edgerton 1
1
The Country with No Name
The Englishman has long been used to living in a certain haze as to what his country is – whether England, or England-and-Wales, or Great Britain or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or the United Kingdom plus its dependent territories or that larger unit which he used to call the British Empire …
Sir Dennis Robertson, speaking to a US audience, 19531
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages … The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.
John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London, 1919)
Side by side, unaided except by their kith and kin in the great Dominions and by the wide Empires which rest beneath their shield, the British and French peoples have advanced to rescue not only Europe, but mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history. Behind them – behind us – behind the armies and fleets of Britain and France – gather a group of shattered States and bludgeoned races: the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians – upon all of whom the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must; as conquer we shall.
Winston Churchill, ‘Be Ye Men of Valour’, broadcast 19 May 19402
I was very glad that Mr Attlee described my speeches in the war as expressing the will not only of Parliament but of the whole nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless and, as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it … It was a nation and race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.
Sir Winston Churchill on his eightieth birthday, 19543
‘You can’t understand Great Britain when all you know is the island itself’. This resonant banality came from the lips of the German industrialist and philosopher of industry Walter Rathenau addressing the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig.4 It was hardly original. It half plagiarizes the British writer Rudyard Kipling, who asked: ‘what should they know of England who only England know?’ The line comes from his poem ‘The English Flag, 1891’, an attack on the street-bred English, who did not know what the British do abroad, especially in the empire, where Kipling was born. The expression, which became a cliché, has a lot going for it. To understand the United Kingdom (and not just Great Britain, or England) one needs to know its peculiar relations with the rest of the world. This was not, as fans of Kipling might imagine, primarily a question of empire. The United Kingdom’s relations, economic, military and political, with foreigners, mostly Europeans, like Rathenau, were almost always more significant. The United Kingdom was quite exceptional in its openness to the world economy. Its people, ships and factories were spread all over the world; its largest wheat fields and its abattoirs were abroad, and its coal fuelled a whole hemisphere. It was not, in short, self-contained. The story of the United Kingdom was not, for the first half of the twentieth century, a domestic, insular story, nor a merely imperial one.
In 1900 the United Kingdom was (comparatively speaking) cosmopolitan, liberal, free-trading with the rest of Europe and the world and part of a much larger British empire, to a much greater extent than any other comparable part of the world. By 1950 the force of foreign events and the evolution of domestic politics created a novel situation which satisfied neither internationalists nor imperialists. By 1950 the United Kingdom had national borders impermeable in ways they were not in 1900. While the United Kingdom had been part of an empire, it now had an empire, but a much reduced colonial one. It was part of a Commonwealth of Nations, but one which was no longer British. It had been changed, by what happened abroad, more than by the desires of its people.
The new British nation increasingly knew only itself. The character of its politics was different from what had gone before. Now the nation was at the centre of politics, and for the first time one-person-one-vote was achieved. The Labour Party, which transformed the character of the House of Commons in 1945, saw itself as a new sort of national party whose politics were those of the collective, national interest. Politics was now national politics, based on the politics of class, of production and of national social services. Whereas once politicians addressed ‘the nation’ – a term of unclear geographical scope, and in any case referring to a notion of a political community, not all the people – they now spoke of ‘Britain’.
To understand the history of the period 1900–1950 we need to think our way out of national assumptions and enter a world in which the nation as it existed in the third quarter of the century was not yet in existence, nor yet even much argued for. The political story of the United Kingdom can usefully be framed as a contest between two programmes or projects: the liberal, internationalist, free-trading one and the imperial-protectionist one. Both programmes were thwarted by events, by foreigners. Imperialism was probably more visible than liberalism. But the third option, nationalism, is practically invisible, and insofar as it is seen, it is as a feature of the Second World War. This trio of positions may be compared with the standard implicit story which is that liberalism, perhaps liberal-imperialism, was superseded by a weak socialism or social democracy in the war or after 1945.
FREE TRADE
Whether measured by stocks or flows, the United Kingdom in 1900 was a place of plenty. The great fluxes of modernity – materials, people, information – passed through it as nowhere else, in unprecedented density. The United Kingdom was the largest importer as well as the largest exporter in the world. Trade followed the potentials of capitalist production, not empire. Telegraphic traffic with the United States was much greater than that to British Africa; tremendous tonnages of British coal flowed into the Baltic, but not the Caribbean.
It was the only major free-trading economy on earth, the most exposed and integrated into the trade of the world. Anything could be imported into the United Kingdom free of duty, excepting those applied on such things as tobacco, alcohol, sugar, tea, hydrocarbon oils, for the purpose of raising revenue and which were applied (many only in principle) to domestic production too. Indeed, indirect taxes, including the internal excise and the external custom duties, accounted for nearly half of state revenue before the Great War. All other countries of any size were defined by economic borders which protected domestic industrial and agricultural producers. In the first half of the twentieth century the United Kingdom imported about half its food and, as a consequence, had the lowest agricultural population of any major nation. It was easily the most urbanized and industrial, which it could not have been had it needed to grow its own food. There was nowhere else like it. To the policy of free imports much of the success and wealth of the United Kingdom was attributed.
The United Kingdom was rich, and in a poor world stood out as such. The territory of the United Kingdom had the highest average income per head of any European national area. It was exceeded only by that of the United States, and was comparable to that of the main white British dominions, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Germany and France, while rich by the standards of most of Europe, were poorer. That comparative wealth was central to understanding its politics, the nature of its armed forces, the power of its business class and much else. Indeed, contrary to what might be inferred from a generation of declinist histories, the United Kingdom would stay without question the richest large economic area of Europe into the 1960s.
Free traders pointed out repeatedly that most of the United Kingdom’s trade was with countries outside the empire, not least in Europe. Most imports of meat, wheat, sugar, fruit, came from ‘foreign countries’ rather than ‘British countries’. For most raw materials, the empire was not very important at all – cotton came largely from the southern USA, while bulky imports, such as iron ore and timber, came mainly from Europe and its immediate environs.
Free trade was a major ideological and moral cause, not merely because it argued for laissez-faire economics. It was often anti-imperialist and anti-militaristic, and called for a genuine internationalism, and was most certainly hostile to nationalism.5 For the free trader, nation did not compete with nation. It made no sense to talk of British trade – only individuals and firms traded with each other. In this scheme of things there was no reason to favour one trader over another – the exporter over the importer, or the producer over the consumer, and in a significant gendering of this argument, of the male producer over the female housewife consumer. The ‘English,’ said H. G. Wells, were a ‘world people’.6
Free traders objected to their very core to the new imperial/national project associated with the Conservative Party. From the beginning of the century this called for a new Great Policy, as it was known, for protection of the national economy and preferential trade within the empire. It meant differentiating between British and non-British territories, including the ‘informal empire’ (fully foreign countries such as Argentina, where British capital and political influence were important), to create an imperial economic block. It was meant to effect a change in direction of trade, to loosen economic bonds with the people of the world and to promote both the national and the imperial economy. These protectionist-imperialists promoted the view, influentially so, that the United Kingdom depended on empire for raw materials and food, when their argument was that it should, not that it did. The free traders responded by arguing that where states tried to make political borders correspond to economic borders they impoverished and degraded themselves. Imperial Germany, which did so, was seen by free traders not only as nationalistic and militaristic, but as a place where wages were low, bread was brown, and meat came from horses and dogs.7 The Conservative campaign failed. The free-trading Liberal Party won the election of 1906, fought on this issue, with a huge majority. Under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Herbert Asquith the New Liberalism set in train the development of the welfare state, and faced down the still powerful House of Lords in order to pass the People’s Budget which funded it. That is the usual story, but as we shall see, it misses out much.
The 1906 election was not the end of the matter with respect to free trade. The Great War led to measures which free-trading liberals regarded with distaste. The wartime coalition, formed in 1915, when Conservatives joined the existing Liberal government, introduced what some liberals regarded as Prussian measures: conscription and some economic nationalism. In September 1915, the Liberal chancellor of the exchequer, Reginald McKenna, introduced a 33⅓ per cent levy on luxury imports in order to fund the war effort. It fell on such things as motor cars (but not commercial vehicles), musical instruments and gramophone records. When the wartime coalition went to the polls in 1918, it noted that ‘One of the lessons which has been most clearly taught us by the war is the danger to the nation of being dependent upon other countries for vital supplies on which the life of the nation may depend.’ Thus they proposed that ‘key industries’ should be supported, and dumping controlled. Imperial preferences would be given.8 The non-coalition Liberals, and the new Labour Party, in its first outing as a major party, remained loyal to free trade: ‘Labour is firm against tariffs and for Free Trade,’ they said, and looked to new international labour legislation to make ‘sweating impossible’.9
The coalition won the election and introduced many protectionist measures with imperial preferences. It continued the McKenna duties and introduced the Safeguarding of Industry Act, 1921. The duties on manufactured goods under the act did not affect empire, which did not export such goods. Where imperial preference mattered was in a 1919 measure which granted imperial preference on revenue duties on sugar, dried fruit and tobacco.
Table 1.1: The United Kingdom’s most important suppliers and export markets, 1928
The story of interwar politics can usefully be understood as, in part, the politics of free trade versus protection. David Lloyd George was deposed in 1922, to be succeeded by Andrew Bonar Law of the Conservatives. He was succeeded by another Conservative, Stanley Baldwin, who called an election in an attempt to get a popular endorsement for protection. He failed to get a majority, and the result was the short-lived first minority Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald, which was staunchly free trading. It phased out McKenna duties and cut the revenue duties. The Labour Party, which from 1922 had around 30 per cent of the popular vote, was deeply committed to free trade, as openly and proudly so as the Liberals. It also wanted in principle to abolish all custom and excise duties, all the indirect taxes. The Labour government did not last long, and Baldwin was returned with a majority in the 1924 general election, following moderately protectionist policies. In 1929 the Conservatives stood on a more limited protectionist programme and again failed to get a majority. The new minority Labour Party which came into office that year was as committed to free trade as it was to financial orthodoxy and the continued search for a new international order. Their policy to deal with the Great Depression which enveloped the world from 1929 was to maintain the pound fixed to the value of gold, to retain free trade and to stimulate world trade and reduce British prices to increase British exports. That policy collapsed with MacDonald deserting Labour to form a National government with the Conservatives in 1931, which went to the country within a few months and got a huge mandate for protection. The National government, now with extraordinary public support, would continue in office to 1940. Its three prime ministers, Ramsay MacDonald (1931–5), Stanley Baldwin (1935–7) and Neville Chamberlain (1937–40) would all later acquire reputations for inaction in the face of poverty and unemployment at home and the rise of the dictators abroad. Yet they did pursue what they saw as a very positive new approach – protection.
The transition to protection was ideologically dramatic. Liberals were, of course, deeply opposed, but so was Labour. The left was almost universally free trading and internationalist. Even mildly protectionist voices, such as the leader of the largest trade union, Ernest Bevin, found their propositions rejected. In a speech to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 1930 he stated: ‘The object of the world federation would be, from our point of view, to create an easy access to the raw materials of this planet.’ But Bevin went on to say that it might be necessary and useful to create a ‘Commonwealth bloc’, given that either an Atlantic or a European bloc was not practical, and empire development was a good thing even if he was not an imperialist. There was opposition, however – on the left tariffs were seen as a capitalist policy; an empire bloc was artificial since there was no such economic unit; what it really meant was greater colonial exploitation. Others worried about dividing the world into antagonistic blocs – that led to war. It would bring ruin to the export of coal, practically none of which went to the empire. Ernest Bevin could only say in response that he was not endorsing empire free trade but wanted a licence to face realities. The TUC left Bevin’s option open.10
One dissenter from free trade was a Labour MP who had crossed the floor of the House of Commons from the Conservatives. The dashing Sir Oswald Mosley, a hereditary knight and a former Royal Flying Corps pilot, resigned from the government in 1930 to advance a very different policy. In the short term he wanted to deal with unemployment, then rising very fast, with early retirement, later school leaving and public works. What was most interesting was his plan for a much more national economy. He claimed that it was no longer possible to export as much as before, and that the country should export only enough to get essential food and raw materials. He was against exporting in order to invest abroad on a huge scale, as was the case before 1914, or to import luxuries.11 In his view imports needed controlling. Tariffs were not enough: import control boards were needed to promote domestic agriculture and other industries.12 He quickly moved from this nationalist position to a more imperialist version. But the Labour left, while keen on the planned trade he called for, could not stomach the imperialism, so he dropped it.13 Mosley’s ‘New Labour Group’ opposed the expenditure cuts the government made in 1931 and six members resigned to form the protectionist New Party. It failed miserably in the 1931 general election and would turn into the radically nationalist British Union of Fascists. The party articulated the thesis that the City of London had as its main business investment overseas, which brought a return in the form of imports into the United Kingdom and which therefore undermined the economic nation.14 This was to become the standard thesis of economic nationalists of the left, too, but only later, as we shall see in Chapter 6. For the moment it is important to note that the nationalism of Mosley’s position is insufficiently recognized, just as the significance of protection was not sufficiently recognized by historians writing after the economy became supposedly Keynesian.
Protection versus free trade was a central element in the 1931 general election. This is not very obvious because the usual framing of the election is as a contest between something like Keynesian reflation and financial orthodoxy, with Labour and Lloyd George on one side, and the recently created National government on the other. But the challenge to orthodoxy came not from Keynesian reflationists but from protection. And that challenge came not from outsiders, but from the Conservative Party itself.
The National government was formed in the summer of 1931 under the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, to effect the policy of cuts in expenditure. It was a coalition which the Conservative Party dominated, but also had a handful of MPs elected for Labour, and Liberals. This government was forced to take sterling off the gold standard, allowing it to devalue. The various parties in the National government stood in a general election soon after, but each on their own manifesto. The dominant Conservatives called for ‘Empire Economic Unity’, which meant tariffs, and quotas for cereals. Indeed, the need for protection was practically the only point their manifesto made. Their minor partners, MacDonald’s National Labour and the Liberal Nationals, were confused on this key issue. The free-trading Liberals also supported the National government. The main opposition – the Labour Party and the Lloyd George Independent Liberals – were, however, firmly in favour of free trade. Labour was categorical:
The Labour Party has no confidence in any attempt to bolster up a bankrupt Capitalism by a system of tariffs. Tariffs would artificially increase the cost of living. They would enrich private interests at the expense of the Nation. They would prejudice the prospect of international co-operation … In the face of the millions unemployed in high-tariff America and Germany, they are clearly no cure for unemployment. They would permanently injure our shipping and export trades and conceal our need for greater efficiency in industrial organisation.15
The winners were the Conservatives and protection.16 In November 1931 the newly elected government pushed through immediate tariffs on the pretext of preventing dumping. In February 1932 the Import Duties Act was passed (over which members of the cabinet were allowed to differ in public, an innovation not to be repeated until the 1975 Common Market referendum). The act was the work of the protectionist chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, son of the original Edwardian advocate of the measure. Conservatism and imperialism and nationalism were in, and this represented an extraordinary change of direction.17 National Labour’s Philip Snowden, who had been the ultra-orthodox Labour chancellor 1929–31 now resigned from the government with two Liberals, the home secretary, Sir Herbert Samuel, and Archibald Sinclair, and a couple of junior ministers, because they still believed in free trade, and did not like the imperialist Ottawa agreement. The government now had only three National Labour ministers, and the only Liberals in the coalition were Sir John Simon’s Liberal Nationals, who for decades would be stronger in parliament than the Liberals who stayed out of or left the National government.18
Thereafter opinions shifted in favour of protection. The liberal economist Maynard Keynes now waxed lyrical about the benefits of national self-sufficiency.19 Amongst his heretical thoughts were that tariffs on cars had created a British car industry; that steel could be modernized behind tariffs; that domestic agriculture was a good thing; that tariffs could indeed save jobs; and that the quality of jobs mattered. As he put it: ‘Free traders, fortified into presumption by the essential truths – one might say truisms – of their cause, have greatly overvalued the social advantage of mere market cheapness, and have attributed excellences which do not exist to the mere operation of the methods of laissez-faire.’20 The Labour Party too shifted its position in favour of protection, slowly and silently. Thus it was that by the late 1940s both major parties, which now dominated politics, were protectionist, a change of great significance, but usually invisible precisely because it ceased to be a matter of contention. If the politics of free trade was very visible and public, the politics of protection became private and complicated, but no less important for that.
