin’s remaining years of power did however see a great reduction in strikes, but also a growing involvement of the unions in consultation on a much wider range of issues than wages and the length of the working day. The first point was epitomized by Ernest Bevin reacting furiously to the formation of the National Government in 1931, not with the remotest contemplation of industrial action, but by deciding to offer
himself as a Labour candidate (he chose Gateshead with little more concern than someone selecting a cigarette from a case, and was beaten by 13,000 in a seat which in 1929 had a Labour majority of 16,000). The second was exemplified by the Mond-Turner talks towards the end of Baldwin’s second premiership and by the increasing tendency of the TUC during his third premiership to talk directly and robustly to the Government on international affairs without worrying much about the sometimes more equivocal attitude of the Labour Party.
Overall, therefore, it would be wrong to regard the Baldwin fifteen years as having disadvantaged the unions. He had resisted the General Strike, but so would have any other likely alternative Prime Minister of the period. He had not deliberately caused it, in spite of some equivocation in his negotiating behaviour during the forty-eight hours before its start.
He could however be accused of having inadvertently created the circumstances out of which it was spawned. This he did by allowing Churchill to take sterling back to the gold standard in April 1925, and at the old pre-1914 parity. Britain faced the world of the twenties with overexpanded, rather out-of-date basic industries geared to export markets which were no longer there. Some difficult adjustment would have been necessary in any event. To revalue the currency by approximately 10 per cent was to guarantee that the operation took place not merely without an anaesthetic but with the nerves specially sensitized.
Churchill hesitated over the foolish decision. He then accepted the determined advice of the official Treasury and the Bank of England. Baldwin appears to have given no consideration to this crucial decision of the administration over which he presided. This was the down-side of his devolved and relaxed methods. He sought to govern by mood creation rather than by decision. This meant that others were liable to take decisions which contradicted the mood he sought to create.
After his electorally unfortunate lurch towards protection in
1923, Baldwin did not seek to impose economic policy. Although his pre-Prime Ministerial experience of office (exiguous by most standards) was exclusively in economic departments—four years as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, nineteen months as President of the Board of Trade, seven months as Chancellor of the Exchequer—his practice in 10 Downing Street was to reserve his energies for the wider politics of the office and to leave the economics to his Chancellor. He gave as great a freedom to Churchill, whose approach was broad-brush, as to Neville Chamberlain, who was informed and meticulous. In the National Government it was MacDonald who a little mistily sought wider international solutions, as with the London Economic Conference of 1933, and Chamberlain who dealt not at all mistily with the nuts and bolts. Baldwin was the man of party power behind the facade of MacDonald’s leadership and was Chamberlain’s political chief. But it is difficult to trace much direct Baldwin influence on economic policy beyond a predisposition towards ‘sound finance’, provided dogma was avoided and the knots of public expenditure meanness were not pulled too tight.
Baldwin’s reputation cannot be equally detached from the economic performance during his years of power. Until recently this was generally held to be a substantial count against him. A man who fought the general election of 1929, when unemployment was over 1 million, on a slogan as static as ‘Safety first’, and who then held power for over half of the 1930s years of distressed areas, basic industries without orders, and men without work, must surely have been guilty of a complacency verging upon discreditable negligence. The summing up of even such a right-wing commentator as Harold Wincott in the 1960 essays was that ‘if in economic terms the Baldwin Age was a bad age to live through it was a good age to learn from’ (and the lessons he thought had been learnt were the avoidance of deflation at home and of ill-ordered currency movements abroad).
More recent events enable a more favourable gloss to be
put on the performance of the Baldwin governments than in those bad old days when Macmillan was following Attlee, Churchill and Eden down the primrose path of full employment. In 1986 the Baldwin record looks a great deal better than it did in 1956 or 1966 or 1976. The 1.2 million unemployment figure which Baldwin handed over in 1929 had risen to 2.8 million by the end of the Labour Government in August 1931. Under the National Government it continued to rise, but more slowly, for another eighteen months, so that it almost touched 3 million in the first months of 1933. This peak represented a higher percentage (18.5 per cent) than the same figure would today, because of a smaller population and fewer women within it seeking to work. The geographical incidence of the unemployment was even more concentrated than today. Wales had an unemployment figure of 34 per cent, and Scotland of 26 per cent. Unemployment was also associated with a more abject level of absolute poverty than is the case today.
All that said, unemployment at these levels was a much more short-lived phenomenon in the 1930s than in the 1980s. Already by the time of Baldwin’s last general election in 1935 it was below 2 million. By the time of his retirement in 1937 it was down to 1.5 million. The prospects for an unemployed man in 1931, particularly of course if he had youth and mobility, were much better than in 1981.
To some substantial extent the improvement of the thirties stemmed from rearmament, and indeed it required not merely the threat of war but more than a year of war itself to eliminate unemployment entirely in 1940/1. But as the next and main count against Baldwin is his dilatoriness in repairing the nation’s defences, it would be ludicrous to dismiss his unemployment record on the ground that he had secured an improvement only by squandering money on rearmament. Nor would it be true. The house-building boom, which was substantially a response to low interest rates (2 per cent bank rate from June 1932 until August 1939), was at least as
significant as rearmament to the recovery and began several years earlier.
No exegesis could make the 1930s into a period of full employment and British economic renaissance. But the comparative performance was not quite so bad as was commonly assumed in the long years of post-war labour shortage. It is also the case that while the basic industries went through a very bad time in the first half of the decade, their capacity was not permanently destroyed. Work on the
Queen Mary
at Clydebank, to take a famous example, was suspended for two and a half years for lack of Cunard funds (until it was restarted with a Government subsidy), but the shipyard was not closed down or dismantled. The steel works, the coal mines, the heavy engineering plants, even the textile mills, all survived and were available to be called back into full use in their original or other capacities when first rearmament and then the war sent demand soaring.
The other indicators of the period presented a mixed picture. Real wages (obviously only for those in work) rose steadily and significantly. The first glint of middle-class standards began to touch the helmets of manual workers in the more prosperous industries and the more favoured parts of the country. There was a widening of the gaps between the unemployed and the employed and between the old industrial areas and the new Britain of arterial roads, semi-detached gabled houses and factories which looked like exhibition pavilions. Britain’s overseas accounts were more or less in balance, although heavily dependent on the revenue from the foreign investments of previous generations. Agriculture remained depressed, and we imported two thirds of our food. Inflation was not a problem, although the sharp price falls of 1929-31 (5 per cent a year) did not persist, and there was even some gentle (and beneficial) upward pressure from 1934.