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Famous Historical Elections: The Liberal Landslide of 1906
15 Plays2 days ago
In this episode, Ethan Reuter speaks with historian Taym Saleh about the 1906 general election—the winter showdown that delivered the last great Liberal landslide and set the stage for the welfare state. After riding jingoistic euphoria to victory in 1900, the Conservative-Unionist coalition collapsed spectacularly, reduced from a 150-seat majority to a miserable rump of just 157 MPs.
The conversation explores how Joseph Chamberlain's crusade for tariff reform and imperial preference tore the Conservatives apart. His two loaves of bread—one slightly smaller under protection—couldn't compete with Liberal warnings of the "dear loaf," horse meat sausages, and the hungry forties. Saleh explains how Prime Minister Balfour found himself trapped, unable to resolve his party's civil war without triggering an outright split, while the Liberals united around free trade, cheap bread, and opposition to "Chinese slavery" in South African mines.
But the 1906 landslide contained the seeds of future upheaval. The Gladstone-MacDonald pact gave Labour its crucial breathing space, winning 29 seats that would grow to dominance after the First World War. The Irish Parliamentary Party's 83 seats positioned them as kingmakers for future crises. And the Liberal government's ambitious reforms—old age pensions, national insurance, the foundations of the welfare state—would trigger a constitutional crisis with the Conservative-dominated House of Lords, culminating in the 1911 Parliament Act that neutered the upper chamber forever. This is the election that killed Conservative dominance, launched the welfare state, and set Britain on course for the tumultuous politics of the early twentieth century.
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Transcript
Introduction to Observations Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Observations podcast, brought to you by Democracy Volunteers. I'm Ethan Reuter, and in today's episode, we'll be talking about the 1906 general election. I'm delighted to be joined by Tame Sala, who is a teacher and a published historian in electoral politics. Tame, welcome to the show.
00:00:27
Speaker
Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me.
Impact of Boer War on 1906 Election
00:00:30
Speaker
I want to first get into the aftermath of the Boer War and the historical context of the election.
00:00:39
Speaker
How did the Boer War and the moral unease that surrounded it impact us going into 1906? Well, i suppose um the the the initial phases of the Boer War so dominated the previous election, that is, in the ninety the general election of 1900, that that it's rather um ah ah ah set things up in such a way that it became kind of, that as soon as the war moves on to further stages, there would be an inevitable big kind unwinding effect.
00:01:11
Speaker
What I mean by that is that in the 1900 general election, The unionists, led by the Conservatives, having already been in power for five years, rode a tremendous wave of ah patriotic or perhaps more accurately, jingoistic euphoria when there was an enormous mobilization of public opinion around the justice,
00:01:35
Speaker
of the um ah the so-called outlanders cause, those ah people of British extraction working in the Africana majority South African republics.
00:01:47
Speaker
ah whose a rights and standing was the kind of the initial pretext for British invasion. um There was an enormous, as I say, ah patriotic resurgence and mobilisation, which formed the basis for the Conservative landslide victory um in 1900. What that meant, though, is that the natural exhaustion ah that accrues upon any government that's been in in office for any considerable period of time.
00:02:17
Speaker
And the considerable and growing uncertainty, especially amongst Conservatives, but really throughout British society and throughout the British political class, about what this new century was going to bring,
00:02:30
Speaker
um ah for Britain and for Britain as a hegemonic imperial power. All of these sort of deeper issues were sort of um foreclosed. They were punted forward into the first decade of the new century by this exceptionally ah kind of frenetic, febrile patriotism at the time of 1900. of course, what this means is that once that euphoria wears off, and once the initial advances of the British army ah degenerate into a pretty ugly counterinsurgency, to use modern terminology, that sees the you know the the pioneering of concentration camps and and so on, um there's not only some revulsion at the moral consequences of that,
00:03:19
Speaker
But there is no longer anything that can really ah ah ah kind of put off or postpone um the reckoning with where ah Britain and britain ah British commercial and political power stands in the world as it is going into the nineteen hundreds I that's the real significance of the Boer War effects unwinding.
Education Act and Religious Liberty
00:03:46
Speaker
And moving from economic and issues into more religious ideas and positions of the non-conformists, how does the Education Act affect the already described conservative dominance in the previous election?
00:04:01
Speaker
How did those transform conservative fortunes? um Well, it it big it is the the fallout from the Education Act. um becomes a sort of harbinger of a ah often you know ah a much more severe series of divisions of I'm sure we'll talk about ah more soon regarding ah protectionism and tariff reform.
00:04:25
Speaker
Because um the ah Boer War effect that we were just discussing had the effect of perilously dividing the Liberal Party and rejuvenatingly uniting ah the Unionists or the Conservatives.
00:04:42
Speaker
um And so Unionists were divided into be basically pro-war and anti-war camps. At the time, they would have been called the pro-Boers. That was sort of the monarchs of the slander that was put at the feet of the anti-war camp.
00:04:58
Speaker
um And the Conservatives had this very uncomplicated thing around which to rally, namely the flag and the army. um But something like the Education Act has ah the opposite effect, at least on the Liberal Party.
