• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1323 0

crowd shouted, “Now King, you have won the Derby—go home and dissolve the bloody Parliament!” Churchill speaking at Leicester in September welcomed the struggle as likely to “smash” the Veto if the Lords rejected a Finance Bill. Balfour stripped the issue down to the land valuation clauses, which as “compulsory registration” were, he claimed, illegal in a finance bill; “How dare you describe it as a Finance Bill?” In fact, as Lord Salisbury had once pointed out over an earlier budget, there was no constitutional bar to the Lords throwing out a Finance Bill—only a practical one: they could not throw out the Government of the day along with it. To reject a budget and leave the Government in power would amount to deadlock. The Government’s recourse, if driven, would be to advise the King to create enough peers to provide a Liberal majority in the House of Lords, as many as five hundred if necessary, a deluge that would drown the hereditary peerage. Nevertheless the mood of the Conservatives was against compromise. Act boldly, said Lord Milner, and “Damn the consequences.” This, with Balfour’s concurrence and under his guidance, was the decision.

“The whole political world is convulsed with excitement,” wrote Beatrice Webb in her diary, as to whether or not the Lords would throw out the Budget. Debate opened in the House of Lords on November 22 and lasted for ten days. Peeresses and visitors, including the King of Portugal, packed the galleries, aged peers came down from the country who “could not even find their way to the Houses of Parliament”; altogether four hundred members took their seats, the largest number to assemble since the rejection of Home Rule. Noble members, from the ancient ex-Lord Chancellor, Lord Halsbury, to young Lord Willoughby de Broke, spokesman of the country group, proclaimed their duty to the country to reject the Bill. As a Liberal, Lord Ribblesdale admitted his distaste for Lloyd George as “half pantaloon, half highwayman,” but he did not see anything really socialistic about the Budget, nor did he think the country would be seriously affected by “the sobs of the well-to-do.” If it came to a division he would vote with the Government.

Lord Rosebery, after all his horrors, advised passing the Budget rather than risk “the very existence of a Second Chamber.” The climax was Lord Curzon’s speech, which one deeply moved peer said was the finest ever heard in the House in forty years. The Government, Curzon said, proposed to introduce any measure it liked and, provided it could be covered with the label of a Finance Bill, force the Lords to pass it—“a revolutionary and intolerable claim” amounting to Single Chamber government. Despite the consequences, he advised rejection in the hope of bringing about a reformed House of Lords acting as an “essential feature” of the Constitution and not “a mere phantom rendered equally impotent and ridiculous.”

The division was called on December 1, 1909, the Lords filed solemnly into the lobbies, the vote to reject was 350–75. Next day amid loud enthusiasm in the Commons, the Prime Minister, declaring a breach of the Constitution had taken place, announced the Government would appeal to the country and called for a dissolution. Customarily recumbent on the Opposition Front Bench, Mr. Balfour, who had a cold, coughed, tapped his chest, took a pill and sniffed a restorative.

While preparing for the new election, Asquith’s Government drew up a Parliament Bill for abolition of the Lords’ Veto which they expected to introduce upon being returned to office. It provided that on bills certified by the Speaker as Finance Bills the Veto should be abolished and that other bills, if passed by three successive sessions of the Commons, should become law with or without the consent of the Lords. Talk flew around London about creation of peers; everyone from poets to tea merchants, “even Hilaire Belloc,” as Wilfrid Blunt noted maliciously, saw visions of the coronet descending upon his own head. Asquith meanwhile dropped hints of guarantees already secured from the King which were