Britain in the first half of the 20th century

A visitor to England in the reign of Kang Edward VII, between 1901 and 1910 might well have felt that the country was run by an oligarchy — a government by the few: in this case a combination of the aristocracy with the richest manufacturers and bankers. The political power of the oligarchy was based upon the sufferance of the voters. In the first decades of the 20^th century, Britain was not a democracy, in that half the adult population had no vote, but almost half did possess the vote, and were beginning to understand the power which it put in their hands. Trade union membership in the early 1900s had already passed three million, nearly all men. In February 1900 a labour representation conference was held in London at which trade unionists and socialists agreed to found a committee to promote the return of Labour members to Parlia­ment. This conference marked the beginning of the 20^th-century Labour party,which, with Liberal support, won 29 seats at the general election of 1906. Although until 1914 the party at West­minster for the most part supported the Liberals, it was eventually to take the place of the Liberal Party as the second party in the state.

The Liberals returned to power in December 1905. The new government embarked upon a program of social legislation. In

• free school meals were made available to poor children; in

• a school medical service was founded; in 1908 a Children’s Act was passed, along with an Old Age Pensions Act granting pensions under prescribed conditions to people over 70; in 1908 the miners were given a statutory working day of eight hours. The vigour of these reforms owed much to a partnership between Win­ston Churchill at the Board of Trade and David Lloyd George, the chancellor of the exchequer.

Lloyd George’s budget of 1909 set out deliberately to raise money to “wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalid­ness.” The money was to come in part from a supertax on high incomes and from capital gains on land sales. The budget so en­ raged Conservative opinion, inside and outside Parliament, that the Lords, already hostile to the trend of Liberal legislation, re­jected it, thereby turning a political debate into a constitutional one concerning the powers of the House of Lords. It was not until August 1911 that the peers eventually passed the Parliament Act by 131 votes to 114. The act provided that money bills could become law without the assent of the Lords and that other bills would also become law if they passed in the Commons and failed in the Lords three times within two years.

The most important legislation was once more associated with Lloyd George—the National Insurance Act of 1911, which provided, on a contributory basis, for limited unemployment and health insurance for large sections of the population.

World War I

The seeds of international war, sown long before 1900, were nourished between 1902 and August 1914. Two intricate systems of agreements and alliances—the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy and the Triple Entente of France, Russia, and Britain—faced each other in 1914. Both were backed by a military and naval apparatus (Britain had been building a large fleet and reforming the army), and both could appeal to half­informed or uninformed public opinion. The result was that a war that was to break the continuities of history started as a popular war.

The 1914 crisis began in the Balkans, where the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in June 1914. Soon Austria, backed by Germany, and Russia, supported by France, were arrayed against each other. The British Cabinet was divided, but after the Germans invaded Belgium on August 4, thereby vio­lating a neutrality that Britain was committed by treaty to support, Britain and Germany went to war.

The government at that period drew criticism for its war poli­cies. For one, Britain was unable to help Romania when it de­clared war upon the Central Powers in the summer of 1916. More significantly, Britain launched its first major independent military operation, the Battle of the Somme (July 1 to November 13, 1916), with disastrous results. On the first day of battle the British suffered almost 60,000 casualties. Although little of strategic sig­nificance was accomplished, the battle brought the reality of war home to Britain. Dissatisfaction with the government mounted.

Not only had Britain’s supreme military effort in 1916 failed but the war had lost its meaning. Belgium was forgotten, still more Serbia. Thus, in the next two years, the government set out to reinvest the war with meaning. Its purpose would be to create a better Britain and a safer world.

The war blurred the frontiers between the classes and the sexes. The war changed the position of women, bringing politi­cal, and to some extent economic and social, emancipation. With the outbreak of war the woman suffrage movement had turned its attention wholeheartedly to the military effort. Large numbers of women were employed by the ministry of munitions, smaller numbers by private armament makers (against serious opposition by unions), and still fewer in government and private offices.

Economically Britain had been hurt severely. The huge bal­ances of credit in foreign currencies that had provided the capital for the City of London’s financial operations for a century were spent. Britain had moved from the position of a creditor to that of a debtor nation. Depression and unemployment, not prosperity and a better Britain, characterized the interwar years.

