Britain in the 20th Century: Responses to Decline, 1895-1914 - Professor Vernon Bogdanor

ladies and gentlemen um we tend I think to see the years before the First World War in rather a hazy and romantic glow as the peace before the storm we're all used to pictures of Edwardian garden parties and like as if those years were an endless free and untroubled summer but in reality I think our Edwardian forebears were very worried people and they were particularly worried thinking people by the idea that Britain was now a declining power from the zenith of her power in mid Victorian times now Britain had been the first industrial country the first country to undergo an industrial revolution and she'd built up in the nineteenth century a great empire covering nearly a quarter of the world's territory and about the same proportion of the world's population the largest land Empire the world had ever seen but she was increasingly worried that other countries were beginning to overtake her in industrial strength and power and in particular two other countries at the United States after the civil war in the 1860s and Germany with the formation of the German Empire in 1871 after Bismarck's victory over the French Germany seemed a particularly threatening power with its great industrial resources powerful educational system strong army and even beginning to develop in the beginning of the 20th century our powerful navy which were threatening Britain because the British view had always been if you've got command the Seas you don't need a strong army you don't need conscription like the Continental countries and so you won't become a very military state but there's a tacit agreement it seemed that Britain would preserve the freedom of the seas with a strong Navy and that continental countries they might build up a strong armies wouldn't actually challenge but he's done into the sea but now it seemed that Germany was beginning to do so and so people were very worried could we compete with these new vast countries and there was a worry related to that about our situation at home because perhaps the last of our Imperial Wars had finished at the beginning of the Edwardian era the Bowa war lasted from 1899 to 1900 and - and during that war people were shocked at the large number of volunteers recruits who were physically inadequate and therefore rejected for military service and people said you can't create keep the Empire unless you have an imperial race and strong people to man the Empire conditions really weren't good enough and that was linked with the beginnings of social investigation in Britain which did reveal the extent of poverty and malnutrition and generally poor physical conditions so people began to think perhaps Britain was in decline there - perhaps from some imagined past but things had never been better then we make people becoming more aware of these social conditions and wondering what could be done about them now to that question how we were to meet decline there were two answers and they broadly correspondent with the two great parties of the Edwardian era the Conservatives or unionists as they called themselves do you remember last time I said they were a coalition between the Conservatives and liberal unionists and then on the Left the Liberals who were supported by the very small Labor Party there were two different answers to that question of how Britain could have a decline now the first answer was the conservative answer because conservatives or liberal mutinous I keep falling into that term conservatives will be Eunice they were in power from 1895 to nineteen five and they said the best way to deal with a threat of decline is to use the Empire constructively now of course Britain have been imperialist countries throughout the 19th century at the 19th century in the sense that she'd been at the head of a great Empire but one writer on the Empire in the 1880s said that Britain had acquired the Empire in a fit of absence of mind she hadn't noticed has he done it the summit had been done by settlers moving out to the colonies from the mother country building up institutions in Australia Canada New Zealand South Africa others by explorers without necessarily help or even the approval of British government it had been done without any conscious government policy an empire was not really a political issue for most of the 19th century except when British were risk in colonial wars in South Africa for example or Afghanistan there were three Afghan wars in the 19th century we never actually succeeds in subjugating Afghanistan but what changed at the end of the 19th century it's appeared of Rudyard Kipling and all that was it imperialism became a self-conscious doctrine mission religion almost and the high priest of that was the colonial secretary the unionist government and here I must use a term unionist because he began as a liberal but had moved into the unionist camp in protest against Gladstone's proposals the home of ours in 1886 Joseph Chamberlain had been a began life as a radical mayor of Berlin and very much on the left but moved to his critics said to the right now in 1895 when the coalition government was formed Lord Salisbury the conservative prime minister asked Chamberlain he was the head of the liberal unionist wing of this he said he could have any post he'd liked in the government and you might expect Chamberlain would have chosen the chancellorship the extended my think most people did think he would choose that both but he said no the post he wanted was that of colonial secretary of course a post which no longer exists because he wants to build up what he called the underdeveloped his state of the Empire and to make Britain conscious of her imperial responsibilities and to use Empire to avert decline this had two aspects the first was that Britain should no longer maintain a passive stance towards the acquisition of territory but the dependent Empire had to be maintained possibly by fourth perhaps even if extended if you were going to meet the competition of other European powers particularly perhaps Germany but also France and Russia with whom we had Imperial disagreements but most important from our point of view was the question