Even then no public statement was issued. There were, not unnaturally, a number of reports in the press even while the conference was in progress purporting to describe what was going on, and subsequently more detailed but still unverifiable accounts were published by journalists. Now the memoirs or biographies of all the participants and of some others who were closely concerned are available. Even so the task of unravelling the course of the negotiations does not become a straightforward one, for there are many statements which lack corroboration, and a few cases of direct contradiction between the interpreters of one participant and those of another. But the main lines stand out fairly clearly.
A union ist memorandum, presented at the beginning of the conference, proposed that legislation should be divided into three categories: financial, ordinary, and constitutional. So far as the first category was concerned it was suggested that the Lords should abandon their claim to reject money bills, provided that tacking could be prevented. Tacking was defined in the memorandum as occurring in the case of bills which, ‘although technically dealing with little or nothing but finance, have social or political consequences which go far beyond the mere raising of revenue’.d On this point substantial agreement was reached. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was responsible for a proposal that a joint committee of both Houses—seven representatives from each with the Speaker presiding and exercising a casting vote—should determine whether or not a measure was a money bill. Austen Chamberlain’s biographer, apparently quoting from an unspecified document, adds the gloss that this committee was to work within the very restrictive rule that ‘if it appears that any provision of a bill, although dealing with taxation, would effect important social or political changes through expropriation or differentiation against any class of owners of property these provisions shall not be treated for the purposes of this act as provisions dealing with taxation’.e
Whether this was accepted by the Government representatives is not certain. On the one hand, Asquith, in a letter to Balfour, most uncharacteristically undated but presumably written towards the end of the conference, referred to the concessions he and his colleagues had made in regard to finance as ‘of the most substantial character, and extremely difficult for us to defend against the criticism of our own supporters’.f On the other, Lansdowne, in a memorandum dated September 10 (such agreement as was reached on finance is commonly thought to have been arrived at in the summer sittings) and also addressed to Balfour, notes that: ‘No one has yet been able to suggest a formula which, to my mind, would be really satisfactory for the purpose of dividing pure finance from legislation partly financial but important quite as much from its political as from its financial effects’.g If Ministers did go as far as Sir Charles Petrie suggests and the conference had succeeded, hardly a single Budget since presented would have been statutorily protected from the interference of the peers.
So far as ‘ordinary’ legislation was concerned, progress was made by accepting a suggestion that when a bill which fell within this category had been twice rejected by the House of Lords, its fate should be determined by a joint sitting of the two Houses. What was to be the composition of such a joint session? Mr. R. C. K. Elisor states that it was agreed ‘that the representation of the Lords … should be so scaled down that a Liberal Government with a Commons majority of fifty would be able to pass its bills’.h But all the other evidence is that this was never accepted by the union ist representatives. The form in which it was put forward by the Government was that the whole of the House of Commons (670 members) should take part in the joint sitting, together with a hundred representatives—chosen on a basis of proportional representation—of the House of Lords.1 Lansdowne wrote at some length on the point, but never got nearer to a solution than to suggest that a reformed House of Lords (the plenum of which could be admitted) was the key to the problem of joint sittings. And agreement on a scheme for reform was never near. Asquith, in a memorandum dated May 28, had committed himself to reform, and according to Lansdowne, had subsequently ‘admitted casually that the hereditary element must not disappear, and that any House of Lords must of necessity be conservative in its general complexion’.i But the Government representatives, again in Lansdowne’s view, had thereafter ‘shown an ill-concealed desire to “shunt” this part of the case’. This, Lansdowne thought, was because they were hopelessly divided as to how reform should be effected. Largely for this reason he decided to concentrate upon the point. It was where his opponents were weakest. In urging this he committed himself to the following magnificently bland statement. ‘We must, in the first place,’ he wrote, ‘remember that we are ourselves convinced House of Lords reformers, and that the House of Lords itself took up the question long before the conference was dreamed of.’2 But it is nevertheless clear that his main reason for stressing reform at the conference was tactical; and a subject approached in this spirit from the union ist side, and bristling with inherent difficulties for both sides, was not likely to be one on which progress could be made. Yet without progress here common ground on the composition of joint sittings was almost impossible to find. We must therefore agree, not with Mr. Ensor, but with Asquith’s biographers when they wrote that ‘no agreement could be reached … in what numbers respectively the two Houses should be represented at the joint sittings’.j