Even as peace with Germany was declared, the British na­tion, as well as members of the government, was beginning to realize that the punitive treaty, which burdened Germany with the responsibility and much of the cost of the war, was a mistake. Accordingly, British foreign policy for much of the decade of the 1920s aimed at rehabilitating Germany and bringing it back into the family of nations. In general, this attempt was opposed by France and resulted in a rupture between Britain and France.

In 1929 the British economy, as well as that of the rest of the world, was devastated by the Great Depression. The postwar world of reconstruction became a prewar world of deep depression, radi­calism, racism, and violence. By the end of 1930, unemployment .was nearly double the figure of 1928 and would reach 25 percent of the workforce by the spring of 1931. It was accompanied, after the closing of banks in Germany in May, by a devastating run on gold in British banks that threatened the stability of the pound.

10 Linder Neville Chamberlain, who became chancellor of the Exchequer in November 1931, the coalition government pursued a policy of strict economy. Housing subsidies were cut; and interest rates were lowered. Manufacturing revived, stimulated particularly by a revival in the construction of private housing. Similarly, un­employment declined, although it never reached the 10 percent level of the late 1920s until after the outbreak of war.

World War II

Chamberlain determined to pursue a general policy of Euro­pean settlement that would include Germany. The prime minister, and many Britons, felt that Germany had been badly treated by the Treaty of Versailles and that the principle of self-determina- tion dictated that German minorities in other countries should not be prevented from joining Germany if they clearly chose to do so. Hence, when Germany overran the Austrian republic in March 1938 and incorporated the small state into the Reich, Britain took no action. Similarly, when almost immediately Hitler began to denounce what he styled the Czech persecutions of the militant German minority in Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain searched for a means not to prevent the Czech borderland from being trans­ferred to Germany but to ensure that it was accomplished peace­fully. The attempted settlement of the crisis, culminating in the so-called Munich agreement,was the climax of the appeasement policy.

On September 1, German troops invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3.The Norwe­gian campaign of Hitler at the beginning of the war destroyed the Chamberlain government. On May 10, 1940 Churchill was an­nounced as prime minister.

When the French government resolved to ask for an armistice on June 18, Churchill announced on the radio that Britain would fight on alone; it would be the nation’s “finest hour.” So began the Battle of Britain. Through August and September 1940 the fate of the nation depended upon 800 fighter airplanes, and upon Churchill’s resolution, in the terrific bombardment. In the last six months of 1940 some 23,000 civilians were killed, and yet the na­tion held on.

Perhaps the important political lesson of World War II lay in the realization that a democratic nation, with a centuries-old tradition of individual liberty, could with popular consent be mo­bilized for a gigantic national effort. The compulsory employment of labour became universal for both men and women. In 1943 Britain was devoting 54 percent of its gross national product to the war. Britain was unified in a way it had seldom been. There was some parliamentary criticism of Churchill’s leadership, but public approval, measured by repeated opinion polls, hardly wavered.

German hostilities in the west ended at midnight on May 8, 1945. Six months earlier Churchill had promised in the House of Commons that he would ask the king to dissolve the sitting Par­liament, elected in 1935, soon after the German surrender unless the Labour and Liberal parties seriously desired to continue the coalition government. As a result, Churchill dissolved the gov­ernment on May 23, appointed a new, single-party Conservative government, and set election day for July 5. Because it was neces­sary to count the military vote, the results could not be announced until July 26. On July 26, 1945, as soon as the results were clear, Churchill resigned.

After the war Britain, not entirely by coincidence, was also beginning its withdrawal from the empire. Most insistent in its demand for self-government was India. The Indian independence movement had come of age during World War I. The All-India Congress Party, headed by Mohandas K. Gandhi, the “Mahat­ma,” evoked sympathy throughout the world with its policy of nonviolent resistance.

The election of a Labour government at the end of World War II coincided with the rise of sectarian strife within India. The new administration determined quickly that Britain would have to leave India. This decision was announced at the height of the postwar financial crisis on June 3, 1947, and British administra­tion in India ended 10 weeks later, on August 15. Burma and Ceylon (which later became Sri Lanka) received independence by early 1948. Britain, in effect, had no choice but to withdraw from colonial territories it no longer had the military and economic power to control.

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Date: 2016-01-14; view: 1943