In private, the prime minister pressed for concessions from the unions and the mine owners. George V, meanwhile, publicly expressed sympathy for the miners: ‘Try living on their wages, before you judge them.’ Herbert Samuel, chair of the Royal Commission, then proposed a compromise – that the TUC accept his recommendations for wage cuts on the understanding that his suggestions for the long-term reorganization of the mining industry would be implemented. Weary of the struggle, now in its ninth day, the TUC agreed. Many of the strikers regarded this as unconditional surrender, yet they had no choice but to return to work. The government had won the class war; the workers had lost.
In the aftermath of the TUC’s ‘betrayal’ of the miners, union membership fell sharply. It had become clear that the government could not be pressured by large-scale industrial action into forcing employers to make concessions to employees. After 1927, industrial disputes declined significantly, despite worsening economic conditions. There was a decisive shift of focus in the Labour movement, away from strike action and towards constitutional socialism. Parliament became the main theatre of the class struggle and the Labour party would be the beneficiary. Even so, the strike had demonstrated the power latent in a united working class. It is surely no coincidence that English employers would keep wages at higher levels than those of workers in other European countries.
The General Strike offered incontrovertible evidence, however, of entrenched class divisions in England. It also made a mockery of Baldwin’s government’s assertion that it would bridge the great divide. For while Baldwin had made conciliatory noises during the confrontation, he had deferred to the claims of the haves over the have-nots. He had also been either unwilling or unable fully to restrain Churchill. Armoured cars had been employed by the chancellor to supply food, while peace demonstrations had been violently broken up by the police. If Churchill’s actions during the strike tarnished the government’s reputation, within months it lay in ruins. In 1927 Baldwin introduced a Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act that outlawed any industrial action aimed at ‘coercing the government’ or ‘inflicting harm on the community’. It also banned all forms of ‘intimidation’ and abolished the unions’ political levy. The bill marked the declaration of a new class war.
20
Get on, or get out
After the General Strike and the Trade Disputes Act, Baldwin now appeared to some contemporaries in a much more calculating light. Instead of reaching out to the working classes as a whole, he seemed to target a segment within their ranks: a group comprising workers who, in Chamberlain’s phrase, had ‘the will and desire to raise themselves to higher and better things’. At its upper end, this segment included the lower-middle-class people who began to acquire houses in the suburbs. These homes were not built by Baldwin’s government but by private companies who made a healthy profit on the sale. While the government cap on rents made rented accommodation relatively cheap, it was not always a feasible option for the lower middle class, especially after the Tory administration stopped building council houses. Meanwhile, Churchill encouraged first-time buying by introducing tax-relief schemes for mortgage payments and by insulating lower-middle-class savings against inflation.
Baldwin’s Conservatives aimed to create the illusion of a property-owning democracy. They could thereby divide the working and lower middle classes between respectable and ratepaying Tory-voting suburbanites, and slumor council-house-dwelling socialist renters, and hoped to convert some of the latter into the former through relocation. Orwell spoke of a plot to turn a vast section of the population into ‘Tories and “yes-men”’, though naturally Baldwin described suburbanization in different terms: ‘Nothing can be more touching, than to see how the working man and woman after generations in the towns will have their tiny bit of garden.’
The ownership of detached or semi-detached property was a badge of status and respectability. The assumption of unprecedented levels of debt in the form of long-term mortgages, meanwhile, forced suburbanites to focus on keeping their jobs. Neither class consciousness nor political activism could flourish. ‘Get on or get out!’ went contemporary Tory slogans. ‘There’s plenty of room at the top.’ Baldwin’s tactics during the General Strike encouraged suburbanites to fear the working classes, while Conservative propaganda depicted Labour MPs as advocates of totalitarian socialism, determined to destroy middle England.
Baldwin’s genius was to claim the suburban lower middle class as the Tory’s natural constituency – no previous Conservative leader had attempted to cultivate its support. By welcoming the middling ranks, Baldwin extended his party’s electoral base and gave it a modern identity. After his second administration, the Tories were no longer exclusively the party of landed or commercial wealth; they were also the party of Daily Mail readers. The ideological links between these disparate groups included a dislike of high taxes, ‘socialism’ and the state, together with a vague but zealous nationalism. Once again, the Conservatives demonstrated their adaptability, and their understanding that superficial change was necessary if the fundamental social and economic order were to survive.
Despite suffering from fatigue, Baldwin was confident going into the general election of 1929. Although it was fought against a backdrop of rising unemployment and in the wake of the General Strike, the Tory leader hoped that those who had opposed the protest would vote Conservative, out of fear and gratitude. During the campaign the Tory party mobilized its superior financial resources and fell back on Law’s old ‘tranquillity’ pitch. Posters of Baldwin, billed as ‘THE MAN YOU CAN TRUST!’ appeared throughout England, emblazoned with ‘Safety First’. The slogan carried an implied warning about the revolutionary legislation a Labour government would introduce.
The Liberal party lacked a broad constituency and required a far more inspiring message. Lloyd George, who had finally replaced Asquith as leader in 1926, came up with a campaign distinguished by audacity, radicalism and flair – precisely the qualities the party had lacked during its decade under ‘Squiffy’. In the aftermath of the General Strike, Lloyd George had drawn on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and developed an ambitious programme of public works. He now promoted that plan under the slogan ‘We Can Conquer Unemployment’. Abandoning conventional economic wisdom, which saw unemployment as inevitable and held that if a government taxed and spent less, the population would have more, the Liberal leader argued that the government should borrow money to finance public works and increase employment. Since the programme was a rejection of laissez-faire economics, many Liberals met it with hostility and even incomprehension. They lacked Lloyd George’s intuitive insight into economic affairs, as well as his sensitivity to changes in the spirit of the age. His economic judgement had been right when he had introduced bold ‘socialistic’ measures during the war; events in the Thirties would prove that he was also right to advocate public spending in 1929.
Not for the first time, British voters appeared more progressive than most MPs. They responded enthusiastically to Lloyd George’s proposal, and his party secured a quarter of the popular vote at the 1929 election. Yet the bias of the electoral system towards the two main parties meant that this translated into less than 10 per cent of the parliamentary seats. For Lloyd George it was a pyrrhic victory in another sense – most of the Liberal MPs returned to the new parliament were traditional ‘Squiffites’, who condemned Lloyd George’s economic ideas as dangerous. The remaining seats were split fairly evenly between the Tories and Labour, though the latter emerged as the largest party for the first time in history, returning 287 MPs. Compared to their performance in 1924 the Tories won 9 per cent less of the popular vote, but lost 37 per cent of their seats. Baldwin was astonished that an electorate he had enlarged by 8 million people had been so ungrateful. The right of the Tory party, meanwhile, now looked to replace him as leader, with the help of the press barons, Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook.