The parliamentary rise of ‘Labour’, and the electoral challenge it posed to the Liberal party, are striking in the history of twentiethcentury politics. As early as 1901, the Fabian Sidney Webb argued that the emergence of a party of labour threatened the Liberal party’s status as ‘the political organ of the progressive instinct’ and as the main opposition to the Tories. Yet in the five years following its formation, ‘Labour’ was merely a parliamentary pressure group, with no aspirations to challenging the Liberals. It had only two MPs, one of whom was the redoubtable Hardie, known for wearing a cloth cap in parliament rather than the customary silk top hat. The sight of him at Westminster was a shock to many: ‘A Republic,’ wrote one journalist, ‘has insinuated itself in the folds of a monarchy.’ Hardie was lambasted by the overwhelmingly Conservative newspapers for his republican views. From the back benches, he advocated increasing as well as graduating income tax (which only 7 per cent of the population currently paid) to subsidize a programme of social reforms, designed to improve the conditions of the working class.
For the moment, no one listened to the voice of Labour. Balfour’s administration, which lasted from 1902 to 1905, showed little interest in introducing social legislation, while the idea of raising taxes was abhorrent to most Tories. Nevertheless the government did pass the 1903 Unemployed Workmen Act, which at least acknowledged that the state ought to address the problem of unemployment. The government’s most ambitious piece of domestic legislation was the 1902 Education Act, which provided funds, from local ratepayers, for denominational religious instruction; it also united the voluntary elementary schools run by the Anglican and Catholic churches with those administered by school boards. But the act provoked outrage on the Liberal benches. It was discriminatory against Nonconformists, they claimed, since it was predominantly Anglican schools that were to be subsidized by rates.
While the Education Act proved controversial, the political cause célèbre of Balfour’s tenure was protectionism. In 1902 a group of Liberal Unionists and Conservatives tried to persuade his government to impose tariffs on all imports coming into Britain from outside the empire. Their proposals effectively called for the end of laissez-faire economics and free trade – two of the great Victorian verities. The Liberal party united in opposition to the proposal, on the grounds that unfettered competition was natural, moral and patriotic.
The debate not only drew a clear dividing line between the two parties, it also split the Conservative and Liberal Unionist coalition. Many Conservatives had sympathy with the arguments of the free-trade Liberals, and even more believed that the status quo should not be disturbed. How, they asked, could such a radical idea emerge from within a Tory-dominated coalition, whose central aim was to conserve things as they were, and to perpetuate the power the party had enjoyed at Westminster for almost two decades?
The answer was simple: Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary and Liberal Unionist leader, whose conversion to Tariff Reform guaranteed it would become the great issue of the day. Chamberlain, as the young Tory Winston Churchill commented, ‘was the one who made the weather’ – in the cabinet, in Westminster and in the country. The charismatic man with the monocle and the orchid in his buttonhole had been ‘Made in Birmingham’. Imbued with the confidence of a city that had experienced extraordinary material and technological progress during the industrial revolution, this former screw manufacturer was truculent, practical, energetic and ambitious. He was an emblem of Birmingham’s thriving commercial aristocracy – he had been mayor of the city in the 1870s and had improved its infrastructure through the implementation of a programme of ‘municipal socialism’.
Given Chamberlain’s character and background, it is unsurprising that not all Tories celebrated his defection to their side of the House in 1886, in protest at the Liberal government’s Irish Home Rule Bill. The old party of the landed governing class and the Anglican Church ought not, some Tories believed, to ally itself with manufacturers and dissenters, especially when they were as radical, flashy and potentially divisive as Chamberlain. Yet he proved to be a great electoral asset to what became the Unionist Alliance. His Liberal Unionist group contributed seventy-one MPs to the coalition after the 1895 election, while the policies he pursued as colonial secretary from that date had been immensely popular. Chamberlain was a zealous imperialist who believed ‘that the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen’. His plan for the empire was the knitting together of ‘kindred races’ for ‘similar objects’; in particular, he aimed to strengthen the ‘bonds’ linking Britain, Canada and America in a ‘Greater Britain’. Yet unifying and integrating the empire were not enough to satisfy Chamberlain; he dreamed of expanding its frontiers. His aggressive policies had helped provoke the conflict with the Boers, which became known as ‘Joe’s War’. In the early days of the military campaign he had basked in the triumphs of the British troops, which helped secure a decisive electoral victory for the Unionist Alliance in 1900.
The speeches and journalism Chamberlain produced during the election campaign were peppered with slogans. ‘Every seat lost to the government,’ he had declared, ‘is a seat sold to the Boers.’ Chamberlain believed that subtlety of argument was inappropriate for the twentieth century: ‘in politics’, he would say, ‘you must paint with a broad brush’. His ability to speak directly to the voting lower middle class and the business classes, through simple language and the modern media, made Chamberlain unique among the coalition ranks. He was, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘the man the masses knew’. While some Tories, and most Liberals, accused him of lowering the standard of public life with his ‘demagoguery’, the party hierarchy was forced to tolerate him.
With jingoism apparently dead following the debacle of the Boer War, and with the Liberal opposition gaining momentum, Chamberlain needed another popular cry. Besides, he was nearing seventy and itching for one last adventure. That adventure might also advance his ultimate ambition – the leadership of a Unionist government and the country. An acute interpreter of the spirit of the age, Chamberlain sensed that businessmen and the lower middle classes were slowly coming to the conclusion that free competition was a Victorian truism. It was this intuition that inspired Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform programme.
Chamberlain presented his plans to the cabinet in 1902. Some of his colleagues were persuaded by his argument that tariffs would protect British industry from foreign competition, but others were openly hostile. Balfour decided that he could not afford to lose the support of Chamberlain’s critics by backing the plan. The government’s official position was expressed in a characteristic Balfourian equivocation – Tariff Reform was desirable but impractical at the present time. Yet Chamberlain was not a man to wait. In May 1903, he defied Balfour by publicizing his proposals in a startling speech in Birmingham, insisting that England’s free trade policies, and the tariffs imposed by other nations on English goods, were destroying the country’s industry. ‘Sugar is gone; silk has gone; iron is threatened; wool is threatened; cotton will go! How long are you going to stand it?’ Only the imposition of tariffs on goods coming into England from outside the empire could arrest the country’s economic decline and preserve English jobs: ‘Tariff Reform’, ran his new slogan, ‘Means Work for All’. Tariffs would, in addition, further the two causes closest to his heart – imperialism and social reform. They would bind the vast empire closer together, as a single economic, political and military unit, and raise government revenue which could be spent on domestic legislation. ‘The foreigner’ would thus pay for social reform, rather than the English taxpayer.