At first the British tariff was restricted to 10 per cent on manufactures, from which empire producers (of which there were few) were entirely exempted. Following the 1932 Ottawa conference on imperial trade, tariffs were raised and extended, granting further imperial preference.21 However, the unwillingness of British imperial territories to open their own markets to national British production meant that empire free trade remained a pipe dream. For the policy of the protectionists, in all parts of the British empire, was nation first, empire second, foreigners third. And that was the rub – it was never empire first. Nationalism trumped imperialism, all over the empire.
Within the empire there were struggles over imposing tariffs against British goods. The case of India is especially revealing and important. A minimal amount of self-government was granted to India in 1919 over the objections of ‘die-hard’ imperialists. India could set its own tariff; in 1931 it raised it, for British goods, from 11 per cent to 25 per cent. A higher Indian tariff applied to non-British goods. The British cotton industry launched a campaign to get the British government to intervene to lower Indian tariffs, which it would not, and to stop the process of giving even greater powers to Indians through the Government of India Bill, proposed in 1934. This became a highly sensitive issue in Lancashire, which voted Conservative, where the cotton industry was concentrated. In late 1934 and early 1935 Sir Oswald Mosley (whose family had been lords of the manor in Manchester), now at the head of the British Union of Fascists, campaigned on the policy of removing the Indian tariff against British cottons, claiming that, with other restrictions, this would create 65,000 jobs in Lancashire.22 His was a policy of making India an open market, but only to British goods.
In this case the wider politics of British India trumped the interests of Tory voters in Lancashire. The Conservatives were able to manage not only the die-hard opposition to the Government of India Bill, among whose partisans was Winston Churchill, but also the industrial interests of Lancashire.23 In fact the British government intervened secretly to sustain the interest of Lancashire, at least marginally. The Japanese had pressured the government of India to reduce tariffs, with a threat to reduce Japanese purchases of Indian raw cotton. London promised to buy any cotton the Japanese would not, stiffening the resolve of the Indian government.24 Furthermore, the Indian tariff came down a bit for British goods, from 25 to 20 per cent in 1936. The direction of travel was clear, however. British textiles, for which the Indian market had been pre-eminent before 1914, would lose out, and the government of India would become ever more Indian.
The idea of the imperial economy was also challenged from outside the empire. During the Second World War the heavily protected United States of America re-entered the world economy through its own overseas military operations. As part of the price for lend-lease of arms and materials to the United Kingdom the United States exacted a promise from the British government that it would give up imperial preference in the future. But it lived on.
In the 1940s and 1950s British trade was more imperial than it had ever been. This was not primarily a matter of choice. Imperial trade was a necessity, as the war broke what were central trading relations with Europe, and they took time to restore, not least given the poverty of the war-racked economies of the continent. The Labour Party, which came into office in 1945, presided over a protectionist, state-controlled economy, with a strong imperial focus. Even in 1950 the Conservative Party was calling for an Imperial Economic Conference.25 Furthermore, imperial preference was supported by both the imperialist right and the left as a shield against the USA.26 Economic imperialism affected even the Communist Party. Its leader called for mutual economic assistance at the level of the old empire; like an interwar imperialist he demanded: ‘Our locomotives for wool; our coal for cotton; our textiles for wheat …’ He claimed, unconvincingly, that these policies were quite unlike those of Lord Beaverbrook.27
EMPIRE
Thinking about imperialism from the perspective of the economy has important benefits. First it highlights the significance of opposition to imperialism in the United Kingdom. Secondly it makes clear that the British economy was at its most imperially oriented (though trade was overwhelmingly between the by then independent dominions and the UK) in the 1940s and 1950s, and not in the Edwardian years, as can too easily be assumed. Thirdly it helps underscore the point that imperialism was in a crucial respect not an orthodoxy but a challenge to it. It was also always a plan, a project, more than a reality.28 As we have seen the idea of one imperial economy was central to Conservative economic politics. Empire was central to party education, and to the writing and thinking of ideologues like the popular historian Arthur Bryant. The term ‘empire’ figured repeatedly in the party manifestos of the interwar years – imperial preference, imperial defence, imperial unity, imperial development being constant themes (Labour ignored empire, and stressed national development and national ownership and in the 1930s national planning). Whether or not empire was important to the public is an open and debated question, whether it was important to the political elite is not.
The reality of British imperialism and the empire was that it was a complex multi-faceted thing, which it is difficult to describe. Thus, while the British empire was regarded by much of the British elite as a good thing, imperialism was not. The British empire, was not imperialistic in the way other empires were or had been, for example the Spanish empire. Even the king-emperor denied the empire was imperialist. Speaking by radio on Empire Day 1940 to his people at home and overseas, he noted: ‘There is a word our enemies use against us – Imperialism. By it they mean the spirit of domination and the lust of conquest. We free peoples of the Empire cast that word back in their teeth. It is they who have these evil aspirations.’ This was not an idiosyncratic royal opinion, but the official view. Pro-imperial propaganda insisted on the benign and different nature of British imperialism, and was conscious of anti-imperial sentiment.
The fact that an Empire Day existed might suggest that there was an official imperialism. Yet the story of Empire Day itself points to its limits. It came about through private initiative from 1904. Some schools began to celebrate it, and it gained the support of local authorities and worthies, though its supporters lamented that it was more enthusiastically taken up overseas than at home. During 1916 Lords Milner and Meath got some official recognition for it, in that government buildings would fly the flag on the day, but they had to insist that Empire Day was not a manifestation of militarism and jingoism, or even imperialism. They claimed it stood for one king, one flag, one fleet, one empire; that it was non-party, non-sectarian, non-aggressive, non-racial. While this was hardly a frank account of British imperialism in which systematic racial exclusiveness and segregation was routine, it was significant that this is what was claimed.
The British empire was unique in scale and nature, even if having an empire was not uniquely British. It is not well described by its most common representation – the map covered in pink. For it was not the land mass of the empire that mattered, or that the sun never set on it, but its great wealth and vast population. The wealth was concentrated in the temperate territories of white British settlement, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which were as rich per head as the United Kingdom. These territories came to be known, from the Edwardian years, with South Africa, as the dominions, and later collectively with the United Kingdom, as the British Commonwealth of Nations. They were intimately connected to the United Kingdom as suppliers of certain foods. If the wealth and trade was concentrated in the dominions, the population of the empire was concentrated in desperately poor India, which had a population of 300 and more million souls, far more than any colonial territory of any other power (the closest was the Dutch East Indies with around 40 million). Every other territory was below 10 million in population. India accounted for four-fifths of the British empire. Only China had a larger population.
Just as there was never one empire economically, so there was never one administratively. The United Kingdom was governed by a complex set of departments of state, some of which covered the whole empire, others the United Kingdom only, and others only parts, like Ireland, or England and Wales. Outside the United Kingdom parts of the empire were administered by different Whitehall departments. There was an India Office and Colonial Office and from 1925 a separate Dominions Office (dealing with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa), encapsulating the different relations with white dominions, India, and the colonies. The colonies were of differing types. There were also a whole series of protectorates, mandated territories (for example Palestine), as well as places clearly in the British sphere of influence such as Egypt, Iraq and Persia. There were at least four civil services manned by UK officials – the Home, Diplomatic, Indian and Colonial services; and two big armies, the British, and the Indian. The dominions, the economic core of empire, did not have London-recruited or directed civil services or armed forces. The empire was never one thing.
Yet there was, in the Edwardian years and later, a tendency to think of the empire (defined in different ways) as one body politic, with its capital in London, its second city in Glasgow. In this picture, the United Kingdom was part of the empire, not something which had an external empire. Thus the Committee of Imperial Defence, an Edwardian development, was the key British defence policy committee, the chief of the imperial general staff the professional head of the British army. During both world wars elements at least of an imperial war cabinet were established. The monarch was notionally at the head of one united empire. The parliament at Westminster was also known informally as the ‘imperial parliament’ (usually in a nineteenth-century usage, as the parliament which covered the whole United Kingdom, as it did from 1801). It was also imperial in the sense that it passed legislation covering subordinate governments and legislatures, among them the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, 1900, the Government of Ireland Acts, of 1914 and 1920, Irish Free State (Constitution) Act, 1922, and the Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935. The powers over the dominions (that is Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) were effectively abolished in 1926, and in statute in 1931, with the creation of the British Commonwealth of Nations, of independent dominions, represented to each other by high commissioners (ambassadors in all but name). It is telling that Scottish nationalists of the interwar years argued not for independence from the United Kingdom or the empire, but rather that the whole empire be recognized as Anglo-Scottish: it had the union of two nations at its heart – Britain was Anglo-Scotland, not England writ large (as the histories nearly always had it).29
Furthermore, in some respects the empire did act as one body, and was certainly presented as doing so. The whole British empire went to war in 1914. The war was presented as one fought by the empire as a whole, with for example the numbers enlisted given as those for the whole empire, sometimes divided into white (7 million) and other races (1.5 million). An imperial war cabinet was formed, with representatives from the dominions. The burial places of service personnel were in the custody of the Imperial War Graves Commission, created in 1917 by Fabian Ware, a pre-war pro-conscription imperialist, editor of the Tory Morning Post. An Imperial War Museum was created also in 1917 and also as a memorial to the Great War. The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, commemorated the ‘many multitudes’ who gave ‘life itself for God, for King and Country, for Loved Ones, Home and Empire, for the Sacred Cause of Justice and the Freedom of the World’.
The identification with empire was far from complete. Only in Great Britain, and not in Ireland or the rest of the empire, was conscription successfully imposed. British soldiers did not, to judge from most war memorials, die for ‘King and Empire’. They died, in most cases, for ‘King and Country’, in which there is a studied and necessary ambiguity in ‘country’. They died for a country with no name. Many memorials invoked, like the Westminster Abbey one, notions of fighting for freedom, and for honour.30 All these complexities are encapsulated in the prominent monument erected next to the National Portrait Gallery to commemorate the execution of Edith Cavell, the Florence Nightingale of Belgian nursing, who had long lived in Brussels. She was shot by the Germans in 1915 for aiding the escape of Allied soldiers from occupied Belgium. The biggest letters are reserved for the word ‘HUMANITY’, but above them we find ‘King and Country’. Added later after pressure from women’s organizations supported by the Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald were the words ‘Patriotism is not enough’.
The Second World War was at its beginning also a war presented as one in which the empire fought as a whole. After the fall of France in June 1940 if anything was alone it was the entire empire, not the ‘island nation’. No one in authority could or would have said ‘Britain stood alone’ – that was a phrase from post-war nationalist history books. Indeed, ‘alone’ was a rarely used term – the standard image was that of a fortress or citadel, a forward base of an empire, and/or the forces of freedom. The empire had allies, even in 1940–41. The mood was, and would become even more, internationalist than imperialist. There would be no imperial war cabinet this time. From early 1942 the war was fought by the ‘United Nations’. There was still, however, a measure of imperial accounting, as when the United Kingdom government noted that four-fifths of the arms in use by the ‘British Commonwealth and Empire’ came from within, and only one-fifth from the USA.31 Furthermore, across many battlefields the world over, the empire had fought as one, and been presented as doing this.
Hardly surprisingly, then, there was imperial feeling after the war, not least in connection to the recent war. When Princess Elizabeth addressed the nations of the empire from South Africa on her twenty-first birthday in 1947, she spoke in terms of empire not nation. It was the ‘British family of nations’, she said, which had the ‘high honour of standing alone, seven years ago, in defence of the liberty of the world’; the ‘British Empire has saved the world first, and has now to save itself after the battle is won’. There the future queen, still on the throne today, declared: ‘My whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.’32 As we shall see, by the time she was crowned in 1953, the implied unitary empire had already gone.
Subjects of the British crown were in principle equally free and could move freely from one imperial territory to another. This was certainly true of white (‘European’) subjects, but not in general. Systematic racial discrimination was central to the British empire and it was codified in the border controls of, for example, ‘White Australia’, which in its essentially racist policies did not discriminate between empire and non-empire. For many official positions throughout the empire one had to be ‘of European descent’ as well as being a British subject. In different forms there were essentially racial administrative distinctions made. The empire, in so far as it was a project, was also a racial project, with white rule over subordinate and carefully segregated peoples. A strict racial ordering determined everything from voting rights to housing to job segregation. The Indian railway colony, African mines and Caribbean plantations operated not merely with whites at the top and locals at the bottom, but with intermediate racial and economic groupings, like the Anglo-Indians in India, or the Indians in the Caribbean and Africa.
Quite overt discrimination applied to local ‘natives’ all over the empire, not just South Africa. Even when in the United Kingdom itself subjects of the crown faced to different treatment based on colour. There were small but well-known non-white communities within the United Kingdom. They were concentrated in port cities and associated with seafaring. Around 120–170,000 British seamen were employed on British ships, along with 10–20,000 foreigners and 50,000 lascars.33 The Indian lascars were the main group of non-white mariners but they were joined by Chinese or African ship-board workers. They lived in specific areas close to the docks, like the communities in Limehouse, and Bute town in Cardiff. Their position was precarious. They could be and were thrown out of the country, irrespective of marriage to locals. The Second World War saw more arrive, notably from the West Indies, to serve in the forces, and in industry.34
When the troopship Empire Windrush (a requisitioned German passenger ship, hence the prefix Empire which was given to all government-owned vessels) landed in Tilbury in 1948, carrying black British subjects from the Caribbean, it attracted negative attention, and has become a symbolic starting point for immigration. Yet the Empire Windrush was far from the first ship to bring West Indians to the United Kingdom, as is clear from the fact that many of the men on it were returning to it. Indeed, one-third were either in the Royal Air Force or returning to re-enlist (many had served as mechanics during the war, and some as aircrew). For many West Indians arriving in the United Kingdom in the 1940s and 1950s the shock was not the imperialism of the British, but the lack of it – these British failed to recognize the West Indians as fellow, equal, subjects of the empire, as the official version of empire required. They found that race and nation trumped empire. The West Indians, the Chinese and the Africans were in fact outnumbered by new immigrants from Europe.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE NATION
As we have seen there was a powerful imperial dimension to the British war effort in the Second World War, though it receded rather quickly. The empire which entered into the Second World War suffered a great defeat in the east in 1942. The consequent ramping up of the liberation struggle in India led to India following Ireland (a case to be discussed later) out of the empire in 1947. The dominions became in effect independent members of the ‘United Nations’ rather than being fully constituent parts of the British empire. They developed a more national and a more-US-focused orientation. This happened to the United Kingdom also. For when the war was accounted at its end, the statistical tables, the listing of the dead, were not as they had been after the Great War tabulated for a British empire, but rather for the United Kingdom alone. The official histories too, would focus on the United Kingdom, rather than the units which actually organized and fought the war. From 1945 it was said that ‘Britain’ had been alone during 1940–41, and it would soon be said that a new nation had been forged in the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. Churchill deployed the ‘island nation’ rhetoric in 1945 not in 1940.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland of the late 1940s can usefully be seen as one of the new nations which arose from the dissolution of the one empire. The war came to be written about in national terms, as a nation that looked inwards, and changed itself internally. From the 1960s ‘alone’ was regularly used in histories to describe ‘Britain’ in 1940–41. The national ‘alone’ was not a myth of 1940, but a post-war creation, part of a general process of nationalizing the history of the war. It was indeed the central national myth, laden with possibilities and meaning well beyond its immediate reach. It came to be linked, again, long after the war, with the idea that a new nation, and a new politics, was born, in what became, from 1940, a ‘people’s war’. In this later account, the war saw many social and economic advances. Labour ran the home front, Churchill the war front, and set in motion what would become the post-war welfare state. In this national framing the story of empire is the story of the loss of imperial territory, through a process of decolonization. What is missing is the sense of parallel emergence out of empire – for the United Kingdom too was in important ideological and constitutional senses a part of empire, not merely the owner of an empire. This was a process invisible in standard historical accounts.
