British Politics, 1910-1935

The Crisis of the Party System

David Powell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134266944
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This accessible new study provides a much-needed guide to the pivotal period of British history between 1910 and 1935, against the background of upheavals such as the First World War and the transition to full democracy as a consequence of the Reform Acts of 1918 and 1928. Combining an up-to-date synthesis of previous work with a reappraisal of the main personalities, themes and events of the period, David Powell brings clarity to this crucial yet complex period.

Examining British politics on the eve of war, David Powell assesses the impact of war on the parties and the political system and the process of realignment that followed in the interwar period. In particular he analyzes to what extent these events as a whole constituted a crisis of the party system.

From the structure of the Edwardian political system and the party politics of pre-war Britain, through to the economic and political crisis of 1931 and the subsequent rebuilding of the party system, this comprehensive analysis offers an indispensable survey to all students of British history or politics.

1 Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain

The brief reign of Edward VII, from 1901 to 1910, was, politically speaking, a time of transition: recognisably Victorian in certain respects; in others suggesting more clearly the shape of things to come. The sense of change was partly symbolic. The death of Queen Victoria in 1901, at the beginning of a new century, was bracketed by the passing of two giants of the late Victorian political scene: Gladstone in 1898 and Lord Salisbury in 1903, the latter shortly after his resignation of the premiership the previous year. More substantively, at the general election of 1906, twenty years of Unionist supremacy were brought to an end in the Liberal landslide and the Labour party made its first significant breakthrough as a parliamentary force. But there was continuity as well as change. New issues – social welfare, tariffs, the problems of imperial and national defence – were coming to the fore, but older controversies – over religious education, Ireland or the House of Lords – still exerted a pull. The political structures of Edwardian Britain, though undergoing internal modification and responding to external pressure, were essentially those that had evolved in the course of the nineteenth century. The parliamentary and electoral conflicts of the Edwardian period represented a final flourishing of the late Victorian party system before it was plunged into a crisis of deepening severity after 1910. In order to understand the origins and nature of that crisis it is necessary first to examine the workings of the Edwardian political system in more detail, to consider the previous history of the Edwardian political parties and to survey the main trends of party politics prior to the two general elections of 1910 and the more serious conflicts of 1910–14.

The Edwardian political system

Edwardian Britain inherited from the Victorians a political system which, over the previous seventy years, had become steadily more representative but which was still far from completely democratic. Parliamentary government had been established during the constitutional struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the early nineteenth century it had become clear that the elected members of the House of Commons would determine the fate of governments, even though ministers were appointed by the Crown and had considerable powers of patronage and influence at their disposal. As a result of the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884, and the accompanying measures of redistribution, the electoral base of the Commons had been made more directly representative of the population at large. The numbers of those qualified to vote in parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom rose from 813,000 in 1833 to 2.5 million in 1868 and 5.7 million in 1885. Even allowing for the simultaneous growth in population (from 24 million in 1833 to 36 million in 1885), this was an increase in the proportion of adult males eligible to vote from approximately one in five in 1833 to almost two in three after 1884.¹ Again, those who were elected were more freely and fairly chosen than had been the case in the early or mid-nineteenth century. The secret ballot had operated in parliamentary elections since 1872. Measures such as the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 imposed limits on constituency spending and reduced the incidence of bribery and ‘treating’ which had already been made more difficult by the increase in the number of electors and the introduction of secret voting. The Redistribution Act of 1885 had created a more uniform map of mainly single-member constituencies so that the vast majority of the 670 MPs sat for seats whose distribution more closely reflected that of the population as a whole. There were still variations both in geographical extent and in the size of individual electorates; a number of two-member seats and the extra-territorial university seats remained. But the patronage or pocket boroughs of the early nineteenth century were a thing of the past by the end of Victoria’s reign. In the course of the nineteenth century local government, too, had become more representatively structured, following the extension of elected local government through the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, the County Councils Act of 1888 and the Parish and District Councils Act of 1894.