00:05:12
Speaker
What the Education Act um did, it aimed, the premise of it was that going into the 20th century, what had previously been a very fragmented um and rather rather unsystematic ah system of arranging ah primary secondary education,
00:05:31
Speaker
um in particularly in England and Wales, needed and that this needed a revamp, right? um And um in sort of setting the administrative ground for this systematisation, the Conservative government decided to resolve certain longstanding um kind of issues, ambiguities in the education system,
00:05:56
Speaker
concerning the role of religious education or religious instruction in schools in favour of the Church of England. in all In other words, to close down some of the opt-outs that religious minorities had had in areas where they were where they were quite a small minority.
00:06:14
Speaker
um This has the effect of taking the Liberal Party away from away from um ah very uncomfortable terrain, which was what to do ah in the face of this jingoistic euphoria ah that we just talked about, and we transports them well into their comfort zone.
00:06:33
Speaker
namely defending the principles of religious liberty, defending freedom of conscience, defending the rights of religious minorities. One has to understand that the Liberal Party in the late 19th and early 20th centuries um ah was ah really the creature of particular...
00:06:53
Speaker
We might call them interest groups or demographic groups. And perhaps in some ways, the the morally most potent of those were the Protestant nonconformists. So members of Protestant churches outside the Church of England, by which I mean ah Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, not quite Methodists, quite an interesting ah denomination or category in this period. They're beginning to behave more and more like nonconformists and less like the Anglicans they originally were.
00:07:22
Speaker
um But the point is that ah the the ah tabling of the of the Education Act puts the liberals in on a much firmer footing and lets them rehearse and regurgitate some of the slogans and ideas and arguments that virtually all liberals, whatever they thought about South Africa, whatever they thought about the British Empire, whatever they think about the but the the future of the British Empire, can all agree that freedom of conscience is good and that church privilege is bad.
00:07:53
Speaker
and that the Tories are bad. And that's a very straightforward series of things that they can hammer away at.
Trade Unions and Liberal Strength
00:07:58
Speaker
From putting the Liberals back on track, what do I mean when I talk about the Taft-Vail judgment in relation to the 1906 general election?
00:08:08
Speaker
um The Taft-Vail case, which was um decided at the House of Lords in 1901, um was a a legal dispute over what should happen legally in the aftermath of a strike of industrial action.
00:08:25
Speaker
Specifically, when a strike in an industry causes businessman, the kind of the owners of capital in those industries, to um ah suffer often very severe financial losses, are trade unions liable...
00:08:44
Speaker
um for those losses in law. Taffale Judgment said that they were, and therefore this created a new legal status quo where striking, ah the right to strike having been effectively more or less enshrined in English law on a statutory basis in 1875, where striking effectively, um ah the the that the de facto ability or legality of striking is is put back on the table.
00:09:12
Speaker
This has a potent effect which in the first instance is straightforwardly good for the Liberal Party. The second instance, is a bit more ambiguous. In the first instance, it puts a real kibosh on any complacency or any ah willingness to accommodate on the part of the unionized working class towards the Conservative Party.
00:09:38
Speaker
And it provides a powerful reminder of why um ah the enfranchised, politically organised, trade union joining working class should have a powerful preference for the Liberal Party over the Conservative Party, since the Liberal Party goes into the 1906 election promising to repeal, to introduce legislation to repeal the consequences of the the court ruling of Taft Vale.
00:10:08
Speaker
um The longer-term consequence, however, is that it puts the questions of capital versus labour the fore um of British politics.
00:10:19
Speaker
um And that is not something that the Liberal Party can permanently feel as comfortable ah assuming in terms of political positioning as they could for things like the Education Act or things like Tower for Form.
00:10:34
Speaker
um And this creates, of course, most perhaps tremendously of all, the ah context and the climate in which um ah trade unions and other ah radical um associations or groups and can begin to think about um forming a quite new political organization.
00:11:01
Speaker
Talking of trade unions and their relative political organizations, I want to get slightly more into the politics pre-election.
Liberal-Labour Electoral Pact
00:11:10
Speaker
The Liberals and the Labour Party form an electoral pact between MacDonald and Gladstone.
00:11:17
Speaker
What impact does this have going into 1906? Well, the Gladstone-McDonald pact is, it does, in the short term, looking specifically the 1906 elections, it does little bit of a thing.
00:11:30
Speaker
um So Ramsey-McDonald, on behalf of the newly founded Labour Representation Committee, soon to be called the Labour Party, which was the this new organisation that I mentioned a moment ago, um ah makes an agreement with Herbert Gladstone, so that's the son of the former prime Minister William Gladstone,
00:11:49
Speaker
who is at this point the chief whip um of the the Liberal Party, um ah where they effectively agree ah not to fight against each other so far as possible in as many constituencies as possible.
00:12:02
Speaker
So in other words, to foreclose the possibility that there will be a split in the anti-conservative votes, which might allow the Conservative candidates in through the middle, a split between a Liberal candidates and Labour candidates.
00:12:17
Speaker
So on the one hand, this um cuts off from the Conservatives a possible reprieve from the electoral changes that are facing them. It makes the landslide defeat that is coming all the more punishing in terms of seats lost.
00:12:35
Speaker
On the other hand, the Liberal Party in making this pact is acknowledging that this new party can't just be squashed out of existence. Nor can the Liberal Party be confident enough, even though in many other ways it has the the the wind behind it to do with um education and divisions within the Conservative Party, we'll talk about in a bit. Despite that, the Liberal Party is not in a strong or confident enough position just to simply squash this this upstart political force.
00:13:08
Speaker
This is a force that clearly has to be accommodated. um Now, in the 1900s, that accommodation does not do the Liberal Party immediately any harm. As we said, it's just it's a good way of ah doing doing over the Conservatives.
