Mr Balfour's Poodle(10)

If in fact this was the position (which is very doubtful), it was for Arthur Balfour and not only for their lordships that God should have been thanked; for it was his views rather than those of the peers themselves which determined the future course of the bill’s progress. He advised them to let it through on second reading, which they did without a division. He drew up and presented a detailed memorandum setting forth a whole table of amendments, which they accepted, so that the bill returned to the Commons in a quite unrecognisable form. What had been intended as a measure of relief for the grievances of Nonconformists became a bill which would place the upholders of denominational teaching in the schools in a position still more favourable than that which they enjoyed under the 1902 Act. The behaviour of the House of Lords in regard to this bill, even more perhaps than on any other occasion, fully justified the taunt of Lloyd George from which this book’s title is taken.

When the bill came back to the Commons, early in December, two courses were open to the Government. They could either attempt to recover their original measure by the long and laborious process of stripping off layer after layer of destructive amendment; or they could take the unprecedented but effective and time-saving course of moving to disagree with the Lords’ amendments en bloc. The latter alternative was chosen, and despite Opposition protests at the new departure (to which the Government retorted with at least equal force that the extent of the Lords’ amendments was also without precedent), the motion was carried by the enormous majority of 416 to 107, the Irish voting with the Government.1

A week later the matter again came before the Lords, and Lansdowne moved, and carried by 132 to 52, a motion ‘that this House do insist on its amendments to which the Commons have disagreed’. There was a small revolt of the ‘moderates’ against the official union  ist attitude which led the Duke of Devonshire2 and Lord Ritchie of Dundee3 into the Government lobby, but it did not extend to men such as Lord St. Aldwyn4 and Lord James of Hereford,5 who were later to be included in this category. The Archbishop of Canterbury6 and seven other bishops voted with Lansdowne; with the exception of Dr. Percival of Hereford, who voted with the Government, the remainder abstained.

The deadlock was now complete, the more so because private negotiations had already taken place and failed. There had been several conversations between the Primate and the Prime Minister and a conference attended by Asquith, Crewe, Birrell, Balfour, Lansdowne, Cawdor7 and the Archbishop had been held on the day before the final vote in the Lords. Both sides had been willing to retreat a little from their public position, but even very substantial Liberal concessions failed to meet the minimum Tory demands. The King had used considerable personal influence to try to bring about a settlement, but it was compromise from both sides, rather than a recognition by the Lords of the relevance of the recent Liberal electoral victory, that he urged.

There was nothing further for the Government to do but to move to discharge the order and abandon the bill. This Campbell-Bannerman did in the House of Commons on the day following the vote in the Lords. The enormity of the action of the Upper House in rejecting the much-canvassed, first major measure of a Government elected by a huge majority, whereas four years previously it had let through without a whimper a far more revolutionary and less discussed bill on the same subject, introduced by an old and weak administration, was plain for all to see.

‘It is plainly intolerable, Sir,’ said the Prime Minister, ‘that a Second Chamber should, while one party in the State is in power, be its willing servant, and when that party has received an unmistakable and emphatic condemnation by the country, the House of Lords should then be able to neutralize, thwart, and distort the policy which the electors have approved.… But, Sir, the resources of the British Constitution are not wholly exhausted, the resources of the House of Commons are not exhausted, and I say with conviction that a way must be found, a way will be found, by which the will of the people expressed through their elected representatives in this House will be made to prevail.’g

One method by which a way might have been sought was by an immediate dissolution, with a proposal to curb the power of the Lords in the forefront of the Liberal programme. Campbell-Bannerman’s biographer tells us that ‘a few, a very few, voices’ were raised for this, but that ‘the great majority’ thought that the education issue was not big enough to afford favourable ground from which to force the issue.h Another consideration working against dissolution was the comparative poverty of many Government members. They did not want the expense of a second general election, unless it were quite unavoidable, within eleven months. The writeri of a contemporary statement of the Liberal case gives considerable importance to this point, and suggests that Balfour depended on it in calculating his risks.