Reprinted from Solon Vol.1 No. 1 October 1969
(c) John Barnes
The co-author of the new standard life of Baldwin explains how Britain is in debt to this undervalued Prime Minister, not just for raising standards of political morality.
More than one shrewd observer of Baldwin's political career remarked on his clear desire to be a Prime Minister as unlike Lloyd George as it was possible to be. It was Baldwin, more than anyone else, who brought down the Lloyd George Coalition at the Carlton Club in October 1922, and the deep antipathy for all that the Welsh wizard stood for was one of the permanent threads of the Baldwin story. There is no doubt of his dismay at "the morally disintegrating effect of Lloyd George on all whom he had to deal with", nor did he doubt that the Coalition "was poisoning the whole atmosphere of public life". His moral revulsion was so apparent that one close friend thought that this alone had brought him to stake all on bringing the Prime minister down. The full extent of the corruption with which Britain was infected will probably never be known. Not only did the world of Maundy Gregory extend its tentacles into both the Palace and Downing Street; but in a wider sense the corruption spread into Whitehall. Honours were for sale, priced almost as if on a grocery list, and there was a cynical disregard of all qualifications but the depth of a man's purse or the extent of his power. The press were in part bought, in part seduced by their constant access to the Prime Minister, to advise and be guided and to achieve a simulacrum of power that was not shattered until Baldwin in 1930 successfully challenged their right to dictate the leadership of the Conservative Party. More serious was the prostitution of judicial office, and the use of senior posts in the Foreign Service to accommodate the ends of political patronage. Rightly it has been said that the integrity of the Civil Service was protected only by the toughness of the Civil Service Commission, and the creation of an official head to the Civil Service was in part at least a move to check the activities of Lloyd George.
But Baldwin's fears ran deeper, and years after he went over the ground with his official biographer, "the nature of party, the justification of party, the relations of a Prime Minister with his colleagues, and of a cabinet with the House of Commons. At every point he maintained that the administration under Lloyd George, the Coalition born of the Infamous Election (his own words) of 1918 was charged with mischief. All the relationships were wrong and the Inner Ring, Lloyd George, Churchill, Birkenhead and Beaverbrook, were at odds with the official prescribed policy, and were irrepressibly vocal at awkward moments." Cabinet Government had disintegrated and the final blow was the implicit bargain by which Churchill, Birkenhead and Austen Chamberlain bought access to the inner counsels of the government by acquiescing in an abrupt change of policy towards Ireland. Lloyd George's quasi-Presidential style was destructive of responsible government and went far to perpetuate the wartime confusion between administration and policy, between the civil servant and his political master. A "kitchen" cabinet operated of civil servants masquerading as private secretaries, possessing more power than many ministers. Lloyd George gave the system his imprimatur, often translating wartime administrators to full political rank. A Treasury official observed, "wherever two or three men of knowledge and determination were gathered together, there was the Home Government. Politics, for the politicians, meant foreign policy. The rest was a scramble." But even where foreign policy was concerned, Curzon could grumble that two offices and two policies existed to the ultimate confusion of both.
There was an inner irresponsibility about the Government also, an absence of principle and a corrosive sense of failure that deeply troubled Baldwin. No one doubted that the leading members of the Coalition were men of genuine stature and large reputation but they were without success in dealing with the catastrophic unemployment left by the collapse of the post-war boom. Not unnaturally, with the Russian revolution before them, there was pressure to use extra-Parliamentary action to speed the birth of a Socialist society. In this near revolutionary climate Lloyd George's virtual abandonment of social reform seemed to Baldwin intolerable, and the betrayal of the promises so liberally scattered in 1918 the negation of responsible government. Worse still from his point of view were the patched up compromises that put an end to every strike. The Sankey Commission found alternative futures for Coal: Lloyd George promised to heed their views, then quietly buried the lot. The labour movement in its bitterness became the ever more likely prey of agitators, and Baldwin from his position at the Board of Trade was supremely conscious of the fact.