00:13:24
Speaker
But what becomes but apparent as we go further into the future is that this new force, you know in the first instance, accommodated, has this vital breathing space electorally in which it can secure with a tacit liberal liberal blessing ah In the first instance, about two dozen seats in the 1906 election.
00:13:45
Speaker
um About 40 seats four years later in 1910. And of course, so once the First World War comes and does what it does to the Liberal Party, then really, from the Liberal Party's point of view, all bets were off.
00:13:57
Speaker
So um the McDonnell-Gladdison pact, in other words, um is a really good way of sticking it to the Tories from the Liberal point of view, but marks the entrenchment on the electoral scene of a very dangerous political force for the Liberal Party.
00:14:16
Speaker
Certainly. And what seems, and we'll get into the impacts, potentially, is that is to come, as you've already mentioned, but whilst researching and whilst reading this, there is the resignation of Balfour and the seismic moment, that that seems to be at least for what is current British politics, if we had a leader resign few
Balfour's Resignation Strategy
00:14:40
Speaker
months before. Can you talk about the political implications and the strategy of a prime minister resigning preview prior to an election?
00:14:48
Speaker
Yeah, this is for modern um but modern audience, for modern observers, um a really peculiar thing, right? To have the government change hands before the election instead of right after it.
00:15:00
Speaker
um This is, umm I'm quite sure the last time this happened, um this was not an uncommon um practice, um where ah even though on paper, the party which Balfour was leading still had a very healthy majority in the House of Commons, Balfour understands perfectly clearly, as is everyone,
00:15:23
Speaker
that um an election has to come soon. And we're talking now that, you know, sort of of ah the late autumn or mid autumn of 1905. An election has to come at some point in the next 12 months.
00:15:34
Speaker
There is no longer any real prospect of um ah things being turned around. The name of the game for the Conservatives is Damage and Imitation. Damage Limitation, um as especially over the divisions that had been plaguing them for the previous three years ah two years about tariff reform.
00:15:56
Speaker
The only hope of mitigation really that the Conservatives have is if if they relieve themselves of the strains of government, because of course it is in government that these strains are the most visible because you you know have it in your power and your responsibility to actually govern and do things. um The hope then is that by relieving the Conservatives of this burden um and by placing that burden onto the Liberal Party, it might perhaps be the term of the Liberal Party,
00:16:25
Speaker
to have to have some of their own ah decisions to make ah once they're around the cabinet table. um um so So as a result, um knowing that all he's doing is forgoing an extra couple of months or maybe a little bit more of time in government, which showed no signs of being particularly productive anyway,
00:16:49
Speaker
Balfour tries to sort of slightly make ah the best of a bad situation and decide that if there is, since there has to be an election anyway, um ah there might yet be some succor for the Conservatives gain and by placing the streams of government onto the shoulders of the Liberal Party.
00:17:07
Speaker
So that's why he resigns knowing an election is coming up rather than waiting for the election to throw him out. And with the starting context covered, I want to get into some of the leadership profiles that we see of the main parties, not only Sir Arthur Balfour, Henry Campbell Bannerman, Chamberlain and Keir Hardie.
Leadership in the 1906 Election
00:17:30
Speaker
What were their leadership styles and their temperament as leaders going into 1906? And how did that affect the election? Well, starting with Balfour, um everything that everyone sort of had said about him, especially before he became prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, um is that he was um ah strikingly um ah amudite intelligence ah a bookish ah politician, rather by the standards of politicians, even at that time.
00:18:01
Speaker
um His intellect, undoubtedly first class, um ah He was the nephew of his predecessor as prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, Lord Salisbury, who retires um in um in 1902.
00:18:21
Speaker
um ah So there is a sort of succession um within the family. And there's maybe lingering instance, although Belfort had one who spurs as a cabinet minister in the eighteen ninety s It's still the case that um ah this sort of family ah succession has, you know, the sign that this is someone who is, ah Balfour is is someone who has not risen to the top um by by a super abundance of grit or political, um ah having borne political scars or anything like that.
00:18:54
Speaker
Once he becomes prime minister, he finds himself for most of his time in power in a rather, um and in a pretty unenviable situation, which is to very self-consciously be the presiding moderates, presiding over two competing factions who are kind of claiming to be competing for his support.
00:19:20
Speaker
um But he knows he cannot ever give that support decisively to one side or the other because it will cause it it would cause the sperned side to leave um And therefore, he can never resolve the dispute by actually throwing his weight behind one side.
00:19:38
Speaker
So this internecine strife within the party has to go on and on and on. And he has to carry on playing this role of being the chairman of this very fractious board. And... Performing this role just kind of consumes everything. And there's not really very much else that he can do. All he can do is from day to day firefight the consequences of this logic that he's trapped in.
00:19:59
Speaker
And he's doomed. the You know, the only person who can resolve the Tory civil war is him. And he can't resolve it because as soon as the war is resolved, the fallout from that resolution would be ah full out split in the parties.
00:20:14
Speaker
um So that's the sort of the the very ugly trap politically that Balfour is in. As for Henry Campbell-Mannerman, he's rather been perhaps, maybe perhaps unfairly, forgotten, given that he, due to ill health, relinquishes the premiership within two years of winning it at the general election, or just before general election.
00:20:41
Speaker
um and has been therefore kind of blotted out from memory by the by um his sort of vastly more um ah so um um ah full of character figures like Asquith and David Lloyd George.
