Mr Balfour's Poodle(32)

Examples of ‘the smaller boroughs and cathedral cities’ which changed hands were to be found in Bath, Bedford, Cambridge, Chester, Colchester, Exeter, Gloucester, Kidderminster, Rochester, Salisbury and Warwick; and there were a number of others. The solidarity of ‘the great industrial centres’, on the other hand, was best illustrated in Lancashire and Yorkshire, where in the whole of the two counties, including the borough constituencies, the Government sustained a net loss of no more than six seats, one in a seaside resort and two in rural Yorkshire. But there were other features in the picture. There were the sharp Liberal reverses in the dockyard towns, with both the seats changing hands in Devonport and Portsmouth and the single seat at Chatham going the same way.2 There was London, where of a total of sixty-two seats the union  ists gained twelve, including not only the present-day ‘marginals’ like North Kensington and North Paddington, but also divisions which should have been much more solidly left-wing—Southwark West, Mile End, Bow and Bromley, Lambeth North and a number of others. These gains gave the union  ists a majority of six in London.

There were the West Midland industrial boroughs (apart from Birmingham), where the Liberal tide ebbed sharply, with losses in Walsall, Wednesbury, West Bromwich and two of the three Wolverhampton seats. Last, and most striking of all, were the Liberal reverses in the southern agricultural counties (east of the Devon border) and in the suburban fringes of the Home Counties. Two seats were lost in Berkshire, two in Dorset, four in Essex, two in Hampshire, two in Hertfordshire, three in Kent, three in Middlesex, three in Oxfordshire, three in Somerset, four in Suffolk, three in Surrey, two in Sussex, and four in Wiltshire. The turn-over in this belt amounted to a half of the total number of seats, and gave the union  ists a third of their total gains.

A feature of this election was the extent to which the gains were not all one way. The balance, of course, was enormously in favour of the union  ists, but their gross gains were offset by the Liberals winning twelve seats which the union  ists had won in 1906, and by the Labour Party winning one. This was quite different from the position in 1945, for example, when the sweeping Labour gains were not offset by a single Conservative gain from Labour; the contrast may be explained by the greater influence which was exerted by the local campaign and the personalities of the candidates in 1910. Without doubt it was widely held at the time that electors were more open to the influence of a powerful speech delivered in the constituency or of some other local factor than is now usually thought to be the case. The results attributed to Lloyd George’s polling-day intervention at Grimsby have already been noted; and Austen Chamberlain, writing to Balfour a few days after the contests and discussing the failure of the union  ists to make gains in Devonshire, said ‘… we were overwhelmed at the last moment by the weight of oratory on the Government side—three Cabinet Ministers and other lesser lights, against whom we could set none but local men. But for this we ought to have won three or four more seats down there’.l This may have been an exaggerated view even then, however.1

Another feature of the results was the almost complete unanimity with which the seats where the union  ists had made bye-election gains during the previous Parliament swung back to the Liberals. North-West Manchester, where Mr. Churchill had been defeated in 1908, Ashburton, Newcastle-on-Tyne (where the union  ist had broken through a huge Liberal majority) Pudsey, Bermondsey, and a number of others all returned to their 1906 allegiance by substantial majorities.

Bye-elections are always an uncertain guide; and those who have assumed that the behaviour of the Lords was almost wholly responsible for the contrast between the general election result which a projection of bye-election returns before the introduction of the Budget would have given and the result which was in fact obtained nine months later may well have applied too mechanistic an interpretation to events. The approach of a general election in itself rallies support to the Government, and this, combined with the fact that the Budget, both for its own merits real or supposed and as an alternative to tariff reform, was a vote winner, is enough to explain the recovery in the strength of the Government. It is therefore by no means certain that Lord Lansdowne and his followers lost the first general election of 1910 for their party. Their action in November did not make the Budget popular. It was already so—although the opposition of the dukes had had something to do with this. What the peers’ rejection did was to make the Budget an effective stepping-stone towards the destruction of the veto and the implementation of much legislation which had hitherto been blocked; and it therefore made the Liberal electoral victory not necessarily greater, but far more fertile, than it would otherwise have been. It was a more modest victory than that of 1906, but it was to be a less sterile one.