E-Book, Englisch, 480 Seiten
Blake The Decline of Power, 1915-1964
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ISBN: 978-0-571-29825-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 480 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-29825-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Robert Blake (1916-2003) was the pre-eminent Tory historian of his day. In addition to his masterpiece, his biography of Disraeli, his books include Bonar Law: The Unknown Prime Minister, The Conservative Party from Peel to John Major and a volume in the Paladin History of England, (a series which he edited), The Decline of Power, 1915-1964. These and Disraeli's Grand Tour are all being reissued in Faber Finds.
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1
‘The disintegration of the Liberal Party is complete,’ wrote Sir Charles Hobhouse, one of the sacked ministers, in his diary on 23 May 1915. ‘We shall not return to power for some years and only then because Labour is as broken as ourselves. Lloyd George and his Tory friends will soon get rid of Asquith.’1 The prediction was partly correct. Asquith was manoeuvred out of office barely over a year and a half later and replaced by Lloyd George with Conservative support. The old Liberal Party disintegrated but Hobhouse was over-optimistic in believing that the divisions of the Labour Party would cause it to reunite. The Liberals never held office on their own again. It was Labour which, for all its disorder, lived to fight another day and become the alternative party of government.
Professor Shannon has mentioned some of the reasons for Asquith’s sudden decision to reconstruct his ministry on a coalition basis.2 The scandal of the shell shortage on the western front, the disasters of the Dardanelles, Lord Fisher’s resignation as First Sea Lord, Conservative distrust of Winston Churchill (shared by many Liberals too), combined to make it impossible for Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, to keep his followers in their silent role since August 1914 as a ‘patriotic opposition’. The only choice was confrontation or coalition. Much historiographical ink has been spent in disputing which of all these problems determined the issue. There is, however, an even more important point to consider. If Asquith had led from strength he might have been ready to face a reversion to pre-war parliamentary conflict, but in fact his hand was weak. Behind the other causes for his decision lay an even more cogent reason. Under the Parliament Act a general election was due to be held at latest in January 1916. In the existing House Asquith was unlikely to be defeated, even if deserted by Irish and Labour MPs, because more Conservative than Liberal members were on active service, but if he had to go to the polls the prospect was very different. His chances of victory were remote, and in the new circumstances only a coalition could avert a general election.3
It is by no means the case that a general election was impracticable in either of the two world wars. The Americans, as their constitution necessitated, held congressional and presidential elections in the Second World War. In fact, in Britain a party concordat resulted, during 1914–18 and again during 1939–45, in the suspension of the Parliament Act, but no such agreement had been reached in May 1915. On separate occasions later both Asquith and Bonar Law mooted the possibility of a dissolution. It was a move that certainly could not be ruled out by political calculators, but at this juncture Asquith had no intention of risking it if he could avoid it.
He had not always viewed the effect of war on his political fortunes with such pessimism. In a curious playlet written for his own amusement only a few weeks earlier he apostrophized himself as he had been in August 1914: ‘You were almost a classic example of Luck … above all (at a most critical and fateful moment in your own career) in the sudden outbreak of the Great War.’4 The war had undoubtedly extricated the Prime Minister and his party from a domestic situation of the greatest difficulty. Apart from a host of other threats, there was a real possibility of civil strife in Ulster. But this stroke of ‘luck’ depended for success upon another to follow it; a short, sharp, victorious campaign in which Germany was quickly beaten to its knees by the conscript armies of France and Russia and in which Britain played a mainly naval role in support. Asquith would then have been on the top of the wave.
Events had not turned out that way. By the summer of 1915 it was clear that the war was going to be a long one, and the longer it lasted the more damaging would be its effect on the Liberals. The values for which the party stood might have survived a rapid war fought by volunteer forces on the basis of ‘business as usual’. They could not survive the stresses of stalemate and the necessities of the first ‘total’ war in modern history. The Liberals had been deeply divided about intervening at all. It was they, not the Conservatives, who needed the moral outrage of the invasion of Belgium to justify hostilities. Even so, two members of the Cabinet resigned. The Conservatives had pressed for intervention from the very beginning on grounds of realpolitik and the balance of power.
