213. Carson honoured, Churchill mocked

213. Carson honoured, Churchill mocked

We start this episode with the unveiling of the statue of Edward Carson at Stormont Castle in Northern Ireland. It rather makes the point that a man who helped organise an armed force against British law, and even to call on British soldiers to mutiny rather than fire on rebels – no doubt because to him and his friend they were the right kind of rebels – could get away with such behaviour if he had the backing of the right circles of power back in England.

Not just get away with it, in fact, but be honoured with a statue.

From there, we move to India where a man like Gandhi kept finding himself being gaoled by the British authorities for actions far less noxious than Carson’s. A brown-skinned Hindu simply couldn’t be allowed to call on action against the rule of the British government, even if that action was far less subversive of the law than what the white-skinned Protestant Carson had championed.

As it happens, the National government in Britain was beginning to consider the possibility of granting a little more autonomy to India, though nothing like as much as enjoyed by white-ruled holdings, such as Australia or Canada, which enjoyed Dominion Status, giving them almost independence. That was far too little for Gandhi, or for Clement Attlee and his Labour Party. On the other hand, it was far too much for Winston Churchill. He fought the government all the way to the point, by the end, of becoming something of a figure of fun in the House of Commons.

No one proved that better than his chief tormentor, Leo Amery, despite being a fellow Conservative and a contemporary of his at Harrow school. He used mockery against him in a way that Churchill himself might have been proud of had he used it himself.

But the real danger for Churchill was that he was perilously close to becoming a bore.


Illustration: the Carson statue outside the home of the Northern Ireland Assembly, Stormont Castle, outside Belfast.


Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License


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179. Insurance, a mishap and two claims

179. Insurance, a mishap and two claims

The year 1911 was action-packed. Churchill, who’d been made Home Secretary the year before and got caught up in that great fake-news event, the Tonypandy massacre, added to his reputation, not in a good way, at the Sidney Street Siege. His leader in their radical duo, David Lloyd George, got his National Insurance Act through and set Britain firmly on the road towards a welfare state. Not that everyone was happy about it, including many of the workers it was designed to help. But it’s noteworthy that even when the Conservative came back to power, they left the National Insurance scheme in place. Then the Kaiser sent a gunboat to Agadir. Europe took a step closer to a major war but avoided it again. For now. Still, Britain decided it had to make some war preparations at last. One involved a change at the top of Navy, with Churchill, in yet another milestone on his career, taking over as First Lord of the Admiralty. Meanwhile, the Irish and the women had to wait again. Though at least the women had a promise, one first made three years earlier. Now, Asquith made clear, it would at last be kept. The Irish would have to hang on a little longer. Illustration: Churchill (the leading figure in the top hat) at the Sidney Street siege. National Army Museum, Out of Copyright Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

28 Jan 202414min

178. Things get radical

178. Things get radical

1910 was a year of battle between the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Which means a year of battle between the Liberals, with their (initially) huge majority in the Commons, and the Unionists with an equally massive (and entrenched) majority in the Lords. Two issues needed settling between them. Firstly, what would happen to Lloyd George’s People’s Budget, which the Lords had already rejected once. That would be the issue decided by the general election of January 1910. It was won by the Liberals, though only just and without an overall majority. However, with help from the Irish Nationalist MPs and Labour, they could form another government and resubmit the budget. Having seen the Liberals win the election, however narrowly, and faced with the threat of the king creating a load more Liberal peers to give them their own majority, the Lords caved and passed the budget. Secondly, it was time to settle the relationship between the two Houses of Parliament. Since the Lords couldn’t be expected to vote to reduce their own powers, the government again turned to the king to have him create enough Liberal peers to force a measure through. He argued that it would require another election, so Brits were called to the ballot box again in December 1910, for the second time that year. Again, and for the last time in their history, the Liberals emerged as the biggest single party in the Commons, though again without a majority. Once more, with support from the Irish MPs and Labour, they could form a government. And, again, faced with the prospect of huge numbers of Liberal peers joining the Lords, the upper house caved, passing the legislation that massively reduced its say in politics. As their price for the support the Liberals needed, the Irish MPs were looking for renewed moves towards Home Rule, while Labour wanted to see more progressive measures adopted. And both groups had the presence in parliament to get their demands listened to. Which must have been painful for the women’s movement. It needed influence to win the vote. Without the vote, however, it lacked influence. A frustrating Catch-22 position to be in. Illustration: The first page of the Parliament Act of 1911. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