00:21:00
Speaker
Kemal Bannam himself was an eminently experienced commons man. He was, if not the only party leader and prime minister ever, then... ah must be one of very few to have been parties and prime minister whilst also being the father of the house of commons he sat without interruption as an mp since 1868 he had um eight he had um ah not entirely dissimilar to Balfour um in opposition at the time the Boer War had to live with the similar Indonesian strife within the Liberal Party regarding attitudes to the Boer War.
00:21:36
Speaker
um And it helped that he wasn't sufficiently um ah committed as a partisan to either side of that fight between so-called pro-Boers on one side and the so-called Liberal imperialists on the other, such that when the political debate moved on away from those peculiar conditions in 1900 that we were talking about earlier. um He was in quite a good position to win the allegiance of both the radical anti-imperialists, non-imperialists, and the liberal imperialists.
00:22:06
Speaker
So um he, having started in a position kind of like Balfour, um found himself in a much more comfortable position because of the way in which the political ah climate had changed after ah the election of 1900.
00:22:21
Speaker
um Joseph Chamberlain, despite not being the party leader, um um at least of the of the Conservative Party, um was, um in a sense, much the more mesmerising figure, more than either the the official party leaders going into this election that we've already discussed.
00:22:40
Speaker
um Peter Marsh, one of Chamberlain's um biographers, um titles his biography um The Entrepreneur in Politics. And I think that's a pretty good way of describing him, not only because he himself was um a businessman before entering politics. He was a man of trade.
00:22:59
Speaker
He was a a Unitarian autodidact who made it big in the industrial scene and in Birmingham. um But his career, once he enters national politics mate in the right through to this period of the 1906 election,
00:23:19
Speaker
seems determined with almost every passing political moment of dominating the political scene and in an attempt to continually reshape the future of British politics through his interventions.
00:23:34
Speaker
the first of the read The first one is his first incarnation of um the a particular kind of big government medical. So he, when he first comes on the scene of the 1870s, he's known in the first instance as someone who um had made it big in local government as the mayor of Birmingham.
00:23:56
Speaker
And as someone who the person who ran municipal politics in Birmingham was associated with this particular ah notion of government intervention in social and economic questions called gas and water socialism whereby municipal government um can be a vehicle to represent local political consensuses which can be used to carry out the kinds of interventions in you know for social matters that we would nowadays tend to associate with national governments.
00:24:27
Speaker
So um to do with the provision of various amenities, to do with poverty reduction and so on. So that's his first brand in the 70s, early 80s. And this looks like being the future of liberal radicalism or radical liberalism, I should say.
00:24:41
Speaker
Then in 1886, crucial moment, um should home rule, what we would nowadays call devolution, be granted to Ireland, Ireland at this point being in its entirety part of the United ah Chamberlain, along with quite a number of other Liberal MPs, says to William Gladstone, the champion of Irish young rule, no.
00:25:03
Speaker
um In so doing, he quite crucially changes the character of what this new party called the Liberal Unionist Party, so the liberals those Liberals who do not want to to to grant home rule to Ireland.
00:25:17
Speaker
Without Chamberlain, there's a danger that liberal unionism comes across as basically a Whig or an anti-radical throwback, where Irish own rule is just the pretext for um various anti-radicals, people to use modern parlance on the right to the Liberal Party, who are already uncomfortable with the populist direction that Gladstone has taken them in and is just using this as a rather useful pretext.
00:25:45
Speaker
but Chamberlain is meant to be the most avant-garde, among the most avant-garde of the radicals. And so him joining the unionist camp really changes what liberal unionism looks like and what kind of um what kind of challenge it is putting to the rest of the Liberal Party.
00:26:03
Speaker
um And then when very quickly, almost immediately, this new liberal unionist party forms an electoral alliance that becomes an enduring union with the Conservatives. That's why until now I've been referring to ah the Conservatives often as the Unionist Party, because that that tends to be how they were referred to in ordinary political parlance at this time.
00:26:25
Speaker
um ah Chamberlain opens for the Conservatives his new allies, this range of possibilities, the ways in which firstly to appeal to the working class,
00:26:36
Speaker
ways in which to reconcile um a ah support for private property, which is the kind of thing that Lord Salisbury's leader of the Conservatives is very keen on, with an appeal to the newly enfranchised working class.
00:26:49
Speaker
Then finally, um moving into the 1900s, the next phase of this of the Chamberlain, the next incarnation of Chamberlain, is as the arch-imperialist. So in the going back to the 1890s, he plays a role in South Africa in trying to agitate between the Cape Colony, the British um possession of South Africa, and the Boer Republics in um ah but the Orange Free State.
00:27:17
Speaker
um so um And so he plays quite a big role in the events that lead up to the Boer War. And then finally, in the nineteen hundred s itself, with the Boer War,
00:27:29
Speaker
um ah fading into acrimony, um his kind of refinement on this sort of radical, big government, ah imperialist, patriotic kind of tribunism is um protection, is an assault on this the the holiest of sacred cows,
00:27:51
Speaker
in kind of the the long ideological legacy of Victorian, um ah British Victorian liberalism, which is free trade. The idea that British industrial um domination was secured by offering no impediments whatsoever to the exchange of goods and and capital between Britain and her possessions vis-a-vis the and the rest of the world.
