Mr Balfour's Poodle(29)

VI The Verdict of the Nation


Any course other than immediate dissolution was out of the question. The legislature had refused Supply, and in these circumstances no government could carry on. It was this, most of all, which gave the full measure of what the Lords had done. They had not merely confronted the Government with the choice of an immediate election or of acceptance of the loss of a particular measure, as they had frequently done before. They had left the Government with no choice, and had taken upon themselves the right of deciding when a Government could carry on and when it could not, when a Parliament should end and when it should not. It was a claim which, if allowed, would have made the Government as much the creature of the hereditary assembly as of the elective assembly.

Asquith responded to the challenge on December 2, when he moved in the House of Commons ‘that the action of the House of Lords in refusing to pass into law the financial provision made by this House for the service of the year is a breach of the Constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons’. He commended his motion to the House in what his biographers describe as ‘a serious argument enlivened by brilliant raillery’,a which was very well received by his followers. In the course of his speech he announced an immediate dissolution—‘at the earliest possible moment we shall ask the constituencies of the country to declare that the organ and voice of the free people of this country is to be found in the elected representatives of the nation’. The resolution, supported by both the Irish and the Labour Party, and opposed by a sick Arthur Balfour,1 was carried by 349 votes to 134.

Prorogation took place on the next day, and the King’s Speech, after thanking the Commons for the ‘liberality and care with which (they) provided for the heavy additions to the national expenditure due to the requirements of imperial defence and social reform’, noted with regret ‘that their provision had proved unavailing’. The dates of the election were not known at once, but on December 23 it was announced that the writs would be issued on January 10, and that polling would be spread over the fortnight beginning January 15. Nevertheless the campaigns, which had begun sporadically as soon as the dissolution was announced, were formally opened on December 10, when Balfour issued his address to the electors of the City and Asquith spoke at the Albert Hall.

The Prime Minister’s audience, which numbered 10,000 and was described by The Times as ‘boiling over with enthusiasm, was by careful design exclusively male, for the suffragettes were very active at the time,2 and strict precautions were thought necessary. Its members were told that the three major issues on which the country had to pronounce were ‘the absolute control of the Commons over finance, the maintenance of Free Trade, and the effective limitation and curtailment of the legislative powers of the House of Lords’. In amplification of the last point he had said:

‘The people in future, when they elect a new House of Commons, must be able to feel, what they cannot feel now, that they are sending to Westminster men who will have the power not merely of proposing and debating, but of making laws. The will of the people, as deliberately expressed by their elected representatives, must, within the limits of the lifetime of a single Parliament, be made effective.’b

And on Home Rule he expressly freed the Liberal Party from the ‘self-denying ordinance’ which had made it eschew this subject in the 1906 Parliament.

Arthur Balfour’s election address deployed arguments which have since become familiar. The attack on the House of Lords, he said, was only the culmination of a long-drawn conspiracy to secure a single-chamber legislature. These ‘conspirators’ wished the Commons to be independent not only of the peers, but of the people. This plot was ingeniously contrived, but was proving unsuccessful. The people were not insulted by having their opinion asked on the Budget, and they did not think that the House of Lords had exceeded its duty in asking for a dissolution on this point.

The day before this address was issued the Chancellor of the Exchequer had begun his own campaign at Caernarvon. After arousing great enthusiasm by his announcement that he proposed to decline the offer made to him to contest Cardiff and to remain in his old constituency,1 he went on to employ, most effectively, a metaphor in his familiar pastoral style:

‘Yesterday I visited the old village where I was brought up,’ he said. ‘I wandered through the woods familiar to my boyhood. There I saw a child getting sticks for firewood, and I thought of the hours which I spent in the same pleasant and profitable occupation, for I also have been something of a backwoodsman; and here is one experience taught me then which is of use to me today. I learnt as a child it was little use going into the woods after a period of calm and fine weather, for I generally returned empty-handed.… But after a great storm I always came back with an armful.… We are in for rough weather, we may even be in for a winter of storms which will rock the forest, break many a withered branch, and leave many a rotten tree torn up by the roots. But when the weather clears you may depend upon it that there will be something brought within reach of the people that will give warmth and glow to their grey lives, something that will help to dispel the hunger, the despair, the oppression and the wrong which now chill so many of their hearths.’c