Yet the march of democracy had its limits. The House of Lords remained a bastion of hereditary privilege, even if the elevation to the peerage of industrialists, senior politicians, imperial administrators and newspaper proprietors was rendering it less traditionally aristocratic.² And although the powers of the Lords were curbed in the struggle between ‘the peers and the people’ which provided one of the great set-piece battles of modern parliamentary history between 1909 and 1911, the House of Commons which emerged victorious from the encounter was itself returned by the votes of fewer than half the adult population. No women were allowed to vote in parliamentary elections. The restrictions of a property-based franchise and the workings of a complex and cumbersome registration system also disenfranchised up to 40 per cent of men. There were in addition other features which prevented the electoral system operating on a fully democratic basis. One was the persistence of plural voting in respect of the multiple ownership of property. There were over half a million plural voters in 1911, approximately 7 per cent of the total electorate of 7.9 million, and plural voting was one of the main targets of radical franchise reformers. Another defect of the system, in terms of strict fairness, was the disparity in the size of constituencies and the over-representation of some parts of the United Kingdom (notably Ireland) at the expense of others. Although the 1885 redistribution had attempted to introduce a more uniform pattern of constituencies it had made no pretence of absolute equality, and disparities were further exaggerated by population trends, so that constituencies like Durham (with fewer than 3,000 voters) had the same representation as Croydon (with more than 75,000).³ Thus not only was Edwardian Britain some way from ‘one man, one vote’ (let alone one person, one vote), its electoral system was also not delivering ‘one vote, one value’ – a fact compounded by the lack of proportionality inherent in the operation of the first-past-the-post system at national level where, in 1906, the Liberals secured their landslide victory (and a majority of 129 over all other parties) on only 49 per cent of the popular vote.

There has been much debate about the character of the electorate which the various franchise and registration provisions produced, and particularly about its composition in terms of social class. After the reforms of 1884–5 there was certainly a working-class majority in the electorate. The creation of single-member constituencies also produced a number of predominantly working-class seats (Henry Pelling’s estimate was 89 seats, electing 95 MPs)⁴ in industrial areas and coalfields, just as it hastened the emergence of a separate political identity for middle-class suburbia. However, the social composition of the electorate was not identical even with that of the male population at large. This was partly because of the existence of business voters and an additional franchise for university graduates – both categories which benefited the middle class. But the working class were probably also disproportionately affected by specific exclusions from the franchise and by the operation of the registration system.⁵ While it is true that the exclusion of men other than householders (for example, sons living with their parents) from the main householder/occupier franchise (which in 1911 accounted for almost 89 per cent of the total electorate) was as likely to deprive middle-class as working-class young men of the right to vote, there were other exclusions – notably those of paupers, soldiers and domestic servants – which operated almost entirely against the working class. Similarly, although the registration provisions which stipulated twelve months continuous residence at the same address before qualifying for the vote were, in theory, class-neutral, in practice they were more likely to affect working men with less settled occupations. In some working-class districts removals could be as high as 30 per cent a year, thereby contributing to the generally lower levels of enfranchisement in working-class constituencies. It is difficult to provide precise quantification, not least because the registration picture was not static, but it is reasonable to assume that of the 4–4.5 million men who were unable to vote in 1910, more than half were working class and that, consequently, working men made up a smaller proportion of the electorate than they did of the population as a whole.⁶ Whatever the truth of this, the electoral system was undoubtedly one that emphasised the rights of property and placed a premium on education and permanent membership of settled communities. The political implications of this will be considered in due course, but to the extent that there was a link between democratisation and working-class enfranchisement, Neal Blewett’s verdict that ‘the [Edwardian] electoral system cushioned the impact of democracy’⁷ may not be too wide of the mark.

That said, the class bias of the electoral system should not be exaggerated, nor should it be allowed to obscure the fact that by the early twentieth century Britain had a genuine mass electorate, to the interests and concerns of which politicians had perforce to respond. The effects of this on the composition of the nation’s political elite were slow to be felt, but they did introduce a democratic dynamic that gave Edwardian politics much of their vibrancy and vitality. At its pinnacle the Edwardian governing elite was still, it is true, largely upper-class in character. The family and social interlinkages of the leading politicians illustrated the extent to which government remained the preserve of a self-consciously exclusive inner circle whose collective identity was sustained as much by a shared social background as it was by collaboration in the chambers and committee rooms of Westminster and Whitehall. Lord Salisbury was the last prime minister to be a member of the House of Lords, but he was succeeded by his nephew, Arthur Balfour, who came from a Scottish landowning family with aristocratic connections; by the Liberal Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the son of a wealthy Glasgow businessman; and by H.H. Asquith, who, despite his initially modest Yorkshire Nonconformist origins, had, through the patronage of a London uncle, risen to honorary membership of the upper class by a career at Oxford and the Bar before being launched authentically into high society by his second wife, Margot Tennant. Asquith’s Liberal cabinet was slightly less aristocratic in tone than Balfour’s Unionist one (containing six peers as opposed to nine in a total of nineteen),⁸ but it nevertheless reflected the continuing influence of hereditary elites. Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, was a member of an old Whig family; Winston Churchill, successively President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty, a renegade member of an old Conservative one.