00:28:19
Speaker
um And to question this, is to nowadays, this seems like a pretty dry, kind of pretty technocratic thing. um Maybe we get the faintest of faint hints of the the um intellectual, political, even emotional power this issue had with some of the arguments in America this year regarding Trump's embrace of tariffs.
00:28:41
Speaker
But that does not really do justice. It's just how strongly people felt. especially on the liberal side of politics, about free trade and what the stakes were when Joseph Chamberlain starts to say free trade is something that needs to be revisited.
00:28:56
Speaker
Finally, Keir Hardie. um We are talking about someone whose name has obviously achieved a kind of immortality as the founding father of the Labour Party.
00:29:07
Speaker
um He ah passes from the political scene in 1914 just as the event that is ah that would go on indirectly to catapult the Labour Party above the Liberal Party, namely the First World War, just as that comes on.
00:29:23
Speaker
And so that has the effect of leaving Hardy as a kind of um um a kind of ah a kind of a relic. His contemporary, Ramsay MacDonald, who would go on in the 20s, of course, to become the first ever Labour Prime Minister,
00:29:35
Speaker
um is a figure who straddles this this period much more um ah fully and is therefore kind of contains the paradoxes of of sort of the these two different ages intermingling.
00:29:47
Speaker
Hardy, however, is much more straightforwardly a product of late 19th century Victorian radicalism. So, of course, he the leader of this new trade union working class focused movement.
00:30:02
Speaker
um But he is also someone who um holds a lot of the shibboleths of, as I said, late Victorian radicalism. He is a he's into teetotalism.
00:30:13
Speaker
He is into the principle of home rule for both Ireland and Scotland. um um And he seems to hold, to see in-home rule, that the promise of freeing from the clutches of oligarchic Toryism and this sort of way of doing local government that perhaps...
00:30:33
Speaker
Irish self-governing body and a Scottish self-governing body um would represent. So Hardee's is is um ah and not ah just an uncomplicated kind of retread of just like a proto-runner, a proto-type forerunner of, um you know, Nye Bevan or much less Kimmins Attlee or Ernest Bevan or anyone like that from the sort of mid-20th century Labour Party that makes it probably a lot more sense to us.
00:31:00
Speaker
Here, Hardy is altogether of a quite older turn of mind.
00:31:07
Speaker
And I want to now look at the campaign.
Tariff Reform vs. Free Trade Debate
00:31:11
Speaker
we've We've touched on the idea that tariff reform free trade dominates the election.
00:31:18
Speaker
Specifically, an incredibly domestic item, which is loaves of bread, comes up. How does this impact and transform with the campaign? Well, it really gets to the heart of why exactly, we've alluded to a couple of things, what exactly is it about the idea of sticking some protective tariffs on certain imports? What what is it about this idea that that is so um incendiary?
00:31:41
Speaker
The first thing to say, ah to answer, to get to this ah mystery is, um as always, in politics, and people tend to to fight the last war. People ah have the positions they do make, the arguments that they do with reference to what they remember, what they think they remember.
00:31:59
Speaker
um And so when it comes to protective tariffs, especially the idea of having protective tariffs on foreign imports of foodstuffs, This is important because Britain is not self-sufficient in terms of producing its own food.
00:32:13
Speaker
eighteen so i mean and Apart from anything else, the 1870s sees a ferocious agricultural depression that really exposes the logic of free trade, that exposes um agricultural the agricultural sector to the logic of free trade.
00:32:31
Speaker
And not only is there a general economic downturn in the 1870s, but um there there's a sort of a perfect storm. You have the general economic downturn. You also have the arrival into British and ah European food markets, food imports from the New World.
00:32:51
Speaker
Partly this is to do with big technological changes. So the enormous agricultural... We've grown hinterlands of the i American Midwest are plugged into the world economy with the advent of the the railroad, linking the hinterland with the East Coast.
00:33:12
Speaker
You have refrigeration, which means it's possible to import meat. from Argentina or even Australia and later on, a bit later on New Zealand. um And so you have the first time farm laborers in East Anglia or the West Country or wherever um fully being exposed to the reality of living, of ah being participants in a global market where you are in position to be very, very ruthlessly undercut.
00:33:39
Speaker
So The point is that by the turn of the century, any idea that Britain is self-sufficient food is is is gone. This means that Britain is a big net importer of food. That means that if you put um a system of tariffs, that will inevitably include ah putting tariffs on food imports, which means, of course, making food more expensive.
00:34:03
Speaker
Now, obviously, in in no regime of democratic politics is is this going to go down well as an idea in itself. this um the The repulsiveness of this idea is given extra life by as the thing I mentioned a second ago, which is memory.
00:34:20
Speaker
um the The item of memory that is resorted to again and again by liberals... campaigning against what Chamberlain calls tariff reform, or have introducing protective tariffs, is the memory of the hungry forty s um so the last time that we had a regime of um protective tariffs on food was ah the era of the Corn Laws, which was ended in 1846 by then Conservative Prime Minister Robert Peel.
00:34:52
Speaker
And for his pains, he was he and his cabinet colleagues who supported him were kicked out of the Conservative Party. And so but this the splits going on in the 1900s feel like an eerie repetition of the splits of the 1840s.
00:35:05
Speaker
So for many working class voters, what had previously been in a 60-year-old piece of historical memory, the hungry 40s, the DLO, looked like being resurrected.