of what was to happen to the self-governing colonies which were Canada Australia New Zealand and South Africa they were the colonies of settlement and Chamberlain said they should be more tightly linked so the one called the mother country then so there could be a common Imperial policy and then while Britain on our own couldn't hope to compete with large countries like America and Germany she could just do so if she could bring the empire together so letting the colonies go their own way was no longer sufficient in the new international conditions which Britain now faced now some of the answers and some of the debate I think is very similar to debate we have in recent years about Europe and you may say that the protagonists those who argued for Empire very similar for the to those who argued for Europe to get together so that Britain could play a larger part in the world some people said Britain couldn't hope to be a world power in the 1950s and 60s to compete with caracals Soviet Union just too small but as a head or perhaps leading European pal Pepsi might be able to do so and one way in which you could do that an obvious perhaps rather crude way would be to secure a federation now some enthusiastic for your clubs many now but in the 1950s and 60s and during a war as well the second war did call the european federation and some people in the 19th century called for imperial federation an imperial federation League was formed in 1884 to try and secure that aim its head interestingly enough was not a concerted or liberal unionist but a member liberal party Lord Rosebery who succeeded Gladstone as Liberal prime minister liberal imperious wing of the Liberal Party now the problem with Imperial Federation's very obvious a similar problem with European Federation I think the presumably imperial Federation meant that you would have an imperial Parliament which would be superior Parliament to the British Parliament Westminster and also to the Australian Parliament and the Canadian Parliament the New Zealand Parliament so on that wouldn't just be the British Parliament dominating decisions now certainly the British weren't going to accept decisions possibly made against their wishes by an imperial Parliament just as I think people today wouldn't accept a decision made against their wishes by the French and Germans and Italians but perhaps equally important from this point of view the New Zealanders the Australians the Canadians they had gained practical independence they ran their own domestic affairs without any interference from Westminster they weren't going to give that up either and so against the trend have colonial self-government for the moment it got nowhere and Chamberlain then produced a second idea which had a a German title it was a union for defense which he called Kriegsmarine the Union for war really Krieg's ver eyes so that the Empire would pool their resources for the point of view of defense and then again I think links up with things people have said about Europe we hear a lot of talk about a common European defence and security policy but again it ran up against the same objections because it seemed at first sight or possibly a good idea because in the Bello war of 1899 the self-governing colonies of their own volition sent troops to help British fight the Boers that is the Canadians the Australians and New Zealanders you may say they had no quarrel with the Dutch in South Africa but they nevertheless sent troops to help Britain so there it seemed there might be some hope of cooperation but here - again that they said no these countries said no they weren't going to they would help Britain voluntarily but they weren't going to subordinate their defence considerations to those of Britain Justins I think we today wouldn't subordinate our own defense to use to those as a French and Germans and Italians on despite Lee agreeing with the French last week I think we want to retain our freedom of action as other countries do so that idea for very similar reasons to the failure of whom people Federation really got nowhere then Chamberlain came up with a third idea which was much more skillful and very similar to the idea that animated the European community as it as the European Union world when it start a common market because what the founders of Europe said was if you say to the countries of Europe he was joined together in a federation they'll say oh no we're not going to do that of course not so you should approach it indirectly by starting with agreements that are in the self-interest of the individual countries and so it started in the post-war era with France and Germany and any other country that want to join getting together in a Coal and Steel community by which they promised to share : steel production and create a common market in coal and steel and that was in into both countries it would lower prices improve efficiency and so no harm in that and seemingly no no dangerous Federalists tenancies but the argument was this would spill over to other changes for example one king who was to regulate the Coal and Steel community are for that you need a High Commission that's the origins of the European Commission but will the Commission be accountable yes yes you have a European assembly that's the origins of the European Parliament and then if you're going to cooperate in coal and steel why not in other things what about agriculture what about fisheries and so on and then if you wanna cooperate in nee there is isn't it observe to go on using national currencies why not have a common currency like like the euro and and if you have a common currency we shouldn't surely allow some countries like Greece to be so reckless that back you'll to supervise what they're doing control their budgets a bit perhaps have move towards a common fiscal policy common budgetary policy and you can see gradually step by step almost without people noticing in a way you move to political Union by harnessing the self-interest of the countries toward it now this was Chamberlain's idea in the beginning of the twentieth century he said if you just approach the idea of Imperial Federation francilee you will get nowhere the colon is a very eager to maintain their