Along with fashions in clothes came fashions in language. To express approval, a flapper might call something ‘jazz’, ‘the bee’s knees’ or ‘the cat’s meow’; disapprobation was indicated by epithets such as ‘Victorian’, ‘stuffy’ and ‘junk’. Boring men were ‘pillow cases’, and young men any girl could ‘borrow’ for the evening were ‘umbrellas’. Women eager for experience were admiringly known as ‘biscuits’, but if a girl stole a friend’s boyfriend she became a ‘strike-breaker’. In such epithets and phrases, we can hear an echo of the confidence and irreverence of the young women of post-war England.
15
The clock stops
Failure to grant electoral equality to women was not the only limitation of the 1918 Representation of the People Act. It also stopped short of establishing the principle of ‘one man, one vote’ in the constituency of residence – around one and a half million middle-class men enjoyed an extra vote, because of their ability to vote in university constituencies or in constituencies where their businesses operated. Neither did it introduce any proportional representation into the electoral system, but instead maintained the first-past-the-post formula, which strongly favoured the more established parties. The continued use of this system created widespread disillusionment among English voters. What was the point of voting for one’s preferred party in a constituency where it had no chance of winning?
Yet despite these defects, the 1918 Representation of the People Act was a revolutionary piece of legislation, tripling the electorate to around 21 million. It gave the majority of workingclass men a stake in society by granting them the vote for the first time. Like the enfranchisement of women over the age of thirty, the granting of the vote to workingclass men was regarded by some politicians as a reward for the enormous contribution these men had made to the war effort, both at home and on the Western Front. It was also an acknowledgement of the status and power that Labour and the unions had achieved during the war, and a pragmatic concession from a political establishment that feared a return to pre-war industrial unrest.
The consequences of enfranchising 14 million women and workingclass men would soon be evident; Lloyd George called a general election immediately after the armistice. Officially he sought a popular mandate to negotiate a lasting post-war international settlement, and to implement a programme of social and economic reconstruction. Yet there were also political reasons for calling an election. Lloyd George wanted to capitalize on his reputation as ‘The Man Who Won the War’ and as the prime minister who could, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘get things done’. The only problem was that he no longer had a strong and united party behind him. Only half of the Liberal MPs in the 1918 Commons backed him, the others standing by Asquith in principled but hopeless opposition. The prime minister also lacked a coherent political credo – traditional Liberalism had been exploded by the experience of war.
But the celebrated political fixer soon came up with a solution: a continuation of the national coalition, in peacetime, under his leadership. Lloyd George believed the traditional battle lines between the parties had become obscured during the war, events having blunted the divisiveness of debates surrounding free trade and protection, jingoism and anti-imperialism, state intervention and private enterprise. He hoped that consensus politics had replaced the old tribal and class-or interest-based politics and that he would emerge as a presidential figure with cross-party appeal. The Unionists signed up to his plan, partly because Lloyd George was unassailable. The party lacked a leader with the prime minister’s popular appeal and doubted its ability to appeal to newly enfranchised workingclass voters. Moreover, some Tories sensed the opportunity of destroying the Liberal party by driving a wedge between the coalition Liberals and the ‘Squiffites’.
The Labour party declined the invitation to remain in the coalition, preferring to work alone. The addition of a great swathe of the working class to the electorate gave them confidence, as did the doubling of the party membership to 3 million during the war, and the enhanced status and size of the unions, which now comprised 8 million members. The increase in subscriptions gave the party the resources to expand its National Executive and establish a network of branches throughout the country. The party’s recent experience of government, together with the demise of the Liberals, inspired optimism throughout its ranks, as did the fact that a socialist economy had been established during the war and accepted by the population.
Labour also believed it could exploit the radicalism that was sweeping across England after the war. People wanted to build a new and better society, and were determined that a capitalist or imperialistic conflict should never break out again. According to George Orwelclass="underline" ‘After that unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn’t go on regarding society as something eternal and unquestionable … You knew it was just a balls-up.’ A similar attitude may have prompted people to protest and riot during the 1919 Peace Day celebrations, which had been organized by the government to encourage national unity. In Luton a crowd stormed and burned down the town hall. The leaders of the nation were perturbed. As one senior courtier, Lord Esher, remarked, ‘The Monarchy and its cost will now have to be justified in the eyes of a war-worn and hungry proletariat, endowed with a huge preponderance of voting power.’
Labour felt emboldened to formulate radical policy proposals, including the nationalization of the railways, the workers’ control of industry and a capital levy to eliminate the national debt. Since workingclass men had been conscripted to fight the war, trade unionists and Labour MPs argued that the ‘accumulated wealth’ of the middle and upper classes should be ‘conscripted to defray the financial liability incurred by the conflict’. The party also decided to adopt an overtly socialist creed, which would clearly distinguish it from its Liberal rivals. In its revised constitution of 1918, it pledged ‘to the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof … upon the basis of common ownership of the means of production and control of each industry and service’.
The reference to ‘workers by brain’ suggests an attempt by Labour to attract the middle classes and the intelligentsia that had been drawn to the reforming Liberal administrations before the war. The adoption of socialism as the official Labour doctrine manifests a desire to distance the party from the unions and to broaden its social appeal; socialism was an international, supra-class creed rather than a workingclass or trade unionist one. Ramsay MacDonald advocated nebulous and gradualist socialism that was tailored to appeal to ‘the middle section’ radicalized by the war, whose ‘nucleus is the intelligent artisan and the intellectual well-to-do’. Yet Labour’s espousal of socialism, however cautious, left it open to attack from the centre and the right. In the run-up to the 1918 election, Lloyd George’s friends in the conservative press raised the spectre of a Labour-sponsored socialist revolution, while the prime minister claimed that ‘The Labour Party is being run by the extreme pacifist, Bolshevik group.’ But Labour was not intimidated into abandoning its endorsement of socialism; it was convinced that the centre ground of politics had shifted to the left.
The national coalition won the election by an enormous margin, with Unionist and Liberal candidates who received a letter of endorsement from Lloyd George and Law claiming over 500 seats out of 700. To add to the prime minister’s delight, MacDonald lost his seat – evidence that Lloyd George’s anti-pacifist jibes had been effective. The result was an expression of the population’s overwhelming gratitude for his wartime heroics and an endorsement of his plans to rebuild the country. The election had been won through promises of a better future, and the electorate’s belief that Lloyd George and his Unionist allies could fulfil them. Young Unionist candidates, such as Neville Chamberlain (the second son of Joseph, and half-brother of Austen), secured their seats with the pledge to ‘show gratitude to those who have fought and died for England, by making it a better place to live in’.