00:35:17
Speaker
In terms of the the embodiment of this idea in you know the image of, or the reality of an actual loaf of bread, there are attempts on both sides to play this.
00:35:31
Speaker
ah Famously, Joseph Chamberlain, when sort of evangelizing for the cause of protective tariffs, appears before an audience with two loaves of bread, which look more or less similar in size to each other. And he says, well, one of these loaves of bread has certain amount of flour.
00:35:50
Speaker
The other loaf of bread has slightly a slightly smaller amount of flour, reflecting the you know the increased cost that would be borne by protective towers. But as you can see, it doesn't really make that much difference.
00:36:04
Speaker
The two levels are more or less similar. And insofar as there is a diminution, it's a price worth paying to secure industries and to make the British Empire ah cohesive economic unit, and so on and so forth.
00:36:17
Speaker
The Liberal Party, having a much more straightforward pitch to make, which is that expense is bad when food gets more expensive, um is able to harp on the idea of the deer loaf.
00:36:29
Speaker
And they're also instantly able to bring in and some other little bits of imagery. um In a lot of the um ah discourse around Britain's commercial and imperial future at the turn of the century, the point of reference increasingly become Increasingly are the United States and even more so Germany.
00:36:53
Speaker
Both saw enormous resurgences in economic and military might um in the closing decades of the 19th century. Both reliant on ah models of political economy, which um have protected tariffs pretty close to their core operating procedures.
00:37:12
Speaker
um In the case of Germany, there's this added thing which is already becoming apparent by the mid-1900s about this looming ah crisis of European diplomacy that we know would explode in 1914.
00:37:26
Speaker
But even in 1903, 1904, going into the 1906 election, part of the stock imagery of anti-protection or of anti-protective talifs is the idea that not only is a cheap loaf better than a deer loaf,
00:37:42
Speaker
um But that um the way in which workers and the poor in a country like Germany, which does rely on protective tariffs, the way they make their ends meet is by having the their the quality of their foodstuffs pretty systematically adulterated.
00:38:00
Speaker
um to kind of meet the costs of importing foreign foodstuffs. You get all kinds of things of and ah bread made with flour inter low interleaving with them with sawdust.
00:38:12
Speaker
You have the the horse meat sausage, um which becomes irreular which becomes a real staple of barnstorming kind of liberal rhetoric in the constituencies. um And so the politics of food, even at the most visceral, visual level, um ah kind of really indicates just what the stakes of um the tariff issue and free trade issue felt like to voters, especially poor voters for whom this was really a matter of subsistence going into the 1906 election. And it tells you why it really does loom as the single dominating issue
00:38:51
Speaker
um that sort of sets the course for everything else that happens in this election. Certainly. And I'd also be remiss when talking about the campaign, not to mention a slightly less whimsical issue from loaves of bread into Chinese slavery and the mention of that um amongst the electorate of the election campaign.
Chinese Labor and Imperial Critique
00:39:16
Speaker
What it's talked about, what do we mean when we say Chinese slavery? Right, so basically this is kind of most fundamentally connected to something that is a feature of the um political economy of the British Empire ever since the abolition of the abolition of slavery in the 1830s.
00:39:35
Speaker
Namely, that in the absence of chattel slavery, um any um ah shortfalls or demands for labor, for cheap, easily exploited labor,
00:39:49
Speaker
um in various parts of the empire, um are met cannot be met by outright slavery because that's been abolished, so must be met by some kind of contractual arrangement that would fall short of enslaving people.
00:40:05
Speaker
um so you have, for example, which is why, for instance, to this day, there are parts of and the Caribbean world where there are ah significant um ah there's a significant Indian population so in Guyana, to a lesser extent, Trinidad and Tobago.
00:40:20
Speaker
That is why the island of Fiji today has Hindi as one of its official languages, and why there was a considerable Indian population in East Africa. um So you have this movement of labor of different ethnicities who are kind of under the calipus of the British Empire, moving about very considerable distances from one part of the British sphere of influence um to the other.
00:40:46
Speaker
um South Africa presents a particular case. um South Africa, of course, um at the heart of so much that happens, particularly the Boer War, is the mineral wealth um upon which South Africa sits, as it still does to this day, particularly, of course, gold and diamonds.
00:41:06
Speaker
um um After the conclusion of the Boer War, um economic ah production ah can continue, having been interrupted by the war.
00:41:18
Speaker
But more than that, the formerly independent Boer republics,
00:41:24
Speaker
ah which had attracted some anglo Anglo-Saxon and ethnic British labor, who had provided the pretext for the Boer War, are now exposed to a much more thorough infusion of British capital to exploit these mineral deposits.
00:41:42
Speaker
And the labor hunger vastly outstrips whatever can be secured in South Africa itself. And so um where you have, the turn of the century, ah big of pools of, to be very blunt about it, surplus labor,
00:41:59
Speaker
um You have capitalists in South Africa who are willing to move heaven and earth to match up the surplus labor with um the um ah sort of the arenas for um surplus extraction.
00:42:14
Speaker
um And at the turn of the century, ah for all for various reasons, partly to do with their exclusion from the West Coast of America in the previous decade, you have a surplus of Chinese labor who can be procured.
