Liberal Government and Politics, 1905–15

249 Pages·2006·0.991 MB·English

by  Ian Packer (auth.)

Liberal Government and Politics, 1905–15
Also by Ian Packer
LETTERS OF ARNOLD STEPHENSON ROWNTREE TO MARY KATHERINE
ROWNTREE, 1910–1918 (editor)
LLOYD GEORGE
LLOYD GEORGE, LIBERALISM AND THE LAND: the Land Issue and Party
Politics in England, 1906–1914
Liberal Government and
Politics, 1905–15
Ian Packer
© Ian Packer 2006
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-0-333-91798-5
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First published 2006 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Packer, Ian, 1962–
Liberal government and politics, 1905–15/Ian Packer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: Government and party — Foreign, defence and
colonial policy — Liberals and the United Kingdom — Liberalism and
democracy — Nonconformist party? — The economy and finance —
Social reform and labour relations — Epilogue: a liberal war?.
1. Great Britain—Politics and government—1901–1910.
2. Great Britain—Politics and government—1910–1936.
3. Liberal Party (Great Britain)—History—20th century.
4. Liberalism—Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Title.
DA570.P33 2006
941.082′3—dc22 2005058537
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Government and Party 7
Leadership 7
The party in parliament 14
The party outside parliament 20
2 Foreign, Defence and Colonial Policy 28
Foreign policy 28
Defence policy 36
Colonial policy 47
3 Liberals and the United Kingdom 55
The background to Irish home rule 55
The home rule moment 63
4 Liberalism and Democracy 76
The House of Lords 77
Franchise reform 86
5 A Nonconformist Party? 97
Nonconformity and Liberalism 97
Church versus chapel 99
The moral agenda 109
The religious context of Edwardian Liberalism 117
6 The Economy and Finance 121
The meaning of free trade 121
The state and the economy 125
National taxation 129
v
vi Contents
7 Social Reform and Labour Relations 142
Social reform 142
Labour relations 156
8 Epilogue: A Liberal War? 161
The decision for war 162
Strategy and the economy 167
Preserving Liberalism 173
The end 177
Notes and References 181
Bibliography 220
Index 234
Acknowledgements
Queen’s University, Belfast and the University of Lincoln have provided
helpful and stimulating environments in which to write this book.
Iwould like to thank all my colleagues in the history departments of
these two institutions for their support and understanding while I have
wrestled with the complexities of Edwardian politics. I owe a special
debt of gratitude to Professor Jeremy Black for originally suggesting that
I should write this book for Palgrave and to Professor Peter Jupp for all
his encouragement and words of wisdom. I am also grateful to my
students in Belfast and Lincoln for giving me the opportunity to think
through and test out some of my ideas.
My parents were supportive as ever. Yet again, I could not have
written this book without the encouragement and help of Lynda. This
is for her.
I am grateful to the following institutions and individuals for access
to and permission to quote from manuscript sources: the Bodleian Library,
Oxford and J. Bonham Carter (Asquith papers), Hon. Mrs C. Gascoigne
(Sir W. Harcourt papers); the British Library (Balfour, Burns, Campbell-
Bannerman, Herbert Gladstone papers); Cheshire and Chester Archives;
Churchill College Library, Cambridge; Gloucestershire Record Office
(W. H. Dickinson papers); Hampshire Record Office (Portsmouth
papers); the Clerk of the House of Lords Record Office; Lincolnshire
Archives; the National Archives (Cabinet, Grey papers); the National
Archives of Scotland; the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland
(Elibank, Haldane, Muirhead, Rosebery papers); the National Library of
Wales (E. W. Davies papers); Nuffield College Library, Lord Gainford
and Professor Cameron Hazlehurst (Gainford papers); the Trustees of
the Joseph Rowntree Foundation; University College of North Wales,
Bangor, Library; University of Birmingham Library (Allard, Austen and
Joseph Chamberlain papers); University of Glasgow Library (MacCallum
Scott papers); University of Keele Library (Josiah Wedgwood papers);
University of Manchester, John Rylands Library (C. P. Scott papers);
University of Newcastle Library; West Sussex Record Office; West Yorkshire
Archive Service.
vii
Introduction
This book examines all the major fields of activity of the 1905–15
Liberal governments. Rather than looking again at the series of debates
about whether this period witnessed the onset of the ‘decline of
