The Edwardian Crisis

Lecture 2: The Edwardian Crisis

Robert Saunders, St John’s

‘Britain may soon be stained with the blood of civil war … No method remains, except armed revolt, by which the country can make its will prevail’ Conservative and Unionist Party Election Guide (1914)

1. ‘The Crisis of Conservatism’

1900 Election

No Liberal candidate in 163 constituencies

Impact of the Boer War:

- Lasts two years longer than expected

- Doubles income tax

- Turns vicious, with the ‘scorched earth’ policy and invention of the concentration camp.

- 1 in 3 volunteers fails the army medical

Lord Rosebery, former Liberal leader, at Glasgow in 1900:

- ‘An empire such as ours requires as its first condition an imperial race … Are we rearing such a race? … [I]n the great cities, in the rookeries and slums … an imperial race cannot be reared … That is a rift in the corner-stone of your Commonwealth’

Tariff Reform: launched by Joseph Chamberlain in 1903:

- An economic strategy, protecting British jobs

- A fiscal strategy, creating new sources of taxation

- An imperial strategy, binding together the empire

‘The day of small nations has long passed away. The day of Empires has come’ (Chamberlain, 1904)

Free Trade: more like a religion than a policy.

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman: ‘to dispute Free Trade … is like disputing the law of gravity’

- Protectionism a rich man’s policy that will harm the poor

- Defence of the consumer interest

- Tariffs will cause corruption and ‘the Americanization of English politics’ (Churchill)

- Will drive the Empire apart

1905: Conservatives resign under strain of divisions

1906 Election:

Even the Conservative leader, Arthur Balfour, lost his seat.

2. ‘New Liberalism’ in Government, 1905-14

Legislative Record:

- Old Age Pensions

- Free School Meals

- Children’s Charter

- Maternity Benefit

- Minimum Wage for ‘sweated trades’

- National Insurance for sickness and unemployment

- Parliament Act, ending the House of Lords veto

- Reform of the tax system

‘New Liberalism’:

- About social and economic, rather than moral and constitutional reform;

- A vision of ‘positive liberty’, promoting opportunity through social reform

- Paid for by land taxes, a ‘supertax’ and higher top rates of income tax

- A language of class, mobilising ‘the productive classes’ against a privileged elite: ‘the People’s Budget’; ‘The Peers against the People’.

Lloyd George on the House of Lords: ‘five hundred men, accidentally chosen from among the ranks of the unemployed’

Challenges to that position:

- Labour

- Anti-state feeling among the working classes

- Trade Unions and industrial militancy: union membership doubled, 1901-14, and the number of days lost in strikes rose from 3 million in 1900 to nearly 41 million in 1912.

- Women’s suffrage movement. Which women to enfranchise?

3. The Ulster Crisis: Tory Rebels?

Two elections in 1910: January and December

December 1910 results:

A hung Parliament, though the Liberals stay in power with Labour and Irish backing.

The price of Irish support is Home Rule.

Home Rule means giving Ireland its own Parliament.

A Liberal policy opposed by the Conservative and Unionist Party.

Unable to stop it because of the Parliament Act of 1911, which strips the Lords of its veto.

Ulster Unionism:

- Led by Sir Edward Carson

- ‘Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right’

- Ulster Covenant, signed by half a million in Ulster

- Creation of the Ulster Volunteers: 23,000 trained soldiers by 1914

British Unionism:

- Led by Andrew Bonar Law

- ‘there are no lengths to which Ulster can go in which I would not support them’

- ‘there are things stronger than Parliamentary majorities’

- ‘We shall take … whatever means seem to us most effective, to deprive [ministers] of the despotic power which they have usurped’

- On the coercion of Ulster: ‘we should regard it as civil war; [we would] urge the … Army not to regard them as a real Government but to ignore their orders’

How to Justify Resistance:

- A minority government with no mandate for Home Rule

- Propped up by the Irish (over-represented) and Labour (bribed with salaries for MPs)

- Parliament Act had taken power away from the people; no check on the House of Commons

Conservatives on the Liberal Government:

- ‘a revolutionary committee which has seized by fraud upon despotic power’ (Bonar Law)

- Ministers had ‘lost the right to that obedience which can be claimed by a constitutional government’ (Law)

- ‘a self-appointed clique of politicians, calling themselves “the Cabinet”’ (Fighting Notes)

Building a Popular Movement:

- Anti-Catholicism

- British Nationalism: ‘Vote for the Unionist – and Britain for the British’

Rudyard Kipling, ‘Ulster, 1912’

‘We know the wars prepared
On every peaceful home,
We know the hells declared,
For such as serve not Rome.
The terror, threats and bread
In market, hearth and field –
We know, when all is said,
We perish if we yield’.

Around a million people in Britain attend demonstrations addressed by Law or Carson.

Up to 15,000 join paramilitary units.

Possible Outcomes:

- Conservatives win a general election, ending the crisis in Britain (though not in Ireland)

- Liberals win an election, but not on Home Rule. Do they have a mandate?

- Ulster Volunteers lose their discipline and fighting breaks out. British soldiers killed

A Crisis of Labour?

- Only 42 MPs in 1910, many Liberals in all but name

- Divided on social policy: Hardie and MacDonald vote against each other on National Insurance

- No distinctive position on free trade, the House of Lords or Home Rule

- Trade Union disillusionment

- Prisoners of the Liberals after 1910?

- Should it renew the electoral pact in 1914, or go solo and risk a Conservative government?