21 Jan 202414min

177. People's budget

177. People's budget

Lloyd George wasn't going to be able to fund his ambitious plans for social reform by simply cutting expenditure elsewhere in government, specifically on defence. Instead he was going to have to cover both social assistance and defence. That meant that he was going to have to raise the money from taxation. His answer was a 'people's budget'. It included a tax on value gained from selling land, and some dramatic innovations in income tax, which would certainly increase its burden. That raised a heck of a lot of hackles, especially among the wealthy, which included most of the membership of the House of Lords. For a while, the government believed that the Lords would respect the convention, in force for over two centuries, whereby the Lords left 'money bills' alone. Not this time. They refused to adopt the Finance Bill until the issue had been tested with the electorate. So Asquith and Lloyd George would be going to the country looking for a popular endorsement of the measures in the 'People's Budget'. Illustration: The ‘terrible twins’: David Lloyd George (left) and Winston Churchill, the radicals of time of the People’s budget. Public Domain Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

14 Jan 202414min

176. Guns AND butter

176. Guns AND butter

The big challenge facing David Lloyd George, and indeed the man who had become something of a sidekick of his on the radical wing of the Liberal Party, surprisingly for a former Tory, was how to pay for old age pensions and later for the other social security measures he hoped to introduce. That was particularly difficult given the pressure to invest more in the Royal Navy, as Germany built itself more ships, and as Germany’s ally, Austria Hungary, pursued an aggressive policy in the Balkans. At one point, Lloyd George seemed to want to fund social security by cutting defence spending. But then he changed, as the Liberal Party set out to spend more on both. Instead of choosing between guns and butter, Liberals decided to go for both. Making Lloyd George’s challenge more challenging still. Illustration: The first of a new class of battleships, HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906. Public domain Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

7 Jan 202414min

175. Liberals transformed and struggling for social reform

175. Liberals transformed and struggling for social reform

The tragedy that struck Joseph Chamberlain in 1906, a massive stroke that paralysed his right side and left this outstanding orator barely capable of speaking, allowed ex-Prime Minister Arthur Balfour to confirm his leadership of the opposition to the Liberal government and of the Unionists in the Commons. He and Lord Lansdowne, in the Lords where the Unionists enjoyed a huge majority, worked hard together to frustrate Liberal legislative proposals. They did, however, let through the Old Age Pensions Act, at least in part because they accepted the government argument that it was a ‘money bill’, a financial measure, and by convention such bills were initiated in the Commons and accepted unamended by the Lords. It came into effect in 1908 and represented a turning point. It was the first step towards the welfare state, and it marked the point when the Liberal Party abandoned classical Liberalism, focused on curbing government spending and avoiding interventions into what were called ‘condition of the people’ matters. New Liberalism took steps to alleviate poverty and was prepared to accept the increased government expenditure that this entailed. Illustration: Amedee Forestier, Pension Day Pensioners Collecting their Old Age Pension, 1909, public domain image made available by WikiGallery.org Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

31 Dec 202314min

174. Men disappointing women

174. Men disappointing women

The first couple of years of the Liberal government elected in 1906 saw some achievements but also a great deal of frustration. The Unionist majority in the House of Lords annulled the Liberals’ in the Commons. That blocked many of the government’s initiatives. This period ended in August 1907 when Campbell-Bannerman, the Prime Minister, started a series of three heart attacks over the next fifteen months. Ultimately, they left him bedbound until, in April 1908, he became the only Prime Minister to die in 10 Downing Street. Meanwhile, in the women’s movement, and in particular among the Suffragists of Millicent Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the NUWSS, dominated by Liberals, there had been great hopes of seeing progress with a Liberal government in power. They were dashed by Campbell-Bannerman’s refusal to act. In part, this was down to party considerations, since both organisations were looking not for universal adult suffrage, but only equality of voting rights with men, on the existing basis. That would only enfranchise relatively well-off women, and they would be inclined to vote Conservative. Just as the NUWSS was linked to the Liberals, so the other main organisation, Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was closely bound to Labour. However, the Pankhursts – both Emmeline and her daughter and closest collaborator Christabel – began to lose faith in Labour from the very time they set up the WSPU. They favoured more militant action, such as intervening in public meetings and heckling speakers. The effectiveness of their campaigning in gaining publicity for the movement even persuaded Fawcett took move towards direct methods, for instance in organising the 3000-strong ‘Mud March’ in 1907. But when HH Asquith, an opponent of women’s suffrage, took over as Prime Minister from Campbell-Bannerman, and it became clear that the government wasn’t going to advance the women’s cause anytime soon, the two organisations’ ways began to part. The SWPU began to explore far more militant tactics yet, which the NUWSS wouldn’t be prepared to adopt. That, though, is for later episodes… Illustration: Christabel Pankhurst, by Ethel Wright, in a portrait exhibited in 1909 National Portrait Gallery 6921 Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