Liberalism’, it seeks to understand the governments’ actions by
analysing their relationship to definitions of Liberalism. In doing so it
builds on a rich and innovative body of historiography. The Edwardian
era has been a particularly fruitful site for historians seeking to investi-
gate the relationship between ideology and politics. The key text in this
field has undoubtedly been Peter Clarke’s Lancashire and the New Liber-
alism. But Clarke followed this ground-breaking work with Liberals and
Social Democrats and Stefan Collini and Michael Freeden also published
distinguished analyses of Liberal politics and thought at about the same
time.1 Subsequently, E. H. H. Green and Matthew Fforde have produced
contrasting views of the role of ideas in Edwardian Conservatism and
Duncan Tanner and Frank Trentmann among others have given serious
consideration to the ideology of the early Labour party.2 All these works
have argued that while British politics has often claimed to be non-ideo-
logical it is impossible to understand how political parties selected their
goals and negotiated their approach to political issues without reference
to a framework of ideas and a notion of what terms like ‘Liberalism’ and
‘Conservatism’ meant.
This does not imply that any Edwardian party had an agreed formal
statement of its beliefs. But, as Green has argued, there was still ‘a
hinterland of rhetoric, values, and received ideas, which may be expressed
in day-to-day political argument, speeches, correspondence, and legislative
acts’.3 Through an examination of these areas it is possible to determine
what contemporaries understood the aims and parameters of their
parties to be and how they sought to shape political argument in ways
1
2 Liberal Government and Politics, 1905–15
that would accord with these ideas. This approach eschews the search
for great ideologues before whom politicians had to bow down and
instead looks at the assumptions that were implicit in the views and
actions of politicians, journalists and MPs. In this sense, ideology was
crucial to the functioning of politics.
However, the relationship between party and ideology was always
fraught and complex. In all parties there were variant interpretations
of the party’s values and traditions. Moreover, ideologies were not
hermetically sealed within parties. Much of the Liberal approach to
politics was shared by many in the Labour party, except on some ques-
tions of industrial policy and social reform. Some Liberals, on the other
hand, argued that Liberalism had to accommodate other ideologies which
did not claim to be specifically Liberal, like those of national security or
gender roles, in policy making. Ideology was not and could not be a rigid
framework. Its boundaries were always being tested and redefined and
its essence was revealed only within the process of argument and debate.
This process has been examined in Victorian Liberalism at cabinet
level by Jonathan Parry and for popular Liberalism by Eugenio Biagini.4
Both looked at a wide range of policy issues and concluded that Liberalism
was not just a bundle of special interest groups or a disparate collection
of people who found Conservatism unpalatable and so gathered under
the Liberal banner. Instead, at both the elite and popular levels,
Liberalism represented a distinctive and reasonably coherent way of
looking at the political world. But these wide-ranging studies have not
been replicated for the early twentieth-century. Instead, the formative
works by historians like Clarke and Freeden have concentrated on the
New Liberalism and the ways in which the party’s ideology was adapted
to accommodate social reform. This is understandable as these historians
were responding to the prevailing orthodoxy of the 1960s and 1970s
that Liberalism was doomed to decline by the inevitable rise of the
Labour party to be the predominant party of the British left and the
wider assumption that the key political development in twentieth-
century Britain was the growth of collectivism.5 But it means that the
current understanding of Edwardian Liberalism tends to concentrate on
just one aspect of party ideology, rather than seeing Liberal attitudes to
social reform as one aspect of a wider complex of ideas and debates.
General books about the achievements of the 1905–15 governments do
not rebalance this equation because they tend to give little space to
ideas as opposed to political tactics and legislative outcomes.6
This book seeks to readjust this perspective by examining a broad
range of Liberal policies and ideas. By looking at what Liberal governments