Three-party politics
CONTENTS
THREE-PARTY POLITICS, 1922-5………………………………………………… 2
THE PRIME MINISTER………………..…………………………………………… 2
THYE LABOR PARTY……………………………………………………………… 3
REMSAY MACDONALD…………………………………………………………… 4
DEBTS AND REPARATIONS……………………………………………………… 5
BALDWIN…………………………………………………………………………… 6
BALDWIN AND PROTECTION…………………………………………………… 6
FIRST LABOR GOVERNMENT….………………………………………………… 7
EDUCATIONAL REFORMS………………………………………………………… 8
UNEMNPLOYMENT………………………………………………………………… 9
THREE-PARTY POLITICS, 1922-5
Politics after the fall of Lloyd George seemed far from the tranquillity
which Law had promised. There were three general elections in less than two
years (^November 1922; 6 December 1923; 29 October 1924), and the terrible
portent of a Labor government. The turmoil was largely technical. Though
Labor had emerged as the predominant party of the Left, the Liberal party
refused to die; and the British electoral system, mainly of one-member
constituencies, was ill adapted to cope with three parties. The general
elections of 1931 and 1935 were the only ones in which a single party (the
Conservatives) received a majority of the votes cast.1 Otherwise a
parliamentary majority was achieved more or less by accident, if at all.
However, there was no profound cleavage between the parties, despite much
synthetic bitterness. They offered old policies which had been their stock-
in-trade before the war. Labor offered social reform; the Conservatives
offered Protection. The victors in the twenties were the Liberals, in
policy though not in votes. The old Liberal cause of Free Trade had its
last years of triumph. If Sir William Harcourt had still been alive, he
could have said: 'We are all Liberals nowadays.' By 1925 England was back,
for a brief period, in the happy days of Gladstone.
The government which Law formed was strikingly Conservative, even
obscurantist, in composition. There had been nothing like it since Derby's
'Who? Who? ' ministry of 1852. The great figures of the party—Austen
Chamberlain, Balfour, Birkenhead—sulkily repudiated the decision at the
Carlton Club: 'The meeting today rejected our advice. Other men who have
given other counsels must inherit our burdens.' The only minister of
established reputation, apart from Law himself, was Curzon, who deserted
Lloyd George as successfully as he had deserted Asquith and, considering
the humiliating way in which Lloyd George treated him, with more
justification;2 he remained foreign secretary. Law tried to enlist McKenna
as chancellor of the exchequer—an odd choice for a Protectionist prime
minister to make, but at least McKenna, though a Free Trader, hated Lloyd
George. McKenna doubted whether the government would last and refused to
leave the comfortable security of the Midland Bank. Law then pushed Baldwin
into the vacant place, not without misgiving. Otherwise he had to make do
with junior ministers from Lloyd George's government and with holders of
historic names. His cabinet was the most aristocratic of the period,1 and
the only one to contain a duke (the duke of Devonshire) . Churchill called
it 'a government of the second eleven'; Birkenhead, more contemptuously, of
second-class intellects.
The general election of 1918 had been a plebiscite in favour of Lloyd
George. The general election of 1922 was a plebiscite against him. Law's
election manifesto sturdily promised negations. 'The nation's first need',
it declared, 'is, in every walk of life, to get on with its own work, with
the minimum of interference at home and of disturbance abroad.' There would
be drastic economies and a foreign policy of non-interference. The prime
minister would no longer meddle in the affairs of other ministers. Law
returned the conduct of foreign affairs to Curzon. He refused to meet a
deputation of the unemployed—that was a job for the ministry of labor. In
the first flush of reaction, Law announced his intention of undoing all
Lloyd George's innovations in government, including the cabinet
secretariat. He soon thought better of this, and, though he dismantled
Lloyd George's body of private advisers, 'the garden suburb', he kept
Hankey and the secretariat. The cabinet continued to perform its work in a
businesslike way with prepared agenda, a record of its" decisions, and some
control on how they were carried out.