His colleagues seemed to ignore it. Lloyd George was obsessed with Europe and his Garden Suburb secretariat were equally adept at finding formulae to conceal the lack of any real progress abroad as they were at papering over the differences at home. The flagrant betrayal of the oft-repeated pledge, "no annexations and no indemnities", was but the first folly of the Versailles settlement; and Baldwin, reading Treasury briefs, translated as they were into best-selling eloquence by J.M.Keynes, shared their disillusion at the cynical stupidity of the victors. His experience in Cabinet confirmed every prejudice. Listening silently, he was far from impressed. "There seemed to be an absence of principle in the way in which they dealt with the problems of a great nation, postulating ten future problems for every one they solved, and a looseness in the presentation of fact that shocked a man who had been brought up to conduct his own business on lines of strict and literal probity. Brilliance, he began to think, was synonymous with a rapid capacity for changing one's ground to suit one's convenience." Once during the Budget discussions of 1922, he was asked what he thought of a colleague's ingenious suggestions. "He feels like a director of some fraudulent company engaged in cooking the books," was the tart reply.
"Only men humble enough to see themselves as one of a crowd can dominate the public life of their time," Douglas Jerrold once observed, and this was certainly not the case with the Coalition. These men belonged nowhere, and were going nowhere. "They were just first-class brains in search of first-class jobs." To me who had sloughed off ambition with the war and who felt that those who had died demanded a corresponding sacrifice of service from themselves, the flavour of careerism left a nasty taste. Baldwin saw himself as a soldier of the Lord and could not bet find soldiers of fortune intolerable. Significantly his alienation was shared. Statesmanship might have redeemed all, but even where it existed it seemed to be dictated by motives less than statesmanlike and elsewhere policy was clouded in hopeless ambiguities. The abrupt reversals that disfigured the last years of the Coalition alienated much sympathy, and the absence of any positive answer to Socialism destroyed far more. The "flavour of final purposelessness" about Lloyd George left him outcast. Without creed or character the Coalition was damned; and Baldwin was concerned only to save Parliamentary Government from the wreckage of its fall.
His mentor Disraeli had defined the conditions antecedent for a Parliamentary administration, "that you should have a Government which declares the principles upon which its policy is founded, and then you can have the wholesome check of a constitutional opposition." Instead they had almost a caricature of a "Parliamentary middleman" who had destroyed one great party and was in process of destroying another. Party for Baldwin, as for any defender of representative government, was the heart of the matter and it ought not to surprise or shock that "he sought to measure all problems of policy by their relation to the integrity of the party which he led." Of course he recognised wider responsibilities, to his country and the world. "No small wonder that a leader has to take a wider view - that in the breadth of that position he has to consider matters that will not, and cannot, enter into the minds of the rank and file. But without the clash of party the nation will not be educated and in its existence it will find a better trustee than Parliament itself. It is party which lends coherence to government and definition to choice, which serves as a safeguard against the worst forms of corruption and which brings home the responsibility for action to a determinate number of persons. If Government is surrendered to interests, responsibility, choice and principle vanish overnight.
It is no small thing to be a party man, to recognise that, far more than any individual, it helps shape political decision and lend it a rationality, even a morality, that would not otherwise be present. Twice at least, at the Carlton Club and at war with the Press Lords, Baldwin felt himself to be saving the soul of his party, and he once defended his action in going to the country in 1923 as an attempt to preserve its moral authority. Over India he would not budge on the central issue, but he took immense pains to carry his followers with him, knowing that failure would not merely threaten present policy, but would cause his party to become prey to that "partisan brew of cold doctrine and hot prejudice" fatal for itself and for Parliamentary Government also.
