Bread for All by Chris Renwick

Author:Chris Renwick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241186695
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-07-17T04:00:00+00:00

7

The Man You Can Trust

The general election held in November 1922 was the worst the Liberal Party had experienced since modern party politics began almost three-quarters of a century earlier. While Lloyd George’s National Liberals won just sixty-two seats, Asquith, who had returned to Westminster via a by-election in Paisley in 1920, rivalled him with an equally paltry fifty-four MPs. Even a united Liberal Party would have stood in the shadow of a Conservative government and its 345 seats. But trouble was coming at the Liberals from the left too. After losing his seat in 1918, thanks to his pacifism, Ramsay MacDonald, a founding member of the Labour Representation Committee, had returned to Westminster as MP for Aberavon in south Wales and been quickly restored as the leader of the Labour Party. On this occasion, though, he was flanked by 141 other MPs, which made him leader of the official opposition in the House of Commons.

The result was not the end for the Liberals, who continued to hold enough seats to have at least a say in parliamentary affairs for most of the 1920s. But it was not a blip either: their influence was waning and, though they did not know it at the time, their victory in 1906 was the last time the Liberals would form a majority government. For people involved in progressive politics, especially those who had played important roles in shaping new liberalism – the active and interventionist form of liberalism that aimed to reconcile individualist and socialist conceptions of political and economic freedom – at the turn of the century, this situation threw up a number of generation-defining questions. Was the writing on the wall for the Liberal Party? Was Labour now the political party of the future? Was it time for the Liberals to give up on Lloyd George’s scheming and throw their lot in with Ramsay MacDonald? The answers mattered to anyone who had thought the ‘People’s Budget’ marked a new dawn in British politics.

But, during the decade after the First World War, when it came to social policy – the aspects of government spending and intervention aimed at alleviating poverty and improving welfare – the arguments that mattered were not solely on the left. The Tories had to face up to the realities of modern Britain, where the Liberals’ once controversial tax reforms and pension and national insurance schemes were now a fact of life, there was soon to be universal suffrage, and the Labour Party claimed to speak for the working class in Parliament. Nevertheless, in becoming the biggest party, if not always the sole party of government, for most of the 1920s, the Conservatives had the opportunity to shape social policy according to their ideals. The very poorest Britons had been the targets – and then beneficiaries – of government intervention during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Now it was the middle classes that saw their situations improve during the interwar years, thanks not only to the economic policies

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