Brack Prime Minister Boris

And other things that never happened
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-84954-245-6
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

History resting on a hair's breadth ... a man dies rather than lives, an election is lost rather than won, one minister is appointed, another dismissed, a coalition is joined, or not. Enter a world of political counterfactuals, twenty-two examinations of things that never happened - but could have. In this book a collection of distinguished commentators, including journalists, academics, former MPs and special advisers, consider how things might have turned out differently throughout a century of political history - from Lloyd George and Keynes drowning at sea in 1916 right through to Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister in 2016. Scholarly analyses of possibilities and causalities take their place beside fictional accounts of alternate political histories - and all are guaranteed to entertain and make you think.

Duncan Brack is the editor of the Journal of Liberal History. Iain Dale is a writer, publisher and LBC radio broadcaster.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brack, Duncan

Leseproben

Chapter 1

What if Lloyd George and Keynes had gone to Russia in 1916?

David Boyle

It was a horrible shock to hear of the Hampshire disaster and to know that you missed it by so little. I could hardly breathe when I realised it at first … and it was your birthday!

Letter to Keynes from his mother, 6 June 1916

It is 5 June 1916. The Grand Fleet has returned to its North Sea bases days ago, battered but unbowed after its ordeal at the Battle of Jutland. In France, the final preparations are being made for the British offensive on the Somme. At the fleet anchorage at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Isles, a senior government delegation heading for Russia is on board a small drifter, battling against the wind to board the cruiser HMS Hampshire.

It is an undignified business. The sea is too rough for the cruiser to dock and too violent to climb a gangway from a boat in the usual way. It requires a hoist. First up the grey sides is Lord Kitchener, the Minister for War, not just a great man but also, as the Prime Minister’s wife puts it, ‘a great poster’. Prince Felix Yusupov, the future murderer of Rasputin, has been impressed by his grasp of Russian affairs and suggested that the Tsar request a visit.

Next up the hoist, a tall, thin intense-looking man, carrying an attaché case, making sure that Kitchener does not have to talk to his boss when he reaches the top. This is John Maynard Keynes, representing the Treasury and there to assist the dynamic Munitions Minister and former Chancellor, David Lloyd George, who follows behind, irritable and restless, his dapper moustache blowing in the wind.

The rain lashes their faces as they struggle under cover as their teams follow up the hoist. The north easterly wind is now rising into gale force. The smoke from the Hampshire’s four tall funnels is blown down, backwards and forwards across the deck. As soon as the dignitaries are aboard, greeted by the Captain and hurried below for lunch, the Hampshire makes her way towards the great boom which guards the fleet from enemy submarines. Two small destroyers follow in her wake.

Outside the comfort of the fleet anchorage, the gale hits the Hampshire with shocking force. The fleet commander, Sir John Jellicoe, has suggested that they take the westerly route around the Orkneys to avoid the worst of the wind, without realising that – only three days before – the German submarine U75 has laid twenty-two mines by Marwick Head, directly in their path, under the impression it was somewhere else.

Below decks, Kitchener smokes as the ship swings from side to side, while Lloyd George and Keynes are locked in impassioned debate about the Treasury papers. All are nervous of vomiting in front of the others. It is a tough, slow journey and the two escorts are forced to turn back by the heavy seas, so that Hampshire is alone at 7.50pm, when she is torn apart by a huge explosion. Sirens wail all over the ship. Steam fills the companionways and it is clear by the immediate list that she will not stay afloat. Ten minutes later, she is gone.

Kitchener is last seen pacing the freezing quarterdeck as the ship goes down. Lloyd George is seen remonstrating with the Captain. There are no reports of Keynes. Most of the crew die in the freezing tumultuous sea, within sight of land.

On board his flagship, in the wireless telegraph room of the Iron Duke, Jellicoe is given the news, just five days after his return from battle and the loss of 9,000 British sailors. He sits down heavily and buries his face in his hands. The wartime icon and victor of Omdurman, the man who could have been Prime Minister, and the economist who could have changed the world, are all at the bottom of the sea.

~

1 June 2011

To: Professor Charles X. Hackenbacker

Economics Department

Oscar Romero University

New Mexico 87654

USA

Dear Chuck,

I was leafing through the pages of the latest edition of the Journal of Economic Mysticism the other day and found the article by your colleague – the one where he claims to have glimpsed some kind of parallel economic universe where an obscure British Treasury official rescued the world.