A national United Kingdom arose after 1945. This new nationalism was somewhere between a United Kingdom and a Great Britain nationalism – for this was a period in which Northern Ireland had Home Rule, and a prime minister of its own. Still, it is notable that Northern Ireland, Unionist dominated, enacted its own legislation over vast areas of concern, but generally followed Westminster, even in the case of the socialist National Health Service, because the Union came first. Furthermore, the whole United Kingdom formed a self-consciously national economy. The economy was seen in very nationalistic terms – it was a national economy which was directed and controlled, forced and exhorted to export, and to restrict imports, irrespective of where they went to or whether they came from ‘British countries’. Economic propaganda did not distinguish between exports to empire and foreign markets. That the Labour Party was elected with a distinctly nationalist but non-imperial orientation was important here. Labour promised in 1945 to create a ‘Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain’ (thus excluding Northern Ireland) and did not bring itself to use the term ‘empire’, and made only the most cursory mention of the ‘British Commonwealth’ and ‘Colonial Dependencies’; on the question of India, it advocated only the ‘advancement of India to responsible self-government’. It was not accidental that its main policy was called ‘nationalization’.
The United Kingdom also became a separate body from the empire in that it got its own nationality. Under the British Nationality Act 1948, a new national-imperial person was created, the Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies. This was a ‘common citizenship’, as propaganda insisted.35 The colonies, looked after by the Colonial Office, were in the Caribbean, Africa and the Far East (numbering around 60 million people). These imperial citizens were now distinguished from another new and much larger category: the Citizens of the Independent Commonwealth (dealt with by the Commonwealth Relations Office, formed in 1947). The need for the act arose because Canadians wanted to have their own nationality, and through it British nationality (rather than the other way around). The United Kingdom, too, had to define its nationality in an analogous way. The act gave citizens of the United Kingdom and colonies the same rights of entry as the Citizens of the Independent Commonwealth. Indeed, the main concern was to give free access to citizens of the white dominions, whose ranks were once again being filled by encouraged emigration from the United Kingdom. Yet it created a distinctively different nationality for the members of the Commonwealth, distinct from that of the United Kingdom.
This new British nation was much more welcoming to aliens than it was to its own non-white overseas citizens. In this it reflected a long history of openness to Europe. Edwardian London was not as cosmopolitan as New York, but it was cosmopolitan rather than imperial in its composition. Although from 1905 the United Kingdom restricted the immigration of aliens, they could and did come in, and they were often naturalized too. The Irish, even after full independence, were never treated as aliens. But there were many aliens. There were Germans and Italians, working at many levels and in many industries; there were ‘Russians’, usually Jews from Poland (until 1916 in the Russian empire), concentrated in the east end of London. In the Great War there were thousands of Belgian refugees. During the Second World War the country had large numbers of Poles and Czechs, Norwegians and Dutchmen, soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians. After the war more than 100,000 Poles were allowed to remain.36 A recruitment drive among refugees in Europe brought in over 345,000 workers, mainly men.37 By 1950 the United Kingdom had a population of European migrants of well over a million, including the Irish. The Pole, Irish, Ukrainian or Balt, was a more common sight than the non-white imperial citizen; white aliens alone (excluding the Irish) were more numerous and welcome than British blacks.
A new national monarchy appeared, though this was well hidden behind imperial and Commonwealth imagery. When Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901, her son, King Edward VII, was proclaimed ‘By the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India’. His son, King George V, was crowned with the same title, but in 1927 the ‘United Kingdom’ disappeared from it. He was now ‘King of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions beyond the Seas’. His son, George VI, retained this style but had to give up the title of emperor of India (though he was briefly king of India and, for a little longer, king of Pakistan), though the Irish no longer recognized him as king from 1937. From 1949 the Commonwealth of Nations, at Indian insistence, was no longer British. Queen Elizabeth II, who came to the throne in 1952, was to be Queen of the United Kingdom, and separately and distinctly of specific other places too. She was a post-imperial monarch.
This new national United Kingdom did not declare itself a new formation. Indeed there was much left over from the past – from liberalism and internationalism to imperialism – which allowed a story of continuity to be told, as indeed it should be. But the break was real enough even if not advertised in the sort of language that made clear what was going on. One reason was that the very notion of nationalism was very problematic at the heart of the empire.
Yet the signs were there. In 1951 a great national exhibition was opened, called ‘The Festival of Britain’, labelled a ‘Tonic for the Nation’. That focus on nation was new – in the past exhibitions of a comparable scale and scope had been imperial and not national. 1938 saw a vast Empire Exhibition in Glasgow. In 1924–5 there was a British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in London, which included a new Empire Stadium. This stadium was known as such at least into the 1960s, though it is now remembered as the old Wembley Stadium.38 But just as for the British there could never be any such thing as British imperialism (as opposed to the British empire), so there could be no such notion as British nationalism (as opposed to the nation). Nationalism was in British understanding an ideology which threatened the empire, and indeed the nation.
IRELAND
Ireland was the first nation to emerge out of the British empire in the twentieth century. Into the early twentieth century the majority of the Irish people were represented at Westminster by the Nationalist Party. Indeed, ‘nationalism’ and the ‘national’ were from this moment terms particularly associated with the opponents of empire, with anti-British sentiment. Among them were the Indian National Congress (1885 – better known as the Congress Party), the African National Congress (originally 1912) and many more. This was the context in which British nationalism would make little sense to most British people, though Irish, Scottish, Indian and African did. Nationalism in British parlance was the doctrine which encapsulated the dubious claims of natives, whether Indian, African, Irish, Scottish, Welsh (and only sometimes of allies). Indeed British imperialism paraded itself as anti-nationalist. As Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the Indian nationalists, put it in the 1930s: ‘[British] Liberals and pacifists and even so-called socialists … chide us for our narrow nationalism, and incidentally suggest to us that the way to a fuller national life is through the “British Commonwealth of Nations”.’39 In this view the empire prefigured an interdependent liberal association of nations; its enemy was the nationalism of others, and the nationalisms within it. On top of this, nationalism was what dangerous continental enemies espoused. Nationalism was, in the official British liberal view, what brought disaster to Europe twice over. Prussians and Nazis were nationalists; to be British was to be anti-nationalist. It was a matter of pride that the British did not go in for the displays of nationalism or imperialism newer, vulgar, nations needed. British stamps and coins had the figure of the sovereign but needed no further identification. British schoolchildren did not salute a flag, or recite patriotic poems.
The Irish Nationalist Party, for decades the third party in the House of Commons, wanted what was called Home Rule for the whole of Ireland, within the United Kingdom. In this they were supported by Liberal governments, who passed Home Rule Bills which were rejected by the House of Lords, and a sizeable majority of the political class. ‘One Law, one Land, one Throne’ was, as in Rudyard Kipling’s notorious anti-papist and anti-Irish poem of 1912, a slogan of the Unionism which resisted the very idea of Home Rule. It was not until 1914, after the powers of the House of Lords had been trimmed, and when the Liberal Party was dependent on the support of the Nationalists in the House of Commons, that the Home Rule Act was passed. The leader of the Conservative Party and senior army officers openly stated they would not accept the verdict of the imperial parliament. This was the other great issue of Edwardian politics – the constitution – meaning the place of Ireland in the United Kingdom, the House of Lords in parliament and the established churches. This was, according to the brilliant young journalist George Dangerfield (writing in the 1930s), one of the three extra-parliamentary rebellions which destroyed British liberalism. This ruling-class rebellion is much less remembered than those by workers and women.
The war intervened to delay the act, and the Unionist rebellion, together with those of women and workers. Instead there was a doomed small nationalist uprising in Dublin in 1916. By 1918 things had changed. An attempt to impose conscription on Ireland in 1918 (a policy earlier controversial even in Great Britain) led to a transformation of the situation. Conscription and nationhood went together – to impose it on Ireland was a powerful Unionist statement. The result was an electoral victory in the 1918 general election by a new party, Sinn Féin, which in one jump became the third-largest party in the parliament at Westminster. The MPs refused to take their seats. They declared independence and there followed a brutal war of repression by the British government. It ended with the creation of the Irish Free State, which remained technically within the empire. It rejected in time all the features even of association with the empire – dominion status and the role of the king. ‘Republicanism’, like nationalism, thus became a concept which was for many anti-British. Ireland imposed tariffs in 1932 and there was a damaging trade war with the United Kingdom between 1932 and 1938, where tariffs were applied to food and to coal. Even so close to home, Commonwealth free trade was a non-starter.
One part of Ireland, named Northern Ireland, remained within the United Kingdom, though paradoxically it got Home Rule, even though the Protestants of the North were the great opponents of the idea. The first devolution went to those who did not want it. A new parliament, and a new state, was set up, under the control of the Unionists, close allies of the Conservative and Unionist Party and the Scottish Unionists.
Ireland points to the importance not just of territory and empire in the politics of the early twentieth century but also, of course, of religion. The United Kingdom was uniquely divided in terms of its Christian religious convictions, rituals and beliefs. Its religious make-up was more complex than straightforwardly bi-confessional Germany, let alone obviously Catholic or Protestant nations.
The British empire organized its affairs as a self-consciously Christian body, with a Protestant monarch at its head. There were a number of official, established churches. The status of these churches was central to politics. The Church of Ireland (Anglican) was disestablished by an act of 1869, hardly surprisingly, since it was not the church of the majority. The Church in Wales was Anglican but was disestablished by Act of 1914 as the result of objections to a national Anglican church, when so many Welsh people were non-conformists. It was a significant constitutional issue for the Tory Party. There was a non-established Anglican church in Scotland, the Scottish Episcopal Church, alongside the official Church of Scotland, which was not Anglican. Then there was the Roman Catholic Church, dominant in Ireland, and important wherever the Irish settled. Thus it was that Liverpool and Glasgow had distinctly Catholic football teams, Everton and Celtic, and a Labour vote which was strongly Catholic too.
The relations of politics and religion were complex – Unionists were closely associated with the Protestant established church. Much of the Tory working-class vote was a Protestant vote, in many places a more specifically Anglican one. On the other hand the more non-conformist Liberal Party attracted Catholics because of its position on Ireland, as did Labour. British socialism was suffused with Christianity (for example in the case of Stafford Cripps) to an extent unthinkable in Catholic Europe. British anti-clericalism has usually been Christian. Catholicism was associated not with order and authority but with rebellion and subversion. The supposed threat of Papism and indeed sometimes mere Anglicanism affected politics. For example, religious issues were central to the politics of education in the Edwardian years – the key issue around the 1902 Education Act was ‘religion on the rates’, ‘rates’ being local property taxes. The Liberals opposed it, forced by its non-conformist grass roots. The last significant religious confrontation in the House of Commons came when it rejected revisions to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in 1927 and 1928 in a notable revolt by non-conformists and evangelical Anglicans against what they saw as papist modifications. Generally speaking, the dominant Anglicanism was moderate and there were no legal bars to divorce or contraception, for example. Religious division relaxed, if not religious feeling. Particularly notable in this respect was the public persona of the Conservative leader and prime minister Stanley Baldwin. Baldwin was clearly Protestant, indeed Anglican, but obviously open to the non-conformist churches – there was in Baldwin a clear notion of a united Christian, though Protestant, front against atheistic ideologies, socialism and more generally against ‘materialism’. For Baldwin, divine providence was at work in the United Kingdom and in the empire.40 Neville Chamberlain retained his family’s Unitarianism.
Indeed, it was not only religious controversy which waned. By the 1930s the great polemics around free trade and protection, empire, the House of Lords and Ireland had also all moderated very considerably, and were certainly no longer directly linked to party conflict. Protection and imperial preference were now accepted, and religious toleration was established in what was and remained a clearly Christian nation. Yet there was to be an important though hidden transformation, as class became the central divide in politics, politics which was now national rather than imperial. The politics of free trade, empire, protection, the constitution, religion were the politics of elites, elites which controlled state and society. The shift to a politics of the nation coincided with a dramatic change in political life – the emergence of a class-based party designed to put workers into parliament. Politics and political structure changed together. Just as the subject matter of politics was different from what it would become, so too was the political system.
DEMOCRACY?
The United Kingdom and the empire were governed by an abstraction few had heard of – the crown-in-parliament, an extraordinary combined legislative, judicial and executive power. Much policy and administrative practice went on without much intrusion from the electorate. His Majesty’s government ruled; the servants of the crown worked on His Majesty’s service, as the marking on official letters and telegrams had it. Although the House of Commons proclaimed its sovereignty over all others including the House of Lords, it was not a creative, policy-making force in its own right. It expressed party power, and approved proposals put forward by the state (whose highest officers were drawn from parliament, but the high civil servants were not under parliamentary control). Ministers of the crown proposed; parliament passed.41 Power passed through Westminster, and might get blocked there, but it originated elsewhere. It is telling that the House of Commons was always deeply respectful of the crown and the state. It routinely showed particular respect to members who were also members of the Bar (lawyers) and officers of the armed services. They were not merely ‘Honourable Gentlemen’, or ‘Honourable Ladies’, but were addressed as Honourable and Learned in the case of barristers, and Honourable and Gallant in the case of officers. State culture and political culture were intertwined.
Parliament included the House of Lords, which was easily the least democratic upper house of all the major nations of the world. While there were many upper houses where nobles and noble voters were overrepresented, before 1914 only Austria, Prussia and Japan had legislative Houses of Lords. Not even the Russian empire, or imperial Germany, had one. After 1918 only the United Kingdom and imperial Japan (until 1947) had such a hereditary legislature.
One entered the Lords by birth, by appointment, by election by fellow old Irish or Scottish peers or by virtue of reaching the very highest ranks of the established English and Welsh Churches or the judiciary (including the Scottish). Welsh bishops disappeared with disestablishment of their Church in 1920, Irish peer representatives in 1920, and all Scottish peers would sit from 1963. Peerages of the United Kingdom (as they were known – all the other types of peer having been abandoned) were routinely created and they were all hereditary until 1958. Two Parliament Acts, those of 1911 and 1949, would limit the powers of the Lords, but they remained real. The Lords had vetoed Irish Home Rule in the 1890s, and would have again had it not been for the 1911 act, which meant that the Lords could only delay legislation, which they did in the case of the 1914 Government of Ireland Act. In 1900 the prime minister sat in the Lords, but he would be the last. The Marquess of Salisbury, of the Cecil family, was to cede the position to his nephew, Arthur Balfour, who sat in the House of Commons.
The House of Commons was what mattered and determined the shape of the government. Here too the high politics of the elite were what mattered. Around 1900 democratic public life was a matter for elites; political parties were parties of elites. Parties and politicians had great freedom to operate independently of the electorate. Most people, when they had a vote, voted not only for parties of the elite, but for members of parliament drawn from the upper reaches of society. Furthermore, politics was fundamentally about what happened in parliament and the elite public sphere, rather than a matter for the electorate. Only rarely did the electorate and electoral system give unambiguous instructions. In 1906 the electorate returned a free trade Liberal government. In 1918 the electorate endorsed a coalition, as it was to do in 1931, with protection the likely result. The 1945 general election brought a Labour majority government, with a distinct programme and parliamentary candidates.
The politics of party and the politics of parliament were usually more important than the votes of the electorate. Politicians decided on governments. Indeed, minority and coalition governments predominated. There was a brief 1905–6 Liberal minority government under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman before the 1906 election, won by the Liberals through their support for free trade, and from 1910 to 1915 (led by Herbert Asquith from 1908) the Liberal minority government relied on Irish Nationalist and Labour votes. There was a minority Labour government (January to November 1924) and another 1929–31. In fact, coalition was the commonest form of government. Coalitions were in office for some twenty-one years of the forty-five years to 1945; twenty-six if one includes the 1900–1905 Conservative-Liberal Unionist administration. Single-party majority administrations were confined to the Liberal governments of 1906–10 and the Conservative government of 1924–9.