00:42:27
Speaker
So this is there's part of a story, but there's something additional here, because this does become an issue on the radical left of the Liberal Party, and it looms quite large in liberal rhetoric. And that's, again, to go back to the Boer War and to point out that the board part of what was so um ah corrosive about the Boer War in British politics um was that it provokes an enormous um flowering of what we would now call anti-imperialist critique of how this kind of foreign policy has been conducted,
00:43:00
Speaker
and and whose interests it really serves. the The British Empire was, of course, by no means um and newly invented in 1899 or 1900, but previously the the wars on the periphery of the British Empire were of an altogether more modest scale compared what happens in South Africa.
00:43:20
Speaker
In South Africa, the cause of expanding the blump the borders of the British Empire draws in the resources of um the metropole to a quite unprecedented extent. And this understandably leads people in the metropole to to to cast an ever more scrutinizing eye as why exactly this is all happening and whom does it really benefit.
00:43:47
Speaker
And so um along pretty similar lines to contemporaneous announcers by Lenin, on imperialism as the final stage of capitalism, you have the radical liberal J.A. Hobson writing about ah why it is that um ah got entire governments, the governments of the most powerful country in the world, can be dragooned to serve the interests of financiers and of mine owners in places of South Africa.
00:44:18
Speaker
um And these this very small coterie of people are capable of exercising such influence upon the political institutions and what's more sinister, the passions of the people themselves.
00:44:30
Speaker
subscribe to subscribe this expedition and this adventure where you go around and you go you have concentration camps, you slaughter people wantonly, you mistreat women and children in these hideous ways. And then to cap it off, after you've won, you ship in these indentured Chinese laborers who look for all the world like ah like a dressed up form of slavery.
00:44:52
Speaker
um And so the what's telling about the role that the this the the so-called Chinese slavery issue has in the 1906 election is that once the business of maintaining the empire starts to become a ah taxing enough endeavor that it really like court has to intrude on the consciousness of um kind of day-to-day politics in Britain,
00:45:17
Speaker
That's when the critics come up, not in the era of ah much sort of more placid kind of complacency in the middle of the 19th century, where these things, for the most part, did not intrude.
00:45:29
Speaker
And individual colonial ventures could operate more or less autonomously ah without tens of thousands of men having to be raised up and then sent to the other end of the world.
Results of the 1906 Election
00:45:40
Speaker
And I want to now get into the actual results that we see post-campaign, post-context. What actually do the polls decide?
00:45:52
Speaker
Well, the verdict of the electorate is pretty um pretty unambiguous, that the Conservative Party, having won a majority of 150-odd six years previously in 1900,
00:46:07
Speaker
are reduced to a pretty miserable rump of 157 seats. Until last year, that was the lowest ever tally the Conservative Party had won. um And the the spoils fall obviously to the Liberal Party as the new government.
00:46:24
Speaker
The Liberals win just shy of 400 seats. But it's telling that um this doesn't entirely fall to the benefits of the Liberal Party.
00:46:34
Speaker
They, of course, get to pick up the prize, Crown government. um We've mentioned the Labour Party. they are They get 29 seats. That's the the effect of the Gladstone-McDonald pact.
00:46:49
Speaker
um And they were also, ah this point, mathematically not important because the Liberals are in such a strong position, but they will get their moments in the sun a few years in the future.
00:47:00
Speaker
um the sort of The long-standing kind of third force of British politics, which is the Irish Parliamentary Party, which um commanded the outside of particular parts of Ulster, ah the representation almost monopolistically of the remainder of Ireland. So virtually every constituency in Leinster or Munster or Connaught, and a pretty large proportion of the Ulster seats as well, actually, um were and returned by i was Irish nationalists.
00:47:35
Speaker
ah we should say that these were not Republicans. These were not outside separatists. um they were calling for a version of the Home Rule vision that Gladstone, a generation previously, 30 or thirty or so years previously, 20 years previously, had um ah had advanced.
00:47:53
Speaker
um And their vision was probably something like, in the again, the parlance of the 21st century, we might call Devo Max. It's the idea of like and ah maximum a maximal form of devolution within some basic kind of framework of a United Kingdom.
00:48:10
Speaker
ah with the crown at the head. um so um So, yeah, so because of Home Rule and the prominence that Home Rule had had in politics, the Irish Parliamentary Party was pretty, it's pretty obvious that in any situation where they would become kind of relevant to the arithmetic of the House of Commons in divisions,
00:48:33
Speaker
and they um were tending to the Liberal side over the Conservative side. So the Conservatives, not only 157 only strong, but they everywhere they look, ah directly across the House, they'll see the Liberal Party, and then they'd look to, ah perhaps to their left, and see an Irish Parliamentary Party, and look for the so Liberal Party.
00:48:57
Speaker
So there's really, the odd they have that no friends, are no friendly faces to look on. When they return to the House of Commons, um ah in February 1906.
Reasons for Conservative Defeat
00:49:09
Speaker
And with no friendly faces to look around um during the House of Commons, um was it the Liberals that truly won the election or was it the Conservatives that lost it in the way in which political commentators frequently ask?
00:49:27
Speaker
I think, I mean, i don't see much point in straying very far from the cliché of it being ah governments that lose elections rather than oppositions that win it. I think that's that's usually pretty a pretty sound piece of analysis.
00:49:40
Speaker
And I think it applies to this, um that the Conservative Party on kind of um allowing itself to kind of embark on this powerful form odyssey,
00:49:51
Speaker
um where you have the sort of the true true believer Chamberlainites who buy into the whole idea lock, stock and barrel. And you have the so-called free fooders who see this as political suicide um and is a pretty fundamental breach with a very salutary political consensus. um And then you have the halfway house crowd in the middle led by Balfour desperately trying not to alienate either side, that this is a pretty sorry way in which you approach a general election campaign.