You know my view on these things. If something has happened, then it had to happen. That’s the way we economists look at things. So I thought I would send you some ammunition against this kind of nonsense in case it comes up in your department. I am avoiding email; we don’t want a repeat of the hacking incident we had last time.

Now, as you know, your colleague suggests that this is all about the career of a Treasury official called John Maynard Keynes, son of the economist John Neville Keynes. Keynes accompanied Lloyd George on his fatal trip in the Hampshire, and my colleague suggests that what should have happened was that neither of them actually went in the end. Both men therefore lived to have their impacts on the world.

Let me go through his suggestions one by one.

The first thing he claims is that Lloyd George would have become Prime Minister in December 1916. This is probably quite true, but – as we know – there was no new Prime Minister in 1916, and Asquith soldiered on until the U-boat and convoy crisis the following year, at which point the Conservatives intervened and the place went to the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law. Perhaps, as he suggests, Lloyd George could have held the wartime coalition together, split the Liberal Party and allowed the Labour Party to move into their space. Perhaps he would have brought Churchill back in from the cold: ‘I would rather have him against us every time’, said Bonar Law.1 Perhaps, but this is just part of his dream world. That isn’t what happened, is it?

These things are perhaps more in my remit than yours, since they concern British history. But, as you will recall, Bonar Law managed to moderate matters at Versailles but then instituted a disastrous series of imperial tariffs, Beaverbrook’s price for making him getting him the top job. This led to ferocious trade competition with the United States, and truly desperate balance of payments difficulties, leading to more spending cuts, strikes and riots before they were dismantled by the Liberal government of 1924.

Your colleague says that Lloyd George would have built 170,000 homes, controlled the rents and provided unemployment insurance, and doubled old age pensions. Maybe he would have done. He certainly had a more mellifluous way with words. I’m sure he could have come up with a better slogan than Bonar Law’s ‘houses fit for soldiers in genuine need’!

But then, as your colleague says, even under Lloyd George, the spending cuts of the 1920s reversed most of these achievements. That is why they had to wait for the Liberals to come back into power, an event sadly overshadowed by the business of ousting the ancient Asquith and replacing him with Donald Maclean. The idea that the Liberals had split by then and a majority Labour government was possible is laughable. Please poke fun at your colleague for that on my behalf.

These were difficult years for the Liberals, as you know. They had inherited a disastrous economy, limping along after the post-war spending cuts put through by the fearsome ‘Chamberlain Chopper’. And we can only imagine what kind of dynamism and ideas Lloyd George might have brought to problems if he had not been residing at the bottom of the North Sea at the time. Perhaps they would not have had to rely on the handful of Labour Party votes to force through the Irish peace treaty after so long, and to unravel the tariffs and trade barriers.

Perhaps they might have prevented the Conservatives returning to the Gold Standard. They might have prevented the Great Depression. Who knows? Still, your colleague is undoubtedly right – if Lloyd George had lived, things would have been different. There would have been a great deal more peers of the realm, for starters.

Then we get to the interesting part. Your colleague suggests that this Keynes, who – in this parallel universe he speaks of – was dropped from sailing on the Hampshire at the very last moment, became the critical figure in economics in the twentieth century. He says he formulated a series of ideas which you and I know as ‘Kaleckian’, after poor Michael Kalecki, who suggested something similar – that markets cannot produce full employment on their own, because the wealthy save rather than spend in the bad times.

This is the idea, which you may recognise, that governments should run their economies at full capacity, increasing aggregate demand by borrowing to invest. It was a theory not so much for Liberals, though Keynes was a Liberal, but to underpin Social Democrats. As a result, your colleague’s parallel universe is full of Social Democrats; ours is not.

We know Keynes as a minor member of the Bloomsbury Group, but primarily as the expert in Indian currencies who persuaded Lloyd George not to suspend gold payments in July 1914, and to issue an emergency currency instead. I believe the notes were called Bradburys, after the man who signed them. What we also know about him (he was only 33 when he drowned) was that he and Lloyd George loathed each other. When Lloyd George asked his opinion in a railway carriage in France, he said: ‘With the utmost of respect I must, if asked for my opinion, tell you that I regard your account as rubbish.’2So your colleague’s idea...