self-governing collisions but the corners are eager to help Britain economically and what the Canadians have said they would do is to give Britain a preference on her tariff for wheat in other words they set up a tannish against all other countries but give Britain preferential entry into her markets provided that the British are willing to respond and the British would have to respond by giving the Canadians preferential access to their manufacturing goods so here you have the chance of an exchange of preferences between the two countries which could lead hopefully in the long run to a much greater degree of Imperial cooperation and you could create within the Empire self-governing Empire a tariff union a customs union as we would now call it with perhaps free trade ordering at lower tatis within it as compared with other parts of the world and this was the prospect that Chamberlain put before his colleagues in the unionist government and the unionists although they were imperialists were profoundly shocked by this for a number of reasons firstly um they said if you have a preference for Canadian wheat it means you have to have a tariffs against foodstuffs from other parts of the world that aren't part of the British Empire and they said Britain's a free-trade country and we've been free-trade since the 1840s and the 1840s were known in Britain as the hungry for teas because with a tariff on wheat from the continent should we say the price of food will rise and poor people won't bear to afford it and the British people are very attached sentimentally if you like but they're attached by did logically whatever you call it to the idea of cheap food and if you go back to the days of deer food you will start you'll you won't win a general election if you're going to tax the workers food and indeed one of the main propaganda efforts of the opposition liberals was to put two loaves on the on the table as it were in a poster ones are various one of the very large loaf that was a free trade loaf and the other was a small loaf which was the tariff reform loaf as they called it and they said the Tory proposals mean you'll be paying more for your food now Trainmen said that worth doing because you'll get a lot of benefits it in linking the empire together but he also gave a more practical advantage which he said would flow from this he said tariffs would bring in revenues and with the revenues you can finance social reform now Trainmen began his career as I said as a radical Mayor of Birmingham very concerned with the condition of the people and very worried by the sorts of evidence that was coming of poor social conditions and one of the things he said you could do with the tariff was to introduce old-age pensions into Britain so for this as he put it a small difference as he said in the cost of food will have a small rise in the price of food you'll get great benefits both with people at home with social benefits of pensions but also in the Imperial sphere you'll make Britain a great power again and Chamberlain failed to convince his colleagues of this argument his colleague someone was sympathetic but they said we got to go fairly cautiously on this we just can't take the risk of attacks on food that part of a program we can't accept might go some other way with you but not as far of that and Chamberlain said he would resign from the cabinet and campaign in the country for tariff reform to try and show his rather timid colleagues but really you could win and win that argument and so he did exactly that in 1903 and he made a powerful speech in Birmingham with his constituency and said the time has come to abandon free trade with Britain it had since the 1840 time come to abandon that and adopt a different policy and to he's going to campaign for that by resigning from the government and he's going to try and push the unionist coalition in that direction now he might have had some success if conditions had remained as they had been when he made those Burnham speech rather depressed because in times of depression perhaps people are worried more about prospects of employment than they are about the cost of living as ill luck would have it for him economic conditions started to improve and britain began to enjoy inflationary boom conditions if you like and people became very very worried about the cost of living and it soon became apparent that people very very frightened to a degree that may think perhaps today seem irrational but they were very very frightened about the dangers of a rise in the price of food and so Chamberlain's campaign failed and not only failed but it led to the most colossal defeat the Conservatives have ever had eclipsing even that of 1997 tariff reform remained a central policy of the Conservative Party and conservatives became to look at it again in the 1920s when Britain really was depressed and in 1923 Stanley Baldwin went to the country on a similar proposal for Chamberlain's calling for a tariff to deal with unemployment but he too was defeated it was it was an albatross that seemed about loser but Britain eventually came to a dock Terrace in the Great Depression of the 1930s that the national government which was bit like the present government some his conservative liberal coalition in 1932 signed agreements with the Commonwealth countries the Ottawa agreements establishing a preferential tariffs between Britain and the self-governing colonies it's great irony about that because the Chancellor of the Exchequer who introduced those Ottawa agreements into Parliament was none other than Joseph Chamberlain's son who became much better known sadly later in the 1930s as a leading apostle of appeasement prime minister naming Neville Chamberlain that he's best remembered for the Umbrella and Munich and the speech about peace in our time but he was a chancellor of the exchequer who introduced the Ottawa agreements in 1932 and at that time someone said about Richard Cobden the foul free trade in the 1840s and the victory over the porn laws that no one can now remember whether Cobden was a man or a horse but the immediate effect as I say of the tariff reform campaign was to bring the Liberals and look looked at they'd never get back to power again but