The Liberals were traditionally the party of freedom of speech, conscience and trade. They were against jingoism, heavy armaments and compulsion. They recognized that some of these ideals would have to be relinquished in war. But the abandonment of them, even temporarily, was painful. Liberals were neither wholehearted nor unanimous about conscription, censorship, the Defence of the Realm Act, severity towards aliens and pacifists, direction of labour and industry. The Conservatives – ‘the patriotic party’ ever since the duel between Disraeli and Gladstone – had no such misgivings. There were even some of them, who, taking Milner as their political and Kipling as their spiritual mentor, positively welcomed the more draconian aspects of wartime legislation. They regarded many of Britain’s pre-war ills as by-products of Liberal ‘softness’. Not all went as far as that, but the party would have exploited the patriotic cry to the full in a general election which they would certainly have won easily.
Among the Liberals, Lloyd George had emerged as the leader of those who believed in all-out war. He became aligned with the Conservative ‘hawks’. Asquith could not be called a ‘dove’. If he had been one, he might, as Professor Shannon suggests, have led ‘Liberalism in its natural bent, as Fox and Grey had done in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and as Campbell-Bannerman had done in 1900’. This would have involved seeking a compromise peace with Germany. Asquith never thought in such terms and he was right. From what we now know about the sort of conditions envisaged by the German government, it is clear that the idea was a delusion. Ironically, it was a former Conservative Foreign Minister, Lord Lansdowne, who took up the cause in 1916 and predictably got nowhere. To say this is not to deny that the world would have been a better place if the great powers had stopped slaughtering each other two years earlier – merely that there was no practical possibility of it happening.
Asquith wished to prosecute the war but he was curiously conservative in his methods while at the same time being much more anti-Conservative in the party sense than Lloyd George. The coalition was thus an uncomfortable affair. The Liberal ministers were on the defensive about their past record and resented the way old colleagues had been unceremoniously discarded, often under Conservative pressure – and in the case of Haldane without even the courtesy of a letter of regret from the Prime Minister. The Conservatives were just as prickly. They distrusted Asquith and hesitated to serve under him at all. The distribution of offices did not help. There were six that mattered in wartime. Of these, four – the premiership, Foreign Office, Exchequer and Munitions – were in the hands of Liberals. The War Office was held by a non-political figure, Kitchener. Only the Admiralty went to a Conservative but since Asquith’s choice fell on Balfour who had been driven out of the party leadership in 1911, the arrangement was not calculated to placate Tory amour propre. Bonar Law and Austen Chamberlain were respectively fobbed off with the colonies and India.
One consequence of the reconstruction was diffusion in the responsibility for directing the war. The constitutional and administrative problems thus raised were to be an important element in the controversies which led to Asquith’s downfall. From August to November 1914 the Cabinet had been the decisive body assuming all the powers of the Committee of Imperial Defence which went into virtual abeyance for the rest of the war. On 25 November a committee of the Cabinet known as the War Council was established. Its powers were never precisely defined. In theory it was subordinate to the Cabinet. In practice its decisions were acted upon and only reported to the Cabinet afterwards by Asquith. But the council met only when Asquith summoned it, and he did not do so regularly. There was a gap of eight weeks between March and May 1915. This was not accidental. It suited Asquith to conduct the war through an informal triumvirate, himself, Kitchener and Churchill.
Kitchener possessed immense authority. Munitions and recruitment came under his aegis as well as military strategy. As the senior serving field-marshal he behaved more like a commander-in-chief than a political minister obliged to take advice from the Army Council. When he visited the western front he wore uniform to the annoyance of Sir John French who saw it as an assertion of rank. His public prestige was enormous and everyone treated him with deference. Yet he had little or no idea what to do with his power. He lacked administrative skill and strategic vision. In the end he was a recruiting poster et praeterea nihil. Churchill for rather different reasons also enjoyed great power, a product of that restless questing energy which was to characterize the whole of his life. His weakness which he himself never saw was that the man in...
