If Baldwin was unable to unite his own family, how could he unify a divided country? Any serious attempt to heal national divisions would require more than soothing rhetoric. Yet transmuting words into deeds was not Baldwin’s forte; he was better at setting the tone of government than he was at working out the finer points of policy. Nor were most MPs in his party enthusiastic about extending the role and power of central government. During the war the state had been omnipresent in the economy, but Conservatives believed those circumstances had been exceptional. In peacetime, the state’s job was merely to ‘hold the ring’, allowing manufacturers to introduce their own innovations, employers to bargain with workers and the market to function. ‘All the available evidence indicates,’ one Tory commented, ‘that State enterprise is inherently un-enterprising.’ Another Conservative remarked that central government had its ‘hand in all pockets and its rod on all backs’. Here we see the origins of the market-orientated, anti-state ideology that would dominate Conservative political and economic philosophy in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Yet despite these unpromising foundations, Baldwin’s government was more active than previous twentiethcentury Tory administrations. That was partly due to the presence in the cabinet of the man Baldwin called ‘the hundred-horsepower mind’. Although Churchill admitted to possessing a ‘limited comprehension of technical matters’, he had been rewarded with the exchequership by Baldwin. The prime minister hoped this onerous appointment would keep Churchill so busy that he would not interfere with other ministers; it was also intended to keep Churchill out of contact with the working classes, who had never forgiven him for sending troops to confront strikers during his time as Liberal home secretary.
In 1925 the chancellor made the momentous decision to return sterling to the gold standard, thereby linking the currency to Britain’s gold reserves. During the war, exchange rate stability and currency convertibility had been abandoned, and Treasury notes had replaced gold coins, since the government had needed to print money to cover its extraordinary costs. But the inevitable consequence of increasing the amount of money in circulation was inflation. Wary of increasing prices, Lloyd George’s coalition had announced that the gold standard would be restored in the mid-Twenties. Churchill, similarly concerned about the potential impact of inflation, decided that the economic conditions were right to fulfil this promise.
Yet in truth the 1925 Gold Standard Act was introduced for political rather than economic reasons. It drew a line under the years of war, intimating a return to the pre-1914 days of peace and plenty that Baldwin loved to evoke. Besides, the Treasury took the view that a failure to return to currency convertibility and exchange rate stability would ‘suggest our nerve had failed’. Churchill decided to fix sterling’s exchange value at the high pre-war rate of $4.86 – a lower exchange rate would imply that Britain’s economy had been surpassed by America in the intervening decade, and that sterling could no longer ‘look the dollar in the face’. Immediately after the passing of the act, the economic weather seemed favourable. Manufacturing production levels started rising slightly and unemployment began to fall. This gave Churchill the confidence to reduce supertax, to the delight of the plutocrats and gentry in his party. Yet he also increased public spending on education, health and housing, in accordance with his previous commitment to a ‘New Liberal’ social state and his current espousal of ‘Tory democracy’.
Churchill was not the only cabinet member whose father had been a proponent of that ‘onenation’ Tory creed. The new minister of health, Neville Chamberlain, was the son of Joseph, a Unionist famous for his commitment to domestic reform. ‘He was a great social reformer,’ Neville remarked of his father, ‘and it was my observance of his deep sympathy with the working classes which inspired me with an ambition to do something in my turn.’ Using the money Churchill made available to the health ministry – then responsible for housing, insurance, pensions and the poor law – the idealistic and indefatigable Chamberlain set about implementing welfare proposals directly inspired by his father’s ‘municipal socialism’. Over the next four years he introduced twentyfive acts that aimed ‘to improve the conditions of the less fortunate’. He united health, insurance and poor law services under one umbrella, extended pensions and insurance, and greatly empowered local government. During the same period Chamberlain established himself as Baldwin’s unofficial deputy; he also excelled in parliament, where his tenacious memory and grasp of policy detail inspired comparisons with Law.
The reserved and methodical Chamberlain admired, but did not entirely approve of, the flamboyant aristocrat over at the Exchequer. While the health minister admitted that Churchill was ‘brilliant’, his ‘amorality’, ‘want of judgement’ and ‘furious advocacy of half-baked ideas’ made him a ‘very dangerous man’. Indeed, in many respects Churchill resembled Lloyd George, whom Chamberlain regarded as a false friend to the British nation, and the tempter of its electorate. For his part, Churchill was impressed by Chamberlain’s proficiency but regarded him as narrow and unadventurous.
Yet while the pair were opposites in terms of character, they often worked in tandem on strategy. Together they also fostered an energetic and ambitious atmosphere within an otherwise undistinguished Tory cabinet. Enterprising policies were formulated, such as the establishment of a public Central Electricity Board to oversee electricity generation, distribution and investment. Although it was in effect a proposal for nationalization, the Tories preferred to call it ‘rationalization’. The resulting 1926 Electricity (Supply) Act would unify 500 separate generating stations under a state monopoly, prompting a fourfold increase in electricity production over the next decade.
Another ambitious act of nationalization was the granting of a Royal Charter, in 1926, for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Run by a director general and a board of governors selected by the prime minister, and funded from licence fees paid by wireless owners, its news bulletins, weather forecasts, children’s programmes, variety shows and coverage of national sporting events and state occasions soon reached every county of England. By the end of its first decade, the BBC would speak to people from every class, as technological advances reduced the price of the wireless.
Baldwin immediately grasped the possibilities offered by the new medium. With his clear syntax, crisp enunciation and evenness of tone, he became a master of the new art of broadcasting. It was said that he would take an audible drag on his pipe just before beginning a talk, so listeners would imagine him sitting next to them as they gathered around the wireless – the modern equivalent of the Victorian hearth. For the duration of Baldwin’s broadcasts, England became the harmonious society that his words invoked.
The most significant bill passed by Baldwin’s government was the 1928 Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act, which extended the franchise to all women over twenty-one, regardless of property ownership, and gave them electoral parity with men. It was a concession to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, which vigorously campaigned for equality of voting rights throughout the Twenties. Although the bill was a cross-party measure, Baldwin convinced his party that the addition of almost 5 million women to the electorate would not be a threat to its re-election.
On the international as well as the domestic stage, Baldwin’s utterances were often followed up by action. The British Empire Exhibition, which ran from 1924 to 1925 at Wembley in London, was a vast and expensive propaganda exercise. Crammed full of symbols promoting peace and unity within Britain’s imperial territories, its official purpose was ‘to strengthen bonds that bind Mother Country to her Sister States and Daughters’. Along with all the palaces dedicated to British engineering and artistic ingenuity, the military displays and the musical performances, there were pavilions in which each colony or dominion exhibited typical products and traditional artefacts. Visitors could traverse the entire globe in a few hours, via roads named after imperial heroes such as Sir Francis Drake. By displaying a powerful British ‘mother country’ at the centre of a vast empire, the exhibition also aimed to rekindle imperial pride among the English lower classes. This was not an easy task in a post-war period when imperialism was constantly attacked by intellectuals, and when separatist movements within the empire had enjoyed considerable success.