they won a landslide in nineteen sixties perhaps significant perhaps rather dismal lesson in a way that the Conservatives or unionists had won their hegemony in 1886 by their opposition to home rule on a negative it was held together by a negative as soon as they came together with a positive they broke up and the Liberals got into power not as many think because the Liberals are promising radical social reforms they weren't the Liberals got to power on a negative they said we are coming to power to ensure there's no fiddling around with free trade that's the main thing we are interested in and really we're not going to do any more than that and they said it wasn't wasn't a victory for social reform or anything like that and instantly enough the Prime Minister the new Liberal government now I've forgotten figure I think but significant in his days a Henry campbell-bannerman he said the policy upon which the government has taken office and upon which they have been supported by their friends is the policy of retrenchment I was a policy of cutting public expenditure not a policy of social reform now the liberal victory as I said was on a greater landslide and Blair won in 1997 there was a 12 percent swing to liberals and the Unionists lost no fewer than 245 seats much larger than Gordon Brown lost 94 that was thought to be pretty bad but the unis lost 245 seats and this was an important a landslide of victory but as symbolically important for Britain because it meant that imperialism lost were the kind of moral strength it seemed to have and the what was going to happen was not if you like a strengthening of the Imperial tie but over the twentieth century a gradual withdrawal from the Empire Britain was not going to be as Chamberlain hoped a self-consciously imperialist power and secondly the Liberals were going to create despite their policies in 1960 willy-nilly they were going to create a welfare state which in outlines is not perhaps as different as you might imagine today from what the Liberals created their significance I think isn't great that liberal government as that as the acting government of 1945 and although in the 1980s Margaret Thatcher said she wants to undo a lot of what she called socialism I think a lot of those landmark policies still remain a lot of fundamental aspects of the welfare state which really no one dare tamper with for example and these are principles introduced by the Liberals in their government from 1906 firstly the use of taxation as an instrument of redistribution and the use of a budget for social reform as in the famous budget of Lloyd George in nineteen nine people budget which rejected by the House of Lords and led to restrictions on the powers of the House of Lords then the idea of a National Health Service the idea of the state is responsible for ensuring the health of its citizens we all know the National Health Service Act came after the Second World War in 1946 and our leaders were now in Bevin in at leas government but in fact the first measures to ensure the public against ill health was taken by the Liberals in the National Insurance Act of nineteen which established a system of health insurance and it's now thought by many they're not by all by many that Lloyd George regarded that as merely a step on the way to a full health service of the kind that are known Bevin introduced then the idea that the state is responsible for the welfare of the unemployed that was also introduced into Britain and unemployment insurance in the National Insurance Act of nineteen eleven and the main inspiration behind that was the president of the Board of Trade and Winston Churchill key figure in that government second danger Lloyd George at that time as a social reformer and unemployment unemployment insurance was very new indeed health insurance had already been established in Germany by Bismarck in the 1880s it was part of his move to outflank the left and particular German Social Democrats unemployment insurance Britain was the first country in the world to introduce that and it was a totally new idea the state should protect its citizens against unemployment so these were all measures of importance with the new government and later in life in the 1930s Lord George was holidaying in the South of France he used to do and he was approached by the novelist now forgotten that quite good news I think rather underrated myself anyway he poked by the novelist CP snow who got into conversation with him and asked him how he thought he would be remembered and Lord George saw something very interesting he said he said I think our wars will seem rather local affairs to posterity because the center of gravity of the world is going to change if it hasn't changed already I am inclined to think that if our interested in me at all they will be interested because in the first country to be highly industrialised I did something to mollify class conflict and whether they approve or not will depend on whether they believe that was a good thing to do and Lenin dedicated one of his volumes of essays to Lloyd George as a subtle defender of liberal what he called liberal capitalism who kept revolution at bear because lloyd-george developed techniques and institutions for containing industrial and social conflict and trying to secure industrial and social peace and political stability avoid serious crises with the labor movement in particular at which he was successful and the sorts of social tensions which between the wars destroyed German democracy and Italian democracy and threatened revolution and and riot in many continental countries were almost entirely absent in Britain and it's a familiar point people make about the into warrior the low condition very bad extremist parties gain minuscule support the communist party never had more than twenty nine thousand members Mosul middle class it happens the British Union of fascists was never able to contest a parliamentary seat and people looked at the last election and said how glad they were that the British National Party didn't win any seats but they contested over three hundred and thirty seats and secured a total of nearly two percent of the vote that's far higher than Mosley would have