Mr Balfour's Poodle(52)
Parliament reassembled, after the long recess, on November 15. An early dissolution was known to be contemplated, but no statement could be made until the negotiations with the King were complete. Asquith therefore moved the adjourment and promised to give more information three days later. The House of Lords could not so easily be made to wait upon the Government’s convenience. Lansdowne announced that on the following day he would move a resolution inviting the Government immediately to submit the Parliament Bill; and when this had been moved, and accepted by Crewe (although with a rather bad grace and accompanied by the statement that the Government would accept no amendments), Rosebery gave notice that he now intended to proceed at once with the two more detailed resolutions of reform which he had tabled in April after the success of his three more general ones, but which had not been debated because of the death of King Edward and the subsequent truce.
He brought them forward on November 17, and they were disposed of after half a day’s debate—the first being carried without a division, and the second abandoned by Rosebery himself on the curious ground that it ‘went too far into detail’. The terms of the resolutions were these:
‘(1) That in future the House of Lords shall consist of Lords of Parliament: (a) chosen by the whole body of hereditary peers from amongst themselves, and by nomination by the Crown; (b) sitting by virtue of offices and of qualifications held by them; (c) chosen from outside. (2) That the term of tenure for all Lords of Parliament shall be the same, except in the case of those who sit ex officio, who would sit so long as they held the office for which they sit.’
The main interest of the debate was provided by Lansdowne’s speech, in which he gave his view that a half of the reformed House might be hereditary peers, and that he would like those selected to be ‘familiar with country life, familiar with the management of landed property’ rather than ‘veterans with a distinguished record, who have arrived at a time of life when they would look naturally for repose’
On the next day—Friday the eighteenth—the Government statements were made in both Houses. The dissolution was announced for November 28, certain parts only of the postponed Budget (of 1910) were to be proceeded with before then, and (as a counter to the Osborne judgment) the Government, if it won the election, was to propose the payment of members of Parliament in the next session. On the whole there was good temper.
‘I heard Asquith and A.J.B. yesterday afternoon,’ Esher wrote on the following day. ‘The House was crowded. Asquith very concise and dignified. Arthur extremely mild and unaggressive. No reference in either speech to highly controversial things. Lansdowne, on the other hand, showed some bitterness.’w
After these announcements interest quickly began to move to the constituencies, although the proceedings in the House of Lords during the following week were of considerable importance. The motion for the second reading of the Parliament Bill came up on the Monday. Lansdowne, who spoke second, claimed that with no amendments allowed the debate was unreal. He would therefore move its postponement in order to bring forward, later in the week, proposals of his own in the form of resolutions. This he did on the Wednesday. The resolutions did little more than re-state the case which the union ists had made within the Constitutional Conference. They implied a ‘reduced and reconstituted’ House of Lords, although they gave no information as to its composition, and they stated that, provided a joint committee of both Houses with the Speaker exercising only a casting vote, and not the Speaker alone, determined what was and what was not a money bill, the House of Lords would abandon its right of rejection in this field; that where a difference between the two Houses on other bills arose and persisted for a year it should be settled by a joint sitting, unless the bill related ‘to a matter of great gravity and had not been adequately submitted to the judgment of the people’, in which case it should be put to a referendum.
After a full debate the resolutions were carried without a division, but also, of course, without the support of the Government peers. It cannot be pretended that they were not greatly disliked by many union ists. The almost impossible position into which the Tory Party had manoeuvred itself was making many converts of convenience to reform. ‘… (The debate’s) most remarkable feature,’ wrote Lord Newton, ‘was the enthusiasm shown for drastic reform by some of those who had previously deprecated any action of this nature as inopportune and ill-advised.’x But even this simulated enthusiasm was far from universal. There were many who agreed with Lord Esher1 that Lansdowne’s proposals constituted more of a break in the English constitutional tradition than did the Government plan for limiting the veto. And so indeed they did. To reconstitute the House of Lords, to distinguish between different bills according to the highly subjective test of their importance, to introduce the entirely novel device of the joint sitting, and, in Asquith’s words, to substitute ‘a plebiscite’ for ‘parliamentary government’, all as a result of no more than six months of far from calm thought, was fairly hard going for a Conservative Party. But in constitutional matters and where its own influence is at stake, the Tories can sometimes be a party not of conservation but of restless innovation.