The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [13]
Another piece of legislation that Churchill piloted through Parliament was the Trades Boards Act. This law was a major blow at the widespread system of sweated labour. It established inspectors who had the powers to prosecute any employer who was exploiting his workers, either by exceptionally low wages or by “conditions prejudicial to physical and social welfare.” A Standing Court of Arbitration put the arbitration of industrial disputes on an impartial plane, with employers and employees equally represented: in its first twelve months, the Court settled seven major industrial disputes.
On becoming President of the Board of Trade in 1908, Churchill had, according to the rules of the time, to seek re-election. He was defeated in his Manchester constituency but found a seat at Dundee. That same year, as well as a Scottish constituency, he found a Scottish wife—Clementine. She much approved of his parliamentary reforming zeal, which, after the end of the First World War, she was to urge him to resume.
The climax of Churchill’s social reform measures as President of the Board of Trade was a comprehensive scheme for national unemployment insurance: the employer, the employee and the State would each contribute. This scheme, on which Churchill worked with enormous energy and enthusiasm, created the system of national insurance that has lasted until this day as a basic feature of social equity and prudence. In its first phase, three million working men, mostly in shipbuilding and engineering, were to be its beneficiaries.
Churchill introduced the scheme to the Cabinet, which accepted it. Unfortunately for him, he left the Board of Trade before his scheme could be introduced to Parliament: it was Lloyd George who introduced it and took the credit. “Lloyd George has practically taken unemployment insurance to his own bosom,” Churchill wrote to Clementine in the spring of 1911, “& I am I think effectively elbowed out of this large field in which I consumed so much thought & effort. Never mind! There are a good many fish in the sea.”
In August 1909 the overwhelming Conservative majority in the House of Lords announced that it would use its existing veto powers to turn down Lloyd George’s forthcoming budget. The House of Lords had the power to reject all Money Bills—proposals coming from the House of Commons which involved expenditure. The use of this veto power would make it impossible for the budget—containing many measures Churchill had either initiated or approved—to pass.
To preserve the budget intact, the Liberals began a campaign against the veto power of the House of Lords. Churchill was at the forefront of that campaign. He had already, in the House of Commons two years earlier, on 29 June 1907, described the House of Lords as “onesided, hereditary, unpurged, unrepresented, irresponsible, absentee.” In a speech at Leicester on 6 September 1909, Churchill warned of the dangers if the budget proposals were rejected. “If we carry on in the old happy-go-lucky way,” he said, “the richer classes ever growing in wealth and number, the very poor remaining plunged or plunging ever deeper into helpless, hopeless misery, then I think there is nothing before us but the savage strife between class and class, and an increasing disorganisation, with the increasing loss of human strength and happiness.”
On 30 November 1909, Churchill’s thirty-fifth birthday, the House of Lords rejected the budget by 350 votes to 75. Four days later, Asquith called a General Election. The Liberal election cry, which Churchill echoed as loudly as anyone, declared “The Peers versus the People.” Throughout the election campaign, Churchill was at the forefront of the attack on the Money Bill veto powers of the Lords. The Liberals won the election, but only just. The Irish Nationalists, who won 84 seats, held the balance of power, with Liberals and Conservatives almost equally balanced, 275 to 272. Labour won 42 seats.
Following the election, Churchill was sent by Asquith