gotten the thirties he actually wasn't strong enough to put a pecans in a general election that's an interesting paradox although conditions are much better today than they were the far right he's doing better than it was in the her hungry thirties and we see all these pictures of black shirts marching through London but forget they were politically completely unimportant they never won a council seat British National Party has over 20 and they never put up a candidate in the general election at all with significant of their weakness so Lord George was very successful in crisis avoidance but in the 1980s people began to ask and I think Margaret Thatcher in particular began to ask haven't we bought that crisis avoidance rather to higher price the cost of a loss of dynamism in industry and such in general haven't we too often preferred conciliation and appeasement particularly of the trade unions to an emphasis on dynamism and efficiency and isn't that a cause of British decline wouldn't be a bit of more successful industrial country if we hadn't devoted quite so much energy to the process of conciliation well that's a question Lloyd George wouldn't have accepted I think he wouldn't have had much sympathy with that outlook now in a history book written in 1965 and still well worth reading if anyone's interested the last volume in the Oxford history of England the greatest or in my opinion very familiar faith on television many years ago AJP Taylor he began the book in this way he said until August 1914 a sensible law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly noticed the existence of the state beyond the post-office and the policeman I think a better date would be actually 1911 rather 1914 so I think the National Insurance Act changed things but still or perhaps even nineteen eight when old-age pensions were introduced now during this period of Liberal government and it carried on to last the war I think till the end of a lloyd-george coalition in 1922 I think Britain moved from one kind of society call it if you like unregulated capitalism or liberal capitalism can give it what tacky like to another kind which people sometimes call corporatism but I think better to call regulated capitalism I think we moved from unregulated capitalism to regulated capitalism and I think that's the only main radical real change we've had in the twentieth century from one sort of society to another and every change since then has been within that framework of regulated capitalism people on the Left wants to regulate it a good bit more someone wanted to move to another form of society which they called socialism but they didn't succeed in that some people on the right wanted to regulate it much less and again Margaret Thatcher's government and people random want to move it perhaps more back to the unregulated system before 1960 a didn't succeed in doing that either and I think it wasn't notice that we were changing society in that way for a very interesting reason because the left people on the Left said the only change in societies to some form of socialism all a party certainly said that the beginning the century the 1920s is the only radical changes to socialism and since we haven't got socialism nothing much has changed it's still capitalism if you like row in red in tooth and claw of phrases the right said since we haven't got socialism nothing has changed we still live in the cactus has had a different form of capitalist society I think and it's been extraordinary difficult to transform it either from the left as the Labour Party found out or I think from the right as Margaret Thatcher found out and it seemed to me a great change caused mainly by the Liberal government at that time now the first reform are very minor reform in modern times but it had in modern town that had some significance perhaps was in nineteen six when a Liberals introduced a proposal for free school meals wasn't compulsory permissive that any local I'll cite huge wish to do so could provide free school meals for children whose parents couldn't afford school meals it was permissive in fact only 11 local office hours actually provided a minimal reform but for some people and I think rightly it was a great issue of principle because they said why shouldn't the parents be punished for neglect if their children are poor and perhaps a parent should be made paupers or put into the workhouse parents responsible for children and not the state and the great constitutional lawyer dicey said this and I say was he was on the right but he wasn't an extremist in any way he said no one can deny that a starving boy will hardly profit much from the attempt to teach him the rules of arithmetic but it does not necessarily follow that a local authority must therefore provide every hungry child at school with a meal still less does it seem morally right that a father who first lets his child starve and then fails to pay the price legally due from him for a meal given to the child at the expense of the ratepayers should under the Act of 1916 the right of voting for a member of parliament and he be deprived of his civil rights why a man who first neglects his duty as a father and then defrauds the state should retain his full political rights is a question easier to ask since answer in other words the state was taking over a responsibility which traditionalists said was that of the individual and then this moved on in nineteen eight the Liberals introduced the first old-age pensions and this was done again on a very minimal scale it was introduced only two people below a level or a certain level of income are now on a sliding scale it was five shillings a week which even then wasn't much for a single person and seven and six months for a married couple it affected half a million people more many more women than men it was in where a great feminist reform now you had to prove to get his money that you have not been a malingerer and that you were of good character and you were not on poor relief and these were all difficult tests it was not universal which the TU C wanted but again the main pressure that came from the right wing and speech in the House of Lords against it was made by Lord Rose broom I mentioned