Baldwin's principal concern was for "that most difficult form of government," democracy, in need of constant care lest it slip over into licence or fall back a prey to tyranny, whether of one man or the many. He saw it as the task of his generation to preserve it at a time when it was subject to widespread questioning and constant challenge. Too many in search of progress had filled "their bellies with the east wind of German Socialism and Russian Communism and French Syndicalism. Rather should they have looked deep into the hearts of their own people, relying on that common sense and political sense that has never failed." Parliamentary democracy was threatened not only by the disrespect inculcated by the habits of Lloyd George, but by its failure to answer the questions posed of it and by the embattled confrontation between classes that threatened its very basis. The more obvious abuses of Lloyd George's regime were easily dealt with. The award of honours was regulated by statute and the Prime Minister's choice subjected to independent review; the 'Garden suburb' was swept away; and the Press relegated to the anteroom which was its proper home. Ministers once more became responsible servants of the Crown, not of the Prime Minister, and Baldwin was not the man to stand between them and their responsibility. The Cabinet once more became the central organ of government; if awkward problems were tossed to committees to chew over and all matters pre-digested by senior ministers, the essence of a plural executive was not obscure, and Baldwin exerted himself to make it effective.
But democracy does not rest on clean government or constitutional forms. There has to be some underlying agreement within the nation to make it work, to accept this manner of doing things at the price of restraint, a certain moderation in all actions and objectives. There was a real danger that Labour was so alienated from the system that those who stood for constitutional modes would lose out to the advocates of extra-Parliamentary action. "The bitterness in the country was of the devil," Baldwin recalled and his task was defined as preventing the class war from becoming a reality. "I want," he said, "to be a healer." With every instinct at his command he set himself to woo the Labour Party, to convince them that their interests were, at least temporarily, in tune with those of others and that there was no doctrinal abyss between them and the remainder of society. It could not have been done if he had not brought his own party into contact with alien channels of thought and imposed on them, less particular measures of social reform, than a general readiness to make it welcome. Laski queried whether it could be done. Would any Conservative leader be able to convince his followers to resist Socialism as an unthinkable disaster and yet persuade them, if they lost, that peace was a higher good than their own property? Before the question was ever posed, Baldwin had in effect answered it. More serious still was the certainty on the left that the inevitability of gradualism was unacceptable. It was this more than anything else that led them in the early '30s to their concept of constitutional dictatorship in itself wholly foreign to the concept of democracy as Baldwin and, one suspects, most of his contemporaries, understood it.
Baldwin knew that the essence of democracy lay in its manner of doing things rather than in any clearly defined view of society and realised that the abrupt transitions involved in any visionary leap to a new order must be avoided no less than any rigid stand on the perfection of the present. He sensed deep in British society an emphasis on co-operation that transcended any particular goal, rooted in centuries of communal self-government, and a fit answer to those who felt that radically different views of the social and economic order must render abortive the tolerance and sense of security which were essential to the practice of representative government. There was one further necessary condition in its practice, that no single class or group within the community should be permanently excluded from power. Profoundly, intuitively, he realised that without that there was no guarantee of benefit, no certainty that the relationship between the economic and political bases of society would follow anything but a Marxist course.
Parties to his mind were in no sense the product or fomenter of the class war. They were necessarily national, instruments of government dependent upon broad-based support if they were to achieve their aims. He would resist to the end every effort to make the interests of the working class dominant through the power of direct action, but he would not prevent their party from taking its proper place within the system nor resist the dialectical influence on the shaping of policy that its very existence made inevitable. "When the Labour party sits on these benches," he declared in February 1923, "we shall all wish them well in their efforts to govern" and less than a year later he refused to be a party to any effort to keep them from power. By his restraint in opposition, his refusal to harass the Government publicly and his willingness to help privately, he reinforced the constitutional forces in the Labour Party just as he helped first Henderson and then Lansbury to nurse them through the ill-tempered parliament of 1931. But more than that he sought to educate his own party, telling them bluntly that their election triumph in the autumn of 1924 gave then a national not a party mandate and talking them out of their desire to alter the basis of the trade unions' political levy in March 1925. The Conservative Party must not fire the first shot. For a year more, he strove to resolve the problems of the coal industry peacefully, while organised Labour threatened to cross swords with an elected Government. Then, when every chance of compromise was gone, and the issue was perfectly clear, he took up their challenge. Within days, the majority of the nation had rallied to his cause. They were not without doubts, but Baldwin handled the issues involved with a skill that left him unchallenged in public regard. On the central issue, the necessary predominance of a constitutional government, he was adamant, but he would not be forced into dealing the trade unions too sharp a lesson. Over the industrial issue he remained conciliatory: he would not be led to declare war on any section of the community. To win was not enough: his opponents must be brought to see the error of their ways, and in a moment of victory his watchword was generosity.
