It may therefore be assumed that Asquith, who had also to live with the facts of party politics in a way which Grey or the other side of Downing Street did not, was an influence, and no doubt the decisive influence, in favour of the more radical course. Nevertheless there could be no question of his giving Redmond the assurance which the latter was constantly demanding—that if the Irish voted for the Budget a veto bill would be passed into law within a year. On February 25 the Prime Minister reported to the King that ‘certain Ministers were of opinion that the wisest and most dignified course for Ministers was at once to tender their resignation to your Majesty’, and on the same day he instructed the new Chief Whip, the Master of Elibank,1 to tell Redmond that there could be no assurance and that he must act on his responsibility as the Government would act on theirs.2
Three days later the morale of Ministers seemed to have rallied somewhat, and Asquith, in moving to take the whole time of the House until Easter for Government business, was able to announce some of the intentions of his Cabinet. Until March 24 the time would be taken up with routine but essential business, mainly relating to Supply. Then, after the Easter week-end, the Government would press on with their detailed proposals on relations between the two Houses, which would be embodied in the first instance in a set of resolutions. These changes in the powers of the House of Lords would be based on the assumption that in a subsequent session a reform bill would be brought forward. No date for proceeding with the Budget was given.
Balfour, rather to the disgust of some of his followers, gave Asquith his motion without a division, and so the decision of the Irish to abstain was of no importance. Trouble then arose over the Government’s need to borrow money to replace the revenue temporarily lost by the failure of the 1909 Finance Bill to reach the statute book. No great sum was involved, for, whether legally or not, the collection of everything except income tax, super-tax and certain other new taxes to the total extent of £30 million was proceeding normally. The Chancellor of the Exchequer sought to fill this gap by the Treasury (Temporary Borrowing) Bill, and the second and third readings of this measure, as well as its passage through the House of Lords, provided the Opposition with opportunities somewhat brazenly to accuse the Government of creating ‘financial chaos’. The union ist leaders claimed that the correct course for Ministers was to split the Budget into parts and to proceed immediately with those sections, including an income-tax resolution, to which the Lords had no objection. To create further embarrassment they caused, in the Prime Minister’s words, ‘the stream of criticism (on Supply) mysteriously to run dry’, and thus gave the Government an unwanted abundance of parliamentary time. ‘Why was it not used to get on with the financial business?’ was continually asked.
Asquith and Lloyd George very wisely refused these enticements. To have split up the Finance Bill and allowed the peers to pick and choose would have been to go back on the position which Gladstone had established in 1861 after the rejection of his Paper Duty Bill. At the same time Ministers’ inability to announce a definite date for the reintroduction of the Budget gave an impression of weakness and confusion, and undoubtedly impaired the prestige of the Government. Disputes outside the Cabinet as to the terms on which the Irish could be persuaded to vote for the Budget, and within the Cabinet as to the relationship between reform and the veto, were still proceeding.
Asquith’s next important pronouncement was made before a public meeting in the Oxford Town Hall on March 18. He first declared, with almost unnecessary frankness, that ‘the Ministry had hesitated whether they ought to go on’. But, he continued, they had resolved not to run away from their tasks—the passing of the Budget and the abolition of the financial, and limitation of the legislative, veto of the Lords. The Liberal Party further held that the Lords ‘must be rebuilt on a democratic basis’. The resolutions were then put on the paper of the House of Commons on March 21. They were three in number and corresponded very closely with Camp-bell-Bannerman’s 1907 scheme. The Lords could neither amend nor reject a money bill, and the definition of a money bill was to rest with the Speaker, acting in accordance with certain specified rules. For other legislation the Lords were to retain a power of delay of two years and one month. A bill sent up from the Commons in three successive sessions was to become law without the assent of the peers if, on the third occasion, it had not been passed by the House of Lords without amendments, other than those agreed to by both Houses, within twenty-eight days of being received by the Upper House. The maximum duration of a Parliament was to be reduced from seven years to five. The only differences between these proposals and those of Campbell-Bannerman were that the provision for a conference between the two Houses had been abandoned, the restriction of the life of Parliaments was new, and so was the drafting of the second resolution in such a way that the three sessions could be spread over more than one Parliament; the last two years of a Liberal Parliament need not therefore be barren, provided the Government was successful at the subsequent general election.