for the great imperious even liberal prime minister after Gladstone but he'd moved they far to write another nominal is too liberal was really with the Conservatives but he said that the old old-age pensions was a pauper izing ille symbolizing the final passing of family pride in caring for their elderly it is of course socialism pure and simple into the beginning of a long process which will culminate in the handing over of hospitals to the state than which he could think nothing worse now was another critic of the pensions bill which you may may find more sympathetic and there's a name where one meets with a lot in the twentieth century namely William Beveridge now we associate beverage with the famous report of 1942 which so much influence the Atlee government's decisions about the welfare state but he first came to prominence much earlier in the twentieth century he was discovered interesting laughs by Winston Churchill as an administrator and he was used to administer the labor exchanges which Churchill set out to complement the system of unemployment insurance this required experts from outside the civil service of state moving into new airs and beverage one of the key figures in that beverage was incidentally himself a liberal and sort of liberal candidate in 1945 he was defeated despite the popularity of the report and someone said in 1945 the beverage a heckler it's in his autobiography well worth reading called power and influence and a heckler said him now for I'm not voting for you I'm voting for Churchill and beverage sober when Churchill was a liberal you could have vote for both of us which Churchill would find there they're no longer liberal but Bewick said it was a mistake to have the pension scheme on a non-contributory basis and that was his view of national insurance after the war he said the pension just giving people five shillings or seven and sixpence in mistake and he said this a non-contributory scheme sets up the state in the eyes of the individual as a source of free gifts a contributory scheme sets up the state as a comprehensive organism to which the individual belongs and which he under compulsion if need be plays his part each view involves abandonment of traditional less affair the first represented change for the worse which it will be hard to remove the second is a natural recognition of the growing complexity in inter development two big nasty industrial life and when people said well you can't expect impoverished people to contribute towards their pensions instead surely a man wastes more than tuppence a week on drink let him contribute that how can a man better prove that he needs and deserves a pension than by paying for contributory scheme now I think David Cameron would have a lot of sympathy but beverage the view about contributing the society the big study to view that's come back very much come back into fashion i think beverage you look beverage always took the view that he said the british people perhaps ought to missing don't want handouts they want to be seen as citizens and therefore contribute to their welfare they do not want free handouts that was why he was so sympathetic to the insurance principle the problem the problem with with all this was that a lot of the benefices of pensions as i said will women who could not contribute because many of them hadn't been working for much of their lives if at all many of them obviously those who had worked and had their peers of work interrupted by a childbirth and so on so that was a great problem with the old-age pension scheme if you were getting to apply it fairly between men and women it had to be really I think non-contributory but um the next major social reform was contributory and that was the National Insurance Act and again beverage had a lot of influence on that and and here Britain was greatly influenced by Germany which as I said a doctor system of health insurance but not unemployment insurance and Winston Churchill wrote to the prime ministers exceeded campbell-bannerman Herbert Asquith in 1988 he said about Germany that she's organized not only for war but also for peace in this way and there were two aspects to the National table the first was national health insurance and that was only for those earning less than a certain amount of money hundred sixty pounds per year and it was not unconditional as with old-age pensions it was contributory and there were a triple contribution the employee paid for pants the employer paid through pants and the state paid tuppence so the the slogan which lloyd-george use about it was you got 9/10 for four points and this covered people in employment it covered men and those women mainly unmarried women who were in employment there was no there were no specific benefits for women other than a maternity grant that was introduced and that again was a landmark policy but the argument that Lloyd George used in those days was this that the aim of national health insurance is not so much to insure people against illness but against insecurity that if a woman or a dependent is ill but the man can go on working the family will stay together if a man is ill and can't work everything will collapse and therefore you ought to insure against that insecurity which will affect people's homes from illness now the unemployment insurance was the first time that has happened in any industrial country the state entered the life of them if you like an ordinary person able-bodied able to work not a pensioner not ill fit and so on adult again mainly men and it was it began a small way confined at the beginning to what were thought of as precarious trades like engineering building shipbuilding and mechanical engineering and there was an employer an employee contribution of tuppence ha'penny the week the state paid 1 and 2/3 pennies per week and this gave a benefit which lasted for a maximum 15 weeks a year and Churchill said rather grandiloquent Lee it was based on what he called a magic of averages and it's a pure statistical idea which he built out for the ground lizard it was assumed that the Thunder would break even at a level of unemployment of 8.3 million what am I talking about of 8.3% if an employment was no hard late point