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Mr Balfour's Poodle(28)

By:Roy Jenkins


Lord James added similar counsel; Lord Rcay remarked ominously that ‘oligarchies are seldom destroyed and more frequently commit suicide’; Lord Rosebery denounced the Bill, but announced, to the great disappointment of the union  ists, that ‘he was not willing to link the fortunes of the Second Chamber with opposition to the Budget’, and said that he would not vote; and Lord Morley combined an accusation that the Lords were in effect repealing the Septennial Act with a curious homily about socialism and the ‘fertilising residue of good’ which he believed that ‘socialistic movements and experiments would leave’.

Lorcburn, the Lord Chancellor, read out a Government declaration saying, ‘It is impossible that any Liberal Government should ever again bear the heavy burden of office, unless it is secured against a repetition of treatment such as our measures have had to undergo for the last four years.’ And Crewe, who wound up the debate, announced that ‘… we must… set ourselves to obtain guarantees, … fenced about and guarded by the force of statute, guarantees which will prevent that indiscriminate destruction of our legislation of which your work tonight is the climax and crown’. He also assured their lordships that ‘they were not the victims of a Ministerial plot; the great majority of the Ministers, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had hoped to the last that the Bill would pass’.

These late warnings, not surprisingly perhaps, were unheeded. When the question ‘that the Bill be now read a Second Time’ was put, the contents were seventy-five and the not-contents were 350; so the not-contents had it. There were few surprises in the division lists. A fine collection of Lloyd George’s ‘backwoodsmen’ turned up. Balfour of Burleigh was almost the only dissenting union  ist who voted for the bill. The great majority of bishops, including the Primate, abstained, although the Archbishop of York1 and three others voted for the Government. The Bishop of Lincoln voted with the Opposition.

What reactions did this decisive rejection produce? The Liberal leaders were certainly not greatly distressed. A Punch cartoon—and Punch was then rather pro-Government— which showed the news being discussed at a hilariously happy Cabinet, was probably somewhat wide of the mark, although more in form than in substance perhaps. What was the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s personal position? There are two pieces of directly contradictory evidence to be reconciled. There is Lord Crewe’s statement, which is of importance both because he was a man most unlikely to say something which he knew to be untrue for the sake of oratorical effect, and because of its precision. He did not say that all Ministers wished to see the bill pass; he said ‘the great majority1… including the Chancellor of the Exchequer’. It is difficult to see why, if he was not bound by the truth, he should have chosen this intriguingly qualified degree of misrepresentation.

On the other hand, we have a biographer of Lloyd George, Mr. J. Hugh Edwards, who was clearly very much persona grata with his subject, and whose book, published in 1930, tells how, at the dinner which the Chancellor gave to celebrate the passing of the Finance Bill through the House of Commons, only one toast was drunk, that of ‘May the Lords reject the Budget!’m This story, for which no corroboration can be found, is a little implausible when it is remembered that the Prime Minister and Haldane, as well as Lloyd George and his henchmen, were present at the dinner. Nevertheless, its spirit is more in keeping with Lloyd George’s behaviour at this time than is Crewe’s statement. It is not necessary to accept the theory that the Budget was designed from the first as a trap for the peers in order to believe that when rejection occurred the Chancellor of the Exchequer was very well satisfied.

‘If the Budget has been buried,’ Lloyd George declared, ‘it is in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection.’ ‘Liberty,’ he went on, ‘owes as much to the fool-hardiness of its foes as it does to the sapience and wisdom of its friends. … At last the cause between the peers and the people has been set down for trial in the grand assize of the people, and the verdict will come soon.’1

The Liberal leaders were pleased, but the public showed no signs of excitement. A demonstration in Parliament Square, called by the Political Committee of the National Liberal Club for the evening on which it was thought that the vote would take place in the House of Lords, was a complete failure,2 and throughout the country the spontaneous protests of 1831 and 1884 were entirely absent.

Conservative spokesmen, naturally enough, gave loyal support to the action of Lansdowne and his followers. ‘Is he wrong?’ Arthur Balfour asked a Manchester audience. ‘He is abundantly right, and there never was an occasion when this power, rested by the Constitution in the Second Chamber, was more abundantly justified.’n But there were many people, far from the ranks of the Liberal Party, who disagreed sharply with Mr. Balfour. Lord Knollys,3 the King’s private secretary, told the Clerk to the Privy Council ‘very gravely and emphatically that he thought the Lords mad’.o Balfour of Burleigh and not Lansdowne had been right: ‘the Lords had not merely treated the Liberal Government outrageously, they had also succeeded in offending the deeper conservative instincts of the country’; and Lord Reay had been right too: an oligarchy was performing the act of suicide.