THE PRIME MINISTER
This preservation of the cabinet secretariat was Law's contribution as
prime minister to British history. The contribution was important, though
how important cannot be gauged until the cabinet records are opened. The
cabinet became a more formal, perhaps a more efficient body. Maybe also
there was an increasing tendency for a few senior ministers to settle
things between themselves and then to present the cabinet with a virtual
fait accompli, as MacDonald did with J. H. Thomas and Snowden or Neville
Chamberlain with Halifax, Hoare, and Simon. But this practice had always
existed. A cabinet of equals, discussing every question fully, was a legend
from some imaginary Golden Age. On the other hand, the power and authority
of the prime minister certainly increased in this period, and no doubt his
control of the cabinet secretariat was one of the causes for this. It was
not the only one. Every prime minister after Lloyd George controlled a
mighty party machine. The prime minister alone determined the dissolution
of parliament after 1931, and the circumstances of 1931 were peculiar.
Above all, the loaves and fishes of office, which the prime minister
distributed, had a greater lure than in an aristocratic age when many of
the men in politics already possessed great wealth and titles. At any rate,
Law, willingly or not, helped to put the prime minister above his
colleagues.
Gloomy as ever, Law doubted whether the Conservatives would win the
election and even thought he might lose his own seat at Glasgow. When
pressed by Free Trade Conservatives such as Lord Derby, he repudiated
Protection, much to Beaver-brook's dismay, and gave a pledge that there
would be no fundamental change in the fiscal system without a second
general election. The other parties were equally negative. Labor had a
specific proposal, the capital levy, as well as its general programme of
1918; but, deciding half-way through the campaign that the capital levy was
an embarrassment, dropped it, just as Law had dropped Protection. The
independent Liberals, led by Asquith, merely claimed, with truth, that they
had never supported Lloyd George. The Coalition, now called National
Liberals, hoped to scrape back with Conservative votes. Beaver-brook spoilt
their game by promoting, and in some cases financing, Conservative
candidates against them; fifty-four, out of the fifty-six National Liberals
thus challenged, were defeated. The voting was as negative as the parties.
Five and a half million voted Conservative; just over 4 million voted
Liberal (Asquithians 2-5 million, National i-6 million); 4-2 million voted
Labor. The result was, however, decisive, owing to the odd working of three-
or often four-cornered contests. The Conservatives held almost precisely
their numbers at the dissolution: with 345 seats they had a majority of 77
over the other parties combined. Labor won 142 seats; the Liberals, with
almost exactly the same vote (but about 70 more candidates), only 117. All
the National Liberal leaders were defeated except Lloyd George in his
pocket borough at Caernarvon. Churchill, who had just lost his appendix,
also lost his seat at Dundee, a two-member constituency, to a
Prohibitionist and to E. D. Morel, secretary of the Union of Democratic
Control. This was a striking reversal of fortunes.
THE LABOR PARTY
The Conservatives and Liberals were much the same people as before, with a
drop of twenty or so in the number of company directors—mainly due no doubt
to the reduction of National Liberals by half. Labor was so changed as to
be almost a different party. In the previous parliament the Labor members
had all been union nominees, as near as makes no odds (all but one in 1918,
all but three at the dissolution); all were of working-class origin. Now
the trade unionists were little more than half (80 out of 142), and middle-
class, even upper-class, men sat on the Labor benches for the first time.3
In composition Labor was thus more of a national party than before and less
an interest group. In outlook it was less national, or at any rate more
hostile to the existing order in economics and in nearly everything else.
The old Labor M.P.s had not much to distinguish them except their class, as
they showed during the war by their support for Lloyd George. The new men
repudiated both capitalism and traditional foreign policy.
There were combative working-class socialists of the I.L.P., particularly
from Glasgow. These Clydesiders, as they were called, won twenty-one out of
twenty-eight seats in their region. They imagined that they were about to
launch the social revolution. One of them, David Kirkwood, a shop steward
who ended in the house of lords, shouted to the crowd who saw him off:
'When we come back, this station, this railway, will belong to the people!'
The men from the middle and upper classes had usually joined the Labor
party because of their opposition to the foreign policy which, in their
opinion, had caused and prolonged the war. Often, going further than the
U.D.C. and its condemnation of secret diplomacy, they believed that wars
were caused by the capitalist system. Clement Attlee,1 who entered
parliament at this election, denned their attitude when he said: 'So long