00:50:29
Speaker
As I said earlier, 150 majority, which they won in 1900, was always something that flattered them due to the peculiar circumstances, the peculiar political atmosphere at the time that the election was held.
00:50:43
Speaker
The Boer War happened to be in a phase that was conducive to this. um And so there was inevitably going to be some kind of snapback. But the scale of the snapback on terrain that was uniquely favorable for the recovery of liberal unity, so just like that we said earlier, the Education Act um had this effect of um putting to the foreground questions that every liberal felt very comfortable saying.
00:51:07
Speaker
So similarly, every liberal, whether they're anti-imperialist or or not, um you know, but they can, ah with complete kind of psychological comfort just talk about the importance of free trade and how you know this is god as cobb had said general two generations earlier this is god's diplomacy um and this is what made britain great and this is ah like a basic stage in um the 19th century of us as a people understanding how political political economy really works
00:51:39
Speaker
and to kind of take in and understand that protective tariffs are just a vehicle for vested interest groups to pervert the workings of the markets, depending on how much access they get to the corridors of power.
00:51:50
Speaker
All of this stuff, there's no liberal in the land who doesn't really believe these things and doesn't enjoy saying these things. And so these were conditions perfectly chosen maximize the comfort of the Liberal Party and the discomfort of the Conservative Party.
00:52:09
Speaker
And what is the legacy of long-term impacts that we see of the 1906 general election?
Liberal Reforms and 1911 Parliament Act
00:52:16
Speaker
Well, um in terms of what the Liberal government actually starts to do, in terms of the things that are sort of lasting importance, the Liberal Party, having campaigned on things like free trade,
00:52:30
Speaker
um and does in office embark on um a series of reforms that do look a little bit more adventurous than just kind of banging the drum for free trade.
00:52:44
Speaker
We have the introduction of the old age pension. We have the establishment of the principle of national insurance. um We have the provisions of what we would later call something that looks like you know a free school meals.
00:52:59
Speaker
So we have what liberals, for the remainder of the 20th century, have well always have always been very proud of scribing, which is that the first foundation stones of the welfare state were So that clearly is very important.
00:53:15
Speaker
that the kind of Not just the Labour Party, which is at this point still very small, but the entire kind of anti-conservative or non-conservative half of the political spectrum in Britain is committed to...
00:53:30
Speaker
um to statism of some kind or other, that's really important. The other thing that's really important about how the Liberal Party goes about office, and this is something that um ah really comes clear no later than, as like a looming issue, no later than 1908, and then really explodes in 1909, 1910, is the fact that this the first time, really, that the Liberal Party has won a decisive majority in the House of Commons, while at the same time being in a severe minority in the House of Lords.
00:54:07
Speaker
So until the, just about going into the eighteen eighty s at the kind of highest level of the British aristocracy, you a slight paradox that although landowners as a class are Tory and always have been, if we think about the Squire and the Ballonet and the the small, you know, the the fairly relatively modest landowners dotted around the the shires, at the highest level, the real plutocrats, the real, but lead you know, that that the... um
00:54:40
Speaker
patriarchs of like the big families, the duchies, the earldoms and so on, those who sit in the House of Lords. Historically, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, their loyalties were much more evenly divided between the two main parties, such that whenever either party formed the government of the 19th century, um it was ah sort of a completely normal part of a government formation, of cabinet formation,
00:55:06
Speaker
to have you know something like half the cabinet seats go to members of the Commons and half to go in the Lords, because you will need Lords debates are important, are just as important as Commons debates, and you need to have a strong front bench to make the government's case there.
00:55:22
Speaker
This situation all already kind of creaking in the middle of the... the the going into the second half the 19th century, collapses with Irish on rule. We said earlier there was a split. People like Joseph Chamberlain um leave the party over Irish on rule.
00:55:39
Speaker
But this becomes even an even kind of graver problem when it comes to um ah the issue of um of how this affects the House of Lords, because liberal peers in the House of Lords are overwhelmingly unionist, overwhelmingly against Irish Home Rule.
00:55:56
Speaker
And so an enormous number of them defect. So by the time that happens, you have a tiny rump oh of kind of loyal liberals left in the House of Lords. um the next So but that's in 1886. In 1892, you have a very fragile liberal minority government, which can't claim much of mandate.
00:56:16
Speaker
ah The fact that it's defeated in the Commons is not terribly important. In the Lords, sorry, it doesn't say that much about the House of Lords. But 1906 is a different story. You have this enormous Liberal landslide. And so the fact that you have this enormous a victory granted by the electorates to the Liberal Party in the House of Commons, they're going to be confronted by an enormous majority of Conservative peers who do not think that the fact that the Liberal Party has won a majority in the House of Commons means that they should cede their power, that they should give way.
00:56:47
Speaker
There's only one way this can end, that and that's in the constitutional crisis of 1909-1910. And that's where we get ultimately the 1911 Parliament Act from, which resolves this issue by neutering the power, the legislat legislative power the House of Lords.
00:57:04
Speaker
So I suppose setting up that constitutional fight in terms of the constitutional history of the british of the of Britain is is also, I think, a really big consequence of the 1906 election.
Podcast Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:57:16
Speaker
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00:57:27
Speaker
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00:57:50
Speaker
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00:58:04
Speaker
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