Mr Balfour's Poodle(36)

At this stage the plan was to take the resolutions, then obtain a first reading for a Parliament Bill based on them, and immediately afterwards to begin again with the Budget. The Budget remained an adventure for the Government, because the Irish, although now offered precedence for the veto over reform, were still unwilling to commit themselves to sinking financial differences without an assurance that a Lords’ rejection of the resolutions would be followed by a demand for the exercise of the prerogative, backed if necessary by a determination to dissolve again. This Asquith was still unable or unwilling to give. On March 3, when asked by a union  ist member what he would do if these circumstances arose, he had first used a famous phrase, which he was later to repeat on a number of occasions. ‘We had better wait and see,’ Hansard recorded the Prime Minister as saying.

The resolutions were exhaustively debated at their various stages in the House of Commons, and were eventually got through, by a free use of the closure, after eleven parliamentary days. Government majorities varied somewhat, but the general pattern was given by the vote rejecting a union  ist amendment to Asquith’s motion to go into committee on the resolutions. A ‘No’ lobby of 351 was made up of 256 Liberals, thirty-four Labour members, sixty-five of Redmond’s Nationalists and two Independent Nationalists. On the other side were 250—all union  ists. It was generally agreed that this and other highly satisfactory Government majorities meant that the Cabinet had at last made up its mind to satisfy the Nationalists that it was prepared to coerce the Lords by advising the use of the prerogative. This appeared the more likely as William O’Brien, the strongly anti-Government Independent Nationalist member for Cork City, had used the week-end before the vote to increase Redmond’s difficulties by making public a private interview with Lloyd George in which, O’Brien claimed, it had become clear that substantial concessions could have been secured on the Finance Bill had the Nationalists been prepared collectively to demand them.

This widespread public impression proved to be correct.1 On April 15, shortly before the guillotine was due to fall on the consideration of the second resolution, the Prime Minister rose to explain the intentions of the Government if the Lords proved recalcitrant, but, the Chairman of Ways and Means having ruled that he could not do so without a general consent, which Balfour refused to give, he was forced to sit down again amidst loud conflicting demonstrations on both sides of the House. Later, when the third resolution had also been cleared and he had presented the Parliament Bill for its first reading, he made his statement on the adjournment:

‘If the Lords fail to accept our policy, or decline to consider it as it is formally presented to the House, we shall feel it our duty immediately to tender advice to the Crown as to the steps which will have to be taken if that policy is to receive statutory effect in this Parliament. What the precise terms of that advice will be—(an Hon. Member: “Ask Redmond”)—I think one might expect courtesy when I am anxious, as the head of the Government, to make a serious statement of public policy—what the precise terms of that advice will be it will, of course, not be right for me to say now; but if we do not find ourselves in a position to ensure that statutory effect shall be given to that policy in this Parliament, we shall then either resign our offices or recommend the dissolution of Parliament. Let me add this, that in no case will we recommend a dissolution except under such conditions as will secure that in the new Parliament the judgment of the people as expressed at the elections will be carried into law.’j

Asquith was followed by Balfour, who denounced the anticipation by months of prospective advice to the Crown and charged the Prime Minister with having concluded an unworthy bargain with Redmond. ‘He has bought the Irish vote for his Budget, but the price is paid in the dignity of his office.’ The brief debate terminated in great excitement, with a Nationalist and a union  ist member almost coming to blows.

Asquith replied to Balfour’s charges in a letter to The Times published four days later. There had been no meeting between himself and Redmond after the Government’s decision and before his statement, he said. In any event, it would be difficult to see in what the unworthiness of the Government action lay. Their decision was just as welcome to the majority of their followers as it was to the Nationalists, and if a decision so taken brings in its train a substantial block of support in the division lobby there is nothing inimical to the best traditions of parliamentary practice in that. Minority governments usually have to compromise with their principles to a far greater extent than did Asquith in these early months of 1910. The real truth is that the union  ists had worked themselves into a position of unusual prejudice and illogicality. They were determined, at almost all costs, to keep the Irish members against their will in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. At the same time they regarded them almost as ‘second-class citizens’, and therefore viewed any majority of which these involuntary intruders formed a decisive part as something of a fraud. It was Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy carried to its ultimate degree.