three percent the fan would break even perhaps be a bit higher one year a bit lower and idea but it was a chuckles the magic of averages though to us it's a fairly simple statistical concept about the nature of insurance now behind these ideas of insurance was this that you deal you could you can the insurance principle deals with the scrounger about which people very worried and in those days that's there are today as well but there's no point scouting because if you're scrounging you just use up your contributions see if your Malinga say you can't find a job or you're ill when you're really not you just use up the contribution so which you pay the benefits there's simply no point in doing that on the insurance principle now the problem was with unemployment what was going to happen if as during interwar period unemployment permanently rose above eight point three percent it was a minimum from 1921 to the outbreak of the second war unemployed reached was at least 10 percent and often much higher reach about 32 percent in the early 1930s what was going to happen then now the answer in earlier days would be well hard luck in you know if you can't manage you have to go to the workhouse that was the answer applied to people who were unemployed after the borough war you couldn't give that answer after the first world war when after all Somy had fought in such terrible conditions they weren't they couldn't be expected to come back where there were no jobs in the labor market and be put into the workhouse society will no longer tolerate that so in 1921 lloyd-george government made a very fateful decision it introduced what it called rather euphemistically transitional benefit and transitional benefit meant that when you run out of benefit paid for by your contributions you would still get benefit from the state and that was Paul in the 20s and 30s it was a highly emotive issue and it led to the collapse of the second Labour government in 931 it was called the dole the dole because it wasn't based on contributions or the insurance principle and once you introduced the dole then people said and these were only people the right it was often people a support a Labour Party within work they were very worried about scroungers and inventing book about the 1920s by a social theorist called Alan D convinced in short book called in search of the scrounger and people used to write to Ramsay MacDonald a burly Delisle laborer voters and they said that married women it was always women some reason were taking men's jobs that they've seen married women drive in their cars in fur coats to the unemployment exchange to collect their dole and wasn't this scandalous and when was a Labour Party can do something about it and this is it could be the government today speaking you know scroungers you see in search of the scrounger so you had to stop the scrounge now how you can do that and two tests were invented in the 20s to stop that happening the first was the genuinely seeking work clause you have to show you genuinely seeking work even though everyone knew there was no work for example if you were a miner in a Welsh Valley you had to have shown that you walk to the next Valley to the employment exchange to see if there was any work everybody knew there wasn't any work you had to share it the second test even more infamous was the means test you had to show that you didn't have the means to survive without the benefit and that meant if you had a panel in your house you had to sell it if you if you if you had excess ferns you had to sell it and there were there were people it varied until 1934 was in by local authorities and labor local archives tend to be more lenient and conservative ones but they also inquire is made as to whether you weren't cohabiting or with someone who had the means to pay for example were you not less than a sexual relation way were you living with an evii who who was in work and trying to scrounge through him and all sorts of burnt inquiries it made the whole thing rather degrading and hated but this was the seeds of all this in the churchill unemployment insurance of 1911 the magic of averages now the Conservatives at that time for the war did not oppose any of these measures in any serious way though some people outside did and in particular there was what was called a revolt of the Duchess's because insurance was conveyed compulsive some reason for domestic servants and it meant the Duchess's had to lick stamps which they thought degrading to to make the payment and the Daily Mail published the following interesting except to say I have seen no reference in the course of this correspondence to the pathetic case of the nursery governess why should she who was perhaps seen better days who is perhaps a lady think of it be dragged through the weekly ordeal of plastering nasty stamps on a grimy card my blood boils when I think of a blush mantling her humble brow the more so as this duty will doubtless have to be performed in the presence of that vast army of prying peering callous gossiping new officials which is growing every day the minions of a radical government and as a meeting the Dowager Countess of disart appear with her maid and they played at the beginning of the meeting the march of the men of Harlech and Rule Britannia and formed the tax defence Association and refused to pay their insurance contribution in a book published at the time had a great impact the writer Hilaire Belloc who wrote a book called the servile state in 1912 when he said the concern that should have opposed National Insurance and bomber law became conservative leader in 1911 said he would repeal it if the conservative government came to office but then he changed it health insurance was bitterly opposed not the conservative so matters from the British Medical Association who opposed also the Health Service in 1946 and that tended to be at that time is the wealthier doctors because on the whole the poorer doctors were rather helped I think by health insurance now as I've said a Lloyd George wanted further reforms in particular I think to create a national health service but that didn't happen it's a liberal powers of paradoxes liberal government I think that we associate