Home>>read Mr Balfour's Poodle free online

Mr Balfour's Poodle(18)

By:Roy Jenkins


Asquith himself has since expressed a certain lukewarmness towards some of the more controversial of the Budget proposals.

‘Being supposed myself to be a financier of a respectable and more or less conservative type,’ he wrote in 1926, ‘I was, in the course of the debates, frequently challenged by Mr. Balfour and others to defend the new imposts, and especially the Undeveloped Land and the Increment Duties. I have undertaken in my time many more intractable dialectical tasks, and though I was fully alive to the mechanical difficulties involved, and perhaps not so sanguine as some of my colleagues as to the progressive productiveness of the taxes, I had never any doubt as to their equity in principle.’e

But by the time these words were written a Government presided over by Lloyd George himself had long since repealed the taxes in question. It may therefore be thought that they constitute no irrefutable proof of the half-heartedness of the head of the Government, as against the full-blooded enthusiasm of his Chancellor, in 1909. And the Prime Minister was probably much more prepared for financial adventure (for which, over a period of three months, he had sedulously been preparing Parliament and the country) in the heat of the day than he was anxious to admit in the cool aftermath of the ’twenties.

Grey, once described by Arthur Balfour as ‘a curious combination of the old-fashioned Whig and the Socialist’, indicated by his subsequent statements that he might have reacted somewhat equivocally to the Budget proposals. If his ‘socialism’ impelled him to welcome them, and his ‘whiggery’ to abhor them, he resolved the conflict by saying that he approved of the proposals themselves but disliked the way in which they were advocated. When a correspondent wrote to him abusing the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he replied sternly: ‘I cannot agree with what you say. Mr. Lloyd George is a colleague with whom I have always been on the best of terms personally, and the Budget raises the money required in a way which presses much less, I believe, upon the poorer classes than any alternative that could be devised.’f And in June he went out of his way, at a dinner given in his honour by the National Liberal Club, to reply to statements made by his old Chief, Rosebery, and to defend the Budget. It ‘was good’, he said, ‘by whatever general principle it was tried; it took taxes from superfluities, and taxed people in proportion to their ability to pay’.g But in private conversation he expressed the view that the Chancellor’s speeches were unfair, and later in the year he wrote to Mrs. Asquith: ‘I am no optimist: X— (whose identity is not difficult to guess) has made too much running, I fear, to carry the electors with us: in this country they move slowly and distrust rhetoric.’h All this was no doubt compatible with a somewhat uneasy acquiescence in Cabinet, although not, it may be thought, with any definite opposition.

Haldane, the third member of the Liberal League triumvirate, was not very well disposed towards Lloyd George at this (or any other) time. A remark of his on Budget Day is quoted by Austen Chamberlain’s biographer: ‘“It seems to me,” remarked Austen’s friend, Leverton Harris,1 speaking of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to Mr. Haldane in the smoke-room of the House of Commons that night, “that he read that speech like a man who does not understand what he is reading.” “Of course he doesn’t,” replied the other. “Why, we have been trying for weeks to make him understand clauses of the Bill, and he can’t.”’i

This malicious story,2 while it certainly shows that Haldane had no desire to enhance the Chancellor’s reputation, is quite incompatible with the theory that the Budget proposals, believed in only by Lloyd George himself, were forced down the throats of a reluctant Cabinet.3

The ultimate test, however, of whether or not Lloyd George had to face and overcome the united opposition of the rest of the Cabinet lies less in any attempt to reconstruct from their subsequent statements and writings the attitude of various Ministers at the time than in the hard facts of the support which they gave to the Chancellor throughout the long struggle to put the Budget through. If the other members of the Government were as hostile to the Budget as some would have us believe, their loyalty in the ensuing months, both to Lloyd George himself and to the measures which they disliked, was one of the most remarkable things in the history of British politics. Asquith himself, in the Chancellor’s own words, ‘was firm as a rock’. For the rest, there were no deliberate indiscretions, no attempts by Ministers to let it be widely known that they stood a little above the conflict, and no resignations. In the House of Commons too, while there was a little cross-voting on individual points, the Liberal back-benchers supported the Government in the key divisions with great solidarity. Mrs. Asquith recorded after the third reading that ‘the remarkable thing about the passing of this Budget was the unanimity with which people of different views backed it. Even the men who act according to their humour … voted for the Bill.’j The shedding of its right wing had for so long been a habit with the Liberal Party that it would indeed be remarkable, even without the suggestion of a reluctant Cabinet, that so controversial a measure as Lloyd George’s first Budget should have produced not a single defection of note.