By definition minority governments were formed by agreement, not by parliamentary necessity. Surprisingly, that was also true of most coalitions. The largest party could have governed alone in all the main coalitions: the 1900–1905 government, the Great War coalition (1915–18), the National government (1931–40), and the Second World War coalition (1940–45). Only the Lloyd George coalition of 1918–22 was an exception, but that was the result of a pre-election pact. The Labour Party was a member of both wartime coalitions, and in neither case because of parliamentary arithmetic. The aim was to include the wider labour movement, not the small number of Labour MPs.
Nor did the electorate often decide the fate of governments of any type. A Liberal government took office in 1905, without an election, but in anticipation of one. The 1915 coalition under Herbert Asquith between the ruling Liberals and the Conservatives involved no election, nor did Lloyd George’s accession to the premiership in 1916, a matter of the highest politics of the state. It resulted in a split in the Liberal Party from 1916, between the followers of Asquith and those of Lloyd George, which the electors had no say in until 1918. Lloyd George was ejected from the premiership by Conservative MPs in 1922, which was followed by a general election. The creation of the minority Labour government of 1924 under Ramsay MacDonald was entirely a matter for MPs, indeed uniquely the government was formed by the second, not the first, party in parliament: the leader of the opposition had more MPs backing him than did the prime minister. It was terminated by MPs also. The formation of the National government coalition of 1931 involved no electors, nor did its transformation into the Churchill coalition including the Labour Party in 1940.
The centrality of parliamentary rather than electoral politics is also evident in the importance of breakaways and shifts of MPs between parties. The Liberal Unionists had split from the Liberals, over Ireland; among them was Joseph Chamberlain. As prime minister Lloyd George created his own party, the National Liberals, to stand alongside the Conservatives in the election of 1918. Labour lost MPs to this Liberal-Conservative coalition as well. The 1924 Labour government was well staffed with former Liberals and Conservatives, including a former viceroy of India, Lord Chelmsford, at the Admiralty (see chapter 8). More important figures also changed party affiliation, notably Winston Churchill, who started as a Conservative MP, became a Liberal, and then a Conservative again. The New Party and the Independent Labour Party (ILP) split from Labour in 1931 and 1932. A small National Labour Party existed as part of the National coalition, 1931–45, and the new Liberal Nationals, also formed in 1931, were more successful than the original Liberals for many years.
The nature of politics was determined by the elite, but also by the electoral system. At the beginning of the century the first-past-the-post electoral system operated differently from its later incarnations. This was because not all seats were contested by all the big parties. Before 1918 many candidates were unopposed, notably but not only in Ireland. Candidates did not stand where there was no hope of winning. Liberals abstaining in favour of Labour allowed the Labour Party to exist before 1918 as the fourth party in parliament. Some constituencies returned more than one MP and some still existed until 1950 (for example Blackburn and Derby). Overall, the number of MPs elected by party had only a loose relationship to total votes received for parties. Although the total voting for each party did not have the meaning it would later have, it is worth noting that the Conservative and allied parties won a greater share of the vote than any other party in every general election between 1900 and 1935 with the exception only of 1906. In another example of the lack of correlation of votes and government formation, the Labour vote went up very considerably between the 1923 election, which led to it becoming a minority government, and the election in 1924, after which a Conservative government took over. What the election revealed was the falling popularity of the Liberals, not of Labour. In 1935 Labour got roughly the same vote as 1929, but in the former case it was able to form a minority government as the largest party (though with fewer votes than the Tories), in the latter it remained very firmly in opposition, with only about one-quarter of all MPs. Thus the temptation to read changes of national mood from the number of parliamentary seats won by each party needs to be resisted.
The electoral system was not entrenched by tradition. New systems were not only proposed but implemented. The general election in 1918 was expected to be on the basis of a more proportional system. The House of Commons wanted the Alternative Vote for parliamentary elections, while the Lords wanted Proportional Representation; the result was the status quo, except for the university seats (mostly multi-member), which were in future to be elected by Single Transferable Vote (STV). These university seats were voted for by graduates of individual or groups of universities. In 1918 fifteen members were elected for nine constituencies, two each for Oxford and Cambridge, one for London, three for Combined English Universities, and so on. A new Northern Ireland parliament created in 1920 (with a House of Commons and a Senate) was formed at Stormont, leading to a reduction in the number of MPs sent to Westminster. The Northern Ireland House of Commons was elected by STV up to 1929 (though it was retained for its four-member university seat for Queen’s University Belfast, which was represented in Westminster by one MP). In 1931 the fall of the Labour government prevented the implementation of the bill that would have introduced the Alternative Vote system in large constituencies. There was no lack of ideas and support for the reform, indeed for the abolition of the House of Lords either. The problem was not conservatism, but politics. The 1945 Labour government, though committed to the abolition of the hereditary, conservative and inefficient House of Lords, merely reduced its delaying power to one year in the 1949 Parliament Act. This was a backing-down from a clear position.42 The problem was what to put in its place.
If the electoral system did not change much between 1900 and 1950, the nature of the electorate changed in multiple ways. Changes were slower, more complicated and more dependent on unfamiliar arguments than might be supposed. For example, it was not until 1950 that it could be said that all adults were equally entitled to cast a vote. Before 1918 the right to vote rested mainly (but not exclusively) with resident heads of households (when British subjects – from anywhere in the empire), except where they were women. Some 60 per cent of men over twenty-one had the vote. This was in marked contrast to the universal male suffrage for, say, the French national assembly and the German Reichstag. British women, when ratepayers, voted in local, but not parliamentary elections.
Women’s suffrage did not, as we might suppose today, necessarily mean votes for all women (as had been introduced in Finland and New Zealand). Many of the suffragettes who campaigned for it wanted votes for women on the existing basis for men as heads of households, etc., which would have given few women the vote. Thus the first so-called Conciliation Bill supported by the suffrage campaigners proposed allowing women the household suffrage, but not the property, university and other suffrages, giving an estimated 1 million women voters compared to an existing electorate of around 7 million male voters. It was claimed that most of these women were working-class householders, thus meeting the objection that a vote for female householders would mean extra votes for higher classes.43 The failure of these parliamentary moves led radical suffragettes to turn to violence. Many went on hunger strike in prison, demanding that their actions be recognized as political rather than merely criminal. By brutal force-feeding, and then by release and rearrest, the government prevented death in state custody, though some women did die outside prison as a consequence. They suffered not for all women, but for some women, for the removal of the ‘sex disability’ rather than votes for all women. The decidedly non-militant suffragist Mrs Millicent Fawcett turned to support the small Labour Party, the only one committed to votes for all women, and all men. Votes for all men was as objectionable to much of the political class as votes for some women.
The objections to male suffrage dissolved during the Great War. It would become intolerable that conscripted young men who had fought, but were not yet householders, should not have the vote. Servicemen would get a vote at nineteen, below the usual twenty-one years. The second change was an age-restricted (over thirty) suffrage for women, though only if they were householders or married to one (it was this last condition which made the greatest difference). The electorate went up from roughly 30 per cent of adults to 75 per cent. In the case of the additional university franchise, women who had passed the necessary exams, even if the university barred them from degrees, though not university education (Oxford to 1920, Cambridge to 1948), could vote. The result of these twin changes was that the overall franchise for the 1918 election was three times greater than for that of 1910.
It was left to a Conservative government, that of 1924–9, to make the franchises equal, which added greatly to the electorate for the 1929 election. Yet the system was still not one-person-one-vote. Additional votes could be got by both men and women owning property in a second constituency, and university graduates voted also in university seats (where votes in effect counted for more than in most constituencies). Both were abolished by the 1949 Representation of the People Act, passed by the Labour government in time for the 1950 election.
The extension of suffrage made little difference to the nature of political representatives until 1945. The people generally voted for members of the elite to represent them, rather than people like them, at least until 1945. This is very evident from the small numbers of women elected. The few women elected after 1918 tended to be elite women. The first woman elected never sat in Westminster as she was elected for Sinn Féin in its 1918 landslide. She was the daughter of a baronet, and by marriage a Polish countess. The second was an American-born viscountess, who stood for the Conservatives for her husband’s old seat after he was elevated to the Lords as the 2nd Viscount Astor. The number of women MPs remained tiny. Labour had a female minister of labour in 1929–31, and a female minister of education, 1945–7, but that was the sum total of women in the cabinet before 1951.
The case of workers shows more change. The Liberal Party put up a few workers as candidates, and later agreed not to oppose a small number of working-class candidates from the Labour Representation Committee, which became the Labour Party in 1906. These workers were in public life not as full members but there to represent special sectional concerns only, even though these concerns affected a majority of the population. They focused on working-class and trade union concerns just as the very small numbers of women in parliament often, but certainly not always, focused on women’s issues.44 The parliamentary Labour Party of the interwar years was dominated by workers, though it was increasingly fortified with MPs drawn from the elite. Yet the whole parliamentary Labour Party was not strong in parliament before 1945. They made up a rough average of 25 per cent of all MPs between 1922 and 1945, significantly less than the share of the Labour vote. The exceptions were 1929–31, when Labour had 47 per cent of MPs, much more than the vote share, and 1931–5, when Labour MPs were only 7 per cent of the House of Commons.
The Conservative and Unionist Party, and the Liberal Parties, which dominated politics up to 1945, were both parties of elites. They represented each of the two programmes we have discussed – the liberal, internationalist and free-trading tendency and the imperialist protectionist one – as well as differing attitudes to the Irish, constitutional and religious questions. There were additional dimensions which will figure later in the book. Broadly the Conservative Party was the party of the constitution. It was the party of the landed elite and the House of Lords, of the Anglican Churches, of the Union with Ireland, of empire, of armaments and, at many times, of protection and of alcoholic refreshment. The Liberal Party was the party of trade and industry, of free trade, of peace not war, of trade not empire (though led by liberal imperialists, that is free traders who supported empire), of non-conformity (though its greatest nineteenth-century leader, William Gladstone, was an Anglican), of home rule for Ireland, of temperance (though its long-serving leader Herbert Asquith was for good reason known as ‘Squiffy’). Of the two the Conservative Party was the closer to established authority, the Liberal Party to reform, to liberty and to internationalism.
The parties were in some ways too easily distinguished from each other. Both relied on working-class votes and both were anti-socialist.45 They were often allies. Thus the Conservative Party was in alliance with the large Liberal Unionist Party until 1912, when the two merged to form the Conservative and Unionist Party. From 1918 to 1922 the Lloyd George Liberals were in electoral alliance with the Conservatives, and not merely in coalition. The coming-together of Conservatives and Liberals can be seen in that most remarkable political phenomenon, the Liberal Nationals. What was defeated in 1945 was not merely the Conservative Party, but the National coalition. The remaining National Labour MPs were all defeated but the Liberal Nationals got 3 per cent of the vote. Renamed the National Liberals, they were effectively part of the Conservative Party into the 1960s, when they disappeared.
Both parties changed. In a remarkable transformation, the Conservative Party of the ultras and diehards of 1914 became the party that marginalized these diehards, as in the case of the Government of India Act. It supported extending the franchise in 1918 and extended it to all women in 1928. It transformed the social services in the 1920s. Under industrial leadership, it would become increasingly open to business of all kinds, to the British people as a whole, to all religions. As an electoral machine it showed concern with the social sciences, the use of cinema and other media, the control of image and indeed the press.46 It never, until 1945, scored less than 38 per cent of the vote, and scored more than 50 per cent in 1900 (if one includes Liberal Unionists) and 1931.
In political terms 1945 represented a major shift. It was not until 1945 that a majority of the British working class, making up 70–80 per cent of the population, voted for the Labour Party. A new party emerged which now rejected to a significant degree the programmes of other parties (though it claimed to be continuing the programme of the wartime coalition in some important respects). It was neither imperialist nor free-trading. More importantly, it was a very different kind of party from those that had previously dominated. From 1945 Labour now had more than 60 per cent of the House of Commons. The Parliamentary Labour Party had many more graduates and public school boys than the population as a whole, yet was radically more representative than the Conservatives or the Liberals. The Labour leader Clement Attlee was quite explicit in saying that while the Tory and Liberal candidates in 1945 were all essentially rich, only Labour candidates reflected all of society. He denounced the Tories for calling themselves National, when their MPs came only from those born rich or who became rich.47 If the working class were under-represented they were nevertheless strongly present. Over half of the 393 Labour MPs had education no higher than a secondary school, just under half (43 per cent) had elementary school education only.48 Though the numbers differ, it seems clear that the absolute number of working-class Labour MPs was higher after 1945 than the 1922–35 average, at about the level of the temporary 1929 peak, a period of fewer Labour MPs, but a higher proportion of workers among them.49 The difference now was that they were in a majority governing party, and installed for the long-term. These working-class members of parliament, as well as the teachers and other middle-class occupations, were not part of elite or state culture. Most Labour MPs were not familiar through quotidian contact with power or the secrets of the state, its experts, its ways and its means. Political culture and state culture were now separate spheres. Indeed, there were now not even senior trade unionists in parliament.
The orthodox view is that the Labour Party inherited the role of the largely defunct Liberal Party as the party of reform. The Liberal Party in this account was a proto-social-democratic party of so-called ‘New Liberals’ who started a wave of welfare reforms before 1914, which would be taken up again by Labour in 1945. In the left version of this view Labour is seen as trapped within the confines of Liberal thinking, about welfare and much else, its social democracy limited to advanced liberalism.50 While there is something in both these views they miss the essentials. First the Liberals were, well past 1914, a party of business, and a party which always allied with Conservatives over Labour. The Liberals of all stripes were anti-socialists, and for them Labour was, after 1918, socialist (it had stood aside for Labour in some seats before then, when Labour was nearly exclusively a trade union party). Furthermore, as we have noted and shall also see in detail in later chapters, the great innovations in welfare were made not by Liberal governments before 1914, but by Conservatives in the 1920s. Where Labour was then liberal – indeed this was central to its programme – was in dedicated support to the old liberal doctrines of free trade. In matters of social services it opposed, though did not change, the main tenets of the New Liberal and Conservative welfare state. However, even if Labour inherited liberal policies, old and new, it was a party of a very different character and by 1945 had left free trade far behind it. Free trade (as opposed to free enterprise) was supported only by the now tiny Liberal Party from the 1930s. Indeed, as we see in detail in chapter 8, the Labour Party presented itself to the post-war electorate in a remarkably national way. It was a nationalist as well as a social democratic party.
After 1945 there was a class-aligned politics which was national in new ways. The direction of the nation, the definition of the national interest were the object of politics, and there was a national economy, and a national society, to direct. The two large parties were national in that that they were contesting nearly all seats all over the country (with the exception of Labour in Northern Ireland). Each party presented itself as a national party, but in different ways: the Conservative Party as the party of established authority, with an imperial bias still; the Labour Party as the party which represented all classes, the true nation, one which was clearly non-imperial. This is not to say that Labour did not inherit a large measure of liberal internationalist thinking, or that the Conservative Party was not in some measure still extremely imperialist. But the basic concerns and political debates had shifted. But on balance the Labour Party was now, and was long to be, the party of the national project, and the Conservative Party an uneasy mix of the party of empire, nation, free enterprise and, in the future, free trade.
In the following eight chapters we will see how in many fields, from food control to energy, from ideas to inventions, there was this same basic shift to nation over the period 1900–1950, and most markedly after 1945. As we shall see, this new national focus was expressed in many different forms – in the existence for the first time in peace of a conscript army, with high military spending, and of the creation of national industries owned by the national state. The creation of a ruling economic elite connected the nation as never before, with much of its wealth tied up in national debt, was also a novel feature. Its industry was bent, for the first time, to a national purpose, that of exporting. Its inventive effort was directed as never before to national aims. And it created social services, what would later be called a welfare state, for the whole nation rather than for just the working class. The corollary is that one can only understand what was happening in all these fields before 1950, or 1945, by taking a non-national approach which allows one to capture both the liberal and the imperial dimensions of British life. What made the United Kingdom different before then was its openness to the world, its wealth and its distinctive modes of sustenance and indeed of exertion of power.
