Mr Balfour's Poodle(15)

The Licensing Bill, a somewhat delayed riposte to Balfour’s Act of 1904, received its second reading in the Commons at the end of April. Its object was a compulsory reduction in the number of public-houses, so that they should not in any area exceed a fixed ratio to the population.1 The money for compensation was to be raised by a levy on the liquor trade, but payments to the holders of extinguished licences were to cease at the end of fourteen years. The measure was denounced by the union  ists as confiscatory and vindictive.2 Arthur Balfour is recorded by his biographer as being ‘furious about it’, and as holding the belief that its effects were ‘against every interest of public decency and morality’.t The Bill was opposed most bitterly at every stage of its passage through the Commons and did not secure its third reading until November 20.

In view of the experience with other bills, there was naturally a widespread expectation that the Lords would not allow the measure to pass. Indeed, as Lord Newton has recorded without comment, the brewers had already threatened to withdraw their support from the union  ist Party if this did not happen.u The King, with the approval of the Prime Minister, had also attempted to exercise influence—but in the other direction, and less effectively. He had summoned Lansdowne to see him on October 12, and had told him of his fear that ‘if the attitude of the Peers was such as to suggest that they were obstructing an attempt to deal with the evils of intemperance, the House of Lords would suffer seriously in popularity’. He assured Lansdowne that the Government was likely to accept an extension of the time limit to twenty or twenty-one years, and urged him to secure for the bill a second reading and to amend it, if necessary, in committee.

Lansdowne told the King that he had not discussed the matter since the summer ‘either with the front bench peers or with Mr. Balfour and those who act with him in the House of Commons’, and added that it was impossible for him to decide what advice he would give to the union  ist peers until he had seen how ‘the Bill fared in the House of Commons’. He agreed however (it would have been a little shameless for him to have done otherwise) that ‘it was not desirable that the peers and the brewers should be represented (my italics) as in too close alliance’.v For the rest, he warned the King that he saw danger in accepting the principle of the bill, and spoke of the ‘bitter experience’ which the peers had undergone with the Old Age Pensions Bill.

This last measure, providing for non-contributory pensions at the age of seventy, which had been taken earlier in the session, had not been warmly received in the Upper House. One peer had talked of it as ‘so prodigal of expenditure as likely to undermine the whole fabric of the Empire’, and another had regarded it as ‘destructive of all thrift’. But the policy of amending it in committee rather than of rejecting it on second reading had been adopted. The resultant amendments, however, had been treated by the Commons as inadmissible, because the measure was a money bill. Under protest, the Lords had accepted this, but they adopted the incident as an excuse for a more intransigent attitude on licensing.

This intransigence was decided upon at a meeting of union  ist peers held in Lansdowne House on November 24. Here a small but distinguished body of peers was opposed to rejection. They numbered about ten, and included St. Aldwyn, Cromer,1 Milner,2 Balfour of Burleigh3 and Lytton.4 Their motives were varied, but Milner, for example, was in favour of moderation both because he believed the bill to possess intrinsic merits and because he thought its rejection by the Lords would stem the union  ist tide which he saw flowing very strongly in the country. But the majority were probably more afraid of checking the brewers than of stemming the tide, and thought that in any event a clash between the two Houses had become inevitable, and that there was little point in attempting to postpone it.

Their policy was adopted. After a three-day debate, the House of Lords declined, on November 27, to give the bill a second reading by a vote of 272 to 96. It was a big attendance of peers, and Lord Fitzmaurice,5 for the Government, remarked that the Upper House was at least giving the bill ‘a first-class funeral. A great number of noble Lords have arrived who have not often honoured us with their presence.’ Yet a third Education Bill had also perished at the hands of the Lords during the year.

In this way the third session of the 1906 Parliament came to an end. As in the two previous sessions, no measure, other than a money bill, had passed on to the statute book in anything like its original form unless, on third reading in the Commons, it had secured the acquiescence of Arthur Balfour. For three years the smallest Opposition within living memory had effectively decided what could, and what could not, be passed through Parliament. In the language of the day, the cup was full, and the sands were exhaustively ploughed.