On the morrow of the General Strike, he was genuinely master of the nation, standing "on a moral level to which I am not sure he ever returned." The long drawn out coal strike and the sharp recriminations over the Trade Disputes Act diminished his prestige, but his victory was never in doubt. The trade unions resolved to influence industry, but not to wreck it, and the constitutional forces in the Labour movement were immeasurably strengthened. Talks between the T.U.C. and the employers in 1927/8, begun with covert encouragement from Downing Street, consolidated the new atmosphere. By the early '30s, leading trade unionists were ready to express the view that Baldwin had earned their respect. He knew their value and their place in national life; more, he was prepared to recognise it publicly, and they in their turn would listen to him as to few others.
Looking back, David Kirkwood put the turning point in the spring of 1925; Baldwin's speech on the Political Levy had "made flesh the feelings of us all.... It expresses the inarticulate feeling for a change and so materialised an ideal thought into a living reality." It is difficult to resist the conclusion that Baldwin restored that measure of confidence and mutual trust within the nation without which democracy must fail. The genuine shock at the introduction of the Trade Disputes Act is in itself tribute to the trust he inspired. Public life and the politician seemed again worthy of confidence and trust. "Mr Baldwin is doing a remarkable work. He is restoring the whole tone and quality of British politics," one observer wrote in The Times, and the verdict was generally thought to be just. The ground is less certain. Certainly he possessed all the qualities of a master politician, so aptly summarised by Henry Fairlie: the ability to arouse and sustain public interest in his cause, the ability to act as a catalyst of public opinion, to find the common ground that is the only basis for democratic action, above all perhaps, the ability to adjust, to reconcile, to find points of contact between the multiplicity of interests that make up our society. Baldwin had an uncanny perception of what the British people were thinking, and, consequently he could frame the necessary myths to prevent the deep rifts in an industrial society, bereft of its sheltering predominance by war, from becoming unbridgeable chasms. He made the transition from late-Victorian society to Welfare State so smooth that few found a point to take stock of the change, much less resist it. Characteristically, Baldwin, himself most conscious of the need for such a change, was yet aware of its hidden dangers.
He was unrivalled "master of a new eloquence: direct, conversational, monosyllabic: rising and falling without strain or effort, between the homeliest humour and the most moving appeal." Part at least of his hold on the country is explicable in his ability to put across his message in simple, comprehensible terms, almost as if he were speaking his thoughts aloud. His simple earnestness brought the greatest of issues within the moral comprehension of his audience, and it may well be that this alone is a claim of greatness. Few leaders are remembered for their legislation, but as a bard or seer, irradiating society with his personality, using words to crystallise trends of political thought and action, stamping his mark indelibly on the politics of an age. Balfour, it will be remembered, thought that no more would be given to Baldwin than to treat as he did "the greatest of political themes in a way and with an inspiration which will gain you for all time an unchallenged position among the orators of the English-speaking race."