The Country with No Name
The Englishman has long been used to living in a certain haze as to what his country is – whether England, or England-and-Wales, or Great Britain or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or the United Kingdom plus its dependent territories or that larger unit which he used to call the British Empire …
Sir Dennis Robertson, speaking to a US audience, 19531
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages … The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.
John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London, 1919)
Side by side, unaided except by their kith and kin in the great Dominions and by the wide Empires which rest beneath their shield, the British and French peoples have advanced to rescue not only Europe, but mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history. Behind them – behind us – behind the armies and fleets of Britain and France – gather a group of shattered States and bludgeoned races: the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians – upon all of whom the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must; as conquer we shall.
Winston Churchill, ‘Be Ye Men of Valour’, broadcast 19 May 19402
I was very glad that Mr Attlee described my speeches in the war as expressing the will not only of Parliament but of the whole nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless and, as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it … It was a nation and race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.
Sir Winston Churchill on his eightieth birthday, 19543
‘You can’t understand Great Britain when all you know is the island itself’. This resonant banality came from the lips of the German industrialist and philosopher of industry Walter Rathenau addressing the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig.4 It was hardly original. It half plagiarizes the British writer Rudyard Kipling, who asked: ‘what should they know of England who only England know?’ The line comes from his poem ‘The English Flag, 1891’, an attack on the street-bred English, who did not know what the British do abroad, especially in the empire, where Kipling was born. The expression, which became a cliché, has a lot going for it. To understand the United Kingdom (and not just Great Britain, or England) one needs to know its peculiar relations with the rest of the world. This was not, as fans of Kipling might imagine, primarily a question of empire. The United Kingdom’s relations, economic, military and political, with foreigners, mostly Europeans, like Rathenau, were almost always more significant. The United Kingdom was quite exceptional in its openness to the world economy. Its people, ships and factories were spread all over the world; its largest wheat fields and its abattoirs were abroad, and its coal fuelled a whole hemisphere. It was not, in short, self-contained. The story of the United Kingdom was not, for the first half of the twentieth century, a domestic, insular story, nor a merely imperial one.
In 1900 the United Kingdom was (comparatively speaking) cosmopolitan, liberal, free-trading with the rest of Europe and the world and part of a much larger British empire, to a much greater extent than any other comparable part of the world. By 1950 the force of foreign events and the evolution of domestic politics created a novel situation which satisfied neither internationalists nor imperialists. By 1950 the United Kingdom had national borders impermeable in ways they were not in 1900. While the United Kingdom had been part of an empire, it now had an empire, but a much reduced colonial one. It was part of a Commonwealth of Nations, but one which was no longer British. It had been changed, by what happened abroad, more than by the desires of its people.
The new British nation increasingly knew only itself. The character of its politics was different from what had gone before. Now the nation was at the centre of politics, and for the first time one-person-one-vote was achieved. The Labour Party, which transformed the character of the House of Commons in 1945, saw itself as a new sort of national party whose politics were those of the collective, national interest. Politics was now national politics, based on the politics of class, of production and of national social services. Whereas once politicians addressed ‘the nation’ – a term of unclear geographical scope, and in any case referring to a notion of a political community, not all the people – they now spoke of ‘Britain’.
To understand the history of the period 1900–1950 we need to think our way out of national assumptions and enter a world in which the nation as it existed in the third quarter of the century was not yet in existence, nor yet even much argued for. The political story of the United Kingdom can usefully be framed as a contest between two programmes or projects: the liberal, internationalist, free-trading one and the imperial-protectionist one. Both programmes were thwarted by events, by foreigners. Imperialism was probably more visible than liberalism. But the third option, nationalism, is practically invisible, and insofar as it is seen, it is as a feature of the Second World War. This trio of positions may be compared with the standard implicit story which is that liberalism, perhaps liberal-imperialism, was superseded by a weak socialism or social democracy in the war or after 1945.
FREE TRADE
Whether measured by stocks or flows, the United Kingdom in 1900 was a place of plenty. The great fluxes of modernity – materials, people, information – passed through it as nowhere else, in unprecedented density. The United Kingdom was the largest importer as well as the largest exporter in the world. Trade followed the potentials of capitalist production, not empire. Telegraphic traffic with the United States was much greater than that to British Africa; tremendous tonnages of British coal flowed into the Baltic, but not the Caribbean.
It was the only major free-trading economy on earth, the most exposed and integrated into the trade of the world. Anything could be imported into the United Kingdom free of duty, excepting those applied on such things as tobacco, alcohol, sugar, tea, hydrocarbon oils, for the purpose of raising revenue and which were applied (many only in principle) to domestic production too. Indeed, indirect taxes, including the internal excise and the external custom duties, accounted for nearly half of state revenue before the Great War. All other countries of any size were defined by economic borders which protected domestic industrial and agricultural producers. In the first half of the twentieth century the United Kingdom imported about half its food and, as a consequence, had the lowest agricultural population of any major nation. It was easily the most urbanized and industrial, which it could not have been had it needed to grow its own food. There was nowhere else like it. To the policy of free imports much of the success and wealth of the United Kingdom was attributed.
The United Kingdom was rich, and in a poor world stood out as such. The territory of the United Kingdom had the highest average income per head of any European national area. It was exceeded only by that of the United States, and was comparable to that of the main white British dominions, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Germany and France, while rich by the standards of most of Europe, were poorer. That comparative wealth was central to understanding its politics, the nature of its armed forces, the power of its business class and much else. Indeed, contrary to what might be inferred from a generation of declinist histories, the United Kingdom would stay without question the richest large economic area of Europe into the 1960s.
Free traders pointed out repeatedly that most of the United Kingdom’s trade was with countries outside the empire, not least in Europe. Most imports of meat, wheat, sugar, fruit, came from ‘foreign countries’ rather than ‘British countries’. For most raw materials, the empire was not very important at all – cotton came largely from the southern USA, while bulky imports, such as iron ore and timber, came mainly from Europe and its immediate environs.
Free trade was a major ideological and moral cause, not merely because it argued for laissez-faire economics. It was often anti-imperialist and anti-militaristic, and called for a genuine internationalism, and was most certainly hostile to nationalism.5 For the free trader, nation did not compete with nation. It made no sense to talk of British trade – only individuals and firms traded with each other. In this scheme of things there was no reason to favour one trader over another – the exporter over the importer, or the producer over the consumer, and in a significant gendering of this argument, of the male producer over the female housewife consumer. The ‘English,’ said H. G. Wells, were a ‘world people’.6
Free traders objected to their very core to the new imperial/national project associated with the Conservative Party. From the beginning of the century this called for a new Great Policy, as it was known, for protection of the national economy and preferential trade within the empire. It meant differentiating between British and non-British territories, including the ‘informal empire’ (fully foreign countries such as Argentina, where British capital and political influence were important), to create an imperial economic block. It was meant to effect a change in direction of trade, to loosen economic bonds with the people of the world and to promote both the national and the imperial economy. These protectionist-imperialists promoted the view, influentially so, that the United Kingdom depended on empire for raw materials and food, when their argument was that it should, not that it did. The free traders responded by arguing that where states tried to make political borders correspond to economic borders they impoverished and degraded themselves. Imperial Germany, which did so, was seen by free traders not only as nationalistic and militaristic, but as a place where wages were low, bread was brown, and meat came from horses and dogs.7 The Conservative campaign failed. The free-trading Liberal Party won the election of 1906, fought on this issue, with a huge majority. Under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Herbert Asquith the New Liberalism set in train the development of the welfare state, and faced down the still powerful House of Lords in order to pass the People’s Budget which funded it. That is the usual story, but as we shall see, it misses out much.
The 1906 election was not the end of the matter with respect to free trade. The Great War led to measures which free-trading liberals regarded with distaste. The wartime coalition, formed in 1915, when Conservatives joined the existing Liberal government, introduced what some liberals regarded as Prussian measures: conscription and some economic nationalism. In September 1915, the Liberal chancellor of the exchequer, Reginald McKenna, introduced a 33⅓ per cent levy on luxury imports in order to fund the war effort. It fell on such things as motor cars (but not commercial vehicles), musical instruments and gramophone records. When the wartime coalition went to the polls in 1918, it noted that ‘One of the lessons which has been most clearly taught us by the war is the danger to the nation of being dependent upon other countries for vital supplies on which the life of the nation may depend.’ Thus they proposed that ‘key industries’ should be supported, and dumping controlled. Imperial preferences would be given.8 The non-coalition Liberals, and the new Labour Party, in its first outing as a major party, remained loyal to free trade: ‘Labour is firm against tariffs and for Free Trade,’ they said, and looked to new international labour legislation to make ‘sweating impossible’.9
The coalition won the election and introduced many protectionist measures with imperial preferences. It continued the McKenna duties and introduced the Safeguarding of Industry Act, 1921. The duties on manufactured goods under the act did not affect empire, which did not export such goods. Where imperial preference mattered was in a 1919 measure which granted imperial preference on revenue duties on sugar, dried fruit and tobacco.
Table 1.1: The United Kingdom’s most important suppliers and export markets, 1928
The story of interwar politics can usefully be understood as, in part, the politics of free trade versus protection. David Lloyd George was deposed in 1922, to be succeeded by Andrew Bonar Law of the Conservatives. He was succeeded by another Conservative, Stanley Baldwin, who called an election in an attempt to get a popular endorsement for protection. He failed to get a majority, and the result was the short-lived first minority Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald, which was staunchly free trading. It phased out McKenna duties and cut the revenue duties. The Labour Party, which from 1922 had around 30 per cent of the popular vote, was deeply committed to free trade, as openly and proudly so as the Liberals. It also wanted in principle to abolish all custom and excise duties, all the indirect taxes. The Labour government did not last long, and Baldwin was returned with a majority in the 1924 general election, following moderately protectionist policies. In 1929 the Conservatives stood on a more limited protectionist programme and again failed to get a majority. The new minority Labour Party which came into office that year was as committed to free trade as it was to financial orthodoxy and the continued search for a new international order. Their policy to deal with the Great Depression which enveloped the world from 1929 was to maintain the pound fixed to the value of gold, to retain free trade and to stimulate world trade and reduce British prices to increase British exports. That policy collapsed with MacDonald deserting Labour to form a National government with the Conservatives in 1931, which went to the country within a few months and got a huge mandate for protection. The National government, now with extraordinary public support, would continue in office to 1940. Its three prime ministers, Ramsay MacDonald (1931–5), Stanley Baldwin (1935–7) and Neville Chamberlain (1937–40) would all later acquire reputations for inaction in the face of poverty and unemployment at home and the rise of the dictators abroad. Yet they did pursue what they saw as a very positive new approach – protection.
The transition to protection was ideologically dramatic. Liberals were, of course, deeply opposed, but so was Labour. The left was almost universally free trading and internationalist. Even mildly protectionist voices, such as the leader of the largest trade union, Ernest Bevin, found their propositions rejected. In a speech to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 1930 he stated: ‘The object of the world federation would be, from our point of view, to create an easy access to the raw materials of this planet.’ But Bevin went on to say that it might be necessary and useful to create a ‘Commonwealth bloc’, given that either an Atlantic or a European bloc was not practical, and empire development was a good thing even if he was not an imperialist. There was opposition, however – on the left tariffs were seen as a capitalist policy; an empire bloc was artificial since there was no such economic unit; what it really meant was greater colonial exploitation. Others worried about dividing the world into antagonistic blocs – that led to war. It would bring ruin to the export of coal, practically none of which went to the empire. Ernest Bevin could only say in response that he was not endorsing empire free trade but wanted a licence to face realities. The TUC left Bevin’s option open.10
One dissenter from free trade was a Labour MP who had crossed the floor of the House of Commons from the Conservatives. The dashing Sir Oswald Mosley, a hereditary knight and a former Royal Flying Corps pilot, resigned from the government in 1930 to advance a very different policy. In the short term he wanted to deal with unemployment, then rising very fast, with early retirement, later school leaving and public works. What was most interesting was his plan for a much more national economy. He claimed that it was no longer possible to export as much as before, and that the country should export only enough to get essential food and raw materials. He was against exporting in order to invest abroad on a huge scale, as was the case before 1914, or to import luxuries.11 In his view imports needed controlling. Tariffs were not enough: import control boards were needed to promote domestic agriculture and other industries.12 He quickly moved from this nationalist position to a more imperialist version. But the Labour left, while keen on the planned trade he called for, could not stomach the imperialism, so he dropped it.13 Mosley’s ‘New Labour Group’ opposed the expenditure cuts the government made in 1931 and six members resigned to form the protectionist New Party. It failed miserably in the 1931 general election and would turn into the radically nationalist British Union of Fascists. The party articulated the thesis that the City of London had as its main business investment overseas, which brought a return in the form of imports into the United Kingdom and which therefore undermined the economic nation.14 This was to become the standard thesis of economic nationalists of the left, too, but only later, as we shall see in Chapter 6. For the moment it is important to note that the nationalism of Mosley’s position is insufficiently recognized, just as the significance of protection was not sufficiently recognized by historians writing after the economy became supposedly Keynesian.
Protection versus free trade was a central element in the 1931 general election. This is not very obvious because the usual framing of the election is as a contest between something like Keynesian reflation and financial orthodoxy, with Labour and Lloyd George on one side, and the recently created National government on the other. But the challenge to orthodoxy came not from Keynesian reflationists but from protection. And that challenge came not from outsiders, but from the Conservative Party itself.
The National government was formed in the summer of 1931 under the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, to effect the policy of cuts in expenditure. It was a coalition which the Conservative Party dominated, but also had a handful of MPs elected for Labour, and Liberals. This government was forced to take sterling off the gold standard, allowing it to devalue. The various parties in the National government stood in a general election soon after, but each on their own manifesto. The dominant Conservatives called for ‘Empire Economic Unity’, which meant tariffs, and quotas for cereals. Indeed, the need for protection was practically the only point their manifesto made. Their minor partners, MacDonald’s National Labour and the Liberal Nationals, were confused on this key issue. The free-trading Liberals also supported the National government. The main opposition – the Labour Party and the Lloyd George Independent Liberals – were, however, firmly in favour of free trade. Labour was categorical:
The Labour Party has no confidence in any attempt to bolster up a bankrupt Capitalism by a system of tariffs. Tariffs would artificially increase the cost of living. They would enrich private interests at the expense of the Nation. They would prejudice the prospect of international co-operation … In the face of the millions unemployed in high-tariff America and Germany, they are clearly no cure for unemployment. They would permanently injure our shipping and export trades and conceal our need for greater efficiency in industrial organisation.15
The winners were the Conservatives and protection.16 In November 1931 the newly elected government pushed through immediate tariffs on the pretext of preventing dumping. In February 1932 the Import Duties Act was passed (over which members of the cabinet were allowed to differ in public, an innovation not to be repeated until the 1975 Common Market referendum). The act was the work of the protectionist chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, son of the original Edwardian advocate of the measure. Conservatism and imperialism and nationalism were in, and this represented an extraordinary change of direction.17 National Labour’s Philip Snowden, who had been the ultra-orthodox Labour chancellor 1929–31 now resigned from the government with two Liberals, the home secretary, Sir Herbert Samuel, and Archibald Sinclair, and a couple of junior ministers, because they still believed in free trade, and did not like the imperialist Ottawa agreement. The government now had only three National Labour ministers, and the only Liberals in the coalition were Sir John Simon’s Liberal Nationals, who for decades would be stronger in parliament than the Liberals who stayed out of or left the National government.18
Thereafter opinions shifted in favour of protection. The liberal economist Maynard Keynes now waxed lyrical about the benefits of national self-sufficiency.19 Amongst his heretical thoughts were that tariffs on cars had created a British car industry; that steel could be modernized behind tariffs; that domestic agriculture was a good thing; that tariffs could indeed save jobs; and that the quality of jobs mattered. As he put it: ‘Free traders, fortified into presumption by the essential truths – one might say truisms – of their cause, have greatly overvalued the social advantage of mere market cheapness, and have attributed excellences which do not exist to the mere operation of the methods of laissez-faire.’20 The Labour Party too shifted its position in favour of protection, slowly and silently. Thus it was that by the late 1940s both major parties, which now dominated politics, were protectionist, a change of great significance, but usually invisible precisely because it ceased to be a matter of contention. If the politics of free trade was very visible and public, the politics of protection became private and complicated, but no less important for that.