On the other hand, the boundaries of the ruling elite were not immovably fixed. Just as, in the nineteenth century, the aristocratic political establishment had admitted increasing numbers of middle-class ministers to cabinet office, so too the Edwardian cabinets opened their doors to new men. Asquith, indeed, though upper class by instinct, had earned his position by merit rather than birth. He was also personally less wealthy than most previous incumbents of his office. Two of his colleagues embodied the spirit of changing times even more graphically. David Lloyd George, the Welsh radical who became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1908, while not quite the child of poverty of later legend, undoubtedly came from a stratum of society not hitherto represented at the highest reaches of government. The presence in Asquith’s cabinet of the former socialist John Burns was, on a purely symbolic level, more important still. Burns, the leader of the 1889 London dock strike and MP for Battersea since 1892, had been appointed as President of the Local Government Board by Campbell-Bannerman in 1905 and was thus the first working-class minister of cabinet rank, surpassing the achievements of Henry Broadhurst and Thomas Burt who held junior posts in Gladstone’s last two governments.

A gradual lessening of social exclusiveness was apparent at the general parliamentary as well as at cabinet level. The social composition of the House of Commons had been changing since the mid-nineteenth century, with a steady decline in the number of MPs drawn from the aristocratic or landed interest (probably fewer than a quarter of the total by 1900) and a corresponding increase in middle- and upper-middle-class MPs with incomes derived from industry, finance or the professions. Solicitors and barristers were the largest single professional group in the 1906 parliament, reflecting the close connection between law and politics, but a wide variety of groups and interests was represented.⁹ The 1906 parliament was also remarkable for the substantial rise in the number of working-class MPs, accounted for largely by the success of the Labour party at the 1906 election but also by the return of twenty-four ‘Lib-Lab’ MPs who were mostly working-class Liberal trade unionists. Yet the barriers in the way of further increases in working-class membership of parliament remained considerable. Working men lacked the educational and social skills of their middle- and upper-class counterparts, most of whom had been educated at public school and university. They faced hostility or indifference when they presented themselves as prospective parliamentary candidates, from working-class voters imbued with a deferential preference for representatives drawn from among their social superiors as much as from middle-class election committees reluctant to support a working man. Finally, of course, there was the financial factor. Until the introduction of an annual salary of £400 for MPs in 1911, elected representatives were not paid. MPs were expected to finance, or contribute to the financing of, election campaigns, the payment of returning officers’ expenses and the running of constituency organisations, as well as supporting themselves during their time in parliament. Inevitably this loaded the dice of political fortune in favour of those with an independent income, except for those working men like the miners’ MPs with solid support from strong trade unions. The same fact helps to explain the high proportion of lawyers, financiers and businessmen (and, to a lesser extent, journalists, writers and academics) among Members of Parliament, and the importance, to ‘career’ politicians like Lloyd George and Churchill, of ensuring an adequate financial base for their activities before they entered the Commons.

More democratic possibilities were opened up by the extension of representative local government. Since the reform of municipal government in the 1830s, new, largely middle-class, elites had been emerging in industrial and urban areas, consisting of local employers, professional men and representatives of the ‘shopocracy’.¹⁰ Further opportunities for ratepayers to influence and participate in local decision making existed through the elected boards of Poor Law Guardians and, from 1870, elected School Boards. For the Victorians, with their strong sense of community spirit and civic identity, urban local government became an important focus of political activity, as well as a training ground for those who, like Joseph Chamberlain, later rose to national prominence. The introduction of county and parish councils in the 1880s and 1890s had a similar democratising effect in the countryside. Until then, in rural areas, local government had rested mainly in the hands of the aristocratic Lords Lieutenant and of the squire and parson who, as justices of the peace, were responsible for a variety of tasks in addition to the administration of the law. The institution of elections exposed the predominance of the squirearchy and landed interest to challenge, and paved the way for power to pass into other hands. The consequences of this must be kept in perspective. In England at least, prominent landowners retained a leading role on the new councils. It has been calculated that in 1911 over 20 per cent of the councillors and aldermen on England’s forty-seven county councils were listed in the ‘socially exclusive pages of Walford’s County Families’.¹¹ Nevertheless, their power was now held at the behest of the electorate, and their fellow councillors represented a fuller cross-section of the local population than had ever previously been involved in county government. In some parts of the United Kingdom, moreover, the results of creating county councils had been more dramatic. In Wales, for example, the first election results in 1889 were, according to Kenneth Morgan, part of ‘an immense social revolution’ in which traditional rural hierarchies ‘were almost totally wiped out by the new nonconformist middle class’.¹² It was at local level too that the political frontiers of gender and class were being pushed back most decisively. The London County Council elected in 1889 contained a number of working-class members, even though its first chairman was the aristocratic Lord Rosebery. Working-class and labour representation on local bodies increased steadily into the Edwardian period. Local government was also the arena in which women made their first breakthrough into the formal politics of the public sphere. Progressively, between 1869 and 1907, women ratepayers gained the right to vote in local elections, and women were eligible to be elected as members of local councils, Boards of Guardians and School Boards. The impact of this was limited but significant. In the pre-1914 period approximately 10 per cent of local voters were women. By 1910 there were over 170 women councillors and in excess of 1,300 women members of Poor Law Boards.¹³