It was Baldwin's great gift to range with ease, if not quite with real intellectual profundity, over the larger themes, and to give a sense that his listener could follow him in them. In valediction he was spoken of as one "who could raise debates to the level of philosophy, who can illuminate controversy with nobility, and who dares to seek the truth where argument ends," and he left an abiding sense of vision and large purpose. Burt perhaps more important in his grasp on both the heart and mind of the average Englishman was his almost "Pascalian belief in the right of the heart to a say in judgements of reason." It was an almost intuitive sense of the feelings that underlay the reasonings of debate that made him so effective in reply to opponents, and it was the same gift that enabled him to emphasise in a way that gave them fresh life in men's minds, those unifying factors that lie deep in national consciousness. He could summon in aid more homely notes of patriotism, recollecting that "most of us... do not see great movements, deep moral or legal issues, groupings of powers, or any of these 'huge cloudy symbols'. We catch our breath and think of something far more intimate, much more dear to us - of the lives of our children and grandchildren, of our friends and companions, of the familiar sights and institutions of our own land, all the boundary stones of our spiritual estate." He set himself to be "a lover of all his fellow countrymen, of his country's history, of its institutions, its ancient monarchy, its great parliamentary tradition, its fairness, its tolerance." All these things were innate in his own disposition. But he steeped himself in them as the part which it was his duty to play as a Prime Minister, and they became more deeply engrained in consequence. "It was," Amery thought, "because he lived up to his ideal that his party and the nation followed him over the General Strike of 1926, over India, over the grave Abdication crisis, and not least, when war came in their response to the test." He was master in his own House of Commons, perhaps as much through character as for any gift of eloquence or sense of its changing mood, and the new medium of broadcasting he made his own. The persona that came over was attractive; simple, direct, sensible, with an ability to jest at his own expense, and a humorous superiority to dogma, even to that of his own party. No-one could ever recall him saying a wounding thing about an opponent. Not only did he recognise their right to speak, but he seemed to recognise the contribution they made in so doing. And in putting himself across and his point of view, he was able to convince those who heard him that he was speaking to each directly, that he was almost one of the small group by the fireside listening to the radio.
Searching for an explanation of his curious hold on the Commons, and, through it, on the British people, Harold Laski came to believe that "the centre of its mystery lies in the power to evoke a sense of trust which transcends the division of parties." "Friend and foe are agreed", MacDonald's Chief Whip wrote, "that the Prime Minister's strength lies in his integrity." It was seldom questioned in his lifetime, and when it was, it provoked disapproving comment even from the journals of the Left. The decision to go to the country in 1923, the refusal to promise more than performance justified in 1925, or to offer panaceas for unemployment, the sacrifice of his own feelings about the coalition and of the Prime Minister's place in 1931, form part of the ground for that developing trust. But at its heart was the intuitive feeling of the Commons that Baldwin respected them and through them the assumptions upon which the House rests.
Parliamentary government was for Baldwin the essence of democracy, and its habits of co-operative discussion were in microcosm the habits of a democratic society. English democracy he recognised to be deeply rooted in the dissenting sects; and their belief in the inner light guiding them in their discussions to agreement lies deep in Baldwin's own working philosophy. He was always reluctant to foreclose discussion with decision, to compel where he could persuade. It is perhaps characteristic that the fullest impression of his political belief is to be found in a lecture to the Brotherhood Conference for he never thought to divorce politics from their ethical root. But if, as a Christian, he thought politics a branch of ethics, he never made the mistake of identifying the two. He was well aware of that dualism in the art of free government whereby political power is measured by the ordinary man's sense of right and wrong. Identify the two, even freely, and totalism threatens. Baldwin feared democratic totalism more than any other form, not least since it had silenced its own conscience. Public opinion must be rooted in groups formed for other purposes and living in accord with their own standards, not those of the State. However limited, however self-interested, these motives are necessary correctives of a political morality.
Knowing this, Baldwin never fell into the trap of identifying the individual, seen as both means and end of the democratic State, with the characteristics they had in common. For him, John Smith existed. "There is no national well-being which is not the well-being of definite individuals." And he would not sacrifice to humanity in the mass the consideration that is due to each particular individual. This consideration is at the heart of democracy properly understood, and promotes the need for free government. In itself, that form of Government often seems without moral content, mere arbitration between interests without any all-pervading aim. Baldwin set himself to dignify its practice by expounding its purpose, to govern with integrity and to educate the public by taking them into his confidence, and because he did so, he was able to weld together a political force that properly belonged to all parties and to none.
"In his shrewd and deep simplicity of character, his patience, his passion for the community and its welfare, his refusal to treat his fellow countrymen as enemies, perhaps too in an occasional gaucheness, and in an essential loneliness of spirit, it is Abraham Lincoln whom Mr Baldwin recalls. Like Lincoln he has that rarest and finest quality of a leader, the power of liberating and calling in aid the deeper moral motives in the hearts of men..." It was this ability that made him the bulwark of democracy for two troubled decades, and in an age where the art of free government is again in question, his example is not without value.
8 October 1969