At first the British tariff was restricted to 10 per cent on manufactures, from which empire producers (of which there were few) were entirely exempted. Following the 1932 Ottawa conference on imperial trade, tariffs were raised and extended, granting further imperial preference.21 However, the unwillingness of British imperial territories to open their own markets to national British production meant that empire free trade remained a pipe dream. For the policy of the protectionists, in all parts of the British empire, was nation first, empire second, foreigners third. And that was the rub – it was never empire first. Nationalism trumped imperialism, all over the empire.
Within the empire there were struggles over imposing tariffs against British goods. The case of India is especially revealing and important. A minimal amount of self-government was granted to India in 1919 over the objections of ‘die-hard’ imperialists. India could set its own tariff; in 1931 it raised it, for British goods, from 11 per cent to 25 per cent. A higher Indian tariff applied to non-British goods. The British cotton industry launched a campaign to get the British government to intervene to lower Indian tariffs, which it would not, and to stop the process of giving even greater powers to Indians through the Government of India Bill, proposed in 1934. This became a highly sensitive issue in Lancashire, which voted Conservative, where the cotton industry was concentrated. In late 1934 and early 1935 Sir Oswald Mosley (whose family had been lords of the manor in Manchester), now at the head of the British Union of Fascists, campaigned on the policy of removing the Indian tariff against British cottons, claiming that, with other restrictions, this would create 65,000 jobs in Lancashire.22 His was a policy of making India an open market, but only to British goods.
In this case the wider politics of British India trumped the interests of Tory voters in Lancashire. The Conservatives were able to manage not only the die-hard opposition to the Government of India Bill, among whose partisans was Winston Churchill, but also the industrial interests of Lancashire.23 In fact the British government intervened secretly to sustain the interest of Lancashire, at least marginally. The Japanese had pressured the government of India to reduce tariffs, with a threat to reduce Japanese purchases of Indian raw cotton. London promised to buy any cotton the Japanese would not, stiffening the resolve of the Indian government.24 Furthermore, the Indian tariff came down a bit for British goods, from 25 to 20 per cent in 1936. The direction of travel was clear, however. British textiles, for which the Indian market had been pre-eminent before 1914, would lose out, and the government of India would become ever more Indian.
The idea of the imperial economy was also challenged from outside the empire. During the Second World War the heavily protected United States of America re-entered the world economy through its own overseas military operations. As part of the price for lend-lease of arms and materials to the United Kingdom the United States exacted a promise from the British government that it would give up imperial preference in the future. But it lived on.
In the 1940s and 1950s British trade was more imperial than it had ever been. This was not primarily a matter of choice. Imperial trade was a necessity, as the war broke what were central trading relations with Europe, and they took time to restore, not least given the poverty of the war-racked economies of the continent. The Labour Party, which came into office in 1945, presided over a protectionist, state-controlled economy, with a strong imperial focus. Even in 1950 the Conservative Party was calling for an Imperial Economic Conference.25 Furthermore, imperial preference was supported by both the imperialist right and the left as a shield against the USA.26 Economic imperialism affected even the Communist Party. Its leader called for mutual economic assistance at the level of the old empire; like an interwar imperialist he demanded: ‘Our locomotives for wool; our coal for cotton; our textiles for wheat …’ He claimed, unconvincingly, that these policies were quite unlike those of Lord Beaverbrook.27
EMPIRE
Thinking about imperialism from the perspective of the economy has important benefits. First it highlights the significance of opposition to imperialism in the United Kingdom. Secondly it makes clear that the British economy was at its most imperially oriented (though trade was overwhelmingly between the by then independent dominions and the UK) in the 1940s and 1950s, and not in the Edwardian years, as can too easily be assumed. Thirdly it helps underscore the point that imperialism was in a crucial respect not an orthodoxy but a challenge to it. It was also always a plan, a project, more than a reality.28 As we have seen the idea of one imperial economy was central to Conservative economic politics. Empire was central to party education, and to the writing and thinking of ideologues like the popular historian Arthur Bryant. The term ‘empire’ figured repeatedly in the party manifestos of the interwar years – imperial preference, imperial defence, imperial unity, imperial development being constant themes (Labour ignored empire, and stressed national development and national ownership and in the 1930s national planning). Whether or not empire was important to the public is an open and debated question, whether it was important to the political elite is not.
The reality of British imperialism and the empire was that it was a complex multi-faceted thing, which it is difficult to describe. Thus, while the British empire was regarded by much of the British elite as a good thing, imperialism was not. The British empire, was not imperialistic in the way other empires were or had been, for example the Spanish empire. Even the king-emperor denied the empire was imperialist. Speaking by radio on Empire Day 1940 to his people at home and overseas, he noted: ‘There is a word our enemies use against us – Imperialism. By it they mean the spirit of domination and the lust of conquest. We free peoples of the Empire cast that word back in their teeth. It is they who have these evil aspirations.’ This was not an idiosyncratic royal opinion, but the official view. Pro-imperial propaganda insisted on the benign and different nature of British imperialism, and was conscious of anti-imperial sentiment.
The fact that an Empire Day existed might suggest that there was an official imperialism. Yet the story of Empire Day itself points to its limits. It came about through private initiative from 1904. Some schools began to celebrate it, and it gained the support of local authorities and worthies, though its supporters lamented that it was more enthusiastically taken up overseas than at home. During 1916 Lords Milner and Meath got some official recognition for it, in that government buildings would fly the flag on the day, but they had to insist that Empire Day was not a manifestation of militarism and jingoism, or even imperialism. They claimed it stood for one king, one flag, one fleet, one empire; that it was non-party, non-sectarian, non-aggressive, non-racial. While this was hardly a frank account of British imperialism in which systematic racial exclusiveness and segregation was routine, it was significant that this is what was claimed.
The British empire was unique in scale and nature, even if having an empire was not uniquely British. It is not well described by its most common representation – the map covered in pink. For it was not the land mass of the empire that mattered, or that the sun never set on it, but its great wealth and vast population. The wealth was concentrated in the temperate territories of white British settlement, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which were as rich per head as the United Kingdom. These territories came to be known, from the Edwardian years, with South Africa, as the dominions, and later collectively with the United Kingdom, as the British Commonwealth of Nations. They were intimately connected to the United Kingdom as suppliers of certain foods. If the wealth and trade was concentrated in the dominions, the population of the empire was concentrated in desperately poor India, which had a population of 300 and more million souls, far more than any colonial territory of any other power (the closest was the Dutch East Indies with around 40 million). Every other territory was below 10 million in population. India accounted for four-fifths of the British empire. Only China had a larger population.
Just as there was never one empire economically, so there was never one administratively. The United Kingdom was governed by a complex set of departments of state, some of which covered the whole empire, others the United Kingdom only, and others only parts, like Ireland, or England and Wales. Outside the United Kingdom parts of the empire were administered by different Whitehall departments. There was an India Office and Colonial Office and from 1925 a separate Dominions Office (dealing with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa), encapsulating the different relations with white dominions, India, and the colonies. The colonies were of differing types. There were also a whole series of protectorates, mandated territories (for example Palestine), as well as places clearly in the British sphere of influence such as Egypt, Iraq and Persia. There were at least four civil services manned by UK officials – the Home, Diplomatic, Indian and Colonial services; and two big armies, the British, and the Indian. The dominions, the economic core of empire, did not have London-recruited or directed civil services or armed forces. The empire was never one thing.
Yet there was, in the Edwardian years and later, a tendency to think of the empire (defined in different ways) as one body politic, with its capital in London, its second city in Glasgow. In this picture, the United Kingdom was part of the empire, not something which had an external empire. Thus the Committee of Imperial Defence, an Edwardian development, was the key British defence policy committee, the chief of the imperial general staff the professional head of the British army. During both world wars elements at least of an imperial war cabinet were established. The monarch was notionally at the head of one united empire. The parliament at Westminster was also known informally as the ‘imperial parliament’ (usually in a nineteenth-century usage, as the parliament which covered the whole United Kingdom, as it did from 1801). It was also imperial in the sense that it passed legislation covering subordinate governments and legislatures, among them the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, 1900, the Government of Ireland Acts, of 1914 and 1920, Irish Free State (Constitution) Act, 1922, and the Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935. The powers over the dominions (that is Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) were effectively abolished in 1926, and in statute in 1931, with the creation of the British Commonwealth of Nations, of independent dominions, represented to each other by high commissioners (ambassadors in all but name). It is telling that Scottish nationalists of the interwar years argued not for independence from the United Kingdom or the empire, but rather that the whole empire be recognized as Anglo-Scottish: it had the union of two nations at its heart – Britain was Anglo-Scotland, not England writ large (as the histories nearly always had it).29
Furthermore, in some respects the empire did act as one body, and was certainly presented as doing so. The whole British empire went to war in 1914. The war was presented as one fought by the empire as a whole, with for example the numbers enlisted given as those for the whole empire, sometimes divided into white (7 million) and other races (1.5 million). An imperial war cabinet was formed, with representatives from the dominions. The burial places of service personnel were in the custody of the Imperial War Graves Commission, created in 1917 by Fabian Ware, a pre-war pro-conscription imperialist, editor of the Tory Morning Post. An Imperial War Museum was created also in 1917 and also as a memorial to the Great War. The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, commemorated the ‘many multitudes’ who gave ‘life itself for God, for King and Country, for Loved Ones, Home and Empire, for the Sacred Cause of Justice and the Freedom of the World’.
The identification with empire was far from complete. Only in Great Britain, and not in Ireland or the rest of the empire, was conscription successfully imposed. British soldiers did not, to judge from most war memorials, die for ‘King and Empire’. They died, in most cases, for ‘King and Country’, in which there is a studied and necessary ambiguity in ‘country’. They died for a country with no name. Many memorials invoked, like the Westminster Abbey one, notions of fighting for freedom, and for honour.30 All these complexities are encapsulated in the prominent monument erected next to the National Portrait Gallery to commemorate the execution of Edith Cavell, the Florence Nightingale of Belgian nursing, who had long lived in Brussels. She was shot by the Germans in 1915 for aiding the escape of Allied soldiers from occupied Belgium. The biggest letters are reserved for the word ‘HUMANITY’, but above them we find ‘King and Country’. Added later after pressure from women’s organizations supported by the Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald were the words ‘Patriotism is not enough’.
The Second World War was at its beginning also a war presented as one in which the empire fought as a whole. After the fall of France in June 1940 if anything was alone it was the entire empire, not the ‘island nation’. No one in authority could or would have said ‘Britain stood alone’ – that was a phrase from post-war nationalist history books. Indeed, ‘alone’ was a rarely used term – the standard image was that of a fortress or citadel, a forward base of an empire, and/or the forces of freedom. The empire had allies, even in 1940–41. The mood was, and would become even more, internationalist than imperialist. There would be no imperial war cabinet this time. From early 1942 the war was fought by the ‘United Nations’. There was still, however, a measure of imperial accounting, as when the United Kingdom government noted that four-fifths of the arms in use by the ‘British Commonwealth and Empire’ came from within, and only one-fifth from the USA.31 Furthermore, across many battlefields the world over, the empire had fought as one, and been presented as doing this.
Hardly surprisingly, then, there was imperial feeling after the war, not least in connection to the recent war. When Princess Elizabeth addressed the nations of the empire from South Africa on her twenty-first birthday in 1947, she spoke in terms of empire not nation. It was the ‘British family of nations’, she said, which had the ‘high honour of standing alone, seven years ago, in defence of the liberty of the world’; the ‘British Empire has saved the world first, and has now to save itself after the battle is won’. There the future queen, still on the throne today, declared: ‘My whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.’32 As we shall see, by the time she was crowned in 1953, the implied unitary empire had already gone.
Subjects of the British crown were in principle equally free and could move freely from one imperial territory to another. This was certainly true of white (‘European’) subjects, but not in general. Systematic racial discrimination was central to the British empire and it was codified in the border controls of, for example, ‘White Australia’, which in its essentially racist policies did not discriminate between empire and non-empire. For many official positions throughout the empire one had to be ‘of European descent’ as well as being a British subject. In different forms there were essentially racial administrative distinctions made. The empire, in so far as it was a project, was also a racial project, with white rule over subordinate and carefully segregated peoples. A strict racial ordering determined everything from voting rights to housing to job segregation. The Indian railway colony, African mines and Caribbean plantations operated not merely with whites at the top and locals at the bottom, but with intermediate racial and economic groupings, like the Anglo-Indians in India, or the Indians in the Caribbean and Africa.
Quite overt discrimination applied to local ‘natives’ all over the empire, not just South Africa. Even when in the United Kingdom itself subjects of the crown faced to different treatment based on colour. There were small but well-known non-white communities within the United Kingdom. They were concentrated in port cities and associated with seafaring. Around 120–170,000 British seamen were employed on British ships, along with 10–20,000 foreigners and 50,000 lascars.33 The Indian lascars were the main group of non-white mariners but they were joined by Chinese or African ship-board workers. They lived in specific areas close to the docks, like the communities in Limehouse, and Bute town in Cardiff. Their position was precarious. They could be and were thrown out of the country, irrespective of marriage to locals. The Second World War saw more arrive, notably from the West Indies, to serve in the forces, and in industry.34
When the troopship Empire Windrush (a requisitioned German passenger ship, hence the prefix Empire which was given to all government-owned vessels) landed in Tilbury in 1948, carrying black British subjects from the Caribbean, it attracted negative attention, and has become a symbolic starting point for immigration. Yet the Empire Windrush was far from the first ship to bring West Indians to the United Kingdom, as is clear from the fact that many of the men on it were returning to it. Indeed, one-third were either in the Royal Air Force or returning to re-enlist (many had served as mechanics during the war, and some as aircrew). For many West Indians arriving in the United Kingdom in the 1940s and 1950s the shock was not the imperialism of the British, but the lack of it – these British failed to recognize the West Indians as fellow, equal, subjects of the empire, as the official version of empire required. They found that race and nation trumped empire. The West Indians, the Chinese and the Africans were in fact outnumbered by new immigrants from Europe.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE NATION
As we have seen there was a powerful imperial dimension to the British war effort in the Second World War, though it receded rather quickly. The empire which entered into the Second World War suffered a great defeat in the east in 1942. The consequent ramping up of the liberation struggle in India led to India following Ireland (a case to be discussed later) out of the empire in 1947. The dominions became in effect independent members of the ‘United Nations’ rather than being fully constituent parts of the British empire. They developed a more national and a more-US-focused orientation. This happened to the United Kingdom also. For when the war was accounted at its end, the statistical tables, the listing of the dead, were not as they had been after the Great War tabulated for a British empire, but rather for the United Kingdom alone. The official histories too, would focus on the United Kingdom, rather than the units which actually organized and fought the war. From 1945 it was said that ‘Britain’ had been alone during 1940–41, and it would soon be said that a new nation had been forged in the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. Churchill deployed the ‘island nation’ rhetoric in 1945 not in 1940.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland of the late 1940s can usefully be seen as one of the new nations which arose from the dissolution of the one empire. The war came to be written about in national terms, as a nation that looked inwards, and changed itself internally. From the 1960s ‘alone’ was regularly used in histories to describe ‘Britain’ in 1940–41. The national ‘alone’ was not a myth of 1940, but a post-war creation, part of a general process of nationalizing the history of the war. It was indeed the central national myth, laden with possibilities and meaning well beyond its immediate reach. It came to be linked, again, long after the war, with the idea that a new nation, and a new politics, was born, in what became, from 1940, a ‘people’s war’. In this later account, the war saw many social and economic advances. Labour ran the home front, Churchill the war front, and set in motion what would become the post-war welfare state. In this national framing the story of empire is the story of the loss of imperial territory, through a process of decolonization. What is missing is the sense of parallel emergence out of empire – for the United Kingdom too was in important ideological and constitutional senses a part of empire, not merely the owner of an empire. This was a process invisible in standard historical accounts.
