Mr Balfour's Poodle(11)

There would have been much to be said for an immediate dissolution. The result would certainly have shown a Liberal majority almost as great as a year previously, and the constitutional issue might well have been resolved before it was allowed to waste away so much of the Liberal strength. Mr. Spender tells us that ‘more than once during the subsequent months he (Campbell-Bannerman) was heard to express a doubt whether he had been right in not taking up the challenge and going to the country again in December 1906’.j

Had the Lords treated all the major measures of the session in the same way as the Education Bill, the Prime Minister’s decision might have been different. But their behaviour towards the Trades Disputes Bill, the loss of which would have caused more popular indignation than the loss of the Education Bill, was more circumspect, although the constitutional case for damage or delay would here have been much stronger.

When the Liberal Government came in there was common agreement amongst its members that a measure was to be introduced to undo the effect of certain recent decisions in the Courts and to restore the presumptive meanings of the Act of 1871. The law of conspiracy was to be relaxed, peaceful picketing was to be legalised, and trade union   funds were to be given special protection. So much was agreed; but there was sharp disagreement in the Cabinet as to the method by which the last objective was to be attained. The lawyers, who were very strong both in numbers and in ability, wished to proceed indirectly by restricting the law of agency, while some others wished to give a direct exemption. At this stage the lawyers won, and a bill along their lines was introduced.

This was coldly received by the powerful new Labour group, and one of its members, Walter Hudson, introduced a private member’s bill embracing the principle of direct exemption. The Prime Minister listened to the arguments deployed in favour of this bill, and proceeded, without consultation, to accept it on behalf of the Government. The protagonists of the original measure accepted the change with a bad grace, and so (if anything, with a somewhat better grace) did Arthur Balfour. The Opposition divided against neither the second nor the third reading of the bill.

This left Lord Lansdowne with little room for manoeuvre if he was to act in accordance with the principle laid down by Balfour in his memorandum of the previous April: ‘It is evident,’ Balfour had then written, ‘that you can never fight for a position which we have surrendered.’ Lansdowne agreed, and neither a motion of rejection nor an amendment to the bill was put forward in the Upper House, although several peers spoke strongly against its provisions. Lansdowne tried to justify his own position, which even his biographer, Lord Newton, clearly regarded as quite unjustifiable, in the following terms:

‘We are passing through a period when it is necessary for this House to move with very great caution,’ he said on December 4. ‘Conflicts, controversies, may be inevitable, but let us, at any rate so far as we are able, be sure that if we join issue we do so upon ground which is as favourable as possible to ourselves. In this case I believe the ground would be unfavourable to this House, and I believe the juncture is one when, even if we were to win for the moment, our victory would be fruitless in the end. I say then that, so far as I am concerned, I shall not vote against the Bill. I regard it as conferring excessive privileges upon the Trade union  s, as conferring dangerous privileges upon one class and on one class only—privileges in excess of what the most trusted exponents of their views have formerly asked for, privileges fraught with danger to the community and likely to embitter the industrial life of this country; but I hold also that it is useless for us, situated as we are, to oppose this measure.’k

There was no suggestion here that it was the duty of the Upper House to hold up the hasty and the ill-considered proposals, and to allow to pass the well-matured, nor even that it was to attempt to judge measures on their merits. The distinction to be made was to be one purely of expediency. If it suited the tactics of the Tory Party for the ‘calm judgment’ of the House of Lords to be exercised in favour of the worst measure in the world, through it would go, without any delay or hindrance at all. But even from the point of view of the purest expediency Lansdowne was laying down rules of discreet behaviour which it would have been difficult for him to pretend, in subsequent years, that he and his followers were observing.

The Plural Voting Bill, on the other hand, which had been opposed by the Tories in the House of Commons, was treated by the Lords with even less respect than the Education Bill. After a debate lasting little more than an hour and a half it was thrown out on second reading by 143 to 43. Both the mover of the reasoned amendment1 and Lansdowne himself rested their case less on the advantages of plural voting, which were difficult to put in a popular form, than on the more sophistical argument that there were a number of anomalies attached to our (or indeed any) system of representation, and that unless they could all be removed it was futile and unfair to try to remove one. Lansdowne was even seized with that sudden interest in votes cast, as opposed to seats won, which is sometimes a characteristic of Tory leaders in Opposition, and told the House of the plight of the under-represented union  ists of Wales. Against such dialectics the crude argument of the mandate was naturally powerless.