The Edwardian political system, in short, like any political system, broadly reflected the nature of the society of which it was the product. The distribution of power corresponded to the distribution of wealth and property. Social hierarchy was an important key to political influence, and those who were most marginal in economic and social terms were excluded from direct participation in the political process. Yet equally the political system was adapting itself to the processes of social change: the declining importance of aristocratic and landed wealth; the expansion and consolidation of the working class; the assertion by women of their right to a political role beyond the ‘separate sphere’ of home and family. These changes may have been felt first at the grass roots, but they affected all levels of the system and emphasised the interconnectedness of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary politics. Although much of the high politics of Edwardian Britain still took place in a rarefied world of almost Trollopian dimensions – in gentlemen’s clubs, country houses and the salons and dining rooms of London society – this world was less self-contained, certainly less self-sustaining, than it had been in Trollope’s day. Even senior politicians were brought into regular contact with the mass electorate, either the voters in their own constituencies or the audiences at the rallies and public meetings which were such a feature of the late Victorian and Edwardian political scene. The years before the First World War marked the high point of political public speaking of the type inaugurated by Gladstone and his contemporaries, when the leading men of the day addressed crowds of thousands in halls and theatres the length and breadth of Britain. This was the classic age of what Winston Churchill, one of its foremost exponents, subsequently described as ‘hammer and anvil’ politics, when a parliamentary candidate ‘could address all his supporters who wished to hear him’ and ‘[a] great speech by an eminent personage would often turn a constituency or even a city’. According to Churchill, this was ‘a real political democracy’, in which ‘by a process of rugged argument the national decision was reached in measured steps’.¹⁴

In addition to the discipline of direct contact with the voters, Edwardian politicians were exposed to the currents of public opinion through other channels as well. ‘Pressure from without’ had been an established feature of politics throughout the Victorian period, with movements such as the Chartists or the Anti-Corn Law League mobilising mass support in an attempt to influence the parliamentary process or to reform parliament itself.¹⁵ In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were large numbers of organisations and pressure groups which sought to attain their particular ends through lobbying, propaganda and interventions in constituencies at election times, or by other forms of demonstration or direct action. Trade unions were becoming an increasingly important factor in politics as the ‘labour question’ took on a more serious aspect.¹⁶ The churches, especially the Nonconformist denominations, had long been active practitioners of pressure group politics, in areas such as education and temperance reform.¹⁷ In Edwardian Britain they were joined by a plethora of other single-issue groups, campaigning for anything from the expansion of the navy to female suffrage. Politicians, of course, could use these groups as vehicles for their own propaganda efforts, as Chamberlain did with the Tariff Reform League. But this did not negate the role of pressure groups as an organised expression of popular opinion, which political leaders could not afford to ignore.

The same was true of the press. As in the Victorian period, the newspaper press was a vital component of Edwardian political life, commenting on events and helping to shape public opinion as well as exerting its own influence on governmental decision making. Editors like C.P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian, J.L. Garvin of The Observer and A.G. Gardiner of the Daily News were formidable political personalities in their own right, while a new generation of ‘press lords’ such as Lord Northcliffe (owner of The Times, the Daily Mail and The Observer) aspired to political influence as much as commercial success. In its variegated forms – national, local, denom...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• British Politics, 1910–35
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Parties and politics in Edwardian Britain
• 2 The crisis of partisanship, 1910 –14
• 3 The crisis of war, 1914–18
• 4 Coalitionism and party politics, 1918–22
• 5 Three-party politics, 1922–4
• 6 Politicians and the slump, 1924–31
• 7 Crisis resolved: the 1930s and after
• Conclusion
• NOTES
• Further reading