A national United Kingdom arose after 1945. This new nationalism was somewhere between a United Kingdom and a Great Britain nationalism – for this was a period in which Northern Ireland had Home Rule, and a prime minister of its own. Still, it is notable that Northern Ireland, Unionist dominated, enacted its own legislation over vast areas of concern, but generally followed Westminster, even in the case of the socialist National Health Service, because the Union came first. Furthermore, the whole United Kingdom formed a self-consciously national economy. The economy was seen in very nationalistic terms – it was a national economy which was directed and controlled, forced and exhorted to export, and to restrict imports, irrespective of where they went to or whether they came from ‘British countries’. Economic propaganda did not distinguish between exports to empire and foreign markets. That the Labour Party was elected with a distinctly nationalist but non-imperial orientation was important here. Labour promised in 1945 to create a ‘Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain’ (thus excluding Northern Ireland) and did not bring itself to use the term ‘empire’, and made only the most cursory mention of the ‘British Commonwealth’ and ‘Colonial Dependencies’; on the question of India, it advocated only the ‘advancement of India to responsible self-government’. It was not accidental that its main policy was called ‘nationalization’.
The United Kingdom also became a separate body from the empire in that it got its own nationality. Under the British Nationality Act 1948, a new national-imperial person was created, the Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies. This was a ‘common citizenship’, as propaganda insisted.35 The colonies, looked after by the Colonial Office, were in the Caribbean, Africa and the Far East (numbering around 60 million people). These imperial citizens were now distinguished from another new and much larger category: the Citizens of the Independent Commonwealth (dealt with by the Commonwealth Relations Office, formed in 1947). The need for the act arose because Canadians wanted to have their own nationality, and through it British nationality (rather than the other way around). The United Kingdom, too, had to define its nationality in an analogous way. The act gave citizens of the United Kingdom and colonies the same rights of entry as the Citizens of the Independent Commonwealth. Indeed, the main concern was to give free access to citizens of the white dominions, whose ranks were once again being filled by encouraged emigration from the United Kingdom. Yet it created a distinctively different nationality for the members of the Commonwealth, distinct from that of the United Kingdom.
This new British nation was much more welcoming to aliens than it was to its own non-white overseas citizens. In this it reflected a long history of openness to Europe. Edwardian London was not as cosmopolitan as New York, but it was cosmopolitan rather than imperial in its composition. Although from 1905 the United Kingdom restricted the immigration of aliens, they could and did come in, and they were often naturalized too. The Irish, even after full independence, were never treated as aliens. But there were many aliens. There were Germans and Italians, working at many levels and in many industries; there were ‘Russians’, usually Jews from Poland (until 1916 in the Russian empire), concentrated in the east end of London. In the Great War there were thousands of Belgian refugees. During the Second World War the country had large numbers of Poles and Czechs, Norwegians and Dutchmen, soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians. After the war more than 100,000 Poles were allowed to remain.36 A recruitment drive among refugees in Europe brought in over 345,000 workers, mainly men.37 By 1950 the United Kingdom had a population of European migrants of well over a million, including the Irish. The Pole, Irish, Ukrainian or Balt, was a more common sight than the non-white imperial citizen; white aliens alone (excluding the Irish) were more numerous and welcome than British blacks.
A new national monarchy appeared, though this was well hidden behind imperial and Commonwealth imagery. When Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901, her son, King Edward VII, was proclaimed ‘By the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India’. His son, King George V, was crowned with the same title, but in 1927 the ‘United Kingdom’ disappeared from it. He was now ‘King of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions beyond the Seas’. His son, George VI, retained this style but had to give up the title of emperor of India (though he was briefly king of India and, for a little longer, king of Pakistan), though the Irish no longer recognized him as king from 1937. From 1949 the Commonwealth of Nations, at Indian insistence, was no longer British. Queen Elizabeth II, who came to the throne in 1952, was to be Queen of the United Kingdom, and separately and distinctly of specific other places too. She was a post-imperial monarch.
This new national United Kingdom did not declare itself a new formation. Indeed there was much left over from the past – from liberalism and internationalism to imperialism – which allowed a story of continuity to be told, as indeed it should be. But the break was real enough even if not advertised in the sort of language that made clear what was going on. One reason was that the very notion of nationalism was very problematic at the heart of the empire.
Yet the signs were there. In 1951 a great national exhibition was opened, called ‘The Festival of Britain’, labelled a ‘Tonic for the Nation’. That focus on nation was new – in the past exhibitions of a comparable scale and scope had been imperial and not national. 1938 saw a vast Empire Exhibition in Glasgow. In 1924–5 there was a British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in London, which included a new Empire Stadium. This stadium was known as such at least into the 1960s, though it is now remembered as the old Wembley Stadium.38 But just as for the British there could never be any such thing as British imperialism (as opposed to the British empire), so there could be no such notion as British nationalism (as opposed to the nation). Nationalism was in British understanding an ideology which threatened the empire, and indeed the nation.
IRELAND
Ireland was the first nation to emerge out of the British empire in the twentieth century. Into the early twentieth century the majority of the Irish people were represented at Westminster by the Nationalist Party. Indeed, ‘nationalism’ and the ‘national’ were from this moment terms particularly associated with the opponents of empire, with anti-British sentiment. Among them were the Indian National Congress (1885 – better known as the Congress Party), the African National Congress (originally 1912) and many more. This was the context in which British nationalism would make little sense to most British people, though Irish, Scottish, Indian and African did. Nationalism in British parlance was the doctrine which encapsulated the dubious claims of natives, whether Indian, African, Irish, Scottish, Welsh (and only sometimes of allies). Indeed British imperialism paraded itself as anti-nationalist. As Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the Indian nationalists, put it in the 1930s: ‘[British] Liberals and pacifists and even so-called socialists … chide us for our narrow nationalism, and incidentally suggest to us that the way to a fuller national life is through the “British Commonwealth of Nations”.’39 In this view the empire prefigured an interdependent liberal association of nations; its enemy was the nationalism of others, and the nationalisms within it. On top of this, nationalism was what dangerous continental enemies espoused. Nationalism was, in the official British liberal view, what brought disaster to Europe twice over. Prussians and Nazis were nationalists; to be British was to be anti-nationalist. It was a matter of pride that the British did not go in for the displays of nationalism or imperialism newer, vulgar, nations needed. British stamps and coins had the figure of the sovereign but needed no further identification. British schoolchildren did not salute a flag, or recite patriotic poems.
The Irish Nationalist Party, for decades the third party in the House of Commons, wanted what was called Home Rule for the whole of Ireland, within the United Kingdom. In this they were supported by Liberal governments, who passed Home Rule Bills which were rejected by the House of Lords, and a sizeable majority of the political class. ‘One Law, one Land, one Throne’ was, as in Rudyard Kipling’s notorious anti-papist and anti-Irish poem of 1912, a slogan of the Unionism which resisted the very idea of Home Rule. It was not until 1914, after the powers of the House of Lords had been trimmed, and when the Liberal Party was dependent on the support of the Nationalists in the House of Commons, that the Home Rule Act was passed. The leader of the Conservative Party and senior army officers openly stated they would not accept the verdict of the imperial parliament. This was the other great issue of Edwardian politics – the constitution – meaning the place of Ireland in the United Kingdom, the House of Lords in parliament and the established churches. This was, according to the brilliant young journalist George Dangerfield (writing in the 1930s), one of the three extra-parliamentary rebellions which destroyed British liberalism. This ruling-class rebellion is much less remembered than those by workers and women.
The war intervened to delay the act, and the Unionist rebellion, together with those of women and workers. Instead there was a doomed small nationalist uprising in Dublin in 1916. By 1918 things had changed. An attempt to impose conscription on Ireland in 1918 (a policy earlier controversial even in Great Britain) led to a transformation of the situation. Conscription and nationhood went together – to impose it on Ireland was a powerful Unionist statement. The result was an electoral victory in the 1918 general election by a new party, Sinn Féin, which in one jump became the third-largest party in the parliament at Westminster. The MPs refused to take their seats. They declared independence and there followed a brutal war of repression by the British government. It ended with the creation of the Irish Free State, which remained technically within the empire. It rejected in time all the features even of association with the empire – dominion status and the role of the king. ‘Republicanism’, like nationalism, thus became a concept which was for many anti-British. Ireland imposed tariffs in 1932 and there was a damaging trade war with the United Kingdom between 1932 and 1938, where tariffs were applied to food and to coal. Even so close to home, Commonwealth free trade was a non-starter.
One part of Ireland, named Northern Ireland, remained within the United Kingdom, though paradoxically it got Home Rule, even though the Protestants of the North were the great opponents of the idea. The first devolution went to those who did not want it. A new parliament, and a new state, was set up, under the control of the Unionists, close allies of the Conservative and Unionist Party and the Scottish Unionists.
Ireland points to the importance not just of territory and empire in the politics of the early twentieth century but also, of course, of religion. The United Kingdom was uniquely divided in terms of its Christian religious convictions, rituals and beliefs. Its religious make-up was more complex than straightforwardly bi-confessional Germany, let alone obviously Catholic or Protestant nations.
The British empire organized its affairs as a self-consciously Christian body, with a Protestant monarch at its head. There were a number of official, established churches. The status of these churches was central to politics. The Church of Ireland (Anglican) was disestablished by an act of 1869, hardly surprisingly, since it was not the church of the majority. The Church in Wales was Anglican but was disestablished by Act of 1914 as the result of objections to a national Anglican church, when so many Welsh people were non-conformists. It was a significant constitutional issue for the Tory Party. There was a non-established Anglican church in Scotland, the Scottish Episcopal Church, alongside the official Church of Scotland, which was not Anglican. Then there was the Roman Catholic Church, dominant in Ireland, and important wherever the Irish settled. Thus it was that Liverpool and Glasgow had distinctly Catholic football teams, Everton and Celtic, and a Labour vote which was strongly Catholic too.
The relations of politics and religion were complex – Unionists were closely associated with the Protestant established church. Much of the Tory working-class vote was a Protestant vote, in many places a more specifically Anglican one. On the other hand the more non-conformist Liberal Party attracted Catholics because of its position on Ireland, as did Labour. British socialism was suffused with Christianity (for example in the case of Stafford Cripps) to an extent unthinkable in Catholic Europe. British anti-clericalism has usually been Christian. Catholicism was associated not with order and authority but with rebellion and subversion. The supposed threat of Papism and indeed sometimes mere Anglicanism affected politics. For example, religious issues were central to the politics of education in the Edwardian years – the key issue around the 1902 Education Act was ‘religion on the rates’, ‘rates’ being local property taxes. The Liberals opposed it, forced by its non-conformist grass roots. The last significant religious confrontation in the House of Commons came when it rejected revisions to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer in 1927 and 1928 in a notable revolt by non-conformists and evangelical Anglicans against what they saw as papist modifications. Generally speaking, the dominant Anglicanism was moderate and there were no legal bars to divorce or contraception, for example. Religious division relaxed, if not religious feeling. Particularly notable in this respect was the public persona of the Conservative leader and prime minister Stanley Baldwin. Baldwin was clearly Protestant, indeed Anglican, but obviously open to the non-conformist churches – there was in Baldwin a clear notion of a united Christian, though Protestant, front against atheistic ideologies, socialism and more generally against ‘materialism’. For Baldwin, divine providence was at work in the United Kingdom and in the empire.40 Neville Chamberlain retained his family’s Unitarianism.
Indeed, it was not only religious controversy which waned. By the 1930s the great polemics around free trade and protection, empire, the House of Lords and Ireland had also all moderated very considerably, and were certainly no longer directly linked to party conflict. Protection and imperial preference were now accepted, and religious toleration was established in what was and remained a clearly Christian nation. Yet there was to be an important though hidden transformation, as class became the central divide in politics, politics which was now national rather than imperial. The politics of free trade, empire, protection, the constitution, religion were the politics of elites, elites which controlled state and society. The shift to a politics of the nation coincided with a dramatic change in political life – the emergence of a class-based party designed to put workers into parliament. Politics and political structure changed together. Just as the subject matter of politics was different from what it would become, so too was the political system.
DEMOCRACY?
The United Kingdom and the empire were governed by an abstraction few had heard of – the crown-in-parliament, an extraordinary combined legislative, judicial and executive power. Much policy and administrative practice went on without much intrusion from the electorate. His Majesty’s government ruled; the servants of the crown worked on His Majesty’s service, as the marking on official letters and telegrams had it. Although the House of Commons proclaimed its sovereignty over all others including the House of Lords, it was not a creative, policy-making force in its own right. It expressed party power, and approved proposals put forward by the state (whose highest officers were drawn from parliament, but the high civil servants were not under parliamentary control). Ministers of the crown proposed; parliament passed.41 Power passed through Westminster, and might get blocked there, but it originated elsewhere. It is telling that the House of Commons was always deeply respectful of the crown and the state. It routinely showed particular respect to members who were also members of the Bar (lawyers) and officers of the armed services. They were not merely ‘Honourable Gentlemen’, or ‘Honourable Ladies’, but were addressed as Honourable and Learned in the case of barristers, and Honourable and Gallant in the case of officers. State culture and political culture were intertwined.
Parliament included the House of Lords, which was easily the least democratic upper house of all the major nations of the world. While there were many upper houses where nobles and noble voters were overrepresented, before 1914 only Austria, Prussia and Japan had legislative Houses of Lords. Not even the Russian empire, or imperial Germany, had one. After 1918 only the United Kingdom and imperial Japan (until 1947) had such a hereditary legislature.
One entered the Lords by birth, by appointment, by election by fellow old Irish or Scottish peers or by virtue of reaching the very highest ranks of the established English and Welsh Churches or the judiciary (including the Scottish). Welsh bishops disappeared with disestablishment of their Church in 1920, Irish peer representatives in 1920, and all Scottish peers would sit from 1963. Peerages of the United Kingdom (as they were known – all the other types of peer having been abandoned) were routinely created and they were all hereditary until 1958. Two Parliament Acts, those of 1911 and 1949, would limit the powers of the Lords, but they remained real. The Lords had vetoed Irish Home Rule in the 1890s, and would have again had it not been for the 1911 act, which meant that the Lords could only delay legislation, which they did in the case of the 1914 Government of Ireland Act. In 1900 the prime minister sat in the Lords, but he would be the last. The Marquess of Salisbury, of the Cecil family, was to cede the position to his nephew, Arthur Balfour, who sat in the House of Commons.
The House of Commons was what mattered and determined the shape of the government. Here too the high politics of the elite were what mattered. Around 1900 democratic public life was a matter for elites; political parties were parties of elites. Parties and politicians had great freedom to operate independently of the electorate. Most people, when they had a vote, voted not only for parties of the elite, but for members of parliament drawn from the upper reaches of society. Furthermore, politics was fundamentally about what happened in parliament and the elite public sphere, rather than a matter for the electorate. Only rarely did the electorate and electoral system give unambiguous instructions. In 1906 the electorate returned a free trade Liberal government. In 1918 the electorate endorsed a coalition, as it was to do in 1931, with protection the likely result. The 1945 general election brought a Labour majority government, with a distinct programme and parliamentary candidates.
The politics of party and the politics of parliament were usually more important than the votes of the electorate. Politicians decided on governments. Indeed, minority and coalition governments predominated. There was a brief 1905–6 Liberal minority government under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman before the 1906 election, won by the Liberals through their support for free trade, and from 1910 to 1915 (led by Herbert Asquith from 1908) the Liberal minority government relied on Irish Nationalist and Labour votes. There was a minority Labour government (January to November 1924) and another 1929–31. In fact, coalition was the commonest form of government. Coalitions were in office for some twenty-one years of the forty-five years to 1945; twenty-six if one includes the 1900–1905 Conservative-Liberal Unionist administration. Single-party majority administrations were confined to the Liberal governments of 1906–10 and the Conservative government of 1924–9.
By definition minority governments were formed by agreement, not by parliamentary necessity. Surprisingly, that was also true of most coalitions. The largest party could have governed alone in all the main coalitions: the 1900–1905 government, the Great War coalition (1915–18), the National government (1931–40), and the Second World War coalition (1940–45). Only the Lloyd George coalition of 1918–22 was an exception, but that was the result of a pre-election pact. The Labour Party was a member of both wartime coalitions, and in neither case because of parliamentary arithmetic. The aim was to include the wider labour movement, not the small number of Labour MPs.
Nor did the electorate often decide the fate of governments of any type. A Liberal government took office in 1905, without an election, but in anticipation of one. The 1915 coalition under Herbert Asquith between the ruling Liberals and the Conservatives involved no election, nor did Lloyd George’s accession to the premiership in 1916, a matter of the highest politics of the state. It resulted in a split in the Liberal Party from 1916, between the followers of Asquith and those of Lloyd George, which the electors had no say in until 1918. Lloyd George was ejected from the premiership by Conservative MPs in 1922, which was followed by a general election. The creation of the minority Labour government of 1924 under Ramsay MacDonald was entirely a matter for MPs, indeed uniquely the government was formed by the second, not the first, party in parliament: the leader of the opposition had more MPs backing him than did the prime minister. It was terminated by MPs also. The formation of the National government coalition of 1931 involved no electors, nor did its transformation into the Churchill coalition including the Labour Party in 1940.
The centrality of parliamentary rather than electoral politics is also evident in the importance of breakaways and shifts of MPs between parties. The Liberal Unionists had split from the Liberals, over Ireland; among them was Joseph Chamberlain. As prime minister Lloyd George created his own party, the National Liberals, to stand alongside the Conservatives in the election of 1918. Labour lost MPs to this Liberal-Conservative coalition as well. The 1924 Labour government was well staffed with former Liberals and Conservatives, including a former viceroy of India, Lord Chelmsford, at the Admiralty (see chapter 8). More important figures also changed party affiliation, notably Winston Churchill, who started as a Conservative MP, became a Liberal, and then a Conservative again. The New Party and the Independent Labour Party (ILP) split from Labour in 1931 and 1932. A small National Labour Party existed as part of the National coalition, 1931–45, and the new Liberal Nationals, also formed in 1931, were more successful than the original Liberals for many years.
The nature of politics was determined by the elite, but also by the electoral system. At the beginning of the century the first-past-the-post electoral system operated differently from its later incarnations. This was because not all seats were contested by all the big parties. Before 1918 many candidates were unopposed, notably but not only in Ireland. Candidates did not stand where there was no hope of winning. Liberals abstaining in favour of Labour allowed the Labour Party to exist before 1918 as the fourth party in parliament. Some constituencies returned more than one MP and some still existed until 1950 (for example Blackburn and Derby). Overall, the number of MPs elected by party had only a loose relationship to total votes received for parties. Although the total voting for each party did not have the meaning it would later have, it is worth noting that the Conservative and allied parties won a greater share of the vote than any other party in every general election between 1900 and 1935 with the exception only of 1906. In another example of the lack of correlation of votes and government formation, the Labour vote went up very considerably between the 1923 election, which led to it becoming a minority government, and the election in 1924, after which a Conservative government took over. What the election revealed was the falling popularity of the Liberals, not of Labour. In 1935 Labour got roughly the same vote as 1929, but in the former case it was able to form a minority government as the largest party (though with fewer votes than the Tories), in the latter it remained very firmly in opposition, with only about one-quarter of all MPs. Thus the temptation to read changes of national mood from the number of parliamentary seats won by each party needs to be resisted.
The electoral system was not entrenched by tradition. New systems were not only proposed but implemented. The general election in 1918 was expected to be on the basis of a more proportional system. The House of Commons wanted the Alternative Vote for parliamentary elections, while the Lords wanted Proportional Representation; the result was the status quo, except for the university seats (mostly multi-member), which were in future to be elected by Single Transferable Vote (STV). These university seats were voted for by graduates of individual or groups of universities. In 1918 fifteen members were elected for nine constituencies, two each for Oxford and Cambridge, one for London, three for Combined English Universities, and so on. A new Northern Ireland parliament created in 1920 (with a House of Commons and a Senate) was formed at Stormont, leading to a reduction in the number of MPs sent to Westminster. The Northern Ireland House of Commons was elected by STV up to 1929 (though it was retained for its four-member university seat for Queen’s University Belfast, which was represented in Westminster by one MP). In 1931 the fall of the Labour government prevented the implementation of the bill that would have introduced the Alternative Vote system in large constituencies. There was no lack of ideas and support for the reform, indeed for the abolition of the House of Lords either. The problem was not conservatism, but politics. The 1945 Labour government, though committed to the abolition of the hereditary, conservative and inefficient House of Lords, merely reduced its delaying power to one year in the 1949 Parliament Act. This was a backing-down from a clear position.42 The problem was what to put in its place.
If the electoral system did not change much between 1900 and 1950, the nature of the electorate changed in multiple ways. Changes were slower, more complicated and more dependent on unfamiliar arguments than might be supposed. For example, it was not until 1950 that it could be said that all adults were equally entitled to cast a vote. Before 1918 the right to vote rested mainly (but not exclusively) with resident heads of households (when British subjects – from anywhere in the empire), except where they were women. Some 60 per cent of men over twenty-one had the vote. This was in marked contrast to the universal male suffrage for, say, the French national assembly and the German Reichstag. British women, when ratepayers, voted in local, but not parliamentary elections.
Women’s suffrage did not, as we might suppose today, necessarily mean votes for all women (as had been introduced in Finland and New Zealand). Many of the suffragettes who campaigned for it wanted votes for women on the existing basis for men as heads of households, etc., which would have given few women the vote. Thus the first so-called Conciliation Bill supported by the suffrage campaigners proposed allowing women the household suffrage, but not the property, university and other suffrages, giving an estimated 1 million women voters compared to an existing electorate of around 7 million male voters. It was claimed that most of these women were working-class householders, thus meeting the objection that a vote for female householders would mean extra votes for higher classes.43 The failure of these parliamentary moves led radical suffragettes to turn to violence. Many went on hunger strike in prison, demanding that their actions be recognized as political rather than merely criminal. By brutal force-feeding, and then by release and rearrest, the government prevented death in state custody, though some women did die outside prison as a consequence. They suffered not for all women, but for some women, for the removal of the ‘sex disability’ rather than votes for all women. The decidedly non-militant suffragist Mrs Millicent Fawcett turned to support the small Labour Party, the only one committed to votes for all women, and all men. Votes for all men was as objectionable to much of the political class as votes for some women.
The objections to male suffrage dissolved during the Great War. It would become intolerable that conscripted young men who had fought, but were not yet householders, should not have the vote. Servicemen would get a vote at nineteen, below the usual twenty-one years. The second change was an age-restricted (over thirty) suffrage for women, though only if they were householders or married to one (it was this last condition which made the greatest difference). The electorate went up from roughly 30 per cent of adults to 75 per cent. In the case of the additional university franchise, women who had passed the necessary exams, even if the university barred them from degrees, though not university education (Oxford to 1920, Cambridge to 1948), could vote. The result of these twin changes was that the overall franchise for the 1918 election was three times greater than for that of 1910.
It was left to a Conservative government, that of 1924–9, to make the franchises equal, which added greatly to the electorate for the 1929 election. Yet the system was still not one-person-one-vote. Additional votes could be got by both men and women owning property in a second constituency, and university graduates voted also in university seats (where votes in effect counted for more than in most constituencies). Both were abolished by the 1949 Representation of the People Act, passed by the Labour government in time for the 1950 election.
The extension of suffrage made little difference to the nature of political representatives until 1945. The people generally voted for members of the elite to represent them, rather than people like them, at least until 1945. This is very evident from the small numbers of women elected. The few women elected after 1918 tended to be elite women. The first woman elected never sat in Westminster as she was elected for Sinn Féin in its 1918 landslide. She was the daughter of a baronet, and by marriage a Polish countess. The second was an American-born viscountess, who stood for the Conservatives for her husband’s old seat after he was elevated to the Lords as the 2nd Viscount Astor. The number of women MPs remained tiny. Labour had a female minister of labour in 1929–31, and a female minister of education, 1945–7, but that was the sum total of women in the cabinet before 1951.
The case of workers shows more change. The Liberal Party put up a few workers as candidates, and later agreed not to oppose a small number of working-class candidates from the Labour Representation Committee, which became the Labour Party in 1906. These workers were in public life not as full members but there to represent special sectional concerns only, even though these concerns affected a majority of the population. They focused on working-class and trade union concerns just as the very small numbers of women in parliament often, but certainly not always, focused on women’s issues.44 The parliamentary Labour Party of the interwar years was dominated by workers, though it was increasingly fortified with MPs drawn from the elite. Yet the whole parliamentary Labour Party was not strong in parliament before 1945. They made up a rough average of 25 per cent of all MPs between 1922 and 1945, significantly less than the share of the Labour vote. The exceptions were 1929–31, when Labour had 47 per cent of MPs, much more than the vote share, and 1931–5, when Labour MPs were only 7 per cent of the House of Commons.
The Conservative and Unionist Party, and the Liberal Parties, which dominated politics up to 1945, were both parties of elites. They represented each of the two programmes we have discussed – the liberal, internationalist and free-trading tendency and the imperialist protectionist one – as well as differing attitudes to the Irish, constitutional and religious questions. There were additional dimensions which will figure later in the book. Broadly the Conservative Party was the party of the constitution. It was the party of the landed elite and the House of Lords, of the Anglican Churches, of the Union with Ireland, of empire, of armaments and, at many times, of protection and of alcoholic refreshment. The Liberal Party was the party of trade and industry, of free trade, of peace not war, of trade not empire (though led by liberal imperialists, that is free traders who supported empire), of non-conformity (though its greatest nineteenth-century leader, William Gladstone, was an Anglican), of home rule for Ireland, of temperance (though its long-serving leader Herbert Asquith was for good reason known as ‘Squiffy’). Of the two the Conservative Party was the closer to established authority, the Liberal Party to reform, to liberty and to internationalism.
The parties were in some ways too easily distinguished from each other. Both relied on working-class votes and both were anti-socialist.45 They were often allies. Thus the Conservative Party was in alliance with the large Liberal Unionist Party until 1912, when the two merged to form the Conservative and Unionist Party. From 1918 to 1922 the Lloyd George Liberals were in electoral alliance with the Conservatives, and not merely in coalition. The coming-together of Conservatives and Liberals can be seen in that most remarkable political phenomenon, the Liberal Nationals. What was defeated in 1945 was not merely the Conservative Party, but the National coalition. The remaining National Labour MPs were all defeated but the Liberal Nationals got 3 per cent of the vote. Renamed the National Liberals, they were effectively part of the Conservative Party into the 1960s, when they disappeared.
Both parties changed. In a remarkable transformation, the Conservative Party of the ultras and diehards of 1914 became the party that marginalized these diehards, as in the case of the Government of India Act. It supported extending the franchise in 1918 and extended it to all women in 1928. It transformed the social services in the 1920s. Under industrial leadership, it would become increasingly open to business of all kinds, to the British people as a whole, to all religions. As an electoral machine it showed concern with the social sciences, the use of cinema and other media, the control of image and indeed the press.46 It never, until 1945, scored less than 38 per cent of the vote, and scored more than 50 per cent in 1900 (if one includes Liberal Unionists) and 1931.
In political terms 1945 represented a major shift. It was not until 1945 that a majority of the British working class, making up 70–80 per cent of the population, voted for the Labour Party. A new party emerged which now rejected to a significant degree the programmes of other parties (though it claimed to be continuing the programme of the wartime coalition in some important respects). It was neither imperialist nor free-trading. More importantly, it was a very different kind of party from those that had previously dominated. From 1945 Labour now had more than 60 per cent of the House of Commons. The Parliamentary Labour Party had many more graduates and public school boys than the population as a whole, yet was radically more representative than the Conservatives or the Liberals. The Labour leader Clement Attlee was quite explicit in saying that while the Tory and Liberal candidates in 1945 were all essentially rich, only Labour candidates reflected all of society. He denounced the Tories for calling themselves National, when their MPs came only from those born rich or who became rich.47 If the working class were under-represented they were nevertheless strongly present. Over half of the 393 Labour MPs had education no higher than a secondary school, just under half (43 per cent) had elementary school education only.48 Though the numbers differ, it seems clear that the absolute number of working-class Labour MPs was higher after 1945 than the 1922–35 average, at about the level of the temporary 1929 peak, a period of fewer Labour MPs, but a higher proportion of workers among them.49 The difference now was that they were in a majority governing party, and installed for the long-term. These working-class members of parliament, as well as the teachers and other middle-class occupations, were not part of elite or state culture. Most Labour MPs were not familiar through quotidian contact with power or the secrets of the state, its experts, its ways and its means. Political culture and state culture were now separate spheres. Indeed, there were now not even senior trade unionists in parliament.
The orthodox view is that the Labour Party inherited the role of the largely defunct Liberal Party as the party of reform. The Liberal Party in this account was a proto-social-democratic party of so-called ‘New Liberals’ who started a wave of welfare reforms before 1914, which would be taken up again by Labour in 1945. In the left version of this view Labour is seen as trapped within the confines of Liberal thinking, about welfare and much else, its social democracy limited to advanced liberalism.50 While there is something in both these views they miss the essentials. First the Liberals were, well past 1914, a party of business, and a party which always allied with Conservatives over Labour. The Liberals of all stripes were anti-socialists, and for them Labour was, after 1918, socialist (it had stood aside for Labour in some seats before then, when Labour was nearly exclusively a trade union party). Furthermore, as we have noted and shall also see in detail in later chapters, the great innovations in welfare were made not by Liberal governments before 1914, but by Conservatives in the 1920s. Where Labour was then liberal – indeed this was central to its programme – was in dedicated support to the old liberal doctrines of free trade. In matters of social services it opposed, though did not change, the main tenets of the New Liberal and Conservative welfare state. However, even if Labour inherited liberal policies, old and new, it was a party of a very different character and by 1945 had left free trade far behind it. Free trade (as opposed to free enterprise) was supported only by the now tiny Liberal Party from the 1930s. Indeed, as we see in detail in chapter 8, the Labour Party presented itself to the post-war electorate in a remarkably national way. It was a nationalist as well as a social democratic party.
After 1945 there was a class-aligned politics which was national in new ways. The direction of the nation, the definition of the national interest were the object of politics, and there was a national economy, and a national society, to direct. The two large parties were national in that that they were contesting nearly all seats all over the country (with the exception of Labour in Northern Ireland). Each party presented itself as a national party, but in different ways: the Conservative Party as the party of established authority, with an imperial bias still; the Labour Party as the party which represented all classes, the true nation, one which was clearly non-imperial. This is not to say that Labour did not inherit a large measure of liberal internationalist thinking, or that the Conservative Party was not in some measure still extremely imperialist. But the basic concerns and political debates had shifted. But on balance the Labour Party was now, and was long to be, the party of the national project, and the Conservative Party an uneasy mix of the party of empire, nation, free enterprise and, in the future, free trade.
In the following eight chapters we will see how in many fields, from food control to energy, from ideas to inventions, there was this same basic shift to nation over the period 1900–1950, and most markedly after 1945. As we shall see, this new national focus was expressed in many different forms – in the existence for the first time in peace of a conscript army, with high military spending, and of the creation of national industries owned by the national state. The creation of a ruling economic elite connected the nation as never before, with much of its wealth tied up in national debt, was also a novel feature. Its industry was bent, for the first time, to a national purpose, that of exporting. Its inventive effort was directed as never before to national aims. And it created social services, what would later be called a welfare state, for the whole nation rather than for just the working class. The corollary is that one can only understand what was happening in all these fields before 1950, or 1945, by taking a non-national approach which allows one to capture both the liberal and the imperial dimensions of British life. What made the United Kingdom different before then was its openness to the world, its wealth and its distinctive modes of sustenance and indeed of exertion of power.
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