24 Dec 202314min

173. Liberal progress slowed. And another suffragist first

173. Liberal progress slowed. And another suffragist first

The 1906 general election had given the Liberals a colossal majority in the House of Commons. In the Lords, however, the Unionist opposition still held an unassailable majority against them. This meant that they could block Liberal legislation as they wished. Some significant measures were lost as a result. On the other hand, some passed, including, strangely enough, some measures backing working-class rights, hardly the kind of initiative you’d expect Conservatives to back. However, they have felt they could win votes that way, as a higher number of working-class voters seemed to support them than might have been expected, and the Conservatives might well be able to take advantage of the fact that in some cases, there were even internal divisions within the Liberals on such issues. Meanwhile, the new Liberal, and newly appointed Under Secretary for the Colonies, Winston Churchill, agreed with the former Boer general Jan Smuts steps towards giving the Boers equal rights with the British in South Africa. Black South Africans were denied any say in their government. It’s clear that possession of a white skin was a route to privilege even under British rule and long before apartheid. Finally, the suffragists, as opposed to the more militant suffragettes, gained another success in a new breakthrough achieved by England’s first female doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, when she became England’s first femal town mayor. Illustration: In 1901, during hte Boer War: surrounded by other Boer guerrillas, General Jan Smuts, once Churchill’s captor, later his lifelong friend. Public domain. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

17 Dec 202314min

172. Liberals back, great power tensions too

172. Liberals back, great power tensions too

Arthur Balfour’s intention in resigning as Prime Minister but without a general election was probably to oblige Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman to form a government, which might force their divisions to the surface. That would weaken their chances in an election that was bound to be held soon. There was a curious symmetry between the divisions in the main parties. The Liberals were split three ways over the Boer War. Liberal Imperialist right wing backed Britain’s military intervention, while the left, sometimes called pro-Boer, opposed it, and in the middle a group around the leader accepted the need for war but denounced its most brutal aspects (such as the concentration camps). Meanwhile, the Unionists were split three ways over tariff reform. The ‘wholehoggers’ backed a full system of import tariffs to protect British trade, the free traders wanted to stick with the old doctrine of tariff-free commerce, and a group around the leader accepted the need for reform but wanted to proceed more cautiously. Unfortunately, tariff reform was topical while the war had been over for three years. The Liberals were able to unite in attacking the government, specifically over tariff reform. And they won their last landslide in the 1906 election. Despite the end of the Boer War, the new Liberal government faced a world haunted by the spectre of renewed war. There was uncertainty over who the enemy would be if a new war broke out. The traditional enemy was France, and Britain likes its traditions. But an increasing threat was now coming from across the North Sea in Germany. Politicians and even novelists (the latter best represented by Erskine Childers and his Riddle of the Sands) were beginning to warn that the German threat was the more serious. The entente cordiale with France in 1904 showed Britain beginning to move closer to France and further away from Germany. Then Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany showed up in Tangier in Morocco, making a speech designed to provoke France, and tensions quickly grew. The conference that ended the crisis failed to address Germany’s issues. That made Tangier just the first of a series of crises that set two groupings of European great powers increasingly at odds with each other. Finally, this episode also talks about a small step forward in the ugliest of the European colonies in Africa, Congo. Again with a link to a novel. Illustration: A 1904 British cartoon on the Entente cordiale: John Bull (Britain) walking off arm-in-arm with Marianne (France), turning their back on Wilhelm II of Germany, whose sabre is poking out of his coat. A Punch cartoon by John Bernard Partridge. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

10 Dec 202314min

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