Liberal Reform and Industrial Relations: J.H. Whitley (1866-1935), Halifax Radical and Speaker of the House of Commons by John A. Hargreaves Keith Laybourn Richard Toye

Author:John A. Hargreaves, Keith Laybourn, Richard Toye [John A. Hargreaves, Keith Laybourn, Richard Toye]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Ireland, British
ISBN: 9781351866125
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-10-25T04:00:00+00:00

7 J.H. Whitley as Speaker of the House of Commons, 1921–28

Richard Toye

This chapter describes and assesses J.H. Whitley’s period as Speaker of the House of Commons. Whitley presided over a House that – following the General Election of 1922 – for the first time included a large number of Labour MPs. It was his view that, inexperienced in customs and procedure as they were, it was necessary ‘to drive them with a loose rein’. This brought him criticisms from some Conservatives for excessive laxity, but others defended him, on the grounds that stricter treatment would play into the hands of the disrupters. On balance, he was probably quite effective in his efforts to guide Labour into the approved channels of behaviour. Drawing on the Whitley Papers, as well as on contemporary press and diary accounts, this chapter will place Whitley’s Speakership within the context of the parliamentary and wider political developments of the time.

There were some striking features to J.H. Whitley’s Speakership. He had a background in the cotton industry, whereas previous Speakers tended to be lawyers or squires. He was also – although of course no-one knew it at the time – the last Liberal Speaker. (The Conservatives then monopolised the position until the election of Horace King, the first Labour Speaker, in 1965.) He served during five premierships: Lloyd George (to 1922); Bonar Law (1922–23); Baldwin (1923–24); MacDonald (1924); and Baldwin again (to 1928). Whitley’s Speakership witnessed the dramatic fall of the Lloyd George Coalition, the first (minority) Labour Government under Ramsay MacDonald and the 1926 General Strike. As his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography notes, during the strike ‘he arranged for parliamentary votes and proceedings to be produced by emergency means. In reply to a threat to withdraw workmen from the houses of parliament he declared that he would not allow the work of the House of Commons to be interfered with, and would, if necessary, conduct the business of the house without printing and by candlelight.’1 As all this suggests, it was a rather tumultuous time.

The turbulence of the period should not be overstated, however. Although much was still up in the air in political terms at the point of his retirement from the Speaker’s Chair, Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative Government did appear to have restored a measure of stability to the country. More than arguably, the tenure of Whitley’s predecessor, James Lowther, had seen greater upheavals, including the constitutional crisis of 1909–11 and the admission of women to the House of Commons from 1918. On the other hand, Whitley’s time in office was much more eventful than that of his successor, Edward FitzRoy. It might best be said, then, that Whitley’s Speakership represented an important transitional phase, one of the most important outcomes of which, along with the decline of the Liberals, was the full integration of the Labour Party into the conventions of Westminster politics.

As David M. Craig has shown, there is no necessary methodological conflict between a ‘high politics’ approach, focussed on

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