the Liberals most of all perhaps with the issue of a constitution constitutional reform and I think social reform was really an interest of minority the Liberals identical ed George and Churchill were particularly representative of the average liberal in the party but nevertheless the Liberal government was much more successful in social reform on the whole than it was in constitutional reform and in particular on the reform in Ireland or Irish Home Rule and it was that that really was it seemed to be about to bring the government to a halt in 1914 because when the they put forward a Home Rule bill in in 1912 the people of the Protestant part of Ireland and political northeast part that are now Northern Ireland said that they were not live under a Dublin government and that when home rules passed they would declare a unilateral declaration of independence from it and this may the Liberal government I think very unpopular because the Ulster Unionists were asking no more than simply to continue to belong to the United Kingdom the Irish nationalists were asking for a privileged home rule devolution we now call in the United Kingdom the out seniors didn't want devolution I just want to remain part of the United Kingdom as people in London or Edinburgh Cardiff or anywhere else to party not King to pay the same taxes the same laws everyone else and not to be forced into a form of government they did not like where the Liberals struggled hard with this and eventually a conference was held at Buckingham Palace suggestion of the King try and reach agreement and there was a temp by the Liberals to secure a compromise and they said the compromise should be this that the Protestant counties of Northern Ireland should be allowed to opt out of home rule for a period of six years and they left this to the unionists and nationalists to discuss from Northern Ireland and he want to know the history of Northern iron wouldn't be surprised to know that they couldn't agree and the unionist said if you just take the Protestant counties that gives you only four but Tyrone and four mana which have small Catholic majorities we can't do without them so we must take six counties at least as a unit and the Nationalists said we can't possibly allow Tyrone and four mana with Catholic majorities to go to the north and unit said we can't possibly allow our own and for mana with you with to go to the south and the unionist leader would say it would Castle and great lawyer prosecutor Oscar Wilde and the famous trial capacity prosecuted him with all of the elements of an old friend and the nationally there was John Redmond and when these discussions had reached a state of helplessness with the liberals and conservatives looking on Redmond went up to Carson and said I have to say how much I admire the position you've taken and where I in your shoes I would do exactly the same as you've done and Carson said well actually I feel exactly the same about what new position you've taken and I think you're absolutely right and I have done exactly the same as you had done in your shoes and they shook hands on and the British looked on helplessly and said how can we ever rule Ireland so they got nowhere and they hadn't discussed time limit where there was also disagreement because the unionist said that exclusion was be permanent and the Nationalists said it can only be temporary for six years so that'll break down and then Churchill says in magnificent prose were worth looking at in the world book called the world crisis which his conservative on Arthur baltha said Winston Churchill has written a huge book about himself and called it the world crisis but he said he said the last meeting of the conference famine brought in a newspaper to say that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been shocked in Sarajevo and he said towers and steeples of fur Manor he said began to fade away in the distance and an unearthly glow began to light up our proceedings and a Spurs wrote to his in the habit of writing letters to his girlfriend after cabinet meetings they're collected in a very interesting book by Michael Brock who asked with letters to Venetia Stanley they were written there were two or three a day written from the Cabinet Room with really a told you everything was going on in the cabin the best source we have for the outbreak of the war and these letters I mean the post was much better than he said at one point she lived in the East End of London I think she was social worker some sort and he said I'd better finish my letter now or you won't get it later today the post will delay it till tomorrow but he said them he said then I had my greater stroke of luck he said with the outbreak of the war which prevented a civil war in Britain as he thought but the outbreak of the war ruined the radical and progressive movement in Britain it came to an end as it did I think in America it killed the whole progressive movement and what's room art 'men sense about the liberal landslide 19-6 is how short appeared it lasted by the election of January 1910 it had gone liberals were dependent on the Irish nationalists and on the Labor Party and liberals were never to win another election again so this was the last great liberal victory this left-wing victory didn't last long longest lasting left-wing victory in modern times was Tony Blair's in 1997 who then hadn't governed to the left for 13 years was liberals from 1960 to 14 in the war broke out eight years and the last great liberal victory no one could predict that Li not Asquith in 1914 but the Liberals would never form a government of their own again and next time I should look at the constants of the war and one letter says destruction of liberalism but there were many others too and hope to see them you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 60,066

Keywords: Political History, British Politics, History, Politics, Government, British History, English Politics, Westminster, Vernon Bogdanor, Gresham College, Gresham, Gresham Professor, lecture, talk, politics talk, politics lecture, history lecture, history talk, education, free education

Id: RTYLhVDlzpg

Length: 58min 12sec (3492 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2011